Out There: a novel (14 page)

The fact that he didn’t say anything at all, that he held his tongue that day, is also one of those inexplicable facts of life. Not even Jefferson could explain why he left the room and walked down the hall, musing silently about his teacher’s mind. Take the novel? Why? Because it would make him less scared? Because the book would be his friend? Is that what college had taught her?

He hadn’t cracked the cover of
One Hundred Years
, didn’t even remember the thing, until about five weeks in, when things started getting rough. He’d met guys from all over the country.  Chattanooga, Irving, Little Rock, Memphis.  And also a few from New Mexico.  Hobbs, Española, Farmington, Las Cruces.  His platoon leader was a guy who went by the initials RT, though Jefferson never learned what they stood for. One thing it didn’t take Jefferson long to learn: either RT was not the kind of leader the US Army should have trusted in the first place, or he had been at war too long.

It was then, five weeks in, when Jefferson’s brain started spinning. What had he done, getting himself caught up in that war? All he’d have had to do was say no to that recruiter, and yes to the Santa Fe High counselor, who just wanted him to meet after school a few afternoons so she could help him with college applications. Beginning in September of his senior year, she’d said he could go almost anywhere he wanted—all kinds of places he’d never heard of—given his combination of good grades, unexpectedly sweet test scores, and the fact that he was three-quarters Native with no real money. One grandma’s love was nice, the counselor said, but it couldn’t pay for college. Even after he’d missed a lot of the deadlines, the counselor didn’t give up. “It’s not too late, Jefferson,”
she said—until it was.

But he was eighteen and full of ideas about digging in the dirt and trimming the trees and all the other things he’d always wanted to do in the backyard. That and climbing the highest peaks in New Mexico and Colorado, even. All those places he wanted to go. The idea of filling out all those applications and moving into a dorm room just so he could study a lot sounded like something a white boy in the movies would go for. What was it going to do for his life? How could reading a bunch more books help?

Jefferson’s default idea was to get a job outside the store and start helping Esco with the bills. If he got a job and spent more time outside of the house, maybe Josephina would start paying him some attention or maybe he’d meet another nice girl. Maybe he’d have a little extra cash to take a nice girl to the movies. The idea of a nice girl sounded distant, like Hollywood as well, but Jefferson thought that a job and some cash might boost his chances more than a stack of books, and he also thought that a nice girl was probably less distant, if he was really being honest about it, than any chance he had with Josephina, her long dark eyelashes, her sweet round face, and the supple dark skin on her bones. This, too, figured into his decision to join the army. It must have.

Certainly none of it had seemed very serious, not really dangerous. Jefferson had lived his first sixteen years in peacetime. He’d just started his freshman year at Santa Fe High, fifteen years old, when the planes crashed into those buildings in New York. He could tell it was a big deal by the way all the adults reacted, by the fact that school was closed for a couple of days, by all the crying and candles down on the plaza. And it was pretty unreal to watch the clips over and over again on TV. Like a scene out of a video game.

Lots of older guys at school began talking to recruiters, signing up at the Mall, going away to defend the country, and Jefferson watched and tried to understand how he actually felt about it all. He didn’t really like the idea of war, but maybe this one, with all its high-tech weaponry and computerized bombs and stuff, wasn’t really like those wars they’d studied in American history, those terrible wars in England and Germany and Japan and Korea and Vietnam. Plus, maybe he wouldn’t really have to fight. Everybody always seemed to think that being in the army was about guns and artillery and killing, but what about all those support jobs, all those jobs far away from the front? He didn’t have a girlfriend to talk to, and he knew what Esco and Nigel would say. His whole family seemed to think he was headed for college and some better life beyond that, but no one talked about the details, because, he guessed, no one in his family really knew how to go to college or beyond, a fact that, frankly, scared him a whole lot more than the idea of wearing a uniform and learning to handle a gun.

So Jefferson thought a lot about it, in the solitude of his own room, staring out at the Jemez Mountains, off and on during ninth and tenth and eleventh grades. When all the college talk began in earnest, senior year, he’d started weighing the pros and cons in a more methodical fashion—a list of pluses and minuses on the back inside cover of his English spiral—and then, over the course of a long weekend in the spring of senior year, his eighteen-year-old brain spit out the answer.
Why not? I’ll join the army.

And he had felt pretty good about the decision. Forward movement out into the world. This was the sort of education that made sense to him. This was the opposite of sitting in a classroom, discussing big ideas with other smart kids in Santa Fe. Besides, he had no real plans to compete with this possibility. There was a chance, he thought, he could make some small difference for his country—maybe save a life or two—and that this would help him be a better person once he was out, back home, setting out on the rest of life’s journey. He assumed he would not be hurt or scarred or changed in any substantial way. It had seemed like it would be nice to have a little money in the bank.

Looking back down now at the black-and-white photo, Jefferson guessed that after a decade of cancer and amber liquor and cigarettes, GGM would be even scarier-looking now. The photo must have been one of the writer’s better ones, seeing as he had agreed to have it printed on thousands of copies of his book. And it had been taken sometime before 1998—a long time ago. Jefferson’s mind rotated on its axis: not only was the guy more than ten years older and possibly scarier looking by now, he could die at any moment.

Again, he tried to doze, but there was no reasoning with his anxiety. He envisioned meetings with García Márquez in his book-filled house in which the writer smiled vacantly, then just turned his back on Jefferson and walked away. He imagined García Márquez’s heavy door slamming in his face, like when Dorothy was refused entry to Oz. The motel ceiling had, he discovered, an intriguing swirling pattern. He wanted to sleep but could not fend off his fears, the back-and-forth inside his head.
You are so anxious, Jefferson. Why are you so anxious, Jefferson? I’m not anxious.

Finally, he turned to the method he’d relied upon for so long. Turning on the lamp, Jefferson retrieved the book from his backpack, opened it up to a slip of paper on which he’d written
Fear
, and held it in his lap, remembering Gabriel’s lines, the lines that had helped him so many previous nights. Now he thought of Gabriel as he sang, with his own words and in his own voice:

I do not need many words to explain

because one is enough: FEAR.

He repeated the sentence slowly, many times, until the words were engraved upon his mind. He did not think about the technical definition of the words. Rather he reflected upon how the words felt on his tongue and the ways in which the spirit of them filled his belly.

I do not need many words to explain

because one is enough: FEAR.

I do not need many words to explain

because one is enough: FEAR.

With eyes closed, Jefferson wrapped the end of one line around until it tangled with the beginning of the next line, and his tongue became encircled by the sounds, and the softened sentiment began to hold him in its silky cocoon.

Jefferson did not make peace with his fear that night, but he did face some of the bleakness, and in so doing he made peace with that bleakness and saw the chance to move beyond it. It was possible that Gabriel of the tangled eyebrows, whose words had saved him from war’s bleakest realities, would be dead by the time Jefferson arrived at his doorstep. That he might have traveled all this way, only to be disappointed.

So on that hard bed on the second night of his journey to find García Márquez, Jefferson proclaimed the truth as he knew it. He sang in a new cadence to the imagined strut of a snare drum, attempting to prove to himself and to anyone who happened to be eavesdropping that he was not delusional.

Gabriel García Márquez may be DEAD
 . . .

Gabriel García Márquez may be DEAD
 . . .

Gabriel García Márquez may be DEAD
 . . .

Deaay—uuuud
 . . .

Deaay—uuuud
 . . .

Deaay—uuuud
 . . .

DEAD.

And finally he curled up with the pup, and slept.

In
the morning Jefferson drove on toward a town named Jiménez, a place he knew nothing about beyond the fact that it marked the road he needed to travel, the road that was taking him farther away from his life as a soldier, the road that was helping him to remember what it felt like to just be himself, Jefferson Long Soldier. He did not know if it was possible, but he would try to live an entire day without thinking about Iraq. Or, if that proved impossible, at least an entire day without crying about it. Jefferson had always been taught that crying was a healthy response to intense emotions—Esco said she had learned this from her husband—but Jefferson felt he had reached the point of diminishing returns. Enough crying already. A day without sad tears was a day worth journeying for. So as he cruised his way past the isolated homesteads that became villages in the miles outside Jiménez, he found a new goal: a day without sad tears.
A day without sad tears
, Jefferson chanted aloud to himself and the wind,
is a good reason for journeying!

As was often the case, this outburst was followed by many miles of contemplation, which was followed by a memory. The memory of why he’d reached for the book in Iraq.

He had been lying on his bunk, thinking about the Jemez Mountains, that oceanic blue-gray presence that for most of his life had beckoned out his bedroom window. He had been closing his eyes and imagining the hard, flat dirt surrounding his barracks to be that hard, flat homeland of New Mexico, the distant rises in that Iraqi landscape to be familiar. Because at one time a pulsing, rocking mass of water had connected this to that, because whales and fishes had once swum unfettered from Timbuktu to Albuquerque, because the wind still knew no bounds, Jefferson thought that none of this was impossible to imagine.

The daydream had led in its way to his sweet grandmother, driving to Walmart to buy him those socks and underwear, the Jemez Mountains pulsing steady before her as she drove her Corolla down Cerrillos Road. Nothing, not even two miles of 1980s auto repair shops and fast food and bargain stores, could be ugly with the Jemez Mountains as a backdrop, she had always said. He saw Esco in his mind’s eye then, sitting among scrabbly chamisa and sage in her folding chair in the backyard, watching the sunset. He imagined her telling him to come outside with her, to come see the fire in the sky.
Look at those orange flames, Jefferson! Look at those magenta cactus flowers!
The hot palette of the New Mexico sky at dusk twisted and turned in his mind. Boys just like him from Kansas and New Jersey and Pennsylvania and, yes, New Mexico, sleeping and eating and waking and doing what they had to do.

He’d curled himself up into a ball on his bed, his chest heaving, wet tears making a mess of his face, wishing that his grandmother were there to sit on the edge of his bed and tell him she was sorry and that it would all be okay. He’d cried for a while, and then he’d thought of the book. He’d gotten down off his bed, retrieved the novel from his T-shirt drawer, and begun to flip through the pages, reading scattered passages. He did not know why.

God, was this land in Mexico beautiful. And all these simple people, natives most of them, living along this simple road. Jefferson was certain that if he could stay long enough in this sparse landscape, along a simple road such as this, if he could eliminate from his view any shopping malls and gigantic parking lots and television shows about people killing people, that he would get better. It was important to realize that it wasn’t just the shooting and the exploding in the war zone that made things so difficult. It was that when you came home, your kind grandmother was still making a decent tofu breakfast burrito, and that she was now sleeping at the foot of your bed.

On the outskirts of towns, stray dogs and roosters ran alongside the motorbike, but the pup kept her nose to the sky, letting out only an occasional bay. And Jefferson began again to chant, once again imagining the monks. Simple, tonal syllables to begin with, and then word upon word until the combination of sounds became a line he’d written in his mind at some point, a line based on so much he’d learned from Gabriel.

He became lost in fecund memories
 . . . in a sensuality he did not know he had experienced . . . in abundant rivers of forgiveness and hope . . .

.
 . . of forgiveness and hope

.
 . . of forgiveness and HO-ope.

It seemed to him a reorienting sort of line, a line meant to turn him from discouragement. The idea of it, and then the chanting of it, led him to picture himself with Gabriel under that willow tree next to the Rio Grande, one of his favorite imagined moments. The writer was explaining in precise terms how it was that water could bring forgiveness and hope.