The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  Shit. Was that how it was? Then where would she stand?

  Esofea sank below the surface of the bath, blowing bubbles. Underwater, she straightened her hair into a long slick strand and thought of a kelp, its hold-fast cemented to the stone of her head. As the bathwater sloshed lazily to and fro over her submerged body, the coppery hair between her legs unmatted like a sea flower and swayed in the waves. Anemone was wind in Greek. Seahorses held on against the sea wind with their tails. The males got knocked up and had the babies. That was it for nature. Just that one tiny turn-about, down in the weeds at the bottom of the ocean, and that was it. God, how she wished all the chemicals had turned Danny Tervo into a seahorse.

  “Were you worried?” she said in a splash and a gasp of breath to Mr. Nilsson, who, from atop the toilet tank, only blinked.

  “The fucker did this to a stranger, used him, planted a body and left him to deal with it. Right in character, don’t you think? Disrespect for human life? That’s why that karma thing, one life for another, I believe it—as I know you do, too, Mr. Nilsson. Agree with me. Unless you think you can swim, you little shit.”

  She sank back to the ocean bottom. Did it matter, now that her bag was in the hospital cabinet? And where was Danny, by the way? Mysteriously gone? Was not that a supporting fact?

  A half hour later, when the water was tepid, Esofea climbed out and dried off and lubed her skin and put on her nightgown and her glasses and confronted the stack of books on the night table. All at once, in her style, she was reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (nights when she believed she could understand Danny through “the metaphor of bullfighting”), and Dr. Seuss’s There’s a Wocket in My Pocket—actually not so much reading that last one but absorbing it into her memory for future professional use.

  She felt too sleepy tonight, though. Didn’t even remember to take her glasses off. Just turned the light out and had the bright idea to hook her tail on a weed to stop the spinning and murmured, “Goodnight, lady seahorse,” and swayed, and swayed in place, until some small pre-dawn hour when a semi honked and he pounded on the door, hollering, “Hey, Sofi. Open up, baby. I got a bottle of wine!”

  13

  Tervo knew women. Women made you wait when they were pissed at you but didn’t know why and had no better way to express themselves.

  “I know you’re up there, Sofi.” Crooning at her window on the second floor. “Hey, lovely girl, I got Grigio.”

  He did this loud enough, Esofea would worry about the neighbors, come down to hiss and scowl, say shut up and get inside.

  Not yet though. Maybe she was zonked. Good times, then. As in likewise.

  Tervo had pulled his tanker into the big empty corner at Engadine and hot-boxed a bud of that new Tucson skank, making his own buzz official, putting stupid Rowntree to the side of his thoughts and letting his mastermind out for a run. Point: canibinoidal thought conferencing; point: global climate change; point: as for the droughts of the future, b-b-b-baby you ain’t seen n-n-n-n-nothing yet; point: water was the new oil. Question: Who was the new Exxon? Who was the new Al Capone? Who was the new Ray Kroc? Fact: in Barcelona, in 2008, tankers convoyed water from distant rivers to save the city. Desalination? Really? Could anyone afford that besides the Saudis? No, ma’am. All he had to do was get upstairs with that wine and put his hand in the right place and say, baby, come on now, I know you see it: my purpose, all I got time for, I’m the father of an idea. He called up there, “Baby, must I yodel?”

  Apparently he must. Finnish folkways being another of his areas, Danny Tervo cut loose in the Laplander style, speaking reindeer about the size of his horn.

  That did it. Baby opened the front door. Her glasses on. Naked.

  See? The girl was crazy about him.

  Esofea Maria Smithback, in love with him since fifth grade, since she had breast bumps and he had cigarettes and they slouched up and down Main Street Newberry after school like a couple of midgets with their arms around each other. She never had done a single one of those nasty things she promised when she was mad at him. Never even dated someone else.

  Girl took off ahead of him toward the bedroom. He slapped her fine bare tush about halfway up the staircase.

  “Looking good, baby.”

  Pursuit. Yeah. He tried to get a grip, reach through and grab that bony redhead pubis like a handle. She sped up, shanked his hand between her thighs, almost broke his thumb off.

  “Damn, baby. You gonna say hello or anything?”

  “Hello, Danny.”

  “Guten abend, my love.”

  “You’ve been busy?”

  “Been out of town, you know, hauling shit around the country. It’s what I do.”

  “Hexane to the Wesson plant?”

  This water thing would be a surprise, Tervo had decided, after he had his Rowntree problem worked out. She would dig his ingenuity.

  “Isohexane, baby. It’s healthier.”

  They were in the bedroom. The reason she was slow to the door: she had been busy torching up some romantic candles. Light flickered on her pale skin. Her glasses held points of flame.

  “You really care, don’t you, Danny? About your fellow man?”

  Lord God on a stick, there were handcuffs on the bed. That game dated back before the accidental fertilization and the drop-off in action. “You know how I feel, baby. Uplift everybody, and you uplift yourself.”

  She jumped—talk about uplift—and wrapped her legs around his waist. Tervo fell back on the bed. She crawled over him like a monkey, her little breasts dangling cutely. Tervo nipped at one as it passed above his face.

  Then—“Damn, baby! Ouch!”—she was sitting on his collarbones. Her pubes prickled his chin. His windpipe flattened as she leaned and reached for his left wrist, pulled it to the headboard of the bed. He felt a cuff come around, cool and hard. He heard a click. Ok. Playing rough. He could dig that. He volunteered his other wrist before she crushed tracheal cartilage.

  “Been a long time, baby. I take this to mean that you finally dig my purpose. You understand how I was born for—you know, how my destiny is not the minivan—how, you know, I’m into some very big ideas, some very big money. Grounded by my principles, right? So listen, I got a story—”

  She muffled him. She put Madam Ovary right square down on his face. This position, Tervo found, was not the same as when it was your own idea, not the same at all. In his fog of distress, he revoked the offer of his right wrist. But she lunged and caught it. As she closed the second cuff, Tervo felt his jaw wrench, her entire 112 pounds bearing down.

  Now Esofea looked right down the middle of her pale and freckled self and into Tervo’s blue Finlander eyes. She looked enormous. Even her breasts looked huge. Her taste and smell filled his senses. Which was way different, the prize, when it wasn’t—

  “We’ve had this conversation before, Danny. Nothing ever changes with you.”

  He pulled in air through one nostril and tried to correct the record: he was change. That’s what she was missing. He was change itself. It was a question of her keeping up with him. But the words backed up in his throat until he was yelling formless sounds straight into her cool, sour—she slid off suddenly—“cunt!”

  She said, “Pretty much sums me up. Do you like my candles?”

  Tervo rolled his head to one side. She had a row of votives along her dresser edge. A large black one, thick as a tanker flange, burned on the nightstand. That was the one that danced in her glasses.

  “Incense too,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Tervo said. “Cool. I dig it, baby.”

  She slid down his body until she sat on his ankles. What that did, basically—Tervo also somewhat of a kinesiologist—was incapacitate his hip flexors, muscles that could not lever well from a flat position. Esofea’s one twelve now stopped his legs completely. Turned out next she had laid a bathrobe sash across the bottom of the bed. She whipped this around his shin bones and tied a knot. Then she slid off and prod
uced a bungee cord. She hooked one end to the mattress frame—as far as he could tell—and then like a trucker strapping down a tarp she stretched up and over at the ankles and hooked the other end to the frame on the other side. Now he couldn’t move much at all.

  Tervo laughed without certainty. “You got me.”

  “Well, I’m working on it.”

  “Do me good, baby.”

  “Yup,” she said.

  “I’ll just lay here and take it.”

  “I guess you will.”

  Tervo’s spine felt uncomfortably bent as he humped his hips at her. “Bring it,” he said, but she came back at him with scissors, working up the right leg of his jeans—“Hey, those are my comfort pair, for driving!”—cutting from ankle to waist.

  “Everything ok between you and me, babe?”

  “Ok as ever.”

  “That’s really good to hear.” She yanked the jeans out from underneath him, leaving a little denim burn on the backs of this thighs. “Really excellent to hear. Fine music, baby. Hey, I wanna tell you a story—”

  But the scissors bit into his boxers. They were brand new, an organic hemp-silk blend with natural dyes that Tervo had scored at a co-op in Tucson, killing time while his first hydroponic client got comfortable with the price point of his product. Awesome moment: the sun beating down, the greatest drought in a lifetime turning everything to a crisp, Tervo with one big deal already in the works. He thought of telling Sofi this instead, impressing her. This guy, this wealthy Arab businessman, Ali Ali Fahm from Syria, sixty years old, builds his twenty-five-year-old blond wife a garden with figs and kumquats and birds of paradise, clipped white swans in one pond, giant Asian lotus in another, and now, losing it all for lack of water, is presented with the offer of a six-month “resource membership”—the way Tervo decided to set it up, like an exclusive club, a privilege only the few could access. Tervo had cruised the co-op for only about thirty minutes, had just picked out these very boxers, before Ali Ali Fahm came back on the track phone, joined the club with a two-grand cash deposit. But now Rowntree—

  Esofea had shredded and stripped away his boxers and she was telling him, “Things have pretty much been excellent, I’d say, since after I let you talk me into having the abortion and I didn’t feeling like screwing you for a while but I had to anyway to keep this bad boy out of the Petri dish, meanwhile realizing that deep down I must have wanted the baby, because I had stopped taking my pills, and also realizing that even though I don’t know where I’m going in life, you and I are born to take totally different paths but I’ve been following yours. I just wasn’t appreciating how excellent that was.”

  “Huh?”

  “Crazy me.”

  “I got no idea, babe, where this is coming from. You doing ok? You on some shit without me?”

  Esofea just looked at him. She was still naked. But it didn’t seem like she was. Also, de-tumescence was now in progress.

  “Darling, aren’t you gonna cut my shirt off too?”

  “Why?” she said, and kept staring until Tervo got the idea they were into a different area of human sexuality here. Like a breast cancer exam or a pap smear—or when the doctor squeezed a testicle like a kiwi fruit. He tested the bungee cord. He had the all the strength and mobility of a tarp, for sure.

  “Hey—we talked about the abortion. We talked and talked. Life should not be an accident. You agreed, babe, it wasn’t the time.”

  “That’s right. Rather than be alone with it. Then, while I was thinking about what I wanted, you went and had your surgery. Only this time we didn’t talk at all. You just did it, and told me later.”

  He had her now, Tervo thought. You fight feminism with feminism, a trick he learned at UNM before he decided that college moved too slowly.

  “Hey—” he gave her a big grin “—my body, myself.”

  But Esofea, no reaction, moved away from the bed. His comeback slumped onto the floor and lay there, flat and dirty. At her dresser, she put on her panties—left foot, right foot—and looked at him over her shoulder. She said, “Feels weird to say that, doesn’t it, when someone else is in control?”

  She put her nightgown on. She tied her hair back. She set her glasses on the dresser and began rubbing cream on her face.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?”

  She came back by the bed and looked down at him, crossing her arms.

  “What are you up to, Danny?”

  “Help me out, Sofi. What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Danny Tervo. I’m done with that. We’re into a new chapter here. You’re not trucking hexane to Oklahoma anymore. Or you never were. Tell me what you’re doing.”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “You can lie better than that.”

  “Ok, look. Don’t worry. I’m not doing anything wrong. How’s that?”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Sofi.”

  “Are you serious?” The glasses went back on. “You never tell the truth.”

  “Au contraire,” argued Tervo, and immediately he regretted the smart-ass linguistics. She had him tied down, for Christ’s sake, his clothes off, his giblets sitting out there on a platter.

  But he really had to dispute the “never tell the truth” remark: “The truth beneath the truth, Sofi, that’s the one I tell.”

  Goddamn librarian now, tight hair and glasses, tight dry lips, looking at him like he’d wiped a booger in a book. Then she startled him.

  “Sure. That’s about where I figured we would end up. So, speaking of the truth beneath the truth, I told Deputy DuCharme you paid that guy to kill Heimo Kock.”

  Tervo’s head came off the bed, his eyes bugging with surprise as she went on.

  “Which is so much the truth beneath the truth that the deputy didn’t even blink.”

  “You little witch. I wasn’t even involved.”

  “Which is exactly what you would say if you were involved.”

  What the hell? Tervo tried to rise up and shake her, slap her, whatever it took—something inside him still not getting the situation, not believing it.

  “Jesus, Sofi—you told the cops I paid for a hit?”

  “That seemed like a real good guess.”

  “I didn’t.”

  She shrugged. “Oh, well. I said you did. I told her that the guy told me that.”

  Christ. She was stupid. She would get felony obstructing. Wasn’t she smarter than that? Now he couldn’t tell his Rowntree story, either. So fuck it. Throw the phone away. Keep the money. Never see the sick punk again.

  “He won’t back you up, Sofi, because it’s not true. And he’s in custody. They’ll talk to him again before you do. You’re screwed, girl. I can prove where I was.”

  “Where?”

  “I mean if I have to.” But shit, then … his alibi would expose Mr. Ali Ali Fahm, Takahashi, and lead eventually to the scene at Brownsville Auto Parts grow house. And it would give up the empire. “What do you want, Sofi?”

  She didn’t answer. She studied his naked lower half, shaking her head slowly side to side and looking sad. She reached out with a toe and gave his giblets a jiggle.

  “Isn’t it a weird feeling, Danny, when those private parts that want to be touched so badly, that really define what we’re here on earth for, that we share with the people we love the most—isn’t it the weirdest feeling when they just hang out there, like raw meat, in the middle of nowhere, with no purpose other than to amuse another person? Doesn’t that just suck to the core?”

  “You’re sick, Sofi.”

  “How about if you reverse it, Danny Tervo.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your snip job. Which stands for all this bullshit with me. Fix it. Yes or no. Decide you can be good to me or I will put your darling ass in prison. Because if you didn’t kill Heimo Kock, you’ll have to say what else you were doing. And I’m sure it’s not legal.”

  Ok. Shit. Follow her here. “So you tell the
truth and I reverse it?”

  “First you reverse it, Danny. Then I’ll tell the truth. Unless I change my mind and think of a better deal for myself. Isn’t that the way you’d play it?”

  Ok, Tervo thought. He had it now. So it was about reversing history, getting a replay on life. This shit was easy. Girl just needed a little philosophy lesson.

  He opened his mouth wide to take a deep, compassionate breath. He closed his eyes to concentrate on his access point to truth and wisdom. “Sofi … girl … what you don’t understand … I mean—ok—let me put it this way: in the words of the great Lao Tsu—”

  She stuffed a lighted votive candle into his mouth.

  All the way back to his molars.

  “Shut up, Danny.”

  And turned away to search the pockets of his shredded pants.

  Tervo thrashed against the cuffs and the bungee. Wax scalded his chin and chest. He screamed in the dark back of his throat. “Oh, sorry,” she said, and blew the flame out.

  He watched her. She found his prepaid in his pants pocket. She took it. She took his keys. She grabbed her alarm clock and a thick book from the nightstand. A pager too, one from the county office. He heard her heels strike wood in the stairway, going down.

  “Nighty-night,” she called.

  14

  Deputy Margarite DuCharme often fly fished in her dreams. This meant that she dreamed of love. That’s exactly how it felt, anyway. Her dreams ran like stage plays where the parameters of love were revealed inside the depths and corners of fishing stories—the unknowable complexity and helpless attraction, the going out and the coming back, the blank faces of rivers and their explosions into idiotic joy, the heartbreak, the yearning, the fleeting moments of grasp—and, in Margarite’s really juicy dreams, the tackle.

  Oh, the tackle …

  The part you carried with you. The part you touched. The part you could touch when you weren’t fishing. The part you dressed and sharpened. The attraction, the connection—the barb, the hook.