Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“Haskell or Vend?”

“Doc Joe says she killed herself,” she said. She fished her keys out of her coat pocket. “I have to go.”

“Doc Joe’s covering his ass.”

“It’s in his job description.”

She started to walk past me to her cruiser parked on the road.

“Wait,” I said. “Will I see you later? Or tomorrow?”

She stopped and put a gloved hand flat on my chest. “I’m glad you’re safe,” she said. “But I don’t know. Maybe not till this is over.”

“Then I hope it’s over soon. You’re holding back.”

“It’s my job.”

“I don’t mean your job.”

She turned away quickly and started for the car. I trudged behind her. She stopped and turned back to me again. “Why is it, Gussy, that the people you love the most hurt you the hardest? Huh? Why is that?”

“Darlene. What’s the matter?”

She trudged up the bank and onto the road.

“Do not follow me,” she said without turning around, “or you will go to jail.”

“Darlene.”

I stood in the road and watched the rear lights on her cruiser recede in the dark. I felt helpless. She veered up the same shore road that the other vehicles had taken a few moments earlier. I couldn’t think of anywhere else they would be going at that hour in that direction but the home of Laird Haskell.

Soupy jumped when I hissed at him from the kitchen behind the bar at Enright’s. I had slipped in through his alley door.

“Jesus, Trap,” he said. “What the fuck?”

“Any of the boys out there?”

“Nah. We’re cleared out. Just me, cleaning up. The game got over early, as you know.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“No you’re not.”

“No I’m not. So you didn’t play it out?”

“Without a ’tender? Shit. We played out that period, blew off the rest. Clem Linke was all pissed off that he had two goals and wanted to go for a hat trick. But the Chowder Heads said, See you at the bar, and we left. Six to one final.”

Soupy stood in a white apron spattered with hot wing sauce, scrubbing out a bar sink with a Brillo pad. In his other hand he held a spatula. He had turned the bar lights up, illuminating the pall of cigarette smoke floating just below the ceiling. Silence fell as “Ring of Fire” ended on the jukebox.

“Jason didn’t come in, did he?” I said.

“Last I heard, he was at the hospital. You got him good, man.”

“Good.”

“You want a beer, help yourself. And help me too.”

I opened a wooden fridge door beneath the back bar and yanked out two Blue Ribbon longnecks. I flicked the caps off and handed Soupy one. He put down the Brillo pad and we both took a long pull.

“Yes, sir,” Soupy said. “First one of the day always tastes best.”

It wasn’t quite one o’clock, so I guessed Soupy was trying to make me laugh. I didn’t. I just said, “I came to settle up.”

“OK. Three fifty.”

Again, I didn’t laugh. “You know what I mean.”

The spatula clanged into the sink. Soupy untied his apron and threw it on the bar. He took two small glasses and a bottle of peach schnapps off the back bar and motioned toward the kitchen. “In there,” he said.

I sat down on some boxes of paper napkins. A Hungry River Rats calendar hung on the wall behind my head. The February picture showed Taylor Haskell in full legs-splayed flop, snagging a puck out of the air with his catching glove.

Soupy propped himself against his griddle. He undid his ponytail and his blond hair fell around his face. He pulled it back onto his head and nodded toward the calendar and said, “What do you think of the messiah?”

I glanced at the calendar. “Ha. Yeah. Watched him last night. Good glove, good on his feet. Gotta keep his head in the game.”

“Don’t we all.”

We sat and sipped our beers for a minute. “Yeah,” Soupy said. “Grace used to say, ‘That kid doesn’t even want to be here.’ ”

“Gracie said that?”

“She’d surprise you, man. Surprised me. She knew some hockey. I don’t know a lot of chicks who understand the two-line pass.”

“Loved the Wings, eh?”

“Yeah. Fedorov was her man.”

Soupy unscrewed the cap of the schnapps bottle, set the glasses down, and filled each halfway. He handed me one, clinked it with the other.

“To Grace,” he said.

“Gracie.”

We gulped them down.

“Jesus, Soup,” I said, grimacing. “Peach schnapps?”

He capped the bottle and set it aside. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d prefer Jack Black. But Grace hated this shit.”

“You mean she loved it.”

“No. Despised it. That’s why she drank it.”

“You’re not making any sense. And what’s with the ‘Grace’ instead of ‘Gracie’?”

Soupy grabbed his beer and took a sip. He cradled the bottle against his chest and looked up at the ceiling.

“She liked ‘Grace’ better,” he said. “I wish I’d called her that before. Maybe”… He waved his bottle around in front of his face. “Ah, nah, fuck it, man. She liked ‘Grace’ better. Enough said.”

“What about the schnapps? Why’d she drink it if she hated it? Whenever I saw her, she was parked behind a gin and Squirt.”

“No,” Soupy said. “Hang on.”

He set his beer down and went back out to the bar. He came back holding a half-filled bottle of Gordon’s gin. The label was marked with a big black “G.” He shoved it toward me. “Try it.”

“No thanks. I know what gin tastes like.”

“Trust me, Trap. Just take a sip.”

I took it, uncapped it, and raised it to my lips, expecting the smell of alcohol. There wasn’t any. I took a sip, swished it around, took another.

“This is not gin,” I said.

“Remember the time we fucked with Stevie on his birthday?”

Soupy and a few of the other boys had brought big blond Stevie Reneau down to Detroit to celebrate his thirtieth birthday. We’d spent most of a Friday night at the Post Bar, ordering round after round of tequila shots. Except only Stevie was drinking tequila. The rest of us were drinking shots of tap water, thanks to the ten spot Soupy threw the bartender when Stevie wasn’t looking. We let him in on it after the tenth or eleventh shot. He took a wild swing at Soupy and fell on his face while the rest of us howled with laughter. We had to carry him to Lafayette Coney Island for 3:00 a.m. dogs.

“So it’s water,” I said. “I don’t get it.”

Soupy took the “G” bottle back and swigged from it. “Gracie wasn’t really drinking, except for a shot of peach schnapps every now and then.”

“Let me get this straight. She wasn’t drinking. But she drank schnapps.”

“Whenever she had the urge to drink, she took a shot of the peach shit.”

“Which she hated.”

“Hey, I didn’t say this was the straightest-thinking chick I’ve ever hung out with. Although she was Einstein compared to my ex. But look, Grace knew what people thought of her. She basically wanted nothing to do with them. Best way to do that, she figured, was let them think what they wanted.”

“That she was a fucked-up drunk.”

“Yeah.”

“So they’d leave her alone. Talk about esteem issues.”

“I’m telling you, man, she was working on it.”

“That and a bottomless glass of Squirt and water.”

I took a long pull on my beer. Gracie had faked me out. I recalled the last time I’d seen her, in the Zamboni shed. She’d seemed shit-faced to me. I recalled how Trixie had gotten in my face when I’d said Gracie was always high or drunk. Of all people, you should know that appearances… she had said, without finishing the thought.

“You really did like her, didn’t you, Soup? It wasn’t just the fucking.”