Starvation Lake

thirty-two

With Dufresne in custody, Judge Gallagher issued more pieces of paper that prevented the state cops from collecting me. After a couple of loopy hearings in his courtroom, they, and Superior Motors, gave up.

Joanie and I wrote front-page stories about Blackburn and Dufresne every day for the next three weeks. Soon the networks had camera trucks crowding Main Street. Reporters from across the country were lining up for interviews with Dingus and egg pies at Audrey’s. But the Pilot owned the story.

Darlene hadn’t really snuck me out of the jail; Dingus was in on it all along. She’d listened carefully to my talk with Mom and, on a hunch, pleaded with Dingus to search Dufresne’s home. Judge Gallagher came through with a quick warrant. Then Darlene left her walkie-talkie on as we stood at Leo’s gravesite. Dingus heard everything. In the trunk of his cruiser were boxes of confiscated photographs and videotapes, labeled with the same cryptic markings I’d seen on Blackburn’s bookshelves.

For years the legend had gone that Dufresne took five thousand dollars he inherited in the late 1960s and, by investing wisely time and again in real estate, turned it into millions. The truth was that he’d taken a thousand dollars from my father and a few other unwitting investors and, with the help of Jack Blackburn, turned that stake into a child pornography business. With Dingus’s help, Joanie and I uncovered a far-flung network of pedophiles buying and selling films and photographs, largely via the Internet. Dufresne was at the center of a loose but sophisticated web of suppliers, distributors, and consumers. The FBI hauled him away on charges of mail fraud, income tax evasion, and possession of child pornography.

Agents found Blackburn, Dufresne’s most reliable supplier, at a highway rest stop near Jacksonville, Florida, sitting on a picnic table eating a bag of fried pork rinds. He’d colored his hair and his beard a garish shade of red. He told the agents he was a recreational-vehicle salesman named James Graham, even producing genuine-looking identification. A cardboard box hidden in the spare-tire well of his Camry contained half a dozen videotapes and three manila envelopes stuffed with photographs.

The town council declared the day of Blackburn’s arraignment an official day of atonement. More than five hundred people piled onto school buses to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to the federal courthouse in Grand Rapids. An hour before the arraignment, they assembled along both sides of the sidewalk leading to the courthouse door. They stood in icy silence as federal marshals ushered Blackburn past, his head down, his eyes on the ground.

After Soupy was released from jail, he holed up in his marina office, shooing reporters away, too ashamed to talk. I left him alone. But that summer I returned to Grand Rapids and took notes as he gave testimony that would help send our old coach to prison. On the third morning of the trial, I spotted Dingus and Barbara Lampley at a coffee shop nearby, holding hands.

Joanie ignored the job offers pouring in while she worked on the Blackburn story. One night after deadline I sat her down with some Blue Ribbons and nacho chips, and we decided she should go to the Chicago Tribune to cover the police beat.

“All right,” she said. “But not until we’re done here.”

“OK, boss,” I said.

A few days after she left for good, I was named executive editor of the Pilot.

One afternoon, I walked up to my father’s old tree house. Under my arm was his Bell amp; Howell movie projector. In my pocket was the key to the closet I had never been inside.

The reels of film, fourteen in all, lay in cardboard boxes on the closet floor. I hung a bedsheet in the garage and aimed the Bell amp; Howell. I ran every reel through it, or tried. A couple of them, rotting, disintegrated in my hands. Others shredded as they fluttered through the projector. Most were movies of Soupy and me and my other buddies playing at Make-Believe Gardens. I’d forgotten how Dad used to run up and down the rink trying to get all of us into the frame; one time he slipped and fell on his face, and we all laughed. Other films showed some grainy images of women and men having sex. But no boys.

I dumped all of it, including the projector, into an oil barrel behind the garage. I doused it with kerosene, lit it, and stepped back in the wet snow to watch it burn.

“Hey, Gus.”

I looked up to see Darlene standing at the corner of the garage, wearing jeans and a denim jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. She walked up and stood facing me on the other side of the fire, a brown paper sack under her arm.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Not much. A little spring cleaning.”

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. I could feel her looking at me. The celluloid sizzled and spat.

“Brought you something,” she said. She walked around the fire and held the bag out, smiling. She hadn’t smiled like that at me in a long time. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Even Mom couldn’t fix her this time.”

I looked inside the bag and saw the tattered remains of Eggo. Darlene must have retrieved it from Horvath Road. I reached inside and touched the scrap of black electrical tape clinging to the thumb. I looked up at Darlene.

“What?” she said.

“I don’t know, Darl. Sometimes, I swear, I wish we’d just brought him back and drowned him in the lake.”

“No, you don’t.”

“What the hell.” I took the bag from her and tossed it on the fire. “I won’t be needing that anymore.”

“Gus. You can’t quit hockey.”

“I know. But I’m done playing goalie. Time to fire pucks at other people’s heads for a change.”

We stood there a little longer. The fire quieted until I could hear the melting snow dripping off the garage roof.

“Want to get out of here?” I said.

“Yeah. Want a ride?”