by Bryan Gruley
Though we had yet to reach the ultimate goal, there was no doubt in our minds that we would in our last year together. In the meantime, our success against Detroit’s best hockey teams meant Starvation Lake wasn’t invisible anymore either. It was no longer just another town up north with a good breakfast joint and a smoky tavern. The town council bought a billboard on I-75 proclaiming Starvation as “Hockeytown North. Home of the River Rats.” Local kids begged us for autographs. Girls came from Sandy Cove and Kalkaska and Mancelona to hang out at our practices. Francis demanded our old sticks and skates to hang in Enright’s. Coach had River Rats caps and T-shirts and stickers made. The town turned blue and gold.
There was green, too. All those people from Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland and Milwaukee who came to Starvation for hockey saw how beautiful the place was and returned to buy lakefront lots and build cottages. Their money lured a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut, a fudge shop, and two new souvenir stores on Main Street that hung Rats T-shirts in their windows. New business swamped the marina, and Soupy’s dad added a refueling station and a big section of dry dock. The town built a little zoo along the lakeshore where tourist kids could ride a miniature train past white-tail deer, red foxes, bobcats, and snapping turtles. New housing developments sprouted around the lake.
The money behind a lot of the building came from Francis Dufresne, who recruited Jack Blackburn as his pitchman. When the time came to persuade the town council to approve construction of this new motel or that new subdivision, Coach would don a sports jacket and his self-assured smile to present the plans to the council while Dufresne watched from the back of the audience, nodding with satisfaction as the council voted his way again and again. The two of them built Starvation Lake into a bona fide resort.
Everything changed after Coach’s accident. Whether from grief or inertia or bad luck, the town seemed to lose the momentum it had had. One summer, a faulty fuse box started a fire that shut down the marina just as the boating season was getting started. The next year, a putrid outbreak of algae left a gooey green slick floating on the lake surface. Sandy Cove and other towns started siphoning off the business. Dufresne and his new partner, Teddy Boynton, kept building, but they kept moving farther from Starvation, becoming silent partners in projects in other towns, even Sandy Cove. Eventually the hockey suffered, too.
The whole town had lost something. It wasn’t easy to pinpoint, but it was more than just a hockey coach. Jack Blackburn had showed Starvation Lake how to win. Somehow, without him, people forgot.
“Gus?”
The woman’s voice pierced the wind on South Beach. I turned to see Sheriff’s Deputy Darlene Esper, nee Bontrager, trudging through the snow toward me. I’d known her forever and could tell immediately that she didn’t want to be on that beach, talking to me. She’d come out of a sense of duty to someone who grew up with her, whom she’d once loved, who had broken her heart.
“Soupy said you might be down here,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I thought you’d want to know.”
“About?”
“The snowmobile. We’re pretty sure it was Blackburn’s,” she said.
“How can you be sure?”
“All we have is the front part, you know, the whatchamacallit, the cowl. But the registration numbers match up.”
“So? That could be a clerical screwup or something.”
Darlene took one obliging step closer. Her eyes were huge onyx marbles. “There’s also a sticker, like, a decal, next to one of the headlights. It’s all faded, but you can tell.”
The River Rats logo. A snarling, toothy rodent in skates and helmet, carrying a hockey stick like a pitchfork. Coach had had decals made every year. I remember seeing them on the insides of his kitchen cupboards.
“OK,” I said.
Instinctively, Darlene reached for my elbow, then loosed it just as quickly and stepped back again. I stared at the shadowy boot prints she’d left in the snow at my feet. “Well,” I said, “it’s not like Coach died all over again.”
“It’s pretty weird, Gus.”
“What do you guys think happened?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the tunnels?”
The tunnels. Many a boat had sunk in Starvation Lake never to be found. The cops would drag the lake and send scuba crews down, but boats that sank in plain sight seemed to have been swallowed up by the lake bottom. Around town the favored theory was that the lake was part of a serpentine network of underwater tunnels linking dozens of inland lakes to Lake Michigan. Sunken boats were sucked into the tunnels and out to the big lake. Like Bigfoot, the legend persisted, even though no one had ever actually located one of the tunnels.
“Come on,” I said.
“I’ve never seen Dingus like this. Calling meetings, in the office before eight, on the phone all the time with the state police. He’s reopening the whole investigation.”
My chest tightened. “Of the accident?”
“Yes. The accident.” She looked away. “But what do you care? You weren’t around ten years ago, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t. What else do they know?”
She shook her head. “Dingus and the guy deputies were whispering about something tonight. They didn’t share it with me.”
I thought of Joanie. She wasn’t going to be happy with me. She’d had the story exactly right.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No. You just want the story.”
“Will you give me a break, please, Darlene?”
“Did I have to come out here and tell you this?”
“No. Thanks. I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry.”
She turned to leave. Up the street I heard Soupy howling something over the rumble of revving pickup trucks, the sounds of Enright’s emptying. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did anyway. “Darl,” I called out. “Give me a ride home?”
She didn’t even turn around.
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 w
onder…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.
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.”