deflected it across the ice. Soupy gathered it up in stride and bolted down the left side of the ice, the crowd shrieking, the clock counting down to twenty-nine seconds, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…Soupy charged into the Hawks’ zone and launched a rising shot that caught their goalie off balance. The puck caromed off his shoulder to Jeff Champagne, who had sneaked to a corner of the net, alone. He took a backhand swipe and knocked it in.
I’ve never heard anything louder than that rink at that moment.
Although we were eliminated in the state playoffs by Detroit’s O’Leary’s Heating, we knew we could play with anybody. Two seasons later, we made the state quarterfinals and fell to Byrd Electric, another Detroit squad, 5–3. When our bus pulled onto Main Street after the three-hour ride from Flint, everyone at Enright’s spilled outside to cheer us. We smiled and waved, but the older Rats-Soupy, Teddy, Stevie Reneau, Brad Wilford, me-knew we had just two years left to win that one big game before we’d be going off to college or jobs or whatever else the real world held. Coach seemed unfazed, though. Before we departed the bus that night, he told us yet again, “Losing is good for winning.”
We made it a step closer the next year, upsetting Paddock Pools in the quarters when Soupy scored on the end-to-end rush memorialized on the wall at Enright’s. We thought we’d finally get our shot. But in the semifinals we were routed, 7–1, by the Pipefitters, a street gang of a team from the steel-making furnace of downriver Detroit. It seemed like they were all big and hairy except for number 17, a scrawny winger named Billy Hooper who skated like his feet had touched molten metal. He scored four, and to this day I can’t remember seeing three of them until they were behind me. Even Soupy had trouble staying with Billy Hooper. We stayed downstate to watch the Pipefitters demolish O’Leary’s in the final, 9–2. Hooper scored three, assisted on two others, and was named MVP of the tournament. Late that night, our bus pulled into the high school parking lot where our parents sat waiting with the exhaust snaking around their cars and trucks. Coach stood at the front of the bus and called for quiet. Then he said, “Men-are you ready?” We knew what that meant. We filed silently off the bus.
Though we had yet to reach the ultimate goal, there was no doubt in our minds that we would in our last year together. In the meantime, our success against Detroit’s best hockey teams meant Starvation Lake wasn’t invisible anymore either. It was no longer just another town up north with a good breakfast joint and a smoky tavern. The town council bought a billboard on I-75 proclaiming Starvation as “Hockeytown North. Home of the River Rats.” Local kids begged us for autographs. Girls came from Sandy Cove and Kalkaska and Mancelona to hang out at our practices. Francis demanded our old sticks and skates to hang in Enright’s. Coach had River Rats caps and T-shirts and stickers made. The town turned blue and gold.
There was green, too. All those people from Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland and Milwaukee who came to Starvation for hockey saw how beautiful the place was and returned to buy lakefront lots and build cottages. Their money lured a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut, a fudge shop, and two new souvenir stores on Main Street that hung Rats T-shirts in their windows. New business swamped the marina, and Soupy’s dad added a refueling station and a big section of dry dock. The town built a little zoo along the lakeshore where tourist kids could ride a miniature train past white-tail deer, red foxes, bobcats, and snapping turtles. New housing developments sprouted around the lake.
The money behind a lot of the building came from Francis Dufresne, who recruited Jack Blackburn as his pitchman. When the time came to persuade the town council to approve construction of this new motel or that new subdivision, Coach would don a sports jacket and his self-assured smile to present the plans to the council while Dufresne watched from the back of the audience, nodding with satisfaction as the council voted his way again and again. The two of them built Starvation Lake into a bona fide resort.
Everything changed after Coach’s accident. Whether from grief or inertia or bad luck, the town seemed to lose the momentum it had had. One summer, a faulty fuse box started a fire that shut down the marina just as the boating season was getting started. The next year, a putrid outbreak of algae left a gooey green slick floating on the lake surface. Sandy Cove and other towns started siphoning off the business. Dufresne and his new partner, Teddy Boynton, kept building, but they kept moving farther from Starvation, becoming silent partners in projects in other towns, even Sandy Cove. Eventually the hockey suffered, too.
The whole town had lost something. It wasn’t easy to pinpoint, but it was more than just a hockey coach. Jack Blackburn had showed Starvation Lake how to win. Somehow, without him, people forgot.
“Gus?”
The woman’s voice pierced the wind on South Beach. I turned to see Sheriff’s Deputy Darlene Esper, nee Bontrager, trudging through the snow toward me. I’d known her forever and could tell immediately that she didn’t want to be on that beach, talking to me. She’d come out of a sense of duty to someone who grew up with her, whom she’d once loved, who had broken her heart.
“Soupy said you might be down here,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I thought you’d want to know.”
“About?”
“The snowmobile. We’re pretty sure it was Blackburn’s,” she said.
“How can you be sure?”
“All we have is the front part, you know, the whatchamacallit, the cowl. But the registration numbers match up.”
“So? That could be a clerical screwup or something.”
Darlene took one obliging step closer. Her eyes were huge onyx marbles. “There’s also a sticker, like, a decal, next to one of the headlights. It’s all faded, but you can tell.”
The River Rats logo. A snarling, toothy rodent in skates and helmet, carrying a hockey stick like a pitchfork. Coach had had decals made every year. I remember seeing them on the insides of his kitchen cupboards.
“OK,” I said.
Instinctively, Darlene reached for my elbow, then loosed it just as quickly and stepped back again. I stared at the shadowy boot prints she’d left in the snow at my feet. “Well,” I said, “it’s not like Coach died all over again.”
“It’s pretty weird, Gus.”
“What do you guys think happened?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the tunnels?”
The tunnels. Many a boat had sunk in Starvation Lake never to be found. The cops would drag the lake and send scuba crews down, but boats that sank in plain sight seemed to have been swallowed up by the lake bottom. Around town the favored theory was that the lake was part of a serpentine network of underwater tunnels linking dozens of inland lakes to Lake Michigan. Sunken boats were sucked into the tunnels and out to the big lake. Like Bigfoot, the legend persisted, even though no one had ever actually located one of the tunnels.
“Come on,” I said.
“I’ve never seen Dingus like this. Calling meetings, in the office before eight, on the phone all the time with the state police. He’s reopening the whole investigation.”
My chest tightened. “Of the accident?”
“Yes. The accident.” She looked away. “But what do you care? You weren’t around ten years ago, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t. What else do they know?”
She shook her head. “Dingus and the guy deputies were whispering about something tonight. They didn’t share it with me.”
I thought of Joanie. She wasn’t going to be happy with me. She’d had the story exactly right.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No. You just want the story.”
“Will you give me a break, please, Darlene?”
“Did I have to come out here and tell you this?”
“No. Thanks. I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry.”
She turned to leave. Up the street I heard Soupy howling something over the rumble of revving pickup trucks, the sounds of Enright’s emptying. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did anyway. “Darl,” I called out. “Give me a ride home?”
She didn’t even turn around.
