Starvation Lake

five

No way was I going back to Audrey’s for lunch. I walked around behind the Pilot and climbed the wooden stairs to my apartment.

I took bologna and ketchup from the fridge, a frying pan from the dish drainer. I turned on the stove and tore the bologna into ragged strips in the pan. The meat sizzled into crisp curls. I dumped ketchup all over it, turned the heat down, and laid two slices of white bread on a paper plate.

Out the window, I stared at Soupy’s truck, still parked in front of Enright’s. I hit the play button on my answering machine. My mother reminded me about coming for Sunday dinner. Somebody hung up. Then a reedy voice filled my breadbox of a kitchen.

“Gus,” it said. “I wish you’d return my calls. Tuesday’s the drop dead.”

“Then I’ll call you Tuesday,” I told the machine.

The voice was the Detroit lawyer I had had to hire in my final days at the Detroit Times. I turned the stove off and scooped the crispy bologna onto the bread.

“Jesus,” I said.

My best reporter-my only real reporter-was angry with me. Teddy Boynton was trying to blackmail me. My old coach had resurfaced. And now it looked like I would finally have to deal with the mess I had made in Detroit. I sat down in the recliner to eat. But I wasn’t hungry anymore.

The sandwich spent the afternoon in the newsroom fridge, while I edited stories and wrote headlines for Saturday’s Pilot. The school board was seeking a special tax to pay for a swimming pool. A cellular phone company cut the ribbon on a store in the mini-mall. A frustrated mother called the sheriff’s department for help putting her eleven-year-old son to bed. And the River Rats were headed downstate for the first round of the state hockey playoffs. I spent most of an hour translating Tillie Spaulding’s Monica feature into readable newspaper patter. She couldn’t write, but she surely could find the strange.

She dug up eighty-three-year-old Gloria Lowinski, a nurse who thought President Clinton and his wife should try tantric sex, and a CPA named Barton Lewienski, who insisted Republicans had paid the intern to seduce Clinton. There was a French poodle named Monica and a cashier at a burger joint called the White House who said, “Monica who?”

I held my nose and sent the thing to the printing plant.

Joanie didn’t turn in her story about the snowmobile until 5:12, eighteen minutes before deadline. It began:

Pine County sheriff’s deputies think a snowmobile that washed up on Walleye Lake may have belonged to John D. “Jack” Blackburn, the legendary youth hockey coach who died in a snowmobile accident ten years ago.

Reading the rest, I saw no more evidence to support that assertion than Joanie had let on outside Audrey’s. Nor did she attempt to explain how the snowmobile, if it was Coach Blackburn’s, had surfaced on Walleye Lake after sinking in Starvation. She was sitting at her desk, marking up a notebook with a red pen. She hadn’t said a word to me all afternoon.

“Joanie,” I said. “You haven’t nailed this snowmobile thing.”

“Fix it then.”

“Too late,” I said, annoyed. “Corporate’ll raise hell if we keep the plant overtime. I’m spiking it.” Just as I turned back to my computer, I heard a metallic thwup against the wall facing me. Two feet over my head, a wet brown stain seeped down the wall. A Diet Coke can hissed on the floor beneath.

“Jesus,” I said, wheeling around to face her.

She was standing now. “Jerk,” she said. “I could’ve worked on Bigfoot, but I spent the day chasing your stupid snowmobile, and now you kill that story, too? You’re so full of crap.”

She had a point. And I could handle her calling me a jerk, but in my short career as an editor I’d never had a reporter throw something at me. I had no idea what to do. But I wasn’t about to fire her when the suits weren’t about to let me replace her. So I just said, “Calm down, Joanie.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t tell me anything.”

Tillie appeared in the doorway in her fur coat with the little mink claws dangling from the shoulders. “What’s going on back here?”

I looked at Joanie. “You’re a loser,” she said.

Tillie walked over, picked up the can, and dropped it in a wastebasket. “Can you children please clean this up? Good night.”

Joanie and I sat in silence. I wanted to get up and tell her how unprofessional and immature she was. Her story was all guesswork. Maybe she’d guessed right. Or maybe not. But she was right-we couldn’t just ignore the damn snowmobile. The clock said 5:26. Son of a bitch, I thought.

My eight-paragraph revision said merely that police were investigating the appearance of part of a snowmobile on the Walleye Lake shore. I left a single reference to Coach Blackburn, in the last paragraph:

Police have yet to determine ownership of the snowmobile. They noted similarities to one owned by John D. “Jack” Blackburn, the legendary youth hockey coach who drowned in a snowmobile accident on March 13, 1988. However, that accident occurred on Starvation Lake. Neither his body nor the snowmobile were found.

I printed it out and walked it over to Joanie. Her eyes flitted across the page. She tossed it on her desk. “Whatever,” she said.

“Whatever?”

“Put it in the paper. That’s your job, isn’t it?”

“Joanie. Is the story accurate?”

“So far as it goes, yes.”

I went back to my desk. As the story disappeared from my screen, I felt Joanie standing behind me. I turned to see she was wearing her parka. “I’m going to make it even more accurate for Monday’s paper,” she said.

“OK,” I said. I nodded at the wall. “You going to clean this up, too?”

“Nope,” she said. I waited until she was gone to get the mop.

When I walked into the smoky tunnel of Enright’s pub, Soupy was standing at his corner of the bar, in his denim coat and red cap, yelling at the bartender to turn up the jukebox. On the TV over the bar, a local weatherman was placing a turtle on a circular chart cut into pie pieces labeled snow, sleet, sun, clouds. Each night, the turtle would crawl dumbly to one of the pieces, and that would be his forecast. He got it right about as often as the weatherman.

“Hold your horses,” said the bartender, Dave Lubienski. He rummaged behind the cash register for the TV remote. Loob was a quiet guy who spent mornings working as an assessor at Town Hall and afternoons building elaborate clocks and birdhouses that he sold to downstate tourists who overpaid. He also tended bar and played for Teddy Boynton’s team in the Midnight Hour Men’s League. “Mute button don’t work,” he said. He clicked the volume to zero, turned toward Soupy, and saw me. “Evening, Gus.”

“Loob,” I said.

Soupy turned and spread his arms wide, feigning surprise. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Trapezoid himself.” He’d been calling me Trap since we were nine, playing a tabletop hockey game I’d gotten for Christmas. Soupy had dubbed his goaltender “Tommy Trapezoid,” after the shape of the little metal figure. Because I was a goalie, he started calling me Trapezoid, too, Trap for short.

Loob set a Blue Ribbon on the bar. The first icy swallow burned my throat. “Another day, another miracle,” I said.

“The trusty Pilot, ” Soupy said. “Michigan’s finest mullet wrapper.” Our motto, printed each day for fifty-seven years beneath the masthead, was actually “Michigan’s Finest Bluegill Wrapper.” Soupy liked to switch the fish around, though. “Long day, Trap?”

“Long day.” I gave him the two-minute version, skipping Boynton’s visit.

“That Joanie’s a piece of work, eh?” he said. “Not much of a looker, though, is she?”

“I tend not to assess my employees by the shapes of their asses.”

“Of course, but Loob here, he might have issues, right, Loob?”

Loob replied on cue. “You can drink them pretty, but you can’t drink them skinny.”

“Yes, sir,” Soupy said, downing his beer with a flourish.

There were no tables in Enright’s, just eight stools, the long, whiskey-colored bar, and an elbow rail along the length of the opposite wall. Above the rail hung a collage of photographs of boys in the blue-and-gold uniforms of the Hungry River Rats. There had once been some of me, but smart alecks kept defacing them, and the bar’s owner mercifully took them down. Our old coach smiled at the center of the display, just his face in black and white, the deep-set eyes, the knife-blade cheekbones, the silver hair combed straight back. “Jack Blackburn, 1934–1988,” read the inscription.

At the other end of the bar hung a photograph of Soupy Campbell, then sixteen, leaping into the air with his hockey stick raised high and his mouth agape in a joyous whoop. It was the night we had beaten Paddock Pools of Detroit in the state quarterfinals. Late in the game, with the score tied at 2, Soupy had stolen the puck from a Paddock winger and weaved his way through the rest of the team until a single defender stood between him and the goalie. The goalie didn’t see Soupy’s shot until it was whizzing past his left ear into the net.

Soupy left Starvation after our last year with the Rats to play on a scholarship for Northern Michigan University. I was at Michigan, but we made a point of seeing each other whenever Northern traveled to Ann Arbor for games. He dazzled them his first year, and in his sophomore season got drafted in the third round by the National Hockey League’s St. Louis Blues. He left Northern abruptly before his senior year and tried the minor pro leagues. He played in western Canada, Salt Lake City, Fort Wayne, finally Hershey, Pennsylvania. Every now and then he’d show a flash of the old brilliance, but mostly he played just well enough to hang on. There were rumors of drug and alcohol use on the hockey grapevine. He tore up a knee, dislocated a shoulder, got arrested in Erie, Pennsylvania, for riding through downtown atop a car naked and drunk in the middle of the night. He married a woman in Flint, had a daughter, got divorced. I asked him about it all a few times, and he grinned and said, “Ancient history, Trap. If I dwell on my screwups, I might remember how much fun they were and start repeating them.” He returned to Starvation around the time of Coach Blackburn’s accident and worked with his father at the marina. Now, with his father seven months dead, he owned it.

“Tell me, Soup,” I said. “Isn’t it kind of inconvenient to park your truck here all day when the marina’s three blocks away?”

“Hey, Mom,” he said. “I came in for one.”

“Uh-huh.”

“One right after another.” He laughed and jabbed at my shoulder with his bottle. “Got a bug up your butt, Trap?”

The day’s aggravation had me just irritated enough to want to extend it. “I hear you’ve got some legal trouble,” I said.

“Trouble?” Soupy said. “Nah. Just some lawsuits.” Loob set fresh beers down. Soupy leaned closer to me. “Lawsuits are one of those real-world things, Trap. You’re in business, people sue your ass.”

“Your old man have as many lawsuits?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Does the zoning board know?”

“Know what?

“About all this?”

“All this?” Soupy tore off his cap and tossed it on the bar. “What this?”

“The marina, Soup.”

“The marina’s fine.”

I wasn’t as worried about the town as I was about Soupy. He was no expert at selling or repairing boats, or at running a business, but he knew enough to keep himself in shoes and beer in Starvation Lake.

“And if Boynton builds his marina?”

“Fuck Boynton,” Soupy said. He turned to Loob. “I’ll be collecting a hundred bucks from his sorry ass tomorrow. Who’s your money on, Loob?”

Loob smiled laconically. “Not Gus.”

They meant the annual Starvation Lake Shoot-Out, to be held the next day before our league playoffs began. Shooters paid twenty dollars for five one-on-one chances to score on a volunteer goaltender. The proceeds bought practice jerseys for the youth teams. Coach Blackburn had started the Shoot-Out when we were kids. This year, I was the goalie, thanks to Soupy, who’d volunteered me. The shooter who scored the most goals won a wool hat embroidered as “The Stanley Cap.” But it was really about bragging rights and side bets. Soupy had won four of the last five Shoot-Outs. Boynton had won the other.

“You can afford a hundred bucks?” I said.

“If I know I’m going to win. Fuck Boynton and his fancy-ass marina.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah, and fuck you, too, Trap. The zoning board is going to shoot Teddy boy down like a porcupine from a tree.”

Soupy figured he had an edge. Two board members had been friends of his father. Another once worked at the marina.

“Maybe,” I said. “But what if they do? What if Boynton walks away then and you tank, isn’t the town screwed?”

“Is that what fuckface Teddy told you?” he said. I started to answer, but he waved me off. “I know, you can’t talk about what goes on inside the holy hallowed walls of the mullet wrapper. But I know Boynton and his fat-ass lawyer have been peddling those lawsuits. I’m not so dumb, Trap. You want my permission to put that shit in the paper? Is that it?”

“I don’t need your permission, Soupy.”

“Look,” he said. “The town will not be screwed.” He set his beer down. “Snow’s been iffy this year, so we haven’t rented out as many snowmobiles as I’d like. But I already got people coming for boats. I’ve been a little distracted with this Boynton stuff, but we’ll take care of that and everything’ll fall into place. Shit, Trap, you hate your job, why don’t you come over and we’ll run the place together? Hell, we used to just about run it.”

“I don’t hate my job, Soupy.”

“You remember the cat, Trap?”

When we were fifteen, both working at the marina, we pooled our earnings to buy a used sixteen-foot catamaran. We took it out on breezy summer evenings after work. Soupy sat and handled the tiller. I buckled on a harness and stood on the pontoon behind him. When a stiff wind caught the sail, my pontoon would lift out of the water and I’d stand up, the bottoms of my feet crooked hard against the pontoon’s edge. I’d lean way back against the harness to keep the boat from flipping, my body nearly horizontal over the water rushing by, Soupy working the tiller, his hair flying, both of us laughing and yelling at the setting sun.

“That was the ultimate, Trap. Better than hockey even.”

I loved him like a brother, but he didn’t make it easy.

“Will you be at the zoning board Monday?” I said.

“Fucking-ay,” he said. He smiled and spread his arms wide. “Hey, man, look-the marina’s got to last at least through summer. I already ordered the softball shirts.”