Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“Didn’t come for a beer,” I said. “But I’ll take one, thanks.”

I slid past her. She was wearing black-and-green snowmobile pants hitched by suspenders over a red flannel shirt unbuttoned to her bosom. I reached into the fridge and grabbed a Blue Ribbon. I twisted the cap off and pinged it into the metal wastebasket beneath the bench.

I reached into my coat pocket and produced a pair of gray wool mittens, a red “G” knitted into the back of each. Mom had made those, too. In high school I had had a pair with blue “G”s on the backs. I would wear them as I was leaving the house, then trade them out for black leather gloves, because I was terrified of what I’d hear if I walked into the hockey dressing room with those mittens on.

“Got your mittens,” I said.

Gracie had the Zamboni part in her hands again, staring at it with her head cocked to one side. “You know,” she said, “you play like a pussy out there.”

I almost coughed up the beer I’d just swallowed.

“What?”

“You heard me. You think I don’t watch?”

My team, Soupy’s Chowder Heads, had beaten the Dead Wings of Murray amp; Murray Funeral Home that night, 5–2. I thought I’d had a pretty good game.

“Did you see my two assists? Including on the game winner?”

She swiveled her head around to look at me. “Only pussies talk about assists,” she said. “So you give the puck to Soupy, he scores. BFD. You still play like a pussy.”

“What the hell do you know about hockey?”

In my entire thirty-five years, I could not recall Gracie ever saying a word to me about hockey except to complain about the reek of my equipment drying in the basement of Mom’s house. She never seemed to care. She never came to a Rats game, at least not that I could remember, unless it was to drink and smoke dope with the burnouts and the football players who clustered behind the rink before we played, hoping the cops would ignore them. I figured she’d taken the job at the rink because it came with a cot and a fridge and a concession stand she could lift food from, not because she gave a rip about hockey.

“I know enough,” she said, turning her eyes back to the Zam part. Without looking she took up the River Rats cup, swished it around a little, and took a drink. “Enough to know you ought to have your ass back in the goal.”

“How the-you never even saw me play net.”

She set the cup back down. “It’s obvious you shouldn’t be playing wing. I mean, you’ve got good enough wheels and you’re smart enough to know your hands ain’t so hot so you’ve got to get the puck to other people. But you don’t like mixing it up in the corners and in front of the net, so you might as well just put your mask back on and get back in the goal where it’s safe.”

“Are you kidding me? Did you ever take a slap shot to the neck?”

“What are you being so pissy for? I didn’t say you were a pussy. I just said you play wing like a pussy. There’s a difference. You’re a goalie. Be a goalie, for fuck’s sake. Just be who you are. At least you have the chance.”

“Thanks for the advice.” I slapped her mittens down on the workbench. “Here.”

“Ah,” she said, her dull eyes brightening a little. She picked up her drink with one hand, the mittens with the other. She drank again while staring at the mittens as if trying to recall where she’d last seen them.

She had left them at Riccardo’s Pizza a few nights before after she and Darlene had had their weekly pizza and Greek salad. They had said their good-byes and Darlene had gone to the ladies’ room. She noticed the mittens sitting on their table on her way out. Gracie was already in her green LTD, about to pull out of the parking lot. Darlene ran outside waving the mittens over her head. But Gracie gunned her engine and Darlene stood in the lot watching the lights of the LTD recede over the Estelle Street Bridge. Later that night, Darlene gave me the mittens and asked me to drop them off at the rink. She wouldn’t see her friend again until Gracie was hanging dead in the shoe tree.

Now Gracie tossed her head back for the last drops in her cup. She set the cup down and pushed away from the bench, mittens in hand.

“Hmm,” she said, to no one I could see. “Don’t want to lose these again.”

She lurched toward me as if I weren’t there. I stepped aside, watching. She grabbed the cot by a leg and dragged it away from the wall, the metal legs scraping on the concrete. She slid around behind the cot and eased herself down to her knees.

On the wall next to her was a heating vent. She set the mittens on the cot and reached into her snowmobile pants, producing a set of keys. She used a key to unwind the two screws holding the vent grille in place. The grille clattered to the floor. Gracie leaned down to peer into the vent.

“Gracie,” I said. “What are you doing?”

She didn’t seem to hear. Totally shit-faced, I thought. All that talk about the way I played wing was just gin-and-Squirt babble.

Gracie reached into the vent with her left hand up to her elbow. The hand came out holding a baggie filled with marijuana. Her stash. I wondered whether the heat flowing around the baggie could turn her room into a giant bong.

She stuck the bag back into the vent. She took the mittens in hand and reached back inside. This time her hand came out empty. “Gracie,” I said, but she did not acknowledge me. It took her a couple of tries, but she fitted the grille back onto the vent and redid the screws. She stood, moved out from behind the cot, shoved the cot back into place, and rubbed her grease-stained hands together. Then she looked up and noticed me as if I’d just walked in.

“How the hell did you get in here?”

Now I crouched behind the cot. The screws on the vent grille came out easily enough. I was careful to lay the grille quietly on the floor.

I leaned my head down and looked inside. It was too dark to see much. I stuck my left arm in, expecting to feel a lumpy cylinder of plastic. But my hand found only the vent’s flat metal walls. I lay down on my side so I could shove my arm in farther. My knuckles banged against the back wall of the vent. I swept my hand all the way to the left and then back to the right.

I found it in the back right corner. Something small and soft. I squeezed it in my palm and pulled it out.

In my hand rested a tiny white shoe. A baby shoe. For the left foot. With a blue satin ribbon intertwined in the white cotton laces. I took it by the ribbon and let it dangle in front of my face.

Was it Gracie’s own shoe? Why would she have saved it? Why would she have stuffed it in this vent? Where was the other shoe? If this shoe was hers, then why a blue ribbon, why not pink?

Down near the tongue of the shoe, a rust-colored key was tied to the ribbon.

I undid the key from the ribbon and slipped it on to my key chain. I put the shoe in my pocket with the brush. I replaced the grille, backed out from behind the cot, and was about to swing the bed back into place when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around.

“Excuse me,” Johnny Ford said.

I’d seen him around the rink a few times but never up close. He always seemed to be scuttling around in the rafters like a squirrel, messing with the arena lamps, crisscrossing the bleachers with a trash bag.

“Johnny,” I said. “Good morning.”

He looked at the floor, nervous. His black jeans sagged atop his unlaced lumber boots. I noticed a mustard stain on the “N” of his Hungry River Rats sweatshirt. The shirt bagged around him, his left forearm hidden in the pouch.

Until his accident, Johnny Ford had been a promising young River Rat center who handled the puck like his stick was part of his body. Working a summer job at Grandview Golf Club, he was mowing at the edge of a pond at number 10 when the mower caught up in some damp weeds and stalled. Johnny reached in to dislodge them, and twenty-two pounds of snapping turtle bit off the first three fingers on his left hand and vanished with them into the green murk. There was a screwup at the hospital; the hand became infected and had to be amputated. He never played hockey again.