Starvation lake sl-1

by Bryan Gruley

  “Mr. Vidigan,” I said. “We plan to run this story in tomorrow’s paper. If you want to comment, now is the time.”

  There was another long pause before he said, “OK. I get it. You want to fuck me at the town council.”

  “I just want to report-”

  “Don’t give me that happy horseshit. You just want a feather in your fucking cap.”

  “Mr. Vidigan, everything you say now is on the record.”

  “Oh, ho, ho, fuck you,” he said. He sounded like he was choking. “Put this in your piece-of-shit paper: I will cave your goddamn-”

  “If I don’t hear from you or your lawyers, I’ll assume you didn’t want to comment. Thanks.”

  Now I hung up.

  Henry went through the story with me line by line, asking what I knew, how I knew it, whether I’d double-and triple-checked all my facts. When we’d finished, he gave me one of his big, crinkly smiles and said, “Goddamn headline ought to be, ‘College Kid Raises Hometown Hell.’” The actual headline, bannered across the top of the front page, read, “Town Strikes Out on Perfect-O-Screw Abatement.”

  That evening, the town council rejected the company’s application for a new tax break, canceled the original abatement, and authorized the town attorney to sue Perfect-O-Screw for $83,174.98 in back property taxes. Cecil Vidigan didn’t attend, but eighty-seven citizens did, quite a turnout for an August council meeting. I counted every one. For a few hours, people talked about something I’d done that had nothing to do with that state title game.

  After the meeting, I went back to the Pilot. Deadlines had passed, the newsroom was empty, and I didn’t have to file a story on the meeting until the next morning. But I didn’t want to go home yet. On my desk I found a copy of that day’s paper with a note scrawled across it in black Magic Marker. “Here’s how you know you had a helluva scoop,” Henry had written. “The mayor called to complain about not being quoted.” I took it into Henry’s office and grabbed a Bud out of the mini-fridge beneath his desk. I propped my feet up on the desk and reread my story about twenty times. I kept thinking, This is just what my professors taught: Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable. I had exposed a cheat and saved the town money. That’s what real journalists did.

  But there was something else, too, that kept me sitting there reading my story again and again into the middle of the night. I was a short, skinny college kid who’d gone toe-to-toe with a captain of industry, or at least what passed for one in Starvation Lake, a man of means and stature and raw, purposeful anger. And I’d beaten him.

  Two years later, after I’d graduated from college, the scissored-out clips of my Perfect-O-Screw stories would impress a Detroit Times editor enough that she’d hire me as a general assignment reporter for the business section. By then Perfect-O-Screw would be out of business, and Cecil Vidigan would be rumored to be running a golf driving range somewhere in the Upper Peninsula.

  But on the night I changed his life, I sat with my feet up and a beer in my hand and decided that if something could make me feel this good for even one night, and it didn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve to be hurt, maybe it was something I could actually do, something I might actually be good at, something that might actually make somebody proud of me.

  fourteen

  The morning after Dingus surprised me in my apartment, I slept until eleven. Dinner at Mom’s wasn’t until twelve-thirty, so after showering and dressing I went down to the Pilot to square a few things away.

  The newsroom was empty. I expected Joanie but left the ceiling lights off. I couldn’t bear the buzzing of those fluorescent lamps when I was alone. Instead I snapped on my desk lamp and proceeded to clear the mess on my desk, filling most of two garbage cans with old printouts, newspapers, and disposable coffee cups. I opened Saturday’s mail: lunch menus for the elementary school. A press release about promotions at a local insurance firm. A one-page announcement that the Starvation Lake Lions Club had named Emil J. “Bud” Popke as its Man of the Year. The Lions Club didn’t send a photograph of Popke. I didn’t know whether we had one, and Tillie didn’t like me messing around in the photo file cabinets, so I jotted her a note to make a photo assignment.

  As I worked, I pondered: What was Teddy Boynton really after at Enright’s? What was on the napkin he pulled from his pocket? Why was Dingus being at once so solicitous and so evasive? Beneath it all I was dreading having to call my attorney downstate. My Detroit troubles were far from over.

  I set the copies of the police report and the $25,000 receipt Dingus had given me next to my computer. I dialed Mom. Her answering machine came on, and I pressed the phone to my ear. My mother talked so fast that it often was hard to understand her recorded messages. But you had to listen because she constantly updated them for whatever was on her schedule: bingo, crochet, euchre, Meals on Wheels. Sometimes she actually called her own phone to find out where she was supposed to be. This morning she rattled off something about church and supper and meeting someone named either Felicia or Theresa at what sounded like the community center. “Mom,” I said after the beep, “I’m going to stop on the way over to start the Bonnie.”

  For Monday’s Pilot, I’d gotten most of the stories and headlines ready on Friday and Saturday. All that remained were Joanie’s two Blackburn stories, which she had yet to file. Which reminded me: Joanie had also been at Enright’s. I guessed that she’d wanted to see the pictures of Blackburn and the Rats, and maybe chat up Francis a bit. But if she really was looking for people who knew Coach, why hadn’t she hung around until the playoff games were over and all the skaters came in?

  Just before noon, I grabbed my jacket and walked up front to check the answering machine. One of the five messages was from Arthur Fleming, Boynton’s lawyer, left at 8:07 that morning. “Mr. Carpenter,” he said, “please call me at your earliest convenience so we can review the status of the article we discussed.” I went back to my desk for the document Fleming and Boynton had given me, but didn’t see it lying where I was sure I’d left it. I rummaged through the stack of papers next to my computer, checked my in-and out-boxes, pulled open a couple of drawers, but couldn’t find it. I looked under the desk and riffled through the stuff in the garbage cans. Still nothing. I decided I’d look later.

  Half a mile from Mom’s, I swung my pickup truck left off Beach onto Horvath Road. My dad had bought property in the hills overlooking the lake’s southwestern end, not far from our house. Atop a short rise jutting from a copse of pines he built a one-car garage. There, he told my mother, he’d have the peace to pursue his hobby of rebuilding motors for go-carts, lawnmowers, and other gadgets. But most of his time he spent gazing out over the lake on a deck he built atop the garage. On summer evenings, he’d sit in a rocking chair with a beer and a cigar, timing sundown against what the weatherman had predicted.

  He called it his tree house. It was a simple platform of two-by-eight planks ringed by two-by-four rails. In the rafters beneath it Dad built a closet with a door where he stowed cigars, a transistor radio, a miniature fridge, and some girlie magazines. He kept it locked, he said, because I was too young to be looking at those magazines. Sometimes he took me up on the deck, though, and we’d put the Tigers on the radio. I could still taste the potato-chip salt, the onion in the chip dip, the sweet orange pop washing it all down. Now and then Dad would joke with Mom that he was going to install a bumper-pool table and a wet bar and apply for a liquor license. Mom would say, “I’m sorry, I don’t think you can get a license if no girls are allowed.” Dad would wink and say, “Not worth the trouble then.”

  The garage eventually became home to the last car he bought before he died. Dad had worked construction, installing drywall, so he drove a pickup truck. But he always talked about owning a Cadillac, if only just for Sunday drives to Lake Michigan. He set aside a little money every week for years. For a while he had a second job on weekend nights. I didn’t understand much about parents, but I knew Mom didn’t like him working Saturday
nights and neither did I because that’s when we went to Dairy Queen and Mom never seemed to be in the mood without Dad around.

  He was still short of affording a Caddy when his doctor told him about the cancer. When later tests confirmed his condition, he left the doctor’s office and drove straight to a car dealership in Grayling. He bought a used 1969 Pontiac Bonneville, gold with a cream vinyl roof, power windows, power seats, air conditioning, and a trunk the size of a swimming pool. When he brought it home, Mom took a look at it and her face tightened up as if she were going to cry. “Oh, Rudy,” was all she said. From my bedroom that night I overheard them in the kitchen, speaking in strained whispers. I couldn’t make out everything, but it seemed my mother wanted to understand why after all that hoping and saving Dad hadn’t gotten the Cadillac after all. My father kept saying something about an “investment.” I didn’t know what that was.

  When I was old enough to drive, Mom wouldn’t let me take the Bonnie because she said it reminded her too much of Dad. But she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it, either. We stored it in the garage beneath Dad’s tree house. Every six months or so, I’d go up and start the engine and let it run for a while, and once a year, I changed the oil and the spark plugs and updated the license plates. Even when I was living in Detroit, I made a point to drive up and service the Bonnie. If I forgot or procrastinated, Mom got on me, though she never ventured up there herself. Sometimes on summer evenings I’d clamber up the ladder to the tree house and lean against the railing.

  Dad had cut a two-track road straight up to the garage through an archway of pines. I parked my truck on Horvath and trudged up the snow-covered two-track to the garage. Icicles the size of baseball bats hung from the eaves. I unlocked the side door and stepped inside. It smelled faintly of oil. A blast of cold smacked me in the face as I lifted the big garage door open.

  The Bonnie started right up when I turned the key. The radio reception wasn’t good, but I could make out the voice of a news announcer from WJR, the Detroit station that carried Tiger and Red Wing games. I switched it off and pushed an eight-track tape into the player Dad had installed beneath the dashboard. Even though I never drove the Bonnie, as a teenager I’d liked to sit in it alone and listen to Dad’s music. My father loved rock and roll. His favorite was Bob Seger. Dad and his younger cousin, Eddie, had seen Seger and his band live at a club in Ann Arbor in 1968, two days before Eddie went off to army boot camp. For weeks the Seger show was all Dad could talk about. Then came word that a rocket had torn Eddie’s chopper from the sky over a jungle crawling with Vietcong. Dad got quiet after that. He took that second job. He found out about the cancer. Through it all, he played Seger on the record player in the house, over and over, the same record, the same song.

  I pushed a button on the eight-track and played it: I just want a simple answer why it is I’ve got to die / I’m a simple-minded guy / two plus two is on my mind.

  The bass throbbed, the guitar wailed, Seger howled. I turned it up and closed my eyes, recalling a summer Sunday afternoon before Eddie was killed, before the cancer, before Dad got quiet. Dad was working on our dock. I was playing army with Soupy and some other kids. I came running around the house wearing a plastic helmet and carrying a toy rifle. Dad was waiting by the birch tree. Sweat stuck his T-shirt to the skin at his collarbone. “Hey, Gus,” he said. “Want to play some ball?” I pulled up for just a second and said, “Not now.” Hurrying past him, I glimpsed just enough of the look on his face to wish I’d said yes. But I kept running. Every time I thought about it, I wished I could go back and tell him yes. Whenever I visited the Bonnie, I made myself think about it.

  The song ended. I opened my eyes. “Two plus two is on my mind,” I said aloud, and I had a little laugh. Wind had dusted the hood of the Bonnie with snow. I turned off the car, brushed the snow off the hood with my sleeve, and closed up the garage.

  As I pulled into Mom’s driveway, I saw her working in the kitchen of the little yellow house she and Dad had built when Starvation was not a vacation destination and a dry-waller and his wife could afford a hundred feet of lakefront property. She was making gravy when I walked in. I put my arm around her and pecked her on the cheek. The aroma of her perfume mixed with that of the pot roast simmering in onions. “Smells good,” I said.

  She poked me in the ribs with her spoon handle. “Could you be sweet and get me a gravy boat? In the china cabinet, bottom shelf, back-left corner.”

  She was talking too fast. “A what?”

  “A gravy boat, dear. Gravy boat.”

  In the living room I looked through the big glass sliding door at the still, white lake. I’d always thought the lake looked bigger and more dangerous in the winter. The china cabinet stood along a wall filled with photographs of Mom and Dad and me, and framed needlepoint designs Mom had made, including one of a goaltender in his ready crouch. I took the gravy boat into the kitchen. Mom hummed off-key as she worked. She was glad to have me home, despite the unpleasant circumstance of my return. She hadn’t asked much about it. But then she’d never wanted me to go to Detroit in the first place.

  “You had a busy week,” she said as she ladled gravy from the steaming pan. “But, Gussy, how could you put that woman in your story? Here, let’s sit.” She set the gravy down on the kitchen table next to the platter heaped with beef and potatoes and carrots. She sat, as always, at the end near the kitchen and I sat to her right. Across from me a place was set, as always, for my father.

  “What woman?” I said.

  “Oh, you know, that whatshername, that nurse. Gloria. Gloria Lowinski.”

  That was the nurse in Tillie’s Monica story. So somebody had actually read it. I speared a chunk of pot roast. “What about her?”

  “Dear,” my mother said, as if it were obvious, “Gloria Lowinski is the biggest blabbermouth in town. She talks about her patients at Dr. Johnson’s office, for God’s sakes. She doesn’t need to be encouraged.”

  “Who’s Dr. Johnson?”

  Mom crooked an eyebrow at me as she spooned applesauce onto our plates. “A gynecologist, dear. Gloria is his nurse. I used to go there until, well, you don’t want to know, but suffice to say that Gloria’s lips were flapping and I finally had to switch to Dr. Schmidt in Kalkaska.”

  “Oh.”

  We ate quietly for a few minutes. I wanted to eat until I was too full and then go take a nap in the living room. I couldn’t, of course. I had a paper to get out. As I chewed I gazed across the table at my father’s setting. After Dad died, Coach Blackburn had sat there for Sunday dinners, until he stopped coming.

  “So,” I said, “what do you think of the snowmobile thing?”

  Either she didn’t hear me or she ignored me. “Are you still playing your season, honey?”

  “It’s almost over.”

  “You sound like you’re glad. It used to be I’d have to go out and drag you off the ice. Remember how your toes got frostbite? If you don’t like to play anymore, why do you play?”

  “I do like to play, Mom.” Once I got myself to the rink and pulled my gear on and got on the ice, I usually did like to play, just like I once did. “I have a lot on my mind.”

  “If you say so.”

  “So what did you think about this snowmobile that washed up?”

  “Not much, really.”

  That wasn’t like my mother. “They say it’s Coach’s.”

  “Well, I don’t see how that’s possible when Jack died right out there on the lake. I stood at that window and watched all those people gawking at the hole in the ice. Unless you believe those silly stories about tunnels under the lake.”

  “Sometimes I wish I did.”

  “How’s the roast? Good? I left it on too long.”

  “It’s great. You know, I’ve had to deal with Dingus a bit. He’s kind of weird.”

  “Oh, tell me about it. Dingus hasn’t been right for years. He never leaves that office. Does he have a bunk in there or something?”

  “Didn
’t notice. Has he always been this way?”

  “You were still down in Detroit, son, but no, Dingus used to be out and about like anybody else when he was with Barbara. You’d see them at the Legion dances and at the Avalon, all over the place. Let’s face it, honey, Dingus isn’t the prettiest kitten in the litter, but he and Barbara made a very cute couple. He adored her.”

  “I guess so. He still keeps her picture in his office.”

  Mom shook her head. “Barbara. Now there’s another one. What that girl was thinking, I will never know. Don’t get me wrong, I love Barbara, I just-I never understood how she could just go off with somebody else.”

  “Somebody else who?”

  Mom stiffened a little; she knew she’d said too much.

  “It doesn’t matter, dear.”

  “Come on. Who’d she go off with?”

  “She didn’t really-I mean she didn’t actually marry somebody else.”

  “OK, but who?”

  Mom started to get up. “I have cherry pie.”

  “Sit down, Mom.”

  She gave me one of those looks that said this was something I didn’t need to know. And then of course I knew.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Coach?”

  “Oh, my gosh, who cares? How did we get on this subject?”

  “I knew Coach was the ladies’ man, all right, but I didn’t know about Barbara. Man, I missed all the fun when I was downstate. So Dingus divorced her?”

  She sighed. “No, he didn’t divorce her. He wanted her back. She wanted Jack. But Jack wasn’t marrying anybody.”

  “And where’s she now?”