Bryan Gruley: Starvation lake

Joanie had written most of the stories on my screen, including the one at the top, slugged BIGFOOT. I punched the story up:

By M. Joan McCarthy

Pilot Staff Correspondent

A glass case on Clayton Perlmutter’s kitchen table contains what some might consider to be a bizarre treasure. Perlmutter’s prize is a three-inch-thick mound of hardened brown feces, which the retired house painter claims came from a Sasquatch, the mythical “Bigfoot” creature rumored to roam the woods of northern Michigan.

But some people think Perlmutter is the one who’s full of it.

I couldn’t help but smile, both at the lead paragraph itself and at the unlikelihood that it would run in the Pilot. We did our best not to put fecal matter in the paper, at least intentionally.

“What’s so funny back there?”

“Nothing, Tillie,” I said.

The Pilot and other papers in our area ran stories every few years on Clayton Perlmutter and his Sasquatch Institute. Invariably, the stories ushered readers through Perlmutter’s dank garage, where he kept his collection of blurry photos, scratchy audiotapes, footprint casts, and maps of Sasquatch sightings. And they quoted Perlmutter about his one-man campaign for a state law that would prohibit the killing of the Sasquatch.

I had expected Joanie to file something equally harmless. Reading her story, I saw I’d been mistaken. She quoted zoologists from Harvard and the Smithsonian discrediting the notion that the Sasquatch had ever existed. She cited a retired local photographer who said he’d helped Perlmutter doctor snapshots of a brown bear. The real news showed up halfway through: For years, Perlmutter had been getting state money to support his organization. In his grant applications, he had said he was maintaining a museum.

Documents obtained by the Pilot under the state Freedom of Information Act show Perlmutter has garnered at least $32,235 in eighteen state grants since 1985. In periodic reports to the state, Perlmutter has said only that the state money had been used for “sundry uncompleted research projects.” When asked, Perlmutter said he had “no obligation under the First Amendment” to address these matters.

I loved the story, even felt a pang of jealousy at Joanie’s ability to nail it. But I doubted it would fly with the corporate guys. It wasn’t just their usual skittishness that was giving me pause. My job was on the line. The bosses at NLP had balked at hiring me after my abrupt departure from the Detroit Times. Only Henry Bridgman’s personal guarantee had persuaded them-that and a year of probation. One bad slip and I could be gone from the Pilot — and maybe the whole newspaper business-for good. I didn’t like it, but I decided I had to let the NLP lawyers vet Joanie’s story. That created another problem. Expecting something tamer, I’d planned to splash the Bigfoot story across Saturday’s front page. Now I needed something else.

Up front, Tillie was leaning against the counter with the Detroit Times spread before her. A bluish cigarette haze hung around her bleached-blond head.

“Hey, Till,” I said. “What’s in the news?”

“Aren’t newspaper editors supposed to keep up with the news?” she said.

“I suppose.”

“Indeed. Well, it’s all Monica all the time.”

“Who’s Monica?”

“She’s a little hussy who worked in the White House,” Tillie said. “She had a little thing with the president. He stuck a cigar in her you-know-what.”

I cringed, less at what Tillie said than at having to hear it from her. “Her last name’s Lewinsky?” I grabbed a phone book. “I need a favor, Till.”

She crushed her cigarette out. “Please, Gus, not a Selby.”

The Pilot ’s former owner, Nelson P. Selby, had some peculiar ideas about “localizing” national news. One of his favorite gimmicks was to have reporters interview local people who happened to have the same surnames as people in Washington or New York or Hollywood who were making news. So, when General Schwarzkopf was leading the U.S. military in the Gulf War, some poor Pilot reporter sought out the three Schwarzkopfs-one may have been a Schwartzkopf-in Pine County to ask what they thought. None were related to the general. A retired plumber wondered if the general had a homely dog, like General George Patton. A widowed schoolteacher thought Schwarzkopf a handsome man who shouldn’t wear sunglasses when being photographed. I’d sneered at this sort of story when I was in journalism school and later as a reporter in Detroit. Now I riffled through a phone book and told Tillie, “There are three Lewinskys in the county, all spelled S-K-I. And there’s two LOW-inskys. If you’re desperate, there’s a Lewinskas.”

“Oh, we’re plenty desperate,” Tillie said. “What happened to Bigfoot?”

“Problems,” I said. “Don’t forget to get a photo. It’ll have to run big.”

Tillie was looking in the phone book. “Here’s old Artemis Lewinski,” she said. “He could definitely run big.”

I winced again. “Copy by four, OK? Where’s Joanie?”

“She went for coffee.”

“Oh, no,” I said. She’d been gone too long. I hurried out without a coat.

Every head in Audrey’s turned as I walked in. Then every head turned back to the round table in the corner. Four men, three wives, and a sister-in-law sat there with Joanie, who was nodding and scribbling in her notebook, her backpack parked on the floor between her feet.

I was too late.

I stationed myself behind Joanie’s left shoulder. She didn’t look up. Their plates hadn’t been cleared; I smelled grease and cinnamon. Elvis Bontrager was talking. He glanced at me from beneath the brim of his Lawson’s Lumber Land cap. The back of the cap was made of plastic mesh, and I could see the rows of thin hairs like wires jutting from his pink scalp. A fleck of Canadian bacon clung to his left cheek as his jowls worked.

“The thing was, I mean, the real thing with Coach was, it didn’t matter who we were playing, they could be bigger or faster or, you know, fancier than us, and he don’t care, he’d figure out how to beat them.”

“A strategist then?” Joanie said.

“Always a good game plan.”

Everyone nodded. Elvis looked at me. Here it comes, I thought.

“But Coach Blackburn, unfortunately, had to have the players actually play the game, right, Gus?” he said. “What happened to your face?”

He meant my stitches. “Puck,” I said.

“Well, at least you stopped one, eh?” Elvis chuckled and turned to Joanie. “You know, miss, Gus is pretty famous around here. He was witness to the end of an era in Starvation Lake hockey. Hell, he was the one who ended it. Tell her, Gus. You know what happened. God knows none of us do.”

Joanie lowered her notebook. “What happened?”

Elvis shrugged. “Nothing. Gus here just lost us a hockey game. A state championship hockey game. Our one and only.”

Joanie looked as though she didn’t quite understand. “That’s it?”

“Miss,” Elvis said, leaning forward, “he lost that game and we ain’t come close to a state championship since.”

“Oh,” Joanie said. She looked at me. “So you jinxed them?”

Elvis had another laugh. He didn’t like me because I gave up that goal, and because, yes, to a superstitious person, and there were plenty in Starvation Lake, including me, I had jinxed them. But he also didn’t like me because I had broken the heart of his niece when I went off to Detroit to work at a newspaper instead of marrying her, as Elvis and everyone else had expected. Her name then had been Darlene Bontrager, but later she married a minor-league hockey player named Esper who suffered a mysteriously chronic back ailment and now spent his days playing video golf at Dingman’s Bar. Darlene Esper was the sheriff’s deputy who had called me about the snowmobile in Walleye Lake.