The Dart League King (13 page)

And since he didn’t have a way to say the thing right now, didn’t even seem to have the capacity for speech, couldn’t be the Tristan that Kelly Ashton seemed to want and remember, he tried to fend off her stories the best he could by holding up a finger, a way to say excuse me, and he walked to the bar to get another pitcher of beer.

And he set the pitcher on the bar silently and waited for the bartender to fill it, and he thought of all the strange things he felt and how he had no words to say them anymore, not even the Spanish ones, and how the world seemed to be floating away from him, or vice versa, how he couldn’t feel connected to anyone or anything other than the body of Liza Hatter in the grave up on the hill. The bartender grabbed the pitcher and, to
avoid conversation, Tristan Mackey looked up at the small TV on the ledge behind the bar, and there was something familiar there, some scene he should recognize right away, something stored in his own memory, but it took several moments before he understood what he saw—a reporter standing in front of the library of the University of Idaho. The sound on the TV was off, but he could read the caption at the bottom of the screen—
New Clue in Case of Missing Student
. There were people walking in and out the door of the library, and it was as if Tristan could see himself and Liza Hatter leaving there together, walking away. And then there was a loud noise he couldn’t quite place and everything went dark.

What mattered
to Russell Harmon, here in the middle innings, you might say, of this particular dart night, this particular Thursday evening, which was turning out to be a strange one, wasn’t so much that Vince Thompson still sat at his corner table, the blood more or less dried on his face, it looked like, one eye nearly swollen shut, his hands laid out flat in front of him as if he intended to crush the table on which they rested, his one good eye fixed like a tracking device on Russell’s every movement, one or another of his guns, no doubt, tucked away in the camouflage pants, not even to mention the knife in a case attached to his belt. And it wasn’t that Tristan Mackey had lost his singles match to the worst dart player ever in the history of the Garnet Lake Dart League, leaving Russell in the position of having to beat Brice Habersham if the 321 Club wanted to wrap up the championship this week, or even that Tristan didn’t seem to care about this one way or another, his back turned toward the dartboard, talking to Kelly Ashton, and now having left the table to go to the bar without even looking in the direction of the scoreboard, as if the fate of the 321 Club dart team, of which he was a member, held no interest for him at all. It wasn’t that Kelly Ashton seemed to have forgotten Russell’s existence, that she sat there now staring out the window, her gaze maybe just three or four inches to Russell’s left but still not taking him in, or the fact that he’d just
seen her, a minute or two ago, when he stepped back from the line after completing his turn, put her hand on top of Tristan’s hand, as if she hadn’t even thought about Russell standing there watching, hadn’t thought about the fact that he was, after all,
human
, that he had feelings too, for Christ sake, even if, as he had to admit, they didn’t exactly play a major role for him most of the time, hidden down underneath the happy exterior where Russell’s thoughts were usually located, skimming merrily along the surface. And it wasn’t that Matt still had the first bindle in his pocket, or that he’d headed to the men’s room at least three times by Russell’s count, or that he was catching the occasional glance from Tristan, either, the glance that told Russell he would probably be laying out more of his stash in that direction, for the amusement of the incompetent asshole who was stealing Kelly Ashton and couldn’t even beat a drooling retard in singles. It wasn’t even that he was having to play the most important match of his life with that
boom-tiskbooming
drumbeat in the background.

No, what mattered to Russell Harmon at the moment, just prior to the end of the first game of his own singles match, was this—he’d discovered that he wasn’t as good a dart player as Brice Habersham. Brice Habersham was, beyond dispute, the king of the Garnet Lake Dart League. And, no longer the king of the Garnet Lake Dart League, Russell Harmon now wasn’t anything. If he couldn’t be the Dart League King, if he couldn’t be the best player in town, then he was just a twenty-three-year-old local boy who’d never done shit, who’d moved around from job to job, a fixture of the bar scene, unmarried, unattached, unwealthy, not having taken advantage like some people his own age, even, of the local real estate boom or the expanding
tourist trade, scooped up by his more successful friend Matt who kept him on (at least for now, because Russell had lately been seeing the signs he recognized from other unsuccessful endeavors) to do a job he couldn’t stand, insisting he keep learning to operate the skidder when he was clearly no good at it, scaring the shit out of himself most of the time and the other guys on the crew occasionally, out in the woods that he never liked going to anyway, too dark and moody, the tall evergreens swaying in the wind that came down the mountainsides. At 6 a.m. he would be back out there, hungover, tired, beginning the worst day of his week. His Thursday night highs were supposed to offset those awful Friday mornings, but tonight he was sinking lower and lower, and there was no telling how bad it would get tomorrow.

He had known at the start of the cricket game that, well, maybe he had drunk a little more than he should have or normally would have, and maybe those last lines with Tristan out in the truck hadn’t been such a good idea. And he had also taken into account the presence of Vince Thompson and how Vince Thompson scared the shit out of him too, possibly even more than the skidder, and he had taken into account the distraction Kelly Ashton caused, and at first, when he started losing, he blamed it on these factors. But the truth was that as the game progressed, everyone but Vince and Kelly and Tristan crowding around and offering encouragement, everything else faded away and he felt just fine at the line, exactly as he had imagined he would, and he had to admit to himself that none of these other things had much to do with it and that he was in fact playing, if not his best, at least very well. Yet every time Brice Habersham took his turn, the gap between him and
Russell widened.

It had started off with Russell losing the cork, and Brice Habersham stepping to the line and throwing, on his very first turn, what was known in darts lingo as a “ton”—five 20s. This put Russell in an awful spot—one whole number and 40 points down. Brice Habersham’s teammates clapped politely and said,
Good job, Brice
, like they were used to seeing this all the time, and from his own team all Russell heard was James say, “Oh, shit.” And right away Russell felt in his slightly ample gut something growing, like an ulcer or a tumor. But he was the Dart League King, and as the Dart League King there was one thing he never did—“chase” an opponent in a cricket game. No, not even Brice Habersham.

The strategy—and everyone on the 321 team knew the strategy, because Russell had devised it and taught it to them—went like this: In a cricket game, it was better for the weaker player to keep the game short, not get points involved. If you started shooting points, the game got longer, and the longer the game went on, the more darts you had to shoot, and the more darts you had to shoot, the more likely it was that the skill of the better player would prevail. So, conversely, it was in the interest of the stronger player to stretch the game out, particularly if he happened to fall behind. And the way to stretch the game out was to get ahead on points so that the weaker player had to make a decision—either keep shooting his own points to catch up, which he would probably fail to do, eventually, or “chase” his opponent, closing out numbers that the opponent had already closed, hoping to keep the game close enough to pull off an upset in the end. Applying the principle to Russell’s current situation, then, the weaker player would be better off,
probably, trying to close the 20s in order to keep the stronger player from scoring further—“chasing,” in effect.

Come hell or high water, Russell decided as he stepped to the line that first time, he was not going to admit to his team—if in fact it was true, which he hadn’t decided yet—that he was the weaker player. So he told himself,
Don’t chase Brice Habersham on the 20s. Shoot, if you can
—highly unlikely, but not impossible—
seven 19s
. That way Brice Habersham would be behind on points, and he would go back to the 20s, and Russell would keep shooting the 19s, and he would shoot better than Brice Habersham and eventually wear him down to the point that Brice Habersham would have to chase
him
and shoot the 19s. This is what Russell actually forced himself to believe, right before he stepped to the line and hit not seven but three 19s—which after all was pretty good but not enough.

Brice Habersham then hit a triple 19 on his first dart, which meant no chance for Russell to score points
there
, and then two single 18s, which meant there wasn’t much use in taking
that
route
either
, and the tumor in Russell’s gut grew bigger and more agitating. But he
would not chase Brice Habersham
. He stepped to the line and shot five 17s. And while Matt and James roared their approval, Russell looked over toward Tristan to find him holding Kelly Ashton’s hand. And then Brice Habersham hit his final 18 and all three 17s, leaving the double 17 for last and hitting it with a certainty that made Russell nearly queasy. Halfheartedly, because he was still pretending to be the stronger player even though the reality, in both the form of the rock-hard tumor and the increasingly lopsided score taking shape on the chalkboard, was quickly establishing itself, Russell threw at the 16s, hitting two singles, his first slightly subpar turn. Other
than that, he’d thrown very well. And then Brice Habersham calmly and coolly hit three single 16s. And so Russell, dragging himself to the line by this point, his arms and legs feeling at the same time both heavy and rubbery, shot a triple 15 and two near misses at the bull’s-eye.

The board looked like this:

And Russell knew what was coming. He felt it ballooning inside of him, and he wanted to close his eyes. And in fact he did watch from one eye as Brice Habersham stood placidly at the line in his silly stenciled shirt, his old man’s hair parted just so, his glasses reflecting the bar light, unaffected by the fake drum going
boom-tisk-boom
and the guitar playing chords that sounded to Russell like maybe James Taylor, although he couldn’t recognize either the tune or the words, which sounded
like they were being sung in Chinese, and hit triple 15, single bull, double bull, bringing the game to an astounding and rapid conclusion. And Brice Habersham’s teammates clapped politely and said things like
Wow, Brice, that’s some good shooting
and patted him on the back while Brice Habersham modestly accepted their congratulations. And Matt and James stood there with their mouths hanging open. And Russell realized that he was a loser and always had been.

But he wasn’t a
quitter
, at least when it came to darts, at least that was what he now tried to tell himself. The match wasn’t over—just the cricket game. If he could beat Brice Habersham in 301, he could force a tiebreaker, and then if he won at Around the World he could be, once again, for the third year running, the Dart League King. But Brice Habersham had just closed out cricket in—count ’em—
five turns
. It was the best dart game Russell Harmon had ever seen anyone shoot.

And as if to commemorate the event, this miraculous and dumbfounding happening, there was a flash of light, and thunder boomed so hard it rattled the windowpanes, and all the lights in the 321 Club went out, as if they marked the Dart King’s passing.

Suddenly Russell found himself in a nearly pitch-black room with a couple of dozen people in a state of general confusion, and one of those people was Vince Thompson, locked and loaded, possibly deciding that this was the ideal moment to locate Russell there in the darkness, pop him once or twice in the gut or in the spine, leave him to bleed to death while he, Vince Thompson, made a beeline for the safety of some foreign country with a funny name, like Saskatchewan.

And even though Russell had decided he was maybe the
biggest loser in town, outside of Vince Thompson himself, he wasn’t ready to die just yet. There was all this laughing and chattering and shuffling of bodies and in the midst of it he could barely see his hand in front of his face or separate one sound from another, and he didn’t know who might be Vince Thompson and who might not be, and if at all possible he didn’t want to find out.

His first impulse was to bolt for the back door, but as he started to make his way there, knocking into a table, hearing a glass crash to the floor, it occurred to him that it might not be a good idea to head off somewhere alone, so that if Vince Thompson were lucky enough to find him he could shoot him without any witnesses, not that anyone could witness much at the moment, but still. It was probably best to stay in the bar. Russell had spent enough time in bars to know the best course of action when all hell broke loose, when the fists started flying and the pool cues started breaking over people’s heads, and even though that was not the problem right now, he decided that the same rule applied, so he made his way carefully with his hands out in front of him, saying softly
excuse me excuse me
when he bumped into something, whether person or inanimate object, over to the wall next to the dartboard, and when he reached out and felt the cool brick surface, he got his back firmly against it and his darts in hand, just in case he needed a weapon.