GPS Read Free

than baseball. Tonight, that meant thinking about anything other than Felix Ascondo, the Savannah right fielder he was being paid to watch and provide some account of to New York after that stuffy, thundery spring night. Jeff was completely disinterested. Not just with baseball, either.
    There was a time, hell five years ago in fact, when the mere chance to identify himself to a player or a fan as a major league scout made him squirm with delight. Now, there was the most certain divorce, the general boredom of thirtydom and the feeling of dread that accompanied the realization that his life’s work up to this point had added up to unhappiness and a shitty paycheck.
    Jeff was at a point where he begged for distraction. Tonight, he prayed that Ascondo — allegedly developing quickly as a hard-hitting, fast-moving switch-hitter — would show him something that would get him out of there early, and maybe into something more dangerous and fun, but more likely into his hotel room drunk and alone. Again.
    At the moment, Ascondo was showing him little more than a fan of sunflower seed shells streaming from the Dominican’s lips as he stood otherwise motionless in the outfield, a few thin clouds of the moths of summer performing their nightly ballet in the buzzing lights above him.
    Usually in Jeff’s experience, early season minor league crowds buzzed much less than the lights as they spent the night in and out of conversation about life and the game, giving each an equal share all night long. The minor leagues sometimes worked in reverse from the big leagues. At the beginning of the season, there was still school, taxes and other bullshit for most people to worry about. It really took the boredom of summer sometimes to make the games interesting to fans.
    To Jeff, baseball was now uninteresting from early April to late August. Only in the offseason did the game seem remotely appealing to him. This was no typical early-season crowd, unfortunately. Tonight was some kids night at the park, which meant Jeff got bumped back from his usual stoop 10 rows behind home plate — he spent his working life either there or in the 10th row down the first base side — and forced him to listen to more shrieks than a cave full of bats every time someone hit the ball.
    The kiddies were out in force, ingesting sugar in seemingly lethal doses as moms doled out cash from purses like bookies. Needless to say, they were talking up a storm, reminding Jeff of how much kid-talking always got done on the airplanes on which he was trying to sleep over the years.
    And then Riley’s voice was back again, his former voice of reason and now just his former wife. He could only bring himself to dial her number when he’d stared down a couple rounds of Bushmills these days. But even those bad decisions and awkward conversations had become less and less frequent with the maturation of Jeff’s relationship with Irish whiskey.
    His estranged wife’s voice had never ceased to be the one inside Jeff’s head, until a new female voice began to dominate his thoughts that spring and summer. It was Riley that had been saying from their earliest days together that Jeff’s cynical view of people was dangerously close to too much, and that he needed to beef up his tolerance to pretty much everything. God, that had been forever ago.
    And now, of course, he thought about that goddamn GPS, still sitting on top of the beer fridge in the garage at home, still in the box. He’d wanted to bring it to Georgia to help christen his official foray into car-only travel this baseball season, but had sped out of New Orleans way later than he’d hoped that morning after drinking way more than he’d hoped the night before. He had left the expensive — and ill-intended somehow, maybe? Maybe — gift from his almost-ex-wife right there in the garage.
    Ascondo, he noticed casually, was standing on the top step of the Sand Gnats dugout now, waiting to scoot out to the on-deck circle