concession stand, making cocoa and popcorn for $3.50 an hour. I hadn’t known her to be a hockey fan-she’d certainly never attended any of my games-but she learned to sharpen skates and drive and maintain the Zamboni. She ditched the motel room for the cot in the Zam shed at the back of the rink.
I saw her when I went to play in the Midnight Hour Men’s League. She’d be on the Zamboni, circling the ice perched on the stool she needed to see over the steering wheel. Gracie put down a good sheet of ice, smooth and hard enough that it didn’t get too chipped up for at least half a game. Some nights after hockey I’d see her late at Enright’s, where the proprietor, my old friend Soupy Campbell, served her double gin and Squirts and slowly sweet- talked her into his bed. Or maybe Gracie sweet-talked him.
There was an appearance of normalcy. Gracie and Darlene got together once a week for greasy ham-and- pineapple pizza at Riccardo’s across the river from downtown. If they talked about Gracie’s downstate years, Darlene did not let on, or at least not very much. I chose to believe that Darlene wasn’t deliberately keeping things from me but protecting her friend’s privacy, knowing that Gracie and I, though we were second cousins, though we had spent a good deal of time around each other as kids, had never really gotten along.
I assumed that Darlene knew many things about Gracie that I did not know, that I really didn’t think I cared to know. But now that she had been found dead, I was curious, of course, mostly because of what Darlene had left unsaid on the phone.
“I don’t know much,” I told Philo, “but Gracie could drink most guys under the table. Drugs? Not sure. Maybe. She did a bunch of stuff when she was a kid, but that was a long time ago.”
“Obviously some issues there,” he said. “A few grafs then. ‘Apparent’ suicide, unless the police confirm the real thing.”
“Right. They won’t. Not here.”
Philo clapped his palms on his knees and stood.
“Now,” he said. “We have a bit of decent news on the financial end of things. An opportunity to consider.”
I leaned back in my chair. Philo had been named managing editor of the Pilot on the fifteenth of December. I was already executive editor. It was explained that he outranked me. I tried not to care. I told myself that I already had so many bosses at Media North headquarters in Traverse City that one more couldn’t make much of a difference. Especially not Philo, who had written exactly two bylined stories since arriving, one on a routine school board meeting, the other on the arraignment of a man for stealing a dog, both of which required corrections (he misspelled the names of both the school board president and the dog, Zuzu). Before that, he had worked at a couple of nothing papers near his home back east.
His blunders did nothing to change the impression he gave that he felt he owned the place. It took me an afternoon of phone calls to Traverse City to determine that Philo was actually the nephew of Jim Kerasopoulos, the chief executive of Media North.
He began to pace between the leaky watercooler and the copier-and-fax machine that had been low on toner for two weeks. His penny loafers clacked on the linoleum, almost but not quite drowning out the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
“Hutch’s Hockey Heaven wants to lock in a quarter-page ad twice a week for a month, ramping up to a half page when the new rink opens,” Philo said. “That alone”-he stopped and closed his eyes as he counted on his fingers-“is close to twenty percent of current budget and would help push us up, quarter to quarter, a couple of percentage points.”
“Nothing to sneeze at,” I said, although, in truth, I knew almost nothing about ads or circulation or anything but putting stories in the paper, such as they were in a town like Starvation. I knew ads brought in money, and money gave me space in the paper. The rest I left to the business guys.
“No, sir,” he said. “Better up than down, which is where it’s been going for the last two years.”
“Maybe we could get some toner,” I said. “I had to call the Kiwanis the other day because I couldn’t read the flyer they faxed about their mostacciolli dinner.”
Philo hesitated for a second before resuming his pacing.
“Even better,” he said, “the rink itself has proposed a month’s buy of full pages in the weeks before it opens followed by a special section-they’re talking eight pages, full color-about the rink, the local hockey team, et cetera. That’s a little gold mine in and of itself. Then they’ll renew the weekly ads on a month-to-month basis depending on local interest, which I’m sure will be no problem to sustain. The town is dying for this.”
Starvation was indeed eager for the new rink. The old one, once called the John D. Blackburn Memorial Ice Arena after an old River Rats coach but now called simply Starvation Lake Arena, was a little more than thirty years old, almost as old as me. It had always been a patchwork job. It had opened as an outdoor rink, complete with hockey boards and goal nets and refrigeration pipes running invisibly beneath the ice to keep it hard through the occasional warm winter day.
I could still remember the thrill of stepping out onto the ice for the first time as a five- or six-year-old and how I yanked my mittened hand from my father’s and then promptly fell down, wondering if I was smelling the secret chemical that froze the ice in the snow that scraped my cheeks. That night, Dad, Mom, and I stood along the boards with hundreds of people from Starvation and Kalkaska and Sandy Cove and Mancelona and cheered for the River Rats midget squad against some Detroit team. I didn’t care that the Rats lost by five or six or that I had to get up on my tippytoes to see over the boards. I had a foam cup of hot chocolate from a thermos Mom had brought and I rolled the miniature marshmallows around in my mouth until they melted away.
By the time Dad died of cancer-I was seven years old-the rink had a ceiling and walls built on two of the four sides. A few years later, the town scraped up the money to close the north and south ends, which meant goaltenders no longer had to blink against snow and sleet being sucked through one end and out the other.
Bad memories lingered, though. The River Rats had lost their one chance at a state championship in that rink. I was the goaltender who’d given up the overtime goal that lost the title game. Eighteen years had passed, and I thought I had finally gotten over it. The town had not.
Now a wealthy man had come from downstate to build a brand-new rink with no bittersweet history. He had brought millions of dollars and a fourteen-year-old son who some said was the best young hockey player Starvation had ever seen. The boy happened to be a goaltender.
“That sounds terrific, Philo,” I said. “What’s the catch?”
Philo stopped pacing and looked at me. He was standing in front of a desk in the back that had nearly disappeared beneath old copies of the Detroit Free Press and Chicago Tribune. The pile wasn’t going to grow because Media North-actually, Philo-had canceled those subscriptions.
“It is a great opportunity for us,” he said.
“Yep. Are the ad guys in Traverse working it?”
“Of course. But we can’t rely on them to carry the entire load.”
“Well,” I said,“you don’t want me selling ads, do you?”
Philo walked over and sat against my desk, pushed his glasses up his nose, folded his arms. Now I heard the fluorescent lamps. I hated that buzzing. It made me feel lonely, even with this long hockey stick of a man sitting next to me on my desk.
“Look,” Philo said, “I only minored in journalism at Penn, but I got my master’s in it at Columbia. I have a deep and abiding appreciation for the historical separation of church and state in news organizations.”
“I’m Michigan, no grad school, but agreed.”
“Emphasis on ‘historical.’ As you know, the present-day realities of newspaper economics do not fit very well with many of the historical templates that our forefathers, with the very best of intentions, constructed for us.”
I was beginning to wish I’d just gone to Audrey’s. “And your point is?”
“All right. I really don’t have to tell you this, but look: if we have no business-and we certainly don’t have much at the moment-then we have no newspaper, which means we have no place to do your journalism. No money, no stories.”
My journalism? I thought. I’d left my naivete about newspapers being a calling at the Detroit Times. I’d worked there for more than ten years, writing mostly about the big automotive companies. I came damn close to winning a Pulitzer Prize reporting about a certain model of pickup truck that burned a lot of people to death. But I went to some extremes in my reporting methods that got me fired instead. In the end, it did not matter that my
