Bryan Gruley: Starvation lake

All I wanted to do after that was get out of there. I went to college downstate, took some journalism classes, started working summers as a reporter at the Pilot. I caught the news bug and, after graduating, joined the Detroit Times. I worked there for better than ten years, mostly covering the auto industry, and never thought I’d return to Starvation Lake, except to visit Mom. I’d loved Detroit, loved waking to the chirping of hungry gulls and walking alone to work along the Detroit River while the sun burned a golden streak across the water. I loved my job and, just before I left, I’d been working on the best story of my life, a story I thought might win me a Pulitzer prize. Instead it cost me my job, my reputation, and my life away from Starvation. Before I knew it, I was back in Starvation, working at the Pilot again, an unmarried thirty-four-year-old without a prospect in sight.

Tire tracks crisscrossed the flattened snow at the Walleye Lake boat ramp. Snowdrifts usually made the beach inaccessible to anything but snowmobiles, but only a foot or so of snow had fallen so far that winter. I left my truck and edged along the bank toward the flashlight beams bouncing in the gloom. Dark bluffs ringed the semifrozen lake, which lay still and gray beneath the low sky. Cracks and dimples showed in the rough ice along the shore. Here and there slabs of ice floated just beneath the surface of the silver water. My boots skidded in mud and I grasped at dry cattails for balance.

“Whoa, there!” A flashlight beam swung up into my eyes. “Freeze where you are, please.” It was Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho.

I tried to shield my eyes against the glare. “It’s me, Gus Carpenter.” I felt for the notebook in my back pocket but decided to leave it there for the moment.

“Nothing for you here, Gus,” Dingus said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

About twenty yards behind Dingus, a deputy played a flashlight along the shoreline. I caught a glimpse of an object lying on the beach, about knee high, triangular, pale yellow, striped with dripping weeds.

“That a snowmobile?” I said.

The sheriff stepped in front of me. “Just checking a situation,” he said. The flashlight glare obscured his face, but I could see the brass badge stuck to the furry flap on the front of his cap. “Police business, Gus,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Leave?” I almost laughed. “You think I wanted to come out here? It’s a public access, for God’s sake.”

“You been drinking?”

Christ, I thought. I had my notebook out now and was patting myself for a pen. “I had a beer after hockey,” I said.

The deputy had walked up. Now two flashlights shined in my eyes. Apparently I didn’t have a pen. I wasn’t about to ask Dingus for one.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t mean to hassle you, but I’ve got a paper to put out tomorrow, and I have to talk to you first thing.”

He shrugged. “Good evening, Gus. Drive carefully, eh? You wouldn’t want to get pulled over with your breath like that.”

I steered my truck up the two-track. At the crest of the bluff, I turned left onto Route 816. I drove a few hundred yards, flicked off my headlights, and pulled onto the shoulder. I had to wait while my eyes adjusted to the blackness. Then I crossed the road and scrambled down the bank and into the woods until I could peer down to the lake’s edge. My toes curled against the snow that had settled into my right boot.

Dingus and the deputy crouched over the yellowish object in the intersection of their flashlight beams. Dingus kept scratching at the side of the thing, then looking where he’d scratched. He did this three or four times, then stood up, walked a few steps down the shore, and sank to one knee. It was hard to see him in the shadows, but it looked to me like he bowed his head as if to pray, or to cry.

Thirty minutes later, I poured myself a Mason jar of water and sipped it in the dark at the kitchen window of my second-story flat. Across Main Street at Enright’s Pub, I could see Soupy’s head in its red wool cap bobbing around in the amber light of last call. He still wore his coat, and he hugged his mug close to his chest as he laughed.

My dinky apartment, where I’d lived for the six or seven months since I’d been back, sat directly above the Pilot newsroom. I rented it from my boss, the Pilot ’s executive editor. At $125 a month, it fit my shrunken budget and kept me from moving back in with Mom, though I loved visiting her around dinnertime once or twice a week.

Enright’s went dark as Soupy and the other diehards spilled out the front door. I’d left my lights off so Soupy wouldn’t come stomping up my stairway for a nightcap. He walked half a block in one direction, toward the lake and his marina, then stopped and reversed course, walking back along Main to where his truck was parked. As he passed the tavern, he reached into his coat and pulled out the half-filled mug he had sneaked out.

I walked into what passed for my living room and sat on the arm of the recliner. I set my water on the plywood tabletop that rested on four cardboard boxes. Three were marked on the sides with the word Trucks. They were filled with notebooks, photographs, and folders I had collected while working at the Detroit Times. I hadn’t gotten around to throwing it away.

I thought about what I’d seen on the beach at Walleye Lake. Yellow was the standard color of the old Ski-Doo snowmobiles that had been popular many years before. The thought sent a little chill down my spine. My coach, Jack Blackburn, had died on a yellow Ski-Doo. He’d been riding with Leo Redpath late on a Saturday night when his snowmobile broke through the frozen lake and he went under. Neither his body nor his snowmobile was ever found. But Coach Blackburn had gone down on Starvation Lake, not Walleye. So that couldn’t have been his snowmobile that Dingus had gone to see. Then why did I feel nausea slithering around in my gut like a worm? What was Dingus even doing out there, and why had he seemed so jittery? What if it was Coach’s snowmobile?

I was too tired to walk down to the Pilot and leave a note on Joanie’s desk, so I picked up the phone and dialed her extension, figuring I’d leave a voice mail. I heard half a ring, then a click, then a rustling sound.

“McCarthy,” she said.

“Joanie?”

There was a pause. “Yes, Gus, it’s Joanie. I’m sleeping.”

“At the office?”

“I forwarded my calls. What do you want?”

“Dingus. You need to call him first thing.”

“What?”

“Sheriff Aho. Ask him about the snowmobile that washed up on Walleye Lake. Or at least I think it was a snowmobile. He wouldn’t say. Might be nothing, but he was acting pretty weird.”

“You spoke with him?”

“I went out there.”

Another pause. “Well,” she said, “I have a bunch of stuff on my plate.”

“Uh-huh. But I need you to check with Dingus first thing.”

“OK, boss,” she said, enunciating it so as to remind me that she wasn’t in love with my being her boss. She was young and smart and bent on getting out of Starvation Lake as fast as possible. Like I’d once been. I remembered that feeling of impatience for what would come next, and how soon, and whether it would come at all, whether you’d get stuck at some small-town rag writing about drain commission meetings while everyone else went to big cities and big stories.

I finished the water and put the jar in the sink. Outside, Soupy’s truck was gone. Next to Enright’s, the backlit sign in the window of Boynton Realty glowed dully. Soupy and Teddy Boynton and I had all played together for Jack Blackburn. I shivered in the darkness. Was Coach back now? I wondered. Had Dingus seen his ghost on the shore of Walleye Lake?