Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “So … ah … you work here?” said Jud’s father.

  Barely, Jud whispered, “Yes.”

  “Good, good.” The man had waves in his brown hair. Like me, thought Jud. His father said, “Good job?”

  “You’re a barber,” said Jud.

  “’Do a lot of things, kid.”

  “He sells cars now,” said Myra. “Don’t you, honey?”

  “You left when I was three,” said Jud. “Got in the red car, drove away and it was a long time and you never came back and I waited, you said we’d play ball. It was a Friday.”

  “Tuesday today,” said Myra.

  “Look,” said the man who was still handsome. Broken veins on his nose. Jud’s knees were water. “Nothing personal, right? A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, so …”

  “Do you have another son?” whispered Jud.

  “Wouldn’t make that mistake twice,” mumbled Andy.

  “I don’t like kids,” said Myra.

  “Hey, but look at you,” said Andy. “Handsome, healthy. Got a good job. I couldn’t have done that good for you.”

  “I’m in high school,” said Jud. “A sophomore.”

  “Education is very important,” said Andy.

  “He always says that,” added Myra.

  “So, ah …” The father glanced at Myra. A slow smile came to his lips. He watched her as he asked, “How’s your mother?”

  “She pushes paper for the state,” said Jud. He could breathe now. In, out: he could do it, he could breathe. “Sits on the couch with a six-pack. Watches TV.”

  “I couldn’t take that shit,” said Andy. “It’s her fault I had to leave you.”

  “She says she should have beat you to the punch.”

  Andy shook his head. “Told you so.”

  “You got a girl?” said Myra, leaning back against the padded booth. “Gotta watch you don’t tangle with the wrong girl.”

  “I have to get back to work,” said Jud.

  “Sure,” said Andy. “I understand. A man’s gotta do.”

  Jud stumbled back to the table where his gray rubber tub waited. He wiped the tablecloth, pushed the chairs into place. Kept his eyes on the kitchen’s swinging aluminum doors as he carefully marched toward them.

  Through them. In the kitchen, Jud dropped the dishtub on the counter beside the chef, who was chopping up a chicken. Enzio was chewing out the Mexican dishwasher. The black-tuxedoed owner turned to yell at his busboy, but Jud ran out to the alley.

  The dark, unseeing alley, with the burning stench of the oil refinery and a sickly sweet cloud above the dumpster.

  Dizzy, he was sick, threw up, sobbed and cried and beat his hands against the metal dumpster as he sank to the tar-sticky earth amidst broken glass and torn paper.

  How long he huddled there, he didn’t know.

  Get up, he told himself. You can do it. Keep going. You can do anything. You can face anyone—fuck them! Fuck him. You can make it.

  Jud’s hwarang-do teacher was a struggling Korean immigrant. “Be wind,” the mystic karate sensei would order Jud, trying to get the boy to channel the fire inside him. “Be water!”

  Be ice, Jud told himself.

  He got off the alley floor. Wiped his eyes.

  Back inside the kitchen, Jud grabbed an empty rubber tub. He’d go back out there. He’d do his work and he’d do it great and he’d do it right in front of that man. He wouldn’t look at him and he wouldn’t look away; that man was nothing. Make him do the looking. Never let him see. He pushed through the swinging doors.

  The table at the back of the room was empty.

  On the road, back on the road. White letters on a green sign: MOLINE 10 MI. Iowa wasn’t far.

  His father died in 1973—Jud manufactured an FBI inquiry that found the report. Cancer. Jud never mentioned his father to his mother. He seldom spoke to her after his year of junior college, after joining the Army. She died in 1975, a heart attack while Jud was doing a crash clean & burn job in Africa, covering up a mercenary project gone to hell. He visited her grave in Chula Mesa once. To be sure.

  In the stolen car, Jud heard Myra’s laughter, smelled her cigarette smoke. Smelled Nora’s smoke, ached for her smile. The landscape outside his windows was green and rolling, not the flat, brown desert by Death Valley. A black African arms dealer in a French suit sat by the side of the road, his head lolling at a peculiar angle; his eyes were open and he saw Jud coming, which was more than he had in Zaire. Jud drove past him; they didn’t wave. A road mirage shimmered up ahead; beyond that lake Jud sensed Art—sprawled on his back, chest blown to gore, smoked sunglasses to the sky. Jud drove on. The lake disappeared. He drank the last of the whiskey; it was good, and he wanted more, needed more.

  He’d needed a drink the day he decided to seduce America. By then, the thirst was steady. Saturday. He couldn’t remember dates, but he never forgot days. That was a Saturday, a summer Saturday in 1979, Los Angeles.

  Jud had been in L.A. five months, Miami behind him, not checking supermarket tabloids to learn what the stars wanted for his fate. He’d walked into a locksmith shop and after twenty minutes of showing his skills, won a job. Three weeks later, he’d been dispatched to a hair salon. He stepped into the perfumed atmosphere of blaring rock music, clicking scissors, and vapid chatter, saw the girl who was answering the phones: cascading chestnut hair, a sweet face with eyes like the ocean, firm swelling breasts, no waist; tiny, fragile—innocent.

  “How are you?” she said, and thunder rumbled in his head.

  “Finally great,” he told her.

  She’d laughed, told him she was Lorri.

  No, he wanted to tell her, you’re my payment due.

  Within a week he’d overwhelmed her, within two days they were renting a house together in a blue-collar zone. They laughed and she listened. He told her so many things, and she heard him, though not with the informed ear of his friend Nick Kelley. Her ear cared about Jud, not at all about the world he revealed. They laughed and they loved and they worked hard.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  That summer Saturday, he had to face that truth: it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t right.

  He was working overtime, retooling doors on homes he couldn’t afford to sleep in. He finished the last job at four; Lorri was a hundred blocks away, scheduling beauty appointments for rich bitches who’d buy the hair off her head if she’d sell it; their husbands would buy the rest, if they could get away with it. Jud drove to a main drag, defiantly chose a fern bar where the waiters wore white shirts and bow ties. The customers were in tennis togs and beach casuals, young and clean and no better than him; their eyes whispered that his blue jeans and work shirt were in the wrong place. But they didn’t dare refuse him a table. He ordered a Scotch and saw the world.

  He’d conceived and executed ops involving hundreds of men and millions of dollars that wrote hidden lines in the history books. Now he did nickel-dime jobs for a mom-and-pop store, took orders from bosses who’d never decided who would live and who would die. He’d rock-’n’-rolled in the White House, went toe-to-toe with heavyweights shown on the evening news. Now pencil-necked geeks in cheap bars lectured him about politics. In Miami, he drove a Porsche, lived in a penthouse, wore tailored suits, had the finest food and priciest whores. Now he drove a rattletrap van painted with someone else’s logo. His jeans and shirt were two years old. His rent was due on a house no better than the one his father fled. He had as much specialized training as a Harvard law school graduate; such lawyers were whores who were called Mister. He’d worked for national security and patriotism and honor, and he was Joe Shit The Ragpicker. He’d been shot at, beaten, he’d lied and been lied to, he’d bled and been sick from bad places and bad times. Risked everything. He’d killed—God, how he’d killed.

  And nobody saw him when they looked.

  What could he do? Be a throwaway, a denied never was. Or be back at the end of their whip, waiting to be snapped onto whatever line they want
ed.

  A man laughed at the bar. He was Jud’s age, with soft hands and a great tan, prep school written all over him as he leaned on the mahogany and made time with two beach bunnies.

  Did I do it all for you? thought Jud. So I could sit here and worship you and smile and be thankful for my Saturday overtime and bar-brand Scotch?

  This damn town, thought Jud. It was worse here than anywhere else, worse than Miami or D.C. Or maybe everything was just clearer here. Los Angeles, his friend Nick had said, the city of perpetual dissatisfaction. The never enough town.

  What was he going to do? Wait for Nick the writer to make him famous? To make all them understand? Nick couldn’t do that. Even if he tried, it wouldn’t be Jud on the billboards or the screen, getting the handshakes, getting the applause. Nobody was going to come down and make it all worth it, not even Nick.

  Joe Shit The Ragpicker.

  Lorri. How long could a mere Joe Shit keep her happy? How long before the daily grind wore down the special look in her eyes when she saw him? How long before the nobody nowhere blues soaked into her eyes and drowned her heart?

  How much longer could he take all this not enough before he blew apart? Snapped some geek’s neck or spilled his guts?

  No more bullshit from assholes, he swore.

  “So, do you want another drink?” sighed a slim waiter who kept his eyes at a languid half-mast.

  “Bring it to me,” said Jud.

  When the waiter swished away, Jud saw Wendell at the bar.

  Saw Wendell watching him.

  Wrong place, wrong time, thought Jud. But with a wink and a nod, he told Wendell it was okay to come over, okay to sit down.

  “Man,” said Wendell, “I ain’t seen you in light-years!”

  Since Miami: Wendell had been a two-pound-a-week dealer way down the corporate ladder built by Art Monterastelli, a simple man who let his love of smoke lead him into buying and selling it. Normally, Jud would not have associated with someone of such low rank in the organization, but Wendell’s confined ambition gave Jud someone to jive with who wouldn’t circle back.

  Or so Jud had thought.

  “Man, how are you?” said Wendell.

  “Surprised to see you here,” answered Jud.

  Wendell leaned close. “Amigo, I’m going to lay it out straight, because I like you and I know you and you got the wrong toes to step on.”

  “You always were smart, Wendell.”

  Wendell cleared his throat. “Miami went nuts. Colombians, feds. You were cool to boogie when you did and while you could.”

  “Like you?”

  “The shit was flying.” Wendell licked his lips. “Thing is, I relocated here—didn’t know where you went, knew better ’n to ask. I don’t comprendo all of what went down and don’t enlighten me, okay. But Raul, Cubans: world of their own. So, I’m here today. Working.”

  Jud nodded.

  “I got a sliver of the cola trade,” said Wendell. “Few ounces a week, clear about a thou. Hell, bunch of my customers are hanging here.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be,” said Jud. “They get careless, you could be a proximity casualty.”

  “My man!” Wendell shrugged. “I had to deliver to one of my guys—imagine that: me with guys on a payroll!”

  “Even worse,” said Jud. “Don’t be there when they do business. Cutouts, Wendell: work smart.”

  “That’s why you’re the man,” said Wendell. “It’s like you went to school for it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look,” said Wendell, “flat out: you here working?”

  “Yes,” said Jud.

  “No offense, I didn’t know. If I’m dancing on your turf, tell me and I’m gone! This cowboy is not that dumb!”

  Jud smiled. “It’s a big city.”

  Wendell grinned. “Let me buy you a drink!”

  The waiter arrived with the refill Jud had ordered. Before he set the glass on the table, Jud told him, “Chivas Regal.”

  The waiter stared at the glass of cheap Scotch on his tray. “What will I do with this?”

  “Drink it yourself.” Jud dismissed him with a wave.

  “Crazy world,” said Wendell. They drank to it.

  “Look at ’em,” said Wendell, nodding to the beautiful crowd at the bar. “More money than they need, everybody wants to be cool, sexy … dangerous. Ride the edge, get pumped up …”

  Wendell raised his beer glass. “Riches to come.”

  Jud drank with him.

  “Hell,” said Wendell, “right time, right place, right product. They’re bored with grass. Besides, the badges are so down on it that you can’t ship enough to make it pay. Booze is for squares. Cola is it: makes you better ’n you are and who doesn’t want that? Doesn’t hurt. Who’s going to tell the people no?”

  This was 1979—after years of mistruths in the name of drug education, after a generation came of age paying price-support taxes for a killer addictive drug called nicotine; after thousands of Americans privatized LSD experiments begun by the CIA in the 1950s and found that not everyone hurled themselves from a hotel window as had the doctor who’d didn’t know he’d been dosed with LSD in a CIA experiment. Cocaine had been used by Freud, the guru of mental health. Nobody died, nobody became addicted: nobody in 1979 knew those were lies. In 1979, nobody imagined a cut-rate refinement from hell called crack or the political consequences of buying a gram of snow, or how at the end of one white line there could only be another. And another. And another.

  “Weird business, man,” said Wendell. “Down in Colombia, everybody’s getting into it. Army, politicians, the whole jungle.”

  “What about the guerrillas?” said Jud.

  “We aren’t talking about Africa!”

  They both laughed.

  “They got guerrillas down there?” said Wendell.

  “Sure,” said Jud, not remembering the name of M-19 or Shining Path or any of the other Latin Marxist groups.

  “Fighting commies was never my gig,” said Wendell. “I figure if the money’s good enough, sooner or later, everybody will go for it. Capitalism rules, man, the dollar is the bottom line.”

  Wendell wiped his lips.

  “Look,” he said, “this is … don’t get me wrong, okay?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Jud.

  “I’m a good man, but I don’t want to be the man. I ain’t cut out for tycoon shit. The business we’re in, that happens fast. You know that. Look at you: highflier in Miami, out here before the wave crests, all set up and low-key …”

  “Proposition,” said Wendell. “I like what I got just fine. Suppose I fold my action into yours? I can double my business, take the same rake or more, you get the skim.”

  “And what would you get?”

  “You,” said Wendell. “The cats crawling around Miami now will pop up on Sunset Boulevard. I need somebody who can keep their claws off my back. Somebody who knows how to play the law. Somebody to watch the big picture. Somebody who I can trust.”

  For a long time the two old friends watched each other.

  The man at the bar laughed, walked out with his arms around two young girls. He didn’t give Jud a glance.

  “We’d have to see how you worked out,” Jud told Wendell.

  “No problem! You call the shots!”

  “You say you can move an extra ounce a week,” said Jud.

  “Easy.”

  “Show me,” said Jud. “This one we go fifty-fifty. The future we work out then. Do this right—no flash, no strangers, no funnsies, strictly business.”

  “No problem. My connection says his people are a clear pipeline, no supply woes. I’ll need eight hundred—”

  “You front this one yourself,” ordered Jud. “I don’t pay for your audition.”

  Wendell blinked; shrugged.

  “Give me your phone number and address.” Jud passed Wendell a pen. “You don’t tell them shit about me or any deal. Secure communications. You work out, I’ll let you bring them in on it
. Everything goes all right, you get everything you want.”

  “How about the waiter?” said Wendell, smiling.

  “That’s your problem,” said Jud, “not mine.”

  “I always thought that was too bad.”

  “It always will be,” said Jud. “Get our tab, show him some flash, leave a big tip …”

  They laughed. Jud stood.

  “One thing,” said Jud, leaning close. “You’re a friend. But you fuck up, you front me out—you pay the tab.”

  Wendell’s eyes said he understood.

  Jud could barely concentrate enough to drive to Lorri’s salon. She frowned while he told her boss they’d be glad to close the place up, but said nothing: Lorri had an instinct for a riff.

  “I don’t get it,” she said when they were alone. “You made me stop popping pills, now we’re going to deal cocaine?”

  “Whole different league,” said Jud. “And we’re doing business, not pleasure. It’s our way out of the shit. Besides, they owe me. This is how they’ll pay.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Don’t worry, baby. It’s okay. I love you.”

  “What if we get busted?”

  “I got that covered,” he said. “I got that covered.”

  She looked at him, laughed. “What the hell, everybody’s doing it. Even Marie who does perms sells grams on the side.”

  “Already you’re earning your way,” said Jud, his subconscious scheming for ways to pull Marie under his umbrella.

  Lorri called the L.A. Times, charmed a weekend editor with a story about her UCLA term paper’s needing a few details about communists and guerrillas in South America. The bored man checked the clip files, read her a story, told her about sushi at a great place on Sunset. Lorri lied and agreed to meet him there for dinner, hung up, and laughed with Jud. They drank beer from the salon refrigerator. She read fashion magazines while he coded the message:

  Previously highly reliable source informed this agent re: involvement in cocaine trafficking of communist terrorist groups possibly M-19, others, in S.A. armed and hostile to U.S. international and domestic interests. Follow-up reaction penetration initiated. Advise operation, complete penetration, maximum cover, deniability. Zero cost projected, minimal contact, minimal support. Operation Plan upon sanction.