The Hanging Tree (9 page)

The last time I had had the brush in my hands, I was a senior in high school and Gracie was in her first semester at Wayne State. Her mother had gone out of town with her latest boyfriend and locked Gracie out of her trailer, so Gracie spent Christmas with us. On Christmas morning, I found a gift from Gracie beneath our tree. I couldn’t remember ever getting a Christmas present from Gracie. She watched, smiling, while I undid the shiny red-and-green paper and silver bow. Inside was the brush. Gracie wanted me to laugh.

I tossed the brush at her. “Keep it,” I said.

“Gussy,” Mom said.

“Don’t be a baby,” Gracie said.

“Or give it to her,” I said, pointing at Mom. “Or Darlene. Or whoever you like. I don’t want to see it again.”

“Gus,” Mom said. “Gracie is trying to be nice.”

“No. She’s messing with me. She’ll probably steal it back tonight.”

“You’re an asshole,” Gracie said.

“Grace Maureen McBride!”

That was one quiet Christmas dinner.

The taunting began a few years later. I had just begun working at the
Detroit Times
. As a rookie reporter, I didn’t get a lot of mail. One day an
envelope showed up, postmarked Detroit. The address was handwritten. I wondered if a reader had seen one of my stories and written a nice note.

But there was no note. Just a color photograph of the brush balanced in the right hand of the
Spirit of Detroit,
a bronze statue outside the city-county building downtown.

“Fuck you, Gracie,” I said. I tore the photo into shreds and threw it away.

Over the years, the photos kept coming, one every six months or so. The brush on the edge of the boards at Joe Louis Arena. The brush dangling from the hand of a hot dog vendor at Tiger Stadium. The brush on a blackjack table in a Windsor casino. The brush on a railing along the Detroit River at dawn. I trashed them all. Finally I started recognizing the envelopes and tossed them without even opening them. The photos stopped coming sometime in the early 1990s, and I forgot about the brush.

Until I found it in Gracie’s duffle bag.

I didn’t use brushes much anymore on what was left of my hair. But I stuffed it in my pocket and kicked the bag under the bed.

A calendar hung on a nail on the wall over Gracie’s pillow. I had never noticed it before but then why would I have? My infrequent visits to this room were usually to chase a beer or two for Soupy while he showered after a game. Now I leaned in and saw, to my mild surprise, that the calendar came from Pandit’s Shell & Service in River Rouge. I tried to picture it. River Rouge was one of the little blue-collar pockets south of Detroit where steel was once made and cars built. Why the hell would Gracie have a calendar from River Rouge?

The calendar was correctly turned to the page for February. Way to go, Gracie, I thought. Each day was struck through with an X etched in black ballpoint pen. Some X’s were the squiggles a drunk would make, but they were all there—except on the last day of Gracie’s life. Maybe that made sense, or maybe it did not. I tried to imagine what she might have been thinking. I couldn’t.

When Gracie scratched the X across the day
before
she died, did she know for a certainty that it would be her last full day on earth? If she knew she was going to die, why wouldn’t she have struck through the actual last day as well? On the one hand, I was surprised that Gracie had maintained this daily discipline at all; on the other, I figured she of all people would relish the flourish of being able to X out her end for
everyone to see. She could have been smiling no matter what the outcome was going to be.

I unhooked the calendar from the nail and flipped the page back to January. There wasn’t a single X mark there.

“Goddammit, Gracie.”

I put the calendar back on the wall.

I leaned back against the workbench and wondered whether the cops had spent any time here. The county had whacked Sheriff Aho’s budget twice in the past year; he couldn’t afford overtime. Darlene had been complaining that her regular hours had been cut. Maybe a deputy had just hung the police tape and left the room for later. Or maybe they’d done a quick dusting for fingerprints, though I couldn’t see what good it would have done. They would have found me and Soupy and Johnny Ford and a dozen men’s league players who had wandered back to bum a beer.

I had been back in the Zam shed myself two nights earlier, the night before the night Gracie died.

“Gracie,” I’d said when I walked in.

She was standing at the bench, her hands streaked black with grease, fiddling with something metal that must have come from the innards of the Zamboni. Within her reach stood a tall blue plastic cup embossed with a gold River Rats logo, a toothy rodent carrying a hockey stick like a pitchfork.

Gracie didn’t seem to notice me at first, though I was standing six feet away. I watched her for a moment. She was just tall enough to get her elbows up on the bench without having to stand on something.

“Gracie,” I said.

“This … this fucking piece of shit,” she said, slamming the part down on the bench. She grabbed a rag and swiped it across her face, leaving a black smudge on a cheek. She looked up and down the bench, apparently not finding what she was looking for, then finally turned to me and waved an arm toward the fridge. “Are you blind? Get your own beer.”

“Didn’t come for a beer,” I said. “But I’ll take one, thanks.”

I slid past her. She was wearing black-and-green snowmobile pants hitched by suspenders over a red flannel shirt unbuttoned to her bosom. I reached into the fridge and grabbed a Blue Ribbon. I twisted the cap off and pinged it into the metal wastebasket beneath the bench.

I reached into my coat pocket and produced a pair of gray wool mittens, a red “G” knitted into the back of each. Mom had made those, too. In high school I had had a pair with blue “G”s on the backs. I would wear them as I was leaving the house, then trade them out for black leather gloves, because I was terrified of what I’d hear if I walked into the hockey dressing room with those mittens on.

“Got your mittens,” I said.

Gracie had the Zamboni part in her hands again, staring at it with her head cocked to one side. “You know,” she said, “you play like a pussy out there.”

I almost coughed up the beer I’d just swallowed.

“What?”

“You heard me. You think I don’t watch?”

My team, Soupy’s Chowder Heads, had beaten the Dead Wings of Murray & Murray Funeral Home that night, 5–2. I thought I’d had a pretty good game.

“Did you see my two assists? Including on the game winner?”

She swiveled her head around to look at me. “Only pussies talk about assists,” she said. “So you give the puck to Soupy, he scores. BFD. You still play like a pussy.”

“What the hell do you know about hockey?”

In my entire thirty-five years, I could not recall Gracie ever saying a word to me about hockey except to complain about the reek of my equipment drying in the basement of Mom’s house. She never seemed to care. She never came to a Rats game, at least not that I could remember, unless it was to drink and smoke dope with the burnouts and the football players who clustered behind the rink before we played, hoping the cops would ignore them. I figured she’d taken the job at the rink because it came with a cot and a fridge and a concession stand she could lift food from, not because she gave a rip about hockey.

“I know enough,” she said, turning her eyes back to the Zam part. Without looking she took up the River Rats cup, swished it around a little, and took a drink. “Enough to know you ought to have your ass back in the goal.”

“How the—you never even saw me play net.”

She set the cup back down. “It’s obvious you shouldn’t be playing wing.
I mean, you’ve got good enough wheels and you’re smart enough to know your hands ain’t so hot so you’ve got to get the puck to other people. But you don’t like mixing it up in the corners and in front of the net, so you might as well just put your mask back on and get back in the goal where it’s safe.”

“Are you kidding me? Did you ever take a slap shot to the neck?”

“What are you being so pissy for? I didn’t say you were a pussy. I just said you play wing like a pussy. There’s a difference. You’re a goalie. Be a goalie, for fuck’s sake. Just be who you are. At least you have the chance.”

“Thanks for the advice.” I slapped her mittens down on the workbench. “Here.”

“Ah,” she said, her dull eyes brightening a little. She picked up her drink with one hand, the mittens with the other. She drank again while staring at the mittens as if trying to recall where she’d last seen them.

She had left them at Riccardo’s Pizza a few nights before after she and Darlene had had their weekly pizza and Greek salad. They had said their good-byes and Darlene had gone to the ladies’ room. She noticed the mittens sitting on their table on her way out. Gracie was already in her green LTD, about to pull out of the parking lot. Darlene ran outside waving the mittens over her head. But Gracie gunned her engine and Darlene stood in the lot watching the lights of the LTD recede over the Estelle Street Bridge. Later that night, Darlene gave me the mittens and asked me to drop them off at the rink. She wouldn’t see her friend again until Gracie was hanging dead in the shoe tree.

Now Gracie tossed her head back for the last drops in her cup. She set the cup down and pushed away from the bench, mittens in hand.

“Hmm,” she said, to no one I could see. “Don’t want to lose these again.”

She lurched toward me as if I weren’t there. I stepped aside, watching. She grabbed the cot by a leg and dragged it away from the wall, the metal legs scraping on the concrete. She slid around behind the cot and eased herself down to her knees.

On the wall next to her was a heating vent. She set the mittens on the cot and reached into her snowmobile pants, producing a set of keys. She used a key to unwind the two screws holding the vent grille in place. The grille clattered to the floor. Gracie leaned down to peer into the vent.

“Gracie,” I said. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t seem to hear. Totally shit-faced, I thought. All that talk about the way I played wing was just gin-and-Squirt babble.

Gracie reached into the vent with her left hand up to her elbow. The hand came out holding a baggie filled with marijuana. Her stash. I wondered whether the heat flowing around the baggie could turn her room into a giant bong.

She stuck the bag back into the vent. She took the mittens in hand and reached back inside. This time her hand came out empty. “Gracie,” I said, but she did not acknowledge me. It took her a couple of tries, but she fitted the grille back onto the vent and redid the screws. She stood, moved out from behind the cot, shoved the cot back into place, and rubbed her grease-stained hands together. Then she looked up and noticed me as if I’d just walked in.

“How the hell did you get in here?”

Now I crouched behind the cot. The screws on the vent grille came out easily enough. I was careful to lay the grille quietly on the floor.

I leaned my head down and looked inside. It was too dark to see much. I stuck my left arm in, expecting to feel a lumpy cylinder of plastic. But my hand found only the vent’s flat metal walls. I lay down on my side so I could shove my arm in farther. My knuckles banged against the back wall of the vent. I swept my hand all the way to the left and then back to the right.

I found it in the back right corner. Something small and soft. I squeezed it in my palm and pulled it out.

In my hand rested a tiny white shoe. A baby shoe. For the left foot. With a blue satin ribbon intertwined in the white cotton laces. I took it by the ribbon and let it dangle in front of my face.

Was it Gracie’s own shoe? Why would she have saved it? Why would she have stuffed it in this vent? Where was the other shoe? If this shoe was hers, then why a blue ribbon, why not pink?

Down near the tongue of the shoe, a rust-colored key was tied to the ribbon.

I undid the key from the ribbon and slipped it on to my key chain. I put the shoe in my pocket with the brush. I replaced the grille, backed out from behind the cot, and was about to swing the bed back into place when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around.

“Excuse me,” Johnny Ford said.

I’d seen him around the rink a few times but never up close. He always seemed to be scuttling around in the rafters like a squirrel, messing with the arena lamps, crisscrossing the bleachers with a trash bag.

“Johnny,” I said. “Good morning.”

He looked at the floor, nervous. His black jeans sagged atop his unlaced lumber boots. I noticed a mustard stain on the “N” of his Hungry River Rats sweatshirt. The shirt bagged around him, his left forearm hidden in the pouch.

Until his accident, Johnny Ford had been a promising young River Rat center who handled the puck like his stick was part of his body. Working a summer job at Grandview Golf Club, he was mowing at the edge of a pond at number 10 when the mower caught up in some damp weeds and stalled. Johnny reached in to dislodge them, and twenty-two pounds of snapping turtle bit off the first three fingers on his left hand and vanished with them into the green murk. There was a screwup at the hospital; the hand became infected and had to be amputated. He never played hockey again.

“Uh,” he said, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be back here. I mean, you’re not.” He tossed his head toward the police tape. “You know, the cops.”

“Yep, saw it,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t touch anything. Just wanted to look around, see if there were any, like, pictures or anything I could use for the paper. I would’ve asked the sheriff for permission, of course. She was my second cousin, you know. Gracie, that is.”

Johnny looked around the room. “You find any?”

“No, not really. Nothing I can use. Guess I’ll check with her mother.”

He just stood there, saying nothing.

“You going to run the Zamboni now?”

It was a dumb question I hoped would distract him. “Already did.”

“Did Gracie ever let you?”

“Once.” He turned back to me. “You better go.”