Starvation lake sl-1

by Bryan Gruley

  I crossed the living room and stepped into the hallway, stopping to let my eyes adjust to the dark. I could still hear the kitchen clock ticking. There was a closed door to my left, one to my right, and a third facing me at the end of the short corridor. Two bedrooms and a bathroom, I figured. As I reached for the doorknob to my left, memory sucked me back to the schoolhouse Soupy and I had broken into as kids. For an instant I could smell the mold and must again. I pushed the door open.

  The bedroom, the size of a child’s, had been converted into an office. A computer monitor and keyboard sat on a desk facing me. A stack of Wall Street Journal s leaned against it. Next to the computer was a box containing what looked like blank VCR tapes, a telephone wired to the computer, and two black marking pens. To the right of the desk stood a small television equipped with a VCR. The TV was angled so that the person sitting at the desk could watch as he worked.

  Against the far wall stood a bookcase holding five shelves of videotapes. A few of the tapes bore labels indicating they were instructional hockey videos: Defense for Beginners. Shoot to Score. Dryden on Goaltending. Some were unlabeled. Many had thin white stuck-on labels bearing tiny black markings. I leaned in close enough to read one and a shiver raced down my spine: LP/0293/FX.

  Blackburn had borrowed Delbert’s filing system. The numbers in the middle, as with Delbert’s, signified a date. Virtually all of the tapes were marked FX, which I assumed stood for Fairfax. I wondered if the first two letters could have been someone’s initials? A boy’s? An empty tape box rested next to Blackburn’s computer. I picked it up. “JJ/1297/FX,” the label read. I wondered why Blackburn hadn’t brought his old River Rat films with him when he fled to Virginia. Maybe there was no time. Tillie could have sent them, of course, but it dawned on me that those were her last claim on Blackburn, the thing that kept him, however distant, in her life.

  I was filled at once with dread at what I had found and exhilaration at what I could now tell the world. There was so much here, and there had to be more in Blackburn’s computer and his video camera. If he had escaped, so be it; he’d left too much behind. I flipped open my notebook. As I put my pen to the paper, I felt something on my shoulder.

  A hand.

  “What?” I cried out. The hand firmed its grip, but I twisted away and stumbled backward against the wall, face-to-face with Jack Blackburn.

  He wore black nylon sweatpants, slippers, and a faded gray Fairfax Hockey T-shirt puffed out at the waist to hide his paunch. He seemed to be smiling, though it was hard to know for sure because his upper teeth, obviously capped, stretched his mouth in an unnatural way, like a clown’s. In one hand he held a glass of what I assumed was whiskey. The other he extended to me. I reached for it without thinking.

  “Hello, Gus,” he said.

  “Going through my things?” The clown’s mouth chuckled. “Should I call the police?”

  “Do what you need to do.”

  “I hear some police may be looking for you, Gus.” He looked at the videotape box still in my hand. “Kind of late in life to be boning up on your hockey skills, isn’t it?”

  I set the box down. “Those aren’t hockey tapes, Jack.”

  “Jack?” he said. “The name’s Richard. Or Rich, if you prefer.” He laughed at this as if it were hilarious. “It’s nice to see your dad’s big boat again.” He’d recognized the Bonnie. “It’s looking pretty good for, what, thirty years old? Though it does stick out like a sore thumb around here. This is the nation’s capital. Nobody drives American.” Again he cackled. “So, what are you here for? An article? Is that what gives you the right to just break into somebody’s house?”

  “I know what you did.”

  That didn’t seem to register. “Is it one of those where-are-they-now stories?” he said. “Wait-aren’t you back at the little-league paper in Starvation again?” He took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “You remember how I used to say, ‘Losing’s good for winning’? Well, no offense, Gus, but I’m thinking maybe you’re the exception. Losing didn’t work so well for you, did it? You just kept on losing. The town goat. The hotshot reporter who let the big story go between his legs. Now here you are sneaking around an old man’s house, looking for who knows what.”

  “I found what I’m looking for, Jack.”

  “Rich, please. And, by all means, let’s talk if I can help with whatever you’re writing. I’d love to hear your questions.” He held his glass out and shook the cubes around. “Cocktail?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’m going to have another myself.”

  I waited in the living room while Blackburn went into the kitchen. He was either perfectly at ease or putting on a fine act. I heard ice clinking and the top of a bottle being spun off. He emerged with a fresh drink, a second glass, one of the bottles of Jim Beam, and a kitchen chair. He put the chair down and motioned for me to sit. I remained standing. He set his drink, the other glass, and the whiskey on the table next to the recliner. Then he just stood there, looking me over.

  “I owe you an apology,” he said. “See how your body has a certain flow to it, how the shoulders flow so nicely into your arms, the arms so nicely along your sides and hips, your hips into your legs? All that nice muscle tone, all that wonderful sinew, even all these years later.”

  I wasn’t going to let him make me squirm. “I’ve got you,” I said. “I know everything you did.”

  Blackburn sat down in the recliner. “When I first saw you,” he said, “way back when, I thought right off you’d be a flopper, because, you know, you were never too tall, and the stand-up goalies tend to be taller. Of course today they’re all floppers, that’s how it is. But the more I looked at you, the more I was convinced you were built to stand up. A runt, but a wiry runt. I figured you had the strength, you know, the sort of-what do you call it? — internal stature that makes a goalie unbeatable.” He paused to lick the rim of his glass. “But you didn’t, did you, Gus? You were weak. You’re still weak. Aren’t you?”

  I sat down now and leaned forward, elbows on knees.

  “I know what you did with Soupy,” I said.

  “Do you still have that glove? What the hell did you call it? You guys and your idiotic superstitions.”

  “And you and your films, huh?” I took out my pen and notebook.

  He pointed his glass at me. “No notes. Or I can call the cops. You can shut off that tape recorder, too.”

  He wasn’t going to call the police anymore than I was, but it didn’t matter. I snapped off the recorder and put my pen and notebook away while he drained his glass in one practiced swallow, then poured again. My coach. The long-dead hero of Starvation Lake. He actually lived alone in a dark house in a place that knew little of the game he supposedly loved. His cheeks had turned the color of a fading bruise. He had a Toyota and a bottle and a TV remote and a bookshelf filled with tapes of naked boys.

  “I may be a failure, Jack, but I am what I am,” I said. “You call yourself a coach, but you aren’t really a coach. You only pretend. You’re a pedophile. You fuck little boys. You fuck their heads. Then you fuck their bodies.”

  He actually laughed again.

  “I know about the billets,” I said. “I know about Soupy and Tillie and Jeff Champagne. Pretty clever, put Champy back on the team so you could fuck him? I suppose he was weak, too, huh? I know about Brendan Blake, too. Remember him?” Now his defiant smile ebbed and an eyebrow twitched, once, then again, an insect shifting its weight. “I know all about your disgusting films, and how you sold them, and how you used the money to buy all your land and the billets and-Jesus, Jack-all that ice time you paid for. What a great guy, picking up the tab for the parents. I’m weak? Maybe so. But I’m not a disgusting, twisted old man who pretends to be something so he can have sex with boys.”

  He reached for the whiskey.

  “And I am not someone,” I said, “who would drive his best friend to suicide.”

  He finished pouring. Then he sat back in
his chair, took a drink, and smacked his lips.

  “You know fuck-all,” he said.

  “I know everything. I have your old films, with you in them. And there are others who are ready to speak up.”

  “Let me get this straight. I forced your worthless, drunk, pathetic friend Swanny to have sex with an older woman who, I think we can agree, was quite a looker then. Yes? Having sex with foxy older women is something a sixteen-year-old boy would never do? Is that it?”

  “It’s Soupy, not Swanny, and I think you-”

  “As for my old friend Leo, when I came to town, he was working in the back of a dry cleaners or something. A nobody. I took him by the hand and next thing you know, he’s basically running the rink and working the door for one of the best damn hockey teams in Michigan. He’s a celebrity in Starvation Lake. A goddamn Zamboni driver.” As he spoke, I repeated his words in my head so they would stick like ink on paper. “And then, there he is, my last night in Starvation, waving a pistol around my head, telling me, ‘I’m drawing the line, Jack, I’m drawing the line right here.’ He’s drawing the line. What a joke. Come on, Gus. Leo didn’t really pull the trigger on himself. He couldn’t have. He didn’t have the balls.”

  “He’s dead, Jack.”

  “God rest his soul. He laid a damn good sheet, eh? Best Zamboni jockey I ever saw. But he got squirrelly on me. All that recovery crap. One minute he’s the porn king of Pine County, next minute he’s got all this horseshit religion and he’s waving a goddamn pistol at me. What was I supposed to do? He could have blown me away and he and Swanny would’ve told the cops it was all in self-defense. So here I am, Gus. Here I am.”

  “I thought Leo didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Then why did you run?”

  He hesitated. Then he shrugged. “I had no choice.”

  “Was someone else there? Someone who could have pulled the trigger? It wasn’t Soupy. He ran before you did.”

  “No.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No. No one else.” He stared into his glass. A bitter smile slowly creased his face. “Look around. I rent. Eleven hundred bucks a month. Can you believe it? Eleven hundred bucks in Starvation, you’d have a mansion on the lake.” Again he gulped the rest of his drink, again he refilled, pouring carefully, as if he could not afford to spill one drop. “Let me ask you, Gus, do you ever think about these things you think you know? I know you believe I’m the bad guy here, I’m the guy who’s done all these terrible things. But do you really think I could have done all this stuff I supposedly did all by myself?”

  “You were the star of the films. I saw you.”

  “Do you know why you’re such a pathetic failure? Take today. First you exposed yourself to me at the rink, then you talked to that very helpful young mother, then you let me lead you here and get the jump on you. You didn’t see the big picture. All you could see was you and your little notebook and your little newspaper and your little ideas about what’s right and wrong. And now you’re missing the big picture again. All you see is your old coach, who let you down-poor Gus-because he blamed you for losing the only game that ever mattered in the whole damn history of your hometown. Which you did, son. You lost that game. Grow up and take the responsibility.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “I kept us in that game. If not for me, we’d have been down five to zero before the second period.”

  He dismissed me with a wave of his glass. “Yeah, the Fitters had a lot of shots, but they were hitting you right in the breadbasket”-he thumped his chest-“you weren’t making saves. Take a lesson from old Billy Hooper, Gus. Remember? ‘Can’t see it, can’t stop it’? One eye and he saw things clearer than you. Sorry, but everything bad that ever happened in Starvation Lake ain’t about me. There’s a whole world of shit out there, and I’m just a little fly buzzing around it. I mean, did you ever think about why the sheriff wouldn’t just drag the lake after I supposedly drowned in it? Seems logical, doesn’t it? But what did they do? Nothing. Why? You’d think a few folks might know.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, hell, maybe old Angus Campbell? Now there was one crafty sonofabitch. It wasn’t two days after I’d supposedly drowned that Angus had all the angles figured out and got himself to the right pers-the right people. And just like that, he had a couple of big checks, one from the town for Jerry’s boat, one from”-he hesitated-“’hell, it doesn’t matter. Jerry got his blessed boat, Angus got his cash, nobody ever said a thing.”

  I shuddered. “Jerry’s boat?”

  “Spardell. The sheriff. He wanted his boat, boy.”

  Jerry’s boat. How could I be so stupid? The scribble at the bottom of the receipt Dingus had showed me wasn’t “Ferryboat.” It was “ Jerryboat. ” Whoever had scratched it there-maybe Soupy’s dad? — had made the J look like an F. I’d just read it wrong. And, as Joanie had told me, that receipt was for a check written April 12, 1988-the day before the town council appropriated $25,000 for a new boat-so it couldn’t have come from the town. Angus had that check in hand when the next day, as mayor pro tem, he called for the executive session at which Clayton Perlmutter changed his vote and the council decided not to dredge. Soon Angus had a second check for $25,000. One, written by the town of Starvation Lake, paid for Jerry’s boat. The other kept Angus’s mouth shut. Who wrote that one? And what did Perlmutter get for changing his vote?

  “How would Angus have known anything?” I said.

  “Ask his worthless son.”

  “So it was hush money.”

  “Call it whatever you like. They don’t care how, Gus, just how many. Remember?”

  “Who paid the hush money?”

  Again he peered into his drink, considering. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like to be dead in the eyes of all of your friends? To be dead in the eyes of everyone you know and love? I know, you don’t think I’m capable of feelings like that, but can you at least imagine it?”

  I thought I could, actually, but I said, “I don’t care.”

  “I left Starvation Lake. Isn’t that enough? I had a good life. I was a good coach. I made all of you into better hockey players. I put that place on the damn map. Here, where a little shitbox like this rents for a thousand bucks a month, you got a lot of rich guys from Boston and New York who think their kids are going to be the next Wayne Gretzky. It’s a joke. There ain’t no Swannies here. No River Rats. No state titles. And me, I’m a nobody, skating around with a bunch of tripods. I’m teaching girls to play, for God’s sake.”

  “And how about the little boys, Jack?”

  “You ungrateful little shit,” he said, thrusting his glass at me so hard that some whiskey slopped over the top. “I made you a goalie. You never would’ve started for the Rats-hell, you never would’ve made the team just to sit your ass on the bench-if it wasn’t for me. I was like a father to you. I had to be a goddamned saint, too?”

  “I had a father. You were not my father.”

  “Oh, listen, son, my daddy got hit by a train when I was six. He was stumbling around drunk in the dark and it came up out of nowhere and knocked him to Nova Scotia. So be it. All good things come to an end.” He took a long swallow of whiskey. “I’m glad you brought your daddy up, though, since you think you know so much, I’m sure you know all about the Friday night poker games then, eh?”

  “I know-”

  “You know zip. For your information, those games were going on a hell of a long time before I got to town. And there wasn’t a lot of poker either. The main attraction was your dear old dad-the late, great Rudy Carpenter and his late, great movie projector. Sometimes I’d even make popcorn. It wasn’t poker night; it was poke-her night. Get it? Poke her?” He jabbed a forefinger at the air. “That was quite a crew-old Lenny Ziolkowski, Angus, Jerry. And your old man. That projector of his made a hell of a racket, but the pictures were”-he looked up at the ceiling, as if seeking inspiration-“
exquisite.”

  He stopped and watched me, savoring my discomfort, then picked up the whiskey bottle, filled half of the other glass, and pushed it along the table toward me.

  “Sorry, son,” he said. “This film business was doing just fine before I arrived in Starvation. They had a healthy little network of flicks moving around the state, some coming up from the South, a few as far out as Iowa. A nice little market. But it was mostly run-of-the-mill stuff, you know, guys and chicks, chicks and dogs, same old same old. It was getting difficult to-what would the Wall Street Journal say? — differentiate the product. I saw an opportunity and was able to, as they say, leverage it for a more profitable market niche. Because, whether you like it or not, there’s huge demand for that stuff out there. Huge.”

  “It’s child pornography. It’s perverted and illegal.”

  “Illegal if you get caught. And the rest, well, it really ain’t for me or you to judge. You know, in hockey, you play the puck where it goes, not where you think it ought to go. Business is no different. Where there’s demand, there’s going to be supply, so you might as well supply, because people are going to get it anyway, one way or the other, just like they get their guns and cigarettes and heroin and”-he jiggled his glass-“this. Sure, my heating-and-cooling business was for shit because everybody and his brother up there was selling furnaces. Too much supply. So I found something with lots of demand and not much supply, at least not then. But remember, Gus, it takes a team to succeed. One guy can screw everything up-you ought to know that, eh? — but it takes a bunch of people working together to succeed. I had a good idea, but I had no money. And it doesn’t matter how good your idea is, you don’t have money, you’re going nowhere. Which brings us back to your daddy.”

  “My dad had no interest in your disgusting business.”