Out There: a novel (12 page)

The darkening dusk, his grandmother and his cousin sitting and standing quietly there with him, the everyday hum of cars along Cerrillos Road, these things grounded Jefferson. It all seemed so clear to him now.

“I love you guys,” he said.

Esco patted his shoulder, and Nigel began to hum. The distinct smell of burning piñon—most likely a fire down at Manny’s—buoyed him.

He told them what he could. “It’s hard to explain, and I don’t want to talk about any of it, but I experienced a lot of loss over there. I’m not the same as when I left.”

Esco squeezed his shoulder, and Nigel came to kneel down behind them on the stoop. His large hands covered hers on the back of Jefferson’s shoulder.

“I have to go find him. I have to try. I’m not sure I have a good reason, but I’m going anyway.”

Still so much needed to be said, and yet the silence continued into the now dark night, eventually giving way to Nigel’s sweet humming
and the hooting of the turtledove who, along with his ancestors, had inhabited the large ponderosa pine at the back of the yard for as long as Jefferson could remember.

Later, as he lay in his bed listening to his grandmother’s ragged breathing, Jefferson arrived at his One Good Reason for traveling to Mexico City to find García Márquez in that mysterious way that people everywhere, through all of history, have made decisions. His very life cried out to him. A miracle. Just like Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Jefferson had failed to die. His very life encompassed the idea of joy coming from sorrow, for what can be more joyful than surviving a tragedy and going on to live a full life afterward? And Gabriel García Márquez was the man who had covered bloody streets with rivers of yellow flowers. He was the one who had imagined a world in which incest and insanity reside alongside pots of geraniums and true romance. Jefferson had to find this man. This good man whose story had not only lightened his load but saved his life.

This one good reason was all he needed.

That
first night, Jefferson rode 250 miles on the Kawasaki, the black wind in his face and the bright stars overhead, cheering him across each new mile. When finally he crossed the border into Ciudad Juárez, he followed the road to the first bright grocery store and parked his bike under the streetlamp closest to the entrance. Sitting down, he propped himself against the lamp, Remedios curled at his feet, and slept the hard, relieved sleep of having begun a necessary journey. When he awoke, it was to the conversation of two old women bickering as they shuffled along. Across the parking lot two young children followed their parents, and the sun burned hot and true on his face.

After buying a baseball cap, two bananas, dog food, a cinnamon roll, and a coffee, he fed Remedios and studied his map in the shade of the building. He’d drawn a yellow highlighter line from Santa Fe to Mexico City, a straight shot south through Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Torreón, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Querétaro. It was a long way down. Aside from Iraq, this was the only time he’d left the United States.

All around him, the world was awakening.

The day before, Nigel had taken him to the Santa Fe High parking lot for a quick lesson and taught him some basics, like the fact that a tank of gas would last a long time. Now, on the road, Jefferson had no choice but to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. This proved to be familiar territory for him, sort of like figuring out how to load an automatic grenade launcher when lying on his back in a deserted school under attack from snipers. He learned quickly that it was necessary to learn quickly or die. Before that trip Jefferson had ridden on the back of Nigel’s bike a handful of times, but he’d never driven the thing himself. Jefferson was a walker by nature and preference. He’d thought about walking to Mexico City. It would not have been impossible. People had done it before him, and people would do it after him.

He coasted down the gradual incline of a high plain of low cacti, a landscape so much like La Bajada Hill between Santa Fe and Albuquerque that he questioned for a moment where he was, as if he’d woken from a dream, disoriented. Ah, yes. Somewhere between Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua, on his way to find the old writer. The day after Thanksgiving. High-tops on his feet, and newly woven traveling headband across his forehead. The pup, Remedios, his solitary companion.

The Monday before, Jefferson had told Dr. Monika the story of the last time he chanted in Iraq. “And then I came home,”
he said. They were sitting on the facing white couches. Outside, the sunflowers bent wearily toward the dirt, their petals faded, most of their seeds stolen away by birds. Dr. Monika looked as if she was waiting for him to say something more, but he had nothing more to say. All the talk that had passed between them did not in this moment seem to offer any additional momentum. She would make herself available to him as long as he kept coming, he guessed. She would maintain an interest in his recovery, even if it took him the rest of his life. Her white couches would always sit in that crisp sunroom, looking out on the garden, going through the seasons as it did.

It was then that he had told her of his plan to borrow Nigel’s motorbike and drive down to Mexico and find GGM. The idea seemed to become real as he spoke it aloud. “I’ve gotta go find him, Dr. Monika,” he’d said. “I won’t know—I’ll always wonder if I never go.”

Part of him had not wanted to say the idea out loud. Saying it aloud made him vulnerable. It might have been better to keep the plan to himself, tell Dr. Monika about it all once he’d succeeded and had a complete story to share. He didn’t want to face her criticism, not at the same moment in which he was trying to buoy himself into action.

But when Jefferson found the courage to look up at her, when he made the decision to look into her eyes, he saw that the muscles of Dr. Monika’s face had relaxed. She was looking upon him as if he were her own son, smiling a smile of hope.

“Just don’t say anything,” he said anyway, not trusting what seemed to be her great faith in him. But she behaved as if she hadn’t heard him. She turned and marched away down her long hall, returning a few minutes later with a wad of cash and a kiss on his cheek. She called him an inspiration for dreamers everywhere. “I love you, Jefferson,” she said, and she wished him great success.

Everything within view struck him as patient and persistent, a landscape barren and untamed but somehow also forgiving. Though he was full of fears about all that could still go wrong, his heart beat a little lighter within his chest and his blood coursed a little more steadily—a little less noticeably—within his veins. He was in Mexico. There hadn’t been any pickpockets in the parking lot in Juárez, the bike engine wasn’t sputtering, and he hadn’t seen a single sign of drugs or bandits. The only real worry was whether Gabriel would still be alive by the time Jefferson got to his house. How would he find his house? He thought of how Nigel would be asking him this question if he’d come along—he was always the practical planner—and he clicked his tongue and shook his head as he pushed the Kawasaki on, anticipating all the people he was going to meet along the way. All the adventuring. The chance, most likely, of miracles.

“I can’t say good-bye again,” Esco had told him. “You better be careful.”
And she had walked down the hall with her tall glass of ice water and closed the door of her bedroom behind her. She knew the basics, his rough itinerary, and she’d handed him a wad of cash stuffed in an envelope, with some of which he’d bought a used rear-mounted motorcycle dog carrier, so Remedios would be comfortable on the road.

So far, none of it had been as scary as he’d feared. He’d never been across the border—he’d never been south of Cruces before yesterday—but the people he’d seen and the land he’d traveled across so far didn’t seem that different from the people and land of home. That Esco was half Mexican, which made him one-eighth, explained part of his comfort, the easy way he breathed. The sand and the chamisa and the scrub were familiar to his New Mexican eyes—familiar and forgiving, like family.

One thing Jefferson had not predicted was the drowsiness. Having never had a motorcycle, much less his own car, he’d not had the chance to drive on long, deserted highways before. He’d had his driver’s license since the age of sixteen, and he used Esco’s car to go to the store sometimes and once to Santa Fe High’s homecoming, but Jefferson had never driven, say, all the way to Albuquerque. In Iraq he’d driven the Humvee only a handful of times, usually for short distances in some sort of emergency. That accident with the poor dog happened because he was not all that used to driving, and he thought he’d put it in drive, when actually it had been in reverse
.
And he’d never driven so far that he’d started to fall asleep. So when Jefferson started to feel drowsy as the high country of Mexico scrolled past, he knew he had to do something.

He started by reciting a line from
One Hundred Years
out loud for five or ten miles, over and over again, matching the words to whatever catchy tune happened to cross his mind until he reached the point at which the exercise no longer held his attention, and he began to feel drowsy again. On that second day, somewhere south of Juárez, he transitioned from popular hits to what he imagined as Old World monk-style chanting. The line was one he’d memorized first for Ms. Tolan and then had revised once he was a soldier.

I did not know why we were fighting.

He dragged out the word
fighting
into two long syllables—
figh . . . ting
 . . .—just as always. And while he began by imagining monks in windowless cells, he transitioned into thinking about ancient people walking across the American plains. The syllables meshed with the deeply resonant melody, and Jefferson bellowed in the deepest of baritones.

I did not know why we were FIGH
 . . . TING . . .

I did not know why we were FIGH
 . . . TING . . .

I did not know why we were FIGH
 . . . TING . . .

But after about five miles his head began nodding again. He tried to fight against the drowsiness by holding his left foot up slightly off the pedal—his grandmother had taught him that trick—but even that didn’t work. He’d seen those pictures in driver’s ed of people who’d driven their cars off the side of the road or across the middle stripe, and he figured falling asleep on a motorbike would be worse. He thought of pulling off the road to try to slap himself awake, but he didn’t want to interrupt his forward momentum. That was when the idea occurred to him, somewhere outside the little town of Café. He would write his own completely original lines. He would mimic the great writer. And that is how it began, Jefferson’s traveling exercise to stay awake and improve his literary skills all at the same time.

His results were humble at best. If he were to be really honest, the lines he composed sort of stunk. But the writing he did in his head that day did keep him alert and alive on the highway, and moving in the direction of Mexico City, and that was what mattered.

The first line Jefferson created, and then chanted in what he thought of as Mexican style for the next ten miles, shaking his head in the wind and sending his voice in the direction of any animals he happened to see, was this:

I am coasting the desert of Chihuahua,

In search of the writer who saved me.

In search of the writer who sa-aaaaved me.

Who sa-aaaved me.

Jefferson became almost lost in these lines as he sang them, time sliding by, imagining himself to be an inspired writer, some traveling priest sailing free. Sometimes Remedios howled along with him, but mostly she remained silent, her nose to the wind. He followed that first line with many more, each based upon the reality of the highway and his growing attempt to see his life as he imagined García Márquez might see it. It was possible, he decided, to change one’s reality by interpreting the nearby world through a more magical lens. Thus he began to compose a long series of lines, lines intended to mend those situations in life that Jefferson felt needed mending.

In the castle dwelled a magician,

whose job it was to free anyone who had been charged unjustly,

and to return the money to those who had ever been cheated because of greed.

Because of GRE—EEED.

GRE—EEED.

This one covered so many injustices, and Jefferson chanted the word
greed,
divided into two syllables and in his deepest baritone, in honor of the many good people who’d suffered because of that one word over the eons. As he chanted and sang, Jefferson thought of the opposite of greed, which he thought of as love, and at some point he began to chant that word instead.
Love.
Love. Love.
He thought of all the heroes in the world, of people who ran into burning buildings to save other people, of people who took care of old people and sick people. He thought of teachers. He thought of all the pain in the world and of all the people who forgave the people who had hurt them. Love was such a big concept, and it covered so many people, that he felt the need to chant the word
love
,
divided into two syllables and skipping around from the lowest part of his range up to the squeakiest whisper of a falsetto, for about forty-five minutes as the bike swooped along the ups and downs of the road.