The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  After the turn east on 410, the roads became “Yooper freeway.” That meant free of rules, free of signs, free of taxes, free of pavement. Esofea bent over the Beetle’s ivory steering wheel and checked the sky. What she didn’t need when driving the Beetle was the road soup that came with rain, also free of charge. But the clouds were high puffs, still pink on their eastern cheeks. She was ok.

  She parked in the Mouth of the Two Hearted Campground. She walked over the river on the little suspension bridge. She crunched her way across the thickness of beach agates to the wave line where walking was easier. She took her shoes and socks off. Cold.

  Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold—until she reached the reunion of waters, where pale brown river swirled into pale green lake. There she stepped from the stinging surf and back onto beach rocks, which felt warm.

  Here was her problem: there was no exact site of burial, not when living tissue simply left your body and entered the flow of shit and piss and eggshells through the sewer pipes. Esofea felt sick for a while, all over again. But this place seemed ok. For one thing—to be positive again—she had heard Sheriff Bruce Lodge report to Deputy Margarite DuCharme that the Coho were out there, schooling in the lake, getting ready to spawn. She thought of a million salmon, massing, building pressure, ready to squirt and race and struggle upstream to implant new life in the river bottom. This, the blunt ubiquity of sex, of drive, made her feel very small, but in a good way, as in not alone. Then there was the opposite motion, river flowing into lake, pretty clouds rising into limitless sky, an endless water cycle where the infinitesimal mingled into the vast and became new shapes and new directions. So the burial site for her baby was here then. The agates made a thousand-million lovely headstones. Only thing missing was the fucker, Danny.

  Action? She should weep. Esofea knew that. She thought about it. Did he weep, her new friend Dog? She stretched her toes, lit a cigarette. She was afraid to weep. The ride was too wild.

  Perched among the agates, her little red cell phone began to buzz, its window saying Sheriff Dept … Sheriff Dept … Sheriff Dept …

  She expected Deputy Margarite, calling to arrange a follow-up regarding yesterday’s events. Instead, Sheriff “Bruce the Moose” Lodge said, “Young lady, where you at right this minute?”

  “The lake.”

  “Doin’ what?”

  She tossed an agate as high as she could. It peaked and fell, entered the lake with a short hard tump!—like all that heavy water had inhaled it.

  “Nothing, I guess.”

  “Good. We’re all tied up today. Do me a favor? I got a call from some folks at the Blind Sucker Campground about somebody shooting off a cannon from the other side of the flooding. You figure that’s your Grandma Tiina with her punt gun again?”

  See? She told herself she should buck up.

  It wasn’t like she totally lacked a family.

  Esofea could confirm the noise complaint from the turn-in to the Blind Sucker Resort. Up on the deck of the main lodge, Mummo Tiina had Great-Grandpa Smithback’s historical punt gun—a shotgun, ten feet long—propped on the rail while she loaded in a shell. The remainder of the Smithback clan—Uncle Rush, Aunt Daryline, Cousin Caroline—milled around, ineffectually and with substances, as they did best.

  Esofea pounded the wimpy Beetle horn as she cornered the Blind Sucker flooding, not wanting to get hit. That gun could shred an entire flock of geese with one pull. She gave the horn all she had. But of course Mummo Tiina pulled the trigger.

  Esofea hit the brakes and ducked.

  Waited.

  Clear, she thought.

  Continued.

  But no—the shot had been aimed skyward. A sheet of raining lead clipped the tail of the Beetle as she made the turn by the boathouse, heading up the hill to the dilapidated family resort. Blind Sucker Resort, Cabins, Boats, Trips, Est. 1937. The sign was barely readable anymore. The resort made a fortune in its day, but lately most tourists turned around right here, at Blind ucker ort, while they still could.

  Big old Mummo Tiina was swabbing out the punt gun’s barrel with a mitten duct-taped to a musky rod as Esofea came through the great room of the lodge onto the deck. Uncle Rush rose from a peeling Adirondack lounger and claimed, “I told her to stop it.”

  “Hmm,” said Esofea, moving around him, “but she just wouldn’t listen to an unemployed man in his pajamas drinking beer at nine in the morning.”

  “You just come right in talking like that,” Aunt Daryline observed from her own lounger. “Like you own the place.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t.”

  Esofea’s grandmother, who did own the place, was preparing another blast. From a crate between her black ankle boots she produced a shotgun shell the size of Uncle Rush’s sixteen-ounce beer can. She loaded the shell and sat back in a wheeled chair from the lodge office. She folded a pillow between the gun stock and her shoulder. Behind her, twelve-year-old Caroline performed a dramatic huff.

  Esofea said, “Mummo, no. The sheriff called me. You’re scaring people all the way across the flooding at the campground.”

  “These ain’t pajamas,” Uncle Rush argued.

  Aunt Daryline backed him up. “Them are his hospital scrubs.” She tipped a coffee cup and took a hit to the face from sliding ice.

  “So Doctor Rush is doing surgery this morning?”

  Caroline muttered, “Oh, my god.” She was having a red Mountain Dew, quart-size, mostly gone. Esofea took it away, poured the rest off the deck.

  “Hey!”

  “How come you’re not in school?”

  “I missed the bus and nobody could drive me.”

  “Which nobody?”

  Esofea turned to glare at Rush and Daryline.

  “Get ready,” she told the girl. “We’re leaving in five minutes. Mummo Tiina, what are you shooting at?”

  “Him.”

  “Him who?”

  Daryline said, “Them are Rush’s scrubs he got legally the time they sewed his tongue back together.”

  “Today we got bad backs,” Rush clarified. “Me and Daryline both. Doctor’s orders. That’s why we ain’t drove her.”

  “Caroline, go. Get ready. Mummo Tiina, which him are you—”

  When the punt gun went off, Esofea lost all sensation. She reeled away into a brainscape of red-and-black zigzags, reminiscent of places Danny had taken her more often than she cared to remember. The fucker was always holding. Always.

  When she had faculties again, Esofea discovered Mummo Tiina had been driven across the deck by the recoil—thus the wheeled chair, which was blocked from hitting the lodge windows by sullen Caroline. Having done her duty for Mummo Tiina, the girl turned to prepare for school.

  “That’ll fix you,” Mummo Tiina said.

  “Fix who?”

  She pointed a gnarled finger toward those pink-cheeked clouds, beyond the flooding and over the big lake.

  “Go to hell where you belong,” the old woman scolded the shreds of some ghost she saw floating in the sky. “You old Heimo Kock.”

  5

  Theodore (Ned) Oglivie, before he went feral, had been fired upon three times, and each time his life had changed.

  The first two of these events took place during his previous life as CEO and sole employee of Oglivie Secure, his start-up corporate security firm in suburban Boston. Those bullets came his way at a time in company history when “corporate client” meant a Citgo station in a rough part of town, or a Lotto outlet that was too close to a liquor store, and before Dog was able to employ targets on his behalf.

  The bullet at the Mopar Auto Parts warehouse in Roxbury was wide right by about twenty feet. The thief had been in flight with so much chrome that his aim was distorted. Still, the percussion, the out-of-the blue shock, had knocked Dog to the glass-speckled asphalt behind the warehouse, where he had lain among cigarette butts and flattened PET bottles while the Mopar manager ran around screaming Ukrainian blood oaths and waving a wicked shank of muffler pi
pe.

  It was during these few moments that as a tenured boyfriend Dog had decided, hell, why not just propose to Mary Jane? It was clear he couldn’t jump the fence and run, didn’t want it quite badly enough. So what was he waiting for?

  The second occasion was freakish luck. Dog and M.J. were still newlyweds. They were party people, spending the money they imagined they would accumulate later, no problem. Mary Jane discovered recreational drug use and began to make up for having been a clueless Catholic pretty girl at Mount Holyoke. Dog stuck to booze and felt righteous about it. The stock market was booming—actually metastasizing, as it turned out. But Oglivie Secure was gaining ground. Dog had nibbled off a little corner of the Raytheon market. He was guarding the parking lot at the Waltham facility. He worked sixteen-hour days. On weekends he interviewed for help.

  Quality guards were tough to come by, though. The good ones were real cops. The bad ones Dog wouldn’t trust to guard a turd in the toilet of the men’s room during a Pats game at Foxborough. In the middle ground were ex-military, and those guys were a tough read. All yessir and nossir, fully capable, sir—with very little, often, to back it up.

  There was one intense young man whose discharge papers “got screwed up in the system and hadn’t arrived yet.” Dog turned him down.

  That Friday afternoon, when a bullet slammed through the window of the parking lot guard booth, Dog knew exactly who it was. The cops picked up Derek Stark, dishonorable discharge for extreme battery, within the hour. Raytheon was impressed. The firm lent him a couple of bonded older guys who quickly retired and went to work for Dog. And bingo. Gunplay the second, and Oglivie Secure was off the ground.

  Those were the days of the contraceptive sponge. Dog’s long fingers snagged one out of M.J. on a winter night, banked it into the wastebasket across the room. “You’re right. Let’s get on with our lives,” he whispered into the cold cream fog around her ear. He might as well have followed his tail around in a circle before he lay down beside her.

  The third time Dog was shot at he was deep in the hardwood forests of upstate New York, on a deer hunting trip with Mary Jane’s father and two of her brothers. This was a few months after the loss. Once again it was time to “get on with our lives.” Angry, sad, and helplessly isolated in his grief, Dog was not following the script. He was not “supporting” M.J., who was using pills, snarling at him, and seeing a dangerously inane therapist who was telling her to live out, have fun, consider this a new beginning. Dog was drinking and reading Hemingway for the rugged self-pity, coming back again and again to “Big Two-Hearted River,” parts one and two. He was dismayed with M.J. He was losing her. By that morning in the New York forest he was losing the business too. He had been sitting on a stump taking a nip of Wild Turkey when a rifle cracked across the foggy clearing from the direction of his in-laws.

  Dog felt a crease in the air at his shoulder. Leave or die, he decided. Go fishing alone, like the kid in “Big Two-Hearted River.” Or the other kid, in McElligot’s Pool. Either one. Or both. He had bought the Cruise Master and was gone inside a week, leaving a long and tortured note that, he was sure, neither explained nor excused a damn thing.

  And now a librarian had shot him. And Dolf Cook had tried to plant that Pflueger on him, frame him for the murder of the brother he couldn’t live up to. And Mary Jane was expecting him. Expecting him to fail. And somehow his little boy Eamon stood observing, holding up a scorecard like a gymnastics judge: zero. This was not to be understood as a score, however, but a direction. I’m heading up to the river, someone said. Right, Dog replied. The words scrolled out perfectly: Up the track and out of sight … beyond the burnt hills of timber … where it stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff.

  And then his brain, having assembled this nightmarish collage, went black.

  After Sheriff Bruce Lodge allowed Fritz Shunk, Luce County Attorney and owner of the Log Jam tavern, to have a peek at Ogilvie—passed out on a special kind of bed, twitching and murmuring through the hole that cradled his face—the sheriff told Shunk, “I’m heading up to the river, give You-Know-Who a break.”

  “She still has a name, Sheriff. A nice one. It’s Margarite DuCharme.”

  “Who’s to say it’s real, though?”

  Shunk put up both hands like he didn’t want to hear any more. He looked back through the hospital doors as they exited. Shunk was always worried about a lawsuit. He said, “Mind if I go up to the river too, have a look?”

  They did not ride together. Sheriff Lodge stopped at Pickleman’s. He was buying a red-and-white Daredevil spoon for spin fishing and a sack of teriyaki beef jerky when Shunk came in. It was awkward. Wonder what he was there for, Lodge mused, back on the road. Shunk had moved up from a suburb of Detroit three years ago and opened a tavern. Later he ran for County Attorney. A pretty nice fellah, but the sheriff had yet to figure out what he found so complicated about life. Maybe he was paying money for water, in a special bottle, with ions.

  Sheriff Lodge did a loop through Oswald’s Bear Ranch to get behind Shunk on the highway. Twenty miles later, he turned into the High Bridge state campground on the West Fork of the Two Hearted. It was after Labor Day. The campground was deserted. The sheriff’s cruiser sank a bit and rode silently in the soft soil of the loop. The plastic bubble of the Daredevil package hit the bottom of the trash barrel. The trunk of Lodge’s cruiser contained emergency flares, a cardboard box of D.A.R.E. pamphlets, a snow shovel, a shotgun, and an Eagle Claw rod and reel.

  Large and gentle, seventy-two years old and not too agile, Sheriff Lodge sidestepped down the steep sand bank, avoiding ant hills, and ended up on a pitched slab of concrete from the old bridge that used to wash out about once a generation. Lodge had seen it swept away four times. Above him, sixty feet up, the new bridge, High Bridge, rumbled as a pulp truck rolled across it.

  Lodge knocked the bail on his reel and flipped that big spoon upstream into the dark water swirling against the abutment of the new bridge. He counted three Eisenhowers and began his retrieve.

  Nothing.

  Second cast.

  Nothing.

  Three casts were all Lodge allowed himself. He was the sheriff, always on his way someplace. He flipped the spoon as far as he could, gave it an extra Eisenhower to sink.

  “Come on, baby. Talk to me.”

  Something struck and Lodge struck back. The spoon launched out of the water with a brook trout about the same size attached. All this business flew toward the basswood behind the sheriff. Spoon-with-trout caught an outlying branch and hung up.

  “Well, suck a duck.”

  Lodge tugged with the rod. The branch bounced. The little brookie wiggled with all its might. The sheriff tugged harder. No deal. Stuck up there. Not a keeper. He had to move fast. They said a trout could live about as long breathing air as a man could live breathing water.

  Sheriff Lodge pulled his service revolver and shot the branch off, first try—reeled it in, freed the trout—wished it was like before, only a week ago, when he could make it a funny story to tell You-Know-Who.

  He parked nose-to-tail with Shunk’s Subaru wagon on the sand highway. The Luce County Bookmobile still blocked the logging road to the river, crime scene tape around it. T-boned behind the bookmobile was a recreational vehicle out of the early ‘80s, when Lodge was a middle-aged sheriff and gas was cheap. The Marquette County crime scene van was parked up the road.

  Sheriff Lodge popped his glove box and stepped out of his cruiser with the package of teriyaki beef jerky. He and You-Know-Who had been having fun with this whole teriyaki thing. The whole world, Lodge complained, was going teriyaki. Shunk’s car was teriyaki. Kids walked around with teriyaki haircuts. Coming next was teriyaki beer. But the joke seemed stale anymore. Lodge rattled the package at Shunk. Shunk said no thanks. More like no way. Lodge didn’t want any either.

  You-Know-Who’s cruiser had been there all night on the oppos
ite shoulder. A rind of frost went along the ditch and up and over the cruiser and back down into the ditch again, as far as Lodge could see along the flat, pine-flanked stretch of State 410.

  He approached the cruiser’s passenger window and scratched a hole in the frost. At least she wasn’t in there making out with You-Know-Who-Else. That was good.

  Shunk had an injury out of Viet Nam but he was a rapid little shitbird anyway. He speed-limped to the spot where the frost was rust-colored, formed over the suspect’s blood. Sure enough sipping ions from shapely plastic bottle, the county attorney said, “Let me make sure I understand. He’s bleeding, crawling along this ditch here, two hundred pellets of industrial grade Ice Melt in his back, and he’s asking you to do him a favor?”

  This was correct. “He was giving me a phone number,” Sheriff Lodge said.

  “Did you get it?”

  “I called it this morning. Somewhere near Boston. Fellah asks me what I want.”

  “And?”

  “Heck if I know. This fellah here with the salt in his back passed out after he gave me the number. I was telling him no, not here, trying to get him to crawl out before he put his face down in this nasty stuff.”

  Shunk looked down blankly. Teriyaki or no, some things never changed. Ions wouldn’t help either. Downstaters still stepped in every kind of trouble they could find.

  “It’s poison ivy.”

  “Oh.”

  Shunk stepped back.

  “He made it past the stuff,” Lodge said. “I told the Boston fellah that I got the number from Theodore Oglivie and a woman starts screaming in the background. Fellah says he’s going report me to the cops.”

  “Always fun.”

  “Yup. I got to say I was the cops. Fellah hung up.”

  Lodge realized he had put a shred of beef jerky into his mouth. He chewed it down to a paste and swallowed. “About ten minutes later, I’m running a CrimeNet check on the phone number—You-Know-Who’s been teaching me computers—and the woman called me back. She’s his ex-wife. And you know what our boy is?”