Winter of the Wolf Moon am-2

by Steve Hamilton

  “Here’s to our new goalie,” he said, raising a glass of Pepsi. We had pushed a couple of tables together in the back of the place. His eight teammates were all there, all quietly working on their second beers.

  “Stop right there,” I said. “You said this was a one-night gig, remember?”

  “Yeah, but you were great, Alex. You gotta keep playing. Do you realize that those guys had a perfect record before tonight? We just tied them!”

  If his teammates shared his enthusiasm, they didn’t show it. I looked at each of them, one by one. A couple you’d know were Indians the moment you saw them. The rest were like Vinnie-a lot of mixed blood. Maybe you’d see it in the cheekbones. Or the dark, careful eyes.

  They were all drinking. Most if not all would get drunk that night. More than one would get to a state well past drunk. I knew it bothered Vinnie. “I feel guilty sometimes,” he once told me, “living off the reservation. A lot of my tribe, they think I abandoned them. When I was growing up, I could go down the street and walk in any house I wanted to. Just walk right in. Open the refrigerator, make a sandwich. Go turn the TV on. Everybody was my family.”

  He never really told me why he left the reservation. Maybe he wanted to buy his own house instead of living on land owned by the tribe. Or all that family togetherness he was talking about, maybe it was just too much.

  He lives in Paradise, right down the road from me. He’s my closest neighbor, maybe my closest friend next to Jackie. He deals blackjack at the Bay Mills Casino when he isn’t doing his Red Sky hunting guide thing. “You know the difference between an Indian blackjack dealer and a white blackjack dealer?” he once asked me. “This is going to sound like a stereotype, but it’s true. The white blackjack dealer never gambles. Those guys in Vegas? They see a thousand people playing blackjack all night long, maybe fifty of them walk away big winners, right? You think those dealers are gonna cash their paychecks and play blackjack with it? I’ve got a couple of cousins who lose every dime, every week, guaranteed. They cash their check, maybe they buy some food and beer, then they go right to the casino and lose the rest of it. Every fucking week, Alex. And nothing I do or say is gonna change it.”

  Vinnie sat at the table, staring at a moose head on the wall. Nobody said anything. Just a quiet frozen winter night at the Horns Inn.

  Until the blue team showed up.

  They busted into the place with a lot of noise and a gust of arctic air that rattled the glasses on our table. “Goddamn,” one of them said, “will ya look at this place?”

  They pushed a few tables together at the other end of the room. There were nine men and nine women. Most of them had leather bomber jackets on. Even with the fur collars, they couldn’t be warm enough.

  My new buddy the center went up to the bar, told the man to start the pitchers coming. He had one of those hockey haircuts, cut close on the sides and long in the back.

  “So who the hell is that guy?” I finally said.

  “Who, the center?”

  “Yeah, Mr. Personality.”

  “That’s Lonnie Bruckman. Some piece of work, eh?”

  “He always play high?”

  Vinnie laughed. “You noticed, huh?”

  “Hard not to.”

  “Guy can skate, though, can’t he? I think he played for one of the farm teams somewhere. Most of those guys on his team are ringers. Old teammates from Canada. He brings in a new guy every week.”

  Bruckman took a couple pitchers back to the tables. When he came back for more, he spotted us. Our lucky night.

  “Hey, it’s the Indians!” he said. As he came and stood over us, I got a good look at him without the hockey gear on. Whatever he was on, he had just taken another dip, probably in the car on the way over here. Coke or speed, maybe both. “Nice game, boys,” he said. “Can I bring a couple of pitchers over?”

  Nobody said anything.

  He looked at Vinnie’s glass. “What ya got there, LeBlanc? Rum and Coke? Lemme buy you one.”

  “It’s Pepsi,” Vinnie said.

  “You’re kidding me,” Bruckman said. “An Indian that doesn’t drink?” He laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d heard in weeks.

  “We’re all set here,” Vinnie said. “Thanks just the same.”

  “Hey, old man,” he said to me, “that was a nice save you made on me. You took away my hat trick, you know that?”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  “I’ll get you next time.”

  “Won’t be a next time,” I said. “I was just filling in tonight.”

  “You gotta play again,” he said. “You’re good. Believe me, I know. I played in the Juniors in Oshawa. I played on the same line as Eric Lindros before he went up. I would’a gone up myself if I wasn’t an American.”

  There it is, I thought. There’s always an excuse. All the guys I played ball with, and most of them never went to the major leagues, of course. Maybe one in a hundred guys who starts out in the rookie leagues ever makes it. The other ninety-nine, they all have a story. Coach never gave me a chance. Hurt my knee. Didn’t get enough at-bats. It’s never just “I wasn’t quite good enough.”

  This American thing, though, that was a new one, because of course you’re only going to hear that one from a hockey player. I should have let it go. Just nodded at the guy, smiled, let him stand there making a jackass of himself, laughed at him later. But I couldn’t help it.

  “That’s a shame,” I said. “They should really let Americans play in the NHL. It’s just not fair. Ain’t that right, Vinnie?”

  “It’s gotta be a conspiracy,” Vinnie said.

  “How many Americans are there?” I said. “I bet we could count them on one hand. Let’s see… John LeClair, Brian Leetch, Chris Chelios…”

  “Doug Weight,” Vinnie said. “Mike Modano, Tony Amonte.”

  “Keith Tkachuk,” I said. “Pat LaFontaine, Adam Deadmarsh.”

  “Jeremy Roenick, Gary Suter.”

  “Shawn McEachern, Joel Otto.”

  “Bryan Berard, is he American?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Derian Hatcher, Kevin Hatcher. Are they brothers?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But they’re both American.”

  “Mike Richter in goal,” Vinnie said.

  “And John Vanbiesbrouck.”

  “All right already,” Bruckman said. “You guys are real comedians. I didn’t know Indians could be so funny.”

  “We forgot Brett Hull!” Vinnie said.

  Bruckman grabbed Vinnie’s shoulder. “I said all right already.” His smile was gone.

  “Get your hand off me,” Vinnie said.

  “You’re making fun of me and I don’t fucking appreciate it,” he said. “Last guy who made fun of me lost most of his teeth.”

  The whole place got quiet. His teammates were all looking at us, as well as the men at the bar. There were maybe a dozen of them. They had all been watching the Red Wings game on the television. The bartender had a shot glass in one hand, a towel in the other. He didn’t look happy.

  “Bruckman,” I said. I looked him in the eyes. “Walk away.”

  He held my eyes for a long moment. He was sizing me up, calculating his chances. I could only hope the chemicals racing around in his brain didn’t make him decide something stupid, because I sure as hell didn’t want to have to fight him without skates and pads on.

  “You were lucky,” he finally said. “I should have had the hat trick. You never even saw that puck.”

  “Whatever you say, Bruckman. Just walk away.”

  “Look at you guys,” he said. “You Indians are so pathetic. I don’t know why they ever let you have those casinos.”

  The bartender showed up with a baseball bat. “You guys gonna knock this shit off or am I going to call the police?”

  “Don’t bother,” Bruckman said. “We’re leaving. Too many drunken Indians in this place.”

  He gave me one last look before he w
ent back to his table. I didn’t feel like telling him I was really a white man just like him.

  When they had all put their leather jackets back on, knocked over a few chairs, muttered a few more obscenities, and then left without paying for their beer, the place got quiet again. Vinnie just sat there looking at the door. His friends all sat there looking at the table or at the floor. I tried to think of something to say to break the spell, but nothing came to me.

  “You know what bothers me the most?” Vinnie finally said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Those women that were with them? One of them, I know her.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I grew up with her,” he said. “On the reservation.”

  It was a little after one in the morning when I left. Vinnie thanked me for playing with his team. Most of the team thanked me. A couple of them were already too far into their beer glasses.

  I went up to the bar, apologized to the man for whatever part I almost had in fighting on the premises.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If I don’t have to read about it in the paper tomorrow, then it never happened.”

  I threw a couple bills on the bar. There were two men sleeping on their bar stools, their heads buried in their arms. The only difference was the man on the left was snoring and the man on the right wasn’t. I didn’t think either of them was an Indian. Just two white men who come into the place every single night, I would bet, and drink themselves unconscious. Somebody once told me that 3 percent of the people who live in Michigan live in the Upper Peninsula, and that they drink 28 percent of the alcohol. That’s not just the Indians drinking all that. And yet I didn’t hear anybody telling me what a disgrace it was, those white men, they’re all just drunken degenerates.

  “Hey,” the bartender said, “aren’t you that private investigator? The one that was working for Uttley?”

  “I was,” I said.

  “Where’d he go, anyway? I never see him anymore.”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said. It was the truth.

  “He had a tab going here,” the man said. “He never paid it.”

  “How much is it?” I said. I pulled my wallet back out.

  He held his hands up. “It’s between him and me,” he said. “I’m not gonna let you pay it. If you ever see him, though, you tell him he owes me.”

  “If I see him, I’ll tell him.” The thought of it made me smile a little. Just a little.

  When I stepped outside, the cold wind off the lake slapped me across the face. I closed my eyes and held my gloves against my face. When the wind died down, I took a deep breath. The air had a smell and a weight to it that held the threat of more snow.

  I looked out across the St. Marys River. It had been frozen solid for almost a month. The locks were shut down for the winter. The next freighter wouldn’t pass through them until March at the earliest. From the other shore the lights of Canada beckoned to me. I could walk right across the river if I wanted to. No customs, no toll. I wouldn’t be the first to do it. There were stories of men who left their wives and families behind them and walked across the ice to a new life in another country.

  I started the truck, got the heater going full blast. It took a good ten minutes to take the edge off the cold. The clear plastic that was covering my passenger side window didn’t help matters any. I made a mental note to call the auto glass place again the next day to see if the new window was in yet. They told me two to three weeks when they ordered it for me. That was almost three months ago.

  I drove across town in the dim light of street lights and barroom windows. I had the plow hanging on the front of the truck, a good eight hundred pounds of cinderblock in the back for traction. The roads were clear of snow that night, but I knew that wouldn’t last long. It never did. Not until spring.

  When I got onto the highway, it took a long while to get the truck up to fifty-five miles per hour. I could feel the engine struggling against the weight. I-75 to M-28, west through the Hiawatha National Forest to 123. I had driven it so many times I didn’t even have to think about it. I had the road to myself, pine trees loaded with snow on either side. The wind whistling through the plastic. When I finally get this window fixed, I thought, the sudden quiet is going to drive me out of my mind.

  There’s one main road in Paradise, with one side road that takes you west to the Tahquamenon Falls State Park. The intersection has a blinking red light. When they change that to a regular stop light, that’s when we’ll know we’ve hit the big time. For now it’s just a gas station, three bars including the Glasgow Inn, four gift shops and a dozen little motels for the tourists in the summer, hunters in the fall and snowmobilers in the winter. Plus a lot of cabins scattered throughout the woods.

  The lights were on at the Glasgow Inn, but I passed it by. I don’t have to stop in there every single night, after all. After eighty or ninety nights in a row, a man is entitled to a night off.

  A mile north of the intersection, there’s an old logging road that heads west into the forest. The first cabin on the left is Vinnie’s. I knew he wouldn’t be home yet-he was doing his designated driver routine for his teammates, dropping them off at the Bay Mills Reservation, and probably having to talk to a hundred tribal relatives who still didn’t understand why he moved away. He’d be lucky to make it home by daybreak.

  The next six cabins were mine. My father built them in the sixties and seventies, one per summer until he got too sick to build them anymore. When I left the police force, I came up here figuring I’d stay a little while and then sell them. That was fourteen and a half years ago.

  Maybe Sylvia was right. Maybe I was hiding from the world.

  I didn’t want to think about it. I was tired. My muscles were already starting to stiffen up in the cold. For that night I wanted only a warm bed. Beyond that simple desire, there were only two other things I could ask for. My first wish was not to wake up the next morning feeling terrible. A little soreness I could take. Just let me get up and walk without screaming. My second wish was not to have to deal with that Bruckman clown ever again. Guys like that bring out the worst in me. Just don’t let me run into him again.

  Just those two tiny requests. Surely that’s not too much to ask for in a man’s life.

  Is it?

  CHAPTER THREE

  I woke up the next morning. I tried to lift my head. Bad idea. I winced, held my breath, regrouped, tried to push myself up to a sitting position. Another bad idea.

  Good Almighty God in Heaven, I thought. I’ve really done it this time.

  I tried to stand. I failed. There are certain muscles that get a real workout when you crouch down into the ready position, when you move your body from side to side. I know this because I used those muscles every day when I was playing ball. The hip flexors. The quadriceps. Now those same muscles were letting me know how unhappy they were. Twenty-four years of not using them and then last night.

  I grabbed on to a chair and pulled myself up. Oh, and the back muscles, tight as piano wire. The hamstrings. The groin muscles. I am such an idiot. If I ever get my strength back I’m going to strangle Vinnie.

  A shower. Hot water on my body. I pointed myself at the bathroom. Nice and easy, no sudden movements. Take a step. God that hurts. Another step. God that hurts. I made my way across the cabin, the wood floor cold and unforgiving under my feet. Through the window I could see that it was snowing softly.

  I got to the shower somehow, turned it on and waited for it to get hot. I looked at myself in the mirror. Forty-eight years old is not supposed to feel like this. This is ridiculous.

  I let out a scream as I stepped into the shower. There was a little rim on the bottom of the shower I had to step over, which meant actually lifting my leg into the air. I let the water pound on me for a good thirty minutes. When I was done I felt a little better. I cleared that rim like it was nothing.

  I put some clothes on. Once I got the pants on, life got easier. I shaved, made
some breakfast, sat at the table and looked out the window while I finished my coffee. It looked like about four inches of new snow. Around here, that qualifies as scattered flurries.

  I went out and got the truck going, ran the snowplow down my road. I headed west first, deeper into the forest. I lived in the first cabin, the one I helped my father build in the summer of 1968. The second cabin was a little bigger. He built that one himself the next year. It was empty now. The man from downstate had called to cancel at the last minute.

  The third cabin was a little bigger, and so on until the sixth and last cabin at the end of the road, each one marking another summer of my father’s life. At this time of year, the renters were all snowmobilers. You could hear them during the day, roaring up and down the trails on the state land. I have this thing about snowmobiles. The noise, that oily blue smoke. And the people who drive them, wrapped up in those snowmobile suits, looking like the Michelin man, most of them full of beer and schnapps. If the wind is right you can even hear them out there in the middle of the night, riding those stupid machines. That’s when the accidents happen. Every week, you’ll read about somebody driving into a tree or falling through the ice. The one I remember most was the man who went off the trail onto a farm, ran right under an old wire horse fence. Imagine the poor guy riding behind him who had to pick up that helmet with the head still in it.

  “You really hate snowmobiles, don’t you?” Jackie once asked me.

  “Yes, Jackie. I admit it. I hate snowmobiles.”

  “Did you know that every motel in town is booked up two years in advance during the wintertime? It’s not the summer people who keep this place going, Alex. And it’s not the hunters anymore. It’s the snowmobilers. Who do you rent out your cabins to this time of year?”

  “Birdwatchers,” I said. “Cross-country skiers. Guys with snowshoes.”