The Dart League King (5 page)

“You know what I like about you?” she said.

He told her no, he didn’t.

“You’re so calm and quiet,” she said. “It makes me feel safe.”

And that pleased him, because he had cultivated for a long time a calm and quiet outward appearance, all the way back to art class in junior high school when he sat next to Kelly Ashton, quiet then because he was too shy to talk and not much worth looking at, an exceedingly skinny kid with a mouthful of metal braces and a fairly bad case of acne, and Kelly Ashton had told him much the same thing one day that Liza Hatter had just
told him now, that she liked how he was confident enough not to have to make noise all the time like the other guys, and right then he had decided that, if Kelly Ashton liked it, this calm and quiet thing was worth looking into, especially since he had the quiet part down already and could master the calm part over time.

So he was feeling a little more kindly toward Liza Hatter as he ambled toward the dock, unselfconscious of his body because he knew women liked it, and dove easily into the water, counting away the freezing seconds as he went underneath, saying to himself
a thousand one a thousand two a thousand three
as a way to get through the part where the cold went to the bone and then could start to work its way out again. When his head popped above the surface he heard a splash behind him, and then just seconds later a high squeal and Liza Hatter saying, “Oh my God oh my God, it’s freezing,” and he smiled, knowing he had been right, that she would retreat as fast as she could to the dock and probably run to the house for a towel. So he went under again, pulling with long strokes against the water, and he started thinking in Spanish, which he did occasionally—
agua fria, agua negra
—and when he came up he let out his breath and shook the hair from his eyes and started swimming in long strokes out into the lake, thinking
lago oscuro, una noche de estrellas
.

He could not recall hearing anything as he swam, nothing other than his own sounds and the music still audible over the water, Ray Charles singing faintly “A Fool for You,” and he allowed himself to enjoy the thin sliver of moon high in the sky and the way it was reflected in the tiny waves always just ahead
of him, and he thought he could go on swimming like this for hours, though he was already numb under the water.

Then he heard her say, “Tristan.” And he heard her actually laugh a little, a nervous laugh, a shy laugh, as if she realized she’d been caught doing something stupid. He turned to her in the water, saw she had followed him all the way out, was maybe fifty feet or so behind him, the dock and the house a long way back, the cliffs of the cove actually closer on either side, he noticed quickly, because he knew what was wrong even before she said so, was already calculating the difficulty of paddling to the rocky bank with her arms around his neck. “Tristan,” she said again, with a desperate edge to her voice this time. “Tristan, I’m out too far. I can’t feel my legs.”

And quietly, calmly, he began swimming back to her. He came closer, closer, close enough to see her now clearly, and when he was within several feet of her, he stopped. He could see her try to come toward him, but she managed only a kind of rough, jerking motion, and she went in up to her forehead and then lifted her face again, choking and coughing. She managed to say the word once more—“Tristan?”—the last thing she ever said to him. He was perhaps two arm-lengths away, treading water, watching her intently. Because something had happened to her face. The moonlight shone on her directly, and he could see the water in her dark hair and on her cheeks, and her mouth opened and closed in little gasps. Her green eyes were huge, almost glowing. In the black irises, he could see the white crescent of the moon. Very pretty, he thought. He could even love her, maybe, if she looked that way all the time. But then she went under the water, softly, and did not come up again.

Standing back on the dock, naked under the stars and shivering, he could still see her pretty face almost perfectly, as if it hovered near the moon.

In the truck
Russell Harmon slid in his Led Zeppelin CD, hoping that would impress Tristan, who was, after all, even if he was trying to hook up with Kelly Ashton right under Russell’s nose, the coolest guy Russell knew. At least that was what everybody in town seemed to think. Russell skipped tracks to his favorite song and heard the familiar dirge-like opening while he slipped the bindle from his pocket, and he wasn’t sure what the hell instrument those guys were playing, but it sure did sound fucking great.

“‘Kashmir,’” Tristan said, his head nodding slightly, his lips kind of screwed up to one side. “A classic, of sorts.”

Of sorts
. What the fuck did
that
mean? Russell unlatched the window to the canopy and felt around back there until he had hold of the mirror. He shook out most of the blow from the bindle and chopped it up with his maxed-out credit card and severed it into two long lines and handed the mirror to Tristan and pulled a ten from his wallet and passed that to Tristan, too, holding everything low and scanning the street and the parking lot for cops.

Tristan held the mirror on his lap and the bill in his hand and didn’t move. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I’ve never done this before.”

This confession surprised and pleased Russell. He took a certain pride in introducing people to this, his new hobby, but he hadn’t expected to have the pleasure with Tristan. So now, in an almost avuncular fashion, he instructed Tristan to roll up the bill and hold the mirror up with his knees, take half the line up one nostril and then switch to the other, wipe his finger across the mirror and run it along his gum line when he was through.

Before Tristan passed the mirror over, Russell had a chance to inspect the world outside the windshield again, and he wasn’t so much looking for cops, he realized, as he was looking for Kelly Ashton, and as a dark-haired woman passed by on the sidewalk his heart did a little hop, skip, and jump, and he wasn’t sure whether that meant he had hoped the woman was Kelly Ashton (it wasn’t) or hoped the woman was not Kelly Ashton. On the one hand, if it were Kelly Ashton leaving the bar, that would mean, first, that she wouldn’t be around to watch him shoot darts against Brice Habersham, and that would be a good thing, he supposed, because he couldn’t quite not think about her as he stood at the line, couldn’t quite not imagine what he looked like to her from her place at the table. But wouldn’t it be nice to have her there if he won? If she understood the significance of his beating Brice Habersham, that is? But he definitely couldn’t beat Brice Habersham if he kept shooting the way he had in the doubles match, with that awful tight feeling in his arms and that constriction in his chest, and maybe Kelly Ashton had been partly responsible for that. And so yes, he thought, a little wave of fear and anxiety taking him at the realization that, soon now, he would have to go back in there and play Brice Habersham again, this time
mano a mano
, with
the singles championship at stake and maybe the team championship, too (although that seemed less likely, Matt and James were probably in there right now putting the finishing touches on the second doubles game, which would mean the Monsters had to win three of four singles matches to tie the match overall, which was impossible given the fact that the other guys on Brice Habersham’s team were what amounted to dart retards, so that the team thing really wasn’t a factor), it
would
be a good thing if Kelly Ashton weren’t there. And, also, if she left the bar now and went home, it would mean she hadn’t cared enough about talking to Tristan to wait around. But wouldn’t it also mean she didn’t care enough about the possibility of talking to
him
?

Russell cut down the volume on the tunes—it was a great song, but it sure went on a long time—and took the mirror from Tristan, watching Tristan run his tongue along his upper teeth, listening to him sniff. “How’s it treating you?” Russell said.

“Can’t tell yet,” Tristan said, and the look on his face made Russell laugh his big, jolly laugh, the laugh that made people like him more than they probably would have otherwise.

“Give it a minute or two,” Russell said. Tristan didn’t say anything. Russell took his line in one swift snort up the right nostril, shut his eyes tight when they started to water, wiped the mirror clean and put it back through the canopy window, got his nose spray out of the jockey box because he’d need it later.

“Mind if I have a smoke before we go back in?” Tristan said.

Russell said sure, and bummed one for himself. He didn’t smoke very often, but he could get used to it if he had to. They
sat there smoking and not talking and staring out the windows at nothing, more or less. Matt was probably on his singles match by now, which meant that Tristan had to get back inside pretty quick, since he was up next. Russell rarely missed any part of one of the league matches, and he tried to remember why he’d asked Tristan to come out to the parking lot in the first place. Something to do with Kelly Ashton, of course, but what had he hoped to accomplish just by getting Tristan out of the bar for ten or fifteen minutes? It wasn’t all that clear.

“You ever think about living somewhere else?” Tristan asked. He blew a steady stream of smoke from his mouth, his head tilted slightly toward the side window, maybe glancing out at Sand Creek and the marina.

“No,” Russell said. But actually he had, once. That was back when he was working for the satellite TV company, traveling around the Northwest to put up dishes for hotels and restaurants and other businesses. They had been in Seattle, and the job was installing a huge dish on top of the Bank of America Tower, the tallest building in the city. They worked close to the edge, seventy-six stories above the ground, and Russell was scared to death of the wind, of the almost limitless space he felt around him, the sheer height, the feeling of being so far up in the world. Several times he’d been afraid of blacking out and falling, imagined floating unconscious toward the pavement, dreaming pleasant dreams on the way down, and he had refused the temptation to shut his eyes tight. Only after they’d finished the job had he been able to relax and breathe. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and felt the crisp air go in and out of his lungs and suddenly found himself calmly looking around. He was on top of everything. All the
buildings of the city stretched out below him, moving far away and up and down the hills, and there was a ferry out in the Sound, and Mount Rainier high and proud in the haze, and the Space Needle, miraculously, somewhere down below. And he thought for a moment that it was a hell of a city, and that one day he might like to live there. But fifteen minutes later, drinking his first beer at a bar down the street, he’d already forgotten all about it, and he hadn’t remembered until just now, when Tristan had asked. “Or not really,” he said. “Why?”

“Just wondering,” Tristan said. He dragged on his cigarette and flicked the ash out the window, still not looking at Russell. “What do you plan to do here, I mean. You going to work for Matt your whole life?”

“Fuck no,” Russell said. “Logging’s bullshit.” He took a deep puff on his smoke and held it in, feeling his head buzz pleasantly. He should definitely take up smoking. It went very well with cocaine. “Die fucking young out in the woods, man. Dangerous shit.”

“Why do you do it, then?”

Russell shrugged. “Job’s a job.” What he meant was it was the only job he hadn’t been fired from. “Pretty soon I’m gonna be working out at Evergreen. Good benefits. Work four tens, get Fridays off. None of this Friday-morning-work-with-a-hangover shit.” A couple weeks before, he’d gone and talked to a guy he knew out at Evergreen Lighting Designs, a place where they made expensive wooden lights for landscaping, but no one had called him yet and, to tell the truth, he had been just as afraid of the band saws and the jointers as he was of the chain saw and the skidder. When he was walking out of the building, the hum of the saw still reaching his ears in the parking lot, he had
thought it was time to admit, maybe, that he just wasn’t very mechanically inclined, and it might be a better idea to sign up for an Internet course in business administration.

Tristan stared at the dash, his jaw clenched. He was feeling the coke now, Russell knew. “So that’s it?” he said. “Russell Harmon, guy who makes lights for peoples’ circular driveways? You’re happy with that?”

“Sure,” Russell said. “Why not?” He tossed the question out casually, or that word that meant you weren’t really expecting an answer, but then he wondered if maybe there
should
be an answer, an answer from Tristan, a smart guy who’d graduated from college with a degree in what was it, some kind of foreign language. But Tristan didn’t say anything. “What about you?” Russell asked.

Tristan laughed through his teeth, kind of a hiss. He sat up straight in his seat and looked at Russell for the first time in about five minutes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about hanging around here a bit longer.”

“And doing what?” Russell asked.

Tristan shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing. At least not until I have to.”

That made sense to Russell, since it had basically been his own philosophy for quite a while now. It was enjoyable to have this sort of discussion with Tristan Mackey, to figure out areas where they saw eye to eye. Still, he had a hard time seeing Tristan with his ass parked in Garnet Lake, Idaho. It was Russell’s impression that Tristan was meant to do unusual things in places that Russell had never heard of. “But if you
were
going to do something,” he said, “what would it be?”

“Around here?” Tristan asked.

“Anywhere.”

Tristan tossed his cigarette butt out the window. “Could do a lot of things. Go to South America and teach. Join the Peace Corps. Go to graduate school.”

Russell nodded eagerly, as if he understood all this. “Fuckin’ A, man,” he said. “Sounds like a plan.” But then he figured he’d better shut up. South America—that was the country down below Mexico, or a
continent,
it was. It had countries
in
it, Brazil and Argentina and a couple other ones, and lots of trees and one of those really big rivers, like one of the big three,
los tres riveros humungos
, the Amazon or the Nile or the Mississippi, but not the Mississippi. Tigris-Euphrates—he remembered that from social studies, but what was it? Did it have something to do with South America? Better not ask. And the Peace Corps—that was where they sent you to Africa to feed the starving kids. It was like the army, only without guns. He’d talked to a girl once, in a bar in Boise, whose parents were in the Peace Corps while she was growing up. She told him they ate roasted beetles for snacks. He’d fucked her, too, that same night at his friend Rick’s apartment on the hide-a-bed. She was wild, he remembered, like she still had some Africa in her. Graduate school—that was where you went to learn how to be a professor. That much he knew. “But hey,” he said, “it’s a good thing you’re around now.” He smacked Tristan on the thigh with the back of his hand. “Good to have you on the dart team. Thanks for making up those score sheets.”