“The kid who was a big star for Blackburn and just quit? The one with the diary? He’s an adult now, of course. His aunt, the newspaper lady in St. Albert, told him about me. He just called me out of the blue.”
She seemed at once excited and oddly put off, almost as if something had offended her.
“What’d he say?”
“I’m warning you. This is nasty stuff.”
“What?”
She made me sit closer to her on her desk and whispered, “This kid’s name was-is-Brendan Blake. He was a good player. A really good player. Pro scouts were watching him. I guess Blackburn knew some of the scouts, and he got them to come out. That’s about when the weird stuff started. A couple years later, Brendan was out of hockey altogether.”
“What weird stuff?”
“Bad stuff, Gus.”
“OK. Just tell me.”
She took a deep breath. “Blackburn started getting this kid alone,” she said. “Mostly on road trips. Sometimes at home. He was abusing him.”
“You mean-”
“Sexually, yes. It’s all in the diary.”
“Jesus. How?”
She told me in a flat, clinical whisper. As I listened, I felt my throat constrict. How could a teenaged boy write such things down?
“Why would a kid-why wouldn’t his parents have called the cops?” I said.
“Come on, Gus. These are hockey parents in a hockey town. How do you think their kid would’ve been treated?”
That I could certainly imagine. Regardless of what happened to Blackburn, the kid would’ve been branded a pansy who should have fended off his coach’s advances. The players, some of the other coaches, even some of the fans would have called him “fag” and “homo” and worse. He would’ve had to leave town himself. Which he apparently did anyway.
“So they just got Blackburn to leave?”
“Yeah.”
“Like in the other place.”
“I’m betting. I’m not sure yet. I have some calls in.”
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“Why wouldn’t he? What’s he got to gain now? It was like he was glad to talk to me, like he’d been waiting for me to call. And he was dying to know what happened to Blackburn. Said he was sorry to hear it.”
“He was sorry to hear the guy who supposedly abused him was dead?”
“Not supposedly.”
“You look a little pale. You all right?”
She shook her head. “You know,” she said, “we had a priest like this at my high school.”
I imagined a middle-aged man, baggy-eyed and paunchy in a black cassock. “Was Brendan angry?” I said.
“I don’t think so. At least not anymore. I mean, it’s been thirty years.”
“What’s he doing now?”
“He’s an electrician. Married. Two little girls.”
I’d heard enough. “OK,” I said. “Write it.”
“Write a story, Gus? Are you sure?”
“He’s on the record, right?”
“Yes.”
“And his story checks out with the folks back in St. Albert?”
“Yes, I went back to them.”
“And it goes to motive, right?” Soupy’s motive, I had to admit.
“Well, only indirectly, unless we know that Blackburn sexually abused players here in Starvation Lake.” Her tone was expectant. But I had no answer for her. This man she was describing was not the one who’d taught me to play goalie and sat at my Sunday dinner table.
“If it happened here,” I said, “I didn’t know about it. Just write it. Straight and simple.”
“OK. I already filed the arraignment story. Boy, was that weird. Do you believe this suicide pact stuff?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” I said. I went to my desk and sat down. And I remembered.
twenty-two
Men,” Coach Blackburn said. We were gathered around him at center ice, having just finished practice the day before the 1981 Michigan state hockey championship was to begin on our home rink in Starvation Lake. Coach held his stick high over his head, pointing at the four blue-and-gold banners hanging in the rafters. Behind the one that said, “Regional Finalist, 1977,” we saw Leo crouched on a narrow catwalk.
“You’ve heard me say it a million times,” Coach said. “Losing is good for winning. You know I believe that. Losing has made us strong. It has helped us see our weaknesses so we could eliminate them. It has made us keenly aware that at any moment the thing we desire most can be snatched away.” He paused. “Now, men, we are done with losing. We have learned its lessons. Now it is time to win.”
After four years of lobbying, Coach had persuaded Michigan’s amateur hockey officials to hold the state tournament in Starvation Lake. Players, coaches, families, and fans from across the state jammed the town’s only hotel and all the motels along Route 816. A line spilled out the door of Audrey’s by seven each morning. Visitors clamored for the glossy tournament program, the souvenir pucks embossed with the River Rats logo, the kielbasa and bratwurst sizzling on grills in the rink parking lot. All week, people from Grand Rapids and Marquette and Trenton and Ann Arbor sought out Coach to tell him what a great tournament and a beautiful place this was.
But for all the good cheer and money flowing down Main Street, the tournament would not be a success unless the River Rats won it in front of our own fans, in our own rink, with all of Michigan’s hockey establishment watching. Coach knew that. And he thought-everyone in Starvation Lake thought-that we had a good chance to win. We’d lost just six of the fifty-seven games we’d played that year. Three Rats-Soupy, Teddy Boynton, and Jeff Champagne, the kid who’d been cut and then reinstated at that uneasy meeting after our first season-had been named to state All-Star teams. And we’d come so close the year before, only to lose to the Pipefitters in the semifinals.
“Remember what we said all those years ago?” Coach said to us. “We said we came together to achieve the ultimate goal. And what was that?”
“To win one game, Coach,” we answered in unison.
“Not all the games. One game. Now we’re going to play that game.” He lowered his stick. “We’re going to play it tomorrow in the quarterfinals. We’re going to play it again Friday in the semis. And on Saturday afternoon, we are going to win that one game, the state championship. Do I have that right, men?”
“Yes, sir,” we yelled.
He gazed up into the rafters. “Leo,” he called out. “Now.”
We all looked up and watched as Leo scuttled from banner to banner, undoing their fastenings. One by one they fluttered down to the ice. Coach gathered them up and carried them away.
Naturally he had a plan for defeating each of our opponents. In the quarterfinals, we came out hitting against quick but small Fife Electric of Detroit and wore them down, scoring twice late to win 3–1. Soupy scored the winner. Against Copperstone Sporting Goods, we frustrated their two high-scoring centers by giving them the outside lanes while jamming up the front of our net. Soupy scored two goals in our 4–1 win. As we did in all of our games, we used the Rat Trap to clog the middle of the ice and make it hard for teams to break out of their own zone cleanly. Our opponents and their fans loathed the Rat Trap, just as our own parents and fans once had. Now, of course, our parents and fans loved the Rat Trap because it helped us win. As Coach was so fond of saying, “They don’t care
