Our last year together, a rivalry developed. To a degree, it was no surprise. Soupy was being recruited by four or five big hockey colleges. Teddy, who lacked the speed and hands to play at that level, was living in Coach’s billets and wondering what came next. But there was more to it than just hockey, something I couldn’t put a finger on. They spoke less and less. They sat at opposite ends of the team bus. I asked Soupy about it once and he brushed me off: “Teddy’s just a jealous fuck.”
I wondered back then if Coach had something to do with it. Soupy-or Swanny, as Coach called him-had always been the favored son. But our last season together, Coach took to calling Teddy “Tiger.” It bothered Soupy, though he tried not to show it. By the time Soupy returned to Starvation Lake years later, his hockey career in shambles, Teddy owned more property than anyone but Francis Dufresne and was one of the wealthiest businessmen in northern Michigan. Soupy and Teddy avoided each other, but their men’s league teams-Campbell’s Chowder Heads and the Boynton Realty Land Sharks-played just about every season for the league title, just as Teddy and Soupy faced each other most years in the finals of the Shoot-Out.
Soupy had to score now and then hope I’d stop Boynton on his final shot. He circled at center ice, once, twice, three times before he started toward me. “Oh-fer, oh-fer, oh-fer,” Boynton chanted as Soupy skirted the blue line and flipped the puck to his forehand, then back, then back again, trying to mesmerize me. I knew his eyes were searching for mine but I stayed riveted on the puck. And then, in an instant, it was in the net. Maybe my eyes saw what happened. My brain sure didn’t. One second the puck was in front of me, big as a pancake, and I started to reach out with my stick to poke it away. The next second, it was gone. Soupy drew it back to himself like a blackjack dealer and spun around on his blades, a full 360-degree spin-o-rama. I lost the puck in his whirling skates. Then I felt its dull weight glance off my left instep and heard it thud against the back of the goal. It was the perfect dangle. Everyone watching whooped and whistled while I whacked the puck out of the net and Soupy glided away.
“Holy shit, Carpie,” Boynton shouted. “Put your dick back in your pants.” They all laughed, except Soupy, who slid slowly along the boards across from Boynton, glaring. I turned around and grabbed my water bottle. I wasn’t really thirsty, but there was nowhere else to hide.
“Carpie!” Boynton shouted. He stood with the puck at his feet, ready for his last shot. “Looks like Coach is back from the dead. You think he heard you were back from the dead and wanted to see if you still sucked?” I heard some of the others chuckle. “Brings back memories, huh?”
I barely had put the water bottle back when he leaped out and drove hard right at me. Usually that meant a shooter was going to try to deke rather than shoot, but Teddy, whose puckhandling wasn’t nearly as nimble as Soupy’s, almost always shot. He loved to aim between the legs so I pressed my leg pads together and kept the bottom of my stick hard against the ice as I moved backward with his strides. Just inside the blue line, he veered slightly to his left, my right. Yeah, here comes a shot, I thought. The puck was on his forehand. I scrunched my head down and stiffened. Teddy veered farther to my right. I slid around in that direction, squaring myself to the puck. He wound up for a slapshot. As his stick blade reached back, he said, “Hooper.”
Hooper.
I couldn’t help myself. It threw me so badly that I took my eye off the puck and glanced up at him. He wasn’t looking, though. He was aborting his shot and snatching the puck away and cutting hard to his right. When I looked down again, the puck was gone. Off balance, I kicked out my left leg, sprawling, and flailed at him with my catching glove. But he was by me. Over my shoulder I watched his backhander snap the mesh in the upper left corner of the net. He stopped next to the goalpost and stood over me, gloating. “Thanks, Carpie,” he said. “Good old Hooper.”
“Fuck off, Teddy,” I said.
Billy Hooper was the star winger for the Detroit Pipefitters who had scored the winning goal on me in the 1981 state final.
“What the fuck was that, Trap?” It was Soupy, who’d skated up behind me. I stumbled to my feet and saw he was angry.
“You can go to hell too,” I said
“Jesus, Trap, Helen fucking Keller could’ve stopped that.”
“Then next time get Helen fucking Keller to play goal.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Whose side are you on?” I dropped my catching glove and grabbed him by the jersey. I told him what Boynton had done. At first he looked at me blankly. Then he turned and stared across the ice at Boynton, who was laughing it up again with the other guys. “Goddamn it,” Soupy said. He turned back to me. “Goddamn it, Trap.”
“Soupy, what the hell is going on?”
Ignoring me, he scooped up a puck with his stick, flipped it into the air, and caught it in his left glove. Then he stopped and, assuming a baseball hitter’s stance, tossed the puck up over his head. As it came down, he took a hard, fluid swing at it and connected with a solid thwack. The puck flew haphazardly at Teddy Boynton. He saw it at the last second and ducked. It missed his head by a couple of inches. “What the fuck was that?” he yelled, digging toward Soupy. “I’ll be wearing the Stanley Cap this year, fuckhead.” The other players grabbed him, laughing, while Soupy skated off the ice.
Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho’s office smelled of gunmetal and powdered sugar. I waited in an angle-iron chair in front of his desk, my hair still damp from the quick shower I’d taken at the rink. I scanned the shelf behind his desk. There were cans of pepper spray, handcuffs, some Field amp; Stream magazines, a framed photograph of a woman whose face I recognized but whose name eluded me.
I wanted to ask Dingus myself about the snowmobile. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t because I didn’t trust Joanie, but it was. Despite my years away, despite my desire not to be there, I still felt that I knew these people and I could get them to tell me at least a semblance of the truth. Part of me wanted to hear that it was all a mistake, that the snowmobile wasn’t Coach’s after all. Mostly I wanted to hear a good reason why the sled wound up in Walleye.
I heard Dingus in the hallway just outside his door. “Call me when you hear something,” he said. He stepped into the office. “Where’s the redhead?” he said as he squeezed into the chair behind his little steel desk. Graying tufts of hair covered his bowling-pin forearms. He wore his cocoa uniform with a mustard tie secured by a brass clasp in the mitten shape of Michigan. “Thought she’d just about moved in here now.”
“Thanks for helping her out, Dingus.”
“Am I to be dealing with you now?”
“He was my coach.”
“Ah,” he said. He grabbed a piece of paper off a stack on his desk, peered at it, then replaced it, facedown. “How’d the Shoot-Out go?”
“Fine.”
“I heard there might’ve been an incident.”
“Boys will be boys.”
“For sure. So how can I help you?”
Dingus had come to Starvation Lake from a tiny Upper Peninsula town populated by Finns named Heikkala and Pikkarainen, and his voice still carried the gentle lilt of their accent. He’d been sheriff for six years. People liked him. He was friendly and mostly docile. He stayed within his modest budget and didn’t try to pump up his revenue by setting traffic-ticket quotas for his deputies as so many other sheriffs did. He also rarely left his office except for lunch at Audrey’s or, lately, to go on the TV news. Perhaps because he faced reelection, Dingus had become a regular on Channel Eight, which most days was desperate for local news and happy to put him on camera, whether it was to announce a new safety-belt campaign or to show off new jackets and caps for crossing guards. Yet Dingus on TV was usually as wooden as the lectern he hauled out for press conferences. Only his singsong accent and the dancing of his handlebar mustache saved him from being a total bore.
I had a notebook out but hadn’t opened it yet. “The snowmobile at Walleye,” I said. “Did it really belong to Coach?”
Dingus smiled. His head gave a barely discernible shake.
“No?” I said.
“Can’t help you.”
“Come on.”
“No comment. You know what you know.”
