Free Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman Page B

sidewalk to look up at the sky, which was still holding forth the prospect of rain. He held his hat to his head to keep a gust of wind from blowing it off.
    “Lots of kids with bare feet, too,” she said. “It seems they could buy an awful lot of shoes for the price of a healthy sow. Why do they do it, Frank? The Chase, they call it. Looks like they’re chasing money they can’t spare off into the wilderness. They must have just herds of wild pigs running around those woods.”
    Pigs, and something else besides.
    Where are your pants, my friend?
    “I don’t know why they do it. Why do people build cathedrals, or flagellate themselves or throw salt over their shoulder? Maybe it makes the corn grow greener.”
    “So you approve?”
    “I’m not saying I approve or disapprove. I’m just saying it’s not our place to judge them.”
    “I don’t like it,” she said.
    “So don’t like it.”
    “So don’t like it,” she said, parroting me, stirring a piece of meat around in its gravy.
    “Dora, we’re here to have a gay time. In the big city. Let’s not quarrel.”
    “Well,” she said, her eyes shining with good humor, “what we’re actually here for is to see if we’re going to expire from a horrid social disease. But while we’re in town, it wouldn’t hurt for us to see the picture show. And try not to quarrel.”
     
     
     
    WE SAW A matinee, a pirate epic full of booming cannons that made me edgy. After the show we stopped for bottles of wine and bourbon before we got in the car and headed home. She rested her head on my shoulder, but the air was heavy between us. I wanted to peek into that lovely head and know what she was thinking, even if it hurt me. Even if she was remembering a time before she knew me and thinking that was better.

CHAPTER TEN
    M ARTIN CRANMER SAT across from me, absently brushing the wooden cheeks and mane of the knight he had captured. He had made that knight with his own hands, along with all the other pieces, the chessboard, the table it sat on, and the chairs beneath us. He had built his crude little house from scratch, from the hickory beams to the pine shingles. All of this was very humbling to a man like me who had trouble hanging a painting without mashing his thumb.
    I could tell from the kingly way he jutted his chin up while waiting for my move that he felt good about the game; he had taken a pawn unanswered, then made me double up my pawns in another exchange. The knight he was so affectionately grooming had been hedged in and taken at the cost of two pawns. But the time he had spent getting up on matériel was going to cost him; I had castled my king away safely in the corner, and now both rooks had found open pathways to the center of the board, pointing into Martin’s splayed forces like a brace of cannon.
    “Suddenly I don’t feel so cocksure,” Martin said, striking a match on the rough surface of his table and lighting a potent, home-rolled cigarette. He offered a second one to me, but I shook my head and pulled a civilized little Chesterfield from the cigarette holder in my trouser pocket. I could not remember having sat in a room so heavily impregnated with smoke, nor having met anyone so thickly cured with tobacco as this taxidermist.
    I moved my queen, forking Martin’s rook and the bishop Martin had left undefended in the earlier bloodletting. He moved the knight out to protect the rook from the queen’s diagonal attack, so she slid laterally and captured the bishop.
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Martin said, standing up and gesturing with open hands as if to show a stuffed beaver on the bookshelf what a tale of woe was unfolding on the board. He paced for a moment and sat back down. His eyes remained nailed to the chessboard as he took another swallow from the jar of white lightning sitting on the corner of the table. It was not yet noon.
    Martin did not speak again for the next series of moves, not until his king was checkmated, smothered behind