by Bryan Gruley
Coach wanted to do some “skimming.” I’d done it a few times with Soupy and other friends, mostly in high school, always when we were drunk. We’d take our snowmobiles and find patches of open water on Starvation or Walleye or one of the other area lakes, and we’d hammer the throttles until we were moving fast enough to skim across the water to solid ice. It was kind of like jumping barrels on a motorcycle, only dumber, because it was usually dark and, as I said, we were drunk. Pine County outlawed skimming after two kids drowned on Little Twin Lake one night in 1982.
Everyone knew Coach loved to skim as much as he loved to dodge the cops who tried to catch him at it. “I’m going to die with my helmet on,” he liked to say, and Leo would invariably respond, “You just might get your wish.” Leo, who had never learned to swim, wanted nothing to do with skimming. Coach taunted him, but Leo would say, “I have no desire to spend my retirement years at the bottom of a lake.” He didn’t even like to watch. When Coach went looking for open water, Leo waited onshore, nipping at a bottle. On this March night, though, Leo relented. Why wasn’t entirely clear, at least from the Pilot. The police quoted Leo as saying he’d simply had too much to drink, and, in fact, he never took another drink after that night. Later, when people asked him what had happened, he usually begged off by saying he was afraid that dredging it from his memory would send him back to the bottle.
Coach led Leo onto the lake beneath a moonless sky. Out past Pelly’s Point, half a mile from shore, Coach and Leo stopped before a large pool of standing water shaped like a pear. Leo told police he lined his sled up facing the narrow end, and Coach steered himself into position to cross the wider stretch, spanning about twenty-five yards.
Half an hour later, just past 1:30 a.m., Leo banged at the door of my mother’s house on the southwestern bank. She called the police.
Leo had chickened out.
He told the cops that, just before his snowmobile reached the water’s edge, he had cut the throttle. Coach did not stop, of course. As always, Leo tried not to watch, but he turned to see after hearing Coach’s snowmobile whine and splash and go silent. He saw Coach’s helmeted head bobbing up and down in the water, heard his gurgling cries for help. “I didn’t know what to do,” the Pilot quoted Leo as saying. The rope they carried for such emergencies was stowed in Coach’s snowmobile. The Pilot said Leo lay down on his stomach and edged close enough to the water to dampen the shoulders of his parka.
Divers found no body or snowmobile. Police said they thought the sled had sunk into the deep silt at the bottom of the lake and Coach’s body had drifted away. They planned to dredge after the spring thaw. I pulled out another binder and looked for stories on the dredging. It never happened. The town council decided it would be futile and expensive, the Pilot said. Nor did the council desire to prolong the town’s mourning. The sheriff then, Jerry Spardell, said he had no good answer for what happened to Coach except that perhaps he and his machine had been sucked into one of those underwater tunnels. Reading it, I shook my head in disbelief.
A cold sun shined on Jack Blackburn’s funeral procession. Townspeople in River Rats caps, hats, and jackets lined Main Street as fifty snowmobiles draped in bedsheets dyed black crawled past, trailing plumes of exhaust and an empty hearse. A blown-up photograph atop the hearse showed Coach standing on a rink in his blue-and-gold sweatsuit, hockey stick in his hands, whistle dangling. I watched with Soupy from the storage room over Enright’s. Now and then I cried. Soupy, who did not cry, laid a hand on the back of my neck and said nothing. Coach had taught me how to play goalie and how to love hockey and how to win. But that wasn’t why I cried. I cried for the years in which Coach and I had barely talked since the day we lost that last game, since I’d left Starvation Lake. I cried because Coach had never taught me how to lose.
I closed the binder and stood there, my eyes fixed on the dates etched on its side, thinking. Why would Leo change his mind about skimming? He’d doubtless resisted plenty of other times when he’d had a lot to drink. Why hadn’t anyone onshore heard Coach’s cries for help? How could the city not dredge the lake, the expense be damned? And what about my mother, a witness once removed? She hadn’t been quoted in the Pilot, not even declining to comment.
What troubled me most was that I hadn’t pondered these questions before, or allowed myself to. Why was it that only ten years later I’d begun to feel that Leo’s story seemed unlikely? Why only now was I wondering what my mother knew that she’d never told? At the time, perhaps, I was too distraught to think about it. And then I ran back to Detroit and tried to forget, while my mother and everyone else who knew how I felt was telling me to let it go, move on with my life. So I did. Now it was catching up with me, a nightmare that had been hiding all those years in the shadowy corners of my mind, unseen and unacknowledged.
As I slipped the binder back into its rack, I heard a creak in the floor above me. Shit, I thought.
Joanie was waiting at the top of the stairs. “Jerk,” she said.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Got a hockey game to get to.”
She stepped in front of me. “What were you doing going to see Dingus? Checking up on me?”
“I wasn’t checking-”
“You have no right.”
“It’s my job-”
“Bullcrap! Editors don’t go around checking up on reporters behind their backs. Editors aren’t supposed to be sniveling little chickens.”
Some bosses might have fired her then and there. I told myself to calm down and walked past her into the newsroom and sat down on her desk. Of course I couldn’t fire her, and not just because we were short-staffed. She had to help me figure out what had happened to Coach.
“Take it easy,” I said. “You were right.”
“Darn right I was right.”
“No, I mean about the whole thing. It is a hell of a story.”
“So what were you doing at the sheriff’s department?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t checking up on you, I swear. I think maybe I was checking up on me.”
“What the heck does that mean, Gus?”
I got up and walked to my desk. My keyboard was buried in a pile of typed articles that had been dropped off by old-lady freelancers, who attended school board and parks commission meetings and babbled on in their stories about what the mayor was wearing and who led the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance. I spent my days rewriting that garbage into slightly better garbage that filled space between ads for pizza joints and lumber yards.
“Look at all this shit,” I said. I turned to face her. “Look, I’m not trying to steal your story, OK? Christ, we work for the same paper. Like it or not, I’m your boss, all right? And I…well, I wasn’t there when all this happened, but I knew-actually I didn’t know what I knew, then or now-oh hell, never mind. Bottom line, Dingus didn’t give me squat. I filled out a request for the eighty-eight police report and he sent me home.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Joanie said. “But for the past two days it seemed like you were trying to keep me away from the story. Now you think it’s a story. Well, hello! It’s the biggest damn story ever to hit his town.”
“‘Damn’? Watch your language, girl.”
She actually blushed. “Sorry.”
“Let’s just work on it, OK? You know D’Alessio, right?”
“Yes,” she said, blushing again.
“You might want to ask him about some forensics analysis they’re apparently doing on the snowmobile. I did hear that while I was over there. Dingus wouldn’t talk about it.”
“It took guts to ask for that eighty-eight report,” she said.
“Why?”
“Dingus wrote it. He was the deputy then.”
We were quiet for a minute. Joanie leaned back against the copier and folded her arms. “You know what happened, don’t you?” I didn’t particularly want to hear. “There was no accident, Gus. Somebody killed Blackburn.”
I gazed at a coffee stain on the tiled floo
r. In my mind I pictured the beach at Walleye Lake, felt the flashlights in my eyes.
“I’m glad you looked at the old papers,” Joanie said. “Hard to figure, isn’t it? I mean, do you really think that Leo dude was telling everything he knew? I don’t. And underwater tunnels? Give me a break. The old folks at Audrey’s might believe that junk, but you sure as heck don’t.”
No, I didn’t, though I had tried to for a couple of days.
“Reminds me,” she said. “I hear your coach was quite the ladies’ man.”
This was old news. “And?”
“Who knows? Could go to motive. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
“Screwing’s always interesting, but it’s pretty tough to get into a family newspaper.”
“So I should just ignore it?”
“No. You shouldn’t ignore anything. You should look at everything and talk to everyone. Just don’t assume everything you get is going to see print.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
I looked up at the clock. It said 6:31. “I’ve got to fly,” I said. “By the way, did you clear up the Canada thing?”
“The what?”
“The thing about Coach-about Blackburn not really being in that one place for four years?”
“Oh, right. Not yet. I called that woman at the newspaper again. It was weird, for a minute I thought she was going to cry. Anyway, she told me to call her at home tonight. Got to do my laundry first.”
Upstairs, I shoved a stack of old Hockey News magazines off my makeshift coffee table and lifted the plywood off the cardboard boxes beneath. I opened the box that wasn’t marked Trucks, the one marked Rats.
It was filled with old tournament programs, newspaper clippings, and photographs. I rummaged in the bottom and pulled out the dog-eared programs and yearbooks Coach had given me when I was a boy. I flipped through them once, then again more slowly, looking for a St. Albert Saints program for 1966-67, the season he supposedly wasn’t there. Then I lined up all the programs across the carpet in chronological order, from Kitchener in 1954 to Moose Jaw to Kamloops to Kelowna to Victoria to St. Albert.
There was nothing from St. Albert in ’66-’67.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. I looked again. There was no program from that season. Was my memory fooling me? I sat on the floor remembering Coach leaning over his empty plate, telling us St. Albert was just too damn cold. The kids were great and they’d nearly won the title, he said, but he wanted those warm summers. “I had four fantastic years there,” I could hear him saying. “But you know what? All good things come to an end.”
eleven
The dressing rooms at Blackburn Arena were cramped rectangles with benches and clothing hooks nailed into cinder-block walls, showers that occasionally spewed hot water, and black rubber mats covered with spilled coffee and spat tobacco dip. The only difference was the numbers one through four on the doors. When we were the River Rats, and now that we were the Chowder Heads, we had to be in dressing room 3. That’s where I found Soupy, Zilchy, Wilf, Stevie, and the rest of the boys before our 8:00 p.m. semifinal playoff game against the Mighty Minnows of Jordan Bait and Tackle. Soupy stood waiting for me to sit. I did and he plopped down on the bench to my left.
“Trapper,” he said. “Pumped?”
“Sure,” I grunted. I had way too much on my mind to be having pucks fired at my head. On my way in, I’d passed the Zamboni shed and spied Leo crouched beneath Ethel with a rag in one hand. It was briefly comforting to see him attending to his normal duties, as if nothing at all had happened the past two days.
“What’s the score out there?” Soupy said.
As we dressed, the Boynton Realty Land Sharks were playing the Capraro’s Pizza Pieholes in the other semifinal. The winner would play the winner of our game in the championship Monday night. The champs would get T-shirts and the runners-up would buy cocktails for everyone at Enright’s.
“It was five to one Sharks when I came in,” I said. “Saw Teddy just about behead Bobby Safranski with an elbow.”
Teddy had always been tough, but over the years he’d grown mean-sneaky mean. Even the toughest players watched their backs around him, especially after play was whistled dead and the refs were busy lining up a face-off. That’s when he might spear you with a stick blade or punch you in the back of the head.
The other guys jabbered as they tightened their skate laces and taped their shinguards. “He get a penalty?” Soupy said.
“Not Teddy. Refs never saw it.” I leaned closer to Soupy. “What was up with you and him today anyway?”
“Me and who?” Soupy said.
“Don’t. You and Boynton. At the Shoot-Out.”
Soupy rummaged in his bag. “What do you think? I lost a hundred bucks. Wasn’t a lot of fun. But everything’s taken care of, don’t worry.”
“Meaning what?”
I was thinking of the settlement offer I’d read in the marina that morning. Had he changed his mind and taken it? I wanted to ask directly but didn’t want him to know I’d sneaked in. Then again, maybe he already knew. Maybe he had left those squirming fish outside the marina door.
“By the way,” I said, “were you fishing this morning?”
“Fishing? Shit, I was in bed till noon. What the hell’s up with you tonight, Trap? It’s time to play hockey now.” He called to Stevie Reneau across the room. “Steve-O. Minnows got both Linkes tonight?”
Twin brothers Clem and Jake Linke were the Minnows’ best players.
“If Jake got out of jail,” Stevie said.
“Jail again? Now what?”
“He got kicked out of some Mancelona dive and got all pissed off and went up and down the street snapping windshield wipers off cars.”
“Nice,” Soupy said. “Could be both Linkes, Trap. Hope you brought your A game.”
“Go to hell,” I whispered back.
I opened my bag with an angry zip. Soupy elbowed me gently in the shoulder. I looked at him. His eyes said he didn’t want me to be mad, but he also wasn’t going to tell whatever he had to tell. Not yet, at least. “Come on, Trapper,” he said. “Stop worrying. Ain’t good mojo to talk business before games.” He meant luck, but it was bad luck to acknowledge that luck was involved.
One day when Soupy and I were eleven, we were riding our snowmobiles when we stopped atop a hill at the border between Pine and Polley counties. From there we could look back and see the lazy crescent of the lake and the chimney smoke curling up from Soupy’s house, where Mrs. Campbell was baking pies for a New Year’s dinner our families planned to share the next day. Soupy wanted to sled down the Polley side of the hill into forbidden territory; our parents’ rule then was that we were not to cross the Pine County line. But it was New Year’s Eve, Soupy argued, so it was OK. He pointed to a clapboard bell tower jutting up through the trees below. “See that?” he said. “We can ring the bell.” Before I could answer he was roaring down.
Ours were the only tracks scarring the snow around the one-room schoolhouse. It looked abandoned; boards covered all of the outer windows. Soupy creaked the front door open and we stepped inside. The vestibule smelled of moldy paper. Through the window of the locked inner door we could see the dusty desks pushed into a corner, textbooks stacked haphazardly on the wood floor. A rope hung down from a square hole in the ceiling.
“The gun,” Soupy said. He ran back outside, returning with his Daisy BB rifle.
“Soupy,” I said. “We’re gonna get caught.”
“Don’t be a pussy.”
“I’m not a pussy.”
“Look,” he said, holding up his gloved hands. “No fingerprints.” He trained the gun on the door window and fired. The hissing BB left a pinhole at the center of a web of spidery cracks. Six more shots opened a hole the size of a fist. Gingerly, Soupy reached through the jagged opening. The door gave way.
The floor groaned as we stepped inside. “Smells like ass in here,” Soupy said. I edged farther inside
, holding my breath against the must. I reached up and clasped a mittened hand around the knot at the end of the rope. I yanked it once and jumped back. “Harder,” Soupy said. I yanked again, and the rope gave way so easily that I fell backward. I looked up and saw rope and bell and shreds of rotted wood plummeting toward me. “Holy shit,” Soupy yelled, and I rolled left just as the bell slammed into the floor. Soupy grabbed the back of my parka, yelling, “Let’s get out of here!”
The cops found us the next afternoon, just before dinner at the Campbells’. Soupy and I were horsing around in the basement when Mrs. Campbell called down. She marched us in front of two state troopers standing on her boot rug in matching navy parkas and earflap caps. One wore thick glasses and smiled sheepishly, as if he was embarrassed to be there. Mr. Campbell stood next to them, arms folded, face pinched with aggravation. We’d interrupted his afternoon of drinking beer and watching football.
“Sure smells good,” the trooper with the thick glasses said. “Got a turkey in the oven?”
“No,” Mrs. Campbell said, giving us a look. “A goose.”
Soupy and I stood shoulder to shoulder. “Boys,” the trooper without glasses said, “we have a report of a breaking and entering out by-”
Soupy interrupted him. “It was me,” he said. “I went in that schoolhouse.” He jerked a thumb toward me. “He was there but he kept telling me not to.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “Excuse me, son,” the trooper with the glasses said. “What we heard-”
Angus Campbell took a step toward us. “What the hell were you doing in Polley?” he said. “You know you ain’t supposed to go that far, boy.” His right hand twitched beneath his left elbow.
“I know, sir,” Soupy said. “I’m awfully sorry.”
“Sorry, my ass,” Mr. Campbell said.