Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “Done. What else?”

  “Suppose I were tracking a guy who didn’t want to be found.”

  “Best way to play the wolf is to think like the rabbit.”

  “One more thing. This is just between us, okay? No need to tell Commander Franklin or any of the other squids.”

  “Semper fi,” said the ex-Marine sergeant.

  They hung up.

  The sky outside the Laundromat was gray.

  Inside, the young mother’s blank eyes pointed at Wes.

  He left a mountain of coins on the ledge by the pay phone, walked out into the wind.

  Night ruled by the time Wes reached home. No headlights rode in his mirror during the trip home. No footsteps echoed on the sidewalk behind him as he walked the two blocks from the parking spot he found to his building. His mailbox in the hall was empty.

  A strip of fresh white tape with the black-inked letters B. Doyle was stuck to the mailbox for the apartment across the hall from his.

  The lights he snapped on showed him his home as he’d left it. Nothing changed, nothing disturbed. No surprises.

  Most nights, Wes stayed in these rooms that had become his home. Alone. He’d read—most often history. His TV set saw most of its use for baseball games. When he could, he’d drive to Baltimore to watch the Orioles play. He’d go to a movie, have dinner at a coworker’s house. Less and less frequently did such an evening involve the colleague’s wife having a single or divorced friend with a legendary great personality or sharp mind and the same trapped smile she’d get from Wes as they ate pasta. He told himself he enjoyed not having to share his bed. Lately, he’d taken to reading old letters from his mother—his father had never written Wes. Each day, their images in black-and-white snapshots looked more like strangers.

  That night, before he ate a restaurant dinner, Wes visited a photocopying store, copied the CIA file—plus the receipts, Berns’s pictures of Jud, Noah’s scribbles, and his own notes. At home, he changed his suit for sneakers, slacks, and a sweater, sat at his kitchen table with a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s and ice, stared at his copies of official secrets. And wondered if he was sliding from schooled caution to unjustified paranoia.

  Better a scared bureaucrat than a disgraced Marine.

  His photocopies fit inside a Ziploc plastic food-storage bag. He folded that bag inside a black plastic garbage bag, used black tape to make a sealed pouch. From his tool closet came a board too good to have thrown away, a hammer, and nails.

  The fish-eye peephole showed him an empty hall.

  Wes stepped into the hall, crept up the access stairs to the flat tar roof. The wind swirled blackness all around him as he crouched by the retaining wall circling the roof. Treetop level. Lights glowed from the windows of town houses across the street, but no one was looking out at the cold night. No one was watching him.

  The building’s air-conditioning unit rested on railroad ties. Wes put his waterproofed stash against the inside of a tie, nailed the board over it to foil the wind and squirrels.

  As he tiptoed down the roof stairs, a woman opened the door opposite his apartment.

  She took him in with a languid smile. Her shoulder-length brass-brown hair had a widow’s peak that swept it up and off each side of her freckled, pale face. She wore a white blouse, black slacks. Her feet were bare. A black plastic garbage bag dangled from her hand. She shook her head—and laughed, a throaty, high-pitched staccato Wes would remember to the day he died.

  “Great,” she said—her voice was husky, “a man with a hammer when what I need is someone who understands the formulas for posttensioning and prestressing.”

  Who the hell are you? was his first thought. Part of him wanted to lecture her: I’m a strange man carrying a tool that could be a weapon, don’t just … But then his heart smiled: whoever she was, she had a hell of a sense of humor and a nimble mind.

  That opened rusted doors in his own memory. Wes asked her, “Do you mean precast or on-site?”

  The door closed behind her. “You’re not a carpenter.”

  “You’re B. Doyle,” said Wes. He joined her on the dimly lit landing. She was more than a head shorter than him, but seemed taller. Lean. Angular yet fluid at the same time. Her mouth was wide, with full lips. Her eyes were well spaced and gray.

  “Beth Doyle,” she said.

  “What happened to Bob?” Wes knew his old neighbor’s name, that he was a lawyer for the Justice Department, that he missed the zen of riding his ten-speed bike because of his job’s long hours.

  “He got transferred all of a sudden because of some work emergency,” said Beth Doyle. “Who are you?”

  Wes told her his name. “Are you a friend of his?”

  “Never met him,” she said. “I needed a place right away, we knew somebody in common, so I’m subletting.”

  “Don’t take out the garbage until Wednesday night,” said Wes, nodding at the bag in her hand, “or the rats will get it.”

  “Hate rats.”

  “Then you should wear shoes and socks if you’re going outside. Never know what’ll run across your feet. Besides, it’s cold.”

  “Shoes I can handle,” she said, “but forget the socks: one more thing to pack. How did you know that concrete stuff?”

  “I had to study it once,” he said. “There’s a fleck of steel sticking in the right side of your nose.”

  “That’s my diamond!” she laughed and touched it. Her fingernails were chewed low. “Twelve years since India. I don’t even see it when I look in the mirror.

  “Most people pretend not to notice it,” she added. And then looked at him differently.

  “Why do you have it?”

  “I was terminally naive. Stick skinny—some things never change. Looked fourteen. I wanted to look sophisticated. Older. So it was a carrot and a gold needle. Don’t ever let anyone tell you there are no nerves in your nose.”

  “It’s a deal,” he promised. “Why were you in India?”

  “It was on the road. You ever been to Asia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you really know those formulas? Could you help me?”

  His mouth opened to say no.

  “I can try,” he told her.

  “I’ve got bourbon,” she said. “If I can find it.”

  She opened her door. Wes followed her in.

  A dozen boxes were scattered around the apartment. The components of a drafting table leaned against one wall.

  “Wait a minute!” she said. He stopped in her threshold. “All I know about you is you’re Wes Chandler, you’ve got a hammer and know something about concrete. You could be a stone killer and I’m inviting you in for bourbon. What do you do? Who are you?”

  “I’m a Marine officer,” he said.

  “The first man I meet in Washington is a Marine?” She shook her head. “What a desperate town. Should I trust you?”

  “No,” he said.

  She laughed and he had to join her.

  “At least you’re honest,” she said. “Close the door.”

  She found the bourbon.

  They sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by half-unpacked cardboard boxes. Engineering textbooks and notebooks lay open between them, glasses of bourbon guarded their sides. From time to time, as she scrutinized her notebook or a text, her hair would slide over her face; without thinking, she’d brush it away, tuck it behind her ear. She smoked Camel cigarettes she lit with the snap and click of a battered Zippo lighter.

  “Don’t tell me it’s an ugly addiction,” she said. “Sometimes late at night when you’re drafting, it’s just you and your cigarette and it’s heaven not to be alone.”

  For once, Wes didn’t mind the smoke floating around him.

  His memory of engineering problems he’d sweated out at the Naval Academy quickly proved useless.

  “What the hell,” she said. “I’ll unpack tonight, get it in class tomorrow.”

  “I know I know how to unpack,” he told her.

&nb
sp; She laughed, handed him a taped cardboard box. As they opened her packaged possessions and assembled her drafting table, she told him she was an archivist with the Oriental Arts Foundation, starting work at the Freer Gallery on the Mall, taking engineering and physics classes at Georgetown to make up for a checkered college career at Denison and Barnard.

  “I’m going to be an architect,” she said. “If I get into school. If I don’t work myself to death getting there.”

  Wes told her he had a desk at the Navy Yard.

  She said she was thirty-two. A Catholic girl from Long Island. Single. Germany came up in her stories. Thailand.

  “Bangkok was my baptism with reality,” she told him after they’d quit pretending to work on academics. “Nineteen years old. I was never so petrified in my life. Millions of little Thai men grabbing at you in the airport. The city is thousands of miles of klongs, canals. They pull bodies out of the klongs every morning. No names, just bodies. Spooky.”

  Wes opened another box of books, found a battered and water-stained thick yellow volume: The I Ching or Book of Changes.

  “Is that where you got this?” he said, handing it to her.

  “Actually, that’s a New York addition.”

  “I’ve never been one for superstition.”

  “That’s not what this is about,” she said, taking the book from him. “Best therapist I ever had was a Jungian, dream man. Jung loved the I Ching.”

  “Doesn’t it promise you salvation?”

  “It promises nothing.” She smiled. “Here, I’ll show you. You’re supposed to have a problem or a question in mind, but I figure you’re one big question.”

  With anyone else, he knew he would have felt foolish, but somehow with her, he felt eager, curious; open. Part of him wondered why he hadn’t balked when she’d mentioned a therapist; he dreaded neurotic women. Dilettantes. Flakes. But despite apparent evidence to the contrary, he instinctively ruled she didn’t fit in those classes. Nor was she like anyone he’d ever known. His pocket held three pennies. She made him toss them on the floor between them six times, each time ascribing a value to the mix of heads and tails, drawing on a paper either two dashes or a solid line to form a hexagram stack.

  “So?” he said as she matched the hexagram he’d made in the index of sixty-four possibilities.

  “So the I Ching is about now,” she said, flipping pages in the book. “This moment. Everything is always changing, and your hexagram can reflect … not advice, but a sense of the changes.

  “Oh-oh,” she said.

  “What?”

  “K’an. The Abyss.”

  “Might not be so bad,” she said, scanning several pages. “K’an means the heart, the soul, light locked up in the dark. Reason. ‘Through repetition of danger we grow accustomed to it…. By growing used to what is dangerous, a man can easily allow it to become part of him…. With this, he has lost the right way, and misfortune is the natural result…. What matters most is sincerity.’ There’s images of water, a river flowing, light.”

  “I didn’t expect danger when you invited me in,” he told her, smiling to lighten the moment.

  “They were your coins.” She smiled. “What do you think?”

  “Makes sense,” he admitted. “But I wouldn’t have used your method to come to those conclusions. I’m more deductive than … imaginative. Or intuitive.”

  She put one of his pennies in his open palm, turned it from heads to tails. The brush of her fingers was electric.

  “Same coin, different sides.”

  Her hand floated away, ground out the cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. Wes glanced at his watch: 11:16.

  “I have to go,” he told her. “I need to get up early.”

  “A breakfast meeting?” she asked.

  “I have to leave town for a few days.”

  “Where to?”

  “Los Angeles,” he said, then immediately regretted it.

  “Never been. Bring me back a souvenir of Hollywood.”

  “Ah, sure.”

  “And next time, you have to tell me about you.”

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  “You’re a bad liar.” She smiled. “I like that in a man.”

  She walked him to the hall. Stood framed in the door, lithe and vulnerable and smoky while he opened his apartment.

  “Don’t forget to come back,” she said.

  GECKOS

  In November 1965, the oil refinery made the guidance counselor’s office in Chula Mesa High smell like a burning highway.

  “Jud,” Mr. Norris told the boy sitting in front of his desk, “your first two years, you were barely here. Last year you pulled your GPA up to a three point four and blew the track coach away. He says it’s like you’ve been running distance for years.”

  “It’s a mile and a half to school, over the hills, through the turkey farm. Until I got fast, I got caught.”

  Chemistry teacher and counselor Norris didn’t want to hear about boys such as this lean, six-foot senior getting pantsed, beaten, and robbed by adolescent wolf packs. There was nothing he could do; that was all just part of becoming a man. And there were worse places to grow up than this southern California town.

  The bell rang. Doors banged open. With a roar, teenagers surged through the corridors of American public education.

  Jud’s eyes are Bunsen burner flames, thought Norris.

  “So have you given any thought to what career you’d like to pursue?” asked Norris.

  “I want to be a spy,” said Jud.

  The counselor blinked. Then exploded in laughter.

  Stop laughing! Jud prayed. I’ll say I was joking. Tell you what you expect. Talk about going on the line at Northrop or junior college. Or I’ll say I’ll wait for the draft. But please, please stop laughing at me!

  A girl giggled in the hall. Laughter from a million faceless voices sucked the strength from Jud’s limbs. He was dead weight in the wooden chair. His tongue thickened until he gagged. Acid churned in his stomach. The laughter grew louder.

  Across the desk, Norris cupped his forehead; his face turned crimson. Tears trickled down his cheeks. His hand dropped into a desk drawer. The counselor’s bald head glistened. His tears and sweat beads turned red and rolled to the sea. Flesh melted from his face, his eyes dissolved into black sockets. The skull cackled at Jud. The skeleton in the white shirt and tie raised a revolver from the desk drawer. The pistol’s bore stared at Jud, a black eye that grew with each sledgehammer blow of Jud’s heart. A bone thumb snicked back the revolver’s hammer. Helpless, Jud watched the bleached-bone trigger finger squeeze—

  “Unhhh!”

  Jud was panting, eyes wide open, seeing nothing.

  A dark room. Bed.

  Awake, he was awake, lying in a narrow bed, sheets soaked with his sweat, his skin clammy, his heart slamming against his ribs, his hands gripping the sides of the lumpy mattress.

  A blast of a semi truck’s horn shook Jud’s trailer as the truck roared past on the night highway.

  The glowing hands of the alarm clock on the nightstand showed four thirty-five.

  Five hours, thought Jud, I slept almost five hours.

  He snapped on the lamp, listened to the ticking clock and the wind tapping grains of sand on the trailer’s walls.

  One of the trailer’s previous inhabitants had screwed a mirror in the wall opposite the bed. Jud watched himself stand. He wore green drawstring pants given him by Carmen and the chopped-sleeved sweatshirt in which he had fled L.A.

  Four days ago, he thought. In the mirror, he rubbed his stomach—still a big gut, but the bloated look was gone: his liver had shrunk.

  Four days since I had a drink.

  The trailer was bigger than a coffin. Jud fit in the shower stall. A sink and a hot plate were the kitchen. A dying refrigerator served as the shelf for a black-and-white TV. Under the bed, where Jud hid his gun, he’d found a decade-old Playboy magazine. The centerfold was a lean blonde with green eyes, wea
ring a sheer white negligee. She stood in the doorway of a shadowed bedroom, wisps of dry-ice fog all around her. She was smiling.

  Quarter to five. Jud didn’t need to walk over to the café until six.

  In the mirror, a skeleton sitting behind a desk laughed silently.

  “He who laughs lasts,” said Jud. He turned on the TV.

  Phantoms lit the screen, a man and a woman sitting around a coffee table in New York.

  “… and today in federal court in Washington,” the TV woman said, “one set of government attorneys will argue against the release of classified documents while another set of government attorneys will argue that they need those documents to prosecute defendants in the Iran-contra scandal. The administration’s position in this is—”

  Jud snapped off the TV.

  In four days he’d cleaned Nora’s Café with a thoroughness the business had never known. He rehung the screen door, unstuck windows, even changed the oil on Nora’s Jeep.

  He paced the length of the trailer. His hands barely trembled. Five o’clock. Dawn would come soon.

  His thoughts drifted to a lean sergeant he’d known years before at JFK Special Warfare school.

  “Time must be your ally!” shouted the sergeant as he marched through the rows of Special Forces trainees locked in the push-up position, his jump boots barely missing their splayed fingers. “If you want to survive, if you want to win, you must always be gettin’ approved rest and rec-re-a-tion, gettin’ ready, or gettin’ it on! All that gettin’s up to you! You don’t get it your way, you get it from the other guy!”

  The other guy. Jud turned out the trailer’s lamp, pushed aside the black muslin curtain. In the end of the night, he saw no one.

  Yet.

  He put on his socks and sneakers. The breeze outside chilled his arms; his pants whipped his legs. The scent of sand and sagebrush filled his nostrils. Packed earth crunched beneath his sneakers as he paced between his trailer and the café. He faced Nora’s adobe house.

  Don’t think about not remembering, he ordered himself. Don’t think about whether it’s been fifteen years. Don’t think: do. Sand pellets stung his face. Not important. Not there.

  He raised his hands until his clenched fists reached his armpits, sank into a squat, toed-out his feet, then swung his heels out and settled into a pigeon-toed stance.