The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  They flattened against the front of the boathouse and slipped through the open door. In the dark and musty interior, Dog’s escort stopped. “By the way, I’m Belcher.”

  The handshake was a bone-crusher. “Dog.” Belcher’s wide pupils dialed in. “That’s it. That’s the punt gun’s punt.”

  Dog took the bow as they lifted a flat wooden rowboat. Outside, rain spotted the weathered transom panel in Dog’s grip and quickly turned it black, raising shadows of ancient duck blood.

  “Belcher!”

  Tervo hollered this suddenly, though they were well out of sight. “Shit,” Belcher muttered. “Belch, come on down here!”

  He was yelling up toward the cabins. Not toward the boathouse. Assorted hideous constructions from the criminal got swept up in a mighty lake gust that cleared the dune behind the flooding and flung rain into Dog’s face.

  “Listen.” Belcher startled him. “I better get up there so I can answer Danny and come down. I don’t, them guys are gonna head up where the old lady and the kid are. And that ain’t the safest way I see this playing out.”

  He positioned the punt gun in the punt. He clamped the barrel in a wooden stockade anchored to the gunnels toward the front. “This thing’ll float I guess.” He roped the breech to an opposing pair of forged shackles at the midpoint, like he was anchoring a canon. “It’s loaded,” he mentioned before he turned and began to sprint uphill toward the cabins: sprinted like a bear, haunchy and low and fast, startling Dog in some deep place—and awakening him.

  There were no oars.

  The first observation of an alert mind.

  There were small paddles fixed to crank handles, attached to the punt in the adipose position, toward the stern. Had to be that you hung your arms over the sides and cranked each handle, rotating the paddles.

  There was no seat either.

  Puzzling, Dog pushed the boat in. He waded beside it. When he stepped aboard he sat down anyway, seat or not. In this way—reaching emptily—he discovered that a punt gun pilot had to lie face down, to create the wingspan to reach the cranks. Now it all came together. Flat and quiet. Low and slow. Stealth.

  Eager now, Dog navigated into the choppy gray water and turned against the lake wind. Broadside against the shoving air, the punt skidded toward shore.

  That wouldn’t do.

  Dog backpaddled, sizing up the situation. There were two vehicles, a dark-blue Chevy pickup with a stickered-over black plastic topper, and a Luce County Sheriff’s cruiser. The pickup appeared empty. Esofea’s head showed inside the cruiser, front passenger seat. She was turned away from Dog, low as she could go and still see where the action was.

  To see what she saw, Dog had to tack to stern and then forward with the wind for a net gain to the east. Now he had a thirty-foot window between the vehicles. The two young men with their backs to him—little one in a gray suit and orange headband, big one in a wet white cap—were the targets. The little one talked with jabs of a hand gun. Tervo, facing Dog, spoke back. Dog paused on him a moment. Esofea’s man looked like Yooper Jesus, tall and loose, magnificently wet, spreading his arms and smiling.

  Dog treaded, adjusting. A little more movement showed him Belcher, arriving out of breath with his hands up. Then the female deputy from Cook’s place—she sat up in a puddle, her head slumped into her chest.

  If he shot right now, Dog thought, he would hit them all.

  Then Belcher made eye contact. Staring at Dog, he slowly tipped his head toward the east. That way.

  Dog backed up farther. He let a new gust return him on a slightly flatter line. As Dog drifted closer, Tervo, Belcher, and the deputy disappeared behind the sheriff’s cruiser. He couldn’t hit them now if he tried. The cruiser would take any stray shot. Esofea twisted to see him, then lowered herself out of view.

  Dog moved his face directly over the barrel. He fussed with his crank pedals, lining up. Suddenly from behind the cruiser Belcher hollered, “Shoot the damn thing!” and the guy in the gray suit twisted and Dog heaved on the trigger.

  The blast singed his nostrils and snapped his head back and stunned his eardrums into a shrill flat silence. Recoil drove the punt twenty feet backwards into the wind. Dog could see no person left standing as he spun broadside and drifted out of control over the middle of the flooding, into a current.

  It was baying hounds, the nagging sound drifting to him from the south above the cabins, that broke the seal on Dog’s ears. As the spinning punt came around, he heard Belcher hollering at him and saw flashes of that saggy gray suit streaking between trees beyond the boathouse, away from the Blind Sucker.

  25

  “I’m Mike,” the enormous black kid told Deputy Margarite DuCharme, “and I haven’t done nothing but pick that psycho up at O’Hare Airport early this morning. He’s killed three people and injured you since then. I’m surprised I’m still standing here, you wanna know the truth.”

  “How in God’s name,” Belcher ranted, “can you miss a person with a punt gun?”

  “It’s ok,” Margarite told him. “It’s good he missed.”

  Her inventory of body parts concluded, she had finally gotten to her feet to take back some authority. She had been shot somewhere—that was all she knew at first. Now she felt her lungs un-sticking and her breath leaking back in. She had taken it square in the chest, like a sledgehammer as hard as you could swing it. Knocked her down, knocked the wind out of her, knocked her heart out of rhythm—but that seemed to be it, aside from a wet ass and a numb left boob. She was fine. Her vest was a hero.

  “He didn’t even hit one of the vehicles!” Belcher was making himself hoarse. “He must have shot over the whole damn scene.”

  “Easy, Belch,” Tervo said. “We didn’t need a bloodbath.”

  Actually, Margarite wasn’t ready to stand yet. She sat back down in her puddle.

  “That’s Rudvig, I’m sure,” she wheezed, hearing dogs at the cabins. “I don’t know why he’s here, but we’ll redirect him.” She nodded toward Oglivie, churning paddles beyond the boathouse, the boat spinning out of control. “It’s only about two feet deep out there. Somebody want to go help him get in?”

  Esofea moved on it. Danny Tervo followed her. “Baby?”

  She turned halfway, not quite looking at him.

  “The power of love is infinite, baby. I saved you.”

  “Fuck you, Danny.”

  She walked on toward the whirling punt.

  “He did.”

  Rudvig had left associates on the trail of Dog and split off to look for Tervo—something about a tipster’s call to the Superior Outfitters home office, blaming Tervo for Kock’s murder—but it was a simple matter of redirection, giving the man’s ridgebacks a sniff of the seat in Lodge’s pickup, a taste of some napkins Mike said the kid with the pistol and the headband had dried his face with, and then letting them run. Rudvig said he had a visual too and he expressed no doubts. His little fleet of ORVs barreled after the dogs.

  With Mike’s help, Belcher lifted Margarite onto the back seat of the cruiser. “A punt gun—are you shitting me?—a punt gun could take out a thousand passenger pigeons at a time! And he hit nothing! From less than a hundred feet away!”

  Mike said, “Well, I sure am glad he missed, you know?” and Belcher finally shut up.

  Fritz Shunk had arrived with Esofea’s Uncle Rush and Aunt Daryline. He left them in his Subaru and drove Margarite’s cruiser up and around the bookmobile to the door of the resort’s lodge and office. A silent Danny Tervo manned the Subaru, delivered a matching set of drunks up the hill. Margarite, wincing with each breath, got more or less comfortable on a smelly couch in the lobby, beneath the musty snout of a bull moose. There was a difference between pain and injury, she had always assumed. You weren’t really hurt if you could keep thinking and moving. Only injury stopped a person. But maybe she would rethink that. Later.

  “You’re the acting sheriff,” Shunk told her. “Until we confirm what happened to Bruce.”

/>   “I figured as much.”

  “I ordered two ambulances.”

  “Good.”

  They shared a look at Oglivie. Their former fugitive sprawled face down on the floor across the lobby, Esofea stroking the back of his head. He was breathing. Just resting, Margarite hoped. Then, spacing out, gazing blankly beyond the reception desk, she saw what she should have looked for all along.

  Above and behind the desk, mounted like a trophy, was a fiberglass fly rod with push-button reel attached.

  “Is that the one Hemingway used here?”

  “Yes,” said Esfoea.

  “It’s always been displayed right there?”

  “Yes.”

  Margarite rose and hunched across the floor. She reached up through the incredible stiffness of her chest, took the rig down and laid it on the counter. She switched on a deer-antler desk lamp.

  The ancient line came stubbornly off the reel: faintly orange, cracked with age—and sliced clean. She held it under the lamp. The cut was back toward the belly of the line, above the nail knot and the leader—and those parts, Margarite was certain now, were in a plastic bag in the evidence locker, back in Newberry. She found scissors in the drawer immediately below. This was the line that killed Heimo Kock.

  “Esfoea? Can you get Caroline and your grandmother?”

  Esofea stood over Oglivie. She took a long slow breath. Looking down at him with a trace of a smile, she carefully lifted a wet string of copper hair away from her face and hooked it behind her ear. She widened the smile at Margarite. Her face appeared flushed with relief.

  “Sure.”

  “Your Uncle Rush and Aunt Daryline too.”

  “You betcha.”

  They made eye contact. Esofea looked giddy, a bit off-balance. Margarite didn’t think, and it worked finally: “Ok den,” she said. “Here I go.”

  “You go and go,” she said. “You betcha.”

  As Esofea herded her ragtag little clan into the Blind Sucker lodge, she was surprised by an infusion of pride. After a promising historical start, represented by decades of impressive trophies, important memorabilia, and a celery mansion, there remained not a functional being among them—yet they had offed Heimo Kock, hadn’t they? Wasn’t that something a hundred smarter people had contemplated over the man’s horrid seventy-two years?

  Alzheimer’s, alcohol, and adolescence—that’s what it took to get the job done.

  Go, Smithbacks.

  But she kept all that to herself. It was story time, led by Deputy DuCharme, who told one ambulance to go on with Dog and asked the other to wait for her—maybe a half hour or so, until Tim Shrigley could get there.

  Esofea’s family pride turned out to be a flash in the pan, though, crowded out by worries as she listened. She withdrew to a dim post beside the reception desk, sat on the floor and chewed a lip, and experienced a fantastic and unsolicited Pippi prayer for Dog.

  May he eat warm, enormous pancakes.

  Mummo Tiina went in and out of reality, but Margarite was patient, as always. Mummo’s replies muddled back to the middle of the previous century, when Great Grandpa Smithback was a legendary guide and Heimo Kock was a red-ass loudmouth—Esofea finally caring about the story—when the trout were big and plentiful, when fly fishing was in its popular craze and when Ernest Hemingway—freshly a winner of the Nobel Prize—had come north for some remedial casting lessons.

  Into this patchwork history lesson, Dog somehow reappeared, glazed and trailing his ambulance attendants. He sat down in an armchair, changed his mind and lay face down again on the floor. Esofea said, “Everybody wait,” knowing her mummo wouldn’t, and she ran and searched in the green cabin and found him Pop-Tarts and a Coke.

  Mummo Tiina had bedded the great Hemingway. Wow. That was the gist while she was gone. Esofea knew it anyway, somewhere inside. Tiina Smithback was sixteen and wild, and the legendary author-fisherman was at the Blind Sucker to learn from Bud Smithback, Mummo Tiina’s father. Not a big surprise, supposedly. But wow.

  Here the self-legendary Danny Tervo cleared his throat and scowled until he was recognized by the deputy.

  “Hemingway hired Kock to guide him on the Two Hearted,” he filled in sullenly. “In 1958. They got skunked and the national press made a big deal about it. Hemingway publicly blamed Kock. Kock wrote an article for Playboy awarding him the Pulitzer Prize for wind knots. They hated each other, and that made Kock famous. Hemingway shot himself a couple years later but Kock kept on hating him.”

  Margarite thanked Danny. He tried eye games with Esofea, who after another five minutes of story had become, conclusively, the granddaughter of his man crush. Esofea Hemingway Smithback. She stuck her tongue out. Fucker.

  Mummo Tiina kept talking. Mummo’s daughter with Hemingway—Esofea’s mother, Ilma Smithback—was a happy child until Heimo Kock began to visit her, also at sixteen, when she was alone with Rush and watching the desk at the resort.

  Esofea’s heart clutched. Sixteen. The same age as Esofea when Mummo Tiina had let her move away to the mansion in Newberry. That had always hurt her, how Mummo Tiina seemed to want her gone from the resort.

  The old woman paused here, as she had once already, to ask where Herman was. Nobody knew who Herman was. Maybe Rush’s daddy, Esfoea thought. The stupid jughead was opening another beer now, doing what he did best while family women were molested.

  “Did Herman get his meatloaf sandwich?” Mummo Tiina wanted to know.

  “He did,” said Margarite. “He loved it and said to thank you.”

  “He doesn’t eat enough.” That sounded normal for a grandmother. But then she said, “He can’t do it but once a day without that meatloaf sandwich.”

  “Well, he got it,” Margarite said.

  “Good. Herman is very sweet. He waits for me.”

  There was a long and awkward silence—and into that, with no warning even to herself, Esofea again began to weep.

  When her mom was sixteen?

  And Esofea was born in ‘77?

  “Shit!” she screeched through her sobs.

  She came out of her chair and upended it.

  “That sonofabitch always flirted with me, always had little gifts for me, while everybody else hated him, and I knew it meant something! I knew it! And that’s why Mummo Tiina never left me alone at the lodge, and why she didn’t mind that when I moved to Newberry, even though she knew Danny was over there all the time. Because she hoped Danny would protect me … And I wonder why am I so messed up? Really? Shit!”

  She collapsed to the floor. Maybe time passed. She had no sense of it. No sense of people waiting or people talking. Only her own horrid thoughts, all her life spent straining outward, spinning crazy words and acts around an unknown truth that pinned her straight through the chest. Esofea Hemingway Kock Smithback. Her mother had died, in a way, when she was a baby. Her father was King of the Cannibals. He had come to the door of the mansion on three separate nights and found Danny there each time. Danny had threatened to kill him if he came back a fourth. She remembered now.

  Finally Esofea revealed her ruined face to the group. “Did he rape her?” Dog was beside her, his hand on her back.

  “Did Heimo Kock rape my mother?”

  “He did what he pleased,” Mummo Tiina said. “But we didn’t use that word in those days, dear.”

  “Did she love him?”

  “Oh, no. She left because of him. By the way … Caroline?” The girl slumped on the floor against the leg of her great-grandmother’s chair.

  “What?”

  “Did you eat up Herman’s meatloaf?”

  “No.”

  “Well, anyway,” Mummo Tiina concluded, her tone revealing she was done with all this attention and talk, “I’m the one that killed him. Caroline was just trying to get him off her.”

  Esofea’s heart began to hurl its awful heaviness against her chest. “Come here, baby,” said Caroline’s father, setting aside his beer can as the girl jumped up. She crossed the ro
om with an unhinged fatty jiggle and sat hugely on her mother’s lap.

  So Aunt Daryline began. “She had been watching the desk a lot, you know, cuz me and Rush was so busy.”

  “End of the tourist season,” Rush put in. “No time to wipe your ass. So much to do a man can’t do anything, like read the newspaper or take care of his finances or nothing. Youse guys don’t know the half of it. So yeah, like Caroline was here—well, because we was so busy that—well, even though we ain’t had nobody since July, there’s a lot of work goes into—”

  Shunk took care of it. “Shut up, Rush.”

  Caroline’s father wound down into non-words and was quiet.

  “She was watching the desk, you know,” continued Daryline, “the way Esofea always did before she went down to Newberry, and it seems Heimo Kock was coming in here and messing on her, believe it or not, an old man like that, and Caroline didn’t realize she could say no.”

  “I said no.” The girl’s tone was fierce. “A hundred times.” Esofea began, “Are you telling me that neither one of you noticed—”

  She stopped herself, unable to foresee anything less than an hour of unhinged screaming. She could kill these people. Daughter of Heimo Kock. Shit. She could kill herself. How had she missed all this? How had she let this girl down? Hanging around here while flying away in her mind, messing with Danny, being here but not.

  She stared at Margarite, who stood gingerly, saying, “Ok. This needs to stop. This needs to be done properly. I have some basic private questions to ask. Then if the family needs to talk among themselves, they can do that. Then, with an attorney present if they want, we can get into formal questioning.”

  “I said no a hundred times,” Caroline repeated. “And I told you and Dad and you and Dad did nothing. You kept leaving me here. And half the time Mummo was asleep all the way over in the red cabin and—”

  “Caroline—” Margarite tried to stop her.

  But she was heedless, her story rushing into open air. She talked over Margarite’s voice. “I saw him coming from the window that day and I knew he was going to do it, really do it, I couldn’t stop him, so I just took some line off that—” she pointed at the Hemingway reel in Margarite’s hand “—and cut it and rolled it up and I kept the piece of line rolled up in my hand and when he got on top of me I slipped it around his neck. I tightened it kind of slowly. I think he blacked out. I went to get Mummo Tiina, and she … and she …”