part three
Click here to read part one.
Click here to read part two.
Saturday morning Foy rose early, as was his
custom, to eat Poptarts and watch Bugs Bunny with his younger brother. They had
seen all the episodes dozens of times, but they continued to watch every
Saturday, their eyes glued to the screen, faces slack and attentive. During the
commercials Foy scanned the instructions that had come with the chess set his
father gave him. He repeated the rules for the movement of the knight to
himself.
“You can move two spaces, then one. Or you
can move one space, then two. Any direction. Two and one or one and two.
Two and one or one and two.”
About 9:30, Foy told his mother that he was
going to the library. He walked his bike from the backyard to the driveway,
mounted it, and pedaled two miles to the local library that was adjacent to the
park. The library was mostly empty except for a few kids in the children’s
section.
David was seated at a table by the juvenile
literature. His index card box was on the table along with a fully prepared
chess board. As Foy approached he noticed that David was studying the board
intensely and making notes on a small pad of paper.
“Hi,” said Foy cheerfully.
David was all business. He motioned for Foy to
take the seat across from him, giving Foy the white pieces. David made some
notation on Foy’s membership card and put it back into the metal box.
Foy tried to make small talk, but David was
interested in getting right to the subject of chess. He mentioned a few foreign
names that Foy had never heard and rattled on about various offensive and
defensive strategies. Foy nodded politely, hardly listening. Then David began to
talk about his vision for the chess club.
“At first you and I will practice together. As
others join, of course, we’ll include them in some kind of a rotation. We could
handicap the games as needed by removing pieces, but we’ll have to see how good
everyone is. Later we’ll organize a mock tournament to prepare ourselves for a
real one.”
Foy had a vague sense of discomfort. This chess
club thing was turning out to be a little more involved than he had realized. He
didn’t understand most of what David was saying, but he kept nodding in
agreement. After a few minutes his attention began to drift. He looked over
David’s shoulder at the front door of the library. David’s words became a buzz
in the background until David moved his hand, pulling Foy’s attention back to
him. He was motioning toward the board.
“Well, shall we?”
“Sure,” said Foy, turning his full attention to
the double row of white chess pieces before him.
After a few moments, David said, “Go ahead,
white has the honor of the first move.”
Foy had no idea how to begin. With all of
David’s talk of strategy, he had begun to realize that chess could be a serious
affair.
“No, go ahead. You go first.”
David seemed okay with this. He carefully
turned the board around so that he had the white pieces. He moved the Queen’s
pawn ahead two spaces. Not wanting to make a silly or embarrassing move, Foy
copied David. He moved his queen’s pawn ahead two spaces as well, parking it
right in front of David’s pawn. David smiled and moved his queen’s bishop’s pawn
ahead two spaces.
“I offer you the Queen’s Gambit,” he said
seriously. “You have a choice to make. Will you accept, or no?”
It was now clear to Foy that he had greatly
underestimated the complexity of this game and David’s commitment to it. The
action seemed to be happening to the middle and right of the board. His eyes
drifted to the pawns over to the left. He grabbed one at random and slid it
forward slowly. He was going to move it two spaces forward, but he impulsively
stopped at one space. It seemed like a little variety might be a good thing.
David leaned over the board, squinting at Foy’s
pawn.
“What is that, some sort of Sicilian defense?”
At that moment Foy noticed some kids coming
into the library. To his horror he recognized Julie Paine and Roxanne Edwards.
Julie was regarded by most boys as the cutest girl in the entire 6th
grade, and Roxanne was her best friend. Julie’s status was completely above
everyone that Foy knew. He wouldn’t dare speak to her, though he had stared at
her from afar in wonder and amazement. She was so gorgeous that she was really
beyond desire or hope. Julie and Roxanne were chatting and laughing. Following
them into the library was a knot of 6 or 7 boys, all of them popular. Most were
on the football team.
It hadn’t occurred to Foy that anyone from
school might come to the library on a Saturday morning. The group began moving
toward them. Foy panicked.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said,
leaping to his feet. David didn’t reply. He was still staring at the pawn Foy
had just moved. Foy slipped through the juvenile literature and moved around the
outside wall to the restrooms, which were in a small alcove. He disappeared
quickly into the alcove, then stuck his head out to see what was happening.
The group of boys and girls flopped into the
seats around the table next to David, who looked up at them, then quickly
dropped his eyes back to the chessboard. A couple of the boys noticed who was
sitting next to them, and there was some snickering and whispering. One of the
boys said something to David, causing an outburst of laughter. A librarian
leaned over, poking her head from around the card catalogues with a stern
expression on her face. Julie Paine hissed, “Stop it!” and softly slapped the
boy on the arm. She glanced at David, then whispered some sort of reprimand to
the boys, a reprimand they all accepted because she was a beautiful and popular
girl. The giggles settled down, and the group ignored David and began talking
amongst themselves.
Foy leaned back into the alcove and chewed on
his thumb. His was a primitive existence that was somehow disconnected from
moral and ethical concerns. It’s not that he was unaware of what was right or
wrong. It’s not that he didn’t care about how David felt. But he lived below
those kinds of higher concerns. His junior high existence was mostly at the
level of fight or flight. There was no question of going back to the table with
David. That question wasn’t up for debate. The fear of open ridicule and being
seen with David Friedman swept that question away.
Foy left the alcove and continued along the
wall toward the front door. Between each row of books, he got a glimpse of
David, who was still staring at the chess board. After three or four rows, the
wall turned and he was more-or-less behind David. He slipped out the front door,
got on his bike, and rode straight home.
So great was Foy’s relief at having avoided
being caught in the library with David Friedman that he never considered how
David might react when he didn’t come back from the restroom. The truth is, he
didn’t really want to play chess with David and was happy to be set free from
the whole affair. Foy was 12-years-old, and he had a child’s ability to simply
put unpleasant thoughts out of his mind.
When Foy got home he watched some more cartoons
with his brother, who hadn’t moved from his spot in front of the television set.
Later he rode his bike, “popping wheelies” and jumping tin cans with a homemade
ramp. He played catch with the boy across the street until it was dark and time
to come inside.
The next day the Davis family went to church.
Foy’s father was one of the ministers. Church was like another world for Foy.
There was a completely different set of rules and social levels for adolescents
there. Foy was much more popular at church than he was at school. There was a
girl with whom he’d had a camp romance and a number of boys who were his good
friends. Foy basked in his weekend world, where he lived and moved in higher
social circles.
Sunday night he watched The Wonderful World of
Disney with his brother and mother, brushed his teeth, and went to bed. He had
not thought of David Friedman since he came home from the library.
On Monday morning, Foy walked into English and
saw David sitting in his usual seat a few rows in front of him. Foy felt a flush
of horror and shame. Suddenly he remembered everything and realized what he had
done. He had left David alone at the library with no explanation. Somehow the
full reality of the situation didn’t reach his awareness until that moment. For
the next hour he stared at the back of David’s head and thought about what must
have happened. He imagined David looking for him in the restroom and around the
library. He could see David gathering up his chess pieces and board in silence
while the boys at the table made faces or flashed obscene gestures.
And what would become of David’s chess club?
Foy knew the answer to that. There would be no chess club. His guilt and shame
created almost as much panic in him as he had felt at the library. The minute
class was over he darted out the door and ran down the hall.
Foy avoided David fairly well for the next
couple of days, but inevitably the moment came when they met in the hall. Foy
saw David headed toward him. There was no way to escape the encounter. David was
being followed and harassed by Chris Shotwell and his loutish friend Bryan, two
notorious troublemakers. As David drew near to Foy, their eyes met. To Foy’s
surprise, David’s facial expression didn’t change. He hardly seemed to recognize
Foy. He trudged past Foy like a man on a death march, seemingly in a trance,
with Chris and Bryan hooting and shoving him along the way.
Foy turned and watched him go by. What he felt
inside was only relief for not being called to task for things he had done and
things he had not done.
Foy and David didn’t have any meaningful
interaction for the remainder of junior high. Foy played football in 7th
grade and made the starting squad. His social level rose a bit. David existed
far below him, and he really never thought much about him after that. When they
all began high school, David Friedman disappeared. He either moved or his
parents mercifully made arrangements for him to go to a private school.
No one ever heard from him again.
****
Foy leaned back in his chair until he felt a
satisfying crack in his spine. He looked at the half-finished sermon on his
computer screen. David’s name came to his mind several times a year. It had ever
since he got out of college. He Googled David’s name once, finding an anarcho-capitalist
economics professor, a kabbalistic artist in Israel, and a photographer. None of
them bore any resemblance to the David Friedman of Edgewood Junior High.
After all these years, Foy felt a small jolt of
pain when he thought about David Friedman. He understood, of course, that he was
a child then and as much a victim of the system as David. He felt no guilt about
it. He felt only a nebulous, undefined stab of emotional pain.
When his own daughter went through a year of
torment in 5th grade, Foy saw the other side of the lives of kids
like David. He saw the emotional collapses at home, the fear that lead to nausea
and even vomiting before school, and the desperate begging to stay home.
After that, the little stab of pain had a
sharper edge to it.
Foy found it interesting that after all these
years, David Friedman hadn’t left him. David had even wormed his way slowly into
Foy’s theology. His memories of David had caused him to think that some sins are
never really atoned for. Some things cannot be fully redeemed. Redemption is a
Sunday school word. It has meaning and reality, but that meaning withers in the
face of real pain and injustice. There was a tough, hard-blinking pragmatism in
Foy’s Christianity, in part because of David Friedman.
He sometimes wondered if some strange karmic
force or principle would cause David’s name to come to his mind until every stab
of pain added up to the full measure of what David had received. No eternal
judgment. No arguing whether or not he could have done better. No guilt of any
kind.
Just a strangely comforting, mathematical
balance in the Cosmos.
rlp
The Foy Davis stories
