The Hanging Tree (14 page)

I saw her once, or thought I did. I was at Joe Louis Arena watching the Red Wings in a playoff game against the Chicago Blackhawks. A woman I was dating from the
Detroit Free Press
was supposed to join me but had to work late so I bought myself a standing-room only ticket and went alone. I stood with a twenty-four-ounce cup of Stroh’s with my back to the wall
along the aisle between the lower and upper bowls of seats, watching Roenick and Larmer and Chelios trample the Wings’ hopes for a Stanley Cup. At a stop in play I looked to my right to check the scoreboard for the shots on goal and there she was.

At first I didn’t recognize her. Gracie had always been cute. The boys liked the way her sharp cheekbones set off her languid blue eyes, the narrow gap between her front teeth, the barely discernible overbite that imbued her smile with a hint of secret mischief. Her body, taut as a guitar string, and her willingness to share it had helped keep her in boyfriends.

But this Gracie following a tall man with black hair slick with mousse and a cashmere topcoat down to the rink-side seats was more elegant and beautiful than I had ever seen. Her auburn hair tumbled over a charcoal turtleneck. She carried a fur coat over one arm. She seemed straighter, taller, less mousy. Maybe it was the turtleneck. Or the fur.

The man, who also wore a turtleneck, stopped and turned with a suave smile and an offer of his hand. She took it and edged into her seat, laying the fur across her lap and fluffing her hair as she settled in. She looked more like a Grace than a Gracie. I tried to keep an eye on her, but the fans behind her kept jumping to their feet and blocking the view. At the end of the second period I went to the men’s room and when I returned to my place against the wall, she was gone.

“Why didn’t she just have a kid?” I asked Darlene.

She just looked at me.

“OK, dumb question. Hard to bring up a kid in a Zam shed.”

“Which was really her point,” Darlene said. “She kept saying, ‘I fucked up my life, I fucked up my life, and I can’t fix it.’ ” She nodded at the baby shoe. “I think I know what that is.”

I picked it up and turned it over. “You do?”

“You really want your prints all over that?”

“What do you think it is?”

She set her chin atop her fists and fixed her eyes on the pillow in front of her. “She had an abortion.”

“When she was downstate?”

“If she’d had one here, we’d all know about it by now, wouldn’t we?”

“I suppose. She didn’t tell you?”

“Not in so many words. But every now and then, she would talk about kids, and, you know, she’d get all misty and after a while she just stopped making sense.”

“Would she have had it recently? Or a long time ago?”

I was thinking of Soupy. But I wasn’t about to bring him up. I wanted to ask him about it before the police did, if they hadn’t already.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if she actually had an abortion. I just have this feeling. Whenever she got into one of her little crying jags, she’d always be saying something like, ‘Don’t ever give up what you got, because you can never, never get it back.’ ”

“Wait,” I said. “Why would she have a shoe if she had an abortion?”

“Come on, it’s Gracie. She might’ve gone to Kmart and bought one.”

“Just one? Where’s the other one?”

“Gussy … I don’t know.”

“You know, Darl, maybe she actually had a baby and adopted it out.”

“Do you think she’d go through that? Nine months? No drinking?”

I didn’t have to think much. “No,” I said.

I watched Darlene staring into the pillow. I felt for her. She and Gracie went back as far as Soupy and I did. As little girls, they’d combed each other’s hair, painted on each other’s makeup, worn each other’s clothes. When Gracie was on one of her extended stays at our house, she’d often go next door to sleep at Darlene’s. I could still picture them sitting knees to knees in their one-piece bathing suits on the dive raft in front of the house, the last of the day’s sun bathing their tan shoulders, them waving their arms, leaning back to giggle, chattering about whatever they chattered about.

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.

nine

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.”

He leaned closer. “That lard-ass in the coveralls plays that damn song about seventy-two times a day.”

“At least it’s not ‘Dream Weaver.’”

“These guys think this is their goddamn living room. That one had his daughter’s fucking baby shower here the other day.”

“Must be good extra cash, though.”

“No. Lost my ass giving toasts away. And they left without paying the bill. Assbag down there”—Soupy jabbed his elbow in that direction without looking—“says put it on his tab.”

“That’s not good,” I said. “Kind of makes you wonder how a guy can afford to shut his bar down early with all his hockey pals coming in.”

Soupy ignored me. “So we tied, eh? Heard you hit the post.”

“Yeah. Where the hell were you?”

“Can’t be missing empty nets, Trap.”

“Where were you, Soup?”

Soupy never missed hockey. When the Chowder Heads were skating, he left Enright’s in the hands of his other bartender, Dave Lubienski. But Soupy had been a no-show the night before. Then we found the bar closed hours before last call.

“Loob’s wife had a chicks’ night out, and he had to stay with the kid. I tried to get Tatch to fill in but as usual he had his head up his ass.” He picked up the dishrag and began wiping down the sink behind the bar. “Ready for the game tomorrow? The Linke boys were in last night talking shit.”

The Linkes played for the Mighty Minnows of Jordan Bait and Tackle, our first-round opponents. Soupy was trying to change the subject. I decided to play along, for now.

“Should be fun,” I said. “Did you get the hats?”

“Oh, Trap, fucking-ay, hang on.”

Soupy hurried back into the kitchen. Every year, he bought the Chowder Heads hats for the playoffs. He thought they brought us good luck. His team hadn’t actually won the playoffs in three years, but Soupy did not relinquish his superstitions easily.

He emerged wearing a red wool cap with a fluffy white ball on the top and black tassels dangling to his shoulders. A pair of soup spoons crossed to look like hockey sticks were embroidered into the front of the hat.

“Awesome or what?” Soupy said. The regulars glanced up, unimpressed. “I ain’t even going to wear a helmet, man.”

“Sweet,” I said. “Is that mine?”

“Fucking-ay.”

He tore the cap off of his head and threw it at me. I pulled it on my head and looked in the mirror behind the bar, mugging. Soupy laughed and reached over the bar for a hand slap.