The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  Rowntree turned to the sky, flinching, shutting his eyes. Water, water, water. He felt his underclothes turn wet. He smelled minerals as the dust jumped. He smelled green from everywhere. He raised his arms. He hooked the two-tone blue Brutinis under a bar of the luggage rack. He got his balance. He opened his jacket. He unbuttoned his shirt, letting out the jersey.

  “Mike! Drive!”

  The Hummer began to roll and Rowntree rode up there, his arms raised like Nash at that ‘01 All-Star Game, hearing it.

  At the next bridge, this old blue pickup blocked the road and stopped them. Rowntree jumped down and walked to the window. Nobody in it.

  He blew the horn. He looked over the rail. Old white man down there, fishing.

  “Yo. Yo, Homer Simpson.”

  Stumbling a little, making a stiff-necked turn, the old man looked up at Rowntree and hollered, “They’re running! The Coho!” Rowntree scowled down at a big silver fish, dead in the rocks. “You blocking me, Homer.”

  “Oh, gosh. Sorry about that.”

  He came up, big monster marshmallow man, huffing and sweating.

  “You … you fellas … lost?”

  “Yeah. Danny Tervo. Friend of mine. Where’s he at?”

  “Well, he’s got a place … over in … Deer Park.” Old man looked at the Hummer, the Illinois plates, Mike behind the wheel. “Hey … what’s going on? You guys … fishermen?”

  “You got a map?”

  “Sure do.”

  Rowntree looked again inside that old blue truck. It was radioed. LED dash strobes down on the passenger floor, like on some of the trucks at Oracle. Old man opened a map stamped on the top Courtesy of the Luce County Sheriff’s Department. He was off-duty law.

  “Where I find the nearest cop up here?”

  Old man laughed.

  Rowntree looked in the truck again. No weapons in view. He reached under his wet jacket to get hold of his own. “You can show me where is Tervo at?”

  “You betcha. You’re headed the wrong way. Deer Park is right here.”

  This old cop put his finger on the map.

  “Appreciate it,” Rowntree said, tossing the map back into the pickup so it wouldn’t get any wetter.

  He put the pistol to the old man’s head, and for a long, beautiful moment it was like he was calm, floating, seeing everything, his options, his plans, his goal, all his messages, his mother in Sinbad’s house—and then he walked Homer ten yards up the road so Buddha Mike could have a good study of a man’s skull when a bullet went through it.

  “Get out,” he told Buddha Mike. “No, leave the keys. We changing vehicles,” he said, and then he pulled the trigger.

  22

  “Don’t,” Dog told her, and Esofea stuffed the brake pedal once, twice, fishtailing the Blind Sucker pickup on the wet road and fumbling her cell phone to the truck floor right at the Whiskey Creek and Pine Stump Junction—but she was already committed to the back route to the Reed and Green Campground.

  Don’t?

  She retrieved the phone but Dog was gone and didn’t answer back. Esofea felt a hard stitch in that heavy region of her heart. Don’t what?

  With a lunatic like her, a Pippi disciple, a Tervo casualty, a woman cut from the cloth of Mummo Tiina, the possibilities for don’t seemed endless.

  There were so many things Esofea felt she should not do, many more she never should have done, and countless things yet to arise that she should not consider doing in the future. Yet somehow the idea of not doing something had never occurred to her. Dog’s one word—don’t—struck her as an epiphany of such appalling significance that she could not bear witness and remain whole, in charge of a speeding pickup.

  Not What Would Pippi Do? This seemed easy, in a way. Or at least natural.

  But … What Would Pippi Don’t?

  She had no idea.

  How about don’t stop?

  She drove faster, that’s what, the wrongness of it gnawing at her. She made that old pickup fly over chuckholes, smashing puddles, taking a washboard corner so fast the truck slid sideways and nearly rolled before she yanked it out and sped on.

  So here it was. Forget grad school. Something was wrong with Pippi. Esofea could not deny that. Something bad made Pippi act out the way she did. Injured girl, being delightful. Cut to Esofea dressing up in costumes, driving a fifty-year-old bookmobile around a county where nobody cared, going home and screwing a criminal. Exactly which don’t ran through all this?

  She couldn’t see it, and in blindness she flew across Wabash Creek to the Uhl’s Camp corner, where she stamped the brakes in startled desperation, nearly colliding with the ambulance from Rainbow Lodge as it churned past.

  In anxious silence now, Esofea followed the ambulance toward the Reed and Green Bridge. Then in a single booming instant the entire sky fell and the windshield blurred. The ambulance glowed wet-red around the turn into the campground and Esofea’s heart sank.

  Dog. They caught Dog. They hurt him.

  Don’t come for me. That was what he meant.

  But here she was. Esofea pulled into the campground. The rain came straight down, deafening against the truck roof. Beyond the last campsite, Deputy Margarite, in an orange slicker, urgently flagged the ambulance into Dolf Cook’s drive.

  Seen through the downpour and the trees, the scene at Cook’s was only indistinct dabs of color and movement. Stalled like this, unsure and near to tears, Esofea thought: but I am all do. Wasn’t that true? Wasn’t that how she had managed to let Caroline down? And now, had she gotten someone killed? Plugged him with rock salt so that a pack of Yooper varmint hose monkeys could chase him down and bag him with the real thing?

  Because she craved Danny Tervo and never heard the thousand don’ts?

  Don’t go out with him. Don’t kiss him. Don’t let him touch you there. Don’t fall in love. Don’t put up with that. Don’t trust him. Don’t take him back. Don’t go off the pill. Don’t abort for him. Don’t try to fix him. Don’t try to outsmart him. Don’t listen to him. Don’t make him mad. Don’t believe him. Just don’t.

  She, with her fabulous actions and distractions—where was the don’t part of her? Where was the stop, look, and listen?

  Esofea watched medics blur the gaps in Dolf Cook’s windows. Families had stories. Pippi’s mother had died when she was a baby, and Pippi “lay in a cradle and howled so that nobody could go near her” Pippi’s father was “blown overboard in a storm and disappeared.” Esofea thought, So what is my story?

  She saw a camera flash inside Dolf Cook’s cottage. Now came a smear of action through the front door: a gurney, a yellow body bag, red ambulance doors swinging open, a swim of bodies in the hammering rain.

  Esofea left the truck and began to run. She passed the bear box and the outhouse, her feet flailing in the slick mud ruts.

  But then she stopped.

  Don’t?

  She turned, scrambled on a crash of lightning back into the pickup. She was reversing, bucking and spinning through a desperate Y-turn, when Margarite pulled her Luce County cruiser in front and blocked the way out.

  And like that they sat, rain plunging between them.

  Greg Bright of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources fiddled with the water export problem an hour or two, tried a few things on the web and with a calculator, then grabbed a rain skin and went out to do his regular iron ranger collection route.

  In his region, collections south of Highway 28 included Big Knob, Hog Island Point, Garnet Lake, Manistique Lake, Manistique River, and Germfask. The campground at the East Branch of the Fox River was a spur, out of his way. Nothing he could do but drive up and back. Returning to Newberry then and moving north, he faced the puzzle of Natalie, Sixteen Creek, Bass Lake, Three Lakes, Soldier Lake, Pratt Lake, Pretty Lake, Perch Lake, Pike Lake, Holland Lake, Bodi Lake, and Culhane Lake, mostly small and sparsely used campgrounds where the iron rangers might be empty. But he had to cover them anyway. In the far northwest of his region, Bright was r
esponsible for Blind Sucker 1, Blind Sucker 2, and Lake Superior. Then along the Two Hearted River, he had to collect at High Bridge, Headquarters, Two Hearted River, Reed and Green Bridge, and Mouth of the Two Hearted River.

  Of course there was logic to his approach, a sequencing that minimized his mileage and routed him first down to the Lake Michigan coast and up to Andy’s Seney Bar by early dinner time. Then in the evening he would do the Blind Sucker circuit. He picked up Pratt Lake, Pretty Lake, and Holland Lake, then caught the sunset on Superior at Blind Sucker 2 before heading to the Dunes Saloon in Grand Marais for microbrew and then to a sofa at his buddy Paul’s place up on Masse Hill Road.

  In the morning, the plan required driving all the way to Bodi Lake, out by the eastern edge of Luce County, nearly to the Crisp Point Lighthouse. He rigged his rod and dug some worms at this point. From there he would work back along the Two Hearted watershed, fishing the Little Two Hearted by Culhane Lake, then the main stem of the Two Hearted, and then finally the West Branch of the Two Hearted above High Bridge.

  This was the optimal way to go about it. You studied the maps the way Greg Bright did, you had that figured out.

  But the call from Sheriff Lodge had really goosed his thought process. It sounded like a hoax at first. What the sheriff said had seemed garbled, actually, but Bright had followed up with the phone numbers Lodge had given him. The captain from the Arizona State Police had been a prick about giving out information. The gardener from Phoenix, on the other hand, had been grimly patient with the details and fiercely insistent on the name: Danny Tervo.

  Bright only knew of the guy. Danny Tervo was the name that Esfoea, the cute girl at the library, had dropped on Bright the time he suggested a drink at The Log Jam. The name was meant to shut him down. And what the hell, it had. He was easy.

  Heading north out 123, disrupting his route today, the ranger glanced at his notes. Brent Takahashi. Saseyama Japanese Garden. He had scrawled wrst drought in recrd hist while Takahashi explained that his entire region of the country was dying of thirst. The golf courses and ball diamonds were long dead. No one had washed a car for a month. It was illegal to serve water in a restaurant, and bottled water was up to five dollars a gallon. Politicians were at each other’s throats, as were whites, blacks, and Hispanics, the wealthy and the poor, the city and the country—everything was coming apart.

  Fnd rsing Bright had scribbled, letting Takahashi continue to vent about the malfeasance of Danny Tervo. The gardener had hit up the Ladies Auxiliary to the Saseyama Japanese Garden for two thousand in cash donations to reimburse his personal check, promising them the koi would live and the rhodies would be holding blooms by the end of the week. Takahashi had a receipt. What he didn’t have for much longer was a job.

  Bright had to speed up his wipers. The numbers had been in his head for a good while now, puzzling him and then fascinating him. There was big money in this. Huge money. Like booze in prohibition.

  But was it a crime actually? Bright had Googled the Great Lakes Water Compact, glanced through it: ratified by Congress and signed by the President, it was complex and vague, straining to satisfy its multi-state and bi-national signees. It was conceptual and feel-good broad policy, Bright thought, like the Kyoto accords, lacking in the specifics necessary to identify and prosecute crimes. It wasn’t really law. Was it? If it was, who was the enforcer?

  Not him, Bright had decided by Eightmile Corner.

  He didn’t have that kind of clarity, or authority.

  And that was the thing. Lacking a clear legal basis, no small bureaucratic body was likely to take it on and get entangled. Not Luce County, that was for damn sure. Probably not the Michigan Department of Natural Resources either—and definitely not through the person of yours truly, Greg Bright, here and now.

  So he would modify his iron ranger collection route to check out Takahashi’s story. That was all. Talk to this Danny Tervo. See if it was really happening. See how it was done. Collect a little information. Put together some observations. Kick it ahead and see what gave. Then talk it over with Paul later at the Dune Saloon—whether or not he was right in thinking that this Tervo guy was an outlaw ahead of the curve, the bootlegger of the future.

  Tervo’s place was an easy find. It was one of the classic old beach cottages across H58 from the big lake. Wow, Bright told himself. What a place. He had lived in the U.P. all his life and always dreamed about a place like that. It was run down, sure, looked soggy under a heavy rain like this and probably needed about a thirty grand in upgrades—but wow.

  Bright parked behind a massive silver tank truck, tucked into a turnout on the lake side of the highway. Wow to that too. Tervo was an independent trucker, Sheriff Lodge had told him. With a property like this.

  The DNR ranger wrestled into his rain skin and stepped out. The tanker had its own rotary transport pump. How it worked, probably, is at night Tervo ran a hose right across the beach into the surf. It wasn’t but a couple hundred feet. A pump like that probably did about four hundred gallons a minute. So within a half hour, including hook-up and take-down, the tanker was full. And big old Gitche Gumee, of course, felt nothing.

  Wow, wow, wow.

  Bright stepped around the tanker and looked at the cottage across the highway. A blue Chevy pickup with a topper sat in the driveway. Hard to say, though, if anyone was at home, or if it was safe to knock on the door. But he had cooked up an idea of what to say, so what the hell. He practiced it once across the road: “Mr. Tervo, I’m Greg Bright from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. We’re concerned that a sudden beach erosion might tip that tanker and we’d have a spill. Can I get a manifest, let my bosses know what’s inside it?”

  Wow—when it rained on the big lake you felt overwhelmed with water. You could do with a mask and gills, Bright thought, getting blown herky-jerk into a rut in Tervo’s driveway. The tailpipe of the blue pickup was still steaming. So the guy was at home. He was a fisherman—all the tackle decals stuck to the topper.

  “Mr. Tervo, I’m Greg Bright from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. We’re concerned that a sudden beach erosion—”

  This strange-looking kid wearing a slack gray suit and an orange headband raised a pistol into his face.

  “Mr. Tervo, I’m—”

  The barrel surged close.

  “I ain’t asked you nothing yet.”

  “Ok … ok …” Bright felt his legs fail. A mammoth black kid stepped out to look.

  “Where’s Tervo at?” said the kid in the suit.

  “I don’t know.”

  Now the barrel touched Bright under the chin. “Don’t look at the Buddha. He ain’t gonna help you. Look at me. Where’s Tervo at, I said.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know the guy … except he goes with the girl at the … at the library.”

  “And where’s she at?”

  “She works at the library.”

  “Not where she works. I said where’s she at?”

  “I … I …” Bright had no idea. But she was chatty sometimes, talked about all the stuff she had to do for her family, the old resort they tried to keep going.

  “She … she … she might be at her grandmother’s, the Blind Sucker Resort … right down the road here.”

  “Where?”

  Bright saw the black kid turn away with a frown and disappear inside. This other kid moved the pistol up to align with his head. Bright lifted his arm and pointed west—just like pulling the trigger himself.

  Tervo, waiting with Belcher for Esofea in the bookmobile, was startled by what sounded like a cannon shot. He bent the page over and put the book down. Belcher was already at the window, looking out at the rain-drenched Blind Sucker Resort.

  Jeheezeous Christ, to quote the great scholar Tom Waits. There lay Esofea’s deranged grandmother Tiina on the concrete floor of the fish-cleaning shelter, underneath what looked like Paul Bunyan’s shotgun.

  The little plumper, what’s-her-name—Caroline—sprawled ab
out ten yards out in the wet grass, like she had been shot-put. Now Granny Tiina was back up already. That gun had to be twelve feet long. The stock was thick as cord wood. A guy could shove his fist down the barrel.

  “Shit, Belch—”

  “I know. Look.”

  Across the yard, what used to be a kiddie basketball hoop was now a decapitated plastic stump. Behind that, the tool shack where Tervo and Esfoea used to smoke and fiddle—the near side of that was shredded chipboard now, the shack’s roof slumping over a swirl of atomized motor oil and ant poison.

  Belcher stammered, “Th-that, Danny, that’s a punt gun, man. That sucker can take out a hundred ducks at a time.”

  Rarely was Tervo speechless, and to the same small degree did Belcher get excited and talk. But off went Belch while Tervo, dumbfounded, watched the old woman order the girl to drag over a picnic table. “You can thank that sucker for the extinction of the passenger pigeon, Danny. They roosted so tight together, you just lined that thing up, blew off the whole treetop, you got maybe a thousand birds with one shot. That’s how it happened. Took two or three guys to hold one. For waterfowl, you know how they would do it, they would attach it to a punt, a little rowboat, and row the punt out—”

  Tervo put his hand up. He reshelved the Hemingway. He had been reading aloud, soothing Belcher with the poetry of extreme manhood, as expressed in The Old Man and the Sea. The old Cuban was on the second night of his struggle with the marlin, towed maybe fifty miles out to sea, eating raw dolphin off the blade of his knife and jabbering to himself.

  “Thanks, Belch. That’s fascinating. She’s gonna aim that thing at us, you think?”

  “I don’t know why she would,” Belcher said, but he sounded uncertain.

  Tervo was watching Esofea’s cousin drag a picnic table backwards over slick grass and under the shelter. When the table was in place, Granny Tiina hoisted that gun like she was a Scotsman in a pole toss. She balanced the butt between her feet and tipped the barrel down, barking at the girl to adjust the line of the table. Then damned if the mad old bitch didn’t swab out that barrel with what looked like mitten wadded around a musky rod. Off the cleaning table she grabbed a brass-cased shell no less than a foot long. “Let’s get out,” Tervo said. “Shit, Belch, I wanna shoot that thing.”