The Texas Blue Norther. Lass Small

time. She probably needed to start a business.

      What sort of business? What—really—interested her enough to apply her attention to what endeavor?

      Nothing she could think of at that time. If she put her mind to it, something would appeal to her. She’d make a good CEO. She would let everybody else run the whole shebang.

      If everyone else ran the business, what would she do? How would her life be any different from what it was? She’d have even more money.

      Her thinking was out of whack. She needed to concentrate on something that was interesting enough and stimulating enough and ragged enough that her attention wouldn’t wander.

      Yes.

      Of course.

      Right away.

      

      The turnoff from the highway ought to be somewhere along that particular empty stretch of the two lane road. It would be to the right and go north. Her eyes watched with some discontent.

      An interestingly weird portion of her friends was taken with the game of a pretend insurrection and how to cope if the government was taken over by an enemy. To Lauren, it seemed somewhat juvenile.

      She thought such an exercise was rather similar to an adult version of Dungeons and Dragons. That fascinating lure had come into being with quartersupplied video games, and later it was the alluring miracle of the 1980’s Apple Personal Computers. The Apple computer was matched with the early computer line called the Gorilla Banana, which had the dot matrix printer.

      When those had burst into being, Lauren had been quite young. She hadn’t been overly interested. But her daddy had thought having the Apple II and the matrix printer would help in schoolwork.

      At the time, all the kids had come to her house to see the computer and play with it. It had been an interesting time. The computer had been magic to them all.

      And for her, now, to be driving out for an airplane pod drop was really another type of Dungeons and Dragons. The pod was a yellow gourd and it had a long cotton tail tied to it. The tail helped the searchers to see it fall to the ground.

      At twenty-seven, wasn’t she too old for such games?

      Not yet.

      Lauren had become involved mostly just to get away from the routine of golf, bridge and meetings. These newer, more complicated games were a distraction.

      So.

      She was admitting she was bored?

      Hmmm. Maybe so.

      If she was only bored, what was the solution to the boredom?

      Her sisters would say it would be something else that was newer. Something more stimulating. Like organizing and helping with some group, traveling and shopping…Or a man.

      Searching for something new was why Lauren was driving out in the sticks, looking for a side road in order to go to a pod dropping.

      In the pod would be some kind of directions. When it was retrieved, the group would “assault” some way station and conquer whoever had been designated to act as the enemy. The actual taking was benign. No rough stuff.

      Well, sometimes the assault got rough. There are just people who take everything seriously—even in games like basketball, golf and cards. There were people who played so intensely that it wasn’t a game. It was war! So, basically, this pod game was a war.

      Take Willard Newman. He was serious about everything. Even her. Willard had wanted her daddy’s backing. He didn’t just want Lauren Davie, he wanted her daddy to see him as kin. That way Willard would have the backing of a man who had clout.

      It seemed to Lauren that no serious courter had ever seen only her. He’d seen past her to her daddy, to the Davie holdings, to security for himself.

      Recognizing such a fact was somewhat diminishing.

      It could be no surprise that Lauren had become sour about men. She wondered how it would be to see the light in a man’s eyes that was for her and not for her money. It would never happen. Her daddy’s name was prime in TEXAS. No one could hear her last name was Davie without asking, “He kin to you?”

      They’d ask in just that way. Not if she was her daddy’s daughter, but was he kin to her.

      Sourly impatient with herself, Lauren watched for the turnoff, and it finally came along with the road under her tires. She signaled needlessly. There were no other cars. She turned with skill from the lessons Mr. Soper had given her in driver’s training those years ago. And she went on, following the map.

      By then, the road wasn’t divided by a painted line down the middle. It was just a road. She felt she was far, far away from civilization. Soon the road deteriorated. In TEXAS? A deteriorated road? It was still asphalt.

      But that didn’t last, either. The road became a onetrack, dirt road.

      Was she lost? Had she taken the wrong turn? There were no markers. The Good Guys of the exercise couldn’t allow the Enemy to know where they were.

      Lauren sighed. She carried water with her always in the wide country of TEXAS. And she had the car phone.

      What was the name of the road?

      There had been a couple of turnoffs that had been dirt tracks, just like this one she was on.

      She stopped and looked at the secret map. Lordy, Lordy, deliver her from games. The map was accurate. It showed she was to go straight ahead and she judged she had another mile at least.

      How had she gotten tangled up in some game this strange?

      Stupidity.

      Undiminished by her own labeling, she went on, watching the mile creep on the adjusted odometer. The moving, seemingly undulating land had emptied out. Even the mesquites were scarce, but there was an occasional, lone oak. There were vast ranges and the vista was beautiful, but it was lonely and bare. It was grazed land. There were cattle out there somewhere.

      The meeting place was a little past that presumed mile, but there were the other two cars. They were tucked in under the short mesquites that appeared along parts of the roads. The cars were hidden? How droll.

      The short, lacy trees were gnarled, and cattle had trimmed up the branches so the trees were like useless, fragile umbrellas. The noisy couple with their mesquite-hidden cars was jubilant she had arrived.

      Mark met her and opened her car door. He scolded, “Why didn’t you answer your car phone? Melissa called, she’s about to have the baby! So Gail and I are going back. You can handle this one. Tom and Buzz couldn’t make it. Jack’ll be here in no time. He’ll buzz you first, then drop the pod. Thanks, honey. We’re gone!”

      And they left.

      Lauren sat in her car, watching the other two cars disappear. She thought, Why am I here? What on earth am I doing? This is really dumb. At my age, I ought to know better than to get involved in something this stupid!

      And there she was, dressed in silks with fragile shoes. And she was supposed to drawl through the fence and retrieve the pod?

      Disgruntled, she waited.

      And waited.

      She looked at her watch and sighed. She looked at her silent car phone. She wondered why she was sitting there.

      Eventually, she heard the sound of a small plane. She looked up. She looked around. She looked down the dirt road. At some distance, she saw the plane buzzing the mesquites clear down yonder. That would be Jack.

      Jack had never struck Lauren as being particularly bright. However, he could fly a plane. She could not. But if he was that smart, why was he buzzing the mesquites, clear down there?

      She had started her engine and was bouncing down the lane toward where Jack had been. Had he gone on off a way and was supposedly dropping the pod? Away from the trees? Why clear out of sight after