So Russell pushed the thought of Vince Thompson aside, leaving it for the nightmare hours. The thing to do now was prepare for Brice Habersham. But when the open mike guy had finished setting up and gone to the bar for a beer, and Russell
and Matt had resumed their 301 game, Russell experienced a strange kind of heightened feeling, a feeling that the colors of the dartboard and the dart leaving his hand in that smooth motion and the solid thunk of the dart entering the board at just the spot he’d intended it to and the taste of the beer and the coke at the back of his throat were all just a bit more precious when there was a man with a gun hunting you. It was similar, perhaps, to the feeling he’d had when he rolled the skidder down a cliff last month and nearly killed himself.
James and Tristan and the first couple of guys from the Monsters team showed up at about seven thirty. Russell had just the right edge on by then, so he excused himself to the men’s room and let the other guys warm up. He locked the door behind him and pulled the first bindle and his keys from his pocket. He unfolded the bindle carefully, dipped the end of his house key into the coke until he’d accumulated a satisfying little pile, carefully lifted the key to his right nostril and inhaled, then repeated the procedure with his left. His eyes watered a little bit, and he rubbed them with the back of his hand, feeling the coke pass through his nasal cavity. He ran water in the sink and got his fingers wet, then put his fingers in his nostrils and breathed deeply, letting the water push the last of the coke up his nose, then he checked the mirror to make sure there wasn’t any white stuff showing. Someone knocked on the door and he called out just a minute. He splashed his face with water and yanked paper towels from the dispenser and wiped his face. Then he dropped the paper towels in the trash and unlocked the door. It was Tristan waiting outside.
“You ready?” Russell said, and fake-punched Tristan in the ribs, and Tristan eyed him funny. Back at the dartboard he
slipped the bindle out of his pocket and tapped Matt on the arm and placed the bindle in Matt’s hand, and Matt’s hand went to his pocket and he headed to the bathroom.
Russell watched the Monster guys warm up. He knew them all—an older guy named Tim who bartended at the Monster and a guy named Slade who was the same age as Russell, twenty-three, but who had graduated high school a year ahead of him because of Russell getting held back in first grade, and some dude named Kurt who worked for Brice Habersham at the gas station he’d bought when he moved to town six months ago or so. None of them were any good. Russell wondered when Brice Habersham would show up. It was fifteen minutes until the match was supposed to start, and they needed to go over the lineups.
He watched the Monster guys throw at bull’s-eyes and miss outside the triple ring until he couldn’t stand it anymore, just the sheer ineptitude, the embarrassment for the dart league as a whole, the very idea that a player as good as Brice Habersham would even allow such people on his team. He looked at their stupid shirts. They looked like bowling shirts, old man shirts—Habersham had probably picked them out of some catalog. They were red with button-up fronts and collars, and stencils of the Garnet Lake Monster, which looked like a cross between a blue whale and a dragon, across the back. The Garnet Lake Monster didn’t look anything like that. Russell knew; he’d seen it once, when he was out in a boat fishing with his uncle Roy. According to local legend it was something like the Loch Ness Monster, but Russell thought it was more like a giant sturgeon, some ancient relic from days gone by. He’d seen old photographs of a sturgeon they’d fished from the Snake River
long ago—a massive fish hauled up from the bank by a chain attached to the rear of a flatbed truck. It would be some strange creature like that, living in the deep water of the lake, far down there where only the glaciers had ever reached. He hadn’t
seen
the monster, actually, that time with Uncle Roy—just the long ripple in the water without explanation, the strong impression that there was something huge underneath.
Russell bought a couple of pitchers of beer and brought them back to the table. That would get the camaraderie going, and camaraderie was one of the main things about dart league. It didn’t matter if it cost a little extra money every week to promote that. James and Tristan were warming up now, and it was almost eight o’clock, and Brice Habersham still wasn’t there. Russell watched Tristan throw. He was the new guy on the team, just joined this spring when he came home from college. They had known each other since grade school, Russell and Tristan, but never that well. Russell was a jock, mostly, a second-string tight end on the football team, while Tristan was the intellectual type, but cool intellectual—into cool music and movies and books. He’d always wished he’d known Tristan better, to tell the truth, and this year’s dart league had been his chance. And yet he still didn’t know Tristan very well. He showed up on time for the matches and took his playing seriously enough and drank beer with the rest of the team and laughed every once in a while and generally took part in the conversation. But when the matches were over he’d shake hands with everyone and leave, or, if it was a home match, go up front to listen to open mike night, sometimes sitting with the open mike host himself, who was teaching Tristan how to play guitar.
So it had been a little disappointing, having Tristan on the
team. But he had gotten pretty good, hadn’t he, Russell thought. He watched Tristan cluster a nice group at the 20—two in, one just outside the wire—and noted again how if he would just shorten his throwing motion, keep the dart in front of him instead of pulling back to the side of his head . . . but then he’d gotten pretty good anyway. Better than James now, who’d been on the team since last year, and getting to the point where he could just about challenge Matt. Russell supposed it had something to do with intelligence—how even if his motion was a bit off, Tristan had the power of concentration to
will
the dart to the spot he wanted. In fact, when he watched Tristan’s dark brown eyes focusing on the board, he became a little reluctant to point out to him again the thing about the throwing motion—no telling how good he might get if he fixed his mechanics and practiced more.
Eight o’clock on the nose now, and still no Brice Habersham. The guys on the Monster team had no idea what might have happened to him. Technically, Russell could call for a forfeit. Technically, the dart league championship could be wrapped up for a third year right here, right now. Russell just had to say the word—you forfeit. But he didn’t want to, didn’t have even the least desire to, even though taking that route would offer the additional advantage of allowing Russell to slip out of the 321 before Vince Thompson came looking for him there, if in fact Vince Thompson planned on tracking him down tonight. All week long Russell had thought of nothing but his match with Brice Habersham. Out in the woods he had thought their match through, visualized the outcome, convinced himself over and over that what he saw on the inside of his head (shaking hands with Brice Habersham after he’d nailed the
bull’s-eye in Around the World—“Hey, man, I got lucky,” he’d say, trying not to smile too big) would become a reality. In Brice Habersham’s gas station, you could see them up on the wall—big trophies from Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville. Not the kind of lame trophies they had made up at the sports shop for the dart league award nights—
real
trophies, heavy motherfuckers, the kind they handed you along with a check. Beating Brice Habersham would make the Garnet Lake Dart League legitimate—
Local Boy Beats Former Professional, Whole Town Basks in Glory
.
And so Russell resolved to wait fifteen minutes, and he informed the assembled dart league members of his decision, and he had James note the time on his watch and appointed him official timekeeper.
Two things happened before the fifteen minutes were up. First, while Russell was checking the entrance every ten seconds or so for Brice Habersham, Kelly Ashton came in. Russell hadn’t seen her in maybe a year, and he hadn’t talked to her in maybe two. She had dark brown hair and breasts as large as grapefruits, and Russell knew certain things about her—that she cried out very loudly when she reached orgasm, which she did easily, and that she liked to hold you tight when you slept together, and that in the morning she wasn’t very good at making pancakes, the mix still adhering in spots where she hadn’t stirred it enough and the bottoms slightly blackened. This had been back when he had his own apartment, when he worked for the satellite TV company, long before he’d had to move back in with his mother. Kelly Ashton’s arrival complicated things. The fact that her eyes were very blue and her bottom teeth were just a little bit crooked in a cute way when
she smiled and her breasts were as large as grapefruits—that she looked really
good
in the way women looked really good when you hadn’t seen them in a long time and were suddenly reminded—created an additional distraction. She sat at the bar and ordered a glass of wine and saw Russell right away and smiled at him ruefully, and it was enough to drive Russell to the bathroom for another bump, even at the risk of upsetting his equilibrium, even though he had to open the second bindle because Matt still had the first one in his pocket.
The second thing that happened was that Brice Habersham showed up, breezing in at 8:13, according to James’s watch. Brice Habersham claimed there had been a little incident of nonpayment at one of the gas pumps, and he had needed to wait around to describe the offending vehicle to the police. Russell doubted it. He had a tendency, in fact, to doubt virtually everything Brice Habersham ever said, unless it had to do with darts specifically, an area in which he never doubted anything Brice Habersham ever said, having seen all the trophies, having seen Brice Habersham once accept reluctantly, after much prodding, a gentleman’s bet (because, he said, he only played for money in officially sanctioned tournaments) that, given three darts, he couldn’t step up to the line with his eyes closed and hit a bull’seye, and then having seen him hit not one, but two. But there was something about Brice Habersham that made Russell feel he was otherwise full of shit. Maybe because he was a little guy, no more than five-six tops, and because unlike most other little guys Russell knew, he didn’t seem to feel the need to talk big. Maybe his appearance—his graying hair so short and neat, the gold-rimmed eyeglasses he wiped with a clean white handkerchief every minute or two, the pressed slacks, the polished
shoes, the aforementioned primly collared team shirt, with his name stenciled in script above the pocket. Maybe how he was so calm all the time, maybe how he drank his beer so slowly, never finishing more than one or two, maybe how he never laughed at anything but always smiled politely, maybe how he always shook his opponent’s hand and said so sincerely, “Nice game.” Russell didn’t trust the son of a bitch as far as he could throw him.
But he was here now, and the match could start. And that—he was going to have to admit it to himself here in a second or two—made Russell nervous. And Russell was not the nervous type. He went over the lineup sheets with Brice Habersham, then swallowed half a mug of beer in two long gulps and excused himself to the bathroom. Taking another bump from the second bindle, he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, the curly brown hair, the face gone slightly pudgy, the cool blue eyes that had won him most of his girlfriends, and told himself that he would be fine, that he would be back in here two hours from now having a celebratory line to mark another championship, but he couldn’t quite make himself believe it.
When he returned to the board, the situation was even worse. Because he’d been late, Brice Habersham refused to take warm-ups, so the first match, with Russell and Tristan paired against Brice Habersham and that Slade guy who couldn’t hit the board if he were shot at it from a cannon, was on
right now
, and Russell had imagined loosening up with another half glass of beer or so. And then there was Kelly Ashton, seated with her legs crossed in a short skirt at a table just behind theirs, apparently there to watch the dart match, and Tristan was sitting next to her in a way Russell didn’t particularly like.
He hadn’t seen Kelly Ashton in a long time, probably because she’d had a baby a while ago, he couldn’t remember exactly how long, and there’d been some trouble with the father, he’d heard, some guy from out of town who apparently had decided to stay out of town more or less permanently after the baby was born, and so, Russell suspected, Kelly Ashton probably didn’t have much chance to get out and about anymore. Which was sad, because she looked damn good, and because she looked damn good he didn’t quite like the sight of her huddled up there with Tristan, and he started wondering if maybe Tristan had invited her downtown for dart night, if this might be their idea of a
date
, and so he said to Tristan in an unusually angry tone, “Tristan, you playing darts tonight, or what?” And Tristan glanced up from his conversation with a look of either surprise or amusement on his face, Russell couldn’t tell which, and said, “I’m here,
El Capitan
. Just call me when it’s time.” A serious breach of dart league etiquette—it was a
team
game, dammit, and you sat with your
team
, not some brunette with nice legs and slightly crooked lower teeth and breasts as large as grapefruits. Russell tried hard now not to look at or think about Kelly Ashton at all.
So he and Brice Habersham threw a cork to see who went first in cricket, and Russell lost, and Brice Habersham stepped up nonchalantly and hit a triple and a single 20, putting Russell and Tristan one number down and 20 points in the hole to begin with. And then Russell stood at the line and it was like something strange and new was happening inside his head, it was almost, for a second, as if he could feel or hear a sort of grinding, like unoiled gears rubbing together, and he shook his head slightly to clear it, clear it of Brice Habersham and Kelly
Ashton and Vince Thompson and whatever else was causing that
screeching
noise inside there, and then standing at the line he wondered, for the first time in his life, how it was that a person was supposed to throw a thing such as a dart anyway—it was as if his motor memory had suddenly been erased. You put your fingers around the barrel like so, he seemed to remember, and you made a little circle with your thumb and forefinger to indicate exactly where you wanted the dart to go—that had always been his own little trick, the secret to his success—and
then
what the hell? You were supposed to make the dart stick in that tiny pielike sliver under the 20? Jesus fucking Christ—it seemed impossible all of a sudden, and sure enough his first dart went just wide and the next two were worse.