Chapter 5: Game 42

I ran around the bar and out the front door.

Brand Boulevard was all sun and buses.

No windbreaker. No blue cap.

Just the twenty on the bar and a beer going warm.

The guy who only knows sports came out behind me, chewing a toothpick.

"You know that guy?" I asked.

"Seen him. Gardena. He's at the card room off Vermont most nights."

"Playing?"

"Taking," he said. "He takes bets. Football, mostly. Anything, if you ask nice."

I looked at the street for a long time.

Then I went upstairs and went to bed at eight o'clock.

I needed my brain on Tuesday more than I needed answers about a man in a hat.

At noon on Tuesday a page took my phone and my car keys and put them in a plastic bag with my name on it.

The challenger's green room was a beige box with a fruit plate and a mirror ringed in bulbs.

I sat there for four hours.

The makeup artist came at three.

She looked at my face for a while and opened a bottle of foundation two shades darker than my skin.

"We'll even you out," she said.

"Leave them."

"The freckles? Honey, under these lights..."

"Leave them. My dad used to count them."

She put the bottle down.

She did my eyes and a coat of lip gloss, and she didn't say another word about my face.

At 4:55 the page knocked.

"They're ready for you."

The stage was smaller than it looks on TV and much colder.

Two podiums under a sky of white lights. A hundred and fifty people in the dark beyond them.

And the chair.

The big red leather chair the champion sits in between games.

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