The Hanging Tree (33 page)

The refs whistled the play dead. My foot was on fire with pain. “Asshole,” I was yelling. “You fucking asshole.”

Jason was not through. He grabbed my shoulder and rolled me over and shoved the palm of his glove into my mask, snapping my head back. One of the refs tried to get between us but Jason shoved him aside with his other arm. He had about forty pounds on the ref and sixty on me.

“You got shit in your ears?” Jason said.

“What the fuck do you want?”

The ref was pulling Jason by the back of his jersey collar but Jason didn’t budge. “I’m giving you two for roughing, Meat,” the ref said. “Don’t push it.”

Jason grabbed the bottom of my mask and pulled my face in close to his. I smelled the tobacco dip on his breath. My gut churned with nausea. My foot felt like it might burst the seams of my skate.

“It’s over, pal,” Jason said. “Got it? She’s here for me. Don’t be fucking calling her anymore. You hear me? Don’t be fucking calling her.”

“It ain’t over with Vend, though, is it, Meat?”

A look of surprise spread over his face. He loosened his grip on my mask.

“You’re his bitch up here, aren’t you, Meat?”

“You don’t know what you’re fucking talking about.”

“Or are you Haskell’s bitch? Better get it straight who you’re working for, Meat, or you’ll wind up like Gracie.”

He shook his head. “You’re dead,” he said. The refs pulled him toward the penalty box as he stared at me over his shoulder. Before he stepped into the box, he pointed his scarred right hand at me. “You’re a little fucking pussy, Carpie,” he yelled. “And you’re fucked.”

Soupy and Zilch helped me to my feet. I couldn’t put much weight on my right skate. “You going to be all right?” Soupy said.

“He broke my goddamn foot,” I said.

“OK,” Soupy said. “Maybe I can get them to play the rest later.”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m going to play.”

“You can barely stand up.”

“Just give me a couple of minutes, I’ll be all right.”

I moved away from him, skated little circles back and forth, most of my weight on my left skate.

“Fuck it, Trap,” Soupy said.

“No.”

I put my stick-hand glove under my left arm and grabbed Soupy by his jersey. “Listen,” I said. I looked him in the eyes. Then I turned and looked behind my net. “Just get that bastard within reach.”

The ref dropped the puck on the face-off dot to my left. I leaned hard on my left skate, gritted my teeth against the pain. Soupy gobbled up the puck and skated it out of our zone. I watched him weave between the Minnows, moving away from me. My gaze moved to the bleachers. Darlene was gone.

Jason was as trapped by Vend and Haskell as Gracie had been. He probably thought he was clever, working both against the middle. Haskell must have thought he had a spy in Vend’s camp. Vend must have thought he had one in Haskell’s. I figured Jason was the one faxing Vend those copies
of my stories, keeping him apprised of the town council’s doings. The two of them were, after all, bound by blood, and then money, and probably drugs and blackmail and who knew what else.

Maybe I should have felt for the guy. Right.

Jason came back on the ice with just under a minute to go in the period. Goalies are supposed to keep their eyes on the puck. But I watched Jason, waiting, knowing he didn’t think I had it in me.

One of the Minnows shoveled the puck into the corner to my left. Jason charged down the boards to get it. Soupy swooped in ahead of him, scooped up the puck, and veered behind my net. That’s where he left the puck.

Jason saw it sitting there and put his head down, churning at full speed.

The heel of my stick blade caught him full on the Adam’s apple. He flew up and back so hard that one of his skates almost knocked my stick out of my hand. I heard his helmet crack against the ice and watched as Jason threw off his gloves and clutched at his throat, choking. One of the refs rushed over and knelt over him. “Holy God,” he said, “somebody call nine one one.” I rested my arms on the crossbar and watched Jason kick his skates this way and that.

The ref turned to me. He was just a kid, maybe seventeen, played for the River Rats and made a few bucks refereeing games for old guys like me. He looked scared. “You better go take a shower, Gus,” he said.

“Fucking-ay,” I said. As I started to skate off the ice, I called out to Jason, “Winners win, motherfucker. Players play.”

I left E.B.’s gear in a pile in the dressing room and swung out of the rink parking lot as an ambulance shrieked in.

twenty

All the shoes were gone.

Stars glimmered on a black sky between the snowy branches of the shoe tree. I looked way up where Gracie’s pink sneaker had hung with Ricky’s football cleat. My eyes moved down and across the boughs where other sneakers and boots and sandals and galoshes should have been dangling.

They weren’t there anymore.

Darlene looked up into the tree. She was standing at the trunk in snow to her knees. She held one hand on the tree, as if she was reassuring it.

She had left a note under a windshield wiper on my truck:
Midnight at the shoe tree.
She was in her brown-and-mustard uniform again, her hair tucked up into her earflap cap. Reflections of stars sparkled in her onyx eyes.

“What happened to the shoes?” I said.

“Evidence,” she said. “We took them all down this morning.”

“Huh. Did you see my skates?”

“What skates?”

“The skates you made me hang up there with your softball spikes.”

“Oh, those.” A sad smile flitted over her mouth. “I don’t know.”

I walked up to within a few feet of where she stood.

“You’re limping,” she said.

“No shit. Since when are you interested in hockey?”

She ignored my question. “D’Alessio told Jason to press charges.”

“Right. The last thing Jason wants is cops messing around with him. Do you know the kind of crazy shit he’s involved with downstate?”

Darlene folded her arms, looked down at her boots.

“Darlene?”

“I can’t talk about it now.”

“Can’t talk about what?”

“Jason. Downstate. Anything.”

“Why did you ask me out here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“I’m right here. Why didn’t we just meet at the apartment?”

“Not smart at the moment. I have to work anyway.”

“Not smart? Why? What the hell is going on?”

“A police investigation is going on.”

“I didn’t set fire to any house downstate, Darlene.”

“I know.” She reached up and briefly took my collar in her gloved hand. “You have to trust me. Things have gotten complicated.”

“I’ll say. Would you like to hear about my trip?”

“I’ve got a few minutes; go ahead.”

“Are you going to spill to Dingus?”

Darlene didn’t say anything.

“I want you to know because you loved Gracie,” I said.

“I can’t promise anything.”

I explained how Kerasopoulos had killed my original story about Gracie and made it a brief about an apparent suicide. I told her about Gracie’s house, about the darker of the two bedrooms, about Trixie, about Vend, about Haskell, about the woman on the swing set in Sarnia. Again I didn’t mention Michele Higgins. Darlene said, “My God,” once or twice. The expression on her face shifted from surprise to anger, from anger to sadness. The surprise wasn’t quite shock, though; it was as if she had heard bits and pieces of the story already.

“Did you ever see her house?” I said.

“No. Until—” She stopped herself. “I mean, I didn’t know she had one.”

“I’m not sure it’s actually hers. You never saw it when you visited?”

“No. But I hadn’t been down there for years.” She steepled her gloves beneath her nose, thinking. “I hadn’t been down there to see Gracie since she was still in school.”

“Or pretending to be in school.”

“I guess. Every time I made plans, she came up with some excuse to cancel. Now I guess I know why.”

There was another reason Darlene didn’t go downstate: I was there.

“She never said a word about Vend or Haskell?”

“Not by name.” She sighed. “No, Gracie didn’t mention anything about …” Her voice trailed off. “Although I do remember her mentioning that Trixie woman once or twice. Said she was the only real friend she had down there.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I bet that kind of hurt.”

Darlene shrugged. “She didn’t even make my wedding. A bridesmaid. I should have cut the bitch off then.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I mean, I tried, I tried to just forget her a bunch of times, but then I’d go to the mailbox and there’d be a letter, and I’d be right back on the hook again. And when she came back here, we took the time to catch up. Or at least I thought we did.”

“How perfect that you kept those letters in a shoe box, eh? Have you had a chance to look through those?”

“Most of them. Even with twenty-twenty hindsight, they don’t tell you much. There’s all this girly chatter about how she’s dating this guy or that guy, and he screwed her over or she blew him off, and she hates her job and her boss is a butthole but it pays well so she’s going to hang in there.”

“Vend.”

“I’m so stupid.”

“Darlene.” I stepped forward and reached for her shoulder, but she put a hand up to stop me.

“No. I am so stupid. Every now and then, she’d make a joke about how she was going to die young, it was her destiny. I just figured it was the usual Gracie drama. But it was all there. She was destined to die young and it just …” She looked up into the tree, struggling not to cry. “It just sucks.”

“Do you think it was Haskell or Vend?”

Darlene went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “Then she came back, and we’d go to Riccardo’s and she’d talk about how she was trying to get a real plan in her life, she just had to get out from under some things.”

“The abortion.”

“Well, that’s what I thought. Or maybe that’s what she wanted me to think. Obviously there were other things going on. God. I thought, I really thought she was sounding better, even last week.”

We both turned our heads toward the sound of sirens coming from the direction of town. I saw the lights of a police cruiser blinking behind the tree line a mile from where we stood, heading north along the eastern shore of the lake. It was followed by a different set of flashing lights, perhaps a fire truck or an ambulance.

Static crackled over the microphone clipped on Darlene’s shoulder. She turned away. “Oh, God,” I heard her say. “Another?” She said something else I couldn’t make out, then “Ten-four” before she turned back to me.

“I have to go.”

“Where?”

She just looked at me.

“OK. Why do you say Gracie was better?”

“I don’t know. Just her attitude. She ordered double pepperoni on her pizza. She was talking about how she was having fun with Soupy, how she thought she might be able to save up enough to at least rent a little cabin on the lake and get out of that disgusting Zamboni room.”

“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.