dollars. Got to be for the boat, huh?”
“What’s the date on it?”
“Let’s see. April twelfth.”
“But the meeting was the thirteenth, right? How could the town give Angus Campbell the money before the council voted?”
“Good question. What does it have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t.
The recorded voice said the call was about to end.
“Hey, that reminds me,” she said. “On Perlmutter, I was going over some of the state grant stuff again and-”
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’m going to be sending you something overnight. Look for it. And do me a favor and call my mom and tell her I’m OK.”
“Gus, listen, one of the names on-”
The dial tone cut her off.
The Zamboni made its final circuit before the 11:45 a.m. hockey skills session. At the top of the bleachers, I placed the video camera on its tripod, slung the still camera around my neck, got out my pen and notebook. A dozen little skaters burst onto the ice in baggy socks and too-big pants, their faces obscured by cages. They swerved right and skated counterclockwise. I made sure the video camera was recording.
Behind the skaters, the door to their dressing room swung open and their teacher emerged. I tugged my Caps cap lower. Richard Blackstone wore his silver hair in a comb-over swept left to right and then back. My heart skipped a beat. Jack Blackburn never wore his hair that way. Blackstone seemed smaller and paunchier than Blackburn, and his face was obscured in a full silver beard. No, I thought. Is that really him? I zoomed the camera in on his eyes. They were downcast, watching his feet. Of course. Blackburn had just one superstition. Had he left it in Starvation Lake? Just before he reached the threshold, Richard Blackstone took a little hop and a skip to stagger his stride before he stepped out, so that his left blade would hit the ice before his right. A shudder went through me. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, he was circling behind the goalie net to my left and heading up the boards toward me. I took a deep breath and looked into the video camera. I caught a closer glimpse of his face, but he quickly passed. I watched him with my naked eye as he circled again. His black sweatsuit did nothing to hide the bulge at his waist. His stride was still smooth, but his legs had to work harder to move him along. As he turned toward me, I leaned into the video camera and focused on his face. His teeth seemed whiter and more prominent, probably false. They set off the dull yellow that tinged his sagging cheeks and the creases at his deep-set eyes. I pictured him in his house at night, drinking by the arid glow of his television. It made me feel good to think of him as alone and pathetic, a dried-up old man unloved and anonymous. He circled again and as he veered my way a third time he turned toward me and looked straight into the camera. It startled me. Maybe I merely imagined it, but I thought I saw a faint, knowing smile play across his lips before he was gone again. Had he recognized me? Had Tillie gotten to him? I hadn’t expected how hard it would be to see those eyes again as I’d seen them so many times across the Sunday dinner table.
Below me, three mothers in parkas stood along the boards, chatting, paying little attention to what was happening on the ice. As the coach gathered the boys around him, I felt the urge to walk down to those mothers and tell them everything I knew. I imagined myself talking and pointing, and the mothers’ eyes darting between me and the ice, and the disbelief on their faces, followed by horror, either at the truth of the matter or at me for telling it. Twice I yanked my cap lower and coat collar higher and ventured down to the edge of the ice where I could get clearer shots of his face. I snapped shots with the still camera and, when his back was turned, took notes.
He ran some of the same drills the River Rats had run. He took the boys by the shoulders and steered them to specific spots on the ice and showed them where to look for the puck and which way to hold their stick blades. He arranged short stacks of pucks around the ice and made the kids weave between and around them without ever touching them with their sticks. If he told them they had to be hungry for those biscuits, though, I couldn’t hear. Near the end of the session, he gathered the boys around him at center ice. Through the camera I watched their helmeted heads nod in unison as he turned this way and that, telling them they’d done well, patting each of them lightly on the head. I heard them laugh. I heard them shout, “Yeah!” I remembered standing there watching him reach out to the other Rats, waiting for his hand to touch me.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. One of the three mothers was standing next to me, wearing a nervous smile.
“Excuse me,” she said. “May I ask who you are?”
“Oh,” I said, startled again. “Just a second.” I repositioned the video camera so it was pointed at the dressing room door.
“There,” I said. “I’m, uh, I’m with a newspaper.”
“I see,” she said. I saw her friends watching. “You’re doing an article?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you with the Post?”
“I wish. I’m just with a little paper.”
“Really? Which?”
Of course I had no idea what papers were in the area. “The Pilot,” I said.
“The Pirate?”
“ Pilot, ma’am.”
“The Pilot,” she repeated. “I haven’t seen that one. But there are so many little papers around here, some days we get four or five on the drive. How could I get a copy of your article?”
“Well, why don’t I send you one? Here.” I handed her my pen and notebook. “Write down your address.”
“I didn’t know newspapers took video.”
“They don’t, usually, but it’s a good visual aid. I don’t take very good notes.” The kids were heading off the ice.
“Mm-hm,” the woman said. She handed the notebook and pen back and stuck out a mittened hand. “Well, I’m Miriam Belzer. If you’d like an interview”-she motioned toward her friends-“we’d be glad to help. What was your name?”
“A.J.,” I said.
“A.J. what?”
I peeked into the camera. The coach was looking up toward us. “Oops,” I said. “This thing is screwing up. Excuse me, ma’am.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ll watch for your story.”
She walked down. I hurried a fresh videotape into the camera. The first one wasn’t nearly used up, but I was going to need two. I refocused the camera as the coach followed the boys off the ice toward the dressing room. At the door, he stopped and turned and looked at me again. I felt an involuntary shiver of fear while I zoomed in on his face, the hard, certain face that nobody in Starvation Lake could fail to recognize, no matter how much they might want to. He held the camera’s gaze for a full two seconds before turning away. Again I wondered if he had recognized me. But this time I relished the thought that he might have stood there wondering, for even a split second, whether his past was about to crash down on him. thirty
I pulled into another gas station pay phone and inserted the rest of my quarters. A man answered at Channel Eight in Traverse
City. I told him Gus Carpenter was calling for Tawny Jane Reese. Five seconds later, a woman picked up.
“T.J. here,” she said.
“I’m holding for Ms. Reese.”
“That’s me.”
“T.J.,” I repeated, liking it.
“You know, you’re pretty famous around here.” Her voice was just as soothing on the phone as it was on TV. “Where are you now?”
“Am I on the air, T.J.?”
“You are not.”
