Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“Sorry,” I said, shaking the snow off my legs. Soupy hadn’t been happy about my call for help, but I rarely asked anything more of him than a Blue Ribbon, so he came. I hoped he hadn’t said anything to his customers at Enright’s about why he was leaving.

“I had to stick Angie behind the bar,” he said, and I caught a whiff of mint laced with liquor. “By the time I get back, I could be wiped out. So where’s your truck? What do you got there, a box of cash or something? Treasure in the woods?”

The lockbox was a little too big to hide in my coat, so I had set it on my lap, as if I carried a box like that around with me all the time. “The truck got towed,” I said. “The box is Mom’s. I don’t know what’s in it.”

Soupy chuckled. “Old Mom Carpenter could probably could keep all her skeletons in a box that small, eh?”

We happened to be passing Mom’s house. I glanced across the road into the trees sheltering Dad’s garage. I didn’t see any cop lights. “Mom’s going to jail,” I said.

“Get out.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not going with her?”

“No. I assume they’d arrest me, too.”

“Holy fuck. First Tatch, now Mom C? Who’s next, Mother Teresa? What did they arrest her for? They don’t think-”

“No idea. They just took her in, up at Dad’s garage.”

“What was she doing up there? That where you got that?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Soup,” I said, “you can’t go back to the bar and start running your mouth.”

“Trap, come on, I love your mother. She’s the last person I’d want to hurt.”

Soupy really did love my mother, really did care about what she thought about him, even if his actions suggested he never heard a word of what she said about his drinking and slut chasing. It reminded me of Mom telling me she was worried about Soupy selling his parents’ place. He had to be “careful,” she had said.

“Eagan, MacDonald and Browne,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Is that the law firm you’re dealing with on your parents’ house?”

“Hold on,” Soupy said. “You’re hiding in the trees like a prison escapee and I’m the one getting questioned? What’s in the box?”

“It’s them, isn’t it, Soup?”

He slowed the truck where the shore road curved into Main at the western end of town. A streetlight illuminated a gnarl of scar on Soupy’s cheekbone where a puck had struck him when we were kids. I remembered the blood spurting between his fingers as he clutched at his cheek and how he made himself laugh while our old coach tried to butterfly the gash closed with hockey tape before he took Soupy to the clinic.

“Eagan whatever sounds right,” he said. “What do you care? Or that Whistler guy?”

“What about Whistler?”

“He’s been asking me about the house, too.”

Damn, he’s good, I thought.

“Who’s the law firm representing?” I said. “They’re sure as hell not buying it for themselves.”

“They didn’t tell old Soupy. Probably some rich guy who’s going to tear the place down and throw up a mansion. Who cares? I need the cash. You going to open that?”

Knowing nothing of the lockbox’s contents, I had no desire to open it in front of Soupy.

“I don’t have a key,” I lied.

“I got a crowbar in the flatbed.”

“Mom told me to take it and go. You have to give me your truck.”

Soupy jammed the accelerator down to blast through the yellow light at Estelle. “Give you my-oh, shit, a cop.”

The sheriff’s cruiser was parked on Main two blocks down. It waited across from my rental house, where, to my surprise, my truck sat in the side drive.

“Soup,” I said. “Turn. Now.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“I thought-”

“Now.”

Soupy swung his truck right onto Garfield, drove a block, and turned right again onto South, rolling toward the parking lot behind the Pilot. I didn’t see a sheriff’s cruiser there, but I couldn’t risk going to the newsroom either.

“Here?” Soupy said.

“Keep going.”

He continued past the Pilot and turned left on Elm, then went another block to Ambling and turned right toward the lake. Then he pulled over again and parked.

“Trap,” he said, “you look like you’re going to have a baby. The cops want that box, don’t they?”

I had to speak to him in a language he would understand. “Soup, you know how they say every hockey game has like three hundred mistakes?”

“Never heard that,” Soupy said.

“I read it in Hockey News, and I thought, I bet you two hundred of them happen when you’re tired. You know, the other team’s in your end, and you’re running around and you can’t get off the ice, and you’re sucking wind, that’s when you screw up, make a bad pass, take a bad penalty.”

“And you’re telling me this because?”

I grabbed the door handle. “Are you going to help me?”

He turned sideways in his seat. “Just square with me. Is Mom C in real trouble?”

“She’s in jail,” I said. “But there’s something else. I mean, she has her memory issues, but she’s either gone crazier than a shithouse rat or there’s something else going on.”

Soupy pointed at the box. “And you think it might be in there?”

“Maybe.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. He sighed. Soupy didn’t sigh much. “What the hell. Take it.” He opened his door and stepped into the street. “You’re going to have to fill it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What I always do: wing it. If I need a truck for something, I can borrow one from one of the five hundred people who owe me money.”

“Soup-”

“No, man, I mean it, just go.” He nodded in the direction of where the cop was parked. “The hell with those idiots. They arrest my buddy, my best buddy’s mom. Fuck them.”

I slid behind the steering wheel. Soupy extended his hand. I shook it.

“Take the back roads,” he said. “I don’t want to have to hock the thing back from the cops. Let me know what happens with Mom C.”

“Will do.”

He slammed the door shut. I gave him a salute. He grinned and gave me the finger.

I didn’t pick up my cell phone until Grayling.

Mom’s lockbox sat on the floor in front of the passenger seat. It wouldn’t fit beneath. It made me nervous sitting there, where a cop could see it if one pulled me over.

Half a mile before merging onto Interstate 75 south, I pulled into a gas station. I leaned into Soupy’s narrow rear seat and scooped up the garbage piled on the floor: crumpled Doritos and Burger King bags, empty dip cans, plastic pop bottles streaked with spat dip, a pizza box holding two old slices of pizza and a torn-open condom package, emptied bottles of Beam and El Toro, wads of hockey tape from nights when Soupy was in such a hurry to get to Enright’s that he undressed in the truck.

I dumped it all on top of the lockbox. Then I got out and stood by the truck watching for cops while the gas tank gurgled full. Dingus couldn’t arrest me in Crawford County, but he’d had me followed in the past. Inside the station, I bought three bottles of Vernors, a big bag of chips, and some onion dip.

Back in the truck, I started to punch a Detroit Times number into my cell phone, then decided to check my messages first. There were two. Coach Poppy had left the first when Mom and I were about to descend the hill to Dad’s tree house.

“Hey, Gus, got a weird call,” Poppy said. “Some woman left a message, said Tex is done playing hockey. Putting away foolish things, she said. Didn’t leave a name, but I gather she’s from Tatch’s camp. I’d heard some talk about this but was hoping it was bull. Without Tex, I’m not liking our chances against the Pipefitters. Give me a shout.”