The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  But along Oglivie’s escape route in back of the hospital, Margarite found an old woman she hadn’t met before, a Mrs. Agnes Cunard, ninety-two years old and hopping mad. Oglivie had tricked her, popped right up, busted her window screen, and taken her late husband’s favorite pair of coveralls. And, oh, yes, a pistol. That she had loaded, yes, to the best of her recollection.

  “Did you see which way, Missus Cunard?”

  “Why, yes, I did,” the old woman said, and she pointed directly at the hospital, which had to be wrong.

  Shit. Double shit. And a pistol.

  Cussing for all she was worth, Margarite cut through back yards to the county building. Someone had helped Oglivie escape. That was all she could think of. Someone who knew the hospital. The timing. Someone with a motive to get tied up in Kock’s death. Oglivie had no friends around here, she was pretty sure of that. Her darkest guess was someone had turned him loose, knowing that a hunt would break out.

  It could be Tervo, sure. She hadn’t found him yet. But Kock had a hundred other enemies. And it was Julia’s fly line that was missing. As deeply as Margarite would like to bury that fact, she couldn’t. Don’t go looking—she had to let that go now. This was new ground. Julia knew the hospital. She knew Tim Shrigley. She hated Kock. She played with Tervo. Did she know, then, where Oglivie was?

  Rename that woman, the deputy thought grimly. Code name Pepto.

  She hit speed dial again and let it go. “What?” snapped Julia after the first ring.

  Margarite was startled. Her throat felt rough and sour. “Where are you?”

  “Margarite, where are you? You just took off, no shower, no note, nothing.”

  “I’m sorry. But by now you know why, right? Where are you, sweetheart?”

  “The White Pines. Subbing for Angie.”

  “Oh.” Margarite looked at her watch. It had somehow become a few minutes before noon. The bar had been open nearly an hour. “Is there a problem? That I have something to do with?”

  “Well …”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, I guess I’m coming over.”

  “It’s a free country.”

  She took the cruiser but parked on Main a block away to get some breathing time. It was still clumsy for her, working in a town so small. She still drove places and on arrival realized she could have walked. But then what if something happened and she needed to move fast? Except that nothing ever happened. Except that something was happening now. Like that, back and forth in her mind.

  The White Pines Hotel bar, once an elegant saloon, was in Margarite’s experience a dark and smoky warren for serious daytime drunks. “Subbing for Angie” meant Angie Miner was too hungover to function today and Julia, who took her place as needed over the last few years, would be in that same condition tomorrow. Margarite and Julia had clashed over this, but anyway the deputy tried to be positive coming in.

  “What’s going on? Ladies only today?”

  One of the women at the horseshoe bar slurred, “Soon as they saw it on the news, they all left to go hunt some escaped convict. Driving drunk maybe they can hit him. ‘Cept for one slacker in the can.”

  Daryline Smithback, Esofea’s aunt, turned on her stool. “Yeah, Rush’s in the can. He’s been on the potty all day. Liquid in, liquid out, that’s what they say. A bunch of them others went out to form a perim … a perim … a perimeter.”

  A hacking laugh erupted from down the bar, beneath the television. Ice rattled in a glass. Margarite blinked. Her eyes stung. Julia came down the bar and stopped across from her. “Drink?”

  Margarite felt her stomach foam. “Pepsi,” she said. “And can we talk over here?”

  Julia dug out some ice, hosed Pepsi into a beer glass. Down low behind the bar, she poured something for herself into a coffee mug, and they took a table beside a burgundy curtain stiff with dust. The Main Street sidewalk was an arm’s length beyond the window. Margarite could see her cruiser through a wedge of sunlight.

  “I didn’t know you were in town.”

  “Was I supposed to tell you?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I’m just surprised, that’s all.” Her first sip of the Pepsi tasted soapy. “I don’t know,” Margarite said. “I don’t know whether I’m … No, I do know. I’m just asking this you because I love you and I’m weak and I’m worried.”

  She stopped. That was neither a lie nor the truth. She had power here, legal power, supposedly, but she couldn’t feel it. She had urgency, but she was moving backwards.

  Margarite tried to gather herself. Julia had been drinking already. She looked good in the first phase of a drunk. Her eyes narrowed and her skin flushed and she got this expression that was a mysteriously attractive combination of come-hither and get-lost. She looked exactly the way she had—tipsy, it was evident now—when Margarite met her in Madison at the concert two years ago. Julia had been leaning against the wall in the lobby of the Barrymore, a plastic cup of beer in her hand, an unsmoked cigarette behind her ear, scoping the crowd for five or ten minutes before Margarite moved in to say hello and was she with anyone. She wasn’t. She had come down from the U.P. solo, Julia had said, just to be someplace else.

  “Well …” This was so dumb. So awful. “I just was surprised that you got new tires for your truck. I mean I’ve known you two years. I’ve been living with you coming up on half that. You’ve needed new tires that whole time but you didn’t care.”

  “You came here because you’re surprised I bought new tires for my truck?”

  “Yes.”

  Julia shrugged. “Ok. Was there anything else?”

  “Was there a certain reason you didn’t buy them earlier but you did now? Anything I should know about?”

  “Nope.”

  “You washed your truck too. Why?”

  “I gave Jim Grove a ride home from softball. His Doberman yakked in the box. I got going with the hose, didn’t feel like stopping. Goddamn, Margarite, are you interrogating me? What do you think I did?”

  “Hit something on the road,” Margarite lied, snatching a plausible excuse out of nowhere. “That’s all. I just worry about you driving when you go out partying.”

  “Hey, I like to party.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’m on the other side of the party. I have a job to do.”

  Julia took a long gulp from her mug that left her lips red. When her chin came down it stopped a fraction of an inch above normal. “You’re checking up on me,” she said. “Which you promised never to do.”

  It was a reflex to lift the Pepsi and drink. Margarite’s stomach returned the bubbles hard against the back of her mouth. Her eyes watered. Maybe I wouldn’t have to check up you if you still had your old tires and the line wasn’t gone from your reel.

  “Sweetheart,” she managed to say, “I’m sure you have good reasons for all of this, but I think you’re lying to me.”

  Julia laughed loudly and falsely.

  “Share the joke,” droned a woman from the bar. “We’re plowed. We’ll laugh at anything.”

  “Barkeep!” roared Esofea’s Uncle Rush. He had emerged from the toilet. “I need a freshener-upper!”

  “Can’t you people just chill out?” Julia snapped over her shoulder. Then her voice came down to a rough whisper. She looked Margarite hotly in the eye. “You’re safe now. Relax. Heimo Kock is dead.”

  “What happened to the line on your fly reel?”

  Julia lit a cigarette. She leaned back and spoke normally. “I should have known better than try to fool a frickin’ detective. Ok. I went out fishing.”

  “Fishing … by yourself?”

  “By myself.”

  “That’s a first.”

  “First time for everything.”

  Margarite turned her Pepsi glass. “I can’t imagine that. I have to drag you out. You don’t try very hard to like it. What made you go fishing by yourself?”

  “Impress you.”

  Margarite didn’t know which objection to start with—or
should she be happy? Julia exhaled smoke toward the stiff curtain. She pulled it open a little, squinted across Main Street. “I wanted to practice and get good at it. So you’re not so frustrated.” She looked back at Margarite. “I love you, woman.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Did you hear me? I said love you.”

  “Thank you. Where—”

  “Thank you? Shit. Ok. The Two Hearted. Main branch. Frickin trees behind me everywhere.”

  “I’m gone all day,” Margarite said. “You could have practiced in front of the house.”

  Julia nodded like all this had been foretold. Her buzzed eyes narrowed to red-rimmed slits as she looked toward the bar.

  “Now you’re trying to tell me exactly how I should do all the stupid little things I do to show you I’m crazy about you. I don’t believe this. You wanna know something? When you used to drive up here once a month? Wasn’t I sweet?”

  “You were very sweet. Yes.”

  “Like a kitten?”

  “Tiger, maybe, and you were a good listener. But—”

  “See, I used to party my ass off for a couple days before you came, so I wouldn’t want to drink and smoke too much while you were here. I would just let you take me places, and hold me and talk to me, put me to bed early and get it on with me. You didn’t know that, right? I did that for you. For us. So we could get along.”

  Margarite might have thrown up if she hadn’t been so startled. Instead, her breath stuck and the acid crept up like a slow, hot knife into the center of her chest. Her eyes flooded and she put one hand to the base of her throat.

  You are a sheriff’s deputy right now, she said to herself. You are a sheriff’s deputy investigating a murder. Cry later. Get yourself back on point.

  “Why the Two Hearted?” she persisted as soon as she could speak evenly. “I told you, it’s too hard to fish. That’s why we never go there.”

  “See what I mean? Twenty questions suddenly.”

  “What happened to your line?”

  “Shit, girl,” Julia said. “You went through my truck.”

  “I did. Your whole fly line is gone.”

  Julia lurched in her chair, standing halfway up. “Yeah—well that ain’t all that’s gone—” She snatched at her cigarette. Margarite caught her hand above the ashtray.

  “Where is Oglivie?”

  “Who?”

  “Sit down. Tell me why you went all the way up to the Two Hearted to practice fishing, and tell me what happened to your line.”

  But Julia wouldn’t budge. Into this small tussle arrived the full tension of their time together, both of them trembling.

  “Just be straight with me one time,” Margarite said. “See how it works out.”

  “I don’t talk to cops,” Julia snarled back.

  “Right now you’d better,” Margarite said. “So that if you did what I think you did, I can figure out how to help you.”

  They held like this, staring each other down so long the drunks took note. “Uh-oh,” sang Aunt Daryline Smithback. “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs.”

  “Busted,” cackled Uncle Rush, turning from a glance out the window.

  “Busted at what?” Margarite said it quietly, gripping Julia’s hand. “Tell me what they’re talking about.”

  “They’re just making noise.”

  “Hey,” blared a third drunk in their direction, “she’s a good girl. She don’t hurt nobody. She’s just a free spirit, that’s all.”

  “Tell me, Julia.”

  Now inebriated singing carried from the sidewalk beyond the open front door. Here came Dolf Cook, tottering, blinded by the sudden darkness, extracting from his wallet some quantity of paper money.

  Cook held the backs of stools and bantered with the ladies as he began his way around the bar—“Make way for royalty. Care to kiss my thing, love? Now where’s my little chickie-babe? She’s got something for me—” and then he saw the deputy.

  Heimo Kock’s brother wavered a moment, focusing, as Julia wrenched her hand free from Margarite and spun to face him, her whole body tensed. That move straightened Dolf Cook. He proceeded in a drunk’s cautious steps toward a small paper sack on the bar. He snatched the sack, shoved it in his pants pocket. He laid the money on the bar, patted it three or four times. Then he managed a U-turn and puttered back the way he came, butchering some moldy tune through the door and down the sidewalk.

  Julia turned back to retrieve her mug. Margarite spoke almost silently, aiming the words. “What the hell was that?”

  “What the hell was what?”

  She bustled away from Margarite, around the bar. She put out her cigarette and poured Rush his freshener-upper at the far end.

  Margarite set her Pepsi at the rail. She could hear Dolf Cook starting his car. Julia came back scowling. She put her elbows on the bar. She raised her eyebrows, like what the hell else do you want?

  “I need to know where your line is. Now.”

  Julia put her chin in her palms, closed her eyes, opened them to a squint: “Sweetheart, you don’t believe me, my line is in the dumpster at the Reed and Green campground, I fucked it up so bad.”

  17

  “Pull over,” Billy Rowntree told Ramon. “We got time. 7-Eleven.”

  Ramon still looked startled. Only yesterday, Rowntree was wearing an electronic arrest bracelet, taking the 72 bus across the city to the botanical garden, coming home and sleeping next to Ramon on the peat moss bags at the rear of the grow house. Now he was in the back seat of Sinbad’s gold Escalade, in a brand new home warm-up, orange with purple piping, purple Nash number 13 in a white outline, leaning up into Ramon’s rear view mirror and telling the Mexican, “I said pull over, bitch. You didn’t hear me?”

  Then he sat back, realizing the 7-Eleven was across on the opposite side of this wide street with lots of traffic and an island in the middle. Ramon was working on it. Cool. Ramon knew how to go places.

  Inside 7-Eleven Rowntree said to the clerk, “Gimme a Slurpee, man, red and large, and we in a hurry.”

  “So very sorry, sir. Under Level 5 restrictions, we may not serve ice drinks.”

  “Then why you keep the machine on?”

  “Sir, if we should drop to Level 4, then we are ready to serve—”

  “For that matter, why you open at six AM when you a 7-Eleven?”

  The clerk scowled. Some kind of turban on his head. None of that at the ranch. Rowntree poked a sweet little Sig he found at Sinbad’s house out the pouch of his warm-up jacket.

  “Bitch,” Rowntree said, “I asked you gimme a Slurpee. And pull a blue one for my driver, yo.”

  He walked out with his hands full, NASH across the back, basketball exploding like an angry sun. Fuck Level 5 restrictions. He had water coming.

  “Here you go, my brother,” he told trembling old Ramon. “American Airlines. I believe that’s Terminal Three.”

  Then Billy Rowntree slouched across the leather back seat of the Escalade with a straw in his mouth, replaying the speed and beauty of his moves. Telling Ramon, yo, old man, go put Sinbad in a hole in the desert. A big hole. Pick up some gorditas on the way back. And then take me to Sinbad’s place. That’s where I live now.

  Ramon eased the Escalade off Interstate 17 onto the airport exit. Rowntree blew soft bubbles in his Slurpee, gazed out at the hot blue sky. He was baked real good, to last all day. He wondered at all the cell phone calls flying through the sky. Riding the lasers. He had called his mother, but she hadn’t answered—probably, Ramon told him, because it was Sinbad’s phone. He had left a message: Let me know you still need money to get here, cuz I got it. Call me back.

  Now he called her number again. He was getting better at finding the keys. A recorded voice told him what number he had reached, which was hers. Cool. At the message tone, he said, “Call me back. I’m going on business to Chicago. So, um, call me back.”

  He forgot something and repeated the process: “On the airplane. Dude there named Quality owes me money. But d
on’t worry, I got some already. So call me back.”

  When Billy Rowntree stepped into the heat in front of Terminal Three, he left his Suns warm-up folded neatly atop the seat for Ramon to take back to Sinbad’s house. He left his game jersey and his orange headband on—keep his luck running, keep Nash in the game. The Sig went back with Ramon too. “And keep that city water off, man. We got some on the way.” Ramon nodding, his brown eyes wide open. “And take good care of shit, man. I’m gonna call you every hour, make sure you do it right.”

  Rowntree closed the car door. The linen suit he bought at K&G Fashion Super Store was a cool gray, pant cuffs sweeping the airport floor because they told him to come back tomorrow and they would have the length fixed. Fuck tomorrow. Tomorrow he was in Chicago, up in Quality’s shit. Underneath he had the Nash jersey. Over that, his shirt, grapefruit pink, for Florida, piled up a little at the wrists. Ramon had knotted the tie for him, silver with fine pink dots. The Brutini shoes, with two-tone blue panels, clicked nice on the tiles, slipped when Billy Rowntree changed directions.

  What he thought about, strolling toward his boarding gate, was his deal for five thousand gallons of black-market water. Four bucks a gallon. Two grand deposit to this hippie from up wherever. Ramon said where do we keep the water? Rowntree said figure it out. Maybe put it into pipes or something.

  He got back from Chicago tomorrow night, Rowntree was thinking, that truck better be filled up and on its way.

  Put some pressure on, Rowntree decided as he reached the gate. Call him.

  He had a phone, man.

  He stepped out of line and dialed. He did it with his thumb this time, leaning on a wall, sending out the lasers.

  Just beyond the road to Sleeper Lake, still a good ten miles from the turn to Dolf Cook’s cottage, Danny Tervo’s cell phone rang. Esofea grabbed it off the flat dash. She waved it at Dog. “Come on. I need a man’s voice. Say hello.”