The Hanging Tree

one

I have learned that you can be too grateful for love.

She stood in front of the window across the kitchen, backlit from the glow of the streetlamp outside her apartment window.

“Darlene,” I said.

But she just waited, watching as I set my hockey sticks against the wall, her arms folded across her breasts, her head tilted so that her mahogany hair fell across the left side of her face. She was barefoot in black panties and a scarlet bra.

“Why do you bring those things up here?” she said. “Nobody’s going to steal them out of your truck, Gussy. This is not Detroit.”

“I suppose not,” I said. I pushed the door back open and stood the sticks on the landing outside. Snowflakes swirled around my head.

“Still storming?”

I closed the door. “Slowed down a little while ago.”

“You’re early. I’m glad.”

I pulled my boots off, dripping melted snow on Darlene’s throw rug. “Enright’s was closed. We get out of the game and there’s nowhere to drink.”

“Did you win?”

“Tied, two all.”

“You score?”

“Hit the post.”

“Hmm,” she said. “You do that a lot.”

“Somebody cross-checked me in the back of the neck just as I got the puck.”

“Did you get his number?”

“Didn’t,” I said. “Got an assist.”

Darlene didn’t seem impressed. She stepped away from the window and dropped her arms. Her pale body glowed through the shadows. She slowly drew herself into a boxer’s crouch and put up her dukes. The hint of a smile crossed her face, her dark eyes glinting.

“Come on.”

“What? This again?”

“Let’s go. Wimp.”

We had known each other since we were children growing up side by side in clapboard houses on the southwestern shore of Starvation Lake. I had never quite figured out how to know Darlene as an adult. But here we were, in Darlene’s second-floor apartment above Sally’s Dry Cleaning and Floral, spending more nights together than not in the year since she had formally separated from her useless husband, since he had left town without a divorce decree or a forwarding address. A married woman whose marriage was over.

I left my clothes in a pile near the door. She circled closer. I was more than aware that, as a deputy for the Pine County Sheriff’s Department, Darlene had undergone expert training at how to take a man down and that her method might well involve my groin.

“Don’t be a wuss now.”

I made my move. I tried to secure her arms and keep her at a safe distance, but she slipped her right arm out and punched me in the shoulder.

“Ow.”

“Wuss.”

I still had a grip on her left forearm. Keeping an eye on her knees, I twisted sideways and tried to push her elbow above her head so I could use my weight to ease her back against the wall. But she wriggled loose and slapped me hard on the back of the head, loosing a giggle as she did. She had never spelled out the rules of these engagements, but I assumed I was not allowed to hit, maybe because I had no desire to hit.

I crouched and slid to my left and got a hand on her right hip, grabbing the hem of her panties, and shoved. That threw her off-balance and she stumbled back, laughing. I grasped her left arm under the elbow and pushed it as gently as I could up and back to move her toward the wall. But she screwed her body into me, whacking me in the chest with the heel of a hand and driving me back half a step, still laughing. I pulled her back in close to me, safer, and took her by the chin.

“What are you doing?”

Her eyes were lit with mischief and lust. I felt her fingertips brush the skin on my belly as they sought the inside of my thigh, and I shivered.

“What?”

“I don’t fight, Darl.”

“Oh,” she said. She reached a hand up to caress my cheek. I felt the tension leach out of her body, and out of mine.

“You’re such a girl,” she said.

She slid her panties off and nudged me backward toward her bedroom.

I must have glanced at the phone on her nightstand when it rang a few minutes later, because Darlene grabbed the back of my neck and whispered hard in my ear, “Do not stop.”

The phone rang this late only if something was wrong with one of our mothers or if the sheriff needed Darlene. And if the sheriff needed Darlene, then there was a chance that I, as executive editor of the twice-weekly Pine County Pilot, circulation 4,124, had a story to report.

The answering machine clicked on after four rings. I heard Darlene’s recorded voice-“You know what to do”-over her stuttered gasps in my ear and I thought, Yes, I do, and rolled her over onto her back and felt her calves and her heels digging into my back, squeezing me into her.

The caller didn’t leave a message. Which meant it was probably the sheriff. Our mothers left messages, but the sheriff, knowing I might be here, wouldn’t take the chance that I would hear what he had to say, lest it appear in the Pilot before he decided it was time. I told myself to try to remember to call him the next day while Darlene clutched me to her breasts and pleaded, “Don’t stop, Gussy. Don’t stop.”

For the moment, I forgot about the phone call.

I awoke as Darlene undid herself from my left arm and crossed the tiny room and dug her cell phone out of the brown-and-mustard sheriff’s hat she’d left upside down on her dresser. The nightstand clock said 2:21. The cell phone’s keypad shone on Darlene’s face as she punched keys. I heard three beeps. Must be voice mail, I thought. She couldn’t help herself.

She put the phone to an ear and turned away from me, facing the mirror over the dresser. I stared at the ceiling, replaying the goal I hadn’t quite scored earlier that night. I’d parked myself at one goalpost, all alone. Zilchy had slipped out of the opposite corner, made a move on the defenseman, and zipped the puck right onto my stick. I’d had the whole damn net to shoot at. But I tightened up a little and the puck caught in the heel of my blade and I pulled the shot. Back when I played goalie, I would’ve loved hearing the clang of that puck off the post. Instead, I was just embarrassed. Still, we played, got a good sweat, there was beer in a bucket of ice in the dressing room.

And now I was in Darlene’s bed.

I moved my head enough to see her reflection in the dresser mirror, but her hair obscured her face. I watched as she listened to the phone, then took it off of her ear, punched another key, put it back on her ear.

Now, as she listened, her head slowly bowed into her neck and she drew her right arm around her waist until I could see her fingertips against her left hip. I raised myself on an elbow.

“Everything OK?” I said.

She tossed the phone back into the hat, straightened herself, threw her head back, stared up at the ceiling. In the mirror I watched her shut her eyes and press her lips together.

“Darlene?”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No, everything’s not OK.”

I got to my feet and moved toward her but she spun around and pushed past me toward her closet.

“I have to go.”

“Go where?”

She flung back the folding door on her closet and yanked out a deputy’s uniform folded over a hanger, tossed it on the unmade bed.

“Let me just do this,” she said. “Go back to bed.”

“What happened?”

She shook her head and went out into the living room, snatched her bra and panties off the floor, wriggled them back on.

“Darlene?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re getting dressed and going out at-”

“Just go back to sleep.”

“Are you going to tell me-”

“Gus. I will call you later. OK?”

I watched her dress. She fixed her brass badge to her brown blouse, the tie clasp in the mitten shape of Michigan to her tie. When she moved to the dresser and reached around me for the hat, I put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at me then. She looked like she couldn’t decide whether to scream or cry.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have to go,” she said. She grabbed the keys and cell phone out of her hat, picked it up, and started out of the room. I let her go. At the doorway she turned and pointed her hat at me.

“Go back to bed, OK? I’ll call you later.”

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t be following me.”

I waited a beat. “All right,” I said.

Darlene closed her eyes, took a breath. She pulled the thicket of her hair back on her head and stuffed her hat down around it.

“Please,” she said.

They found her hanging in the shoe tree at the edge of town.

Gracie McBride had started the shoe tree some twenty years before, when she was sixteen years old and in love or at least lust with a boy from Sandy Cove, the next town over. His name was Ricky and all I remember about him is that he played football, not hockey, and that he went through one hell of a pregnancy scare with Gracie. No one told him that, even if Gracie did have a baby in her belly, there was no way to be sure it was his.

When she finally let him know her period had come two days after it actually arrived-Gracie liked to have fun with boys that way-Ricky was so relieved that he drank half a quart of Jack Daniel’s and went out in his father’s enormous Chrysler something and backed it over every mailbox on Sunset Trail between Horvath Road and Walleye Lake. It actually wasn’t that many mailboxes, but enough for Ricky to spend a weekend in jail.

Gracie was so impressed that when he got out, she told him to bring his football cleats and drove him out to an old oak towering over Main Street about a mile east of Starvation. There in the summer midnight dark she took off her clothes and then Ricky’s and after they’d writhed in the tall grass at the base of the tree, she tied one lace of one of his cleats to one lace of one of her high-top sneakers-she had dyed it a bright pink so you could see it from afar-and threw the pair over her shoulder and clambered up into the tree. Ricky told her this was a stupid thing to do, especially naked, but Gracie giggled and kept climbing until she could find no more branches that would hold her ninety pounds. Then she reached over her head and looped the pink sneaker and black cleat over a bough.

Gracie wasn’t as good at climbing down, or at least she pretended not to be. Ricky put his pants on and tried to help her, but he was too heavy to climb as high as Gracie, and she insisted, giggling again, that she was too afraid to descend. He finally drove into town while Gracie sat on a high branch in the dark, wearing nothing, until a fire truck came and plucked her from the tree like a pussycat. When one of the Pine County sheriff’s deputies asked her what the hell she was thinking climbing fifty or sixty or seventy feet into a tree naked in the dark, she said, “I don’t know, officer. Didn’t you ever do anything for love?”

Soon more shoes began to appear in the tree. At the high school, hanging shoes became a spring ritual for graduating seniors, which naturally prompted a brief, futile attempt by the police to stop it, seeing as the kids’ hangings usually involved beer and sometimes ladders. But adults hung shoes in the tree, too, especially after a night at Enright’s Pub. Out-of-state tourists saw the tree and pulled over and hung their own shoes and flip-flops, their equivalent of writing in the guest book at a rental cottage. Sometimes when a romance soured, one of the two lovers would bother to shinny into the tree and slice a pair of shoes away.

But mostly the shoes multiplied, and over the years the oak took on the look of a matronly ghost dressed in a ragged nightgown. And somewhere in her highest branches dangled a single snow-covered football cleat tied to a high-top sneaker faded to a dirty gray, the pink but a memory.

And way below the sneaker now hung Gracie herself.

The headlights on my pickup truck pushed through the dark, my tires creaking through the fresh eight inches of snow left by the blizzard that had howled through Starvation between supper and sometime after midnight. Wind whistled into the cab through a twisting hairline crack in the window next to me. Twice I had to slow down and steer around branches the wind had severed from trees.

I saw the dim pulse of blue and red police lights about half a mile ahead. The silhouettes of the bare trees etched skeletons on the linen sky. I pulled onto what shoulder there was and parked, reached into my glove box and pulled out a notebook, my cell phone, a ballpoint pen, and a pencil, in case the pen didn’t work in the cold. I stuffed it all in my jacket and stepped out onto the road.

For the record, I did not follow Darlene. After I heard her clomp down her back stairs and roar away in her police cruiser, I dressed and hurried out across Main to the Pilot. The police scanner on the plywood shelf near my desk told me all I needed to know.

The tree stood in a clearing about twenty-five feet off the road, surrounded by a field buried in snow and ringed by woods. The cops hadn’t taken the body down, probably had barely touched it yet except to ascertain that it was dead, as they worked to encircle the clearing with yellow do-not-cross tape.

I veered to the shadows along the right shoulder across the road so the cops were less likely to see me. It wasn’t easy to see over the wall of snow piled high along the opposite shoulder, but it gave me a bit of cover. The sheriff generally didn’t appreciate me showing up before he’d had a chance to determine what had happened and what he would tell me and my friends at Channel Eight.

I spied Darlene unspooling police tape at the far end of the clearing, a duty she might have chosen so she would not have to face the body of her oldest and best friend up close in death. The area around the base of the tree was illuminated by headlights and the flashing lights of an ambulance, a fire truck, and three police cruisers parked at haphazard angles along the road.

Two paramedics bundled in parkas and wool caps stood behind the open double doors of the ambulance talking with the sheriff. The sheriff, a man built like an elm tree in a knee-length brown parka and a fur-lined earflap cap, pointed at the body. One paramedic nodded. The other climbed into the back of the ambulance. The sheriff held up a hand, as if telling them to wait a minute, then started toward the tree. He had to lift his knees high to get through the accumulated snow. We’d had a lot this winter, more than we’d seen since the 1980s. When the sheriff reached the hanging corpse, he stopped and played a flashlight slowly up the limp body. The light flashed white on her face.

“Jesus,” I said to myself.

The wind gusted near the tree and Gracie swayed back a few inches, then swayed forward again. Not much of her face was visible through the jagged scraps of ice and snow that clung to her forehead and cheeks. Patches of white covered much of the rest of her. She was wearing something dark beneath all the snow and ice. Maybe a black leather jacket, a pair of black jeans.

Her left foot appeared to be shoeless. She could have lost a boot as she kicked away whatever she had stood on. I couldn’t tell if the foot wore a sock. And whatever Gracie had climbed up on must have fallen into the snow. She hadn’t climbed nearly as high as she had all those years ago. Just enough to secure herself to one of the sturdy boughs eight or nine feet off the ground. She wasn’t ninety pounds anymore either.

Stray snowflakes blowing around had dampened the first page in my notebook. I flipped back to a dry page, took off my right glove, grabbed the pencil, started jotting some notes. I had reported on one suicide before, before I’d left Detroit and returned to my hometown, Starvation Lake, back when I was still covering the auto industry for the daily Detroit Times. A laid-off middle manager for Superior Motors, a big auto manufacturer, leapt from the Ambassador Bridge spanning the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor. Hitting the water didn’t kill him but the current sucked him under, and his body, in dark suit, white shirt, and red print tie, fetched up on Fighting Island downriver. My four paragraphs got buried at the bottom of A14 or 15.

I figured Gracie would get similar treatment in the Pine County Pilot. Newspapers didn’t care much for suicides, unless they involved rock stars. The editors would argue that you could never truly prove anyone had committed suicide without knowing exactly what they were thinking right up to the last milliseconds before they died. Even if there was a note, you couldn’t be positive that the dead one hadn’t felt a desperate urge to call it off, to save himself as he plummeted toward the sidewalk, or whether the carbon monoxide so flummoxed her that her fingers weren’t able to roll the car window down. Maybe it was, in the very end, just an accident.

This was no accident, though. Gracie had many choices that had led her to this final one. I can’t honestly say that, as I stood watching her body rock in the wind, I felt much sympathy for Gracie. But I felt for Darlene.

Brilliant light flashed across my notebook. I stopped writing and looked up. The sizable upper half of Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho loomed over the snowbank in front of me, his flashlight extended.

“This is a crime scene, young man,” he said. “Better get going.”

I shielded my eyes against the glare and took a step closer.

“Dingus,” I said.

He waved the flashlight beam toward my pickup.

“I’ll ask you once to get in your truck and go home,” he said. “If I have anything to say, you’ll hear it later.”

“Sorry, can’t hear you,” I said, moving close enough that I could see the ice striping his handlebar mustache. “That’s Gracie McBride, isn’t it?”

“I have nothing to say at the moment.”

Despite his bulk, it was sometimes hard to take Dingus seriously because he still spoke in the singsong lilt of a Finn who’d migrated down to Starvation from the Upper Peninsula.

“This would be the first suicide in the shoe tree, wouldn’t it?” I said.

“Nice try. Now move along.”

I scribbled something illegible in my notebook, just to let Dingus know I wasn’t giving up. Not that it mattered much. Early on a Monday morning, Channel Eight would have an entire day to cover the story before Tuesday’s Pilot came out. And I doubted we’d run much anyway. A woman who’d been racing toward the gates of hell for most of her life had arrived a bit quicker than we’d all expected. Not much news there, actually.

“Dingus, could you at least confirm-”

“Gus!” he said, turning the beam on his face. “Look at me.”

I stopped writing. The light gleamed on the badge pinned to the front of his earflap cap. He jerked a gloved thumb over his shoulder.

“You don’t really want her to see you here, do you?”

I looked past him and saw Darlene and another deputy moving toward the ambulance. Dingus was right, I really didn’t want Darlene to see me, but I didn’t know how that could be avoided.

“I’m just doing my job,” I said. “She’ll have to understand.”

“She’ll have to, huh? I think you know her better than that.”

“I guess.”

“Look-off the record?”

“Sure. It’s Gracie, right?”

He shrugged. “It’s getting dangerous to drive a Zamboni around here.”

Gracie had driven the ice-resurfacing machine at the hockey rink where my buddies and I played late at night. Starvation’s last suicide, about a year before, had also driven the Zam at the rink.

“You going to do an autopsy?”

“Up to the coroner. But it’s pretty standard procedure.”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded toward the tree. “What happened to her other shoe?”

A vehicle approached. Both of us turned our heads. Twin yellow beams shined between the headlights. Dingus squinted in disapproval as the Channel Eight van rolled closer.

“Damn it all,” he said. He shouted at his deputies. “Let’s move it, people. Get her down and into that ambulance chop-chop. I don’t want her mother seeing this on TV.”

I stepped back to the opposite bank and watched as the deputies and paramedics lowered Gracie from the shoe tree. I expected Darlene to stand aside but she shouldered her way in and took hold of Gracie around the waist.

“Careful,” she shouted. “Be gentle with her.”

The ambulance doors slammed shut as the Channel Eight van’s passenger door swung open. Out jumped a slim woman in a quilted black parka. She shot me a frown before bounding up the snowbank, waving a microphone over her head. “Sheriff! Sheriff Aho!”

I looked past her and saw Darlene at the back of the ambulance. She held one gloved hand flat against the door. She dropped it only after the ambulance pulled away, churning snow in its wake.

I wished I could wrap my arms around her. Later, I thought.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets and started back to my truck. As the ambulance siren faded in the distance, I heard the muffled ringing of my cell phone in my pocket. It could only be one person.

“Darlene,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t see you?”

She was upset. I decided I’d let her be.

“Sorry. Gotta do my job.”

“You always say that.”

Cold stung my knuckles. I switched the phone to my other hand.

“We don’t do much with suicides anyway,” I said.

“Good.”

“Yeah, no need to embarrass her mom.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She said it with such force that I stopped and spun around toward the shoe tree. “What do you mean?”

“Gracie did not-oh, goddammit, Dingus. Hold on.”

I waited, watching the police lights flicker in the branches of the shoe tree. Darlene came back on.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “We’ll talk later. I love you.”