Starvation lake sl-1

by Bryan Gruley

  When one hockey team faces another that is clearly faster and more skilled, the job of the goalie on the lesser squad is to keep his team close until they catch a break that might shift the momentum in their favor. Keep your team within a goal, even two goals, and they play with the proper balance of patience and urgency needed to come back. Get behind by three and despair begins to take over. You start playing stupid. Then it’s over. In hockey there is no better match for superior speed and skill than a hot goalie.

  I was never hotter than during the first two periods of that state title game.

  The Pipefitters won the opening face-off and flung the puck hard into the corner to my left. While two Fitters gave chase, Soupy tried to rifle the puck around the boards behind the net. But one of the Fitters slapped it out of the air and the next thing I knew it had bounced out in front of me and onto the stick of Hooper, not fifteen feet away, all alone. His rising shot caught me on the left side of my neck, hitting me so hard that it popped my mask clear off my head. The puck deflected downward and pinged off the goalpost as I tumbled backward, grasping at the crossbar for balance, determined not to go down. The refs were whistling play dead, but Hooper skated up and deliberately banged into me. I saw his left eye up close, phlegmy and gray as the innards of a clam. He wanted me to see it. “Fuck off,” I said, pushing him away. He laughed and kicked my mask aside. Then Soupy and Teddy and Wilf and two other Fitters converged, shoving and swearing as the refs pulled us apart. When we’d separated and I leaned over to pick up my mask, Soupy turned to Boynton and punched him once, hard, in the chest, nearly toppling him right there in front of all the Pipefitters and the Rats and the fans standing three deep along the glass. “Where the fuck were you?” Soupy said, and I heard Hooper laughing again as Teddy turned and skated to his position. “Guys, what the hell?” I shouted. My neck was burning and my butterflies were gone.

  For the next fourteen minutes, it seemed like the Pipefitters never left our zone. It was as if they had ten skaters to our five, as if there were an invisible wall at our blue line that kept the puck from going to the other end of the ice. I scuttled furiously back and forth between the goalposts, trying to stay square and upright between the puck and my net as the Fitters relentlessly circled, quick as bumblebees, the puck flashing from one Fitter’s stick to another, corner to slot to point to dot, behind me, in front of me, and back again and again and again. The shots came from everywhere, two and three at a time. I kicked them into the corners. I snatched them from the air. I deflected them off my shoulders, chest, Eggo, mask. Whenever I could, I gathered the puck into my chest or my glove to freeze it for a face-off so we could get fresh legs on the ice. The Rats were gasping for air.

  Teddy got better at staying with Hooper, but it didn’t matter much because that just left their four players against our four, and almost all of theirs, skater for skater, were better. Part of our problem was Soupy. He was as good as any of the Fitters, even Hooper, but he wasn’t playing his game. He wasn’t controlling the puck and leading the charge out of our zone. He was hanging back. Coach Blackburn knew. I saw him glower when Soupy went to the bench. I saw Soupy ignore him.

  With two minutes to go in the period, the Fitters’ enormous defenseman, the aptly named Wallman, stepped between Teddy and Hooper and suddenly Hooper was free. Someone got Hooper the puck and he faked out the last man, Zilchy, as if his skates were tied together. Now it was just Hooper and me. I slid forward to cut down the angle, hearing the crescendo roar of the crowd even as I heard Coach in my head: “Hold your ground.” Hooper dropped his left shoulder to fake a shot. I felt my right knee buckle. I slid to my left as Hooper dug his blades into the ice and cut in the same direction. In a flash the puck was on his backhand. It was just how I’d seen him deke the other goalies. Like them, I wanted to go down, my legs wanted to, my body wanted to. Hooper flicked the puck at my right shoulder. My knees were giving way, my butt was dropping, and momentum was taking me to my left, away from the puck, when I flung out my right hand, the one inside Eggo. As I fell to the ice, the puck just barely caught the edge of the waffle and skipped higher. I craned my neck to look back as I sprawled and saw the puck-or maybe I just heard it-clang off the crossbar and fly up and over the glass behind the net. Whistles shrieked. I jumped to my feet. I’d gotten away with a flop, a sloppy one at that. The crowd began to chant: “Gus! Gus! Gus!” Hooper spun on his skates and stopped, looking straight at me. Our eyes met. He grinned and winked his good eye. I looked away.

  Finally, we caught that break. Wallman crushed Jeff Champagne against the boards on my left as Champy tried to scoop the puck out of our zone. But Wallman’s stick blade snagged in a seam of the boards and snapped off. He dropped the broken stick and tried to kick the puck as Champy fell to a knee, poked it past him, jumped up, and wheeled around him on a breakaway. The poor Fitter goalie must have been cold; he hadn’t seen a shot in ten minutes. He flopped, of course. Champy waited till he was down, then fired a shot over his right shoulder. As the goal light flashed red, I raced out of my net to the blue line with my stick raised in celebration. I couldn’t believe it. The Fitters had put twenty-two shots on net to our two. But we led, 1–0.

  The lead held well into the third and final period. The Rat Trap really took over then, taking the edge off the Fitters’ offensive game. Their passes went awry, the open man wasn’t so easy to find as he was in the first period. Within our zone, Coach drew us into a defense designed to jam the front of our net and force the Fitters to take low-percentage shots from the perimeter.

  The clock wound down-ten minutes to go, seven, five. The Fitters were gasping now, and growing frustrated. They seemed astonished that they could be losing to our team. With three minutes and sixteen seconds to go, their astonishment turned to exasperation-one of them took a cross-checking penalty. Their coach nearly vaulted the boards to assail the referee. Now the Fitters were playing stupid. We’d have a one-man advantage for two minutes. In the stands, our fans began to celebrate. The state title was within reach. All we had to do was keep the puck out of our net.

  I don’t know why Teddy Boynton chose that moment to leave Hooper alone and chase a loose puck in the Fitter zone. Hooper was as tired as the rest of his teammates. He hadn’t had a clean shot on me since that breakaway I had barely stopped. Maybe Teddy thought, with the one-man advantage, he could take a chance on scoring the goal that would put the game and the championship away. But when he abandoned Hooper in pursuit of the open puck, he left five strides between himself and his man. I heard Coach scream, “Tiger-no!” As Teddy reached the puck, Wallman snuck up on his blind side and flattened him. The Rats fans howled for a penalty. Wallman whacked the puck off the glass and it slid to Hooper in full stride. “Tiger, get up!” Coach yelled. But Hooper was gone.

  Teddy’s gamble left the rest of the Rats flat-footed. Soupy gave futile chase from the opposite side of the rink as Hooper swooped in from my right. I pushed out. He wound up. I never saw the puck. I heard three distinct sounds, barely a second apart. First was the thunderous thwack of wood on rubber. Then the sickening ring of the puck inside the juncture of the goalpost and the crossbar. Then the roar of the Fitter fans. As Hooper whipped past me, his stick raised high over his head, he looked over and again winked his good eye. “Can’t see it, can’t stop it,” he said.

  I felt a hand grab me by the back of my jersey. It was Soupy, red-faced and furious. “Fucking Blackburn,” he sputtered, his spittle flecking the skin behind my mask. “I knew this would fucking happen.”

  “Forget it, Soup,” I said. “We’re going to win.”

  “You don’t understand,” Soupy said. Past him I could see Blackburn and Leo calling out from the bench, Zilchy and Wilf skating over. “Blackburn fucked us, Trap.”

  “Calm down, Soupy.”

  “Like fuck,” Soupy said. He turned to skate away and then, as Zilchy and Wilf caught up to him, he wheeled around and yelled, “Watch. I’ll show these motherfuckers a fancy-ass fag move, a
ll right.”

  I knew immediately what he meant.

  When it happened, we were five minutes into sudden-death overtime. We had just dumped the puck into the Fitter zone. Number 25 slapped it high on the glass around the back of the net and up the opposite boards. Champy stopped it with his chest and shoveled it back across the ice into the corner left of the Fitter net, where Soupy, having snuck in from his defensive post, now appeared. Two Fitters converged, but Soupy sidestepped one, then the other, cut left, and scooted behind the net. The two Fitter defensemen momentarily froze in front of their net. The goalie grabbed his crossbar and looked frantically over one shoulder, then the other, trying to anticipate which way Soupy would go. But I was the only one in the rink who knew what was about to happen, the only one in the theater who’d seen the movie before, who knew how it was going to end, who knew that Soupy, no matter how Coach had upset him, was going to be the hero.

  He scooped the puck up in his stick blade, lacrosse-like, in a motion so fast that only someone who’d seen it before could fathom what was happening. To me, it was all in slow motion. It was Soupy all alone in the rink that afternoon months before, flinging pucks into the goal mesh from behind the net. It was Soupy practicing the same utterly absurd, utterly sublime move, unbeknownst to Blackburn or anyone else except me, in the moonless cold on the frozen patch behind his garage. The Rats and Fitters crisscrossed in my line of sight. I squatted low and eased forward so I could see through to Soupy. He raised his stick, the puck a black blotch on the white tape on his blade, and snapped it around the wide-open upper corner of the Fitter net. I raised my arms over my head and took a big stride, then another, waiting for the goal light, the last whistle, the explosion of the crowd. We were going to win the state title.

  But none of it came.

  Instead of the fans’ roar, I heard the clank-I would learn only later-of a puck bouncing off the crossbar. When I looked for the goal light, I saw instead the Fitter goalie pointing his stick in the air high above the rink. Everyone on the ice turned in my direction, looking for the puck.

  Billy Hooper found it first.

  He appeared, alone, legs in full churn, tearing down the boards to my left, Zilchy and Stevie in hopeless pursuit. Coach was yelling, “Back, Gus! Back! Back! Back!” I looked down to see that my celebration had taken me almost to my blue line, a good forty feet from the net. The puck fell from the sky and plopped to the ice about fifteen feet to my left and in front of me, directly in Hooper’s path. For one foolish instant I hesitated, thinking I could beat him to it. Another mistake. I started backpedaling as Hooper snatched up the puck. Coach yelled. The Fitter fans shrieked. There were still twenty feet between me and the empty net when Hooper pulled nearly even on my left. I was never going to outrace him. I had no choice.

  I threw the lower part of my body across the ice, stacking my leg pads to form a sliding blockade. I hoped to flummox Hooper enough that he might hurry a shot that would hit some part of me or skitter wide. The crowd’s roar swelled in my ears. Hooper leaned hard to his left while keeping the puck just out of reach of my outstretched stick. His blades dug in and I felt the spray of snow like needles across my neck and face. He lost his edge. He fell. I ground my slide to a halt and twisted around and propped myself on Eggo. Other skates were scraping toward us. The puck had come to a stop ten feet from the open net, just out of Hooper’s reach. If I had jumped up at that very instant and dove and threw my stick at the puck, I might have been able to smack it out of his way. But I didn’t. Instead, in that sliver of a split second, I looked at Hooper. Our eyes met again. This time, his eye startled me more. Maybe it was because I realized then in the back of my mind that he had lost most of his dreams forever, and there I was trying to take the last one away. Or maybe I just choked. Whatever the reason, I froze. Not for long. Half a second maybe. But it felt for that half a second as if my arms and legs were stuck to the ice. In the years to follow, that half a second would become a full second, five seconds, a minute, a lifetime in the town’s collective memory. Elvis Bontrager got used to telling people, “I could’ve rotated my tires in the time he laid there staring at that damned puck.” To the people of Starvation Lake, in the wake of Soupy’s heroic effort, and despite my own heroics earlier in the game, I’d had a chance to keep the River Rats, and our state championship dream, alive. And I’d blown it.

  The puck sat between us. Hooper lunged and caught the puck with the heel of his stick. I dove, finally, but the puck crossed the goal line inches ahead of my stick. Whooping Pipefitters piled on Hooper as I dragged myself away.

  We sat in the dressing room, dazed and silent but for a few muffled sobs. Coach and Leo left us alone. After what seemed like an hour Coach came in and packed up the tackle box he used to carry tape and first-aid supplies. He looked around the room. “We’re done here, boys,” he said. “Get dressed and get out.” He turned to leave.

  “Get the fuck out yourself.”

  It was Soupy, sitting on my left. Blackburn stopped and turned around. “Excuse me?” he said. Behind him the door opened and Leo stepped inside.

  “You heard me. You cost us the fucking title.” Soupy threw his runner-up plaque to the floor at Blackburn’s feet. “You put the wrong guy on Hooper and you know it.”

  “Fuck off, Campbell,” Teddy Boynton said.

  Blackburn set the tackle box down and walked over to Soupy. He leaned down until his face was barely two inches from Soupy’s. “I cost us the game?” he said. He smiled in a way I’d never seen before. It made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. He took Soupy’s chin in his hand. Soupy tried to pull away, but Blackburn held tight. “You pull that selfish little fag move of yours and I cost us the game?” he said. “You are a joke, son, you know that? A joke. Maybe when you realize that, you’ll be able to make better use of your God-given talents instead of wasting them on hot dog fag moves.”

  “Fuck you,” Soupy said, still trying to jerk his face away.

  “Coach,” I blurted. “Leave him.”

  Coach let Soupy’s chin go and turned slowly to me.

  “What did you say?”

  “Shut up, Trap,” Soupy said.

  “He’s upset,” I said. “Leave him. He didn’t lose the game. I lost the game.”

  “Trap, shut up.”

  “You,” Blackburn said. He reached across Soupy and jabbed a forefinger hard into my chest. “Jack!” Leo admonished, but Blackburn ignored him. “What the hell were you thinking, Gus, when you were just lying there staring at number seventeen? Huh? Why didn’t you kiss him?” He jabbed me again and I flinched.

  “I couldn’t get up. I tried-”

  “You tried?” He pointed his stabbing finger at the door. “Well, you know what? All those people out there who thought we were going to have a state championship in this town? They don’t give a damn if you tried or what you tried or how hard you tried. Because you failed. That’s what they know, and that’s what they’ll always know. How many times do I have to tell you, Gus? Nobody gives a good goddamn how. They only care how many. And you know what? I’m with them. Because right now we could have a state championship trophy in this room, but we got a little piece-of-shit plaque and it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing how anymore. Do you hear me?”

  Soupy leaned between us and directed a low, hoarse whisper at Blackburn, as if he wanted no one else to hear. “He knows,” he said.

  Coach’s head snapped back to Soupy. “What?”

  Their eyes met. Blackburn backed away, raising his palms in a gesture of angry surrender. “Fine,” he said. “Fine.” He picked up his tackle box and walked out with Leo.

  Soupy drove me home in silence. When he pulled into my driveway, I turned to him. “What was going on back there?” I said.

  “When?”

  “When you told Coach, ‘He knows.’ What was that all about?”

  Soupy kept his eyes on the road. “Nothing,” he said. “Just that you already knew all that crap he was saying. I just wanted
him to shut up.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe him, but I just said, “Thanks.” We never spoke about it again.

  twenty-three

  I was editing Joanie’s story on Brendan Blake when she tapped me on the shoulder. She whispered, “Is there a way to listen to the messages without using the phone up front?”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got to hear one of the Sound Offs.”

  I found an instruction book for the message machine in a pile next to the copier. Joanie sat next to me as I dialed. She had a folded map in her hand.

  “OK, I’m in,” I said. “What am I listening to?”

  “Can you skip through the messages? You want number thirty-four.” I kept hitting buttons and hearing beeps until the automated voice said, “Message number thirty-four, received today at three twenty-seven p.m.”

  The recording began. At first, all I heard were indistinguishable voices in the background, then what sounded like a car passing. The call must have come from a pay phone. “Yo,” came the voice, a male rasp carrying the hint of a southern accent. “Tunnels? Y’all must be joking.” He cackled. “Ain’t no tunnels, ain’t no Blackburn. Time to maybe make a deal.” He hung up.

  “Know that voice?” Joanie said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  I pushed replay and listened again while Joanie spread the Pine County map on my desk. Two X ’s were marked in green Magic Marker a quarter inch from the western edge of Starvation Lake. One X was just above and to the left of the other. She pointed to the lower one. “That’s where Blackburn and Redpath and Campbell were the night Blackburn died.”

  “OK.” Though I had snowmobiled plenty in the woods between Starvation and Walleye, I had no idea where Coach and Leo might’ve built their midnight fire.

  Her finger moved to the other X. “This is where Clayton Perlmutter lives.”

  The Sasquatch hunter. “No way,” I said.