Starvation Lake (36 page)

“Soupy, why?” I said.

Catledge pressed against me. “Don’t make me, Gus.”

“I got to talk to you, man,” Soupy said.

Catledge shoved me back another step. “Now, Gus,” he said. “You want the cell next to his?”

I let Catledge push me back and away. The paramedics strapped Soupy down and lifted him into the ambulance.

“Sorry, man,” Soupy cried. “I’m sorry about, about—fuck, man, my fingers burn!”

As the ambulance pulled away, a bright white light shined on us from across the horseshoe. Tawny Jane and her camerman were walking up. Dingus turned to Joanie and me, the fire raging behind him, his face flushed crimson, his mustache drooping with a crust of ice. “Go home,” he said.

   We rode to town in silence. I let Joanie out at her car in front of the
Pilot.

“Long day,” she said.

“Yeah. Good job. The Blake story’s going to look great.”

“Thanks.”

I parked in back. I pulled Dad’s Bell & Howell out of the backseat and lugged it into the
Pilot,
where I retrieved the boxes of film I’d found in Delbert’s files.

   Upstairs, I poured myself a jar of water and drew the shades. From the wall facing the kitchen counter, I removed two pictures—one of my parents sunning on a pontoon boat, my mother pregnant in a pink one-piece swimsuit; the other of my old dogs, Fats and Blinky, asleep on a rug. I set the projector on the kitchen counter, facing the wall. It took me a while to make it work. I got a little thrill of accomplishment seeing the bulb flash a white square on the wall. But I discovered I did not have a take-up reel. Probably dropped it when I slipped on Mom’s basement steps. I toweled out my sink and plugged the drain, figuring I’d run the film into the sink and untangle it later if need be.

I inserted the reel marked F/1280/SL/R4. I assumed it was from December of 1980, when I had just turned seventeen. The projector whirred and rattled. A grainy black-and-white image blinked on the wall. I saw our indoor rink viewed from the bleachers, where Leo must have been sitting. On the ice, the River Rats—my River Rats—were practicing. Most of the skaters huddled near the penalty boxes on the opposite side of the ice. Five others stood spread out between the blue lines at center ice. I saw myself standing just outside the blue line on the right of the screen, looking too skinny, even in my goalie gear, to be playing hockey. The shaggy head of Blackburn’s mutt, Pocket, poked up from the bench behind the boards.

In the middle of the ice, Blackburn, in skates, hockey gloves, and a blue-and-gold Rats sweatsuit, pointed and waved and shouted directions. The film was soundless, but I could tell he was drilling us in the Rat Trap. He held a puck over his head and skated across the blue line on the left, where he set the puck down on a face-off dot. Then he went to each of the five players and showed him exactly where he was supposed to be. It was hard to make out individual players. I recognized Teddy, who didn’t look skinny at all, and Soupy, with his hair splayed across his shoulders. When Blackburn wasn’t looking, Soupy would turn and mug for the camera. Blackburn finally caught him, of course, and ordered us all to the end of the rink for sprints.

I didn’t recall this particular scene, but it happened often enough. As we lined up to skate, I saw Boynton barking at Soupy, who shrugged and said something back, probably something like, “Twelve-pack on this one, boy-O?” Sometimes I wondered if Soupy deliberately got us into trouble so he could win his Friday night ration of beer from Teddy. I watched us sprint. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. Blackburn presided at the blue line, stick at his side, whistle in his mouth. So many times he’d watched from there while we stood shoulder to shoulder between sprints, leaning on our sticks, gulping at the Freon air.

As Blackburn raised an arm to call for another sprint, the screen went blank white again. I looked at the projector. The spinning reel was still nearly full of film. Could that be all? Maybe Leo didn’t want to waste film on sprints. I waited. For a few seconds, the screen went black and the room dark. Then the wall began to flicker with jagged fragments of light. The white square reappeared, followed by a fuzzy new image.

It focused. The camera was now peering into a room. The frame contained a shadow frame within, as though the camera had been aimed through a window. At the center of the picture stood a pool table, covered with a blanket. On the wall behind it hung a bar sign advertising Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon. “What the hell?” I said aloud. I knew this place. Coach usually didn’t have enough out-of-towners to fill the third billet, so he made part of it into a playroom. This was it.

The body of a woman moved languidly into the picture, her head cut off by the upper limit of the frame. Her hair, the color of day-old snow, cascaded down to the tops of her bare shoulder blades. The rest of her was covered in a bedsheet she held in a bunch at her breasts. She stood with her back to the camera, obscuring most of the picture. The way she’d strutted slowly into the picture, then held herself there, as if on display, suggested to me that she wanted to be there, that she belonged. Behind her someone else entered the frame. I spied enough of a forearm to think it was male. His head, too, was cut off by the frame. She let her arms fall to her sides. The sheet fell away. On her bottom’s right cheek I glimpsed a tattoo, too small to see clearly, though I thought it might be a four-leaf clover. She gestured toward the pool table. The man seemed frozen in place. The woman moved toward the table, leaving the frame. Now I saw that the man was not a man but a boy. His face still wasn’t visible, but I knew his chest and shoulders and the way his boxers drooped on his thin hips.

It was Soupy.

The woman reentered the frame. She was crawling naked across the pool table toward Soupy, her head down, her hair hiding the corner of her face included in the frame. Soupy turned toward her, tentative, and hooked his thumbs inside the waistband of his boxers. Her head snapped up then, the hair flipping back, but the camera slid downward and she was headless again. She slithered across the table, took Soupy by his shoulders, and pulled him toward her.

He obeyed with the shy reluctance of a child. He lay motionlessly on his back while the woman slipped his boxers off and mounted him. I wanted to turn away but instead I reached into the drawer next to my head and grabbed a pen and notebook and began taking notes. The woman pressed the heels of her palms flat against his belly and writhed, her hair tossing back and forth on her shoulders. There still was no sound, but the way she moved suggested she was enjoying herself. Soupy’s arms lay still at his sides as he gazed blankly at the ceiling.

A man entered the frame from the right, fully clothed. His face was clearly visible. It was Jack Blackburn. Soupy closed his eyes. The woman continued to grind against him while Blackburn propped his thighs against the side of the table behind the woman, over Soupy’s bare feet. I knew what was going to happen then. It had happened to Brendan Blake. Blackburn unzipped his pants and took his erect penis in both hands. Now I closed my eyes, though only briefly. With the celluloid piling up in the sink, I felt it was my duty to compile a record. I forced myself to watch as Blackburn masturbated. He ejaculated on Soupy’s pale feet. The toes curled. Soupy twisted his face away from the camera.

I thought of him in our dressing room, jamming his too-small skates onto his feet, and I jumped up and lurched around and leaned into the sink, trying to keep from vomiting. My breathing echoed on the stainless-steel walls. Beneath my face the unspooled film was heaped like dead snakes in a sewer. I pushed away and stumbled into the bathroom, where I flicked on the light and splashed cold water on my face and the back of my neck. Staring into the mirror, I drew deep breaths and watched the water trickling down my cheeks and off the stitches still in my jaw. I wiped my face and brought the towel with me into the kitchen.

For the next two hours I filled most of the notebook with everything I saw on the three reels. I had to stop now and then to collect myself. On every reel, scenes of River Rat practices were spliced with scenes of Soupy in the playroom. The woman was in some of the scenes, some not. Blackburn performed in every one. The level of light and the camera angle varied slightly from one reel to the next, suggesting that there had been numerous sessions. In one scene a whiskey bottle and a glass appeared on a shelf in the background. In another, Blackburn’s little dog, Pocket, jumped onto the table and licked Soupy’s face; Soupy, showing the only emotion I saw in any of the films, angrily swatted the dog away. I scribbled it all down.

I concluded Blackburn had placed the camera behind a mirror on the wall—a one-way mirror, obviously. Was Leo behind the camera? Or had Blackburn set it up and let it run while he participated? The wall was common to a bunkroom. For his last two years on the Rats, Teddy had stayed in that bunkroom alone while other out-of-town players shared the other billets. Imagining Teddy there aroused my nausea again, and then a searing wave of sympathy I’d never before felt for him.

Each time a reel finished, I lifted the snarl of celluloid from the sink and packed it gently in a brown paper bag that I then stashed in a Cheerios box in the back of my pantry. After stowing the last film, I unplugged the projector, wrapped the cord around it, and stuffed it under my bed. Then I lay down without taking my clothes off. I couldn’t sleep, though. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Soupy and that tattooed woman writhing on the pool table. I tried to focus on the ceiling, but that didn’t work. It was too quiet and too dark. I reached under my bed and pulled out the projector. I set it up again on the kitchen counter and turned it on. The empty white square appeared on the wall. I sat down on the floor and leaned back against the cabinets beneath the sink. The projector
click-click-clicked
. I stared at the blank light until my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.

   I woke with my face pressed against the scratchy wool braid of a throw rug. The phone was ringing. I shut off the projector and grabbed the phone. “Yeah?”

It was Joanie. She was angry. “Brendan Blake is not in the paper.”

“It’s on the front below the fold.”

“No. On the front below the fold there’s a high school wrestling story. The Blake story isn’t in the paper anywhere. I even looked through the classifieds.”

“A wrestling story?”

“By Matilda P. Spaulding.”

“Goddammit,” I said. “Goddamn Tillie.”

Tillie must have eavesdropped on me leaving the message for Kerasopoulos. That’s why she’d been smiling that smile I didn’t like. Then she’d obviously called him, and he killed the Brendan Blake story. With nothing else handy at the last minute, the printers substituted wrestling. No doubt I had a message from Kerasopoulos waiting downstairs.

“Come on,” Joanie said, incredulous. “Tillie wanted a front-page byline?”

“Of course not,” I said. A bit of the previous night’s queasiness returned. “Tillie didn’t give a damn about the wrestling story. She’s just kissing up to the bosses.”

“You’re her boss.”

“Yeah, right.”

The line went silent. Then Joanie said, “You know what? Fuck Tillie. Fuck Kerafuckface. Fuck the fucking
Pilot
.”

“Joanie!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, everything’ll be fine, you’ll get all my stories in the paper. I don’t even care anymore. I’m so fucking out of here.”

She slammed the phone down before I could say anything else.

   I opened a cabinet and took out my only liquor, a dusty plastic bottle of vodka. I poured a little in a coffee cup and took it into the bathroom. I dipped some tweezers in the vodka and plucked the stitches from my chin. I didn’t know the trick of removing them without pulling part of the suture back through the wound, so I applied a dab of vodka after each one came out.

I took a shower and dressed. In my bedroom closet I found the knapsack I’d used to carry the Superior transcripts out of the Detroit bus station. I filled it with underwear, white socks, three T-shirts, and two flannel button-downs. I zipped a toothbrush and toothpaste into a separate pocket.

I lifted the plywood sheet off the boxes marked Trucks and Rats. One by one I hauled them down the outside stairs. The wind whistled around me as I loaded them into my truck’s flatbed, where my hockey bag still sat, covered with snow.

I did it all without really thinking. It felt like I was getting ready to leave, but I had no idea where I was going, or even if I was going. I just felt like I might have to leave, and quickly. I had to supply the name of my Superior source by noon or face arrest. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could run, didn’t even think I wanted to. But something was telling me to be ready. A lot of things I’d never expected had happened in the past few days.

A few minutes before eight, the phone rang again. I picked it up expecting Joanie. “Are you in the office?” I said.

“Excuse me? Mr. Carpenter?”

“Oh, sorry. This is Gus.”

“It’s Terence Flapp, attorney for Alden Campbell.”

Flapp told me Soupy had spent a few hours in the hospital but now was back in lockup. Soupy wanted to see me. Flapp wasn’t sure why. He had advised Soupy against seeing anyone. But Soupy was Soupy.

“Judge Gallagher will have my head for this if he finds out,” Flapp said. “Although I should tell you I do not intend for this to become an interview for your paper.”

I actually had no great desire to see Soupy. But I did have some questions. “Dingus doesn’t mind?”

“You tell me. When I told him I wanted to bring someone in, his first response was, ‘Over my dead body.’ But when I told him who, suddenly it was fine.”

“Huh.”

“Yes, well, meet me at the jail at ten-thirty.”

I had another stop to make first.

   Gloria Lowinski, R.N., answered the door of her pink frame house in a white housecoat decorated with faded pink flowers. Pins and curlers knitted her hair, dyed the color of rust, tightly to her scalp. I hadn’t even introduced myself when she opened the door wide and beckoned me in. “Oh, oh, oh, you’re the man from the newspaper, aren’t you?” she said. Her eyes were exceptionally bright for a widow in her eighties. “I’ve seen you at the diner. Come in, come in. Would you like coffee? I’m a tea drinker myself, but most people drink coffee. Are you like most people?”