Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

I thought I knew what Darlene was thinking: if only Gracie had never left Starvation, maybe she would have been all right.

But how could Gracie not have gone? It was late in her senior year of high school. In my junior English class, room 211, we were discussing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when we heard a shrieking in the hallway that every one of us immediately recognized as Gracie McBride. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, it’s so cool, so so cool!” Our teacher dropped his book and rushed out to see what the commotion was about, and five or six of us got out of our seats and followed. We saw Gracie spinning her way down the hall, the orange plaid pleats of her skirt whirling out from her hips.

“I’m going to college,” she sang. “I’m going to college.”

An anonymous donor had offered to pay Gracie’s full tuition, room, and board, so long as she attended Wayne State University in downtown Detroit. The donor, whom everyone in town assumed was a Wayne grad, had made the gift in honor of Gracie’s father, who had been awarded the Purple Heart posthumously after Vietnam. Gracie’s mother raised a brief stink about being entitled to some of the gift, seeing as she was the one who had lost her husband. No lawyer would touch it.

That fall, Gracie left for Wayne. It was September 1980. Almost eighteen years would pass before Gracie walked Main Street again. Not once in those years did she even visit, and most folks in town forgot about her. Except Darlene, who called her now and then and visited downstate once or twice. And my mother, who spoke with her each month on the twenty-second, the anniversary of Gracie’s father’s and my father’s deaths.

“What the hell did she do in Detroit?” I said. “How did she survive?”

“I don’t really know,” Darlene said, and I could tell it hurt her. “She was always vague when I asked her, or she made jokes: she was dancing in a strip club, she was selling coke. For a while she worked as a secretary somewhere. A real estate company, I think.” She nodded toward the shoe box on the table. “That’s why I dug that out.”

“She never graduated from Wayne.”

“No.”

I slid across the bed and placed my palm lightly on Darlene’s shoulder. She reached up and touched my fingertips with hers.

“Speaking of out-of-towners,” I said. “When were you going to tell me Jason was back?”

“Who cares?”

“Have you seen him?”

“Nope. Don’t care to either.”

“I saw him. He looks good. A lot better than he did.”

“I really don’t want to talk about him right now.”

She twisted around to see the clock on her stove. “Crap,” she said. “Lunch is way over. Dingus is going to be p.o.’d.”

I waited on the bed while she put her uniform back on, fitted the hat on her hair. She grabbed the shoe box and came to the bed, standing over me. She leaned over and kissed me on the neck.

“You were sweet today,” she said.

She was almost out the door when I called after her. “Hey. How about I make you spaghetti tonight and then we can go to the Rats game?”

“OK,” she said, and she was gone.

A soggy dishrag lay on the bar at Enright’s. Somewhere a faucet was running. The air tasted of mustard and pickled eggs.

At the far end of the long, whiskey-colored bar sat two regulars, both men, one stool between them, always one stool between them. They nursed their longnecks and lit cigarette after cigarette, never saying a word, just staring into the rank air in front of their unshaven faces, their eyes drifting up to the soundless television behind the bar.

Taking my own seat a few stools away, I considered for a second whether they might be contemplating where their lives had taken that wrong turn, how they had wound up spending every afternoon in a dive on an anonymous Main Street, shoving their last balled-up dollar bills across the bar. But they were more likely wondering how they were going to get out of splitting that pile of logs their old ladies had been bitching about since New Year’s.

“Trap-you want Thousand Island?”

Soupy leaned out of the kitchen at the other end of the bar and shouted at me, using the nickname he’d given me when I first started playing goaltender. I wasn’t playing goalie now, but the nickname remained.

“On the side,” I said.

“Blue Ribbon?”

I looked at the clock behind the bar. It bore the slogan “No Wine Before Nine.” All the numbers on the clock’s face were nines.

“Why not?” I said.

Soupy threw the dishrag in a sink behind the bar and set the beer in front of me with a plastic basket containing a cheeseburger and onion rings bleeding grease into a red-and-white checkered napkin.

I wanted Thousand Island dressing on the burger but I was so hungry that I picked it up and took a bite first. My teeth crunched through the charred crust and into the juicy red middle. The bite was too big and the melted Monterey Jack stuck to the roof of my mouth. Soupy wasn’t good at much besides hockey, but he sure knew how to make a burger.

“Boffing’ll get you hungry, huh?” he said.

I popped an onion ring into my mouth. It was the frozen kind but good anyway, crisp and hot.

“What are you talking about?”

“Fuck you,” he said. “I was going to the bank and saw you chasing the little lady up her stairs there, lover boy.”

“I was not chasing.”

“Nothing like a little afternoon action to break up a dreary day.”

“Mr. Carpenter declined to comment.”

Soupy leaned his elbows on the bar. Ketchup and grease streaked the white apron he wore over his Northern Michigan University T-shirt. His blond hair was tied back in a ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades. He knew I’d come to ask about Gracie, and I knew he’d probably do what he could to avoid talking about her. Soupy liked to jaw about hockey and beer and fishing and how to get women into bed. Everything else was small talk.

“How’s the bluegill wrapper?” he said.

I plucked the top bun off the burger and added the dressing, replaced the bun, took another chomp, just as big. Even better. I bit into half an onion ring, cooled it all down with a pull on the beer.

“Bleeding red ink,” I said. I made a show of looking around the bar. Pictures of Soupy as a kid in his River Rats blue-and-gold hung up and down the knotty pine walls in between the big brass hooks where snowmobile riders hung their helmets. There were no pictures of me, but Soupy had installed the goaltender’s mask I no longer wore on the back bar between bottles of Mohawk root beer schnapps and Southern Comfort. The backlighting gave the mask the look of a skull. A few bottles down stood two of Gordon’s gin, one full, the other half full, both marked on the label with a big black “G.”

For Gracie. Everyone else got Beefeater.

“When are you going to rename this dump ‘Soupy’s’?”

The summer before, Soupy had sold the town marina his family had owned for fifty-some years and used the cash to buy Enright’s. At the time he was actually trying to quit drinking, so he joined the legions of other drying-out northern Michigan drunks who reckoned the best way to be sure they were genuinely sober was to test themselves every single day by getting other people drunk. He quit the quitting thing pretty quickly. He kept the bar.

“You know what it costs for a lousy goddamn sign?” Soupy said. “Anyway, it’d be like putting up a billboard for the IRS: ‘Over here, dudes.’”

“Good point.”

My cell phone started ringing from my shirt pocket. I considered answering, but the jukebox was wailing “Moondance.”

“You going to get that?” Soupy said.

“Can’t hear in here.”