Nature of the Game (34 page)

Nora lay in Jud's arms.

“I told you, all you had to do was relax and everything would be fine,” she said, kissing his chest. “In fact, I'll give you more than fine.”

“Okay?” ventured Jud.

“No man wants to know that it was
‘Okay,'
” said Nora, raising up on her elbows to smile at him. “You all want to know that it was
great
.”

“Was it great?”

“It was okay,” she said.

A heartbeat, then they both laughed.

Nora lightly kissed his lips.

“I told you so,” she said.

They laughed again, and she nuzzled back down on his chest. She sighed.

Another night together. Their silent understanding made sure that he brought nothing more than his toothbrush to Nora's house. His clothes, his money, his secret gun—all stayed in the trailer.

“What were you thinking of just then?” she asked.

“I was following orders,” replied Jud. To her frown, he added, “Yours. You told me not to think. Just to feel. Relax.”

“Not
then
.” She grinned. “I know what you were thinking about then: you were thinking about
then
—if you were thinking at all. This early in it for us, you aren't remembering or fantasizing. Men believe it's a big secret that they're thinking about something else or somebody else or imagining things when they're with a woman. But we know.”

“Oops,” said Jud.

“I don't mind,” she said. “If you think that what's in your head is more …
interesting
than what we're doing …”

She trailed a finger up his thigh.

“Even my mind's not that crazy,” said Jud. “Or strong.”

“Yeah, but afterwards …” She shook her head. “You guys slip away faster than you slip out. If it's been
okay
for a woman, she hangs around for a while. You guys go.”

“Not always,” he said.

“Always enough.” She brushed her hair off her forehead. Jud adored the wrinkles on her brow, the crow's-feet by her blue eyes. “Were you thinking about your ex-wife?”

“No.”

“Someone else?”

“Not really.”

“Well, that narrows it down.”

She poked him in the ribs. “So then, what do you want to talk about, the tumbleweed count or UFOs?”

“That's it! The reason we haven't seen any UFOs lately is they're disguising themselves as tumbleweeds!”

“Let 'em.” Nora propped herself up on her elbow. “How come you never ask me about being a prostitute?”

“I know how that works,” whispered Jud.

“'Cause you're a spy.” She said it flatly. No trace of condescension, no hint of disbelief. Flat acceptance.

He looked at her. “How did you start?”

“Just lucky.”

They laughed.

“Sauk Centre, Minnesota,” she said. “My hometown. There's this billboard next to the highway by the city limits. Says Sinclair Lewis wrote a book about the town. I'd see that sign every day from the bus I rode to grade school, and I swore I'd never read any book about that damn place.

“Daddy was fire and brimstone for Jesus, Mom was afraid to be for anybody or anything. Back then, the law had something called ‘status offenses,' and my status was offensive. Hitchhiking to town from our farm. All I wanted to do was go to the football game. Where I went was reform school. Twelve years old.”

“
Incorrigible
, they said.” She shook her head. “Even then, I had tits out to here.
That
scared the hell out of the men in charge, made them think
bad
thoughts—so I had to be bad.”

She sat up in bed, stretched. Jud thought her breasts were beautiful, and he told her so, quietly, almost like a boy.

“Not bad for a woman winking at fifty,” she said.

“How long did they keep you in reform school?” asked Jud.

“As long as they could. Six years. I lived in a lot of fear. Learned how to survive. You figure out who the ringleaders are, learn what you have to do to get along with them. Learn how to cover your feelings. Only cry in your cell alone at night. Had my first sexual experience there, lesbian. I think that's pretty normal though, don't you?”

“My first was a girl, too,” said Jud.

She laughed.

“Then what?” he asked.

“Then I got out. I was intelligent, but not smart. My schooling was a joke—two times two equals four, and that's as far as it went. I had two choices: I could crook or I could hook.”

“Tried crook, but if you have trouble reading and writing, passing bad checks is tricky. I got caught. Got another year—this time in jail. Saw some old friends, learned a little more about reading and a lot more about how to stay out of jail. Came out blond and beautiful, schooled and connected.”

“I never worked the streets,” she said. “Never worked cribs. Lived with a black guy. My lover and business manager.”

“Pimp,” said Jud.

Nora shrugged. “He taught me a lot. Made me read the
Wall Street Journal
every day. Got me onto the high-class track in L.A. Beat me up some, but I expected it. Wouldn't take it now, but then … That was the way things were. I got busted once. Paid a fortune to the right lawyer, everything smoothed out fine. Stay in line with the
real
power structure, you don't get run over.”

It was Jud's turn to laugh.

“People liked me,” she said. “I was good at getting men to give me money. I ended up in Vegas because a man I loved was there, and because the money was there.”

“What about your Johns?”

“I never called them that. I was a working girl, they were dates. They gave me what I wanted, I gave them what they wanted. I didn't hurt anybody, didn't steal or lie or cheat, always gave the bellman his third off the top. I charged a fortune and made a fortune, couple, three grand a night—clear. Men loved giving me money and I loved taking it.”

“Wasn't bad work.” She shrugged. “Could have done worse. Just … turn off your mind. In the middle of the wildest sex scene, thinking about what to get at the grocery store on the way home …

“Did you ever use a working girl?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. Waited, then, “Does that bother you?”

She smiled. “No.”

Her blue eyes looked toward the bedtable.

“I'm gonna get some cigarettes,” she said. She kissed his forehead. “Don't go nowhere.”

Barefoot, naked, she padded from the bedroom.

Jud let himself settle back on the pillow. The room smelled like sweat and sex and lilacs from her perfume, and he let himself relax, let himself love it.

There'd been some rough days.

One afternoon, while he was washing dishes in the café's kitchen, he got the booze shakes so bad the two truckers sitting at the counter could hear the plates rattling in the soapy tub. Carmen scurried out front to fill coffee cups whether they needed it or not. Nora sat behind the cash register, reading the Las Vegas newspaper. She said nothing.

“Do you have your car keys?” he'd asked Nora when the truckers left.

“Yes,” she answered. “No.”

“I have to—”

“Do what you have to do,” she'd told him. “But I won't give you my keys to do it. You want to run your sorry ass into town and drink, fine, your choice. But I'm not letting you drive my car drunk, and I'm not making it easy for you.”

“I don't need any AA bullshit!”

“That's right,” she said, still reading the paper, “you've got enough bullshit of your own.”

He trembled: in rage, in need, in fear. He could force her to—No.
No
. Sweating, shaking, gut wrenching, he staggered back into the kitchen. His mind reeled. He held on to the sink until he could finish the dishes, until the sickness passed.

They didn't need to talk about that incident.

She made him keep practicing his katas, though he knew she hated the thought of fighting. “They make you feel safe,” she'd told him. She had Carmen bring him an expensive pair of running shoes from Vegas and always had coffee waiting for him when he staggered back down the road.

“Maybe I just want to see how far you'll run,” she told him. “Maybe I just like to watch you come back.”

She shot a rattlesnake on the road one day. With the café owner's gun, a .25 automatic with a cracked pearl handle.

Using the pay phone by the highway, Jud had reached Dean in Los Angeles.

“Check my tracks,” Jud had asked. Dean eagerly agreed.

When Jud called Dean two days later, he learned that the dead man at the Oasis bar hadn't even made the L.A. papers.

“I went there like a shadow,” said Dean. “Bartender bragged about the cops doing shit. He probably told them nothing. If you want, he'll tell me—”

“Leave him alone,” said Jud.

And Dean laughed.

“Old day, old ways, huh?” he asked. “If you want—”

“All I want is for you to be cool—understand, Dean? Nothing more. Nothing less. Cool. And don't worry.”

“
Worry?
I don't
worry
. Did you forget who I am?”

“I know,” said Jud.

“I've been waiting. Waiting. Why were you so long gone?”

“Never mind,” said Jud.

“Your friend called.”

Jud's hand tightened on the receiver.

“That writer. Nick Kelley.”

“You gave him your number—remember?”

“Remember. Yes, I remember. So did he.” Dean laughed again, high-pitched, intense—then abruptly clipped off. “He wanted to be sure you were fine.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I didn't know anything. Then.”

“Don't have any contact with him—
any
.”

Dean's voice was soft, chilly. “Is he a problem?”

“No: he's not a player.”

“Oh.”

At the pay phone in the desert, Jud wiped his brow, closed his eyes.

“My leg is fine,” whispered Dean. “I'm strong.”

“Just stay cool.”

“Where are you?”

Jud opened his eyes.

“If something stirs,” said Dean, “you'll need to know.”

Through the windows of the café, Jud saw Nora laughing with Carmen.

“I'm out of touch,” he said.

“That's not smart.”

He was right. He was wrong and he was right. He was Dean, and Jud knew it. His head ached and rolled with alcoholic waves, his heart said no, but crazy Dean made sense, so Jud made the best play he could think of.

“I'll give you a pay phone number,” said Jud. “I'm not there, but I'll detour there every other day at six in the morning. If I don't answer, don't speak.”

“Relax,” said Dean. “I've got your back.”

The pay phone hadn't rung since. Jud made no other calls—not even to Nick. What could he say? Nick was out of it, clear. Had a real life. Jud wouldn't pull him in.

Relax
, Jud told himself as he lay in Nora's bed. Your trail is clean, your tracks are gone. They can't find you, can't touch you. He glanced toward the curtained window, the night beyond. There was nothing out there. Nothing he could see.

But something bothered him. Something he might have done, some erratic act lost in chemical and battle-battered brain cells, some vibration humming deep in his instincts from a step he couldn't remember, couldn't connect.

Years ago, you'd have remembered
, Jud told himself.
But years ago, you wouldn't have had a misstep to remember
.

“Carmen brought supplies,” said Nora as she walked back into the bedroom. Still naked. She carried a brown paper grocery sack. “Look, everything we could ask for!”

She climbed on the bed, pulled the sheet over her legs.

“The floor's cold,” she said, lifting a carton of cigarettes out of the sack. She took a pack from the carton, slit a thumbnail along cellophane, handed him a bottle of spring water.

“And,” she said, “we even have”—she pulled a tabloid newspaper out of the bag—“the truth of the world!”

The American Enquirer
. The nation's largest weekly tabloid newspaper, available with equal ease at a Korean green grocer in uptown Manhattan, New York, or at Manhattan, Montana's, food store-gas station.

“I don't want to see that thing,” snapped Jud, sitting up in bed and looking the other way.

“Come on!” Nora lit a cigarette. “It's all just fun.”

“I know what it says.”

“How? What's the big deal?”

Jud closed his eyes, hung his head. When he looked at her again, she felt a chill in his eyes.

“Turn to page nine,” he said. “The astrology column. It's been there for twenty years, always on the same page. Same guy, they never change his picture.”

“Okay,” she said, turning the pages, finding the feature. “You want to know your horoscope?”

“Today's date,” he said. “What's the sign for today?”

“That's … Pisces.”

“Count that sign as zero. Go chronologically. What's the sign for number seven?”

After a moment, she answered, “Libra.”

“Somewhere in Libra it says ‘choppy waters.'”

“‘Libra,'” Nora read aloud. “‘September twenty-third to October twenty-second. Moon cycle high. Romance in the picture. Financial caution wise. Ch …'”

She looked at him. His face was impassive.

“‘Choppy waters,'” she said. “How did you know that was in there?”

His smile was hard. “Just lucky.”

“Because you're a spy,” she said.

The forgotten cigarette in her hand dropped a long ash onto the paper with the truth of the world.

“I'm not supposed to ask questions, am I?” she said.

“
Nobody's supposed to ask questions
,” he whispered.

“What are you supposed to do?”