Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“Angie,” I said.

She knew my name but probably didn’t want to take the trouble to recall it. Instead she lifted her tulip glass of beer in a halfhearted toast, took a sip, and set it back down next to her cigarettes and Bic lighter. She returned to staring at the soap opera flickering soundlessly on the television over the bar. Beneath the TV hung a sign that said “If you’re drinking to forget, please pay in advance.”

I didn’t have to worry about a lunch rush at Enright’s. There hadn’t been one since the griddle stopped working in December. I’d been there that evening, awaiting a patty melt. Soupy was standing in front of the griddle, spatula in hand, watching a burger fry when the sizzling ebbed and then stopped altogether. He stared at the half-cooked meat for a minute, then tossed the spatula aside with a clatter and started fiddling with the griddle controls. “What the fuck?” he said. He stood there another minute staring at the grill, then picked up the spatula and scooped the meat into a garbage can. “Fuck it,” he said. “Go to McDonald’s.” He went back to his office and came out with a piece of cardboard he had torn from a gin box. “Grill Not Working-SORRY” was scratched across it in felt-tip pen. He stuck it to the wall over the back bar with a piece of white hockey tape.

The sorry sign was hanging there still when I walked in that afternoon looking for a Coke and a bag of Better Mades to take to the Pilot. Soupy hadn’t yet fixed the griddle, saying he didn’t have the money. That was undoubtedly true, but even if he did have the money, I doubted he would’ve squandered it on necessary repairs when he could be investing it in booze and the Bay City stripper who came up every other Monday to screw him, ignorant of the fact that Mr. Big Shot Resort-Town Tavern Owner was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and might never emerge. “I know what happens in Chapter Eleven,” Soupy liked to say. “Who knows about Chapter Twelve?”

Today he came out of his office sucking on a finger. He wore an apron stained with ketchup, or maybe blood, over an old Hershey Bears T-shirt. The Bears were the last minor league team Soupy had skated with before he walked away from his once promising hockey career for the more reliable pursuit of hungover weekday mornings.

“You hurt yourself?” I said.

“Shit, Trap.” He flicked on the cold water in the bar sink and let it run over his finger. “Need a damn chain saw to cut into those booze boxes. If they used the same glue on the space shuttle, we’d never had a problem.”

He turned the water off and reached into a fridge beneath the back bar. “Soup,” I said. “Just a Coke. I’m working.”

Soupy popped the caps off of two Blue Ribbons on an opener bolted to the sink. He slammed mine down so that foam slopped over the lip.

“Don’t be a pussy, Trap,” he said. He held his bottle out to me. “To Mrs. B.”

“Not fair.”

“She was a sweetheart.”

I clinked my bottle into his and took a swallow. I usually loved that first burning cold gulp of a beer, but this one was as lukewarm as a Detroit Lions fan.

“Did you pay the electric bill?” I said.

“Are you my mother?” Soupy said. “The lights are still on, aren’t they? Why don’t you go back to the fish-wrapper and fix this fucked-up town? Jesus, can’t the cops get anything right? People think they have to stay in their goddamn houses every night instead of going out for a drink with their friends. It’s tearing up the social fabric. Now Mrs. B is dead? It’s killing me.”

I had heard Soupy’s rant before. He must have heard “social fabric” on some talk show on the bar tube. While it was true that some people were staying closer to home, I doubted the old folks whose houses had been broken into had set foot in Enright’s since Reagan was president. But Soupy needed someone to blame besides himself.

“Who the hell would want to kill Mrs. B anyway?” he said.

“Nobody.”

“How’s Darlene doing? She talking to you now?”

“Yeah.”

“I figured she’d be back.”

“She’s not back the way you mean, but at least we’re talking.” I wanted to change the subject. “How about you? Get your mom’s house sold yet?”

Soupy’s mother had been dead for nearly two years, his father almost three, and Soupy was finally selling the house they had lived in for more than forty years. It sat on a few acres on the back side of the ridge above Tatch’s camp. Soupy hadn’t lived there in a long time and said he didn’t want to live anywhere his old man had lived. And he needed the money.

“Working on it,” he said. “Was over there yesterday, digging through Mom’s shit. What a pack rat. Stacks of magazines from the sixties, Liz goddamn Taylor on the cover, and she’s not as big as a house. And, oh, hey-I found the old Bobby Hull.”

“The table hockey game?”

“Yeah, man, with the little metal players. I thought it was long gone, but there it was, all covered with dust under the basement stairs. Way to go, Ma.”

As kids we’d played hundreds of games on that table. Soupy had nicknamed his goalie “Tommy Trapezoid.” When I started to play goalie myself, he started calling me Trapezoid, too, and soon shortened it to Trap, which he called me still.

“We’ll resume the series,” I said. “I’m up like two twenty to two hundred five.”

“Bullshit, man, I was way ahead. You couldn’t handle my right-wing-to-center move.”

“Whatever. When’s the garage sale?”

He’d been talking about having a garage sale for months. I couldn’t imagine Soupy actually going to the trouble of making price tags and haggling with old ladies over an ancient ottoman or toaster oven. More likely, he would load everything into his pickup and take it to the county landfill. Even more likely, load everything up and tote it around for a few months.

“Rethinking that,” he said.

“How come?”

“Not sure.”

He turned to the back bar and started rearranging schnapps bottles.

“Not sure about what?” I said.

He turned back around, glanced down the bar at Angie, lowered his voice.

“Really don’t want all these local assholes talking about my business,” Soupy said.

“You got a buyer?”

“Kind of out of nowhere. Yeah. Five above asking.”

That was a good price in Starvation, where houses for sale sat for months, even years, without an offer. The Campbells’ place, a two-bedroom with water-stained clapboard walls and a roof enveloped in vines, wasn’t even on the lake.

“They must love that knotty pine paneling, eh?” I said. “And the cigarette smell. Who’s the buyer? Do I know them?”

“I’m dealing with some law firm downstate.”

“You get me the name, I might be able to check it out for you.”

Soupy studied the rim of his bottle.

“Thanks. Don’t want to jinx it just yet,” he said.

You don’t know a guy for thirty years and not know when he’s bullshitting you. Especially Soupy, who, except when he had a hockey stick in his hands, wasn’t nearly as clever as he imagined. I let it go for the moment.

“Rats going to do it tonight?” he said.

“I think so.”

“Best thing that could happen around here, Rats win the state title. Good for the soul, good for the economy. Mrs. B would’ve wanted it that way.”

Mrs. B wouldn’t have given a rip, I thought. “I was just out giving Tex his skates,” I said.

Soupy flipped his empty at the overflowing barrel of garbage next to his office door. The bottle clanged off of another and nestled against a pizza box.

“Out where?” he said.

“Tatch’s.”

“Camp J.C.?”

“Yeah. A little spooky. Have you seen it?”