Lunar Attractions by Clark Blaise

Author:Clark Blaise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2017-02-10T22:02:06+00:00

PART 3

Thumb hitched in the pocket of my new “D” jacket, I could spread my fingers to the jaws of the gothic letter and hide the symbol of my sport—a pawn—imposed upon us chess players by the more traditional athletes of Daley Ridge High School. I was a tenacious, defensive chess player, whose competitive function was to earn draws against fifth-board opposition. Sometimes, however, on dark winter afternoons in the chessroom after school, I would practise against our celebrated first-boarder, Irving Melnick, and be able to slip a queen or rook into his blocked eighth row for a lightning checkmate. Something about the quality of my play—its lack of elegance, fire or dark romance—drove him to boredom, the only mental condition he couldn’t handle. Boredom was my element. Anyway, at a distance in my brown and grey “D” jacket, thumb hitched and fingers cunningly fanned, no one would guess (despite my stout officious body) that I was not at least the manager of some more manly undertaking. After high school it wouldn’t matter. I’d be graduating in a few months and going on to a university where I intended to lift the pawn with a razor blade and project the image of an erstwhile defensive tackle who’d given up the sport to concentrate on serious study.

The summer was laid out for me in a bolt of eighty-five days at my parents’ furniture store. Evenings would be my own, since the store was open till ten, six nights a week. But the fattest sales were closed after the main lights were out and the front door was locked, when my father could turn on the pressure and the customers be made to feel guilty and rushed. By the time they did the books and stopped by a restaurant for a bite to eat, it would be past midnight before my parents got home.

The store broke even from the start, as it had to, since we’d opened it without a month’s reserve of cash. It was a creation of the banks and of my father’s vision, but this time my mother had insisted on a lawyer before the final papers were signed. We’d lost stores in the past through half a dozen loopholes; the first venture in Florida had been seized by creditors the moment the bank balance fell below $1,000. In my father’s mind, lawyers were last-ditch operators, like brain surgeons, to be called in after everything else had failed. His universe, like mine, resembled those perpetual-motion gadgets concocted by autodidacts: breezily indifferent to invisible principles like entropy or pollution or even gravity, that eventually wear them down. Money spent on prevention was down the drain; eventualities were invisible and might never happen. If they did—who could stop them? He believed in luck, hard work, and the alchemy of the times, traffic and the feel of a product or a person. The rest would look after itself.

For my mother, invisible and malignant forces were always at work, and their results were everywhere.

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