Fiction

August

The Final Game

Mark Gelbart

I suppose most everybody’s had a rival at some time in their lives, but I doubt anyone’s ever been cursed with such a lifelong annoyance as I’ve had. Leumas is my rival and the competition between us has made me a poorer and weaker man. He clearly understands that I wish to be rid of him, yet he stays with me no matter how furiously I reject him. At last after twenty years he has agreed to come to my apartment on this night and put an end to our competitive relationship once and for all with a decisive game of Russian Roulette.

I first met Leumas at Walden Park where I was impressing the high school tennis coach with the quality of my ground strokes. Though I was only twelve years old, Coach Bianco said I had a better backhand than any of the players on his team. To demonstrate, he had me play a set against Doug, a basketball player with a big serve who only played on the team after Milltown was knocked out of the state roundball tournament. Doug played an aggressive serve and volley game and rushed the net constantly, but I was hot that day and cracked home one crisp passing shot after another and won in a tiebreaker.

Leumas had a sulky look on his face while he hung around the outside fence and watched us play. Later, after everybody left he came up to me and sneered.

“You’re not that good. I bet I could beat you,” he said.

I was brimming with confidence and because it was obvious he was jealous of Coach Bianco’s praise, I almost laughed.

“I bet you can’t,” I said.

I was right that day. We started playing and he proved to be a novice and to get his serve in he had to hit a lollypop pat which I easily and regularly smeared for winners.

I was leading four games to nothing when he hit one over the fence on purpose. I went to get the ball and upon my return he had vanished and I imagined him crying in the woods over his bitter embarrassment.

I learned quickly, however, that he was not finished on the tennis courts. Every evening after the town tennis crowd left the courts, Leumas would be out there practicing in the twilight against the backboard. I stayed and felt sorry for him, offering to teach him how to improve his game.

“No, I don’t need your help. I challenged you before I was ready. I promise that next time, I’ll be no pushover.”

When it got too dark to practice against the backboard, he’d take a bucket of balls and practice his serve and it was then that I usually left him, impressed with his determination but shaking my head at his stubborness. He continued through the winter, even shoveling snow off the courts and persevering with broken racquet strings caused by the freezing weather.

Next summer, I figured he would be a better player, but still no match for me because he hadn’t been playing the town’s top players like I had. He shocked me.

“I’m ready now,” he said on the evening of the Fourth of July . I planned to wipe him out fast so I could go watch the fireworks. I’ve always loved watching them and Milltown puts on the best show in the county. This time he was like a human backboard and I was irritated that I couldn’t finish him off quickly. I finally broke serve and was up five to three when he rallied and won three straight games and was one point from beating me.

He had a smirk on his face when he served for the set, and he unleashed a side-spinning serve to my forehand corner that I’d been having trouble returning, but miraculously, I managed to hit a cross court shot, putting him on the defensive and leading to a wild point with ebbs and flows where at times it looked like each of us was the sure loser. I hit a drop shot and the ball bounced twice before he could get it and I had saved myself. After I won the next two points he declined to play a tiebreaker, starting an aggravating tradition of finishing the match the old-fashioned way by having to win a set by two games.

I had the momentum and two games later had triple match point, but he saved every point and we played into the dark and gave up and declared the match a draw, tied eleven games apiece. I missed the fireworks and felt like strangling the jerk.

Oddly, Leumas chose not to play on the high school tennis team, allowing me to win the county tennis tournaments without having to defeat him and I barnstormed the state beating many of the top players in my age group. In my senior year of high school I was a candidate for a tennis scholarship at Ohio State. There are only nine players on a major college tennis team and an offer of a scholarship is rare because they recruit worldwide. To have a chance, a high school player must win the scholastic state championship. I was in the finals and knew the recruiters were looking at me. Leumas ruined my chance.

The night before the match, Leumas lured me to the court, ostensibly for a practice session, but he had an ulterior motive.

“You know you can beat Fred Trech. You beat him last year. When you beat him, you’ll know who the best payer in the state is—me,” Leumas said. The comment irked me as he knew it would.

We played a marathon match that lasted until I blew out my elbow. Despite the injury, I put my body on the court the next day and lost. Boy, did I look bad that day and no scholarship by any school was ever offered because I didn’t like to make excuses and kept my injury a secret, and it looked like I tanked the match.

Leumas has destroyed my love life as well. He’s the single reason I’ve never been able to establish a stable relationship and it all started at Bowdoin College, a small private school I chose, never knowing that by bizarre chance it was the college he’d picked. I met him on campus one day and decided to forget our past rivalry. I no longer played tennis and was lucky enough to land a job loading trucks for UPS in the early morning hours so I could pay my way through school—a hard but acceptable substitute for a tennis scholarship. He suggested we hoist a few down at the Tip Top Tavern—a little smoky dive with one pool table, two dart boards, and a bitchy middle-aged waitress who served up pitchers of beer and platters of hot wings to the college kids working on their night moves.

I wasn’t used to drinking yet and after two beers I lost control, falling on the floor and laughing like a silly loon. The waitress apparently reported me to the owner, an old guy with arms the size of my legs and an attitude of a war veteran, intolerant of sophomoric hijinks.

“Act right or get out,” he said without dropping the cigar that he kept chomped between his lips.

“I’ll drive him home,” Leumas said.

I was grateful that a familiar face rescued me from a humiliating situation, forgetting it was Leumas who introduced me to the drinking business that put me in such a state. Leumas helped me to the front door of my apartment and in a decision I’ll forever regret I invited him to live with me, thinking we could save money by splitting the rent.

We had no problems until I started dating a sharp featured red head by the name of Priscilla. I had such a crush on her I felt like Charlie Brown when he tied his peanut butter sandwich in a knot every time the little red haired girl came near him. But I did get Priscilla to go out with me and after a few dates she agreed to come to my apartment.

Leumas didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was jealous. The first time she was over he stayed in his room and every time I got up to use the bathroom I saw him giving me dirty looks. I wasn’t as fortunate the second time Priscilla came over. Whenever I turned my back, he was all touchy feely and he would tell jokes just below what was audible to me. I came back from the kitchen with a few beers for us all and heard them laughing. It was maddening. Moreover, he was sitting on the couch right next to her.

Aggressively, I sat between them, squeezing Leumas out of the way; and I firmly placed the beers on the coffee table, grasped Priscilla with both hands on her shoulders and brazenly and deeply kissed her. For a minute I thought Priscilla was going to push me away, but she acquiesced and Leumas got up and I imagined the indignant look on his face he must have had when he marched to his room. For once I felt victorious. I underestimated the diabolical mind of Leumas.

He knows I have a weakness for women with large breasts, and oftentimes he made light of my collection of Juggs Magazines that I keep under my bed. Priscilla was an attractive woman and I loved her passionately, but she was not very well endowed at all and I noticed that she was sensitive about it. I was to meet Priscilla in the school cafeteria one day when she saw me engaged in innocent small talk with a full chested woman. Priscilla looked uncertain and even sad, while she walked to the table. I moved quickly to eliminate her insecurity.

“Sue, this is my girlfriend, Priscilla. I was just telling Sue what chapters I thought Dr. Black would emphasize on our biology test.”

Priscilla accepted the innocence of my conversation with Sue though for the rest of the day she seemed suspicious. Leumas was hanging around with us that day and witnessed the situation. The next day Leumas started bringing Cathy to our apartment. To put it bluntly, Cathy looked like a prostitute. She had disgusting layers of paint on her face, white on her cheeks, red on her lips; and she was always chewing gum and popping the bubbles in her mouths. She wore loud black boots, fishnet stockings, and had heavy breasts. Leumas ignored me, took her to his room, and they had noisy sex. The racket disturbed me and I felt like climbing the walls, but I had to study and couldn’t leave the apartment.

As soon as she left, I confronted Leumas.

“I forbid you to bring that whore to my apartment ever again,” I said.

“Our apartment,” he reminded me.

“Either way, it’s half mine and I forbid her presence here.”

“Why, are you jealous?”

“You know that’s the opposite of the truth. You’re jealous of Priscilla.”

“I don’t forbid Priscilla’s presence. And here you’re forbidding my girlfriend’s presence. You just can’t stand it ‘cause I make love to the more beautiful woman. I’ve outdone you again.”

I charged toward him with murder in my eye and shoved him into the mirror which cracked and a broken piece of glass sliced open my fist. Still, I didn’t let go of my grasp on his shirt.

“Ok, ok,” he whimpered. “I won’t bring her around any more.”

But the jagged smile on his face should have warned me.

A few weeks later, Leumas was away when I heard a knock on the door. I opened the door and Cathy was standing there wearing a white t- shirt with no bra. Her appearance alone made me nervous.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

“Leumas isn’t here,” I said.

She gave me a funny look.

“I’m here to see you. I heard you don’t want me around and I know that can’t be true. What’s the matter? Don’t you like me?”

I stood there for a moment, realizing she was trying to seduce me and remembered that Priscilla had to work all day. Oh, how jealous Leumas would be, if he only knew that his girlfriend wanted to sleep with me. A quickie, I thought, Priscilla will never find out.

I invited her in and before long I was getting motion sickness from our rigorous rutting on my bed. I forgot to close my apartment door—a disaster. Priscilla entered and saw everything. She ran to the exit and I was slow disengaging and dressing in my attempt to follow and salvage the relationship.

I was sure Leumas had set me up so he could steal my girl, but I had no proof. For a month he was hardly ever home and I grew even more suspicious, believing he was clandestinely dating Priscilla. Meanwhile, I was devastated and called and called Priscilla’s number to no avail because she never answered or her roommates would answer and tell me to go to hell for what I did to her.

One afternoon the suspicion was eating me up inside and I broke down and searched through Leumas’s things, sure that I would find evidence that he was now seeing Priscilla. All I found was a ticket to a bar called the Cash House. This was in the days when music videos were a big deal and this bar’s specialty was showing them on a big screen. Priscilla and I used to frequent the place and now I was certain she was going with Leumas instead.

I picked up the phone and called her. This time she answered and I could hear she was playing the Billy Joel song, “Uptown Girl.”

“Hello,” she said, sounding more cheerful than I’d hoped.

“This is me. I’m so sorry, won’t you please, please give us another chance,” I begged.

“No, you’re too late. I’ve found someone else.”

And she hung up.

I drank from a whiskey bottle and worked myself into such a state over the next few hours that I was ready to kill my roommate. I smashed the empty bottle against the kitchen wall and stormed out of my apartment. I drove to the Cash House and crept inside. The red carpeted room smelled of booze and beer and was packed with college kids and bikers, partying and watching AC/DC belt out “For Those About to Rock” on the big screen. There were dozens of occupied round tables and it was dark. But I searched the room and saw Priscilla sitting near the front with Leumas, his back to me and his black hair slicked down, a style he copied from me.

I targeted the back of his head, flew toward it, and threw a right cross that connected hard and accurately. He fell off his chair. Priscilla looked up at me.

“What, what did you do that for? We’re through.”

She got on her knees and turned the man over. It wasn’t Leumas. He sat up and shook his head and I ran out. A muscular bouncer grabbed me, but I twisted out of his grasp and made it to my car.

I was later arrested and given probation because it was a first offense. I was tempted to blame Leumas in court. It was his fault, I was sure of it. But no one would understand how he set me up.

Priscilla is just one example of how Leumas has wrecked my love life, and I’ve lost several other lovers due to his schemes. My reputation is shot and when I meet an attractive woman, they avoid me, almost like Leumas is constantly stabbing me in the back.

I once had a great high paying sales job. Something Leumas plotted cost me this too.

I graduated from college and was hired by a big real estate firm in Florida. I was excited about my new career, until I moved there and discovered Leumas had also been hired and we would be working in the same office. To this day I don’t know how he found out where I was moving because I tried so hard to keep it a secret from him.

I did good solid sales, but Leumas always seemed to outdo me. I’d sell a fixer upper to a retired couple from New Jersey, and he’d make a deal on a new condo complex with Bob Tanner, the richest tycoon on the gulf coast.

Our boss, John Grubbs, a balding and outgoing man, loved money and therefore, he openly praised Leumas while ignoring me. It didn’t seem fair: my deals were solid and if they earned less money, at least they were unflawed, but the deals Leumas made were sloppy and sometimes barely skirted the law.

Soon, Grubbs was letting Leumas go on golfing excursions with Bob Tanner and some important bankers, while I was forced to set up open houses on Sundays with the part-time housewives who moonlighted as real estate agents.

This bothered me. I contemplated quitting and finding a job with another agency. I was about to hand in my resignation when Leumas took me aside.

“Let’s go for a drink. I’ve got a deal I’d like to discuss and if you agree, you’ll get all the credit,” he said.

I drove us to the Bayshores Country Club and in the afternoon its cool air conditioning was a welcome respite from the subtropical heat. The tables in the elegant dining room were covered with white table clothes and had neat folded napkins, upright and triangular, in front of each seat, but more importantly there were no ears this time of day that could overhear our conversation. We sat at the bar by ourselves opposite a mirror that ran the full length of the bar. The waiter, dressed in a white tuxedo, served us our drinks, and Leumas waited until he went to the kitchen before he told me his plan.

“Bob Tanner knows the government will buy Heron Island from him. They’re going to turn it into a nature preserve and compensate him for his financial loss. To increase the value of the land, he needs to prove that he’s already sold lots. Bob’s got fourteen buddies who’re willing to say they’ve bought the lots. Unfortunately, their credit ratings would preclude them from allowing us to sell lots worth two hundred thousand a piece. You know me, I don’t understand all those accounting rules, but I told him you were the man for the job. Just think—commission on fourteen two hundred thousand dollar lots. Grubbs might promote you to vice-president.”

“And what do you get out of it?” I asked.

“Bob Tanner said he would give me all the business on the new construction in Horse Trail subdivision.”

“This is illegal.”

Leumas slapped the air in front of his face like he was swatting a gnat away.

“Don’t worry about it. Tanner’s got some bankers in his backpocket who’ll falsify the records. Some people in the courthouse too who can backdate the sales.”

“Ok.”

When the deal went down Grubbs glorified me and did promote me to vice-president. Even though Leumas was behind it, I could see he loathed the positive attention I received. I could never prove it, but I believe he’s the one who blew the whistle on the whole thing. Grubbs was forced to dissolve his real estate business, and I narrowly avoided jailtime and lost my real estate license. Thanks to anonymous bad references from me, Leumas can’t get a job in real estate either and we’re working together again as industrial janitors. We wear stupid pin-striped uniforms with stupid red name tags over our left shirt pockets, and ironically, the job makes me feel like an imprisoned man anyway. I figured that Leumas and I had just enough money saved so that if one of us combined that wealth, he could quit and invest in a business. It was no surprise he agreed to this final game.

Leumas, wearing his janitor’s uniform, suddenly appears in the room. He sits down across from me and I admire how closely he resembles me— the jet black hair, the haunted bloodshot eyes, the strong chin, and the skinny mustache of a lady’s man. I can understand why he confuses the passions of my girlfriends.

“Did you bring the will?” I ask.

He throws the envelope on the table and I rifle through the contents until I’m satisfied that all the legal documents are in order. We flip a coin and he loses and has to go first which means I have to go twice before he has a turn again. He puts the bullet in the chamber, spins it, and raises the gun to his forehead.

There is a click and it is my turn. I wipe my sweaty palms on my pants and pick the gun up. I spin the chamber and put the gun to my head.

There is a click and it is still my turn. I spin the chamber. There is a click and it is his turn.

He trembles, closes his eyes, and exhales after the click.

My turn.

He slides the gun to me.

I spin the chamber. I put the gun to my head and just know by weight and feel as my finger pulls the trigger that the bullet is in this chamber. And as I look at the reflection of his rectangular red name tag—the letters sewed in fancy cursive—for the first time I notice that, his name, Nivel Leumas, is my name spelled exactly backwards.