Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“Who’s Mic-Mac’s guy again?” he said.

“Holcomb,” I said. “Pinky Holcomb. Number nine.”

“Pinky? The guy a fag?”

“Be tolerant, son,” Tatch said.

“You don’t want to mess with Pinky,” I said.

Mic-Mac’s captain and top scorer had gotten his nickname after dropping his gloves in a hockey fight and having his left pinky severed by a skate blade in the melee. He wasn’t the most skilled player, but he played with unrelenting fire, a little cannonball who would skate through a brick wall for a stray puck.

“Well, only wimps wear nine,” Tex said.

I hesitated because Gordie Howe, the Red Wings great, had worn number 9.

“Right,” I said.

Tex’s eyes focused behind me, his smile fading.

“I’m out of here,” he said. “Thanks for the skates.”

“Hey there, Mr. Breck,” Tatch said. “Was just about to come up.”

I turned around. Standing before me was the clapping man from up on the ridge. He wore a long denim coat and a wool cap tight on the back of his head. His too-small wire-rim glasses pinched his face in a way that made him look like a sallow John Denver. I felt unsure that I would like him. He smiled and offered his hand. I took it.

“Mr. Gus Carpenter,” he said. “Of the Pilot. ”

“That’s me.”

“I am Mr. Breck.”

“You’ve seen my byline?”

“Some, yes. Forgive me, but I find that newspapers offer little of value. There is no salvation to be found on the sports page.”

“Hard to argue with that.”

“What brings you here?”

The way Breck had commandeered the conversation, with Tatch just standing meekly by, made me wonder if Breck, not Tatch, was actually in charge.

“Brought Tex his skates,” I said. “He’s a little superstitious.”

“Matthew,” Breck said.

“Matthew.”

“He’s got a warm-up skate before the game on account of it’s a playoff tonight,” Tatch offered, sounding apologetic.

Breck folded his arms and looked at the trailer behind Tatch. “We need his strong shoulders on the hill. Everyone’s working hard. We cannot count on the county to do the right thing. We will have to force their hand.”

“I’ll get him going,” Tatch said.

“Thank you, Mr. Edwards.”

“What about the county?” I said.

Breck turned back to me. “Your town,” he said. “You come looking for a boy to bring you a trophy so you can hoist it high over your head.”

“Excuse me?”

“You ask a boy to carry your town on his shoulders.”

“Actually, I just did him a little favor.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Carpenter, you did yourself a favor.” He smiled again. “You have a mistaken idea of what a messiah is. You and everyone down there.”

I gave Tatch a who-the-hell-is-this-guy glance. “Well,” I said, “I’m not sure what to say. It’s just a game.”

“Indeed,” Breck said. “You, of all people, should understand that.”

Tatch touched my elbow. “Mr. Breck’s been a good friend since he come to us a few months back. Met him at a Christian convocation down to Monroe. He’s helping us out with our tax issue, the legal stuff.”

“Have you told him?” Breck asked Tatch.

“No,” Tatch said, looking guilty nevertheless. “Told him he might want to attend that drain commission meeting tomorrow.”

“I see.”

“You from around here?” I said.

“I am now,” Breck said. “We are building a Christian community. I’m sure it doesn’t look like much to you. But we are working hard. Our faith sustains us.”

“And a backhoe?”

Breck twisted his glasses off and turned and pointed them at the ridge. I saw shovels flinging dirt and the backhoe shuttling backward and up. Many a developer had begged Tatch’s father to sell the land, but he refused to do anything but put his trailer and a pole barn on it.

“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” Breck said. “Do you see that line of trees there, the one that tops out with the oak on the ridge?”

I looked up. I felt my breath catch. I hadn’t noticed before. The trees were filled with crosses. Christian crosses. Dozens of them. Small ones made from two-by-twos, larger ones from two-by-fours. Painted black, white, red, gold. Nailed into the tree trunks at twenty, thirty feet above the ground, out of reach without a ladder. Some facing down on the clearing, some facing up toward the sky.

“Mr. Carpenter?”

“Yes,” I said. “I see.”

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged,” Breck said. “Where I’m pointing approximates the property line on the western edge of the Edwards’s parcels. On the other side of that line is land owned by your friends in Pine County.”

I was less interested in the property line than in those crosses on the trees.

“The county purchased it in the nineteen-seventies when the economy was poor and the land could be had cheaply,” he said. “Of course the people who run the county could never decide what to do with it, so it sits.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Long ago, a handful of homes once stood there, and beneath them a septic field. We believe it to be leaking.”

“Thus the backhoe and the shovels.”

“It’s bad enough, wouldn’t you agree, that the county wants us to eat their property tax crap.” He glanced at Tatch. “Please forgive the language.”

“They just want us out of here,” Tatch said.

“Mr. Edwards.”

“Praise Jesus,” Tatch said.

“If the land is so polluted,” I said, “who would want to buy it?”

“Hard to believe in this country, but there are motives aside from strict financial enrichment,” Breck said. “Perhaps we’re mistaken about the septic matter, but if we’re not, well, we may have to take the matter up with the drain commission, or the county itself, or whatever collection of cronies currently mismanages things. Perhaps we’ll need to avail ourselves of the courts.”

“So you’re a lawyer?”

He fitted his glasses back on, adjusted his cap. “I apologize for my earlier stridency. We actually would just like to be left alone.”

“Until there’s a fire in one of the trailers, or rain washes out that two-track. Then you’ll be calling for help.”

“We have work to do.” He looked at Tatch. “Please get Matthew.”

Tatch shifted uneasily in the mud. “I think he’s resting up.”

“For what? His warm-up? Why must he play twice in the same day?”

I wanted to tell Breck that lots of teams had pregame skates, but I thought I might get Tatch in more trouble than he was already in.

“I’ll get him,” Tatch said. “Take her easy, Gus. God bless.”

He went into the trailer.

Breck said, “Why are you running errands, Mr. Carpenter, bringing skates to boys?” He nodded in the direction of the town. “Don’t you have more pressing matters to attend to?”

“I do.”

Breck turned and started to walk, then jog, toward the ridge. He resumed the clapping as he disappeared behind a trailer. The women and men seemed to shovel harder. He was an interesting stranger, this Breck who’d come to Starvation not long before the break-ins began. Maybe his arrival was mere coincidence. My gaze drifted up to the crosses. I felt myself shudder as I turned away.

Soup? You back there?”

I called down the whiskey-colored bar that ran the length of the tunnel of week-old smoke that was Enright’s Pub. A crash came from the office and storeroom behind the bar, like a stack of boxes had toppled.

“Son of a bitch,” I heard Soupy say. “Fucking closet.”

Foghat was grinding out of the jukebox. An old woman sitting at the other end of the bar nodded at me. Stalks of white hair stuck out from beneath her orange LaCoste Builders cap.