Mighty Pawns

If I told you Earl, the toughest kid on my block in North Philadelphia, bow-legged and ominous, could beat any man or woman in ten moves playing white, or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded masters at the Belgrade Chess Association, you'd think I was given to hyperbole, and if, at dinnertime, I took you into the faint light of his Section 8 home reeking of onions, liver, and gravy, his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat for room in front of a cracked flat-screen, one whose diaper sags it's a wonder it hasn't fallen to his ankles, the walls behind doors exposing the sheetrock the perfect O of a handle, and the slats of stairs missing where Baby-boy gets stuck trying to ascend to a dominion foreign to you and me with its loud timbales and drums blasting down from the closed room of his cousin whose mother stands on a corner on the other side of town all times of day and night, except when her relief check arrives at the beginning of the month, you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity after-school on the board in Mr. Sherman's class, but not necessarily when he stands near you at a downtown bus-stop in a jacket a size too small, hunching his shoulders around his ears, as you imagine the checkered squares of his poverty and anger, and pray he does not turn his precise gaze too long in your direction for fear he blames you and proceeds to take your Queen.