Starvation Lake

seven

I was out of bed at 5:45 the next morning. I wanted to see Leo Redpath before the Pilot hit the streets and the codgers at Audrey’s started talking.

I found him in the back of the Zamboni shed at the rink, hunched over his workbench in a pale wash of light. A faded River Rats cap hung on a nail above his head. “Good morning, Mr. Carpenter,” he said without looking up. “The Shoot-Out doesn’t begin for several hours, you know.”

“I’ve got to tell you something, Leo.”

Although he’d never played and wasn’t really a student of hockey, Leo was the closest thing the River Rats had had to an assistant coach. He drove our bus on out-of-town trips. He filmed our practices. He kept tape handy and the water bottles filled. During games he worked the bench door for players hopping on and off the ice. Even as we grew into adults, he still took care of us, supplying pucks, sewing up gashes, keeping a few beers in the fridge. He turned to me while wiping his hands on a rag. I could tell he already knew.

“The police were here last night,” he said.

“Oh.”

Leo had been with Coach on Starvation Lake that night. Off the ice as well as on, they were nearly inseparable. They drank and hunted and fished and snowmobiled together. On that night, they’d been out riding and had a few drinks around a campfire in the woods west of the lake. Leo never said much about that night. The police interviewed him and he was quoted briefly in the Pilot. At Coach’s funeral, he declined to give a eulogy. I asked him about it one night in the Zamboni shed and he acted as if he hadn’t heard me. When I asked again, Soupy told me to leave him alone. “He feels guilty enough,” Soupy whispered. Leo kept working at the rink, but except when he was steering Ethel around the ice, you rarely saw him. He slept on a cot in the shed some nights and otherwise retired to his mobile home off Route 816.

He quit drinking after Coach’s death. On the pegboard above his bench he took to pasting aphorisms he’d clipped from books about addiction recovery: Today, I will embrace each minute of my day with joy and wonder…Today, I will leave shame behind and move forward into peace…Today, I will face the truths about myself and lose my fear of acknowledging their presence in my life… Leo never spoke about the sayings, and we understood not to ask.

Since Coach’s death, Leo seemed a man in constant pain, constantly trying to talk himself out of feeling it. I wished there was something I could do to make him feel better.

“Did the police tell you anything?” I said.

“Not much. They said something about those tunnels.”

“They told you that?”

“Not in so many-well, I don’t suppose I’m supposed to talk about it. Are you interviewing me?”

“No. What did you tell them?”

He shrugged. “What could I tell them? Nothing’s changed, Gus. Jack was a foolish man sometimes. There was nothing anyone could do.”

I didn’t think he really believed that. “You went to my mom’s house that night, right? After the accident?”

“It’s all in the record. You can look it up. But I’m kind of busy right now, Gus. I’ll see you later?”

On my way out I caught a glimpse of Leo’s reflection in a sheet of Plexiglas leaning near the door. He had turned to watch me leave. He wore the expression of someone who was straining to remember something.