I drank too much at a chess tournament once and woke up the next day with a black eye and a trophy, and no memory of how I’d gotten either.
Like anyone else, I have openings and defenses I’m familiar with and ones that would give me trouble, but you would really need to know what you were doing to beat me. Like anyone else, I play worse when I’m flustered or distracted. I realized at an early age that if this was true for me, it was probably true for others, and so I would try to fluster my opponents when I could. So the black eye made sense even if I didn’t remember exactly how I got it.
When I moved, the trophy was in a box with some coffee filters and framed photographs, by an oscillating fan and a recliner turned upside-down to fit in the back seat.
A few miles past my exit, I picked up the hitchhiker: because I had always wanted to but hadn’t ever gotten the chance, and because I didn’t think I had anything to lose at that point.
I asked her what her name was and she squirmed a little and wondered if she could move the seat back. I thought about how I had packed back there, zero wasted space.
“You’re welcome to try,” I offered. I wouldn’t pull away until she’d promised not to kill me with the banjo she was carrying.
I was remembering my old apartment in the spring while I drove, when I’d open my window while I cooked pasta and drink beer cold out of cans when temperature fronts would hit together and drum up thunderstorms. I cried in a bar when I found out I had to leave, and later threw a bottle of mid-shelf whiskey out of my window and watched it shatter near my downstairs neighbor’s car.
“You’re supposed to ask me where I’m headed,” said the girl in my car.
I told her I wasn’t up yet on the etiquette.
“Did you know that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” she asked me.
“I think I read something about that.”
“I have some literature.”
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about spaghetti and lightning, and waking up early to run outside, and the way that a good porch feels at night when you have a steady job.
“What’s that trophy for,” she asked me.
“Chess tournament.”
“Part of the Kingdom of Heaven is that everyone has a gift and talent,” said the banjo girl after a while. “Even if you don’t know what it is or think you have one. Is chess your gift?”
“Can Chess be a gift?”
“Can you pull over here,” she asked softly.
She was on her way to college. Some directional bible college – I don’t remember if it was Southeastern or just Southern – that she hitched to at the beginning of every semester. She wanted me to pull in a rest stop she always went to so that I could play her friend Nathan in chess.
“Nathan is perfect at chess. It’s his only gift, he can’t really do anything else.”
“I’m pretty good, too.”
“Pretty good won’t mean anything to Nathan. He can’t lose, because he has the gift of prophecy.”
“Nathan is probably the best chess player in the world,” she said. “You couldn’t keep him still long enough to get him in a tournament, but he’s unbeatable.”
I pulled over where she directed, walked up to a vending machine, and by the time I came back with pretzels a vagrant had a chessboard set up on the hood of my car. He had loose fitting clothes and long hair, but it looked like he had shaved that day, if not hours before. The girl took the pretzels out of my hand and gave them to Nathan, then handed him a grocery bag she had with her.
“Two games,” he said. “I can play you twice but after that I can’t ever play you again. Two times.”
“You must be Nathan,” I said.
When I tell the story, I talk about having control of the middle of the board and letting him slip bishops into good position. I try to save face as a guy who knows something about chess. The truth is, Nathan blew me up. He forked my pieces in ways I never saw coming, he unveiled threats with other, beautiful, movements that were threats themselves. His knights moved in deliberate, unexpected ways, like a virtuoso wrestler’s feet. We played again, and the same thing. I wanted a rematch.
“Never again. I know what you look like. I’ll recognize you and I won’t play you.”
“Just one more.”
The girl was tuning her banjo, and Nathan waved his hand to dismiss me from his sight to the twangs of it being guided into pitch.
“It’s not your fault,” said the girl. “You could play him a million times and never win. That’s his gift. You see what I’m talking about with the sitting still, though.”
But Nathan was sitting still, and it seemed like he would for as long as the girl was willing to play her banjo.
“Don’t stop playing,” I said.
“I haven’t really started yet,” she said. “I’m just tuning.”
I opened the back door of the car behind the driver’s seat and pulled the trophy out of the box. I wiped it off with part of my shirt. I approached Nathan and before he could send me away I handed him the trophy.
We sat then, and listened to the girl play her music.
She told us the song she wanted to play was about the ghost of Tom Light, who is restless because the world isn’t yet the way it’s supposed to be. She had her shoes off. It started to rain softly but none of us moved.
R. Hunter Whitworth‘s fiction has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Saturday Evening Post, Chicago Quarterly Review, the Cincinnati Review, and most recently Brown Hound Press. His debut collection is forthcoming with Cowboy Jamboree. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughters. See more at rhunterwhitworth.com
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