Starvation Lake

twenty-four

What a load of crap,” Joanie said. “We traded a perfectly good story for that?” My truck bounced along the snow-covered gravel road two miles from Blackburn’s old place. “Third bullet, my butt. Probably just another drunken miss.”

“We got the photo.”

“I bet it’s rigged. And this fourth guy-or girl, or, heck, maybe it was Bigfoot-why didn’t he just tell us? I’ll tell you why. Because he didn’t see a thing. He was working us.”

She looked at me for a reply, but I was going over what Perlmutter had told us while dreading what we might find at the old Blackburn place. Yes, his “third” bullet could have been a fake. But the photograph intrigued me; the figure in the photo seemed to have that hunch Leo had in his shoulders. As for a fourth person, I didn’t want to think about it too hard without knowing who it was. Boynton? Dingus? Elvis Bontrager?

“Did you ever find out anything about Blackburn’s family?” I said.

“Nada. If he had a brother-in-law in Kalamazoo, he isn’t there now.”

I swung the truck onto Route 571. A dim orange glow pulsated in the sky ahead. “How about the property?” I said. “Who owns it now?”

After Blackburn’s death, the county had boarded up his house and the billets and declared the property off-limits. Now and then some kids would break into one of the billets and have a party. It had all since been purchased, or so the rumor went, by an out-of-state real-estate investment firm.

“Some company in Virginia,” Joanie said. She flipped through her notebook. “It’s in my backpack. Something like Richards Incorporated or Richards Company.”

“You got this at the clerk’s office?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you get past Verna? Vicky?”

“Yeah-holy crap!”

We crested a hill and in the clearing below orange flames and billowing black smoke leaped into the sky through the falling snow. Swirling police lights painted the bare trees in scarlet and blue while the fire hoses etched silver arcs of water catapulting over Blackburn’s house and the three billets.

Everything was burning.

I stopped the truck on the horseshoe drive that looped in front of the cabin, where our parents had parked their cars when we were kids playing at Make-Believe Gardens. A cluster of deputies swung around and pointed flashlights our way. “Stay back,” one said, but it was only Skip Catledge, so I moved ahead of Joanie into the reek of charred wood and gasoline.

Catledge turned and shouted to another deputy, “Tell Sheriff the press is here.” He turned back to me and said, “Not another step, buck.”

“What the hell’s going on?” I said.

“Judge never should’ve let him out.”

So it was Soupy, as I had feared. This was how he put his affairs in order. “Where is he?”

“One of the little houses in the back. Said he isn’t coming out, but the firefighters are going in before the smoke kills him.”

I tried to move past Catledge, who put a gloved hand firmly in my chest. “Back off, Gus. If this isn’t evidence of guilt, I don’t know what is,”

“Come on, Skip, I’ve known the guy for thirty fucking years.”

“I’ve known him just as long, and he’s an idiot,” Catledge said. He turned around and surveyed the scene, then grabbed me by my jacket shoulder. “All right. Come on.”

We trotted up to within fifty yards of the billets. The heat and smoke stung my face and the inside of my nose. “Far enough,” Catledge said. “Stay here.” He jogged off toward the fire.

Cops and firefighters encircled the burning billets. I imagined Soupy crouched inside, the fire and smoke closing in on him, his idiotic bravado vanished. I thought of his estranged daughter in Flint and how even though she hadn’t seen him in years she would be crushed to hear how her daddy had died. I wanted to run into the burning buildings and punch him to death. And I wanted him to come out, sputtering for breath.

Just then a firefighter, followed by a second one, burst from the front door of the nearest billet. They stumbled awkwardly off the porch into the snow, hefting a body wrapped in a blanket. Two paramedics rushed past us with a stretcher.

“They got him,” Joanie said.

I walked in a daze of fury and relief toward the paramedics. They laid the body on the stretcher and unwrapped the blanket. It was Soupy, all right. His eyes were shut. He was limp and motionless. A flap of thick hair fell over one side of his face. The hair on the other side was singed off. Charcoal smears blackened his nostrils and upper lip. Dingus emerged from the smoke to our right. He was waving and yelling something I couldn’t make out. He saw Joanie and me approaching and held up a hand as if to stop us. Catledge jumped in front of us. “You’re gonna get me in trouble,” he said.

“Is he alive?” I said.

“No idea. Get back.”

The paramedics closed around Soupy, blocking our view. All I could see was Soupy’s arm dangling lifelessly off the stretcher. In all of our years of playing hockey, I’d never seen him on a stretcher, not even close. He was lucky that way. Other things didn’t hurt Soupy. Mostly it was Soupy who hurt Soupy.

One of the paramedics leaned away and I saw Soupy’s arm jerk up and down, once, then again. Then Soupy’s head rose a few inches off the stretcher. He coughed a moist wad up on his chest. He leaned over the edge of the stretcher and spit more in the snow, struggling for breath. I felt myself exhale before the anger rushed back in.

“Soupy,” I yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”

Dingus pushed in front of me. “Deputy, get them out of here.”

“Trap,” I heard Soupy say. “Trap. Man, I’m so, I’m so sorry, man.”

“Deputy!”

Catledge put his hands on my shoulders. “Let’s go, buddy,” he said. He pushed me back a step and I stiffened.

“Soupy, why?” I said.

Catledge pressed against me. “Don’t make me, Gus.”

“I got to talk to you, man,” Soupy said.

Catledge shoved me back another step. “Now, Gus,” he said. “You want the cell next to his?”

I let Catledge push me back and away. The paramedics strapped Soupy down and lifted him into the ambulance.

“Sorry, man,” Soupy cried. “I’m sorry about, about-fuck, man, my fingers burn!”

As the ambulance pulled away, a bright white light shined on us from across the horseshoe. Tawny Jane and her camerman were walking up. Dingus turned to Joanie and me, the fire raging behind him, his face flushed crimson, his mustache drooping with a crust of ice. “Go home,” he said.

We rode to town in silence. I let Joanie out at her car in front of the Pilot.

“Long day,” she said.

“Yeah. Good job. The Blake story’s going to look great.”

“Thanks.”

I parked in back. I pulled Dad’s Bell amp; Howell out of the backseat and lugged it into the Pilot, where I retrieved the boxes of film I’d found in Delbert’s files.

Upstairs, I poured myself a jar of water and drew the shades. From the wall facing the kitchen counter, I removed two pictures-one of my parents sunning on a pontoon boat, my mother pregnant in a pink one-piece swimsuit; the other of my old dogs, Fats and Blinky, asleep on a rug. I set the projector on the kitchen counter, facing the wall. It took me a while to make it work. I got a little thrill of accomplishment seeing the bulb flash a white square on the wall. But I discovered I did not have a take-up reel. Probably dropped it when I slipped on Mom’s basement steps. I toweled out my sink and plugged the drain, figuring I’d run the film into the sink and untangle it later if need be.

I inserted the reel marked F/1280/SL/R4. I assumed it was from December of 1980, when I had just turned seventeen. The projector whirred and rattled. A grainy black-and-white image blinked on the wall. I saw our indoor rink viewed from the bleachers, where Leo must have been sitting. On the ice, the River Rats-my River Rats-were practicing. Most of the skaters huddled near the penalty boxes on the opposite side of the ice. Five others stood spread out between the blue lines at center ice. I saw myself standing just outside the blue line on the right of the screen, looking too skinny, even in my goalie gear, to be playing hockey. The shaggy head of Blackburn’s mutt, Pocket, poked up from the bench behind the boards.

In the middle of the ice, Blackburn, in skates, hockey gloves, and a blue-and-gold Rats sweatsuit, pointed and waved and shouted directions. The film was soundless, but I could tell he was drilling us in the Rat Trap. He held a puck over his head and skated across the blue line on the left, where he set the puck down on a face-off dot. Then he went to each of the five players and showed him exactly where he was supposed to be. It was hard to make out individual players. I recognized Teddy, who didn’t look skinny at all, and Soupy, with his hair splayed across his shoulders. When Blackburn wasn’t looking, Soupy would turn and mug for the camera. Blackburn finally caught him, of course, and ordered us all to the end of the rink for sprints.

I didn’t recall this particular scene, but it happened often enough. As we lined up to skate, I saw Boynton barking at Soupy, who shrugged and said something back, probably something like, “Twelve-pack on this one, boy-O?” Sometimes I wondered if Soupy deliberately got us into trouble so he could win his Friday night ration of beer from Teddy. I watched us sprint. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. Blackburn presided at the blue line, stick at his side, whistle in his mouth. So many times he’d watched from there while we stood shoulder to shoulder between sprints, leaning on our sticks, gulping at the Freon air.

As Blackburn raised an arm to call for another sprint, the screen went blank white again. I looked at the projector. The spinning reel was still nearly full of film. Could that be all? Maybe Leo didn’t want to waste film on sprints. I waited. For a few seconds, the screen went black and the room dark. Then the wall began to flicker with jagged fragments of light. The white square reappeared, followed by a fuzzy new image.

It focused. The camera was now peering into a room. The frame contained a shadow frame within, as though the camera had been aimed through a window. At the center of the picture stood a pool table, covered with a blanket. On the wall behind it hung a bar sign advertising Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon. “What the hell?” I said aloud. I knew this place. Coach usually didn’t have enough out-of-towners to fill the third billet, so he made part of it into a playroom. This was it.

The body of a woman moved languidly into the picture, her head cut off by the upper limit of the frame. Her hair, the color of day-old snow, cascaded down to the tops of her bare shoulder blades. The rest of her was covered in a bedsheet she held in a bunch at her breasts. She stood with her back to the camera, obscuring most of the picture. The way she’d strutted slowly into the picture, then held herself there, as if on display, suggested to me that she wanted to be there, that she belonged. Behind her someone else entered the frame. I spied enough of a forearm to think it was male. His head, too, was cut off by the frame. She let her arms fall to her sides. The sheet fell away. On her bottom’s right cheek I glimpsed a tattoo, too small to see clearly, though I thought it might be a four-leaf clover. She gestured toward the pool table. The man seemed frozen in place. The woman moved toward the table, leaving the frame. Now I saw that the man was not a man but a boy. His face still wasn’t visible, but I knew his chest and shoulders and the way his boxers drooped on his thin hips.

It was Soupy.

The woman reentered the frame. She was crawling naked across the pool table toward Soupy, her head down, her hair hiding the corner of her face included in the frame. Soupy turned toward her, tentative, and hooked his thumbs inside the waistband of his boxers. Her head snapped up then, the hair flipping back, but the camera slid downward and she was headless again. She slithered across the table, took Soupy by his shoulders, and pulled him toward her.

He obeyed with the shy reluctance of a child. He lay motionlessly on his back while the woman slipped his boxers off and mounted him. I wanted to turn away but instead I reached into the drawer next to my head and grabbed a pen and notebook and began taking notes. The woman pressed the heels of her palms flat against his belly and writhed, her hair tossing back and forth on her shoulders. There still was no sound, but the way she moved suggested she was enjoying herself. Soupy’s arms lay still at his sides as he gazed blankly at the ceiling.

A man entered the frame from the right, fully clothed. His face was clearly visible. It was Jack Blackburn. Soupy closed his eyes. The woman continued to grind against him while Blackburn propped his thighs against the side of the table behind the woman, over Soupy’s bare feet. I knew what was going to happen then. It had happened to Brendan Blake. Blackburn unzipped his pants and took his erect penis in both hands. Now I closed my eyes, though only briefly. With the celluloid piling up in the sink, I felt it was my duty to compile a record. I forced myself to watch as Blackburn masturbated. He ejaculated on Soupy’s pale feet. The toes curled. Soupy twisted his face away from the camera.

I thought of him in our dressing room, jamming his too-small skates onto his feet, and I jumped up and lurched around and leaned into the sink, trying to keep from vomiting. My breathing echoed on the stainless-steel walls. Beneath my face the unspooled film was heaped like dead snakes in a sewer. I pushed away and stumbled into the bathroom, where I flicked on the light and splashed cold water on my face and the back of my neck. Staring into the mirror, I drew deep breaths and watched the water trickling down my cheeks and off the stitches still in my jaw. I wiped my face and brought the towel with me into the kitchen.

For the next two hours I filled most of the notebook with everything I saw on the three reels. I had to stop now and then to collect myself. On every reel, scenes of River Rat practices were spliced with scenes of Soupy in the playroom. The woman was in some of the scenes, some not. Blackburn performed in every one. The level of light and the camera angle varied slightly from one reel to the next, suggesting that there had been numerous sessions. In one scene a whiskey bottle and a glass appeared on a shelf in the background. In another, Blackburn’s little dog, Pocket, jumped onto the table and licked Soupy’s face; Soupy, showing the only emotion I saw in any of the films, angrily swatted the dog away. I scribbled it all down.

I concluded Blackburn had placed the camera behind a mirror on the wall-a one-way mirror, obviously. Was Leo behind the camera? Or had Blackburn set it up and let it run while he participated? The wall was common to a bunkroom. For his last two years on the Rats, Teddy had stayed in that bunkroom alone while other out-of-town players shared the other billets. Imagining Teddy there aroused my nausea again, and then a searing wave of sympathy I’d never before felt for him.

Each time a reel finished, I lifted the snarl of celluloid from the sink and packed it gently in a brown paper bag that I then stashed in a Cheerios box in the back of my pantry. After stowing the last film, I unplugged the projector, wrapped the cord around it, and stuffed it under my bed. Then I lay down without taking my clothes off. I couldn’t sleep, though. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Soupy and that tattooed woman writhing on the pool table. I tried to focus on the ceiling, but that didn’t work. It was too quiet and too dark. I reached under my bed and pulled out the projector. I set it up again on the kitchen counter and turned it on. The empty white square appeared on the wall. I sat down on the floor and leaned back against the cabinets beneath the sink. The projector click-click-clicked. I stared at the blank light until my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.