The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  But he wouldn’t. He kept his arms braced on the checkout counter and the barrel of that big revolver wavering like compass needle in the direction of her head. He might not have heard her. His eyes were beyond bloodshot. His sweat had soaked the shirt she gave him. Maybe he couldn’t hear her. Oh, well.

  “Tervo Enterprises, this is Sofi,” she answered, one-handing the clumsy old bus around a mild curve with a pulp hauler roaring past the other way.

  “Bitch,” said the voice on the other end, “where’s my water at?”

  Esofea said, “I’m sorry, and your name is?”

  “My name is Where’s My Water At, Bitch.”

  “Which water is that?” Esofea inquired—and the dude was gone.

  Esofea glanced over her shoulder. “See? Six-oh-two area code. Where’s my water. Danny’s got fishing clients calling already.”

  She wasn’t totally sure, though. That didn’t sound like a fisherman. She goosed the Luce County Bookmobile down the dip into High Bridge. She could tip Dog over, she thought, maybe at the Perch Lake corner. She could bury him with an avalanche of Michener from the Fiction section and take his weapon away. He looked that weak.

  She started talking again, working it through. “Heimo Kock was in Danny’s way. He always was, anything Danny tried to do, guiding, stealing snowmobiles, bringing weed from Ontario across the lake, whatever, Kock would bust his balls. It went way back to when we were in high school, but I’m not sure why they hated each other. Danny wanted him dead, but of course he wouldn’t do it himself. Now look—” she held up Danny’s business phone “—he’s got fishermen calling. He’s in the guide business, like he always wanted.”

  “Nobody paid me to kill Heimo Kock.”

  “Ok, dispose of, like you said.”

  “Nobody did that either.”

  “Hey, I’m not convicting you here. I’m saying maybe you met a guy named Belcher? Grimy, short, with a beard? He protects Danny, so maybe he never mentioned him. He just showed up and wondered if you’d like some cash to take a body somewhere far away? You said yes, but then you went down the road a little ways and—”

  Dog fired the pistol. Esofea hit the brakes. The bookmobile skidded. Its tires shrieked. She shrieked too but then felt nothing. She turned her head warily and saw smoke curling from the cover of the Webster’s Unabridged, the twenty-five pounder.

  “Turn right,” he told her.

  “Here?”

  “And shut up.”

  That did it. Esofea took the right onto 414 East with a jerk of the wheel that sent all forty million words of Michener down on the varmint’s head. She stomped the brake pedal all the way to the floor this time. Her fishtail onto the shoulder dumped on Harry Potter and Philip Pullman, burying him in a pile of wizards.

  The bus was hardly stopped when she sprang over the checkout counter into the heap of books. He moved erratically beneath the sliding spines and covers. Accustomed to bed-wrestling with Danny, Esofea was startled by Dog’s strength. She tried to pin the wrist with the pistol. But when she grabbed him, her arm moved with his arm, light as a cuff on his sleeve. But then he twisted his back to her, and she grabbed a fistful of perforated skin. He stopped fighting. He looked at her, his sweat-streaked face turning pale and tight with pain.

  “Actually, Dog, Bingo, Balto—” Esofea caught her breath “—nobody tells me to shut up.”

  “Let go.”

  “Get that thing out of my face.”

  “I had nothing to do with the death of Heimo Kock.”

  “Ok.”

  “Ok?”

  “Ok. You’re not going to shoot me, so get that thing out of my face.”

  “Let go.”

  “I did.”

  He lowered the pistol. She took the weapon from his hand and snapped open the cylinder. Empty. He saw it too—one bullet, used on Webster—closed his eyes and swallowed.

  Esofea said, “Did you find the Tylenol?”

  He began to shake. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back. She pulled her canvas shoulder bag across the floor. “I grew up around shotguns,” she told him. “I thought I waited until you were good and far away.” She opened the bottle of water and touched it to his unresponsive hand. “My grandparents built a resort on the Blind Sucker Flooding. Can you hear me? There were so many ducks and geese around the cabins—you’ve seen Hitchcock’s The Birds?”

  No answer.

  “Picture geese instead,” she said. “Ridiculous.”

  He sputtered water when she put it to his lips.

  “You want to hear something wild?” She shook him by the arm. “Balto, listen. Don’t tell anyone this, but my great grandpa basically lived in the nineteenth century and had a big old punt gun. You know what that is? It’s a shotgun the size of a fire hose. You could take down the Detroit Lions with one pull. Those geese were ruining the business. My GG had to shoot a couple thousand before the collective birdbrain got the message.”

  This time he admitted a sip. She popped the lid off the Tylenol.

  “After that it was my job to wing a couple honkers with sidewalk salt every now and then when they got too brave—with a regular twelve-gauge, of course. I packed the shells myself.”

  She withdrew the bottle as water began to run down his chest.

  “In fact, I dropped you with that very shotgun, a 1955 Savage, with a shell I packed when I was about fifteen. Kept in the bus here for varmint control. Legal with salt in it.”

  She paused to shake out three Tylenol.

  “Look. Ok. We need to get out of the ditch and go somewhere. I can help you. You can help me. Bingo? Buddy? You’re not just any dog anymore. You’re my dog. Ok? You listen to me. So what should I call you?”

  His head lolled.

  “Ok. Buckles. I’m Esofea Smithback. You can hate me all you want, Buckles, but you’d be dead now if I hadn’t shot you. Now why Dolf Cook’s place? What’s there?”

  Dog gathered himself slowly until he could explain it. She listened, quiet for an unusual stretch of time. He started with his visit to Dolf Cook’s cottage, the night he burned his fishing gear. Cook hadn’t been there when Dog arrived. Dog figured he must have strangled his brother at the cottage sometime while Dog was out fishing, then stashed the body near the garbage box or the outhouse. Then he invited Dog over, to “give him something,” which had turned out to be the reel that contained the line that strangled Kock. While Dog waited in his cottage, Cook had circled back to the campground and wrestled his dead brother inside the Cruise Master. From there it was driving, discovery, more driving, until Dog was back in Luce County, rolling Kock’s body down the sand bank into the Two Hearted, meaning to put the ball back in Cook’s court where it belonged. That was end of his story. He needed Dolf Cook’s reel to show where the murder weapon had come from.

  When she started talking again, Dog begged inside his head for Esofea Smithback to make sense.

  Which she did, to a degree.

  She believed his story about wanting to make it home in time for Eamon and M.J. But she also believed, she said, that it was not Dolf Cook but her boyfriend, Danny Tervo, who was behind Kock’s murder and that Dog, knowingly or not, was part of it. Fair enough, Dog allowed, as long as she delivered him to Cook’s for a chance to prove otherwise.

  She turned the bookmobile around without getting stuck. She headed back out to 410 East and through the Perch Lake intersection onto 410 West.

  Dog rode standing with his elbows on the checkout desk. A pale blue sky filled the windshield, agitated by a front off Superior. Treetops trembled. The bus felt a small gust broadside.

  “You feeling ok now?”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “You move quite a bit slower than a goose,” she told him, “so actually you were closer than I thought.”

  “I was only twenty feet away.”

  He focused on her. No pigtails or paint-on freckles today. But the copper hair was really hers. “Well, I had to knock you down,” she explained. “O
therwise what was the point?”

  She had convinced him, too, that he should approach Dolf Cook’s indirectly, with stealth, from the Two Hearted River. They had kayaks at her family’s resort. She would dump the bookmobile, use a pickup to drop him with a kayak, retrieve him later, downstream. In between that she expressed ominous plans involving the release of this guy Danny Tervo from some form of captivity, followed by the diversion of bear hounds—something about donuts—she was sure they had gotten her message at the outfitters by now and those donuts and hounds would be looking for Tervo’s trail. Not Dog’s. Because the donut guy believed her. She hoped.

  Dog tuned out, backsliding into pain. The sky had faded to a dull gray by the time they turned off 410 West and bounced a half-mile on gravel to a shabby old lodge and bungalows that a weather-beaten sign said was Blin ucker ort, Cabins, Boats, ips, Est. 1937.

  “Just stay inside here, out of sight,” she said as she parked behind a row of tiny cabins. Each cabin was a different faded color, trading sun for shade and sun again under a turbulent sky. Dog moved back from the windows.

  “I might be a little while,” she said on her way out the door, but then she returned within minutes bearing two large blue capsules that Dog swallowed without asking.

  “Now I really might be a while,” Esofea said. “I’ve got a bit of a mess to sort out, as you can see.”

  Dog inched forward enough to look out the windshield. A large old woman in a nightgown paced the grass in front of one of the cabins, holding an armload of cordwood and shouting in a foreign language.

  “That’s my grandmother, Tiina. She’s taking the woodpile apart. Something on the TV about an escaped murder suspect. You get my drift? And she does not use rock salt. So find something to read. And oh, practice sounding like this.”

  She made a low and dopey voice like she had already taken a few pills herself: “Live to share, brother. Your infinity is inside you.”

  Dog could not locate a response.

  She patted him on the arm. “You can do it. You’re on Percocet now. Actually, work on this.” Out came the same stoner voice: “‘What water you talking about? Dude, we gotta communicate better.'” She caught his chin, made him look at her. “Remember that phone call from the six-oh-two area code? When I come back, we’re going to return the call from Danny’s phone, and you’re going to say to the guy, ‘What water you talking about? Dude, we gotta communicate better.’ Ok? Be ready.”

  Dumbfounded, Dog watched her out the door.

  Billy Rowntree, aboard an airplane for the first time, flying the red-eye from Phoenix to Chicago beside this retired truck driver, turned on Sinbad’s phone and used the chance to figure out some math. They taught that, at Oracle—how to use a calculator. Rowntree said, twenty thousand to make a run from the Midwest to Arizona, how would a trucker make out on a paycheck like that, figuring mileage and keep-up? This trucker driver just chuckled and winked and rattled his plastic cup of Bloody Mary and said, “When do I start?”

  About a half hour later, Rowntree’s eyes closed, the trucker tapped his arm.

  “You gotta figure in the cost of the cargo, though. What you’re hauling ain’t free.”

  “Bitch,” said Rowntree, “can’t you see I’m trying to sleep?”

  But he was thinking, actually. The hippie’s water was free. After road costs, Tervo’s operation was pure profit. Then he noticed something on the phone: a tiny picture of an envelope. A message. His mom had called him back.

  But when Rowntree arrived at O’Hare another two hours later and checked Sinbad’s prepaid, the phone said it was Tervo who left the message: “What water you talking about? Dude, we gotta communicate better.”

  Rowntree shouted, “Motherfucking bitch!” and nearly threw the phone. A rent-a-cop followed him, keeping a distance. Outside, Rowntree snapped at the Sinbad Junior who picked him up in a Hummer at Arrivals: “Let’s go. I got business. Where’s Quality at?”

  The Hummer was yellow. This fat black banger just stood beside it in his baggy pants and crooked Sox cap, looking at Rowntree with no expression.

  “We’re going where Quality is at,” he said.

  “That don’t tell me where he’s at.”

  “When we get there, then you’ll know where he’s at.”

  “Yo,” Rowntree said. “Yo, Buddha.”

  As he said it Rowntree remembered Buddha was this fat black giant on the ranch at Oracle, Rowntree’s first couple years. Calm as hell. Got out at eighteen, like Rowntree. Next day he busted somebody’s neck, Rowntree heard. That’s how calm he was.

  “Yo, what?”

  Rowntree backed off. “Just drive, man. All right?”

  “I’m driving.”

  He did, for an hour or so more until there were Chinese signs everywhere, old Chinese people in the street, Chinese laundries, Chinese food on every corner. Outside a kung fu gym this Buddha stopped the Hummer, everything quiet for a moment until he said, “Ok, man. Listen. I’m going to tell you something. Quality don’t got your money. He didn’t agree to see you because he was going to give you something.”

  Rowntree stared out the window. He felt the sweat roll beneath his new suit. He had wanted to carry Sinbad’s Sig, but Ramon told him on the plane you couldn’t. He wondered could he take Buddha barehanded, peel off whatever his weapon was. Fat bitch might bust his neck.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” Rowntree said.

  “I’m not fucking with you, man. He says he never got any stuff from Phoenix. He’s gonna, you know … when you walk in there, man, Quality’s gonna, like … cancel the contract.”

  “When I walk in where? This kung fu place?”

  “Naw. We ain’t at Quality’s yet. I’m just telling you something, man.”

  Rowntree looked out the window. The kung fu gym was murky behind dusty glass with peeling gold letters and curled-up Chinese posters taped everywhere. Down the sidewalk this old man carried an umbrella like he expected rain. Rowntree looked up at a cloudy sky. He hadn’t seen rain in five months. The ranch, they rationed the showers. Rowntree got shit.

  “So why we stopped here?”

  Buddha hesitated. Rowntree stared into the low gray clouds through the windshield. Cancel the contract. Anybody could do that. Tervo too. Or Rowntree.

  “Because you just got off a plane, man, so I know you’re not carrying nothing right now. And they sell shit in there, which you need.”

  Rowntree looked at Buddha.

  “Man, he’s gonna cancel the contract,” Buddha said. “You know? I’m telling you something here.”

  “Yeah?” Rowntree said. “Why you telling me?”

  “You don’t believe me?’

  “Why should I?”

  “You came all this way to die?” Buddha said. “You ready?”

  “I said why.”

  “He thinks I stole the Phoenix shit, man,” Buddha said, his voice rising. “But I never stole it. Lately, he thinks everybody stole some shit from him. That’s just where the dude is at. That’s why he sent me to pick you up. Which one of us he’s gonna take out first, that’s the only question.”

  The rest was fast and simple. They pulled up at Quality’s crib three blocks away. The door opened on darkness and smoke and lazy music, Mr. Quality a smooth, pot-bellied, Dr. J-style bitch with one hand behind his back, all cordial in the doorway until he was dead from a bullet through the forehead.

  Back at the Hummer, his jacket pocket heavy with the pistol on one side, Rowntree leaned through the window. “What’s your name, brother?”

  “Mike.”

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah. My name’s Mike.”

  “Buddha Mike.”

  “Just Mike.”

  Rowntree got in. His ears rang from the pistol shot. His heart flew around in his chest. He found Tervo’s postcard in the pocket of his suit coat. “Yo, Buddha Mike, I’m gonna be needing me some more of this ride here. Now Michigan, where’s that at?”

  18

  The
Newberry Correctional K-9 unit took off from the backyard of Mrs. Agnes Cunard on West Truman Street. Sheriff Lodge watched from the window of his cruiser. Three German Shepherds lunged ahead of three young officers in fatigues and jackboots who reminded him of guys like Tommy Woods and Mitchell Svjosej, halfbacks he used to pull-block for in high school. Did they wear helmets then? He couldn’t remember. That was funny. Couldn’t remember if he wore a helmet. Get it? He and Margarite shared a chuckle inside his dizzy head.

  The dogs crossed the yard of Mrs. Agnes Cunard into the neighbor’s driveway. The guards followed at a slow trot, yipping encouragements. Then the dogs stopped. They circled. They picked something up and surged again. Off charged the prison K-9 team out West Truman Street onto the Tahquamenon-Pike Lake snowmobile trail, the way Oglivie really went, apparently. The Luce County sheriff watched them out of sight.

  Oglivie had shucked his hospital gown beside Agnes Cunard’s screen porch. Lodge had ripped the gown, given half to the prison team, and kept a piece. Now he levered out of his cruiser and limped on that sore hip around to his trunk and opened it. He lifted out his spinning rod and hooked the gown shred to the treble of a new Daredevil spoon. He brought all that back to the front seat with him, got it situated, got on the radio with Tim Shrigley.

  “Timmy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Where you at?”

  Like he hoped. Rudvig was milling around in frustration west of Camp Seven Lake on the land where Chevrolet big wigs used to hunt back in the ‘50s. By the sheriff’s instructions, Tim Shrigley supported them on the county’s ORV.

  “We have another sighting. You tell Donuts for me that he was just seen crossing the highway a little northeast of where you’re at, exactly at that dirt road into Sleeper Lake.”

  When Lodge arrived by cruiser at that point, he opened his window to a wall of fresh wind that meant a storm was coming. Gusts from the north punched back the baying and hollering of Rudvig’s Rhodesian ridgebacks, but Lodge could hear them coming. They were close.

  He cast the shred of the trout bum’s gown out the window with a little backhand flip. Not far enough into the ditch. He reeled in. He reversed the cruiser a few feet. He flipped again. Farther. Better.