Bryan Gruley: Starvation lake

I’d gone off to Detroit so that someday I might be able to come back to Starvation and walk up to Elvis and tell him, “Why don’t you go to hell, so what if I lost a stupid hockey game years ago? Look at me now, a big-city reporter, a Pulitzer Prize winner.” But there I was, just another local loser who worked at the little paper across the street with the shaker shingles over the door and the sign in the window that read, “Peerless Pilot Personals Will Put You on the Path to Pleasure and Profit.” Screaming would have felt great. Instead I managed a tight smile and said to Joanie, “What’s all the interest in the coach?”

“The snowmobile,” she said. “Looks like it could’ve been his.”

“Weren’t you out to Walleye last night, Gus?” Elvis said.

“Yes, but I-”

“We heard they found a pair of Jack’s old skates inside, all rusted out.”

Joanie scribbled furiously in her notebook. This was just what I had feared. If I didn’t get her out of there fast, by nightfall we’d be hearing about sightings of Jack Blackburn, and maybe the other Elvis, too.

“Sounds like you all know a lot more than I do,” I said. I put a hand on Joanie’s shoulder. “We need to get the paper out.”

She shrugged my hand off and stood. “Come on back, Miss Joanie,” Elvis said. “I’ll buy you a cup.”

The door had barely shut behind us when she turned to me, florid with anger. “Why did you do that? I was getting good color.”

“Color for what?”

“For the snowmobile story you told me to do.”

“Blackburn died on Starvation Lake,” I said, “not Walleye.”

“Whatever. The cops think it might be his.”

“ Might be?” I noticed Elvis craning his neck to see us through the window.

“They got the registration-part of the registration number-and it matches. I mean, part of it matches what’s-”

“Part of it? Did Dingus confirm it?”

“No. D’Alessio.”

Pine County sheriff’s deputy Frank D’Alessio was young and dumb and a notorious skirt chaser. “I’ll bet it’s not on the record, though, huh?”

“So?”

“So you’ve got part of a number and the word of a deputy who won’t go on the record. You don’t really have a goddamn thing, do you?”

“Watch your language, please.”

“This is a small town, Joanie. Asking questions about stuff you don’t know to be true is no different than gossiping to everybody here.”

“Well, maybe this town’s too small.”

“Maybe. Just don’t bring me this stuff until you have it nailed.”

“OK, boss,” she said. She veered to cross Main without me but had to wait for a car to pass. She spun to face me again. Her hair had fallen across her eyes. I knew D’Alessio. He’d be all over that.

“What about the Bigfoot story?” she said.

“What about it?”

“Do you need anything more?”

“Not right now.”

“Meaning?”

I glanced away. Soupy’s truck was parked in front of Enright’s. “It’ll run next week. Got to have it lawyered first.”

“Lawyered? Bullcrap! They’ll cut out all the stuff about the grants and all the crap Perlmutter’s been peddling all these years. And you can run the usual little piece of crud instead of a story that might turn a few heads.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But you know, don’t you, Gus?”

I watched, speechless, as she turned and darted into the street, holding up her hand to slow an oncoming pickup.

No way was I going back to Audrey’s for lunch. I walked around behind the Pilot and climbed the wooden stairs to my apartment.

I took bologna and ketchup from the fridge, a frying pan from the dish drainer. I turned on the stove and tore the bologna into ragged strips in the pan. The meat sizzled into crisp curls. I dumped ketchup all over it, turned the heat down, and laid two slices of white bread on a paper plate.

Out the window, I stared at Soupy’s truck, still parked in front of Enright’s. I hit the play button on my answering machine. My mother reminded me about coming for Sunday dinner. Somebody hung up. Then a reedy voice filled my breadbox of a kitchen.

“Gus,” it said. “I wish you’d return my calls. Tuesday’s the drop dead.”

“Then I’ll call you Tuesday,” I told the machine.

The voice was the Detroit lawyer I had had to hire in my final days at the Detroit Times. I turned the stove off and scooped the crispy bologna onto the bread.

“Jesus,” I said.

My best reporter-my only real reporter-was angry with me. Teddy Boynton was trying to blackmail me. My old coach had resurfaced. And now it looked like I would finally have to deal with the mess I had made in Detroit. I sat down in the recliner to eat. But I wasn’t hungry anymore.

The sandwich spent the afternoon in the newsroom fridge, while I edited stories and wrote headlines for Saturday’s Pilot. The school board was seeking a special tax to pay for a swimming pool. A cellular phone company cut the ribbon on a store in the mini-mall. A frustrated mother called the sheriff’s department for help putting her eleven-year-old son to bed. And the River Rats were headed downstate for the first round of the state hockey playoffs. I spent most of an hour translating Tillie Spaulding’s Monica feature into readable newspaper patter. She couldn’t write, but she surely could find the strange.

She dug up eighty-three-year-old Gloria Lowinski, a nurse who thought President Clinton and his wife should try tantric sex, and a CPA named Barton Lewienski, who insisted Republicans had paid the intern to seduce Clinton. There was a French poodle named Monica and a cashier at a burger joint called the White House who said, “Monica who?”

I held my nose and sent the thing to the printing plant.

Joanie didn’t turn in her story about the snowmobile until 5:12, eighteen minutes before deadline. It began:

Pine County sheriff’s deputies think a snowmobile that washed up on Walleye Lake may have belonged to John D. “Jack” Blackburn, the legendary youth hockey coach who died in a snowmobile accident ten years ago.

Reading the rest, I saw no more evidence to support that assertion than Joanie had let on outside Audrey’s. Nor did she attempt to explain how the snowmobile, if it was Coach Blackburn’s, had surfaced on Walleye Lake after sinking in Starvation. She was sitting at her desk, marking up a notebook with a red pen. She hadn’t said a word to me all afternoon.

“Joanie,” I said. “You haven’t nailed this snowmobile thing.”

“Fix it then.”

“Too late,” I said, annoyed. “Corporate’ll raise hell if we keep the plant overtime. I’m spiking it.” Just as I turned back to my computer, I heard a metallic thwup against the wall facing me. Two feet over my head, a wet brown stain seeped down the wall. A Diet Coke can hissed on the floor beneath.

“Jesus,” I said, wheeling around to face her.

She was standing now. “Jerk,” she said. “I could’ve worked on Bigfoot, but I spent the day chasing your stupid snowmobile, and now you kill that story, too? You’re so full of crap.”

She had a point. And I could handle her calling me a jerk, but in my short career as an editor I’d never had a reporter throw something at me. I had no idea what to do. But I wasn’t about to fire her when the suits weren’t about to let me replace her. So I just said, “Calm down, Joanie.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t tell me anything.”

Tillie appeared in the doorway in her fur coat with the little mink claws dangling from the shoulders. “What’s going on back here?”

I looked at Joanie. “You’re a loser,” she said.

Tillie walked over, picked up the can, and dropped it in a wastebasket. “Can you children please clean this up? Good night.”