Sizemore wasn’t there yet, but next to her, at Board One, Beltik was facing in her direction. Beth looked at him and then looked away. It was a few minutes before three. The lights in this smaller room—bare bulbs under a metal protection basket—seemed brighter than those in the big room, brighter than they had been in the morning, and for a moment the shine on the varnished floor with its painted red lines was blinding.
Sizemore came in, combing his hair in a nervous, quick way. A cigarette hung from his thin lips. As he pulled his chair back, Beth felt herself becoming very tight.
“Ready?” Sizemore asked gruffly, slipping the comb into his shirt pocket.
“Yes,” she said and punched his clock.
He played pawn to king four and then pulled out his comb and started biting on it the way a person bites on the eraser end of a pencil. Beth played pawn to queen bishop four.
By the middle game Sizemore had begun combing his hair after each move. He hardly ever looked at Beth but concentrated on the board, wriggling in his seat sometimes as he combed and parted and reparted his hair. The game was even, and there were no weaknesses on either side. There was nothing to do but find the best squares for her knights and bishops and wait. She would move, write the move down on her score sheet and sit back in her chair. After a while a crowd began to gather at the ropes. She glanced at them from time to time. There were more people watching her play than watching Beltik. She kept looking at the board, waiting for something to open up. Once when she looked up she saw Annette Packer standing at the back. Packer smiled and Beth nodded to her.
Back at the board, Sizemore brought a knight to queen five, posting it in the best place for a knight. Beth frowned; she couldn’t dislodge it. The pieces were thick in the middle of the board and for a moment she lost the sense of them. There were occasional twinges in her abdomen. She could feel the thick batch of paper between her thighs. She adjusted herself in her chair and squinted at the board. This wasn’t good. Sizemore was creeping up on her. She looked at his face. He had put away his comb and was looking at the pieces in front of him with satisfaction. Beth leaned over the table, digging her fists into her cheeks, and tried to penetrate the position. Some people in the crowd were whispering. With an effort she drove distractions from her mind. It was time to fight back. If she moved the knight on the left… No. If she opened the long diagonal for her white bishop… That was it. She pushed the pawn up, and the bishop’s power was tripled. The picture started to become clearer. She leaned back in her seat and took a deep breath.
During the next five moves Sizemore kept bringing pieces up, but Beth, seeing the limits to what he could do to her, kept her attention focused on the far left-hand corner of the board, on Sizemore’s queenside; when the time came she brought her bishop down in the middle of his clustered pieces there, setting it on his knight two square. From where it sat now, two of his pieces could capture it, but if either did, he would be in trouble.
She looked at him. He had taken out his comb again and was running it through his hair. His clock was ticking.
It took him fifteen minutes to make the move, and when he did it was a shock. He took the bishop with his rook. Didn’t he know he was a fool to move the rook off the back rank? Couldn’t he see that? She looked back at the board, double-checked the position and brought out her queen.
He didn’t see it until the move after next, and his game fell apart. He still had his comb in his hand six moves later when she got her queen’s pawn, passed, to the sixth rank. He brought his rook under the pawn. She attacked it with her bishop. Sizemore stood up, put his comb in his pocket, reached down to the board and set his king on its side. “You win,” he said grimly. The applause was thunderous.
After she had turned in the score sheet she waited while the young man checked it, made a mark on a list in front of him, stood up and walked to the bulletin board. He took the pushpins from the card saying SIZEMORE and threw the card into a green metal wastebasket. Then he pulled the pins out of the bottom card and raised it to where Sizemore’s had been. The UNDEFEATED list now read: BELTIK, HARMON.
When she was walking toward the girls’ room Beltik came out of “Top Boards” striding fast and looking very pleased with himself. He was carrying the little score sheet, on his way to the winners’ basket. He didn’t seem to see Beth.
She went over to the doorway of the “Top Boards” room, and Townes was standing there. There were lines of fatigue in his face; he looked like Rock Hudson, except for the weariness. “Good work, Harmon,” he said.
“I’m sorry you lost,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s back to the drawing board.” And then, nodding to where Beltik was standing at the front table with a small crowd gathered near him, he said, “He’s a killer, Harmon. A genuine killer.”
She looked at his face. “You need a rest.”
He smiled down at her. “What I need, Harmon, is some of your talent.”
As she passed the front table, Beltik took a step toward her and said, “Tomorrow.”
When Beth came into the living room just before supper, Mrs. Wheatley looked pale and strange. She was sitting in the chintz armchair and her face was puffy. She was holding a brightly colored postcard in her lap.
“I’ve started menstruating,” Beth said.
Mrs. Wheatley blinked. “That’s nice,” she said, as though from a great distance.
“I’ll need some pads or something,” Beth said.
Mrs. Wheatley seemed nonplused for a moment. Then she brightened. “That’s certainly a milepost for you. Why don’t you just go up to my room and look in the top drawer of my chiffonier? Take all you require.”
“Thank you,” Beth said, heading for the stairs.
“And, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “bring down that little bottle of green pills by my bedside.”
When Beth came back she gave the pills to Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs. Wheatley had half a glass of beer sitting beside her; she took out two of the pills and swallowed them with the beer. “My tranquility needs to be refurbished,” she said.
“Is something wrong?” Beth asked.
“I’m not Aristotle,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “but it could be construed as wrong. I have received a message from Mr. Wheatley.”
“What did he say?”
“Mr. Wheatley has been indefinitely detained in the Southwest. The American Southwest.”
“Oh,” Beth said.
“Between Denver and Butte.”
Beth sat down on the sofa.
“Aristotle was a moral philosopher,” Mrs. Wheatley said, “while I am a housewife. Or was a housewife.”
“Can’t they send me back if you don’t have a husband?”
“You put it concretely.” Mrs. Wheatley sipped her beer. “They won’t if we lie about it.”
“That’s easy enough,” Beth said.
“You’re a good soul, Beth,” Mrs. Wheatley said, finishing her beer. “Why don’t you heat the two chicken dinners in the freezer? Set the oven at four hundred.”
Beth had been holding two sanitary napkins in her right hand. “I don’t know how to put these on.”
Mrs. Wheatley straightened herself up from her slumped position in the chair. “I am no longer a wife,” she said, “except by legal fiction. I believe I can learn to be a mother. I’ll show you how if you promise me never to go near Denver.”
During the night Beth woke to hear rain on the roof over her head and intermittent rattling against the panes of her dormer windows. She had been dreaming of water, of herself swimming easily in a quiet ocean of still water. She put a pillow over her head and curled up on her side, trying to get back to sleep. But she could not. The rain was loud, and as it continued to fall, the sad languor of her dream was replaced by the image of a chessboard filled with pieces demanding her attention, demanding the clarity of her intelligence.