Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “I’ll help you,” volunteered Plaid Jacket.

  The bartender handed him one of Jud’s feet. Jud wore cheap black high-top sneakers and no socks. The bartender jerked his head toward the back door, counted, “One, two, three!”

  They pulled Jud across the floor. His chopped-sleeve sweatshirt slid up over his massive belly and hairless chest.

  The bartender said, “You’re stronger than you look.”

  “Yes,” answered Plaid Jacket.

  Jud felt his head bounce as they dragged him out the back door. He kept his eyes closed, his weight lifeless. The men dragging him rested on the porch landing.

  “The bull pen,” said the bartender, nodding down to the wood-fenced, packed-dirt yard. “’Course these guys are steers.”

  Their laughter echoed in the cool night. The bartender squinted down the shadowed staircase.

  “Ain’t nobody else sleepin’ it off down there,” he said. “Let’s see if he can do it hi’self.”

  Jud let them muscle him to his feet. His head hung low on his chest, so he risked opening his eyes a slit. Saw a hand belonging to a plaid sleeve holding his right arm.

  “Hey! Buddy!” The bartender shouted in Jud’s left ear. “You all right? You can make it, right?”

  To Plaid Jacket, the bartender said, “He can make it.”

  The bartender shoved Jud down the steps. Whirling, bouncing off the brick wall and the railing, Jud crashed to the ground. After a few seconds, he rolled on his side.

  “See?” said the bartender. “Drunks, you can’t hurt ’em.”

  He led Plaid Jacket inside for a beer on the house.

  Get up, Jud told himself as he lay gasping in the dirt. Only got until Plaid Jacket establishes his cover.

  He found the wall and used it to brace himself. Sitting. Standing. Leaning against the bricks. Not falling down.

  From inside the bar, Jud heard laughter. Willie Nelson singing about federales and finks. Jud was surprised the bar had a jukebox. The only person inside who’d waste pocket change on music would be Plaid Jacket. Not a waste for him, realized Jud: cover.

  A seven-foot wood fence surrounded the bull pen in the California night. The falls had knocked some of the liquor from his system. Jud shuffled to the fence, to the gate.

  Locked. He caressed the lock’s smooth face. If he had tools, thirty seconds. If his hands didn’t shake. He gripped the top of the fence—couldn’t lift his bulk off his toes.

  In the bar, another record started, a woman singing sweet and clear. Jud loved women who could sing sweet and clear and loud enough to cover whatever Plaid Jacket had planned.

  Last good chance. Jud retreated until he was under the porch. Three deep breaths: he charged, resisting the urge to yell as he careened through the darkness like a human cannonball.

  Smacked into the wooden gate.

  Sprang back like a beach ball, sprawling on the ground as the fence shook and the gate held.

  Jud lay on his back, his shoulder swelling, eyes open to the night where smog hid the stars. He could surrender, fade into blackness. He imagined Plaid Jacket laughing on his barstool.

  They could have at least sent someone with more class.

  He got up.

  Inside, the woman stopped singing. Glasses clinked. In his mind, Jud saw Plaid Jacket slide off his stool, fish in his pocket for a quarter, feed the jukebox, and turn. Motion established. Cover.

  Jud staggered up the stairs. Found no loose boards, no bricks or pipes, no jagged piece of glass. He stared at his trembling hands. The skills of a dozen teachers had been soaked out of that flesh. Tonight, there wasn’t a drunk in the bar who couldn’t beat him. And it wasn’t a drunk who’d try.

  Dion’s “The Wanderer,” which had been a hit when Jud raged through adolescence, spilled out into the night.

  Iron bars covered a window in the wall behind the half-open door. A drainpipe ran beside the window to the roof.

  “Hey!” came the bartender’s yell from inside the Oasis. “Where you going?”

  Jud slid behind the door, stepped on the windowsill, and grabbed the bars. He teetered but made it, back against the bricks, clinging to the drainpipe and heels on the window’s ledge.

  Then he did his best to let go inside, to relax, to not-think. One chance, one play.

  A form interrupted the light filtering through the open door. From his perch, Jud could see the top of a man’s balding head and the shoulders of his plaid jacket.

  “Somebody has to make sure he’s okay!” the man yelled. He stepped onto the porch, intent on the darkness of the yard. While his eyes scanned the stairs inches from his shoes, his hand reached behind him, pushed the door shut.

  Jud loosed his grip and fell off the windowsill, his arms wide as he surrendered to gravity and the night.

  He slammed into Plaid Jacket like a walrus plopping on a leopard seal. The two men crashed down the wooden stairs, thudding onto the packed dirt. Jud landed on top.

  The man beneath him was bony and still, his head at an awkward angle. Jud probed the man’s neck; found no pulse.

  Next thing Jud realized he was leaning against the fence. Vomiting. His head swam and bile burned his throat each time he gasped. Tears stung his eyes and he blinked them away.

  It was the fall, Jud agreed. If I hadn’t been drunk, I’d be dead, too. He was supposed to be stunned so I could run. He wasn’t supposed to die. Not him, too.

  Jud silenced his conscience, bent to search the corpse.

  A dime-store notepad and pen in the plaid jacket. A pack of Camels and a box of kitchen matches. From the pants came two hundred dollars in bills and loose change. Fingernail clipper. A handkerchief. A set of car keys, house keys. A wallet. Half a dozen credit cards matched the California driver’s license, which matched the face well enough. No work ID of any kind. First-rate paper cover. Innocent. He found no gun, but a good field man wouldn’t need one. Jud strapped the man’s digital watch to his own bare wrist, filled his pockets with the dead man’s things, looked down. Swallowed hard.

  Walked up the stairs, eyes forward.

  No one else who didn’t belong had come into the bar. Plaid Jacket’s backup might be waiting outside.

  Fuck it, thought Jud. Don’t back down.

  The bartender had his rear to the room, watering a rummy’s shot. He glanced in the mirror as Jud walked by.

  “Hey!” called the bartender, turning. “What about you?”

  “Keep the change,” Jud muttered.

  Jud stepped outside beneath the red neon OASIS sign, silently screaming as he waited for the bullet to cut him down.

  Nothing.

  A dozen parked cars, all empty. No one in the doorways. No one crouched on the skid-row fire escapes. A police siren wailed down distant boulevards, wrong direction and too soon to be for Jud. He didn’t have the time to match the dead man’s keys to a parked car. Jud had no car. His $l7-a-night hotel was four blocks away, easy to stumble home to after a hard night at the Oasis. Or to crawl. But he wouldn’t risk going there. He had next to nothing in his room. Suitcases of worn clothes. A couple snapshots. Keys to a Mercedes he gave to Lorri when she left. His wallet held his driver’s license and empty slots for credit cards.

  And the men from yesterday finally wanted him dead.

  What the hell, he thought. Make ’em work for it.

  The least important difference between California and the East Coast is that the sun rises three hours earlier over the Atlantic. On that last Monday in February 1990, dawn broke in Washington, D.C., at 7:21, EST, filling Nick Kelley’s suburban Maryland bedroom with gray light. Nick slept quietly beside his wife, her black hair spread on her pillow like a Japanese fan.

  The telephone rang.

  Which spooked their rottweiler, who barked and woke the baby in the next room; Saul cried. The phone rang again before Nick could grab the receiver. Beside him, Sylvia stirred.

  “’Lo?” whispered Nick into the phone.

  “This is the A T a
nd T operator. Will you accept a collect call from, ah, Wolf?”

  Nick closed his eyes, sighed. Opened his mouth to say no, then shook his head and said, “Yes.”

  “Who is it?” mumbled Sylvia, sitting up, brushing her hair off her forehead. She wore a long, white nightgown.

  “Jud,” whispered her husband as he sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Shit,” she said. Nick half-hoped her curse hadn’t carried over the phone line, half-hoped it had. Sylvia flipped the covers back, padded from the room to care for their son.

  “It’s me,” Jud said on the other end of the line.

  “I guessed,” replied Nick. Partly for his wife, he said, “Do you know what time it is?”

  At a corner pay phone in Los Angeles, Jud checked the dead man’s watch.

  “Zero four-thirty, my time,” he told Nick.

  “You woke the baby.”

  “Oh. Sorry. How is he? Saul, right?”

  “He’s fine.” Nick sighed. He ran his hand through his steel-flecked black hair—prematurely gray, he noted. And this is how it got that way. “He was due to wake up anyway.”

  “Look, I just called to tell you, if you don’t hear from me for a while—”

  “I haven’t heard from you for a while.”

  “—I’ve got to go under.”

  “Again?” said Nick flatly. He yawned. Nick was a wiry man, almost too lean for his just under six-foot height.

  “This time is different.” Jud’s calm tone held none of his practiced drama.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No shit.”

  Nick licked his lips; Sylvia was still out of the room. “Does it have anything to do with us?”

  “With you?” said Jud, understanding. “Doubt it.”

  What if you’re wrong? thought Nick.

  “We had us some times, didn’t we, partner?” said Jud.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know I love you like a brother.”

  Nick’s face burned. Sylvia walked back in the bedroom, their sixteen-month-old son in her arms. The sleepy baby burrowed his face into Mommy’s chest.

  “Uh, yeah.” Nick avoided Sylvia’s glare. “Me, too.”

  “In case I don’t get to, tell Saul about me.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “The truth.”

  “What’s that? Where do I start?”

  “With good-bye,” said Jud. A pair of headlights rolled toward him. He hung up.

  On the East Coast, Nick heard the phone click, waited, then hung up, too, and knew that finally, this had been the call.

  In Los Angeles, the headlights flowed past Jud. He rested his throbbing forehead on the pay phone, closed his eyes.

  Jud had caught a bus seven blocks from the Oasis. He played the forgettable wino for the bored black bus driver, five laughing Hispanic women dressed in janitor’s uniforms, three stoic Korean men, and a sleeping black woman, a bowling-ball bag on the seat beside her. In the green light of the bus’s interior, Jud made a convincing wino.

  When he went to work for Angel Hardware & Lock six months earlier, Jud mastered the alarm system and cut himself a set of store keys. Inside the store, he turned on the coffeemaker and started a can of tomato soup on the hot plate. He went to his time card. He was owed for eleven shifts, plus overtime.

  One shelf held dusty gym bags. Jud ripped the tags off two and cruised the aisles. Swiss army knives. A nylon jacket. Four pairs of work socks; a soldier could always use socks. Jud blushed when he realized he wasn’t wearing any. Leather work gloves and cotton gardening gloves. A flashlight. From the workroom, he took lockpicks and tension bars, master keys, compact screwdriver and wrench kits, a ball peen hammer, a jimmy, and a plastic shimmy.

  The tomato soup was bubbling. He ate the whole can, drank strong coffee. He put socks on under his sneakers. In the bathroom, he found a bottle of aspirin and a safety razor. He took four aspirin, put the bottle and razor in his bag.

  Jud let himself into the owner’s office and snapped on the snake-necked desk light. Musty papers, ledgers, lock parts, and tools covered the desk. Jud took $131 from a cashbox. He sat in the desk’s squeaky chair, thought about the fat, cigar-smoking owner who drove a Caddy and hated and feared the world. Taped to the bottom of the middle drawer, Jud found an envelope with pictures of hard-looking women naked except for black boots and whips. The envelope also held three $100 bills. Jud put the money in his pocket, the pictures back in the envelope, retaped it to the drawer. The owner would tell no one of that loss. Clipped inside the right-hand drawer, Jud found a dusty snub-nose .38 revolver.

  The gun was loaded. Jud cleaned and oiled the weapon. He wedged the gun between his belt and his right kidney, hoped the nylon jacket would cover it, hoped he could still do the cop draw.

  He scrawled We’re even across his time card and dropped it on the office desk.

  Bags in hand, he walked six blocks to a pay phone. He leaned against a light pole and tried to clear his brain before he called Nick. After they talked, he rested his forehead on the phone. The Dodgers were using his head for batting practice. When he breathed, he tasted tomato soup, cheap whiskey, and bile. The gun dug into his back.

  Don’t need bullets, he thought, I’ll just blow on ’em.

  He picked up the receiver, reconsidered: Do that last.

  On a sleeping residential street four blocks away he found a Chevy without a locking gas cap. Jud wore the cotton gloves. He slid the plastic shimmy along the passenger window, sprang the door lock, popped off the ignition cover, spliced the wires into a switch stolen from his old shop. The engine purred. He put his two bags on the front floor, eased the Chevy into gear, and coasted down the block with the lights out.

  He drove back to the pay phone, parked so the receiver was a fast step away from the open car door. Stared at the phone until it became nothing. Punched in a toll-free number.

  On the other side of the continent, where it was now 8:26 A.M., five men in conservative shirts and ties sat in a windowless room, enjoying croissants and coffee at their computer-laden desks. Clocks on the wall showed the time in every U.S. zone, Greenwich, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The men laughed about a woman they barely knew.

  A blue phone rang on the second desk from the left. The desk’s computer screen automatically split. The man at the desk looked like a Yale professor, an image he’d cultivated since graduating from the University of Wyoming five years before. He adjusted his earphone and mike headset, held up his hand for silence, then flipped a switch to answer the call.

  “Hello?” he said, his eyes on his computer screen.

  “Why don’t you answer ‘Security Force’ anymore?” said Jud.

  “Hello?” repeated the man, frowning.

  “This is Malice.”

  The man typed MALICE onto the screen, pushed the enter key. Within seconds, a six-word column appeared on the screen’s left side. The man chose the first word.

  “Is that M as in mother?” he asked.

  “M as in malign.”

  “E as in …”

  “Enigma,” said Jud. “Lame, don’t waste time running the list. You know who I am.”

  The right side of the screen lit up.

  “Yes,” said the man who’d answered the call as he read the computer’s instructions. “I think I know who this is.”

  The man’s coworkers looked over his shoulder. One whispered, “Malice—I had him twice.”

  “Shame on you guys,” said Jud. “Shame on you.”

  “What?” said the man who’d answered his call.

  “That was no way to say good-bye,” Jud told them.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Ask around the Oasis Bar, Lame. You’ll figure it out. If you’re cleared high enough.”

  “What can I do for you?” asked the man Jud had called.

  Suddenly, in L.A., the dead man’s watch began to beep. Jud poked buttons on the watch dial. The be
eps didn’t stop.

  “Do you hear a beeping noise?” asked the man in front of the computer screen.

  Jud banged the watch on his wrist against the pay phone’s glass wall. The glass cracked, but the watch kept beeping.

  “Are you there?” said the smooth voice in Jud’s ear.

  Jud curled his arm outside the phone cubicle so the beeping watch was on the other side of the glass.

  “Can I help you?” tried the would-be Yalie one last time.

  “You tell ’em I said hello, huh? Not good-bye, Lame. Not like that. You tell ’em all I said hello.”

  Across the bottom of the right-hand screen the computer printed the number of Jud’s pay phone.

  “Tell who?” asked the man. He kept his voice calm.

  “Yeah,” said Jud. “Yeah.”

  He hung up.

  The watch quit beeping.

  “God, I don’t need this,” muttered Jud. He fastened the dead man’s watch around the telephone receiver. Left that high-tech prankster for them. Drove away in the stolen Chevy. To the west waited the ocean. South was Mexico and bad karma. East was where he’d been. Jud headed north, the direction a mouse took in search of the wren he loved in the only happy story Jud remembered from his childhood.

  THE CHOSEN ONE

  Major Wesley Chandler, United States Marine Corps, drove past two sheriff’s deputies parked at the mouth of a suburban Virginia cul-de-sac, their windows cracked so they wouldn’t suffocate, their engine chugging so they wouldn’t freeze in the March night. He nodded to them; they noted his uniform and nodded back, comrades-in-arms against the barbarians.

  Cars lined the residential street, middle-class mobility machines. He saw no limousines. And no parking spaces.

  A man with an unbuttoned overcoat stood in the porch light’s glow at the rambling Tudor home that matched the address on Wes’s notepad. A second man wrapped in Washington’s ubiquitous Burberry trench coat lounged against a blue sedan with three antennae on its trunk. The Burberry was unfastened. A plastic tube ran from the coat to the man’s left ear. The two men’s eyes rode with Wes as he cruised past the house.

  He drove back to the mouth of the cul-de-sac. The parking space he found was too close to the corner for the law, but the deputies didn’t seem to care.