Power & Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page A

time. That’s good. Keep the mind sharp. Keep the body lean. That’s what makes a warrior, and I see you got what it takes to wage wars and win wars. I’m always in a war. Fuck, life’s a war. I built me up an army—you’ve seen some of my lieutenants—but none of them, even those twice your age, got your brains. They depend on me to make all the decisions. They scared of me. Well, that’s good, ’cause on one hand, they need to be scared of me. But on the other hand that ain’t good ’cause they don’t got the balls to challenge me. They ain’t thinking of better ways to expand our businesses. Businesses either expand or die. I gotta think of everything. I gotta figure out the odds and place the bets. I gotta breed the horses. Gotta feed the horses. I gotta run this motherfucking race all by myself. Now ain’t that a bitch?”
    “It doesn’t sound easy.”
    “It ain’t. You ever play chess, Power?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Well, I play. Not with my lieutenants. They too dumb for chess. So I got a couple of guys from the university who come up to the house and play. You’ll meet them. One guy teaches French. The other teaches history. Both PhDs. Case you don’t know, that means doctors of philosophy. Well, neither of those doctors of philosophy have ever beat this nigga at chess, not even once. And you know why?”
    “Why?” I asked, eager for the answer.
    “ ’Cause I didn’t learn how to play out of a book or in some university, but at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, Georgia.”
    “I didn’t know you were in prison.”
    “There’s a whole lot about me you don’t know. It was in Reidsville that I met my master. Cat called Sylvester Brooks Sanders. We called him Mr. S. He was a white man who worked for the biggest bank in the state. Finance guy. He’d figured out some scheme to skim millions, and he would have gotten away with it except that pussy tripped him up.”
    “Pussy?”
    “Pussy will make a smart man dumb. See, Mr. S was married for twenty years. He was pretty loyal to Mrs. S except for the strip joints. Couldn’t stay outta the strip joints. One stripper in particular caught his eye and turned him out. Mrs. S found out and went crazy. Mrs. S did him in. She guessed he’d been scamming the bank, and going through his safe, she found the evidence. She wanted to put him away—and she did. So Mr. S winds up my cell mate. That’s where he started talking this philosophy about how life is a chess game. He thinks if you can win at chess, you can win at anything. He studied the game his whole life. Won tournaments and shit. Says there ain’t no one who will ever beat him, short of a few cats in Russia. I say, ‘Teach me, Mr. S, and I’ll whip your sorry ass in a year.’ A year is all I was in for.”
    “For doing what?”
    “That’s another story. This story is how after a month or two, I was playing quality chess. I took to it like a duck to water. It all made sense to me, especially the part that said you gotta think six steps ahead. I saw that if I had thought six steps ahead, I would have never wound up in jail. I took the game seriously, Power. Studied it with a mighty concentration. Mr. S had to admit I was a natural.”
    “You beat him?”
    “That’s the funny part, son. It was a month before my release and I still hadn’t beaten him. We’d played at least twenty thousand games. I’d come close—real goddamn close—but this dude was sharp. If I was two steps ahead, he was three. If I was four, he was five. And then one afternoon, the sun came out. It had been raining for days. Lightnin’-and-thunder rain. But on this day the little window above our beds was flooded with light. Sunlight just pouring through. Sunlight lighting up the chessboard where me and Mr. S were head-to-head in a ferocious match. The light was what I needed. It lit up my brain. For the first time, I saw his master plan. I knew what to do. I saw how to corner him. I was on the verge of declaring