The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  He didn’t kill his brother. He swore to God. His brother hated him—he had told Margarite this much so far—because he changed his name from Kock to Cook. Because he went to a fancy college. Because he owned restaurants in fifteen states. His brother hated him because he was acquainted with better and richer celebrities. The restaurants, you know. His brother hated him because he had had so many good-looking wives, whereas his brother’s wife, June the Goon—and here he had managed to stop himself, possibly realizing that “June the Goon” had nearly killed him.

  But then Cook got going again. His brother wouldn’t let him into the Royal Coachmen Society.

  His brother wouldn’t even admit there was a Royal Coachmen Society. That was a dirty lie. Dolf Cook knew there was. He knew they met once a year on Isle Royale, flew in during the coaster run with high-class working girls and casks of twelve-year-old scotch. But he didn’t kill his brother. He swore it. His brother was his brother, for chrissake. Then he said he had to piss.

  Margarite kept her mouth shut. She watched Cook wobble inside the Deer Park Lodge general store. She left the cruiser running, went around behind the store, and waited in the drizzle by the LP tank. She caught Cook by the back of his neck as he tried to sneak out the delivery door, slapping at a wet circle on the crotch of his trousers.

  “Be gentle,” he slurred at her. “For chrissake, officer, be a lady.”

  “I’m a dyke, you idiot.” She hurled him onto the back seat. “So is Julia Inkster.”

  “You mean—”

  “No. I’m sure she can just barely tolerate you and your restaurants in fifteen states.” Margarite twisted from the front seat to glare at the fool. “Your clue is when the sex costs you truck tires.”

  He lay there the last five miles, silent except for gasping sounds. This last hour, since the deputy left the White Pines in pursuit of Cook, Julia had been pounding Margarite’s cell phone with messages. She let them go. But she couldn’t stop herself: “I know it’s hard, Mr. Cook. But look on the bright side. At least you’re a dishonest drunk.”

  She turned off before the Reed and Green bridge—she glimpsed someone in a flannel shirt down there at the river, launching a kayak—and took the campground road. The same short drive that she took two days ago to meet the DNR guy, Greg Bright, now seemed to take a thousand heartbeats and a hundred acid swallows. God damn you, Julia. God damn you. But there weren’t words for it.

  Cook shambled to his door. He took a key from his pocket. He inserted it. Apparently the door had been unlocked—he had now locked it. While he sorted out the whole conundrum, Margarite looked over toward the campground dumpster, just visible through the trees. But she had to stay here, make sure Cook had no wiggle room.

  “Don’t touch anything.”

  “It’s my house; I’ll touch what I want.”

  Margarite reached for her cuffs.

  “All right, all right. Lord God, why do people despise me?”

  She stepped inside. Was it two days ago she had first come here? It was a harmless mess then. Today the place groped and leered. Its breath stank. Goddamned Julia.

  “Stop. Sit there. Put your hands on the table top and keep them there.”

  Margarite left the front door open. Wind whipped jackets in the foyer, sleeves slapping a kindling box below them. She drew back a curtain and let in the approaching storm’s skidding light. By this she reviewed the photograph of Cook holding the large brook trout—and now she saw the pale, cracked, pumpkin-colored fly line draped over Cook’s arm at the margin of the picture. Was this the line that killed Heimo Kock? Or was this Julia’s line? Or …

  “You said your brother took this photograph.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Then you wrapped that line around his neck?”

  “Huh? No. No, I—” He lurched in the chair. “May I stand?”

  She let him. She stepped aside as he puttered nervously behind her, reaching into a cabinet cluttered with fishing gear. He returned to the table. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Now I recall. My reel … that reel … I gave that reel to the fellow with the RV. I’m sure you’ve found it in his things by now.”

  Margarite stared him back to a sitting position. “No. We didn’t find it. I don’t believe he had much of anything to do with this. Who took this picture?”

  Cook jerked his head toward the window, where a gust wobbled grimy window panes in their mullions. “He did. The trout bum.”

  “Who caught the fish?”

  “He did.”

  “You gave him a thousand bucks cash?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? And why did you lie to me?”

  Cook stood again. Drifting unsteadily toward his bar, he asked,

  “May I?”

  He poured himself a scotch.

  “In answer to my own question, why do people despise me,” he announced, tossing down the drink, “I cheat. I always have. It began, you might say, when I changed my name from Kock to Cook—though of course I was still one hundred percent Kock, spell it any way you like. But it was a manner of misrepresenting the truth, et cetera, et cetera. It all follows from there. I couldn’t catch a fish like that in the picture to save my life. I can’t even figure out how to cast a goddamned fly rod.”

  Margarite released her mind a little further into the room, easing up to the fact that Julia had moved around in here, with a drink and a smoke, her buzzed eyes and her party voice. Julia had breathed this air, touched these things, touched this man. For a leather jacket and sunglasses, free booze, and truck tires. And then touched me. Margarite wheeled around at a sound: coat sleeves, slapping in the foyer.

  “Porn,” Cook said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That’s called porn. Fish porn.” He slopped his drink toward the brook trout photograph. “In the trade, pictures like that, that make a fisherman drool—pornography.”

  “And fish porn is part of your application to the club?” There was the dish of the flies tied by Oglivie, still on the table. “The Royal Coachmen?”

  “You have to get something published.” Cook tottered over from the bar. He poked through the mess on the table and tossed a newsprint magazine toward her, a pretty picture of a spring creek on the front. Midwest Fly Fishing. “Has to mention Hemingway, the Royal Coachman, and use the word ‘ass.’ The keeper of the box has to see it. He has to contact you. Tough shit if he doesn’t. You can try again. Look at page three.”

  “This is just a letter to the editor,” Margarite said. “That counts?”

  He was silent as she read. Adolf Cook of Chicago (winters) and Luce County, Michigan (summers), was correcting a previous letter to the editor (Ed Smith, Joliet) containing the false information that Ernest Hemingway was indifferent to fly fishing. In point of fact, Cook wrote, the famous author, disgraced in print by a young UP guide named Heimo Kock (my brother), had visited three weeks in 1956 at the Blind Sucker Resort, where with a guide named Elmer Smithback he worked his illustrious ass off to learn the craft of fly casting and repair the damage to his ego and reputation. However, Mr. Hemingway—who favored a Royal Coachman, wet—left abruptly upon discovery of his affair with an underage local beauty. Mr. Ed Smith, though well intentioned, and undoubtedly a gentleman, should get his facts straight.

  “Apparently my brother felt a letter to the editor did not count,” Cook said, “and I heard nothing.”

  “I’ll bet you were Ed Smith, too.”

  Cook merely shrugged. His hands trembled. Thunder boomed from the direction of the big lake.

  “How did you know your brother was keeper of the box?”

  “I couldn’t get in, that’s how. I had my first piece in the Marquette Miner, Outdoor Page, fall of 1997. I had another in 2000. Nothing. Nada. Rejection like that, it had to be him.”

  “Somehow you knew the application requirements.”

  “Rumor,” Cook said with a shrug. “That stuff’s been out there thirty years.”

  “You finally got something el
se in print.”

  “Goddamn right. And nothing again. Nada.”

  Margarite set the sack with Julia’s reel on the table. “Tell me the requirements again,” she said. “Fish porn and what else?”

  “Porn, pelt, and press,” muttered Cook. “Porn and pelt to a P.O. box in Detroit. Along with a perfect fly for the box.”

  “Pelt?”

  “Pelt.”

  “As in beaver?”

  “Correct.”

  “Meaning woman?”

  “The very thing, yes.” His head hung, eyes on his piss-spattered slippers. “That’s just the sort of thing we men do, you know, among one another, powerful men like my brother and the rest of us.”

  Margarite’s breathing felt cut-off, shallow. This horrid drunken pal of Julia’s had assumed almost a British accent. Apparently it helped him express depravity. Along with the rattling windows, and the empty jackets dancing in the foyer.

  “You know at Yale, we Bonesmen gave George H. W. Bush the name Magog for a reason. He had a third leg, that rotter, and he knew how to use it.”

  Cook began pushing papers aside, gearing up for more. Margarite snarled, “Stop.”

  He did, limply.

  “You disgust me.”

  “I know.”

  “You were never in Skull and Bones. Not a chance. You read about it, that’s all.”

  “I was not. No. Yes, I’m something of a reader.”

  “You went to Yale?”

  “U of Illinois.”

  “Do you know who killed your brother?”

  “I do not.”

  Margarite abstained from believing that, or disbelieving it. Her mind was leaping forward. The Hemingway thing. It was time she got it.

  “Hemingway’s underage beauty. Tiina Smithback?”

  Cook looked surprised. “That’s what my brother claimed. He was hot for Tiina but she didn’t like him. He was jealous. He blamed it on Hemingway, though I don’t think anyone really believed him by that point, with their feud and all that.”

  Margarite measured one raw breath—in, out—and pointed at the mess of paper on the table.

  “Your pelt is in here too?”

  “Yes, I believe it is.”

  “This woman is a regular visitor?”

  “A bit of one over the years, yes. Various activities.”

  “Julia Inkster?”

  He shrugged, stared at his slippers. Margarite felt tears building behind her eyelids. Shit. She opened the sack, rolled out Julia’s reel.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Verification,” he muttered. “Because I’m not in the picture with her. Could be anybody’s pelt. Figured that might hang me up. Paid her for the reel. You saw that. Paid her for every goddamn thing.”

  Then he reached into the slew of documents again.

  “No. Move your hands back.”

  Margarite would do this herself. She lifted one piece of paper after another and another—until at the top of one sheet she saw a woman’s sunburned bare arms lashed with pale orange fly line to a tree trunk. That line came off a fly reel, gripped in one of the woman’s fists. The reel, the fist: Julia’s.

  Margarite pulled the sheet from the pile by millimeters. Beneath a pair of dirty, reddened elbows appeared the top of Julia’s head. Strands of her frizzy hair had snagged in the tree bark, the way they had sometimes snagged in Margarite’s eager fingers.

  Suddenly the wind released the windows. Outside the trees stopped thrashing. The jackets sleeves fell still. Margarite looked no further.

  Dog winced and cussed, stabbing along the river bottom with a dead branch. Five years and not a single phone call. Now he couldn’t keep up with them.

  Some guy named Belcher, expecting he was Danny. Now another call.

  As the ringing of Tervo’s phone intensified, Dog levered to the bank. He looked for gravel where the kayak wouldn’t leave a nose mark. He caught the tip of a spruce bough and pulled himself aground. He had passed the campground. Now he saw it. That was Dolf Cook’s place, ahead on the left, up an eroded bank about a hundred feet high.

  “Hello?”

  “The fucker’s gone!”

  Esofea shrieked this—and Dog stowed his first thought, which was good. Also his second thought, a complaint involving his lack of a kayak paddle.

  “And … he hurt my cat … and Caroline is mad at me so she told my Mummo Tiina that I left the Blind Sucker in the pickup with a strange man who wasn’t Danny so I called and said you were Danny, for sure, but Caroline got a stool and looked in the bookmobile window and said she saw Danny really in there with his friend Belcher but Mummo Tiina believes me about Danny, that he’s with me—she hasn’t seen Danny in I don’t know how long—so Caroline thinks she’s been called a liar and she’s sulking while my mummo’s getting out the punt gun and I think she’s about to blast the—”

  “Punt gun?”

  “I told you. It’s a—never mind.”

  “You’re at the Blind Sucker now?”

  “I’m driving there. Get your business done. I’m going to swing through the campground and pick you up. You can’t come back with me, but I know an empty cabin on Muscalonge Lake, so you’ll jump off—”

  Her voice cut out. Dog waited: only wind and river noise and the high-pitched static of his pain. “Hello? Listen, I can’t—”

  “—later, then I’ll—”

  “A different guy called—”

  “—Mummo Tiina blows Danny and Belcher into a million—”

  “Hello?”

  But she was gone. A gardener down in Phoenix, he meant to tell her, was expecting Tervo to deliver a tanker of water from Lake Superior. This guy had paid four bucks a gallon. Twice the price of crude oil, the guy had pointed out, furious because he thought Dog—thought Tervo—was stonewalling. Now the gardener wanted out, wanted no part of whatever Tervo was into, wanted his check back—and Dog, who had nothing to say to the guy, had finally figured out how to hang up.

  Brilliant. Insane. Visionary. Criminal. No wonder Esofea loved Danny Tervo, Dog thought. And hated him.

  He returned the phone to his pocket. He beached the kayak. He clawed his way up the sloughing sand bank toward Dolf Cook’s cottage. By the top his wounds had cracked their peroxide husks and dissolved and bled and stung themselves up to a new level of hurt. Dog hid within a sumac thicket, did not move again until he had measured the additional burden. He disconnected his legs, his brain, his hands, checked their function, then carried his pain away like a sack of red-hot nails slung over his shoulder. The pain was on him, not in him. He could stand it a while.

  The cottage was quiet. Cook’s vehicle was not there. At the corner of the house Dog found a rusted axe, wedged deep in the grain of a cedar stump. He worked that loose and took it to Cook’s door, which stood open.

  Cook sat at his dining table, but he did not see Dog step in. The little automatic pistol Dog had given away two nights ago was there on the table, heel down, Cook trying to jam in the wrong end of the magazine. Dog silently pushed jackets aside. He reached down into the kindling box: the Pflueger reel was exactly where he had dropped it.

  He kept his eyes on Cook. The old man’s scalp bled thinly behind one ear. The cheek on that side was inflamed, and the eye watered. His clothing was grass stained, as if he had fallen. His hands trembled too much to discover that the magazine didn’t fit because it was backwards. Dog rapped the axe against the door jamb.

  “Nobody home.”

  “Guess who.”

  “Go away.”

  “I will in a minute. I’ve got the reel you tried to plant on me. Look. Now give me the print of you with that brook trout you paid me to catch. I’m going to undo your set up before I get killed for it.”

  Cook raised his head.

  “You can take any goddamn thing you want. Help yourself.”

  “I’ll take my pistol back too.”

  “The hell you will.”

  With a hard metallic click, the magazine ins
erted on its own. Cook looked up. He looked back down at the pistol. Just as he realized he could shoot it, Dog stepped in, went low in a dive and then exploded up. His head and shoulders connected. His thighs drove hard. He flipped the table over on top of Cook. He charged across the tipping underside with the axe butt ready.

  But nothing moved. Cook had disappeared completely, just a soft and whimpering fulcrum beneath Dog’s weight. He stepped off.

  He looked at the reel in his hand. The old Pflueger held a cracked orange line—yes—but that line was un-cut, whole, fastened with a leader, wind knots and all.

  He was wrong.

  Cook hadn’t killed his brother. Not with this anyway. Maybe the reel was a true gift. Maybe the old liar beneath the table had been reaching out for friendship.

  This knowledge came over Dog like a deeper silence than the room could hold, and in poured sounds: Cook’s windows rattled. Treetops whipped and swished. The garbage lid clanged at the campground. Thunder rumbled from the lake. Dog eased to the side of the window and looked out. A sheriff’s deputy circled the trash box.

  “Who killed your brother?”

  The table slid a centimeter, rose and fell minutely. Cook was muttering.

  “Come on, old man. I’m taking the fall for it. Who?”

  At Dog’s feet was the photo he had wanted: Cook the cheater, with his trout-for-hire. A secret fly fishing society was made up of just such men, Dog imagined. Maybe the secret was how appalling they were. It didn’t matter now.

  Dog nudged an upside-down table leg. He eased around a corner of the pale wood slab, watching out for Cook. If the pistol showed—with a wrist, an arm—he would chop down with the axe.

  “They’re on me with bear hounds. A posse. And there’s a cop outside. I deserve a lot of things, but not that. How did your brother end up in my vehicle?”

  The next photograph Dog retrieved from the floor was the image of a young woman lashed to a scrawny tree trunk, naked except for hip boots. She gave the camera a disturbing smile: insincerely lewd, subliminally enraged. Above her head, her wrists were lashed to the tree with a pale-pumpkin-colored fly line. That line trailed from a reel in her right hand. Not the Pflueger. A different old reel.