Bryan Gruley - Starvation lake

“Soupy said you might be down here,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d want to know.”

“About?”

“The snowmobile. We’re pretty sure it was Blackburn’s,” she said.

“How can you be sure?”

“All we have is the front part, you know, the whatchamacallit, the cowl. But the registration numbers match up.”

“So? That could be a clerical screwup or something.”

Darlene took one obliging step closer. Her eyes were huge onyx marbles. “There’s also a sticker, like, a decal, next to one of the headlights. It’s all faded, but you can tell.”

The River Rats logo. A snarling, toothy rodent in skates and helmet, carrying a hockey stick like a pitchfork. Coach had had decals made every year. I remember seeing them on the insides of his kitchen cupboards.

“OK,” I said.

Instinctively, Darlene reached for my elbow, then loosed it just as quickly and stepped back again. I stared at the shadowy boot prints she’d left in the snow at my feet. “Well,” I said, “it’s not like Coach died all over again.”

“It’s pretty weird, Gus.”

“What do you guys think happened?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the tunnels?”

The tunnels. Many a boat had sunk in Starvation Lake never to be found. The cops would drag the lake and send scuba crews down, but boats that sank in plain sight seemed to have been swallowed up by the lake bottom. Around town the favored theory was that the lake was part of a serpentine network of underwater tunnels linking dozens of inland lakes to Lake Michigan. Sunken boats were sucked into the tunnels and out to the big lake. Like Bigfoot, the legend persisted, even though no one had ever actually located one of the tunnels.

“Come on,” I said.

“I’ve never seen Dingus like this. Calling meetings, in the office before eight, on the phone all the time with the state police. He’s reopening the whole investigation.”

My chest tightened. “Of the accident?”

“Yes. The accident.” She looked away. “But what do you care? You weren’t around ten years ago, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t. What else do they know?”

She shook her head. “Dingus and the guy deputies were whispering about something tonight. They didn’t share it with me.”

I thought of Joanie. She wasn’t going to be happy with me. She’d had the story exactly right.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No. You just want the story.”

“Will you give me a break, please, Darlene?”

“Did I have to come out here and tell you this?”

“No. Thanks. I’m sorry.”

“You’re always sorry.”

She turned to leave. Up the street I heard Soupy howling something over the rumble of revving pickup trucks, the sounds of Enright’s emptying. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did anyway. “Darl,” I called out. “Give me a ride home?”

She didn’t even turn around.

I was out of bed at 5:45 the next morning. I wanted to see Leo Redpath before the Pilot hit the streets and the codgers at Audrey’s started talking.

I found him in the back of the Zamboni shed at the rink, hunched over his workbench in a pale wash of light. A faded River Rats cap hung on a nail above his head. “Good morning, Mr. Carpenter,” he said without looking up. “The Shoot-Out doesn’t begin for several hours, you know.”

“I’ve got to tell you something, Leo.”

Although he’d never played and wasn’t really a student of hockey, Leo was the closest thing the River Rats had had to an assistant coach. He drove our bus on out-of-town trips. He filmed our practices. He kept tape handy and the water bottles filled. During games he worked the bench door for players hopping on and off the ice. Even as we grew into adults, he still took care of us, supplying pucks, sewing up gashes, keeping a few beers in the fridge. He turned to me while wiping his hands on a rag. I could tell he already knew.

“The police were here last night,” he said.

“Oh.”

Leo had been with Coach on Starvation Lake that night. Off the ice as well as on, they were nearly inseparable. They drank and hunted and fished and snowmobiled together. On that night, they’d been out riding and had a few drinks around a campfire in the woods west of the lake. Leo never said much about that night. The police interviewed him and he was quoted briefly in the Pilot. At Coach’s funeral, he declined to give a eulogy. I asked him about it one night in the Zamboni shed and he acted as if he hadn’t heard me. When I asked again, Soupy told me to leave him alone. “He feels guilty enough,” Soupy whispered. Leo kept working at the rink, but except when he was steering Ethel around the ice, you rarely saw him. He slept on a cot in the shed some nights and otherwise retired to his mobile home off Route 816.

He quit drinking after Coach’s death. On the pegboard above his bench he took to pasting aphorisms he’d clipped from books about addiction recovery: Today, I will embrace each minute of my day with joy and wonder…Today, I will leave shame behind and move forward into peace…Today, I will face the truths about myself and lose my fear of acknowledging their presence in my life… Leo never spoke about the sayings, and we understood not to ask.

Since Coach’s death, Leo seemed a man in constant pain, constantly trying to talk himself out of feeling it. I wished there was something I could do to make him feel better.

“Did the police tell you anything?” I said.

“Not much. They said something about those tunnels.”

“They told you that?”

“Not in so many-well, I don’t suppose I’m supposed to talk about it. Are you interviewing me?”

“No. What did you tell them?”

He shrugged. “What could I tell them? Nothing’s changed, Gus. Jack was a foolish man sometimes. There was nothing anyone could do.”

I didn’t think he really believed that. “You went to my mom’s house that night, right? After the accident?”

“It’s all in the record. You can look it up. But I’m kind of busy right now, Gus. I’ll see you later?”

On my way out I caught a glimpse of Leo’s reflection in a sheet of Plexiglas leaning near the door. He had turned to watch me leave. He wore the expression of someone who was straining to remember something.

At 6:35, I was the only person in Audrey’s Diner. I took a seat at the counter. “Morning, Gussy,” Audrey said. “You know what you want?”

“Morning, ma’am. Egg pie, please.”

Audrey DeYonghe was a surprisingly unplump woman in her sixties who had run the diner alone since her third husband took off with a buxom blackjack dealer he’d met at an Indian casino in Gaylord. He had shown up one morning a year later to beg Audrey’s forgiveness, but by then she had taken up with a gift shop proprietor from Petoskey-also a woman in her sixties-and told her husband, while her breakfast patrons stilled forks to listen, that divorce papers were waiting on a chopping table in the back.

Ordinarily, a love interest like Audrey’s would’ve caused a stir in Starvation Lake. But her diner was the only good breakfast place nearby. And a good breakfast place is as essential to a northern Michigan town as a reliable propane supplier. No one made a fuss. Besides, Audrey was nice. And she baked a wicked gooey cinnamon bun.

The diner was blessedly quiet. I gazed down the counter at the photograph of old Red Wing Gordie Howe hanging on the wall. Audrey was no hockey fan, but Gordie Howe happened to be her girlfriend Molly’s uncle, and he’d signed the photo. Beneath it lay a copy of that morning’s Pilot. I ignored it. I wanted to eat in peace and get out.

“One egg-pie special,” Audrey said as she set my breakfast on the counter. Cheddar cheese and scrambled eggs bubbled up through a golden cocoon of Italian bread. I stabbed at the crust with my fork and steam billowed from the sausage, bacon, potatoes, green peppers, mushrooms, and onions baked inside. I had to let it cool before I dug in. Sometimes when I ate something I really liked, I ate in small bites, to make it last. That wasn’t necessary with an egg pie. The hard part was getting a single forkful with every ingredient in it. Since I was a kid, I had averaged about two all-ingredient mouthfuls per pie.