Returning to his room, where Judson was kneeling over the homemade Stratego board, Perry weighed the benefits and costs of taking his sister’s place at the Haefles’ reception. On the credit side were the goodness of this action, the satisfaction of adhering to his new resolution, the unprecedented look of gratitude with which Becky had accepted his offer, and the advancement of his self-interested campaign to secure her silence regarding his earlier bad actions. On the debit side, he now had to attend a reception for clergymen, with Judson.
“Listen, kiddo,” Perry said, sitting down across the board from him. “I need to ask you a favor. How would you feel about going to a party where there aren’t any kids your age?”
“When.”
“As soon as Mom and Dad get home. We’ll go with them.”
Judson’s brow creased. “I thought we were playing the game.”
“We can slide it under my bed. It’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Why do I have to go?”
“Because I have to go. You don’t want to be home alone, do you?”
A brief silence.
“I don’t mind,” Judson said.
“Really? You kind of freaked out, that time in the fall. It wasn’t even at night.”
Judson stared at the game board with an odd little smile, as if the boy who’d freaked out about some noises in the basement, though undeniably him, were an object of faint amusement; as if the shame of that time in the fall, when he’d been left home alone for too long, might pass over him and land somewhere else.
“The snacks will be good,” Perry said. “You can bring your book and find a place to read.”
“Why do you have to go?”
“It’s something I’m doing for Becky.”
Perry waited for the obvious question: Why do a good thing for Becky and not for his little brother? But this wasn’t the way a superior human being’s mind worked.
“Can we finish the game first?”
“Probably not.”
“You promised we’d play tonight.”
“We started it tonight. We’ll finish it tomorrow.”
Absorbing this sophistry, Judson stared at the board. “It’s your move,” he said.
Each player had forty pieces whose identities were concealed to his opponent. The object was to capture your opponent’s flag, via the slaughter of lesser pieces by pieces of greater rank, while avoiding deadly collisions with your opponent’s bombs, which were immotile and removable only by your very low-ranking miners. In classical strategy, you planted your flag at the rear of your forces and surrounded it with bombs, but Judson had apparently now grasped the weakness of this strategy: as soon as your opponent could advance a miner, unscathed, to the protect ing bombs, your flag was helpless and the game was over. Observing Judson’s guileless excitement about his new idea, Perry could have pretended to be surprised by it and let him win the game. Instead, anticipating Judson’s more freewheeling placement of bombs, he’d deployed his own miners in more forward positions. It was plausibly good to beat Judson again and again, teaching him to not betray his strategy, forcing him to develop his skills, until he was able to win fair and square. Wouldn’t Judson’s happiness then be all the greater for being hard earned? Or was this merely the rationalization of an intelligent person who selfishly hated losing, even to his little brother?
Becky in her boots had clattered down the stairs, bound for the Crossroads concert, and Perry had defused the third of Judson’s bombs, at the nugatory sacrifice of a miner to a captain, when the telephone rang. He went and picked up on the extension in the parental bedroom.
“Yeah, ah—Perry?” his father said. His voice sounded strained and metallically distorted. There was street noise in the background. “Can I speak to your mother?”
“She’s not here.”
“She already went to the Haefles’？”
“No. I haven’t seen her all day.”
“Ah, okay, so. When you see her, can you tell her not to wait for me? There’s a problem with the car—I’m still in the city. Can you tell her she should just go on without me? It’s important that one of us be there.”
“Sure. But what if she—”
“Thanks, Perry. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.”
With notable haste, his father ended the call. Likewise notable had been the guilty look he’d given Perry some hours earlier, when Perry spotted him and Mrs. Cottrell in the family car.