He opened the bail on the reel and pulled forward. Maybe thirty feet or so behind the cruiser would be right. He hit the reel handle, tripped the bail, set the rod butt down between his leg and the door. He would drive on the wrong side of the road.
“Timmy?” he said into his radio as he pulled away.
“Yessir?”
Been a long time since he trolled, Lodge thought, looking back in his mirror. That was lake trout, with Charlotte and another couple. The pale blue shred dragged and fluttered along the shoulder of 407. Trolling for shitbird now. Rudvig and the rest of Heimo’s people. They would not touch Margarite. He would stop all that.
“That’s all I need, Deputy. You go help the prison team now.”
Your infinity is inside you?
High on Percocet, staring out the window of the Luce County Bookmobile with a book in his hand, Dog began to feel the spiritual gravity, if not the purpose, of Esofea’s maxim. Your infinity is inside you. Yeah.
A person’s outer, actual life was such a narrow slice of what could really happen.
A person’s limits lay far beyond where they were presumed to be. Compared to the errors we feared, the errors we could actually make were completely more splendid. These are not actual errors …
Stamp that on the forehead of any man enjoining middle age, Dog decided.
Before long, vast thoughts such as these had replaced the pain in his back.
But—oh, yeah. The book. The guide book. U.P. Trails and Treasures—he had been looking up Heimo Kock.
“Outfitters” listed Superior Adventures. On that page was a photo of the man, barrel-chested and silver-bearded, jibbed out in technical fibers, big amber sunglasses—his arm cozily around, the caption said, actress and fly fisher Jane Seymour, star of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Dog murmured. A gust of wind broke around the bookmobile’s prow-shaped window glass. Thunder rumbled. Dog could not feel his feet.
Superior Adventures was the Upper Peninsula’s “oldest and largest outfitter of …” What followed seemed like every conceivable outdoor activity: hunting, bear hunting, fishing, fly fishing, lake trout fishing, musky fishing, walleye fishing, cruises, snowmobiling, rafting, canoeing, snowshoeing, cross country skiing, tubing, spelunking, backpacking, horseback riding, off-road vehicles, orienteering, rock hounding, even bird watching. Kock had outlets in Eagle River, L’Anse, Munising, and the Soo. He was pissing on every tree in the forest.
Dog’s eyes chased the swimming words. The man’s bio, headed “Guide to the Stars and Heroes of our Time,” informed him that Heimo Henrich Kock was born in 1914 in Marquette. He had a degree in mining. He had hunted and fished around the world, claiming numerous fish and game records. He began guiding at age eighteen. In his fifty-five years of “service” he had “introduced to the U.P. such stars and heroes as Jane Seymour, Jimmy Carter, Merlin Olsen, Ted Williams, Bobby Knight, Dick Cheney, Joan Salvato (Wulff)—and even Ernest Hemingway!”
That last claim lifted Dog’s buzzing head from the page. Kock guided Hemingway? That could be. But no—it said that Kock had “introduced” Hemingway to the U.P. Not possible. At the museum in Seney, Dog had learned that Hemingway first traveled to the Upper Peninsula in 1919, as a young man, with some buddies. Writing much later in Paris, he had based “Big Two-Hearted River” on that trip. Kock would have been five years old during Hemingway’s first visit. So what did that mean, introduced?
He was too near the window, Dog realized. A heavy young girl stared at him from under the eave of the Blind Sucker lodge. Above her, the big lake seemed to be sneezing. Fine spray swirled over the lodge and cabins and hit the bookmobile in soft gusts. In the way of pebbles dipped in a stream, the cabins had brightened. The most distant one glistened like a new robin’s egg. The next one was a wet, faded yellow, like a glass of lemonade. Then came a rain-warmed green, and after that a cabin the color of an old red barn in a fresh oil painting. The cabin nearest to the lodge had taken on decades of soot from the lodge chimney, achieving the sheen of a wet black bear that Dog had startled a week ago on a dark corner of the Fox River. That was the river Hemingway and his friends had fished, with fly rods and live grasshoppers, taking trout so big they could swallow the ones Dog had been catching.
He was getting loopy on this stuff. But the girl. Her eyes remained on Dog. She stepped inside the lodge’s main screen door as Esofea emerged from the red cabin and hustled past around the downhill side of the lodge. A moment later, just a shape now, the girl held still as Esofea returned dragging a red plastic kayak, which she dumped over the tailgate of a drab green pickup that advertised Blind Sucker Shuttle across its rusted tailgate.
In through the door of the green cabin Esofea went, then out again she came, carrying a mixing bowl with a plate over the top. She pinched her face against a lake sneeze. Dog dimly registered a thumping at the bookmobile door. Oh, yeah, open it.
“I think this is edible.” She handed him the bowl and a fork. “I nuked it good. Now, more practice.”
Dog dug into macaroni-and-cheese with cut-up hot dogs. He tasted nothing, but his appetite was surprising. “Practice what?”
“I looked up the six-oh-two area code in the phone book. This guy called Danny’s cell phone from Phoenix. We’re going to leave him another message. Or maybe he’ll answer this time. We need him to tell us what water he’s talking about.”
Dog said through a mouthful, “What water?”
“Heimo Kock owned certain rivers in his mind. He scared people off them. Maybe Danny ran into him there. Maybe that’s where you got the body.”
“Besides guiding—” Dog was burning his mouth, not feeling it much “—what does your boyfriend do?”
“He jerks me around.”
“I mean for a living.”
“He borrows money from me. Then he jerks me around.” Dog hung his mouth wide, letting in some air. “And his infinity is inside him?”
“That’s pretty much the situation, yeah.”
“He does drugs?”
“Religiously.”
“You find out what he’s up to, that he killed Kock or whatever, that he set me up, what do you do with it?”
“Concessions.”
“Concessions—?”
“Long story,” she told him, “involving private parts. Or else I let him loose and tell Donuts Rudvig that Danny can run those hounds instead of you. Oh, by the way. The TV says there are two dog teams out after you, both of them looking in the wrong place.”
Dog beheld her in a kind of fuzzy wonderment. She opened the boyfriend’s phone.
“What?” she said. “You’re confused?”
She pressed a key. She put the ringing phone in Dog’s hand. “Phoenix answers, or you get the service again, you say, ‘Let’s work it out, my brother. We had a misunderstanding. What water did I promise you?’ Then when Danny lies to me, I’ll know exactly how to play him.”
“Play him. Sure. But for me, how—”
Motherfucker, what the fuck?
Dog stared at the phone’s tiny speaker. Esofea rushed her lips to his ear: “Let’s work it out, my brother.”
“Let’s work it out, my brother—”
Motherfucker, fuck you, I ain’t your motherfucking brother. The voice came to Dog like from a bee on its hind legs, shouting. Where’s my water at?
Esofea hissed in Dog’s ear again. Dog repeated it: “We had a misunderstanding. What water?” Motherfucking motherfucker!
That made Dog laugh. Esofea gestured wildly at him to stop. You got my deposit, bitch!
“Yeah?” Dog said as Esofea grabbed at the phone. “Well, I’m keeping it.” He held the phone away. “What do you say to that?”
For moment the speaker played miniature road noises, wee honking, petite obscenities. At last the bee voice came back: What I say is we almost in Green Bay, bitch, and that ain’t far from where you at.
Then Phoenix snapped it off.
Now Dog let
Esofea snatch the phone.
She appeared to think things over for a minute. “Green Bay?” she said. Then she pecked a kiss onto his forehead. She took the bowl, fed him the final forkful of macaroni.
“Good boy, Cujo,” she said. “Perfect.”
Now she had to hurry. Into Mummo Tiina’s red cabin went Esofea and back out with the first-aid box. She noticed Caroline under the eave of the lodge.
“Sweetie, your mom and dad still have bad backs, right? Go see if they’re ok.”
The girl gave a pouty shake of her head.
“What’s that mean?”
“They’re not home.”
“Where’d they go?”
She shrugged. “Where do you think?”
“Ok, then. I’m glad they’re better. But Mummo Tiina seems a little upset today. Maybe read her a story.”
Just that sullen, accusing, hormonal stare. Esofea fought a heavy, pulling feeling.
“What then?”
And the girl said, “Who ate my macaroni?”
Shit. With her cousin now lurking suspiciously outside, Esofea lay Dog on his belly on the bookmobile floor. She stripped the coveralls to the tops of his thighs. She uncapped a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
“Our story,” she said, answering his question, “is that after his Pulitzer and his Nobel, Hemingway took an assignment from Esquire to come back to the U.P. and revisit the Big Two Hearted River stories that everybody loves. He hired Heimo Kock to take him fly fishing. That was the hot thing then, fly fishing, and Heimo was the hot young guide. But I have no idea what to do here without hurting you.”
“Just dump it on.”
“You can’t scream, then. My cousin Caroline is suspicious. She says anything, my Mummo Tiina will come out with a shotgun, except it will not, I repeat, be salt.”
“Just dump it on.”
Esofea held the bottle over his back. She said, “I’m so sorry,” and poured. He gasped and his fists clenched and his naked ass went tight as a walnut. The dozens of inflamed wounds fizzed like tiny volcanoes. Esofea heard his forehead grind against on the floor. “More of Uncle Rush’s stupid pills for you,” she said. Then she heard a door. She rose. Caroline had gotten into the resort truck, was fiddling with the lights and wipers, pretending to drive.
“So Heimo Kock … took Hemingway fly fishing?”
“Yes. And he couldn’t catch anything. When he tried to blame that on his guide, Kock told the whole world that Hemingway couldn’t cast a fly rod.”
“Again,” Dog said.
She repeated the procedure. This time his hand shot out and grabbed her ankle. He pinched his butt and whimpered and said, “Perfect, thank you. And then?”
“The Esquire article Hemingway was supposed to write never happened. But Kock did an interview with Playboy where he said that Hemingway was strictly a bait guy, and the best he could do with a fly rod was down-and-across with a wet fly. My great grandpa kept the issue. Kock called Hemingway ‘the wind knot champion of the world'—or something. I don’t know what that means exactly, but I’m sure you do.”
He let go of her ankle. “That’s why I want to get to Dolf Cook’s place. Dab it off.”
“Ok.”
“A wind knot is made by bad casting like Cook’s. The line that strangled his brother—it had wind knots in the leader. Cook tried to plant the reel with the rest of the line on me. I wouldn’t take it, but I know where it is.”
Cotton balls from the first-aid kid clung wrongly to his wounds. She unwrapped gauze, cut a strip and folded it into pad. Better. She dabbed him dry, worrying again that Danny really wasn’t involved. Would that be a problem?
“Where we come into the story is when Hemingway returned the next summer and hired my great-grandfather to teach him proper fly casting. This was before Kock muscled everyone else out of the guiding business. Hemingway was going to disprove what Kock said to Playboy. We still have the rod and reel he used, hanging with the rest of the junk in the lodge.”
She helped Dog roll to his side and sit up.
“You’re all clean.”
His voice was small and hoarse. “Thanks.” He looked at her dizzily. “And?”
“But it didn’t work out. Hemingway acted crazy. He said Kock was with the FBI. Kock was working for Castro. Then he messed around with Mummo Tiina—that’s what I think—she was just sixteen, a big, pretty girl. My great-grandpa Smithback threw him out after a week, and he shot himself shortly after.”
“In Ketchum, Idaho. On July 2, 1961.”
“Oh, god,” she said. “You too?”
“Me too what?”
“Admire that crap.”
“What crap?”
“Come on.” She pulled him to his knees. “This was my great-grandpa’s shirt.”
She helped him into a dark brown flannel. She stood him up, lowered the coveralls, helped him step out. He was naked beneath. And how.
“And GG’s boxers,” she said, holding his waist, guiding him into a pair of fifty-year-old underpants.
“Belt or suspenders? Which do you think? Belt? Good boy. So here’s what we do. The bookmobile stays here. I already put a kayak in the back of that pickup out there. I’ll drop you off upstream of Dolf Cook’s. You come up on his place from the river. He won’t expect that. There’s a steep bank there. You’ll just have to climb it. Meanwhile I continue to Newberry in the truck and do my business with Mr. Tervo. Then I come back here, pick up the bookmobile, drive it to the campground at the Mouth of the Two Hearted. That’s where you are, because you’ve gotten back into the kayak and continued downriver to the lake. Ditch the kayak at the end of the spit. I’ll pull through the boat launch parking lot, you’ll get on board—”
A honk startled both of them. “That’s just Miss Caroline,” Esofea said, “making things difficult.”
Dog looked at her.
“Admire what crap?” he asked again.
19
By the time Conrad Belcher approached Danny Tervo’s house, Danny’s tanker had been parked in its turn-out on the lake side of H58 for nearly seven hours.
This observation permitted Belcher, returning from a deer scout in Schoolcraft County, to draw near at a perfect moment that balanced the possibility he would wake Danny and piss him off against the possibility that Danny was already awake and already pissed off that Belcher had waited.
This was the “rabbit hour”—when the risks of acting and not acting equalized and became now.
So Belcher moved in, intending to ask Danny if he was supposed to run the hose across the beach tonight, fill the tanker for a delivery to those poor bastards down in drought-country.
Or did Danny want him to drive to Grand Marais for pizza and beer?
Or should he just give Danny some space to work on Esofea with a bottle of wine and a bag of weed?
At the roadside, he called Danny’s house, gazing across the highway at where the phone rang.
But no Danny. Strange.
Belcher’s inner rabbit hesitated now—there was a balance here too, where his empathy for the hunted leveled perfectly with his instinct to kill, the equilibrium forming a surreal and intoxicating oneness.
Belcher returned to his truck. He strapped a.45 Magnum sidearm under his left pit. From the compound bows and mineral licks and other junk in the truck box he sorted out a hickory-handled musky gaff. He slipped the handle up the sleeve of his Realtree jacket, cupped the hook in his palm.
He held still against a ninebark shrub as a couple of minivans convoyed west toward Munising. At his back, an autumn storm had begun to squat and piss on the lake. Electricals snapped a mile or two out. It would rain in thirty minutes. Maybe thirty-one. No one saw him cross the road.
Belcher felt annoyed, as always, approaching Danny’s house. Here was another balance: friendship. It used to be a nice old summer house, one of the best. Then Danny’s mom got the place in a divorce and didn’t take care of it. Then she got remarried and moved, and Danny—alone as a senior in high
school—took over the house. It looked terrible now, the way Danny kept it up, meaning he didn’t. The shrubs rose to the gutters, blocking the windows. The stone path was shagged with salt grass. Invasives claimed the gardens, Japanese knotweed and garlic mustard up to Belcher’s waist as he stepped through, phragmites clogging what used to be a minnow pond, kudzu going up the trunks of the old growth pines in back of the driveway. And that was just the vegetable neglect. Windows were broken, screens hung loose, the septic line was ruptured. Bricks from the chimney had popped out and landed on the roof so long ago that pine and maple seedlings grew around them. All this called attention to Danny—which you did not want if you were into the stuff Danny was into—which was inconsiderate—think about it—to the people who cared about Danny and basically believed in him and supported him in certain risks—people such as, for example, his best old friend, Conrad Belcher.
But try to explain this to Danny.
When you called attention, you got attention, eventually. That was a law of nature. When you made trouble, trouble made you back.
Belcher kicked through newspapers in plastic sleeves and knocked.
No sound. No movement.
Once more he called the house. No.
He circled outside, muting his footfalls on fallen leaves—yellow beech, red maple. Heineken bottles on the deck table, labels faded. Black panties in a stunning red viburnum.
Goddamned Danny. Sofi wouldn’t do that.
The back door was ajar. With the gaff raised in one hand and the.45 cocked in the other, Belcher went in. He stalked through the place, room by room—thinking, The tanker is here, and that means Danny. But no …
So why does the enlightened man not stand on his feet and explain himself?
Earlier, by about five that morning, using a meditation on this koan from Shogen, Tervo had worked his legs free of the bungee cord. This was just after he heard Esofea pull away in his tanker.
Because when the feet of enlightenment move, the great ocean overflows.
The Wind Knot Page 21