Dead Stones [manxman] [boyxboy]

Peanut Butter! Part II

His buttoned shirt long to his thighs, his trousers sleeves wide as timbers, Luke ambled into the go club, buoyed with peanut butter dreams. Sweet feelings coursed his heart; he jostled his head to the baroque cello music looping in his head. The café teemed with the sounds of off-key croons and off-kilter go players: Brett grumbling about his muddy mind, Ling Ling vilipending the lost art of Chinese go scoring, Cindy bewailing a game so close, but so lost. Luke was thankful that Albert had stayed put in Irvine.

Then Zoë, popping noises with her mouth, canted in by Luke’s table, the paisley sac of her mother waddling not far behind her. The light sleeked over Zoë’s cheeks round and ripe with pink pasties. Upon catching her diamond eyes, Luke shuffled a board giddily over the table and then tapped his fingers musically for that palpable scent of cookies.

“I don’t care about playing Hao anymore.” She rounded to him and bounced by his side and brandished her farded cheek. “My best friend Brandie painted them. Do you like it?”

Luke was inching with peanut butter need, but he remembered his manners as his mother would insist: smile and agree. “Yes. The outline of fuchsia and the black … a seven-leaf flower might be more realistic. It’s the Fibonacci—” He could feel preternaturally Lisa pinching the small of his back, then stiffening, said apprehensively, “It seems I win. I memorized all seven games. You owe me two dozen homemade peanut butter cookies.”

“I would have won if I played along,” Zoë said.

“But you gave up, so you lost. As such I’m owed cookies.”

“I didn’t lose. I just decided not to memorize the games.” Zoë, face bent, pawed her feet against the ground. “Mom says I don’t have to if I don’t wanna.”

“But an agreement is an agreement. You still owe me peanut butter cookies.”

“WOULD SOMEONE BUY THE BUM A COOKIE?”

Luke jolted to the direction of the bellow. Past the tables seated with plugged-in robots, at the entrance stood Hao. And over the country strums of open mic, an inquisitive noise gathered around his presence rather garishly casual in dress jeans and glimmering gray tshirt. “Hao? Hao? Where have you been?… Long time … A teaching game? I need a game review… Looking good!” Crimson shaded his temples, and he trotted away to Monica at the counter, in a pushy air that hinted a day of bottomless coffees and slugabed secretaries.

Amid their soft sounds of pleasantries and the whipped-up miseries of MFA applications, Luke stared as a weak light touched up the contours of Hao’s smile. The wide flat face beamed a look of boyish roguery; and even with the strident lines striating Hao’s temples, he detected nothing of pallid shadows or the damp look of desuetude of their first meeting. A warm feeling seeped Luke’s pores as grisly ideas of Hao were falling away like snowflakes upon a concrete pyre.

Hao, coffee in one hand, the shadow of a precious package in another, strode across the briar of chairs to Luke’s table. Cologne spiced the space between them and floated Luke to the earthy quietude at three in the morning when he would lose himself among the barren downtown warehouses and search for a true spot in the city where the ghosts were still and the sky was the blackest.

Luke shuddered to realize he had been staring into Hao’s eyes for too long. His mother would have barked at him to stop, and his father would have laughed away in heartening cadences. And seeing now his gaff, he could not quite turn away without rising the meter of his clumsiness. However, Hao tsked and faced Cindy donning a mannish smirk complete with her hands hooked in her skinny jeans pockets.

“Looking good, Hao. I love your classy casual look. Never liked those bulky stuffy suits anyway,” she said.

Hao’s brows was bunched down to his nose thereabouts. “How many of the tsumego have you solved?”