Starvation Lake Read Online Free PDF

Till.”
    She crushed her cigarette out. “Please, Gus, not a Selby.”
    The
Pilot
’s former owner, Nelson P. Selby, had some peculiar ideas about “localizing” national news. One of his favorite gimmicks was to have reporters interview local people who happened to have the same surnames as people in Washington or New York or Hollywood who were making news. So, when General Schwarzkopf was leading the U.S. military in the Gulf War, some poor
Pilot
reporter sought out the three Schwarzkopfs—one may have been a Schwartzkopf—in Pine County to ask what they thought. None were related to the general. A retired plumber wondered if the general had a homely dog, like General George Patton. A widowed schoolteacher thought Schwarzkopf a handsome man who shouldn’t wear sunglasses when being photographed. I’d sneered at this sort of story when I was in journalism school and later as a reporter in Detroit. Now I riffled through a phone book and told Tillie, “There are three Lewinskys in the county, all spelled S-K-I. And there’s two LOW-inskys. If you’re desperate, there’s a Lewinskas.”
    “Oh, we’re plenty desperate,” Tillie said. “What happened to Bigfoot?”
    “Problems,” I said. “Don’t forget to get a photo. It’ll have to run big.”
    Tillie was looking in the phone book. “Here’s old Artemis Lewinski,” she said. “He could definitely run big.”
    I winced again. “Copy by four, OK? Where’s Joanie?”
    “She went for coffee.”
    “Oh, no,” I said. She’d been gone too long. I hurried out without a coat.
     
     
       Every head in Audrey’s turned as I walked in. Then every head turned back to the round table in the corner. Four men, three wives, and a sister-in-law sat there with Joanie, who was nodding and scribbling in her notebook, her backpack parked on the floor between her feet.
    I was too late.
    I stationed myself behind Joanie’s left shoulder. She didn’t look up. Their plates hadn’t been cleared; I smelled grease and cinnamon. Elvis Bontrager was talking. He glanced at me from beneath the brim of his Lawson’s Lumber Land cap. The back of the cap was made of plastic mesh, and I could see the rows of thin hairs like wires jutting from his pink scalp. A fleck of Canadian bacon clung to his left cheek as his jowls worked.
    “The thing was, I mean, the real thing with Coach was, it didn’t matter who we were playing, they could be bigger or faster or, you know, fancier than us, and he don’t care, he’d figure out how to beat them.”
    “A strategist then?” Joanie said.
    “Always a good game plan.”
    Everyone nodded. Elvis looked at me. Here it comes, I thought.
    “But Coach Blackburn, unfortunately, had to have the players actually play the game, right, Gus?” he said. “What happened to your face?”
    He meant my stitches. “Puck,” I said.
    “Well, at least you stopped one, eh?” Elvis chuckled and turned to Joanie. “You know, miss, Gus is pretty famous around here. He was witness to the end of an era in Starvation Lake hockey. Hell, he was the one who ended it. Tell her, Gus. You know what happened. God knows none of us do.”
    Joanie lowered her notebook. “What happened?”
    Elvis shrugged. “Nothing. Gus here just lost us a hockey game. A state
championship
hockey game. Our one and only.”
    Joanie looked as though she didn’t quite understand. “That’s it?”
    “Miss,” Elvis said, leaning forward, “he lost that game and we ain’t come close to a state championship since.”
    “Oh,” Joanie said. She looked at me. “So you jinxed them?”
    Elvis had another laugh. He didn’t like me because I gave up that goal, and because, yes, to a superstitious person, and there were plenty in Starvation Lake, including me, I had jinxed them. But he also didn’t like me because I had broken the heart of his niece when I went off to Detroit to work at a newspaper instead of marrying her, as Elvis and everyone else had expected. Her name then