Starvation Lake (16 page)

The Bonnie started right up when I turned the key. The radio reception wasn’t good, but I could make out the voice of a news announcer from WJR, the Detroit station that carried Tiger and Red Wing games. I switched it off and pushed an eight-track tape into the player Dad had installed beneath the dashboard. Even though I never drove the Bonnie, as a teenager I’d liked to sit in it alone and listen to Dad’s music. My father loved rock and roll. His favorite was Bob Seger. Dad and his younger cousin, Eddie, had seen Seger and his band live at a club in Ann Arbor in 1968, two days before Eddie went off to army boot camp. For weeks the Seger show was all Dad could talk about. Then came word that a rocket had torn Eddie’s chopper from the sky over a jungle crawling with Vietcong. Dad got quiet after that. He took that second job. He found out about the cancer. Through it all, he played Seger on the record player in the house, over and over, the same record, the same song.

I pushed a button on the eight-track and played it:
I just want a simple answer why it is I’ve got to die / I’m a simple-minded guy / two plus two is on my mind.

The bass throbbed, the guitar wailed, Seger howled. I turned it up and closed my eyes, recalling a summer Sunday afternoon before Eddie was killed, before the cancer, before Dad got quiet. Dad was working on our dock. I was playing army with Soupy and some other kids. I came running around the house wearing a plastic helmet and carrying a toy rifle. Dad was waiting by the birch tree. Sweat stuck his T-shirt to the skin at his collarbone. “Hey, Gus,” he said. “Want to play some ball?” I pulled up for just a second and said, “Not now.” Hurrying past him, I glimpsed just enough of the look on his face to wish I’d said yes. But I kept running. Every time I thought about it, I wished I could go back and tell him yes. Whenever I visited the Bonnie, I made myself think about it.

The song ended. I opened my eyes. “Two plus two is on
my
mind,” I said aloud, and I had a little laugh. Wind had dusted the hood of the Bonnie with snow. I turned off the car, brushed the snow off the hood with my sleeve, and closed up the garage.

   As I pulled into Mom’s driveway, I saw her working in the kitchen of the little yellow house she and Dad had built when Starvation was not a vacation destination and a dry-waller and his wife could afford a hundred feet of lakefront property. She was making gravy when I walked in. I put my arm around her and pecked her on the cheek. The aroma of her perfume mixed with that of the pot roast simmering in onions. “Smells good,” I said.

She poked me in the ribs with her spoon handle. “Could you be sweet and get me a gravy boat? In the china cabinet, bottom shelf, back-left corner.”

She was talking too fast. “A what?”

“A gravy boat, dear. Gravy boat.”

In the living room I looked through the big glass sliding door at the still, white lake. I’d always thought the lake looked bigger and more dangerous in the winter. The china cabinet stood along a wall filled with photographs of Mom and Dad and me, and framed needlepoint designs Mom had made, including one of a goaltender in his ready crouch. I took the gravy boat into the kitchen. Mom hummed off-key as she worked. She was glad to have me home, despite the unpleasant circumstance of my return. She hadn’t asked much about it. But then she’d never wanted me to go to Detroit in the first place.

“You had a busy week,” she said as she ladled gravy from the steaming pan. “But, Gussy, how could you put that woman in your story? Here, let’s sit.” She set the gravy down on the kitchen table next to the platter heaped with beef and potatoes and carrots. She sat, as always, at the end near the kitchen and I sat to her right. Across from me a place was set, as always, for my father.

“What woman?” I said.

“Oh, you know, that whatshername, that nurse. Gloria. Gloria Lowinski.”

That was the nurse in Tillie’s Monica story. So somebody had actually read it. I speared a chunk of pot roast. “What about her?”

“Dear,” my mother said, as if it were obvious, “Gloria Lowinski is the biggest blabbermouth in town. She talks about her patients at Dr. Johnson’s office, for God’s sakes. She doesn’t need to be encouraged.”

“Who’s Dr. Johnson?”

Mom crooked an eyebrow at me as she spooned applesauce onto our plates. “A gynecologist, dear. Gloria is his nurse. I used to go there until, well, you don’t want to know, but suffice to say that Gloria’s lips were flapping and I finally had to switch to Dr. Schmidt in Kalkaska.”

“Oh.”

We ate quietly for a few minutes. I wanted to eat until I was too full and then go take a nap in the living room. I couldn’t, of course. I had a paper to get out. As I chewed I gazed across the table at my father’s setting. After Dad died, Coach Blackburn had sat there for Sunday dinners, until he stopped coming.

“So,” I said, “what do you think of the snowmobile thing?”

Either she didn’t hear me or she ignored me. “Are you still playing your season, honey?”

“It’s almost over.”

“You sound like you’re glad. It used to be I’d have to go out and drag you off the ice. Remember how your toes got frostbite? If you don’t like to play anymore, why do you play?”

“I do like to play, Mom.” Once I got myself to the rink and pulled my gear on and got on the ice, I usually did like to play, just like I once did. “I have a lot on my mind.”

“If you say so.”

“So what did you think about this snowmobile that washed up?”

“Not much, really.”

That wasn’t like my mother. “They say it’s Coach’s.”

“Well, I don’t see how that’s possible when Jack died right out there on the lake. I stood at that window and watched all those people gawking at the hole in the ice. Unless you believe those silly stories about tunnels under the lake.”

“Sometimes I wish I did.”

“How’s the roast? Good? I left it on too long.”

“It’s great. You know, I’ve had to deal with Dingus a bit. He’s kind of weird.”

“Oh, tell me about it. Dingus hasn’t been right for years. He never leaves that office. Does he have a bunk in there or something?”

“Didn’t notice. Has he always been this way?”

“You were still down in Detroit, son, but no, Dingus used to be out and about like anybody else when he was with Barbara. You’d see them at the Legion dances and at the Avalon, all over the place. Let’s face it, honey, Dingus isn’t the prettiest kitten in the litter, but he and Barbara made a very cute couple. He adored her.”

“I guess so. He still keeps her picture in his office.”

Mom shook her head. “Barbara. Now there’s another one. What that girl was thinking, I will never know. Don’t get me wrong, I love Barbara, I just—I never understood how she could just go off with somebody else.”

“Somebody else who?”

Mom stiffened a little; she knew she’d said too much.

“It doesn’t matter, dear.”

“Come on. Who’d she go off with?”

“She didn’t really—I mean she didn’t actually marry somebody else.”

“OK, but who?”

Mom started to get up. “I have cherry pie.”

“Sit down, Mom.”

She gave me one of those looks that said this was something I didn’t need to know. And then of course I knew.

“Whoa,” I said. “Coach?”

“Oh, my gosh, who cares? How did we get on this subject?”

“I knew Coach was the ladies’ man, all right, but I didn’t know about Barbara. Man, I missed all the fun when I was downstate. So Dingus divorced her?”

She sighed. “No, he didn’t divorce her. He wanted her back. She wanted Jack. But Jack wasn’t marrying anybody.”

“And where’s she now?”

“Last I heard, the IGA in Sandy Cove. Or maybe Kalkaska.”

“Wow. Just like that.” I scooped more potatoes onto my plate. “You dated Coach for a bit, Mom. What did you think?”

“No, I wouldn’t call it
dating.
We went to a show once or twice, dinner a couple of times. No big deal, really. Now, your friend Tillie, she actually
dated
dated him.”

I remembered seeing Tillie at a few of our games. She still had most of her beauty then. “Weren’t they just drinking buddies?” I said.

“Well, maybe so. Tillie is everyone’s drinking buddy, isn’t she?” Mom stood. “Would you like ice cream on your pie?”

“Sure.”

She went into the kitchen. I heard the microwave start, the freezer door open and shut, a fork clink. My mother was never this quiet. She came back and set the pie and a cup of coffee in front of me. “Thanks, Mom,” I said. I nodded at the chair across the table. “Remember when Coach used to come to dinner?”

“Of course. The man was a garbage disposal.”

“Do you remember how he always used to talk about coaching in Canada, how great the kids were up there?”

“Vaguely, dear. I never paid much attention to all that hockey stuff.”

Yes, she did, I thought. She was always asking whether the parents in Canada were as obnoxious as the ones in Michigan. “You don’t remember him saying anything about taking a year off from coaching, do you?”

“I remember him talking about all those championships he almost won.” Four fantastic years, I thought. “Your mother’s an old lady, Gussy. It’s all a blur now.”

I set my fork down. “Mom. I know we’ve never really talked about this.”

“About what?”

“About the night Coach died.”

I’d asked her only once before. It was the evening of Coach’s funeral. We were sitting in the back of the American Legion hall. Drunken former River Rats and their dads were toasting Coach at a microphone. At first Mom pretended she hadn’t heard my question. I asked again. She patted my knee. “Let’s listen, dear.” I persisted. “Didn’t you hear me?” she said. I thought she was going to cry. I let it go.

Now she said, “That was so long ago. Who cares?”

“It’s my job. His snowmobile washed up on the wrong lake.”

“I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding and Dingus will clear it up.”

“No, it’s not a misunderstanding. Help me out here.”

She sipped her coffee. “It was bingo night. Or maybe bowling night—sweet Lord, my memory’s gone—I just remember I was sleeping like a baby, so I must’ve been out late. Leo must’ve been banging a while before I woke up.”

“He was at the slider?”

“No.” She waved toward the kitchen. “He came in the back door. I couldn’t make him out at first, because there was something bright shining in my eyes—the headlights on his snowmobile—and I was half asleep. Scared the devil out of me.”

If Leo really had come to the back door, then he would have come from the road behind the house. But why wouldn’t he have come directly from the scene of the accident and crossed the lake and come up the hill to the sliding door facing the lake?

“And he came in the house?”

“Yes. I remember he had liquor on his breath because it turned my stomach. And he was loud, which wasn’t like Leo. He said we had to call the police, call nine one one, Jack drowned in the lake. He kept saying—forgive my language, Lord—‘Goddamn Jack, Goddamn Jack,’ over and over, and he seemed so angry.” She looked at me uncertainly. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“That he was angry.”

Why would she wonder about that now?

“Sure,” I said.

She pointed at the living room. “He came in here. I tried to make him sit down, but he just stood at the window like this”—she wrapped her arms around herself—“staring out at the lake until the police came. Dingus was with them. They went out to the lake.”

“Was he wet?”

“Who?”

“Leo. Was he wet? At least his shoulders and his head? Were there icicles in his hair?”

“Icicles? Why?”

“Because he just tried to pull Coach out of the lake.”

“Well then, I guess he must have. I don’t remember.”

“Did you give him a towel?”

“Are you interviewing me, son?”

“Mom. You were here. I just want to know.”

“What good is it going to do, Gussy?”

I finished the last of my pie. “God, that’s good,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, dear.”

“You know, I went back and reread the
Pilot
stories from back then. I didn’t see your name in there. How did you keep the reporters away?”

“I didn’t, dear. Henry Bridgman called and called and I think he even stopped by one night. But the police asked me to keep quiet because they were investigating. I did what I was told.”

“Dingus said to keep quiet?”

“Not Dingus. He was just a deputy. Sheriff Spardell.”

“And what about the towel?”

She looked into her coffee cup. “Gus, that was so long ago. Why would I be worrying about—”

A flurry of loud knocks came at the kitchen door. Mom turned. “Who could that be?”

Through the kitchen window I saw Joanie’s red Honda Civic parked on the road shoulder. “I’ll get it,” I said.

Joanie stood on the back porch in a hooded sweatshirt, her hands stuffed inside the belly pocket. I stepped outside. “Where’s your coat?” I said. “It’s freezing.”

“I knew it.”

“You knew what?”

“There’s a bullet hole.”

“What?”

“There’s a bullet hole in the snowmobile. That’s what the forensics were about. A bullet hole. Somebody shot Blackburn.”

I glanced to make sure Mom wasn’t standing behind me. “Keep it down,” I said. “How do you know?”

She hesitated just long enough to make me resent her for not trusting me. “A department source,” she said.

D’Alessio, I thought. Always working it. “OK. Good. Go back and start writing. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“This is huge.”

“Yep. Good work.”

I knew how she felt, knowing she had a juicy story. But I just felt empty and stupid, like I’d never known anything at all.

Inside, Mom was at the sink, scraping the roasting pan. “Sorry, Mom, duty calls,” I said. “Dinner was fantastic.”

She turned to hug me. She held the squeeze a little longer than usual. “I wish you could stay. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

As I started my truck, I thought, She remembered Leo’s liquor breath but not a towel because she didn’t give him a towel, because she didn’t need to.