The Hanging Tree (6 page)

Something about that memory bothered me.

“What is it you always say about your work?” Mom said. “‘You don’t know …’” Her voice trailed off. She was struggling to remember. She had been doing a lot of that lately.

I started to say, “You don’t know what the story—” but she cut me off: “Don’t.” She stared at my hand on her knee. “‘You don’t know what the story is … until it’s in the paper.’ ”

“Yes.”

She lifted her head. “You’re making assumptions here.” She hesitated. “I hate to say this, but I think you may be letting your emotions cloud your judgment.”

“What emotions?” I said.

“Please, Gus.”

My cell phone rang in my pocket. “Excuse me,” I said, pulling it out.

“Those things will be the death of civilization. Why couldn’t they, just leave them down in Detroit with the rest of the rat race?”

“Get with it, Mom,” I said as the phone rang again. “Media North is bringing us into the twenty-first century.”

“This one’s plenty hard enough. Put that down.”

I figured it was Darlene, and I wanted to talk with her, though not in front of Mom. I stopped the ring. “Sorry. Where were we?”

Mom hesitated, then said, “It’s not your fault that you were an only child, honey.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“An only child gets used to having things his way. Then you suddenly had Gracie in your world.”

“She liked having things her way too.”

“And you didn’t appreciate it. You didn’t like Gracie.”

“That’s not true.”

It really wasn’t. I didn’t dislike Gracie any more than she disliked me. Our house just wasn’t big enough for both of us. Or maybe Mom wasn’t.

Over the years we had found a way to coexist, largely by avoiding each other, even after Gracie returned to Starvation the year before. When I saw her at the wheel of the Zamboni, I usually called out, “Hey, Gracie,” and she’d nod, if not smile. I sent her a drink or two when I saw her sitting on her stool at the back of Enright’s, her Kools and Bic lighter at the ready. Sometimes she acknowledged it, sometimes she didn’t.

But now, as my mother prodded me, I was thinking of Gracie’s old VW. She’d gotten rid of it a long time ago, of course, and I was trying to remember what she had been driving recently, besides a Zamboni.

I stood again.

“Gus?” Mom said.

“Do you remember what kind of car Gracie had?”

Mother looked at me blankly.

“Mom,” I said. “Did you go to the doctor?”

“The what? Oh. Yes. I mean—yes. Yes, I did. Yesterday.”

“Yesterday was Sunday, Mom.”

I walked into the kitchen and stared outside at the garage. Mom’s car, a
tomato red 1995 Buick LeSabre, was parked inside. Gracie had driven an old lady’s car too. It had been in a photograph on an inside page of the
Pilot
. After a long Two-fer-Tuesday evening at Enright’s, Soupy had nearly driven it off the Estelle Street Bridge into the Hungry River.

I walked back into the living room.

“What’s with all the rosemary on the pork roast?” I said. “It looks like a pine branch.”

Mom furrowed her brow. “It’s good for you,” she said. “I saw it on that channel, the one that, you know. With all the recipes. They said it’s good for your digestion and circulation. Gets the blood flowing to your brain.”

Ah, I thought, a home remedy for creeping senility.

“Hey,” I said. “What kind of car did Aunt Helene drive when she used to come up from Bay City?”

“That was years ago.”

Long enough ago that Mom might remember.

“A Ford, wasn’t it?” she said, brightening. “A hideous green thing.”

“Yeah. An LTD. That’s what Gracie drove. Not quite as big, but just as green and ugly. With a big rust spot—a hole actually—in the back of the trunk lid.”

“Why does this matter?”

I stood there remembering the night before. My mind’s eye traveled up and down the snowbanks on either side of the road. I saw police cruisers, the ambulance, the fire truck. I did not see an ugly green Ford LTD with a rust hole in the trunk lid.

“I would have noticed that,” I said, thinking aloud.

“What?” Mom said.

“Gracie’s car, it wasn’t there.”

“Where?”

“At the shoe tree.”

“No?”

“No. How the hell did she get out there? She couldn’t have walked in that storm, although I suppose—” My cell phone rang. “Hang on.” I didn’t want to miss Darlene twice. I answered. “Yeah?”

“Beech here.”

Philo. I wished I hadn’t picked up. “What’s up?”

“It’s on with Haskell. Eleven fifteen.”

“Sorry?”

He paused. “Laird Haskell. Your appointment.”

“Oh, right, sorry. OK. I’ll be there. You coming?”

“Unfortunately, no, I have a meeting in Traverse City. Buzz me when you’re done, OK?”

“I’ll try.”

“Gus.”

“Yeah?”

“Just … just keep in mind now is really not the time to stand on principle.”

I was too stunned to answer right away. Philo said, “Talk later,” and hung up the phone.

“What’s wrong?” Mom said. “You look surprised.”

Surprised wasn’t quite the word.

“Nothing,” I said. “Where was I? Gracie’s car. That’s right. It wasn’t there. I guess—”

“No, Gus.”

“—she could have walked.”

“No.”

No.

As a reporter for the
Detroit Times
, I had written plenty of stories about people killed in or by cars and trucks. Regardless of whether I saw the blood spilled across asphalt or just heard about it from a police sergeant over the phone, I felt for the dead. I felt they’d been wronged, whether it was by a faulty steering suspension or a drunk driver or even their own innocent mistake. I felt for them even though they were strangers. Or perhaps, more accurately,
because
they were strangers. Because I knew nothing of their flaws. How they always grabbed the last piece of French toast for themselves. How they sucked up to their bosses and lied to their wives. How they used silence to punish their children.

But I knew all of Gracie’s flaws. Or imagined that I did.

I thought of her sitting on Mom’s lap in that very chair, the two of them sharing a box of Jujubes and chattering about the girls at school—“phony-baloneys,” Gracie called them—who wore too much makeup and the kind of blouses that would make the boys notice their boobs, both Mom and Gracie hopelessly blind to Gracie sitting there with her eyelids
painted indigo and her T-shirt tied in a fat knot tight beneath her budding bosom.

It wasn’t that I thought Gracie somehow deserved her fate; it was more that I believed it was where she alone had aimed herself, a destination she had mapped out, consciously or not, years before. I had nothing to do with it then, so why should I have anything to do with it now?

But there were questions I could not answer: How did she get into the tree? What did she stand on before she dropped to her death? How did she get out there? All by herself. In a storm that had torn branches from trees.

I thought of Elvis and the others at Audrey’s snickering over their breakfast plates. Boneheads, every one of them.

“All right, Mom,” I said.

My phone started ringing again. I ignored it.

“All right what?”

“I’ll be looking into this. There must be an explanation.”

Mom allowed herself a faint smile. She shrugged the afghan off her shoulders and stood. “You better get going then,” she said. “I’m going to put those turnips on.”

four

Look,” Gracie said. “Is it dead?”

She had spotted the white-tail lying beneath the boughs of a Scotch pine in the woods near Jitters Creek. July sun dappled the deer’s back but the trees were thick enough away from the creek bed that most of the animal lay in shadow. It held its head up straight, its eight-point antlers reaching into the branches above its head. Its eyes were closed. I’d never seen a deer with its eyes closed.

“No,” Darlene said. “It’s sleeping.”

Gracie took a step toward the deer. I grabbed a fistful of the back of her T-shirt. “Don’t,” I said. “It might be hurt. Dad said never mess with a hurt animal.”

“It’s just a deer,” Gracie said, yanking herself away. “What’s it going to do?”

“It can put a hoof right through you.”

“It’ll never catch me.”

“Yes, it will,” Darlene said. “Deer are fast.”

“They run like deer,” I said.

Gracie sneered. At eleven, she was a year older than Darlene and me, and she thought she was a lot smarter.

“Ha-ha-ha, booger face. I’ll just go jump in the creek. I’ll bet he can’t swim.” She started toward the deer again. This time Darlene grabbed her by the arm. “Wait.” Darlene bent and picked a dead tree branch off the ground. “Let’s test him first.” She took two tentative steps toward the deer and tossed the branch at its back. The deer didn’t budge.

“See, he’s dead,” Gracie said.

“Let me try again.” Darlene found a bigger branch lying on a bed of pinecones. She threw it end over end and it glanced off the deer’s neck.

The deer opened its eyes. All three of us jumped back.

“Oooooh,” Gracie cried. We scrambled behind a tree and watched.
I felt my heart pumping hard. The deer’s head swiveled slowly in our direction. The rest of him did not move. His eyelids drooped.

“He’s hurt,” I said.

“Poor thing,” Gracie said. Again she started to move toward the animal and again I grabbed her. This time she didn’t try to pull away.

“Gracie. That deer will kick your butt.”

“But we have to do something.”

“We should call the ranger,” Darlene said.

“What ranger? There’s no ranger.”

I let go of Gracie.

“Your mom’s is closest,” I said. “We can mark the spot and go tell her.”

Our bikes waited back on the two-track road that wound down through the woods. We had planned to do some bike-diving into the creek, flying down the hill over the bank into the water. But Gracie had insisted on seeing if we could find a new path through the trees. “We can slalom,” she had said.

Now she looked at me, then at the deer, at Darlene, at the deer again.

“No,” she said. “Let’s leave the deer alone.”

“Leave it alone?” Darlene said. “A minute ago you wanted to go right up and pet it. We can’t leave it alone. It’ll die.”

Gracie shrugged. “Everything dies. I don’t want to tell my mom.”

“She’s not going to know we were bike-diving,” I said. “We’re not even wet yet.”

“She doesn’t give a crap anyway,” Darlene said.

“No,” Gracie said.

“We can’t just leave it here to die. Somebody might be able to help it.”

“Not my mom, or her—just leave it.”

“Her what?” Darlene said.

“This is stupid,” I said. “We should tell someone. You’re going to be bragging about it anyway.”

“Just wait, Gus,” Darlene said.

I waited. The girls stood there watching the deer. Its eyes were closed again. Finally, I said, “I’m going to count my steps back to the road so the police can find it.” I turned and started walking back toward the bikes.

“It won’t be the police,” Gracie said. “Gus.” She shouted it as I took big running steps up the hill.

After I told Mrs. McBride that the deer was twenty-eight steps down Jitters Trail, twenty-three steps to the right, and fifty-three steps down through the trees, she picked up her phone. When Gracie heard her say, “Bucky boy,” into the phone, she punched me in the ribs.

“Ow,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Butthole. I told you.”

I looked at Darlene. She looked away.

Four hours later, the deer was hanging antlers up from a joist in Gracie’s mother’s carport, dripping blood onto an oil-stained piece of cardboard. The fur around its neck was matted, and some had been worn away so that patches of pink skin showed through. One of the deer’s hind legs jutted out from its body at an unnatural angle that made me think of the day the winter before when my friend Jeff Champagne lost a skate edge and slid into the boards and broke a leg.

I didn’t know what the smell was in the carport, but I knew I didn’t like it.

A man named Ringles stood looking the gutted animal over. Blood smeared the “Matilda” tattoo on his left arm. He turned to Shirley McBride, who was leaning against a garbage can sipping a longneck bottle of Drewry’s.

“See where he got me?” Buck Ringles said. He fingered a tear in the rolled-up sleeve of his flannel shirt. “Fucker jumped up like he was coming for me. Goddamn leg’s broken in two places, but the fucker would not give up.”

“Buck.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He grinned at Gracie, Darlene, and me. “Bastard would not give up.”

“You going to try to get a license?” Shirley said.

Ringles rubbed the gray stubble on one of his sunken cheeks. He was two heads taller than Shirley, skinny but for the belly that sagged over his belt. He and a cousin made their livings cleaning out septic tanks. Shirley had dated them both, off and on. For the moment, she was with Buck.

“Don’t know,” he said. “You know, you can get a license if you hit one with your car. My ex-brother-in-law did it when that doe run into him up on M-32.” Buck touched the deer’s skewed leg. “This one looks like he got hit himself.”

“Maybe your car hit it,” Shirley said.

Ringles grinned. “Maybe.” Then his eyes brightened. “You think the DMV’ll let me have a license for strangling a deer in self-defense?”

They both laughed.

We had overheard him earlier telling Mrs. McBride how the deer had died. Buck Ringles had taken his hunting knife into the woods—“just in case,” he said—but was afraid that he might inadvertently cut himself in a struggle. He crept up on the deer from behind. When the deer suddenly turned and raised itself up on its front legs—“lurched,” as Ringles put it—Ringles clambered atop its back, removed his belt, and quickly looped it around the deer’s neck, pulling one end through the buckle and yanking with all of his strength.

When the deer lost consciousness, Ringles jumped off and found a tree branch. He brought it down on the deer’s head again and again until he heard something crack and the head lolled over, limp. My stomach went queasy as we eavesdropped from Gracie’s bedroom, hearing Buck’s voice rise as he described himself swinging the branch.