Starvation Lake

twenty-seven

On that March night in 1988, the pistol felt cold against Soupy’s palm. He gripped it loosely, nervously, in his coat pocket as he emerged from the trees at the clearing’s edge.

“Hello,” he said.

Jack Blackburn and Leo Redpath barely heard him over the crackle of the fire in the rusted oil barrel. The glow of the flames played across their faces where they sat on their snowmobiles.

“Look who’s here,” Blackburn said. “Old Swanny.”

“The returning soldier,” Leo said, waving a flat, clear glass bottle. “Welcome home, Mr. Campbell. Come toast the Ides of March. We’re celebrating early this year.”

The knee-deep snow felt like mud as Soupy stepped toward the men. He was sweating. He’d been building up courage at Enright’s.

“What’s up, Jack?” he said.

“What’s up, Jack?” I said. “You’ve got a gun in your pocket and you’re saying, ‘What’s up, Jack?’”

“I know,” Soupy told me. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I almost bolted right there.”

“Almost?”

He shook his head. “Fuck him, Trap. I hope he’s frying in hell.”

“Jack?” Blackburn said. He smiled and raised his own brown bottle to his lips. His hair was matted from wearing the wool cap and helmet that rested in his lap. “How’d the season go, Swanny? Still in Harrisburg?”

“Hershey,” Soupy said. His last season in the minors. The booze churned in his belly. His hand was now shaking so badly that he let the gun go and clutched the inside of his pocket. “Got hurt.”

Blackburn grunted. “I’ll bet. You were never too big on the conditioning. You just wanted to play.” He took another drink. “Just wanted to show off for the girls.” He and Leo laughed.

Soupy felt a surge of anger and took hold of the gun again, his index finger resting on the trigger. “Champy says hello, Jack,” he said.

“Pardon?”

Something rustled in the bushes behind Soupy. He looked around, keeping his hand in his pocket, and saw nothing.

“Just a deer that wants a beer,” Blackburn said. “He won’t hurt you, Swanny.”

“You don’t remember Champy, Jack?”

“What’s got you so hot under the collar?” Blackburn said. “Who?”

“Champy, Jack. Played for the Rats. You cut him, remember? But he turned out to be a player. Good wheels. Awesome hands. Better hands than me.”

Blackburn propped his bottle on his knee. “I had a lot of players, down here and up in the homeland. I don’t remember all of them. But nobody had better hands than you.”

“He had the stuff to make it big, Jack,” Soupy said. “But he’s all done now. Like me. He was pretty much done when he got to Hershey this year. You know, Jack, if we had a three-day break between games, Champy could blow through a pile of coke bigger than your head.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. What’s your point?”

“When Champy showed up in Hershey, I hadn’t seen him in years. We talked a lot, Jack. Talked a lot about you.”

Blackburn shifted the bottle to his other knee.

“Worried?” Soupy said. “You can probably figure what we talked about, huh, Jack? You probably thought nobody would ever talk about it. You were wrong.”

Leo stood. Blackburn looked at him and then back at Soupy. He said, “Spent the evening at Enright’s, eh, Swanny?”

“Don’t fucking call me that anymore.”

“Soupy,” Leo said. “What’s the matter?”

“Quiet, Leo,” Soupy said. “Don’t fuck around with me, Jack. You stayed in pretty close touch with Champy, didn’t you? Real close. His parents must have loved you helping him get the full ride to State. I wonder what they would’ve thought about you going to visit him now and then. Do you think they would’ve been happy about you fucking their son? Huh, Jack?”

“Jack?” Leo said.

Blackburn twisted the cap onto his bottle. “Let’s go, Leo. The boy’s had too much to drink.”

“No,” Soupy said, taking a step forward. He pulled out the gun and pointed it at Blackburn.

“What the hell?” Blackburn said.

Leo took a step toward Soupy. “My God, son.”

Soupy waved him back with the pistol. “Sit down, Leo. Ain’t about you. This is all about Jack. And Champy. And me.”

“What do you want?” Blackburn said.

“Hah,” Soupy said. “Whatever it is, Jack, it’s way too fucking late for you to give it to me. Or give it back.”

“You know what? I think you’re drunk, eh? I think you’re a little pissed off about your shitty little career and you’d like someone to blame. You might want to go look in a mirror, eh? As for your friend, Champy or whatever, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Tears had begun to burn in Soupy’s eyes. He lowered the gun barrel until it was aimed at Blackburn’s crotch. “What was his name, Jack?”

“Put the gun down, Swanny.”

“I’m going to blow your dick off, Jack.”

Blackburn lowered his voice. “You little shit. I never did anything you didn’t want me to.”

“Jack?” Leo said.

“What was his name?” Soupy said.

“Jeff,” Blackburn said. “Jeff Champagne, all right?”

“Fuck you, Jack.”

The shot went off as Blackburn somersaulted backward into the snow. The bullet missed him and pierced the snowmobile. Soupy aimed to fire again but Leo had jumped in his way, crying, “Oh, my God.” Blackburn scrambled out from behind the snowmobile and flung his bottle at Soupy’s head. Soupy ducked at the same time that something whacked him hard behind his left ear and he fell. In an instant Blackburn was on top of him with the pistol. He grabbed Soupy’s coat collar with one hand and pointed the gun at his head with the other. “You little shit,” he said. He forced the gun barrel into Soupy’s mouth. The metal banged against his teeth. “Suck on this,” Blackburn said. Soupy closed his eyes. He heard another voice, maybe Leo’s, he wasn’t sure, shout, “Get off that boy!” and then another-not Leo’s, not Blackburn’s, not one he recognized in his drunken grogginess-say, “You took it too far, Jack. Too damn far.” Then Blackburn cried out and his weight fell suddenly away and Soupy half opened his eyes to see Leo standing with the pistol in hand and Blackburn sitting in the snow, rubbing the back of his head.

“Get up, Soupy,” Leo said.

Soupy struggled to his feet. Blood was dripping from his left ear. Leo pointed the gun at Blackburn. It shook in his hand.

“You lied, Jack,” Leo said. “You didn’t stop.”

Blackburn groaned. “Jesus, Leo. You hit me.”

“You said you’d stopped.”

“It’s not my fault his life is all fucked up.”

“Enough,” Leo said. He swung the pistol awkwardly across Blackburn’s eye, as if he didn’t want to hurt him. Blackburn grunted and keeled over, his blood coursing red into the snow. Leo turned to Soupy. “Get out of here.”

“What are you going to do?” Soupy said.

“Just go.”

“I ran like hell,” Soupy told me. “Had to puke before I got to my truck.”

“Did you hear anything?”

He paused. Then he said, “A shot.”

“One shot? You didn’t turn around?”

“No way. Didn’t even stop.”

“Just one shot?”

“Yeah.”

That made for only two shots, as the police had concluded: one in the snowmobile, one in Blackburn’s head. It didn’t account for the bullet Perlmutter supposedly found embedded in the tree. Were there two bullets or three? Three people or four, as Perlmutter claimed?

“How come nobody else heard shots?” I said.

“What difference would it make? Drunk assholes are always shooting their guns off around here.”

“And the only ones out there were Blackburn and Leo?”

“All I saw. I might’ve heard someone else, but I don’t know for sure.”

“You didn’t hear somebody else running away?”

He shook his head.

Even though I’d never heard the story before, never came close to imagining it, hearing it made enough sense now that it gave me an eerie sense of deja vu, as if I’d been standing there myself, watching from the clearing’s edge.

The door opened. D’Alessio ducked in. “Carpenter,” he said.

“Our time’s not up.”

“One minute.”

In the hallway, he looked around to make sure no one was listening. “We got a call from the state police,” he said, his voice edged with irritation. “They want our assistance in case they have to make an arrest.”

“Yeah?”

“They wanted your place of residence, Gus.”

Superior. That’s what a company that sold a lot of discounted cars to the state police could do. My watch said I still had more than an hour before I had to give up my source’s name. “OK,” I said.

“I don’t know what the hell you got going with the state boys, or why the sheriff would care, but he told me to tell you. Now you know.”

I sat back down with Soupy. “So what about this suicide pact Blackburn and Leo supposedly had?” I said.

Soupy shook his head. “That’s bullshit. Why would Leo make a deal like that? He wasn’t doing any of the shit in the billets.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t working the camera?” It came out before I could stop it.

“What camera?” Soupy said.

“Shit,” I said. I told him what I’d seen. “I found them totally by accident.”

“Did you watch them by accident too?” Soupy said.

“Soup, nobody else has seen them, so far as I know. Obviously Blackburn, but he’s dead.”

“Fuck it, man, don’t worry about it.” Soupy shoved his chair back. “Everybody’s probably seen those things.”

“Everybody who?”

“Every twisted fucking pervert who goes for that shit.”

“How?”

“Blackburn. The motherfucker was selling them, making money off them.”

So Soupy knew all along.

“No,” I said.

“How do you think he afforded all those houses, Trap? He was a goddamn air-conditioning guy. He was selling those films. To whoever buys that kind of shit.”

“How do you know?”

“Leo. Jack cut him in when he first got started. You know Leo; he went along. He was a great guy, but that porn shit got to him, man, he got to love it, like a drug. He finally went to a shrink. Took him a while, but he got better. He tried to get Jack better too, but Jack just pretended. He was a hopelessly sick fuck. He was still fooling around with Champy after Leo thought everything was cool. Then when Leo found out that night at the fire, they blew up like they did. Leo never told me what happened after I bolted that scene. But these last couple of years, he was trying to help me find those films.”

“How?”

“The new way, man. The Web.”

“The Internet? You can do films on the Internet?”

“Nah, but they can pick stills out of them. And of course all the slimeballs who crave this shit can communicate real fast and easy without leaving much of a trail. Anyway, Leo thought we might be able to track down my films, or maybe the guys who had them, and maybe buy them up. It was pretty stupid. Like we were going to buy up every little piece of me out there. Never did find me. But there was plenty of porn. Little boys. Little girls. Cats. Dogs. Ducks. Pigs. Fucking pigs, man. The whole world is a goddamn porn freak show now.” He stopped and thought for a moment. “Leo got hooked on that shit all over again. He said it wasn’t a problem. But it was a big problem. I wish I’d thrown his damn computer in the lake with Blackburn.”

So all that happy blather pasted over Leo’s workbench had nothing to do with alcohol, but pornography. Maybe he had been behind the camera in the billets. Maybe he had expected that everything he had on his computer would have come out in the courtroom. Maybe he had killed himself out of pure suffocating shame.

“Leo never told you what happened?”

“Never.”

“Come on.”

“Nope. Neither one of us ever said a word. Even when we were hunting around on his computer, we acted like that night never happened.”

“So you always knew the snowmobile accident was bullshit.”

“Yep. And that pisses you off, doesn’t it, Trap? Sorry, man. You got your job, I got mine. Leo saved my goddamn life. I couldn’t take a chance on getting him in trouble. Turns out I did anyway.”

It infuriated me that I had no choice but to understand. “What about that other voice you heard that night? Was it Leo?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I was half blind.”

“So there might’ve been somebody else out there? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know. Why do you keep asking that?”

“Somebody…I heard there might’ve been somebody else.”

“From who? Boynton?”

“No.”

“Well then, hell, Trap, maybe it was Boynton out there. Maybe he just showed up late with the marshmallows.”

“You know,” I said, “maybe it was. He certainly seems to have known a lot about all this stuff. Enough to blackmail you and get Leo in trouble with the cops. I wonder if he tipped them off to the computer. Would he have known about that?”

“Ah, fuck, man,” Soupy said. “Listen.”

The night before the state title game, Blackburn had Soupy and Teddy leave the rest of the team in the billets and come to his house. Over cocoa in the kitchen they argued about how we would cover Billy Hooper. Soupy insisted that only he was fast enough to stay with Hooper. Coach said he thought Teddy could handle it. Teddy sat there smiling, letting Coach do his talking. Coach said he’d sleep on it. He told Soupy to go back to the billets and get to bed, Teddy would be along soon.

Soupy fell asleep listening for Teddy to come in.

The next morning, Teddy sat next to Soupy on the bus to the rink. Soupy looked out the window. Teddy leaned over and whispered: “Guess what I watched last night?”

“So he knew everything?”

“Pretty much. And he loved it. He told me if I ever fucked with him, he’d tell the whole world.”

The films flickered in my head. “Blackburn had to have been pulling the same stuff on Boynton, Soup,” I said.

He chuckled bitterly. “Maybe I was just jealous.”

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?”

“Why do you think, dipshit? You think I was proud of it?”

“It wasn’t your fault, Soupy. Why didn’t you tell someone?”

“I told my fucking father, OK? And, as you can imagine, he was so understanding. First he wanted to hear all about Tillie’s tits, then he told me to stop making things up. I never brought it up again.”

“What about your mom?”

He shook his head.

“Have you told anyone else any of this?”

“Nope.”

“Not even Flapp?”

“Not much.”

“Well, what the hell are you thinking, Soup? Are you thinking you’re going to go to prison for Leo? Leo’s dead and you aren’t bringing him back.”

“You know,” he said, “none of this is why I asked you here. I wanted to tell you something else. So shut the fuck up a minute.”

He tried to stand, but the manacles on his ankles made it difficult. “You know?” he said. “The guy was my coach. I did what he said. You did what he said, too, Trap. You worshipped the guy and you could’ve been on that table if it wasn’t me. I worshipped him, too. He made me feel like I was fucking famous around here, you know what I mean? I was the man. You go look in Enright’s sometime and you count who’s got the most pictures on the wall.”

“That’s what you had to tell me?”

“No.” He loosed a long, sorrowful sigh. “Ah, Jesus, Trap.”

“What?”

“You remember the lacrosse shot?”

“In the title game?”

“Yeah. I missed it, man.”

“I know. You hit the crossbar.”

“No, man. I could’ve made that shot a thousand out of a thousand. I made a hundred in a row once behind my garage. But I was pissed at the world. I aimed for that crossbar.”

I heard the puck ringing off the pipe again as my legs involuntarily lifted me out of the chair. I saw the puck flopping on the ice in front of me. I saw Hooper’s dead eye, felt myself freeze, saw the puck trickle into the goal, heard the sickening roar of the crowd.

“You missed it on purpose?”

“Sorry, man.”

“You never told me.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Thanks,” I said. I stuffed my notebook in my pocket. “I’m damn sorry for everything that happened to you, Soup. Good luck.”

Outside I stared at my steering wheel. I screamed as loud and as long as I could. Just once. Nobody but me could hear it over my idling truck and the hum of the wind.

I parked next to a green Dumpster behind the IGA. I got out and threw the lid open, then reached into my flatbed and unzipped my hockey bag. I removed each piece of stiff, frozen gear-leg pads, chest protector, arm pads, mask, baggy pants, skates-and heaved each of them, one by one, into the stinking void. Last out was Eggo. A scrap of shiny black tape remained stuck to the thumb where Darlene’s mom had stitched it. I put my right hand in the glove and stuck it out in front of me, flexed my fingers inside, turned it back and forth as I would during pregame warm-ups. I opened the truck door and tossed the glove onto the floor. Then I grabbed my empty bag and hurled it into the Dumpster before I slammed the lid shut and pulled away.