Starvation Lake (2 page)

“Try to be more careful,” Leo said, emerging into the light again. “You boys aren’t boys anymore.”

For something like thirty years, Leo Redpath had maintained the rink’s compressors and ice scrapers and Zamboni machine. He performed the odd carpentry and plumbing chores that kept the dressing rooms, snack bar, and restrooms in working order. Mostly he kept to himself, content to tinker in his shed and tend to the Zamboni he affectionately called Ethel. And although Leo was no doctor, his workbench sometimes doubled as an operating table for players who didn’t want to bother with the local clinic. Leo had been doing it so long that he barely left scars anymore.

“See the game tonight?” I said.

“I never watch,” Leo said.

I smiled at his lie. The stitches tugged at my chin. I could make out his wide, hunched-over shape shuffling around in the shadows surrounding Ethel. “You don’t see hockey like that too often in Starvation Lake.”

“I’m sure no truer words were ever spoken,” he said.

“It’s that deceptive speed, eh, Trap?” The voice came from the other end of the shed. Soupy walked in with a beer in one hand and two more dangling from a plastic six-pack holder. “We’re even slower than we look.”

It was one of his favorite lines, and he laughed at it, by himself.

Leo stepped out from behind Ethel. “Well, if it isn’t Sonja Henie,” he said. “Was that a triple salchow that landed you on your derriere?”

“Derriere?” Soupy said. “Derri-fucking-aire? Haven’t we told you like eight million times to speak English around here? I think the word you’re looking for is ‘ass,’ my friend. And who the hell is Sonja Henie?”

“Leo didn’t watch,” I said. Talking hurt.

“True,” Leo said. “But I did catch a glimpse while carrying a box of Junior Mints to the snack bar.”

I jumped down from the workbench. My teeth rattled when I landed. “Well, then, maybe you noticed whether Soupy punched Boynton’s ticket on his way past?”

“Blow me, Trap,” Soupy said. He stood a head taller than me, long and lanky in a blue denim overcoat with the words “Starvation Lake Marina” encircling an anchor embroidered over the left breast. Thick blond curls furled out from under his red woolen cap. “Gave you a chance to shine. You ought to thank me.”

“I would have but I was unconscious.”

I finished my beer, tossed the can at the wastebasket, missed, and motioned for one of Soupy’s beers. Leo picked up the empty.

“Ultimate Teddy Boynton assault and battery,” Soupy said. “You poke-check him, he runs you over.” While I was out cold, as Soupy explained, Boynton threatened to punch a referee, who threw him out of the game. “The bastard probably didn’t mean to knock you out. Or who knows, maybe he did.” Soupy took a long pull on his beer. “He probably didn’t like your editorial.”

I had no idea Soupy read editorials. “Probably not.” I looked around the shed. Leo had disappeared behind Ethel again. “We have a meeting tomorrow.”

“With Teddy boy?” Soupy asked.

“And his lawyer.”

“His
asshole
lawyer, Trap.”

“Of course.”

Soupy touched his beer to the side of his head. “Try to keep your head up this time, huh?”

“Quiet, please.” Leo was trying to listen to the police scanner. It sat on a stack of milk crates, keeping him company on slow nights. We heard some crackling and some beeps, then the voice of the dispatcher, Darlene Esper. She was talking with a deputy on his way to Walleye Lake. A snowmobile had washed up onshore.

“Christ,” I said. It was probably nothing. But every local over the age of fifty had a police scanner next to the bed, on the garage workbench, or on the shelf over the washing machine, and they’d all be talking about that snowmobile on Walleye Lake at Audrey’s Diner the next morning. I grabbed Leo’s rotary phone and dialed the sheriff’s department. One of the perks of being associate editor of the
Pilot
was knowing that number by heart. Darlene answered.

“Deputy Esper,” I said. “Gus Carpenter.” I hoped for a chuckle. Darlene and I had grown up next door to each other. Our mothers had finally given up trying to marry us. So had Darlene.

“Gussy,” she said. “You hear about the sled?”

“Yeah.”

“You better get out there. Sheriff’s out there.”

“Dingus? Why, is there an all-you-can-eat buffet?”

“Just go, Gus.”

I lingered on the phone—her voice always got me that way—but she’d already hung up. I zipped up my parka, fished out my truck keys. “Leo, thanks for the embroidery,” I said. He didn’t answer.

“Can’t keep away from her, can you?” Soupy said.

“Good skate, Soup,” was all I said.

As I stepped into the night, I heard him call out: “Mrs. Darlene Esper—sweetest ta-tas in Starvation Lake.”

   My pickup nosed down the icy two-track road that wound between the pines to Walleye Lake. I’d often wondered why it was called that. No one had ever caught a walleye in its mucky, weed-clogged water. A carp maybe, or a sucker trout. Never a walleye.

I grew up a few miles away, on Starvation Lake. My dad died of colon cancer when I was seven, so it was just Mom and me in our yellow clapboard house on the southern shore of the lake. We had a rickety dock, a dive raft, and a fishing boat with a ten-horsepower outboard motor, everything a kid needed to love summers on a clear blue lake. Over the long winters, I played goalie, the little guy barely taller than the net, for the town’s youth hockey team, the River Rats. I was the goalie for the greatest of the Rat squads, the one that for the first time beat the mighty teams from Detroit, when no one thought it could be done. And I was the goalie who allowed the overtime goal that cost us our one and only chance to win the town a state championship.

It was a shot I should have stopped, a fluke really, a stupid lapse, that cost us the state title in our very own rink, right there in town in front of just about everybody who lived within fifty miles. I couldn’t really blame them for not forgiving me, for looking at me out of the sides of their eyes and shaking their heads, for calling me “sieve” and “funnel” and “pylon” behind my back, sometimes even to my face, if they’d had enough to drink. I’d replayed my mistake in my mind a million times. I had trouble forgiving me, too.

It shouldn’t have mattered, of course. We were just boys playing a game. But when the River Rat teams that followed us failed to come close to winning a state title again, the townspeople concluded that my flub had cursed them forever. My coach, Jack Blackburn, seemed to agree. He was the guy who’d taught me to play goal when I was just a little kid missing his dad, who’d befriended my mom and come to dinner on Sundays and regaled Mom and me with stories of his hockey triumphs in his homeland, Canada. But after we lost that state final, Coach never had much to say to me. It was like he’d just sliced away the part of his brain or his heart that had me in it. We would see each other at the rink or on the street and he’d say, “Gus,” and I’d say, “Hey, Coach,” and he’d just keep going and I’d turn and watch him walking away. He stopped coming to dinner, too.

All I wanted to do after that was get out of there. I went to college downstate, took some journalism classes, started working summers as a reporter at the
Pilot.
I caught the news bug and, after graduating, joined the
Detroit Times.
I worked there for better than ten years, mostly covering the auto industry, and never thought I’d return to Starvation Lake, except to visit Mom. I’d loved Detroit, loved waking to the chirping of hungry gulls and walking alone to work along the Detroit River while the sun burned a golden streak across the water. I loved my job and, just before I left, I’d been working on the best story of my life, a story I thought might win me a Pulitzer prize. Instead it cost me my job, my reputation, and my life away from Starvation. Before I knew it, I was back in Starvation, working at the
Pilot
again, an unmarried thirty-four-year-old without a prospect in sight.

   Tire tracks crisscrossed the flattened snow at the Walleye Lake boat ramp. Snowdrifts usually made the beach inaccessible to anything but snowmobiles, but only a foot or so of snow had fallen so far that winter. I left my truck and edged along the bank toward the flashlight beams bouncing in the gloom. Dark bluffs ringed the semifrozen lake, which lay still and gray beneath the low sky. Cracks and dimples showed in the rough ice along the shore. Here and there slabs of ice floated just beneath the surface of the silver water. My boots skidded in mud and I grasped at dry cattails for balance.

“Whoa, there!” A flashlight beam swung up into my eyes. “Freeze where you are, please.” It was Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho.

I tried to shield my eyes against the glare. “It’s me, Gus Carpenter.” I felt for the notebook in my back pocket but decided to leave it there for the moment.

“Nothing for you here, Gus,” Dingus said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

About twenty yards behind Dingus, a deputy played a flashlight along the shoreline. I caught a glimpse of an object lying on the beach, about knee high, triangular, pale yellow, striped with dripping weeds.

“That a snowmobile?” I said.

The sheriff stepped in front of me. “Just checking a situation,” he said. The flashlight glare obscured his face, but I could see the brass badge stuck to the furry flap on the front of his cap. “Police business, Gus,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Leave?” I almost laughed. “You think I wanted to come out here? It’s a public access, for God’s sake.”

“You been drinking?”

Christ, I thought. I had my notebook out now and was patting myself for a pen. “I had a beer after hockey,” I said.

The deputy had walked up. Now two flashlights shined in my eyes. Apparently I didn’t have a pen. I wasn’t about to ask Dingus for one.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t mean to hassle you, but I’ve got a paper to put out tomorrow, and I have to talk to you first thing.”

He shrugged. “Good evening, Gus. Drive carefully, eh? You wouldn’t want to get pulled over with your breath like that.”

I steered my truck up the two-track. At the crest of the bluff, I turned left onto Route 816. I drove a few hundred yards, flicked off my headlights, and pulled onto the shoulder. I had to wait while my eyes adjusted to the blackness. Then I crossed the road and scrambled down the bank and into the woods until I could peer down to the lake’s edge. My toes curled against the snow that had settled into my right boot.

Dingus and the deputy crouched over the yellowish object in the intersection of their flashlight beams. Dingus kept scratching at the side of the thing, then looking where he’d scratched. He did this three or four times, then stood up, walked a few steps down the shore, and sank to one knee. It was hard to see him in the shadows, but it looked to me like he bowed his head as if to pray, or to cry.

   Thirty minutes later, I poured myself a Mason jar of water and sipped it in the dark at the kitchen window of my second-story flat. Across Main Street at Enright’s Pub, I could see Soupy’s head in its red wool cap bobbing around in the amber light of last call. He still wore his coat, and he hugged his mug close to his chest as he laughed.

My dinky apartment, where I’d lived for the six or seven months since I’d been back, sat directly above the
Pilot
newsroom. I rented it from my boss, the
Pilot
’s executive editor. At $125 a month, it fit my shrunken budget and kept me from moving back in with Mom, though I loved visiting her around dinnertime once or twice a week.

Enright’s went dark as Soupy and the other diehards spilled out the front door. I’d left my lights off so Soupy wouldn’t come stomping up my stairway for a nightcap. He walked half a block in one direction, toward the lake and his marina, then stopped and reversed course, walking back along Main to where his truck was parked. As he passed the tavern, he reached into his coat and pulled out the half-filled mug he had sneaked out.

I walked into what passed for my living room and sat on the arm of the recliner. I set my water on the plywood tabletop that rested on four cardboard boxes. Three were marked on the sides with the word Trucks. They were filled with notebooks, photographs, and folders I had collected while working at the
Detroit Times.
I hadn’t gotten around to throwing it away.

I thought about what I’d seen on the beach at Walleye Lake. Yellow was the standard color of the old Ski-Doo snowmobiles that had been popular many years before. The thought sent a little chill down my spine. My coach, Jack Blackburn, had died on a yellow Ski-Doo. He’d been riding with Leo Redpath late on a Saturday night when his snowmobile broke through the frozen lake and he went under. Neither his body nor his snowmobile was ever found. But Coach Blackburn had gone down on Starvation Lake, not Walleye. So that couldn’t have been his snowmobile that Dingus had gone to see. Then why did I feel nausea slithering around in my gut like a worm? What was Dingus even doing out there, and why had he seemed so jittery? What if it was Coach’s snowmobile?

I was too tired to walk down to the
Pilot
and leave a note on Joanie’s desk, so I picked up the phone and dialed her extension, figuring I’d leave a voice mail. I heard half a ring, then a click, then a rustling sound.

“McCarthy,” she said.

“Joanie?”

There was a pause. “Yes, Gus, it’s Joanie. I’m sleeping.”

“At the office?”

“I forwarded my calls. What do you want?”

“Dingus. You need to call him first thing.”

“What?”

“Sheriff Aho. Ask him about the snowmobile that washed up on Walleye Lake. Or at least I think it was a snowmobile. He wouldn’t say. Might be nothing, but he was acting pretty weird.”

“You spoke with him?”

“I went out there.”

Another pause. “Well,” she said, “I have a bunch of stuff on my plate.”

“Uh-huh. But I need you to check with Dingus first thing.”

“OK, boss,” she said, enunciating it so as to remind me that she wasn’t in love with my being her boss. She was young and smart and bent on getting out of Starvation Lake as fast as possible. Like I’d once been. I remembered that feeling of impatience for what would come next, and how soon, and whether it would come at all, whether you’d get stuck at some small-town rag writing about drain commission meetings while everyone else went to big cities and big stories.