The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

might like to live there. But fifteen minutes later, drinking his first beer at a bar down the street, he’d already forgotten all about it, and he hadn’t remembered until just now, when Tristan had asked. “Or not really,” he said. “Why?”
    “Just wondering,” Tristan said. He dragged on his cigarette and flicked the ash out the window, still not looking at Russell. “What do you plan to do here, I mean. You going to work for Matt your whole life?”
    “Fuck no,” Russell said. “Logging’s bullshit.” He took a deep puff on his smoke and held it in, feeling his head buzz pleasantly. He should definitely take up smoking. It went very well with cocaine. “Die fucking young out in the woods, man. Dangerous shit.”
    “Why do you do it, then?”
    Russell shrugged. “Job’s a job.” What he meant was it was the only job he hadn’t been fired from. “Pretty soon I’m gonna be working out at Evergreen. Good benefits. Work four tens, get Fridays off. None of this Friday-morning-work-with-a-hangover shit.” A couple weeks before, he’d gone and talked to a guy he knew out at Evergreen Lighting Designs, a place where they made expensive wooden lights for landscaping, but no one had called him yet and, to tell the truth, he had been just as afraid of the band saws and the jointers as he was of the chain saw and the skidder. When he was walking out of the building, the hum of the saw still reaching his ears in the parking lot, he had
thought it was time to admit, maybe, that he just wasn’t very mechanically inclined, and it might be a better idea to sign up for an Internet course in business administration.
    Tristan stared at the dash, his jaw clenched. He was feeling the coke now, Russell knew. “So that’s it?” he said. “Russell Harmon, guy who makes lights for peoples’ circular driveways? You’re happy with that?”
    “Sure,” Russell said. “Why not?” He tossed the question out casually, or that word that meant you weren’t really expecting an answer, but then he wondered if maybe there should be an answer, an answer from Tristan, a smart guy who’d graduated from college with a degree in what was it, some kind of foreign language. But Tristan didn’t say anything. “What about you?” Russell asked.
    Tristan laughed through his teeth, kind of a hiss. He sat up straight in his seat and looked at Russell for the first time in about five minutes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about hanging around here a bit longer.”
    “And doing what?” Russell asked.
    Tristan shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing. At least not until I have to.”
    That made sense to Russell, since it had basically been his own philosophy for quite a while now. It was enjoyable to have this sort of discussion with Tristan Mackey, to figure out areas where they saw eye to eye. Still, he had a hard time seeing Tristan with his ass parked in Garnet Lake, Idaho. It was Russell’s impression that Tristan was meant to do unusual things in places that Russell had never heard of. “But if you were going to do something,” he said, “what would it be?”
    “Around here?” Tristan asked.

    “Anywhere.”
    Tristan tossed his cigarette butt out the window. “Could do a lot of things. Go to South America and teach. Join the Peace Corps. Go to graduate school.”
    Russell nodded eagerly, as if he understood all this. “Fuckin’ A, man,” he said. “Sounds like a plan.” But then he figured he’d better shut up. South America—that was the country down below Mexico, or a continent, it was. It had countries in it, Brazil and Argentina and a couple other ones, and lots of trees and one of those really big rivers, like one of the big three, los tres riveros humungos , the Amazon or the Nile or the Mississippi, but not the Mississippi. Tigris-Euphrates—he remembered that from social studies, but what was it? Did it have something to do with South America? Better not ask. And the