The Dart League King (22 page)

Vince Thompson opened his eyes to see that Russell Harmon had started walking again on the bridge. Maybe he should let him walk. Maybe he should let him get to wherever the fuck he was going to. It was his life, and maybe Vince Thompson, when you got right down to it, was happy to let him have it. He, Vince fucking Thompson, had spent almost his whole life in this town, and that poor Russell Harmon bastard out there on the bridge was the only friend he had to show for it, at least if you could believe what the son of a bitch said, goddamn Russell Harmon with his own fucked-up piece-of-shit father and the same problems Vince Thompson had.

Maybe just say screw the whole thing. There was nothing left for him in this town. Soon he would have to move out of his place above the hardware store and into the apartment complex. And nobody wanted cocaine anymore, they all wanted to fry their brains on crank, and the high school kids didn’t even want to smoke pot, they all wanted Darvocet and Oxycontin and shit. The world wasn’t what it used to be, that was for sure. And old Mrs. Krum would probably fire his ass from his job managing the apartment complex, too, as soon as she got a good look at his fucked-up face tomorrow morning. Old Mrs. fucking Krum, riding around on her motorized grocery cart or whatever the fuck it was. She’d miss him for a couple of days, until she found someone else.

Maybe the thing to do was drive to the goddamn folks’ house,
march right in the goddamn door, no sneaking around. Grab the box, have it out with the old man, then hit the fucking road. Do it fast, without thinking. Staring down the barrel of the gun, still keeping Russell Harmon’s back in line as squarely as he could, Vince Thompson didn’t remember the name of that little California town, and it was absurd to think a girl he left there so long ago would still be hanging around, after all he wasn’t a fucking fool, but it had been a nice little town regardless, and once he was cruising down the highway as fast as his piece-of-shit car would let him, he’d bet you he remembered it. Or, if not, he’d bet you he could pick it off a fucking map. All he had to do to make it happen was ease his finger off that trigger, but still he held it there, kept squinting down the sights at Russell Harmon on the bridge, the seconds ticking down, the time revved to such a speed that there was no room in his head for thoughts or decisions, the story of his fucking life, it was all up to his goddamn finger, finally—tighten or loosen.

Kelly Ashton sat
in her chair, turning the candleholder around and around with her thin fingers, weighing the two phrases of three words against each other.
Wait right here
.
Come with me
.

Oh, if she had only stayed home tonight, said no to Tristan’s call, she could be in bed right now in her little room, Hayley asleep in the crib right next to her. Or she could, right now, be taking Hayley out of the crib and bringing her into the bed and holding her in her arms, feeling Hayley’s breath against her neck and the soft curls of Hayley’s hair against her lips. How nice that would have been.

But she had put herself instead into a difficult situation, and it seemed that she was being called upon to make a decision, and it was very likely one of the most important decisions she would ever make, and she had had one too many beers and one too many glasses of wine.

Tristan had left his cigarettes on the table over an hour ago, before he had disappeared, or she had disappeared, she couldn’t remember. She took one out now but she didn’t have anything to light it with, and she turned to the first person she could find, the muscle-shirt man who’d been in the bar brawl, and asked him. He didn’t smoke, didn’t have a light, but he’d go to the bar and get some matches, the least he could do for a pretty girl like her. Good Lord. He came back and made a big
show of lighting her cigarette and sat in the chair across from her, and she settled down to the business of ignoring him and weighing her offers.

On the one hand, there was Tristan. Tristan was intelligent and he was handsome and he could take her out of this town into a different life if he wanted to, if she could convince him to, but he was, she had discovered tonight, a little more odd than she’d remembered. Several years ago in a high school English class, Tristan Mackey had made her dream, and dreaming was something she needed then, her father lost in the mountains, and it was probably something she needed now. She was sure she had needed it until tonight. Then she had gone with Russell Harmon to his truck—God she couldn’t believe she’d done that—and she had told him about Hayley and she had seen the look in his eyes and she had known that, if nothing else, Hayley had a father in this world. And for that she felt very grateful, and it had settled the issue for the moment. But at the same time she had felt—and she knew it was stupid,
stupid
, a feeling born from watching too many dumb TV shows with her mother, from too much time watching herself fantasize in front of the mirror—that she was selling herself short. And then there had been that ridiculous dart game, grown men making fools of themselves throwing their little darts at their little board and shouting and yelling while—Jesus Christ, didn’t they notice?—there was a world outside the fucking window, a sky that held so many stars. And Russell at the center of it somehow, much to her embarrassment. And just as it was all over, Tristan Mackey reappeared and approached the table.
Come with me
. And then there had been some huge, senseless brawl, and Russell somehow, some way, for some unapparent
reason, had left the bar with that crazy freak.
Wait right here
. It was about what she expected of him, really. Russell Harmon. She knew him through and through. Russell Harmon
was
this town, or at least the part that she’d been trying to leave. He
was
the life she’d lead here. And it wouldn’t be the life she’d dreamed of in his truck, the story that she’d told him. The cozy little house of her imagination would in fact be dingy and dark, with two small bedrooms and a tiny bathroom with bad plumbing, cheap vinyl siding on the outside, treeless yard and patchy grass, cardboard box of toys left out to crumble in the rain. But it would be a safe life for Hayley, with a father she could be sure of. And there was something about Russell Harmon that she loved.

So, on the other hand, Russell. She realized, with what she had to admit was a warm feeling inside her, that she was in fact waiting right here.

But then she had waited five minutes, ten. The man was still sitting across from her, though he had stopped talking. His eyes were on her low-cut blouse, and he was turning the matchbook in his fingers, making sure his muscles flexed. He had been the one to jump in when Russell was on the floor.

“How do you know Russell?” she asked.

He looked up at her with some alarm. “What?” he said.

“Do you know Russell Harmon?” she asked. “Do you know where he went?”

He looked down at the table and then out the window, and his mouth opened and closed, and a sour look took shape on his face, the wrinkles standing out around his eyes. Without a word, he left the table and went to the bar to join his friend.

It had been ten minutes, easily. She checked her purse to
make sure her cell phone was in there. She took out the phone and checked the time. After midnight. Too late to call and check on Hayley, because if her mother woke up she would start drinking again. She looked around the bar for Matt but didn’t see him. Where was the little man with the glasses, the one Russell had played darts with? He probably wouldn’t know where Russell went anyway. Maybe she should just walk out the front door to her car across the street and drive home. She grabbed the matches and lit another cigarette. When she finished it she stubbed it in the ashtray, grabbed her purse, and walked out the back.

The air was cold, the way it could get on clear summer nights, and she folded her arms in front of her and started walking fast. There was Tristan’s truck, the engine already running. As she approached the door, the streetlights came on. Standing there, she felt like she had just been spotlighted on a stage. She could see herself clearly, as if she were her own audience—there were the heels, there was the skirt, there the blouse she’d picked out, there the painted fingernails, the version of herself she’d put together so carefully. And yet she saw herself as disgusting and dirty. What was she doing,
really
? Was she actually going to sleep with Tristan, too? Who
was
Tristan but the remnant of an old idea, one she should have already forgotten? He would take her to the lake house, probably, but she didn’t really care. And if he wanted to talk, that was fine. And if he didn’t want to talk, that was fine, too. She was too tired suddenly to care what happened, just so long as he got her back to town first thing in the morning. There wasn’t any dignity left in her position, anyway.

Some movement on the bridge caught her eye, and her hand,
which had reached for the door, dropped by her side. There was Russell, coming this way. He stopped. He had seen her, too. They looked across at one another, each in their lighted spaces. At this distance, she could see his curly hair, almost read the words on his shirt. She wanted to go back in the bar and wait as he had asked her to. He could be there in one minute. Maybe he would hold his hand up right now to say,
I’ll be there
.
Wait for me
.

But that was weakness talking. The thing to do was get in the fucking truck. This was the moment when the losers were born, when the could-have-beens and should-have-beens were made, when the fault was exposed in the underlings. This was the moment when, facing the mirror, one averted one’s eyes, denied oneself and all the plans that had been laid.

She wished she were at home right now, looking in the mirror. She wished she could trust herself alone, but she didn’t know how to, couldn’t seem to get started that way. She didn’t want to look at either Russell or Tristan, so she looked off across the lake toward the faraway mountains, and she pictured her father there. He had gone off in his illness, walked into the woods to curl up and die like an animal. Or maybe it had been just the opposite. Maybe he, too, had suffered all those long years in silence, stuck in the house with her mother, maybe he had felt the quiet panic and hadn’t known how to end it, maybe in a moment of extreme determination he had stopped his truck on that mountain road and set off up the ridge in his brown suit and his dress shoes, headed for a life on the other side, where he was waiting right now for her somewhere, enjoying a glass of wine, two tickets in his pocket for the theater. The thing to do was quit being such a baby, get in the
fucking truck.

She reached for the door handle, but her eyes went to Russell on the bridge. God, the weight of these choices, the options held in a balance, the direction the scales would tip. Even now, she knew, it would take just one gesture from Russell for her will to dissolve, for her to give up everything right in this moment and do what her heart was telling her to. All he had to do was wave.

But here was Tristan Mackey opening the door, inviting her in, saying to her without words,
Come with me, to wherever I’ll take you
.

Russell Harmon breathed
a lot easier once he was out of Vince Thompson’s car and into the fresh air. He was glad to have the Vince Thompson nightmare behind him, and as he reached the bridge he was able finally, fully, totally, for the first time during this crazy Thursday night, to relax—to feel, in other words, like the real Russell Harmon. And yet he was a different Russell Harmon, he knew. He was like a new Russell Harmon who had been dug out from under a rock or released from an air bubble to rise to the surface of a stream. He was a Russell Harmon who had conquered his fears by beating Brice Habersham, and he was a Russell Harmon who had learned that he was the father of a baby girl—or a toddler, a year old, two years old? He couldn’t figure it out exactly.

But as he started across the bridge he took a few moments to try to get the rest of the evening straight in his head, because that was what this new Russell Harmon was all about, getting things straight. That was why he had broken up the fight between his father and Vince Thompson, that was why he had slipped Tristan the last bindle. Or maybe he had broken up the fight because it was embarrassing and strange and he had realized all of a sudden that it would be a good way to make Vince Thompson like him again and not kill him, and maybe he had slipped the bindle to Tristan because he was afraid the cops would show up. And definitely there was some wavering
when he got in the car with Vince Thompson, the idea of a line or two had sounded pretty good, but getting
out
of the car was definitely an instance of getting things straight—so he was confident now that he was headed in the right direction. The first thing to do was go back to the bar and meet Kelly Ashton before she got angry at him and left, which would probably lead to a cold reception when he went to her apartment tomorrow afternoon to see Hayley right after he got off work, or maybe he should take a shower first. Go back to the 321 and meet Kelly, have one last beer and a little chat, maybe discuss his visit with Hayley, come up with a game plan for how to go about introducing him into the family, because he knew it was something that would take some time, then walk Kelly out to her car and get her to go home before her mother, his mother-in-law now in a sense, and probably his actual honest-to-God mother-in-law sometime soon if things worked out the right way, burned down the building. And then after Kelly was gone, he would need to talk to Matt. He didn’t think he’d go into the whole explanation, he figured it would be best to save that for tomorrow morning’s drive in the truck, but he needed to make sure that Matt had picked up his expensive darts and his dart case, which he’d left behind in the midst of all the excitement. Then he would take Matt home and then he would go home himself and get some sleep, because Friday morning was going to be a bitch like always, even if he had ultimately laid off the coke and the beer more than usual.