“Of course,” she said. A smile flickered on her face. Her handshake dug a fat diamond into my palm. “Nice to finally meet you.”
For a second I wondered if she was being sarcastic. I figured she was the one who’d insisted that I stop calling the house for her husband.
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry for all the phone calls.”
“No trouble at all.” She looked at Jason. “It’s nice to see you, too, Jason.”
“Felicia.”
“I have to be going,” she said to Haskell. “But I can show Mr. Carpenter out.”
“Thank you, dear,” Haskell said. He reached for my hand. I shook without thinking. “Call if you need anything.”
“Not at the dinner hour, please,” Felicia Haskell said. “Come.”
I slid past Jason. Neither of us made a move to shake hands.
“See you,” I said.
“You going to be at the game tomorrow night?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Keep your head up.”
eight
You had to be hungry to eat at Riccardo’s Pizza, and not because the portions were especially large. The pizza tasted as if grease had been ladled on instead of sauce. The stromboli should have been served with a chisel and hammer. The mozzarella sticks lay in your belly like lead sinkers. But it was cheap. And I was curious.
I stood at the counter, breathing garlic as Aerosmith blared from a boom box in the back, the sole lunch customer at seventeen minutes after noon. Riccardo’s did most of its business late at night when the drunks came pouring out of Enright’s.
“Anybody home?” I called out.
There were three tight booths and a wall cooler filled with bottles of pop and chocolate milk. Next to the cooler was a small hole in the wall plaster that hadn’t been fixed since the last time I’d been in, with Darlene, weeks before. I remembered hearing it was made by a napkin dispenser flung across the room.
The pizzeria sat on a steep rise above the river. I stepped to the window and peered down on downtown Starvation Lake. My gaze fell upon the door to Darlene’s apartment, set atop a set of outer stairs leading down to a railed sidewalk that ran along the river. I recalled the night before, how she’d grappled with me before we slipped into our lovemaking.
“I thought you don’t eat here no more.”
Stefan Bellissimo stood behind the counter in a white apron streaked with spaghetti sauce, hands on his hips, a butcher knife in one hand. Beneath the apron he wore a threadbare River Rats T-shirt. A hairnet mashed his black ringlets to his forehead. A ballpoint pen protruded from behind his ear. Flour powdered his thick eyebrows and mustache.
“Belly,” I said. “How are you, buddy?”
“Don’t give me that shit. You know what you did.”
The men’s hockey team I played on, the Chowder Heads, had for years ordered postgame pizzas from Belly’s joint. But I had finally persuaded our captain, Soupy, to switch to Gordy’s in Fife Lake. The pizza was better and Gordy usually threw in fried mushrooms.
“Hey,” I said, “I still bring Darlene in.”
“Darlene brings Darlene in. I’m one of your paper’s biggest customers. You can’t even bring your boys by?”
“What? One ad a week?”
“Look at that,” he said, pointing at his booths, where he used old Pilots as tablecloths.
“Ah. Well, I’m here. What’s good?”
“Don’t be pulling on my dick. The pizza’s good.”
I squinted over his head at the backlit menu on the wall. Belly had owned the place for something like ten years, in which time it had been called Zito’s, Sicoly’s, Fat Tony’s, Provenzana’s, Enzo’s, Mizzi’s and, for a time while he dated an Irish woman from Sandy Cove, Hickey’s. He kept changing the names, he said, for marketing reasons. The pizza stayed the same.
Today’s “Rats Special” was a grilled cheese sandwich with pepperoni. Too risky, I thought. Maybe a cold sub. Just $2.95 with chips. Pretty hard to screw up.
“What did Darlene have the other night?” I said.
“What she always has. Small Greek salad, ham-and-pineapple pie.”
“What about Gracie?”
“What?” Belly said. “You want food or not?”
I wanted to know what Gracie and Darlene had talked about there. The minute I had left Haskell, I’d forgotten about his little announcement and returned to the questions about Gracie swirling in the back of my mind: Why the fresh groceries if she’d planned to off herself? How did she manage to hang herself on a high branch without a ladder? What about the calendar with the dates crossed out in February but not January? Was she counting down the days till her death, and if so, why hadn’t she crossed off the final day? What about the single baby shoe left in her hiding place? And the key attached to the ribbon? Her ever-present Wings cap was hanging in the Zam shed; had she made a conscious decision to leave it behind? Or had she been forced to leave? And if so, why? Why would her worthless little life matter that much to anyone?
“Yeah, yeah,” I told Belly. “Italian sub, extra peppers.”
He waved the butcher knife around. “I’m not hearing a lot of enthusiasm.”
“You want me to sing?”
He put the heels of his hands against the countertop and leaned forward. Beads of sweat along the tops of his eyebrows glistened in the overhead light. “Let me ask you a question: You got a problem with us?”
“No problem,” I said. “I just happen to like Gordy’s-”
“Not that. That pissed me off but I mean like the whole thing. You got a problem with the whole town. It’s like we’re some bunch of fucking hooples who can’t do anything right, and you’re going to set us straight.”
“Hooples? What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m fucking talking about. You know how much the game means to this place.”
Belly, who did not play hockey but attended every Rats game and supplied half-price pizzas for team functions, always referred to hockey as “the game,” in the same sort of bizarre sacred intonation that baseball freaks used about their tedious sport. I loved hockey, loved watching it, loved playing it most of the time. But love to me didn’t require reverence. It was just a game.
“What’s your point, Bel?”
He plucked the pen from behind his ear, a greenish order pad from an apron pocket. “My point is, why do you got to jam this guy up in the paper?”
“What guy?”
“The guy who’s building the rink. You seen his kid play yet? Patrick Roy rolled into Kenny Dryden.”
“The old rink’s not good enough for him?”
Belly slapped the order pad down on the counter. “Ain’t the point,” he said. “The point is, a new rink equals a new attitude-we can win. We ain’t had that around here. You of all people ought to know that. We’re like the goddamn Lions. No matter what we do, we lose because we think we’re going to lose. Something’s got to change to turn that around. This rink, the guy’s kid is our chance. Why do you have to fuck it up?”
I really hadn’t tried to fuck it up.
As a player, I was delighted to hear I’d be skating on a fresh sheet of ice and dressing in a room where my feet didn’t stick to the rubber-mat floors. As a reporter, I grew skeptical after two subcontractors left me late-night voice messages saying they had not been paid and Haskell wasn’t returning their calls.
I started stopping by the Pine County Courthouse every few days to see if any lawsuits had been filed against
