Page 26 of The Player in New Zealand
“There’s actually a game next Monday night. I think Nina and a few other staff are coming. You should come too.”
“Yeah, that sounds fun.”
“Good,” Tane said, standing. “I’ll clear out. So you can finish cleaning up and go home.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, shuffling a little on his feet. “Good night, Claire. Thanks again.”
* * *
“Claire, what are you doing here?”Marissa looked at me, confused, and checked the time on her phone. “Your shift doesn’t start for another hour.”
“Nina asked me to come in early, since we’ve got a bachelorette party for twenty today.”
She shook her head. “That’s tomorrow.”
“Is it?” I pulled out my phone, thumbing through text messages until I found the right one.Damn it. “Fuck, she did say Friday. Son of a bitch.”
Marissa tilted her head toward the backyard. “It’s a nice day—go relax in the back.” She spun around, searching the shelves until she found what she was looking for. “You wanna drink?” she asked, wiggling the bottle of fake gin at me.
“Nah, that’s okay. I’ll play games on my phone or something. Thanks, though.”
I pushed open the back door and found that I wasn’t the only person who’d had this idea. There was a group of four people over on one of the targets, and Tane was on the porch, stretched out and keeping an eye on them. It was lovely out, a sunny and warm New Zealand summer day.
“Claire?” he said, surprise in his voice.
I shrugged, chagrined. “Came in for work too early.”
He shifted his weight, sitting up and pulling his legs in a bit more. “Want a seat? Or... do you want to play?” His chin tilted up, drawing my attention to the rows of targets that lined the lawn.
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “I’ve never thrown an axe before.”
Tane heaved himself up, and I followed him as he made his way down to the range. He picked a lane, with space between us and the guests, but not so far that he couldn’t keep an eye on them.
Each lane had a U-shaped bench with a low table in the center that stored scorecards. The trellises of grapes served as dividers between the lanes, and the targets themselves were large wooden boxes, the open end facing the seats, the bottoms of the boxes painted with a red-and-white target.
Tane pulled an axe out of a small box nailed to the post. “First rule: Don’t walk away with the axe. The weapons never leave this area between the post and the target, okay? Don’t take them back to the seats, and don’t hand them to someone. You throw, retrieve, and put it back into the box, okay?”
I brought my brows low, mimicking the seriousness in Tane’s face. “Okay.”
He showed me how to throw, putting his grip on the handle—the haft—just right, raising the axe overhead and then chucking it at the target.
With a solidthwackit sank into the wood.
“How do you get it to rotate right?”
“Practice” was his answer. “You’ll start to get a feel for the way the axe rotates.” He demonstrated again, and after retrieving the axe, he put it in the box. “Your turn.”
I grabbed the haft, pulling the axe out of the box. I replicated the grip, and pulled it back over my head. Using my arms, I tried to chuck the axe at the target. Instead it buried into the grass a few feet short of the target.
“Wow,” I said, shaking out my shoulders. “That’s heavy.”
“We have smaller ones,” he offered.
I shook my head. “Let me try again.” I retrieved the axe and gave it another go, this time releasing way earlier than I had before. It spun and hit the top right of the target, bouncing off and hitting the ground.
“Close,” Tane encouraged me.
I tried again and again, finally figuring out how it felt to release the axe with the right rotation to get it to land blade-first. After a few successful throws, I put the axe into the box. “How do you keep score?”
Tane showed me the scorecard, and told me how you could score several variations of the game, like darts. I wrote my name at the top, and then Tane’s.
