The Hanging Tree

eight

You had to be hungry to eat at Riccardo’s Pizza, and not because the portions were especially large. The pizza tasted as if grease had been ladled on instead of sauce. The stromboli should have been served with a chisel and hammer. The mozzarella sticks lay in your belly like lead sinkers. But it was cheap. And I was curious.

I stood at the counter, breathing garlic as Aerosmith blared from a boom box in the back, the sole lunch customer at seventeen minutes after noon. Riccardo’s did most of its business late at night when the drunks came pouring out of Enright’s.

“Anybody home?” I called out.

There were three tight booths and a wall cooler filled with bottles of pop and chocolate milk. Next to the cooler was a small hole in the wall plaster that hadn’t been fixed since the last time I’d been in, with Darlene, weeks before. I remembered hearing it was made by a napkin dispenser flung across the room.

The pizzeria sat on a steep rise above the river. I stepped to the window and peered down on downtown Starvation Lake. My gaze fell upon the door to Darlene’s apartment, set atop a set of outer stairs leading down to a railed sidewalk that ran along the river. I recalled the night before, how she’d grappled with me before we slipped into our lovemaking.

“I thought you don’t eat here no more.”

Stefan Bellissimo stood behind the counter in a white apron streaked with spaghetti sauce, hands on his hips, a butcher knife in one hand. Beneath the apron he wore a threadbare River Rats T-shirt. A hairnet mashed his black ringlets to his forehead. A ballpoint pen protruded from behind his ear. Flour powdered his thick eyebrows and mustache.

“Belly,” I said. “How are you, buddy?”

“Don’t give me that shit. You know what you did.”

The men’s hockey team I played on, the Chowder Heads, had for years ordered postgame pizzas from Belly’s joint. But I had finally persuaded our captain, Soupy, to switch to Gordy’s in Fife Lake. The pizza was better and Gordy usually threw in fried mushrooms.

“Hey,” I said, “I still bring Darlene in.”

“Darlene brings Darlene in. I’m one of your paper’s biggest customers. You can’t even bring your boys by?”

“What? One ad a week?”

“Look at that,” he said, pointing at his booths, where he used old Pilots as tablecloths.

“Ah. Well, I’m here. What’s good?”

“Don’t be pulling on my dick. The pizza’s good.”

I squinted over his head at the backlit menu on the wall. Belly had owned the place for something like ten years, in which time it had been called Zito’s, Sicoly’s, Fat Tony’s, Provenzana’s, Enzo’s, Mizzi’s and, for a time while he dated an Irish woman from Sandy Cove, Hickey’s. He kept changing the names, he said, for marketing reasons. The pizza stayed the same.

Today’s “Rats Special” was a grilled cheese sandwich with pepperoni. Too risky, I thought. Maybe a cold sub. Just $2.95 with chips. Pretty hard to screw up.

“What did Darlene have the other night?” I said.

“What she always has. Small Greek salad, ham-and-pineapple pie.”

“What about Gracie?”

“What?” Belly said. “You want food or not?”

I wanted to know what Gracie and Darlene had talked about there. The minute I had left Haskell, I’d forgotten about his little announcement and returned to the questions about Gracie swirling in the back of my mind: Why the fresh groceries if she’d planned to off herself? How did she manage to hang herself on a high branch without a ladder? What about the calendar with the dates crossed out in February but not January? Was she counting down the days till her death, and if so, why hadn’t she crossed off the final day? What about the single baby shoe left in her hiding place? And the key attached to the ribbon? Her ever-present Wings cap was hanging in the Zam shed; had she made a conscious decision to leave it behind? Or had she been forced to leave? And if so, why? Why would her worthless little life matter that much to anyone?

“Yeah, yeah,” I told Belly. “Italian sub, extra peppers.”

He waved the butcher knife around. “I’m not hearing a lot of enthusiasm.”

“You want me to sing?”

He put the heels of his hands against the countertop and leaned forward. Beads of sweat along the tops of his eyebrows glistened in the overhead light. “Let me ask you a question: You got a problem with us?”

“No problem,” I said. “I just happen to like Gordy’s-”

“Not that. That pissed me off but I mean like the whole thing. You got a problem with the whole town. It’s like we’re some bunch of fucking hooples who can’t do anything right, and you’re going to set us straight.”

“Hooples? What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m fucking talking about. You know how much the game means to this place.”

Belly, who did not play hockey but attended every Rats game and supplied half-price pizzas for team functions, always referred to hockey as “the game,” in the same sort of bizarre sacred intonation that baseball freaks used about their tedious sport. I loved hockey, loved watching it, loved playing it most of the time. But love to me didn’t require reverence. It was just a game.

“What’s your point, Bel?”

He plucked the pen from behind his ear, a greenish order pad from an apron pocket. “My point is, why do you got to jam this guy up in the paper?”

“What guy?”

“The guy who’s building the rink. You seen his kid play yet? Patrick Roy rolled into Kenny Dryden.”

“The old rink’s not good enough for him?”

Belly slapped the order pad down on the counter. “Ain’t the point,” he said. “The point is, a new rink equals a new attitude-we can win. We ain’t had that around here. You of all people ought to know that. We’re like the goddamn Lions. No matter what we do, we lose because we think we’re going to lose. Something’s got to change to turn that around. This rink, the guy’s kid is our chance. Why do you have to fuck it up?”

I really hadn’t tried to fuck it up.

As a player, I was delighted to hear I’d be skating on a fresh sheet of ice and dressing in a room where my feet didn’t stick to the rubber-mat floors. As a reporter, I grew skeptical after two subcontractors left me late-night voice messages saying they had not been paid and Haskell wasn’t returning their calls.

I started stopping by the Pine County Courthouse every few days to see if any lawsuits had been filed against Haskell. Soon there were three. I wrote a fifteen-inch story and scheduled it for the front page, above the fold, where we had run earlier stories about the rink’s progress. I made repeated calls to Haskell and his attorney. They ignored me.

I was surprised to see the next morning that the story did not appear on the Pilot front page. Only later did I learn that Philo Beech, who’d been in meetings at headquarters in Traverse City, had read the story there and, without consulting me, decided to shorten it and move it to the bottom of page A6. When I asked him why, he explained that anybody could file a lawsuit and, without a response from Haskell, the story really wasn’t fair and balanced.

Philo was sitting with his boots up on his desk behind a two-day-old Wall Street Journal. I listened from my swivel chair across the room, speechless. What proof did we have, Philo said, that the subcontractors had actually completed the work they claimed to have completed? These disputes could just be run-of-the-mill contractual spats best left to the involved parties. At least the story hadn’t been killed outright, he said; I should be happy it had run at all. So blithe were his criticisms that I got the impression that he was relaying something he’d heard from someone else. He finally put the paper down and, for the first time in his little soliloquy, actually looked at me: Had I finished that feature on the outhouses-on-skis race that Sandy Cove was planning for the weekend?

I swallowed my pique, kept my mouth shut, and stayed on Haskell, sneaking calls and e-mails and half-day trips in between chamber of commerce press releases, school board meetings, and girls’ volleyball games. I combed through every local, county, and state file and database where I might find a reference to him, his Detroit firm, or any related business entity. There wasn’t much. I filed requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act with four different state agencies. I wrote and e-mailed Haskell and his lawyer; I called Haskell at home at night; his lawyer threatened to sue us; Philo ordered me to stop calling.

I started driving past the construction site each morning before work. A cubical shell of rust-colored girders and columns had risen amid the mounds of mud and scrap and snow. Dump trucks and backhoes and bulldozers were parked around the site. I never saw them moving. I saw smatterings of workers on some mornings, none at all on others. I bought a disposable camera and, on four consecutive Fridays, drove to the site and from my truck window took four black-and-white photographs, one from each corner of the structure. I had them developed, shuffled them like playing cards, and left the stack one night on Philo’s desk chair.

The next morning, I was working at my computer when I spied him in the reflection of my screen, flipping through the pictures and looking puzzled.

“Gus,” he said, “are these yours?”

I swiveled around. “Yep. I thought we could run a sort of sequence of photos showing the progress they’ve made on the new rink.”

“Interesting idea,” Philo said. He riffled through them again. “Did you mark the order you took them in?”

“I didn’t. But you can figure it out, can’t you?”

Philo regarded my grin through his horn-rims. “A little game, huh?”

He spread the sixteen photos out on his desk. He quickly discerned the four different angles and arranged the pictures accordingly. Then he stood back and folded his arms. After a few moments, he said, “I don’t see it.”

“You don’t see what?”

“The progression. Which one goes before-” He stopped himself. “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

“Not at all. That’s how it is.”

“That’s how what is?”

“That’s how the rink is. Four weeks. Zero progress. Lots of trucks and piles of stuff. But nothing actually being built.”

“Well,” Philo said, “if you put these in the right order-”

“Be my guest.”

He pushed his glasses onto his forehead, snatched up a picture in each hand, and brought them close to his face. He looked at one, then the other, then back at the other. He picked up a third picture, then a fourth. I saw the back of his jaw flex as he ground his teeth. He flipped his glasses back down.

“These could have been taken on the same day.”

“You’re right, they could have,” I said. “But they weren’t.”

“OK, I get it. May I keep these?”

I never saw the pictures again. I watched the court docket for Haskell’s replies to the lawsuits and, when those inevitably appeared, I used them as excuses to write stories. Philo seemed relieved that Haskell was getting his public say. I doubt Haskell was pleased, though. Although the stories invariably ran short and at the bottoms of inside pages, I was able to shoehorn in tidbits from my far-flung fishing-liens placed on various Haskell properties around Michigan, litigation over the sale of his Bloomfield Hills house, a delinquent property tax bill on the same. Maybe it all added up to not much; after all, Haskell was a lawyer, and lawyers litigate. Or maybe it meant he’d eventually leave Starvation Lake holding a multimillion-dollar bag.

The town council didn’t seem to think much of it. Nor did the zoning board, nor the road commission. They all did whatever Haskell’s lawyer asked, every step of the way. I wondered why I was even bothering to report things that nobody heard or wanted to hear anyway.

Then late one Friday in January, just early enough for us to make deadline but too late to do much additional reporting, Haskell’s lawyer faxed over a three-paragraph press release stating that construction on the rink had been “temporarily suspended.” No shit, I thought. The second paragraph said, “The local media’s campaign to derail this well-intentioned project has emboldened certain of our creditors and made it difficult at this time to come to an understanding about the most expeditious path forward. However, we are confident…”

That story ran on the front page, above the fold. Twenty-three messages awaited me on my office phone that morning.

“Why can’t you just leave us alone?” said the first.

“Stick to screwing up hockey games instead of rinks,” said the second.

The rest were the same. Different words, same rebukes.

“I don’t know,” I told Belly. “Ice is ice, attitude’s attitude. The Rats are playing pretty well in the old barn.”

“What’s the matter with you?” he said. He set the knife down, tore his hairnet off and threw it aside, his curls tumbling down onto his forehead. “You cursed this place with your fuckup twenty years ago or whenever the hell it was. Now you don’t want to help a team that could put the curse to rest?”

This wasn’t going well. I wanted to ask about what Darlene and Gracie had discussed. “Christ, Belly, I’m just making a living. Are you going to make my sub? Or-or should I have something else? What did you say Gracie had?”

“The chick who offed herself? Jesus, what the hell do you care?”

“Maybe I’m superstitious.”

“Fucking hockey players.” He picked up the butcher knife and pointed it at me. “Well, I don’t know what the hell she had, pal. She was in here twice this week with two different babes and I can’t keep it all straight in my fat head.” He smiled. “Come to think of it, might’ve been an Italian sub. So maybe you’re taking a big chance, eh?”

I turned away and looked through the window to town. A sheriff’s cruiser pulled into a space in front of Kepel’s Ace Hardware. The door opened and Darlene got out. I looked back at Belly. He was pulling his hairnet back on.

“She was in twice?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, tucking his hair under the elastic with the same fingers that would be putting provolone on my sandwich. “OK, enough preaching. You ain’t hearing me anyway. I’m going to make your sub.”

I glanced outside again. Darlene crossed Main and turned into the alley that led to the river walk and the stairs to her apartment.

“Hey, Bel, never mind,” I said. But he’d already gone back into the kitchen and turned the music up loud, an old Rod Stewart tune. I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my jeans pocket and set it on the counter. “Bel,” I said, trying to make myself heard over Rod. “I gotta go.”

“What?” he yelled.

“I gotta go. Hey, tell me-who was the other babe?”

“What?”

“The other babe with Gracie?”

“Onions raw or grilled?”

I looked out the window again. Darlene was ascending her stairway two steps at a time. “Goddammit,” I said, and rushed out the door as Belly yelled again, “Raw or grilled?”

She was already coming back down the steps when I arrived at the landing. She stopped when she saw me. She had a shoe box under one arm.

“Hey,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

“Hey.”

She saw my look at the shoe box.

“They’re just letters,” she said.

“Are you taking them in?”

She looked down at her boots, trying not to cry.

“Darl,” I said. She turned and went back up the stairs.

She finally stopped sobbing.

I stroked her hair as her tears dried on my chest. Her bedroom was silent but for the rumble of an occasional pickup passing on Main Street.

When we’d entered her apartment, Darlene had dropped the shoe box on her kitchen table and shoved me up against the refrigerator. She brought her lips to mine and kissed me hard, unbuttoning my shirt, her deputy’s badge digging into my rib cage. Then she grabbed me by the waist of my jeans and dragged me into her bedroom, though I did not have to be dragged.

We had made love twice before either of us said a word, Darlene crying in between and afterward in whimpers and shuddering sobs. “Ah, Jesus,” she finally said. She turned to face me, propped her elbows on my belly. The imprint of her sheriff’s hatband was still on her hair. She didn’t like the hat, thought it framed her face in a way that made it look fat, but she kept it on when she was on duty so nobody would take her any less seriously than any male cop.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She settled her face into the heels of her hands and rubbed her eyes, then let her chin fall to my chest. “If she had just killed herself, maybe I wouldn’t be crying. Maybe I’d just be angry.”

“Gracie was Gracie,” I said. “Hard to account for anything she did, without getting into her head.”

“She didn’t like people messing around in there.”

“Did I ever tell you about the prom?”

“What prom?”

“Senior year. The prom. I wanted to take you.”

“You were probably too chicken to ask.”

“Not exactly,” I said. I shifted in the bed so that Darlene straddled my left leg. I liked the feel of her skin warm around my thigh. “You were sort of on and off with that football player.”

“Pete Klein. God, he was gorgeous. But really, I was just trying to make you jealous.”

“You succeeded. But still, as you say, I wasn’t really sure whether to ask you. So I went to Gracie.”

“No.”

“Oh, yeah. I figured, she’s your best friend, she’ll know your deal, she’s a romantic, she’ll level with me. Big mistake.”

“What did she say?”

“She said-and I quote-‘What makes you think you’re good enough?’ ”

Darlene giggled.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“You said you wanted her to level with you. What did you expect?”

“I thought you’d be on my side.”

“I am. Now. But… it doesn’t matter.”

“What?”

I waited.

“Gracie told me.”

“Gracie told you what?”

“That you might ask me.”

“Yeah, right. So stay away from your phone, eh?”

“No,” Darlene said. “She said I should go with you.”

“She did not.”

“Yes, she did. Anyway, you didn’t ask me.”

I sighed. Darlene let her head fall to my chest and we lay quietly for a few moments. Then I said, “I did a little snooping at the rink.”

Darlene lifted her head. “Gus. That’s a crime scene. I hope you didn’t touch anything.”

I didn’t reply.

“Oh, God. You’re going to get me fired.”

“I thought you wanted me on this, Darlene. The town would love to smack a suicide label on it and get back to building their rink.”

“Did you or did you not-wait. Your voice mail. Why did you want to know which shoe Gracie was missing?”

“The left one, yes?”

“Why?”

I rolled out from under her and dug the baby shoe out of my coat pocket. The hairbrush was there too but I reflexively left it hidden away, as I would have when we were stealing the brush from one another years ago. I laid the baby shoe on the sheet next to Darlene and sat on the bed. The cheek under Darlene’s left eye twitched once. I saw tears welling again.

“You want me to put it back?”

She bit her lower lip, put a hand on my forearm, squeezed. “That’s what she was saying.”

“Gracie? When? What are you talking about?”

“The other night. At Riccardo’s. She kept talking about how her life was a failure because… because…”

“Because why?”

She shook her head. “She wanted a kid.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Can you imagine what a disaster-”

“Shut up. She was serious. She said her time was running out.”

Maybe Gracie should have considered that when she was partying away her body, her mind, her heart, the men who took to her. But then I did not really know what her life had been like all those years in Detroit. Even though we had lived in the same town for a long time, we rarely took any trouble to seek each other out, apparently content to live in our separate worlds, mine a submersion in newsprint and sources and late-night calls from phone booths, hers I had no idea what. At my mother’s insistence, I tried to call Gracie once in a while, but I couldn’t keep up with her ever-changing phone numbers and finally gave up. I wish I could say that I felt bad about it. There were no calls from Gracie, after all.

I saw her once, or thought I did. I was at Joe Louis Arena watching the Red Wings in a playoff game against the Chicago Blackhawks. A woman I was dating from the Detroit Free Press was supposed to join me but had to work late so I bought myself a standing-room only ticket and went alone. I stood with a twenty-four-ounce cup of Stroh’s with my back to the wall along the aisle between the lower and upper bowls of seats, watching Roenick and Larmer and Chelios trample the Wings’ hopes for a Stanley Cup. At a stop in play I looked to my right to check the scoreboard for the shots on goal and there she was.

At first I didn’t recognize her. Gracie had always been cute. The boys liked the way her sharp cheekbones set off her languid blue eyes, the narrow gap between her front teeth, the barely discernible overbite that imbued her smile with a hint of secret mischief. Her body, taut as a guitar string, and her willingness to share it had helped keep her in boyfriends.

But this Gracie following a tall man with black hair slick with mousse and a cashmere topcoat down to the rink-side seats was more elegant and beautiful than I had ever seen. Her auburn hair tumbled over a charcoal turtleneck. She carried a fur coat over one arm. She seemed straighter, taller, less mousy. Maybe it was the turtleneck. Or the fur.

The man, who also wore a turtleneck, stopped and turned with a suave smile and an offer of his hand. She took it and edged into her seat, laying the fur across her lap and fluffing her hair as she settled in. She looked more like a Grace than a Gracie. I tried to keep an eye on her, but the fans behind her kept jumping to their feet and blocking the view. At the end of the second period I went to the men’s room and when I returned to my place against the wall, she was gone.

“Why didn’t she just have a kid?” I asked Darlene.

She just looked at me.

“OK, dumb question. Hard to bring up a kid in a Zam shed.”

“Which was really her point,” Darlene said. “She kept saying, ‘I fucked up my life, I fucked up my life, and I can’t fix it.’ ” She nodded at the baby shoe. “I think I know what that is.”

I picked it up and turned it over. “You do?”

“You really want your prints all over that?”

“What do you think it is?”

She set her chin atop her fists and fixed her eyes on the pillow in front of her. “She had an abortion.”

“When she was downstate?”

“If she’d had one here, we’d all know about it by now, wouldn’t we?”

“I suppose. She didn’t tell you?”

“Not in so many words. But every now and then, she would talk about kids, and, you know, she’d get all misty and after a while she just stopped making sense.”

“Would she have had it recently? Or a long time ago?”

I was thinking of Soupy. But I wasn’t about to bring him up. I wanted to ask him about it before the police did, if they hadn’t already.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if she actually had an abortion. I just have this feeling. Whenever she got into one of her little crying jags, she’d always be saying something like, ‘Don’t ever give up what you got, because you can never, never get it back.’ ”

“Wait,” I said. “Why would she have a shoe if she had an abortion?”

“Come on, it’s Gracie. She might’ve gone to Kmart and bought one.”

“Just one? Where’s the other one?”

“Gussy… I don’t know.”

“You know, Darl, maybe she actually had a baby and adopted it out.”

“Do you think she’d go through that? Nine months? No drinking?”

I didn’t have to think much. “No,” I said.

I watched Darlene staring into the pillow. I felt for her. She and Gracie went back as far as Soupy and I did. As little girls, they’d combed each other’s hair, painted on each other’s makeup, worn each other’s clothes. When Gracie was on one of her extended stays at our house, she’d often go next door to sleep at Darlene’s. I could still picture them sitting knees to knees in their one-piece bathing suits on the dive raft in front of the house, the last of the day’s sun bathing their tan shoulders, them waving their arms, leaning back to giggle, chattering about whatever they chattered about.

I thought I knew what Darlene was thinking: if only Gracie had never left Starvation, maybe she would have been all right.

But how could Gracie not have gone? It was late in her senior year of high school. In my junior English class, room 211, we were discussing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when we heard a shrieking in the hallway that every one of us immediately recognized as Gracie McBride. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, it’s so cool, so so cool!” Our teacher dropped his book and rushed out to see what the commotion was about, and five or six of us got out of our seats and followed. We saw Gracie spinning her way down the hall, the orange plaid pleats of her skirt whirling out from her hips.

“I’m going to college,” she sang. “I’m going to college.”

An anonymous donor had offered to pay Gracie’s full tuition, room, and board, so long as she attended Wayne State University in downtown Detroit. The donor, whom everyone in town assumed was a Wayne grad, had made the gift in honor of Gracie’s father, who had been awarded the Purple Heart posthumously after Vietnam. Gracie’s mother raised a brief stink about being entitled to some of the gift, seeing as she was the one who had lost her husband. No lawyer would touch it.

That fall, Gracie left for Wayne. It was September 1980. Almost eighteen years would pass before Gracie walked Main Street again. Not once in those years did she even visit, and most folks in town forgot about her. Except Darlene, who called her now and then and visited downstate once or twice. And my mother, who spoke with her each month on the twenty-second, the anniversary of Gracie’s father’s and my father’s deaths.

“What the hell did she do in Detroit?” I said. “How did she survive?”

“I don’t really know,” Darlene said, and I could tell it hurt her. “She was always vague when I asked her, or she made jokes: she was dancing in a strip club, she was selling coke. For a while she worked as a secretary somewhere. A real estate company, I think.” She nodded toward the shoe box on the table. “That’s why I dug that out.”

“She never graduated from Wayne.”

“No.”

I slid across the bed and placed my palm lightly on Darlene’s shoulder. She reached up and touched my fingertips with hers.

“Speaking of out-of-towners,” I said. “When were you going to tell me Jason was back?”

“Who cares?”

“Have you seen him?”

“Nope. Don’t care to either.”

“I saw him. He looks good. A lot better than he did.”

“I really don’t want to talk about him right now.”

She twisted around to see the clock on her stove. “Crap,” she said. “Lunch is way over. Dingus is going to be p.o.’d.”

I waited on the bed while she put her uniform back on, fitted the hat on her hair. She grabbed the shoe box and came to the bed, standing over me. She leaned over and kissed me on the neck.

“You were sweet today,” she said.

She was almost out the door when I called after her. “Hey. How about I make you spaghetti tonight and then we can go to the Rats game?”

“OK,” she said, and she was gone.