The Skeleton Box (26 page)

“I can’t believe you’re playing hockey,” I said.

She smiled. “Maybe we’ll get out there together sometime.”

“Maybe.”

“You know, Gus, you belong here.”

I slid into the truck. “Sometimes I wish I did.”

Brittle wind whistled through the hole in my window as I veered from Interstate 96 West onto U.S. 23 North. I didn’t want to stop long enough to patch the hole, so I kept my hat and gloves on and turned the heat up as high as it would go.

I turned on my phone. A tiny red light was blinking, telling me the power was about to run out. I wondered if the blinking light itself was wasting power. I wanted to call Darlene but felt like I had to call my mother’s attorney first.

Shipman was just heading into court. He told me he’d seen Mom in the morning and she was fine. The sheriff’s department was keeping her in hot tea and magazines. He had advised her not to talk, and she had obeyed for the most part, except for a brief conversation she’d had in her cell with Darlene.

High beams flashed in my rearview mirror, somebody wanting to pass. I glanced at the speedometer. I’d been driving in the left lane at sixty miles per hour, about twenty-five too slow for the maniacs escaping Detroit on I-75.

I eased the truck into the right lane and asked what Mom had said. Mostly small talk, Shipman said, though she let on that she might have said something about, as he put it, “the new guy with Tatch and the other religious folks.” You mean Breck, I said. Correct, he said, adding that he’d heard a rumor that Tatch also might have intimated something to the cops about Breck.

“Really?” I said. “Like what?”

Maybe, I thought, Tatch had had enough of his new “friend.”

“Not sure, but Dingus seemed more jumpy than I’ve—”

That was the last I heard.

I looked at my phone. The red light had stopped blinking. A car horn beeped. I looked to my left. The man in the SUV next to me flipped me off before speeding ahead.

A
blue Volvo station wagon was parked behind the
Pilot
when I pulled in. I didn’t recognize it. You didn’t see a lot of Volvos in Starvation Lake, or northern Michigan, for that matter. If you did, you’d be in Harbor Springs or Petoskey or Charlevoix.

A man was sitting at the desk mounded with old newspapers where the
Pilot
’s photographer had sat before Media North decided we didn’t need a full-time shooter. He stood and offered his hand, and the first thing I noticed was that he was even shorter than me.

“Gus Carpenter?” he said. “Bennett Fuqua.”

I shook his hand, thinking, The Media North bean counter, Fuckwad. Instinctively, I glanced over at the police scanner perched on a shelf behind Whistler’s desk. Whistler had left the damn thing on again. I wondered if Fuqua had noticed.

“What brings you all the way over here?” I said. “Did the board authorize the mileage?”

He smiled uneasily. “Ah, ha, well, I was coming over anyway. United Way meeting in town, and I’m on the board. See, I specialize in nonprofits.”

At first I didn’t get that he meant the
Pilot.
“Funny,” I said. As nonchalantly as I could, I walked over and turned the scanner off.

“Don’t you need that?” Fuqua said.

“The cops’ll call if there’s anything important.”

Fuqua considered that, then said, “How is your mother?”

“She’s fine, thank you.”

“Philo tells me you were quite close to the woman who died. My condolences.”

“Thanks.” I threw my coat on a stack of press releases atop a rusted Royal typewriter I hadn’t gotten around to throwing away. “Excuse me a second.” I plugged my cell phone into an outlet next to my desk. On my
blotter I set a bottle of A&W and a brown bag holding a turkey-and-cheddar I’d picked up at the Twin Lakes Party Store. I sat and dumped the sandwich out, wishing I’d asked for an extra dill pickle.

Fuqua sat back down. A puddle of snowmelt glistened around his rubber-toed boots. In his creased black corduroy slacks and white turtleneck sweater, he could have posed for an L.L. Bean catalog. “I’m actually hoping to come back for the big game,” he said.

“You’re a hockey fan?” I said.

“Newly so.” I was a little surprised at how young he seemed. I had pictured him as a bald man in his sixties with a bullfrog neck. But he couldn’t have been much older than me, if at all. “My daughter started playing, and I got hooked.”

“That’s how it is.”

“Growing up in Ohio, we didn’t have much hockey around. But what a fast game. Pretty expensive, too. Of course my daughter had to play the most expensive position.”

“She’s a goalie?”

“That’s right. I think I heard that you’re a goalie, too, right? Someone said you played on the last great team around here. That must have been something.”

I decided I wasn’t going to let this guy soften me up. I’d imagined that Fuckwad was the kind of penny-pinching eyeshade who would piss on his grandmother’s grave for a nickel, and I wasn’t going to change my view because he helped the United Way and liked hockey. “It was something, all right,” I said. “Mind if I eat?”

Fuqua knitted his fingers together in his corduroy lap. “You know how much we—actually, I—admire you and what you do.”

“That and ten bucks will get me a fresh package of legal pads.”

I took a big bite of my sandwich. Not bad. I wished Fuqua would wait outside until I finished. But he went on doing what he’d really come to do.

“As I think Philo told you, the Media North board of directors met yesterday. They deliberated for quite some time about the futures of a variety of our properties. They had to make some difficult decisions.”

I went on chewing, looked up at the wall clock. D’Alessio’s dog-and-pony show at Tatch’s camp was supposedly going to start in a little more than an hour. “Hold that thought,” I said.

“Gus, this is important.”

I ignored him, took another bite, dialed my desk phone.

“Yo, Enright’s,” Soupy said. I heard the Guess Who in the background.

I swung my chair away from Fuqua. “Hey,” I said.

“You got my truck?” Soupy said.

“Yeah. I’ll pick you up in twenty.”

“I’m working, man. Just leave it out front.”

“Take a lunch.”

“Trap, I’m up to my ass. Why?”

“It’s a surprise. Bring some Blue Ribbons.”

I didn’t want a beer but figured it would hook Soupy.

“Oh, OK,” he said. “I can’t go long, but a six—that shouldn’t take long, eh? But I’ll have to kick Angie out. She drained half a bottle of Crow when I left her here yesterday.”

“See you in a bit.”

I hung up and turned back to Fuqua. “Sorry.”

He was sitting straighter, his hands now flat on the chair arms. “The board had to make a particularly difficult decision regarding the
Pine County Pilot.
”

OK, I thought. Whistler and I would have to wear gloves and hats in the office to stay warm. Copies would now be fifty cents a page, out of our pockets. At least that’s what I hoped. Nothing worse.

“Let’er rip,” I said.

Fuqua told me as if he was telling me I had some mayo on my cheek.

“The last issue of the
Pilot
will be published this Friday,” he said.

“Saturday.”

“No. We’re moving it up a day.”

“Now? With all the stuff going on around here?”

“There’s no good time to do this,” Fuqua said.

An image of Darlene kneeling over her dead mother flashed in my
brain. “There are some better than others,” I said. “What about the hockey? What if the Rats win and go to the final? What if they win?”

When my Rats team had played in the state final against the Pipefitters in 1981, windows on every house and store and office in town were plastered with Rats team photos that had been printed across two full pages in the
Pilot.
I was front and center, sitting next to Tatch, our billowy leg pads touching. Even after we lost, people kept those pictures up for months until the tape dried out and peeled away. Then they folded them up and put them in the drawer where they’d saved front pages of the Tigers’ 1968 World Series win and the day Kennedy got shot.

“There was some discussion of publishing into next week,” Fuqua said. “Unfortunately, it’s a business thing. Our printing contract expired at the end of February. They gave us a grace period, which is up Friday. If we go beyond that, we have to renew for six months.”

“So the hell with Starvation, eh?”

Fuqua shifted in his chair. “After some discussion,” he said, “the board calculated that the River Rats were unlikely to beat the Pied Pipers anyway.”

“It’s the Pipefitters. And what the hell do you and the board know about hockey?”

Fuqua pursed his lips. I swiveled away, afraid I’d say something even worse, and punched a key on my computer. I had an e-mail from Joanie. I called it up:

great seeing you.
call me about whistler

—j

I turned back to Fuqua. “Tell me,” I said. “This difficult decision didn’t have anything to do with a certain consultant charge, did it? Please tell me four hundred and fifty piss-ass little dollars didn’t doom a paper that’s been here since they named the place Starvation.”

“Every factor was considered,” Fuqua said. “Although I will say one or two board members expressed some concern that the charge you mentioned looked like it might be checkbook journalism.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me.”

“I realize you’re upset,” he said. “Which is why I let the language go the first time. Now I’d appreciate a more professional demeanor.”

“My reporter used a consultant to help him get some information. It probably wasn’t penny smart, but he wasn’t whoring us out either. He even offered to pay himself.”

“It wouldn’t change our contractual situation.”

“I see,” I said. “Then I guess we’ll just do our best online. If the Rats win it all, people can still print out the page and put it up. As for the other stuff, I guess maybe you’re right.”

“No, Gus.”

“You just said—”

“No. No online. No anything. The
Pilot
is shutting down. It’s over. We’re closing the paper as of Friday.”

My stomach turned over. Icy needles of sweat pricked the back of my shoulders. “Hold on,” I said. “This can’t—Philo told me nobody wants to close the paper. He said the board was considering how to rationalize print and online.”

“That’s what the board did,” Fuqua said. He stood. “Philo said you yourself thought it would be a mistake to go online only. Something about antilock brakes.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It doesn’t matter. The money’s not there.”

I looked around the room and felt a sudden fondness for the clunky metal desks, the claptrap copier, the bubbling linoleum, the yellowing Pine County map peeling back from the wall, even the buzzing lamps. Fuck the board, I thought. Fuck every one of those fat-asses and the five thousand bucks they got for attending a two-hour meeting where they put a gun to the head of the only newspaper in Pine County. Fuck them and their fat-assed fucking wives and children. I hoped their fucking dogs died.

But I didn’t say it. Instead I sat there feeling a little like I’d felt all those years ago when I let in the goal that gave the Pipefitters the state championship. Now the
Pilot
would die on my watch as executive editor. I would be left to wonder again, as I had for years after that goal, whether I could have done something differently to make things right.

Fuqua explained that the board had deemed that the
Pilot
’s closing would be announced in its final edition, and nothing would be said about it before. I nodded without agreeing. He said a human resources person would call to go over our “separation options.” By then I was too stunned to speak. I sat silent until Fuqua finished and asked me if I was all right. “I guess I’ll have to be,” I said, and he asked me if I would speak with Luke Whistler and I said I would. Then he told me he was sorry, he had to get to his United Way meeting, and I heard the back door close as he went out to his Volvo. I was facing my final deadline.

I dropped the rest of the sandwich in the trash. I threw my coat on and hurried out to Soupy’s truck and pulled it onto South Street and took two lefts to Main and pulled up in front of Enright’s, honking.

I forgot about calling Joanie.

“Jesus, Trap, it reeks in here,” Soupy said. “What the hell did we come here for?”

“Sentimental,” I said. “Want to get a last look before you sell it.”

I hadn’t been in Soupy’s mother’s house since an Easter dinner she had hosted when I was still living in Detroit. She made a leg of lamb with buttermilk mashed potatoes. That was the good part. The rest was Soupy’s dad getting plastered and lighting into Mrs. Campbell for spending too much on the dinner. His marina wasn’t doing well but, like his son, Angus Campbell was not a man inclined to find fault with himself. Soupy, his belly full of Blue Ribbons, had stepped in and soon the two of them were outside, threatening to kill each other while Mrs. Campbell and my mother yelled at them to grow up. Soupy threw one punch. Angus collapsed, unconscious, facedown in one of his own grimy boot prints in the snow. By the time we had carried him back inside,
Mrs. Campbell and Mom had taken my mother’s car and gone. The first thing Angus Campbell said when he woke up was, “Goddamn broads.”

Now Soupy and I stood in the little dining room where we had sat down to that meal. The table had vanished beneath mounds of moldy magazines and decaying
Pilots,
kitchen appliances, a rusting empty birdcage, an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner in a duct-taped cardboard box. The floors were covered. There were boxes and brown-paper bags and milk crates and plastic bags, all filled to the top with lamps and books and vases and coffee mugs. There were rolls and rolls of wrapping paper, mud-caked flowerpots filled with spoons and forks, a soiled cat-litter box, at least a dozen half-eaten apples, shriveled and brown. I nudged a box with the toe of a boot and heard glass clink against glass.

“What a mess,” I said.