The Dart League King (12 page)

Thinking along these lines while the current singles match dragged out interminably, Brice Habersham found himself even more puzzled by Vince Thompson this evening. There sat Vince—beerless, bleeding, alone, and (perhaps most alarmingly) silent. What did it mean?

It occurred to Brice Habersham that, if he actually were who he pretended to be here in this small town, he could simply go over to Vince Thompson and ask. But he wasn’t who he pretended to be. And Vince Thompson wasn’t who he pretended to be, either. Vince Thompson was a drug dealer, and almost by definition a drug dealer was someone who led a double life,
who spent part of his time selling drugs and the rest of his time pretending that he did no such thing. Brice Habersham’s life was much the same—he was a drug enforcement agent who spent most of his time pretending to be the proprietor of a convenience store. So there was really no honest ground on either side from which to approach Vince Thompson.

Brice Habersham focused on the dartboard, watched the darts of the two mediocre opponents in the second singles match continually go astray. He looked at his watch again. It was already after ten o’clock, and there was another singles match to get through after this one, and then his match with Russell Harmon. Dart night was dragging along, and perhaps if he let it continue to drag, didn’t make his phone call until everything was already completed but the beer drinking and the post-match talk, Vince Thompson would get bored and go find someone besides Russell to threaten.

He let out an uncharacteristic sigh, picked up his beer glass and took a sip, removed his glasses and wiped them with the handkerchief. There was no escaping what he felt—these moments of sadness crept up on him again and again these days. It was something about this town—about the moonlit water of Sand Creek he saw through the window, about the cool night air coming in the open back door, about the first few notes of the guitar he heard. Everything about this place felt like the small Midwestern town he had grown up in, except that with the lake and the mountains it was much prettier here. It was too pretty, in fact. Even in the short time he’d lived here, Brice Habersham could see where things were headed—the logging industry in steady decline, the farmland encroached upon by development, the property values shooting through the roof, the traditional downtown businesses—the hardware store and
the five-and-dime and the local grocery—muscled out of the way by corporate superstores and retailers who catered to the tourist trade. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be much left here for the likes of Vince and Russell and Matt, who nevertheless continued to go about their business as if their hometown wasn’t being swiped out from under them. Vince Thompson coming into the store to buy lightbulbs or duct tape or an extension cord, whatever small items he needed for whatever small jobs pestered him that day, grumbling ad nauseum about Mrs. Krum, tossing around his casual and, insofar as Brice could tell, unconscious racial slurs. Russell and Matt arriving in the early evening from the woods, covered head to toe with dirt and sawdust, the pungent smell of sweat and engine exhaust and new-fallen timber trailing them down the aisle to the beer cooler, always laughing about something while they wiped their dirty faces with their dirty hands, Russell asking Brice questions about his dart trophies.

Brice Habersham had never felt sorry for the people who lost their freedom as a result of his work. They were lawbreakers, defilers of the stern code. But somehow he couldn’t see why Vince Thompson had to go to prison. Somehow he couldn’t see why Russell Harmon had to be branded a criminal on the one hand and an informant on the other. He couldn’t see why he might have to drag a couple of these other boys—because that’s all they were, mere boys, even Matt who ran his own logging operation, even that agitated young man talking to the pretty brunette, his foot tapping out a coked-up drumbeat beneath the table—into the proceedings. These boys, at least, were too young to know what they were doing with their lives, and it was a shame to see them headed in the wrong direction in such a pretty place. But who was he to give advice, really, even had he
been able to, if he had not been bound by the requirements of the job he had to do? He had no children of his own, not because he and Helen couldn’t have, as far as he knew, but because they had never had sexual intercourse, not once in twenty-five-plus years of marriage. What would he—childless, still virgin in late middle age—say to them?
Cleave to the straight and narrow path
.
Perform the duty that lies in front of you
. These were the rules that had guided him always. And yet tonight he stood here among all these people younger than himself, even sad Vince Thompson in the corner, and he envied them. Yes,
envied
them, even knowing the trouble that was headed their way. Envied them for their youth, even envied them for the risks they chose to take, the errors of chance they courted so recklessly. He had begun, Brice Habersham realized, to feel his life stretched out behind him rather than in front of him. And there was not enough behind him, not as much as he had hoped for or counted on, of which to be proud, and not enough enjoyment to recollect. And though he loved Helen, loved her deeply, he could see nothing in his future but his wife and her imagined illnesses, the greater and greater burden she would choose to become.

What he would like more than anything, he decided, would be to really be the gas station/convenience store proprietor. That way, Vince Thompson would be a real customer instead of a drug dealer, Russell Harmon would be a real opponent in a real dart match instead of a simple possession charge, and he, Brice Habersham, would be a real person instead of an undercover agent for the DEA, and he wouldn’t have to spend yet another night of his life in a roomful of people who didn’t really know him at all.

There was something
Tristan Mackey wanted to say, something pressing on him more and more as time passed, and it was important that he say it to the right person—not, for instance, to Russell Harmon, to whom he had been tempted to blurt out something just an hour ago. It was that sort of unwise impulse that had sent him in search of the proper audience before it was too late, and of all the people in his acquaintance, it seemed to him that Kelly Ashton might be the one person who could respond to what he had to say both sympathetically and with something approaching actual understanding. So he had called her, and here she was. But sitting with her here at the table, he couldn’t come up with any words. It was like that sometimes now. He could be doing anything—walking down a street, maybe—and he would look at the things around him and they would all fall away, disappear, and he would see nothing and hear nothing, as if he were sinking into some deep part of himself where everything was quiet and dark.

And then someone might come up to him on this street and say hello. He would attempt to say something in response, he could feel his tongue stuttering at the words, but as often as
not they would want to come out in a different form, and the things on the street would suddenly seem to want to assume some different form as well, unfamiliar and foreign, and he would find himself looking at the things in his own hometown and thinking of them in Spanish—
calle
,
acera
,
tienda
—and the thing the person said would sound like something else entirely, like his name, as if the person had said the word
Tristan
instead of merely
hello
, and inflected the name upward into a question, the same question Liza Hatter asked, so that it was as if he were the constant subject of a one-word interrogation. And often it seemed like Liza Hatter herself had approached him and asked for some difficult translation of the word—
Tristan?
—and he wouldn’t know the answer or how to offer it and he would simply wave his hand and smile and move on down the street, wordless. And so he had decided it was time to put an end to these difficulties.

“
Es tiempo
,” he said to Kelly Ashton now. He poured beer into his glass, and the last of the pitcher into hers.

“Tristan,” she said, in the voice of Liza Hatter, “you’re talking in Spanish.”

“It means,
it’s time
,” he said. He looked at her in her chair. Her face was pretty and her eyes flashed intelligence, but he couldn’t feel anything about that, and it was important that he feel something about it, because why else was he speaking to Kelly Ashton instead of some other person? It had been easier for a while, after the coke. But the coke seemed to be wearing off. Maybe he could get some more from Russell Harmon.

“I know what it means,” she said. “I just don’t know why the hell you keep doing it.”

“You know Spanish?” he asked her.

“I took two years of it, remember? I sat right behind you. Mrs. Whitley yelled at us for talking all the time.” She folded her arms below her breasts and her crossed leg began to sway. This meant she was perturbed, he knew. “
¡Callete, Tristan y Kelly!
Remember? Does it ring a bell? Hello?”

“Shut up,” he said.

“Right,” she said. “Shut up. Tristan and Kelly. We used to talk all the time.”

“
Las memorias olvidadas
.”

“Right,” she said. “The forgotten memories.” She nodded, a sullen look on her face. “Forgotten,” she said. “I guess.”

That was, in a sense, what the whole thing was about—memories. It was this very thing, Liza Hatter’s memories—who she
was
, in other words—that made him want to speak to Kelly Ashton. It was the idea of Liza Hatter’s memories that had led him to spend hours on the Internet in search of her. Every entry he found was about her disappearance, all except one—a brief article announcing that she had been voted to homecoming court at her high school in Salmon, Idaho. And so, lacking any more direct information about Liza Hatter herself, he had studied the small town she came from. He knew its tourist attractions and its local businesses and the members of its city council. He knew its yearly rate of precipitation and he knew the year of its founding and all of its red-letter days. And yet all he knew about Liza Hatter, still, was that she had been twenty-one years old and that she had been a member of homecoming court and that her parents were David and Carol and that a teacher, Mrs. Courtland, said she was “a bright student who kept in touch and was doing well at college,” and that she read
Lucky
magazine and liked to cuddle and wanted to be
a veterinarian, and that she’d had a crush on Tristan Mackey, whom she’d died right in front of on a night in May, her wide eyes reflecting the moon. And that was insufficient, because he had come to have strong feelings regarding Liza Hatter and needed to know more about her and her memories. Even his own memory of her was fading, and it was for that reason that he had been led for the first time to dig up her grave.

It was early in the morning and the day was still cool and there were long shadows from the trees on the hillside where he’d buried her. It had not taken so long to dig her up with the shovel, because he was only interested in her face. Two feet down he grew careful, because he didn’t want to injure her. He dug with his hands until he received the initial shock—the pretty face had begun to decay, and the eyes in particular, which were liquidy and gray, and there were maggots and beetles and ants on her mouth and her nose and her ears, and, feeling sick, he had picked them off one by one and then shoveled the dirt back in.

Back in front of the computer, he switched his study to the decomposition of bodies in earth. He studied the horrifying effects of putrefaction, learned that the body ate itself from the inside out, that the insects came along quickly to help. He was sickened by the photographs of rotting human corpses, the bloated bodies of pigs. But he learned one valuable piece of information—that he could slow the process by burying her deeper, to keep the insects away. Now she was four feet down, and it took forever to unbury her and bury her again, which he had done several times, uncovering her until he could see her face, until he could sit with her, trying to ignore the evidence of her transmutation, the cheesy, loose consistency of her skin,
the shriveling of the eyeballs that held just the barest trace of the look he had seen in them, sucking back into the sockets, soon to be gone forever.

“Why did you ask me out tonight?” Kelly Ashton said. What business did she have sitting next to him, looking so pretty and healthy? And yet she had asked the right question. He had called her because he wanted to tell her about Liza Hatter. Liza Hatter was dead, poor Liza Hatter who had been beautiful for one moment in her life, and someone had to know about it, had to know her story. That seemed to be what she was insisting on every time he heard her say his name, and Tristan was the only person who could tell the story, and Kelly Ashton, because of some lingering feeling he had for her, was the person he had chosen to hear it.

“There was something I wanted to say,” he told her.

“Then say it,” she said. “Why are you acting so weird?”

What an effort the whole thing was, almost too trying to believe. He was losing her, he could tell, and if he wanted to hang onto her he would need to be the old Tristan for a while, and now that the coke was wearing off it seemed so difficult and pointless to whip that old Tristan into shape, make him say clever things and smile. He would have to give it a try, but his mouth hung open soundlessly, his tongue pressed against the back of his teeth.

Then Kelly Ashton did something surprising—she reached across and grabbed his hand. It was the first hand he’d held since the day he carried Liza Hatter up the hill, and Kelly Ashton’s warm pulse made him remember Liza Hatter’s cold fingers. “You know,” she said, “I’ve got a limited amount of time here. I don’t have, like, three days.”

But he couldn’t respond, and she pulled her hand away, and he could feel a tingle in his palm. Then she started telling him a story, something about did he know what it was like to lose somebody close to you and did he know what it was like to have someone who depended on you entirely, and he wanted to say, thinking of Liza Hatter, yes he did, yes he did know, both of those things, but the words wouldn’t come, not a single word would come at all, it was as if he had lost some sort of internal pressure, almost lost the capacity to breathe, and he began to drift off while she talked about a drunk mother and a dead-end job and then something about the stars. But there was a gleam in her eyes as she spoke, a teary reflection of the bar lights, and it reminded him of how he used to feel about Kelly Ashton, and it reminded him too of Liza Hatter’s eyes, and it made him think that, yes, Kelly Ashton was the right person after all, and that he would have to find a way tonight to say this thing, for Liza Hatter’s sake.