Starvation Lake

eight

At 6:35, I was the only person in Audrey’s Diner. I took a seat at the counter. “Morning, Gussy,” Audrey said. “You know what you want?”

“Morning, ma’am. Egg pie, please.”

Audrey DeYonghe was a surprisingly unplump woman in her sixties who had run the diner alone since her third husband took off with a buxom blackjack dealer he’d met at an Indian casino in Gaylord. He had shown up one morning a year later to beg Audrey’s forgiveness, but by then she had taken up with a gift shop proprietor from Petoskey-also a woman in her sixties-and told her husband, while her breakfast patrons stilled forks to listen, that divorce papers were waiting on a chopping table in the back.

Ordinarily, a love interest like Audrey’s would’ve caused a stir in Starvation Lake. But her diner was the only good breakfast place nearby. And a good breakfast place is as essential to a northern Michigan town as a reliable propane supplier. No one made a fuss. Besides, Audrey was nice. And she baked a wicked gooey cinnamon bun.

The diner was blessedly quiet. I gazed down the counter at the photograph of old Red Wing Gordie Howe hanging on the wall. Audrey was no hockey fan, but Gordie Howe happened to be her girlfriend Molly’s uncle, and he’d signed the photo. Beneath it lay a copy of that morning’s Pilot. I ignored it. I wanted to eat in peace and get out.

“One egg-pie special,” Audrey said as she set my breakfast on the counter. Cheddar cheese and scrambled eggs bubbled up through a golden cocoon of Italian bread. I stabbed at the crust with my fork and steam billowed from the sausage, bacon, potatoes, green peppers, mushrooms, and onions baked inside. I had to let it cool before I dug in. Sometimes when I ate something I really liked, I ate in small bites, to make it last. That wasn’t necessary with an egg pie. The hard part was getting a single forkful with every ingredient in it. Since I was a kid, I had averaged about two all-ingredient mouthfuls per pie.

“So what do you think?” Audrey said.

“About what?”

“About anything.”

I smiled. She always did this with me. “I think I like your new hairdo.”

“Oh, yes, and the hairnet makes it all the more stylish, don’t you think?” she said. “But thank you, dear. What else is on your mind?”

“What’s been the talk in here lately?”

“Oh my gosh, if I hear about that snowmobile again. It’s all I heard in here yesterday, and then the hockey, and then of course, well, you were in here for a little.” She folded her arms across her chartreuse smock. “Sometimes I don’t like some of those people much.”

She meant they’d talked about me, and that goal I let in. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe it is the tunnels.”

Audrey loosed a scornful whoop as she turned for the kitchen. “Sure, dear. And there are flying frogs in the lake, too!”

As I savored my first bite-eggs, cheese, potatoes, and sausage, minus the rest-I heard a clattering on the sidewalk outside. The door jangled open and I turned to see three children in identical black-and-gold snowmobile suits clump into the diner, each carrying a black helmet. Behind them lumbered a man the size of a meat freezer bursting at his own black snowmobile suit, stitched with a name-“Jimbo”-over his left breast.

I turned quickly back to my plate, hoping he hadn’t noticed me. I listened while he herded the children to one of the big tables in the back. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw another stuck out over my egg pie.

“Gus?” came a foghorn voice. “Jim Kerasopoulos.”

Kerasopoulos was the general counsel of NLP Newspapers, owner of the Pilot. “Jim, how are you?” I said. “Got the whole brood here?”

“Three of ’em, anyway,” he said. “Linda’s got the other two at some cheerleading thing. The snowmobile trails are cooked out by Traverse. They’re still nice and white over here.”

“Yep.” I remembered the Pilot lying on the counter and wished I had brought it nearer to my plate.

“I was going to stop by your-hey, kids. Kids! Excuse me.” His children were banging their helmets on the table. “Do you want your French toast?” he said. “Let’s put the helmets down.” He turned to Audrey and ordered three French toasts, an egg pie, and four orange juices. Then he sat down on the stool next to mine. “I wanted to talk to you anyway about that story you have about the gentleman who hunts the uh, the-”

“Bigfoot?”

He slapped his palm on the counter. “That’s it. Perlman.”

“Perlmutter.”

“Exactly. Quite the character. And a very interesting story.” He put on the thoughtful look that lawyers affect when they want you to know that they can see things to which you are hopelessly blind. “Maybe a tad too interesting, if you catch my drift. Your reporter, what’s her name?”

“Joanie. McCarthy.”

“Exactly. She has done some very, shall we say, aggressive reporting here. The documents she uncovered are very interesting, perhaps even persuasive.” He interrupted himself. “Gosh, all that money Perlman’s been pulling out of the state kitty, I wonder how much more it costs me in boat-use fees.” He chuckled at his little joke. “But, but,” he said, his thick brows furrowing into one at the bridge of his nose, “what’s crucial to remember here, Gus, is that Mr. Perlman is a private individual. You know what that means.”

“Perlmutter. And yes, I know.” It meant that, according to libel law, it would be easier for him to sue us and win than a public figure, like the sheriff.

“Does he have an attorney?” Kerasopoulos said.

“Yes. But neither of them are saying much.”

Kerasopoulos’s kids were banging their helmets again. “Have we made every attempt to give Mr. Perlberg a chance to respond?”

“We have. Joanie went out there once and talked to him. But since he figured out what she had, he hasn’t returned her calls.”

“Exactly,” Kerasopoulos said, rapping a finger on the counter for emphasis. “This is a gentleman who seems perfectly at ease with the tedium of paperwork. And he’s an aggressive individual who obviously has a good deal to lose. Put those together and you have a lawsuit.”

“He’s a thief who’s been defrauding the public for years,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

“Whoa there, partner. That’s for others to decide. We simply submit facts in as fair and balanced a way as we can. Are we clear?”

I looked at my congealing egg pie. “We’re clear.”

“I used to be a reporter myself, Gus.”

You used to be skinny, too, I thought.

“We may have a problem here,” he said.

“Jim, this is a legitimate story.”

He stood. “If you were sure of that, Gus, you would’ve just run it. But you sent it to us for our opinion, and I’m giving it to you.”

I wanted to tell him to take his double-wide ass back to his corner office with the drawings of duck blinds and lighthouses and golf holes on the walls and stop sticking his nose into things. I wanted to tell him he was a small-timer and he would always be a small-timer, making the money that paid his boat-use fees off little towns whose newspapers he neutered daily. Except that he was right, at least partly. I could’ve just put the story in the paper and taken my lumps from corporate, maybe even lost my second newspaper job in a year. But I’d been covering my ass, playing to the bosses, securing my own smalltime future. And now, by blurting out the truth about Perlmutter, I had put the story in even greater danger of never seeing print. I felt like smacking myself.

“Look, Jim,” I said, “let me see if we can get Perlmutter to respond.”

“You do that,” Kerasopoulos said. “You know what I always say: We can never be second with something that matters to our readers. Right? OK. Listen, I’ve got to get back to my kids before they wreck the place. You made the right call on this, Gus. We appreciate the caution.”

I pushed the egg pie away and looked out the window. Standing in the street with a Pilot folded under his arm was Elvis Bontrager. He was talking with someone I couldn’t see. I stood to leave. Audrey turned from the griddle. “Gussy, you barely ate.”

“Sorry, Mrs. DeYonghe. I’m not feeling so hot. The pie was great, really.”

“Feel better. And give your mother my love.”

I eased out the door, trying to keep the bells from jangling. I saw Elvis was talking with Teddy Boynton. I hurried down Main Street, head down, rock salt crunching under my boots. “There he is,” I heard Boynton say as I swerved down the alley next to Enright’s. It dawned on me that in two days I’d had two meals ruined by lawyers.

At the Hungry River I slowed and turned toward the lake. Across the frozen river lay the snow-covered beach where Boynton wanted to build his marina and hotel. A sign on the property showed an artist’s rendering of a creamy white four-story hotel on a golden beach, a pavilion of shops crowded with people at picnic tables beneath powder-blue umbrellas, and a sparkling bay dotted with sailboats, cruisers, and powerboats. Only the zoning board-and Soupy’s opposition-stood in the way. With the board’s approval, Boynton’s lenders would release the first $5 million he needed to start construction.

Over my shoulder hovered Starvation Lake Marina, a four-story hulk of corrugated steel painted the dull green of a brontosaurus. I walked up to the door of the business office and cupped a hand over my eyes to peek inside. A tower of pizza boxes had toppled in a corner, and a garbage can overflowed with empty beer bottles and cans. A wall calendar was stuck on the previous July, when Soupy’s father had died. I walked around the side of the building and felt beneath the water meter for the magnetized box that held the spare key.

Inside, the office reeked of stale hops and pepperoni and the lingering sweetness of marijuana. I snatched a dusty page off one of the chest-high stacks of paper on Soupy’s desk. It was a summons ordering Soupy to court at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, January twenty-fourth.

“Way to go, Soup,” I murmured.

I recalled that he and I had gone ice fishing that morning; he hadn’t said anything about a court date as he polished off a six-pack before 10:00 a.m. Two unmarked file folders rested alone next to the stacks of papers. I flipped one open. Inside was a two-page letter, dated four days earlier, from Arthur Fleming, Boynton’s lawyer. It proposed a “joint venture” in which Boynton Realty would take a 25-percent interest in Soupy’s marina and, in return, Soupy would get 1 percent of the Pines at Starvation Lake and an immediate cash payment of thirty thousand dollars. The venture would continue to operate Soupy’s marina “so long as it is deemed fiscally prudent,” and the cash would help Soupy “resolve outstanding litigation.” In return, Soupy would drop his opposition to Boynton’s marina at Monday’s zoning board meeting. It wasn’t a bad deal. The cash would come in handy, and the stake in Boynton’s marina might be worth a lot someday. But it wouldn’t take long for Boynton to decide it was no longer “fiscally prudent” to keep Soupy’s marina alive.

I picked up the other folder, but before I could open it, I heard a metallic groan in the dry-dock area, where boats reclined in tall steel racks like sleeping birds. I sidled over to the window to the dry dock and saw the huge steel door at the other end rumbling upward. Light spilled in beneath it, revealing a pair of boots and legs in silhouette. Tatch, Soupy’s right-hand man, was starting work. I ducked down and scurried for the back door. Taking a quick step outside, I swung the door closed behind me and immediately flopped up in the air and onto my rump. “What the hell?” I said.

I sat up, wincing, and saw at my feet a pile of slimy carp and sucker trout, barely alive, puckering their mouths. I scrambled to my feet, disgusted. “Fucking fish?” I said, kicking at a carp. “How the hell did you get here?” Fish blood and guts were slopped across the snow; some of the fish had been slit open. I looked around but saw no one. “Not funny,” I said, as if someone could hear. “Not funny at all.” I hustled down the river walk, brushing snow and fish scales off my butt and wondering if anyone had seen me in the marina. The dying fish I left for Soupy.

At my apartment I hung my coat, stinking of fish, on the stair rail outside. I hauled out my hockey bag and zipped it open on the living room floor. The smell wasn’t much better than my coat. My gear felt clammy as I laid it out to dry. Leg pads, arm pads, chest protector, pants. Catching glove, blocking glove, protective cup. Skates, mask, a stiffened towel, a canvas pouch holding tape, laces, Bengay. I wished I had unpacked it after the game Thursday night. Now it would feel heavy when I played that night, and I’d be a hair less agile or, worse, I’d think I was. Thinking was everything. If you didn’t think you were going to stop every single shot, you wouldn’t. If you lost that focus for a sliver of an instant, the puck would be behind you. Even on one of your off nights, after you’d given up four or five goals, you had to keep thinking you could stop them all, or just like that there’d be seven or eight behind you, and Coach would pull you and you’d have to skate off the ice while everyone on your bench and the other team’s bench and in the stands watched with scorn or pity or both.

I sat down in the recliner with my favorite piece of gear, the blocking glove I wore on my right hand, the one that held my goalie stick. I unwrapped the shiny black electrical tape wound around the thumb. With its wide rectangular shield, the glove looked like a big waffle. I had considered it my lucky waffle-or, as Soupy nicknamed it, Eggo-since the day the dogs got to it.

I was thirteen then. I’d been watching television one afternoon-the Three Stooges, I think-when I heard growling from Mom’s laundry room, where my hockey stuff was airing out. I hurried in to find our two mutts, Fats and Blinky, in a snarling tug-of-war with the waffle. “Damn dogs!” I yelled. But it was my fault. I’d forgotten to close the laundry room door. I ripped the glove away and swung it halfheartedly at the dogs. As they scampered away, their toenails clicking on the linoleum, I noticed a tatter of leather jutting from Blinky’s mouth. My heart sank. I turned the waffle over. The thumb was gone.

We had a regional playoff game that night. I couldn’t play with a bare thumb sticking out of my glove. I cornered Blinky and traded her a dog biscuit for the thumb. Mom was out shopping, so I took the waffle and the chewed-off thumb next door. Darlene was doing geography homework at her kitchen table. “You’re such an idiot, Gus,” she said, but I could tell she was glad I’d brought my problem to her. We showed the glove to her mother, who worked part-time at a shoe repair and had once mended a tear in one of my leg pads. After inspecting the glove, she cast a disapproving look at me.

“This cost your mother a fortune, Gus.”

“Yes ma’am, Mrs. B.”

“And you need it by six?” She shook her head and handed the glove and thumb back to me. “I’m sorry. It’s euchre night, Darlene’s father will be home any minute, and I have dinner to get.”

I looked helplessly at Darlene. She grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled her into the hallway off the kitchen. I heard them whispering. When they returned, Darlene was smiling. “You children,” her mother said, snatching the glove back. “It might not be fixable, you know.”

I thanked Darlene at the door. “I just hope Daddy doesn’t mind pancakes for dinner,” she said. “It’s all I know how to make.”

I wore the glove that night. Just to be safe, I wrapped black electrical tape around the fresh leather stitching on the thumb. For some reason I liked the way it looked. Our opponents were a bunch of fast kids from Grand Rapids. But I had the shiny black tape. I stopped all but one of their forty-eight shots and we won, 3–1.

In the twenty-one years since, I’d replaced every piece of my goalie gear, except for Eggo. Before every game-I never missed once-I applied fresh tape to the stitching, always the shiny black stuff, wrapping it exactly as I had that night when I was thirteen. All the tape really held was my confidence.

It made no sense, of course, but superstitions are as much a part of hockey as elbows to the nose. We had to put our pads on a certain way, tape our sticks a certain way, line up the water bottles on the bench a certain way. Stevie Reneau had to take a cold shower right before games. Wilf had to puke, and kept a bottle of ipecac in his bag to induce if his butterflies weren’t going to do it. Zilchy refused to sit next to a goalie in the dressing room, nor would he speak a word until the opening face-off.

Soupy had more superstitions than a witch doctor. He had to sit directly to my left. I had to be sitting there when he sat down; he couldn’t sit first. No one could touch his equipment while he was dressing; if someone accidentally did, Soupy had to strip down and start all over again. Just before we went out to the ice, he had to reach around my head and smack me on the right shoulder and give me a last word of encouragement. “Tonight, you’re a brick wall,” he would tell me, or, “Tonight, you’re a giant sponge, sucking in everything and spitting it back out.” In his last couple of years with the Rats, he started wearing skates four sizes too small for his feet; he insisted he couldn’t skate his fastest unless his toes were jammed in so hard that they hurt. That was especially weird, I thought, but that was Soupy. Some nights he would sit for half an hour after the game massaging feeling back into his arches and toes. Even now, in his thirties, he kept wearing skates he could barely get on.

Coach Blackburn tolerated our rituals because they made us believe in ourselves, while insisting that he himself had never fallen for such silliness. We knew otherwise. Coach had his own little secret superstition. He always-always-stepped onto the ice with his left skate first. If he had to take a little hop and skip to stagger his stride before he stepped out, he did it so that his left blade hit the ice before his right. Soupy called him on it once before a practice, thinking it funny; Coach responded by announcing that this would be a no-puck practice. We never mentioned his superstition again.

Now I leaned back in the recliner with the retaped Eggo in my lap and closed my eyes, preparing for the Shoot-Out that would begin in an hour. I tried to picture the rink, how the overhead lamps would drape shadows along the sideboards, how the skaters would veer and feint as they bore down on me, how the puck would spin and flutter and rise and dip coming off of their sticks, how I would try to slow it down in my mind, try to make it look bigger.

The phone woke me.

“The snowmobile was Blackburn’s,” Joanie said. “Without a doubt.”

“I heard.”

“Yeah. Yesterday. From me.”

“You didn’t have the cops saying it, Joanie.”

“No, no signed confession. No fingerprints on the gun.”

“What are the cops saying now?”

“Haven’t been down there yet. But there was this fat guy at the diner-his name’s in my notes-and he had this whole theory about the coaches from Detroit supposedly hiring someone to kill Blackburn and dump him in Walleye.”

The locals always had had trouble accepting that Coach himself might’ve done something stupid. “That’d be news to Leo,” I said.

“The guy who was with Blackburn that night? I went to see him too. What a weirdo.”

I let that go. “The cops talked to him.”

“How do you know?”

“Bumped into him at the rink.”

“Uh-huh.” She was getting her back up again. “Look, this is my story: Big-shot coach dies and then the town that worships him finds out it might not have happened the way they thought. Bet you AP picks it up.”

She was right, but I didn’t want her to be. Part of me wanted to know what had happened. Part wanted to leave it all alone.

“Actually, Joanie, it’s the Pilot ’s story. And I’ve still got to live here.”

“You played for Blackburn, didn’t you?”

“A long time ago.”

She paused. Then she said, “Do you know anything about where he was before he came here?”

“A little.”

As a boy I’d sat for hours poring over yearbooks and game programs he’d given me from his years playing junior and minor league hockey in Canada, and his later years coaching teenagers there. At Sunday dinners, he regaled Mom and me with tales of coaching juniors in western Canada.

“OK,” Joanie said, “so the Pilot clips say he came here in seventy after four seasons coaching the St. Albert Saints in, um, Alberta. There’s a couple of quotes from Blackburn talking about his four years there. ‘Four fantastic years,’ he keeps saying. But all I can find is he coached the Saints for three years. Doesn’t look like he was even there in sixty-six. I called a newspaper up there and got a woman who put me onto this geezer who’s like the unofficial team historian. He told me Blackburn came in sixty-seven and left in seventy.”

“So?”

“Actually, ‘skedaddled’ is what the guy said. And the team was really good that year, like, they won some big championship. But Blackburn leaves? What’s up with that? I asked the guy, and he said it was ancient history and got off the phone.”

“Maybe the guy’s memory isn’t so good.”

“Maybe. But I gotta go. Later.”

It made no sense. Why would Coach lie about something so mundane as how many years he spent coaching a hockey team? He must’ve counted wrong, I thought, or my recollections were faulty. I closed my eyes and pictured him sitting across the dinner table while Mom cleared the dishes. I could clearly see him speak that phrase: “four fantastic years.” His past was easy enough to check. One of the boxes beneath the makeshift table at my feet contained the yearbooks and programs Coach had given me. I made a mental note to look through them later. Now I had to get to the Shoot-Out.