The Hanging Tree

by Bryan Gruley

Mother looked at me blankly.

  “Mom,” I said. “Did you go to the doctor?”

  “The what? Oh. Yes. I mean—yes. Yes, I did. Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday was Sunday, Mom.”

  I walked into the kitchen and stared outside at the garage. Mom’s car, a tomato red 1995 Buick LeSabre, was parked inside. Gracie had driven an old lady’s car too. It had been in a photograph on an inside page of the Pilot. After a long Two-fer-Tuesday evening at Enright’s, Soupy had nearly driven it off the Estelle Street Bridge into the Hungry River.

  I walked back into the living room.

  “What’s with all the rosemary on the pork roast?” I said. “It looks like a pine branch.”

  Mom furrowed her brow. “It’s good for you,” she said. “I saw it on that channel, the one that, you know. With all the recipes. They said it’s good for your digestion and circulation. Gets the blood flowing to your brain.”

  Ah, I thought, a home remedy for creeping senility.

  “Hey,” I said. “What kind of car did Aunt Helene drive when she used to come up from Bay City?”

  “That was years ago.”

  Long enough ago that Mom might remember.

  “A Ford, wasn’t it?” she said, brightening. “A hideous green thing.”

  “Yeah. An LTD. That’s what Gracie drove. Not quite as big, but just as green and ugly. With a big rust spot—a hole actually—in the back of the trunk lid.”

  “Why does this matter?”

  I stood there remembering the night before. My mind’s eye traveled up and down the snowbanks on either side of the road. I saw police cruisers, the ambulance, the fire truck. I did not see an ugly green Ford LTD with a rust hole in the trunk lid.

  “I would have noticed that,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “What?” Mom said.

  “Gracie’s car, it wasn’t there.”

  “Where?”

  “At the shoe tree.”

  “No?”

  “No. How the hell did she get out there? She couldn’t have walked in that storm, although I suppose—” My cell phone rang. “Hang on.” I didn’t want to miss Darlene twice. I answered. “Yeah?”

  “Beech here.”

  Philo. I wished I hadn’t picked up. “What’s up?”

  “It’s on with Haskell. Eleven fifteen.”

  “Sorry?”

  He paused. “Laird Haskell. Your appointment.”

  “Oh, right, sorry. OK. I’ll be there. You coming?”

  “Unfortunately, no, I have a meeting in Traverse City. Buzz me when you’re done, OK?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Gus.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just … just keep in mind now is really not the time to stand on principle.”

  I was too stunned to answer right away. Philo said, “Talk later,” and hung up the phone.

  “What’s wrong?” Mom said. “You look surprised.”

  Surprised wasn’t quite the word.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Where was I? Gracie’s car. That’s right. It wasn’t there. I guess—”

  “No, Gus.”

  “—she could have walked.”

  “No.”

  No.

  As a reporter for the Detroit Times, I had written plenty of stories about people killed in or by cars and trucks. Regardless of whether I saw the blood spilled across asphalt or just heard about it from a police sergeant over the phone, I felt for the dead. I felt they’d been wronged, whether it was by a faulty steering suspension or a drunk driver or even their own innocent mistake. I felt for them even though they were strangers. Or perhaps, more accurately, because they were strangers. Because I knew nothing of their flaws. How they always grabbed the last piece of French toast for themselves. How they sucked up to their bosses and lied to their wives. How they used silence to punish their children.

  But I knew all of Gracie’s flaws. Or imagined that I did.

  I thought of her sitting on Mom’s lap in that very chair, the two of them sharing a box of Jujubes and chattering about the girls at school—“phony-baloneys,” Gracie called them—who wore too much makeup and the kind of blouses that would make the boys notice their boobs, both Mom and Gracie hopelessly blind to Gracie sitting there with her eyelids painted indigo and her T-shirt tied in a fat knot tight beneath her budding bosom.

  It wasn’t that I thought Gracie somehow deserved her fate; it was more that I believed it was where she alone had aimed herself, a destination she had mapped out, consciously or not, years before. I had nothing to do with it then, so why should I have anything to do with it now?

  But there were questions I could not answer: How did she get into the tree? What did she stand on before she dropped to her death? How did she get out there? All by herself. In a storm that had torn branches from trees.

  I thought of Elvis and the others at Audrey’s snickering over their breakfast plates. Boneheads, every one of them.

  “All right, Mom,” I said.

  My phone started ringing again. I ignored it.

  “All right what?”

  “I’ll be looking into this. There must be an explanation.”

  Mom allowed herself a faint smile. She shrugged the afghan off her shoulders and stood. “You better get going then,” she said. “I’m going to put those turnips on.”

  four

  Look,” Gracie said. “Is it dead?”

  She had spotted the white-tail lying beneath the boughs of a Scotch pine in the woods near Jitters Creek. July sun dappled the deer’s back but the trees were thick enough away from the creek bed that most of the animal lay in shadow. It held its head up straight, its eight-point antlers reaching into the branches above its head. Its eyes were closed. I’d never seen a deer with its eyes closed.

  “No,” Darlene said. “It’s sleeping.”

  Gracie took a step toward the deer. I grabbed a fistful of the back of her T-shirt. “Don’t,” I said. “It might be hurt. Dad said never mess with a hurt animal.”

  “It’s just a deer,” Gracie said, yanking herself away. “What’s it going to do?”

  “It can put a hoof right through you.”

  “It’ll never catch me.”

  “Yes, it will,” Darlene said. “Deer are fast.”

  “They run like deer,” I said.

  Gracie sneered. At eleven, she was a year older than Darlene and me, and she thought she was a lot smarter.

  “Ha-ha-ha, booger face. I’ll just go jump in the creek. I’ll bet he can’t swim.” She started toward the deer again. This time Darlene grabbed her by the arm. “Wait.” Darlene bent and picked a dead tree branch off the ground. “Let’s test him first.” She took two tentative steps toward the deer and tossed the branch at its back. The deer didn’t budge.

  “See, he’s dead,” Gracie said.

  “Let me try again.” Darlene found a bigger branch lying on a bed of pinecones. She threw it end over end and it glanced off the deer’s neck.

  The deer opened its eyes. All three of us jumped back.

  “Oooooh,” Gracie cried. We scrambled behind a tree and watched. I felt my heart pumping hard. The deer’s head swiveled slowly in our direction. The rest of him did not move. His eyelids drooped.

  “He’s hurt,” I said.

  “Poor thing,” Gracie said. Again she started to move toward the animal and again I grabbed her. This time she didn’t try to pull away.

  “Gracie. That deer will kick your butt.”

  “But we have to do something.”

  “We should call the ranger,” Darlene said.

  “What ranger? There’s no ranger.”

  I let go of Gracie.

  “Your mom’s is closest,” I said. “We can mark the spot and go tell her.”

  Our bikes waited back on the two-track road that wound down through the woods. We had planned to do some bike-diving into the creek, flying down the hill over the bank into the water. But Gracie had insisted on seeing if we could find a new path through
the trees. “We can slalom,” she had said.

  Now she looked at me, then at the deer, at Darlene, at the deer again.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s leave the deer alone.”

  “Leave it alone?” Darlene said. “A minute ago you wanted to go right up and pet it. We can’t leave it alone. It’ll die.”

  Gracie shrugged. “Everything dies. I don’t want to tell my mom.”

  “She’s not going to know we were bike-diving,” I said. “We’re not even wet yet.”

  “She doesn’t give a crap anyway,” Darlene said.

  “No,” Gracie said.

  “We can’t just leave it here to die. Somebody might be able to help it.”

  “Not my mom, or her—just leave it.”

  “Her what?” Darlene said.

  “This is stupid,” I said. “We should tell someone. You’re going to be bragging about it anyway.”

  “Just wait, Gus,” Darlene said.

  I waited. The girls stood there watching the deer. Its eyes were closed again. Finally, I said, “I’m going to count my steps back to the road so the police can find it.” I turned and started walking back toward the bikes.

  “It won’t be the police,” Gracie said. “Gus.” She shouted it as I took big running steps up the hill.

  After I told Mrs. McBride that the deer was twenty-eight steps down Jitters Trail, twenty-three steps to the right, and fifty-three steps down through the trees, she picked up her phone. When Gracie heard her say, “Bucky boy,” into the phone, she punched me in the ribs.

  “Ow,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Butthole. I told you.”

  I looked at Darlene. She looked away.

  Four hours later, the deer was hanging antlers up from a joist in Gracie’s mother’s carport, dripping blood onto an oil-stained piece of cardboard. The fur around its neck was matted, and some had been worn away so that patches of pink skin showed through. One of the deer’s hind legs jutted out from its body at an unnatural angle that made me think of the day the winter before when my friend Jeff Champagne lost a skate edge and slid into the boards and broke a leg.

  I didn’t know what the smell was in the carport, but I knew I didn’t like it.

  A man named Ringles stood looking the gutted animal over. Blood smeared the “Matilda” tattoo on his left arm. He turned to Shirley McBride, who was leaning against a garbage can sipping a longneck bottle of Drewry’s.

  “See where he got me?” Buck Ringles said. He fingered a tear in the rolled-up sleeve of his flannel shirt. “Fucker jumped up like he was coming for me. Goddamn leg’s broken in two places, but the fucker would not give up.”

  “Buck.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He grinned at Gracie, Darlene, and me. “Bastard would not give up.”

  “You going to try to get a license?” Shirley said.

  Ringles rubbed the gray stubble on one of his sunken cheeks. He was two heads taller than Shirley, skinny but for the belly that sagged over his belt. He and a cousin made their livings cleaning out septic tanks. Shirley had dated them both, off and on. For the moment, she was with Buck.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “You know, you can get a license if you hit one with your car. My ex-brother-in-law did it when that doe run into him up on M-32.” Buck touched the deer’s skewed leg. “This one looks like he got hit himself.”

  “Maybe your car hit it,” Shirley said.

  Ringles grinned. “Maybe.” Then his eyes brightened. “You think the DMV’ll let me have a license for strangling a deer in self-defense?”

  They both laughed.

  We had overheard him earlier telling Mrs. McBride how the deer had died. Buck Ringles had taken his hunting knife into the woods—“just in case,” he said—but was afraid that he might inadvertently cut himself in a struggle. He crept up on the deer from behind. When the deer suddenly turned and raised itself up on its front legs—“lurched,” as Ringles put it—Ringles clambered atop its back, removed his belt, and quickly looped it around the deer’s neck, pulling one end through the buckle and yanking with all of his strength.

  When the deer lost consciousness, Ringles jumped off and found a tree branch. He brought it down on the deer’s head again and again until he heard something crack and the head lolled over, limp. My stomach went queasy as we eavesdropped from Gracie’s bedroom, hearing Buck’s voice rise as he described himself swinging the branch.

  Now, as we stood marveling at the garroted deer in Mrs. McBride’s carport, Ringles reached beneath his potbelly and whipped off his belt. “Look here,” he said. We saw specks of blood and short gray hairs stuck to the belt buckle. Ringles stepped back and whacked the deer on its rump. “That’ll last to winter,” he told Mrs. McBride. “Stew, steaks, chops, a whole damn smorgasbord. All free. And a nice little rack for over the fireplace to boot.”

  “You owe me,” Shirley said. She was smiling.

  Buck Ringles winked at her. “Don’t worry, baby. You’ll get everything you’re owed and more.”

  “Oh, I will, will I?”

  Gracie turned and stormed out.

  “Where you going?” Buck Ringles called after her.

  “She don’t know,” Shirley said. “She’s always pissed off about something. It’ll pass. How about another beer?”

  Darlene and I found Gracie in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her bed, clutching a pillow to her chest.

  “It’s boring here,” I said. “Let’s go back to Jitters.”

  Gracie gave me a look filled with anger. She turned to Darlene. “Tell him to go away.”

  “What did I do?”

  Darlene sat down next to Gracie. “He didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “But it happened,” Gracie said. “Tell him to leave.”

  “So the deer’s dead,” I said. “Everything dies, remember?”

  “Get out of here.”

  I turned to Darlene.

  “What?” she said. “It’s not my house.”

  “What if it was?”

  “Tell him.”

  Darlene looked at Gracie, then at me. “You better go.”

  “What? No. No, I’m not going. This is dumb. Come on, let’s go down—”

  “Get out,” Gracie said. “Do you hear me? I hate you.”

  I heard her say it again, louder, as the kitchen door banged shut behind me.

  five

  I waited until I got into my truck to call Darlene.

  “Esper,” she said.

  “Good morning.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “My God, Gus, I am so—” She stopped herself. I imagined her holding the cell phone close to her face, ducking away from the sheriff and the other deputies. “I am so sick of being a girl.”

  “What?”

  “Being treated like a girl.”

  “What happened?”

  “Dingus sent me back to the department.”

  “You’re at your desk?”

  “I’m handling the frigging press. We’re off the record, by the way.”

  I decided not to make a joke. The “press” would be me and the woman who went on the air for Channel Eight. I started my truck, pulled it into Mom’s driveway, threw it in reverse, and backed it onto Beach Drive.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Are they thinking—”

  “Don’t you dare take their side.”

  “I’m not. I just thought—”

  “I know what you thought. You thought, This is my oldest friend, maybe I shouldn’t be working on this.”

  “No.” I really hadn’t. Yet.

  “Well, that’s what Dingus said. ‘Maybe you should take a little time, Darlene.’ He can kiss my buns.”

  Dingus, I thought, might also have worried that she would tell me things she shouldn’t. He didn’t always mind me knowing things, but he liked to be the one who decided what I knew or didn’t and when.

  “Maybe he’ll reconsider.”

  “I’ll make him.�
��

  I let the conversation pause as I veered onto Main Street and passed the old marina, Repicky’s, Enright’s, Sally’s, Audrey’s, and crossed Estelle where the businesses gave way to two-story houses on either side of the road, their sprawling front porches buried in snow.

  “How are you really?”

  “I’m pissed.”

  “I know, but, I mean, you know, with Gracie and all.”

  “Are you going to write a story?”

  “I have to write something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Are you handling the press now?”

  She softened her voice. “Like what, Gussy?”

  The houses fell behind me and fields of white opened beyond both road shoulders. An occasional fence post knotted with barbed wire poked through the drifts. A new cell tower jutted into the sky high above the tree line.

  “I don’t know. If I had to write it this minute, I don’t know how I could write anything but apparent suicide. But I have yet to hear from Dingus—”

  “Screw Dingus.”

  “—and you cut me off last night and then you left me that weird voice mail this morning. Luckily, I don’t have to write this minute, but I will a little later today, so any help you can give me …”

  “Hang on,” Darlene said. I imagined her looking around her office to make sure no one could overhear.

  I pulled the truck to the side of the road, not far from where I had parked it the night before. Down the road, the lights of police cruisers flickered near the shoe tree.

  As far as I knew, a pair of my old hockey skates still hung from one of the higher branches. When I was still a very young man, Darlene had brought along a paper grocery sack on one of our dates and insisted I take her to the tree. It was the summer before I left Starvation Lake. Parked near the tree in my truck we made love; I remember searching for her eyes in the dark.

  Darlene pulled her jeans on and took the paper bag from the flatbed and beckoned to me. From the sack she produced a pair of her softball spikes, still flecked with dried mud, and a pair of my skates she’d gotten from my mother. “Now,” she said. I climbed as high as I could and hung them next to each other on the only branch I could find without shoes already hanging from it. Perched on a branch, clinging to the tree trunk, I looked down and felt glad to hear her laugh and see the sweat on her forehead glistening in the moonlight.