Strategy

The chess pieces are placed in rows, occupying the checkered squares like soldiers, one missing here or there as if a rook and a queen went off to bed together. A king, overturned, a cleft of stone missing from the base, a denotation of shame. The white pawns have a jaundice tone to them where the afternoon light is muted behind sheaths of clouds. The men are slouched in the metal furniture, bulky and overcrowded in their Levi’s, flannel and work boots. The man closest to me taps his index finger against his temple, a single vein protruding there like a river on a roadmap. A cigarette collects ash in the overturned coffee cup. The man swipes at the corners of his mouth with his thumb as if he is about to turn a stubborn page in an old book, then retrieves his cigarette. His eyes remain fixed on the pieces. His opponent drags a hand through brassy strands of hair that shine in ripples like light on water, the tips skimming the seams on the shoulders of his shirt. His eyes scan the board as if he’s skimming prose. He retrieves a rubber band from around his wrist and pulls his hair into a low-slung ponytail, a few strands freed from wafts of air, lifting away from his face, flitting around his square, set jaw and nudges a pawn forward with his knuckle.

My pen is paused over notebook paper. Through the glass I watch a muted aplomb, these men whose large, stained hands, poised over a chessboard, move pieces with such care and precision, in a game of attack and capture, a strategy of calculation, trust and betrayal. I scoff to myself, “most men would prefer football.” The man with the ponytail wraps his palm around the porcelain mug to his left, sips, his lips left wet, rubs the back of his neck, pulls the loosened hair in the rubber band a bit tighter.

That flaxen hair, escaped from the grips of the rubber band, on my neck, grazing my collar bone, draws paintbrush-thin lines of perspiration across the tableau of my chest as he dips his head to taste the salt on me. He would move invisible chess pieces over my flat stomach with his fingertips, talk to tactics versus strategy. He’d retrieve chess pieces off his dresser and place them across my torso, the cold marble or stone resurrecting goose bumps. He would trace pathways of the bishop at queen with his thick and apt tongue. He would smell of ginseng and aftershave, a little pine, and taste like maple syrup.

Through the glass, pawns lay in a small cardboard box, a holding cell for traitors, the board absent of its kingdom except for a few survivors. The sky fills with billows of pewter clouds and raindrops leave track marks ageist the window. The men show no sign of leaving. The stray strands from his ponytail cling to his forehead, matted, as the rain comes harder. He plucks a black knight from its occupation near the center of the board and moves it a space closer to the peripheries of the board. His opponents king stands vulnerable, the pawns captures and unable to protect him. Beads of water collect on his mustache and beard, dripping every so often onto the nearly empty board. And the sky opens up with hot light and sound. The rain comes. And I do not know their names.