Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  Everything’s fine, thought Jud. He remembered a sign on the door of the restaurant where he’d worked during high school: PROPER ATTIRE REQUIRED. No shit, thought Jud.

  That night Jud wore full thermal long underwear. Double socks. Nylon gloves covered by wool gloves with the fingers cut out—risky but he’d need the flexibility. Next came black ski gloves. Jud had the sergeant major wrap black duct tape from the nylon cuff of each ski glove to Jud’s forearms. They knew about another mission in which the wind had ripped the team leader’s right glove off at 40,000 feet. His Number Two had seen it go, seen the leader’s hand curl and crack and his fingers freeze solid, snap off. The man went into shock, tumbled in without pulling a cord. No one on his team would die that way, vowed Jud. Over his thermals, Jud wore a black jumpsuit with black zippers, Velcro flaps. Jungle boots. Over his head, Jud slipped a skintight black hood, with eye holes and mouth slit. A second hood went over that, then an extralarge jump helmet.

  “Your HALO gear costs two-plus grand,” the instructor had announced during training. “Secure your DZ, then bury that shit.”

  Jud strapped an altimeter to each wrist, stuffed a third one into a chest pocket, fastened the Velcro of the pocket shut, and tied the altimeter’s cord around his neck. The wind ate the only altimeter carried by Milder, so he’d had to guess when to pull. He guessed wrong, popped open a mile too high (falling at 185 mph, who could blame him?)—which meant a patrol spotted him. The patrol missed seeing the rest of the team drop, and they got Milder back, but it cost the mission and an arm for Milder.

  They wouldn’t hit the ground. Not at first. First was the jungle, five canopy layers, steam rising from emerald-green trees full of bone-eating bugs and ten-step snakes. Perfumed flowers and rotting swamp. Tigers usually weren’t a problem. They’d crash through the trees until the branches grabbed the chutes and left them dangling, swinging in the moonless night while monkeys screamed and birds took wing and God please let any patrols think it was just another jungle jump-up and God please don’t let there be any patrols, there weren’t supposed to be. Not tonight. Not according to the briefing given Jud and Curtain.

  Jud had strapped a knife to his right boot. A second knife hung butt down from a sheath above his heart. For safety, he carried a razor knife in a zippered side pocket. To cut free of the chute, to let him use the three hundred feet of climbing rope packed ready to spill out from his waist under his reserve chute.

  Jud looked over at the Nungs—men whose ancestors had walked from China to Southeast Asia. These four had not done their ancestors proud. Murderers and thieves, they’d looked up from their North Vietnam death-row prison hole weeks ago and there had been Jud, beckoning, the cell door swinging open, their jailer slumped against a far wall. They’d gone, believing there was no worse hell than the cell.

  Now, huddled in the belly of the B-52, Jud wagered they weren’t so sure. There’d been ten. The handlers washed four out right away; where they went, Jud didn’t know. Number five washed out because he couldn’t learn enough about weapons. The sixth left when Jud saw the wrong terror in his eyes. That left four, the mission needed four, so Jud made them make it. Babied them through their only other parachute drop: hooked up to an open canopy before dawn when the other troops at the Okinawa jump school slept, then shoved off the platform for a three-hundred foot controlled drop to the sand.

  “Tell ’em it’s like Disneyland,” Jud ordered the interpreter who was coaxing the Nungs onto the jump platform. Jud spoke almost none of the Nungs’ dialect; gambled on hand signs, obvious common interest, and their hunger to interpret divine will to get the team through the mission. “Tell ’em anything, but make sure they understand I am head fuckin’ Mickey Mouse.”

  No one mentioned High-Altitude, Low-Opening alternatives.

  They’d been on three patrols together, trial runs based from Da Nang, safaris into Indian country. The Nungs showed a crook’s instincts for stealth, slaughter, and survival. They slept in a circle with Jud at the center—their choice. He rewarded them with beer and Thai whores who didn’t speak their dialect.

  Crouched now on the plane, Jud shifted his weight and felt the black canvas bag on his shoulder that held his silenced Russian AK-47. In a shoulder holster underneath his jumpsuit was a fourteen-shot, Smith & Wesson 9mm automatic. A holster on his belt cradled a .45 automatic. He’d rigged a holster next to his naked left thigh for a two-shot derringer guaranteed to put a .22 long inside your skull and keep it bouncing around until your brain turned to mush. The derringer’s slugs were coated with shellfish toxin from the same Langley lab that in 1960 dispatched lethal bacteria to an assassination team targeting Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. Jud could pull the trigger without drawing the derringer, send a slug into his leg. The Wizards promised him results in sixty seconds and didn’t know Jud knew they lied about the agony.

  A black nylon HALO chute and special breathing apparatus rode on the team’s backs. Oxygen masks had been rigged into the bomb bay for the flight, but no internal radio links.

  We have no need to talk anyway, Jud thought, remembering when he and Curtain met the B-52’s crew, told them sketchy cover stories, and memorized trivia about each of the fly-boys to con an NVA interrogator into thinking Curtain and Jud belonged on the plane. Photos of Jud and Curtain with girls and football buddies were taped on the plane wall, just as two real crewmen might have done. Faked pictures, faked girlfriends. In case the bomber survived being shot down.

  Don’t think about anything you don’t need to think about, Jud warned himself, and he remembered a girl in high school he’d never dared to talk to.

  Panic seized Jud: What if he couldn’t understand the asset waiting for them on the ground? The asset was a survivor of two groups of North Vietnamese the CIA smuggled out of Haiphong in 1955, trained in Saigon, then sent back to the communist north. He was supposed to speak French and English, plus Curtain spoke beaucoup Vietnamese, but what if the asset didn’t make it to the rendezvous? What if Jud couldn’t see the amber light that was supposed to be flashing through the trees to guide them to the DZ? What if the asset had been picked up, hot-ironed, and hell, what if he wasn’t an asset? Double, NVA, Pathet Lao, or even Chinese? What if he just fucked up? What if—

  Then, Jud told himself, pulling it all down to one word he could manage, one word he could keep from mutating into a million shapes and sounds: then.

  Two red dots glowing in the bomb bay violated light silence and let Jud see not much, not far. But enough to realize the Nungs had joined hands, each gripping the hand of a man from their tribe whom they might not care about but whose fate they were destined to share. Jud reached out, gripped the free hand of the Nung next to him, raised it. The Nungs stared. Curtain made the chain complete. Slowly, all the joined hands rose, triumphant. Jud felt energy flow through their chain, knew the Nungs felt it, too. The right move at the right moment, and even if it wasn’t, what the hell, Jud loved the energy, too.

  He was already linked to the two Nungs closest to him, as was Curtain to the other two. Two clusters of three men, each cluster bonded with a rope. Jud had tied the Nungs twenty feet apart, giving Curtain and himself more slack. The Nungs only knew they were going to jump, that it would be like on the tower. That they would fall a long time, then Jud would pull himself in close, cut their daisy chain, and jerk their rip cords before he popped himself. Jud knew they thought the free-fall would last about ten seconds. If he’d told them three minutes, they would never have jumped. The plan called for them to panic, falling, blackness all around, the wind rushing, the cold … freeze-up. They’d drop like stones. If they didn’t panic enough, one of them might find his rip cord, and they’d all be jerked out of free-fall, too much weight for one too-soon chute, tumbling out of control….

  That happens, Jud told himself, you can still cut free. You’ll have time. Cut free, stabilize, skim away like a bird. Pop your chute, improvise a ground plan. You mind will be clear and your will won’t fail
you.

  Someone tapped his left shoulder. He looked up into the body of the plane and saw the copilot, oxygen mask, safety line. The copilot made the okay sign, then in the air drew an L.

  Laos.

  Jud stood. Watched his team follow him, watched them remove the plane’s oxygen masks and affix their own self-contained breathing apparatuses. Again Jud grabbed the hand of the Nung behind him, had that man do the same, only this time the chain was two separate sections, with Curtain leading the second group. Jud was One-Zero, so first out. The copilot pulled away the catwalk’s rope railing. The steel grate trembled beneath Jud’s feet. The giant bomber pitched and swayed, dropping down to 41,000 feet. Jud fought to keep his balance and not tumble into the open blackness. The cold rushed in through the bomb-bay doors. Wrapped in his layers of clothing and gear, Jud was sweating. And he was cold.

  Down the line, he saw Curtain’s black form. Jud pointed his forefinger at him, and Curtain nodded.

  I’ll see you on the ground, thought Jud. I’ll see you then.

  The copilot’s hand chopped up and down, a metronome counting off seconds relayed over the intercom to him by the pilot as Jud and his team watched. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  He hit Jud’s shoulder.

  And Jud rolled off to his left, his daisy chain slipping behind him into the roar of wind and jet engines, followed without a skipping beat by Curtain’s group. The copilot watched them spin away into swirling blackness and cold and thought of penguins diving off an ice floe, of lemmings.

  Cold. Black, timeless cold.

  Jud hit the ground.

  “What hell you doing in my truck!” roared a God voice in the clouds of Jud’s mind. Jud was on his back, on sand, the shoulder of a road, sunshine warmer than his dream, blue sky …

  “Who hell you think you are up there anyway?”

  A wiry old man in a battered straw Stetson, faded print shirt, and jeans with their cuffs tucked into scruffy black boots stood beside the junk-filled cattle truck, staring down and screaming at the bum he’d just rolled off his scavenged treasures.

  Pain squeezed his whole body. Jud moaned.

  “You big bum! Hope———Christ you broke goddamned back!”

  The sun was two hands over the horizon, burning into Jud’s eyes. He squinted at the gap-tooth mouth yelling at him.

  The old man was Vietnamese.

  In tacky cowboy gear. Jud fought back the urge to sweep the old man’s feet, realized he probably couldn’t do it anyway.

  “Just needed a ride,” Jud said, sitting up.

  “Need ride! Need ride!” The old man’s eyes found Jud’s bags in the truck’s cargo box. “Hah!” Like a monkey, he scrambled into the cargo box, threw Jud’s bags at him. “These need ride, too, yes! Hah!” Scrambled back to earth.

  The desert, thought Jud. Flat, scrub brush, brown. Sawtooth, powder-blue mountains for a horizon. A big empty.

  “Everybody need ride! Nobody pay! Nobody give me!”

  About a mile ahead, across the two-lane blacktop road: a cluster of buildings, a trailer house. Café? Gas station?

  “Do you know what time it is?” asked Jud.

  “What time? All same time for you. Is now. No time.”

  The old man tipped back his hat, hooked his thumbs in his belt like he’d seen true cowboys do in Caliente, Nevada, USA.

  “You pay me, bum, I take you up road with me.”

  Dien cai dau! Jud wanted to say, but his lips were dry. Nature saves your cover, he realized. He floated back to Saigon. Never let the other guy see you lose control. Never dignify him with a curse. Keep your face and rob him of his.

  “No thanks,” said Jud. “Right here is fine.”

  “Hah!” The old man spit in the sand between them. “No thanks. You mean no money. No money, no nothing.”

  He stomped to the cab of the truck, spun a cloud of dirt and sand over Jud as he roared back onto the highway. Gone.

  The dust cloud settled. Jud sat by the side of the empty desert road. Tumbleweeds bounced past him. Sage and sand tinged the air. A lake mirage shimmered on the blacktop between his Buddha in the dust and the buildings a thousand meters hence. Something flicked in the corner of his eye—a jackrabbit—then it was gone, back in the scrub brush. The desert. Not like the high dry of Iran. Its own place. This desert. Is now.

  He rose, ignored his thirst and his pains, the heat flowing to the land. Bags in hand, shuffle in his step, he circled away from the highway and looped toward the buildings.

  Two cardinal rules of Escape & Evasion are Don’t Be Seen, and when that maneuver fails, Don’t Be Noticed. Jud stopped next to a cluster of brush fifty meters from the café. A wooden sign dangled from a post above the door, black letters burned into weathered pine: NORA’S. Half a dozen cars were parked between the front of the building and two gas pumps. Jud’s stomach rumbled. But if that many people saw him, that many people would notice him.

  Behind the café, a battered trailer house pointed like a finger into the desert. Beyond it was a squat adobe house, flowers planted beneath brightly curtained windows.

  The cars left over the course of what Jud estimated to be a half hour. Five cars carried men, one ferried two women who wore head scarves over blue-gray hair. No new cars arrived. No delivery trucks from bakeries or beer companies. No fuel haulers came to refill the pumps. No station wagon driven by a deserted housemom came by with a fresh load of newspapers for the three metal vending machines by Nora’s front door.

  The screen door creaked when Jud stepped inside, out of the eye of the world. A woman with curly, faded-blond hair trimmed below her jaw sat at the counter, reading a newspaper. Alone. Swinging doors led back into the kitchen. Her face was tan and pretty, with time lines in the corners of her wide-spaced blue eyes. Her white blouse and pants were not a waitress uniform. Jud filled her eyes, then she looked over his shoulder, saw no vehicle out here in the big nowhere.

  “I can pay,” he said quickly.

  “Looks like you already have.” Her voice was husky from too many cigarettes. “What do you need?”

  “Are you Nora?” asked Jud.

  “Sure.” She smiled. “What can I do for you?”

  “Can I have breakfast? Lots of breakfast? And coffee?”

  “Sit down,” said Nora, standing. She moved with easy grace. “I’ll bring you coffee and a menu.”

  While she disappeared into the kitchen, Jud took a stool at the counter that let him watch the door. A fly buzzed across the room. From the kitchen came whispers of daytime TV, a portable black-and-white with a coat-hanger antenna. The screen door banged once, twice, hung silent. Jud smelled grease and bacon, fried eggs, beans. Three stools around the horseshoe counter still had dirty dishes in front of them. One of the booths along the wall and one of the small tables hadn’t been cleared either.

  “’Scuse the mess,” said Nora as she pushed through the swinging doors. “My cleanup man skedaddled with the wind.”

  “Gone,” said Jud.

  “Good ’n’ gone.” Nora put a mug of coffee in front of Jud, slid over a creamer and sugar shaker.

  “Where …,” said Jud, hesitated to not seem dumb (and noticable), then figured what the hell. “Where is this?”

  She smiled. “You’re on Route One Twenty-seven halfway between Baker and Shoshone. Death Valley’s up ahead. Nevada ain’t far. I didn’t like this place’s name, so I gave it mine.”

  “Good as any.”

  “That’s right.” She handed him a menu. “Take your time.”

  “Can’t decide,” confessed Jud.

  “How’s your stomach?” she asked.

  “Strong.” He sighed. “Whipped.”

  “Huevos rancheros,” she told him. “Not too spicy and Carmen can cook that real good. Giant orange juice. Home fries on the side. Run you about six bucks.”

  She took his order into the kitchen, then turned on the air conditioner above the door and went back to her newspaper. Jud slumped on his stool. A squat Mexic
an woman in blue jeans and a pink sweatshirt padded through the swinging doors. She wrinkled her nose at Jud, put steaming plates of fried eggs over beans and tortillas and greasy potatoes in front of him. Nora brought him a glass of orange juice, a napkin, and silverware. Jud had cleaned half his plate before Carmen made it back to the kitchen to turn the volume up on her daytime serial in which everyone was beautiful and before Nora finished the wire service story about a new wave of genocide in Cambodia.

  When Jud was on his fourth cup of coffee, three aspirin and a trip to the bathroom under his belt, car tires crunched gravel out front.

  A white Cadillac parked by the door.

  The driver swaggered inside. He was further into his forties than Jud. Like Jud, he carried too much beef between his chin and his hips. His open-collared white shirt showed a gold chain, his sleeves showed the Rolex watch his cousin had snared in a Hong Kong alley for only fifty bucks. His hands were manicured, with one diamond ring. He wore gold slacks suitable for golf course or office, two-tone-brown, Italian-design loafers with tassels. His jowly face was salon and windshield tanned.

  “Hi, honey,” he called out to Nora.

  She kept her eyes on her newspaper as he straddled a counter stool. Jud sat to his left, Nora off to his right.

  “You talking to me, Harold?” she told him.

  Harold panned the room; did a double take when he saw Jud’s scruffy form slumped on a stool.

  “I sure as hell ain’t talking to him,” said Harold.

  Seen, thought Jud.

  “You should be more careful who you let in here,” Harold told her, his eyes on Jud. “This place could lose its class.”

  Noticed, thought Jud.

  “I can dream,” said Nora. “You want something, Harold, or did you just crawl in off the desert to hide from the sun?”

  “Oh, I want something, but how about a cup of coffee?”

  “I got one, thanks,” said Nora.

  “What’s a guy have to do to get some service around here?” said Harold.

  The words that came out of Jud surprised him as much as they did Nora and Harold: “You could try asking nicely.”