“I gotta go back and get that first,” the sheriff said, because wouldn’t you know it, you leave your radio behind, it starts to squawk and complain, like one of the ravens across the river.
15
Agnes Cunard knew it would happen someday. The Newberry State Correctional Facility would send some sick or injured psychopathic criminal down the road one mile to the public hospital that backed up against her yard. That criminal would escape out the rear exit and trespass into her garden. For a hideous moment he would freeze there in his white socks upon her dirt, peeping around just like this one did, his ugly hind-end buck naked, just like this one’s was. Though she had imagined the bare ass would be colored.
Gang bangers, they called these criminals on the television. In her day, gang bang meant something regular men could get away with on the likes of Agnes Cunard, landing them in trouble only if they did it to the daughter of a mine owner, say, or the wife of the foreman at the Newberry celery farm. The likes of Agnes Cunard had better watch out for gang bangers—exactly what she had done for ninety-two years, a full third of those without her beloved Sten. It would be a colored coming after her, Sten had told her. But she should hold her fire, Sten said, until the criminal hit the top step of the porch.
This fellow went into the pole beans first, staggering and knocking things over. He had shaggy hair and a beard. Maybe this was a hippie, Agnes Cunard thought, though it had been quite some time since she had seen one. A hippie was the next thing to a colored, in any case.
The pistol was heavy. This was one reason Sten taught her not to set up too early. She might get tired holding it. It was Sten’s revolver from the war, a Smith and Wesson.38 that fired 200-gram bullets. Dearest Sten made her remember the bullet type, for after he was gone. He had left her ten of them in a dominoes tin.
Here is what the hippie did: he went into a canvas bag he was carrying, dropped a few things out on the dirt, then stripped off his hospital gown and crouched there, bare naked now except for socks, looking her direction. Slowly, from a squat, he peeled off the socks.
Agnes Cunard sat motionless in a webbed chair against the house in the far back corner of the porch. Above and beside her, sweaters and jackets and coveralls, mostly Sten’s, hung on hooks. If she didn’t move she might look like one of these, she hoped, like an old gray sweater. To fire the pistol, though, she would need to lean her arms forward onto the television tray where she had laid out her solitaire game. So while the hippie tied his hospital gown around his waist and put on a t-shirt, hat, and a pair of thongs, Agnes Cunard got set up, because otherwise, if she waited until he got close, he was going to see her move.
Now here he came—thongs popping—out of the pole beans and onto the grass. He stumbled around the bird bath and walked right through her purple asters as they were starting to open for the day. As per Sten, she was using the porch screen door as a target, going to shoot right through the center of the top panel the instant the door moved inward.
But the hippie fell down somewhere. She lost sight of him below the half wall of the porch. She wrestled opened the pistol’s cylinder. What folks did these days, she recalled suddenly, was call a number on the telephone, 911, for help. Sten never thought much of this idea, didn’t trust it, but that was what they told you to do. Lately when Agnes Cunard went to the senior center they gabbled on about it, these young people waving tiny telephones that had no cords and lived in their pockets.
Or was this a while ago? Quite likely, she began to think, they had changed the number by now. But changed it to what? And, oh yes, load the bullets first. Her stiff fingers cracked the dominoes tin and made one fit. And suddenly there he was, his hairy face at the screen right beside her, so close she could smell hospital and see crazy in his eyes.
“Hippie,” scolded Agnes Cunard, closing the cylinder.
He punched his hand directly through the screen—then he had Sten’s pistol. The other hand came through, toward her throat, and she ducked. He yanked Sten’s coveralls off the hook behind—Agnes Cunard felt the straps across her shoulders—and next he tore out more screen to grab a pair of fur-tipped boots that Agnes Cunard could not recall seeing before. When she raised up and the dizziness went away, the hippie was gone. Only his socks, his hospital gown, and his thongs remained in the yard.
Arrayed across the dew-soaked side grass of the house next door were snowmobiles, ATVs, mini-bikes, and hobby tractors—but Dog didn’t have the time. He jacked a kid’s one-speed bike from the driveway. Standing on the pedals, he wobbled up to speed and cornered into West Truman.
In coveralls, mukluks, and a ball cap that said “I’d Rather be U.P. North,” Dog herky-jerked that little blue bike toward the west end of town, the long-barreled pistol flopping heavily in his bib pocket. Several people saw him. No one seemed alarmed. This was the U.P. after all, Dog thought vaguely.
Two blocks, three blocks, a crumbling, trash-strewn dead end, and Newberry was behind him, Lake Superior State Forest ahead.
Dog did not slow or look back. He transferred the pistol into the horn mount over the handlebars, where it wedged and stayed still. He crouched like a jockey, spun those deflated mini tires down a wide trail into jack pine forest before the bike fizzed to a stop in heavy sand.
Dog pitched to his knees on the trail, dizzy for air. Ahead of him sprawled the pistol and the bag provided by his local librarian. The bag was still fat with items.
Dog shook a map out, spread it on the sand. Luce County ORV and snowmobile trails. Yellow highlight pen traced a route north maybe twenty miles to a place called Blind Sucker Flooding. Ink pen circled spots where the trails crossed roads.
Dog’s finger followed the yellow path to a junction south of Dawson Creek. There he broke away on his own, east toward Dolf Cook’s place, plotting snowmobile trails across what looked like wetland. He had no way to resolve the question of whether only winter’s frozen ground made those trails passable. Swamps and bogs sucked at his mind, but the map was silent. Should he go back, he wondered, and carjack? Should he go back and surrender?
The canvas bag began to vibrate. He pulled it to him. In a small outside pocket he found a pager. He pushed buttons haphazardly. The pager buzzed out.
More items in the bag. His dirty palm caught Tylenol capsules, like tiny red-and-white bobbers. He washed down six with the bottle of water. He fit the pistol into the bag. Once you ran, you were guilty. Dog comprehended that. So go, Dog, go.
He pushed the bike for solid ground. When the trail forked a mile or so later, he found the sun. He checked his map and peddled north, his distance measured by an assiduous deer fly that bit his neck at twenty-yard intervals. When he killed that finally, another rotated in. And another. In a short while more, it was yellow jackets that ascertained the meaty scent of his wounds and circled him like reef sharks. In a slow spot, where the bike bogged down, a nimbus of mosquitoes caught him and charged their toll in blood, left him slapping and scratching and wobbling one-handed over the asphalt dome of the first paved road with the dignity and control of a fugitive circus bear. On the other side, the shoulder was too steep. He had to lift his feet and let the pedals spin, jittering at high speed down into the shelter of the opposing forest. At the bottom, the little bike stuck its front tire into mud, flipping Dog onto his back.
His back. Two hundred wounds spraying mace-hot pain to his brain until he rolled over and made it only slightly better.
As Dog lay there the pager went off again. Pain masked the complexities of the situation, revealing a simple thought: the librarian. She was tracking the pager. That was it. The pager was sending back its coordinates. She was looking for him.
He pulled the bike out of the mud. The rim of the front wheel had buckled. He traced the seep that made the mud, away from the road through high brush to a small bog, pretty with yellowing bracken ferns and darting dragonflies.
He flung the bike toward open water. It floated like some strange Schwinn swan in the soft grip of lilies, then slo
wly began to sink. Watching the bike inch under, Dog thought he too could sink down in that cold black muck. Do that now. Sink. This was too much pain.
But the image of the old Pflueger reel at Cook’s place returned him to task.
No. Not now. Go dog, go.
A short distance up the trail, a big tamarack had died and tipped over. Dog got behind the root ball and waited. The pager buzzed. It buzzed again.
The Luce County Bookmobile rumbled along the adjacent paved road maybe ten minutes later, stirring Dog from a swamp of mental numbness. The librarian parked at the trail crossing. She left the old bus running, came down the steep shoulder, jumped over the mud, then changed her mind. She went back up and shut off the engine. Then she blew the horn twice and came down onto the snowmobile trail again. She looked up the trail, over toward the bog, then picked up her pace, trotting as she passed the root ball.
She stopped when she saw Dog there. She looked full of ideas. Her mouth started up, but Dog raised the pistol and said, “No.”
“Wow. You got a gun?”
“Turn around.”
“What? Do you realize what I just—this is the second time I saved your—”
“Walk,” he rasped, turning her. Then he shoved her in the back.
On the way to the road he threw up twice, water and Tylenol—keeping the pistol on her. Inside the bookmobile he got her in the seat behind the wheel. He was nearly blacking out. She was streaking words past his ears.
He backed up a few steps. He got around the checkout counter and leaned on it. The sound of her voice overwhelmed him. He cocked the hammer by way of interruption. That made things quiet.
“Go on,” he said. “Drive. Dolf Cook’s place.”
16
Deputy Margarite DuCharme said to Donuts Rudvig, when Rudvig surprised her by appearing at the county building exactly as requested, at ten that morning, “I should have called you, Paul. I’m sorry. We’re too busy right now, so we’ll have to talk later. Thanks for coming though.”
But she got the sense right away that Rudvig hadn’t come to be questioned. He was with Ron Lindgren again. The two of them looked like they had been in a swamp all night, taking charm lessons from a rabid possum. Margarite peered past them out the lobby doors. That jacked-up black pickup of Rudvig’s was parked wrong-way on West Harrie in front of the county building. The deputy observed dog snouts in the cage. Across the street had to be Lindgren’s rig: four animals in that one, coon dogs it looked like, tethered and frantic. She brought her eyes back to the short view again: both of Kock’s bear guides were mouth-breathing, their bloodshot eyes darting around the sheriff’s office.
So this much was clear to Margarite: news of Oglivie’s escape was out among Kock’s crowd.
No surprise, really. She and Lodge and part-time deputy Tim Shrigley were just back from a Keystone Kops ninety minutes of gunning both Luce County cruisers plus the sand-and-salt truck in random patterns through and around greater Newberry. The suspect, the witness, whatever Oglivie was at this point—he was gone. Bruce the Moose, seeming on the verge of a stroke, had retreated to his office with the door closed. Margarite felt like she had barbed wire in her esophagus. She had been interviewing Shrigley, who was adamant that no one had penetrated his guard before the hospital was locked down. Not one single person. A simple no, of course, would have been more convincing.
Margarite met Rudvig’s possum leer. She was comprehending Esofea’s varmint thing. She said, “If you’re here to help look for him, the answer is no.”
“Look for who?”
“This is a law enforcement job. You guys stay out of it.”
Lindgren wanted to play too: “Stay out of what?”
“You gentlemen interfere, you’re obstructing justice. We are busy, but we’ll make time.”
Rudvig pulled a paper cone from the water cooler and spat brown goo into it. He stuck the mess through the trash can flap. “Ok. The guy slipped away from you. Everybody knows it. Now you got who? You got Bruce the Moose, you got Half-a-Sandwich in there—” he jerked a black thumb toward Tim Shrigley in the break room “—and you, hell, you gotta keep your finger in the dyke, am I right?”
Gotta love the deep north, Margarite thought, forcing a breath. Everything so fresh for people. Lindgren stared bluntly below her utility belt.
Rudvig continued: “What’re you idiots going to do, drive around some more, hope the guy is out there in his hospital gown, hitchhiking? We can nail his ass inside the hour, soon as we get the sighting from you people.”
“Go home,” Margarite said. But sighting? You people? Oglivie had not been seen. No one had called in. The sheriff’s department had no clue where he was. “We’ve got the state prison K-9 team getting ready now,” she said. “Go home and stay out of the woods.”
Here the sheriff’s door opened. Bruce the Moose looked ok, but in a vacant, inappropriately contented kind of way. Maybe he had his stroke already and this was the ominous outcome: the howdy-do smile, the acetylene torch in his hand.
“No, no, no. Paul’s right,” he said, waving a big freckled paw. “I was just coming out to tell you, deputy. We’re understaffed. I asked Paul to come in and give us a hand.”
“You—”
“He’s the best,” Lodge said. “Right, Paul? Those ridgebacks of yours could track a fart in a windstorm. Hey! Ronny Lindgren, how you doing?” The sheriff extended his hand for another shake. “Long time, no see, pal. How’s things over in Baraga? Pretty bearable? Get it? Bearable?”
Margarite, stunned, said, “Sheriff, you can’t—”
Lodge interrupted her. “Now, now. I’m in charge.”
And she thought: You are? Since when?
“Here’s your lighter,” Lodge said, and he handed the torch to Rudvig. Rudvig took it warily. Margarite’s jaws clamping together, fighting back a surge of acid. A torch like that—the fire investigator’s guess—was used in the Pine Stump Junction fire. What the hell was going on? Lodge had evidence? And now he was giving it back?
“Why, thank you,” Rudvig said. “Hang on a sec.” With the dirty pinky of his three-fingered right hand, he scooped out his dip and flicked it through the flap of the trash can, leaving half of it to hang there. Next, smirking at Margarite, he fished a wrinkled box of Phillies out of his saggy shirt pocket. He stuck a cigar in his mouth. Lodge said jovially, now handing over the torch, “Be careful with that thing. Might be set a little high.”
Margarite blurted, “Sheriff? You’ve got to stop this right here.”
All three men looked. She crossed her arms over her vest. It was Lodge she looked back at.
“You can’t send a civilian posse out there. It’s illegal. It’s dangerous. Especially not these nutjobs.”
“Fuck you, lady,” said Lindgren, the kind of man who waited until he had enough cover. “By the way, just for my information, what’s it take to get a pretty one like you to do it regular?”
Margarite glanced at Lodge. The sheriff’s placid look had abruptly vanished. He was leaning onto his toes, his jowls reddening, his hands flexing. Let it go, she told him with her eyes. Don’t defend me. “Just give us the sighting,” Rudvig said.
Lodge blinked, looking disoriented for a moment. Then he walked Rudvig over to the county map on the wall inside the door. He raised his chin. He squinted at the map, his big pink index finger coasting over it like Braille. Then he stopped.
“Right here,” he said.
Margarite moved close enough to see. The sheriff’s finger trembled under Camp Seven Lake, near the old Chevrolet Hunting Club.
“Motorist saw him cross the highway there, westbound.”
Margarite thought: who says motorist?
“Here’s a radio you fellahs can use.”
Lodge took one off his belt. Lindgren grabbed it.
Margarite felt desperate, confused, deceived. “Sheriff—can we talk?” She came right up to the map as the others pulled away. Oglivie was there? That far? How? “Could you just slo
w down and talk to me?”
“Certainly,” Bruce the Moose said, but when she looked again he was holding the door, and Rudvig and Lindgren were through it already. Rudvig sparked the torch and lit his cigar from the concrete apron just outside. Lindgren hooked the radio over his belt.
She watched them all the way to the trucks. They bumped shoulders once, again, high-fived each other. They would have a bullet in Oglivie’s back by noon.
Margarite turned to the sheriff. “Yes?”
“Well, you know,” Lodge said with a shrug, “they were going to hunt for him anyway, whether we liked it or not. They might as well hunt in the wrong place.”
Rudvig’s truck roared obscenely. His dogs yelped. Lindgren and crew added to the din.
“With a dead radio,” the sheriff added.
Margarite backed up and sat down hard on the edge of the reception desk. She felt a blast of sweaty heat rise from under her vest. Now Lodge was kind of grinning at her, giving her that old jam-on-the-face look.
“That was good,” she told him. “That was real good. Maybe you ought to stay up all night and bump your head more often. Wow.”
She expected a comeback, or an explanation, or the next strategic step, or even a wet tongue to the face. Something relevant to the moment at least, to the triumph of Sheriff Bruce Lodge dialing in on some real sheriff-style action.
Instead he said, “Meant to tell you. I called up to the Rainbow Lodge. The Cohos have been trickling up river since last evening, so the run is about to get going. And it looks like a good one.” He smiled at her. “Just to let you know.”
He was heading back into his office.
“Sheriff? Bruce? You ok?”
She phoned Danny Tervo’s home again. No answer. She checked with the library. Esofea had logged in a bookmobile run to the Ojibway charter school at Brimley. The deputy pushed her speed dial number for Julia but hung up before it rang.
Don’t go looking.
She crossed the street, took statements at the Helen Joy Newberry Hospital and got circuitous dithering about security procedures and shift changes and work loads and so on. The escape had occurred at six sharp. Staff was minimal. The sheriff’s guard wasn’t in yet. No one had seen which way Oglivie went. She left the hospital in frustration. It was nearly ten o’clock.
The Wind Knot Page 18