A Game of Chess

105

Hutch’s marriage is troubled and his friendship with Starsky just beginning.

 

Archivist’s Note: Please Note: Rated R for some content.

Originally published in the Boys in Blue Zine in 2008, edited by Enednoviel.

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Don’t play the queen too early.

 

Hutch knew by the second day of the week’s vacation between Academy classes that his marriage was ending. It made him feel sick when he thought about divorce, and when Vanessa let her bathrobe fall just inside the bedroom and sashayed toward him, hands on hips, he forgot. Again and again. But afterward, when she perched on the plastic chair in front of the motel dressing table to renew her makeup and brush her hair into glinting, crackling points, he caught the malice in her reflected eyes, and the sharp words ricocheted back and forth through the smudged mirror until he felt stuck in the Wasteland.

 

Speak to me. Why do you never speak?

 

She clipped the flat pearl disks to her ears and said, night after night, “Where are we going to dinner?” as lightly as if she did not know that he couldn’t afford anything more than Howard Johnson’s or IHoP on his cadet’s salary.

He should never have married. Not before he had a real career, instead of a series of false starts that would have exasperated a much more patient woman than Van. A little medicine, a little law, a little time in his father’s business, a little in her father’s—they’d lived in three states already and put down roots in none of them. Not that Van seemed to miss roots. Not roots precisely.

The fourth night of the six, she didn’t ask about dinner. Instead, she came out of the shower with a towel still wound around her hair and the robe cinched tight, and said, “Ken? I called an old friend while you were out running, and we’re going out tonight.”

“A hen party?” he asked.

“Well, no,” she said with the little smile she saved for something she meant to hurt.

So he didn’t ask, but he wasn’t much surprised when the friend turned out to be six feet tall with a dark, thick mustache and a gold chain around his neck. “Hey, man,” he growled, and crushed Hutch’s hand in a bearlike grip. Hutch gripped back but didn’t try to make him wince. After all, she wasn’t moving out of the motel, just… having dinner?

When they were gone, he called Starsky.

 

Develop your pieces. I don’t mean the pawns.

 

Starsky called the motel the next afternoon. Hutch only caught the call because he had stepped inside to pick up a book, since Van was sunbathing at the pool, with her eye-guards on and only opening her mouth to drink from a can of Tab.

“Hey, buddy, a buncha the guys, we’re going out bowling, get a pizza.” He paused, evidently not able to say I figured you might prefer it to another night waiting around for your wife. Hutch hadn’t actually said more the previous evening, than that Van was with a friend of hers. But he already knew that Starsky was nobody’s fool.

He paused for a moment, thinking of Van’s gleaming skin in the sun, her legs stretched out on the lounge chair, the contrast of tanned to pale skin when she took the bikini off. He allowed himself a moment’s fantasy of fucking her, pounding her into the bed with her fingernails rasping his back raw and her voice wavering as it rose and fell, as she gripped him and writhed under him. Then he thought of another handshake with Gold Chain Man, Van flashing him another little triumphant smile as she walked out the door.

“Sure,” he said. “Who else is coming?”

“Oh, Colby called some guys. Sounded like Jackson, Meyer… I thought I’d ask Johnny Blaine, remember he did that lecture about Vice? I’ve known him since I was a kid. His wife’s away—I figure he’d like to have somethin’ to do tonight.”

It was a good opportunity to meet a senior officer, Hutch thought. Van always said it wasn’t what you knew but who.

 

Control the center of the board.

 

Blaine was a big, sandy-haired man who reminded Hutch of his father. In fact, as they shook hands, he looked Hutch over much as his father had done every day when they met at work. Hutchinson Senior had wanted an exemplary, by-the-book, worked-his-way-up-from-the-mailroom heir to the law firm he was already calling “Hutchinson and Son” at the dinner table. Hutch had been a lackadaisical researcher and a resentful target of the “and Son” remarks at home. Now, he shook the big hand with its dusting of grayish hair on the back and realized his face was falling into the sullenness of a nepotistic hire.

He grinned widely to counter it, then thought he must look over-eager, but Blaine went on looking good-natured and pleasant. Hutch and he were on the same side, with Starsky, in the impromptu bowling match. Colby joined the other two, whom Hutch had met but didn’t know well, as the second team. When Meyer, who seemed never to have bowled before, played yet another gutter ball, Colby got red in the face.

Hutch patted his shoulder and said, “Hey, we’re only wiping the floor with you. Don’t take it so hard.” The smile he got back would have cut glass. “You should meet my wife,” he said without thinking.

“What?” Colby said irritably.

“Never mind.”

Despite Colby’s little snit, Hutch had a good time. He liked bowling, though he was pretty mediocre at it, and his team was relaxed. Starsky, especially, had a way of approaching the alley with a tiny movement of his hips and an absorbed smirk, which was both funny to watch and suggested a sense of humor about the outcome of the shot. One ball slipped past the pins without even shaking them, and Starsky wiggled his nonexistent mustache like Chaplin and shuffled over to the ball return with his toes turned out. Blaine chuckled, glanced at Hutch, and then away, as he’d been doing all evening.

“He says you knew him when he was a kid?” Hutch said, giving in to his curiosity.

“Yeah,” Blaine said. “Knew his dad, too, so when he came out here to stay, I kept an eye on him. He was a hellion. Into everything, running in all directions. Had friends all over the city, black, Mexican, girls. Oh, the girls.” He chuckled again. “I taught him to shoot just to keep him off the streets. I was afraid I’d have to tell Ruth she was a grandmother when some crazed papa tracked him down with a shotgun. That’s why I let him rebuild my old car, too.”

“Tellin’ all my secrets, Johnny?” Starsky had come up out of Blaine’s line of sight. “Don’t forget that goes both ways.”

Blaine looked genuinely startled, but chuckled after a moment. “You don’t know ’em, boy,” he said.

Starsky grasped Hutch’s shoulder and rocked it back and forth, but spoke to Blaine. “This guy don’t need to know every window I broke, ya’know. You’ll scare ‘im off, John. An’ then he won’t ever lend me money.”

“Or hide you from the girls,” Blaine said.

“Or beat your ass at cards,” Hutch said, though in fact he didn’t usually win when they played in the academy dorms in the evenings.

“Your turn, big talker,” Starsky said, his hand still firm and warm on Hutch’s shoulder, and Hutch felt a rush of gratitude for being here, right here among the hollow crashing sounds and mingled smells of pizza, beer, and shoes, with Blaine looking back and forth between them as if they belonged standing side by side.

A better evening than Hutch would have had at the motel. Even with Van. He opened his mouth to say something, but the words didn’t come quickly enough, and Colby was already saying something in a voice that, though the words were unclear, still conveyed his irritation just fine.

“Okay, here comes the strike,” he said, and went to get his ball.

It wasn’t a strike, of course, though a few pins did go down.

At the end of the night, they gave Blaine a hand to his car. Hutch privately thought he was too stewed to drive. The older man put his arm around Hutch’s waist and practically laid his head on Hutch’s shoulder, though he was walking fairly steadily. In the driver’s seat, he reached out to pat Starsky’s face fondly, and said, “Good kid, thanks for callin’ me.”

“Is he going to be all right?” Hutch said as the car turned out of the parking lot.

“You wanna be the one to say ‘Don’t drive’?” The set of Starsky’s mouth said he wasn’t entirely happy about it, but he went on, “He can hold it. He’s been a cop mosta my life, in New York, then out here. You think he don’t know how much he can drink and still make it to the house?”

Hutch put an arm around his shoulders. “He’ll be okay,” he said reassuringly, as if he hadn’t been the one to bring it up.

Starsky looked up at him silently for a moment, then said, “I’ll take you home.”

“The motel,” corrected Hutch.

“Well, yeah.”

He went silently to Starsky’s car, got in, and stared out the windshield. Starsky glanced over, then started the engine without saying anything. They drove a few blocks, then Hutch reached for the radio knob, but Starsky put out a hand to stop him. “Lousy sound, nothin’ but buzz.”

It was amazing how warm Starsky always seemed to be. Right now, the fingertips against Hutch’s wrist were like little spots of Ben Gay, turning cold when Starsky put his hand back on the steering wheel.

“Y’think tomorrow…” Starsky began.

“Yes,” said Hutch. “Yes.”

 

Sometimes you sacrifice to gain a better position on the board.

 

Van was back before them. She greeted Starsky for the second time that night with the same brittle charm—a lot of teeth and no kindness even for appearance’s sake. The door had hardly shut as he left before she turned on Hutch, and though he’d been expecting it, the display made him instantly tired.

She stood with one foot slightly advanced, a hand on the same hip and her head tilted to the other side. Hutch thought of taking the offensive and asking what she was modeling, but she forestalled him: “This certainly has been an enlightening little vacation.”

“Yes,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, in what he was coming to think of as his own spot. “It is.”

This took her aback a little. She really was not as good at soul-crushing scorn as she thought, and Hutch almost felt pity. She seemed far away, as if he were looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. She tossed her miniature head, showing off her hair, and drew her tiny brows together.

She didn’t ask what he meant, though. “To think I married you without even finding out you’d as soon be… with the boys.”

A moment passed before he got her implication, and then he couldn’t keep back a short cough of laughter. “Oh, please,” he said.

“Please shut my eyes? Please ignore that you left me here to go out bowling? You forget I know exactly how often you’ve been bowling in the last five years.”

“Because you hate it,” he said.

“Because he asked you. He’s the only one you talked about when you first got here; you’d think he was the only one there, no teachers, no anybody but this Stasky—”

“Starsky.”

“What difference does the name make?” She was all worked up now and no mistake. Her voice rose, her cheeks flushed, and she glared at him through narrowed lids. If he’d been within reach of her nails… he shook his head slightly at the distracting thought, and she reacted to his movement: “Oh please! And then he gets here and he’s just this, this trashy little—”

“Careful.”

“Careful! You’re telling me to be careful how I talk about him, he’s that special and immune from criticism? He’s got you trained and that’s for sure! He’s… he’s…” She was like a little cat, fur all on end, spitting and hissing in all directions, dancing sideways on her toes with her tail in the air.

“He’s got you in thrall,” she said.

He was angry. He knew, distantly, that he was, but he rose laughing and swept her backwards against the wall, overwhelming her struggles and smothering her voice in his own mouth. She writhed as she always did under him, and his cock pressed hard into her, and she dug her fingernails into his neck. He scooped her up and almost threw her onto the bed. She pulled her skirt up for him to strip off her hose and shoes, but he left her holding the hem while he kicked his own loafers off and stripped off his pants.

“Is this what you wanted?” he asked as he pushed in, and from her wetness he thought it really was.

Sometime near dawn, though, he woke to hear her crying in the other bed. He knew his own breathing had changed by the way she quit, was silent for a moment, and then gasped with the next sob. But she didn’t speak, so he didn’t either.

 

Protect your king. Castle when you can.

 

He called Starsky while Van was showering, to cancel the half-plan they’d made. “It’s the last night, you know,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, sure. I shoulda thought,” Starsky said.

Hutch was speechless, the contradictory things he wanted to say pressing like mucus at the back of his throat.

“So… see you back at the Academy, then,” Starsky said at last.

The words came out of nowhere: Hutch heard himself say, “You ever play chess?”

“Naw, that’s a college-boy game.”

“I’ll pick up a set and teach you. I think you’ll be good at it.”

Starsky laughed briefly. “Dunno why you’d think that.”

“Wait and see.” Hutch took a breath, let it out, changed his mind, and said, “I won quite a bit of money on chess, at college, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh yeah? Huh. I wonder if Colby plays, then.”

Hutch laughed and hung up.

Van’s toweled head was sticking out the bathroom door. Her face without makeup looked blank and young.

Hutch smiled at her with some real feeling and said, “There’s a beach I like, not too far. What to go out and… walk or something?”

After a moment she said, “Yes. Yes, I will,” and ducked back into the bathroom.

 

Good positions don’t win games. Good moves do, and the more moves ahead you can think, the better you will fare.