The Dart League King (16 page)

The thing was, he realized, that he didn’t want to kill Russell Harmon. The thing was that he didn’t know if he could kill anybody. But the thing was also that if he couldn’t kill a man, what was it that he
could
do. That was the upshot of his upbringing. Sometimes you’ve got to take a life to save one, like his asshole
father used to say, and Vince Thompson knew pretty well whose life he’d be saving. So he turned from the fence and made his way back through the bushes and across the grass to the deck and he thought again of how it would be, how he could picture the scene, how he could work up the anger, because the anger was always there, wasn’t it, and there had to be some use for it, so he would put the fucking Beretta to Russell Harmon’s head and say, just before he pulled the trigger,
You should have been my fucking friend
. And then he walked back in the 321 and he ignored the convenience store dude who was still there at the dartboard, and why was the fucker staring at him, it seemed to Vince, and he turned up the quarter-full pitcher of beer that was left on Russell Harmon’s table and drank it, wincing at the shooting pain behind his swollen eyelid, and he went to the bar to order his own beer because what the fuck did he care after all about fucking Bill and if Bill didn’t want to serve him Vince Thompson would just like to see him go ahead and try to say so, and then he stood there in fucking amazement, looking at the newcomers to the bar.
Well, well
, Vince Thompson thought, and he couldn’t help smiling a bit despite the pain.
Would you look at what the cat dragged in
.

So someone had seen her
at the library. That much Tristan could be sure of. Whether he’d been seen with her was another question, one that he found immaterial. Now that the news story was out, there would be someone—one of the shuffling figures who passed through the stacks while he sat with Liza Hatter and she thumbed through her magazine, the red-haired librarian he’d noticed at the desk on the way to the door, one of the several faces they’d passed after making their way out into the warm afternoon—who would remember seeing a tall auburn-haired girl (yes, the one in the pictures!) in the company of a tall handsome guy with long wavy hair, a regular student, no one you would have suspected. And there would be one person behind one of those faces who had, say, taken a class with him, maybe Chemistry 101 way back in freshman year, and who remembered his name. And when they came looking for him, there would be no way to hide it, he wouldn’t find the right words to hide it if he found any words at all, and in fact he no longer wanted to hide it, didn’t want to
deny Liza Hatter in the face of a direct question. No, he knew what he would do—he would take a deep breath, and slowly his arm would rise from his side and point to the hill where Liza Hatter lay buried. Between that moment and this one there was only time.

And in this moment he felt quite relaxed. There was no need for talk, no need for explanation. There were no words he knew how to speak, in fact—he had become, as nearly as he could tell, perfectly mute. He tried now, again, to say a word, any word, just to test his capacity, but all that came when he opened his mouth was the quiet wordlessness of breathing, and he was satisfied. It was comforting not to speak here in the yellow light of candles, the light reflecting in long streaks on the table where his elbows rested, the cool air that came in the open front door following the storm. And no one spoke to him. He had it seemed achieved anonymity, perhaps invisibility, except to his friend the musician, who sat on the stage strumming chords and looking at Tristan from one eye occasionally, a peaceful smile on his face. This was the man who had taught him to speak the language of music, who had converted Tristan’s love for the sounds into the ability to speak them through his fingers—awkwardly, stammeringly as yet, a baby’s inarticulate approximation of the sounds he had long recognized: G chord, F chord, G. This was the man who, himself, spoke the language so hauntingly, in a way that no one but Tristan could hear. Not one of the other customers in the bar had ever understood this man, had ever heard in the subtle phrasings and almost hidden melodies the presence of a genius for hearing the world, its ambient sounds and rhythms. This man’s music, Tristan had known from the first time he
heard it, spoke the language of ticking clocks in empty rooms, of cars passing at night outside the window, of unseen birds in the treetops, of dry leaves skittering on the pavement at dusk when the streetlights buzzed to life. It was the language of unpopulated spaces. That was why people couldn’t love it or hear it. When the musician sang “Heart of Gold” or “Lay Lady Lay,” the crowd would grow attentive, hearing the sounds they already knew, but on the few occasions when he used his instrument to speak the strange language, the crowd would grow impatient, talk to the ones they came with, turn to the bar to order another beer.

At first, Tristan tried to put words to the music. For the two weeks he was home prior to the night with Liza Hatter, he toyed with the musician’s strange understated melodies and loose rhythms. And each time he went to the musician to learn the language of fingers and strings, he showed the musician the words he had produced, and each time the musician looked at them and put them away, and Tristan felt that he had failed. Only now did he see that there was no failure—there was simply nothing at which to fail. The music of human absence and silence would by definition admit no words.

Tristan no longer cared. That was the musician’s failure now—looking at Tristan while playing the guitar, thinking that Tristan was still involved in the insoluble riddle of the music, perhaps thinking that Tristan had been avoiding him because of his failure to solve the riddle. And in fact Tristan had been leery of the musician and his ability to hear things, penetrate things—until tonight, until now. Because what the musician didn’t know was that the music now meant nothing, at least in and of itself. Nothing meant anything to Tristan except Liza
Hatter, the fact of her up there on that hill, a fact that only Tristan knew though there were many others searching to know it. And since only Liza Hatter mattered and only Tristan knew, a chasm yawned between Tristan and the world, and into that chasm all the words had been poured,
las palabras que desaparace
, so that he could do nothing but sit mutely amid the candle flames, and the musician and his odd song meant something only for this reason—that they were in the process of teaching Tristan where he had gone wrong. Of
course
it was impossible for him to tell Liza Hatter’s story to Kelly Ashton; Liza Hatter’s story, like the musician’s song, was one of absence and silence, so there were no words in any language with which to tell it. He, Tristan Mackey, could not serve as translator.

And yet the story was still in his head while he sat listening to the music, as if the story and the music had intertwined.
Liza Hatter was born and raised in Salmon, Idaho
.
Liza Hatter was in homecoming court
.
Liza Hatter was a conscientious student at the university
.
Liza Hatter loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian
.
Liza Hatter had strong feelings for Tristan Mackey and went with him one spring evening to the lake, where her feelings were strong enough to pull her too far into the water
.
Liza Hatter in her last moments appealed out of the strong feeling—love?—to the only person who was left to her
.
Liza Hatter’s eyes widened, she took one last breath, and she said that person’s name, in the form of a question—“Tristan?”

He had heard the word so many times in the weeks following Liza Hatter’s drowning, heard her calling it in that soft, frightened voice, that it had begun to set up a kind of echo in his head—
Tristan ((Tristan)(Tristan))
—calling to him from a line that divided the Tristan he had been before that night and
the Tristan he had been ever since. And although he had come to love Liza Hatter in a way, he was growing tired of the voice and wanted to put it to rest, and to do that he had to fulfill his obligation to her, had to get her story told. But he had discovered in listening to the musician’s song about absence and silence that he could not tell her story himself. It wasn’t a question of words, it was a question of that body lying under the ground on the hill. The only person who could tell Liza Hatter’s story was Liza Hatter. And that could be arranged.

He would need to speak three words to one more person when the time came, before he walked out the back door into the moonlight, three words that would lead to the telling of the story that would reach just one more person’s ears, so that someone else could hear in Liza Hatter’s silence the echo of his name, which sounded, strangely, like the song the musician was playing now, as if the musician
had
penetrated everything, knew everything after all, his sharp eyes glowing now and his lips curling into a smile for Tristan, who smiled back this time, hearing the sound like the inside of his head, like the vibrating space between the limitless stars, like the lungs’ and the mouth’s last breathing.

The candles had
a curious effect. Because his head was slightly uptilted when he looked at the numbers on the board, Brice Habersham’s glasses caught the dancing candlelight, which threw a tiny glare, like sunspots. It was a mild inconvenience, not an actual handicap. After all, he could often hit what he wanted even with his eyes closed. But for the time being he occupied himself with measuring the candlelight’s effect, throwing his three darts and plucking them out and throwing them again, calculating the subtle shifting of the light across the bull’s-eye and the flickering glint off the silver wires. He imagined, as always, the dartboard as a vortex, his release point as the vortex’s widest circle, the space between the release point and the board a sort of funnel, his chosen target the concentric point where the narrowing circles met, where the dart would be sucked in. It was interesting that the optical tricks played by the light off his glasses altered his throwing motion just slightly, just the tiniest bit, a tightening in his fingers and his wrist and his forearm, as if the well-trained mechanism didn’t want to operate with the target not clearly defined. There was, indeed, a measurable difference in the results.

Amusing himself with the task of learning to throw by candlelight helped him not to think of the things he should have been thinking at the moment. He felt a vague indifference, for instance, to the fact that Russell Harmon had left the bar with the pretty brunette, that he was probably someplace close by snorting cocaine with her. He wasn’t overly interested in Vince Thompson’s departure, even though it might represent some danger to Russell, though he doubted Vince Thompson would try anything stupid with the girl present. Actually, now would be the perfect time to slide out of the bar himself, ascertain Russell’s whereabouts, and, if Vince Thompson weren’t around, make his call to the police. They could pick up Russell and the girl, maybe one or two of Russell’s friends, and he could go down to the station and supervise the questioning and get the statements he needed to arrest Vince Thompson, and then he could go home to Helen and a decent night’s sleep, provided Helen would let him have one. But the idea of making the call slipped further and further away, and he told himself that there would still be plenty of time, that the lights would come back up and they would all reassemble, hopefully without Vince Thompson, and finish the match before the unpleasantness began. Only one thing needed to be taken care of in the meantime—the phone call to Helen.

He called home on the cell phone and walked out the back door onto the deck and stared out over the dark water while he waited for Helen to answer. The phone rang six times before she picked it up from the bedside table.

“Brice,” she said. “
Brice
,” as if it were a demand rather than a question. The person on the other end of the line
had
to be him.

“It’s me,” he said.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Thank God. I thought you weren’t coming home. I thought you’d forgotten me.”

“Of course I haven’t forgotten you,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“
Miserable
,” Helen said. “Completely
miserable
. Are you on your way home?”

“What’s wrong?” he said.

There was a silence on the other end of the line and then a bumping sound and he could hear a little clang from Helen’s bell being knocked over on the table and then he could hear her gulping water from a glass and then setting the glass back down and adjusting her pillow against the headboard. She sighed deeply. “Are there lights where you are?” she said. “Because there are no lights here. Where are you? Do you have lights? Electricity?”

“No,” he said. “The lights are out here, too.”

“Here where?” Helen said.

He told her the 321 Club and she asked if that wasn’t a bar and he explained to her again, in a quiet voice, as much as he could about what he was doing tonight.

“When the lights went out, the dogs started barking,” Helen said.

“Which dogs?” Brice Habersham said.

“All of them,” she said. “All around the neighborhood. They haven’t quit for a second and my head is pounding. Can you come home now? There’s a crackle—an electric crackling, that’s the only way I can describe it—behind my left eye. Have you ever felt that before?”

Brice Habersham said he hadn’t.

“That’s the only way I can describe it,” she said. “It’s going to get worse. If the dogs don’t stop, it will get worse. If you’re not here, I’ll have to do something myself,” she said.

He waited for her to say that she would call the police and he prepared to tell her not to do that, please, and that he would be home as soon as he was able to come. But she was silent on the other end of the line. He heard her sigh and then she started to say something and he heard her voice tremble and she stopped again.