The Hanging Tree (8 page)

“Aha,” I said. “Well, welcome back, Meat. Why’s he back? Did someone beat his video golf record at Dingman’s?”

“I hear he’s fixed himself up pretty good,” D’Alessio said. “But you can see for yourself tomorrow.”

Tuesday night, Soupy and I and our team, the Chowder Heads, had a first-round playoff game in the Midnight Hour Men’s League.

“No shit, huh?” I said. “Meat’s playing?”

“Yes, sir. Last time you saw him on the ice, he was skating for the Pipefitters, wasn’t he?”

The Pipefitters was the team from south of Detroit that beat us in overtime in the 1981 state final.

“Yeah,” I said. “But he was young, didn’t get a lot of ice time.”

“He’ll get plenty tomorrow, unfortunately for you.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Deputy!”

The shout came from the shoe tree. We both looked to see Dingus waving his arms over his head. He didn’t seem happy. D’Alessio, flustered, gave him a thumbs-up, then looked back at me.

“Move it along,” he said. “I’ll see you at the rink or”—he smirked again—“maybe in the hospital.”

I swung my truck around and headed back in the direction of town. As I turned north on Ladensack Road, I tried Soupy’s cell phone. As usual, he didn’t answer. Probably still in bed, I thought. I didn’t bother to leave a message he wouldn’t bother to retrieve.

*   *   *

The Starvation Lake Arena, in all of its cinder-block glory, squatted in a parking lot ringed by snow-laden pines and birches.

I slowed to let a snowplow pull onto the road in front of me. I was glad to see the lot empty but for a single Dodge pickup. Snow was piled high against the marquee on wheels near the roadside, but I could still make out the advertisement for that night’s game. “River Rats v Mar ue te, 7 o’clock, SRO”, it said, the “q” and a “t” missing from “Marquette”. I smiled and shook my head. It had been a long time since the Rats had commanded standing-room-only crowds. Back then, I was the goalie, Soupy was the all-state defenseman, and the Rats were one of the best squads in Michigan.

I drove around to the back of the building and parked. A rusted oilcan overflowed with beer cartons covered in snow. The door to the back of the rink was locked so I walked around to the front, hoping I was alone.

The sweet smell of refrigerant filled my nose as I pushed open one of the double doors between the arena lobby and the rink itself. The only sound was the hum of a generator beyond the walls somewhere. I walked to my left and stopped on the rubber-mat floor behind the net I had tended as a kid for the River Rats and, many years later, in the Midnight Hour Men’s League.

I’d liked the vantage all those years I was a goalie: the rink spreading out in front of me, the bleachers rising to the shadows beneath the ceiling on my left, the benches and penalty boxes stretching down the dasher boards to my right, the opposing net facing me two hundred feet away, the banners dangling from the rafters overhead. When a crowd had gathered, I could feel the glass behind me groaning against their weight, hear them cursing me or praising me, no matter what I did. Some were on my side, some weren’t. Sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference.

Finally, I had had enough of throwing myself in front of flying pucks, enough of people firing pucks at my head. A year before, I had ditched the mask and leg pillows and chest protector, grabbed a stick with a hook on the blade, and started playing on a wing. It felt good to be on the bench bitching about the goalie instead of being the one on the other end of the bitching, good not to be alone between those iron pipes.

I scanned the rink, looking for whoever had parked the Dodge outside. Sometimes old folks came and walked circles around the perimeter for exercise. None were there on this morning. The preschool figure skating class
wasn’t due for another hour. I knew these useless facts because I read them each week on the press releases someone sent to the
Pilot
. I peered up at the banners. The last, in faded Rats blue and gold, had been hung in 1987, when the team won the regional final before losing in the state quarters. The best—or the worst—was the banner from 1981, when my own Rats team lost in the state final, in that very rink, because of the goal I allowed into the net I was now standing behind.

A noise came from the concession stand. I turned and saw a cardboard box marked Koffee-Kleen Filters appear on the counter. Whoever drove that Dodge was working back there—probably a kid a year out of high school who’d work in rinks and on construction sites between unemployment checks his whole life without ever leaving Starvation Lake. I ducked my head and skittered around the corner of the rink boards to my right, hoping no one had seen me.

Staying low, I scrambled along behind the benches and penalty boxes toward the back of the arena. The floor peeled up in places. Chilly drafts blew over me through thin cracks in the walls. An electrical outlet box hung haphazardly off the back of the announcer’s box, spewing bare wires. Puddles had formed where water had dripped through the sieve of a roof. Even though the Rats were finally winning again, skating stride for stride with the downstate teams for the first time in years, the town was letting the rink go to pot.

The town council, chaired by none other than Elvis Bontrager, had planned the year before to pay for refurbishments. Then Laird Haskell showed up at a council meeting one night with a box of glossy blue-and-gold folders embossed with the slogan “River Rats: Return to Glory.” He had a goaltender son who would keep other teams off the scoreboard and a bank account that would build the finest hockey facility in Michigan, complete with a weight room, two Zambonis, a bar called the Stanley Club—and a new scoreboard with a video screen that would show replays of his son’s brilliant saves. “We’ll build this,” he told the council, “and the championships will come.”

The council, without asking a single hard question about when or where he was going to get the money, gladly set aside the plans to fix the old rink and started shoveling our tax dollars toward helping Haskell. What reason was there to doubt him? He was a wealthy
man—just look at his enormous house on the lake. Why would he propose a new rink if he couldn’t pay for it? Why throw money at the old rink when a free one was there for the taking?

At the back of the arena, I looked back over the top of the boards toward the concession stand and saw Johnny Ford doing something at the frozen yogurt machine. So that was his Dodge in the lot. He wasn’t out of high school yet. Either he didn’t have morning class or he was skipping.

He hadn’t seen me, I decided.

I crept past the two extra goalie nets leaned against the back wall and into the high-ceilinged bay where the Zamboni stood dripping water on a concrete floor. Johnny must have run it just before I’d arrived. I walked around the Zam once slowly, smelling gasoline, looking for anything that might give me an inkling as to how Gracie had wound up in the shoe tree.

Three tall plastic buckets embossed with Miller Lite logos sat along the back wall, one filled with rags, another with clotted snow. Next to the buckets stood a broom-sized squeegee and a pair of shovels. Along a side wall stood half a dozen carbon-dioxide tanks beneath a fuse box.

I glanced once more out the Zamboni bay to make sure Johnny wasn’t coming, then ducked under the yellow police tape strung across the doorway into the shed that Gracie had called home for the past few months.

I smelled something like incense mixed with the unmistakable odor of marijuana. The town had so lost interest in the rink that nobody even cared if the Zamboni driver smoked dope. Maybe that’s why Gracie had been turned down for a job at the new rink.

The floor in Gracie’s home was concrete. A scuffed wooden workbench ran alongside the wall to my left. A pegboard above the bench was empty, maybe because Gracie was too short to reach it. The bench was strewn with tools, cans of oil and paint and WD-40, greasy rags, some purple-and-orange marking pens, and an old Detroit Red Wings cap frayed around the bill. Gracie had worn the cap whenever she ran the Zam, her fading reddish hair streaked with silver straggling out the back.

I stopped for a second and thought, She must’ve taught herself to use the tools to keep the Zam in working order. I had never given it a thought before she died, when my pals and I were playing and she was driving the Zam. Before she returned to town, I had never known she was handy around machinery, that she didn’t mind getting dirt under her sparkly
pink-and-purple fingernails. Nor did I have the slightest idea what she had done for a living during her years downstate. Never cared either.

When Gracie last lived in Starvation, she’d slung ice cream cones at the Dairy Queen. Business was especially good on her Friday nights because she always wore the tiniest, tightest top she could find, and boys would come all the way from Torch Lake to flirt. The luckiest one would get a cone that came with a wink and a question: “Extra sprinkles tonight?” More than a few times, the lucky one was Soupy. And Soupy being Soupy, I was never short on the details of what happened in the backseat of his Chevy Nova or the woods around Gracie’s mom’s trailer. “The Gymnast,” he took to calling her, or sometimes “Nadia.”

Beyond the bench stood an old wooden filing cabinet, a small refrigerator, and Gracie’s cot. As quietly as I could, I pulled out each drawer of the cabinet to see what I could find. Three of the drawers were empty and one contained a smattering of file folders filled with papers, some of the folders marked with dates from the early 1990s. Dampness had stuck the edges of the paper together. Maybe the cops had already taken all the revealing stuff, if there was any. Could there be a diary? A journal? I couldn’t imagine Gracie having the patience to sit and write in one.

Atop the fridge stood four empty bottles of Gordon’s gin, their caps removed; two unopened bottles; and one bottle still about half full. I opened the fridge. The inside of the door was lined with sixteen-ounce plastic bottles of Squirt, the grapefruit soda pop Gracie splashed into her gin. I counted the bottles: ten unopened, one not quite empty. Five bottles of Blue Ribbon waited in the back of the fridge. For Soupy. The fridge’s top shelf held a loaf of wheat bread that hadn’t yet been opened, a package of cheddar cheese, and a bunch of low-fat strawberry yogurts. I picked up one of the yogurts and looked for the expiration date. March 11. More than four weeks away.

Gracie had just bought all of this stuff, I thought. Why would she go grocery shopping if she knew she was going to kill herself? She wouldn’t.

I closed the fridge.

Her cot was unmade. There was a pillow, a sheet that looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks, and an afghan identical to the one my mother had made for me. Mom had given it to Gracie when she’d left for downstate. I imagined her asleep, breathing refrigerant and paint fumes.

Beneath the cot I spied a green-and-gold Wayne State University duffle bag. I reached under and pulled the bag out. It was unzipped. I poked around inside. There were a couple of Squirt bottle caps and, in a zippered pocket inside the bag, a blue plastic hairbrush with black bristles.

“I’ll be goddamned.”

My mother had bought me the blue brush at Fortune Drug when I turned nine. I kept it proudly on the top of my dresser. Gracie, during one of her extended stays with us, took it and hid it. I threatened to beat her up but she laughed in my face. She said my mother would kill me if I touched her.

She was right about that. So I waited for her to go out to the lake one day and snuck into her room and went through her things until I found the brush in the back of her underwear drawer. I was grossed out, as Gracie surely had intended, but I wanted my brush. She stole it back while I was asleep that night. “You’re a little bitch,” I told her the next day, and my mother heard me and made me stay in my room for the duration of a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Then Gracie told Darlene about the brush and the next thing I knew, Darlene had stolen it from Gracie and Gracie was calling her a slut. My mother finally figured out what was going on, but instead of using her motherly prerogative to order the brush returned to its rightful owner, she filched the brush herself while she was over at Darlene’s having coffee with Mrs. B. She let Gracie and me know she had it over dinner at the picnic table that night, and Gracie laughed so hard that she choked on a mouthful of hot dog.

By the next morning, Gracie had pilfered the brush from Mom, and by night, I’d grabbed it and hidden it in the freezer box of the fridge in the garage where Dad used to keep his Carling Black Labels. Mom found it there and hid it in the bird feeder on the beach. Gracie took it from there and didn’t have it a day before Darlene stole it and stuck it beneath her mattress.

I didn’t even think about using it on my hair anymore. Once Mom joined the game, the brush became something entirely other than a brush. It was now
the
brush. And it wasn’t so much the having of it that mattered, but the keeping of it, the not losing it to someone else, at least for me. Maybe it was because I was a hockey player; one-goal games and sudden-death
overtime were much more about fear than triumph. Once I had the brush in my possession, I tried not to give it a thought—then I would wake up in the middle of the night to see my bedroom door being swung shut by one of the thieves in my life, Gracie or Darlene or my own mother.

I came to hate losing it. It was my brush, after all. And it didn’t matter who had it, or where it was; if I didn’t have the brush in my possession, I blamed Gracie, because she had started the stupid game. And whenever the rest of us seemed to have lost interest, Gracie would find the brush and secretly return it to me, then wait a few days before stealing it back, just to show me that she could make me feel that sting. I was an idiot, of course, but I fell for it again and again. Occasionally I would try to reconcile Gracie’s nasty streak with her lot in life, having lost her father and been forced to live with her crazy mother. Of course I’d also lost my father, and though my mother wasn’t crazy in the same way Shirley McBride was, it was clear whose side Mom was on when it came to the brush. And I let that gnaw at me too.