The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  10

  Luce County Sheriff Bruce “The Moose” Lodge built his and Charlotte’s dream house up on Widgeon Creek, isolated and perfectly quiet, with bird feeders and mineral licks for the deer, with flower and vegetable gardens, and then sixteen months later Charlotte had her stroke and died. You know. That whole sob story.

  He didn’t care to go into it. What can you do? What can you say?

  The sheriff did take longer getting through his day. That was one thing. He didn’t hurry home. He kind of stretched things out. He knew every bridge in the county that had fishable water under it. There were eighty-six.

  From the crime scene up on 410 he had followed the ambulance with Heimo Kock’s body back to where the highway became paved and then turned to four lanes and swept between the Indiantown bluffs into Munising, toward the morgue and the medical examiner. He came back on 28 eastbound, flipping his big spoon three times into Prairie Creek and three times into the Creighton and Driggs rivers. Trout jumped all over but paid no attention to the Daredevil. It was brushy as hell after mid-summer, too, and his angles were bad.

  He had a late lunch in Seney and might have felt a strike on his first cast into the Fox River before a call came about teenagers drinking at the Natalie campground on the Dollarville Flooding. Sheriff Lodge drove down there, poured some alcohol out on the ground, and caught an axe-handle pike in the flooding, casting from the boat launch.

  In an hour he was back at his desk. The sheriff’s big hands smelled like pike and schnapps as he put the word out to look for Kock’s vehicle. It was a white GMC Yukon. Might have a food pantry delivery in the back. Canned goods and macaroni, that kind of thing.

  That’s when it hit him that Heimo Kock, a fellow he’d known all his life and dealt with for thirty years as sheriff, a fellow he both loved and despised, was dead.

  What can you do? What can you say? Everybody had some good in them, and everybody had some bad in them, and everybody died.

  Bruce Lodge did need to dab his eyes a little, actually. Blow his nose.

  Couldn’t argue with Fritz Shunk, though. Kock was without a question the biggest horse’s ass Lodge had ever known. The man had to dominate every fish and mammal within about a two-hundred-mile radius. He had to have relations with every woman who would let him and with a few who wouldn’t and with far too many who weren’t even women yet. He had kept cranking up his machine to get Bruce the Moose re-elected, term after term, the sheriff neither asking nor giving permission for the help, no discussion between them on the topic, ever. Winters, when outfitting was slow, Kock loaded up that Yukon at Dobber’s in Escanaba and drove Cornish pasties all over the whole U.P. to folks shut in by the weather, dropped off fruitcakes at all the resorts and motels and sports shops, bought rounds in all the taverns. In summer he collected for food pantries, passed out free hats, tuned his political engine. Kept himself on people’s minds. Gave the sheriff the cover of saying he was a good man. Hell. Who wasn’t, in some way?

  In the afternoon, the school bus to Curtis broke down near the north shore of Manistique Lake. On his way out, the sheriff stopped at the bridge over the East Branch of the Manistique River. One cast. Two casts. Bad angle again. He went up and across the road to get a better look from the upstream side. His third cast overshot and hung up in alder branches across the river. It came out, but with a big green leaf attached, wobbling back across the current like something even a musky wouldn’t look at. Strike three. Suck a duck.

  He delivered half a dozen kids to their houses and the driver home to Engadine. It was after five o’clock by then. At Furlong Creek, first cast, his spoon hit the concrete bridge abutment and returned with its treble hook broken off. Climbing back to the road, the sheriff stumbled in the jagged chunks of concrete fill. His big body toppled hard.

  He lay there. Nothing serious, just pain that went away, and a broken rod, but he lay there longer than he needed to, exploring the dimensions of a quiet disappointment that dwelled in the cold shade beneath the bridge. He watched swallows swoop under to their mud nests, trailing little wakes of sunshine, and eventually he thought about You-Know-Who.

  The lady-lover.

  The impostor.

  The lesbian.

  The one who should have told him.

  Margarite.

  Maybe a half hour passed. Eventually he noticed that of all those names, it was the last one, Margarite, that returned to his mind and then his tongue, made him feel like standing up, going home, getting on with it.

  Margarite. She had a name again.

  Hell, though, he still felt angry.

  She was sitting on his porch when he arrived home at dusk. They crossed words as he limped up his little bark path. “Funny seeing you here.”

  “You broke your rod.”

  “Really?” He scowled at her. “I didn’t notice.”

  “I brought beer.”

  “You’re on emergency tonight.”

  “Right. But you’re not.”

  Here came Goldie, Charlotte’s ancient kitty, trotting across the lawn. Her half-cup of Friskies was sometimes the only reason Lodge came home at all. Though where else he might go was unclear to him. He turned on the porch light.

  “You’re in my chair.”

  “I’m not contagious. But ok, I’ll move.”

  “That’s Charlotte’s chair.”

  “You can make me stand, Sheriff, but you can’t make me leave. We’re going to talk.”

  Lodge went inside and got a bowl of cat food. He set it on the deck and collapsed down heavily in his chair. His knee hurt, his elbow. His rod was busted. He was hungry without a clue what he had in the house to eat. So he just said it.

  “You should have told me.”

  “Why?”

  “So I could have hired someone else.”

  There. That was one angry piece of how he felt. Making a fool of him. A dunce. Bruce the Moose. He had enough of that.

  “Ok,” she responded at last, slowly. “By that you mean to say there was someone better?”

  He looked at his deputy. Such a goldarned beautiful young lady, first class in every way. Polite too: holding out an open bottle of beer from some pissant teriyaki brewery that thought too highly of itself.

  “You mean you had a better candidate than me, but you passed that one over and hired me for my looks? And it turns out you did that for nothing? Because I do it with girls? Tell me, Sheriff. Was I supposed to do it with you?”

  Lodge gripped the arms of his lawn chair.

  “You should have told me, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do. Be honest.”

  “Really. Then you should have told me Heimo Kock ran this county, got you elected to pick off downstaters for speeding tickets and stay out of his way. Be honest.”

  Lodge clenched his jaw. Goddamn Heimo Kock had pushed him around since grade school. His wife had always said that. “Sit down.”

  “Charlotte won’t mind?”

  Lodge sighed. “Charlotte is dead.”

  His head drooped to his chest. He had never said that before. Almost seven years now, and those three words—Charlotte is dead—had never left his mouth. Now, as Margarite sat, he felt a presence in Charlotte’s chair beside him, and he knew what he had done. Another truth just flowed from his mouth, on a plan of its own.

  “You reminded me of her. That’s all. When she was young.”

  He covered himself with a swallow of the beer. Crap with bubbles, teriyaki dark and weird, just like he imagined. The bottle trembled in his big fist.

  “She was so pretty,” he said. “That’s all. So graceful.”

  He raised his head to look across the creek. There it was, the sunset, lighting the treetops on fire. This is what he tried to miss. He tried to come home after it was over.

  “She was fun to be around. Smart kid. Decent.” His voice shook. “She always said what she was thinking.”

  Lodge took a deep breath. He looke
d away from the western sky. Another swallow of that beer took the edge off, for sure. Powerful alcohol. Almost made you forget you were surrounded by teeny brook trout and teriyaki everything, by lesbians and civil rights lawyers and beer the color of tobacco spit. Heimo Kock was finally dead. Next up: Bruce the Moose. Was that it? Join Charlotte in heaven? He was supposed to believe he would see her again, but he had found out that he did not. He ought just as well to lie down beneath a bridge, become mud, turn into swallow nests.

  A mosquito lit on the sheriff’s finger. He blew it off. It flew over his deputy’s way. Now they were looking at each other. “She wouldn’t have told a dirty joke like you told to the divers. She wasn’t like that.”

  “Of course not. She didn’t have to be like that.”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “No, she didn’t have to be. You don’t get it, do you?”

  “I most surely do not.”

  She sat forward. “I get hassled a lot. Men think I’m straight. When they find out I’m not, they’re cheated, they feel they have a license to attack. Sound familiar?”

  Lodge stared at her face: she stared clear-eyed right back at him. He never felt like attacking. More just jilted and hurt, now that he thought about it.

  “A dirty joke like that?” she said. “That’s how I let men know I’m not afraid of them. And you want to know one reason I wear my vest all the time? I don’t need the extra attention my body attracts. I tell the dirty jokes first, before they get told on me.”

  Lodge rubbed his face. Goldie finished her food and jumped up on the porch rail. She tight-roped to the middle and then sat down. Here was something the sheriff felt he could say: “Well, I just thought you were real pretty and real smart and a very nice person who wouldn’t normally say things like that.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  Lodge tried the beer again. So bitter it climbed up in his sinus. He looked at the bottle. It had won a blue ribbon somewhere. Lord help him.

  After a moment his deputy said, “Listen. The problem is that when you find out who I’m in love with, you want to take all those things away from me. You want to say I’m somehow counterfeit. I’m not who I claim to be.”

  “I just thought you should have told me.”

  She sighed and Lodge felt bad. He couldn’t help it. He just thought she should have told him. It wouldn’t go away.

  “You didn’t inform me, did you, Bruce, who you were sleeping with?”

  “I’ll tell you now. Goldie.”

  “But you had plans for me?”

  Lodge groaned and stood up, waving at mosquitoes. He turned off the porch light. He didn’t know what he had plans for. Even though she reminded him of Charlotte, his feelings weren’t ever like that, and it made him angry and confused that she thought so. He wished he hadn’t admitted anything. He dumped the rest of that yuppie swill down his throat. It had a kick. He sat back down and looked at the sky, a little dizzy.

  The sun was gone, leaving a dome of deep, glowing indigo that felt closer than any other sky ever did. It made your eyes give in. It made your heart open up. Charlotte said this late summer deep indigo was the color she wanted to paint the bedroom in the new house behind him. She never managed to get it right, though. So they had to come outside all the time, make love right here. But only a year and a half of that, two summers, and then …

  Margarite hit two mosquitoes, slap, slap, and then she stood up. Sheriff Lodge tried to make out her face in the dark.

  “Are you asking me to resign?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because I’d sue the roads right off Luce County.”

  “That’s what Shunk says.”

  “Listen to Shunk,” she said. She stepped off the porch and crossed the grass toward her cruiser. She turned. “And don’t forget we’re meeting him tonight.”

  He was relieved that she couldn’t see him in the dark: Sheriff Lodge had started to smile a little. He felt proud of her.

  He drove with his window down so the night chill could contest with that ridiculous bottle of beer. It had an aftertaste he could not identify as something that belonged in his mouth.

  By the time he sat down in his desk in the Luce County building, another bad taste had entered his mouth. Julia Inkster. A little shitbird like that, what was Margarite thinking?

  The deputy entered his office carrying an evidence drawer, Shunk behind her, and behind the county attorney some hotshot who Lodge understood was the new tri-county medical examiner. Shunk cradled soda cans in his left arm, balanced a carry-out container on his briefcase, keeping it all together no problem despite that alarming hitch in his gitalong.

  Cokes and deep-fried mushrooms from The Log Jam. That should kill the beer taste. Lodge studied Margarite, tried to see how the taste for shitbird showed itself in her.

  He couldn’t see it, really. He took a Coke, tapped a thick, yellowed fingernail against the top, working his memory. Julia Inkster had stocked trips for Heimo Kock at one point. As far as Lodge knew, she still partied with Paul “Donuts” Rudvig, Kock’s main bear guide, and with a few other of those nasty—

  “Ok, folks.” Shunk interrupted the sheriff’s thoughts, setting the treats down on Lodge’s desk and pulling up a chair. “We’re twenty-four hours in. The law says we have to charge this guy or we can’t hang on to him. This is Doctor … sorry.”

  “Boyd.”

  “Sorry. Dr. Boyd has come down from Munising, so let’s hear what he has to say.”

  Maybe I’m just an old pump handle anymore, Lodge thought as he tried to focus. This Dr. Boyd was gay too maybe? He dressed like he was off a page from one of Charlotte’s catalogs that kept coming in the mail, seven years later—like a downstater on a sailboat vacation, wrinkle-free trousers, topsiders with perfect leather laces, open coral-colored shirt with sleeves three-quarter rolled—or maybe the shirt was “puce,” the sheriff studying these matters on the shitter—an exquisitely trim fellow with a nifty dark beard and smooth, expressive fingers, a cool impatience in his manner until he got a look at Margarite. Then he showed off big, hungry teeth. So not gay? Was that it?

  The top of Bruce Lodge’s head grew hot as the doctor explained directly to his deputy and no one else how Kock had died from ligature, yes, but not from tracheal closure, which required at least thirty-three pounds of pressure. Kock had no neck injuries. There had been no significant pressure. His hyoid bone was intact.

  Hyoid bone. Now there was a new one on Sheriff Lodge. Thirty-some years in the business without hearing about the hyoid bone.

  He tried to wink up Margarite. Teriyaki sauce all over this fellow. But she didn’t look at him.

  “It’s a small, horseshoe-shaped bone in the neck, Sheriff, that helps support the tongue.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  “It is normally broken in a tracheal strangulation. We would also see damage to the cartilage of the larynx.”

  “Ok then.”

  “Only ten pounds for ten seconds.” The doctor returned his attention to Margarite. “That’s all it takes to compress the carotid arteries and cause unconsciousness. Sustain that state for four to five minutes, and the brain dies.”

  Margarite nodded. “He didn’t struggle.”

  “Correct.” Dr. Boyd flashed his teeth for her. “The bumps and abrasions happened after death. The skin on the back of his head is a paste. His buttocks and calves show post-mortis bruising.”

  Suddenly the doctor seemed fascinated with himself, leaning back and crossing his perfect pants at the knee, fondling his beard. Good golly, Lodge erupted silently. Enough already. He stood, his entire head feeling hot as Dr. Boyd said, “He had soil and pine needles in his underpants that didn’t come from the river. My guess it he was dragged around quite a bit. I saved the soil in case you’d like it analyzed.”

  Lodge put out his enormous hand. Dr. Boyd looked like he would rather not, and the sheriff confirmed that worry for him, made it absolutely real as rain with a bone-crushing handsh
ake.

  “We’ll let you know, Dr. Boyd, if we need any more of you.”

  The sheriff started the computer Margarite had been teaching him to use. Shunk became talkative.

  “Dragged around, to me—I mean, dragged around for a significant period before Oglivie dumps him in the river—to me, that doesn’t fit a simple robbery.”

  “Plus his vehicle is in his garage,” Margarite said. “Up in Grand Marais.”

  Lodge looked up, surprised.

  “Well, shit,” Shunk said.

  “And his sunglasses were in his jacket pocket,” she said. “He wasn’t driving. He was inside somewhere.”

  Lodge let them go around with it while he tried to remember how to get into the circuit court records. Onto the internet, and then … He glanced up to see Margarite lift a chain-of-custody envelope from the evidence drawer. “My guess is we haven’t even found the light switch on this one yet. That might be because it’s down in Chicago.”

  “Chicago?” Shunk laughed explosively, staccato and loud, like a startled kingfisher. “I thought I was done with Chicago. I practiced there in the eighties. Got the heck out and went to Detroit. Like that was better.”

  There. Lodge’s big fingers had found their way. Inkster, Julia.

  “Here’s the situation,” Margarite said. “Esofea says that Danny Tervo’s mixed up in this. He wanted to guide fly fishing on his own. Kock was threatening him. That’s one piece. Then June Kock tells me this afternoon that she believes it’s about some secret society of fly fishermen, which I take to be rich guys from Detroit, Chicago, places like that, and Kock was the head of this. The Royal Coachmen. I don’t see Tervo involved in that. But still, that’s piece number two.”

  While the computer system went on its shitbird hunt, Lodge looked up at his deputy. Margarite’s lady friend was from Boney Falls, last he heard, lived on-and-off between man friends with her folks in the dam keeper’s house there. Margarite had bought the old Gavinski place on the Tahquamenon. When had Julia moved in with her? No—that wasn’t his question. What he didn’t get was why.