The Dart League King (8 page)

And there he was, sitting alone with a glass of beer at a little table surrounded by wooden chairs. And there was a moment—too short, but definitely there—between them in which she could tell he was glad to see her. He leaned back in his chair, his eyebrows went up, and a slight grin spread across his face. His eyes went for a second from her tight shirt to her bare legs, but then just as quickly back up to her face, he always looked at her face and she liked him for that, and she remembered then being with him at the lake house, the moment after she’d first undressed, when he’d had a chance for appraisal after wondering all these years, and even then he’d seemed more interested in her eyes. That had been a nice moment, before he’d seemed to drift off, and now there was a nice moment again.

He said hello, she said hi. “It’s a good night,” he said, whatever that meant. And then he just sat there. He looked out the
window. This was both the attractive and the unattractive thing about him, his tendency toward silence. It was nice not to have to say something all the time, just to be able to sit with someone, not have to fill up the space with words. But sometimes you wanted to talk. And when he was quiet it was as if you couldn’t say anything, as if you weren’t there at all, as if only Tristan were there, Tristan and the world inside his head. He could go away for minutes at a time, so that the only thing that seemed to exist was whatever went on in his head, and you were just a sort of absence waiting to become present again. It was this sense of having vanished that explained why she’d never gone out with him back in high school when he’d been so in love with her—that and the fact that he’d never asked her to.

So this was how it was going to be—hello, hi, it’s a good night, stare out the window, start all over again at square one, as if they hadn’t been together for the first time just a month and a half ago, as if that shouldn’t have meant something or didn’t amount to anything after all these years. She wasn’t hurt by this, just exasperated. Tomorrow morning she would have to go back to work, drop Hayley off at day care and drive up the mountain to the ski resort, sit at a desk while the summer sun shone out the window and make phone calls, try to sell condos, try to sell family ski passes, try to sell vacation packages, try to convince people in the outside world she longed to go to that they in fact needed to come here, and she would want to scream into the phone
Don’t be stupid!
She didn’t have time for silence tonight.

But she couldn’t think of anything to say. So she looked out the window too, because what was out there was more interesting
than the people throwing darts at the dartboard. Out the window were birch trees, and Sand Creek, and boats, one boat with green and red lights on the bow slipping quietly up to a dock right now, the waves gentle behind it like a soft stream of air, and on the other side of the creek the small parking area, and then past that the lights of the city beach, and beyond that, even though you couldn’t see it from here in the bar, the lake itself, the reason all these people first came here, the reason there was a town here at all. And then she could see way off in the distance the Cabinet Mountains, black against the fading sky. What if you could just fly off, what if you could just lift yourself up from the table and go right out that window, fly off right above the creek and the beach and high up over the water, sailing through the evening sky with the mountains coming closer, growing bigger, and what if you could soar above the peaks of that range until you found a skeleton in the trees, maybe in the thick brush by a stream, a skeleton wearing a coat and tie, wearing just the right socks to match. Would that accomplish anything? Or what if you could sail on past those mountains, what if there weren’t any skeleton at all, what if you could trace where that man had walked over the mountains, where he’d walked into Montana, where he’d grown a mustache maybe and renamed himself Rupert, moved on to Chicago, started a chain of clothing stores, and was waiting right now for something he couldn’t put his finger on, the name of something he’d left behind, a daughter he’d somehow forgotten? Would that make a difference?

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Russell, back from the bathroom and approaching the dartboard. And Tristan, she saw, was watching her now. “You get that look on your face,”
she said to him. “Where
are
you when you’re like that?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” he said.

Russell was talking to a little man with gold-rimmed glasses. The man took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead. “Maybe,” she said. “But I asked you.” Russell and the man went over to a table and looked at some sheets and Russell laughed, not his natural laugh, not the one she knew.

“
El hombre que desaparece
,” Tristan said. He picked up the pitcher in front of him and poured himself a glass of beer but didn’t take a drink.
El hombre
—the man. But what was that last word? She’d taken two years of Spanish. She should know. Tristan leaned in closer to her, raised his eyes to her, looked like there was something he wanted to say.

“Tristan, you playing darts tonight, or what?” Russell called out. He sounded angry, and Russell was never angry. What was wrong with everyone tonight? Maybe it had something to do with her and maybe it didn’t.

“I’m here,
El Capitan
,” Tristan said, smiling, still looking at her and not Russell. “Just call me when it’s time.” He took a drink of beer and set the mug on the table.
Desaparece
—what was it? “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you want to get out of here?”

Now maybe they were making some progress after all. “Out of this bar, you mean, or out of this town?”

“Either,” he said.

“All the time.”

“Really?” he said.

Really. Now Russell threw a dart and the man with the glasses threw a dart and then there was some kind of brief discussion and she was afraid any second Tristan would get called
away from the table. “All the time,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. You’ve been gone for four years.”

“But still—”

“No,” she said, “you don’t know.” She leaned in closer. “Are you saying you want to
stay
?” She didn’t mean to sound angry, but if Tristan Mackey thought for one second that he intended to stay in this town, she was going to slap him. If there was one person in her whole life whom she’d ever been sure about, ever known for sure would move on to bigger and better things, it was Tristan. She wanted to make sure he stayed put long enough to get accustomed to having her around, to grow fond of Hayley, to come to think of them as a family, and not a second longer.

“Most of the time I don’t even realize I’m here,” he said. “It’s like I’m not anyplace at all, I mean it’s like I’m somewhere in my head but not actually in a physical space.” He took up a cigarette pack and a lighter from the table, lit a smoke.
Desaparece
. He sat there smoking for a few seconds, his foot tapping. “Does that make sense?”

“Sort of,” she said. “Not really.” What else was she supposed to say? He could sit there and stare at her accusingly all he wanted to, but if she didn’t get it, she didn’t get it. And she wanted him to sound comprehensible.

“I get focused on one thing inside so that I can’t see the things outside it,” he said, “and then I feel like that one thing inside is the only real thing, and that outside of it I’m not really anyplace.”

“OK,” she said. “Got it.”

“And then there’s a night like this. Everybody’s just hanging around, and I’m in a pretty good mood and not thinking about
a lot of things, and then you come walking in”—he motioned toward her with the cigarette, the cigarette taking in the hair she’d fixed just so, the eyebrows she’d plucked just right, the tight blouse that maybe wasn’t too tight after all, the skirt and her legs underneath—“and you look good, and I remember what you’re like, and it’s like I’m coming up from under the surface somewhere, like I haven’t been able for a long time to breathe and look around.” He looked down at the floor, took a drag, cleared his throat. “And so, yeah, then it seems like life has possibilities.”

All right, so he wanted her to rescue him—a good start on the personal commitment front, if not the emotional and psychological. But she could work with that. She leaned in to say something and then Russell called to him in an irritated tone. “Hold that thought,” he said.

And so she did. She wanted to go places and do things, and she had decided that the person to go places and do things with was Tristan Mackey, and even though he sounded a little depressed and not quite like himself tonight, she wasn’t going to give up due to some slight trepidation on her part, was she? She should look at it as an opportunity—he was feeling a little low, and she could be the one to raise his spirits. She thought of this while they threw their darts, while she found herself for some reason watching Russell more than Tristan, maybe because there was something wrong with Russell tonight, too, Russell who might be stupid but was always relaxed and easy, never tense, never
intense
, like he seemed to be tonight, but thinking of Tristan, and wondering if she could say to him, maybe say,
Do you remember that time in English class, the time you talked about the stars?
Oh, she’d practiced lines like that,
she’d practiced, there in front of the mirror, staring straight ahead, not a single muscle of her body or her face moving, saying lines silently and with no expression, filling the script of a hundred movies simply with the thoughts in her head, a secret performance undertaken in a little room with a fucked-up mother outside the door, a father nowhere to be found, and then when a baby was napping, her baby breathing lightly behind her somewhere in the room, maybe sensing her mother’s dreams.

Once she had gone so far as to attend an audition for
My Fair Lady
at the community theater, convinced that she would make the perfect Liza Doolittle. She sat there in a seat in the old converted movie theater, and she said the lines in her head, knowing exactly what they would look like and sound like onstage, but she left before the director called on her, sensing that if she went on that stage and uttered a sound there would be some gap, some violation of the perfect form she imagined, either in her execution or the shabby nature of the whole production itself. Maybe she wasn’t destined to do something like that in her life. But every life should be its own drama, and hers, such as it was, thus far had the unhealthy feel of budding tragedy rather than romance. Tristan Mackey could help change that. But could she tell him about all these things? Could she trust him to have enough imagination?

When he came back to the table he had completely forgotten their conversation and simply sat there staring out the window. And then she started thinking to herself how ridiculous it was that she needed anyone at all, a Tristan Mackey or anyone else, to get the hell out of here, but she couldn’t do it alone with Hayley, had known that for a long time even though
she’d imagined scenes of she and Hayley driving, just the two of them going down the road, just she and Hayley like water flowing out into the whole wide world.

And when Tristan was entirely done with his silly game he came back over to her and sat in the chair but he might as well have been on the moon. His eyes were that far away, that far gone. He didn’t even know she was there. “Tonight,” he said suddenly, “might be perfect.” Perfect for what? He reached in the pack on the table for a cigarette and put the cigarette to his lips and lit it without ever looking at anything. He grimaced for a second, as if he were frustrated at not being quite able to get hold of something. Then his eyes were blank again, and she was sure he didn’t even know he’d been speaking to her.

She felt that tingle she’d felt in English class, but not a good tingle this time, not at all. The root, what was the root?
Desapara
. . .
desaparacer
. To
disappear
. Tristan Mackey, the disappearing man. It was true. He’d vanished right before her eyes. She grabbed her purse and headed to the bathroom. Safely inside, the door locked, she fumbled for her cell phone, called home, made her mother get Hayley, made Hayley say, made her say it three times,
Hi momma
,
Hi momma
,
Hi momma
, made Hayley make everything OK, made Hayley make sure that everything at home was the same as it always had been.

So there was Vince Thompson.
It was raining like bejeezus, and Russell Harmon wanted to get back inside and get back to his match, to get back to Brice Habersham. But here was Vince Thompson approaching in the rain. And what was more horrifying, what really stopped Russell in his tracks, was that Vince Thompson was
bleeding
. You could see it in the streetlights—the puffed-up face, the black-looking blood from the mouth and nose. And if Vince Thompson was
bleeding
, then that meant he would be
angry
, bleeding and angry, and Russell remembered all the times Vince Thompson had talked about how he would
blow motherfuckers’ asses away
and
waste those goddamn pieces of shit
. Russell knew he was one or the other, a piece of shit or a motherfucker, and he could easily be wasted or blown away, right here, right now, on First Street.

So he thought it best, under the circumstances, to stop. He also thought it best to cower, to duck, maybe to run away, but he didn’t, possibly because he couldn’t seem to get his body to work very well all of a sudden, couldn’t seem to find his legs there under his stomach. There went Vince Thompson, bleeding, looking at Russell. There he went toward the door of the 321, and the rain made a rasping noise on the pavement, not much different from the noise that had gone on in Russell’s head when he tried to throw darts just a while ago against Brice Habersham. Vince Thompson looking at Russell, Vince Thompson walking and not shooting even though his hands were in his pockets and
Jesus
, he was wearing the camouflage pants, that was a bad sign Russell knew,
that
meant he was in his motherfucking-goddamn-asshole-military-father mode. Vince Thompson appeared to be walking right into the 321, and there was Tristan too, running, getting farther and farther away from Russell, like someone fleeing the scene of a crime, or running directly into it. It was like a math problem, Russell had time enough to think, strangely, since he had never been much interested in math problems before—if Person A, Vince Thompson, walked to the bar at the rate of such and such and Person B, Tristan, Tristan-who-now-owed-Russell-something-because-he-had-snorted-Russell’s-cocaine, ran toward the same bar at the rate of so and so, would Person C, Russell Harmon, have time to address a question to Person B, running away in the rain at a certain speed, before Person A killed Person C? “Tristan,” Russell shouted. “Could you get Matt to come out here?” And then Tristan disappeared into the bar and then Vince Thompson, still looking at Russell—and was he smiling, shaking his head?—disappeared into the bar, and Russell was
alone on the street. And
man
was his heart pounding. And he was getting his ass wet, too.