Year’s.
“Trap-you want Thousand Island?”
Soupy leaned out of the kitchen at the other end of the bar and shouted at me, using the nickname he’d given me when I first started playing goaltender. I wasn’t playing goalie now, but the nickname remained.
“On the side,” I said.
“Blue Ribbon?”
I looked at the clock behind the bar. It bore the slogan “No Wine Before Nine.” All the numbers on the clock’s face were nines.
“Why not?” I said.
Soupy threw the dishrag in a sink behind the bar and set the beer in front of me with a plastic basket containing a cheeseburger and onion rings bleeding grease into a red-and-white checkered napkin.
I wanted Thousand Island dressing on the burger but I was so hungry that I picked it up and took a bite first. My teeth crunched through the charred crust and into the juicy red middle. The bite was too big and the melted Monterey Jack stuck to the roof of my mouth. Soupy wasn’t good at much besides hockey, but he sure knew how to make a burger.
“Boffing’ll get you hungry, huh?” he said.
I popped an onion ring into my mouth. It was the frozen kind but good anyway, crisp and hot.
“What are you talking about?”
“Fuck you,” he said. “I was going to the bank and saw you chasing the little lady up her stairs there, lover boy.”
“I was not chasing.”
“Nothing like a little afternoon action to break up a dreary day.”
“Mr. Carpenter declined to comment.”
Soupy leaned his elbows on the bar. Ketchup and grease streaked the white apron he wore over his Northern Michigan University T-shirt. His blond hair was tied back in a ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades. He knew I’d come to ask about Gracie, and I knew he’d probably do what he could to avoid talking about her. Soupy liked to jaw about hockey and beer and fishing and how to get women into bed. Everything else was small talk.
“How’s the bluegill wrapper?” he said.
I plucked the top bun off the burger and added the dressing, replaced the bun, took another chomp, just as big. Even better. I bit into half an onion ring, cooled it all down with a pull on the beer.
“Bleeding red ink,” I said. I made a show of looking around the bar. Pictures of Soupy as a kid in his River Rats blue-and-gold hung up and down the knotty pine walls in between the big brass hooks where snowmobile riders hung their helmets. There were no pictures of me, but Soupy had installed the goaltender’s mask I no longer wore on the back bar between bottles of Mohawk root beer schnapps and Southern Comfort. The backlighting gave the mask the look of a skull. A few bottles down stood two of Gordon’s gin, one full, the other half full, both marked on the label with a big black “G.”
For Gracie. Everyone else got Beefeater.
“When are you going to rename this dump ‘Soupy’s’?”
The summer before, Soupy had sold the town marina his family had owned for fifty-some years and used the cash to buy Enright’s. At the time he was actually trying to quit drinking, so he joined the legions of other drying-out northern Michigan drunks who reckoned the best way to be sure they were genuinely sober was to test themselves every single day by getting other people drunk. He quit the quitting thing pretty quickly. He kept the bar.
“You know what it costs for a lousy goddamn sign?” Soupy said. “Anyway, it’d be like putting up a billboard for the IRS: ‘Over here, dudes.’”
“Good point.”
My cell phone started ringing from my shirt pocket. I considered answering, but the jukebox was wailing “Moondance.”
“You going to get that?” Soupy said.
“Can’t hear in here.”
He leaned closer. “That lard-ass in the coveralls plays that damn song about seventy-two times a day.”
“At least it’s not ‘Dream Weaver.’”
“These guys think this is their goddamn living room. That one had his daughter’s fucking baby shower here the other day.”
“Must be good extra cash, though.”
“No. Lost my ass giving toasts away. And they left without paying the bill. Assbag down there”-Soupy jabbed his elbow in that direction without looking-“says put it on his tab.”
“That’s not good,” I said. “Kind of makes you wonder how a guy can afford to shut his bar down early with all his hockey pals coming in.”
Soupy ignored me. “So we tied, eh? Heard you hit the post.”
“Yeah. Where the hell were you?”
“Can’t be missing empty nets, Trap.”
“Where were you, Soup?”
Soupy never missed hockey. When the Chowder Heads were skating, he left Enright’s in the hands of his other bartender, Dave Lubienski. But Soupy had been a no-show the night before. Then we found the bar closed hours before last call.
“Loob’s wife had a chicks’ night out, and he had to stay with the kid. I tried to get Tatch to fill in but as usual he had his head up his ass.” He picked up the dishrag and began wiping down the sink behind the bar. “Ready for the game tomorrow? The Linke boys were in last night talking shit.”
The Linkes played for the Mighty Minnows of Jordan Bait and Tackle, our first-round opponents. Soupy was trying to change the subject. I decided to play along, for now.
“Should be fun,” I said. “Did you get the hats?”
“Oh, Trap, fucking-ay, hang on.”
Soupy hurried back into the kitchen. Every year, he bought the Chowder Heads hats for the playoffs. He thought they brought us good luck. His team hadn’t actually won the playoffs in three years, but Soupy did not relinquish his superstitions easily.
He emerged wearing a red wool cap with a fluffy white ball on the top and black tassels dangling to his shoulders. A pair of soup spoons crossed to look like hockey sticks were embroidered into the front of the hat.
“Awesome or what?” Soupy said. The regulars glanced up, unimpressed. “I ain’t even going to wear a helmet, man.”
“Sweet,” I said. “Is that mine?”
“Fucking-ay.”
He tore the cap off of his head and threw it at me. I pulled it on my head and looked in the mirror behind the bar, mugging. Soupy laughed and reached over the bar for a hand slap.
When I had played goalie for the Rats and for Soupy’s men’s league team, the Chowder Heads, Soupy had always been my best defenseman, the smartest at staying between the puck and me, the most adept at stealing the puck and hurrying it to the other end of the ice. If an opposing player gave me the slightest bump, or whacked one too many times at my pads, I could count on Soupy giving him a stick shaft to the back of the neck, maybe a glove to the face.
After his hockey career evaporated in a steam of booze and drugs in the minors, Soupy had stopped expecting much from life. It didn’t take much to make him happy anymore. A case of beer, a bag of barbecue chips, a Red Wings game on the tube, a new cap for a playoff game. Gracie’s return had been a bonus. She was at once the new woman in town, since she’d been gone so long, and a familiar one, who knew Soupy well enough to have no expectations, except for a few drinks, a little reefer, a night in his bed.
For a while I had been glad for him. But eventually came the creeping suspicion that my apparent satisfaction with Soupy’s lot was a symptom of my own complacency, a sign that I too was now willing to settle for a day-to- day existence in Starvation, with none of the visions I once carried around about changing the world with the things I could find out and write down.
“I like it,” I said, stuffing the cap in a coat pocket.
