Starvation Lake. Had I left the door open too? I crept to the top of the stairs and tried to peek inside. I couldn’t see anything unusual but I smelled something. Cigar smoke. Cheap cigar smoke. I eased the door open with a boot, reached in, and flicked the wall switch. “Hello?”
Sheriff Dingus Aho sat in my recliner, biting a Tiparillo beneath his handlebar mustache. “Gus,” he said, smiling. “You were parked illegally. I took the liberty of moving you before you got a ticket.” He tossed my keys on the plywood table. “You know, you shouldn’t just leave them in the ignition, son.”
“And you shouldn’t just let yourself into my house. Do you have a warrant?”
“A warrant? No. But I have this.” He leaned forward and set down a thin blue file folder. “Please. Sit down.”
I dropped into my sofa and picked up the folder. Before I could open it, Dingus reached over and lightly grasped my wrist. “Yesterday, you made a request for a report,” he said. “You’ll get a formal response from the county attorney in, oh, six weeks, maybe eight. So we need to agree that I was never here.”
“All right.”
“And you can’t be putting any of this in your paper, at least not yet.”
He let go of my wrist.
Inside the folder were four pages stapled together. The top three were a photocopy of a Pine County Sheriff accident investigation report dated March 13, 1988. Parts were smudged and barely legible. Scanning the spare description of Coach’s accident, I learned little I didn’t already know, although it noted that Leo Redpath “became visibly upset and approached a hysterical state.” He kept repeating, “What’s done is done. What’s done is done…” The report was signed by Sheriff’s Deputy Dingus Aho.
The fourth page was a photocopy of a receipt for $25,000 paid to the Starvation Lake Marina, “Angus Campbell, proprietor.” It was dated April 12, 1988. Across the page someone had scribbled PAID FULL, CK 5261, FIRST DETR BANK. Nothing was listed under the purchases column. A signature near the bottom of the page was badly smudged. Beneath it I read something slightly more legible: “Ferryboat.” The F on “Ferryboat” had a little tail on it like a fishhook.
I tried to look indifferent, but my mind was buzzing. What had upset Leo so? Was it simply losing a friend to foolish behavior, or was there something else? What did this receipt or Soupy’s late father have to do with anything? Why would somebody in Starvation Lake want a ferryboat? I couldn’t remember ever seeing one at the marina, though I suppose Soupy’s dad could’ve gotten his hands on one if he had a buyer. What was Dingus after?
“Thanks, Dingus,” I said. “But I have no idea what to make of this.”
He blew out a plume of Tiparillo smoke. “There are some additional materials our attorney might give you,” he said, “but I can tell you they’re not terribly revealing.”
“None of this is. You wrote this report. Help me out here.”
Dingus stared at the pages in my hands. “I have an idea, Gus, but it’s a little worn from age. I doubt you’d believe it. Nobody did way back when. And it cost me, let me tell you.”
“Try me.”
He stood. “I’m confident you’ll figure it all out.”
“Come on. Why’d you bother coming here if you’re not going to tell me?”
He moved toward the door. “You know, Gus, I heard the rumors about how you had to leave Detroit. I hope you don’t mind, but I made a few calls down there. You’re a pretty enterprising guy.”
“What’s the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Pretty gutsy guy, too. Anyway, I’m thinking you’ll figure this out and shine a little light on this subject. Also, next time you park on Main, remember we changed the signs a few weeks ago. You had a front-page story on it.”
“Dingus.”
He closed the door softly behind him.
thirteen
I never set out to be a newspaperman. From the time I was twelve, I had worked summers with Soupy at the marina, long, hot days made longer by Soupy’s dad chewing our butts. After two years at the University of Michigan, I decided to try something different. I’d taken a journalism class that year. It seemed easy enough. I liked sports, and one of our neighbors was Henry Bridgman, executive editor of the Pilot. Instead of scraping perch innards off boat decks, I figured I’d write about sports for Henry. Mom called him.
I showed up at the Pilot the next morning. Henry was sitting behind his steel desk, turned sideways at a typewriter. A copy of that day’s paper lay on the desk. A headline on the front read, “School Board Mulls Millage Increase.” Henry bit on a cigarette and stiffened his forefingers to bat out something hunt-and-peck style on the typewriter. “Christ,” he blurted, cigarette jiggling in his mouth. “These bastards must be on drugs if they think they can get away with this.” I had no idea what he was talking about. He stopped typing and stared at his words. “OK,” he declared, and swiveled to face me. A grin creased his face, all bony cheeks and crinkly eyes. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Did your mother give you my message?”
“Um.” I glanced at my watch. “She said ten o’clock.”
“Oh, holy Christ,” he said, laughing in a hoarse guffaw, haw haw haw. “I get to do the dirty work then.”
“Pardon?”
He haw-hawed again. “See, I don’t really need a sports reporter.”
“You don’t?”
“Naw, hell.” He screwed his cigarette around in his mouth, squinting against the smoke. “I can get some high school kid to do sports. I got real news to cover.”
I wondered if “real news” had anything to do with a “millage,” whatever that was. Why hadn’t I just stayed at the marina? “OK,” I said.
Henry let me cover the occasional high school track meet or baseball game. But mostly I covered the police, the school board, and, when Henry couldn’t make the meetings, the town council. I forced myself to learn about police procedure, zoning variances, even millages. Henry had to rewrite some of my stories so they made sense. I didn’t mind. I felt good about having comprehended enough to write anything down. There were night meetings to cover, but the hours were better than at the marina, my boss was not an asshole, and I was making a few more dollars. That’s all I really thought about it. It was a summer job. Mom would ask how it was going and I’d say, “Fine.” She wanted to hear that I’d found something to do with my life. I couldn’t tell her that. In my mind, there was that summer and there was my future, and one had little to do with the other. Until I got my first big scoop.
His name was James Baumgarten, but his softball teammates called him Bubba. He had biceps like muskmelons and a fat tomato face, and he could hit a softball farther than anyone in Starvation Lake. Somehow Bubba wound up at Soupy’s tailgater one night after his team had whipped our team, also called the Chowder Heads, sponsored by Soupy’s marina.
Bubba and I got to talking over beer and bratwurst. His team, the Screwballs, was Starvation Lake’s perennial softball champion, sponsored by a local manufacturing company, Perfect-O-Screw Inc. Every summer, it seemed, the Screwballs recruited a couple of outfielders built like Bubba. We never saw them around town except on Wednesday evenings, when they’d smack homer after homer over the 283-foot fence at Thinnes Park. Bubba was the latest Screwball ringer. I was a little surprised to hear he lived in Boyne City, more than an hour’s drive away. I asked him why he would come so far just to play softball-there were leagues in Boyne City, after all-and he snickered like a little kid. It took a few beers, but Bubba finally confided that Perfect-O-Screw was paying him to play. “No shit,” I said. I don’t think he knew I was a newspaper reporter, and I didn’t feel compelled to tell him. A few more beers and he was bragging that Perfect-O-Screw even reimbursed him for his mileage.
The company gave Bubba eighty-nine days of pay at the minimum wage and in return he hit long balls and agreed to have himself listed on Perfect-O-Screw’s full-time payroll. He had never set foot in the factory except to pick up his uniform. “You can’t be telling anyone this shit,” he said. “I could lose my job.”
“Your job? You mean left field?” I said. We both howled with laughter.
