When your lover gives you a gun

I know Dale. He's an amiable middle-aged recovering alcoholic who has more than 10 years of sobriety. He's lost something between the time he left the Navy and now. Maybe the booze took it. He shakes his head over the chessboard singing, “A game of chess is hard to win/ you'll probably just lose / might as well resign right now/ let me show you how.” He's playing a casual game, so his singing is tolerated. He makes comments after every move. “Looks like we're gonna have some exciting chess,” or “a pawn is a pawn is a pawn.” If his opponent slips up and utters anything, he throws it back, “An 'uh-oh' has been declared,” “An 'oh-shit' has been declared.”
Dale is warm, giving, trusting, and wouldn't hurt anyone. When I saw him last he invited me to go with him to dinner at the poor house. He tells me he's going to meditation after his game is over. He says it's great.
I'm not here to talk to Dale though. My mark is Erik, a young man who doesn't fit the chess stereotype. He's slender and medium-height, with a black 'Tool' ball cap, a goatee and visible tattoos – 'strength' written in blackletter gangster lettering down one arm and what looks like a dense ball of black fire on the other. A former long-haul truck driver, he is as down to earth as Dale is disconnected.
The trucking job brought this Easterner to Montana. Hauling a load of energy drinks from Wisconsin, he stopped at a truck stop here for a pack of cigarettes. The woman behind the counter asked if he'd like to meet her at a bar later. “We hit it off,” Erik says.
After several months of telephone calls, Erik moved to Missoula to be with her. It was his opportunity to quit trucking. “It's a lonely life. I got real fat, got depressed,“ Erik says. He thinks the loneliness accelerated the relationship.
Within two months, Erik realized his lover was cheating. “She started not coming home,” he says. Then Erik found out that she'd been married all the time they'd been together.
“She gave me a gun though. I kept the gun.” Erik says. “She told me she wanted me to kill her husband. I laughed, but she didn't. I wouldn't have done it.”
Erik is 27, and he's sure he won't marry, “Not my style,” he says.
What I respect about Erik is the way he doesn't let his ego get caught up in chess. When he wins he doesn't pump a fist, and when he loses he sincerely congratulates his opponent. “When you're a beginner, everyone is looking to beat up on you,” he says, explaining his empathy for the uninitiated. Erik relates how when he started playing chess four years ago, he was entirely wrapped up in it. “Chess is the most dangerous game in the world,” he says.
He credits his rapid improvement in the past year to playing chess three times a week with Greg Nowak, a master strength player known to just about everybody in Missoula as 'The Octopus' for playing hordes of people simultaneously.
“Greg is my idol,” Erik says, “He doesn't have a phone. He doesn't have a TV.” Erik says that Greg is the highest rated player in Montana, so not to play and study with him would be a waste of an opportunity. Erik is willing to pay the two dollars per hour that Greg charges. “He's just trying to cover [the cost of] his coffee.”
Erik considers Greg a mentor, which is why Erik gets upset when Greg tries to take more than his advertised price. "You gotta watch your dollars when you play him. He's tried to take dollars from me a couple times, he's tricky." Despite the occasional breach of the relationship, Erik can forgive. “I'd be pretty sad if he died,” Erik says.
Tonight, Erik is playing a guy whose personality could not be more different than his own. Tim is a young mortgage broker who smirks when he wins, makes excuses when he loses and gives an intentionally crushing handshake before every game. Erik has never lost to Tim, but tonight he does.
“Bullshit,” Tim says as Erik turns over his king, apparently accusing him of throwing the game. He didn't, but his calm over the unprecedented loss only stokes Tim's paranoia. Tim leaves in a huff without saying goodbye.
Greg wanders by and is incredulous when he hears the news of Erik's loss.
“Did you blunder?”
“Yep. Twice.”
Greg seems the more upset of the two.