Bryan Gruley: The Hanging Tree

A peewee team from Starvation Lake was playing one from Alpena. I didn’t bother to check the scoreboard. Johnny Ford watched from his perch behind the concession counter. He held his gaze even after I plopped my skates on the counter. He was wearing the same River Rats sweatshirt he had worn the night he had caught me snooping in the Zam shed, with the same mustard stain on the “N,” the yellow now turning brown.

“Hey, Johnny,” I said. “Can you do these?”

He still didn’t look my way. “Look at that,” he said. He pointed the stump below his left elbow in the direction of the ice. I turned to see. “Three guys coming into the zone, all on the same side of the ice. What’s the advantage in that? Might as well be two guys. Shit, one.”

I had figured that Johnny Ford watched a lot of hockey, but until then I had no idea that he cared.

“Yep,” I said. “All about two-on-ones, man.”

“Really ain’t that complicated.” Now he looked at me; then, dolefully, at my skates. “It’s kind of late, isn’t it?”

“I don’t need them tonight,” I said.

“When’s your next game?”

“Pickup skate, tomorrow night.”

“I’ll leave them under the counter. Four bucks.”

I gave him a twenty. He turned his back and moved to the cash register. He punched something with his stump and the drawer flew open. I heard the bill-holders snap inside the drawer as he plucked out a ten, a five, and a single with his other hand.

“Hey, Johnny.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever find that phone?”

He shoved the drawer shut with his butt. He laid the change next to my skates. “Nah,” he said. “She probably lost it.”

I took the ten and the five.

“You get a new one yet?” I said.

He dug in his sweatshirt pouch, produced a cell phone. “This.”

“They let you keep your number?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yeah.”

“Why the hell did you loan it to her anyway?”

“She let me drive.”

“The Zam?”

“Yeah.”

“How was it?”

“All right. A little harder with the-” He waggled his stump.

“I’ll bet. But you’re doing a fine job now, man. Ice was good last night.”

“Thanks.”

“I heard a funny story about a Zamboni driver tonight. He was-”

“No, no, no, man.” Johnny waved his hand at me. “Bad luck.”

“OK, OK.” I laughed. “But look, I was just thinking, you know, the cops are all over Gracie’s stuff since, you know. They might find the old phone. You can trade it in for, I don’t know, maybe some cash.”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to mess with cops.”

“I don’t blame you.” I looked at the skates. “Ready tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

I started to leave, then stopped and turned back to Johnny Ford. “Shit, you know, John, I’m talking to the cops about ten times a day. Give me your number and if it turns up, I’ll give you a call.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No trouble.”

He had to get low to the counter, his hair hanging down over his face, so he could hold a napkin down with his stump while he scratched out the number.

The napkin was crumpled in my left hand as I knocked on the door of Darlene’s apartment with my right.

She answered in an old white-and-green Michigan State football jersey that hung to her knees, number 23. She opened the door without a word, turned and walked into her little kitchen. I followed. She flicked on a light and took a glass out of the dish drainer and filled it with water from the tap.

I unzipped my jacket. “We have to talk,” I said.

Darlene pulled her dark hair back with one hand and drank the glass down. She set the glass in the sink. She turned to me.

“Did you sleep with her?” she said.

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I had no good answer for that. “Like you said, things got complicated. I was doing my job.”

We didn’t say anything for a minute. Darlene gazed vacantly at the wall behind me, thinking. “I was doing my job, too.”

“When?”

“When you saw me at the rink. We had Jason under surveillance. Dingus had talked to someone in Detroit about him. I was the tail because he wouldn’t suspect me.”

“You?” I felt at once stupid and relieved. “Jeez. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She lowered her eyes now. “We followed you, too.”

“When? When I went downstate? No.”

“Yes. D’Alessio.”

“Frankie? He let those shitheads basically kidnap me?”

“You were doing your job, Gus. Isn’t that what you wanted? You got to Vend, right? You figured it all out?”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Why are you here? Haven’t you had enough pain yet? This isn’t hockey. You can’t just swing your stick at somebody’s head and make everything right.”

I set the napkin on the counter, the number facedown.

“Whatever happened to Sarnia?” I said.

“You’re such a boy.”

“What about the chick on the swing set, Darlene? The Sarnia cops wouldn’t talk because I’m a reporter. But they’d talk to you.”

She wasn’t going to tell me. Or she didn’t know. Or she hadn’t called. “You know I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation,” she said.

“Of course. Not now. So you can’t tell me whether you ever tracked down that phone call, can you?”

“What phone call?”

“The one that set off the Zamboni bomb.”

That stopped her, as I had expected. “Why?”

“What do you mean why? Did you track it down or not?” She started to shake her head. “Stop fucking with me, Darlene.”

“Why are you fucking with me?” It was almost a shout. Tears were filling her eyes; I couldn’t tell whether from anger or sadness. “What difference does it make? Gracie’s gone. Nothing’s going to bring her back.”

Goddamn, I thought. She knows, too. She knows. Maybe not what my mother knew, but something nobody else did.

I flipped the napkin over and pushed it along the counter. “That’s the number of the cell phone that ignited the bomb,” I said. “Gracie got the phone from Johnny Ford, the one-handed kid at the rink.”

Darlene wouldn’t look at it.

“Am I getting a little closer to what really was getting complicated?”

She pulled the State jersey up to swab her cheeks. “Haskell’s in jail,” she said. “Jason’s in jail. The state police are going to have Vend soon. Isn’t that enough? Do you really want to bring in-” She stopped herself. She was going to say too much. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Bring in who? My mother? Your mom? Trixie?”

“Go.”

She stepped forward and shoved the heel of one hand hard into my chest. I fell back a step. But I wasn’t leaving yet.

“The phone that called this phone to make it ring and set off that little bomb-the area code was two four eight,” I said. “Wasn’t it? Only one person could have set that off and been sure it wouldn’t hurt a certain someone. Only one person knew exactly where her boy was when she dialed that number.”

Darlene grabbed the napkin and balled it up in her hand and drove both of her fists into my chest, driving me backward into the door.

“Get out.”

“You knew.”

“Get the fuck out.”

I opened the door, felt cold wash over the back of my neck. “You knew,” I said. “I mean, you didn’t know what Gracie was going to do, but once she did it, you knew. And you kept it to yourself.”

“Everything is,” she said, “as it should be.”

I stood at the bottom of Darlene’s stairway for a while, shivering in the dark, wondering if she would reconsider. The outside light over her door went out. I walked away, feeling the ache in my bruised foot again.