Out There: a novel Read Free Page A

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