Starvation Lake (7 page)

“Well,” Coach said, “why don’t I have your sons tell you?” He looked in our direction. “Boys?”

After practice earlier that afternoon, Coach had placed a cardboard box in the middle of our dressing room floor. We’d watched as he sliced it open with a pocketknife, reached in, and pulled out something wrapped in clear plastic that he held up for us to see. “What do you think, boys?” Inside the plastic was a shiny blue jacket with gold stripes on the collar and cuffs, and gold piping along the sleeves. A River Rats logo was stitched over the right breast and a player’s name—“Stevie” this one read—over the left. We all jumped up, oohing and ahhing. “The
ultimate
ultimate,” Soupy said. We’d never had team jackets before. Coach had told us to stow them in our hockey bags until the parents’ meeting.

Now the seventeen of us filed into the snack bar in our new jackets, as Coach had told us beforehand. It was the parents’ turn to ooh and ahh. We formed a tight semicircle around Coach, Soupy and I on either side of him, again as he had instructed. He laid his hands gently on our shoulders. Surveying the room, I saw my mother smiling from her table. She’d probably known about the jackets ahead of time.

“Gus,” he said. “Can you tell the folks here, what is the ultimate goal?”

All the parents’ eyes were on me. I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets and blurted, “To win one game, Coach.”

“Just one, Gus?”

“Yes, Coach.”

Champagne snorted. “One game?”

“Why don’t you let him finish, Don?” It was the voice of Francis Dufresne, who was leaning on a vending machine in the back of the room. Dufresne didn’t have children, but he never missed one of our games. The bar he owned, Enright’s, ran a shuttle bus to the rink on game nights.

“Gus,” Coach said. “What is that one game?”

I gave the answer. A few parents seemed to sit up straighter. Coach turned to Soupy. “Alden. Is the ultimate goal to win
all
the games?”

“No, Coach.”

“Why not all the games, Alden?”

“Because losing is good for winning, Coach.”

“Say again?”

“Losing is good for winning, Coach.”

“This is ridiculous,” Champagne shouted.

“Boys,” Coach said, looking around at us, “how many games are we aiming to win?”

“One, Coach,” we answered in unison.

“And that game is?”

“The state championship, Coach.”

“Hear, hear,” Dufresne said. He’d moved away from the vending machine to hover over the sitting parents, a short man in a black leather jacket who seemed to take up more space than he actually did. “The best damn town in the state of Michigan ought to be able to prove it’s the best at the best damn sport there is.” He raised a fist to the level of his shoulder. “We’ve been doing this for, what, twenty years? We’ve got someone here who’s telling us what it takes. It’s time to stop whining and do it.”

Lenny Ziolkowski, the father of Paul “Zilchy” Ziolkowski, stood. Mr. Ziolkowski played poker on Friday nights with Coach, Leo Redpath, Soupy’s dad, and a few other dads at Blackburn’s cabin. “Jack’s got a tough job,” he said. “We ought to give him the room to do it, unless someone here thinks they can do a better job.” He glared momentarily at Champagne. “We’re not out there on the ice with him, but our boys are, and the boys sure seem to like him.”

I looked up at Coach then. I saw a spark in his eye I’d never seen before, a spark like the one I saw in the eyes of shooters bearing down on my net. It wasn’t there long, and it scared me at first, but the fear didn’t last, because I knew Coach was on my side.

“Folks,” he said. “Tell you what. I cut a boy from the team yesterday. Maybe I got a little ahead of myself. I’d like to restore him to the roster, effective immediately. I can’t guarantee he’ll play a whole lot, but he’ll have every chance to earn it.” He looked directly at Don Champagne now. “If you’ll get me the right size, I’ll order Jeff a jacket first thing tomorrow.”

Champagne just nodded. Then I saw my mother waving her hand. “Yes, Mrs. Carpenter?” Coach said.

My mother talked fast, and I worried she’d say something nobody would understand. But it was clear enough. “I would just like to say, I don’t know about anybody else, but I think the boys look just adorable in their jackets.”

“Adorable?” Dufresne cried out. “Bea, we don’t want adorable hockey players.”

“Oh, all right, Francis, wonderful then or—oh, I don’t know!” She started to clap, and then Dufresne started clapping, and pretty soon the whole room, even Champagne, was applauding. By the time the meeting ended, Coach had persuaded the parents to chip in for a new skate-sharpening machine, and Dufresne had offered to organize a committee that would investigate installing new benches in the dressing rooms.

That Sunday, Coach came to dinner at our house. Mom made fried pork chops and baked potatoes with gravy. We didn’t talk about the Rats at first, but Mom finally asked how he thought the meeting had gone. Coach shrugged as he reached for a bowl of peas and carrots. “You know, Bea?” he said. “It’s like I always say. They don’t care how. All they care is how many.”

   It was late in our fourth full season that we finally proved ourselves. By then we were whipping all the teams up north and had beaten some good squads from as far downstate as Ann Arbor. But the Detroiters still had our number.

Griffin Hawks, a team from the suburbs west of Detroit, came up for a pair of weekend games. Friday night we blew a 2–0 lead to lose 4–2. There were tears in the dressing room afterward. We’d never come so close to beating a Detroit team. Coach normally would’ve told us hockey wasn’t for crybabies and ordered us to listen up, eh, here’s how we gave up those last two goals. But on this night he just stood by the door, hands folded behind his back. When we’d all gotten our clothes on and our bags packed, he raised his arms for silence.

“Men?” he said. He never called us that. “Are you ready?” We lifted our wet heads to meet his gaze. “Ready for what, Coach?” one of us asked, and Blackburn shushed him. “Are you ready?” he said again. “You better be ready. Because tomorrow will be the biggest night of your life.”

   I got an inkling of what he meant just before the next day’s game. The guys were warming up our backup goalie, and I was in a corner shoveling pucks out to the shooters when I noticed one of the Griffin coaches standing on their bench, gnawing on an unlit cigar in his black-and-orange Griffin jacket. He was watching Soupy. Soupy was skating tight figure eights, backward, with a puck on his stick, flipping it back and forth like it was glued to the blade, his head up, gathering speed as he circled. The coach leaned to his right and called another coach over. He said something to the other coach and gestured toward Soupy. They both nodded.

We weren’t invisible anymore.

As we played that night, word was getting around town that the Rats were about to beat a team from Detroit. Later I heard that Francis Dufresne had made a bunch of phone calls. Whenever play stopped, I glanced into the stands. It seemed as if more people were there every time.

By the start of the final period, the bleachers were filled. I hadn’t seen that since the Red Wing old-timers had come to town for an exhibition game. As we were lining up for a face-off just to my left, I heard banging on the glass behind me. I turned to see people lined up all along the glass, two and three deep, neighbors and friends and people I’d seen on the street and at church, some I’d never seen before. The game was tied at 2, and those people were pounding on the glass, shouting my name and my teammates’ names, yelling for us to hang in there, we could do it, we could win. As I turned back to the game, I slammed the heel of my stick into my catching glove and drew down into my crouch and I could feel my heart pounding, swelling as it never had before, and I knew that we could not possibly lose. And I knew that I’d known this even before the game had begun. Just as Coach had known.

With less than a minute to go in the game, we were still tied when a Griffin wing deked past a Rat at the blue line and swooped in alone on me. First he faked a shot, trying to get me to drop, but I held my ground as he fired a low, hard bullet to my left. The puck looked huge to me. I kicked my left leg out at precisely the right instant and deflected it across the ice. Soupy gathered it up in stride and bolted down the left side of the ice, the crowd shrieking, the clock counting down to twenty-nine seconds, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…Soupy charged into the Hawks’ zone and launched a rising shot that caught their goalie off balance. The puck caromed off his shoulder to Jeff Champagne, who had sneaked to a corner of the net, alone. He took a backhand swipe and knocked it in.

I’ve never heard anything louder than that rink at that moment.

Although we were eliminated in the state playoffs by Detroit’s O’Leary’s Heating, we knew we could play with anybody. Two seasons later, we made the state quarterfinals and fell to Byrd Electric, another Detroit squad, 5–3. When our bus pulled onto Main Street after the three-hour ride from Flint, everyone at Enright’s spilled outside to cheer us. We smiled and waved, but the older Rats—Soupy, Teddy, Stevie Reneau, Brad Wilford, me—knew we had just two years left to win that one big game before we’d be going off to college or jobs or whatever else the real world held. Coach seemed unfazed, though. Before we departed the bus that night, he told us yet again, “Losing is good for winning.”

We made it a step closer the next year, upsetting Paddock Pools in the quarters when Soupy scored on the end-to-end rush memorialized on the wall at Enright’s. We thought we’d finally get our shot. But in the semifinals we were routed, 7–1, by the Pipefitters, a street gang of a team from the steel-making furnace of downriver Detroit. It seemed like they were all big and hairy except for number 17, a scrawny winger named Billy Hooper who skated like his feet had touched molten metal. He scored four, and to this day I can’t remember seeing three of them until they were behind me. Even Soupy had trouble staying with Billy Hooper. We stayed downstate to watch the Pipefitters demolish O’Leary’s in the final, 9–2. Hooper scored three, assisted on two others, and was named MVP of the tournament. Late that night, our bus pulled into the high school parking lot where our parents sat waiting with the exhaust snaking around their cars and trucks. Coach stood at the front of the bus and called for quiet. Then he said, “Men—are you ready?” We knew what that meant. We filed silently off the bus.

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, née 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.