Out There: a novel (11 page)

Hazelton, 29, of Edinburgh, Indiana.

Teresa Blue, 23, of Rosedale, Maryland. I saw the explosions and later helped carry her body.

26 yrs old. His name was Alton. Bellevue, Nebraska. His vehicle was behind mine when an IED blew it off the road. I’d never spoken to him but he had a real nice smile.

Father and three young girls in old Toyota station wagon near Fallujah. Their young eyes were scared out the back window at me—I don’t know why. I hope nothing ever happens to them. I watched until their car disappeared into the dusty landscape.

27-yr-old Barker of West Seneca, New York.

40-yr-old Benton of Winona, Minnesota.

Dan Logan from another little town in Pennsylvania. Watsontown.

Debree, 20, of Evansville, Indiana.

Tristan’s hand. He’s alive and has been sent home. 24.

Cheever, Jr., 31, of Charlotte, NC.

Daniel Waterford, 19, of Auburn, California. A real nice guy.

Hume, 21, of Appleton, Maine. Stupid IED. Sang in the evenings like Johnny Cash.

Thomas. Mount Vernon, Washington. Only 21. I was with him on his birthday.

Dvorak, 24, of East Brunswick, New Jersey.

Gomez, 20, of Irving, Texas, who died in the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. I was there when he went down but heard later of his death.

A young guy from Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.

25-yr-old from Gilmanton, New Hampshire.

Dorn, 32, of Minnesota, his helicopter went down in the Tigris River. He was the first one to call me crazy to my face.

Harry Wisener, 26, Golden, CO.

Master Sgt. Pinga Pinau, 33, of Watertown, New York. Loved this guy. He was so funny and what a beautiful name.

Zach LeBlanc who was younger than I was. Damned IEDs. From Buffalo.

Lawrence from New York City. 26 years old.

A guy from Rochester Hills, Michigan. I think his name was Aron. Never got his last name. 23.

19-year-old Galen from Albuquerque. Went down after telling me about his grandparents surviving the Nazis.

Johnston, 46, of Sackets Harbor, New York. When an IED detonated nearby he was injured and died two weeks later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in DC. I saw him the day they shipped him back home and he said he’d always loved the way I read from my book even if everyone else might have thought I was crazy.

Anderson. Something about the physical training in Baghdad. He was from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. 24 years old.

A guy name Jeff Kleiner from Stockbridge, Georgia, 25, who drowned in a lake on the palace compound in Al Fallujah.

Dwight from Cass Lake, Minnesota. Another 20-year-old. Could have been a stand-up comedian.

The old man and his goats, pleading in an unknown tongue.

Sgt. Schoener from Ohio. Also a sprinter in high school. 26 years old.

Steiner, 29, of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Thomas T. Stromberg, III. 18, of Lopez, Pennsylvania.

Johnson, 28, of Sarasota, Florida. His helicopter was attacked. I saw him board the helicopter. He’d just given me a handful of gum and said he really liked my sneakers.

Richard Seiders. Gettysburg, PA.

The 17-year-old and then the hound. They were both accidents.

A guy from Missouri named Lincoln flew through the air and died on top of me. Also immediately: Baxter Flavius, 20, of Boise, Idaho; Burkland, 26, of Rockville, Maryland; Ferre, 21, of Bakersfield, California; Connor, 19, of Jamestown, New York; Sgt. Monday from Newark, Delaware.  And later, Howell, 32, of Philadelphia, New York; Lamb, 23, from New Orleans; Charles Terrazas, 25, of Clarksville, Tennessee; Nick Warren’s leg, 24, of Fairview Heights, Illinois; and Rich Rosales’s feet, 21, Saint Louis, Michigan.

Ray Soto, 26. He loved Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he told me once. Loved him. Why did this have to happen?

He
decided to present his decision in the kitchen to his grandmother and Nigel as if it were final, rather than appear to be asking them for advice. He figured they would say it wasn’t the best idea, that there were so many reasons not to go, and besides, why? He’d just returned home.

“Aw, honey
 . . . ,” was all Esco said at first. After a few minutes of settling, she said, “Tell me one good reason.”

But then, before he could begin to explain, she was off and away, telling him how Mexico wasn’t safe for Americans traveling alone, that there were regularly reported tales of drug traffickers killing whoever happened to cross their path, that anyways, Jefferson was still jumpy. “Every time someone walks up behind you, you freeze like a stunned jackrabbit,” she said, and then went on to recount the incident at the post office when Jefferson had jumped to the ground and covered his head, screaming, after a man dropped his pile of junk mail. She said she was going to call his therapist (“Esco, I don’t have a therapist”) and ask if it was safe for a young veteran in his state to leave home again so soon. And besides, she was curious where he was going to get the money to pay for his international travel, and anyway, didn’t he care about her and his cousin, who had been waiting all this time for him to get home safe so they could get on with their lives? When was he going to start reading again? As she talked, she shoved plates and glasses into the upper cabinet, jamming a few saucepans and skillets down below.

Nigel just leaned against the kitchen wall, his eyes closed, seemingly humming a silent tune.

Jefferson waited. Despite his grandmother’s words whirling about him, he felt calm.

“Here’s what I wanna know—,” said Nigel, when Esco had slowed down a bit and begun to repeat her arguments.

She immediately took Nigel’s words as support for her view, interrupting him. “See, Jefferson, your cousin has a problem with this coco-minnie idea too, see?”

“Cockamamie, Esco. Cock-a-MAMIE,” said Jefferson.

Nigel seemed to be waiting for the talkers in his family to take another breath. When the pause had lasted a full ten seconds, he started up again, pushing back away from the wall and standing wide-legged between the kitchen counter and the dishwasher, using his hands like a football coach describing a play. “One question,” he said, holding up the pointer finger of his right hand at Jefferson. “Are you taking the dog?”

But Esco continued on in her own line of thought. “You’re not taking the Corolla,” she said.

Jefferson had an answer to Nigel’s question, but he turned to Esco first. He’d wanted to talk to Nigel once more privately about taking his motorbike, to seal the deal, but it looked like he wasn’t going to have that chance. He wanted to tell her that he was planning to take the Kawasaki, but she interrupted, saying, “There’s the camper van in the backyard, but I think it’s been sitting out there too long. I doubt even Nigel could get that thing runnin’ again.” Then she put her hand on her forehead and sat down in the nearest kitchen chair, as if mention of the van or the suggestion of Jefferson’s mom or both had been too much for her. “That van’s been sitting out there over twenty years, boys.”

“Not twenty years, Esco,” Nigel said, but then he paused and seemed to calculate in the air. “Oh, well, yeah, I guess you’re right. Hmm . . .” He was now looking at Jefferson with raised emphatic eyebrows, encouraging him to tell their grandmother what the two of them had already discussed.

Jefferson smirked, looked up at the ceiling and way off beyond that to a faraway place that seemed to be materializing before him.

“I was gonna ask Nigel to borrow his motorbike, Esco,” Jefferson said finally. He had been mulling the idea over for two full days since their first conversation about it. “And I was planning to put a little carrier or basket thingie on the back for Remedios,” he said, now turning to face his cousin. “—of course I’m takin’ her.”

Nigel wrinkled up the right side of his face.

“I just can’t believe we’re really talking about this,” Esco said into the kitchen tablecloth, her fingers now squeezing the bridge of her nose. It seemed to her that once again the ground was moving under her feet, that the stability she’d yearned for after Jefferson’s return from war had not come to be. Some part of her had known it was too much to expect. He’d been out there in a hostile world, doing things, seeing things, she could not imagine. And though she had done her best all along to raise him, to love him, she knew that Jefferson had suffered losses before he ever left for war. She had done her best, but Esco knew that this was sometimes not enough.

Nigel’d been reworking that bike since before Jefferson had graduated from Santa Fe High. When he’d bought the scrap parts from the owner’s widow, he’d weighed under two hundred pounds and had been dating a girl named Marissa. He’d told her he was going to take her on rides down to the Rio Grande in Albuquerque, and to the balloon fiesta. There was a moment back then when Nigel’d thought he’d marry Marissa.

“I’m one hundred and ten percent for it,” said Nigel, “but you need to practice riding before you head out, cousin.”

“I know how to ride a bike,” said Jefferson.

“I never seen you ride one.”

The conversation went round and round—Esco with her head propped between her hands, mostly silent and Nigel with his swaying hulk hammering at the practicalities—until the sun’s last glare angled through a broken slat in the front window blinds, hitting him in the eyes as he sat on the living room couch. It was all too much. “Let’s get outside and watch the sunset,” Jefferson said finally.

Out of weariness as well as the desire that came each day at this time to see something beautiful, the two followed Jefferson onto the back stoop. Esco plopped down in her metal chair, Nigel leaned against the house near the back door, and Jefferson perched on the stoop, his feet swinging above the scrag grass. The yard—a rectangular patch of scrub and dirt and empty plastic yogurt tubs and a tumbledown shed and Jefferson’s mom’s old camper van—provided the counterweight for the sky’s display. It could not have been so beautiful without the contrast of the ugly yard. Jefferson had figured this out back in high school when he needed a reason to feel okay about the junk that surrounded them. Tonight, far off in the west, the orange fireball eased toward the horizon as the three of them watched.

He didn’t have any answers for their concerns. It was true what Nigel had said: he didn’t really know how to ride a motorbike. Each of his grandmother’s amorphous fears was also probably valid. There were lots of things she hadn’t considered, Jefferson guessed, that were valid concerns as well. Concerns more at the heart of the matter. What was the point? And what were the chances he’d get to see GGM, even after he’d traveled all that way, even if he could find where he lived, in the fifth or seventh or tenth largest city on the face of the planet? Assuming he did find the courage to knock on the heavy antique door Jefferson imagined, lifting the tarnished brass doorknocker he imagined, formed in the shape of a lion’s head, what then? It was possible that García Márquez would stare at Jefferson through the peephole of his thick wood door and refuse to open it. It was also possible that he would let Jefferson in, and Jefferson would then find himself tongue-tied, with absolutely no words to express why he had searched García Márquez down over a thousand miles from home, on a borrowed motorbike, with his dog. So many potential failures awaited him.

He needed a good reason to do what he wanted to do.

What was it? What was the one good reason?

In the quiet of that evening, as the distant star became a semicircle and then a sliver and then nothing but a source of dim light and heat below the horizon, Jefferson told himself that this trip might be the most important thing he would ever do. That it could be the beginning of his personal revolution. That it would change the world as he knew it, and the way he knew himself in the world. He told himself he had to go find García Márquez to end the nightmares and the horrible daydreams and the feeling of empty solitude that followed him around. So that he might continue breathing in and out, so that he could taste his grandmother’s
posole
when she set it down in a white bowl on the green place mat in front of him. He had to go to Mexico City so he could once again recognize the good heat of the sun on his skin, experience the ever-so-slight-but-real tingle of his birthday, November 18, a day unlike any other.

No one but Dr. Monika knew all forty-one stories. Jefferson hadn’t wanted to burden his grandmother or Nigel. They both worried plenty already. Though she said she was happy to have him home, that he looked so well, Jefferson knew Esco still worried all the time. She still slept at the foot of his bed when he wasn’t sleeping out in the van, and she was still afraid he’d hang himself from the ceiling fan if she left him alone for even twenty minutes. She’d admitted this after a few days of his return when he’d said he was okay, that she could go back to sleeping in her own room. She kept hearing stories about soldiers returning home and pretending to be okay, and she wasn’t taking any chances, she told him. He’d have to push aside his poor old grandmother sleeping on a cot at the foot of his bed if he was going to try to kill himself.

“I’m not going to kill myself,” he’d told her, again and again.

“That’s exactly right, Jefferson—and that’s why I’m sleeping in here with you.”