by Brad Ashlock
* * *
The following days were uneventful. Gordon Dudley’s missing granddaughter became international news by New Year’s Day. Tigran Naumkin all but forgot the odd coincidences and strange dreams by January third. Jeffrey Hore’s mother had called and informed Naumkin that her son would be taking a break from chess until summer just to concentrate more on school (apparently there had been a couple bad grades on Jeffrey’s most recent report card). Naumkin didn’t expect to see Cal Burgess until the eleventh, but the boy called him on the fourth.
Cal sounded upset but didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. Cal was calling from in front of the gas station in downtown Rogue; he wanted Naumkin to pick him up if he could. Despite Naumkin’s prodding, the boy was a clam. Naumkin put on his jacket and headed to the gas station. Cal was standing between the payphones, a despondent look on his face. He ambled around to the passenger door of Naumkin’s wagon, got in, and fastened his seatbelt.
“What is this all about?”
“It’s OK, Mr. Naumkin. My mother dropped me off at the movie theater. I walked here.”
“That’s a long walk,” Naumkin said and pulled onto M12 to head back home.
“About three miles.”
Naumkin looked questioningly at the gangly boy. Cal was turned away from the Grand Master, looking out the passenger-side window at the passing white and brown. “My dad wants me to quit chess and go to some stupid hunting camp this summer.”
Naumkin felt his heart sink in his chess. He sighed, slowed the car, and made a sharp left to the private road that led home. He coasted up the winding, hilly route to his driveway, parked in the garage, and then he and Cal made their way into the house. Naumkin fixed some hot cider, sprinkled some cinnamon into the mugs, and sat with his student at the kitchen table.
“What is hunting camp?” Naumkin asked.
“My dad says I’m too cerebral. He wants me to be more active. I told him chess is a sport, but he wasn’t buying it. He said I was wasting too much time with my nose buried in chess books when other kids were snowboarding, playing football, fishing with their dads, or out in the woods. “
“I see.”
“Hunting camp is this dumb thing in the fall. My dad wants me to learn gun-safety, get a license, and kill a deer.” Cal looked up from the mug of cider and said, “He wants me to be like him.”
Naumkin raised his eyebrows and frowned.
“He bought me a .22 rifle for Christmas. I had asked for an X-Box. It’s a new video game, totally bitched out. He says if I get a deer, I can play chess again. I can’t sneak up on a wild animal! I’m a klutz. And even if I could, I couldn’t just blow Bambi away.” Tears welled in Cal’s eyes. The boy buried his head in his arms, cradling the warm mug of cider against his face, and began to cry.
Naumkin put a hand on Cal’s shoulder and asked, “What is it? What’s wrong with you?”
“I thought it was on safety! I really did!”
“What are you blubbering?”
“This morning I had the rifle out. I was just practicing loading and unloading it, you know.”
“What happened?”
The boy raised his head out of his arms, and, cheeks smeared with tears, said: “I shot my dad’s salt-water aquarium.”
Naumkin burst out with a deep, loud laugh. It came up like a hiccup and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it; the guffaw led to a flood of hysterics. Naumkin leaned back in his chair and covered his face with his hands, sputtering between his fingers. Cal’s hurt expression shifted to embarrassment, amusement, and in seconds he was joining his teacher in doubled-up cackles.
“All his fish just spilled out and flapped on the floor. It was a twenty-gallon tank,” Cal said haltingly between giggles. “The entire room was flooded!” The boy’s tears were now ones of abandoned delight.
After the hilarity subsided, Naumkin patted his student on the shoulder. “Would you like to play a couple speed games?”
Cal’s eyes sparkled, and then darkened. “What? Our last games?”
“I’ll call your father later tonight and talk with him.”
“You will?”
“Do you want to become a chess master?”
“Yes.”
Naumkin adjusted the pieces on the board and said, “Why, Calvin?”
Cal glanced to his teacher, a look on his face like he had just bitten into an unripe peach.
“Why do you want to play chess?”
“It’s fun.”
“So it’s like a video game. An X-box?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then tell me,” Naumkin said. He sat back in the chair and folded his arms behind his head.
Cal squirmed for a second in his chair, finished off the mug of cider, and said, “Chess is a maze.”
Naumkin unfolded his arms from behind his head, put his elbows on the table, pressed his hands together into a steeple, and touched his lips to his fingertips. “Chess is a maze,” he quoted.
“Yeah,” Cal said, his confidence building, “a maze. It’s like a maze where all the doors are constantly shifting, and the hallways and rooms are constantly shifting. Doors pop up out of nowhere in the ceiling and even in the floor. You can never map the maze. And somebody’s with you, trying to lock all the doors. You’ve got to trap him, your opponent, before he traps you. You’ve got to trap him in the Everywhere Doors. That’s chess.”
Naumkin smiled, nodding, and said, “I am a good chess teacher. And you’re the best student I’ve ever had, Calving Burgess. Thank you.”
They played chess for an hour, speed game after speed game. They played with joy. They played as friends: teacher and pupil, master and apprentice, old man and boy, but friends just the same. Tigran Naumkin had Calvin Burgess’s respect and trust; Calving Burgess had Tigran Naumkin’s faith and love. After the games began to degenerate from fatigue, Naumkin asked, “Would you like to ride the ATV?”
“The what?”
“My four-wheeler.”
“Can I?”
“Your father wants you to mix chess with the outdoors, doesn’t he?”
They donned their winter apparel and went down to the pole barn. Naumkin opened the large roll-down door and Cal rushed immediately to the vehicle, petting it as he might a horse. “Bitched out!”
“Just put this on,” Naumkin had found an old motorcycle helmet, pulled the cobweb out of it, and tossed the helmet to the boy. Cal put it on, looked to his chess coach for approval, and climbed onto the big four-wheeler. He looked like a spaceman from the 1950s with that big white helmet and his thick gloves. Naumkin showed Cal how to start the ATV, shift it, and, most importantly, showed him the brake, brake, brake, brake. He had Cal do a few practice runs around the house, and, after filling the gas tank, ushered him to the entrance of the trail that led out to the field and Dudley’s woods.
“Just follow the old tire tracks,” he advised the boy, tapping on the helmet. “Be back in an hour.”
Cal shot down the trail and disappeared into the trees. Naumkin went back to the house and relaxed on the divan. He expected Cal to return in a couple hours. Cal had told Naumkin that his parents wouldn’t be worried about him. He had told his mother he’d probably stop at a friend’s in Rogue after the movie, anyway. Cal had told her he just needed to get away from the house, the fish tank, and his furious father. Naumkin considered the boy’s chess musings: a maze—that was good. Cal’s answer showed depth, imagination, and articulation. It was also accurate. Chess was a maze that seemed to suck certain people up. The game turned players into obsessed wanderers through its endless, answerless doors. Its Everywhere Doors. It will take you everywhere to nowhere. Everywhere to the white and brown.
Naumkin reached under the couch and withdrew Warpath. He was almost finished with it: the pot was really boiling now. Cort Wilder and the Indians were about to meet out in Miller’s Field, but the night before the appointed showdown, the Indian Chief, Silver Falcon, is ambushed and mortally wou
nded by Sam Duncan’s right-hand man, big bad Dwight Browne, meanest son of a bitch, side-winding pistoleer this side of town. The character even had a mean old bulldog for a pet that the character had won in a wage in Merry Ol’ Ing-uh-lind. Warpath wasn’t art, but it never pretended to be more than what it was. Its readers were just supposed to curl up with it for a few hours, lose themselves, forget their problems, and then dump the pulp back at The Book Kaboose between mystery and sci-fi.
Naumkin licked his fingertips, pinched the top corner of a page, and then abruptly paused mid page turn. What was that name? Please, let me be wrong. He flipped quickly back a few pages, scanned, and rested on two words, a name: Dwight Browne—Dwight Browne of the snow and dirt; Dwight Browne of the white and brown. It had followed him from the Ukraine to the lower peninsula of Michigan, it had followed; from 1931, the year he was born, to the first stomps of a new century, it had chased him across an ocean to blanket his world (his westerns!) in relentless whites and browns.
Naumkin dropped the book and rushed to the kitchen. He returned to the divan with a notepad and a pen, and picked the book up off the floor. He read quickly now, his lips moving, the pen, seemingly of its own volition, underlining certain words that had a kind of arcane coincidental significance to his current state of joyously suicidal ambivalence.
Three hours later, he looked at his list of underlined words and passages: Dwight Browne = White Brown; Pinehill Cemetery = Pines; Browne’s bulldog = bullmastiffs; Miller’s Field = the field; Sam Duncan = Gordon Dudley (?); Rose Kellem (Cort’s sweetheart) = anagram for Meeko Russell. Naumkin could get nothing out the name Cort Wilder or the Indians (the squaw had entered his dreams after he began reading the book, unlike the bulldog who didn’t show up till chapter twenty-one). He thought of one more connection: poor old Chief Silver Falcon. Didn’t the albino from his dream carry a cane topped with a metallic bird head? He jotted this down, set the pen on the floor and rubbed his eyes. They ached in their sockets from the sudden dimness in the room. He turned on the lamp behind the divan and looked out his window; dusk was approaching. Eyes suddenly wide (aching be damned), Naumkin slammed the book shut and looked over his shoulder to the grandfather clock. Where was Calvin?
Naumkin zipped his jacket and hurried out the door. The woods looked like they had been dipped in gloom and sprinkled with shadows. The field was lighter but still dark. He scanned the horizon, searching for the four-wheeler, knowing it would be difficult to find even on the sunniest of days. Now he connected Calvin Burgess to Meeko Russell. Was something out there that just sucked children up? The Maze of the Everywhere Doors? Naumkin followed the tracks of the four-wheeler down the tree-bracketed trail, across the bridge of planks, and up the sheer hill that led to the field.
Darkness had almost completely fallen. In his panic, Naumkin had forgotten to bring a flashlight. He had to mind the ground; there were deep gulches everywhere camouflaged by a uniform level of brush. As he stumbled across the field, the ATV tracks lost to dusk, he continued to call Cal’s name. Naumkin could hear his own voice echo back to him from the hills, just as empty and afraid as it had sounded from his own throat. Where was the damn boy? Naumkin had specifically told the insolent patzer to stay around the field and to not go into Dudley’s woods. Naumkin clenched his hands into fists, closed his eyes, and noised a frustrated grunt. Naumkin was getting angrier by the second because he was getting more afraid by the second. The newspaper photograph of Meeko Russell kept flashing in his mind, just to aggravate his sense of despair.
Naumkin was tired now, and the cold was getting to him (he had forgotten his balaclava in addition to the flashlight). He needed to rest. He walked along the tree line of Dudley’s woods until coming to the pile of rocks he often rode over to get into the forest. He hobbled up it and sat on the cold granite slab at the top. A stick cracked behind him in the woods. He turned around, not breathing, not moving, not doing anything but peering into the hints of branches and ground in the ebbing light. Whatever it was, it was only a few yards away obscured by a tree trunk. Naumkin arose to his haunches, and slowly began to crawl backward down the rock pile, his eyes never leaving the curtain of shadows in the woods beyond. Deer didn’t move like that in the woods. This sounded plodding, not fleet. Naumkin’s bad knee buckled and his leg shot out from under him, kicking a small stone from the pile that rolled away noisily.
“Hello?” a thin voice called from the darkness.
“Calvin?”
A few more plodding footsteps, almost stumbling into a dip, and then Cal Burgess was visible from behind the brush.
“What are you doing?” Naumkin said.
The boy looked back over his shoulder and returned his gaze to the chess master. “Four-wheeler’s stuck.”
“I told you not to go into the woods!”
“I didn’t really. I went along that fence,” Cal explained, joining Naumkin atop the pile of stones, “and ended up on some wide path with power lines along it.”
“That’s next to the marsh.”
“I found that out.”
“Do you have the key?”
“Right in my pocket,” Cal said, patting it through his jeans.
“Take me to where it got stuck. There’s a pulley in the back compartment.”
Call looked wearily into the black mouth of the woods. “No,” Naumkin said, “we’re not going back in there. We’ll walk up to the fence over there, and then down the path you went on the four-wheeler to the power pylons.”
“And the marsh.”
It was a starry night, but the moon was a thin clipped-fingernail offering little light to walk by. They moved along the edge of the tree line until they came to the electric company’s barbed wire fence. To the south sprawled an expanse of darkness in a clearing of trees. This path, maintained by the DNR, cut through the woods for about half a mile and came out to where the power pylons droned above the dirt bike trails and patches of marshland.
“Sure is dark,” Cal said, shivering and cupping his ears with his hands.
“Where is the helmet?”
“I left it on the four-wheeler.”
They stepped onto the black path. The sky was blotted out by crisscrossed weaves of gnarled branches. Naumkin and Cal’s boots crunched through the ice coating the ground to snag or kick up entombed roots, twigs, and acorn shells. The woods were denser to their left. Darker, too. If the tree trunks were frames, and the shadows they enclosed glass, the woods to the left formed a black-on-black cathedral window of angular shapes and impenetrable shadow. Then something snorted from behind the black stain glass window of murk and trees. The noise shattered the illusion that there was a barrier between the path and the woodland.
“It’s just a deer,” Naumkin assured Cal. “It’s got our scent.”
They continued onward, past an area of frozen ferns, their leaves brown and crisp, and emerged on a hill in the starlight. The pylons looked like humungous incomplete scarecrows connected not by power lines but by old ship rigging. Naumkin and Cal headed down the hill and were soon past the area where Naumkin had met Meeko Russell’s parents.
“It’s just ahead,” Cal said.
“Yes, I see it.”
Two wheels were half-submerged in black mud. The back tire, Naumkin discovered upon inspection, was not making any contact with the ground whatsoever; it had spun itself a groove. Cattails stuck around the four-wheeler making it look like a cockroach on a pincushion. “Didn’t you see all those cattails? You’d think that would have told you there was water here.”
“I thought everything was frozen.”
Naumkin sloshed to the rear of the trapped vehicle and withdrew a rope, hook, and pulley, all wrapped together in a tangle, from the back compartment. “I should have told you I had this pulley back here.” He untangled everything, hooked one end around a sturdy piece of metal on the back of the ATV, and the other around the legs of one of the pylons. He told Cal to push from the front as he cranked the gear. The line tautened and sho
ok before the four-wheeler incrementally lurched from the muck. When it had been pulled out far enough, Naumkin set the pulley down, got the key from Cal, and inserted it into the ignition. He started the machine and turned on the headlight. The yellow beam illuminated the snowy ground, but didn’t get far before being swallowed by the thick night. Naumkin unhooked the four-wheeler from the rope, got on, made sure she was in reverse, and backed out of the mire, spraying Cal with muck in the process.
“Sorry,” Naumkin said.
Wiping his mouth, Cal told him it was all right, but his eyes said differently.
“OK, gather the rope and we’ll head back home.”
Cal did as he was asked, pulled the space-helmet over his head, and hopped onto the ATV, not sure where to put his hands.
“Just hold me tight,” Naumkin said.
They avoided the mire and puttered to the other side of the pylons where the ground was higher and dryer. They sped up to the dark path they had walked down, turned onto it, and drove north toward the field. As they passed the area of ferns, the engine made a machine-gun sound and an oily plume of smoke belched from the exhaust pipe. Naumkin swore and the ATV stalled.