The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  Esofea scooted her kiddie stool a bit to the left. “Good story,” she said. Funny how the fucker was so anatomically correct, with the tight brown forearms, the long-fingered hands, the slightly feral slouch. “Hemingway-caliber bullshit. My boyfriend Danny Tervo loves that macho pain junk. But I’ve built up my immunity.”

  She kept the shotgun pressed into her shoulder as she reached back, feeling along the Health and Wellness bookshelf with her left hand. The book she wanted was a heavy one, with a brittle dust jacket. She tossed The Family Guide to Abnormal Psychology across the floor. “Look on page eighty-six. And read,” she said.

  She re-established the shotgun. “Read. It’s good for you.”

  Varmint Face read, “‘A USC study has found the first proof of structural brain abnormalities in people who habitually lie, cheat, and manipulate others … significant association with criminality and other antisocial pathologies …’”

  He looked at her without blinking. His kind could do that. “You think I’m lying? Right behind you. Green Eggs and Ham. Open it. I’ll prove I was a father.”

  Esofea snorted and broke out laughing. She had heard all kinds of Yooper hose-monkey-varmint-face malarkey in her twenty-nine years but never had she heard of Tervo et. al. begging for a chance to prove paternity. I didn’t do it. That was their motto. Suddenly here was someone different, refreshing actually, axing his way into her life.

  She balanced the shotgun in one hand. She opened the Seuss book. “That’s quite an offer, Dad. But it’s gotta be perfect.”

  Dog had played a game with Eamon. For a while his little boy was obsessed with x-ray vision. So Dog had learned to close a book and pretend to read it through the cover. He would grunt and struggle, grit his teeth, shake the book. He would ask Eamon to massage his temples. He would spew nonsense. “I am a donkey.” He would tilt the book to a new angle and improve to half-nonsense. “I am Rick.” At last he would ask Eamon for a stiff slap to the back of the head—whap!—and finally Dog would get it right.

  “I am Sam,” he said now. “Sam I am.”

  The librarian was instantly unimpressed. “Never mind,” she said, twisting abruptly to re-shelve the book. The shotgun never lost its vector at his head. “Everybody knows that. It’s the only book most people can remember. Now where did you say you were from?”

  “Boston.”

  “A father in Boston in would know Sterling Carpenter.”

  “I do.”

  She brayed an awkward laugh that seemed to hurt somewhere in her chest. For a moment she stared blankly at Dog. At last she said, “Of course you do. God, you are so much like Danny Tervo, knowing every goddamn thing a person can think of, or claiming to. Go on. Prove it.”

  Dog fumbled in his memory for a title, a topic, any purchase on the work of Sterling Carpenter, who was right up there with the Make Way for Ducklings guy—was it Robert McCloskey?—yes, right up there with McCloskey in the pantheon of local writers erected by the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Christ, there was a bronze statue of Mrs. Mallard in Boston Commons. Then he had it: the lobster. A plaque on the Boston Harbor Walk. Ludwig the Lobster, by Sterling Carpenter. About a silly lobster in the live tank at a grocery store, anxious to be selected.

  Dog began, “‘Pick me!’ cried Ludwig the Lobster …”

  The librarian seemed startled.

  “… as he tip-toed in the tank. ‘I’m the nicest! I’m the brightest! I’m so much handsomer than Hank!’”

  He looked at her. “More?”

  “Of course more,” she said, “fucker.”

  Dog ground his teeth. He wondered if the shotgun was loaded, if there had been time in the frantic moments before he had plunged back through the windshield.

  He went on. “‘Over here!’ waved Ludwig Lobster, as he wiggled in the tank. ‘I’m a singer! I’m a dancer! I’m so much fancier than Frank!’”

  Now Dog summoned up in wrenching detail the wideness of Eamon’s eyes as they had frozen on the picture of crackpot Ludwig, begging to be chosen for someone’s kettle of boiling water. Eamon’s alarmed expression, Dog recalled, had showed a nervous father just how vast was the innocence he was charged with defending, and maybe that explained why the words of Sterling Carpenter had never left his mind. Here came more.

  “‘I’m the one!’ proud Ludwig signaled, as he swam around the brim. ‘I’m oh so stronger! Oh so longer! Oh so healthier than Slim!’”

  The librarian had him fixed in a grim squint. He noticed the whiteness of her knuckles on the stock of the shotgun. “And?” she said. “Next?”

  “We closed the book then. We put it back.”

  “Why? Liar. It’s hilarious. Sterling Carpenter is goddamn hoot.”

  Dog stared down the shotgun barrel into those pinched green eyes. “Yeah, well … fatal ignorance, self-inflicted doom … those concepts are hell on four-year-olds, I guess. My little boy was horrified.”

  She lowered the barrel a little. She shook her strangely pigtailed head side to side in mock admiration. “Wow. You’re good. Ludwig the Lobster, not age-appropriate. That is developmentally correct, as a matter of fact. But probably this is just an aspect of your psychopathy, knowing just how children get messed up.”

  “Oh, I messed him up, all right.”

  Dog’s voice trembled on the confession. But with a silent effort he bit off his grief. He could hurl the heavy reference book at her, he thought, then roll and dive for the shotgun. But not yet—now that she was sort of smiling at him, her elbows looking loose.

  “Ludwig the Lobster escapes,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  He didn’t know that. He drifted a hand beneath the book. “Yeah? How?”

  “Someone falls in love with him. You know, with his self-delusion, his damaged behavior, his complete lack of a realistic worldview.”

  “Lucky Ludwig.”

  “You want to put the psych book down? Slide it across the floor? Put your hands behind your head? Fucker? Thanks.”

  With the effort of raising his arms, Dog realized he was weak on adrenaline, not much juice left in the gland. Still, he summoned an idea.

  “You still think I’m lying?”

  “Brilliantly.”

  “Then how about this. My boy’s favorite book. Mine too. Right behind you again. McElligot’s Pool.” She re-tightened her grip on the shotgun. Dog clasped his hands exactly on top of his head. “Go on. Open it. You might have forgotten. It’s about hope, and enthusiasm, about never giving up, and trusting what you believe.”

  “It’s about fishing.”

  “Like I said.”

  She found the book by feel, right over her shoulder, its cellophane jacket cloudy and cracked.

  Dog said, “Go to the page second from the end, the one with all the fish in the sea.” She paged. He waited. “With curly noses and feather tails and buck teeth. One with frog feet. One with a kung-fu moustache. How many fish are there in the sea?”

  “How many fish in the sea? Just one.” She gave him a cheesy smile—bitter cheese. “Just my man.”

  “On the page.”

  “‘A number’ it says.”

  Dog said, “My son counted sixty-eight. Is he right?”

  The librarian looked down, her eyes roving over the Seussian throng of goofball swimmers.

  “Go on,” Dog urged. “Sixty-eight. Check him.”

  She sighed, “Ok, stop,” and closed the book.

  “Fucker,” she muttered, glaring at him.

  Dog let a breath out. “Is there a society of professional librarians?” he asked, “where I can report you?”

  “If I let you go,” she answered, “will you kill someone for me, too?”

  “Sure.”

  “Liar.”

  “This boyfriend of yours must be a real asshole. What’s his name again?”

  He watched her eyes press shut. Quickly, silently, he un-knit his hands and sprang to one knee. But she caught it. She aimed the shotgun at his groin. “I believe you know him. Danny
Tervo. And what was your son’s name?”

  “Ea—”

  The word, the name, the first sound of it, made Dog’s heart ache and his throat close. “Eam—” His airway stuck. His heart had ballooned up and choked him.

  “The lollipop would be cute right now,” she said, “while your eyes tear up.”

  Dog squeezed a breath in and out. A strange thought entered his mind: if he were ever free of this, he could ask this woman on a date—and strangle her.

  “Eamon Theodore Oglivie.”

  This made two tears spill out and wander into his beard. Then a third.

  “Fucker,” she murmured. “You’re a pro. You oughta teach the class. He was how old?”

  “Four. Four-and-a-half.”

  “And he drowned in the tub? And you didn’t kill yourself? See, I know something about the pain of that, and that’s how I know you’re lying.”

  Dog jaw fell slack. “What kind of person would lie about something like—”

  “Danny Tervo.”

  Dog could not respond. The librarian seemed spent as well. They stared at each other. A chipmunk chattered outside. Then a dove began to keen. Dog wiped a sleeve across his face.

  “Let me go,” he said at last. “It will turn out ok.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Let me go.”

  “I wish I could help you.”

  “You can. You can trust me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You can trust me.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Fucker. I hate those words. Fucker.”

  She blinked rapidly. Breathed rapidly too. One of her legs, the one in the black stocking, jittered up and down at the knee, and her head began to shake along the horizontal plane of her pigtails. This went on while Dog weighed his options. Then her eyes fell shut. She seemed in some sort of trance.

  Dog stood with extreme care. He waited for his balance. The gritty floor of the bookmobile made faint crunches as he moved in reverse. One step, two steps, three …

  Then he spun. He hit the door. He sprang onto the deserted dirt highway.

  He made three strides to the opposite shoulder, hearing a siren in the near distance. He was in mid-air, hurdling the ditch in a cloud of mosquitoes, when she shot him in the back.

  4

  When Danny Tervo heard about the corpse of Heimo Kock dumped in the Two Hearted River, he was just outside of Tucson, Arizona, six am, heading north on Interstate 10 with an empty tanker, and he celebrated. He blew his horn and waggled the tanker’s ass-end in the face of an airport mini-van behind him. He lit up an American Spirit—the organic one—and blasted his dusty windshield with a big, smoky “Ahhh!”

  Sweetness. Heimo Kock was dead.

  God Grand Coulee Damn. How lucky could he get?

  His bud Conrad Belcher waited, mouth-breathing out of Tervo’s prepaid phone.

  “Belch, come on. You’re not just shitting me?”

  “I shit you not.” Belcher was Tervo’s man on the ground, so to speak, though the dude spent half his life in tree stands. Tervo pictured Belch in the U.P. dawn, cross-legged on a platform in the Seney swamp, a camo-skin cell phone to his ear.

  “Shot?”

  “Strangled.”

  “Perfectly righteous. They know who?”

  Tervo heard a meaty slap. “Damn skeeters coulda done it.” So maybe Belch wasn’t in a tree stand. Maybe he was walking over a mud bog in his snowshoes with a bucket of bear bait. “But I heard they got some fly fisher dude from back east.”

  Tervo changed lanes to the right. He wanted to slow down and savor this. Some fly fisher dude from back east. How about that? All those U.P. tourism dollars finally paying off, everybody free to do business from here on without the hassle of Heimo Kock—everybody meaning especially him, Tervo, who had been in need of a Kock solution of his own. As a matter of fact, he had been planning to coffee-up and hatch something on the drive home.

  But strangled by a tourist? And a fly fisherman? Belcher could have told him the Blind Sucker River had filled up with Oktoberfest beer and Danny Tervo could not have been more spliffed—or more eager to get back home.

  “But, Danny, here’s the thing.”

  Tervo wasn’t totally listening. The problem with chilling in the right lane was the sleep-addled clowns who approached merging onto a highway like they were half-inch-to-ball-sac on Lake Superior and couldn’t take the plunge. Tervo blew his horn for real, a long foghorn blast at some Outbacker who couldn’t find his gas pedal.

  “Yeah? What, Belch? The thing?”

  “Well … you and Esofea, where’s that at these days?”

  “Huh?” Tervo had to rattle his brain a little. “Uh, yeah, Esofea, lemme see.”

  His run to Tucson had been a big event. He had made his inaugural product dump at his ideal price point, and then he had met some people. These people had been holding some stuff. There had been a pool party, brown women, multi-lingual karaoke. Right now the U.P. seemed ten thousand miles away.

  “The usual, I guess. I had the snip and she was pissed. I know I said some shit to her. Probably there was also some shit I didn’t say. I just can’t remember if we got back together or not.”

  “She might be mad at you, then?”

  “Dunno.”

  “You gonna reverse the surgery?”

  “Belch—what the hell? Whose side you on, brother?”

  Anticipating the rush of early commuters at the North Tucson on-ramp, Tervo forced the truck back into the center lane. Belcher said, “I’m trying to help you here.”

  “Ok, Belch. Help me. What’s the deal?”

  “You check your regular cell?”

  “Didn’t bring it. Only the prepaid on business trips, Belch.”

  Belcher’s voice was faint suddenly: “You want I give Esofea this number?”

  “Hell, no. What? Belch—”

  “—I heard she told one of the EMTs—” Tervo shook the phone. Too far from a tower.

  “Belch?”

  One of the Upper Peninsula’s national forests had swallowed the signal. Now down a curl of concrete onto Interstate 10 bumpered a new flight of Arizonans, swarming out of their drought-stricken suburbs, heading out to eat and drink and buy and sell as usual in this worst-ever, total water catastrophe.

  The deepest drought in a hundred years, and nobody down here wanted to give up anything. There was big money in inertia, Tervo was sure. Big.

  So Esofea told who what?

  Danny Tervo drove a retired Golden Guernsey milk tanker, five thousand gallons, rebuilt Volvo engine under the hood, four hundred horses, chemically etched clean on the inside and repainted outside to say The Essence of Soy, except it wasn’t paint actually, it was stickers, like the wraps they put on buses and trains these days, so Tervo could change stories as needed. He was DSY Environmental during a dry run of the pumping and dumping aspect. Early summer for an exploration of weigh station evasion techniques he got honks with Moose Creek Maple Syrup—having a little too much fun with it. Five thousand gallons of maple syrup? What the hell was he thinking? The idea was to avoid attention.

  All the way up through Marana and Eloy, Tervo just spaced around in the afterglow of Heimo Kock’s death. Talk about a perfect drought, however. It was dry everywhere southwest of Denver. And it was spreading. Some places had water under the ground, aquifers, but even the aquifers were in trouble. A few hundred miles north, beneath all that Kansas corn and wheat, the Oglala was the biggest underground water resource in North America. Five hundred feet below his truck sometime later in the wee hours would be an estimated twenty-three trillion gallons. But Tervo’s research had told him even the Oglala aquifer was shrinking by about five percent a year. Amazing. Scary. Whereas Lake Superior was at three quintillion gallons and holding. So … money in the bank, right?

  Off and on through recent history, according to Tervo’s studies, some Arizona or New Mexico politician had suggested tapping the
Oglala, floating the argument that the water resource belonged to everyone and had to be shared equitably, or at least traded on the free market. After all, didn’t Arizona send microchips to Kansans who did not make their own? Didn’t Florida share its citrus with Nebraska? But this bullshit was shot down by spectacular opposition. Now and then some idiot cowboy congressman mentioned diverting water from the Great Lakes Basin and thereby committed political seppuku, laid his bowels out on the desk of some CNN talk show. You didn’t touch the Great Lakes. Not out in the open. Tervo had done the research. The Great Lakes were a Swiss bank.

  At a co-op in Casa Grande, he had vegan eggs Benedict and a bottle of kombucha. He wired up on Korean ginseng and aimed for Phoenix. Lovely.

  She didn’t cross his mind, Esofea.

  But Danny crossed and double-crossed her mind a dozen times until at dawn Esofea pulled the plug on a nightlong Xanax-vs.-nicotine throwdown in a ring of sweaty sheets and admitted she had shot someone who was possibly not Danny Tervo in absentia. Who was possibly innocent. Possibly.

  To a girl with a pestilence—this was her problem—every man looked like a varmint.

  Esofea Maria Smithback confessed this to herself, and got up, and looked at the Newberry Motors calendar that hung above the wood box in the kitchen of the old Frens mansion. She thought of this Dog and his trip to the cemetery in Boston. So his idea was to formalize his grief? To give it a place and a time and an action, so that it wasn’t everywhere, all the time, in everything he did? It couldn’t hurt her to try. She picked an anniversary date. Today. She knew the place, too.

  She made coffee and fit the travel mug between the seat and the emergency brake in her rickety red VW Beetle—Danny Tervo sold it to her—and drove against the morning stream of empty pulpwood trucks all the way to where the Two Hearted River joined Lake Superior. Her cell phone buzzed twice atop the passenger seat: Danny’s pal Belcher. She loved Belcher. But she ignored it. She had the date and place. What would be her action, she mused, for grief?