Bryan Gruley: Starvation lake

“I may be a failure, Jack, but I am what I am,” I said. “You call yourself a coach, but you aren’t really a coach. You only pretend. You’re a pedophile. You fuck little boys. You fuck their heads. Then you fuck their bodies.”

He actually laughed again.

“I know about the billets,” I said. “I know about Soupy and Tillie and Jeff Champagne. Pretty clever, put Champy back on the team so you could fuck him? I suppose he was weak, too, huh? I know about Brendan Blake, too. Remember him?” Now his defiant smile ebbed and an eyebrow twitched, once, then again, an insect shifting its weight. “I know all about your disgusting films, and how you sold them, and how you used the money to buy all your land and the billets and-Jesus, Jack-all that ice time you paid for. What a great guy, picking up the tab for the parents. I’m weak? Maybe so. But I’m not a disgusting, twisted old man who pretends to be something so he can have sex with boys.”

He reached for the whiskey.

“And I am not someone,” I said, “who would drive his best friend to suicide.”

He finished pouring. Then he sat back in his chair, took a drink, and smacked his lips.

“You know fuck-all,” he said.

“I know everything. I have your old films, with you in them. And there are others who are ready to speak up.”

“Let me get this straight. I forced your worthless, drunk, pathetic friend Swanny to have sex with an older woman who, I think we can agree, was quite a looker then. Yes? Having sex with foxy older women is something a sixteen-year-old boy would never do? Is that it?”

“It’s Soupy, not Swanny, and I think you-”

“As for my old friend Leo, when I came to town, he was working in the back of a dry cleaners or something. A nobody. I took him by the hand and next thing you know, he’s basically running the rink and working the door for one of the best damn hockey teams in Michigan. He’s a celebrity in Starvation Lake. A goddamn Zamboni driver.” As he spoke, I repeated his words in my head so they would stick like ink on paper. “And then, there he is, my last night in Starvation, waving a pistol around my head, telling me, ‘I’m drawing the line, Jack, I’m drawing the line right here.’ He’s drawing the line. What a joke. Come on, Gus. Leo didn’t really pull the trigger on himself. He couldn’t have. He didn’t have the balls.”

“He’s dead, Jack.”

“God rest his soul. He laid a damn good sheet, eh? Best Zamboni jockey I ever saw. But he got squirrelly on me. All that recovery crap. One minute he’s the porn king of Pine County, next minute he’s got all this horseshit religion and he’s waving a goddamn pistol at me. What was I supposed to do? He could have blown me away and he and Swanny would’ve told the cops it was all in self-defense. So here I am, Gus. Here I am.”

“I thought Leo didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”

“He didn’t.”

“Then why did you run?”

He hesitated. Then he shrugged. “I had no choice.”

“Was someone else there? Someone who could have pulled the trigger? It wasn’t Soupy. He ran before you did.”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“No. No one else.” He stared into his glass. A bitter smile slowly creased his face. “Look around. I rent. Eleven hundred bucks a month. Can you believe it? Eleven hundred bucks in Starvation, you’d have a mansion on the lake.” Again he gulped the rest of his drink, again he refilled, pouring carefully, as if he could not afford to spill one drop. “Let me ask you, Gus, do you ever think about these things you think you know? I know you believe I’m the bad guy here, I’m the guy who’s done all these terrible things. But do you really think I could have done all this stuff I supposedly did all by myself?”

“You were the star of the films. I saw you.”

“Do you know why you’re such a pathetic failure? Take today. First you exposed yourself to me at the rink, then you talked to that very helpful young mother, then you let me lead you here and get the jump on you. You didn’t see the big picture. All you could see was you and your little notebook and your little newspaper and your little ideas about what’s right and wrong. And now you’re missing the big picture again. All you see is your old coach, who let you down-poor Gus-because he blamed you for losing the only game that ever mattered in the whole damn history of your hometown. Which you did, son. You lost that game. Grow up and take the responsibility.”

I couldn’t help myself. “I kept us in that game. If not for me, we’d have been down five to zero before the second period.”

He dismissed me with a wave of his glass. “Yeah, the Fitters had a lot of shots, but they were hitting you right in the breadbasket”-he thumped his chest-“you weren’t making saves. Take a lesson from old Billy Hooper, Gus. Remember? ‘Can’t see it, can’t stop it’? One eye and he saw things clearer than you. Sorry, but everything bad that ever happened in Starvation Lake ain’t about me. There’s a whole world of shit out there, and I’m just a little fly buzzing around it. I mean, did you ever think about why the sheriff wouldn’t just drag the lake after I supposedly drowned in it? Seems logical, doesn’t it? But what did they do? Nothing. Why? You’d think a few folks might know.”

“Like?”

“Like, hell, maybe old Angus Campbell? Now there was one crafty sonofabitch. It wasn’t two days after I’d supposedly drowned that Angus had all the angles figured out and got himself to the right pers-the right people. And just like that, he had a couple of big checks, one from the town for Jerry’s boat, one from”-he hesitated-“’hell, it doesn’t matter. Jerry got his blessed boat, Angus got his cash, nobody ever said a thing.”

I shuddered. “Jerry’s boat?”

“Spardell. The sheriff. He wanted his boat, boy.”

Jerry’s boat. How could I be so stupid? The scribble at the bottom of the receipt Dingus had showed me wasn’t “Ferryboat.” It was “ Jerryboat. ” Whoever had scratched it there-maybe Soupy’s dad? — had made the J look like an F. I’d just read it wrong. And, as Joanie had told me, that receipt was for a check written April 12, 1988-the day before the town council appropriated $25,000 for a new boat-so it couldn’t have come from the town. Angus had that check in hand when the next day, as mayor pro tem, he called for the executive session at which Clayton Perlmutter changed his vote and the council decided not to dredge. Soon Angus had a second check for $25,000. One, written by the town of Starvation Lake, paid for Jerry’s boat. The other kept Angus’s mouth shut. Who wrote that one? And what did Perlmutter get for changing his vote?

“How would Angus have known anything?” I said.

“Ask his worthless son.”

“So it was hush money.”

“Call it whatever you like. They don’t care how, Gus, just how many. Remember?”

“Who paid the hush money?”

Again he peered into his drink, considering. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like to be dead in the eyes of all of your friends? To be dead in the eyes of everyone you know and love? I know, you don’t think I’m capable of feelings like that, but can you at least imagine it?”

I thought I could, actually, but I said, “I don’t care.”

“I left Starvation Lake. Isn’t that enough? I had a good life. I was a good coach. I made all of you into better hockey players. I put that place on the damn map. Here, where a little shitbox like this rents for a thousand bucks a month, you got a lot of rich guys from Boston and New York who think their kids are going to be the next Wayne Gretzky. It’s a joke. There ain’t no Swannies here. No River Rats. No state titles. And me, I’m a nobody, skating around with a bunch of tripods. I’m teaching girls to play, for God’s sake.”