Issue #1 Winter 2002
A Private Space
by Paul Eggers
(Page 1 of 2)
When Gary Martindale's dim and flabby older brother, Rick, left Tacoma for South Vietnam—he was going to be an infantryman in the Delta, a radio operator—Gary, nineteen, was given to understand that people from families such as his own invariably came to a mean and wasteful end. It was evening, and he was poring over chess books, preparing for the upcoming Washington State Chess Championship. Just that morning he had stood somberly alongside his mother and father at the bus station, saying goodbye to newly minted lance corporal Rick Martindale. But now, slightly stoned, still unnerved by what he had witnessed, he sprawled out comfortably on his bed, a magnetic pocket chess set on his pillow, a Chess Informant #46 at his elbow, analyzing a brilliant innovation by Bobby Fischer, a move so profound it overturned in a single stroke decades of grandmasterly assumptions.
Stirred, perhaps, by Bobby’s improbable victory over communal and ingrained ideas, he saw in his own dogged attention to the move an attempt to renounce the certain outcome of his brother’s tour of duty, the certainty of which had struck him like a slap in the face that morning at the bus station. He began nodding. Outcomes, he knew, toking thoughtfully, were echoes of their beginnings and middles. The trajectory could be traced, the trace illuminated, sources identified. If he was honest—and at such a moment, he acknowledged, how could he not be?—he had to admit that Rick’s beginnings and middles under the family roof commingled with his own. Rick the sad sack, the lard ass, the twenty-one-year-old lump: that they were related hardly seemed possible, yet it was undeniably true. There was contamination involved, leaching, a hoary and involuntary exchange of cells and fluids, DNA. Once or twice Gary thumped his chess set for emphasis. He found himself suddenly teary. He stretched out his arms then, stiffly, as if for embrace, and by this act gave form to what he had always known but had never before confronted. At the core of their shared history, his and Rick’s, were not the bedrock pillars of strength and affection that family life was intended to promote, but a vast and terrible nothing.
Incidental and, beginning in adolescence, of increasingly little influence, Rick had attached himself in parasitic fashion only to certain household memories, none of which featured Rick as the main image: Rick glimpsed in the doorway, clumping around in a terrycloth robe; Rick off in the bathroom, gargling; Rick lingering after a meal, nibbling on corn. His conduct of daily life seemed to occur just out of Gary’s line of vision, like a tv flickering in the corner. Rick was, in effect, the idea of an older brother, not the older brother himself, and like most things one step removed, even the solidity of his physical mass seemed a gift from the minds of others, from those such as he, Gary, whose collective will constitutes the social and physical world. Like it or not, that was the nature of things. Right or wrong was not at issue.
Still, shaking his head, Gary now affirmed that he had never willfully obstructed Rick’s forays into a wider, fuller existence. At the same time Gary could not help but admit that he had at times offered up Rick’s life to unnamed deities in exchange for increasingly brutish rewards for himself, concluding during his junior and senior years with sincere prayers for a richly pornographic hour with Annie Hershberger, who lived in the Sorenson Trailer Park and wore hot pants like no one else. For such acts no court of law could have or would have convicted him, true. There was, as well, much to be said for not only asserting your rightful place in the world but for insisting upon the proper place of others. Winters, for example, Gary joined with neighbors Dan Bacha and Tim Underwood in grinding his brother's face into mounds of dirty snow. Summers, they jabbed Rick's fat gut with a rake handle until rosy welts bloomed on his skin in a lush, garden-like patch. Once, making some point or other about weak chess players, Gary told some mocking Rick-story in front of Russ Rassmusson, the Tacoma Chess Club ratings-ladder leader and many-times Washington State chess champion. “You got your white sheep, you got your black sheep,” said Rassmusson, shaking his head. “Then you just got sheep.”
Gary could not have agreed more. Though his mother, Cindy, and father, Marion, had wondered aloud sometimes if the abuse Gary meted out was intended to punish the eldest boy for being unlovable, and though to Gary the word unlovable sounded foreign and hysterical, altogether inappropriate, he had never been able to restrain from noting, publicly and defiantly, a mewling lack in his older brother. This lack, this absence, was of concern not only to Gary but, he believed, to the entire community. By proximity and parasitic contact, Rick posed the threat of infection. He was a corruption, a distortion, a shrinkage, even, of the rigorous and unforgiving larger natural order.
Evidence: Rick was large-hipped, questionably muscled, possessed of soft pouty lips and luxurious brown hair; he wore thick, black hornrims and blushed easily. When the sun slanted just so, flooding between pine branches, his cheeks sometimes turned so pink you had to wonder if he had applied a layer of rouge. He was no good with his fists, and in personality he was grimly unresourceful, once pissing his pants in the hallway when the cylinder on the bathroom doorknob snapped, barring his entry. So when out of nowhere Rick would cry—and he cried all the time, a regular baby boo-hoo—Gary did not ask what was wrong. When they argued, Gary simply hit him, then watched in silence as Rick fell to the floor and spouted outrage, too slow to fend off blows, too stupid to shut up. They shared nothing, not friends, bikes, smokes, ways to steal change from vending machines.
But now in Vietnam Rick was going to get the top of his head blown off, and when he lay dying in the elephant grass he would think to himself how loud the flies were buzzing today and how muggy the air had grown and how dizzy he felt, and maybe even how the voices of his platoon buddies hovering overhead brought him comfort and joy. He would not think of Tacoma or his mother or father, and he would certainly not think of his younger brother Gary, who, that night, after admiring Bobby Fischer’s brilliant new move, found himself shocked at his own tears when recalling the morning’s scene at the bus station, when all he could think to do was shake his brother's hand and say “Take care of yourself.”
At such moments young men sometimes feel their spirits push out against their skin, held in check only by welling goose bumps and electrified hairs. And, in fact, at that moment of goodbye inside the bus station Gary had very nearly left his body. The station smelled of diesel and rank toilet water. The green paint of the pillars had been inscribed with racial epithets, and on the pavement lay a naked plastic doll, beheaded and dirty. Behind the Martindale family, a greasy man in a trench coat, some lunatic, kept up a feverish banging on a trash can, then lifted the lid by its broken handle and spun the lid around, as if to make it fly. Rick was already gone from them, his face a failed mask of warrior calm. Cindy and Marion bore the look of children receiving punishment for crimes they did not understand, stunned and distant, not up to acknowledging what had come to pass. A million thoughts went through Gary’s head, and they all seemed to circle like bees, busy and confused, as if trucked through the night and presented in the bright morning with a new and uncharted field. Gary’s hand went up, bye, then Rick's paunchy form boarded the idling bus and settled deeply into the crinkly brown seat.
That settling, viewed from below, outside, nearly caused Gary to cry out in alarm. The window framed the image: Rick frowning and frizzy-haired in the heat; Rick’s head suddenly sinking back—Gary swore he could hear the bus seat exhale—as if into the wrinkled palm of the Devil himself. The sight was so unexpected, so jolting, as to seem removed from normal space and time. Gary did not experience a premonition, exactly, or even the moment of clarity he had heard visited those blessed with higher orders of intelligence and observation. It was a moment commonly experienced, yet little discussed, that lit-from-within passage of time in which you sense another you is present, another you that knows all the ways in which this moment is a beginning to some things and an end to others. Gary’s other Gary knew, and thus Gary knew, that brother Rick, burying his head deeper into the seat, receding from sight bit by bit, was by this act meekly surrendering to a monstrous, hurrying machinery of which real machinery was but a part. The bus would race him to the airport, a plane would hurl him across the Pacific, then a shuddering chopper would dump him onto some flat, boring field—quick now, double quick!—so that someone, some hurrying alien stranger, could shear off the top of his head clean as an onion.
Surely Columbus, centuries ago, had experienced such a
moment of awareness. Months of
muscular, rude waves and empty, gaping horizons, enormous and mushrooming
heavens. Sky above, water below.
The cosmos growing, day by day. Then
out of nowhere: a strip of island, a black smudge.
India, Columbus reported
wrongly, but that couldn’t have been his most immediate or most significant
thought. The smudge surely did not
inspire in him the objective contemplation of his commercial and scientific
idea, the verifiable end of a long train of inquisitive thought.
The most immediate, and meaningful, response aboard his stinking and
unhappy ship must surely have been of awe, of helpless, fearful praise in the
presence of something strange and powerful.
What that smudge actually was made little difference, at least at first.
Any number of images would have sufficed: mermaids; a circle of jutting
rocks; a phalanx of futuristic skyscrapers; even fantastical apparitions, the
guardians of the mystic Spanish universe. All
would have burned into his mind with the intensity of a clapping, bubbling
emotion, the unprovoked kiss of a girl you just met, the curious, burrowing
muzzle of an animal you didn't know was creeping up from behind.
I am small, one thinks at such
moments. The
story is in progress and cannot be stopped.
That was how Gary felt on his way home. Shaken, invigorated, vaguely embarrassed, he thought, If that's true . . . well, if that’s how the world turns, then what difference does anything . . . what chance do I . . . ?
He threw himself into preparation for the state championship. His Informants, of course, but also Chess Life, Schachmanty Bulletin, Modern Chess Openings (5th edition), even The Dynamic Caro-Kann Defense: A Monograph—he searched their pages for blunders, traps, sacrifices, for secrets. He didn’t want to think about Rick anymore. He didn’t want to think about what was unfolding in front of his eyes.
The following week, Russ Rassmusson (Washington State Chess Champion, 1960, ‘62-’65, ’67) phoned the Martindale household and invited Gary to be his training partner for the state championship, less than a month away. “I want you to be ready for some work,” said Rassmusson. “No screwing around. Anything that’s not chess, put on hold.” Gary jumped at the chance.
Rassmusson appeared to be in his late thirties, compact and dark-haired, ruggedly handsome despite the small pits in his left cheek, pockmarks grown so smooth over the years they appeared to have been scooped by a tiny spoon. When he walked into the Tacoma Chess Club, heads turned, and when his fine-looking girlfriend (Rassmusson never revealed her name) strolled in occasionally to say hi, she sent electricity up everyone’s spine. Regardless of the weather, Rassmusson always wore a long-sleeved, button-down shirt and a brown sportcoat, an attractive and even necessary wardrobe, Gary thought, if you spent weekends hunched over a chessboard, alongside rows of the grossly ugly and fearful and inept, who also, bafflingly and unexpectedly—they are nothing like me, one thinks, they are aberrations—filled those nearby rows of tables and chairs, and said hello to you and made howlingly stupid moves with their chessmen. An instructor of English at the community college, Rassmusson smoked Dunhills from a small, narrow cardboard box and claimed not to understand that a tenny runner was what kids in Tacoma called a sneaker, all of which gave him an air of rigor and sophistication, especially when viewed in the context of his polite but distancing lack of interaction with the aforementioned patzers and woodpushers—“fish,” in chess parlance, the bottom-dwellers blind to the tricks being played upon them by the strong players above.
The club itself was in a small building downtown. It smelled of pipe tobacco and urine, and its rows of chess sets were said to have been specially constructed by a Pakistani craftsman for the 1960 Seattle World’s Fair. The club’s plate glass window, notable for its professionally painted giant knight and pawn, suggested an earlier era, one in which men wore fedoras and women listened to Benny Goodman on the radio . So, too, did the giant ratings-ladder board, a green-felted expanse of plywood, bolted to the wall, on which members’ names and chess ratings had been written on white cards, in Magic Marker, and affixed by thumbtacks in order of chess rating; so did the heavy chairs and tables, made of fine burnished dark wood, and the long line of framed black-and-white photos, along both walls, of deceased and still-living world chess champions. There were, as well, bulky onyx ashtrays, purchased and donated, the treasurer said, by retired master sergeant Jim “Ju-Ju” Bowen at an airbase in Guam, and a stainless-steel coffee urn that seemed forever to be percolating. The linoleum floor, installed for free by immediate past vice-president D. Dzironky (“I am Dee,” he said, in thickly accented English), was a serendipitous and pleasing rust and cream chessboard pattern.
The club was a home away from home, lovingly tended by the city’s small but committed cadre, and sometimes late in the evening, fresh from a victory, Gary would rub his thumb on the glass of the picture frames, searching for resemblances between himself and the former champions, whose likenesses seemed to stare back with a severe and regal sympathy. There was inside the club an air of calm and order. On the giant ratings board you saw your name and rating, and everyone else did, too. There were no secrets, no withholdings, and you spent your evenings knowing all you needed to know about the fish sitting across from you, or about the fish grimacing by the coffee pot, or about the fish striking the plunger of the chess clock too hard.
Even a cursory glance at the giant ratings board told you something very clear and important. Russ Rassmusson had been at the top forever. His card, occupying the first spot on the board, had turned yellow with age, and it still had no creases, no thumbprints, as if never touched by human hands. Rassmusson had been profiled twice in the Tribune; he had once received a complimentary hand-written note from a visiting Latvian champion; he had been elected unanimously to the Washington State Chess Hall of Fame. Recently, though, not all the talk was of Rassmusson. As any visitor in the past six months would have clearly seen, the ratings board had begun to reveal something new, something equally clear and important: below Rassmusson, in the second spot but well above the depressingly but unsurprisingly vast ocean of fish (“The poor, sayeth Jesus, shall always be among you,” said Rassmusson), was the bright, well-creased card of Gary Martindale, the whiz-kid rising so fast some fish once asked him if he was getting the bends.
Now, Tuesdays and Thursday evenings, and on weekends, Gary trained with chessmaster Russ Rassmusson. They played five-minute chess for quarters. They reviewed mating attacks with bishop and knight versus king, contemplated rook and pawn endings, studied variations and sub-variations of the King’s Indian, the Sicilian, and the Ruy Lopez. “Pay attention,” said Rassmusson, snapping his fingers. “You’ve got to be here, not floating around.” So Gary straightened in his chair. He watched Rassmusson take apart his Nimzo-Indian. Then he showed Rassmusson a gambit line in the French Defense; Rassmusson found a flaw immediately. They stayed until the buses stopped running.
Through it all, through the bitter coffee in styrofoam cups Rassmusson brought along, Gary could not still his mind long enough to stop thinking about that awful morning at the bus station. He thought about it in roundabout ways. He thought, for example, about the family’s living situation. He had pulled a 3.0 GPA in high school without ever doing homework, and friends called him Brainiac (he had won the state high school chess championship his junior year), but he had no plans and money was tight so he lived in his parents’ attached garage, despite the wolf spiders in the shag rug by his bed and, especially during dry months, the bloated snakeflies that rose in the night to burrow into his mattress and deposit larvae. His parents’ home was a small, boxy house in the south part of the city, at its farthest point, in unincorporated Tacoma. It stood on a crumbling unpaved street where all the houses looked swayback and peeling, and no one knew who was living next door.
Certainly the only time you saw couples at the threshold of their houses was when one was shoving the other out the door. Gary had witnessed such an event in the neighborhood three times. The man would be standing outside on the steps; the woman would be inside, half-exposed, grasping the knob, opening and closing the door quickly. You give me nothing, she'd yell, something like that. The man, silent and fuming, would turn and see Gary staring, then shout something equally loud toward the door, bitch, cunt, words to that effect, and walk quickly to the car and spray gravel into the sewage drain and go roaring down the road. The woman would then appear behind the living-room window, veins ballooning on her face, hands pressed white against the pane, shouting something Gary couldn't hear.
Why should such an event occur right in front of him three times? It defied statistics. How was it that, a few blocks down, in incorporated Tacoma, life proceeded along lines of generosity and fullness? It seemed a conspiracy of great natural forces, and, indeed, the city planners seemed to take great pains to reinforce the distinctions between incorporated and unincorporated Tacoma. Two blocks north of the Martindales, the vague and beaten unincorporated gravel road transformed into a thickly tarred street, smooth and wide as a private waterway, marking entry into the incorporated sections of the city. There, a good rain made the houses shine, and the dew hung from shrubs like the sheer cloth you sometimes see on saintly women in religious paintings. The tucking in the brickwork was fresh, the windows clean, and the gutters were straight and cleared of birds’ nests. Evenings, you could see middle-aged couples inspecting their marigolds and roses, bending plumply at the knees, their iced teas held at arm’s length, like the tiny, pole-borne weights carried by high-wire walkers.
Invariably Cindy would say, “Look at all this.” His mother would be cornering, turning the steering wheel of their rusting Buick by tiny increments, keeping her hands in a ten-and-two position. “Everything’s so nice,” she'd say, sharply. Then she’d stomp on the gas pedal and speed home dangerously, running stop signs sometimes, once driving a girl on a bike into the curb. Had she always acted so crazy? Gary wasn’t sure. He listened intently now from the passenger seat. He analyzed. She worked in a dry cleaners and smelled of dyes and wet wool. Most of the time she spoke in the swallowed monotone of someone used to being ignored.
“All the little cornish hens nice in a row,” she said, roaring down the incorporated street. “Look at these houses.” She had a thing about cornish hens. For years she had prepared dinners of cornish hens, four whole birds on four plates, and even when the family stopped having dinners together, sometimes Gary saw her at the table, sawing with a plastic knife and fork through the innards of a freshly cooked cornish hen. They were perfect, she’d always said: complete, separate, an entire creature in miniature. And it was true, you felt important when you ate one, like a giant. In a few quick bites you could swallow everything, limbs and breasts and neck.
Maybe, really, that's what she wanted to do. Every day she had to drive home in the Buick, down Marigold Avenue, then onto 70th, past all that perfection. Maybe she wanted to stride down those sparkling blacktop streets and devour tree and shrub and house, and maybe the fact that she couldn’t made her tempt the laws of statistics. Maybe, when he thought about it, she saw in the line between incorporated and unincorporated Tacoma evidence of a hurrying, hateful machinery. Quick now! As fast as you can go. Double quick, out, out! In old photographs Gary had seen, black and white shots with wavy edges, she looked pretty and dark-haired. Now she wore a clear plastic cap around her head. Her face and arms looked drained of blood. She hardly ever seemed to move her eyes.
Gary had been blessed with certain attributes, a fine head of blond hair, a pleasant face, and a profoundly compressed belly—the result of a medical condition, the intestines slowly strangling the stomach, which of course made it not a blessing, but which, in his vanity, he fancied would ensure his escape from imprisonment in a sludgy prison of fat. Rick, who had not been blessed with certain attributes, had always been blubbery, even after basic training, as were so many of the fish at the chess club. The club was always full of stinky fat men, and they moved slow as dray animals. There were cripples, too, men in wheelchairs, and quiet, doughy boys who didn’t like the sun; and there were blotchy alcoholics and bearded men who apparently didn’t bathe. Occasionally, unkempt souls in dirty pants wandered in and helped themselves to the restroom in back. Months ago, Gary had looked on with approval when Mr. Finnegan walked in, Mr. Finnegan looking like Burt Lancaster, tall and athletic, well groomed, Mr. Finnegan, who might as well have spit in the coffee urn when he told Russ Rassmusson he was a machinist and out of work.
Now these men filled Gary with rage. Now he wanted them dead. “Quiet,” he barked at a chatty newcomer. He picked up a pawn and cocked his arm, as if to hurl the chess piece at the offender’s head.
“Oh, my,” whispered Rassmusson. He reached into his pants pocket and much to Gary’s surprise pulled out a folded Swiss army knife. “You’ll be using this next if you’re not careful.” He quickly put the knife back into his pocket, then reached across the chessboard and placed a hand on Gary’s arm. “Focus,” he said, gently. “Just let them be. We all play the hand we’re dealt.”
Rassmusson’s fingers seemed to burn into Gary’s skin. He looked Rassmusson in the eye. What if, wondered Gary, the hand he had been dealt was in fact Rassmusson’s hand? There were sources, traces, trajectories binding them together. He had known Rassmusson for more than a year. They were at the top, the lion and the cub. Rassmusson had chosen him, for Christ’s sake. Rassmusson had the big talent, and maybe he did, too. In front of his friends Dan Bacha and Tim Underwood, Alex talked about all the money he had won in tournaments—local ones, to be sure, ones awarding twenty dollars for first, but officially sanctioned events, nonetheless. They called him a professional, and he never bothered to correct them. He had trophies on a bookshelf, checks to cash, and an inscribed certificate from the United States Chess Federation.
With Rassmusson as tutor, he might even win the state championship, might get his photo in the paper. At some distant point he might even be another Rassmusson, a man with a white-collar job, with neatly pressed clothes, a man with a presentable face and body, a fine-looking girlfriend, a sense of humor appreciated by others, a ready fund of knowledge about the world outside (coming in late one evening, Rassmusson had excused himself, saying he’d been working on the McGovern campaign). Once, Gary had smelled alcohol on Rassmusson’s breath, but it had been late in the evening and near Christmas. The man presented a wonderful picture, and that night Gary had a flying dream. In the morning, he swore he would cut back on weed and the occasional chaser of speed, and cease masturbating altogether, at least until after the state championship.
But other days, walking in the front yard, Gary passed through patches of tall wet grass and felt the heavy moisture clinging to the blades. Tropical, he concluded. He squatted and ran his fingers through the foliage. He stared long and hard into the treeline down the block. It would be scary, sure, but wouldn’t it be something to walk up behind Rick in some rice padi and stick out his hand and tap Rick on the shoulder and say Hey. Wouldn’t it be something? Hey, he whispered, and he stuck out his hand, shoulder-height, tapping air. Hey. Hey, Rick.
In the house, his father, Marion, was always watching tv. “One boy in Vietnam, one boy here,” Marion would say, tipping back a Schlitz. “One fights a war, the other plays chess. What you gonna do, sir? What you gonna do?”
Marion had always done that, had always mumbled to himself like an actor memorizing a script, but his question—what you gonna do?—became a mantra, at least when Gary was around. The mantra was hypnotic and for that reason powerful, especially when intoned, increasingly now, in front of Gary’s friend Tim Underwood, who tromped through the living room with a folding chessboard and plastic pieces, intent on finally beating Gary in an offhand game, before they went down to the Sorenson Trailer Park, where they’d drive around, smoke grass, maybe scare some kids, see if Annie Hershberger was in her hot pants and wanted a ride somewhere. “You win the state championship,” said Tim Underwood, “Hershberger’ll do it with you. I bet you she will. Win that title, Brainiac.”
“Oh, I will,” said Gary, capturing another of his friend’s chess pieces. “I’m on a mission.”
Marion calmly wheezed, talking loudly from a chair in the kitchen. Cindy sat across the table, watching Walter Cronkite on their small black-and-white. “Sir, what you gonna do?” said Marion to no one in particular. “You sir, that’s right, you.” He stared glumly at some point on the wall.
Looking up from the chessboard (he was already up a queen and a rook), Gary saw in Marion’s narrow, blinking eyes the strain of a man struggling to hold back something. A judgment, perhaps. A summing up. Marion’s words took on a menacing aspect, grazing Gary's ear like scattershot. This man, his father, bunched on the chair, working swing shift at the West Coast Groceries warehouse, sleeping through the day: had he always looked so weary, so baffled?
Gary, capturing another of Tim’s chessmen, shouted out to Marion. “If I ever saw a gook here,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.” Gary then shook his head for a long time, signaling what he’d do to the trespasser was too terrible to tell.
Marion, sighing, got up and walked toward the refrigerator.
“Are you getting another beer?” Cindy said, turning from the tv.
“Yes ma’am,” Marion said. “I’m getting another beer.”
She watched him pull out a Schlitz. “So be my guest,” she said. She shook her head. “Drink yourself silly. Do whatever you want.”
Marion walked back to his chair.
“You know what I’d do?” Gary said. He looked up from the chessboard at Marion, then at Cindy. “I’d beat the shit out of a gook, that’s what I’d do.”
Marion got up and opened the door to the utility room. He rolled the cold can across his forehead and proceeded down the stairs.
Cindy frowned. “Gary,” she said, “no swear words in the house.” She balled up a fist, raised her arm slightly, then splayed her fingers, as if discarding something.
There’s no trash like white trash, Cindy was fond of
saying. Of late, she had begun to let her tossing motion say the words for
her.
When did Gary start to worry the strain was too great?
We soar, but admit to only the plainest of sins. The two parts of that sentence are as close to an answer as Gary would ever find. The airiness of the first part is forever shackled to the mutters of the second, soar mutter, soar mutter, soar mutter, over and over so fast and so hard the oppositions threaten to break the middle. Things began to happen quickly, and for Gary time took on a fantastical, herky-jerky quality, though one with a pattern, with a movement forward. Time became like swimming, the water thunking against you, your face shining and clean, and then you plunge, upside-down, driven for reasons you cannot say toward the seagrasses and sand, down into a strong-arming current that bullies you along wherever it wants to go.
(Page 1 of 2)
©2002 Paul Eggers