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9/25/08
9:08 AM
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SEAN DOOLITTLE
Meanwhile, we cultivated adults had stayed out on the Sewards’ back deck as daylight seeped away behind the trees, drinking margaritas and playing Risk, the old-fashioned board game where you build up your armies and try to dominate the world. Upon capturing Madagascar and the South African peninsula, thus eliminating the Callaway team and our pitiable troops from the game, Barry had nodded sagely, joined his palms together, and that’s when he said it. The victorious warrior wins first. I still remember the flickering light from half a dozen citronella candles playing dramatically over his brow. And then goes to battle. Poor Barry. Pudgy, earnest, nice guy Barry Firth. We’d hurt his feelings, cackling like tipsy teenagers, but it was that sort of evening, and we’d all assumed he was trying for laughs. How does anybody deliver a line like that with margarita salt on his eyeglasses and a straight face? It wasn’t until two or three pitchers later that Trish, to her husband’s booze-blushed horror, had confided the truth to the group: Roger himself had given Barry the board game we’d been playing as a gift for Christmas the previous year, along with one of those popular business wisdom books titled Suit Tzu: The Art of War from Battlefield to Boardroom. According to Trish, Barry had been posting sticky notes with hand-scribbled quotations around the house for random inspiration ever since. “And who got the Flint account in May?” he’d protested, sending us all howling again. It strikes me now, in a way that it hadn’t then, that we hadn’t all been yukking it up at Barry’s expense. Not our friend Roger Mallory. Roger just grinned, chucked Barry on the shoulder, and said, “Keep at ’em, General.” Come to think of it, Roger hadn’t been drinking margaritas, either. Within the next few turns he’d single-handedly overtaken the whole of Africa with one massive invasion force. Come to think of it, playing Risk that night, he’d outlasted us all.