Starvation Lake (15 page)

“Are you really going to arrest me?”

Now she smiled, too. “I might.” She leaned back against the door until it closed.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know. A citizen’s arrest?”

We didn’t say anything for a while. We just looked at each other, me on my knee, Darlene in her uniform, the flashlight beam playing across my chest. My heart was pounding now from something other than fear. Darlene and I had gone on a few dates and gotten into a few clinches, but one of us had always stopped things before they went too far. I think we knew we really liked each other, and we knew I wasn’t going to stay in Starvation Lake, and we knew that those two things could only come to pain. But there in the humming silence of the Pine County courthouse, with the town asleep around us and my stupid little secret hanging on the air, I guess it was easier for both of us to say the hell with it, this is our place, for now.

I sat back on the floor. She snatched her hat off and tossed it at me. I caught it against my chest and set it down next to the bucket I’d upended. Darlene locked the door and snapped off her flashlight.

   I got my story. Bubba Baumgarten wasn’t the only slugger on Perfect-O-Screw’s payroll. I called some of the guys whose names I’d found in the courthouse records. As it turned out, there were six Perfect-O-Screw employees who hadn’t done anything more for the company than catch fly balls and swing bats. Henry was so delighted that he never asked why I hadn’t come in until noon.

“Christ,” he said, “it’s a double play. You nailed ’em screwing the city
and
the softball league.”

More like a triple play, I thought.

Henry wanted to publish the story on the day the town council was scheduled to finalize Perfect-O-Screw’s newest tax break. The day before the meeting, my phone rang just after 9:00 a.m. “Gus Carpenter,” I said.

“What the fuck are you?” came the voice. I knew it from the softball field. I looked around for Henry. He’d gone for doughnuts.

“Mr. Vidigan?” I said.

“What the hell have I ever done to you? Did I strike you out or something? Will ruining me be a feather in your fucking cap? Will you be able to go to your bosses and say, ‘Stop the fucking presses, I’m about to destroy Cecil Vidigan’?”

“Actually, Mr. Vidigan—”

“By the way, print a word of this and I’ll come down and cave your goddamn skull in.”

Then he hung up. My hands were trembling. What if I had the story all wrong? I wished Henry were there.

The phone rang again.

“Gus?”

“Yes, Mr. Vidigan. Sir, I had fully—”

“No, no, Gus, please.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said all that sh——, all those things. You’re just doing your job. As you can imagine, Gus, this company, I’ve built it from the ground up. I’ve sweat blood, Gus. Cried tears, friend, real tears. And I think I’ve contributed a hell of a lot to this community.”

“I understand,” I said. “Do you think you could tell me—”

“Listen,” he said. “Why don’t you come out to the shop in the morning? I’ll lay it all out, how this grimy little joint—I’m pretty damn proud of it—how it makes a big difference around here. What do you say?”

My hands still hadn’t stopped shaking. “Well,” I said, “I actually need to do this now.”

“Now? Like today?”

“Yeah.”

He cleared his throat, a little too loudly. “Look, Gus, today’s just impossible. I got a huge shipment to get out of here.”

“We can do it over the phone. What I’m working on is this tax abatement—”

“No. I can’t do it now. Tomorrow.”

Now that I’d heard his anger turn to feigned calm and finally to desperation, my initial fear of Vidigan began leaching away. I’d worried for a second or two that maybe he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for hiring softball ringers, that maybe my story wasn’t a story after all, maybe I’d wasted my time breaking the law with Darlene at the courthouse. But now I was sure, without even hearing what he had to say, that I really did have a story.

“Mr. Vidigan,” I said. “We plan to run this story in tomorrow’s paper. If you want to comment, now is the time.”

There was another long pause before he said, “OK. I get it. You want to fuck me at the town council.”

“I just want to report—”

“Don’t give me that happy horseshit. You just want a feather in your fucking cap.”

“Mr. Vidigan, everything you say now is on the record.”

“Oh, ho, ho, fuck you,” he said. He sounded like he was choking. “Put this in your piece-of-shit paper: I will cave your goddamn—”

“If I don’t hear from you or your lawyers, I’ll assume you didn’t want to comment. Thanks.”

Now I hung up.

   Henry went through the story with me line by line, asking what I knew, how I knew it, whether I’d double-and triple-checked all my facts. When we’d finished, he gave me one of his big, crinkly smiles and said, “Goddamn headline ought to be, ‘College Kid Raises Hometown Hell.’” The actual headline, bannered across the top of the front page, read, “Town Strikes Out on Perfect-O-Screw Abatement.”

That evening, the town council rejected the company’s application for a new tax break, canceled the original abatement, and authorized the town attorney to sue Perfect-O-Screw for $83,174.98 in back property taxes. Cecil Vidigan didn’t attend, but eighty-seven citizens did, quite a turnout for an August council meeting. I counted every one. For a few hours, people talked about something I’d done that had nothing to do with that state title game.

After the meeting, I went back to the
Pilot.
Deadlines had passed, the newsroom was empty, and I didn’t have to file a story on the meeting until the next morning. But I didn’t want to go home yet. On my desk I found a copy of that day’s paper with a note scrawled across it in black Magic Marker. “Here’s how you know you had a helluva scoop,” Henry had written. “The mayor called to complain about not being quoted.” I took it into Henry’s office and grabbed a Bud out of the mini-fridge beneath his desk. I propped my feet up on the desk and reread my story about twenty times. I kept thinking, This is just what my professors taught: Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable. I had exposed a cheat and saved the town money. That’s what real journalists did.

But there was something else, too, that kept me sitting there reading my story again and again into the middle of the night. I was a short, skinny college kid who’d gone toe-to-toe with a captain of industry, or at least what passed for one in Starvation Lake, a man of means and stature and raw, purposeful anger. And I’d beaten him.

Two years later, after I’d graduated from college, the scissored-out clips of my Perfect-O-Screw stories would impress a
Detroit Times
editor enough that she’d hire me as a general assignment reporter for the business section. By then Perfect-O-Screw would be out of business, and Cecil Vidigan would be rumored to be running a golf driving range somewhere in the Upper Peninsula.

But on the night I changed his life, I sat with my feet up and a beer in my hand and decided that if something could make me feel this good for even one night, and it didn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve to be hurt, maybe it was something I could actually do, something I might actually be good at, something that might actually make somebody proud of me.

   The morning after Dingus surprised me in my apartment, I slept until eleven. Dinner at Mom’s wasn’t until twelve-thirty, so after showering and dressing I went down to the
Pilot
to square a few things away.

The newsroom was empty. I expected Joanie but left the ceiling lights off. I couldn’t bear the buzzing of those fluorescent lamps when I was alone. Instead I snapped on my desk lamp and proceeded to clear the mess on my desk, filling most of two garbage cans with old printouts, newspapers, and disposable coffee cups. I opened Saturday’s mail: lunch menus for the elementary school. A press release about promotions at a local insurance firm. A one-page announcement that the Starvation Lake Lions Club had named Emil J. “Bud” Popke as its Man of the Year. The Lions Club didn’t send a photograph of Popke. I didn’t know whether we had one, and Tillie didn’t like me messing around in the photo file cabinets, so I jotted her a note to make a photo assignment.

As I worked, I pondered: What was Teddy Boynton really after at Enright’s? What was on the napkin he pulled from his pocket? Why was Dingus being at once so solicitous and so evasive? Beneath it all I was dreading having to call my attorney downstate. My Detroit troubles were far from over.

I set the copies of the police report and the $25,000 receipt Dingus had given me next to my computer. I dialed Mom. Her answering machine came on, and I pressed the phone to my ear. My mother talked so fast that it often was hard to understand her recorded messages. But you had to listen because she constantly updated them for whatever was on her schedule: bingo, crochet, euchre, Meals on Wheels. Sometimes she actually called her own phone to find out where she was supposed to be. This morning she rattled off something about church and supper and meeting someone named either Felicia or Theresa at what sounded like the community center. “Mom,” I said after the beep, “I’m going to stop on the way over to start the Bonnie.”

For Monday’s
Pilot,
I’d gotten most of the stories and headlines ready on Friday and Saturday. All that remained were Joanie’s two Blackburn stories, which she had yet to file. Which reminded me: Joanie had also been at Enright’s. I guessed that she’d wanted to see the pictures of Blackburn and the Rats, and maybe chat up Francis a bit. But if she really was looking for people who knew Coach, why hadn’t she hung around until the playoff games were over and all the skaters came in?

Just before noon, I grabbed my jacket and walked up front to check the answering machine. One of the five messages was from Arthur Fleming, Boynton’s lawyer, left at 8:07 that morning. “Mr. Carpenter,” he said, “please call me at your earliest convenience so we can review the status of the article we discussed.” I went back to my desk for the document Fleming and Boynton had given me, but didn’t see it lying where I was sure I’d left it. I rummaged through the stack of papers next to my computer, checked my in-and out-boxes, pulled open a couple of drawers, but couldn’t find it. I looked under the desk and riffled through the stuff in the garbage cans. Still nothing. I decided I’d look later.

   Half a mile from Mom’s, I swung my pickup truck left off Beach onto Horvath Road. My dad had bought property in the hills overlooking the lake’s southwestern end, not far from our house. Atop a short rise jutting from a copse of pines he built a one-car garage. There, he told my mother, he’d have the peace to pursue his hobby of rebuilding motors for go-carts, lawnmowers, and other gadgets. But most of his time he spent gazing out over the lake on a deck he built atop the garage. On summer evenings, he’d sit in a rocking chair with a beer and a cigar, timing sundown against what the weatherman had predicted.

He called it his tree house. It was a simple platform of two-by-eight planks ringed by two-by-four rails. In the rafters beneath it Dad built a closet with a door where he stowed cigars, a transistor radio, a miniature fridge, and some girlie magazines. He kept it locked, he said, because I was too young to be looking at those magazines. Sometimes he took me up on the deck, though, and we’d put the Tigers on the radio. I could still taste the potato-chip salt, the onion in the chip dip, the sweet orange pop washing it all down. Now and then Dad would joke with Mom that he was going to install a bumper-pool table and a wet bar and apply for a liquor license. Mom would say, “I’m sorry, I don’t think you can get a license if no girls are allowed.” Dad would wink and say, “Not worth the trouble then.”

The garage eventually became home to the last car he bought before he died. Dad had worked construction, installing drywall, so he drove a pickup truck. But he always talked about owning a Cadillac, if only just for Sunday drives to Lake Michigan. He set aside a little money every week for years. For a while he had a second job on weekend nights. I didn’t understand much about parents, but I knew Mom didn’t like him working Saturday nights and neither did I because that’s when we went to Dairy Queen and Mom never seemed to be in the mood without Dad around.

He was still short of affording a Caddy when his doctor told him about the cancer. When later tests confirmed his condition, he left the doctor’s office and drove straight to a car dealership in Grayling. He bought a used 1969 Pontiac Bonneville, gold with a cream vinyl roof, power windows, power seats, air conditioning, and a trunk the size of a swimming pool. When he brought it home, Mom took a look at it and her face tightened up as if she were going to cry. “Oh, Rudy,” was all she said. From my bedroom that night I overheard them in the kitchen, speaking in strained whispers. I couldn’t make out everything, but it seemed my mother wanted to understand why after all that hoping and saving Dad hadn’t gotten the Cadillac after all. My father kept saying something about an “investment.” I didn’t know what that was.

When I was old enough to drive, Mom wouldn’t let me take the Bonnie because she said it reminded her too much of Dad. But she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it, either. We stored it in the garage beneath Dad’s tree house. Every six months or so, I’d go up and start the engine and let it run for a while, and once a year, I changed the oil and the spark plugs and updated the license plates. Even when I was living in Detroit, I made a point to drive up and service the Bonnie. If I forgot or procrastinated, Mom got on me, though she never ventured up there herself. Sometimes on summer evenings I’d clamber up the ladder to the tree house and lean against the railing.

Dad had cut a two-track road straight up to the garage through an archway of pines. I parked my truck on Horvath and trudged up the snow-covered two-track to the garage. Icicles the size of baseball bats hung from the eaves. I unlocked the side door and stepped inside. It smelled faintly of oil. A blast of cold smacked me in the face as I lifted the big garage door open.