Some were unlabeled. Many had thin white stuck-on labels bearing tiny black markings. I leaned in close enough to read one and a shiver raced down my spine: LP/0293/FX.
Blackburn had borrowed Delbert’s filing system. The numbers in the middle, as with Delbert’s, signified a date. Virtually all of the tapes were marked FX, which I assumed stood for Fairfax. I wondered if the first two letters could have been someone’s initials? A boy’s? An empty tape box rested next to Blackburn’s computer. I picked it up. “JJ/1297/FX,” the label read. I wondered why Blackburn hadn’t brought his old River Rat films with him when he fled to Virginia. Maybe there was no time. Tillie could have sent them, of course, but it dawned on me that those were her last claim on Blackburn, the thing that kept him, however distant, in her life.
I was filled at once with dread at what I had found and exhilaration at what I could now tell the world. There was so much here, and there had to be more in Blackburn’s computer and his video camera. If he had escaped, so be it; he’d left too much behind. I flipped open my notebook. As I put my pen to the paper, I felt something on my shoulder.
A hand.
“What?” I cried out. The hand firmed its grip, but I twisted away and stumbled backward against the wall, face-to-face with Jack Blackburn.
He wore black nylon sweatpants, slippers, and a faded gray Fairfax Hockey T-shirt puffed out at the waist to hide his paunch. He seemed to be smiling, though it was hard to know for sure because his upper teeth, obviously capped, stretched his mouth in an unnatural way, like a clown’s. In one hand he held a glass of what I assumed was whiskey. The other he extended to me. I reached for it without thinking.
“Hello, Gus,” he said.
“Going through my things?” The clown’s mouth chuckled. “Should I call the police?”
“Do what you need to do.”
“I hear some police may be looking for you, Gus.” He looked at the videotape box still in my hand. “Kind of late in life to be boning up on your hockey skills, isn’t it?”
I set the box down. “Those aren’t hockey tapes, Jack.”
“Jack?” he said. “The name’s Richard. Or Rich, if you prefer.” He laughed at this as if it were hilarious. “It’s nice to see your dad’s big boat again.” He’d recognized the Bonnie. “It’s looking pretty good for, what, thirty years old? Though it does stick out like a sore thumb around here. This is the nation’s capital. Nobody drives American.” Again he cackled. “So, what are you here for? An article? Is that what gives you the right to just break into somebody’s house?”
“I know what you did.”
That didn’t seem to register. “Is it one of those where-are-they-now stories?” he said. “Wait-aren’t you back at the little-league paper in Starvation again?” He took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “You remember how I used to say, ‘Losing’s good for winning’? Well, no offense, Gus, but I’m thinking maybe you’re the exception. Losing didn’t work so well for you, did it? You just kept on losing. The town goat. The hotshot reporter who let the big story go between his legs. Now here you are sneaking around an old man’s house, looking for who knows what.”
“I found what I’m looking for, Jack.”
“Rich, please. And, by all means, let’s talk if I can help with whatever you’re writing. I’d love to hear your questions.” He held his glass out and shook the cubes around. “Cocktail?”
“No, thanks.”
“I’m going to have another myself.”
I waited in the living room while Blackburn went into the kitchen. He was either perfectly at ease or putting on a fine act. I heard ice clinking and the top of a bottle being spun off. He emerged with a fresh drink, a second glass, one of the bottles of Jim Beam, and a kitchen chair. He put the chair down and motioned for me to sit. I remained standing. He set his drink, the other glass, and the whiskey on the table next to the recliner. Then he just stood there, looking me over.
“I owe you an apology,” he said. “See how your body has a certain flow to it, how the shoulders flow so nicely into your arms, the arms so nicely along your sides and hips, your hips into your legs? All that nice muscle tone, all that wonderful sinew, even all these years later.”
I wasn’t going to let him make me squirm. “I’ve got you,” I said. “I know everything you did.”
Blackburn sat down in the recliner. “When I first saw you,” he said, “way back when, I thought right off you’d be a flopper, because, you know, you were never too tall, and the stand-up goalies tend to be taller. Of course today they’re all floppers, that’s how it is. But the more I looked at you, the more I was convinced you were built to stand up. A runt, but a wiry runt. I figured you had the strength, you know, the sort of-what do you call it? — internal stature that makes a goalie unbeatable.” He paused to lick the rim of his glass. “But you didn’t, did you, Gus? You were weak. You’re still weak. Aren’t you?”
I sat down now and leaned forward, elbows on knees.
“I know what you did with Soupy,” I said.
“Do you still have that glove? What the hell did you call it? You guys and your idiotic superstitions.”
“And you and your films, huh?” I took out my pen and notebook.
He pointed his glass at me. “No notes. Or I can call the cops. You can shut off that tape recorder, too.”
He wasn’t going to call the police anymore than I was, but it didn’t matter. I snapped off the recorder and put my pen and notebook away while he drained his glass in one practiced swallow, then poured again. My coach. The long-dead hero of Starvation Lake. He actually lived alone in a dark house in a place that knew little of the game he supposedly loved. His cheeks had turned the color of a fading bruise. He had a Toyota and a bottle and a TV remote and a bookshelf filled with tapes of naked boys.
“I may be a failure, Jack, but I am what I am,” I said. “You call yourself a coach, but you aren’t really a coach. You only pretend. You’re a pedophile. You fuck little boys. You fuck their heads. Then you fuck their bodies.”
He actually laughed again.
“I know about the billets,” I said. “I know about Soupy and Tillie and Jeff Champagne. Pretty clever, put Champy back on the team so you could fuck him? I suppose he was weak, too, huh? I know about Brendan Blake, too. Remember him?” Now his defiant smile ebbed and an eyebrow twitched, once, then again, an insect shifting its weight. “I know all about your disgusting films, and how you sold them, and how you used the money to buy all your land and the billets and-Jesus, Jack-all that ice time you paid for. What a great guy, picking up the tab for the parents. I’m weak? Maybe so. But I’m not a disgusting, twisted old man who pretends to be something so he can have sex with boys.”
He reached for the whiskey.
“And I am not someone,” I said, “who would drive his best friend to suicide.”
He finished pouring. Then he sat back in his chair, took a drink, and smacked his lips.
“You know fuck-all,” he said.
“I know everything. I have your old films, with you in them. And there are others who are ready to speak up.”
“Let me get this straight. I forced your worthless, drunk, pathetic friend Swanny to have sex with an older woman who, I think we can agree, was quite a looker then. Yes? Having sex with foxy older women is something a sixteen-year-old boy would never do? Is that it?”
“It’s Soupy, not Swanny, and I think you-”
“As for my old friend Leo, when I came to town, he was working in the back of a dry cleaners or something. A nobody. I took him by the hand and next thing you know, he’s basically running the rink and working the door for one of the best damn hockey teams in Michigan. He’s a celebrity in Starvation Lake. A goddamn Zamboni driver.” As he spoke, I repeated his words in my head so they would stick like ink on paper. “And then, there he is, my last night in Starvation, waving a pistol around my head, telling me, ‘I’m drawing the line, Jack, I’m drawing the line right here.’ He’s drawing the line. What a joke. Come on, Gus. Leo didn’t really pull the trigger on himself. He couldn’t have. He didn’t have the balls.”
“He’s dead, Jack.”
“God rest his soul. He laid a damn good sheet, eh? Best Zamboni jockey I ever saw. But he got squirrelly on me. All that recovery crap. One minute he’s the porn king of Pine County, next minute he’s got all this horseshit religion and he’s waving a goddamn pistol at me. What was I supposed to do? He could have blown me away and
