The Dart League King (20 page)

After all the shouting had died down, at the tail end of the show of faith, Russell stepped to the line and threw without thinking. He couldn’t allow himself to think, had to do this with the unthinking part of himself that had done almost everything in his life, because if he started to think now (hitting the 1 with his first dart, missing the 2 with his second, hitting the 2 with his third, hearing as if from far away a collective sigh of relief), if he started to think
now
it was all going to grow too big, it was going to get as huge as that lake out there, it was going to be like trying to swim all the way across that lake one tiny stroke at a time (which was how he was making his way around the board, making the circle with his fingers and throwing a single 3, a single 4, a single 5), it was going to be like that deal Kelly Ashton had told to him once with the butterfly wings, how they flapped somewhere and set off a hurricane, if he started thinking he was going to think about how everything reached out to something else, how if he failed there would be people disappointed, and how that disappointment, even if it was a tiny one, even if it was like one time, say, when a father failed to speak to his son when he saw him in a crowd, and that son had not been able to sleep that night or for many nights afterward, lying in bed fighting the dark hours and feeling emptier and emptier and more and more alone inside until the inside disappeared altogether, and it had made that son a different person than he might have wanted to be if there had been an inside left in him to do any wanting, how the disappointment might be
enough to make one of these people who wanted something from Russell Harmon now argue with a girlfriend, maybe, and this argument would come back years later to cause somebody pain, maybe even cause the children of those somebodies pain in some small or very large way, maybe all these people would leave this bar on this summer night with the disappointing feeling that Russell Harmon had lost this match and was no longer the Dart League King and in a series of little words, little actions (like the slight movement of his hand now, and the dart sneaking fortuitously, because his aim was a little off, into the triple 7, which nudged him along to 10), would set off a chain of disappointments that spread far beyond the confines of this town and lasted for generations, if he started thinking now and let the pressure build and lost, it would be one more thing he’d lost at in the eyes of Kelly Ashton, one more thing to show that he was unfit, that he would always lose, and it would look that way to his father, and his father could once again find a reason to turn away, and worst of all, biggest of all, if he started thinking now instead of just letting his hand do what it had to do (releasing the dart now, watching it settle softly into the triple 12, now the single 15, it was going very smoothly and very quietly for him despite all the noise, the fact that Matt was standing on his chair now and shouting, that there was someone who insisted on clapping him on the back), it would grow inside starting from this time and going on, that in the one thing in the world at which he’d been pretty good he wasn’t good enough, and that a person who wasn’t good enough at even one thing couldn’t hope to be good at something else, something larger and more important, something complicated and mysterious like being a father, say, and especially if one
had never had a father oneself but only an Uncle Roy, who was really more of a fishing and hunting buddy than a father, and if you had always thought to yourself over and over as a child in a kind of obsessive daydream that if you were a father you would take your child somewhere else, teach your child to do something other than catch things and kill things, talk to your child more about the world of children, their world of desperate love for the things they didn’t have, and how this would be even harder if you added the complication of the child being not a boy, which is what you’d always imagined, but a little girl who didn’t even know your name, if he started thinking about that now, how every time he let the dart go (a double 17 with his third dart, thank God, because his hands were beginning to shake, and he didn’t know how much longer or further he could go) it was like he was releasing his whole life into the air, there would be no way to keep going, to do this thing, which was the first thing before the next thing and the next. And so he refused to think about any of that as he stood at the line with his second dart in hand, the first dart jutting straight out from the single 19.

He had come to the same place as Brice Habersham. There he stood with his second dart in hand, and he could go the safe route, waste the second dart and shoot a single 20 with the third, provided he didn’t miss, and then have three shots at the bull’s-eye. Or he could, as some phrase stuck in his head from somewhere long ago, maybe some English class, suggested to him that he might, screw his courage to the sticking place and throw the 20 with dart number two, leaving him one shot at the bull’s-eye, just as Brice Habersham had done. The thing was to keep not thinking about it, just do what his body said
to do, but he was pausing, he was waiting for something to tell him, and Matt was definitely trying to, he could hear Matt over there saying
Do
not
even go there, Russell, do
not
be stupid, don’t do it
, and his hand was moving now, he was trying to listen to something in the air and what he heard for the first time, oddly enough, since it had always bothered him so much before, was the musician’s song, unplugged this time from the annoying drumbeat, just an isolated plunking note or two that settled in his heart and washed into his bloodstream, and the dart, which was supposed to fly above the board and settle harmlessly into the red felt backing, instead described its arc and wobbled precariously into the upper-right corner of the single 20.

Which left Russell Harmon with one dart in his hand. And that hand was raising already, because he couldn’t stop to think, and that hand was now releasing the dart, and Russell felt all the breath go out of him as if it were his breath and not his hand that set the silver ball onto that wheel, sent the dart into the air, where it twirled ever so briefly, like the bright burst of a single lifetime measured against the stars, the flights spinning gently in little flames of candlelight, blond twists of a small girl’s hair, and before Russell Harmon had time even for the lowering of his hand he saw the dart stick firmly in the red heart of the double bull’s-eye, as perfect a throw as he or Brice Habersham or anyone else in the history of the world had ever made, and looking at that dart in the board’s dead center his relief was so great that he would have burst into tears if he’d remembered how. He barely heard the air around him erupting with cheers.

And then unexpectedly his feet left the ground and he wondered if he was flying, but there was a crash against a table and
whirling candlelight and glass and his body going down, down, till his elbows hit the floor, sending sparks up his arms into his shoulder blades, and in pain he wrenched around to find the face of Vince Thompson looming over him like a dark moon eclipsing the sun.

Vince Thompson
had the whole menagerie assembled right in front of him, Russell Harmon and his asshole father Clint Harmon and Vince Thompson’s own asshole father, and he had a gun in his pocket and a knife on his belt and he could lay waste to the whole goddamn joint if he felt like it, just come up stabbing and firing right and left and then jet on into the night, make a beeline for his folks’ place and grab his money box and then maybe stop at the gas station on the way out of town for some Tylenol, which he could sure as hell use right at the moment, since his whole fucking head felt like it was ready to explode or just drop right off his neck and roll onto the floor. What he found himself doing instead, though, was watching that son-of-a-bitch little convenience store guy, little what’s his name, Bruce or Boyce
he couldn’t remember, his brain didn’t work worth a shit anymore, but anyway watching this little guy with the neat haircut and the shiny glasses and the silly dragon shirt throw some fucking darts. The dude could
throw
some fucking darts, Vince Thompson could tell. It wasn’t like he was exactly a dart expert or anything, Vince Thompson, in fact he found the game pointless and stupid, but he’d played some motherfucking darts himself once upon a time, he’d logged enough fucking hours of his tragic misspent youth hanging around bars and killing time at the dartboard, enough to know what the hell was going on at any rate, and he knew a shooter when he saw one, and even though this little convenience store guy wasn’t actually playing the best he’d ever seen anyone play, you could see it in everything the guy did, the precise movements that were the same every time, the total concentration, the calmness, that this guy was a fucking pro, and now that you mention it there were those trophies, weren’t there, he’d seen the fuckers at the convenience store, that’s right, but he hadn’t assumed
this
little dude had won them, he didn’t know why. He had actually had this experience many times before, running into some quiet little guy at a bar, generally some dude just trying to mind his own fucking business but Vince Thompson would keep bothering him, because he liked bothering people who were trying to stay out of his way, and generally little guys were better because they wouldn’t punch you, although he’d had that happen a few times too, and then finally the little guy would start talking and you’d find out he actually had some fascinating talent or whatever, he’d turn out to know everything there was to know about jazz, for instance, or he’d be a rare stamp collector and he’d pull out a bunch of stamps and show them to you and
explain their history, stuff like that, the little fascinating details of nondescript people, stuff that would make Vince Thompson envious because he’d never been able to focus on one thing long enough to really know it like these people did. And so here was this quiet Bruce guy or whatever who turned out to be a badass dart player, who’d have thought, but there was something wrong with him, too, he kept moving his head back and forth like a fucking Tourette’s patient or something, but it didn’t take Vince fucking Thompson long to figure it out, given his own history with the fucked-up vision thing, the guy couldn’t see the goddamn board, that was his problem, he was probably just about blind as a fucking bat without his glasses and now it was too dark in the room or the candles were screwing with him or something, but still the guy was shooting up a fucking storm, putting an ass-whupping on Russell fucking Harmon, who had always bragged to Vince Thompson about his supposed dart-throwing expertise, he was the champion this and the champion that for thus and such number of years. Yeah right, well
that
was about to come to a sad conclusion. Compared to the little Bruce dude, Russell Harmon shot darts like a fucking girl, and Vince Thompson took a lot of pleasure now in watching how Russell’s shoulders seemed to stiffen every time he turned to the board, probably imagining a bullet thudding into his fat ass, he, Vince Thompson, was glad to have a hand in Russell’s undoing, so he made sure to smile in a mysterious way each time he caught Russell Harmon’s eye so that Russell would think he was a lunatic. And so when Russell Harmon calmly threw a single and two triple 20s, Vince Thompson was at first annoyed. The dangerous grin was no longer having its desired effect. But as Russell Harmon kept
shooting, as he actually started shooting
better
than the little Bruce dude, and even though you had to take into consideration the problem with the Bruce dude’s impaired vision, Vince Thompson began to have that same odd feeling he had when he found Russell having sex with the Ashton babe in the truck, a feeling that suddenly made him want to turn to someone next to him, one of those other fucking geeks with the dragon on his shirt, maybe, and say, “I
know
that dude, he buys drugs from me,” which of course wasn’t a thing it was possible to say, but he wanted there to be a connection between him and Russell Harmon, something to link him to Russell and the evening’s exploits, and by the time Russell had
won
the fucking 301 game, Vince Thompson was asking the dragon guy at the next table all about the situation, and he heard all about the league championship and the individual championship and how Brice, which turned out to be the little dude’s name, used to be a professional, and he realized that Russell Harmon was in the match of his life, that the scope of this thing was beyond what he, Vince fucking Thompson, had imagined, and he felt ashamed of himself for the trouble he had been causing Russell Harmon, who was here trying to win the dart league championship against a serious fucking badass dart player, a
ringer
more or less by Vince Thompson’s estimation, some guy who’d been brought in unfairly from out of town,
ashamed
that he had been distracting Russell Harmon with the threat of physical violence and sudden death, he felt bad about this, and now that asshole Brice was shooting the lights out in Around the World, it was impossible to make the guy miss, Vince Thompson tried coughing loudly a couple of times right when he went to throw and it had no effect, he just kept plunking in single after single,
and Vince Thompson felt like standing up and letting the Brice dude have it with the Beretta in the back of the fucking head,
that
would put a stop to him, and then pretty soon the Brice dude had come to the fucking bull’s-eye, and Vince Thompson had scooted forward to the edge of his seat and he closed his eyes and held his swollen head because he couldn’t watch, couldn’t look, and then there was noise and he looked up and the Brice dude had missed, had
missed
, and Russell was at the line and Jesus, he looked a little shaky, didn’t he, and Vince Thompson felt his hands start to sweat and he was hot in the camouflage pants even though they were still wetter than shit and he’d been freezing his ass off just a minute before, but Russell was keeping it going, a wild shot here but a single there, making the shots when he had to, and then he started finding his rhythm, it started going more and more smoothly, and Russell Harmon looked to Vince Thompson like a Greek god there at the line with his curly hair and his goddamn gut pushing out the front of his T-shirt, he was like a blaze of light in the fucking darkness, and Vince Thompson could barely contain himself, he started looking around at the other faces to see if they saw it too, and goddammit that Ashton chick didn’t look like she had a fucking clue, just sitting there swinging her leg under the table, and Clint fucking Harmon and the asshole air force colonel father just talking, talking, laughing, laughing,
ha fucking ha
, like they weren’t fucking impressed, the cocksuckers, and Vince Thompson couldn’t stand it anymore, there had to be something for him to do, so he was up out of his chair and over behind Russell and he started slapping Russell on the back in between turns, saying shit like
That’s my boy!
, causing some visible alarm among Russell’s friends, it
looked like, but not to Russell himself, who didn’t seem to notice where the slaps or the words were coming from, even, so totally wrapped up was he in the brilliance of what he was doing, a triple, a double, and finally, with everything on the line, with the pressure built up to its most extreme point, so that Vince Thompson felt the climax of Russell’s performance would be that Vince Thompson’s own pounding blood would spew right out of his fucked-up head, Russell fucking Harmon threw a goddamn dart right in the middle of the fucking bull’seye, a throw so fucking perfect that the dart sticking straight out from the very goddamn center of the board looked like it had arrived somehow at the core of the entire fucking world. It was the most beautiful thing Vince Thompson had ever seen in his entire fucking miserable life and there was nothing he could do to hold himself back anymore in the expression of his sheer his utter fucking joy, it had built up inside him now to such a point that there was abso-fucking-lutely nothing he could do other than tackle Russell Harmon as hard as he could from behind and knock him to the floor. But when Russell Harmon turned to see him it was with a look of, what, maybe terror, and Vince Thompson felt so bad that he started almost crying, saying softly
I’m sorry, I’m sorry
, but then the next thing he knew he’d been kicked in the ribs and it wasn’t by Russell who was after all underneath him but by that same son of a bitch Clint Harmon, who, oh,
now
all of a sudden wanted to claim Russell as his fucking kid or something, now that everybody was congratulating him and shit, but it was too goddamn late for that, too late for the deadbeat dad, and Vince Thompson grabbed for the knife to stick it in Clint Harmon’s gut while Clint Harmon got on the floor and started pounding him
again
,
god
damn
was there never any end to this fucking night, he was going to wind up in the hospital by the time it was through, and he got the knife unsnapped but before he could get it in his grip it had clattered loose and his knuckles were being rapped on the hardwood floor, it was the asshole air force colonel father unit, saying
piece of shit
and
crazy
and
waste of human life
and shit like that, Jesus he and Clint fucking Harmon were like a whole fucking SWAT team between the two of them, and his head knocked on the floor from one of Clint Harmon’s punches and the bar went kind of blurry and tilted and surreal so it was hard to know what exactly happened next but he was lifted up from the floor and set against the wall where he was standing, leaning, wobbling, and there was his fucking
friend
, his fucking
good friend
Russell Harmon, the best goddamn dart thrower Vince fucking Thompson had ever seen, shoving his own father out of the way and saying
Get the fuck
off
him, man, that’s
enough, shit like that, and then Vince Thompson was trying to clean the fresh blood off his face and Russell was talking to someone, saying
Wait right here
, and then he was telling goddamn Bill the bartender,
All right, all right, I’ll get him out, don’t call the cops
, and then he and Russell Harmon were out on the sidewalk and the air on Vince Thompson’s face was like cool cool water. And after he had gotten done telling Russell thank you over and over and he had gotten done telling Russell that he was his friend and that he wouldn’t ever let that asshole father upset him ever again, he’d go right back in there and shoot him right between the fucking eyes all Russell had to do was say the word, and after he’d gotten done telling Russell that the bull’s-eye he’d thrown was the greatest thing he’d ever seen, it was like the sudden alignment of all the fucking cosmic
forces orchestrated by a godly higher being, no
shit
, he was
serious
, motherfucker, don’t
laugh
at him like that, Russell was holding him by the arm and helping him stagger down the street to his car, which Vince Thompson kept trying to point to in a roundabout sort of way but it was
hard
, goddammit, he was seriously beat to shit now and he kept getting confused and not seeing things correctly, the street was dark as piss, he just wanted to make it to his car and go home and fall asleep and in the morning he’d clean the bloody sheets, he didn’t give a rat’s ass right now, he was just so incredibly fucking tired, but when they got to the car finally and he’d gotten the goddamn thing cranked and was telling Russell Harmon out the window that he was OK, he was fucking OK, Russell was his friend, he suddenly didn’t want to go home anymore, he didn’t want Russell Harmon to leave, so he offered the only thing he could offer, the only thing he’d ever been able to offer for a long, long time now, and Russell Harmon looked around the dark night as if he was searching for something and his big hands squeezed the window frame and Vince Thompson held his breath because it mattered so much to him right now, he was so fucking lonely, go ahead and admit, and he might have even said it out loud, he couldn’t tell, but then Russell was in the passenger seat and Vince Thompson was making a U-ey in the street and not even giving a shit about checking for cops and he was driving leaned up over the steering wheel trying to see out of his fucked-up face with Russell guiding him and they made the block and came around and crossed the bridge over Sand Creek and Vince Thompson pulled the car to a stop in the gravel parking area on the other side. And when he went to grab a bindle out of his pocket he put his hand in the wrong one and found
the Beretta instead, and he realized with a kind of horror that, just like the uncanny perfection of Russell Harmon’s final dart throw, everything had turned out exactly like he’d planned.