Starvation Lake

nine

The puck zipped past my left shoulder and grazed the left goalpost before smacking the mesh at the back of the net.

“Can’t see it, can’t stop it,” Teddy Boynton said as he sped past me. He spun on his skates and taunted me as he backed away: “But you’re expert at missing pucks, aren’t you, Carpie?” I’d heard that one a few times before.

The Starvation Lake Shoot-Out was nearly over. I’d faced more than a hundred wrist shots, snap shots, slap shots, backhanders, and dekes in a series of one-on-one showdowns. I’d stopped most of them. Thirty shooters had been eliminated. Now it came down, as it did most years, to Soupy Campbell versus Teddy Boynton. Each had three final shots. I’d stopped both of their first efforts. Teddy had just scored on his second, a slapper that caught me leaning to my right. I plucked my water bottle off the top of the net, flipped my mask up, and skated away from the net for a breather.

All afternoon, I’d been struggling not to think about Coach’s unsettling reappearance in my life. It was damned hard to do while standing in Blackburn Arena. When he’d arrived in Starvation Lake, the rink was just a sheet of ice protected by two thin steel walls and a roof that sagged under the weight of snowstorms. With the help of Francis Dufresne, Coach had gotten the town to replace the roof and close in the ends of the rink. He finagled new dressing rooms, showers, a scoreboard, bleachers. Each time he went before the town council, he brought along three or four River Rats. We stood at his side in our satin jackets as he made his pitches, our smiles polite, our hair combed neatly, our hands folded behind our backs, just as he had instructed.

“Today, Trap!” It was Soupy shouting from center ice, where he stood flipping a puck back and forth on his stick.

“Relax,” I said, as much to myself as to Soupy. I leaned my head back and doused my face with water. Above me in the steel rafters I glimpsed the faded blue-and-gold banners marking the Rats’ progress in the state playoffs, 1977 to 1981: regional finalist, regional finalist, state quarterfinalist, semifinalist, runner-up. I leveled my gaze and looked past Soupy to a banner that had hung at that end of the rink for as long as I could remember. It read: “To win the game is great, to play the game is greater, to love the game is the greatest.” I skated slowly back to my net, set the bottle down, and pulled my mask down over my face. Slapping the blade of my goalie stick once against each goalpost, I lowered myself into my semicrouch and yelled, “Bring it on.”

Soupy was what hockey players admiringly call a “dangler,” with hands that cradled the puck as if it were no heavier than a tennis ball. He could dangle it between his skates, behind his back, one-handed, backhanded, skating backward, on one knee. All the while the puck stuck to his stick like a nickname. He had a thousand moves that he’d practiced for hours in his basement or late at night on a patch of ice behind his garage. He liked to practice in the darkness, the darker the better, so he was forced to rely not on his eyes, but on simply feeling the puck on his stick blade with his amazingly sure hands. That way he’d never have to look down, he could always be scanning the ice for an opening or an open man, and he’d always be ready when an opposing defenseman was lining him up for a hit.

He’d worked on one particular move for most of a season. He’d gotten the idea when we were playing in a tournament in Detroit. One night in our hotel room, we picked up a Canadian TV station broadcasting indoor lacrosse. The players ran around on a shiny concrete floor resembling a hockey rink, flinging a ball from thin sticks fitted with webbed leather baskets. “Man,” Soupy said, “if you could cradle the puck like that, how cool would that be?”

After practices, while the rest of us undressed, he’d take a bucket of pucks and position himself behind a net. With a puck at his feet, he’d try in one motion to scoop it up, raise it shoulder high, step out to the side of the net, and then sling the puck, lacrosse style, into the upper corner of the goal. He quickly mastered the scooping part but had trouble keeping the puck on his stick as he sidestepped out from behind the goal. Some nights the rest of us would come out of the showers and stand on the bench teasing him. But he kept at it. Coach watched, too, but he didn’t say anything, at least not at first.

One afternoon I came out of the dressing room late and was nearly out the door to the parking lot when I heard the whang of something hitting a goalpost. I knew Soupy was the only one on the ice, so I dropped my gear and walked back to see. He was standing behind a net with his back to me. There were four or five pucks at his feet, and a couple in the face-off circle to the right of the goal. Six or seven others lay in the net. I watched silently as he snatched up a puck, took two quick steps to his left, and whipped his stick around until it clanged on the goalpost and the puck flew into the high corner of the net. “Holy shit,” I said. Soupy turned and grinned.

Coach spoke to Soupy about it for the first time before our next practice. Stickhandling drills were fine, Coach said, but he didn’t want to see any lacrosse shots during games. He called it “a fancy-ass fag move.”

Coach never used profanity around us, and he forbade us from using it. “Fag” and “faggot” were in a different category. Coach used them all the time to define for us what hockey was and wasn’t. Elbowing an opponent in the chin was hockey; kicking his skates out was a fag move. Scorers who could take a hit were hockey players; scorers who shied from the rough stuff were fags.

Soupy never tried the lacrosse shot again in practice. But one night he swore me to secrecy and told me he’d kept practicing it behind his garage.

“For what?” I said.

He shrugged. “Coach is a dickhead.”

“No, he’s not. Are you saving it up for something?”

He smiled to himself. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Maybe my ass.”

“Maybe I’m just a fag.”

Now Soupy shoved the puck out in front of him and took three long strides toward me. I eased out from the net to cut off the angle. He gathered up the puck and, as he swerved left, I followed.

On most goalies, Soupy liked to fake a shot that would make them drop to the ice, then he’d either snap the puck over one of their shoulders or cut hard, flip the puck to his backhand, and skate around them in a burst to the open side of the net. But as a stand-up goalie, I wasn’t as likely to drop. Soupy usually tried to beat me with a low shot to one of the corners, or he’d drive hard right at me and try to juke me to one side and slip the puck past me on the other.

He raised his stick high behind his left ear. I braced myself for the explosion of wood and rubber while staying on my toes in case this was just the first part of whatever Soupy had planned, the part meant to fool me. But he wasn’t trying to trick me. His stick whipped down and I heard the blade drive through the puck and saw it jump off the stick right at me. Not to my left or my right or even at my feet, where I might have left an opening, but right at me, chest high, the easiest of shots to stop. It hit me just above the sternum and I smothered it there with my catching glove.

Something was wrong. Soupy never hit goalies square in the chest.

I watched him as he snagged another puck and headed to center ice to take his final shot before Boynton took his. Teddy was laughing and yelling, “One more and it’s oh for three and a hundred smackers for me, baby. Looks like you’ll be emptying out your pop machine.”

They had once been friends, in our early years with the Rats. On the ice, they made a splendid pair. Soupy was the swift defenseman who set up plays with tape-to-tape passes and scored dramatic goals on end-to-end rushes. Teddy was the rough-and-tumble forward who mucked for pucks in the corners and scored his own scrappy goals on rebounds and deflections and scrums in front of the net. Teddy loved turning Soupy’s perfect passes into goals; Soupy loved how Teddy peeled opponents off the puck. They were pals off the ice, too, chasing the Sandy Cove girls and swiping beer from unlocked garages.

Our last year together, a rivalry developed. To a degree, it was no surprise. Soupy was being recruited by four or five big hockey colleges. Teddy, who lacked the speed and hands to play at that level, was living in Coach’s billets and wondering what came next. But there was more to it than just hockey, something I couldn’t put a finger on. They spoke less and less. They sat at opposite ends of the team bus. I asked Soupy about it once and he brushed me off: “Teddy’s just a jealous fuck.”

I wondered back then if Coach had something to do with it. Soupy-or Swanny, as Coach called him-had always been the favored son. But our last season together, Coach took to calling Teddy “Tiger.” It bothered Soupy, though he tried not to show it. By the time Soupy returned to Starvation Lake years later, his hockey career in shambles, Teddy owned more property than anyone but Francis Dufresne and was one of the wealthiest businessmen in northern Michigan. Soupy and Teddy avoided each other, but their men’s league teams-Campbell’s Chowder Heads and the Boynton Realty Land Sharks-played just about every season for the league title, just as Teddy and Soupy faced each other most years in the finals of the Shoot-Out.

Soupy had to score now and then hope I’d stop Boynton on his final shot. He circled at center ice, once, twice, three times before he started toward me. “Oh-fer, oh-fer, oh-fer,” Boynton chanted as Soupy skirted the blue line and flipped the puck to his forehand, then back, then back again, trying to mesmerize me. I knew his eyes were searching for mine but I stayed riveted on the puck. And then, in an instant, it was in the net. Maybe my eyes saw what happened. My brain sure didn’t. One second the puck was in front of me, big as a pancake, and I started to reach out with my stick to poke it away. The next second, it was gone. Soupy drew it back to himself like a blackjack dealer and spun around on his blades, a full 360-degree spin-o-rama. I lost the puck in his whirling skates. Then I felt its dull weight glance off my left instep and heard it thud against the back of the goal. It was the perfect dangle. Everyone watching whooped and whistled while I whacked the puck out of the net and Soupy glided away.

“Holy shit, Carpie,” Boynton shouted. “Put your dick back in your pants.” They all laughed, except Soupy, who slid slowly along the boards across from Boynton, glaring. I turned around and grabbed my water bottle. I wasn’t really thirsty, but there was nowhere else to hide.

“Carpie!” Boynton shouted. He stood with the puck at his feet, ready for his last shot. “Looks like Coach is back from the dead. You think he heard you were back from the dead and wanted to see if you still sucked?” I heard some of the others chuckle. “Brings back memories, huh?”

I barely had put the water bottle back when he leaped out and drove hard right at me. Usually that meant a shooter was going to try to deke rather than shoot, but Teddy, whose puckhandling wasn’t nearly as nimble as Soupy’s, almost always shot. He loved to aim between the legs so I pressed my leg pads together and kept the bottom of my stick hard against the ice as I moved backward with his strides. Just inside the blue line, he veered slightly to his left, my right. Yeah, here comes a shot, I thought. The puck was on his forehand. I scrunched my head down and stiffened. Teddy veered farther to my right. I slid around in that direction, squaring myself to the puck. He wound up for a slapshot. As his stick blade reached back, he said, “Hooper.”

Hooper.

I couldn’t help myself. It threw me so badly that I took my eye off the puck and glanced up at him. He wasn’t looking, though. He was aborting his shot and snatching the puck away and cutting hard to his right. When I looked down again, the puck was gone. Off balance, I kicked out my left leg, sprawling, and flailed at him with my catching glove. But he was by me. Over my shoulder I watched his backhander snap the mesh in the upper left corner of the net. He stopped next to the goalpost and stood over me, gloating. “Thanks, Carpie,” he said. “Good old Hooper.”

“Fuck off, Teddy,” I said.

Billy Hooper was the star winger for the Detroit Pipefitters who had scored the winning goal on me in the 1981 state final.

“What the fuck was that, Trap?” It was Soupy, who’d skated up behind me. I stumbled to my feet and saw he was angry.

“You can go to hell too,” I said

“Jesus, Trap, Helen fucking Keller could’ve stopped that.”

“Then next time get Helen fucking Keller to play goal.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Whose side are you on?” I dropped my catching glove and grabbed him by the jersey. I told him what Boynton had done. At first he looked at me blankly. Then he turned and stared across the ice at Boynton, who was laughing it up again with the other guys. “Goddamn it,” Soupy said. He turned back to me. “Goddamn it, Trap.”

“Soupy, what the hell is going on?”

Ignoring me, he scooped up a puck with his stick, flipped it into the air, and caught it in his left glove. Then he stopped and, assuming a baseball hitter’s stance, tossed the puck up over his head. As it came down, he took a hard, fluid swing at it and connected with a solid thwack. The puck flew haphazardly at Teddy Boynton. He saw it at the last second and ducked. It missed his head by a couple of inches. “What the fuck was that?” he yelled, digging toward Soupy. “I’ll be wearing the Stanley Cap this year, fuckhead.” The other players grabbed him, laughing, while Soupy skated off the ice.

Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho’s office smelled of gunmetal and powdered sugar. I waited in an angle-iron chair in front of his desk, my hair still damp from the quick shower I’d taken at the rink. I scanned the shelf behind his desk. There were cans of pepper spray, handcuffs, some Field amp; Stream magazines, a framed photograph of a woman whose face I recognized but whose name eluded me.

I wanted to ask Dingus myself about the snowmobile. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t because I didn’t trust Joanie, but it was. Despite my years away, despite my desire not to be there, I still felt that I knew these people and I could get them to tell me at least a semblance of the truth. Part of me wanted to hear that it was all a mistake, that the snowmobile wasn’t Coach’s after all. Mostly I wanted to hear a good reason why the sled wound up in Walleye.

I heard Dingus in the hallway just outside his door. “Call me when you hear something,” he said. He stepped into the office. “Where’s the redhead?” he said as he squeezed into the chair behind his little steel desk. Graying tufts of hair covered his bowling-pin forearms. He wore his cocoa uniform with a mustard tie secured by a brass clasp in the mitten shape of Michigan. “Thought she’d just about moved in here now.”

“Thanks for helping her out, Dingus.”

“Am I to be dealing with you now?”

“He was my coach.”

“Ah,” he said. He grabbed a piece of paper off a stack on his desk, peered at it, then replaced it, facedown. “How’d the Shoot-Out go?”

“Fine.”

“I heard there might’ve been an incident.”

“Boys will be boys.”

“For sure. So how can I help you?”

Dingus had come to Starvation Lake from a tiny Upper Peninsula town populated by Finns named Heikkala and Pikkarainen, and his voice still carried the gentle lilt of their accent. He’d been sheriff for six years. People liked him. He was friendly and mostly docile. He stayed within his modest budget and didn’t try to pump up his revenue by setting traffic-ticket quotas for his deputies as so many other sheriffs did. He also rarely left his office except for lunch at Audrey’s or, lately, to go on the TV news. Perhaps because he faced reelection, Dingus had become a regular on Channel Eight, which most days was desperate for local news and happy to put him on camera, whether it was to announce a new safety-belt campaign or to show off new jackets and caps for crossing guards. Yet Dingus on TV was usually as wooden as the lectern he hauled out for press conferences. Only his singsong accent and the dancing of his handlebar mustache saved him from being a total bore.

I had a notebook out but hadn’t opened it yet. “The snowmobile at Walleye,” I said. “Did it really belong to Coach?”

Dingus smiled. His head gave a barely discernible shake.

“No?” I said.

“Can’t help you.”

“Come on.”

“No comment. You know what you know.”

Nobody loved the cat-and-mouse more than small-town cops. It made the tedium of their jobs more bearable. Still, Dingus’s “no comment” was confirmation enough for me. “So how the heck does the sled wind up in Walleye?” I said. “And please don’t tell me the tunnels.”

He sat back and placed his hands flat on his head. “Strange things happen, Gus,” he said. “Remember Felix?”

Everyone in town knew the story. Felix, a golden retriever, dove into an ice-fishing hole on Starvation just as his master, Fritz Hornbeck, was hauling up a perch. Felix was going after the fish, but he missed and disappeared beneath the ice. Hornbeck, who was into his second bottle of blueberry schnapps, assumed the dog had drowned. But an hour later, Felix emerged from another ice-fishing hole in a shanty half a mile away, shaking off lake water in front of Elvis Bontrager. It was the talk of Starvation for weeks.

“That’s your comment?” I said. “‘Strange things happen’?”

“No. No comment at all.”

“Come on, Dingus.” Joanie was going to raise hell with me for interfering with her story. It’d be worse if I had nothing to show for it.

Deputy Frank D’Alessio walked into the office and, without noticing me, handed Dingus a steaming mug and a thin file folder. “Forensics, chief,” the deputy said. Dingus shot him a look, and D’Alessio turned and saw me.

“Ah, jeez,” he said. “Gus.”

“Frankie,” I said. “Forensics?”

He glanced nervously at Dingus, then started for the door. “You’re playing tonight, right?” He meant our playoff game. “See you out there.”

I smiled at Dingus. “Forensics on a snowmobile?”

Dingus shrugged. “Routine stuff,” he said. “And that’s off the record.” He stood up from his chair, closed his office door, and sat down again. The name of the woman in the photograph came to me: Barbara Lampley. Dingus actually displayed a picture of his ex-wife. What man did that?

“Off the record, Dingus? Give me a break. Has the Pilot ever burned you?”

He folded his meaty hands on his desk. “Not yet,” he said. “I’d really like to help you, Gus, but fact is, I have an ongoing investigation here.”

“Ongoing or reopened?”

“No comment.”

That gave me an idea.

“Can I get a copy of the original police report from 1988?” I said.

“Tell you what,” he said. He pushed back from the desk, pulled a drawer out, plucked a sheet of paper from inside, and handed it to me. “Fill her out and we’ll get back to you.”

The sheet was a form for requesting records under a state public-disclosure law. “Dingus, I can’t wait for this,” I said.

“Well, I’m afraid somebody else has asked for the same report, and I asked them for the same thing.”

“Joanie?”

“No, not the redhead.”

“Who then?”

He shook his head. “That’s all.”

I couldn’t imagine who else would be interested in that report.

“Are you going to drag Walleye?”

“Sure,” Dingus said. “With an icebreaker.”

This wasn’t like Dingus. He usually gave it up once he saw you were serious. Did he have more at stake here than I knew? I recalled watching him from the woods on the night the cowl washed up, how he knelt in the shadows on the beach. I didn’t remember him being a close friend of Coach, but then I wasn’t around Starvation for years.

“Hey,” I said. “Isn’t that Barbara Lampley? Your ex?”

“What of it?”

“You’re a better man than me, Sheriff.”

“OK,” he said, pushing away from his desk. “We’re done here.”

“No, tell you what, Dingus, I’ll take your advice.”

Remembering Barbara reminded me that Dingus had been a deputy once-maybe during the original investigation. I slapped the information sheet down on his desk and scribbled my name, the Pilot address, and my request for the 1988 file on Coach’s accident. I handed it to Dingus. He stared at it for a long moment, then looked up at me, holding my gaze as if he were sizing me up. We really didn’t know each other very well. I guessed that was going to change. “All right,” he said. “We’ll process it within the required ten days.”