The Name of the Game is Death

II

The only time I was ever in the pen, the boss headshrinker gave me up as a bad job.

"You're amoral," the prison psychiatrist told me. "You have no respect for authority. Your values lire not civilized values."

That was after he'd Hipped his psychiatric lid at his inability to pierce my defense mechanism, as he called it. I had him taped from the first sixty seconds. He didn't care what I was; he just wanted to know how I got that way. It was none of his damn business, so I gave him a hard way to go.

Oh, I could have told him things. About the kitten, for Instance. I was maybe eleven or twelve. Fifth or sixth guide. I saw this kitten in the window of a pet shop. A blue Persian, although right then I couldn't have told it from a spotted Manx. I ran my finger across the glass and watched her little pink nose and big bronze eyes follow it, and I knew she was for me.

I went home to make my case. I wasn't from any underprivileged family. The kitten's price might have jolted my folks a little, but I wasn't in the habit of asking for much. I was the youngest in the family, with a bushel of sisters and mints, so getting me the kitten became a family project. I they'd been trying for some time to get me to play more with the neighborhood kids. I'd given up trying to explain that other kids gave me a pain, king-sized.

I named the kitten Fatima. First syllable accented, ail short vowel sounds. It seemed to suit her coppery eyes and smoky coloring. I played with her by the hour. I even taught her tricks. No one teaches a kitten anything it doesn't want to learn, but Fatima humored me. We had a grand time together.

I still got a load of guff frequently from the family about not participating more with my age group. I paid no attention. I had Fatima, and she was all the company I needed. In some moods she was a natural-born clown, but in others she had an aloof dignity. I'd never have believed that anything so tiny could be so fearless. Fatima would have tackled a lion if one had got in her way.

Some women's organization in town gave a pet show. YWCA, Junior League, Women's Club, American Legion Auxiliary, BPOE Does—I don't remember which, but I remember women were running it. I bought a little red leash for Fatima out of my paper-route money, and I entered her in the show.

Fatima and her red leash knocked their eyes out. She was a real ham. She sat up in the center of the outdoor ring and went through her whole bag of tricks, better than she did them for me in private. She went through the kitten and cat classes like a streak, and we were brought back for best in show. In the ring for the final judging there was Fatima, a big boxer dog. a black rabbit, a hamster, a goat, and a bowl of topical fish shaded from the sunlight.

The boxer belonged to a kid who went to the same school I did, a fat tub of lard a grade or so ahead of me. I knew him by sight. If I ever knew his name, I've forgotten it. When I saw the boxer, I steered Fatima to the other side of the ling, She just plain didn't like dogs. The fat kid saw what I was doing, and he followed me in a smart-alecky way.

Fatima swelled her throat ruff and hissed a Persian's surprisingly loud hiss at the boxer. The fat kid laughed. I asked 111111 to move his dog away. Deliberately he gave him more leash The boxer leaned down for a closer look, and quicker than I can say it, Fatima raked his nose. The boxer snarled, then snapped. Just once.

Fatima lay on the grass, one tiny little dot of blood on her ruff. Her neck had been broken. The big dog nosed at the inanimate bit of blue gray fur, then looked up at me as though half-ashamed. I didn't blame the boxer. He'd done the natural thing for any dog.

I picked up Fatima's body and turned blindly away. All I wanted was to get out of there. The fat kid—who'd first looked scared and then defiant—grabbed my arm and spun me around. "Look!" he crowed. "Lookit him! Cryin' like a baby!"

I beat the shit out of him.

The women got me off him finally. I was scuffed up, and so were a couple of them. There was a hell of a lot of gabble-gabble I walked out on. I took Fatima home and buried her in the backyard.

That was Saturday. Sunday I hung around the house most of the day. Monday afternoon I waited in the schoolyard for the fat kid, and I beat the shit out of him all over again.

That night his father came over to my house, and there was a big pow-wow. My family was surprised to learn about Fatima's having been killed. They hadn't missed her. Finally they settled everything to their satisfaction. The fat kid's father would get me another kitten, and I would apologize to the fat kid.

I told them no. I was polite, but I told them no. I told them I didn't want anything from anyone. My father took me upstairs for a little talk. I listened and said nothing. When he saw he was getting nowhere, we went back downstairs. The pow-wow broke up with all the adults making baffled sounds at each other.

The next afternoon I had to chase the fat kid from school clear to within a couple blocks from his house before I caught him. It didn't help him a bit when I did.

There was a lot of telephoning that night. My father was mad. He took me upstairs again and gave me a licking. He said we were going over to the fat kid's house, and I was going to apologize. I was still crying from the licking, but I told him I wouldn't do it. He made a lot of sputtering noises before he left the bedroom. We didn't go

anywhere.

Later that night our minister came to the house. He talked to me for a long time—all about the unexplainable things that happen in life and the necessity for understanding. I listened to him. I was polite. I wasn't going to give them a chance to call me surly or bad-mannered. When he was tired of talking, the minister went away. I don't think even he thought he'd accomplished much.

The fat kid wasn't in school the next day. I was disappointed. When I got home, there was something for me. The fat kid's father had left a carrying case with a blue Persian kitten. I didn't say anything to my mother or my sisters. I took the case out into the backyard, and when they stopped watching me I walked crosslots to the pet shop and gave the case and kitten back. I told the pet shop man to give the fat kid's father his money back. The pet shop man looked funny, but he took the kitten, and he didn't say anything.

My father blew his stack when he got home that night. I didn't answer him back when he started in on me. All I wanted was to be let alone, and no one would let mc alone. My father said I was damn well going to do what I was told, and if the new kitten wasn't back in the house the next night the consequences would be mine. I knew it wasn't going to be there.

So when I got a licking the next night it was partly for having caught the fat kid again on his way home from school, and partly for not having gone back to the pet shop for the kitten.

The next day in school I was called down to the principal's office. He talked a long time, too. The gist of it was that one more go-round with the fat kid and I'd be expelled from school. I asked him politely what the situation had to do with school. I can still see his face tightening up. muscle by muscle. The principal said sharply I was persevering in an attitude I would regret to the last day I lived, but he never did answer my question.

The fat kid wasn't in school that day, but I got a licking anyway that night for not having brought the kitten home. I got another the next night, and another the next. They were almost ritualistic by then, without a word being said on cither side. I overheard my mother arguing with my father about his handling of me, and him shouting at her. I was sorry to hear it. I didn't want sympathy. I didn't want anything. I was stronger than they were, and I knew it. I had undivided purpose. I didn't feel like a martyr. I felt like someone doing what he had to do.

At school I was having trouble finding the fat kid. He was leaving by different doors, at different times. It was three days later before I caught him. The next morning I was back in the principal's office. He wasn't there, but his secretary told me I was expelled. She looked kind of funny all the time she was telling me. I just kind of hung around nil day and went home at the usual time.

My mother and sisters were all waiting for me. At first I thought it was about being expelled, but they hadn't heard. They'd bought me a new Persian kitten. I thanked them. I wasn't mad at them about anything. I wasn't mad at my father about anything. I fed the new kitten because it was a poor dumb animal that needed my help, but I didn't play with it.

My father came home early, in a tearing rage. The principal had called him. When he saw the new kitten and learned where it had come from, he clouded up and thundered my mother and sisters about going behind his back. They turned on him en masse, and it astonished him. He didn't change his mind, exactly, but for the first time in better than a week I got to bed that night without a licking. I had to admit I was glad. My right shoulder had

been hurting a little worse each of the last three days. I made a bed for the new kitten and went to bed early myself.

By noon the next day I had caught up again on lickings. Before breakfast I slipped out of the house and waited for the fat kid on his way to school. He screamed like a girl just at the sight of me. I was in the house at ten o'clock when my father came home from work and marched me

upstairs. He really laid it into me. About an hour afterward I was sick to my stomach.

I didn't go downstairs for lunch. My stomach still felt bad, and my shoulder was really giving me a hard time. I tried staying in bed, but that made the shoulder worse. Around two o'clock my mother came into my room. She looked at my eyes, put her hand on my forehead, and called the doctor. I had a broken collarbone, and the doctor strapped me up like a mummy. He asked me about the marks on my body. I didn't answer him. It was none of his business. Afterward I heard him talking to my mother out in the hall, and my mother was crying.

I took it easy the rest of the afternoon. I wondered how I could keep after the fat kid with an arm strapped down, but I knew I'd find a way. I was sitting downstairs leafing through an encyclopedia when my oldest sister came flying into the house. She ran into the kitchen without seeing me, and I heard her breathlessly telling my mother about a big moving van in front of the fat kid's house.

His family was moving away.

I don't know why I was so sure they were moving out of town. Maybe because I knew they knew I'd find him if They lived anywhere in the same town. I felt a deep sense of peace.

And just like that, it ended.

The shoulder healed in live weeks.

In eight they let me back into school.

Around the house the subject was never mentioned.

In a year I think everyone had honestly forgotten.

Except me.

I made El Paso the first night.

Highway 20 through Mesa, Safford, and Duncan in Arizona brought me to Lordsburg, New Mexico. Between Safford and Duncan the desert is for real. The stark, multi-colored rock and sand of buttes and coulees grimly overshadow the sparse greenery of saguaro cactus, mesquite, and palos verde.

Highways 70* and 80 join up at Lordsburg and run together through Deming to Las Cruees. I turned south there on 80 to El Paso. The temperature when I left Phoenix had been eighty-five. Rolling past the railroad-marshaling yards in El Paso, there was a flurry of snow in the headlights. Altitude makes a difference. The odometer on the Ford said 409 miles when I pulled into a motel on the east side of town.

I'd pushed it a bit to make El Paso. I had a reason. I had to get my arm attended to before the bandage became a part of the tissue. I knew where I could get it cared for, no questions asked, across the International Bridge in Juarez.

The motel office had signs at the front desk advertising fabulous guided tours of the fabulous city of Ciudad Juarez in fabulous Old Mexico. I had them call the agency, and in thirty minutes a potbellied little Mex showed up to guide me. He was about thirty-five, with the eyes of a well-fed weasel. Six dollars changed hands, and we took off in his car.

He was a cheerful talker. Compulsive, almost. He had been baptized Jaime Carlos Torreon Garcia, he told me, but his friends called him Jimmy. He worked for Pan Am in El Paso, but lived in Juarez. He guided nights and weekends. Would I care to see the most excellent Mexican filigreed silver, handworked? I regretted that on Mexican filigreed handworked silver I was loaded. Jimmy was too old a hand at the game even to look disappointed at my turndown.

It was a twenty-minute ride from the motel to the bridge. On the way across it, Jimmy had a sparkling remark for everyone at the check-in stations—English for the US customs men, Spanish for the Mexican soldiers. No one bothered to look at me. With the number of trips Jimmy made over that bridge, he was better known than the president of the country. Either country.

The fabulous city of Ciudad Juarez was—as always— dirty, dusty, and squalid. Except when it rained, and then it was muddy beyond belief. Mexican authorities show a reluctance to put drains in their streets. God sends the rain and the mud, and God will take it away.

My mentor headed unerringly for a bar. "My friend," he told me, with an encompassing wave of his hand at the swarthy, shock-headed proprietor. "He has the finest cantina in the old town."

I looked around at the empty booths and flyspecked walls. "He's not a relative?" I asked Jimmy.

"A cousin," he admitted blandly. Since I so obviously knew the rules of the road, he sat down and ordered Canadian Club for us both without consulting my taste in the matter.

"Have a couple," I told him. "Take your time. I'm going to walk around to the Street of Girls."

He slid from his stool immediately. "I must go with you," he protested. "Or they will cheat you, amigo."

"I'm the bashful type, Jaime Carlos," I said. "I'll go it alone. I'll pay your commission just like you'd get it from the house." He eyed me doubtfully but returned to his Canadian Club.

Out on the street I side-doored it a couple of times to make sure lie wasn't following me. I couldn't see any sign of him, although probably half the Mexican population shared his silhouette. I hadn't been in Juarez in years, but I knew where I wanted to go. I turned up the third street on the left. The side street's macadam ended ten yards from the intersection, and the sidewalk vanished. I stepped down eight inches onto an earthen footpath.

I found the old woman's place with no trouble. I recognized the partly rusted-away iron fence around the scruffy, postage-stamp-sized front yard. The last time I was here, Ed Morris had been with me. Ed had been pushing up daisies for quite a while now. He'd never learned to keep his mouth shut in a strange bar.

I In old woman looked me over through a hole in the door panel when I knocked. I don't know what she thought she saw, but she opened the door. There was no conversation. She tested the bill I gave her under three different lights while I removed my shirt. Her fat hand then made a swooping movement somewhere inside her clothes, and the bill disappeared.

She hummed a tuneless monotone while she worked on the arm. I'd been afraid she might have to steam the old bandage free or use ether, but she cut it carefully in several places and worked it loose. She knew her business. It wasn't a painless operation, but considering the length of time the wound had gone unattended it went a damn sight easier than I expected.

I looked at the wound while she prepared a new bandage. A beauty contest queen might have hollered foul, but it was healing. The new bandage was smaller and less bulky, and so easier to hide. The woman never spoke while she applied it. The last time I'd been there she'd looked three years older than the Archangel Michael, and she'd found no Fountain of Youth in the meantime.

Outside again I headed back to the main street. I turned automatically for a look behind me as I stepped back up on the sidewalk. A dim street light away I saw a figure of Jimmy's general dimensions. I stepped into a doorway and gave the half-seen figure a chance to catch up, but nobody passed. It bothered me. I used my handkerchief to wipe the red dust of the earthen path from my shoes, then walked back to the cantina.

Jaime Cargos Torreon Garcia wasn't there.

His cousin, the bushy-haired proprietor, looked surprised to see me again so quickly. "No sport?" he inquired.

"No sportsman," I answered. "Too old, I guess."

"It comes to all of us," he philosophized, but he crossed himself against the approach of the evil day.

Jimmy bustled in die front door. He, too, seemed surprised to see me. His well-managed expressions of sympathy for my supposed lack of success would have gone down better if I hadn't seen the thick coating of red dust on his shoes.

I tossed a bill down on the bar and hustled him out of there before he could speak. Whatever he knew, it was going to stay with him. Let the cousin believe my sudden exit to be the frustrated petulance of a sexual loser. Cousin Jimmy had acquired dangerous knowledge. Dangerous for him.

We got into his car while he kept shooting nervous little glances at me. If he had information, I was sure he didn't know what to do with it. He needed to put his head together with someone and plan a financial coup based on his knowledge of the gringo's movements. Jaime Carlos Torreon Garcia had the proper piratical instincts but a serious deficiency in his operating procedure. And he wasn't going to live long enough to improve it.

"I think I've had enough sightseeing," I said, turning toward him. I drew the Woodsman, and his eyes popped like a frog's on a hot rock. "Drive up to the checkout zone. Tell them 'no purchases' in Spanish. Nothing more. Let's hear you say it.

"No compra," he said huskily.

"That's all you'll say," I warned. "Let's go."

He had trouble getting that much out at the bridge, let alone anything else. We went through in a breeze. I repeated my warning before we reached the US inspection station. Two minutes later we were back in El Paso, and I felt better. Trouble in Mexico I didn't want. Authorities there have a nasty habit of tossing a gringo into a flea-infested calaboose and conveniently losing the key. Sometimes a man can buy his way out, but sometimes he can't.

That left Jimmy.

"Drive up one of these side streets," I told him.

I le got the whole picture immediately on a big screen. Me nearly let the wheel go completely. "S-Senor, don't do lines thing," he stammered. "I beg of you, don't do—"

"Left, Jimmy. Now." The car lurched as he yanked convulsively at the wheel. The street lights were conveniently spaced. I estimated we were a half-mile from the motel, comfortable walking distance. "Pull over," I ordered. "Between the lights." He did so, babbling unintelligibly in a half-English, half-Spanish, high-pitched wail, "Dump your pockets out on the seat," I demanded. "Be quick."

It was dark, but I could see. About the third item he showered on the seat was a pocketknife of the type known along the border as "Nacional." Heavy bladed and in a solid casing, it's a lethal weapon. Jimmy was still turning out his pockets when I picked up the knife and opened it.

I don't know if he heard the snick of the opening blade or saw the movement of my arm, but he screamed hoarsely and went for the door handle. I grabbed his collar and jerked him back. He collapsed on the seat beside me, his high, keening voice yammering. I hit him in the belly to shut him up.

In the sudden silence I took his sweaty neck in my hand and found the carotid artery with my thumb. I opened the door on my side. A carotid can be messy. I didn't want to get splashed. I braced my heels against the floorboard and reached for him with the blade.

Then I hesitated.

In the quiet I seemed able to think—for the first time since I'd seen red dust clinging to this man's shoes. I'd been so upset at my own stupidity in letting the fool follow me that I hadn't thought the situation through.

Alive, he'd talk.

Later, if not sooner.

That I knew.

But dead, his body would talk, perhaps even more to the point. His cousin expected him back with a tale of where Jimmy had followed the turista and what profit might be wrung from it. If he didn't come back, the cousin would eventually call the police. They'd have little trouble tracing Jimmy to the agency. I had had the motel call the agency. And the motel would furnish the police with a description of me.

And of the Ford.

It would make me too easy to find.

Dead, the man was an anchor around my neck.

Alive? Better, although not much better.

I clicked the knife blade shut. "Sit up and listen to me," I said.

He gave a kind of shuddering sigh. "Por Dios, S-Senor, I implore—"

"Shut up. Drive back to the motel."

It took him a full minute to get the car started. His coordination was gone. He drove like a sleepwalker, his face like yellow wax in the light from the street lamps, his eyes sneaking looks at me. The car bounced high as he turned too fast into the motel driveway. For a second I thought we might take out a unit before he hit the brake and we skidded to a stop.

I got out of the car, then motioned at him. "Take off, man. Get lost."

He stared at me suspiciously from behind the wheel. Was it a trick? It didn't take him long to decide if it was, that he still liked it better than where he'd been. He tramped on the accelerator, and his car hit the street doing forty-five, tires squealing in the night.

I watched him go.

Jimmy had been right up to the gates, and he knew it. Given his type, la-should head straight for his bed and stay there with the covers over his head for three days.

But I couldn't count on it.

Five minutes after his tail-lights winked out of the motel driveway. I was headed east again in the Ford.