Free Nature of the Game by James Grady Page B

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.
    â€œ 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 …
    â€œ 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œJust needed a ride,” Jud said, sitting up.
    â€œNeed 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.
    â€œEverybody 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?
    â€œDo you know what time it is?” asked Jud.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œNo thanks,” said Jud. “Right here is fine.”
    â€œHah!” 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