The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  Dog slid down the bank. He waded out but quickly bogged down in muck. He crawled to the bank and worked his way downriver through dense brush to the sand spit. The mosquitoes were trying to make a goddamned citizen’s arrest. He took Heimo Kock by the shoulders and pulled him into deep water, let him go again. That was all he could do. He fled the river bank.

  Dog recovered his deadfall broom, walked backwards to his driver’s door, dragging the broom behind him. Now it looked like a UFO had landed and tried to take off again—close to how Dog felt about his whole U.P. experience.

  Yet he was going to make it. He visualized: out the sand logging road, down the dirt highway to the gravel highway, down the gravel highway to the pavement, down the pavement through Newberry, Engadine, and Manistique, through Escanaba, Marinette and Green Bay, back through lovely Schaumburg around midnight, around the Horn of Gary, east into a turnpike sunrise—

  But an old green bus barricaded his path to the dirt highway.

  Not an old green bus. Different. Modified. Doors fore and aft on the side facing him. Solid body in between. Windshield in two angled pieces, wipers at the top. Antique, wallowing, misplaced thing. Dog slowed, squinting. Lettering on the side of it.

  Unbelievable words.

  Really? On this occasion? Here?

  The Luce County Bookmobile?

  Dog blew his horn.

  Into the window of the front flap door, a young woman’s face popped into view, then out, then in again—a pigtailed redhead—then out again to stay.

  Dog horned hard. She did not reappear. The driver’s seat remained unoccupied. He considered ramming the thing. But old attachments paused him in neutral: all that Dr. Seuss in there, all that Curious George. The sacred texts, The Wind in the Willows, Goodnight Moon—he took his foot off the gas.

  The bookmobile door was locked. Dog pounded. A shrill voice inside told him, “You’re under arrest, buddy!”

  “The hell I am. Move this thing.”

  “I’m calling the sheriff right now!”

  “Move it.”

  “I saw what you did!”

  Dog circled, cussing in large, hair-curling terms. He stood on the front bumper and cupped his hands to the glass. Keys hung from the ignition. In the rear of the bus, a wiry young woman flattened her body against a loaded bookshelf, a cell phone open against her cheek. She met Dog’s eyes with a hot glare. Dog lingered inside his hand-tunnel, eyes adjusting. Her frightened face was spotted with huge freckles, framed in coppery hair shaped in square bangs and weird, horizontal pigtails. She wore a patchwork shift, mismatched knee socks and clod-hopping boots.

  All this looked vaguely familiar. But he couldn’t place it. He jumped off the bumper. He tried to take the Cruise Master around, through the brush-clogged ditch. He went at speed, embedding the front end in a tangle of small-bore limbs and stumps until his wheels spun. Backing out, he sheared off his far-side mirror. His keepsake fly reel snapped off between the wipers. Something popped between his ears. His brain went fizz.

  When he emerged from the Cruise Master this time, he carried his camp axe. He hopped the bumper. He inserted the camp axe through the bookmobile’s divided windshield with one crisp chop.

  She shrieked. “Fucker!”

  Dog shoved his head through broken glass. “Never heard that word in a library.”

  She shrieked again. “Get away you fucker!”

  “You parked me in.” Dog elbowed safety glass to the side. “That’s not nice.”

  “You are under citizen’s arrest!”

  “The hell I am. I’m moving this bus.”

  “Stay—fucker!—stay where you are!”

  Dog kicked in head first over the window seal. He hung upside down, reaching for the keys. Her big clodhoppers clunked. She was coming. He grabbed the steering column to stop himself from somersaulting. He strained for an extra inch. She snatched the keys from his grasp.

  Boot-clunks scampered back. “Now he’s got an axe,” she informed someone through her phone. “He’s coming in.”

  Dog let go into the somersault. He hooked glass, tore his pants from crotch to cuff. He came up lunatic with pain and desperation. Yes, he did have an axe. He raised it for emphasis.

  “Give me those keys.”

  “No! Yes! State 410, a little west of Reed and Green! I’ve got him blocked in. Tell Margarite. She’s where? Oh, shit.”

  Dog inched toward her. “I didn’t kill that guy.”

  “I saw you.”

  “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I saw the smoke. I walked in there and I saw you dump him in the river.” To the phone she said, “I know you have to tell the sheriff. Just tell Margarite too.”

  “Give me the keys.”

  “You were burning evidence.”

  “You read too many books,” Dog said. “Why don’t you give me the keys, and mind your own business.”

  She clipped the keys to a lanyard around her neck, where they hung with an ID card. She reached behind her. She hurled a heavy book past his head.

  “Ok,” she said into the phone. “Put her on.”

  She hurled another book. Very accurate. Dog felt the spine graze his shoulder.

  “Stay where you are, fucker. Stay back. Margarite? Jesus, Margarite—you’re all the way in Brimley? With Julia? Not with Julia. Fishing? Not fishing. Ok. Ok. Yes, I have the pager. I didn’t think of it. Ok. But wait—it’s behind him.”

  Breathing fast, she eyed Dog up and down. “Yes, an axe. About six feet and thin, sunburned, green eyes maybe, shaggy brown hair, and a dirtball beard. Forty or so. What? Yes. But he’s right there in front of that, too. Ok—ok, I’ll try.”

  She folded the phone with a pop that charged the air between them.

  Dog said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Sure.” Those weird pigtails emphasized the incredulous tilt of her head. “I’ll bet you’ve said that before. Right before you started chopping limbs off.”

  Dog leaned the axe against Local History. He tried to settle himself. “I’m not dangerous. Please. You’re a librarian. Is that right?”

  “I do have a degree in Information Sciences, so that’s right, fucker.”

  “I’ve heard it’s bad luck to hurt a librarian.”

  “Oh, it is,” she said. “The worst. Don’t mess with us. Or me, in this case. I’m the only one in Luce County, and they’ve cut me back to part time. How about that?”

  “Keys,” Dog said, holding out his hand. “You won’t be letting loose a criminal. I promise. I’m a good guy. It will all work out.”

  “You’ve got all the lines, axe man.”

  She began to creep those clod-hopping boots toward a little checkout station at the rear door of the van. Meanwhile she was changing tones, keeping Dog off balance.

  “I’ll bet you just need a chance.”

  “You’re right. I do.”

  “You just need a break. Just this once.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Someone to believe in you.”

  “Right.”

  “You haven’t done anything all that wrong. Anyway, you didn’t mean to.”

  “Not really, no.”

  She was near the desk, near the door. “Lately, I’ll bet, you’ve done a lot of soul searching.”

  “More than you can imagine. And stop fucking with me. Give me those keys.”

  “And … you’ve changed,” she said. “You really have … honest.”

  “Look … why don’t we just move this bus and let the cops worry about me.”

  Dog had followed her in little dry-fly stalk-steps. Again he reached his hand out.

  “Just give me the keys. Please?”

  “Ok.” Suddenly teeth and dimples. “You convinced me.”

  She raised the keys, jingled them, and threw them over his head. No, she didn’t. She faked him. They never left the lanyard. When Dog turned back, she had punched the rear door and jumped.

  Dog followed. When he got out, she
was heading back into the bookmobile by the front door. Dog arrived just as that door locked. “Fucker!” he heard shrieked from down by the rear door, which was now locked too.

  Dog howled his own terrible words into the cool purple of a U.P. dusk. Mosquitoes descended.

  He went back to the Cruise Master and looked at his map. He considered hoofing it, running from here to Dolf Cook’s, grabbing the picture of Cook and the brookie, digging in the wood box for the old Pflueger reel, the one Cook had tried to plant on him, with its cracked pale-orange line to match the one around his brother’s neck. But Brimley—where this “Margarite” was—Dog guessed was forty minutes away. There was time to work this out. This was a damn bookmobile, after all. This was a librarian, in pigtails and magic marker freckles, terrified, with her knee socks falling down. How hard could it be?

  But when Dog dropped once more through the broken windshield, she shoved a vintage shotgun in his face. She had his axe too, filed behind her in Psychology. She showed him a small, black pager.

  “Hey, fucker. Welcome back.” The pager buzzed. “There we go. The sheriff’s department now has your exact GPS coordinates.”

  She pulled up a little stool from the kiddie section and got comfortable. Her legs folded smoothly beneath those baggy knee socks, one black, one brown.

  “You too. Sit down.”

  She adjusted her aim until with one squeeze she could shelve Dog’s head in Self Help. Then she gave him the perfect, perky, storytime smile.

  “So … let me guess, Mister …”

  “My name is Ned Oglivie. I’ve been calling myself Dog.”

  “Oh, how sad,” she said. “Because deep down you’re just a lost puppy who’s in a lot of pain. Right? Fucker?”

  3

  Esofea Maria Smithback watched him check her up and down, boots to pigtails, with bloodshot eyes surrounded by sunburn and rimmed in a mask of pale, dirty skin the shape of his sunglasses.

  This she called “varmint face.”

  She had seen it a thousand times.

  This was the taxonomic mug shot of the Yooper hose monkey as he woke up in middle age on the verge of renal failure and a permanent vehemence against all things that frustrated him, primarily women. It was a fact that her boyfriend, the hose-monkey varmint-face fucker Danny Tervo, was currently diagramming his big passage into man-hell, and he was planning to take her with him.

  She was calming down, her brain beginning to work again. She had seen this “Dog,” this canine member of the Tervo brotherhood, drag a large man’s body off a little hump of sand and let it go into the river current. She had felt frightened, then she had felt filled with civic outrage, then frightened again—but now she felt mostly sick with exasperation. She had so been here before.

  He ran a dirty hand through his dirty hair and looked around the Luce County Bookmobile. She had reorganized the old bus that morning, while it was parked outside the county office. She had put all books with Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck references together on the Focus Shelf. These had been for the Crisp Point Light Historical Society luncheon. She had snuck in books on U.P. Indian massacres and the epic deforestation of the white pine, making a backdoor point about real tragedies, the kind that kept on happening. After the luncheon, she had dressed up and done a “Hop on Pop” at a birthday party in Deer Park—slipping a little Pippi Longstocking into that one.

  This varmint was exactly what Danny Tervo was planning to be in another few years—wasted, stupidly criminal, but still thinking he was smooth. He said, “Let’s calm down. So, you fish?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Salvelinus fontinalis on your ears.” He nodded. “Your earrings.”

  “Is that what they are?”

  “Brook trout.”

  Esofea didn’t know brook trout from Brooke Shields. Her new girlfriend in the Sheriff’s Department, Deputy Margarite DuCharme, a lesbian, had given the earrings to her. Platonically, it was understood.

  “So you think you can flirt your way out of this? Is that it? Fucker?”

  “I thought we could get to know each other a little. See if that helped any.”

  He glanced at the shotgun, probably wondering if she knew how to use it. She released the cross-bolt safety at the rear of the trigger guard, to convey the fact that as a Smithback woman, she did know, and she had, and she would. He tried to act unimpressed. Old ground.

  “Brimley is a long way off,” he said. “What else are we going to do?”

  “Maybe you could beg for your life.”

  “You’re some kind of librarian.”

  “Yeah?” Esofea said. “Which kind?”

  “In my experience, yours are a peace-loving people.”

  She studied him a while. Dirty, dangerous, lippy, and clever—yes, she did have a weakness. She and Deputy DuCharme had discussed these things—tendencies and patterns—over instant coffee in the break room of the Luce County office.

  “So who did you kill?”

  “Nobody. But that was Heimo Kock.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’ve seen Heimo Kock. Looks just like his brother Dolf Cook but in better shape. Silver hair and red face. Dressed in boat-rep swag.”

  She was truly astonished. If this were true, it was perfect. If Heimo Kock was dead, no doubt Danny Tervo was involved. With this “Dog.” Amazing how these fuckers found each other.

  “You offed Heimo Kock …”

  “I didn’t off him.”

  “Unbelievable. Somebody finally offed Heimo Kock.”

  “I didn’t touch him until he showed up dead in my vehicle.”

  “You’re a hero. And a dead man.” These elemental Yooper truths just came to her. “Assassin to the ‘Governor of the U.P.’ What a feeling, huh?”

  He just shook his head, no.

  Esofea sat back on the kiddie stool to give the shotgun a little more room. Remarkable how these fuckers could claim they had not done what they had obviously just done. Their trick was they believed their own bullshit. She tried to recall if Pippi, including the movies and all the Swedish TV episodes, had ever held a psychopathic criminal at gunpoint. Times like this, Esofea had a mantra for herself. What Would Pippi Do? WWPD, for short.

  “Can I have a lollipop?” the fucker asked her.

  They were in a basket behind her. “Those are Jolly Pops,” she told him, “and there are no Jolly Pops for bad boys.”

  “Come on. Toss one over here.Purple.”

  “Purple, huh? Your favorite?”

  “No.”

  “Then why purple?”

  He waited to respond, building drama. “Well,” he said at last. “Well,” he repeated, “shit.” His shoulders slumped. “Ok, I’m going to tell you.” And here came the classic hose-monkey-varmint-face shift to the quivering voice and the teary eyes. To the tender man grief. “You know where I was headed before you parked me in?”

  “Hmm … Mexico?”

  “Walnut Hills Cemetery, Boston, Mass.”

  “Oh, good boy. You visit your victims.”

  She tossed him a green Jolly Pop. He gave her this deflated look, as if to say: Green? How could you? Danny Tervo made that same face when she nailed him, like it just wasn’t fair to turn over the rotten log of his soul and watch the bugs squirm. And half the time the fucker would get an apology out of her, complete with her special acrobatic make-up sex. That was the sickest part, really. Her gullibility. Her guilt and loneliness. Her inability to take the risk and cut him off forever. And this all went way back.

  Discussion points, all of these, with Deputy Margarite, who was now on the cell phone, updating. Just out of Brimley, coming up on Raco. Thirty minutes. Was she ok? Did she have her varmint gun on the suspect?

  “He whacked Heimo Kock,” she interrupted the deputy. “Can you believe it?”

  Margarite was silent a moment. “Well, hang on to him,” she said finally. “For the sheriff’s department, obviously, but for his own good, too. Know what I mean?”

&n
bsp; “No shit,” Esofea said.

  Varmint Face, watching her for a weakness, repeated, “I didn’t kill him. I haven’t done anything wrong. I made a bad decision, but I didn’t kill anyone.”

  Funny: even green eyes like Danny. “A sheriff’s deputy will be here in three minutes,” she lied, dividing the situation by ten.

  “Can you listen to me? Can I tell you what happened?”

  “Sure. We can make it story time. Go ahead.”

  “I was at the campground. I was the only one there except for Dolf Cook. I left about midnight. I drove down to Chicago and that’s where—”

  “Don’t give me the ‘I-didn’t-do-it’ story,” Esofea interrupted. “You can try that one on my friend the deputy. She’s a lesbian. Not having had the pleasure, she might be more sympathetic. As for me, the story I’m game for is the ‘I-couldn’t-help-it’ story. It’s my favorite. I hear it all the time.”

  He swallowed. Looked hurt still. “You,” he said, “ought to be driving something like a parking enforcement vehicle, not a bookmobile.”

  “I love kids,” she said. “They really are innocent.”

  “They haven’t double parked yet.”

  “Right.”

  “They’re not so injured. Like me and you.”

  That slowed her down a beat. Like her? Injured? He could see that? Were the freckles too thin? Danny never saw it.

  “After a certain point we’re all in pain,” he went on. “Some more than others.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “My little boy drowned in the bathtub six years ago, while my wife and I argued about tulips.”

  Esofea squinted at the varmint. “Wow. Swinging for the fences right away. You don’t even need to warm up?”

  “He would have turned ten in two days.”

  “Oh, sure, and—”

  “And I’ve been away,” he talked over her, “more than five of those years. This Saturday his mother is going to drive through the gates of the cemetery, like she has every year, with flowers and balloons and toys, and she’s going to wonder where the hell I am. This time I was planning to be there. But someone dumped a body on me—and here I am, trying to dump it back … and be on my way.”