“You play, son?” he’d asked on the first day. A father who never called me anything but nicknames, most of them animals—Pup, Dodo, Pussy—and this man I’d never seen before calling me son. If my equilibrium was messed up already, it was more so now. Kilway was older than me, but not as old as my dad, and around him I wanted to be my best self, my most grown-up being.

  “I do, a bit,” my consonants carefully pronounced.

  “Come then,” he said, as though I had answered no. “I’ll teach you.”

  As I moved toward the picnic table, the grass reached up and tangled my laces, knocked my ankles together until I had to grab the top of the table to stay upright. The chess pieces danced into new squares, and I heard Kilway’s laugh for the first time. If his body made me want to be an adult, his laugh made me want to crawl inside him and haunt the space that made that sound, to take it for my own.

  “Hmm,” he said. “We might have more in common than I thought.”

  Watching him watch me, my blood made my ears so hot I wasn’t sure I heard him right. I put one leg carefully through the space between the bench and the table and then the other. I lowered myself into the seat across from him, making sure my knees did not touch his. I noticed them, though; his thin legs leaned sideways against the bench, clad in jeans despite the heat.

  Kilway turned the board so the ebony pieces were in front of me. They were made of wood, and the grain shone through in the necks and heads of the horses. Kilway set up his pieces, white wood the same color as his fingers, grains and fingerprints in the same swirled patterns. Under his careful fingers, each piece landed directly in the center of its square.

  “Chess is about planning, logic, thinking ten steps ahead,” he said. “Must know what your opponent’s thinking.”

  I listened, tried to center my pieces on their squares, but I knocked over my king. Kilway either didn’t notice or was kind enough to not comment if he did.

  We played three games of chess that day. I lost every time. Not because he was better than me—he was better than me, his every move was careful and planned—but because every time his hand made its move across the table toward me, my ears went hot all over again and my feet tangled under the table even though they weren’t trying to get anywhere else. The third game, he beat me in less than five moves. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.

  “You’ll get it,” he said. And for some reason—maybe the way he talked, maybe that quiet, controlled stillness—for some reason, I believed him.

  Later that night, I lay in my bed listening to my dad and Kilway clink beers and laugh out in the yard. I closed my eyes, and images of Kilway’s fingers on the head of his king wouldn’t leave my head. His fingers tightened and slid down the chess piece, from crown to body. Back up. And then, in my mind, Kilway, too, rose and walked to my side of the table. He bent over me until his breath brushed the back of my neck. He put his hands slowly into the air until they met the skin of my arms and rested there. My body ached and shuddered at the image, while outside Kilway laughed at something my father said.

  It went on like that for nearly three weeks, Kilway and me sitting across the table from each other, with my body turning hot every time he looked at me, swept one of my pieces off the table or reached across the board with his careful hands.

  I’d been with my dad for twenty days by then. That night, he came onto the porch, his arms crisscrossed over the blue T-shirt he wore on his days off, as I slid my queen right up against a checkmate.

  “You’re gonna’ lose again, Pup,” he said, as though he’d been standing there watching me lose for all those days already and not working down at the salt mine. Every night, he’d come home a grayish-white color and smelling like tears. I thought that had been a smell that belonged only to my mom and me, but now I saw that it was everywhere. I thought maybe it was a smell that would follow me my whole life, one of those accidents of genetics that you were stuck with forever.

  “Kilway, why don’t you come over for dinner?” my dad called. “I’m grilling steak on the Barbie-doll, and we’ll test Pup’s salad-making skills.”

  My hand pinched the crown of my queen, while I waited to see what Kilway would say. Part of me wanted him to say no—he was something, one thing that felt like mine here in this space of my father. And part of me wanted him to say yes, so I could hold on to him longer, see him do something besides sit at the picnic table and whomp me in chess.

  “We’ll have to eat out here,” Kilway said, tapping his fingers in a deliberate rhythm against the side of his thigh. His smile was something I hadn’t seen before, a half curve at the side of his mouth, his lips staying closed like they held a secret. “If that would be all right with you.”

  I moved my queen forward to butt against Kilway’s king, but my hand shook. When I placed the piece down, every still-standing piece on the table trembled.

  “Yeah, yeah,” my dad waved a hand in the air. His movement had none of Kilway’s care, so his hand flopped between his shoulder and his belt buckle, pushing the air aside as it went. “I know, I know, you always need something.” But my dad said it in the way that he sometimes talked to the dogs when they pushed against his legs and he rubbed their ears as they whined to go out. Not the way I’d heard him talk to my mother when she needed something—money, school clothes, a place for me to stay for the summer.

  Kilway’s answering voice was something I hadn’t heard before either, and I maybe believed my dad for once, that maybe he and Kilway were friends of sorts. And maybe enemies a little bit too. And all of that seemed to be okay between them.

  “Yeah,” Kilway said as he picked up his king. “And you always got something to give.”

  Dinner was burnt steak, some wilted spinach that I mixed with Italian dressing, and bottles of beer. The beer was the best part. I had another year before I was legal to drink, and the cold liquid tasted good in my mouth for that reason alone, because otherwise it just tasted like shit.

  We ate without talking, the way I was learning that men do, my dad next to me, Kilway sitting on his side of the bench. In the heat and silence, the dogs panted on the porch, waiting until my father would stand and stretch and put down his plate for their leftovers.

  Dad rose before I was finished. There wasn’t much meat left for the dogs—between the three of us, we’d cleaned it out good. In the near dark, Dad scraped the burnt bits off the grill with his jackknife and wiped it on a paper plate.

  “Kilway, you gonna’ get off your ass and help with the cleanup, since I cooked?” The way my dad talked to him that night was—I didn’t have a word for it, but it made me feel like I was intruding, pitcher-ears my mom used to say, even though he wasn’t talking about anything but domestic stuff. It wasn’t like lovers, not that I’d had many—a few girls who liked me well enough for a night and one boy who’d taken me in his mouth and then cried—but it was a sound I’d heard sometimes by accident, that way couples jostled, like poking each other with steak knives that were no longer sharp.

  “He is a funny, funny man, your father,” Kilway said low to me across the picnic table. To my dad, he shouted, “No, but I thought I’d come over later and take out your garbage.”

  I took a swig of my beer and let the bitter brew slide down my throat. I couldn’t figure the turn things were taking, Kilway and my dad so friendly-like, bantering about shit that I either couldn’t follow or that I didn’t know. It made my feet feel ready to trip me up, even sitting still.

  “Pup, get your new friend to pull his weight around here,” my dad said, wiping his hands clean on a towel. “I’m tired of carrying his sorry ass.” But I could tell he didn’t mean it from the way he pulled another beer out of the cooler and handed it to Kilway.

  Kilway held the bottle the same way he held his pawns: two fingers tight around the neck. And when he put it to his lips, I felt a shiver in my belly that I thought maybe meant I’d had too much beer. But at the same time, I knew it was something else. It was seeing those lips against the open mouth of that bottle, the way they circled. It was seeing something that I’d known a long time but hadn’t known at all.

  Dark came on as we sat there. My dad took one long last swallow of his beer.

  “’Bout ready?” my dad asked. At first, I thought he was talking to me.

  It was Kilway who answered.

  “Ayet,” he said in what sounded like he was clearing his throat, but that I could tell was some kind of yes. “If you don’t mind.” Kilway reached around to the side of the table and did something in the dark that I couldn’t quite see. There was a small metallic clank and then another.

  My dad did something next I never thought I’d see him do in his life. He bent down and let Kilway wrap his arms around him, Kilway’s big arms going right around my dad’s neck. I sat with my mouth half-open, dribbling out beer. My first thought was, He’s like me. My second thought was, What the hell does that mean?

  I didn’t have a third thought because my dad lifted Kilway up and carried him. Carried him like he maybe used to carry me before he came out here to the other coast, before I was what I thought meant too big to be carried. My dad grunted a little under Kilway’s weight but didn’t falter. He just picked him up and put him down again. I saw what I hadn’t before: the metallic clunks had been a wheelchair, unfolding.

  “Oh, shit, David,” Kilway said to my dad. “Look at that boy’s face. He didn’t know.”

  I didn’t know how he could tell, in the almost dark. Something in my eyes maybe. Or the way my chin held itself, my nose full of the scent of burnt meat and falling night.

  “You’re the one’s been playing chess with him three weeks straight,” my dad said. “Figured it was your job to say something if you were gonna’.”

  “I’ll say good night to you boys, is what I’ll say,” Kilway said. And then, slow and careful, he put his hands on the wheels of his chair and pushed himself toward his place.

  I could tell my dad wanted to talk to me about it, although what he’d say, I didn’t know. I felt stupid for not knowing, for not seeing what was right in front of me, and my face was hot in a way that was different than the way Kilway’s touch made my skin heat.

  I thought I wouldn’t fall asleep dreaming of Kilway that night, but I did. And this time it was me rising from the bench, making my way around the table without fumbling my feet. Me leaning over Kilway, daring to put my hands against the back of his neck. My mouth too, my lips against that place where his hair curled just so against his skin.

  I didn’t say anything to my dad. And I sure didn’t say anything to Kilway. Just showed up the next morning with my feet tangling me up in the grass. The chessboard was in front of him, but it was empty, all the pieces still crashed on their sides in the box. For the first time, I could notice the way Kilway’s leaned legs didn’t move from the bench and how the folded silver chair glinted in the morning sun as it lay against the side of the table.

  He saw me looking at it.

  “Your dad helps me out in the mornings and at night sometimes,” he said. “I have a lady who comes, helps me with the rest.”

  I didn’t ask the rest of what. I didn’t know how.

  He set the pieces up, his and mine, and then we played in silence. For the first time ever, not a word passed between us, playing steady until there was nothing left for me to do but settle his king.

  “Check,” I said.

  When I went to move my piece, he caught my hand. It was the first time we’d touched. His warm wood-grained fingers sent my heart down between my legs.

  “You can ask me about it,” he said.

  My mouth was somewhere else in my body too, because I couldn’t seem to find my tongue.

  “Motorcycle accident,” he said, as though I’d actually asked. “Cliché, I know, but that’s what life becomes, I think, if you live it long enough. Even if you fight against it. Hell, ’specially if you fight against it.”

  His hand was still on mine. Three fingers pressed into the back of my hand, holding down my heart, my tongue. Only my heartbeat rose, thick and quick with blood, and spurred me into making a move of my own.

  I pushed myself up to lean across the table and touched the soft curve of his lips with my own, the scent of him in my breath. For a moment, it was the two of us, touching that way, his hand still on mine, closing soft around it. I thought I could feel the swirls of his fingertips, the soft ripples of his mouth. I wavered, strengthened in his touch, until nothing was dizzy, nothing would ever trip me up again. The pieces wiggled and fell on the board beneath me, toppling in a series of slow sounds.

  Kilway’s fingers shifted, slid up in that careful way of moving, found the base of my chin and held it as he looked at me. Those eyes, yes, but I wanted his hands. I wanted that touch to move me, slow and careful, the way he moved the chess pieces. To manipulate me and bend me, each angle and square.

  “Son,” Kilway said. “Oh, son, it’s not like that. It’s, well, it’s me and your dad.”

  The bench knocked the air and vision out of me when I sat or fell, so that my breath came hard when it came at all. Kilway’s white king was the only piece still standing, that stupid crown. I swept it off the board with the back of my hand, not even waiting to hear it clatter.

  That night, when my dad came home, I could hear him and Kilway talking outside. There wasn’t any laughter, no clinking of glass against glass. Just that quiet kind of talk that is so low it sounds like grass moving, like something that’s only for the darkness to hear.

  I lay in bed and made plans. I would get a job, a real one. I would go to college on my own. I would live in the middle, somewhere between the coasts, and never be split again.

  I didn’t hear my father come in, but I could smell him, straight from the mines.

  “Pup,” he said. “Puppy. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  I lay as still as I could, only opened one eye a slit so I could see him through the bars of my lashes. He was kneeling beside the bed, his skin covered in crystalline shards that made him almost glow. He smelled like salt and sweat and tears. Or maybe that was both of us: the shared genetics, the way misery followed us like an unseen hand, always planning to capture our hearts.

  FIRST ROACH POND

  Martin Delacroix

  I don’t believe in serendipity. I think all things happen for a reason.

  Do you?

  A lightning bolt snaked across the night sky, highlighting white-caps on First Roach Pond. A thunderclap followed; it shook my cottage. Above the dining table a propane lantern swayed from a ceiling hook, casting shadows onto knotty pine walls while, outside, saplings trembled in the gale.

  My cottage sat on a ridge overlooking the lake, with a lawn sloping toward the shore. A row of double-hung windows faced the water, offering a pleasant vista during daytime: the lake, evergreens on the opposite shore and, beyond, several granite-peaked mountains. But at night I saw little besides moonlight reflecting off the lake’s surface.

  Viewed from an airplane, First Roach looked like a Rorschach blot: seven miles long, two miles wide, with jagged shorelines. At the lake’s northwest corner was Kokadjo, the village closest to me, with a general store, gas station, post office and motel. The nearest town was Greenville, twenty-three miles away, and our community’s isolation rendered cell phones useless.

  Now, as I stood at my windows and listened to rain drum my roof, I saw a beam of light cut through darkness, down at the shore, and I squinted in disbelief. Who’d be out on a night like this? My nearest neighbor, Raymond Devine, lived a quarter mile north, and Ray knew better than to venture out during a storm like this. The beam swung here and there, a yellow cone piercing the downpour.

  Another lightning bolt flashed, revealing a powerboat I didn’t recognize. Tied to the end of my dock, it pitched and rolled in the froth. A fellow in a ball cap and rain poncho made his way toward my cottage, ascending the slope with some difficulty. Twice he slipped and fell.

  I greeted my visitor on my covered front porch. I’d left the cottage door open, and the propane lantern’s glow cast a yellow rhombus onto the planks. He climbed my porch steps, then removed his cap and shook it. His dark hair was plastered to his head and a drop of rain glistened at the tip of his nose.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, his voice a syrupy baritone, “but this storm came up awfully quick.”

  I said I had to agree. Thirty minutes before, all had been calm and dry.

  He pointed to the lake. “I’m staying at O’Connor’s. You know it?”

  I nodded. O’Connor’s was a fishing camp on the other side of the lake, a two-mile trip by boat from my place.

  “You’re shivering,” I said, “come inside.”

  Unlacing his mud-caked hiking boots, he kicked them off and left them on the porch along with his poncho. He wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans, both drenched and clinging to his lanky frame. “My name’s Gordon Noyle,” he said, extending his hand.

  I’m six-two and he was half a head shorter than me. Fair-skinned, with dark eyes, he looked close to my age. (I was twenty-three.) Stubble dusted his chin and jaw.

  While we shook I told him I was James Beauregard. “But,” I said, “friends call me Beau.”

  Gordon nodded. “If it’s okay, I’ll wait here till the weather calms down.”

  I fetched a flannel robe and a clean towel, then I showed Gordon the bathroom. “Get out of your clothes and we’ll dry them.”

  Minutes later he sat on my sofa, sipping from a beer bottle, legs crossed at the ankles while his shirt and jeans, socks and briefs, lay atop my oil-burning heater, steaming.

  He said, “I feel like an idiot, getting caught on the water like that.”

  “You were fishing?”

  He puckered one side of his face and shook his head. “I went for a moonlight cruise, then the weather turned bad and…” he shrugged, “…here I am.”

 

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