Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

Then Gracie told Darlene about the brush and the next thing I knew, Darlene had stolen it from Gracie and Gracie was calling her a slut. My mother finally figured out what was going on, but instead of using her motherly prerogative to order the brush returned to its rightful owner, she filched the brush herself while she was over at Darlene’s having coffee with Mrs. B. She let Gracie and me know she had it over dinner at the picnic table that night, and Gracie laughed so hard that she choked on a mouthful of hot dog.

By the next morning, Gracie had pilfered the brush from Mom, and by night, I’d grabbed it and hidden it in the freezer box of the fridge in the garage where Dad used to keep his Carling Black Labels. Mom found it there and hid it in the bird feeder on the beach. Gracie took it from there and didn’t have it a day before Darlene stole it and stuck it beneath her mattress.

I didn’t even think about using it on my hair anymore. Once Mom joined the game, the brush became something entirely other than a brush. It was now the brush. And it wasn’t so much the having of it that mattered, but the keeping of it, the not losing it to someone else, at least for me. Maybe it was because I was a hockey player; one-goal games and sudden-death overtime were much more about fear than triumph. Once I had the brush in my possession, I tried not to give it a thought-then I would wake up in the middle of the night to see my bedroom door being swung shut by one of the thieves in my life, Gracie or Darlene or my own mother.

I came to hate losing it. It was my brush, after all. And it didn’t matter who had it, or where it was; if I didn’t have the brush in my possession, I blamed Gracie, because she had started the stupid game. And whenever the rest of us seemed to have lost interest, Gracie would find the brush and secretly return it to me, then wait a few days before stealing it back, just to show me that she could make me feel that sting. I was an idiot, of course, but I fell for it again and again. Occasionally I would try to reconcile Gracie’s nasty streak with her lot in life, having lost her father and been forced to live with her crazy mother. Of course I’d also lost my father, and though my mother wasn’t crazy in the same way Shirley McBride was, it was clear whose side Mom was on when it came to the brush. And I let that gnaw at me too.

The last time I had had the brush in my hands, I was a senior in high school and Gracie was in her first semester at Wayne State. Her mother had gone out of town with her latest boyfriend and locked Gracie out of her trailer, so Gracie spent Christmas with us. On Christmas morning, I found a gift from Gracie beneath our tree. I couldn’t remember ever getting a Christmas present from Gracie. She watched, smiling, while I undid the shiny red-and-green paper and silver bow. Inside was the brush. Gracie wanted me to laugh.

I tossed the brush at her. “Keep it,” I said.

“Gussy,” Mom said.

“Don’t be a baby,” Gracie said.

“Or give it to her,” I said, pointing at Mom. “Or Darlene. Or whoever you like. I don’t want to see it again.”

“Gus,” Mom said. “Gracie is trying to be nice.”

“No. She’s messing with me. She’ll probably steal it back tonight.”

“You’re an asshole,” Gracie said.

“Grace Maureen McBride!”

That was one quiet Christmas dinner.

The taunting began a few years later. I had just begun working at the Detroit Times. As a rookie reporter, I didn’t get a lot of mail. One day an envelope showed up, postmarked Detroit. The address was handwritten. I wondered if a reader had seen one of my stories and written a nice note.

But there was no note. Just a color photograph of the brush balanced in the right hand of the Spirit of Detroit, a bronze statue outside the city-county building downtown.

“Fuck you, Gracie,” I said. I tore the photo into shreds and threw it away.

Over the years, the photos kept coming, one every six months or so. The brush on the edge of the boards at Joe Louis Arena. The brush dangling from the hand of a hot dog vendor at Tiger Stadium. The brush on a blackjack table in a Windsor casino. The brush on a railing along the Detroit River at dawn. I trashed them all. Finally I started recognizing the envelopes and tossed them without even opening them. The photos stopped coming sometime in the early 1990s, and I forgot about the brush.

Until I found it in Gracie’s duffle bag.

I didn’t use brushes much anymore on what was left of my hair. But I stuffed it in my pocket and kicked the bag under the bed.

A calendar hung on a nail on the wall over Gracie’s pillow. I had never noticed it before but then why would I have? My infrequent visits to this room were usually to chase a beer or two for Soupy while he showered after a game. Now I leaned in and saw, to my mild surprise, that the calendar came from Pandit’s Shell amp; Service in River Rouge. I tried to picture it. River Rouge was one of the little blue-collar pockets south of Detroit where steel was once made and cars built. Why the hell would Gracie have a calendar from River Rouge?

The calendar was correctly turned to the page for February. Way to go, Gracie, I thought. Each day was struck through with an X etched in black ballpoint pen. Some X’s were the squiggles a drunk would make, but they were all there-except on the last day of Gracie’s life. Maybe that made sense, or maybe it did not. I tried to imagine what she might have been thinking. I couldn’t.

When Gracie scratched the X across the day before she died, did she know for a certainty that it would be her last full day on earth? If she knew she was going to die, why wouldn’t she have struck through the actual last day as well? On the one hand, I was surprised that Gracie had maintained this daily discipline at all; on the other, I figured she of all people would relish the flourish of being able to X out her end for everyone to see. She could have been smiling no matter what the outcome was going to be.

I unhooked the calendar from the nail and flipped the page back to January. There wasn’t a single X mark there.

“Goddammit, Gracie.”

I put the calendar back on the wall.

I leaned back against the workbench and wondered whether the cops had spent any time here. The county had whacked Sheriff Aho’s budget twice in the past year; he couldn’t afford overtime. Darlene had been complaining that her regular hours had been cut. Maybe a deputy had just hung the police tape and left the room for later. Or maybe they’d done a quick dusting for fingerprints, though I couldn’t see what good it would have done. They would have found me and Soupy and Johnny Ford and a dozen men’s league players who had wandered back to bum a beer.

I had been back in the Zam shed myself two nights earlier, the night before the night Gracie died.

“Gracie,” I’d said when I walked in.

She was standing at the bench, her hands streaked black with grease, fiddling with something metal that must have come from the innards of the Zamboni. Within her reach stood a tall blue plastic cup embossed with a gold River Rats logo, a toothy rodent carrying a hockey stick like a pitchfork.

Gracie didn’t seem to notice me at first, though I was standing six feet away. I watched her for a moment. She was just tall enough to get her elbows up on the bench without having to stand on something.

“Gracie,” I said.

“This… this fucking piece of shit,” she said, slamming the part down on the bench. She grabbed a rag and swiped it across her face, leaving a black smudge on a cheek. She looked up and down the bench, apparently not finding what she was looking for, then finally turned to me and waved an arm toward the fridge. “Are you blind? Get your own beer.”