The Blind Draw

I parked my sedan between a pickup with a gun rack and a dirt bike that had no business being leaned against a porch, and I sat there for a minute with my hands on the wheel, listening to the neon sign over the lodge buzz like a wasp in a jar. The Salt Flats Lodge, the sign said, except the S and the L were dark, so it just read ALT FLATS ODGE, and I figured that was about right for my luck. Forty-four years old, six years of nothing but my own right hand and a lot of bad TV, and here I was at a knife-throwing contest in the desert because a guy at work said it changed his life.

It was a Saturday night in July, hot enough that the dry lake bed out front shimmered even after dark, and the crowd smelled like dust and whiskey and sunscreen that had given up around noon. I locked the car, which was a joke out here, and walked toward the floodlights. Somebody had strung them up on telephone poles around a dirt arena, and the bleachers were full of people who all looked like they'd been drinking since Thursday.

The registration table was a folding card table with a milk crate behind it, and the guy sitting on the crate was maybe fifty, wearing a vest with too many pockets and a name tag that said DEACON even though I doubted that was on his birth certificate.

"Contestant or spectator?" he asked, not looking up from a clipboard.

"Contestant." My voice cracked on it, which was embarrassing, so I covered with, "Been throwing since I was a kid."

That was a lie. I'd thrown exactly eleven knives, ever, and nine of them were last weekend into a cork target I bought off the internet. But the whole point of coming out here was to feel like a different guy, and different guys have backstories, so I gave him one. "Grew up on a farm. Hay bales, fence posts, whatever."

Deacon looked at me over his glasses for about two seconds, which felt like a parole hearing, and slid a legal-sized paper across the table. "Waiver. Sign at both X's. Death or dismemberment is on you, not us, not the lodge, not the county."

"That's reassuring," I said.

"Nobody's died," he said. "Lost half a thumb a few years back, but he signed the same paper you're signing." He dug around in a cigar box and came out with a knife, held it handle-first toward me. "Practice blade. Keep it. You'll want your own if you make the second round."

I took it and it felt wrong in my palm right away, too heavy in the front, like the balance point was a half inch ahead of where my hand expected it to be. The grip tape was old and tacky and it smelled faintly like somebody else's sweat. I signed both X's with a pen tied to the table with fishing line, and Deacon wrote my name on a bracket sheet pinned to a plywood board, and that was it, I was contestant number fourteen, J. Hanson, out of bracket against a guy named Colt and a woman who hadn't signed in yet.

There was a bar set up where the taxidermy station used to be, I guess, because there was a sawdust-stuffed jackalope head bolted over the bottles and a sign that said NO REFUNDS, NO CRYING, NO THROWING KNIVES AT THE BAR. I got a beer in a plastic cup, nine dollars, and stood at the edge of the arena to watch the early rounds. Colt, my bracket guy, was built like a refrigerator with arms, and he threw sidearm, fast and ugly, and his knives stuck in the target in a rough circle about the width of a dinner plate. Decent, I thought, and then I thought, what am I even doing, and then I drank more beer.

That's when she stepped up to the line beside me.

She didn't warm up. She didn't stretch or shake out her arm or do any of the stuff the other contestants were doing. She just walked up, and her left forearm was wrapped in athletic tape from wrist to elbow, layers of it, white and gray, like she'd done it in the dark and didn't care how it looked. Thirty-nine, maybe, hard to tell, with a face like she'd stopped explaining herself to people around age twenty-five. Black tank top, jeans, boots, hair tied back so tight it looked like it hurt.

She stood at the line a second, rolled her shoulder once, and threw.

The knife went into the bullseye with a sound like a nail going into green wood, dead center, no wobble I could see from where I stood, and the crowd did that low huh sound crowds do when something real happens instead of something loud.

"No warmup?" I said, mostly to myself, but she heard me.

"Blade's light," she said, pulling her next knife from the kit at her hip. "Wind's nothing. Two hundred feet, give or take." She threw again, and it stuck a half inch from the first one. "Bullseye's easy. The eight ring is the hard one, going around it on purpose."

"Why would you go around it on purpose?"

"Because sometimes the payout's on placement, not the target." She turned and looked at me then, and her eyes did a quick inventory, shoes, hands, the beer in my cup, and I got the feeling she'd priced me and come in low. "You competing or just standing here sweating?"

"Competing." I held up my practice knife. "Got my equipment and everything."

She looked at the knife and then at me, and one corner of her mouth moved, which I later learned was her whole range of expression when she found something funny. "That's a bar knife. Somebody give you that off a cigar box?"

"Maybe."

"Name?"

"Jarrod."

"Meghan." She didn't offer a hand, which was fine, because her grip was probably worth avoiding anyway. "You ever thrown in a tournament before, Jarrod?"

"Once or twice," I said, and she laughed, one short note, not mean, just factual, like she'd heard a dog bark and identified the dog.

"Sure," she said. "Well. Tip goes in the wood, handle follows, keep your elbow out of your ear. You'll do great." She walked back toward the line for her third throw, and I stood there holding the wrong knife in the wrong hand feeling like the only sober person at a wedding.

The loudspeaker was just a guy with a microphone hooked to a car battery, and he called bracket rounds in a voice like gravel in a blender. My name came up around nine o'clock. Meghan had already finished her bracket, four throws, all four in or touching the bullseye, and the crowd had started doing that thing where they watched her instead of whoever else was throwing. Colt went first against me, put four knives in a plate-sized cluster, got a cheer, and then it was my turn and my mouth went dry in a way I hadn't felt since the divorce papers.

First knife, I threw too hard and it bounced off the target and landed in the dirt, and a guy in the bleachers yelled something about refunds. Second knife stuck, low left, maybe the seven ring if you were generous. Third one stuck too, closer, and the fourth one actually hit inside the eight ring, and I heard myself make a noise that I'll admit to nobody. Colt won it on points, no shame in that, and the mic guy moved us along like I was a commercial break.

I went back to the bar and got another nine-dollar beer and stood there doing the math on the drive home, when Deacon's voice came over the speaker announcing the final throw-off, top four scorers, single target, one knife each, winner takes the pot and, he said, and here he read off a card like he didn't write it, "and the customary prize."

"What's the customary prize?" I asked the guy next to me, a fat man in a Meshuggah shirt.

"The purse and the bonus round," he said. "Bonus round's whatever Deacon's got written on the card."

Meghan and three others stepped to the line. She threw last. The other three put theirs close, one touching the bullseye line, and then she stepped up, and the whole bleacher section got quiet, and she didn't roll her shoulder or do anything, she just threw, and the knife hit so close to center that the target guy had to call people over to look at it.

Deacon raised her arm up like a boxing ref and read the card. "Winner, Meghan Vance. Purse is two thousand four hundred dollars, and the customary prize is dinner, on contestant fourteen, J. Hanson, who signed the board before I added the bonus line, so it counts."

The bleachers laughed. I did not. I stood there with my beer, and Meghan Vance turned around and looked straight at me across the dirt, and she didn't smile, and she didn't look sorry either. She looked as if she had just been handed exactly what she'd paid attention for.

The mic guy tried to move the bracket along, and the bleachers kept hollering stuff at me, mostly jokes, one guy yelling take it like a man and another one yelling something I didn't catch but Deacon told him to knock off. I set my beer down on the bar, which used to be a taxidermy station and still had a brass hook where somebody hung deer heads, and I thought about it, honestly thought about it, for maybe the length of one slow breath.

For the six years since the divorce, I'd said no to everything. No dates, no drinks with women from work, no nothing, because after Karen cleaned out the checking account and the apartment and most of my self-respect in about the same month, I'd decided wanting people was a bad investment, and I'd stuck to that decision the way some men stick to a diet or a religion, completely right up until I didn't.

And here was the thing, and I didn't understand it yet but I felt it, standing in the dirt with nine dollars of warm beer sweating in my cup. Losing to her had felt honest. Standing in her line of sight felt honest too, in a way that scared me more than the knives had.

She started walking over. The crowd got louder, and she didn't hurry and she didn't slow down, just crossed the dirt like she was crossing a parking lot, and stopped about two feet from me, close enough I could see the tape on her forearm was fraying at the wrist.

"So," she said. "You going to make this weird?"

"Probably."

"Good. Weird I can work with. Trying to be smooth, that's where guys lose me." She took the beer out of my hand, drank half of it, and handed it back. "Here's how it works. Deacon does this every year, some variation. Last year the prize was the winner gets to shave the runner-up's head. Year before that it was a weekend with a boat. It's whatever he writes on the card, and it's not binding, it's crowd bait. You can say no right now and the whole thing evaporates and everybody boos for four seconds and goes back to drinking."

"That's an option?"

"That's an option. You say no, you keep your dignity, I keep two thousand four hundred dollars, I eat dinner alone, everybody goes home." She looked at me, and there was no pressure in it anywhere, which was somehow worse than pressure. "Or you say yes to a burger, and after that it's whatever we decide it is, you and me, because Deacon's card doesn't come with instructions. I want to be plain about that so you're not out here doing math about what you owe anybody. You don't owe me a thing. I won a contest. That's the whole prize, a burger on you."

"You keep two thousand four hundred dollars either way."

"I keep it either way. The prize money's the prize money. The bonus round is a party trick for the bleachers." She crossed her arms, careful of the taped one, and I noticed her hands for the first time, callused in a line across both palms like she'd been holding rope or steel her whole working life. "So. Jarrod. Yes or no. Take your time, but not too much, because the bleachers are doing a chant and I'd like it to stop."

The chant was my name. Fourteen. Fourteen. Fourteen, which was somehow both flattering and the loneliest thing I'd ever heard.

"Yes," I said, and the bleachers roared like I'd signed a mortgage.

"Good," she said. "Then here's my terms. Nobody touches anybody until I've had food and about an hour to get the shakes out, because throwing finals messes with my hands and I don't like to do anything important with shaky hands. You eat with me. We talk. If either of us says stop at any point, we stop, and that's not a negotiation, that's a rule, and it goes both directions. You get me?"

"I get you."

"And you don't have to be good at anything," she said, quieter, and her eyes did the inventory thing again, slower this time. "I mean anything. Whatever you're thinking you have to perform for me, delete it. I've been wanted by professionals. I'd rather have somebody honest."

The guy with the mic called the last bracket round, and she tapped the bar twice with two fingers, some goodbye that was hers, and went back to the line, and I stood there at the taxidermy bar feeling like I'd just agreed to something enormous and also something simple, and not knowing yet they were the same thing.

They gave out the trophies around eleven, which were belt buckles, because it was