driving range somewhere in the Upper Peninsula.
But on the night I changed his life, I sat with my feet up and a beer in my hand and decided that if something could make me feel this good for even one night, and it didn’t hurt anyone who didn’t deserve to be hurt, maybe it was something I could actually do, something I might actually be good at, something that might actually make somebody proud of me.
fourteen
The morning after Dingus surprised me in my apartment, I slept until eleven. Dinner at Mom’s wasn’t until twelve-thirty, so after showering and dressing I went down to the Pilot to square a few things away.
The newsroom was empty. I expected Joanie but left the ceiling lights off. I couldn’t bear the buzzing of those fluorescent lamps when I was alone. Instead I snapped on my desk lamp and proceeded to clear the mess on my desk, filling most of two garbage cans with old printouts, newspapers, and disposable coffee cups. I opened Saturday’s mail: lunch menus for the elementary school. A press release about promotions at a local insurance firm. A one-page announcement that the Starvation Lake Lions Club had named Emil J. “Bud” Popke as its Man of the Year. The Lions Club didn’t send a photograph of Popke. I didn’t know whether we had one, and Tillie didn’t like me messing around in the photo file cabinets, so I jotted her a note to make a photo assignment.
As I worked, I pondered: What was Teddy Boynton really after at Enright’s? What was on the napkin he pulled from his pocket? Why was Dingus being at once so solicitous and so evasive? Beneath it all I was dreading having to call my attorney downstate. My Detroit troubles were far from over.
I set the copies of the police report and the $25,000 receipt Dingus had given me next to my computer. I dialed Mom. Her answering machine came on, and I pressed the phone to my ear. My mother talked so fast that it often was hard to understand her recorded messages. But you had to listen because she constantly updated them for whatever was on her schedule: bingo, crochet, euchre, Meals on Wheels. Sometimes she actually called her own phone to find out where she was supposed to be. This morning she rattled off something about church and supper and meeting someone named either Felicia or Theresa at what sounded like the community center. “Mom,” I said after the beep, “I’m going to stop on the way over to start the Bonnie.”
For Monday’s Pilot, I’d gotten most of the stories and headlines ready on Friday and Saturday. All that remained were Joanie’s two Blackburn stories, which she had yet to file. Which reminded me: Joanie had also been at Enright’s. I guessed that she’d wanted to see the pictures of Blackburn and the Rats, and maybe chat up Francis a bit. But if she really was looking for people who knew Coach, why hadn’t she hung around until the playoff games were over and all the skaters came in?
Just before noon, I grabbed my jacket and walked up front to check the answering machine. One of the five messages was from Arthur Fleming, Boynton’s lawyer, left at 8:07 that morning. “Mr. Carpenter,” he said, “please call me at your earliest convenience so we can review the status of the article we discussed.” I went back to my desk for the document Fleming and Boynton had given me, but didn’t see it lying where I was sure I’d left it. I rummaged through the stack of papers next to my computer, checked my in-and out-boxes, pulled open a couple of drawers, but couldn’t find it. I looked under the desk and riffled through the stuff in the garbage cans. Still nothing. I decided I’d look later.
Half a mile from Mom’s, I swung my pickup truck left off Beach onto Horvath Road. My dad had bought property in the hills overlooking the lake’s southwestern end, not far from our house. Atop a short rise jutting from a copse of pines he built a one-car garage. There, he told my mother, he’d have the peace to pursue his hobby of rebuilding motors for go-carts, lawnmowers, and other gadgets. But most of his time he spent gazing out over the lake on a deck he built atop the garage. On summer evenings, he’d sit in a rocking chair with a beer and a cigar, timing sundown against what the weatherman had predicted.
He called it his tree house. It was a simple platform of two-by-eight planks ringed by two-by-four rails. In the rafters beneath it Dad built a closet with a door where he stowed cigars, a transistor radio, a miniature fridge, and some girlie magazines. He kept it locked, he said, because I was too young to be looking at those magazines. Sometimes he took me up on the deck, though, and we’d put the Tigers on the radio. I could still taste the potato- chip salt, the onion in the chip dip, the sweet orange pop washing it all down. Now and then Dad would joke with Mom that he was going to install a bumper-pool table and a wet bar and apply for a liquor license. Mom would say, “I’m sorry, I don’t think you can get a license if no girls are allowed.” Dad would wink and say, “Not worth the trouble then.”
The garage eventually became home to the last car he bought before he died. Dad had worked construction, installing drywall, so he drove a pickup truck. But he always talked about owning a Cadillac, if only just for Sunday drives to Lake Michigan. He set aside a little money every week for years. For a while he had a second job on weekend nights. I didn’t understand much about parents, but I knew Mom didn’t like him working Saturday nights and neither did I because that’s when we went to Dairy Queen and Mom never seemed to be in the mood without Dad around.
He was still short of affording a Caddy when his doctor told him about the cancer. When later tests confirmed his condition, he left the doctor’s office and drove straight to a car dealership in Grayling. He bought a used 1969 Pontiac Bonneville, gold with a cream vinyl roof, power windows, power seats, air conditioning, and a trunk the size of a swimming pool. When he brought it home, Mom took a look at it and her face tightened up as if she were going to cry. “Oh, Rudy,” was all she said. From my bedroom that night I overheard them in the kitchen, speaking in strained whispers. I couldn’t make out everything, but it seemed my mother wanted to understand why after all that hoping and saving Dad hadn’t gotten the Cadillac after all. My father kept saying something about an “investment.” I didn’t know what that was.
When I was old enough to drive, Mom wouldn’t let me take the Bonnie because she said it reminded her too much of Dad. But she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it, either. We stored it in the garage beneath Dad’s tree house. Every six months or so, I’d go up and start the engine and let it run for a while, and once a year, I changed the oil and the spark plugs and updated the license plates. Even when I was living in Detroit, I made a point to drive up and service the Bonnie. If I forgot or procrastinated, Mom got on me, though she never ventured up there herself. Sometimes on summer evenings I’d clamber up the ladder to the tree house and lean against the railing.
Dad had cut a two-track road straight up to the garage through an archway of pines. I parked my truck on Horvath and trudged up the snow-covered two-track to the garage. Icicles the size of baseball bats hung from the eaves. I unlocked the side door and stepped inside. It smelled faintly of oil. A blast of cold smacked me in the face as I lifted the big garage door open.
The Bonnie started right up when I turned the key. The radio reception wasn’t good, but I could make out the voice of a news announcer from WJR, the Detroit station that carried Tiger and Red Wing games. I switched it off and pushed an eight-track tape into the player Dad had installed beneath the dashboard. Even though I never drove the Bonnie, as a teenager I’d liked to sit in it alone and listen to Dad’s music. My father loved rock and roll. His favorite was Bob Seger. Dad and his younger cousin, Eddie, had seen Seger and his band live at a club in Ann Arbor in 1968, two days before Eddie went off to army boot camp. For weeks the Seger show was all Dad could talk about. Then came word that a rocket had torn Eddie’s chopper from the sky over a jungle crawling with Vietcong. Dad got quiet after that. He took that second job. He found out about the cancer. Through it all, he played Seger on the record player in the house, over and over, the same record, the same song.
I pushed a button on the eight-track and played it: I just want a simple answer why it is I’ve got to die / I’m a simple-minded guy / two plus two is on my mind.
The bass throbbed, the guitar wailed, Seger howled. I turned it up and closed my eyes, recalling a summer Sunday afternoon before Eddie was killed, before the cancer, before Dad got quiet. Dad was working on our dock. I was playing army with Soupy and some other kids. I came running around the house wearing a plastic helmet and carrying a toy rifle. Dad was waiting by the birch tree. Sweat stuck his T-shirt to the skin at his collarbone. “Hey, Gus,” he said. “Want to play some ball?” I pulled up for just a second and said, “Not now.” Hurrying past him, I glimpsed just enough of the look on his face to wish I’d said yes. But I kept running. Every time I thought about it, I wished I could go back and tell him yes. Whenever I visited the Bonnie, I made myself think about it.
The song ended. I opened my eyes. “Two plus two is on my mind,” I said aloud, and I had a little laugh. Wind
