toward the lake. Then he pulled over again and parked.
“Trap,” he said, “you look like you’re going to have a baby. The cops want that box, don’t they?”
I had to speak to him in a language he would understand. “Soup, you know how they say every hockey game has like three hundred mistakes?”
“Never heard that,” Soupy said.
“I read it in Hockey News, and I thought, I bet you two hundred of them happen when you’re tired. You know, the other team’s in your end, and you’re running around and you can’t get off the ice, and you’re sucking wind, that’s when you screw up, make a bad pass, take a bad penalty.”
“And you’re telling me this because?”
I grabbed the door handle. “Are you going to help me?”
He turned sideways in his seat. “Just square with me. Is Mom C in real trouble?”
“She’s in jail,” I said. “But there’s something else. I mean, she has her memory issues, but she’s either gone crazier than a shithouse rat or there’s something else going on.”
Soupy pointed at the box. “And you think it might be in there?”
“Maybe.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. He sighed. Soupy didn’t sigh much. “What the hell. Take it.” He opened his door and stepped into the street. “You’re going to have to fill it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What I always do: wing it. If I need a truck for something, I can borrow one from one of the five hundred people who owe me money.”
“Soup-”
“No, man, I mean it, just go.” He nodded in the direction of where the cop was parked. “The hell with those idiots. They arrest my buddy, my best buddy’s mom. Fuck them.”
I slid behind the steering wheel. Soupy extended his hand. I shook it.
“Take the back roads,” he said. “I don’t want to have to hock the thing back from the cops. Let me know what happens with Mom C.”
“Will do.”
He slammed the door shut. I gave him a salute. He grinned and gave me the finger.
I didn’t pick up my cell phone until Grayling.
Mom’s lockbox sat on the floor in front of the passenger seat. It wouldn’t fit beneath. It made me nervous sitting there, where a cop could see it if one pulled me over.
Half a mile before merging onto Interstate 75 south, I pulled into a gas station. I leaned into Soupy’s narrow rear seat and scooped up the garbage piled on the floor: crumpled Doritos and Burger King bags, empty dip cans, plastic pop bottles streaked with spat dip, a pizza box holding two old slices of pizza and a torn-open condom package, emptied bottles of Beam and El Toro, wads of hockey tape from nights when Soupy was in such a hurry to get to Enright’s that he undressed in the truck.
I dumped it all on top of the lockbox. Then I got out and stood by the truck watching for cops while the gas tank gurgled full. Dingus couldn’t arrest me in Crawford County, but he’d had me followed in the past. Inside the station, I bought three bottles of Vernors, a big bag of chips, and some onion dip.
Back in the truck, I started to punch a Detroit Times number into my cell phone, then decided to check my messages first. There were two. Coach Poppy had left the first when Mom and I were about to descend the hill to Dad’s tree house.
“Hey, Gus, got a weird call,” Poppy said. “Some woman left a message, said Tex is done playing hockey. Putting away foolish things, she said. Didn’t leave a name, but I gather she’s from Tatch’s camp. I’d heard some talk about this but was hoping it was bull. Without Tex, I’m not liking our chances against the Pipefitters. Give me a shout.”
I knew I had more important things to worry about, but the old River Rat in me couldn’t help thinking: Damn, the Rats are so close, if they just had Tex, they could actually bring a state title, a little glory, a bit of relief to Starvation.
The second message was from Darlene. My heart skipped a beat when I heard her voice say, “Gussy.” She hadn’t called me that in a long time.
“I waited outside your house for an hour,” she said. Oh, shit, I thought; that was her in the cop car across the street, not someone who’d come to arrest me. She must have made sure my truck
made it home, too. “Bea is safe… I hope you’re safe… Be careful, OK?”
It felt good to hear that. I saved the message and turned the phone off, wishing I had the charger, which was plugged into a wall socket at the Pilot.
Traffic was light, the weather clear. I stayed in the right lane and kept my speed around seventy-four, a bit over the limit but not so fast as to rouse a state trooper. I almost pulled into the rest stop at Nine Mile Hill, but a state trooper darted into the exit lane ahead of me and I stayed on I-75. Twenty-five miles later, I veered into the rest area at West Branch. Two sedans and a minivan were parked near the restrooms. A pudgy man in a Catholic Central High School fleece was dragging a little girl toward the restrooms. She was throwing a flop-around tantrum and the man was barking something at her that, thankfully, I could not hear. I rolled past them and pulled into a spot about five places down from their minivan.
I left the dome light off. I took a quick look around, checked all the mirrors. The man and the squalling girl disappeared into the glowing restroom hut. The lot sat still and quiet beneath the high street lamps. No cops. Nobody behind me.
I bent to the passenger seat floor, pushed the trash aside, and picked up the lockbox. I set it on my lap and pulled the blue key out of my pocket. I glanced around again before sliding the key into the lock. At first it jammed when I tried to turn it. I jiggled it gently, not wanting to break it off. Who knew when my mother had last opened the thing?
Finally it gave. The lid opened soundlessly. Taped to the bottom of the box was a manila envelope. Scratched on the front in black ballpoint pen, in my mother’s cursive hand, was one word: “Nilus.”
I felt goose bumps break out along my forearms.
I peeled away the tape securing the envelope inside the box and lifted the envelope out. I ran a palm across the top surface. It was smooth and flat except for a cluster of bumps beneath the paper in one corner. I shook it. The bumps seemed to rattle. I turned the envelope up and the bumps slid down to the other end.
Fresh tape sealed one end of the envelope, as if Mom had recently opened and then resealed it. As I stripped away the new stuff, I saw the speckled gray outlines of past sealings, felt the cracked, yellowed remnants of tape that looked to be years old. I peeked into the open end. It was too dark to see inside. I dipped a hand in. My fingertips brushed over the rough edge of a piece of paper, then across a thinner, softer paper, like old newsprint. I reached into the corner where the bumps had slid. I cupped them in my palm-a necklace? — and pulled my hand out.
Curled in my palm was a rosary.
I took it in two fingers and let it unwind before my face. A crucifix of bronze or something cheaper dangled at the end of a thin metal chain strung with smooth brown wooden beads. As the rosary twirled in the shadows of Soupy’s truck, I noticed a gold tag attached to the chain at the end opposite the crucifix. I pinched the tag and brought it close to my face. Something was engraved on it that I couldn’t make out in the dark. I reached overhead and switched on the dome light.
I squinted to read the engraving on the face of the little tag, bracing myself for the possibility that it might read “Nilus.” It did not. The engraving bore only three letters: BCD. For Beatrice Clare Damico, I assumed. My mother’s maiden name.
“Man,” I said to myself. I turned off the dome light.
I tried to recall Mom saying the rosary. I could imagine a woman kneeling before a statue of the Blessed Mother at St. Valentine’s, her head bowed and her eyes shut, her lips forming shapes of the words in the Hail Mary, a rosary laced in her fingers. But I couldn’t tell if it was actually Mom before she walked away from the church, or an image I had conjured from a book or a movie or my own scant memories of services. I held my hand up, let the rosary slide down between my fingers, closed my hand into a gentle fist. Why had my mother saved it? Why had she felt the need to lock it away?
I dropped the rosary back into the envelope. I reached in and pulled out one of the pieces of paper. Out of the
