Free Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck Page B

said, “You’ve moved a pawn of mine and your queen and knight.”
    â€œHow’d you know?” the Patrón asked.
    â€œI know the game,” said Doc. “Look, Joseph and Mary, chess is possibly the only game in the world in which it is impossible to cheat.”
    Joseph and Mary inspected this statement with amazement. “Why not?” he demanded.
    â€œIf it were possible to cheat there would be no game,” said Doc.
    J and M carried this away with him. It bothered him at night. He looked at it from all angles. And he went back to ask more about it. He was charmed with the idea, but he couldn’t understand it.
    Doc explained patiently, “Both players know exactly the same things. The game is played in the mind.”
    â€œI don’t get it.”
    â€œWell, look! You can’t cheat in mathematics or poetry or music because they’re based on truth. Untruth or cheating is just foreign, it has no place. You can’t cheat in arithmetic.”
    Joseph and Mary shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said.
    It was a shocking conception, and he was drawn to it because, in a way, its outrageousness seemed to him like a new, strange way of cheating. In the back of his mind an idea stirred. Suppose you took honesty and made a racket of it—it might be the toughest of all to break. It was so new to him that his mind recoiled from it, but still it wouldn’t let him alone. His eyes narrowed. “Maybe he’s worked out a system,” he said to himself.

5
Enter Suzy
    It is popular to picture a small-town constable as dumb and clumsy. In the books he plays the stock bumpkin part. And people retain this attitude even when they know it’s not true. We have so many beliefs we know are not true.
    A constable, if he has served for a few years, knows more about his town than anyone else and on all levels. He is aware of the delicate political balance between mayor and councilmen, Fire Department and insurance companies. He knows why Mrs. Geltham is giving a big party and who is likely to be there. Usually he knows, when Mabel Andrews reports a burglar, whether it is a rat in the dining room, a burglar, or just wishful thinking. A constable knows that Mr. Geltham is sleeping with the schoolteacher and how often. He knows when high-school boys have switched from gin to marijuana. He is aware of every ripple on the town’s surface. If there is a crime the constable usually knows who didn’t do it and often who did. With a good constable on duty a hundred things don’t happen that might. Sometimes there’s a short discussion in an alley; sometimes a telephone call; sometimes only his shadow under a street light. When he gets a cat down out of a tree he knows all about the owner of the cat. And many weeping, parent-prodded little boys and girls put small things, stolen from the Five-and-Dime, in the constable’s hands, and he, if he is a good constable, gives them a sense of mercy-in-justice without injuring the dignity of the law.
    A stranger getting off the Del Monte Express in Monterey wouldn’t be aware that his arrival was noted, but if something happened that night he would know it all right.
    Monterey’s Joe Blaikey was a good constable. He wouldn’t ever be chief—didn’t much want to be. Everybody in town liked Joe and trusted him. He was the only man in town who could stop a husband-and-wife fight. He came by his techniques in both social life and in violence from being the youngest of fifteen nice but violent children. Just getting along at home had been his teacher. Joe knew everyone in Monterey and he could size up a stranger almost instantly.
    When a girl named Suzy got off the Greyhound bus, she looked up and down the street, fixed her lipstick, then lifted her beat-up suitcase and headed for the Golden Poppy Restaurant. Suzy was a pretty girl with a flat nose and a wide mouth. She had a good figure, was