Perpetual Check (12 page)

Neither brother decides on a particularly aggressive opening. Zeke has the same empty, doomsday feeling in his gut as he did when Abington scored on that penalty kick last fall. As if his one real chance has slipped away again. He knows that the odds of beating Randy twice in a row (he's counting that first game as a victory) aren't good.

That feeling begins to dissipate as the game unfolds and neither player takes control. If Randy was going to trample him, it would have been evident right away.

Of all the people Zeke's tried to unnerve over the years, Randy's always been the most frustrating. Zeke
is
a good athlete, way better than average, the type who was always a leader on the youth soccer teams that transcended the local
recreation programs, playing in weekend leagues against other select teams, participating in tournaments up in Binghamton and as far south as Philadelphia and Harrisburg. He saw significant playing time on the high school varsity as a freshman and was a starter at forward for three straight seasons. He also made first-team all-league in tennis last spring and is always an early selection for pickup basketball games and softball.

But there were better soccer players in those leagues, guys who could make him look slow and awkward as they slipped by with dazzling footwork and moves. And even if Zeke was probably in the top 10 percent of all high school tennis players in the state, there were dozens of guys who could beat him in straight sets at love without even breaking a sweat.

So Zeke knew very well what his father and his coaches were all too willing to ignore. Being very good is one thing; pretending to yourself that you have elite status just diminishes your actual worth.

Zeke is too good at pretending. But he's finally beginning to recognize that.

He studies the board. He knows that Randy's most recent move was meant to lure him into a rapid-fire exchange of pieces. He quickly envisions what the board would look like after each move, and how each player would almost surely have to react. He shifts a pawn one space forward.

Randy presses two fingers to his lower lip, glances up at his brother, and takes one of Zeke's rooks with one of his own.

Zeke captures that rook with a knight, Randy takes the knight with a pawn, and the next several moves go just as he expected. The exchanges continue until both players have lost
a rook, a knight, and two pawns on consecutive moves. But Randy captures a third pawn on the final move of the series, coming away from the carnage with that slight advantage in material.

The once-sedate game is suddenly wide open. Dina sneezes. Zeke looks up at her quickly and returns his gaze to the board.

Zeke was at that dance in October, leaning back on the lowest row of the bleachers with his arms crossed. A few of his soccer teammates were there, but Zeke wasn't paying much attention to them. He was watching a group of girls dancing together near the deejay. He was trying not to look like he was watching, but he was.

In walks Randy, of all people, holding hands with a girl that Zeke couldn't quite bring himself to admit was rather cute.

People were going over to Randy and his date, joking around, laughing. After a few minutes, Randy and the girl started dancing. They kept at it for quite some time, mostly dancing fast but then doing a couple of slow ones.

“This is the lamest thing I've ever been to in my life,” Zeke finally said to Donny Curtis, the goalie. “I'm out of here.”

He drove down to the Turkey Hill convenience store and bought a pack of Yodels, then went home and watched three episodes of
The Simpsons
on DVD.
Anybody could get a girlfriend like that one,
he told himself, even though he'd never had one of his own.

Randy takes Zeke's remaining bishop with a knight, leaving the knight under attack by a pawn. Zeke winces slightly and takes the knight, but it wasn't quite an even exchange of pieces. There's the age-old argument of whether a bishop outranks a knight. But Zeke knows that—in Randy's hands at least—it does.

It's another of those small disadvantages that Zeke knows he can't afford. He'd been winning that first game because of a couple of big hits, most notably knocking out Randy's queen in the early going. But this one is turning into a slow battle of attrition, and that always falls to Randy's favor. Those small cuts eventually bleed you dry. And Zeke's got more cuts than Randy does.

The coaches at both Bloomsburg and Kutztown have said he can try out if he gets admitted, but there wouldn't be more than two or three roster spots for walk-ons at either school. Zeke desperately wants to continue playing soccer in college, so a season at a local two-year school like Lackawanna might be a better bet. But then what would he do about housing? Commute to Scranton? Keep living with his parents? There has to be a better alternative.

Having his father telling him what a star he is for all those years hasn't been a plus after all. Somehow it made him decide that an extra hour of working on his ball control was plenty, no need to make it two; that fifty sit-ups after practice were just as good as a hundred; that sometimes it wasn't worth running hills in the pouring rain. He was great; he was unbelievable. His natural talent would carry him as far as he wanted to go. It was heady stuff at twelve or thirteen or fifteen.

Randy never got caught up in all that, despite how outstanding he'd been when he was little. He never wanted to do
that hard work, so he had no reason to pretend that he was anything other than what he was. He had no reason to try to fulfill some image his father had of him. No reason to be anybody but himself.

The game has been brutal, but Zeke has virtually no way to win it. His only real hope is a draw, to lure Randy into a stalemate.

Randy has been moving his last remaining pawn up the board toward promotion. Zeke's king and his lone pawn are stacked on the edge of the board, with the king in the seventh rank and the pawn one spot in front of it. Randy's king is in the next spot in that file, blocking Zeke's pawn from moving.

Randy advances his pawn. It's three spaces to the side of Zeke's king and one move away from promotion.

Zeke shifts the king one space to the side, still protecting his pawn. Randy promotes his pawn, then leans back to make a decision.

Zeke quickly reviews all of Randy's possible exchanges. The queen is nearly always the right choice for promotion, but is it in this case? A knight would put Zeke in immediate check, but he'd have five different moves to get out of it. Only one of those moves would really make sense, because he still needs to protect his pawn from Randy's king. And then Randy's advantage would be slimmer, because checkmating with just a knight and a king is difficult.

But the queen's dexterity can backfire in a case like this, too easily putting the king in a spot where it is not in checkmate but has no legal moves. Stalemate means starting over. Again.

It'd serve Pramod right to have to wait another hour,
Zeke
thinks. But Randy does the logical thing and promotes to a queen.

Zeke has just one legal move, and he shifts the king to his right. Randy brings the queen into the same rank.

Zeke moves his king to the corner of the board, three spaces down from Randy's king. That exposes his pawn, of course, and Randy takes it with his king.

There is only one move Zeke can make. He shifts his king to the left.

Randy gives a tight smile, nods to his brother, and moves his queen directly in front of Zeke's king, protected by his own.

Checkmate.

Zeke lets out his breath in a steady, low whistle. “Well done,” he says softly, pushing back his chair.

“Best game I've played all weekend,” Randy says.

“In your
life,
you mean.” Zeke laughs. No excuses. For the first time, a loss doesn't feel all that deflating. He came back from the dead and beat Pham, he knocked out the number one seed, and he just came within a couple of moves of stalemate against a pretty damn good player, a player he'd all but beaten in that screwed-up game after lunch.

No sore wrist, no momentum killer, just an all-out effort that came up short.

ELEVEN
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