Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

One of the Minnows shoveled the puck into the corner to my left. Jason charged down the boards to get it. Soupy swooped in ahead of him, scooped up the puck, and veered behind my net. That’s where he left the puck.

Jason saw it sitting there and put his head down, churning at full speed.

The heel of my stick blade caught him full on the Adam’s apple. He flew up and back so hard that one of his skates almost knocked my stick out of my hand. I heard his helmet crack against the ice and watched as Jason threw off his gloves and clutched at his throat, choking. One of the refs rushed over and knelt over him. “Holy God,” he said, “somebody call nine one one.” I rested my arms on the crossbar and watched Jason kick his skates this way and that.

The ref turned to me. He was just a kid, maybe seventeen, played for the River Rats and made a few bucks refereeing games for old guys like me. He looked scared. “You better go take a shower, Gus,” he said.

“Fucking-ay,” I said. As I started to skate off the ice, I called out to Jason, “Winners win, motherfucker. Players play.”

I left E.B.’s gear in a pile in the dressing room and swung out of the rink parking lot as an ambulance shrieked in.

All the shoes were gone.

Stars glimmered on a black sky between the snowy branches of the shoe tree. I looked way up where Gracie’s pink sneaker had hung with Ricky’s football cleat. My eyes moved down and across the boughs where other sneakers and boots and sandals and galoshes should have been dangling.

They weren’t there anymore.

Darlene looked up into the tree. She was standing at the trunk in snow to her knees. She held one hand on the tree, as if she was reassuring it.

She had left a note under a windshield wiper on my truck: Midnight at the shoe tree. She was in her brown-and-mustard uniform again, her hair tucked up into her earflap cap. Reflections of stars sparkled in her onyx eyes.

“What happened to the shoes?” I said.

“Evidence,” she said. “We took them all down this morning.”

“Huh. Did you see my skates?”

“What skates?”

“The skates you made me hang up there with your softball spikes.”

“Oh, those.” A sad smile flitted over her mouth. “I don’t know.”

I walked up to within a few feet of where she stood.

“You’re limping,” she said.

“No shit. Since when are you interested in hockey?”

She ignored my question. “D’Alessio told Jason to press charges.”

“Right. The last thing Jason wants is cops messing around with him. Do you know the kind of crazy shit he’s involved with downstate?”

Darlene folded her arms, looked down at her boots.

“Darlene?”

“I can’t talk about it now.”

“Can’t talk about what?”

“Jason. Downstate. Anything.”

“Why did you ask me out here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“I’m right here. Why didn’t we just meet at the apartment?”

“Not smart at the moment. I have to work anyway.”

“Not smart? Why? What the hell is going on?”

“A police investigation is going on.”

“I didn’t set fire to any house downstate, Darlene.”

“I know.” She reached up and briefly took my collar in her gloved hand. “You have to trust me. Things have gotten complicated.”

“I’ll say. Would you like to hear about my trip?”

“I’ve got a few minutes; go ahead.”

“Are you going to spill to Dingus?”

Darlene didn’t say anything.

“I want you to know because you loved Gracie,” I said.

“I can’t promise anything.”

I explained how Kerasopoulos had killed my original story about Gracie and made it a brief about an apparent suicide. I told her about Gracie’s house, about the darker of the two bedrooms, about Trixie, about Vend, about Haskell, about the woman on the swing set in Sarnia. Again I didn’t mention Michele Higgins. Darlene said, “My God,” once or twice. The expression on her face shifted from surprise to anger, from anger to sadness. The surprise wasn’t quite shock, though; it was as if she had heard bits and pieces of the story already.

“Did you ever see her house?” I said.

“No. Until-” She stopped herself. “I mean, I didn’t know she had one.”

“I’m not sure it’s actually hers. You never saw it when you visited?”

“No. But I hadn’t been down there for years.” She steepled her gloves beneath her nose, thinking. “I hadn’t been down there to see Gracie since she was still in school.”

“Or pretending to be in school.”

“I guess. Every time I made plans, she came up with some excuse to cancel. Now I guess I know why.”

There was another reason Darlene didn’t go downstate: I was there.

“She never said a word about Vend or Haskell?”

“Not by name.” She sighed. “No, Gracie didn’t mention anything about…” Her voice trailed off. “Although I do remember her mentioning that Trixie woman once or twice. Said she was the only real friend she had down there.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I bet that kind of hurt.”

Darlene shrugged. “She didn’t even make my wedding. A bridesmaid. I should have cut the bitch off then.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I mean, I tried, I tried to just forget her a bunch of times, but then I’d go to the mailbox and there’d be a letter, and I’d be right back on the hook again. And when she came back here, we took the time to catch up. Or at least I thought we did.”

“How perfect that you kept those letters in a shoe box, eh? Have you had a chance to look through those?”

“Most of them. Even with twenty-twenty hindsight, they don’t tell you much. There’s all this girly chatter about how she’s dating this guy or that guy, and he screwed her over or she blew him off, and she hates her job and her boss is a butthole but it pays well so she’s going to hang in there.”

“Vend.”

“I’m so stupid.”

“Darlene.” I stepped forward and reached for her shoulder, but she put a hand up to stop me.

“No. I am so stupid. Every now and then, she’d make a joke about how she was going to die young, it was her destiny. I just figured it was the usual Gracie drama. But it was all there. She was destined to die young and it just…” She looked up into the tree, struggling not to cry. “It just sucks.”

“Do you think it was Haskell or Vend?”

Darlene went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “Then she came back, and we’d go to Riccardo’s and she’d talk about how she was trying to get a real plan in her life, she just had to get out from under some things.”

“The abortion.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. Or maybe that’s what she wanted me to think. Obviously there were other things going on. God. I thought, I really thought she was sounding better, even last week.”

We both turned our heads toward the sound of sirens coming from the direction of town. I saw the lights of a police cruiser blinking behind the tree line a mile from where we stood, heading north along the eastern shore of the lake. It was followed by a different set of flashing lights, perhaps a fire truck or an ambulance.

Static crackled over the microphone clipped on Darlene’s shoulder. She turned away. “Oh, God,” I heard her say. “Another?” She said something else I couldn’t make out, then “Ten-four” before she turned back to me.

“I have to go.”

“Where?”

She just looked at me.

“OK. Why do you say Gracie was better?”

“I don’t know. Just her attitude. She ordered double pepperoni on her pizza. She was talking about how she was having fun with Soupy, how she thought she might be able to save up enough to at least rent a little cabin on the lake and get out of that disgusting Zamboni room.”