for the bishop trade.’
‘Didn’t know you played.’
‘Chess club president my senior year.’
I had learned the game, or at least learned how the pieces move, at around the same stage of life, on the endless dogwatches of seventh-period study hall at General Braxton Bragg, but even if we’d had a chess club I was pretty sure I never would’ve made president. But I did eventually get good enough to win most of the games I played, except when the opponent was Coach Alonzo ‘Jesus Wants You to Light Up That Scoreboard’ Bubner, who was doing a better job of making a halfback of me than a chess player.
Coach believed the cornerstones of victory were the running game on the football field and the knights at the chessboard. The running game thing made sense to me, but the knights were a headache. Their attack is indirect – a combination of one and two squares at right angles to each other in any direction – and they can’t be blocked by intervening pieces. But understanding this isn’t the same thing as being able think ahead four or five knight moves, which is what it took to stay in the game against Coach Bub.
Then suddenly I saw, precisely superimposed on the chessboard, a brilliantly clear image of Bragg Field back in Rains County, where I’d played football for Coach, as it had looked from the visitors’ end-zone stands, top row centre, the stadium brightly lit but completely empty and silent. As I watched, the overhead lights began to go out in rapid succession – each leaving an indecipherable hint of an afterimage too brief and faint to register on the retina but somehow imprinting itself directly on my brain – and then the lights beyond the stadium, a wave of darkness rolling outward toward the horizon in every direction, leaving the world in a cold, starless nothingness deeper and blacker than any night.
But intense as it was, the image had no staying power, dissolving almost immediately to leave me staring at the chessboard behind it. All my life I’d had what my grandmother called a ‘touch of the Sight’, beyond ordinary intuition but rare, unpredictable, and almost always short of useful clairvoyance, and I assumed I’d just been touched. But as usual I had no idea what it meant. I sat for a minute, thinking about it and waiting for my heart rate to subside. Nothing occurred to me.
Then, remembering that as usual lately I’d skipped breakfast this morning, and wondering about the relationship between blood sugar levels and a runaway imagination, I found a couple of fairly crisp singles in my billfold and headed for the break room. Finding it deserted, I walked across and stood at the window for a minute watching the rain from a new angle. It seemed to be coming down harder now, and though I couldn’t hear anything through the thick double-paned glass I actually thought I could smell it, the two facts seeming, for no reason I could put my finger on, strange and wrong to me.
I pulled the knobs for a couple of candy bars, poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup and picked up a copy of the Gazette somebody had left on one of the small Formica-topped tables against the wall. No surprises here: everybody supporting the proposed new rehab facility and halfway house as long as it wasn’t in their neighbourhood, evangelical commandos in a sweat over sex education and Huckleberry Finn in the high schools, Louisiana Quarter politicians angling for a cut of the new highway bill. A tenth anniversary retrospective on the unsolved rape and murder of a local eleven-year-old named Joy Dawn Therone, the coverage then transitioning into a rundown of all the uncleared murders and disappearances of girls and young women in this part of the state over the last thirty years. I folded the paper and pushed it across to the other side of the table.
Then the vision of Bragg Field returned, this time superimposed only on the background of the break room and persisting as an accurate replay of something that had actually happened. Now the stands and the field were no longer dark but rocking with life and light and sound inside the cold grey roar of the rain soaking the county and threatening to drown out the marching bands and the screams, cheers, whistles and air horns from the stands, never letting up from the kickoff to the last play. Our Homecoming game, the field now nothing but a hundred yards of churned mud and turf, the District championship and our shot at the State title on the line, and time running out on us. We stood in a ragged, dripping circle, eyes on number 16, quarterback Eldrew Cleveland Dasbro, brutally forcing himself to stand straight in defiance of the two cracked ribs that would show up on the x-rays after the game.
‘Red Hook Toss?’ he gritted through clenched teeth at Johnny Trammel, who’d just brought the play in from the sideline. ‘Are you shittin’ me?’
Johnny, my closest friend at Bragg, was a magician. He’d played Dr Prestidigito in the drama club’s fall presentation, and I’d seen him make all kinds of things appear and disappear – the coins from his collections, golf balls, even on one unforgettable occasion a gerbil that had first vanished, then somehow gotten out of Johnny’s coat pocket and down the neck of Janie Cochran’s sweater. But, as quick and elusive as he was, Johnny could never pull the Red Hook out of the hat, not in conditions like these, or against the kind of speed the Hawks’ defensive end had. We were down seven points with two and a half minutes left in the game; this was the only shot we were going to get. Johnny shook his head miserably.
But Daz was through with bullshit. ‘Okay, listen up, you lesbians,’ he said. ‘This here’s your higher power telling you Fake Twenty-two Boot Right is what Johnny-boy said, and that’s what we’re gonna run on these limp-dicks.’ Winking at me, he leaned aside to spit through his facemask, flinching and showing his teeth at the movement, then clapped his hands to break the huddle. Then as he stepped in behind centre I saw him do what he’d always done when he had to – send his pain to some other dimension and become an uninjured version of himself, nothing now to show he was hurt but the blood on his hands.
At the snap I feinted left toward the line as Johnny blew by me to wrap his arms around Daz’s phoney handoff, Daz sideslipping back from the line with the ball still on his hip in a perfect bootleg fake, me kicking out and swinging downfield through the right flat and Daz floating the ball over my shoulder with flawless touch. I cradled it in twenty yards downfield, just out of the corner’s reach, and a few seconds later I was in the end zone, bringing us to within a point of the Hawks. We went for the two-point conversion and got it, me going off-tackle this time, nothing fancy, just hitting the hole as hard as I could. We were up by one.
Our kickoff carried to the back of their end zone in spite of the downpour, and four hopeless plays later the Hawks were done. Daz took a knee a couple of times and the District championship was ours.
The coaches all agreed that if he could stay healthy Daz was a sure thing for a major college scholarship, and would probably go no later than the middle rounds of the pro draft, but as it turned out he was a dead man walking. Halfway through a season when it looked like the Aggies’ were on their way to the Cotton Bowl, Daz on the roster as the freshman second-string quarterback, he would crash head-on into an eighteen-wheeler out of Beaumont while driving the brand new Audi an alumni dealer had let him ‘borrow’, his death instantaneous.
The memories popped like bubbles when Ridout stuck his head in the door, holding up his right hand splayed like a chicken’s foot. ‘Cueing Squarepants in five,’ he said.
‘I thought it was your turn?’
‘Nope. We traded back when you took the girls to Sea World.’ He disappeared, leaving behind a suggestion of Stetson aftershave on the air.
A former Texas-side chief had come up with an idea he called Conference Day, designating a media room where the departments announced toy drives, made excuses in high-profile murder cases, warned against drunk driving and issued tactical lies. My old partner Floyd Zito had called it the Officer Squarepants Show, and the name had turned out to have legs. This morning Channel Six wanted a two-minute spot on the dangers of burglar bars.
