Free GPS by Nathan Summers

to get to the ATM at the back, he had an unexpected feeling of survival about him, a swelling in his chest. It was like the feeling a person gets right after losing control of the car in a rainstorm, skidding off the side of the road and screeching to a stop inches from the guardrail. He had no idea where he’d gone, how he’d gotten there or if he’d ever be going back. He could only remember that short glimpse — the screams, the rearing, grunting horses and the SUV convoy raking through everything in its path.
    He slid his hand into his back pocket as he walked past the brats, pulling out his wallet, and a sudden flash of the little girl in the picture came to him. He didn’t get the same feeling of annoyance when he thought of her that he did with all other humans age 15 and under. Her helplessness made her much different than most of the kids in his day-to-day path. Somewhere deep in his mind was the knowledge that he could have created that kind of connection with Riley, that he should have when he had the chance. It was always too late, it seemed.
    The little girl made Jeff wish that whatever else there was to that scene in the desert, before and after what he saw or remembered, that he had done something. That he didn’t just hide on the sideline. That he had been somebody over there that he could not seem to be over here. But how could he have? If there was any place to hide from that attack, he would have been wrestling with dozens of the other people for it and would have been found anyway. How did no one see him out there? Was he really there?
    If Jeff would have looked over his right shoulder at the moment he was asking himself that question, he would have gotten reassurance that he was there. A New Mexico state trooper was giving the mud-crusted Celica a good, long stare over the frames of his sunglasses as he sauntered across the parking lot from Pump No. 14 to the store entrance. Nothing against the law about having a dirty car, of course, but the Celica in its current state was quite an attention-getter. Jeff remained oblivious at the back of the store.
    He typed in his pin number, and he thought about how ATMs in convenience stores always took forever. And only the ones inside convenience stores. And bars. Why? Since this one apparently did not want to disappoint in that regard, Jeff impatiently opened up his wallet to see what, if any, money he might already have. He’d never gotten to that part of the personal inspection that morning at the Elegante. Had that maid been flirting with him? That seemed a like a month ago right now.
    There was no money in the wallet, naturally, not even a dollar. But there was, in the place of money, a folded-up piece of white paper. The ATM droned on and on, seeming to call out to other ATMs in the area for help as to what to do next, how to make the bills inside the machine come rolling out. Jeff set his wallet on the stupid thing so he could unfold the sheet of paper, which he immediately thought he recognized in another brief fit of deja vu.
    As the 10 Andrew Jacksons he’d requested finally crept out one by one into the steel tray underneath the ATM, and as the New Mexico state trooper pondered the many different kinds of cookies this particular store — called Endless Sun — had to offer in the adjacent aisle, Jeff said the words he saw scrawled on the paper, out loud, almost triumphantly, and without realizing he was doing it.
    “Únete a la revolución!”

 
    - 9 -
     
     
     
    A convenience store hot dog never tasted so good, Jeff thought to himself as he watched, for the first of what would prove to be three times, the Celica being pushed through the Gold Wash treatment at Scrubbles, right down the road from the University of New Mexico. The crew of blue-T-shirted men looming at the other end of the giant car wash’s tunnel — each one’s hands draped in matching blue towels, waiting to embrace another dripping car as it rolled out — could not help