Out There: a novel (7 page)

Jefferson had always imagined but never witnessed Esco saying things like this. Of course he knew she loved him. Of course he knew she was the reason he’d survived childhood without a mother. Of course he knew she worried. But this outpouring, this desperate clinging to his chest, this sobbing
 . . . She wasn’t supposed to be crying, and now that she had flung herself against his chest, now that she clung to him as if to prove to herself it was really him, Jefferson knew more than ever that he had to find a way to heal himself. If that doctor down in Albuquerque was not the one to help him, then Jefferson had to find someone else.  Esco needed him to be well.

Finally the darkness seemed to have lifted within Esco. She raised her head, and looked past Jefferson at the pile of blankets on the couch.

“What is that all about?” she asked.

When he told her in an excited voice that he’d opened up the van and that it was a perfect hideaway in which to heal, no visible rats or snakes, and that he planned to start spending time out there, beginning that very night, and that tomorrow he was going to prune all the dead stuff out of the elm and beautify every chamisa and lilac and rosemary bush in the yard, and oh, by the way, did she know where his clippers were? she thought someone had yanked the braided rug, the rug that had covered the floor under the kitchen table for fifteen years, away from under her feet.

“You can’t sleep out in that van,” she said.

But he was already gone, halfway through the expanse of dirt and weeds, humming a tune she couldn’t place but that she’d heard several times as he’d showered lately.

A
week later, while his grandmother thought he was on his way by train back down to Albuquerque to meet Dr. Wesleyan for the second time, Jefferson watched Nigel read the weekly alternative paper—he liked the classifieds on the back page and the kinky sex column written by the gay guy—as one of the Bee Gees screeched yet again that whether you were a brother or a mother, you’d best be staying alive, staying alive. Piles of projects awaited his cousin’s attention: a blender, several kids’ bicycles, a footstool missing a foot. Over in the corner a Kawasaki 400 motorbike, rebuilt and repainted burnt orange—a classic from the 1980s, Nigel claimed—leaned against the wall. It was hard to believe, but Nigel actually made enough to pay for his food and entertainment working as a fixer. He charged by the job—small jobs, $25; medium jobs, $65; large jobs, $100—and always had a backlog. Several hours each day he devoted to his own projects; for a while now that project had been that Kawasaki 400, which he’d bought for $50 from the bike’s owner’s widow.

“You ever hear anything about Josephina?” Jefferson had waited just about as long as he could, and now he finally had to ask.

“You mean Joz?” Nigel raised his eyebrows and curled his upper lip when he said it.

Jefferson nodded.

“She’s all messed up, man. I think she’s havin’ a kid, I don’t know really.”

Jefferson did his best to show no reaction to this information, instead asking his cousin about the Kawasaki again—when he was going to be finished with it, what he planned to do with it when he was done. As Nigel talked about how he was going to bask in his creative juices, though, Jefferson wasn’t really paying attention. Instead he was thinking about Josephina being pregnant and what Nigel meant by the words
messed up
and whether or not he should still drop by her house and say hello. In other words, whether or not he and Josephina had any hope of turning out like José Arcadio and Petra Cotes
,
in love despite it all.

Nigel flipped through a few more pages of the paper, paused briefly, and then moved on again, finally refolding the whole thing and flipping over to the back page. He read every back-page ad on Wednesday mornings, the day the weekly came out, and now, as Jefferson watched, he began reading from the top left column.

“Listen to this,” he said, reading aloud. ‘Want some affection? Hug ’n’ cuddle therapy sessions.’ How ’bout that, cousin? You want some affection?”

Jefferson could hear what Nigel was saying, but something about his cousin’s voice seemed very far away now, echoing as if Jefferson’s eardrum had been bored through. He was thinking of Josephina. Josephina Maria C de Baca. The girl who’d been his friend since second grade at Kaune Elementary. They’d been in the same class all the way through elementary school. Ms. McIntyre. Ms. Thompson. Mr. Treadway. Ms. Amanda Cisneros. Ms. Otero. They’d held hands for a week during sixth grade on the walk home from school, and Jefferson had never forgotten the tingling, the sensation of his heart momentarily stopping. He’d helped carry the diorama Josephina had constructed on the Great Sphinx of Giza, using bottle caps and Styrofoam curlicues. He knew that she preferred Dr Pepper to any other soda, and that she had alternated between salted peanuts and M&Ms as an after-school snack through most of middle and high school.

“Here’s one,” Nigel continued. “ ‘Yoga for Veterans.’ How ’bout somma that? Or this—‘Potters for Peace. Make a handmade bowl to feed the homeless. This Saturday on the Plaza.’ ”

But Jefferson was thinking that if he were really honest, he’d have to admit that he’d always thought he would end up with Josephina. That they were meant to be together. It didn’t hurt that she lived on Brae Street, one block over from his house on Tesuque Drive. It was true that he hadn’t had many real conversations with Josephina since ninth grade, and that since that time she’d spiked her hair in an odd asymmetrical way, and that her new friends called her Joz. It was true that she’d dated a few rough guys who had dropped out of Santa Fe High, one of whom was busy selling weed at the park while another already had a kid with a girl from Española.

Sometimes Josephina had shown up at track meets and watched Jefferson dash the 200. Several times she had invited Jefferson over to tell him about one of the rough guys and how bad he had treated her, but the whole thing was so nauseating to Jefferson that he had started saying he was busy when she came into the store with her mascara running. He was smart enough to know when being in love with a childhood friend was going to bring him nothing but trouble.

“Here’s a woman who’ll help you write your novel
and
give you a massage. I mean, I think she’s a woman. Says her name is Per. I guess that could be a guy, no?” said Nigel, jiggling the newspaper.

Esco had gone to Walmart with her friend Waci on their biweekly outing for toilet paper, paper towels, frozen burritos, candy and canned beans and condiments for the store. Jefferson needed to be around when she returned, help her unload, but that would be hours from now.

“What about you, Jefferson? What’re you gonna do? You unpacked yet? You need me to give you a job?” Nigel could go on all day like this, but already Jefferson’s weariness had developed an edge. What
was
he going to do with himself? Not just today, but tomorrow and the next day and the day after that? Before Iraq he hadn’t been the type to be bored; he remembered being excited about free time for reading or listening to music or cutting out magazine clippings for his bulletin board. Clipping trees and shrubs in the backyard. And walking around on his hands. Coach Shelton had suggested handstands as a way of calming his nerves before a race, but Jefferson had come to think of being upside down as one of his favorite pastimes.

“Esco thinks I’m seeing that VA doctor again today,” he said now, without explanation.

“Yeah?”

“Yep.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“So . . .” This was one communication technique the cousins shared, conversation Ping-Pong. With nothing but grunts and sighs and one-syllable replies, there could be a lot of talk with little chance of any significant communication. Jefferson felt it was just what he needed.

Besides, his mind was still stuck on Josephina.

Toward the end of senior year, when things were getting serious and it was starting to sink in that Jefferson really had signed on the army’s dotted line—he’d received a letter in the mail with an actual start date for basic training—he’d found he couldn’t stop thinking about Josephina. He wanted to talk to her, to let her in on the secret he had yet to share with his grandmother or Nigel, to make up for all the times he’d hesitated, for all the times he’d watched her walk by on the other side of the street without saying more than “Hey, Josephina, how’s it goin’?” He began to imagine normal conversations with her, and then he began to imagine that all those conversations in his head were real.

When that chance came and went, and Jefferson had gone for his basic training right after graduation and immediately after that for duty station training and had returned once again to Santa Fe with only ten days’ break before shipping out to Iraq, he’d planned it all out. He was going to tell Josephina he cared for her, and he planned to use the word
love
and maybe even the word
deeply.
He would explain that he was being deployed to Iraq, that he didn’t know exactly when or if he would return, and that he wanted her to know his true feelings before he left because, god forbid, she might run off with another rough guy if she didn’t know how he really felt. Jefferson felt full of the possibility of changing the course of their two lives.

Saturday mornings Josephina almost always came into the store for a few things for her mom. So on that last Saturday before Jefferson left for Iraq, he waited, ready to call her by her full name.
Josephina Maria C de Baca.
But on that particular day, Joz had not come to the store. All day he waited, and at 5:05 p.m., after helping Esco turn off the lights and lock the front door, Jefferson walked the block and a half to her house on Brae Street and knocked. He knocked and knocked, but no one answered, and the next morning he left for war. Later, in that faraway desert, whenever Jefferson found himself missing home, he also found himself thinking about Josephina as a child who had grown up to be his friend.

“Look, Nigel,” he said now. “Can we talk about you and your plans for once? I mean it, man. I’m sick of being in the spotlight with nothing to say. Literally sick of it. Can you please come up with your own story, something really interesting about what you’re planning to do with yourself once the motorbike is fixed?”

But instead of talking, Nigel undertook the bold effort of standing up, an effort that required several deep breaths and a long red-faced pause once he was upright. He gave his sweatpants a tug, walked over to Jefferson, and handed him a piece he had torn from the newspaper. “Looka here. Last one in the far column. Read it.”

Jefferson followed his cousin’s pointed finger to an ad in the bottom corner:

Need a Pseudo-Doctor to talk to you about your problems? First session complimentary. 982-5410.

“Thanks, Nigel. Just what I need. A pseudo-doctor.”

“You need sump’n, cousin.”

Jefferson gave Nigel the look he’d always used when his cousin tried to jive-talk him, his palms up around his ears in an exaggerated
wuzzup?
pose and his lips all wrinkled. Nigel had taught him this pose years ago, and Jefferson loved giving it back to his cousin at opportune moments.

Nigel returned to whatever it was he was working on, and Jefferson stuck the slip of paper in his pocket and headed back out of the shed. It had been exactly one month. The Bee Gees followed him as he walked back through the scrubby yard, shrieking at him to use his walk to show he was a woman’s man, shrieking at him to live. He thought he was out of range when Nigel’s voice found him, his feet already on the curb.

“Hey, Jefferson, you listen here,” Nigel said, his large frame again filling the shed’s doorway, his eyes lost but intense nonetheless deep within his heavy face. “You best forget about you-know-who, you know what I mean? She’s nothin’ but trouble, I don’t care how nice she used to be in second grade or whatever. And anyways, cousin, her boyfriend’ll kill you.”

But Jefferson was smiling, his mind back on GGM and all his descriptions of children who played together as kids and grew up to love one another as adults, and of the misery of men missing women they’d never truly held. It was more proof that the writer understood Jefferson’s life. Jefferson had heard the syllables of Josephina’s name in the call of Iraqi birds outside his window, and in the metallic grind of the gate as it had opened and closed to release him into the war-zone hinterlands. He’d begun to believe that there was something inevitable about her, and sometimes he imagined that the young woman of his dreams—the Josephina he had thought of as he entered the dark bedrooms of captured towns, who had materialized in the smell of bandages, in the metallic brutality of gunfire, in the sheer horror of human death screams—would somehow yet reveal herself in a new way, smiling at him in the middle of it all perhaps, a flower tucked behind her ear.

From
the path that ran along the railroad tracks, Jefferson could see nothing but the top of the stadium lights and the back of the cafeteria. He cut through the old parking lot—the one where the unlicensed drivers practiced parallel parking—left the bike against the chain-link fence, and walked down into the visitors’ side of the old concrete stadium, sunken like an imperfect oasis within the desert. Way down, there was real grass, but up here a plastic grocery bag rode the gritty wind.

He’d waited until three to begin his ride so he could watch some of practice, which had always begun around 3:45. Should have been starting soon, so he waited as one runner grew to two and then a small group to over a dozen, stretching at the far corner of the track. And then there he was: Coach Shelton in his blue warm-ups, holding his clipboard as if it was 2005. His crisp voice was almost audible, directing the distance runners to set off toward the arroyo and then decreeing what the sprinters probably already knew, that today would be a day of 200-meter killers. Wednesdays had always been tough. It came back to him now.