And he stood there and got his ass wet for a while, it seemed to Russell, and Vince Thompson did not appear in the doorway to shoot him, and so Russell, tentatively, eventually, moved under the awning at the 321’s entrance, taking a peek now and then through the front door but never seeing much of anything. Fucking Tristan. Fucking Matt. Russell pictured the two of them in the bathroom snorting up the rest of the bindle he, Russell, had handed Matt, what . . . an hour ago? It seemed like about two days.
There was a flash of light in the sky and then a few seconds later thunder, and the rain began to pelt the awning with even greater intensity. Russell watched the rain hissing down under the streetlights and the wind whipping the birches by the parking lot. Maybe it would be best to just make a run for the truck and go home. He could say he’d gotten sick. They could still win the championship next week if they played up to par. But then what if they didn’t? And could he live without knowing if he could beat Brice Habersham? He turned his attention back to the bar. No Vince Thompson anywhere, which meant that he must be at a table back by the dartboard, the only area of the bar not visible from the street. And then he caught sight of Matt, sitting right there on a bar stool talking to Kelly Ashton. Kelly Ashton’s back was turned to him, but Russell thought he could see her head turn a little to the right while Matt talked, as if she were looking around for someone else. Him, Russell? Tristan? Probably Tristan. But now wasn’t the time to think about that. Trying not to look too much like a fool, he began waving one arm over his head, even jumped up and down a
little. He was just about to lean in the door and shout or whistle when Matt looked up suddenly and saw Russell’s face almost pressed against the window, and Russell motioned to him frantically to get his ass outside.
Matt excused himself, trying to look suave or some shit, practically
bowing
, for God’s sake. Then he came out the door and stood with Russell. “Holy shit,” he said, looking at the rain.
“You see him?” Russell asked.
“See who?”
“Vince,” Russell said.
“Vince Thompson?”
“Yeah,” Russell said.
“No.”
Russell craned his neck around to see as much as he could toward the back of the bar. Nothing. “He’s in there somewhere.”
“I don’t think so,” Matt said. “I would’ve seen him.”
“I
saw
him go in the door.”
They stood and looked in the window together. There was no sign of Vince Thompson anywhere. “So, what does that mean, then?” Matt said.
“The fuck you mean, what does it mean?”
“I mean, does that mean you quit? You gonna get the hell out of here?”
Russell scanned the faces, the backs of heads, leaning close into the window, which was getting speckled now with water coming in through gaps in the awning. Still no sign of Vince Thompson anywhere.
“We lost, by the way,” Matt said, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets.
“
What?
”
“We lost.”
“What do you mean, ‘we lost’?”
“We lost the doubles.”
“You
lost
the doubles?”
“We lost the doubles.”
“To those guys?” Russell said. “How?”
“We didn’t throw too good,” Matt said. He kept looking in the window—at Kelly Ashton, Russell realized now.
“What, you got a thing for her now, too?” Russell asked. “You and Tristan both? No wonder we can’t shoot worth shit.”
“No,” Matt said. “She just looks good. If you’re going to look at something, why not look at something that looks good?” He tilted his head up and squinted. “I’m getting wet,” he said. He sniffled. “You bring your nose spray?” he said.
Russell dug the nose spray out of the pocket of his baggy shorts and handed it to Matt. Matt turned his back to the window, glanced up and down the street, and took a hit up each nostril.
“You’re not wasting all of that, are you?” Russell asked.
“All of what?” Matt said.
“All of what-do-you-think?” Russell said.
“I don’t know,” Matt said. “‘All of what’ meaning the coke or ‘all of what’ meaning the nose spray?”
“The
coke
,” Russell said. “Who gives a shit about the nose spray.”
“I don’t know,” Matt said. “I thought you might.”
“No,” Russell said. “The coke.”
“No,” Matt said. “There’s still plenty.” He put the nose spray in the same pocket as the bindle and turned back to the
window. A couple of guys Russell recognized vaguely made a run for the bar entrance from across the street and ducked inside. “So what are you gonna do?” Matt asked. “I don’t think he’d shoot you right in front of all these people, would he? I mean, he wouldn’t just stand up and waste you while you were throwing darts or anything.”
“He’s bleeding,” Russell said.
“He’s what?”
“Fucking
bleeding
,” Russell said. “From like his nose and his mouth.”
Matt turned his head toward Russell. “How do you know?”
“Because I fucking
saw
him,” Russell said. “I told you that already. I saw him come right up the street in the fucking rain and his face was covered with blood and he was wearing his camouflage pants.”
Matt looked back in the window and started craning his neck like Russell had before. “That’s not good,” he said.
“No shit,” Russell said. “Not good at all.”
“He might shoot you if he’s wearing the camouflage pants,” Matt said.
“And
bleeding
,” Russell said.
“And bleeding,” Matt said. He looked at Russell for a second, looked at him closely as if he were trying to see him for the first time all over again, maybe. “I don’t think I’d go back in there if I were you,” he said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be playing singles right now?” Russell asked.
“We were waiting for you,” Matt said.
“Why?” Russell asked.
Matt shrugged. “You’re the captain,” he said. “You’ve always been there before.”
Matt would win his singles. There was no way he’d lose to that lame Kurt guy. That would put them up 2-1. But then what if Tristan, or more likely James, lost? Russell’s forfeit would mean a tie, which would mean that they’d have to win next week against the second-place team, Big Ed’s. If they lost to Big Ed’s—which wasn’t very likely, but still—that would mean a tie for the championship overall, and in the case of a tie, according to the dart league rules, the championship went to the team that beat the other in head-to-head competition, which would be Big Ed’s. If Russell skipped his match with Brice Habersham, he would lose the individual championship, and possibly the team championship, too. And if he ran from Vince Thompson now, what would stop him from just coming after Russell next week? And if he wasn’t going to play Brice Habersham, what did he have to look forward to anyway? He didn’t have any money, not to speak of, and he hated his job and he wasn’t very good at it, and he lived in the basement of his mother’s house, and he didn’t even have a father, really, not one that would count, and he didn’t have a girlfriend, either, and the one girl he’d probably most like to have for a girlfriend was in there now, getting up from her bar stool, he saw, and headed to the back of the bar, probably looking for Tristan Mackey. Russell wiped the rain from his face, his cheeks feeling hot despite the rain, his hand shaking a little bit. If he was going to get shot, he might as well go ahead and get it over with.
“I’m going in,” Russell said.
“Your funeral,” Matt said, opening the door.
A Thing of Beauty
The night Liza Hatter
drowned in Garnet Lake, Tristan Mackey did not dream of her at all. He didn’t dream anything that he could remember. In the morning, the lake house was bone cold, and he went out to the wood-pile and brought in an armload of cedar to start a crackling fire. He made a pot of coffee. He sat on the couch and put his coffee cup on the table and looked out the picture window at the lake, and it was only then that the fear caught up to him. It was a sunny day, the morning sun dancing on the water. And other than that there was nothing. Everything looked the same as always. But it was as if he could sink beneath the waves, recall his underwater swim of the night before, and underneath the water now he could sense the body of Liza Hatter, as if she were suspended beneath him, rising slowly, ready to tickle his feet. And in imagining her beneath the water he thought of her face, the way she had looked before going under. And it occurred to him that, in some odd way, he missed her already, even though he’d really never known her at all. Liza Hatter—she’d wanted to cuddle, she’d wanted to rent movies, she’d wanted to take a moonlight swim, she’d wanted to be a veterinarian. Liza
Hatter, whose eyes caught the moon as she slipped down into the lake.
He cleaned up, got rid of the evidence that they’d been there. He did it indiscriminately, stupidly, dumping her clothes and her purse into a trash bag without even checking for identification, money, a cell phone, and took the bag to the Dumpsters behind the vacation cottages at Garfield Bay Resort, then drove to his duplex in town, and, feeling heavy and dull, fell asleep again. But he woke very quickly from a half dream, half thought of her body floating ashore. Then he was back in the truck, driving to the lake house as fast as the narrow road along the cliffs would let him, and realizing now that he’d already made one big mistake, that today was his college graduation and he wasn’t there, and that that would certainly look suspicious if he were linked in any way to Liza Hatter’s disappearance.
But he wasn’t. Out at the lake house, there was no body. Over the next few days, there was no visit from the police, no phone call from a roommate or a friend who might have found some evidence of her whereabouts. When an article finally appeared in the Spokane paper, one day short of a week since Liza Hatter had drowned, there was no mention of anyone seeing her with a tall, good-looking, shaggy-haired young man, no mention of her in the passenger seat of a black pickup truck headed north out of town. There were no clues whatsoever. The time of her disappearance had been placed at Thursday afternoon. The last person to report seeing her was a psychology professor, to whom she had turned in a late paper Thursday morning. There was speculation that she might have found a ride to her hometown in southern Idaho for the weekend. A photograph accompanied the article—it showed the Liza Hatter Tristan
didn’t particularly care for, her features a bit too sculpted, a bit too aloof.
At times fear hit him in a gust. His head spun into some weird orbit, usually when he woke from dreams. Then he would throw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and drive to the lake house. Once there, he slammed on the brakes in the gravel driveway, took long breakneck strides down the trail to the water. But again there would be no body. And standing on the dock looking out at the sun-bright water his hands would start to shake, his fear passing from his heart into his fingers, where he could almost feel it tremble into the air.
He did a hundred little things wrong, he knew. He quit going to his guitar lessons, though he managed to show up for dart nights. He hardly talked to anyone, including his family. He used his computer to look up information on forensics, on the rate of decomposition of bodies in water, files that the police could find. He was seen at the county library perusing certain books. He drove back and forth to the lake house obsessively. He smoked more than he ever had. He spent a lot of time swimming, diving underwater to try to reach bottom at different depths, particularly over a certain spot. Eventually, he moved his things out to the lake house, told his parents he needed some time alone, asked them to stay away. They indulged his whim in the way they always had. He stood for long periods at the end of the dock, looking out over the water. He read the newspapers every day. He failed to get a job. He kept spending his money. He didn’t fill out applications for the Peace Corps or the international teaching program he’d spent so much time looking into. He didn’t touch base with his professors or his friends. He didn’t shave. He had an aimless
look about him. Some days he didn’t get out of bed. On several occasions, he picked up the phone to call the police, but, phone in hand, he failed to come up with an explanation for why he hadn’t called before. Liza Hatter had looked pretty. He had been tired. Everything had seemed so quiet. There hadn’t been anything wrong.
He drove to Moscow. On a cloudy day he walked around town, stopping before telephone poles, stopping before streetlights, stopping before bulletin boards, stopping before store windows, looking at the posters that named Liza Hatter a missing person. Surreptitiously, he took one of the posters down, and later taped it to the inside of a closet door at the lake house. He went to the library, lingered at the table where he’d talked to her. He drove by her apartment, slowing almost to a stop. He went to the convenience store, made small talk with the clerk about Liza Hatter’s disappearance. He’d done all these things wrong, he knew, but no one suspected him. Not yet. But he prepared himself for the day when someone would, opening the closet door each morning to reveal Liza Hatter’s picture—the same one they’d used in the newspaper, her head tilted back, her red hair flowing, the version of her he found distasteful—and standing naked in front of his mother’s mirror, studying his breathing for signs of agitation, observing his facial expressions, practicing the words he would use when someone, anyone, finally asked him,
Are you a friend of Liza Hatter’s? Have you seen her recently? Do you know she’s disappeared?
But the longer he stood there the more the words refused to come, and he wouldn’t think of anything, staring at the picture and then staring at himself, watching his chest rise and fall with air.
Strangely, though, he felt pretty good most days. He was,
almost always now, Tristan—almost always himself. When he sat or stood at the end of the dock, sometimes for hours, waiting for Liza Hatter to appear, because according to the statistics it might be days, it might be weeks, it might be never if the water were cold enough and deep enough, the world moved by peacefully, the sun rising or the sun going down, the waves pricking up in the wind or the lake lying flat and calm, the temperature rising or falling, the slow passing of a cloud, and he could be Tristan, just Tristan, apart from everything, one moment to the next.