Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

Everything changed then. Now the Rats were carrying the play and Mic-Mac was chasing. With one minute, forty-two seconds to go and the Rats swarming the Mic-Mac net, Davey Straub tipped a Tex Do-brick slap shot up and over the falling goaltender’s left shoulder to tie the game. The arena shook, our old runner-up banner trembling in the rafters. I glanced at the Mic-Mac bench. Now they had the slumped shoulders.

With just over thirty seconds to go, Tex scooped up a rolling puck at our blue line. Butterfly bandages had closed two cuts under his left eye. He leaned his long body into a churning circle, cradling the puck on his stick with one hand, then exploded out of the turn at center ice, blowing past a Mic-Mac winger as if his skates were set in concrete. Tex zigged left, cut right, head-faked a center, flipped the puck high off the glass, zoomed around a defenseman, and caught up to the puck with the other defenseman in futile pursuit.

The Rats on the bench jumped to their feet. I actually felt a fleeting pang of sympathy for the Mic-Mac goalie. He must have been praying that Tex’s shot would hit him in the head, the neck, the chest, somewhere, anywhere, because there was no chance that he was going to see it.

Tex dipped a shoulder. His wrists snapped. The goalie flailed. The black blur of puck grazed the inside of the near post and tore into the mesh at the back of the net.

The game ended twenty-seven seconds later, Rats 2, Mic-Mac 1.

Gloves and helmets and sticks littered the ice around the blue-and-gold mound of players swarming Tex. Some of the younger fans vaulted the glass and shuffled across the ice in their shoes and threw themselves onto the pile, while the rest of the fans stamped their feet, chanting, “Let’s go, Rats! Beat Pipefitters! Let’s go, Rats! Beat Pipefitters!” In Thursday night’s state semifinal, the Rats would face the Pipefitters, their old nemesis from downstate, the team the Rats had never beaten, the team that stole the title from us in 1981.

I slipped out through the Zamboni shed.

I called Mom as I walked to my truck.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “The police keep driving by.”

“They’re just doing their job,” I said.

“They’re irritating.”

I wondered how she would even know they were driving by. She would have had to stand in the kitchen to see the road. She was usually in bed by nine.

“I’m coming over.”

“No. I’m fine. I have things to do.”

“I thought you were going to bed.”

The phone fell silent. Then Mom said, “Just be sure to lock the door. And make your bed in the morning.”

A single light burned over the kitchen sink at Mom’s. The house was quiet. I locked the kitchen door, slipped off my boots, turned my phone off, and tossed it on the snack bar. I opened the fridge. It was packed with platters and casseroles wrapped in cellophane and foil that neighbors had dropped off. I chose a chicken dish with broccoli and noodles and slid it into the microwave over the stove.

Walking through the bathroom with its doors at each end, I saw a balled-up clump of police tape in the wastepaper basket next to the toilet. The tile floor was bare, the Me Sweet Ho rug having been confiscated as evidence. The door to Mom’s bedroom was closed, but I inched it open and peeked in. She was asleep, faced away from me toward the lake side of the house. A paperback by Jacquelyn Mitchard rested on her nightstand.

It gave me a little start. Mom had given me my first book, From the Rocket to the Jet: Hockey’s Greatest Heroes, when I was six. I almost didn’t read it because the title didn’t include the greatest player of them all, Gordie Howe of the Red Wings. Mom told me not to judge a book by its cover. I read it. Gordie was in it after all.

Mom bought me another book, The House on the Cliff, and then another and another until I was reading them so fast that my parents couldn’t afford to keep buying them and I got my first library card. I thought of the sixty-year-old photograph I had seen at the clerk’s office showing a young woman, a nun, who had done the same for my mother. If Mom had ever said a word about her, I had missed it, or forgotten.

I shut Mom’s door.

Back in the kitchen, I scooped a heap of the chicken casserole onto a plate and poured myself a glass of milk. A set of headlights eased past the house. I went to the window and squinted into the dark to see if it was a Pine County sheriff’s cruiser but it was gone before I could be sure. I took my plate and glass into the living room and sat in the recliner and grabbed the TV remote. I clicked the volume low and pushed Channel Eight for the news. The set blinked on to a hockey game, the Wings playing the Blues in St. Louis, late in the third period, Wings up, 4–2, and Stevie Yzerman squatting for a face-off.

I tried to clear my mind for a few minutes of everything I had seen and heard and read in the long day behind me. The casserole was delicious. The Wings were about to win. I set the plate on the end table next to me and picked up the remote. Maybe I wouldn’t bother with the news after all. Maybe I could find a Seinfeld rerun instead. The Blues pulled their goalie for an extra skater. I shoved myself back in the recliner, thought I wouldn’t mind if I fell asleep right there.

Less than twenty seconds remained in the game when a ribbon of words began to scroll across the bottom of the TV screen. “CHANNEL EIGHT BULLETIN YOUR NEWS NORTH SOURCE CHANNEL EIGHT BULLETIN,” they began. Not another snowstorm, I thought. The string went blank, then these words rolled across: “BINGO NIGHT KILLING LINKED TO LATE PRIEST.” I bolted up in the recliner. “What the fuck?” I whispered. I waited. “CHANNEL EIGHT BULLETIN YOUR NEWS NORTH SOURCE CHANNEL EIGHT BULLETIN,” it repeated while my stomach

twisted into a knot. The next line rolled past: “POLICE INVESTIGATING CONNECTION TO FR. NILUS MOREAU. DETAILS AFTER THE GAME.”

I jumped to my feet, thinking, How the hell could they know that? It had to be Tawny Jane Reese reporting. There was no way that Darlene would have told her, or that D’Alessio would have known now that he was openly campaigning against Dingus. Vicky Clark? Could Vicky have figured out what I was really doing at the clerk’s office? And even if she had and then had thought to call Tawny Jane, Tawny Jane couldn’t have reported it based solely on a secondhand tip from a deputy county clerk.

The only other person who knew was Luke Whistler.

I went into the kitchen, turned on my phone, dialed Whistler.

“Where the hell were you?” he answered.

“Did you just moan it out when she was going down on you?” I said.

“Settle down, junior,” Whistler said. “I didn’t tell her a thing. She told me. I got it out of her. I tried to call you from her bathroom.”

“Bullshit.”

“I left you a message about twenty minutes ago.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear. The message light was blinking. Shit, I thought. “I don’t give a damn,” I said. “You told her.”

I looked through the kitchen and dining room to the TV. There was Tawny Jane on the screen, microphone in hand, doing a stand-up in front of St. Valentine’s. Goddamm it, I thought.

“The next time you accuse me,” Whistler said, “I’m gone, and you can fill your little rag by yourself. If you’d had your phone on-”

“Shit!” I said, spluttering it.

“If you’d had your phone on, you could’ve beaten her to the punch on the Web and I’d be getting my ass chewed by her instead.”

“Then how the hell did she know, Luke?”

“Are you watching her now?”

I walked into the living room. Tawny Jane was signing off, her brows furrowed into their deepest crease of seriousness. “Yes. Fuck.”