The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  Well, someone had.

  Margarite sat down in her cruiser and dialed her cell phone. “I’m back,” she told her new friend, Esofea Smithback, who had approached Margarite in the Luce County building after Margarite’s outing at the brat fest. She had given the deputy some kind of spirit-healing geode and a hug. Next day Margarite had reciprocated with a pair of earrings she had decided not to give Julia.

  “Meet you at the office?” Margarite asked her now.

  Esofea’s reply was small and sniffly: “Ok.”

  “Just like you told me the other day,” Margarite said. “You are so much bigger than this. You’ll survive.”

  “Ok.”

  Margarite started the cruiser and pulled onto Main Street. What developed next in the Kock saga was that Shunk had found himself unable to get any traction on the Pine Stump case as long he was working with Sheriff Lodge and the county’s assorted part-time deputies. They were all too habituated to avoiding the wrath of Kock. So the new county attorney convinced the board to put a line in the budget for a full-time deputy. Enter applicant Margarite DuCharme, who, given her looks, and however she played them—up, down, or sideways—had gotten every job she had ever tried for, from sixth-grade president to sheriff’s deputy. So there she was suddenly in the Upper Peninsula, living very privately with her new love Julia and investigating a 2006 fire that killed Farooq Kalim, the former dry-waller from Pontiac who had been burned beyond recognition trying to save his investment in the Pine Stump Motel.

  Margarite worked for Shunk discretely over the next several months. She had felt insubordinate and guilty leaving her boss, sweet old Bruce the Moose, out of the loop. But Shunk seemed right in claiming that the sheriff didn’t much want to know. Quite easily, she had turned up stuff the sheriff should have documented four years ago. She had given Shunk two “meetings” between Farooq Kalim and Heimo Kock. She had given Shunk affidavits from six others in the U.P. recreation business, establishing a long history of intimidation by Kock. As for Paul “Donuts” Rudvig (nearly the county attorney, Margarite had to remind her unwilling brain): she had placed Kock’s right-hand-man near the scene one hour before the fire. Shunk had been just one link away from filing charges against the “governor.”

  Now what?

  Margarite drove up Main and turned right onto West Harrie just as the high school let out for lunch. The kids used to wave. They would again. Eventually. Maybe. But today they nudged each other, whispered and smirked. There goes Deputy Dyke.

  Margarite sighed heavily. New frictions chafed everywhere in the last few days, in formerly simple moments, expanding and bearing down. Goddamned Julia. How was this fair? Margarite had been taking care of her, protecting her. As Julia’s partner, and payer of the rent, didn’t Margarite deserve more than a sudden, vulgar exposure? Lately Kock, or someone on Kock’s behalf, had tried hard to intimidate Margarite: a broken window, dead fish on the lawn, menacing phone calls. She had hidden these threats from Julia, knowing she would respond badly, get herself into trouble. But … that whole dynamic … secrets, assumptions, silent sacrifices, taking care of someone who did not reciprocate … God, it felt familiar. Margarite’s gut burned. What was wrong with her?

  She stopped waving to the high school kids. She had other things to think about. Events could break quickly from this point. How it worked was the “Governor of the U.P.” was a racketeer and an extortionist. He had established a world where all Upper Peninsula guiding and tripping, everything from fly fishing to sea kayaking to snowmobile tours, had to go through his company, Superior Outfitters. If not—as in the case of Farooq Kalim—then “meetings” took place to discuss the unwritten laws of the land.

  It was such a shame. Margarite had learned that Farooq Kalim had been a natural for the U.P. Before leaving Pakistan in the ‘80s, he had hunted ibex, wild boar, deer, and ducks, and he had also done some fishing. He loved snowmobiles and hated government. He saved his money, bought and upgraded the failed motel at Pine Stump Junction, and immediately refused to pay his taxes, like a good Yooper patriot. But then Kalim’s American dream went too far. He got an outfitter’s license and offered bargains, packages, free trail maps, got his business written up in the Daily Miner and the Detroit Free Press. In the first off-season, deep February, after his apparently unsuccessful meetings with Heimo Kock, his motel caught fire. According to the fire inspector’s report, Kalim’s body was so charred, and the motel so totally devastated, that it was impossible to say what had prevented him from getting out. The case photos haunted Margarite.

  She took a third slug of Pepto just on the memory. Still distracted as she rolled past Saint Gregory’s Catholic Church, Margarite answered a live call from Julia, and Julia said, accusation in her voice, “Where are you?”

  Margarite told her precisely. She was heading west of Main on Harrie, passing the church.

  “Well, you don’t have to be that way about it,” Julia responded. “You just never tell me anything.”

  “Now I’m turning left into the county lot.”

  After a few seconds, the pissed-off silence on the other end was disrupted by the sounds of Julia twisting the cap off a beer bottle, the cap bouncing off the counter and rolling on the kitchen floor. Margarite couldn’t help herself.

  “How many is that?”

  “You don’t come home, you don’t call—” Julia was going for the train wreck right off the bat “—what am I supposed to do?”

  So many angry answers to that one. Clean the house. Cook something. Get a job. Get treatment. You have all these options, and yet you—

  But anger chews holes in a person’s stomach, Margarite reminded herself. So she took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry,” and then she broke it all down for Julia: Sheriff Lodge getting to the scene first, Margarite having to bust hump all the way from Brimley because she was over there taking complaints about extortion by Kock from a guy at the marina—meanwhile their bloody suspect crawling off into the bush, a pile of evidence on fire down that sand road, and what might be Kock’s body rolling away along the bottom of the Two Hearted River.

  Deep breath.

  Honestly, she was too busy to even think of calling—though somewhere on Highway 28, yes, a whole half hour in the cruiser, it might have crossed her mind. But then the logistics got hairy. The sheriff went with the ambulance back to Newberry, gone before Margarite even arrived. That left her with Esofea Smithback to manage—

  “Oh, your little librarian quote-unquote friend. I see.”

  —to try to get some straight answers out of a girl who had popped a couple of Vicodin or something, who Margarite had found sitting against the wheel of the bookmobile reading Dr. Seuss books and giggling through a stream of tears. So she called Tim Shrigley, who worked as a part-time deputy for special events, and had Tim come drive Esofea home.

  “So nice, the way you think of her.”

  Then these borrowed crime scene people arrived from Munising and muddled around until dark. Bruce the Moose asked her would she mind to spend the night there, make sure no one messed around—which she had already decided was necessary. So she spent the night reading in the bookmobile, or walking up and down the road trying to keep warm, and by morning they had borrowed divers coming to look for the body in the river. So once Bruce the Moose got there to supervise that, she had to drive back down to Newberry to get on her computer, put the suspect into the system, let it work. Then there was all this evidence to log. But for the moment she had to go interview Esofea—

  “Oh, of course. Have fun.”

  Here came the lid off the Pepto bottle. Glug four. The pink stuff slid down.

  “Sweetheart,” Margarite said, “I love you.”

  Another bottle cap spun on the kitchen counter. “No, you don’t. You hate me. You’re mad at me.”

  “We’ll talk tonight.”

  Esofea Smithback, heavy into a Xanax-and-Five-Hour Energy mixer, replayed those twenty minutes inside the bookmobile over and over in her mi
nd. She had the varmint, then she lost him, then somehow he had her, which got him shot.

  But she found, under review—her loopy, anxious mind double-tasking while she reread Astrid Lindgren’s lovely chapter called “Pippi Plays Tag with Some Policemen”—that she had not pulled the trigger in the midst of complete emotional anarchy, as she had first assumed. Shooting the man the news websites were calling “trout bum Theodore ‘Ned’ Oglivie, 42, of West Newton, Massachusetts,” was actually not the single most confused and awful thing she had ever done. At least it was not only that. She had apprehended either the killer or an accomplice in the murder of Heimo Kock. She had dropped him with rock salt before he escaped into the bush—and therefore she had also saved his life. And that life, again upon review, seemed quite possibly worth saving.

  No doubt she had saved him. The validation for that still made her pulse race uncomfortably. Only last summer an inmate had defeated security during a transfer at Newberry Correctional and made a dash into the vastness of the Lake Superior State Forest. The runner was an anonymous white man from Indiana, in prison for routine offenses involving drug dealing. But from the way the local asshats mustered their civilian militia, you would have thought a Black Panther had shot a Republican president during a Super Bowl game. Well ahead of the prison search unit and the state police, vigilante dog teams had combed the swamps around the upper Tahquamenon River for no more than a hour or two before a premium varmint named Donuts, Kock’s bear hunting coordinator, had “regrettably” shot the unarmed convict five times “in self-defense” in a bog on Syphon Creek. Esofea’s trigger squeeze had stopped a repeat of that scenario, no doubt.

  And also, thinking in layers, she was at the same time saying to herself, Right here, this moment, is a good place to stop all this shittiness in my life, to find out why I am the way I am, face facts, and do something about it—and meanwhile her eyes were taking in the words that made Pippi dance away along the ridgepole of Villa Villekulla while two policemen dimly pursued. She was laughing out loud about this or perhaps about something else she hadn’t thought of yet when Deputy Margarite DuCharme touched her shoulder and she jumped. It was kind of a blur, this state she was in, the aftershock of shooting someone.

  “Thanks for coming in,” the deputy said. “How about we sit outside?”

  “Sure”

  “You a sun or a shade person?”

  “Shade.”

  “I’m sun,” Margarite said. “Gotta have it. Hmmm, what shall we do?”

  The deputy led Esofea by the arm out the front and around to the west side of the Luce County building. There a red pine cast its mid-morning shadow across the dry and bumpy lawn. The ground sloped awkwardly down into the asphalt lot where the bookmobile, with its shattered window, had been returned to its place beside the cruisers and the snow plows. That was no good, Margarite said.

  Esofea dropped spacily behind and followed the deputy to the south side of the building, where they found only a few little streaks of shade behind saplings that needed water. Watering was custodian Derek Tapp’s job to remember, Margarite commented, but at the current time Derek was having trouble remembering not to drink Jägermeister during work hours.

  The west side was all sun, bees buzzing up from the grass in the early autumn heat. Margarite sighed, “Ahhh,” but kept walking. Esofea liked the way she walked. It was perfect. Margarite DuCharme could pass, if she wanted to, for Cindy Crawford, 2002, People magazine, one of the 50 Most Beautiful—which made it just so cool, so in your face, that the deputy loved girls.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Margarite said, and waited for her. “Let’s go across the street.”

  “Any place is fine.”

  “Not true,” Margarite said, smiling at her. “A ‘whatever’ statement like that is never for real. I’m going to have to watch out for you today, I can tell.”

  A few seconds later, leading Esofea across West Harrie Street to the lawn of the Helen Joy Newberry Hospital, where the grass was green and shaded, the deputy fought a yawn and lost. Esofea yawned too. Margarite said, “Well, you probably did save his life.”

  “I know.”

  “I know you know. But I know that anyway you feel terrible and confused and not sure if you’re in trouble.”

  “Am I?”

  “Some.”

  “What kind?”

  “Well, you shot him in the back. And he was unarmed.”

  Esofea was silent. She couldn’t think of what to say.

  Margarite, teasing her, said, “I know, I know. He’s a good-looking guy under there. You didn’t want to mess up the front,” and Esofea felt herself smiling too as they sat down. But the ground seemed a long way off—and then it was right there, jarring her spine and shaking Pippi from her grip.

  “You ok?”

  “Yup.”

  The deputy smelled like overtime and Lady Speed Stick as she helped Esofea brush off. She leaned forward to pick up the book. “This the good one?”

  “It’s the original. It’s translated into over seventy languages. There are film versions of it in Sweden, the Soviet Union. It’s in Japanese computer games. It comes up in Seinfeld, Austin Powers, The Simpsons—“

  Here she was chattering suddenly, in anxious librarian mode, trying to sell her girl Pippi. At Northern Michigan University, she had written her thesis on the original Pippi Longstocking versus Goes on Board and In the South Seas, two sequels that were sellouts by comparison, picaresque and shallow, caving to societal fears of authentic female independence. She could go on about this and had done so many times with her finger in the face of Danny Tervo, whose Mr. Hemingway never wrote a female character with one-tenth of Pippi’s courage and spunk and who, truth to tell, in Esofea’s opinion, was a rather shitty handler of female … but Margarite’s yawning silence finally registered and Esofea stopped talking.

  The deputy’s eyes were puffy and dark underneath. “I read all the Pippi last night,” she told Esofea. “South Seas was my favorite. It probably shouldn’t be.”

  Esofea’s jaw felt stiff. Suddenly she had to hew words out of the resistant air in front of her. “That’s ok. Everybody’s different. Nobody’s better.”

  “You are just all full of whatever today, aren’t you?” Margarite said. “I’m not much of a reader. I already confessed that.”

  “I should go jogging or something,” Esofea countered. “Be in shape like you.” In her careening mind at this moment, it was exactly eighty-seven days ago and Danny was speaking, telling her why they weren’t ready for their accidental pregnancy—that she needed about six months of detox and aerobics—that he needed to shore up his boundaries before she got too needy—that their relationship required time to reveal its true purpose. And then the fucker, without discussion, while Esofea was walking around in a diaper because the aspiration procedure made her bleed like a stuck pig, went and got his tubes snipped—and this is why he had to suffer.

  “I should do Pilates,” she blurted and started laughing. It came to her abruptly. God, she could take Danny by his empty balls now, couldn’t she?

  “You ok?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was a trick question. You shot someone,” Margarite said. “You are not ok.”

  This was confirmed by a long silence between them while the Saint Gregory’s bell rang eleven times. Esfoea strummed the pages of her Pippi, up and down. Why would a knockout sweetheart like Margarite be interested in Julia Inkster, she found herself musing. And since when was Julia gay? The same little bitch that had poached on Danny two summers ago? How did this make sense? Along West Harrie rumbled a flatbed truck with that dusty RV on the back of it. This guy Dog’s side door flapped loose as the truck turned up the sloped drive into the county lot. The driver jumped out, hit levers, started things hissing. The truck bed began to tilt.

  “If we can keep him safe in there, he’s going to be ok,” Margarite said with a tip of her head toward the hospital.

  “Really?”

  “
Very likely, if he can avoid infection. He’s sedated for the time being. They’re going to see how the salt crystals behave beneath his skin. He should recover pretty fast after that.”

  “Good.”

  “Yes. Good. And lucky.”

  “Who me?” Esofea said. “Lucky?”

  “Yes, you. He was running away from you, not a threat. Anybody else would have let him go, but you pulled the trigger. And you’re lucky that I’m the one to ask you about it. Now I need you to go back inside the bookmobile and remember everything that went on between you two.”

  Esofea swallowed a giddy burp. That was a funny way to put it: what went on between you two.

  Like Margarite could see into her mind and watch Esofea and Dog having their little Smithback-Tervo relationship workshop, compacted into twenty minutes at gunpoint within the bookmobile, and marvel at how it had ended with Esofea in this strange and exiting new place.

  But of course her deputy friend could not see into her mind.

  People just thought other people could see what they were thinking.

  But they couldn’t.

  Esofea’s mouth was dry. She should drink more water. And never smoke, of course.

  “He told me everything,” she said.

  Deputy Margarite DuCharme reached into her shirt pocket for a pen.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” Esofea said. “Starting with when he met Danny Tervo.”

  6

  Brent Takahashi was knee deep in the reed river, taking a water sample, when he saw the silver tanker glide into the parking lot and scatter a group of ladies coming in for the Ikebana Club breakfast.

  Essence of Soy. This idiot is so lost, Takahashi thought.