Bryan Gruley: Starvation lake

“You can afford a hundred bucks?” I said.

“If I know I’m going to win. Fuck Boynton and his fancy-ass marina.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah, and fuck you, too, Trap. The zoning board is going to shoot Teddy boy down like a porcupine from a tree.”

Soupy figured he had an edge. Two board members had been friends of his father. Another once worked at the marina.

“Maybe,” I said. “But what if they do? What if Boynton walks away then and you tank, isn’t the town screwed?”

“Is that what fuckface Teddy told you?” he said. I started to answer, but he waved me off. “I know, you can’t talk about what goes on inside the holy hallowed walls of the mullet wrapper. But I know Boynton and his fat-ass lawyer have been peddling those lawsuits. I’m not so dumb, Trap. You want my permission to put that shit in the paper? Is that it?”

“I don’t need your permission, Soupy.”

“Look,” he said. “The town will not be screwed.” He set his beer down. “Snow’s been iffy this year, so we haven’t rented out as many snowmobiles as I’d like. But I already got people coming for boats. I’ve been a little distracted with this Boynton stuff, but we’ll take care of that and everything’ll fall into place. Shit, Trap, you hate your job, why don’t you come over and we’ll run the place together? Hell, we used to just about run it.”

“I don’t hate my job, Soupy.”

“You remember the cat, Trap?”

When we were fifteen, both working at the marina, we pooled our earnings to buy a used sixteen-foot catamaran. We took it out on breezy summer evenings after work. Soupy sat and handled the tiller. I buckled on a harness and stood on the pontoon behind him. When a stiff wind caught the sail, my pontoon would lift out of the water and I’d stand up, the bottoms of my feet crooked hard against the pontoon’s edge. I’d lean way back against the harness to keep the boat from flipping, my body nearly horizontal over the water rushing by, Soupy working the tiller, his hair flying, both of us laughing and yelling at the setting sun.

“That was the ultimate, Trap. Better than hockey even.”

I loved him like a brother, but he didn’t make it easy.

“Will you be at the zoning board Monday?” I said.

“Fucking-ay,” he said. He smiled and spread his arms wide. “Hey, man, look-the marina’s got to last at least through summer. I already ordered the softball shirts.”

I left Enright’s a little after eleven and walked along the river to the lake to clear my head of the smoke and alcohol. The wind whistled low through a birch stand at the far end of South Beach. Across the lake, dim lights of homes on the bluff made hazy silhouettes of the fishing shanties dotting the lake. I looked toward the darkness past Pelly’s Point, where Coach Blackburn had gone down.

He had come to Starvation in 1970 from Canada, where he’d played hockey into his twenties and then had been a coach, first of little kids, then older ones, finally sixteen-to nineteen-year-olds, Canada’s best amateurs. He left Canada, he told us, because he couldn’t stand the cold anymore; he longed for warm summers. He said his brother-in-law, who was from Kalamazoo downstate, had told him Starvation was one of the prettiest lakes anywhere.

He started a heating-and-cooling business and bought a cabin in the woods a few miles west of town. That first winter, he built a rink outside in the clearing next to his cabin. The town had plenty of backyard rinks, but none like Coach’s. He encircled his with slatted construction fence for dasher boards and made goal nets from two-by-fours and chicken wire. He lined up red and blue milk crates for team benches and erected a huge blackboard for keeping score. He made it known that all of Starvation Lake’s young skaters were welcome to come to “Make-Believe Gardens” to play hockey.

On Saturday mornings in January and February, when it was so cold that our skate blades squeaked on the ice, there’d be ten, fifteen, twenty of us out there in helmets and hockey gloves, our Detroit Red Wing and Chicago Blackhawk and Toronto Maple Leaf jerseys pulled on tight over thermal underwear and flannels and wool sweaters. We’d stop at noon to wolf the sandwiches and cookies our mothers had packed. Coach would hand out push brooms and we’d line up across one end of the rink and sweep until the ice glistened in the sun. Then we’d play until dark, and sometimes after, if enough of the dads who’d come to collect us were willing to wait a while and shine their car headlights out over the ice. Sometimes five or six squeezed into a station wagon with Coach to drink beer and watch the last game of the day.

Usually Coach was on the ice. He called penalties and broke up fights and tended to bloodied noses and bruised ankles. Every hour or so, he’d whistle play to a halt and gather us around. “Listen up, eh?” he’d say, and we’d mug at one another about his Canadian accent. He’d show us the best way to scoop a rolling puck off the boards, how to throw a hip to knock someone off his skates, why it was better to shoot low because the puck might glance off a leg or a stick and fool the goalie. While he coached, his fuzzy mutt, Pocket, sat on a milk crate watching, his head swiveling back and forth as the puck moved up and down the rink. Whenever somebody went near Blackburn, little Pocket would bark his nails-on-blackboard bark. He did a lot of barking.

Originally, I had wanted to play forward, like the Detroit Red Wings’ great right wing, Gordie Howe. But my dad’s favorite Red Wing had been a goaltender named Roger Crozier. Like me, Crozier was small and feisty and Dad liked how sometimes he would flop to block a shot and then right himself by grabbing the crossbar over his head. After Dad died, I decided I would be a goalie, like Crozier. No one at Make-Believe Gardens objected; everyone out there wanted to score goals, not stop them. At first, I wasn’t much good at minding the net. Mostly I just flung my body in front of the puck, hoping it would hit me. Maybe my lack of ability looked like fearlessness, though, because Coach Blackburn noticed. One day after we’d played from morning till dark, I sat in a snowbank, exhausted, staring at the ice caked in my skate laces and rubbing my neck where a puck had left a welt the size of a half dollar. Coach crunched up next to me and said, “You’re all right, Gus. If I ever get to coach a team around here, you’re going to be my goalie.”

That spring, after Make-Believe Gardens had melted away, Coach showed up at my house one morning with a pair of goalie’s leg pads, a goaltender’s stick, and another of his homemade nets. All that summer, he came over two or three times a week and shot tennis balls at me. He showed me how to kick my legs at a shot, how to cut down angles, how to gauge whether a breakaway skater would shoot or deke. And he told me again and again to avoid the temptation to be a goaltender like Crozier, who nearly always flopped to the ice to stop a shot, kicking his legs to each side in a butterfly fashion. Coach didn’t like floppers. He said goalies who flopped tended to give up goals over their shoulders. And young players liked to shoot high because it looked cooler than shooting low.

“Floppers look fancy, eh?” Coach would say. “Up and down, up and down, the girls like that hotdog stuff, eh? But you might get a crick in your neck from watching those pucks go flying past your ear. Your job isn’t to look good, it’s to stop the puck, and if you want to stop the puck, you got to be a stand-up goalie. Especially you, Gus, because you’re short, eh? You’re barely standing up even when you’re standing up.” He’d smile then and muss my hair. “The floppers lose control, Gus. You don’t see anybody else out there flopping around, do you? So stand up. Hold your ground. You can’t control what’s going on in front of you, but you can control what happens in your little corner of the world.”