And so his heart struck up against his chest like a little hammer and his fingers pulsed strangely, and throughout the first game, while Tristan kept them in it, throwing better than he ever had and sauntering over to the table to talk with Kelly Ashton between turns, Russell missed and missed and missed.
Somehow, with Tristan nailing bull’s-eyes and Slade shooting just about the worst darts Russell had ever seen thrown in the Garnet Lake Dart League, they managed to win the cricket game. Tristan won the cork from Slade for 301 and doubled in on his first dart and again held up Russell’s end of things with Brice Habersham breathing down their necks despite his worthless partner, so that finally the score stood at 32 for the 321 Club and 42 for the Monsters, and it was Russell’s turn to shoot. There was about a fifty-fifty chance that Brice Habersham could finish the game off from 42, and Russell had three darts in his hand to make the chances zero, and Tristan
had left him double 16, the perfect out in 301. Russell had hit double 16 a thousand times, but now his first dart stuck in the 8 about four inches from where he’d aimed. He shifted to double 12 then, with 24 remaining, and his next dart missed the board entirely.
It was perhaps the most embarrassing moment in Russell Harmon’s life—for Russell, at least, although anyone who knew him well could probably have picked out any number of events that
should
have been greater sources of embarrassment—and for the first time ever he broke rhythm and stepped back from the line. The back of the bar was entirely silent. From up front, he could hear the music from the stereo, some old country shit that Bill had put on. Out the window the sun had crept down and Russell saw the branches of the birch trees in silhouette against the orange sky and on past that the evening light on Sand Creek. Everyone was waiting. He could feel the eyes of Tristan and Kelly Ashton boring into his back, their conversation stopped now, and to his right Matt stood there looking at him, eyebrows raised, hand in his pocket fingering the bindle he hadn’t given back to Russell yet. To his left stood Brice Habersham with his arms crossed, eyes still on the board as if there hadn’t been any interruption of play, as if nothing unusual were occurring, darts in his right hand, the flights clacking together, waiting to see if he would shoot again this game. In his own right hand Russell held one dart, and if he hit a double 12 he could put an end to the stupid fucking doubles match and go outside to his truck for a good long line and a chance to get his head together. With nothing more than that in mind he stepped up to the line and threw, and just like that the first match was over and he was receiving handshakes
all around and downing a beer and smoking a cigarette someone gave him while the other guys warmed up for the second doubles match, and it was almost like he had never panicked at all. Strange.
James and Matt were still in the early stages of their cricket game when Kelly Ashton got up to go to the ladies’ room. Something occurred to Russell, what you might call a plan. He walked over and sat with Tristan at the table. Tristan was holding one of the crappy house darts he threw with, examining the design on the flight as if it held some interest for him. “Why were you looking at me funny when I came out of the bathroom?” Russell said.
“What?” Tristan asked, looking Russell up and down like he might have to fight him in a minute.
“Why were you looking at me that way?” Russell said again.
Tristan shrugged. “You were in there an awful long time.”
“And?” Russell said.
“And I guess I wondered if you were holding,” Tristan said, leaning over the table.
Russell scooted back his chair, grabbed his mug off the table, chugged what was left of it, and set it down empty. “I am,” he said. “Come on.”
Tristan glanced toward the restrooms.
“She’ll be here when you get back,” Russell said.
Jack the Fucking Dude
Vince Thompson
was forty-two years old and he lived all by himself in a one-bedroom apartment above Gillespie’s Hardware on Third Street, and that was good enough for him. Problem was that the new Home Depot on the outskirts of town had run Gillespie’s out of business finally, and now his friend Chuck, his fucking supposed
friend
Chuck, who owned the building, was leasing the fucking apartment right out from under his ass because the new people who leased the downstairs, some computer firm that developed software or some such shit, some of this new high-tech crap that Vince knew absolutely nothing about other than how to find porn on the Internet, wanted his upstairs apartment for “executive office space” and were willing to pay double what Vince paid in rent. And so fucking Chuck, this is the same Chuck who, when they were in sixth grade, hit Vince with an iceball on the play-ground after school and scratched the cornea of his left eye, and then his fucking dad, Vince’s fucking dad, the hardcore Vietnam air force colonel asshole, had said Vince was being a baby and didn’t need a doctor, and before he changed his mind the eye was infected and next thing you know Vince is half
blind for the rest of his life and it probably caused his fucking hard-ass father about two goddamn seconds of actual fucking sorrow and worry when he was away on his monthly duty down at the base in Mountain Home and found out about it when he called the house to make sure his goddamn wife, Vince’s mother, the perpetually aproned maternal unit, the goddamn dinner-cooking, floor-sweeping, dish-washing, feather-dusting, vacuuming-the-carpet-to-within-an-inch-of-its-fucking-life
fool,
was holding down the so-called fort while he was gone—now this same Chuck, who you have to admit pretty much ruined Vince’s life with the goddamn iceball, I mean think about it, because how’s a twelve-year-old kid supposed to hit a baseball with no goddamn left eye to speak of, how’s he supposed to see a pass coming on the fast break, how’s he supposed to run a crossing pattern when a) if he’s going left to right he can’t see the defender, and b) if he’s going right to left he can’t see the goddamn
football
, and now he has to make new friends because he’s not on the goddamn high school sports teams, not a big-ass jock motherfucker, and so he has to start hanging out with the potheads in the parking lot and smoking dope at lunchtime so his grades go down the shit hole and he can’t get into college and he’ll be
damned
if he’ll go into the service, and not even to mention the self-confidence factor, which pretty much goes down the goddamn tubes when he’s sitting on his bicycle seat and trying to pick up on some adolescent girl with fresh nipples poking through a bikini top and legs as long as sunshine down at City Beach, Vicki Ashton her name was, and now she’s a drunk-ass single grandmother if you can believe that who lives across town but at the time she was a fine piece of teenage ass if ever there was one, and then his goddamn
left eye starts doing some goofy shit, he can feel it like
drifting
around uncontrollably in the socket, and consequently he pedals away on his cheap-ass bike that his cheap-ass dad grumbled about buying him for his eleventh birthday and it’s already too goddamn small for him now but the old man won’t buy him another one till he’s at least fourteen because where the fucking hell does money grow, on trees? And then he’s never quite the same. So right, this goddamn Chuck who ruined his life in the first place, who he was decent enough, who he was
white
enough, to actually forgive and become friends with, is now going to set his ass out on the street after ten fucking years of model citizenship with the goddamn rent always coming on time, not late even
once
, and now he’s got the nerve to look at Vince out of the corner of his eye—which Vince can barely see him doing, by the way, because he’s standing to Vince’s left—has the nerve to say to Vince that it’s too
risky
to have him here anyway.
Fuck
him.
So now Vince Thompson would have to clear his shit out—his guns, first of all, the Beretta and the Lugar, the Bushmaster semiautomatic and the Winchester 30-30 and the Winchester 12-gauge and the Japanese Nambu pistol from the Korean War that his father, the son of a bitch, gave him on his eighteenth birthday, and the other ones he couldn’t remember at the moment, along with the assorted knives and sabers and shit, and the various paraphernalia, the scales and the razor blades and the baggies and the baby laxative, and what little furniture he owned, the old beat-up couch and kitchen table and shit he’d inherited from his dead grandma, or not really inherited, because no one wanted the cheap-ass shit and his asshole father wouldn’t give him any of the good stuff, anyway,
saying how he, Vince, didn’t
deserve
it, and then giving all the good shit to his motherfucking brown-nosing older brother Douglas, named after General Douglas Mac-fucking-Arthur no less, and the futon he slept on in his bedroom and the computer and the three thousand or so CDs that took up pretty much every square inch of the apartment along with his bitching stereo, his incredibly awesome music collection, all the old classic stuff, sure, but also kick-ass new stuff that even these fucking kids around here hadn’t heard of with their goddamn Britney Spears and their
boom-de-boom
hip-hop, like some sad nigger off the street with no musical ability whatsoever and a stupid name like DJ Tony T or some shit could hold a candle to, would be fit to wipe the
ass
of, some major musical genius like Miles Davis or Coltrane, truly revolutionary dudes who changed the fucking world, who made it into a proper badass place where things were called by their fucking right names, where a spade was a fucking spade, and then afterward you could
have
your kick-ass rock and roll, your Stones and your Nirvana, and more and more kick-ass motherfuckers who also knew what the world was about, violence and anger, and the best you could do was set it to a beat and a hummable tune and they weren’t afraid to say so, now he was going to have to take all his shit, all this valuable shit, across town to live in the apartment complex he managed part-time, where the goddamn landlady, the wheezy old half-dead bitch with her respirator and shit, Mrs. Krum, who lived across the street and was always riding over on her little four-wheeled moped contraption, what did they call the thing, My fucking Buddy?—yeah right, her little goddamn four-wheeled friend, he practically had fucking
dreams
, I shit you not, about the old biddy forgetting
to look both ways and being plowed over by a dump truck, always riding over to make sure he was keeping busy, clipping the hedges or fixing a toilet or posting late-rent notices, he was going to have to move into the goddamn complex, into apartment no. 2 right next to the kid with his pregnant girlfriend and all the goddamn yelling and abuse, he’d had to call the cops on them just last week, and the old goddamn landlady was going to take his rent out of his paycheck, which would make it seem like, disregarding the logic here, because it was the
feeling
that mattered, he was working practically for free, even though the job was just a front, basically, a way to explain how he had some cash while the
real
business, the real fucking
business
he ran, the narcotics operation responsible for the fucking forty thousand dollars he had stashed in a locked box in a closet in his old room at his goddamn parents’ house, and which was eventually going to get him the fuck
out
of this piece-of-shit town, went along its way, although things were making Vince Thompson nervous lately, there was a shitload of stuff going back and forth across the border, and his goddamn supplier, Fred, this dude he’d been getting his shit from for upwards of ten years, suddenly seemed to be getting, like, delusions of grandeur, like talking all the time about how his business was fucking
expanding
, and how he wanted Vince to
come on board
more than he had been,
get inside the loop where the big money was
, where what Vince wanted was to just keep on toodling along his merry fucking way, not taking the big risks, the shit that would get you caught again, like he was back in the early nineties when he’d had to do a six-month stretch at the state pen and he
didn’t ever
want to go back there, no
fucking
way, especially since the old man’s lawyer wouldn’t get
his ass out of the proverbial sling next time around, the old man had assured him of that, he would be doing serious time, so shit no, no thank you, you could just leave old Vince out of the big money, he’d just go on making his money slowly, slowly, because that way he could sleep nights like he hadn’t for a while, partly because of all the fucking meth on the streets now, this homemade cheap-ass shit that Vince wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, all these amateurs cooking up this shit in their trailers out in the fucking boonies, but primarily because of this dickwad Russell Harmon, this goddamn addicted fuzzy-brained numb-nuts who wouldn’t pay his legitimately accrued debts, and who Vince Thompson was starting to get the idea, was starting to see the signs, was just the sort of limp-dick motherfucker, chickenshit, pantywaist, to go blubbering in a goddamn fright to the police and make a confession that would send Vince Thompson up the river, and
then
, since he
couldn’t go back there
, he’d have to sell out Fred, no fucking choice in the matter, and then the shit would get
majorly
serious, we’re talking witness protection program, no fucking lie, and Vince could just see his lower middle class ass parked in some fucking vinyl-sided nightmare in the middle of goddamn Nebraska, working at the elementary school as a goddamn janitor the rest of his life, cleaning up after the fucking first-graders who didn’t know to lift the goddamn toilet seat, and when things got
this
bad, when they got so bad that you actually found yourself
hoping
that your friend Fred was a big enough supplier to get you into the federal witness protection program when you ratted on his sorry ass, Vince Thompson figured it was time to make a decision, time to make a fucking move, and as far as he could see the goddamn limited options were these: a) cancel Russell
Harmon’s outstanding debt, say good-bye to Fred, and get out of the business alto-fucking-gether or b) take his 9mm Beretta and find a good way to just jack this Russell Harmon dude, and then get the fuck out of town. And right now, on this particular Thursday night, watching the sunset out of his upstairs apartment window, Vince Thompson was leaning toward the latter.