Grandmaster (3 page)

“I think it would be fun.”

“That’s a ‘yes’?”

“Don’t do it for me either.”

He let out a long, tortured sigh. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t do it for your mother and I won’t do it for you and I certainly won’t do it for me, because we’re operating on a policy of total honesty here, and I don’t want to ever play chess again. But yes, I’ll do it.”

“For who?” I asked, confused.

“
I said I’ll do it
. Don’t push any more. Just take it or leave it, Daniel.”

“I’ll take it.”

His hand stayed on my shoulder a second more, and then he pulled it back. “With two conditions. First, don’t expect too much.”

“Come on. It’s like riding a bicycle.”

“A very rusty old bicycle,” he said. “The wheels probably don’t even turn.”

“We’ll oil them. What’s the second condition?”

“After this is over, it’s over. One tournament. One time. I’ll spring for a New York hotel room. We’ll have to economize on meals and don’t expect Broadway shows. I’ll do my best and play my hardest. But that’s it. Okay?” He held out his hand to seal the deal.

“Done,” I told him, shaking his hand and looking him in the eye. “But since we’re being totally truthful with each other, I’ve gotta tell you—I don’t buy that story about why you quit. Nobody gets that good at something and quits cold turkey ’cause they realize it’s not a good way to meet girls and their stomach hurts. Why did you really quit?”

“Think what you want to think,” he said. “I’m going to bed. Good night.”

“Good night, Grandmaster. Can I call you that now?”

“Never, ever,” he told me emphatically as he walked back into the house. And just before the screen door slammed I heard him mutter, “Good night, Patzer-face.”

4

When a girl can look beautiful streaked with pond scum, you know she’s dangerous. Her name was Britney, she was wearing waders and carrying a net, and her long brown hair was tucked up into a cap so it wouldn’t drag in the murky waters of Grimwald Pond. “Hey, are you ready for some high-quality goo?” she asked, walking up to me and depositing a netful of sludge in my glass beaker.

Grimwald had been the first headmaster of Loon Lake Academy a hundred years ago. A photo of him hangs in the library near the reference section, a serious-looking man with a bushy mustache and a glare on his face that says: “Study harder and keep your big mouth shut.” According to the dates under the photo he was headmaster for almost a quarter of a century, so he probably deserved something better than getting his name on this fetid pond.

“Collectors, scoop with the nets, don’t jab with them,” Mr. Cady, our bio teacher, urged, walking up and down the long line of kids like a general appraising his troops. “Try to preserve the sedimentary logic of the ecosystem. Surveyors, be vigilant. What you dismiss as a wood chip may in fact be something truly remarkable. Recorders, please write legibly.”

I was a surveyor, knee-deep in pond water, holding a big glass vial in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. Britney was a collector. In addition to her netful of silt and ooze, she had managed to collect a long streak of orange-brown mud that ran from her hairline down past her wide blue eyes, an inch to the right of her cute nose, and terminated on a level with her puffy and highly sensual lips.

“Thanks,” I told her, swishing her sample around in my water-filled vial and studying it through the magnifying glass. We had been in the same bio class for seven months, and even worked together as lab partners on occasion, but we had never stood together in a muddy pond before.

“You’re welcome,” she replied with a little smile. “This is disgusting, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think we’re going to find much except mud and crud,” I said. “Maybe an old shoe if we get real lucky.”

“I kind of hope I don’t find anything in here,” she told me, peering down. “Even an old shoe sounds pretty gross.” I expected her to trudge deeper into the pond, but Mr. Cady had moved on down the line so no one was watching us. She lingered, took a step closer, and surprised me by saying: “I hear from Brad that you’re going to New York this weekend.”

I had e-mailed Brad the good news right after my conversation with Dad on the back porch. I nodded and tried to sound casual about it. She had never mentioned her senior boyfriend to me before. Come to think of it, in seven months of being in the same class, we had never discussed anything about our personal lives—not that I had much of a personal life. “Yeah, it should be, um, interesting.”

“I know you guys will win,” she said. “Brad is such a strong player. And Eric never loses at anything either.” Her words sounded like such rah-rah girlfriend drivel that I almost dismissed her as a dumb and starry-eyed cheerleader for a jerk. But I couldn’t help wondering if on some deeper level she wasn’t really poking fun at Brad, and maybe even expressing a little sadness at being bound to these two arrogant big shots.

I wanted to ask her why a nice fourteen-year-old girl would date an eighteen-year-old jerk—even if he was handsome and successful—and why her parents would let her. But instead, I looked right into her glistening blue eyes and said: “Well, I’ll probably lose every game. But it’ll still be fun to go to New York with my dad.”

She looked a little surprised. If she was hanging around Brad and Eric she probably never heard them express doubts about winning anything. “Oh, don’t worry about screwing up,” she told me. “Brad was telling me about the tournament. Each team has to have six players to enter, but for every round they only count the scores of the top five. So even if you lose every game, it’s no problem. What’s the matter?”

I stood there, nodding very slightly. Of course, that was why they had invited me. They didn’t care about my score—they were after my dad so they could have five superstrong players for each round. “Nothing,” I told her. And then, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice, I said: “You have mud on your face.”

“Really? Yuck.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s just pond scum.”

She gave me a curious look. “Did I make you feel bad telling you that only five players counted in each round? I thought you knew.”

“I do now.”

For a moment her face softened. “Sorry. The way Brad put it, it seemed like everyone was on the same page.”

“I think you’d better collect some more mud,” I told her. “There’s nothing in this sample but silt.”

Instead of walking away, Britney stepped yet closer. I could smell her lilac perfume over the stench of pond muck. “I think it’s sweet that you want to go to New York with your dad. Would you do me a favor, Daniel?” she asked. “I’m wearing these waterproof gloves. Would you wipe the mud off for me?”

“Off your face?”

“Yup.”

I swallowed. “With what?”

“Your hand.”

I looked back at her and heard myself mumble: “Okay. Right or left?”

She giggled. “Whichever’s cleanest.”

I stuck the magnifying glass into my back pocket, handle first, and reached toward her hesitantly. The fingers of my right hand touched the side of her face.

“Go on, wipe it off,” she said. “I don’t bite.”

I wiped the mud off, which meant gently stroking down the side of her face. She tilted her head slightly and smiled back a little playfully at me.

I reluctantly pulled my fingers away and took a breath. “It’s all off,” I said.

“Thanks, Daniel,” she replied. “I may be coming to New York this weekend with my mom, so we may meet up with you guys for dinner. And you know what?”

“What?” I asked.

“I think you might just surprise yourself and win a game or two,” she told me. “I bet you’re a lot better than you know.”

Then she turned and waded back into Grimwald Pond, her scoop net poised for the next interesting specimen that swam her way.

5

When I finished my homework on Thursday night and walked out into the living room, Dad was watching the news, but he was really waiting for me. He switched off the TV and said, “Where’s your chess set?”

“Need to brush up?” I asked.

“I want to see if I still remember how to set the pieces up,” he told me without a smile.

I got the purple sack and the green-and-white-checked board and handed them over. He unrolled the board and dumped the sack of pieces out onto it and started setting up the white side. I probably should have helped him by setting up the black pieces, but I couldn’t stop myself from watching him.

He had the strangest look on his face, as if he were returning to a place where something beautiful but also terrible had happened to him long ago. I got the feeling he had been absolutely positive he would never visit this place again. He almost seemed to be climbing onto the board himself and rubbing shoulders with the pieces so that he could exchange small talk with the pawns and salute the king and climb the crenellated parapets of the rooks. When he picked up a knight, his hand trembled.

“You okay?” I asked him. “Something wrong with the knight?”

His hand had frozen for a moment, with the knight suspended in midair. He was holding the piece by its long equine neck, and I saw his thumb trace down the length of the plastic horse as if stroking its mane. “It’s the only piece that can move at the beginning of a game,” he told me softly.

“I never realized that,” I said.

“The only one that can jump over others.” He placed it almost reverently on the board. “Since chess was invented in India, more than a thousand years ago, it’s the only piece whose role and movement have never changed at all.”

“They don’t teach us much about the history of chess in our club,” I told him. “But I guess each piece has something unique about it.”

He placed the white queen next to the king. “When they first cooked up the game, the king was a scholarly, wise Indian emperor—much too refined to do much fighting himself. What we call the queen was a male war minister who stood near and advised him. The Spanish later turned the piece into a powerful woman, probably to honor the Virgin Mary, or perhaps because women can be so dangerous.”

I thought of Britney and how she had hurt my feelings and then reduced me to a babbling idiot when she asked me to wipe the mud off her face. “You can say that again,” I muttered. “No wonder they can move so far in so many different directions.”

His white pieces and pawns were ready now, and he set up the black pieces and then leaned back and surveyed the board. There was an expression on his face that I had never seen before—a dangerous sharpness, a knife-blade-like keenness. He was a gentle man, but peering down at the chess pieces through his thick glasses he looked downright nasty. “Do you have any idea what chess really is, Daniel?”

“A game? A pastime?” He shook his head and I tried again. “A three-dimensional timed logic test?”

“War,” he told me. “Two armies facing each other on a battlefield, fighting to the death.”

“That’s one way to think about it.”

“There’s no other way. It’s war and annihilation, pure and simple. When you capture a piece, you’re killing it. When you capture the enemy king, his whole army is put to the sword.”

“That’s a pretty bloodthirsty interpretation,” I said. “I prefer to think of it as a logic test.”

“Logic test be damned,” he grunted, and took a few fast breaths. His fingers had folded into fists and I could see how tense he was and how hard he was trying to relax. I wondered what was making him so nervous. “Listen,” he said, “I made the hotel reservation at the Palace Royale. We’re sharing a standard room. Twin beds. No frills. It’s still more than two hundred a night.”

“We could stay at home and drive back and forth,” I suggested.

“No. The opening round is on Friday night, and the first Saturday round starts early. If we’re gonna do this, let’s stay in Manhattan and do it right.”

“A standard room will be fine,” I told him. “I don’t care if I have to sleep on the floor.” I tried to come up with something positive, to make him look a little happier. “Maybe we’ll win first prize. It’s ten thousand dollars, Dad. Our share of that would be more than three grand.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” he said.

“Brad and Eric are strong players,” I pointed out, “and so are their dads. And I know you haven’t played in years, but you were a grandmaster. So we probably have as good a shot as anyone.”

“Aren’t you forgetting somebody?” he asked. “What about you?”

I was very tempted to tell him about the five-player-a-round rule, and that they had only invited the two of us to add his score to their own totals. But instead I said: “Sure, I might have a strong tournament, too. You can never tell.”

“No, you can’t,” he agreed, taking off his glasses and starting to polish them on his shirt, so that he was looking away from me when he added softly, “Daniel, you may hear something at the tournament about me.”

“What kind of something?”

He was still looking down at his glasses and not at me. “The chess community is small. People hang around for years. They remember things they should have forgotten.”

“You mean I may hear something bad about you?”

He glanced up at me, and there was a clear warning in his eyes. “If you do hear anything, I want you to remember it happened a long time ago. I was a very different person back then.”

“Sure,” I said. “Look, I’m the one who got you into this. Whatever happened in the past is history. But do you want to give me a heads-up about what I may hear, just so I can prepare myself to ignore it and forget it?”

“No,” he said, “I’d rather not. Let’s play.”

“Against you? You’re a grandmaster.”

“Then I’ll give you white.”

He turned the board around so that the white pieces were in front of me. “Go ahead, son,” he said. “Bring it on.”

So I tried to bring it. I know other kids wrestle their fathers, or race them, or play one-on-one basketball against them, but we had never even arm-wrestled before. This was the first time that I could remember my father and me going full tilt at each other in friendly combat.

I say “friendly” because we started out amicably enough, smiling and making small talk—and we were playing in the warmth and comfort of our own living room. Also, there was nothing at stake—no money, no trophies, not even rating points.