Out There: a novel

by Sarah Stark

  This was the part of the homecoming that was not right; not all of Jefferson had come home.

  Outside, a plane scudded down the runway and took to the sky, and he thought of all those other soldiers returning home. Survivors from San Francisco and Waco and Charlottesville and Birmingham, Las Cruces and Española and Abiquiu and Los Alamos, each one leaving a plane and walking through an airport and hugging and being hugged. Each one returning home.

  “Let’s go home,” said Esco, curling her small arm into the crook of Jefferson’s elbow as she had since he was a teenager. Nigel picked up his duffel, and the three of them moved as one through the airport and out into the familiar solace of the high desert.

  3

  When that horrible thing happened to Ramon’s throat on the forty-seventh day, Jefferson wrote it down on a piece of paper and folded it inside the cover of the book, thinking it would be his tribute; there, he would keep Ramon’s memory close to his heart. It was a single line on a blank piece of paper, a lone memory of a solitary loss Jefferson had seen happen right next to him.

  Not too long after, the thing that happened to the guy named Adair, from Hollidaysburg, joined the thing that happened to Ramon. Then there was Dudzinski, twenty-two. Then Hazelton, twenty-nine. Then Alton with the corn-husk voice from Nebraska.

  Still, it was not a list.

  The string of losses on that piece of folded-up paper kept multiplying, but Jefferson would not call it a list. Like an ancient scribe recording by candlelight all that would otherwise be forgotten, Jefferson wrote, memorializing hometowns and the ages of the men and women he had watched die. With few exceptions, these were the only details that stuck with him. Not so much the names—names had always been secondary for him, difficult to remember—and only occasionally a detail about the face or the voice, but rather the places from which these soldiers had come. The trees rooted in the land in those places, the birds that roosted there, according to their own natures. These were the pictures that took up residence in his mind.

  4

  Out the car window, purple mesas and red sky slid past, a welcome celebration for Jefferson’s eyes. He knew Esco and Nigel were trying not to ask questions. What parts of him were aching? How could they make it better? The ordinary part of Jefferson’s brain had expected this, but so much more of it was spinning. He’d thought something about these two would have changed, but when he looked at them, it was as if he had never left. He’d thought his hands would have stopped twitching by now. He’d thought Nigel would at least have said something about his beaded high-tops. He wondered if he should recite from García Márquez, something simple for the two of them, something that might help, but decided against it when he noticed the deep wrinkles in his grandmother’s forehead. Maybe she had changed a little, after all. He was sure those wrinkles hadn’t been there before.

  She reached out to him with her right hand. “Oh my boy. Oh my boy—it is you. Is it really you?”

  Her hands were as soft and hardworking as he remembered, patting his shoulder and then tucking short hair behind her ear, correcting the steering wheel as it veered right. She couldn’t stop saying it. “You were gone for so long, honey. Gone a long, long time. Is it really you?”

  “Looks like it, Esco, sweet old woman,” he said when she stopped talking. She seemed tired. He held on to her hand as she drove, smelling her lavender conditioner. He wanted to tell her stories about the guys he’d met, and explain why he hadn’t come home once in more than three years, but his mind was jumping along the highway.

  What he really wanted to talk about was the puppy, how he’d dreamed of her on the last leg of the flight. He was hoping Esco could drive straight to the animal shelter on the way home. The pup could help him unpack, witness his struggles with sympathetic eyes and ears. Jefferson imagined reading to the pup after everyone else had gone to bed, maybe a little García Márquez, maybe a little of the list. And then the pup would be with him when he woke up on his first new day home. But Jefferson didn’t know what time it was as they continued on up the highway toward Santa Fe—he couldn’t even say what day it was—so he decided to hold the dream inside just a little longer.

  Nigel thrust his head into the gap between the two front seats, not sure what to say but wanting to be a part of it all. Little Jefferson was home. True, he looked a bit beefy. The beaded high-tops were a nice touch—Little Jefferson always did have a certain flair—but what was with that plastic headband cocked catawampus across his forehead? And there’d been some commotion down at the end of the straightaway at the airport—Nigel could see the other passengers hanging back, staring, as Jefferson approached the security barrier—even before the hand-walking that had almost gotten them all arrested. But Jefferson was alive, and now they were in the car, headed home, and it was all going to be okay.

  Darkness was coming as they began the climb up La Bajada Hill, a little more than halfway home. Esco and Nigel would do just about anything for him, Jefferson told himself. He wished he could sink his hands into the earth right now, let the blood run heavy into his head, but that was impossible in the car, so instead he closed his eyes and prayed. As Esco gunned the Corolla up the long rise, he visualized his fingers gripping the stones by the road, his feet waving to the ravens.

  Nigel tapped him on the shoulder. “You prayin’, cousin?” His big head was too close.

  “Sorta,” Jefferson replied, his eyes slits.

  Nigel got the message, withdrawing his head and sitting back.

  Jefferson closed his eyes and summoned back the place where his hands traveled through the rough scrabble along the highway, thought about needing a dog and wanting a dog and how Esco and Nigel had to understand this.

  The Corolla crested the top of La Bajada Hill, and Jefferson knew the timing would not get any better. Esco and Nigel might be tired and ready to get home, but at that moment they were also the least likely people in the world to say no to anything his heart desired.

  He cleared his throat. “Do you think we could stop at the animal shelter on the way home, Esco? I’m hoping to get a dog—a puppy, really. I’m thinking a sweet puppy with an old soul to keep me company now that I’m home. You know, to listen.” Jefferson stopped, not knowing what else to say.

  Esco seemed to force a smile, and Nigel said, “We can do whatever you need us to, cousin,” and so they drove to the animal shelter. It was twenty-five minutes before closing time, and there were background investigations and forty-eight-hour waits and fees to be paid. But the volunteer on duty had lost her lover in Vietnam, and she looked upon Jefferson with a pure and heroic love as he explained his need for a dog, and escorted him through the kennels until he settled on the pup of his visions, a gray-eyed blue heeler that had some oddly comforting measure of hound in her bold voice.

  He named her Remedios the Pup, after Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years, who was said to be wise beyond her years and of a beauty so intense as to drive men to insanity. Nigel, not understanding the reference, said of the pup, “Well, she is a very pretty girl,” and Esco just clicked her tongue in approval.

  Once they got home, Jefferson nestled Remedios in soft towels on his bed. No one slept much that night because of her various needs and insecurities. Esco stationed herself on a cot at Jefferson’s feet, and Nigel slept in his sleeping bag on the floor. They were not taking any chances with Jefferson’s safety, they told him. Though they were sure he was okay and the pup would be his guardian angel, they’d still sleep better right there with him.

  5

  Over the next few days Esco found herself unable to settle. She stood behind the counter as Jefferson ate his tofu breakfast burritos, filling small bowls with cashews and Cheetos and raisins, dusting the tile mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe over the stove, sitting on her stool with her book, pretending to read but unable to track the words along the page. She had so many questions she wasn’t brave enough to ask out loud. When would he tell her how he really was? When would the stories from over t
here begin to come out of him? And what was he carrying strapped to his chest, under his shirt? She’d noticed the bulk of it when they hugged at the airport, but she hadn’t said anything, waiting for a better time.

  And what had happened to his voice? Aside from a few words of greeting at the airport and his request to stop by the animal shelter on the ride home, she had only heard Jefferson baby-talking to little Remedios the Pup and singing late at night in the bathroom. He hadn’t mentioned the new turquoise paint on the kitchen cabinets. And had he forgotten the garden behind the house? She’d thought he would go straight back there.

  Jefferson found himself wanting to recite again—that dry anxiety forming in his throat, that thirst for the words—but he took another bite of his burrito instead. The night before, he’d taken the book out in the bathroom before getting into bed and sung a few favorite lines in what he imagined to be a whisper. Esco had given him an odd look when he’d jumped—cannonball style—into his old bed, but he ignored it. He’d tell her all about García Márquez and the novel later, when he felt more connected to his surroundings. When he’d spent some time in the backyard, maybe, clipping back the chamisa and rosemary bushes he was sure had grown wild while he was away. When he’d caught the scent of piñon and begun to remember this place he had called home for so long. Airplane travel created a problem for people like him, who needed time to adjust to the land. It was too much to be in one sandy country at the beginning of the month, in another sandy country by the middle of the month, with ten days in between at a military base in New York near Lake Ontario.

  In the bathroom he’d looked in the mirror at the vaguely familiar outline of skin and bones and cartilage. For several minutes he’d whisper-chanted his own version of the line from the novel—I have the tired look of a vegetarian. I look like a tired vegetarian—laughing to his reflection. That idea always struck him right in the funny bone. What did GGM have against vegetarians?

  His skin looked tired, as did his eyes, which made sense. A pretty woman in the army had told him that war was terrible for your complexion and your eyes. “Unless you like looking wise.” She laughed. “They say every death you witness adds ten years.” She’d been wrong, though, Jefferson thought, sitting down on the tile floor. He looked old, but he didn’t look ancient. After that he’d begun again with another tribute to GGM, another riff on a line that he loved for its humor in the face of sadness. All the politicians are the same. The only difference is, some go to church at eight o’clock and some go at eleven. Oh, how he loved that line, and in the cozy pink-tiled bathroom of his home, he found it had just the cadence to calm his brain. Just this one line, he thought to himself as he chanted. Just this one line. And he had gone on to chant it for fifteen minutes with his head propped against the wall next to the tub, like he’d done in middle school when he’d wanted to listen to Coldplay in privacy. Even chanting very softly, he liked the natural way his voice paused after the first two syllables of politicians before belting out the final two syllables more quickly and in a lower register—PO-LI-ti-shuns. After singsonging the entire line for all those minutes, Jefferson became so attached to this word that he chanted it for an additional three minutes.

  Though he loved the sound of the word politicians, it brought up the difficult topic of politics. Jefferson didn’t understand why anyone spent energy on politics. In the range of all human activity, politics seemed so dishonest and low. He imagined the good things all those politicians could have done with their lives if only they’d chosen other paths. If he found himself in a conversation that turned political, he just threw his hands down on the nearest level patch of sand and kicked his heels high overhead. This tended to kill the conversation.

  He was trying to remember what the next line had been when Esco, still standing across the kitchen counter but now staring at his chest, said, “What was that you were singing last night in the bathroom? Sounded nice—a song, maybe?”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “You heard that?”

  She gave him the be-serious look.

  “More like chanting,” he said.

  She just stared.

  “I’m serious—you know me, I’m no singer, Esco.”

  But her curled lip said she was in no mood for his funny talk. “And what’s that you’ve got under your shirt?” she said.

  Jefferson returned his grandmother’s penetrating gaze with a pinched-eyebrow look of his own. Though he wanted to move toward honesty and openness, he didn’t have the energy now. To allow himself to heal, he needed to take his time when it came to discussing difficult issues. And the book strapped to his chest? García Márquez’s godlike words? Words that had been a blanket of comfort ever since the night Ramon from Las Cruces was shot in the throat, two feet from Jefferson in an overturned humvee? That was his own private business, and it was sacred. For all her spirituality, all her love of books, Esco would not understand his need to have GGM’s words strapped to him, so close.

  “Under my shirt? It’s nothing, really,” he said, trying to reassure his grandmother, not deceive her. He rubbed the book reflexively through his shirt, and grabbed a handful of Cheetos. “Sure is good to be home, Esco. Sure is good to be home.”

  Esco was hearing an echo. Ever since Jefferson walked through that door at the airport, his words had come at her as if in a dream. His voice sounded faraway and hollow, like her mother and grandmother’s voices when they visited in the night. The boy was heavy, too, as if he’d stuffed himself with white bread and soda over there. She noticed a tightness in his jaw—he must have been grinding his teeth—and his eyes seemed to pulse to a brooding, uneasy drumbeat. Though his body bore no visible wounds, it was clear that his soul was sick.

  She didn’t believe that he had nothing under his shirt—she could see the outline of something stiff and rectangular—but she was too tired to pursue it. All she wanted now was to sit on her stool in the kitchen, watching him eat his food. She too had trouble envisioning the future, what Jefferson would do now that he was home. But she was older than he was—a lot older—and she’d had plenty of practice in waiting. Most things in life resolved themselves in time.

  “Go see your cousin,” she said finally. “He really missed you.”

  6

  Jefferson walked with the pup the two blocks to Nigel’s, past the Old Man Ramirez rental shacks and the old woman’s adobe with its boarded-up windows and the plastic tulips in pots on the porch. She might be dead by now, but the same concrete blocks were still stacked by the mailbox. Passing Brae Street, he thought of Josephina. She was probably home right now, probably married. It was stupid even to think about it, so he kept on. He cut through the chamisa and scrag grass of the vacant lot and headed straight for the shed in the corner of Nigel’s backyard.

  Auntie Linda, Nigel’s mother and the much-older sister of Jefferson’s own mother, was probably still asleep in the house. Esco had had two daughters, both wild as jackrabbits. Unlike Jefferson’s mom, Linda had stayed around, but in her fifty years she had yet to find a job that mixed well with her hard late-night habits. Nigel’s dad Jorge, a kind-hearted loner who worked for one of the museums, had stayed around too.

  Jefferson could see Nigel in the entrance to the shed, his bulky body filling half the doorway, spilling over the upturned concrete blocks that served as his stool. In addition to the shell of a Ford Pacer, the shed housed tin cans full of nails and screws, a stack of old tires, an electric train set, and a ten-speed’s seat and handlebars. Throughout the neighborhood Nigel was known as a fixer. At the moment he was fiddling with his old motorbike, and he didn’t look up.

  Jefferson ducked through the doorway and positioned himself in Nigel’s line of sight. From the old CD player on the windowsill floated the screechings of the Bee Gees. He could have sworn the Gibbs brothers had been belting out the same track the last time he’d visited Nigel’s shed. Nigel had loved the Bee Gees since sixth grade, when “Stayin’ Alive” was the first 45 he ever played on his portable reco
rd player. Smokey Robinson and certain Johnny Cash tunes also held special places in his heart.

  “Wuzzup, Nigel? Looking good.” Jefferson indicated the motorbike, which had been an on-again, off-again project for Nigel as long as he could remember. It too had begun as handlebars and a seat.

  Nigel smiled broadly. “Can’t complain,” he said. “My bike’s almost done, you’re home safe and sound . . . stayin’ aliiii-iiiii-iiii-iiive . . .”

  Jefferson bowed.

  Nigel paused, but when they finally came, his words were as expected. “So, you think you’re gonna be okay after a while? You look pretty good to me.” He chuckled to himself as he tightened a screw. “Life pretty much back to normal, you think?”

  “Right. Life back to normal.”

  From around the corner came the deep rumble of a Harley—Manny-Down-the-Street, Jefferson guessed, still fixing bikes out of his garage. He looked for the metal folding chair that had at one time been his, but it was nowhere to be seen. He knew the Pacer was off-limits, as were the stacked tires, so he crossed his ankles and sat in the dirt.

  The two had never been big talkers, but there were things Jefferson needed to share if Nigel was going to understand the New Jefferson. It would take time. For now he would let Nigel believe that all was well, that his transition back home would be smooth. Jefferson wanted to believe this too, but the shakiness in his hands and the way he’d jumped just now when Nigel dropped his wrench on top of the metal toolbox made him doubt it.

  “Esco make you your favorite breakfast?” Nigel asked.

  “Yup. Tasted so good. I don’t know what was up with the army’s tofu, man, but I couldn’t get it down. Practically had to start eating meat, I’m telling you.”