The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

She couldn’t tell if Esofea meant to agree. This was a woman who could cry hard enough to hurt herself. Margarite had known a lot of women, too many, and the ones who cried like this were sometimes the strong ones. They were sometimes the ones who could stop crying—and move on.

  “Later, I’ll need to arrest you.”

  Esofea attempted to look at Margarite as she explained. “You told me Oglivie met Danny and Danny put him up to killing Kock. That wasn’t true, and I think you knew it when you said it. In terms of sentencing, that could work out to anything from picking up highway trash to a year in prison. But I hadn’t pursued your lie yet. I can tell a judge I never took you seriously so it didn’t interfere with my investigation, and that will help. It will help too if you tell me where Oglivie is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me. He’s in danger.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Margarite stared down the campground road where the ambulance had disappeared with Cook’s body. “This feels like the scene I read where the policemen chase Pippi around the house and up onto Pippi’s roof and they get stuck up there until she helps them down. Esofea—don’t play.”

  “I’m not playing.”

  Esofea moved in awkward bursts. She stopped her wipers and turned her headlights off. She rubbed her palms on her jeans.

  “I was supposed to pick him up here. He thought Cook did it and he could get the evidence, a reel with some line cut off—and by the way, Danny didn’t do it either. The fucker was out of town. God, how much I hate him.”

  Margarite sat, glumly lost in thought. Not Julia. Not Tervo. She and Esofea had both used the death of Heimo Kock to reach for some apocalyptic healing of wounded hearts. Now here they sat, returned to pain and ruins, darkness falling. They belonged in this place, hearts torn open, confidence drained away. This is where Margarite’s thoughts went. This was how people like them were made. They couldn’t help it.

  She picked up Esofea’s hand. She wrapped hers around it. She placed the pair of hands on the seat between them.

  “You talk about your grandmother and your aunt and uncle. And your little cousin Caroline. Even your lost baby. Never your parents.”

  “I don’t have parents.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I never have. I took care of myself. So there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Are you sure?” Margarite squeezed her hand. “Maybe you’ll find something while you talk. Did you ever try that?”

  Slowly, Esofea calmed herself. Margarite waited, watching rain explode against the windshield. Funny—Kock and Cook were dead, a killer was at large, Oglivie was lost out there—but all she cared about, right now, was hearing her friend.

  “When my Granny Tiina was sixteen she got knocked up by a cabin guest.”

  Esofea sniffled, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Her voice sounded hoarse but determined.

  “She never said who, except she always told people it was not Hemingway—which I always thought was her funny way of getting attention, you know, of having a brush with greatness, only not. Or else she was just lying and she had slept with him. Anyway, out of that came my mom, who did more or less the same thing, I guess …”

  She glanced at Margarite, who nodded. “You know, got knocked up by a mystery man, probably a fisherman or hunter at the lodge—she never said who. Lack of sexual common sense is a trademark of the Smithback female, along with gunplay. Right? You know that, after dealing with me. So that’s how I came about. Then when I was around two, my mother took off with a boyfriend to Detroit for a Fleetwood Mac concert and we never heard from her again. My mummo raised me. Sort of, as you can see.”

  “Fleetwood Mac. And not Hemingway. That’s funny,” Margarite said, and then—the story—all those variables out there—her path opened up. She saw a clear line from the famous author to Heimo Kock floating in the Two Hearted River.

  “What do you know about Hemingway taking casting lessons at the Blind Sucker? Dolf Cook told me, so I can’t count on it. Did he come here back in the fifties? And did Hemingway and Heimo Kock hate each other?”

  Esofea’s eyes darted over Margarite’s face and down to their joined fingers. “Before my time,” she said, and withdrew her hand. She began to rub her palms on her jeans again.

  “Then,” Margarite said, “I think I need to visit the resort and talk to your grandmother.”

  “Danny’s there.”

  “You ride with me,” Margarite said. “I can handle Danny.”

  Boom!—and the punt gun took out the bookmobile’s window.

  But Tervo held in his mind the image of Lodge’s black-topped blue pickup creeping along the rutted gravel down by the flooding. This would all work out fine in a few minutes. Bruce the Moose would interrupt. He would buffer. He would corral the craziness of the Smithback girls.

  Tervo sat back in the litter of glass and retrieved The Old Man and the Sea. He paged ahead. One thing that irked him about the story—irked and yet fascinated him—was the cheap-shot ending. Hemingway played it as if the old Cuban had never thought of sharks until that final moment. Like the old man knew the sea so well that he could lower a herring on a hand line and parse out a thousand-pound marlin, knew the sea so well he could see a hurricane coming five days ahead, so well he could stay alive by meat-fishing one-handed in the dark, in a near-coma, while being towed by the marlin, and know ahead of time which fish would end up on his hook and how it would taste—and yet after he catches the marlin, as he sails across the Gulf Stream, a bleeding carcass the size of a Ford Escort lashed to his gunnels, it never occurs to the brilliant old pedo that he will attract sharks. No. This obvious fatal complication does not present itself until Hemingway is ready, until the story is ready, and then the author places the long-overdue thought inside the señor’s head, ending the tale right there.

  It was a deliciously cheap out, Tervo thought, wholly artificial stuff, dressed up as brutal reality. It required a charmed and gullible reader—and it worked, obviously, to the tune of a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. All this told Tervo a lot about people, and about Hemingway, and it made him a fan.

  “Belch,” he said, sucking blood from the outside meat of his palm, “I’m sorry, man. I thought she hit me worse than that, I’m serious. I thought she blew my hand clean off. I wasn’t effing with you.”

  Belcher was so upset he was ruminating for grains of Skoal around his mouth, ejecting them off the tip of his tongue with ferociously tiny outbursts of air.

  “You’re always fucking with me, Danny. Especially when you say you’re not fucking with me. And now you’re gonna get me killed.”

  “Ah, Belch,” Tervo said, “dark words. Very dark. Turn the light on, my brother.”

  He beckoned Belcher toward the empty windshield. The rain had nearly stopped. Esofea’s insane genetic source material was knocking another shell into her punt gun.

  “Look down there.”

  “That’s Sheriff Lodge’s truck.”

  “Right. So everything’s jake, is it not?”

  “But that’s not Lodge,” Belcher said.

  Tervo couldn’t see anything more detailed than a truck, but Belcher’s eyesight was legendary. He could probably read the decals on the topper.

  “Who is it?”

  “At the wheel it’s a big black guy in a White Sox hat,” Belcher said, “with a pistol to his head. Passenger seat, with the pistol, little greasy-haired guy in a gray suit … and an orange headband.”

  Stunned, all Tervo could think for a good while was how?

  How in the hell had she done this to him?

  Buddha Mike’s head stayed still. As far as Rowntree could tell, he was watching water falling on top of water on the lake beyond the truck’s windows. “I ain’t driving up there just to see you shoot more people,” he said.

  “At this point in time,” Billy Rowntree said, “I ain’t shot nobody, Mike, unless you tell somebody I did.”

  “Then how’d we get th
at Hummer?” Buddha Mike said. “And this pickup? I don’t see no car lots. Man, a lot of shit just doesn’t occur to you, does it?”

  “By the time it occurs to me, I already done it,” Rowntree said. “I’m ahead.” He was feeling high, words just jumping into his mouth. “Man, I bought my momma a car already, while we been sitting here.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Some kind of Oldsmobile or something. Red.”

  “Ok, man.”

  Rowntree looked across this lake where it curved and then narrowed toward some distant trees. He wiped fog off the window on his side. “You see that green shit out there on that water?”

  “That’s called lily pads.”

  “You some kind of plant scientist, Buddha Mike? Damn. Maybe I can use you back in Phoenix.”

  “Everybody knows lily pads. Except you. Seems like you don’t know nothing.”

  Rowntree wiped off fog again.

  “I could run across the top of that shit. Because I don’t stop to think what’s gonna happen. That’s how I roll. That’s how I fly, Mike.”

  Very slowly, Buddha Mike reached out and switched the wipers off. He turned his head so the pistol barrel was right at his chin. He looked at Rowntree through his fat-pinched eyes.

  “That’s how you fly?”

  “That is how I fly.”

  “You the dumbest motherfucker I ever met in my life,” Buddha Mike said. Very slowly, he shifted in the seat, squaring on Rowntree.

  Rowntree moved the pistol up between Buddha Mike’s eyes. “Here we go, Mike,” he said. “Game on.”

  But on a knock on Buddha Mike’s side interrupted this.

  A woman’s face, a cop in a gray uniform, telling him to roll it down.

  “You gentlemen mind stepping out of the vehicle?”

  From the bookmobile window, Tervo watched Esofea’s lesbo deputy friend Margarite try to handle the situation without backup. That was Esofea, left behind in the cruiser.

  Out the driver’s side came the big black kid, moving real slow, raising big pale palms to show he had nothing going on, he just happened to be driving a pickup that belonged to the Luce County Sheriff. Don’t know how that happened. Is there a problem, Officer?

  Tervo tossed the Hemingway aside. Hell, yes, there was a problem. The dude still inside with a pistol was the problem. Billy Rowntree.

  “Belch, we got issues.”

  Billy Rowntree came out the passenger side looking like somebody had pissed on a perfume commercial for midgets who dug orange headbands. He concealed that pistol behind his saggy pants as he came around the tail end of Lodge’s pickup.

  Esofea blew the horn of the cruiser too late.

  Rowntree drew the pistol around and fired a shot that sounded like a cough in the wet air. Tervo waited for the deputy to drop—he had to know what he was dealing with, or without—and she did go down, very slowly. She bent forward to an unbalanced angle like she was bowing to a Japanese prime minister and then she sat back with a hard splat into a puddle on the road.

  So she had a vest on. Sensible lesbian. It looked like she also knew to lie back and play dead until her faculties returned.

  Now Tervo had to move before Esofea did. You could not expect good judgment from a girl who believed her father was King of the Cannibals, who fantasized about eating twenty-six pounds of candy and twirling robbers on her fingertips. Esofea might not have the sense to lock the doors and stay in the cruiser.

  These thoughts propelled Danny out the shattered bookmobile door and beneath a blast from Granny Tiina’s punt gun.

  He felt a wicked stinging in a few places along his left side, but that was about it. And, glancing back, he saw good old Belch swarm right out behind him, heading straight down the line of that massive gun barrel toward the genetic base of Esofea’s insanity. Cousin Caroline, drenched and screaming, hurled herself at Belcher and stuck like a tick, but Belch kept on trucking.

  Tervo cut left, skidded, plunged inside the Blind Sucker Lodge and rushed through to the deck door, sliding it open and stepping out to a view of the scene below at the flooding. At the rail, he raised both arms into the rain.

  “Billy!”

  The gale-swept downslope between them defeated Tervo’s effort. Rain, wind, water, everywhere you turned. “Billy Rowntree!”

  Now the kid in the sopping gray suit and the orange headband turned toward the resort buildings. It was him for sure.

  “Billy!” Tervo bellowed. “Peace, my brother! Welcome!”

  Conrad Belcher hadn’t ever held a punt gun. In fact, he couldn’t hold it. Not like a normal shotgun. The thing was ten feet long and at least fifty pounds. The butt was the thick shape of a skinned-out bear hock. The barrel could shoot tennis balls.

  Belcher’s hands trembled, and not because the nutty old Smithback lady had nearly decorated the trees with a thousand pieces of his dense and hairy body.

  Belcher’s own death had never occurred to him within the context of fear. Nor had Heimo Kock ever successfully frightened him. He guided for himself, his way. He had killed a thousand animals, each one efficiently and with its dignity intact. On dozens of occasions, he had stripped firearms from the hands of clients who were about to do otherwise, and he had driven these men back to their and bed-and-breakfasts and thrown their shit out on the pavement and kept the deposit. He would receive death as he had given it, Belcher believed—Kool-Aid and pizza would be fine—and he didn’t worry.

  No, his hands trembled because this was a punt gun, the stuff of hunting history and legend.

  Only a few of these still existed in the world. Belcher had looked it up. Once at the Newberry Library, with Esofea’s help to get started, he had gone out on eBay and Craigslist and failed to find a single intact punt gun for sale in the entire U.S.—only shells, or stocks, a few ram rods for the early black-powder models, never one whole and functional like this.

  Now Belcher wondered, was there a punt at the resort somewhere too, a little wooden deadrise skiff with a barrel bracket on the bow, breech ropes, knee-marks from shooters skidding backwards when the big gun went off?

  But ok—one thing at a time, the hunter’s creed—Belcher took a breath and brought his thoughts back around. The heavy blond girl with the green Esofea eyes had stopped screaming, but now she started in again. The grandmother was tearing at Belcher’s hands, trying to load in the eight-bore brass cartridge he had knocked from the breech.

  Belch, we got issues, Danny had said. Then he had surprised the hell out of Belcher by doing something.

  Now the girl and the grandmother began pointing together toward a man at the tree line of the resort grounds. Belcher wiped rain from his eyes and clarified the blur. Not a problem. The guy was shoeless and unarmed.

  Still, Belcher studied patiently, as if the guy were an upwind whitetail. About six-two and wiry-thin, forty years plus a couple. Skin weathered the way fishermen’s skin could get, a mask of white around the eyes from sunglasses. Soaking wet and dressed in clothes that didn’t fit the time or the body. Behind him were segments of bright yellow—a vehicle parked back beyond the tree line. This had to be the fugitive, the guy who put an end to Heimo Kock.

  Good deal.

  Belcher pried the cartridge from the old woman’s hands. He pushed the panicked girl behind him. He called across the wet yard, “We got issues, man. Come on. I need somebody under the barrel of this gun.”

  His mind stripped bare but for the image of the murdered old man, Dog had one concern. “Where is Esofea?”

  “She’s in trouble. Get under this thing. Let’s go.”

  The two other Smithback women—the grandmother, the cousin—gaped at Dog.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” he promised them.

  “Yet,” said the big man with the punt gun.

  That’s what it had to be—a punt gun—this colossal firearm that Dog held by a barrel bigger around than the exhaust pipe that whanged off the Cruise Master and down a cliff in southern Utah.

  �
��Hey. You with me? You’re bleeding through your shirt.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Dog balanced the stock of the punt gun on his shoulder and followed the big man into a stand of hardwoods behind the tool sheds and the bookmobile. Concealed in this grove was the high ground of a prehistoric sand dune. Whoever this guy was, Dog thought, he knew where and how to walk. High and clear, soft and straight.

  In stride, over his shoulder, he low-voiced a question for Dog: “These guys shot one officer right in front of us. So I wonder where the sheriff is at, since they’re driving his truck. You got any idea?”

  “That could be him over by Culhane Lake with his brains blown out.”

  “About what I figured.”

  They made ground south toward the flooding and the big lake. Soon Dog heard voices to his right, where the gravel drive climbed to the main cabin and office. Actually two voices. One of them—pretty sure—was the guy from Tervo’s phone, the genius with the subject-verb-motherfucker grammatical habits. The other voice, on the move, moving parallel with the punt gun, called out, “Brother, put your weapon down. The only tool you need is kindness.”

  Tervo. The boyfriend.

  “I’ll put my motherfucking weapon down your motherfucking kindness, motherfucking bitch.”

  Wrong about the grammar, Dog thought as the long barrel jerked him off stride and down the far side of the dune. The big man mashed through heavy brush. Dog followed. Diagram a sentence like that, you had to take a shower afterward.

  “Hey. Stay with me. You all right?”

  “Not really.”

  “So here we go.”

  As they came up on an old wood-frame structure, Dog received a game-stalker’s open-mouthed whisper. “Here’s the boathouse. The punt’s inside. I hope. Put it down.”

  With a sweep of the long gun, they folded over grass that grew on the muddy bank of the flooding. They set the weapon on that. On a blast of buck scent and body odor, the big man came right up in Dog’s face.

  “We go in together and carry the punt out and back over here. Only Danny might see us as far as I can tell. Esofea’s still inside the deputy’s car and the deputy is lying down in the road. She’s hit but I think she’s alive. The two guys we gotta watch out for are facing away.” He hesitated. “Ready?”