by Bryan Gruley
“Except for the wrestling meet, yes,” Tillie said.
“Can you handle the wrestling story?”
“I cannot wait.”
On her phone the number 38 glowed red in the message window. “Whoa,” I said. “Did we get that many Sound Off calls?”
“It’s not many more than we usually get,” she said.
I let it go and punched the button to hear the first message: “This is Phyllis T. Fraser of 661 Oak Lane.” The elderly woman sounded like she was underwater. “My opinion is that of course there are tunnels in the lake. In point of fact my uncle Sherman’s boy Kevin, a graduate of the Michigan Technological University, says it has been studied by hydrogenists from his institution. And anyway, the tunnels are a tradition we’ve held dear for as long as I can remember, and I’m seventy-six, actually almost seventy-seven. We’ve always believed it. Who would think-”
“Hydrologists?” I said, while pushing the button for the next message. A man’s voice came on. “Can I ask you something?” he croaked. He cleared his throat, coughed, coughed again. “May I ask why you waste valuable space on items like this? Who cares about tunnels when we have a Social Security system that is-” I shut the machine off. Tillie was smiling.
“Any good ones?” I said.
“I’m on deadline.” She waved her hand in Joanie’s general direction. “Worry about your star reporter. She’s getting her precious career started, and what better way than to shovel dirt on a dead man’s grave?”
“What’s with you?” I said.
“Gus!” Joanie called out.
I went back to her desk. “What’s her problem?” I said.
Joanie glared past me in Tillie’s direction. “She spends most of her day eavesdropping,” she said. “My sources are always asking why I’m whispering.”
“What’s up?”
She lowered her voice. “The lawyers are going to be too chicken to run this story. Maybe you will be, too.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. What is it?”
“I got the kid in Canada.”
“Which kid?”
“The kid who was a big star for Blackburn and just quit? The one with the diary? He’s an adult now, of course. His aunt, the newspaper lady in St. Albert, told him about me. He just called me out of the blue.”
She seemed at once excited and oddly put off, almost as if something had offended her.
“What’d he say?”
“I’m warning you. This is nasty stuff.”
“What?”
She made me sit closer to her on her desk and whispered, “This kid’s name was-is-Brendan Blake. He was a good player. A really good player. Pro scouts were watching him. I guess Blackburn knew some of the scouts, and he got them to come out. That’s about when the weird stuff started. A couple years later, Brendan was out of hockey altogether.”
“What weird stuff?”
“Bad stuff, Gus.”
“OK. Just tell me.”
She took a deep breath. “Blackburn started getting this kid alone,” she said. “Mostly on road trips. Sometimes at home. He was abusing him.”
“You mean-”
“Sexually, yes. It’s all in the diary.”
“Jesus. How?”
She told me in a flat, clinical whisper. As I listened, I felt my throat constrict. How could a teenaged boy write such things down?
“Why would a kid-why wouldn’t his parents have called the cops?” I said.
“Come on, Gus. These are hockey parents in a hockey town. How do you think their kid would’ve been treated?”
That I could certainly imagine. Regardless of what happened to Blackburn, the kid would’ve been branded a pansy who should have fended off his coach’s advances. The players, some of the other coaches, even some of the fans would have called him “fag” and “homo” and worse. He would’ve had to leave town himself. Which he apparently did anyway.
“So they just got Blackburn to leave?”
“Yeah.”
“Like in the other place.”
“I’m betting. I’m not sure yet. I have some calls in.”
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“Why wouldn’t he? What’s he got to gain now? It was like he was glad to talk to me, like he’d been waiting for me to call. And he was dying to know what happened to Blackburn. Said he was sorry to hear it.”
“He was sorry to hear the guy who supposedly abused him was dead?”
“Not supposedly.”
“You look a little pale. You all right?”
She shook her head. “You know,” she said, “we had a priest like this at my high school.”
I imagined a middle-aged man, baggy-eyed and paunchy in a black cassock. “Was Brendan angry?” I said.
“I don’t think so. At least not anymore. I mean, it’s been thirty years.”
“What’s he doing now?”
“He’s an electrician. Married. Two little girls.”
I’d heard enough. “OK,” I said. “Write it.”
“Write a story, Gus? Are you sure?”
“He’s on the record, right?”
“Yes.”
“And his story checks out with the folks back in St. Albert?”
“Yes, I went back to them.”
“And it goes to motive, right?” Soupy’s motive, I had to admit.
“Well, only indirectly, unless we know that Blackburn sexually abused players here in Starvation Lake.” Her tone was expectant. But I had no answer for her. This man she was describing was not the one who’d taught me to play goalie and sat at my Sunday dinner table.
“If it happened here,” I said, “I didn’t know about it. Just write it. Straight and simple.”
“OK. I already filed the arraignment story. Boy, was that weird. Do you believe this suicide pact stuff?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” I said. I went to my desk and sat down. And I remembered.
twenty-two
Men,” Coach Blackburn said. We were gathered around him at center ice, having just finished practice the day before the 1981 Michigan state hockey championship was to begin on our home rink in Starvation Lake. Coach held his stick high over his head, pointing at the four blue-and-gold banners hanging in the rafters. Behind the one that said, “Regional Finalist, 1977,” we saw Leo crouched on a narrow catwalk.
“You’ve heard me say it a million times,” Coach said. “Losing is good for winning. You know I believe that. Losing has made us strong. It has helped us see our weaknesses so we could eliminate them. It has made us keenly aware that at any moment the thing we desire most can be snatched away.” He paused. “Now, men, we are done with losing. We have learned its lessons. Now it is time to win.”
After four years of lobbying, Coach had persuaded Michigan’s amateur hockey officials to hold the state tournament in Starvation Lake. Players, coaches, families, and fans from across the state jammed the town’s only hotel and all the motels along Route 816. A line spilled out the door of Audrey’s by seven each morning. Visitors clamored for the glossy tournament program, the souvenir pucks embossed with the River Rats logo, the kielbasa and bratwurst sizzling on grills in the rink parking lot. All week, people from Grand Rapids and Marquette and Trenton and Ann Arbor sought out Coach to tell him what a great tournament and a beautiful place this was.
But for all the good cheer and money flowing down Main Street, the tournament would not be a success unless the River Rats won it in front of our own fans, in our own rink, with all of Michigan’s hockey establishment watching. Coach knew that. And he thought-everyone in Starvation Lake thought-that we had a good chance to win. We’d lost just six of the fifty-seven games we’d played that year. Three Rats-Soupy, Teddy Boynton, and Jeff Champagne, the kid who’d been cut and then reinstated at that uneasy meeting after our first season-had been named to state All-Star teams. And we’d come so close the year before, only to lose to the Pipefitters in the semifinals.
“Remem
ber what we said all those years ago?” Coach said to us. “We said we came together to achieve the ultimate goal. And what was that?”
“To win one game, Coach,” we answered in unison.
“Not all the games. One game. Now we’re going to play that game.” He lowered his stick. “We’re going to play it tomorrow in the quarterfinals. We’re going to play it again Friday in the semis. And on Saturday afternoon, we are going to win that one game, the state championship. Do I have that right, men?”
“Yes, sir,” we yelled.
He gazed up into the rafters. “Leo,” he called out. “Now.”
We all looked up and watched as Leo scuttled from banner to banner, undoing their fastenings. One by one they fluttered down to the ice. Coach gathered them up and carried them away.
Naturally he had a plan for defeating each of our opponents. In the quarterfinals, we came out hitting against quick but small Fife Electric of Detroit and wore them down, scoring twice late to win 3–1. Soupy scored the winner. Against Copperstone Sporting Goods, we frustrated their two high-scoring centers by giving them the outside lanes while jamming up the front of our net. Soupy scored two goals in our 4–1 win. As we did in all of our games, we used the Rat Trap to clog the middle of the ice and make it hard for teams to break out of their own zone cleanly. Our opponents and their fans loathed the Rat Trap, just as our own parents and fans once had. Now, of course, our parents and fans loved the Rat Trap because it helped us win. As Coach was so fond of saying, “They don’t care how, just how many.”
We were to play the Pipefitters in the state final. They had dispatched their first two opponents with ease, 5–0 and 7–1. They were big and fast and intimidating in their goatees and sideburns and long hair hanging down over the numbers on their jerseys. Mostly they were good. To beat them we knew we would have to execute the Rat Trap to perfection and take advantage of whatever scoring opportunities we could muster. Even if we did all that, we would not win if we did not stop number 17, Billy Hooper.
College scouts had started watching Hooper when he was just thirteen. That year he scored 127 goals in eighty games for Paddock Pools. The Pipefitters lured him away by making his father an assistant coach. By the time he was sixteen, colleges were begging Hooper to enroll, and he was projected as a number-one draft pick in the Canadian junior leagues. But in an accident that summer, Hooper lost the sight in his left eye. As Pipefitter fans told it, Hooper pulled over on the Ford Freeway near Detroit to help a woman whose car had broken down. When he tried to jump-start her car, the battery exploded. His face was somehow spared severe burns, but the hot acid splashed his eye. Outside Pipefitter circles, another story circulated. It involved Southern Comfort, jumbo firecrackers, and a neighbor’s mailbox. Doctors told Billy Hooper his hockey career was over. But when the Pipefitters held tryouts that fall, he showed up wearing a black eye patch. He struggled at first. His impaired depth perception made it hard for him to feel how hard to shoot and pass. His coaches worried that his severely limited peripheral vision made him a target for crippling checks. Hooper played on. He removed his eye patch for games; his teammates took to calling him “Deadeye.” In a few months he was turning defensemen and goalies inside out again and, by season’s end, Billy Hooper was again one of the most talked-about players in Michigan. Still, nobody was talking anymore about college and the NHL. The scouts didn’t believe a one-eyed skater could make it at those levels. They stopped coming.
In the Pipefitters’ first two state tournament wins, Hooper was unstoppable, scoring five goals and assisting on four others. I saw him score on a wrist shot, a low slapshot, a deke, a high backhander. At one point, seemingly trapped behind the net, he caromed a goal in off a goaltender’s calf. On breakaways, I noticed, he especially liked to try to stare the goalie down and then head-fake him into flopping, whereupon Hooper would come to a near stop and calmly flip the puck over the fallen tender.
Coach noticed, too. After our semifinal win, he squeezed between Soupy and me on the bench in dressing room 3. “Tomorrow night, Gus, number seventeen,” he said. “Remember-you’re a stand-up goalie. I’ve seen you watching him. He’s got a lot of dipsy-doodles, eh? Every one’s designed to make you fall on your face so he can go high on you. Don’t take the bait, Gus. You’re not a flopper. Hold your ground.”
“I will.”
“Good.” He put his arm on my shoulder. “You coming tonight?”
Coach had invited us all to stay in his billets. He said it was important for the entire team to be together before its biggest game ever. Everyone was going-except me. My mother insisted that I stay with her, at home.
“I don’t think so, Coach,” I said. “My mother-you know.”
“Yes, I know. You ought to be there tonight. I’ll speak with your mom again.”
That was the night I called my mother a bitch.
Soupy was quiet the next morning at our pregame skate-around. I sat down next to him in the dressing room as he struggled with his left skate.
“Have fun last night?” I said.
“Same old thing,” he said. He kicked his skate heel against the floor to force his foot all the way in.
“I hope you guys got some sleep.”
“I’ll get a nap before the game.”
“You OK?”
“Just nervous.”
We weren’t going to be playing for hours, but already my stomach was squirming like a bass on a fishing spear. Soupy never seemed to get nervous, though. He was always fooling around, throwing tape wads, telling jokes. He didn’t really look nervous now, either; he just wasn’t himself. Something wasn’t right.
Coach walked in. “Good morning,” he said. “Are we ready to win?”
“Yes, sir,” we all said, except for Soupy, who was preoccupied with his skates.
“Swanny?” Coach said.
Soupy didn’t look up. He plopped his helmet on his head, grabbed his stick, stood up, and brushed past Coach on his way out of the room. Coach silently watched him go. Teddy Boynton came in with his bag slung over a shoulder. Coach slapped him on the back. “Ready, Tiger?”
“Oh, yeah,” Teddy said.
I leaned over to Wilf, who was taping his stick blade. “What’s with Soup?”
“Hell if I know. Maybe he’s pissed about Teddy shadowing the one-eyed guy.”
“We’re shadowing Hooper?”
A “shadow” would stay with Billy Hooper wherever he went on the ice, in the hope of keeping him from getting the puck in the open. It was a difficult but potentially glorious job. A shadow had to be fast and disciplined and utterly selfless. For a player as quick and shifty as Hooper, I couldn’t imagine anyone but Soupy being the shadow.
“Don’t know for sure,” Wilf said. “But Coach had Teddy and Soup up at his house for a couple of hours last night, and when they got back, I thought I heard Teddy say something about it, but I was half asleep.”
“Man,” I said, “we never had a shadow before. Coach must think this Hooper is still hot shit.”
“Fuck Hooper,” Wilf said.
Eight hours later, we were back in dressing room 3, dressed and waiting to go out on the ice for the state championship game.
I sat next to Soupy, staring at the shiny black tape I’d wound onto my waffle glove, Eggo. I was so afraid to play that I couldn’t wait to get out on the ice. That’s how goaltenders think. My belly would keep jumping around even after I got in the net and started roughing up the ice with my skates and whacking the goalposts with my stick. The butterflies would disappear only after the first shot on goal drove into me and I swatted it down or kicked it away or grabbed it in my catcher. If it hurt, even better.
The only sound in the dressing room was of stick blades being tapped nervously on the rubber-mat floor. Through the closed door we could hear the crowd’s rumble, and when the door swung open to let Coach in, we saw the throng in blue and gold squeezed in the space between the room and the rink, clapping and yelling. Leo slid in behind Coach. Co
ach threw the bolt on the door and stood before us in a jacket and tie, a gold River Rats stickpin in his lapel. His eyes scanned the room, falling briefly on each one of us. He clapped his hands together in front of him and held them there.
“Men,” he said. “Three things.”
He held up an index finger. “First, as always, the Rat Trap.”
He held up two fingers. “Second, the Fitter goalie’s got a good glove and two left feet. Make him use those feet. Shoot low and crash the net for rebounds.”
He held up three fingers. “Last, we’re going to shadow number seventeen. Teddy the Tiger’s our man.”
I looked at Soupy, who was sitting, as always, to my left. His eyes were on the floor. “Seventeen’s got some speed and a few moves,” Coach said, “but he doesn’t much like the rough stuff, does he, Tiger?”
“No, sir,” Teddy said.
“Truth is, he’s a little fag, isn’t he, Tiger?”
“He’s a one-eyed fag with a lot of fancy-ass fag moves,” Teddy said. He looked across the room at Soupy, the hint of a smirk on his lips. The others egged Teddy on, saying “Yeah, Teddy boy!” and “Do it!” and “Kill the little fag!” Soupy kept his eyes down. I elbowed him. We couldn’t win without Soupy.
“Soup,” I whispered. “You don’t want to be tied up covering Hooper. The guy’s got one fucking eye. Hell, the Fitters’ll probably have a shadow on you. ”
He ignored me.
“What do you say, men?” Coach said. That was our signal. It was when Soupy usually clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Tonight, you’re a sponge…” Now he didn’t move. Everyone was up, crowding around Coach. I stood. “Soup?” I said. Still he did not move.
Coach stuck out his right hand and we all reached in to touch it, glove on glove on glove. Coach got up on his toes and looked over our heads at Soupy. “Swanny?” he said. Soupy slowly stood without raising his eyes and placed a glove on my outstretched forearm. Coach watched. Then he looked at the rest of us and said, “One game.”
“One game!” we yelled. Everyone but Soupy.
