The Hanging Tree (21 page)

“I’m just looking.”

I walked around and offered my hand. We shook. He was a little taller than I’d thought. His damp brown hair—he’d just showered after practice—glistened over blue eyes flecked with green. He had a pinkish sprinkle of acne along his forehead. Except for the eyes, he looked like his father.

“Gus Carpenter,” I said. “I used to have a jacket like that.”

He looked down at his jacket, as if he’d forgotten he had it on. “You were on the Rats?”

“A long time ago. Played goalie, too. Not anymore, though.”

“Huh. How come?”

“How come what?”

“How come you stopped playing goal?”

It was not an idle question asked by a bored adolescent. Number 19 of
the Hungry River Rats really wanted to know why I had chosen to leave goaltending behind. I wondered if Taylor Haskell knew that I had been the goat of the ’81 title game. Maybe he hadn’t been in Starvation long enough for that indoctrination.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Guess I had enough of people shooting pucks at my head. Time to have some fun for once, you know?”

I was joking, but Taylor didn’t take it that way.

“Yeah,” he said. “What’s it like?”

“Playing out of the net?”

“Yeah.”

I really hadn’t given it much thought. I knew I didn’t feel nearly as much pressure playing wing. That was probably the best part. Even in a men’s league where games started at 11:45 p.m. and guys showed up stoned or drunk, I got butterflies before going out to tend goal. Wingers can screw up two or three times a shift and nobody cares. A goalie screws up twice in a game and their buddies start yelling at them to start fucking trying already.

“It’s fun,” I said. “I mean, I’m nothing great on wing and, from what I’ve seen, I wasn’t nearly the goalie you are.”

“Taylor, what are you doing?”

The woman was standing in the lobby just outside the shop in a white ankle-length parka trimmed with fur. She gave me a once-over without meeting my eyes. Taylor turned around and said, “Can I get a stick?”

“Taylor,” she said. “We don’t have all day.”

“Come on, Mom.”

The woman gave me a look that said this was none of my business.

“We’ll talk to your father again tonight.”

Taylor’s shoulders drooped. “Oh, right.”

“We’ll see.” She waved him out. “Let’s go.”

Now Marquette’s number 6 faked around a Rats wing and veered left toward the center of the ice. Jeremy Bontrager, Elvis’s nephew, stepped up to cut him off but 6 wound his stick back behind his left ear and, one stride outside the blue line, slapped a long, chest-high, flip-flopping shot at Taylor Haskell.

Following the fluttering puck while watching Taylor out of the corner
of my eye, I knew immediately that he’d come out of his crease half a second too late. The crowd didn’t know it, but I could feel them holding their breath anyway, because Taylor Haskell, for all of his shutouts and spectacular stops, had gradually gotten a reputation for giving up soft goals.

It’s one thing for a goalie to stop back-to-back shots then watch a third one go in as he’s sprawled on the ice. It’s one thing for a goalie to be beaten by a sniper firing a bullet of a shot through a tangle of bodies. It’s one thing for a goalie to succumb to a skater bearing down unmolested who knows exactly what he’s going to do with the puck. But it’s another thing entirely for a goalie to let in a goal he should not let in: A middling wrister that sneaks between his legs or wobbles high when he guessed down. Or, worst of all, a long dying quail of a shot that the shooter himself never imagined would score, that the shooter was just flipping toward the net in hopes of a rebound or a face-off.

Soft goals are death to a hockey team. Almost nothing—a stupid penalty, a missed empty net—is more demoralizing. A team can totally dominate a game, outskating their opponents, beating them to every loose puck, blasting shot after shot at the opposing net, but if their own goalie then lets in a shot that everyone in the rink knows a blind man could have stopped, the game can change as suddenly and unforgivingly as if the teams had traded jerseys. A goaltender never wants to give up any kind of goal. But when I played in the net, there were nights when I would rather have faced the other squad’s best skater on a breakaway than a tumbling puck sliding toward me from a hundred feet away.

Nobody in Starvation Lake was saying it out loud, because the softies surrendered so far by Taylor Haskell had come late in games, with the Rats enjoying comfortable leads. But there were whispers nonetheless. About the high one against Muskegon that he seemed to lose in the lights. The weak backhander that dribbled between his skates against Panorama Engineering. The one from behind his net that bounced in off of his butt against Compuware. The titters and the whispers became nervous little jokes that Taylor was so impenetrable that he had to actually
let
other teams score once in a while.

The night Compuware scored off of his rear end, Channel Eight was
waiting in the arena lobby when Taylor emerged from the dressing room. Usually his parents whisked him out a side door to their idling SUV, but tonight Laird and Felicia had gotten intercepted by Elvis Bontrager, and they weren’t about to cut off the chairman of the town council. By the time they reached Taylor, he was standing in a ring of teammates and their moms and dads, bathed in camera light and speaking haltingly into a microphone held by Tawny Jane Reese. I happened to be there, standing behind a gaggle of girls getting up on their toes for a glimpse of number 19.

Tawny Jane asked him about the game—the Rats had won, 4–1—and he grinned and said it was a lot easier to be a goalie when the puck was in the other end most of the time. Good answer, I thought. She asked what he thought of the new rink going up and he said he hoped it would be ready for next season. Oops, wrong answer, I was thinking when I felt someone push past me: Laird Haskell. Felicia had him by a sleeve but he pulled away and pushed through the throng. Tawny Jane was asking the boy what had happened on that butt-bounce goal.

Taylor didn’t seem to mind. “I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” he said. He shrugged. “I was kind of bored.”

“Miss Reese,” Haskell said. “Please.”

Tawny Jane looked up. Taylor turned around, eyes wide with apprehension, looking like he had in the pro shop when I’d seen him shopping for regular sticks. I turned and saw Felicia standing with her hands clapped over her mouth, looking mortified.

“Please turn that off,” Laird Haskell said as he emerged into the camera light. “Miss Reese, I really wish you would have asked me about interviewing my son.”

Tawny Jane looked over her shoulder at her cameraman. The light stayed on. “Mr. Haskell,” she said, shoving the mike in his face. “Taylor tells us he hopes the new rink is ready for next season.” She smiled her widest fake smile. “Does he know something the rest of us don’t?”

Haskell shook his head no as he took Taylor by the shoulders and moved the boy behind him. “He’s fourteen years old, Miss Reese.” Beads of sweat had broken out on Haskell’s forehead, but he pasted on his own phony smile. “I worry about the rink, he worries about keeping pucks out of the net.”

“Yeah,” one of the mothers said. “Stick to hockey, lady.” Others chimed in. Tawny Jane glanced around, saw me. I was grinning, as much in sympathy as amusement. She lowered her mike. The light went off.

“Could we talk later, Mr. Haskell?” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “Call my attorney.”

I watched Felicia grab the boy, wrap an arm around his shoulders, and hurry him away, Laird Haskell trailing behind. “Bored?” Haskell snapped. “What do you mean, bored?” Over her shoulder his wife shot him a look of searing disdain as she ushered the boy through the lobby doors.

Whoa, I thought. Bet they’ll be having a chat tonight.

Now, as the fluttering shot from Marquette’s number 6 reached Taylor Haskell, I could see that he was in trouble. Because his initial reaction had been late, he had overcompensated, trying to catch up. He was off balance, his stick had come up from the ice, and his body wasn’t square to the puck. He should have snagged it easily with his catching glove, but instead it smacked him just under his mask on the left side and bounced up and over his shoulder while he flailed with his glove. The crowd groaned. The puck bounced in the crease and rolled toward the goal line and a 1–1 score. Taylor toppled over backward, twisting his body around, stretching his glove out for the puck.

He grabbed it just before it crossed the goal line. Players crashed into one another above him. Whistles blew. The stands exploded with a cheer of relief. I felt a sharp poke in the back of a shoulder and turned around.

“Got a minute?” Jason Esper said.

He threw the inside bolt on dressing room 3. I sat in the spot where I always sat for both the Rats and Soupy’s Chowder Heads, on a bench along the cinder-block wall. The tang of disinfectant stung the air. Johnny Ford must have just swabbed the shower mats.

Jason grabbed a folding chair. He spun it around in front of me so that he sat facing me with his elbows propped on the chair back.

“Not a bad little ’tender,” he said.

“The Haskell kid? Yeah.”

“But something ain’t right.”

“Gives up a softie now and then.”

“Got lucky on that last one. But it’s more than that. He doesn’t want to be out there.” Jason smirked at me. “Kind of like you, eh, Carp?”

“He’s fourteen, Meat. I’m thirty-five.”

“Fuck,” Jason said, and he guffawed. “He’s the fucking future of Starvation Lake. And you’re the past. God fucking help us all.”

“What do you want, Jason?”

“What do I want?”

I waited.

“What the fuck do you care what I want?” he said.

I didn’t want to have this discussion. “How the hell did you end up here anyway?”

Jason shrugged. “Ah, you know, this guy knew that guy. Hockey’s a pretty small world. You know.”

He hitched the chair forward a foot. I caught a whiff of whatever goop shined in his tight blond curls.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “How the hell did Wilford fuck up his marriage? Wasn’t he married to that Brenda babe?”

“Brenda Mack.”

Why did Jason Esper care about Brad Wilford’s failed marriage?

“The calendar thing finally do him in?”

At the start of each season, Wilf dutifully noted all of his scheduled hockey games on a calendar hanging in his kitchen. He would add a fictitious game or two and, when those nights came, tell Brenda he didn’t really feel like playing, he’d rather just spend the time with her. This, he bragged to us, was the surest way to get laid without having to get his wife plastered.

Of course, this being Starvation Lake, Brenda found out.

“Among other things,” I said.

Jason studied his right hand, turning it around as if he were examining it for the first time. The stringy scars crisscrossing his knuckles made the hand look like he’d stuck it in a lawnmower. “You know,” he said, “I wasn’t just a goon. I wasn’t even a goon. I could skate. I had size. I had hands.”

“You played for the Pipefitters.”

“Yeah. But I got better after that. I had a real shot, did you know that?”

“At the pros?”

“The Flyers. Twenty-one years old. Bus gets me to Philly the afternoon
of the game and I figure no way they’re putting me on the ice tonight—shit, they’re playing the Habs—so I’m getting something to eat. I go in a bar, get a couple beers and a cheesesteak, maybe another couple beers. Love those cheesesteaks with mushrooms. I walk over to the rink just to check out the locker room and I’ll be goddamned if my name isn’t on the lineup card. Dude, I’m penciled in on a line with fucking Zezel and Kerr.”

“Really.”

“I’m like, oh fuck, what do I do? I go out into the concourse because I don’t want anyone to see me in the locker room and I find a men’s room and lock myself in a stall and jam two fingers down my throat. Got a little out but the goddamn cheese just wouldn’t come up.”

“Did you play?”

“Yeah. Three shifts. Tripped a guy after he got by me because I was gassed. Stupid fucking penalty. Of course the Habs score on the power play. Coach moves me to the fourth line. I get one more shift. And that was it. One of the guys said I looked like Casper the Ghost.”

“And you never played in the bigs again.”

Jason didn’t like the way I said that.

“Always figured I would,” he said. “But that was it. One chance and I blew it. Bounced around in the minors. Started to fight, thinking I might get the call-up as a goon. Got my ass kicked a bunch but finally learned how to go and got a pretty good reputation as a hammer.” He looked at his hand again.

“Did you like fighting?”

“I don’t know. You like typing?”

“Depends what I’m typing.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Which brings us to what I’m about to tell you.”

In one quick motion he had my left wrist in his hand, squeezing the bones between his thumb and forefinger. It hurt. I tried to pull away but my arm stayed where it was. Jason leveled his eyes on mine.

“I’m done fucking up my life,” he said. “And you are done fucking my wife.”

A shiver rippled down the backs of my arms. Not because I was afraid; Jason Esper, coach-to-be of the River Rats, wasn’t about to kick my ass in a dressing room in the middle of a game with half the town in the arena. But the certainty with which he said what he said made me wonder: Had
he told Darlene the same when they spoke in the parking lot behind the sheriff’s department? Had she told him to go to hell? Or had she said something that made him think he could succeed in scaring me away? Or winning her back?

“She’s only your wife,” I said, “on a piece of paper.”

Jason let go of my wrist. He stood. He picked up his chair in one hand and set it back against the wall near the shower. Then he came back and stood over me. “Maybe I should’ve got a prenup like the one old Laird stuck his old lady with, eh? Now that’s one happy fucking household. If she wants out—and believe you me, she wants out—she gets her panties back dirty, that’s about it.”

“Serves her right for negotiating with a scumbag lawyer.”