Starvation Lake

ten

Glassy cobwebs arched over the stairway down from the Pilot newsroom. I flicked a switch and gray light filled the basement, a dank concrete vault the size of a one-car garage. Along three walls stood wooden racks holding black binders of Pilot s dating to the 1970s, dates etched in gold lettering on their sides. The one I wanted was marked “March 1-March 15, 1988.”

I hefted the binder from the rack and set it on a slab of Masonite laid across two file cabinets beneath the stairway. Pink Post-its jutted from the edges of the binder-Joanie’s doing. I flipped to the newspaper marked by the first Post-it, Monday, March 14, 1988. Coach’s death covered the front page. The headline bannered across the top read, “Blackburn Dies in Snowmobile Mishap.” Beneath it a photograph showed cops standing around a patch on the frozen lake, the headlights of their snowmobiles and ambulances illuminating the early morning gloom.

There was a story recounting the reactions of local people, a story about other recent snowmobiling accidents, and a story about Blackburn’s coaching career headlined, “Proud Coach Put Starvation Hockey on the Map.” That story wrapped around the same smiling mug shot of Coach that hung on the wall at Enright’s. Another picture showed Make-Believe Gardens, Blackburn’s billets fuzzy in the background.

The main story began, “Legendary hockey coach John D. ‘Jack’ Blackburn disappeared on Starvation Lake early yesterday in what appears to have been a drowning in a snowmobile-related incident.” Police offered scant details, the story said. There were unhelpful quotes from a few lakeshore residents and a brief, unrevealing interview with the sole eyewitness, Leo Redpath. I pulled out another binder and skimmed the next several papers. Photos showed that police encircled the accident scene with yellow tape at a fifty-yard radius. Townspeople in long coats and wool hats gathered along the perimeter to watch cops in scuba gear drop into the jagged hole in the ice. Some left flowers. The bouquets froze and wind scattered the petals so that flecks of scarlet and gold and violet speckled the hard gray lake. The cops kept the tape in place for three days. By then the sheriff’s department was talking a bit more freely and the Pilot had pieced together a version of what had happened.

As they often did on Sunday nights in winter, Coach and Leo had gone riding on the trails that wound through the woods north of the lake. They stopped at their usual places, the Hide-A-Way, Dingman’s, the Just One More Saloon. A bit before midnight, they parked their snowmobiles in a clearing a mile from Starvation’s western shore, built a bonfire, and shared a bottle.

Coach wanted to do some “skimming.” I’d done it a few times with Soupy and other friends, mostly in high school, always when we were drunk. We’d take our snowmobiles and find patches of open water on Starvation or Walleye or one of the other area lakes, and we’d hammer the throttles until we were moving fast enough to skim across the water to solid ice. It was kind of like jumping barrels on a motorcycle, only dumber, because it was usually dark and, as I said, we were drunk. Pine County outlawed skimming after two kids drowned on Little Twin Lake one night in 1982.

Everyone knew Coach loved to skim as much as he loved to dodge the cops who tried to catch him at it. “I’m going to die with my helmet on,” he liked to say, and Leo would invariably respond, “You just might get your wish.” Leo, who had never learned to swim, wanted nothing to do with skimming. Coach taunted him, but Leo would say, “I have no desire to spend my retirement years at the bottom of a lake.” He didn’t even like to watch. When Coach went looking for open water, Leo waited onshore, nipping at a bottle. On this March night, though, Leo relented. Why wasn’t entirely clear, at least from the Pilot. The police quoted Leo as saying he’d simply had too much to drink, and, in fact, he never took another drink after that night. Later, when people asked him what had happened, he usually begged off by saying he was afraid that dredging it from his memory would send him back to the bottle.

Coach led Leo onto the lake beneath a moonless sky. Out past Pelly’s Point, half a mile from shore, Coach and Leo stopped before a large pool of standing water shaped like a pear. Leo told police he lined his sled up facing the narrow end, and Coach steered himself into position to cross the wider stretch, spanning about twenty-five yards.

Half an hour later, just past 1:30 a.m., Leo banged at the door of my mother’s house on the southwestern bank. She called the police.

Leo had chickened out.

He told the cops that, just before his snowmobile reached the water’s edge, he had cut the throttle. Coach did not stop, of course. As always, Leo tried not to watch, but he turned to see after hearing Coach’s snowmobile whine and splash and go silent. He saw Coach’s helmeted head bobbing up and down in the water, heard his gurgling cries for help. “I didn’t know what to do,” the Pilot quoted Leo as saying. The rope they carried for such emergencies was stowed in Coach’s snowmobile. The Pilot said Leo lay down on his stomach and edged close enough to the water to dampen the shoulders of his parka.

Divers found no body or snowmobile. Police said they thought the sled had sunk into the deep silt at the bottom of the lake and Coach’s body had drifted away. They planned to dredge after the spring thaw. I pulled out another binder and looked for stories on the dredging. It never happened. The town council decided it would be futile and expensive, the Pilot said. Nor did the council desire to prolong the town’s mourning. The sheriff then, Jerry Spardell, said he had no good answer for what happened to Coach except that perhaps he and his machine had been sucked into one of those underwater tunnels. Reading it, I shook my head in disbelief.

A cold sun shined on Jack Blackburn’s funeral procession. Townspeople in River Rats caps, hats, and jackets lined Main Street as fifty snowmobiles draped in bedsheets dyed black crawled past, trailing plumes of exhaust and an empty hearse. A blown-up photograph atop the hearse showed Coach standing on a rink in his blue-and-gold sweatsuit, hockey stick in his hands, whistle dangling. I watched with Soupy from the storage room over Enright’s. Now and then I cried. Soupy, who did not cry, laid a hand on the back of my neck and said nothing. Coach had taught me how to play goalie and how to love hockey and how to win. But that wasn’t why I cried. I cried for the years in which Coach and I had barely talked since the day we lost that last game, since I’d left Starvation Lake. I cried because Coach had never taught me how to lose.

I closed the binder and stood there, my eyes fixed on the dates etched on its side, thinking. Why would Leo change his mind about skimming? He’d doubtless resisted plenty of other times when he’d had a lot to drink. Why hadn’t anyone onshore heard Coach’s cries for help? How could the city not dredge the lake, the expense be damned? And what about my mother, a witness once removed? She hadn’t been quoted in the Pilot, not even declining to comment.

What troubled me most was that I hadn’t pondered these questions before, or allowed myself to. Why was it that only ten years later I’d begun to feel that Leo’s story seemed unlikely? Why only now was I wondering what my mother knew that she’d never told? At the time, perhaps, I was too distraught to think about it. And then I ran back to Detroit and tried to forget, while my mother and everyone else who knew how I felt was telling me to let it go, move on with my life. So I did. Now it was catching up with me, a nightmare that had been hiding all those years in the shadowy corners of my mind, unseen and unacknowledged.

As I slipped the binder back into its rack, I heard a creak in the floor above me. Shit, I thought.

Joanie was waiting at the top of the stairs. “Jerk,” she said.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Got a hockey game to get to.”

She stepped in front of me. “What were you doing going to see Dingus? Checking up on me?”

“I wasn’t checking-”

“You have no right.”

“It’s my job-”

“Bullcrap! Editors don’t go around checking up on reporters behind their backs. Editors aren’t supposed to be sniveling little chickens.”

Some bosses might have fired her then and there. I told myself to calm down and walked past her into the newsroom and sat down on her desk. Of course I couldn’t fire her, and not just because we were short-staffed. She had to help me figure out what had happened to Coach.

“Take it easy,” I said. “You were right.”

“Darn right I was right.”

“No, I mean about the whole thing. It is a hell of a story.”

“So what were you doing at the sheriff’s department?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t checking up on you, I swear. I think maybe I was checking up on me.”

“What the heck does that mean, Gus?”

I got up and walked to my desk. My keyboard was buried in a pile of typed articles that had been dropped off by old-lady freelancers, who attended school board and parks commission meetings and babbled on in their stories about what the mayor was wearing and who led the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance. I spent my days rewriting that garbage into slightly better garbage that filled space between ads for pizza joints and lumber yards.

“Look at all this shit,” I said. I turned to face her. “Look, I’m not trying to steal your story, OK? Christ, we work for the same paper. Like it or not, I’m your boss, all right? And I…well, I wasn’t there when all this happened, but I knew-actually I didn’t know what I knew, then or now-oh hell, never mind. Bottom line, Dingus didn’t give me squat. I filled out a request for the eighty-eight police report and he sent me home.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Joanie said. “But for the past two days it seemed like you were trying to keep me away from the story. Now you think it’s a story. Well, hello! It’s the biggest damn story ever to hit his town.”

“‘Damn’? Watch your language, girl.”

She actually blushed. “Sorry.”

“Let’s just work on it, OK? You know D’Alessio, right?”

“Yes,” she said, blushing again.

“You might want to ask him about some forensics analysis they’re apparently doing on the snowmobile. I did hear that while I was over there. Dingus wouldn’t talk about it.”

“It took guts to ask for that eighty-eight report,” she said.

“Why?”

“Dingus wrote it. He was the deputy then.”

We were quiet for a minute. Joanie leaned back against the copier and folded her arms. “You know what happened, don’t you?” I didn’t particularly want to hear. “There was no accident, Gus. Somebody killed Blackburn.”

I gazed at a coffee stain on the tiled floor. In my mind I pictured the beach at Walleye Lake, felt the flashlights in my eyes.

“I’m glad you looked at the old papers,” Joanie said. “Hard to figure, isn’t it? I mean, do you really think that Leo dude was telling everything he knew? I don’t. And underwater tunnels? Give me a break. The old folks at Audrey’s might believe that junk, but you sure as heck don’t.”

No, I didn’t, though I had tried to for a couple of days.

“Reminds me,” she said. “I hear your coach was quite the ladies’ man.”

This was old news. “And?”

“Who knows? Could go to motive. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”

“Screwing’s always interesting, but it’s pretty tough to get into a family newspaper.”

“So I should just ignore it?”

“No. You shouldn’t ignore anything. You should look at everything and talk to everyone. Just don’t assume everything you get is going to see print.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.”

I looked up at the clock. It said 6:31. “I’ve got to fly,” I said. “By the way, did you clear up the Canada thing?”

“The what?”

“The thing about Coach-about Blackburn not really being in that one place for four years?”

“Oh, right. Not yet. I called that woman at the newspaper again. It was weird, for a minute I thought she was going to cry. Anyway, she told me to call her at home tonight. Got to do my laundry first.”

Upstairs, I shoved a stack of old Hockey News magazines off my makeshift coffee table and lifted the plywood off the cardboard boxes beneath. I opened the box that wasn’t marked Trucks, the one marked Rats.

It was filled with old tournament programs, newspaper clippings, and photographs. I rummaged in the bottom and pulled out the dog-eared programs and yearbooks Coach had given me when I was a boy. I flipped through them once, then again more slowly, looking for a St. Albert Saints program for 1966-67, the season he supposedly wasn’t there. Then I lined up all the programs across the carpet in chronological order, from Kitchener in 1954 to Moose Jaw to Kamloops to Kelowna to Victoria to St. Albert.

There was nothing from St. Albert in ’66-’67.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. I looked again. There was no program from that season. Was my memory fooling me? I sat on the floor remembering Coach leaning over his empty plate, telling us St. Albert was just too damn cold. The kids were great and they’d nearly won the title, he said, but he wanted those warm summers. “I had four fantastic years there,” I could hear him saying. “But you know what? All good things come to an end.”