The Dart League King (14 page)

The laughing and the chattering continued, and the drunks at the front of the bar let out a whoop that was picked up by some other drunks, setting off a rattling in Russell’s skull that made his lips buzz and his teeth clench, and he wondered where Vince Thompson was, and if he was one of the people
yelling, letting loose his murderous war cry.

Then there was someone standing in front of him. Russell’s eyes were beginning to adjust, and by the dim light through the back window he could make out that it was someone about Vince Thompson’s height, and his blood thrummed through his veins with the coke, and he thought about how disappointed his mother would be when the autopsy revealed the presence of drugs in his system.

“Russell?” It was Brice Habersham.

“
Quiet
,” Russell said. “Please.”

There was a pause, and the bar had calmed down a little, and then Bill the bartender yelled out for everyone to stay put while he got some candles. Russell wondered why he hadn’t announced this before, but then realized that it had been only thirty seconds or so since the lights went out, even though it seemed like two days.

“Why?” Brice Habersham said, in a bit softer voice that almost hinted at sympathy. “You in some trouble, Russell?”

“Maybe a little bit,” Russell whispered. “Nothing too much.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Brice Habersham said. “A young man like you . . . ” he said, and then didn’t complete the thought, leaving Russell to wonder what sort of young man Brice Habersham meant. The kind of young man who had just received an ass-whupping at cricket, probably. Brice Habersham had no doubt seen a lot of those guys. “What would you like to do?”

There were maybe a lot of things that Russell would like to do if he lived to see tomorrow—find a way to pay Vince Thompson the money he owed him chief among the things that came to
mind—but he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do right
now
. “Uh,” he said, “I think it might be best if I just stand here.”

There was a little glint of light along the gold frame of Brice Habersham’s glasses. “I mean about the dart match,” he said.

The dart match. It rose up suddenly, a beacon of hope, something that Russell could get his mind around, something familiar, even if he was getting his ass kicked. “I want to finish it,” Russell said.

Russell saw Brice Habersham’s arm move, and then there was a small blue circle in the dark, a light from Brice Habersham’s watch. “I’ve got about a half hour, hour tops,” he said. “Let’s hope they get the lights back on soon.” He reached out and put his small hand on Russell’s shoulder, patted the shoulder gently, then turned around and walked off. The pat had been so delicate that it made Russell want to cry, even if Brice Habersham turned out to be a fag or something.

Then came Bill the bartender with a candle, and there was a circle of yellow light from the table nearest Russell, and he sank back against the corner of the wall. The tumor in his gut gave him a violent stab, but then he saw something amazing—the table where Vince Thompson had sat was empty. In a minute Bill had candles lit all around the back room, skinny white candles sticking up out of glass globes, rather classy Russell thought, and he grew happier and happier at having the leisure to think such things as the light reached farther and farther, revealing that Vince Thompson was nowhere to be found. Matt and James came up to him and Russell started to explain about the dart match, about the half hour, hour tops, and then in the warm candlelight there was Kelly Ashton approaching—not
smiling, but deliberately approaching him nonetheless. She stepped between Matt and James and, without a word, took Russell’s arm in her soft hand and led him to the back door. Russell hesitated just a moment, scared of what might be waiting for him out there in the dark. Kelly Ashton opened the door and pulled Russell after her, and as Russell scanned the bar one last time for Vince Thompson, he fell prey to a rare flight of fancy—the candles looked like tiny men with their heads on fire, waiting for someone to save them.

Tristan had wandered off
to the bar, and he hadn’t come back, and so now Kelly Ashton’s eyes and thoughts turned to Russell Harmon, because
something
was going to happen tonight, she’d determined that much, and after all Russell had always been, somewhere in the back of her head, Option B, or Option C, or Option D, one of those options further down the line in the space below Option A, which most of the time remained a bit hazy and undefined, just something
more
, but which had lately come to be Tristan Mackey. But with Tristan acting so strangely tonight, Russell was at least worth investigating. She hadn’t seen him in a long time, and maybe he had changed, or maybe he hadn’t—she wasn’t sure which she was hoping for. But it was worth finding out.

By the time she had taken his hand and led him out the back door the rain had almost stopped, the last few big drops
splashing down in scattered fashion as if, having completed its work of knocking out the lights in town, the storm could now die peacefully or rumble off to some other place. Still, she was getting wet, and her hair would be a mess, and she didn’t want Tristan following her, supposing he gave a damn. So she guided Russell past the wooden chairs and tables and out across the lawn and through some knee-high shrubs into the parking lot.

“Where are we going?” Russell asked.

“Your truck,” she told him.

Russell’s truck smelled like empty beer cans and cigarettes and something else she couldn’t quite name—maybe sweat, though she had a hard time imagining Russell sweating. At the moment the smells didn’t disgust her. They were more or less what she’d expected, the familiar atmosphere of Russell. She set her purse down firmly on the emergency brake, as if she intended to stay awhile.

“What are we doing?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she said. Russell rummaged in the jockey box, holding up CD cases and peering at them in the moonlight, then plucked one out and put it in the player, some goopy, mellow music she immediately couldn’t stand. Russell Harmon’s idea of romance. “Turn on the light,” she said.

The cab light came on, fuzzy and dim, and she looked at Russell. His curly brown hair was soft and light, hanging down loosely around his eyes and over his ears and down his neck to the collar of his T-shirt. It was Hayley’s hair, exactly. And she could see Hayley, too, in the round shape and rosy color of his face. The pale blue eyes were his own. Hayley’s were more green, wider, like hers. The grin that curled up the corner of his
mouth was wholly and typically Russell.

“Why’d you grab me like that?” he asked. “We go like two years without talking and then you come and kidnap me.” He stretched his heavy legs out around the steering wheel and put his right arm on the back of her seat and turned toward her, as if he expected her any minute to lean over and give him a blow job. Stupid Russell.

“Do we have to listen to this shit?” she asked him. Some guy was singing some horribly maudlin thing about saving time in a bottle, as if you could do anything with time other than fight it, try to stop it from going by so fast.

“Un-unnh,” he said. “It’s my mother’s, anyway. I thought it was something else.” He turned the truck key and the CD lights went off and there was silence. He turned off the cab light and it was dark again. “I kind of don’t want people outside to see me,” he said, and his head took a turn looking out all the windows, bobbing up and down trying to pick through the shadows.

“I brought you out here to tell me a story,” she said. Russell laughed, that loud sort of cocky chuckle that she was supposed to find endearing. And she did, at least a little bit. “What kind of story?” he said.

“You remember, you used to tell me stories.” They would lie in bed in Russell’s apartment before or after sex and she would drape her leg over his and he would recount the details of his high school football games and there was one story about how when he was a kid he’d peeled and eaten all the Easter eggs before his mother and Uncle Roy had had a chance to hide them and one about seeing the Garnet Lake Monster when he was out fishing with Uncle Roy and one about a hunting
trip, which was her favorite. “You remember you told me once about the first time you shot a deer?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sort of.” He was looking at his big hands on the steering wheel.

“Tell me that story again,” she said.

So he did, he started telling her, and she remembered why she liked the story, which was because it had made her like him. How he felt like he hadn’t even been shooting the buck, like he wasn’t even out in the woods, like it wasn’t even happening, and then how when the buck lurched he had thought it was because of the noise, and then its white tail had flickered and it had started to scamper uphill, but then its legs didn’t seem to work, and they crumpled up under him suddenly, and then he rose but the legs crumpled again, and he lay down on his side and you could see his belly heave, and Russell had wanted to cry but he couldn’t because his uncle Roy was there. Yes, she remembered the story, and yes, it made her feel the same old way, but she grew impatient before he could get very far.

“I want you to tell me a different story, Russell. I want you to tell me a story about me.”

He laughed again. “What do you mean?” he said. “I don’t know any stories about you.”

“You don’t?” she asked, looking at the curls of his hair, the only thing she could make out about him there in the dark.

“Once upon a time there was a girl named Kelly Ashton,” he said, “who always burned the bottom of pancakes.”

She sighed. It was impossible to get what you needed from people. “I want you to tell me a story about you and me,” she said. “I want you to tell me a story about how you and me and Hayley would live in a little house, a nice clean little house,
right here in town, and what we would do there.”

“Whoa,” Russell said.

“Tell me
that
story, Russell,” she said, her head burning now, beginning to get angry. “You
tell
it to me.”

“OK,” he said. “
Jesus
. Calm down.” Then he tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel. Then he looked out the windows again, bobbing his head up and down. What the fuck was
wrong
with people tonight? They were just sitting and talking. They weren’t even doing anything. “OK,” he said finally, and sniffed hard and tried to clear his throat. “You and me and Hayley—is that your baby?”

She was tempted to say it—say the word
your
, say the word
our
. “Yes, that’s my baby. Only she’s really more a toddler now.”

“What’s the difference?” Russell said.

“She walks and talks. She
toddles
.”

“OK,” Russell said again. “You and me and Hayley, we would live in a nice little house right here in town.” He stopped, looking over at her, checking to see if he was getting started correctly.

“Go on,” she told him.

“It would be a clean house,” he said. “Because we would keep it clean.” He stopped again. It was like pulling teeth. She thought of him with the notebook wire stuck up his nose that day in English class, while Tristan Mackey was sitting somewhere in the back of the room, thinking about destiny.

“Well, you and Hayley would hang out there during the day while I was at work. You would, you know, play stuff, like little games. Then late in the afternoon, or like in the winter when it was already dark outside, I would come home.” He grabbed
at his pants near his crotch and tugged on the seam, getting himself comfortable, she supposed. At least he seemed to be trying to think. “I would take off my boots and socks and leave them by the fire.”

“Would we have a fireplace or a woodstove?” she asked him.

“Um,” he said, “a fireplace?”

“OK,” she said. “Keep going.”

He rested his elbows on the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. “Then I would maybe sit on the couch and you would sit in a rocking chair that we would have. And then . . . oh, I guess this is maybe before you made dinner. Which would be pancakes.” She could feel him smiling at her. “Then, like, Hayley, she would kind of walk around between us, back and forth, and she would talk. And we could maybe watch TV. And I would have a couple beers.”

He leaned back in his seat and dropped his hands to his sides and his head was pointed down. That was the end of the story, then.

“That’s it?” she said. “‘We could maybe watch TV,’” she said, mimicking him in a way that made him sound, she knew, more than slightly dumb. “‘Maybe have a beer.’ Russell, you’re describing every night with my mother.”

“Well,
I
don’t know,” he said, raising one hand in the air, the fingers spread. “What the fuck are you asking me this stuff for? What’s going on here?”

“Use your imagination,” she said. “Come on. How hard can it be? ‘I would come home, Kelly, and we would have a nice antique couch and we would lay on it with you tucked up under my arm, and Hayley would climb up on top of us and lay there,
too, and we would all laugh and enjoy each other’s company. And we would get Chinese takeout, and then later when Hayley was in bed we would split a bottle of wine and watch a foreign movie, and then we would listen to music together or read a book to one another, and then we would go to the bedroom and make love, and we would be happy.’ Why don’t you say
that
, Russell? Why don’t you tell me
that
story? I wasn’t asking where you’d put your shoes and socks.”

For a second she could sense him looking at her, dumbfounded. “Yeah,” he said then, in a softer voice. “All right. That’s a good one. I kind of like that story.” And he stopped talking, staring again out the windshield. And just when she was about to give up, just when she was about to open the door to go back inside and find Tristan Mackey, he said one more thing, uttered the magic words. “We would live in the little house and we would all be happy and I would never leave.”