The Hanging Tree (20 page)

The phone rang again. Kruger let it ring three times before picking up.

“Yeah?”

“Jesus, guy,” the man in 13 said. “It sounds like they’re tearing the room apart next door. I just heard a hell of a crash.”

“Help is on the way, sir,” Kruger said. “Please be sure your door is locked and the dead bolt is in place.”

He heard the first siren just as the door on number 14 burst open and a man, naked and barefoot, staggered out into the light and fell. Kruger stood up from his chair.

The man crawled haltingly around on the pavement outside 14, grabbing at his throat, his skin glowing yellow in the wash of the bare bulb next to the door. The woman emerged, still in her summer dress, a shoulder strap fallen onto her arm. She dropped to her knees and placed a hand on the back of the man’s neck. She leaned down to his ear and said something. He shook his head no, pushed her away. She leaned in again. He pushed her away harder. She stood and backed into the doorway and pulled the shoulder strap back over her arm.

The door on number 13 opened. A man came out. Kruger considered going out himself, almost put his hand to the doorknob, but the siren was growing louder.

He thought better of it.

The man from 13 was barefoot in jeans and a wrinkled white V-neck undershirt. His left forearm bore a faded, shapeless tattoo.

The naked man slowly stood. Kruger saw that he had a penis like a section of garden hose, much darker than the rest of his ashen body. Kruger grabbed the crank on his window and opened it enough to hear. The sirens, more than one now, swelled in his ears.

“Jesus H. Christ, man, you all right?” the tattooed man was saying. The naked man seized his penis in his right hand and yanked something rubbery and black away. He tossed it at the woman, who caught it and threw it into the room. “What in hell is going on here?” the tattooed man said.

The naked man stepped forward and said something Kruger couldn’t make out. The woman clapped a hand over her mouth, laughing. The tattooed man took a step backward toward his room. The naked man offered him a hand. As he did, the light illuminated a scar on the right side of his neck the shape of a jagged crescent moon.

“Get the hell away,” the tattooed man said.

It happened so fast that Kruger would have trouble explaining it to the police. The naked man stepped forward and took the tattooed man by his shoulders and hammered the butt of his head into the other man’s face. The tattooed man staggered backward, grasping at his nose and cursing as blood spurted between his fingers. The naked man watched for a few seconds. Kruger thought he looked amused. Then the naked man turned and ran to the Jaguar, snickering as he hopped gingerly across the gravel. The woman gave chase but he leapt over the door into the driver’s seat and stomped on the gas. She threw up her arms to shield her face against the flying pebbles.

The woman was uncooperative with Deputy Sheriff Dingus Aho, refusing, at first, even to acknowledge that she was Grace Maureen McBride. She denied knowing anything about the peculiar equipment the police found inside number 14, insisting it had been there when they checked in.

An eyebolt had been screwed into a stud inside the wall just above the bed, about three inches below the ceiling. Hanging from the bolt the police found shreds of sheet that appeared to have been torn from the bed in the room. The bed had been stripped to a bare mattress on which police found bits of drywall plaster and a tangle of frayed yellow twine. The materials were marked as evidence and sent to the state crime lab in Grayling for further analysis. Dingus’s report noted that the black rubbery item the naked man had removed from his penis appeared to be a vacuum cleaner attachment.

The ambulance took the tattooed man to a hospital in Traverse City. No charges were filed against Gracie, despite Kruger’s protests that he was entitled to recompense for the shredded sheet and the damage to the wall in number 14. A warrant was issued for the arrest of the naked man, but if he was apprehended, that was not reflected in Dingus’s written report.

Gracie at first told police that she did not know the naked man’s name, but she apparently slipped and referred to him as “YAR-ek”, or at least that’s how Dingus wrote it in his report. I had never heard such a name before. Gracie then insisted that she really did not know this man well, that his last name was too long to pronounce or to spell, that he came from somewhere downstate but she could not remember exactly where.

Dingus’s report said he released Gracie into the custody of Beatrice
Carpenter. When I read this, I looked away from the pages and stared down the beach to my left, in the direction of my mother’s house. I imagined Dingus walking Gracie up to the back door, his hand lightly on her elbow, the kitchen lights coming on, my mother in her fuzzy blue robe hugging Gracie and thanking Dingus, who would have kept his lights off so as not to alert the neighbors.

My mother had never said a word to me about this.

Then I remembered why the date—August 26, 1995—had resonated. Darlene and Jason had married on that Saturday. I had heard about the wedding from Soupy but of course had not been invited and remained in Detroit that weekend, working.

My mother later asked me if I had heard that Darlene had wed. By then it was Labor Day weekend and we were sitting on the bench swing that overlooked the lake. I took a long sip on my can of beer and told her, yes, I had heard. Mom then told me the wedding had been nice, but nothing special, which was her way of letting me know that she was sorry—not for herself but for me—that I had not been at the altar with Darlene.

Darlene never said anything about the incident at the Hill-Top Motel. She may not have known about it. In August of 1995, she hadn’t yet moved to the sheriff’s department; she worked then for the Bellaire Police.

I scanned Dingus’s report again quickly, turning it over and back, letting the wind ruffle the corners of the pages. As I was slipping it back into the accordion folder, I noticed a piece of notebook paper crumpled inside.

I pulled it out. Someone had written on it in neat block letters:

J Vend

26669 Harman Street

Melvindale Michigan 48122

twelve

The old rink shuddered with cheers as I walked in.

Through the glass doors between the lobby and the arena, I saw Taylor Haskell glide away from his net with the puck cradled against his chest in his catching glove, his stick held high to ward off opponents who might think of giving him a little after-the-whistle bump. Three young River Rats in their blue-and-gold uniforms coalesced around him, whacking his leg pads with their sticks as Taylor flipped the puck to a referee. Whistles trilled and Taylor returned to his net. The stands exploded again with applause.

The scoreboard said River Rats 1, Maroons 0.

I’d had to park in the First Presbyterian lot a quarter mile from the arena because cops were waving vehicles away from the jammed rink lot. Pickups and SUVs lined the road shoulders for two hundred yards in either direction. A handmade sign taped to the arena’s double-door entrance announced
TONIGHT’s GAME SOLD OUT
! Luckily, as a Rats alumnus I needed no ticket, regardless of my allowing that title-blowing goal in ’81.

I squeezed into the crowd lining the glass to the left of Taylor Haskell. Though I didn’t play goalie anymore, when I watched a game I still liked to be near the furious action around the net. Be they pros or teens or squirts in jerseys that hung to their shin guards, I liked to see the expressions on their faces, hear the shit-talking between opponents, watch the goaltender try to keep a clear line of vision to the puck through all of the crisscrossing bodies.

From up in the bleachers, hockey looks like a game of savage grace and swift beauty, which it is, but only up close can you see how hunger and poise and guile and anger can make a player who lacks wheels and hands the best player on the ice at any given moment, sometimes the moment that decides a game. Only up close can you see the difference between
someone who knows how to play ice hockey and someone who is a genuine hockey player.

As the skaters glided into the face-off circle to his left, awaiting the next drop of the puck, Taylor skated slowly back and forth between his posts, settling himself after his last save.
HASKELL
read the white-and-gold nameplate across the back of his shoulders, over the numeral 19. Goaltenders usually wore number 1 or 30 or 31 or 35, but I had heard that Taylor wore 19 because it was the number of his favorite Red Wing, Steve Yzerman, and of his most hated Red Wing opponent, the wily sniper Joe Sakic of the Colorado Avalanche. I had never heard of a kid wearing the number of a player he didn’t like; I guessed Taylor had a mind of his own.

The teams lined up at the face-off dot to Taylor’s left. He got into his squat, square to the dot, his catching glove open at his left shoulder, his stick pressing flat against the ice. I wondered if he had always been a goaltender. Many a player becomes a goalie by default: as a six- or seven-year-old, he’s the weakest skater on the frozen lake or the flooded backyard, so he gets stuck standing at one end of the rink, stopping pucks and jumping up and down on his blades to keep warm when the action’s at the other end. But many goalies develop into strong and agile skaters who can stay with the fleetest defensemen and forwards on their teams, even while wearing all that extra armor. And some can shoot as hard as any of them, too, for their arms and wrists have grown sinewy wielding that big stick with those potholder gloves.

But, at least on the ice, they remain alone, always.

I’d thought I quit tending goal because I was tired of waiting around for things to happen. Which is what goalies do, a lot of the time. But now, as the referee dropped the puck and I followed it between one center’s skates to a winger’s stick blade and off the high glass and outside the blue line where the River Rat center gave chase against a Marquette defenseman, I thought maybe I had stopped because I no longer wanted to feel alone.

In the dressing room, in the hockey shop, in the tavern, the goalie is one of the boys. On the ice he is stranded, lost inside his bloated pads, hiding his face behind a mask. When he gives up a goal his teammates figure he should have stopped, he is alone, circling his crease, dousing himself from his water bottle, wishing he had another chance at the shot he was sure he
had with the toe of his skate until it hit someone’s knee and deflected just inside the post.

He knows that on the bench the other guys are muttering about the pylon or sieve or funnel between the pipes. He knows that even if he had a chance to explain—the puck took a funny hop, the defenseman left a guy uncovered—he would not be understood. Because nobody sees the game as a goalie does: as a low, flat, horizontal puzzle of bodies and blind spots and caroms and bounces that is constantly being assembled and disassembled on his left, his right, behind him, his left again, in front of him, beneath him, down low, up high. All of which he feels responsible for trying to control. Even if he isn’t, really. Even if it’s ultimately impossible to control, or even make sense of.

Not terribly unlike my day job. Or my life.

Marquette’s number 6 collected the puck and slapped it across the rink to his defensive partner, number 4. Beyond the boards behind him I noticed Darlene and Deputy Skip Catledge standing in uniform at the entrance to the Zamboni shed. No yellow police tape was in sight. The Zamboni driver was dead but the game would go on.

Number 4 shoveled the puck right back to 6. High above 6’s helmeted head at the top of the bleachers perched the private box Laird Haskell had built. A banner proclaiming “The Rat Pack is BACK” hung the length of the box. I couldn’t see inside the box from where I was, but usually Laird Haskell stood at one end with a mixed drink in hand, chattering with whatever guests he might have without ever taking his eyes off his son. Whenever the puck was around Taylor’s net, Laird Haskell would stop his conversation and shout clipped commands at the boy:
Stop it! Kick it! Grab it! Freeze it!
And just before face-offs, always:
Focus!
I never heard him say “Taylor”; instead Laird Haskell called his son “19”, or “number 19”. I couldn’t tell if Taylor heard his father. He never looked up at the box or made any other sign of acknowledgment, unless you counted the way he sometimes bowed his head when his father snapped,
Nineteen! Focus!
Maybe Taylor was focusing. Or maybe not.

Next to Haskell’s box, the bleachers were filled top to bottom, blue line to blue line with high school kids wearing gold sweatshirts embossed in blue with the slogan the puck stops here. The Rats had started selling the shirts after the Haskells arrived the autumn before and Taylor, the
brand-new goalie from downstate, started the season by shutting out the first five opponents he faced. He snapped his catching glove like a bullwhip, and he got down and up and from one post to the other faster than goalies who were years older. Some of the kids passing me to go to the concession stand and the pay phones had had their sweatshirts autographed by the fourteen-year-old guarding the Rats goal tonight.

I had met Taylor Haskell once, a few weeks before.

I had gone into the rink pro shop to buy a stick. I was looking at the rack with left-hand curves when I noticed a kid in River Rats sweats picking through the right-curve sticks on the opposite side of the rack. Taylor said the gold stitching over his left breast. He selected an Easton and held it in both hands like a right wing would. He leaned down on the shaft until it bent a little, testing its stiffness.

“Fresh lumber?” I said. “Aren’t you in the wrong rack?”

He looked up and his cheeks flushed as if I had caught him doing something wrong. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the door to the shop.

“Um,” he said. “Just waiting for my mom.”

“You want those, don’t you?” I pointed at a rack of paddle-bladed goalie sticks across the room. “That little thing you got isn’t going to stop a slapper.”