Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

Her hair was cropped short and straightened, which made her green eyes seem bigger and brighter. She had never lacked for confidence, at least not around me, but watching her move around the pool table, weighing her options, calling her shots, leveling her stick, I thought she seemed more like a woman, even at just twenty-five, than the impatient girl who had left Starvation for bigger and better, first in Chicago, now in Detroit.

She missed a seven-nine combo that would have ended the game.

“Oh, crap,” she said.

I stepped into the light. The piss-yellow felt on the table was threadbare along the rails. “You mean, ‘Oh, fuck’?”

She turned to me, brushing reddish bangs from her eyes. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s not a pool stick,” I said, mimicking the complaint I had heard from her about obscene words. “It’s a fucking pool stick.”

She laughed as she came over and surprised me first with a two-armed hug, the tip of her pool stick poking me between the shoulder blades, then a light kiss on the neck that made me shiver a little.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said.

“You, too.” Up close I saw a scar I had never noticed before, an upside-down smile etched between her chin and lower lip. I pointed at it. “Bar fight?”

“Not quite. How was your trip?”

“OK,” I said, thinking of the lockbox. “No traffic.”

“Excuse me.”

It was the guy with Joanie. He was moving around the table. I wasn’t in his way, but he wanted me to think I was. I took a step back. He gave me a look, gave a different one to Joanie, who didn’t seem to notice. The guy was big. Not athletic big, just lumbering cumbersome big, like a washing machine. He was wearing his olive drab winter coat open. A striped wool scarf dangled from his neck. He snapped the tip of his stick on the table’s edge, grabbed the chalk.

“Game over,” he said.

Again the voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Good luck,” Joanie said. “Hey-meet my friend Gus from up north. Gus, this is Albert Gaudreault.”

I started to offer a hand across the table but the guy was already lining up his shot. He jabbed at the cue ball. It struck the seven, which bumped the nine into a corner. He spread his arms and looked at Joanie. “Like I said.” He pointed the stick at me then and waggled it.

“Frenchy,” he said.

“Pardon?” I said.

“Call me Frenchy.”

In my head I repeated the name I had heard: GAW-droh. It, too, sounded familiar, though again not familiar enough that I knew what it meant to me. Frenchy didn’t speak with even a hint of a French accent, as did some of the French-Canadians I’d encountered in hockey rinks. If anything, he sounded like he might have come from downriver. Maybe River Rouge, or Woodhaven.

“Gus,” I said.

“Yeah.” As if he knew me.

Somehow the Clash became Three Dog Night.

“Buy you a beer?” I said.

He looked at Joanie. He had the sad face of a basset hound, but the attitude was more Doberman. He mouthed the words, “This is the guy?”

Joanie stepped over, flattened a hand on the slight curve of his belly, leaned up and kissed him, quickly, on the lips. The hair on the back of her neck parted, revealing the whiteness of the nape.

Frenchy looked past Joanie to me. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m going.” Then to Joanie, “Careful now, sweetness.”

She laughed as she pushed him toward the stairway. He glanced at me over his shoulder before he disappeared. Then Joanie grabbed me by my belt and pulled me toward the bar.

“Nightcap,” she said.

“That your boyfriend?”

Joanie and I half sat, half stood on the rickety stools at the bar, a rectangular box of plywood and two-by-fours hung with a torn Kid Rock poster. The guy I’d seen cleaning up the puke appeared from a back room. His mood had not improved. Blue Ribbon wasn’t on the menu, so I ordered a longneck Bud, Joanie a Jack Daniel’s, neat.

She shook her head no to my question.

“You know him?” she said. “You know everybody.”

I peered at the doorway to the stairs, as if that might tell me. Frenchy was at least ten years older than Joanie, probably older than me. “He looks… I don’t know.”

Joanie shook her head. She obviously liked the guy, but I couldn’t tell if there was more than that. In my experience, the only thing that got Joanie going was scoops.

“Poor Frenchy,” she said.

“He’s not your boyfriend?”

“I don’t have boyfriends.”

“Really? Does he work for the Times?”

“Sort of. Not really.”

“Meaning?”

“He used to work there. The Free Press, too. Now he does a little of this and a little of that. Kind of a freelancer.”

“Ah. One of those guys.”

I knew a few. They hopped back and forth between the Times and the Free Press, playing the papers and their editors off of one another, getting raises and more raises until one day an editor who’d hired them at one paper had a drink with one who’d hired them at the other and halted that little gravy train. Guys like Frenchy wound up hanging out at the Anchor and the Post and the Money Tree, picking up dollar-a-word assignments and pretending they were loving the freelance life while leaving $10 bills on $120 tabs.

“He says the past is the past,” Joanie said, and I thought, Were it only so. She inched her stool closer. I caught a whiff of her body wash. Almond. “He’s good at computer stuff. You’ll see. How are you?”

I told her without telling her anything she didn’t need to know. She listened, her chin in one hand, her eyes intent on my face. She asked about Dingus, about the Pilot, about my mother. She had gotten to know Mom, and Mom her, while she was in Starvation. When she asked about Darlene, I changed the subject and asked her how she had wound up on the cop beat in Detroit, at the Times, after leaving the Pilot for the Chicago Tribune.

Joanie stirred her whiskey with a forefinger, licked the finger. I remembered how she once had surprised me by chugging a can of Blue Ribbon in the Pilot newsroom. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was more money.”

“The way I heard it, the Times came after you big-time after you broke some highway construction scam.”

“L trains, actually,” she said. “But, yeah, I guess. Whatever. The new editor at the Times used to be at the Trib. ”

She had been in a hurry since the day I had hired her at the Pilot. In a hurry for bigger stories, bigger audiences, bigger prizes. Lots of young reporters were in a hurry, but most were prone to tripping over their own feet. I had once been in a hurry and wound up stumbling all the way back to the small time.

“Don’t apologize for success, Joanie.”

“Don’t be a wimp, Gus.”

“What does that mean?”

“You could be back here now. All the people who sold you out are long gone. All you have to do is pick up the phone and you’d be kicking the auto companies’ butts again.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Look what you did in Starvation. You got the bad guy.”

“We both did. But I should’ve gotten him twenty years ago.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter where you are, it’s what you do that matters.”

I took a drink of my Bud. Warm again. “No complaints here. My mom needs me. I like my life OK. Got a new reporter.”

“You mean old reporter, don’t you?”

“You know him?”

“Lucas B. Whistler? Are you kidding? The youngest Detroit reporter ever to be a Pulitzer finalist? Prizewinning basher of computer screens?”

“He already smashed one at the Pilot, ” I said. “Sounds like you got Pulitzer envy.”

“I have another year to beat him,” she said, holding her glass up in a toast, then sipping from it. “And after I actually win, I plan to keep my job longer, too.”