The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  And people drown in that shit, Tervo thought. It’s too deep for them.

  In any case, he could then twist to one side and loose a screaming piss off the side of the bed, fire-hosing some jewelry off the top of Esofea’s bureau. Awesome.

  After that he took a little nap, thinking Esofea would be back any minute, the truck in a ditch, all sorry, all done riding the estrogen rocket, or whatever. And she had come back, just before sunrise. Tervo recognized the sound of his own Kawasaki Ninja 650. He should have never taught her to ride that rocket, obviously. He recognized the sound of the heavy carriage doors on the mansion’s garage. Then she had left again, he didn’t know how or where to, and when the St. Gregory’s bells woke him at ten, Esofea wasn’t back yet.

  Tervo registered this unpleasant surprise in his molars, grinding inside a dry mouth. Maybe he really had a problem.

  So break it down. He still had about twelve hours to get the tanker filled and back on the road to Phoenix. If he got Belcher going now, the truck could be rolling by midnight. The ornamental gardener, Takahashi, could not afford to be patient. Avoiding that psychopathic insect Billy Rowntree—he hadn’t figured that one out yet.

  But maybe, speaking of insects, he could try an inchworm. Like that. Yeah. He used his hips and ass to work the mattress off the box spring beneath. Finally the mattress slid to the floor. These activities took until noon and exhausted him. But now, in a deeper pocket of space atop the box spring, he had enough play to roll back like a pill bug and see what he was dealing with.

  So this was his strategy: he pushed hands and cuffs as high up the brass spindles as they would go. Then he put his feet to his wrists and pushed them higher, until he could get into sarvangasana, the Ashtanga yoga shoulder stand. From here, spreading his feet down the arc of the top pipe, he created enough knee bend to kick toward the ceiling. He hammered the piping upward in its sleeves. It popped out and fell on top of him.

  Tervo rolled off the bed. He was a free man, aside from the fact that he was cuffed to his batshit girlfriend’s antique brass sex-handle.

  But he could swing the thing sideways and hammer his way down the staircase to the ground floor. He cracked plaster. He smashed light fixtures on both landings. He fractured the bottom banister, booted the newel knob into the next hallway.

  Then Tervo took measures. First, he rehydrated. He drank water at the kitchen sink, lifting the whole headboard with the cup. He knew where Esofea kept her weed, and he burned some of that, the antique pipes moving like the complex armature of some fantastic bong. As Tervo, now stoned, entered the front parlor, the kitty Mr. Nilsson startled, ran across the rug and turned to look again.

  Which gave him a thought.

  An awkward, hilarious, impossible, perfectly vengeful thought. Sensing something, Esofea’s kitty cat fled to the next room. But—headboard and all—he would catch it.

  Caroline rolled down the pickup’s window. “Oh, finally,” she said. “You were like in there forever.”

  “Caroline, honey, can you get out of the truck?”

  “Who’s in there?”

  “No one.”

  “Is Danny in there?”

  “Why would Danny be in there?”

  “Because he’s your boyfriend and you guys do it.”

  “Danny has a house. I have a house. If we were going to do it, sweetheart, we would do it in a house. In a bed. That’s how people do it when they love each other. Come on out now and go inside. I need the truck.”

  Squinting as the drizzle sailed sideways, Esofea opened the pickup door. Caroline didn’t get out. The girl wiggled the shifter, jerked the steering wheel left and right. Then she said, “I wouldn’t do it unless somebody made me.”

  “Good girl. Come on out.”

  “They went to the White Pines,” Caroline said. “Again.”

  “Who did?”

  “Mom and Dad.”

  “That’s nice. So they’re feeling better. Now, please—out.”

  “Then who’s in there?”

  “Nobody.”

  “It’s that guy, right?”

  “What guy?”

  “You shot him and then he escaped from the hospital? Mummo’s watching on TV. He has a gun and everything? So, are you guys doing it now?”

  Esofea took her by the arm—this suddenly heavy, stupid girl—gripped the baby fat below her armpit and tugged. For a few ugly moments, Esofea’s cousin resisted, clawed the steering wheel, tried to hook a foot through it, called Esofea a stupid twat and a houkka, until at last Esofea extracted her and steered her inside the great room of the lodge, where the girl tore away and stood hulking and trembling amidst the rods and guns and game trophies.

  “Keep your mouth shut, Caroline, and stay right here.”

  “I don’t like it in here.”

  “It’s fine in here.”

  “It’s … it sucks in here. It’s boring.”

  Esofea slung open the drawer where the games were kept. She pawed through playing cards, dominoes, Laugh-a-Day books of riddles and jokes, Don’t Spill the Beans, Operation, Chutes and Ladders, a bb pinball game—heaped this stuff out wholesale onto the sawed-pine lodge table. “Keep busy,” she ordered the girl. She left behind the empty pint bottle of Bailey’s Cream. Uncle Rush probably. But no time to wonder.

  “I want to go with Mummo.”

  “Mummo’s sleeping.”

  “She is not.”

  Esofea pushed her toward the deer-hide sofa. But the girl fought again—as if the sofa would burn her—then twisted loose and fled into Great Grandpa Smithback’s old rocker.

  “Leave Mummo alone. Don’t upset her. Play some games.”

  “That junk?” Her voice cracked and she sniffled. “No way.”

  Caroline adjusted the bloom of her rear end and from a pocket there produced a pink electronic game of the type Esofea sometimes competed with at library story time.

  “Who got you that?”

  “Who’s in the bookmobile?”

  Esofea backed up inside her mind. The girl wasn’t sassing her, she realized. She was negotiating. She had something. Some knowledge, some information, some trouble. It just wasn’t free. “How about we tell each other tomorrow?” Esofea asked her more gently. But a heaviness flooded her heart. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she would play the games, ask the questions, do what she should do for a girl growing up in a way she, of all people, ought to understand.

  “I’m sorry, Caroline. And I mean it. We’ll talk.” Caroline kept her head down over the game, her thumbs a blur. “Whatever.”

  Dog let Esofea help him aboard the pickup. She drove hard, lake wind whipping from behind. The kayak hammered in the box, sending vibrations to the cab. Loose firewood slung around back there too, and what sounded like a maul, pounding back and forth between the wheel wells. Dog’s wounds got wired again. His pain rewound.

  “Any more of those pills on hand?”

  He asked this twice. He needed to brace against the dash. “Somebody’s messing with her,” she said through gritted teeth. “My little cousin.”

  “Messing with her?”

  “Do I have to explain?”

  Dog lost the thread of this. “Any more of those pills?”

  “And I think I know who. After I let Mr. Tervo out for the dogs to play with,” she said, “you can find me at the White Pines Hotel.”

  That didn’t seem like the plan that Dog remembered. Ten rough and worried miles went by, his eyes closed and his teeth locked. He thought about the cold water of the Two Hearted River. Lie down in it. No—the big lake, Superior. Now that was cold water. If he got that far—if that was still the plan—he would stretch out in lake water, go numb.

  “Get down.”

  Dog opened his eyes.

  “Down!” She caught a fistful of hair, yanked him apart from a blur of sound and image: dogs yelping at the roadside, men in camouflage, someone hollering.

  “Shit,” she muttered grimly. “You should have disappeared right where I picked y
ou up. Somehow those psychos got way up here.”

  Five miles on, she threw the kayak onto the road at the Reed and Green Bridge. “Don’t drag it. You’ll leave a mark in the sand. Carry it overhead and put it down in the water so they don’t know you have it.” She gave him the boyfriend’s phone. “Use that if you need it. I made myself speed dial number one.”

  “Number one?”

  “You find that funny?”

  Then she left him, the kayak paddle going with her on the way to Newberry, slamming around with the firewood and the maul.

  Dog lingered on the bridge beside the kayak, shivering on a wave of pain. Should he hit number one and call her? Or should he find a good branch, pole the kayak downriver? Call her, he decided, studying the phone keys—and then the damn thing rang.

  And rang again louder. And louder. Until Dog pressed something and it stopped.

  “You took the paddle—”

  Bitch, I get to Iron Mountain, which way I go next?

  “Take a left and go to hell,” Dog said. The screen said he had another call. Trying to get it, he pushed OFF. He said, “You took the paddle.”

  Silence. Blank screen.

  So OFF was off. He pushed ON, but that didn’t bring the call back. He lingered, hoping Esofea would reappear on a fishtail of sand and throw the paddle out.

  But no. He carried the kayak to the Two Hearted. He set the boat in a little slip of backwater, its nose on a mat of gnat-infested flotsam. He was sorting through deadfall along the riverbank, looking for a pole, when the phone rang again.

  “The paddle. You took it with you.”

  The what?

  “Who is this?”

  This is Takahashi. From Phoenix? I gave you two grand, remember? You said seventy-two hours. The koi are floating on their sides. The rhodies are dropping petals all over the parking lot. Can you make it sooner?

  Conrad Belcher located his pal Danny Tervo inside the kitchen of the Frens mansion a little after noon. His first thought: turn around and leave.

  Because Danny was stoned and handcuffed to a brass headboard and in the midst of doing a very bad thing.

  “Let the cat go, Danny. Let him out of there.”

  “I caught him while I was attached to this thing, Belch. Do I have talent, or what? Can you believe it? Now watch.”

  Handcuffs clattered on brass spindles as Belcher’s buddy pumped the plunger on an extra large salad spinner. Danny’s arms and hands were scratched and bleeding. Mr. Nilsson, mashed inside, became a yowling whirl of gray fur.

  “That’s messed up, Danny.”

  “He fell into the bathtub, Belch. He got all wet.”

  Just coming in there, after searching several bars for Danny, Belcher had felt extremely tense. He hated bars. Give him a pint of Schnapps and a tree stand. In those bars, there was hardly anyone to ask about Danny, and Belcher had learned that the suspect in Kock’s death was loose in the woods with half the gun nuts in the county out after him. Bear dogs and ORVs. Talk of spotter planes. Boats heading out from Grand Marais and Deer Park to “patrol the coastline.” It hadn’t felt right—the guy escaping from the hospital, vanishing. He had help. Only way it was possible. And this shit here looked connected. Which meant Esofea was in trouble.

  “Come on, Danny. Knock it off.”

  “Give me your phone, Belch. I’m gonna take a picture.”

  “Danny, I found that cat, begging for graham crackers in the Pratt Lake Campground. I gave him to Sofi.”

  “Give me your phone.”

  “Hell no.”

  “Then take a picture for me and send it to Sofi.” Danny pumped the plunger again. This time Mr. Nilsson whirled in silent terror. “Text message: sorry baby, your pussy got wet.”

  “Where is she, Danny?”

  “Cut me out of this thing, Belch.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I can’t hear you, buddy.”

  “Where is she, Danny? She’s in trouble, right?”

  “Cut me out, Belch.”

  Belcher turned his back. He stormed outside, stood on the porch with tears in his eyes. He spat out his Skoal. Like Esofea always said: fucker.

  Then he went to his truck and got the cutters.

  20

  Careful not to spook Dolf Cook, Deputy Margarite DuCharme left the White Pines Hotel by the rear door, drove the opposite way around the block, then fell in and followed Cook at a distance.

  The dead man’s brother drove erratically. She should have pulled him over, gotten him off the road. She didn’t.

  She stayed a quarter mile behind the dust-caked silver Jeep Cherokee—Illinois plates, taillight out—watching a dangerous drunk speed and slow, catch the shoulder, drift over the center line, perform the entire gamut of DUI maneuvers—because she had to find out about Julia.

  Which meant, really, that she had to find out about herself.

  Which meant she didn’t know.

  There. Now it was on the table. She didn’t understand her own self. The why. The who. The where it was that she always went wrong in her life.

  Cook took the first big turn north of Newberry from the left-hand lane, but Deputy DuCharme allowed him to drive on. Several lucky miles later, going eighty on a straight, he swerved around Donuts Rudvig and his bear hounds as they surged along the shoulder. What were they doing all the way up here? And on the roadside? She heard Rudvig curse a particular female sexual part as she flew past, nearly clipping a Rhodesian ridgeback. First she had lost Julia, Margarite decided. Then Oglivie. Now she had lost her mind. Next would be her badge.

  Everything hurt suddenly, but all she had was Pepto. Then Cook made it worse. He deepened her morass of doubt, following 424 to 421 past Deadman’s Lake to 422 and onward past Peanut Lake into the Tahquamenon chain, into the middle of nowhere.

  She went too far, too fast, with the wrong one. She always did.

  Margarite fell way back and followed, racking up a brutal list of should-haves. She should have grilled Julia harder about all the men she liked to mention, especially Tervo. She should have grilled Julia harder about Julia. She should have stayed with the Milwaukee job and made Julia come to her, not the other way around. Long before that, at the Tori Amos concert, she should have asked herself why is this perfectly hot grrl just leaning there on the wall, alone with her beer, nobody coming close to her?

  Nobody but me.

  Why?

  At State 77, Dolf Cook turned north toward Grand Marais, and suddenly Margarite guessed where he was going. She picked up her radio.

  “Sheriff? Just checking in. I’m in Grand Marais, headed for Kock’s house.”

  She heard nothing back for five or six miles, driving into a misty squall of lake wind, the beginning of a storm. She was right, though: Cook had just crossed Wilson Street and turned right past the West Bay Diner, headed for his brother’s house.

  “Sheriff? Bruce? You copy?”

  She turned behind Dolf Cook up the hill on Morris. He maneuvered a drunken left onto Burton Street, clipping the snow stake but otherwise making the corner. His brother’s house was up the long private drive from there.

  Margarite pulled over to watch, her brain a messy swirl of duty and doubt. Did June Kock know who killed her husband? Wait by the door, she had said. The one who did it will come for the box.

  “Sheriff? Damn it, where the hell are you?”

  Her windshield was misted over. Two hundred yards up the bluff, Cook had disappeared through the gate to his brother’s house.

  “I’m going in on Kock’s house. You copy?”

  Margarite pulled ahead and took the hill on foot. She charged up the steep incline, through dune grass and shrubby red pines. Sure enough, when she looked over the cedar fence, Cook was leaving his vehicle, heading up the front walk—dithering along, unaware that June Kock had appeared in the picture window, standing against the drapes to watch his approach—not with a knife, though. The widow dropped shells into a shotgun.

  Neither of them saw Ma
rgarite clear the fence. She landed in soft landscape bark. Wind noise covered her dodge through shrubbery and her sprint over grass.

  June Kock opened the door.

  Dolf Cook skidded tipsily to a halt.

  June Kock raised the shotgun.

  Cook said, “It’s only me, dear,” and he was doffing an invisible cap as Margarite took a last long stride and laid herself out in the air. She heard June Kock pump the shotgun. The deputy slammed into Cook at midsection, a full-out tackle, heard his breath squeak out as she landed hard on top of him. The shotgun tore a hole in the air above, spraying lead against the fence across the yard.

  Beneath her, Cook made a bawl of angry sound and began to thrash. Margarite twisted his head and shoved his face into the grass until he went fetal. She looked up. “No. Mrs. Kock. Wait.”

  June Kock, in her lumpy stretch pants and slippers, pumped the weapon a second time: “Clear outta the way, missy.”

  “No. Please. Wait.”

  Margarite struggled up into the line of the shotgun. She squared her vest to the barrel. Her chest heaved.

  “Mrs. Kock, please.”

  The woman’s brother-in-law unreeled from his fetal position and corkscrewed a swing at the deputy. Margarite caught him by the forearm. With her free hand she pushed the gun barrel down. She tried to recover her breath.

  “He’s … he’s … we’re going to take care of it.”

  “Take care of what?” Cook thrashed feebly. “I didn’t kill him! Get your hands off me!”

  She bent Cook’s arm until he yelped. She wanted to snap it.

  “The sheriff’s department is taking care of it, I promise,” she panted at June Kock. “Now put that thing away. Unload it, put it away, and don’t answer your door. Lock your gate. Please let us take care of it.”

  “I didn’t touch him! He’s my brother, for chrissake!” She spun Cook. She shoved a hand down his baggy pants pocket. She withdrew the paper sack from the White Pines and tore it open. Julia’s empty reel.

  “Come on.” She pushed Cook ahead. “You’re riding with me. We’re going to do this at your place.”

  Dolf Cook blubbered all the way from Grand Marias to Deer Park, then said he was going to piss his pants. Deputy Margarite DuCharme stopped at Deer Park Lodge and let him go inside the general store.