The Skeleton Box

by Bryan Gruley

  Tex grinned. “Sorry, old man.”

  “Got your skates,” I said.

  On the trailer, a shred of cardboard duct-taped over a cracked window waggled in the breeze. I smelled something wafting out, at once acrid and sweet, maybe canned beans burned onto the inside of a pan. A preacher’s voice tinned through a transistor radio: “There is no ice in hell . . .”

  Tex squirmed past his uncle, towering over both Tatch and me, pale biceps bulging against the threadbare sleeves of his gray Spitfires T-shirt. “Thanks,” he said, taking the skates. One by one he turned them over, shut one eye, and peered with the other down the length of each blade. Each time, he nodded and said, “That’s it.” Then he looked at me. His hair, black as a puck, was matted on one side. He’d been napping.

  “Who’s Mic-Mac’s guy again?” he said.

  “Holcomb,” I said. “Pinky Holcomb. Number nine.”

  “Pinky? The guy a fag?”

  “Be tolerant, son,” Tatch said.

  “You don’t want to mess with Pinky,” I said.

  Mic-Mac’s captain and top scorer had gotten his nickname after dropping his gloves in a hockey fight and having his left pinky severed by a skate blade in the melee. He wasn’t the most skilled player, but he played with unrelenting fire, a little cannonball who would skate through a brick wall for a stray puck.

  “Well, only wimps wear nine,” Tex said.

  I hesitated because Gordie Howe, the Red Wings great, had worn number 9.

  “Right,” I said.

  Tex’s eyes focused behind me, his smile fading.

  “I’m out of here,” he said. “Thanks for the skates.”

  “Hey there, Mr. Breck,” Tatch said. “Was just about to come up.”

  I turned around. Standing before me was the clapping man from up on the ridge. He wore a long denim coat and a wool cap tight on the back of his head. His too-small wire-rim glasses pinched his face in a way that made him look like a sallow John Denver. I felt unsure that I would like him. He smiled and offered his hand. I took it.

  “Mr. Gus Carpenter,” he said. “Of the Pilot.”

  “That’s me.”

  “I am Mr. Breck.”

  “You’ve seen my byline?”

  “Some, yes. Forgive me, but I find that newspapers offer little of value. There is no salvation to be found on the sports page.”

  “Hard to argue with that.”

  “What brings you here?”

  The way Breck had commandeered the conversation, with Tatch just standing meekly by, made me wonder if Breck, not Tatch, was actually in charge.

  “Brought Tex his skates,” I said. “He’s a little superstitious.”

  “Matthew,” Breck said.

  “Matthew.”

  “He’s got a warm-up skate before the game on account of it’s a playoff tonight,” Tatch offered, sounding apologetic.

  Breck folded his arms and looked at the trailer behind Tatch. “We need his strong shoulders on the hill. Everyone’s working hard. We cannot count on the county to do the right thing. We will have to force their hand.”

  “I’ll get him going,” Tatch said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Edwards.”

  “What about the county?” I said.

  Breck turned back to me. “Your town,” he said. “You come looking for a boy to bring you a trophy so you can hoist it high over your head.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You ask a boy to carry your town on his shoulders.”

  “Actually, I just did him a little favor.”

  “On the contrary, Mr. Carpenter, you did yourself a favor.” He smiled again. “You have a mistaken idea of what a messiah is. You and everyone down there.”

  I gave Tatch a who-the-hell-is-this-guy glance. “Well,” I said, “I’m not sure what to say. It’s just a game.”

  “Indeed,” Breck said. “You, of all people, should understand that.”

  Tatch touched my elbow. “Mr. Breck’s been a good friend since he come to us a few months back. Met him at a Christian convocation down to Monroe. He’s helping us out with our tax issue, the legal stuff.”

  “Have you told him?” Breck asked Tatch.

  “No,” Tatch said, looking guilty nevertheless. “Told him he might want to attend that drain commission meeting tomorrow.”

  “I see.”

  “You from around here?” I said.

  “I am now,” Breck said. “We are building a Christian community. I’m sure it doesn’t look like much to you. But we are working hard. Our faith sustains us.”

  “And a backhoe?”

  Breck twisted his glasses off and turned and pointed them at the ridge. I saw shovels flinging dirt and the backhoe shuttling backward and up. Many a developer had begged Tatch’s father to sell the land, but he refused to do anything but put his trailer and a pole barn on it.

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” Breck said. “Do you see that line of trees there, the one that tops out with the oak on the ridge?”

  I looked up. I felt my breath catch. I hadn’t noticed before. The trees were filled with crosses. Christian crosses. Dozens of them. Small ones made from two-by-twos, larger ones from two-by-fours. Painted black, white, red, gold. Nailed into the tree trunks at twenty, thirty feet above the ground, out of reach without a ladder. Some facing down on the clearing, some facing up toward the sky.

  “Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I see.”

  “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged,” Breck said. “Where I’m pointing approximates the property line on the western edge of the Edwards’s parcels. On the other side of that line is land owned by your friends in Pine County.”

  I was less interested in the property line than in those crosses on the trees.

  “The county purchased it in the nineteen-seventies when the economy was poor and the land could be had cheaply,” he said. “Of course the people who run the county could never decide what to do with it, so it sits.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Long ago, a handful of homes once stood there, and beneath them a septic field. We believe it to be leaking.”

  “Thus the backhoe and the shovels.”

  “It’s bad enough, wouldn’t you agree, that the county wants us to eat their property tax crap.” He glanced at Tatch. “Please forgive the language.”

  “They just want us out of here,” Tatch said.

  “Mr. Edwards.”

  “Praise Jesus,” Tatch said.

  “If the land is so polluted,” I said, “who would want to buy it?”

  “Hard to believe in this country, but there are motives aside from strict financial enrichment,” Breck said. “Perhaps we’re mistaken about the septic matter, but if we’re not, well, we may have to take the matter up with the drain commission, or the county itself, or whatever collection of cronies currently mismanages things. Perhaps we’ll need to avail ourselves of the courts.”

  “So you’re a lawyer?”

  He fitted his glasses back on, adjusted his cap. “I apologize for my earlier stridency. We actually would just like to be left alone.”

  “Until there’s a fire in one of the trailers, or rain washes out that two-track. Then you’ll be calling for help.”

  “We have work to do.” He looked at Tatch. “Please get Matthew.”

  Tatch shifted uneasily in the mud. “I think he’s resting up.”

  “For what? His warm-up? Why must he play twice in the same day?”

  I wanted to tell Breck that lots of teams had pregame skates, but I thought I might get Tatch in more trouble than he was already in.

  “I’ll get him,” Tatch said. “Take her easy, Gus. God bless.”

  He went into the trailer.

  Breck said, “Why are you running errands, Mr. Carpenter, bringing skates to boys?” He nodded in the direction of the town. “Don’t you have more pressing matters to attend to?”

  “I do.”

  B
reck turned and started to walk, then jog, toward the ridge. He resumed the clapping as he disappeared behind a trailer. The women and men seemed to shovel harder. He was an interesting stranger, this Breck who’d come to Starvation not long before the break-ins began. Maybe his arrival was mere coincidence. My gaze drifted up to the crosses. I felt myself shudder as I turned away.

  NINE

  Soup? You back there?”

  I called down the whiskey-colored bar that ran the length of the tunnel of week-old smoke that was Enright’s Pub. A crash came from the office and storeroom behind the bar, like a stack of boxes had toppled.

  “Son of a bitch,” I heard Soupy say. “Fucking closet.”

  Foghat was grinding out of the jukebox. An old woman sitting at the other end of the bar nodded at me. Stalks of white hair stuck out from beneath her orange LaCoste Builders cap.

  “Angie,” I said.

  She knew my name but probably didn’t want to take the trouble to recall it. Instead she lifted her tulip glass of beer in a halfhearted toast, took a sip, and set it back down next to her cigarettes and Bic lighter. She returned to staring at the soap opera flickering soundlessly on the television over the bar. Beneath the TV hung a sign that said “If you’re drinking to forget, please pay in advance.”

  I didn’t have to worry about a lunch rush at Enright’s. There hadn’t been one since the griddle stopped working in December. I’d been there that evening, awaiting a patty melt. Soupy was standing in front of the griddle, spatula in hand, watching a burger fry when the sizzling ebbed and then stopped altogether. He stared at the half-cooked meat for a minute, then tossed the spatula aside with a clatter and started fiddling with the griddle controls. “What the fuck?” he said. He stood there another minute staring at the grill, then picked up the spatula and scooped the meat into a garbage can. “Fuck it,” he said. “Go to McDonald’s.” He went back to his office and came out with a piece of cardboard he had torn from a gin box. “Grill Not Working—SORRY” was scratched across it in felt-tip pen. He stuck it to the wall over the back bar with a piece of white hockey tape.

  The sorry sign was hanging there still when I walked in that afternoon looking for a Coke and a bag of Better Mades to take to the Pilot. Soupy hadn’t yet fixed the griddle, saying he didn’t have the money. That was undoubtedly true, but even if he did have the money, I doubted he would’ve squandered it on necessary repairs when he could be investing it in booze and the Bay City stripper who came up every other Monday to screw him, ignorant of the fact that Mr. Big Shot Resort-Town Tavern Owner was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and might never emerge. “I know what happens in Chapter Eleven,” Soupy liked to say. “Who knows about Chapter Twelve?”

  Today he came out of his office sucking on a finger. He wore an apron stained with ketchup, or maybe blood, over an old Hershey Bears T-shirt. The Bears were the last minor league team Soupy had skated with before he walked away from his once promising hockey career for the more reliable pursuit of hungover weekday mornings.

  “You hurt yourself?” I said.

  “Shit, Trap.” He flicked on the cold water in the bar sink and let it run over his finger. “Need a damn chain saw to cut into those booze boxes. If they used the same glue on the space shuttle, we’d never had a problem.”

  He turned the water off and reached into a fridge beneath the back bar. “Soup,” I said. “Just a Coke. I’m working.”

  Soupy popped the caps off of two Blue Ribbons on an opener bolted to the sink. He slammed mine down so that foam slopped over the lip.

  “Don’t be a pussy, Trap,” he said. He held his bottle out to me. “To Mrs. B.”

  “Not fair.”

  “She was a sweetheart.”

  I clinked my bottle into his and took a swallow. I usually loved that first burning cold gulp of a beer, but this one was as lukewarm as a Detroit Lions fan.

  “Did you pay the electric bill?” I said.

  “Are you my mother?” Soupy said. “The lights are still on, aren’t they? Why don’t you go back to the fish-wrapper and fix this fucked-up town? Jesus, can’t the cops get anything right? People think they have to stay in their goddamn houses every night instead of going out for a drink with their friends. It’s tearing up the social fabric. Now Mrs. B is dead? It’s killing me.”

  I had heard Soupy’s rant before. He must have heard “social fabric” on some talk show on the bar tube. While it was true that some people were staying closer to home, I doubted the old folks whose houses had been broken into had set foot in Enright’s since Reagan was president. But Soupy needed someone to blame besides himself.

  “Who the hell would want to kill Mrs. B anyway?” he said.

  “Nobody.”

  “How’s Darlene doing? She talking to you now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I figured she’d be back.”

  “She’s not back the way you mean, but at least we’re talking.” I wanted to change the subject. “How about you? Get your mom’s house sold yet?”

  Soupy’s mother had been dead for nearly two years, his father almost three, and Soupy was finally selling the house they had lived in for more than forty years. It sat on a few acres on the back side of the ridge above Tatch’s camp. Soupy hadn’t lived there in a long time and said he didn’t want to live anywhere his old man had lived. And he needed the money.

  “Working on it,” he said. “Was over there yesterday, digging through Mom’s shit. What a pack rat. Stacks of magazines from the sixties, Liz goddamn Taylor on the cover, and she’s not as big as a house. And, oh, hey—I found the old Bobby Hull.”

  “The table hockey game?”

  “Yeah, man, with the little metal players. I thought it was long gone, but there it was, all covered with dust under the basement stairs. Way to go, Ma.”

  As kids we’d played hundreds of games on that table. Soupy had nicknamed his goalie “Tommy Trapezoid.” When I started to play goalie myself, he started calling me Trapezoid, too, and soon shortened it to Trap, which he called me still.

  “We’ll resume the series,” I said. “I’m up like two twenty to two hundred five.”

  “Bullshit, man, I was way ahead. You couldn’t handle my right-wing-to-center move.”

  “Whatever. When’s the garage sale?”

  He’d been talking about having a garage sale for months. I couldn’t imagine Soupy actually going to the trouble of making price tags and haggling with old ladies over an ancient ottoman or toaster oven. More likely, he would load everything into his pickup and take it to the county landfill. Even more likely, load everything up and tote it around for a few months.

  “Rethinking that,” he said.

  “How come?”

  “Not sure.”

  He turned to the back bar and started rearranging schnapps bottles.

  “Not sure about what?” I said.

  He turned back around, glanced down the bar at Angie, lowered his voice.

  “Really don’t want all these local assholes talking about my business,” Soupy said.

  “You got a buyer?”

  “Kind of out of nowhere. Yeah. Five above asking.”

  That was a good price in Starvation, where houses for sale sat for months, even years, without an offer. The Campbells’ place, a two-bedroom with water-stained clapboard walls and a roof enveloped in vines, wasn’t even on the lake.

  “They must love that knotty pine paneling, eh?” I said. “And the cigarette smell. Who’s the buyer? Do I know them?”

  “I’m dealing with some law firm downstate.”

  “You get me the name, I might be able to check it out for you.”

  Soupy studied the rim of his bottle.

  “Thanks. Don’t want to jinx it just yet,” he said.

  You don’t know a guy for thirty years and not know when he’s bullshitting you. Especially Soupy, who, except when he had a hockey stick in his hands, wasn’t nearly as clever as he imagined. I let it go for the moment.

  “Rats goi
ng to do it tonight?” he said.

  “I think so.”

  “Best thing that could happen around here, Rats win the state title. Good for the soul, good for the economy. Mrs. B would’ve wanted it that way.”

  Mrs. B wouldn’t have given a rip, I thought. “I was just out giving Tex his skates,” I said.

  Soupy flipped his empty at the overflowing barrel of garbage next to his office door. The bottle clanged off of another and nestled against a pizza box.

  “Out where?” he said.

  “Tatch’s.”

  “Camp J.C.?”

  “Yeah. A little spooky. Have you seen it?”

  “Nope.” He reached into the fridge for another Blue Ribbon. “But I was out at Mom’s the other day and heard them making all sorts of noise.”

  “They’re turning the hill into an ant farm. Got a backhoe going.”

  “Bunch of crazy Jesus freaks, don’t want to pay their fair share.” It was Angie, shouting from her bar stool.

  “Need a refill, Ange?” Soupy said.

  She looked at her glass as if she hadn’t noticed it before. “Might as well.”

  Soupy poured another tulip glass from the Busch Light tap and took it down the bar. When he came back, he said, “Where the hell was Tatch last night anyway?”

  “He said family stuff.”

  “Since when did Tatch give a shit about—” Soupy stopped and turned toward the front door as chilly air washed into the bar. Luke Whistler stepped in and closed the door.

  “Gus,” he said. “Mr. Campbell.”

  Soupy grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and slapped a shot glass down on the bar. “Chief,” he said, filling the glass and nudging it in Whistler’s direction.

  Whistler looked at it for a second, smiling uncomfortably, then picked it up and drank it back in one smooth swallow. As he set the glass back down, Soupy held the bottle up for a refill. Whistler pulled the glass away. “No thanks.”

  “I guess you guys know each other,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be much of a reporter if I didn’t know the town barkeep,” Whistler said. Then he said to Soupy, “You’re going to get me in trouble with the boss.”

  “Who, him?” Soupy said. “He’s a goalie. He doesn’t worry about anybody but himself and his little net. Ain’t that right, Trap?” He grabbed the beer I had pushed away and shoved it in front of me. “Drink up. People are dying of thirst in Cambodia.”