The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  The Tahquamenon River, a long cast beyond her window screen, now moved through Margarite’s dreams. That lovely beer-brown water flowed around her as she eased over the muck-and-sand bottom, tipsy Julia behind with chipped-lavender fingernails through Margarite’s wader belt, complaining all the way—why didn’t they just go back to the porch for another drink?—stumbling and slipping, about to lurch completely out of balance and dunk them both.

  Margarite spoke to a half-dozen lovers every time she spoke to Julia: “Come on, girl. Hang on to me. We’re going to make it.”

  Why did they always ask make it where?

  Or when? Or how? Or why?

  None of those questions mattered when Margarite stepped into a river. As a girl, when Reggie DuCharme was still around, she had heard him say here we are over and over. Her dad said here we are when he parked in the weeds beyond some bridge and they put their waders on. He said here we are when he handed Margarite a rod, and again when he handed her a fly. He said it when she caught fish and also when she stripped in clots of water weed. He said here we are when rain burst over them, here we are when they sat to undo tangles and wind knots, here we are when he chugged his flask and stretched back for a nap. It was Margarite’s experience that she and her dad were always where they wanted to be, doing what they wanted to do. That was her singular sensation when fishing—and when loving, too—here we are. Satisfaction was simple. It was everywhere. Or she wanted it to be.

  Every woman she fell in love with, Margarite had tried to take fishing. Down at Madison, at the Barrymore Theater during intermission of the Tori Amos concert, this cute little tipsy shitkicker Julia Inkster had told her, “Do I fish? Are you kidding? I’m from the U.P., woman. I was born fishing.”

  “Come on, sweetheart. You said you could do this. Can you get one foot here?”

  “It’s cold.”

  “We’ll get warm later.”

  About once a week through the summer, after dinner, drinks, and wheedling, Margarite could get Julia into a pair of waders and across the yard, into the smooth Tahquamenon just as a high northern sunset flushed through the jack pines and reflected in the big curve below the house. Every night trout rose down there. Julia could catch one on a fly—maybe, hopefully—if they could only make that one small journey together.

  This dream skipped and Julia was casting. She was using the rod like a badminton racket, swatting and swatting harder. Of course that wasn’t working. Then her style shifted to something that might have worked for throwing cats. Her line snagged the water behind her. She ripped it out, flung it yowling in an arc overhead and smacked it to the surface in the short foreground. Her leader and fly fluttered down around her shoulders. Margarite picked it free with calming talk. Ten o’clock and two o’clock. Pretend you’re in a phone booth. Lock the wrist. Load the rod. There were at least a dozen wind knots on that leader, some of them doubles and triples, so dream-big they filled Margarite’s palms and thwarted her fingers. She let go. It was too dark to go on. Anyway, the line was cut, about thirty feet missing—and the rest was a cracked, pale pumpkin color, like the line around Heimo Kock’s neck. “No!” gasped Margarite, and she jerked upright in bed, her heartbeat a hot sting in the tip of her left ear.

  Cracked with age, faded orange—that dream line was Julia’s real line. That line was on the cheap old Cortland reel Julia had discovered at her parent’s house at Boney Falls and insisted on using.

  Margarite eased away from her lover in the bed. The left side of her face was hot. Her left arm was asleep. Holding herself against the early morning chill, she stepped outside in her nightgown. It was foggy in the river bottom. When she hit the yard light, the same old coon wobbled away from the garbage cans, and Margarite’s temper flared out of nowhere. She chucked a stick of firewood at the creature. She missed it not by much. The firewood cartwheeled across the driveway, whanged off the wheel well of Julia’s truck.

  New tires? Four of them? For a girl who scrounged through pockets and ashtrays for beer money?

  Don’t go looking, Margarite told herself. That was a personal rule. You investigate criminals, never friends.

  But she was moving into the fog toward the little black Toyota, pushed by a wave of morbid disbelief. She could not be this unlucky in love. She could not possibly deserve another failure. It had been settling in with her. Esofea nearly blurted it just hours ago. The greatest surprise to locals seemed to be not that Margarite was queer, but who she was queer with. Like Julia had another life, obvious to everyone but her.

  There would be a credit card receipt on the floor of the pickup, and it would be Margarite’s card, if Julia’s habits held. Or did these tires come from the same unspecified source as the Oakley sunglasses that showed up two weeks ago, or the bottle of Hennessey and the leather jacket Julia brought home back in July? She had clerked at Pickleman’s since last November, abruptly quitting in June for no apparent reason. Don’t go looking. Margarite had held to that guideline—until now.

  She found nothing related to tires amidst the junk on the passenger seat and on the floor beneath. Margarite popped the glove box. An empty Bud longneck rolled out. There behind it, startling Margarite, was Julia’s loose-screwed old Cortland fly reel.

  As Margarite removed the reel, the knob snagged inside the glove box and the spool spun freely. Through her mind ran Julia’s words as they discussed Kock’s threats: I told him he had to go through me, he wanted to try some bullshit like that.

  That old fly line—with its wind-knotted leader—it was gone completely.

  Sheriff Bruce Lodge, taking the emergency shift, had been blinking dry-eyed at his computer screen when sleep at last forged its way through his fog of irritation and felled him backwards in his desk chair at 4:02 AM precisely. His great soft dewlap stretched out. His jaw hung open, flecked by a few scraps of deep-fried mushroom. His dingleberry red nose plumed snores at the ceiling.

  His deputy, Margarite DuCharme, was completely clean. She had left no legal footprints along her path toward lap-dancing in public with a delinquent little shitbird drug-eater like Julia Inkster.

  His Margarite was a good girl. In the dream he was having, Sheriff Lodge was shaking her by the shoulders. He was pleading with her. Then he was in his cruiser, on the highway somewhere, screaming up behind Inkster’s little black pickup and pulling the shitbird over. He was stepping out into the swampy dreamscape of a high-risk vehicle-approach when a shout and a gunshot rocked him awake.

  He spun his desk chair slowly until he faced the window. There was a fire in the middle of West Harrie Street. Lodge ran a big mitt over his face. He stretched his eyes open. He pinched his nose, backhanded the last dream-words from his lips. Flames leapt six feet high, right in the middle of the street.

  Lodge bowled the chair back. His shoes were off, lost deep beneath the desk. One of his guilty secrets with his wife gone: peeling his shoes off while they were still tied, leaving them anywhere and going around in his socks, even out to piss on the dewy lawn after dark.

  He staggered groggily across the damp grass of the county building’s lawn toward the fire. It leapt higher, reflecting in the glass box of the hospital emergency entrance. The cold wetness against the bottoms of his feet woke Lodge fully. He looked down. Suck a duck. No shoes.

  A few more befuddled steps and the sheriff found himself stranded in the middle of West Harrie Street.

  Probably that was a firecracker, not a gun. Because there was a fire, not a body, in the street. But what was he planning to do, in sock feet, his hands empty, with a fire?

  The Pine Stump Junction fire flashed through the sheriff’s mind—the astounding heat of it when he stepped from his cruiser, the hungry violence, the awful feeling that he might have let this happen but was helpless to stop it now, his despair as Farooq Kalim’s wife hurled herself against his belly, shrieking and clawing while the motel roof caved in.

  Then in the dark behind Lodge, from the direction of Saint Gregory’s, an engine revved, revv
ed higher, and then a vehicle surged from the church lot on a neutral-drop and a howl of rubber.

  By the time the sheriff turned, a square-nosed pickup with its lights off accelerated straight at him, sucking up the pavement beneath its squealing tires.

  Lodge stumbled back. He raised his palms. The vehicle’s headlights blazed on, blinding him. He was going to get hit. Killed. Like Kalim. He got it now, that instant, in his gut: Heimo Kock had been a killer. Now he lived on through his people.

  But then the inevitable seemed to fly to pieces—brakes screeching and tires smoking, the pickup spinning, Lodge falling away untouched on his own power, scraping his elbows and braining himself on the street as the truck slid around, slinging something from the bed that clanged and bounced into the grass of the hospital lawn.

  Lodge crawled to the curb and sat. Tires squealed again. The truck backed up enough that Kock’s filthy shitbird Donuts Rudvig could leer out the passenger window and hiss back at the driver, “Dumbass. That ain’t her.”

  “This is her night, man. Thursday night.”

  “It’s Bruce the Moose. He ain’t a problem.” Rudvig raised his voice. “Right, Bruce? And you’re gonna make good and sure that fuck in the hospital pays for what he done. Am I right? So we don’t have to?”

  Lodge crawled to a sign pole and raised himself to standing as the truck peeled away. It was a blowtorch that had bounded over him. He found it in the dark wet grass.

  It was true. He wasn’t a problem. Never had been. Yet.

  Thirty minutes later, Sheriff Lodge parked at the road to McPhee’s Landing, angled across Margarite’s driveway, blocking it. He brought his service shotgun up from the trunk. He loaded it. He watched the road, incoming, his cruiser shrouded first in darkness and then in fog as the sun began to emerge above the vast stillness of the Hiawatha National Forest.

  Gradually, colors emerged. Blue sky, white vapor, black river—and in his mirror something pink out there beyond the house, moving.

  Her.

  Lodge started the engine and rolled up the driveway to where his deputy stood shivering in a pale pink nightgown dotted with dark red hearts. He ran his window down.

  “Morning.”

  “Hi.”

  “You ok?”

  “Sure. Yeah.”

  “You going fishing?”

  She looked at the reel in her hand. It was a fly reel, Lodge noted. Pretty useless article, as far as he was concerned. “No. Sleepwalking, I guess.”

  “Everything ok at the house?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nobody bothering you?”

  His deputy didn’t answer that, except to turn away toward the shitbird’s little black Tacoma. The passenger door was open. She put the reel in the glove box and then took care of the door.

  Lodge levered stiffly out of his cruiser. Pain arced from his right hip across his pelvis. He had lost skin from his left palm. His elbow on that side was so swollen his shirt was tight. His head ached, and his heart felt about to burst, but his thinking seemed clear.

  “Somebody’s bothering you,” he said. “Tell me. We can take care of it.”

  “I’m ok.”

  “Listen,” he began. “You said I’d been letting Heimo run things around here.”

  “Never mind,” she said, her voice flat and quiet. She was shivering, looking toward the Taquahmenon. “He’s dead.”

  “No. There’s truth to it. I guess I was just too happy, all those years. I didn’t want to spoil things. I liked driving around the county, chatting with people, being helpful. Those days there were some decent trout beneath the bridges. I liked to bring a good one home to Charlotte.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I was lazy.”

  He looked at her feet. They were bare and wet, flecked with cut grass and sand from the driveway.

  “Heimo did pretty much whatever he wanted. I can’t deny that. He got me elected, then had his way, and I loved my wife and built my house and … but he never … he pushed people around a little, sure, but … I never thought he’d hurt anybody …”

  She exhaled, looking exasperated, and turned away. A little trout jumped all the way out of the river. Suddenly, after all these years, going all the way back, God almighty, sixty years to the “Bruce the Moose” playground taunts, Lodge was ready to knock Heimo Kock’s teeth down his throat. He’d been clenching his fists, hadn’t he, since Charlotte was gone? Now it was too late.

  “Listen.” He started over. “You and Shunk might be right about Pine Stump. I can see a good chance that Heimo had someone light that fire, and I just missed it.”

  That turned her. She pulled hair from her face and looked at him with puffy eyes.

  “Rudvig is probably dangerous,” he admitted. “He might do a thing like that, especially for money, in the winter, when money’s hard to come by up here. And if he thought you were getting ready to arrest Heimo, Rudvig might have killed Heimo so Heimo wouldn’t give him up.” He paused to get his phrasing right. “I guess you might be a target too. They’ve been bothering you. I’m pretty sure.”

  Again, she turned away toward the river. The fog lingered heaviest over the smooth, black current. She and shitbird had a bench beyond the tall grass over there. A fire pit. A lantern stand. A coffee can in the grass for shitbird’s butts.

  “No. We’re fine.”

  When Lodge cleared his throat his entire neck hurt, reminding him that this pain he felt was supposed to be his deputy’s. It was her turn to take emergency calls. They knew that, and they meant to run her over.

  “If Rudvig and them ever threaten you, we can arrest them.”

  She didn’t answer. That same little trout did a flip, missed the bug it was after. Lodge rolled his neck around. He felt the back of his head—a ripe scab there. She was looking.

  “You’re hurt. What happened last night?”

  “Not a thing. Quiet. Fell asleep in my chair.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Oh, that. Some punks lit a fire in the street. I fell down chasing them. You?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “She come home late, wake you up?”

  Margarite just shrugged. Lodge said, “Love can be the damndest thing. Charlotte was married and divorced before we settled down. Twice.”

  The sheriff felt himself chuckle softly. He hadn’t looked back at this stuff in a long time.

  “She liked to drink, get into a lot of drama. We didn’t have drugs in those days or she would have been into those too. But she settled down. So you know, maybe …”

  “I said we’re fine.”

  Margarite turned, zombie-walked into tall wet grass toward the bench. “It seems like you don’t know who you’re with,” Lodge blurted, following.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Julia Inkster hasn’t gone two years since junior high school without getting arrested. Did you know that?”

  “Of course.”

  “She isn’t all … you know, like you are … all for women, either.”

  Her nightgown was wet to the waist when she turned on him, her face abruptly ruined and ferocious: “What do you want?”

  Lodge blinked at her. Blinked again, opened his mouth, tasted salt and by God he was falling all apart suddenly. He was shaking, his thoughts and vision blurring, his big hands open and extended, groping into this space between them.

  “I …”

  “What?”

  “You just reminded me of her. That’s all. You filled my heart up when I saw you. I felt happy. But … I’m sorry … I want you to forgive me.”

  He wavered there, blind and lost until she caught his hands and held them.

  “Stupid old man,” he choked out.

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. I understand. It’s ok.”

  “It’s not. I’m sorry.”

  Cautiously, deliberately, she moved against him. The side of her face pressed his chest. Her hair caught in the st
ubble on his chin and smelled like lilacs. Her hands skimmed like feathers across his back and then suddenly she gripped him, squeezed him, her pulse hammering at his belly.

  “It’s nice to feel cared for.”

  “Forgive me, Margarite. Please.”

  She rested against him, breathing deeply. She said nothing for a long time. Only the humming of mosquitoes, the cawing of crows, reached Lodge’s ears. At last she pushed away to arm’s length. She shivered hard. That ruined look was still there, but she was trying to smile.

  “Think you could take me fishing someday?”

  “Me? Take you?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m a one-trick wonder. Spoons, which you don’t like. And I don’t catch much.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I don’t know how to wave a fly rod. What is it? Wind knots?”

  “I don’t care. Could you?”

  “I guess I could. Sure.”

  “Isn’t it Coho season? The run?”

  “Almost. They’re bunching up outside the rivers.”

  “You know a place?”

  “I can look around a little.”

  “And we bring a picnic? A few beers? Some teriyaki snacks? Take a nap in the grass?”

  Lodge’s heart beat too fast. And suck a duck—his hands were trembling.

  “Sure.”

  Her teeth chattered. Her chin was blue. She squeezed his hands and said, “And I talk. I tell you what I should have told you before … I mean … and … what I should have told my dad, I wish, before he …”

  That was it. She turned away, sat down on the wet bench.

  “Sure,” Lodge managed. “You got a deal.” He walked back to his cruiser. He tossed his radio on the seat and opened the trunk. He forgot the radio when he brought his duty jacket over. On the way he looked up at the house she shared with Julia Inkster. Its green roof glowed wet in the sun. The windows below were black, night still inside them.

  He put the jacket on Margarite’s shoulders. He stood over her, watching the house, the road, the river.

  “Sit down,” she said at last. “Tell me about the Coho run.”