Go check on
his daughter
. The woman was
smoking in the house
. She was
drunk
. “Do you need to go home?” he said.
Kelly Ashton shook her head and held up a finger to say hold on. She shook her head again—
Good. OK. Don’t fall asleep on the couch, Mom. Go to bed. Yes it does make a difference it
does.
You’ll fall asleep on the couch with a cigarette and burn down the building. You’ll
. . . listen
to me, Mother
.
The woman was
burning down the building
. Shouldn’t someone be alarmed? Russell made a dart-throwing motion and did a little pantomime with his fingers, like the Indians used to do to explain things to the white men in the old Wild West movies—walk many moons, reach land over the mountains where buffalo cavort in the long grass—to show himself walking to the board, playing darts with Brice Habersham, then coming back to Kelly Ashton and
taking Kelly Ashton home
, or if not taking her home then at least participating somehow in the process of home-going. Kelly Ashton went into a head-nodding routine, as if this all made sense to her. “Are you sure—” he
said, but she nodded again and put a finger to her ear so she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
He turned stiffly to the dartboard and some sort of bustling ensued, people choosing seats to watch the show. Then he was playing darts with Brice Habersham, what he had come down here for tonight. They were playing 301. He’d lost the cricket game, and if he lost 301 he’d lose the match. No individual championship, and the team championship would still be at risk next week. He told himself these things, but they were part of some forgotten belief system, some religion for which he’d worn out his fervor. Russell Harmon was dimly aware that he was losing, and he didn’t really care. He had a vague recollection of doubling in to start the game, of shooting darts and subtracting numbers on the chalkboard. But the photograph was burning a hole in his shorts. He couldn’t think about anything else.
He stood at the line, darts in hand, and he stepped back for a moment and looked at Matt, who puffed out his cheeks and raised his eyebrows.
Tough going
, his look seemed to say. Russell turned around and looked at Kelly Ashton. She met Russell’s gaze and smiled politely. Bored. He thought about calling the whole thing off, just quitting. Look, he would say to all assembled, I just found out we—he would indicate Kelly Ashton—had a baby together. But her mother is burning down the building. I think I better see her home.
Then Matt started clapping. A steady clapping, like the hoofbeats of a horse. “Come on, Russell,” he said. He nodded at Russell, who stood at the line with his arms at his sides. “You can do it, buddy.” He quit clapping and cupped his hands around his mouth, as if he could direct the words straight
into Russell’s ear, and said a little more softly, although still loud enough for everyone, including Brice Habersham, to hear: “Remember you’re the fucking Dart League King.” Then he clapped a couple more times for emphasis, as if he were reminding Russell of who he was and what it was that he could do if he could remember how to do it.
Almost the whole back of the bar was filled with spectators, standing with their arms crossed or sitting at the tables with the candles lighting their faces. Even his father had been drawn from the bar by whatever was going on, most likely not realizing that Russell was involved, but holding his ground now along with Vince Thompson’s dad, both of them yucking it up over some stupid joke, trying their best to make it look like they weren’t paying attention. Probably they were scoping out Kelly Ashton, whose chair they were standing behind, and Kelly Ashton’s breasts, which they could conveniently get a peek at. And right to the side of Kelly Ashton, Vince Thompson had pulled up a chair. No one sat at his table with him, for obvious reasons. He was grinning at Russell out of the side of his mouth in a way that Russell didn’t particularly care for, but he didn’t look like a guy who was ready to shoot anyone at the moment. In fact, strangely, he resembled someone watching a dart match.
All these people, all these faces, turned to him expectantly while he stood there with the darts in his hand. Even the faces of Brice Habersham’s teammates seemed to be encouraging him, as if those teammates, despite their dart-league affiliation, were secretly hoping that Russell got the job done:
Out-of-Town-Guy-Former-Professional Moves to Area, Buys Out Convenience Store and Nice Home in Nice Neighborhood Poor Local Losers
Can’t Afford, but Can’t Buy Victory over Dart League King (or At Least Not So Easily)
.
So they wanted him to throw darts, that much seemed clear. So OK. Maybe he could do that. Russell turned to the board, let his eyes adjust to the candlelight, raised his arm and made the little circle with his fingers around the fat part of the 20, and then let the dart go. The board thupped. A single 20. He closed the circle around the triple 20 and threw again, and, almost without waiting to see the result, again. Each dart had hit where he aimed it. 140 points. How easy it was. You just let the dart go where it wanted to. You could just about go to sleep. When he used to come back from hunting with Uncle Roy, cold and wet and smelling of dirt and sweat and damp wool, they would go to PJ’s for a “relaxer,” according to Uncle Roy, and Russell—twelve years old, fourteen years old, sixteen—would go to the back where they had the old beer-stained pool table and the beat-to-shit dartboard, and while Uncle Roy drank at the bar, talking to the worn-out fake-blond bartender (Uncle Roy’s “girlfriend”)—Russell learned to play darts, throwing and throwing while his boots steamed away by the baseboard heater where he’d placed them to dry, slowly becoming mesmerized by the easy repetition of the motions involved, barely able to keep his eyes open but still plunking darts into the board. That was what it felt like now, almost. One time in particular when he and Uncle Roy had come back to town without having managed to shoot anything, Russell woozy as an old dog, throwing darts like a sleepwalker, one of the old guys had come back to challenge him. “Hey, Roy,” Russell heard the guy say after the game was done. “Too bad he can’t make a living shooting darts, your nephew.” It was the first time Russell remembered
feeling that he knew how to do something right.
And Brice Habersham seemed to be struggling, at least for Brice Habersham. He kept tilting his head at odd angles when he threw. He wasn’t finishing the game off as rapidly as he should have. And now, as Russell fell into the pattern of stepping up to the line and throwing, it wasn’t as if he were actually
thinking
—no, but he was beginning to feel something, something opposite from the constriction in his chest and his arms that he’d felt earlier in the evening, something in the center of him that involved the memory of throwing those darts in the dim and musty bar when he went with Uncle Roy, the peaceful dizziness he’d felt in the truck cab on the way there, half sleeping while the snow swept up at the windshield, spinning him gently into space while the rattling heater and the hot chocolate in the thermos his mother always packed warmed him outside and inside, something old and half forgotten, a comfortable feeling in his body’s memory that he could do this thing, the thing that lay before him, in this case beat a man whom he knew he was no match for, not as a dart thrower and not as a person probably, either, a steady polite man who never got ruffled or angry and who said things like “Good darts” to you when you were beginning to kick his ass—as Russell seemed to be doing now, strangely enough—a good man, probably, who took both his victories and his defeats quietly without resorting to boasts or excuses, who certainly wouldn’t need all the pandemonium that was breaking out around Russell now to make him feel good, even though Russell was glad to see that everyone was on his side, it was nice enough to see, but this growing feeling was of more importance, more important than the fact that Kelly Ashton still seemed vaguely uninterested,
more important than the fact that his own father was appraising him in earnest now, possibly for the first time, or that he had absolutely no idea what the look on Vince Thompson’s battered face meant, no, the feeling was more important than all that, because if the feeling that he could do this thing, that he could beat Brice Habersham, held true, then maybe he could do other things too, maybe he could actually be the Russell Harmon he’d imagined when Kelly Ashton had told her story about the cozy house and the little girl who would climb on his chest, put her head down there and go to sleep. Maybe he could actually be that man and not the one who sat in the truck cab afterward looking at her picture and feeling, he knew now, that there was so much distance between the Russell Harmon he’d become and the little girl that it could never be covered, that his intentions would carry him only so far, and that it would not be enough to change his life or hers. Maybe Russell Harmon did not actually think any of this, but he felt it in the slow raising of his arm, the eyes that sought the target each time he threw.
And before he really even knew it, he had beaten Brice Habersham in 301, and the match was all even. Matt was behind him, grabbing his shoulders, slapping him on the arm. Russell didn’t want to look at anyone else, though the back of the bar sounded like it was full of happy people who were excited by what he’d done. Matt was the only one who understood, Matt, who had talked strategy with him all week, who had helped Russell keep his confidence up, who had given him the easy job running the backhoe today so he wouldn’t be exhausted, who, win or lose, would be there at Russell’s at 5 a.m., idling the logging truck on the street—the only alarm clock Russell needed—while Russell struggled blearily into his dirty jeans,
his ragged T-shirt, his pitch-stained work boots, Matt, who would tell him good morning and hand him a cup of coffee when Russell climbed into the cab. If Matt thought he could do this thing, then maybe Russell thought he could too.
But Brice Habersham nodded to him to throw a cork for Around the World, and as Russell toed the line he couldn’t help it if a little of the nervousness crept back up, because the cork would make all the difference here, Around the World was a simple game, you just had to hit numbers 1 through 20 and a bull, not a game for a former professional, a bit of an embarrassment, really, a concession to the poor quality of the league itself, a way to keep the evening moving faster than the proper game, 501, would, and because it was a simple game the competitor who threw first had a distinct advantage, the problem with Around the World was that if you went first you never had to stop shooting, if the third and final dart of each turn hit the appropriate target, you were rewarded with three more darts, so, theoretically, and very literally in the case of an excellent shooter, a former professional, say, with a shiny trophy from Cleveland on the shelf above the drive-thru, it was possible to complete a game of Around the World without ever allowing your opponent to shoot (Russell had come very close to doing this himself on a couple of occasions)—it was all running through his head now, a latent cognizance of worst-case scenarios . . . and Russell was shocked to find that the cork had already left his hand. He had thrown when he wasn’t concentrating. His dart was lodged somewhat crookedly an inch down and left of center from the bull’s-eye. Brice Habersham could beat that throwing between his legs.
Briskly, almost
unfairly
, Russell Harmon thought, because
on some level he was beginning to care now, because he hadn’t
meant
to throw the damn dart right at that particular moment and was maybe thinking of inquiring about the possibility of a do-over, although that would certainly have been against the rules, Brice Habersham stepped in, squared the toe of his shoe along the line, tilted his head in that funny way that Russell couldn’t figure out, and zipped one of his darts into the green single bull’s-eye. It was the deciding game of the match, and Brice Habersham had won the cork.
It wasn’t so much that he wanted it for himself, he thought as he watched Brice Habersham shoot, score with his third dart, pluck the darts, shoot again, score with his third dart, pluck the darts, beginning to make his way from number 1 to number 20 with alarming speed now, the head-tilting still going on but apparently he’d found the right angle, and Russell realized what it was now, that the man couldn’t
see
. . . it wasn’t something he wanted for himself anymore, not especially, to be the Dart League King, which seemed like a childish and almost improper title for the father of a baby girl, but it seemed to be something that other people wanted, that
these
people wanted, the ones sitting in the chairs and standing by the tables, the ones he’d known all his life, some of them, and if they wanted it, it seemed like something he should give to them, like a pat on the head, like a piece of candy, a simple response to a simple need, what a father might give to a child, for example. But there was this impediment—this man with the slicked-down hair, the shiny glasses, the fiery dragon on his shirt, whirling back and forth in the candlelight from the board to the line to the board to the line like a little red demon, refusing Russell Harmon his opportunity. And Russell Harmon felt kind of
pasty, suddenly, there was a clamminess to his skin, like he was being embalmed with the sweat from his own pores, because it began to dawn on him that he was really, truly losing,
reallytrulylosing
yet again, at one more thing that, at least, used to be important, and maybe still should be.
And then the board took a hard spin, as if it were one of those whaddayacallit wheels in Vegas, one of the things you dropped the ball into and crossed your fingers, hoping for luck, and Russell took a step back and leaned his arm on a chair to stop the spinning. Brice Habersham had just done something shocking, hadn’t he? He had thrown his second dart right square in the heart of the single 20. Russell had one second to glance at Matt for confirmation, and he could see it on Matt’s face, a look of disgust, because to Matt it would seem like blatant arrogance, wouldn’t it, like a form of disrespect, but to Russell it seemed very brave, something to admire. Brice Habersham—even knowing that he was playing the Dart League King, that if one person in the entire league, the entire town, even the entire state of Idaho, maybe, could run the board on him in Around the World, go from zero to bull’s-eye without giving up his turn, he was playing that one person—had thrown his second dart into the single 20, leaving himself just one dart in hand to hit the bull’s-eye and win the game or forfeit his turn, when he could have, should have, thrown his second dart off the board and then hit the 20 with his third, giving him another turn in which he would have three chances to hit a bull’s-eye and win the match. Russell Harmon had just enough time to lean on the table, look at Matt, think all these things before Brice Habersham’s third dart thupped the board, a millimeter outside the bull’s-eye. Brice Habersham
walked calmly to the board and pulled his darts, wrote “20” on the chalkboard, stepped off to the side, and folded his arms, looking at the board, waiting. Russell Harmon would have his turn.