Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

But now, as my mother prodded me, I was thinking of Gracie’s old VW. She’d gotten rid of it a long time ago, of course, and I was trying to remember what she had been driving recently, besides a Zamboni.

I stood again.

“Gus?” Mom said.

“Do you remember what kind of car Gracie had?”

Mother looked at me blankly.

“Mom,” I said. “Did you go to the doctor?”

“The what? Oh. Yes. I mean-yes. Yes, I did. Yesterday.”

“Yesterday was Sunday, Mom.”

I walked into the kitchen and stared outside at the garage. Mom’s car, a tomato red 1995 Buick LeSabre, was parked inside. Gracie had driven an old lady’s car too. It had been in a photograph on an inside page of the Pilot. After a long Two-fer-Tuesday evening at Enright’s, Soupy had nearly driven it off the Estelle Street Bridge into the Hungry River.

I walked back into the living room.

“What’s with all the rosemary on the pork roast?” I said. “It looks like a pine branch.”

Mom furrowed her brow. “It’s good for you,” she said. “I saw it on that channel, the one that, you know. With all the recipes. They said it’s good for your digestion and circulation. Gets the blood flowing to your brain.”

Ah, I thought, a home remedy for creeping senility.

“Hey,” I said. “What kind of car did Aunt Helene drive when she used to come up from Bay City?”

“That was years ago.”

Long enough ago that Mom might remember.

“A Ford, wasn’t it?” she said, brightening. “A hideous green thing.”

“Yeah. An LTD. That’s what Gracie drove. Not quite as big, but just as green and ugly. With a big rust spot-a hole actually-in the back of the trunk lid.”

“Why does this matter?”

I stood there remembering the night before. My mind’s eye traveled up and down the snowbanks on either side of the road. I saw police cruisers, the ambulance, the fire truck. I did not see an ugly green Ford LTD with a rust hole in the trunk lid.

“I would have noticed that,” I said, thinking aloud.

“What?” Mom said.

“Gracie’s car, it wasn’t there.”

“Where?”

“At the shoe tree.”

“No?”

“No. How the hell did she get out there? She couldn’t have walked in that storm, although I suppose-” My cell phone rang. “Hang on.” I didn’t want to miss Darlene twice. I answered. “Yeah?”

“Beech here.”

Philo. I wished I hadn’t picked up. “What’s up?”

“It’s on with Haskell. Eleven fifteen.”

“Sorry?”

He paused. “Laird Haskell. Your appointment.”

“Oh, right, sorry. OK. I’ll be there. You coming?”

“Unfortunately, no, I have a meeting in Traverse City. Buzz me when you’re done, OK?”

“I’ll try.”

“Gus.”

“Yeah?”

“Just… just keep in mind now is really not the time to stand on principle.”

I was too stunned to answer right away. Philo said, “Talk later,” and hung up the phone.

“What’s wrong?” Mom said. “You look surprised.”

Surprised wasn’t quite the word.

“Nothing,” I said. “Where was I? Gracie’s car. That’s right. It wasn’t there. I guess-”

“No, Gus.”

“-she could have walked.”

“No.”

No.

As a reporter for the Detroit Times, I had written plenty of stories about people killed in or by cars and trucks. Regardless of whether I saw the blood spilled across asphalt or just heard about it from a police sergeant over the phone, I felt for the dead. I felt they’d been wronged, whether it was by a faulty steering suspension or a drunk driver or even their own innocent mistake. I felt for them even though they were strangers. Or perhaps, more accurately, because they were strangers. Because I knew nothing of their flaws. How they always grabbed the last piece of French toast for themselves. How they sucked up to their bosses and lied to their wives. How they used silence to punish their children.

But I knew all of Gracie’s flaws. Or imagined that I did.

I thought of her sitting on Mom’s lap in that very chair, the two of them sharing a box of Jujubes and chattering about the girls at school-“phony-baloneys,” Gracie called them-who wore too much makeup and the kind of blouses that would make the boys notice their boobs, both Mom and Gracie hopelessly blind to Gracie sitting there with her eyelids painted indigo and her T-shirt tied in a fat knot tight beneath her budding bosom.

It wasn’t that I thought Gracie somehow deserved her fate; it was more that I believed it was where she alone had aimed herself, a destination she had mapped out, consciously or not, years before. I had nothing to do with it then, so why should I have anything to do with it now?

But there were questions I could not answer: How did she get into the tree? What did she stand on before she dropped to her death? How did she get out there? All by herself. In a storm that had torn branches from trees.

I thought of Elvis and the others at Audrey’s snickering over their breakfast plates. Boneheads, every one of them.

“All right, Mom,” I said.

My phone started ringing again. I ignored it.

“All right what?”

“I’ll be looking into this. There must be an explanation.”

Mom allowed herself a faint smile. She shrugged the afghan off her shoulders and stood. “You better get going then,” she said. “I’m going to put those turnips on.”

Look,” Gracie said. “Is it dead?”

She had spotted the white-tail lying beneath the boughs of a Scotch pine in the woods near Jitters Creek. July sun dappled the deer’s back but the trees were thick enough away from the creek bed that most of the animal lay in shadow. It held its head up straight, its eight-point antlers reaching into the branches above its head. Its eyes were closed. I’d never seen a deer with its eyes closed.

“No,” Darlene said. “It’s sleeping.”

Gracie took a step toward the deer. I grabbed a fistful of the back of her T-shirt. “Don’t,” I said. “It might be hurt. Dad said never mess with a hurt animal.”

“It’s just a deer,” Gracie said, yanking herself away. “What’s it going to do?”

“It can put a hoof right through you.”

“It’ll never catch me.”

“Yes, it will,” Darlene said. “Deer are fast.”

“They run like deer,” I said.

Gracie sneered. At eleven, she was a year older than Darlene and me, and she thought she was a lot smarter.

“Ha-ha-ha, booger face. I’ll just go jump in the creek. I’ll bet he can’t swim.” She started toward the deer again. This time Darlene grabbed her by the arm. “Wait.” Darlene bent and picked a dead tree branch off the ground. “Let’s test him first.” She took two tentative steps toward the deer and tossed the branch at its back. The deer didn’t budge.

“See, he’s dead,” Gracie said.

“Let me try again.” Darlene found a bigger branch lying on a bed of pinecones. She threw it end over end and it glanced off the deer’s neck.

The deer opened its eyes. All three of us jumped back.

“Oooooh,” Gracie cried. We scrambled behind a tree and watched. I felt my heart pumping hard. The deer’s head swiveled slowly in our direction. The rest of him did not move. His eyelids drooped.

“He’s hurt,” I said.

“Poor thing,” Gracie said. Again she started to move toward the animal and again I grabbed her. This time she didn’t try to pull away.

“Gracie. That deer will kick your butt.”

“But we have to do something.”

“We should call the ranger,” Darlene said.

“What ranger? There’s no ranger.”

I let go of Gracie.

“Your mom’s is closest,” I said. “We can mark the spot and go tell her.”