Some Kind of Magic (13 page)

He didn't want to go back there.

He noticed that Claire was still trying to figure out what he was talking about.

“Big news?” She put her fingertips to her lips, lips that were slightly swollen from kisses that he now understood had been too rough. Several times on the ride to town, he'd looked over to see her gently touching her mouth, a perplexed expression on her face.

“About your pictures,” he said gently, coaxingly, part of his mind running on a totally different track, one he didn't want to be on.

He was going to have to leave. He'd known it before, but last night had made it a reality.

“You know the proposal I was telling you about?” Claire asked her friend. “I sold the idea to Cardcity.”

Libby stared at her, the words finally sinking in. Her eyes got big. Her mouth dropped open. She shrieked in much the same way Claire had shrieked last night. Had that only been last night?

Libby grabbed Claire's hands and began jumping up and down. Then she grabbed a bewildered Claire and hugged her tight. “I'm so happy for you! So happy!”

She pulled away, finally realizing that Claire wasn't sharing her enthusiasm. “What's wrong? Is something wrong? I thought this was good news.”

Claire gave her a weak, watery smile. “I'm having cold feet.”

“What you need to do is go home, take a nice hot bath, and then come over to my place for champagne. How does that sound?”

If possible, Claire turned even paler.

“Actually,” Dylan told Libby, “Claire hasn't been feeling very well today. I think she's going to go home and go to bed.”

Claire nodded. “I'm sorry, Libby.”

Libby pulled down Claire's glasses and got a good look at her bloodshot eyes. “Oh, my. I see you've been celebrating already.” She slipped the glasses back into place.

Claire glanced over at Dylan, then gave Libby a feeble smile. “I guess you could say that.”

That evening, Dylan sat staring blankly at the TV, hopefully giving the impression that he was paying attention to what was occurring on the screen, when in fact he was basking in his own misery, telling himself how much Claire hated him, and how she had every right to hate him.

He suddenly realized he was watching a mindless sitcom. He pointed the remote at the TV, switching channels. National news. Did he really want to watch the news?

He was about to click again, when the lead-in got his attention. It was about his traveling companion of a few weeks ago.

“After living in seclusion for ten years, Daniel French came out of hiding and has once again turned the chess world upside down. Since his return, he’s been undefeated. He is now scheduled to play American champion Gregory Christianson. Does Daniel French still have what it takes? The world will be watching and waiting.”

Dylan sat there, stunned. That son of a bitch. That sneaky son of a bitch.

He clicked off the television, tossed down the remote control, then headed outside to chop more wood. At this rate, Claire would have enough fuel to last her the rest of her life.

The physical labor wasn't enough to keep Dylan’s mind stagnant, to keep it from wandering, first to Claire, then to his childhood ....

There had been times at the orphanage when Dylan thought about running away. School was a bitch. He found he couldn’t relate to Americans, even though he was one. How could he care about clothing styles and hairstyles, and cars and sports? At first his teachers decided he had a learning disability. Then a behavior disorder. Then they just plain kicked him out.

He was supposed to look for a job, but instead he started hanging around the strip where he discovered the mind-numbing combination of alcohol and dope. He never got into the heavy stuff. Maybe he would have if he hadn’t met Uriah.

Uriah was an artist. He created chalk murals on the sidewalk, a boom box beside him, blasting out Leonard Cohen. It was weird, but he almost always drew pictures of people playing chess. All kinds of people of all nationalities. If he wasn’t drawing people, then he was drawing chess pieces, beautiful, ornate masterpieces that should have been in a museum or something.

Uriah was obsessed with chess. He claimed it was an intellectual game that crossed all language barriers.

“Why the sidewalk?” Dylan asked the first time he saw him. “And why chalk? Why don’t you do a mural out of paint so it doesn’t go away?”

Uriah leaned back on his heels and shoved a strand of blond hair out of his face. “Do you know what the word ‘ephemeral’ means, kid?”

Dylan shrugged, hands in the front pockets of his jeans, his back to the barred windows of a pawnshop. “Gay or something?”

The guy spelled it out in green chalk. “Go look it up and come back tomorrow and tell me why I like to put my pictures down in chalk.”

“You’re full of shit.”

Dylan had been hanging around the street long enough to know how to beat a person at his own game.

Chalk Man didn’t act like he even noticed. That night, Dylan looked up the word. The next day he was back in front of the pawnshop. The guy had his back to him, hunched over his picture, shading in a bright umbrella that loomed above the chessboard.

“It’s something that doesn't last.”

The guy never even turned around. He just kept dragging the chalk across the rough surface of the sidewalk.

“What's your own take on that?” the man finally asked.

Dylan had spent the last several months— hell, years—trying not to think. And here was a guy asking him to figure out why the hell he was drawing a beautiful picture on a sidewalk for people to walk on and spit on, and for the rain to finally wash away.

“It makes it something spiritual. Because real beauty is fleeting,” Dylan said.

The arm with the chalk slowed.

Dylan continued. "On a large scale, it could be like life itself. If you think about how old the universe is and all, then life itself could be ephemeral.”

The arm stopped altogether. Chalk Man turned around. And now Dylan could see he wasn't really much more than a kid. He didn't look like he could have been over twenty-five.

'"Have you eaten lately?” he asked.

~0~

Uriah was just smart as hell. Maybe one of the smartest people Dylan had ever met. That's why it took Dylan by surprise to find out he was homeless.

Uriah knew everything there was to know about everything. He taught Dylan how to stack a deck of cards, he taught him how to panhandle effectively, he taught him how to survive on the street.

And he taught him how to play chess.

It was a game that Dylan's father used to play. When Dylan was four, his dad had held him on his lap at the kitchen table and had shown him how the pieces were moved.

“He's too young for that,” his mother had said, smiling.

“Never too young to learn to play chess.”

Dylan had loved the horse—not the white horse, but the black one, the dark horse.

“It's a knight,” his father had corrected.

“But it’s a horse.”

“Okay. Call it a horse if you want.”

Uriah taught him strategies. Taught him how to use the pieces in combination to attack. Dylan could swear Uriah knew the name of every play ever made.

“I have a photographic memory,” Uriah told him one day. “I don't forget anything. But some of the best chess players don't have the plays memorized. They play from the gut.” He nodded his head. “But the good ones, the ones who make it big, they do both. You've got Moiseevich, who was a purely analytical player. And Adolf Anderssen, who was perhaps too emotional. And then there was Jacob Sax. His strength was the fake out, the con. If a player can be all three, then he's really got something.”

~0~

“I used to be married,” Uriah told Dylan one day. Uriah didn't usually talk about himself. “I had a house and a car. A decent job. Guess what kind of work I did?”

Dylan shook his head.

“Come on. Take a stab at it.”

Dylan tried to picture his friend in some kind of employment, but it was impossible. “I don’t know,” he said, impatiently, not wanting to play a guessing game. Why didn’t the guy just tell him? “A plumber?”

Uriah slapped the back of Dylan’s head. “Don’t piss me off, kid.” Most people would have gotten scared by that point, but Dylan egged him on. “I know.” He pointed, acting surprised and honored. “You’re that guy.”

Uriah fell into his trap. “What guy?”

“You know. The guy.”

“You want me to smack you again, li’l fucker?”

“The guy who sifts the cigarette butts from all the sand ashtrays in the world.”

“You smart-ass.”

He acted like he was going to smack him again, but instead, he got him in a headlock and gave him a Dutch rub. Except Uriah didn’t know his own strength. It felt like his knuckles were going right through Dylan’s skull.

“So,” Dylan asked him later. They were walking down the sidewalk, eating the sandwiches the cook at Barley’s had given them through the back door. “What’d you used to do?” Uriah seemed about to answer, when an old lady pushing a shopping cart appeared out of nowhere, almost bumping into him. Uriah jumped lithely to one side. The woman looked up at him and her mouth dropped open. She began babbling in Cajun, made the sign of the cross, and scurried away.

Dylan had picked up enough Cajun to know that she'd said something about Uriah having death on his face, or in his face.

“Man,” Dylan said. “That was just plain freaky.” He turned to look at his friend.

Uriah's face was ashen.

“Hey, you don't believe that crap, do you? The woman was some nutcase.”

Uriah let out a nervous laugh. “Hey, if I die you can have all my stuff.”

“That's bullshit. Come on. You were getting ready to tell me what you used to do.”

Uriah handed his half-finished sandwich to Dylan. “I used to design arcade games.”

Dylan laughed, thinking it was almost as funny as his ashtray joke. But then he realized Uriah wasn't kidding. His friend pulled out a pack of generic nonfilter cigarettes, offered Dylan one, then lit both cigarettes with one match. “I couldn't take the pressure,” Uriah said, tossing the match to the ground and pocketing his cigarettes inside the black leather jacket he'd picked up at the Salvation Army. “There were always deadlines.” He shook his head. “Too much pressure. I ended up in the nuthouse. I lost everything. My wife. My home. My car. But you know what’s weird? I don’t really miss it. None of it.”

Dylan didn’t believe him for a second. A family. A wife. He had to miss his old life. How weird to have lost it all. How did that kind of thing happen? The fact that Uriah had also lost his family made Dylan feel even closer to him, more like maybe
they
were family, brothers.

Two days later, Dylan couldn’t find Uriah anywhere. He asked around. The first two people just shrugged. The third person told him Uriah was dead.

“You’re lying,” Dylan shouted, shoving the guy against a wall.

“No I’m not, man.”

He put up his hand, in case Dylan decided to shove him again. “Some gang beat him up. Calling him a faggot. He’s dead. He was put in a body bag and all. I’m not shittin’ you, man. I swear. I’m not shittin’ you.”

Dylan turned and ran in the direction of the police station.

Everything was a blur. On the sidewalk, peoples’ open-mouthed faces turned in his direction. He knocked a bag of groceries from a woman’s hands but continued running, finally reaching the police station, stopping at the first desk he came to.

“Yeah, we picked up John Doe in the red-light district,” the officer said, his mouth full of food. How could he eat at a time like this? Didn’t he have any respect for the dead? For the living?

“Where?”

The man pointed with his sandwich. “Four blocks down the street at the morgue.”

It was Uriah.

He didn't look bad. Not really. Dylan was glad he didn't look bad.

Dylan turned and ran back into the street. He ran and ran, all the way to the wharf. He stared out across the gulf. Life was so hard. Life was so damn ugly. He wanted to jump in and keep swimming until he couldn't swim anymore.

The next day, he went to the spot where Uriah had slept. He hadn't used any of the shelters, preferring to have his own spot under a bridge not far from the ocean. There, Dylan found Uriah's magic cards and Leonard Cohen tapes. He also found a notebook with page after page of chess moves and chess strategies, most of which Uriah had taught him.

And there was a chess set. Handcarved, a timeless replica of the fleeting, intricate, beautiful chess pieces Uriah had drawn in chalk.

Dylan picked up the black knight, feeling its weight, its perfect balance.

So far he hadn't cried. But now he broke down and sobbed.

Dylan was sixteen.

After Uriah died, Dylan couldn't stay out of trouble. He was always getting thrown in jail for loitering, or breaking curfew, fighting, and underage drinking . . . until one of the cops noticed how much he liked chess and told him about a club in town for kids. He even offered to take Dylan to the meeting.

At first, Dylan felt so damn out of place he wanted to turn around and run. All the kids there were decked out in brand new clothes with their shiny faces and neatly parted hair. Rich kids from rich families. He didn't belong. He didn’t want to belong.

But it only took him a short while to realize they had more things in common than he’d thought. There was the obsession with chess, yeah, but there was more. For years, Dylan had been picked on and made fun of because he was different. So had these kids.

Dylan had first been subjected to verbal ridicule from his uncle, then by the other kids at the orphanage. He didn’t know how or why things were so wacko, but that’s the way it was when you were smarter than your peers. They came at you like a pack of rabid dogs. He’d once read how horses would attack and sometimes kill a white horse in their own herd because the white horse stood out from the rest. Apparently people hadn’t evolved all that much. He was living in a place where being smart was a handicap, but fortunately he’d recognized that twisted fact at an early age. He’d learned to play dumb in order to get along with the rest of the herd.

With these kids, he could be himself. Or at least a version of himself.

He began competing, first on a local level, then state. And when he began competing, things moved fast. There was no holding him back. Maybe it was because chess was all he had, or maybe it was something for him to pour himself into, to vanish into, so he didn't have to think about anything. Whatever it was, Dylan became the equivalent of an overnight success. By the time he was nineteen, he was an international chess champion with a handful of high-stakes games behind him that had made him a millionaire. His picture was plastered on the cover of hundreds of magazines. The paparazzi gave him no peace. Even the legitimate press hounded him. Two years after becoming an international chess champion, Daniel Dylan French quietly disappeared.

Dylan was twenty-one.