Want to play checkers?

My grandfather was not a nice man. That’s how I felt about him, honest to God. He was on the short side of tall, thin, a head of wavy hair he seemed quite proud of, from the way he combed it. At some point, that head of hair turned white, and I personally never saw him with any other color. With the years, he became quite gaunt, and though it’s hard to describe, his body also seemed to turn wavy, I mean, his shoulders turned forward, his back arched a bit, and his hips were set forward. Usually his clothes fit well and were always formal. He wore a lot of white shirts, starched to an uncomfortable hardness, plus a tie. Until close to the end, he wore a tie every day, even when he accompanied us on vacation in August.

My grandfather was as stiff as his shorts and smelled of the afore-mentioned starch. He used an electric razor and sometimes I’d watch him while he was shaving. Then I’d run off, because he appeared gruff. He never spoke to me much, but when he did, there was no kindness to his voice. It was hard to believe he’d ever been married to my grandmother, but she too had been stern, if not gruff. If she tried ti smile, it looked like she had a skull sitting atop her neck. They were two peas in a pod, which is why they just stopped living together, although they never got divorced because good Protestants didn’t do things like that. So they were both rather handsome, but only in appearance, not in spirit. Not at all.

I don’t know whose I idea it was to play checkers, mine or his. By checkers I mean either the regular kind with the red and black squares or the Chinese kind with the triangles and marbles. Whichever one we played, it didn’t matter; he always left a chip in the front line or in the point of the triangle. He had his reason, and thought it was a good one, because he never failed to use the same trick.

My grandfather did that for a reason. He explained to me that if he did that, he couldn’t lose; he blocked me from moving my pieces into the end zone. I wasn’t too young, because I was old enough to know that he was being spoiled, and childish. In order not to lose to me, he would make it impossible for either of us to win. That made it pointless to play. I might have been just a girl, but that didn’t stop me from realizing how childish that was. After all, checkers is just a board game, and nobody’s life was at stake. One would think.

For several years I let him apply his strategy, but then one day I got fed up and challenged him. He didn’t care; he was very set in his ways. But one day I got really frustrated, because I was the point of refusing to play ever again. It wasn’t clear of he would miss the game of checkers when he saw that his strategy was a great success and he could keep a little journal that he never let me see.

Finally, it was hard to calm down; I bit my tongue and tried to let the big baby have his way He didn’t have much of a life and needed incentive; let him play his games… then things changed…

My grandfather seemed to watch me before upping the ante and leaving four pieces in their beginning squares, not moving them.. He insinuated it was the only choice and I had to love it or leave it. 

My anger grew and finally, one day after we’d both lost - or both won - my patience snapped. I vowed to take revenge and knew he had done it, gone too far. And one day I let out my ideas. I didn’t care. There were nicer things to do with the game of checkers, but he stood in my way, so I took action. I was going to teach him a lesson.

I took all the flat, round checker pieces from his side - he always chose the red ones and I was left withe the dreary black ones. I took those red suckers and dipped them in a mysterious liquid I’d found on my father’s workbench, then I let them dry, then set the checkers board without letting him seeing what I’d done.

The next time my grandfather set down at the board that had been placed on a coffee table and urged me to play with him, I was prepared. Very prepared. He started in, then as I knew he would, he picked up a piece to move it. He often licked his fingers while he played. When I’d asked him why he did that, he just replied “I want to keep my fingers clean,” which didn’t make sense, and I asked him why he did that. He just responded with, “Because I don’t want to get the pieces dirty.”

I waited, knowing my grandfather’s decisions were inalterable. He was going to get his way, which meant more than a little dose of checker pieces and a definite contact with his fingers, which had soon grown cold, and patience. After he had licked a few pieces, his eyes grew transparent as some powders they use to kill mice and rats. I decided to wait, and the results of his removing the pieces by picking them up became obvious.

In no more than five minutes, the mysterious substance had permeated his body though his fingers. He began to slow down, and stopped talking.

“It’s your turn, grandpa, I urged him to keep going until he snapped out of it” He did just as I’d expected: his breath rattled, his stomach seemed as loud as as a snoring god, because I’d taken over grandpa’s work. It’s work I knew exactly how to carry out.

When my grandfather collapsed, sprawling on the floor, I grabbed his pieces quickly, gloves on my own hands, and threw them in the garbage before substituting them with a clean set I’d purchased with my allowance money. I acted fast and was quite clever, I thought.

Three days later, at the funeral, I was able to make tears stream down my face as we drove to the cemetery. However, inside I was smiling, because I knew he’d never be able to pull that cussed trick on me again. This time he had lost, and it was for good. I was proud of myself and very happy. 

Nobody ever figured out what I’d done, and I wasn’t about to tell.