Bryan Gruley: Starvation lake

I stepped through the kitchen into a small living room. The front window curtains were drawn. The beige walls were bare. An unlit floor lamp stood behind a recliner, which faced a television that stood in a corner. A TV remote rested on a copy of Business Week magazine atop a small folding table next to the recliner. Along the wall to my right stood a table hockey game, the kind with a plastic bubble top I’d seen in bars. Beyond it in the corner stood a garbage can filled nearly to the top with empty Coke and Mountain Dew cans.

“Mr. Blackstone?”

Across the living room a doorway beckoned to a darkened corridor. I felt an involuntary urge to leave. I could go back to the Bonnie and stake out his house until he returned. But what if he didn’t? What if he’d recognized me and was now fleeing? I might never find him again. I couldn’t go back to Dingus and the rest of the town and tell them Jack Blackburn was still alive without being able to say I had confronted him in the flesh. They might not believe me. They might not want to believe me.

I crossed the living room and stepped into the hallway, stopping to let my eyes adjust to the dark. I could still hear the kitchen clock ticking. There was a closed door to my left, one to my right, and a third facing me at the end of the short corridor. Two bedrooms and a bathroom, I figured. As I reached for the doorknob to my left, memory sucked me back to the schoolhouse Soupy and I had broken into as kids. For an instant I could smell the mold and must again. I pushed the door open.

The bedroom, the size of a child’s, had been converted into an office. A computer monitor and keyboard sat on a desk facing me. A stack of Wall Street Journal s leaned against it. Next to the computer was a box containing what looked like blank VCR tapes, a telephone wired to the computer, and two black marking pens. To the right of the desk stood a small television equipped with a VCR. The TV was angled so that the person sitting at the desk could watch as he worked.

Against the far wall stood a bookcase holding five shelves of videotapes. A few of the tapes bore labels indicating they were instructional hockey videos: Defense for Beginners. Shoot to Score. Dryden on Goaltending. Some were unlabeled. Many had thin white stuck-on labels bearing tiny black markings. I leaned in close enough to read one and a shiver raced down my spine: LP/0293/FX.

Blackburn had borrowed Delbert’s filing system. The numbers in the middle, as with Delbert’s, signified a date. Virtually all of the tapes were marked FX, which I assumed stood for Fairfax. I wondered if the first two letters could have been someone’s initials? A boy’s? An empty tape box rested next to Blackburn’s computer. I picked it up. “JJ/1297/FX,” the label read. I wondered why Blackburn hadn’t brought his old River Rat films with him when he fled to Virginia. Maybe there was no time. Tillie could have sent them, of course, but it dawned on me that those were her last claim on Blackburn, the thing that kept him, however distant, in her life.

I was filled at once with dread at what I had found and exhilaration at what I could now tell the world. There was so much here, and there had to be more in Blackburn’s computer and his video camera. If he had escaped, so be it; he’d left too much behind. I flipped open my notebook. As I put my pen to the paper, I felt something on my shoulder.

A hand.

“What?” I cried out. The hand firmed its grip, but I twisted away and stumbled backward against the wall, face-to-face with Jack Blackburn.

He wore black nylon sweatpants, slippers, and a faded gray Fairfax Hockey T-shirt puffed out at the waist to hide his paunch. He seemed to be smiling, though it was hard to know for sure because his upper teeth, obviously capped, stretched his mouth in an unnatural way, like a clown’s. In one hand he held a glass of what I assumed was whiskey. The other he extended to me. I reached for it without thinking.

“Hello, Gus,” he said.

“Going through my things?” The clown’s mouth chuckled. “Should I call the police?”

“Do what you need to do.”

“I hear some police may be looking for you, Gus.” He looked at the videotape box still in my hand. “Kind of late in life to be boning up on your hockey skills, isn’t it?”

I set the box down. “Those aren’t hockey tapes, Jack.”

“Jack?” he said. “The name’s Richard. Or Rich, if you prefer.” He laughed at this as if it were hilarious. “It’s nice to see your dad’s big boat again.” He’d recognized the Bonnie. “It’s looking pretty good for, what, thirty years old? Though it does stick out like a sore thumb around here. This is the nation’s capital. Nobody drives American.” Again he cackled. “So, what are you here for? An article? Is that what gives you the right to just break into somebody’s house?”

“I know what you did.”

That didn’t seem to register. “Is it one of those where-are-they-now stories?” he said. “Wait-aren’t you back at the little-league paper in Starvation again?” He took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “You remember how I used to say, ‘Losing’s good for winning’? Well, no offense, Gus, but I’m thinking maybe you’re the exception. Losing didn’t work so well for you, did it? You just kept on losing. The town goat. The hotshot reporter who let the big story go between his legs. Now here you are sneaking around an old man’s house, looking for who knows what.”

“I found what I’m looking for, Jack.”

“Rich, please. And, by all means, let’s talk if I can help with whatever you’re writing. I’d love to hear your questions.” He held his glass out and shook the cubes around. “Cocktail?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’m going to have another myself.”

I waited in the living room while Blackburn went into the kitchen. He was either perfectly at ease or putting on a fine act. I heard ice clinking and the top of a bottle being spun off. He emerged with a fresh drink, a second glass, one of the bottles of Jim Beam, and a kitchen chair. He put the chair down and motioned for me to sit. I remained standing. He set his drink, the other glass, and the whiskey on the table next to the recliner. Then he just stood there, looking me over.

“I owe you an apology,” he said. “See how your body has a certain flow to it, how the shoulders flow so nicely into your arms, the arms so nicely along your sides and hips, your hips into your legs? All that nice muscle tone, all that wonderful sinew, even all these years later.”

I wasn’t going to let him make me squirm. “I’ve got you,” I said. “I know everything you did.”

Blackburn sat down in the recliner. “When I first saw you,” he said, “way back when, I thought right off you’d be a flopper, because, you know, you were never too tall, and the stand-up goalies tend to be taller. Of course today they’re all floppers, that’s how it is. But the more I looked at you, the more I was convinced you were built to stand up. A runt, but a wiry runt. I figured you had the strength, you know, the sort of-what do you call it? — internal stature that makes a goalie unbeatable.” He paused to lick the rim of his glass. “But you didn’t, did you, Gus? You were weak. You’re still weak. Aren’t you?”

I sat down now and leaned forward, elbows on knees.

“I know what you did with Soupy,” I said.

“Do you still have that glove? What the hell did you call it? You guys and your idiotic superstitions.”

“And you and your films, huh?” I took out my pen and notebook.

He pointed his glass at me. “No notes. Or I can call the cops. You can shut off that tape recorder, too.”

He wasn’t going to call the police anymore than I was, but it didn’t matter. I snapped off the recorder and put my pen and notebook away while he drained his glass in one practiced swallow, then poured again. My coach. The long-dead hero of Starvation Lake. He actually lived alone in a dark house in a place that knew little of the game he supposedly loved. His cheeks had turned the color of a fading bruise. He had a Toyota and a bottle and a TV remote and a bookshelf filled with tapes of naked boys.