Free Cassada by James Salter

him, unable to speak. The words were jammed in his throat.
    â€œWhat did you get?” he said. His cheekbones were burning.
    â€œI don’t know,” Harlan shrugged. “Forty-eight percent. Something like that.”
    Cassada stood there, humiliation coloring his fairness.
    â€œGood enough for you?” Harlan said. He was dropping the pebbles from one hand to the other.
    â€œI’ll beat it,” Cassada said.
    Dunning was watching with a cool, remote smile.
    â€œYou will, eh?” Harlan said.
    â€œYes, I’ll beat it.”
    â€œYou’ll be lucky if you even qualify.”
    Cassada’s hands were trembling. He had put them in his pockets.
    â€œI’ll beat any score you make,” he said.
    â€œJust put up your money.”
    Cassada stood there. He tried to think for a moment of what he was doing. Harlan was pouring the pebbles from hand to hand. That was the only sound. The vehicles passing, the aircraft engines being started, all of it seemed far off.
    â€œWell?”
    â€œAll right,” Isbell broke in. He was about to say, that’s enough, but Dunning lifted a hand in restraint.
    â€œLook . . .” Isbell nevertheless began.
    â€œCaptain Isbell,” Dunning warned.
    â€œI’ll bet,” Cassada said. “How much?”
    â€œJust whatever you want,” Harlan said.
    â€œFifty dollars.”
    Isbell was shaking his head in disgust.
    â€œHell. Is that all?” Harlan said.
    â€œI’ll bet whatever you want to bet. A month’s pay. Is that good?”
    â€œYours or mine?”
    â€œI don’t care. Yours,” Cassada said.
    Harlan sniffed calmly. He dropped the pebbles he was holding to the ground. “All right, that’s a bet.” He held out a hand.
    Cassada ignored it. “My word’s enough,” he said.
    â€œYour word, hell. Shake on it.”
    Cassada didn’t move. “You have enough witnesses,” he said.
    He stayed at the target afterwards, alone, staring at it as one might at some construction where everything had gone wrong. Isbell went back into the operations hut. Wickenden followed him.
    â€œThat’s about what I would expect of him,” Wickenden said. “Didn’t surprise me at all. He’s a fool.”
    â€œSomebody should have stopped them. I wanted to,” Isbell said.
    â€œWhat for?” Wickenden said. “That’s the only way someone like that ever learns.”

In Sunday quiet, in the creaking of canvas, Wickenden lay on his cot reading. When he turned a page he folded it back, doubled, so he could hold the book in one hand. With the other he brushed at his arm or leg from time to time, at an annoying fly. Dumfries sat writing a letter. From the next tent a voice occasionally drifted over, a voice that was confiding to Grace, confessing to him. He had to hit—something like that—it was hard to make out the exact words. In any case, Wickenden ignored them and the slight they represented. He read on.
    Idle Sundays. Dunning was off playing golf with the group commander and group ops on a course that was mostly sand dunes. Godchaux and Phipps had driven the silken black road that ran along the coast—the same road on which the guns and sun-baked armor of the Afrika Korps and British Eighth Army had fought back and forth—to one of the ruins, Leptis Magna, with its chalk-white columns and vacant amphitheater scorched by the sun, a great tumbled quarry near the sea. He and Phipps wandered the wideavenues. The Romans had built three cities along the coast, Phipps explained. “Tripoli, three cities. That’s what it means.”
    â€œIs that right? Where’d you find that out?”
    â€œSabratha is the other one.”
    â€œWhy’d they build this? What did they do here?”
    â€œThis was a big city. Everything.”
    â€œLet’s go this way,” Godchaux said. He had seen a man and two girls walking along a