Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

I flipped the index card back to the front. A faded blue stamp in the upper right hand corner said MICROFILM.

“Shit,” I said.

I slipped the card into my shirt pocket. I ran up the stairs and sat down at my desk and picked up my phone. I felt a little burst of that energy I’d felt at the Detroit Times whenever I thought I was on to a good story. I wanted to tell someone. For a second, I thought about calling Whistler and telling him too bad about your allergies.

Instead, I dialed the clerk’s office.

“Pine County Clerk,” Verna Clark said.

I hung up and looked at the clock. Three forty-five. The pregame skate had already begun. I had to get going. I dialed again.

“Clerk,” Verna Clark said.

I couldn’t afford to wait again. “Vicky, please.”

“Vicky?” her mother said. “Is this a personal call?”

I screwed up by hesitating. “No. Not really.”

“Not really? Well then, perhaps I can help you if whatever you need is doable within the next hour and fourteen minutes. After that, I’m afraid you’ll have to call tomorrow.”

“It’s Gus Carpenter, Verna.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Can I speak to the deputy clerk?”

“May I?”

“May I speak to the deputy clerk?”

“She’s busy at the moment. How can I help you?”

If I told Verna Clark what I really wanted, which was to look at the microfilm of those newspaper clips in the county archive, she would have informed me that I would need to come to the office the next morning and fill out a request form and then wait a week or ten days or whatever she decided would be long enough to frustrate the hell out of me. Silently I cursed the Media North bean counter who had decided the Pilot ’s oldest stories could be most efficiently stored where Verna could lord it over them. The Pilot actually paid the county for this privilege.

I had to throw her off somehow. So I said, “I need to ask Vicky about a recipe.”

“A recipe? This is not Audrey’s Diner.”

“Yes, but-”

“I’m sorry. Is there any official county business I could help you with, sir?”

“Could you tell your daughter I called?”

“Excuse me?”

Verna Clark hated to be reminded that her deputy also happened to be her daughter. Her opponent in her last election had run an attack campaign based largely on nepotism, and Verna had been forced to nearly drain her election fund defending herself. She even had to stoop to buying ads in the Pilot, which must have infuriated her.

“Could you please-”

“I heard you the first time, Mr. Carpenter. The Pine County Clerk’s Office will welcome your request in person. We close in one hour and thirteen minutes and reopen tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp.”

She hung up. But I had gotten her to speak my name aloud. My phone rang again a few minutes later. Vicky Clark whispered it: “Are you ready for chicken and dumplings?”

Pucks boomed off of the rink boards as I pushed through the double-door entrance to the Starvation Lake Arena. It felt reassuring. There would be no talk of burglaries or murder there.

Through the lobby windows I saw Tex on the ice, bearing down on the goalie, Dougie Baker. Tex faked to his right, then dragged the puck the other way with the toe of his stick. Dougie slid with him. The puck hit a rut in the ice and rolled up on an edge. Tex tried to snap it between Dougie’s legs but got only half of the tumbling puck. It flip-flopped up and Dougie snatched it with his catching glove.

“Fucking bullshit,” Tex yelled. He turned hard, spun behind the net, wound up with his stick, and, as he came around the other side of the net, swung the shaft across the goalpost with an echoing crack. The broken-off blade went flying. Tex skated to the bench.

We really did have to talk with him.

Refrigerant stung my nostrils as I hustled across the black rubber-mat floors past the benches beneath the big gold-and-blue Home and Visitors signs. I had relished that whiff of chill since I was a boy and the town rink, about the same age as me, hadn’t yet been closed in on the ends.

My dad took me to my first River Rats game when I was five. By the second period, I had taken my hot chocolate and climbed down from the bleachers to stand along the glass behind the Rats’ goalie, a short kid with quick hands named Ronayne. I was fascinated by all the straps and buckles and laces that attached his leather and plastic armor to his arms and chest and legs and how it made him seem so much bigger than when I had seen him walking along Main Street.

I liked how he tossed his head around between face-offs, twisting his neck this way and that, his face inscrutable behind his molded white mask, the sweaty ends of his stringy hair flopping on the back of his jersey. It wasn’t long before I was strapping on the goalie pads and squatting, alone, between the goalposts.

Now I laced my goalie skates on in dressing room 3. I heard Coach Poppy blow two blasts on his whistle. The skate was nearly over. I shoved on hockey gloves, grabbed a stick, and clomped out to the ice.

The seventeen young River Rats were kneeling around Poppy at center ice in their blue-and-gold helmets, gloves, and sweats. High above their heads hung a faded banner declaring the Rats the runners-up in the 1981 Michigan state championship. My team. A team I wished had been forgotten, but was not.

“On your feet, buckets off,” Poppy said. I skated up and stood facing him from the other side of the players’ circle. The Rats doffed their helmets, hair stuck by sweat to their necks and foreheads. “Let’s have a moment of silence for Coach Carpenter. He lost a good friend who was a good friend to the River Rats.”

Tex and the other boys lowered their eyes. I saw stickers on the sides of their helmets bearing the initials PMB. I wondered if any had known Mrs. B. I wondered what they would have thought if they knew that, the morning after our loss in that state final so long ago, she’d come to our house with a plate of peanut butter cookies she must have gotten out of bed at dawn to make. I petulantly refused to eat. Later I felt sad that she had been so kind and I had turned her away. I walked next door and, while Darlene watched, I apologized to Mrs. B. She laughed and told me she was glad I hadn’t eaten those cookies because it wasn’t her best batch and she’d given one to the dog and thrown the rest away.

The team assembled around me now was poised to wipe out the memories of the team that had come so close but fallen short. These Rats were as quick and hungry as their namesakes and, to the delight of the fans, as nasty, too, certainly tougher and scrappier than any of the teams that had preceded them. For years, the mighty squads from Detroit-Little Caesars and Slasor Heating, Byrd Electric and Paddock Pools-had intimidated the Rats with their jutting elbows and chopping sticks. But these Rats weren’t afraid to meet a slash with a slash, a cross-check with a cross-check.

Best of all, it was Tex, their leading scorer, their most skilled player, who inspired their toughness, though not only with his heavy slap shot or his fast feet or his knack for finding the back of the opponents’ net with the puck. Unlike many a star player, Tex refused to let his teammates fight his battles.

Early that season, he’d scored two goals and an assist and the Rats were finishing a 5–2 win over Detroit’s Byrd Electric when a double-wide defenseman named Cranch, nicknamed “Crunch,” gave Tex a whack to the back of a knee. Tex collapsed and slid into the side of his own net. The crowd howled for a penalty, but no ref had seen. Cranch skated away with a smirk between his chapped-red cheeks. Tex struggled to a knee, then to both feet, and started wobbling down the ice after Cranch. “No, Tex,” Poppy screamed from the bench, and I joined him, yelling, “Come to the bench-now!”