The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  The girl glanced nervously at her great-grandmother. Mummo Tiina had her bony elbows up on the chair arms, her large arthritic fingers knit together. She was humming.

  “Mom!” barked Rush. “Yo! Hello!”

  “Huh? Yes, sweetheart?”

  “You gotta do that now and then,” Rush advised the group. “Mom, sometimes, you know—well, it’s quite a bit of work taking care of—”

  “Shut up, Rush,” Shunk said.

  Mummo Tiina said, “Me? Oh, I put my foot on his chest and wrapped that line around as many times as it would go and then I pulled and pulled, like starting a chainsaw.” She went back to humming.

  At Esofea’s shoulder Dog cleared his throat. “I ended up with the body …”

  He couldn’t manage a full question, so Esofea added, “How?”

  “Me and Rush come home to a situation,” Daryline said. “As you may imagine. So we put that s.o.b. under a canvas in the pickup and convoyed his vehicle home, threw his keys under the seat. Then we took him down the West Fork of the Two Hearted to that big swamp across from Ohio Camp.”

  “Hell, you could lose a jumbo jet in that swamp,” Rush said.

  He stopped, glancing warily at Shunk. This time, the county attorney said, “Speak.”

  “But I guess it was this fellah’s RV that was blocking the road and you know it’s just a little sand road, no place to go around unless you want to get stuck, which of course is why he left his vehicle in the road in the first place.”

  Rush paused again. That her uncle expected to be shut up when he should go on told you everything. Esofea ground her teeth together. The moron could not distinguish meaningful from meaningless talk—and she had tried to grow up in that. In that, and in a silence that Caroline had finally broken.

  Margarite said, “So you …”

  “Yeah, so we, uh, I guess you could say we kind of panicked and did a bad thing.”

  “Well, the plates said Massachusetts,” Daryline explained. “So, of course, in that case, you know, we …”

  She stopped right there. Esofea never knew what she meant. Nor wanted to.

  26

  Each rock salt crystal embedded under Dog’s skin would maintain a sufficient sterility within its own wound. This is what the doctor hoped. He wasn’t sure. A great deal of sweat, sand, soil, blood, and other microbial carriers had gotten mixed into the deal. Debridement, at this late point, was not the automatic course of action.

  Dog listened, belly-flopped on a bed at the Bell Memorial Hospital in Munising. His wounds had scabbed over beneath raised red bumps that by report were slightly hot to the touch and topped with crusts of drying pus. This meant some staph infection, though he was not feverish and was perhaps fighting it well. If Dog wished, the doctor could reprise the Newberry doctor’s original debridement strategy—that is, open each of nearly a hundred abscesses with a scalpel, excavate any foreign matter, douse with antiseptic, allow to rescab—or the doctor could prescribe some ampicillin and painkiller and send him home.

  Dog laughed weakly. Home?

  Which option he chose, the doctor continued, would probably depend on his insurance.

  Dog laughed a little more deeply. Everything hurt. His insurance? So which pharmacy did he normally use?

  Dog made it back to the lobby on his own power. Esofea looked up from reading In Our Time. She was conducting a post-feminist reassessment of the author, she claimed, powered by the new light that events had cast upon the excellence of his gene pool.

  Dog said, “I’m supposed to go home.”

  “Hmmm …”

  “Can I come over?”

  She fed him grapefruit seed extract, Echinacea, and Pickleman’s pizza, with a tall vodka-Tang. She spread tea tree oil across his back and somewhat gratuitously into the firm curve at the top of his buttocks. They talked for an hour or so. Then she put him to bed in one of the downstairs bedrooms and read him to sleep with McElligot’s Pool. He drifted off during the herd of whales and slept for two days. This was ample time for Esofea to help Danny Tervo adjust to a new set of ideas: Hemingway was ok, but he, Tervo, sucked possum ass.

  “Intuition is my new best friend, Danny. And of course, there is no love without compassion. So I ask myself, intuitively, do I feel compassion for you?”

  The deposed boyfriend sat at Esofea’s kitchen table with his long brown legs stuck out so that she, the granddaughter of his hero Ernest Hemingway, had to walk around them as she crushed and steeped a pile of feathery yarrow stems, preparing to combat fever as needed.

  “You want me to define compassion,” Esofea continued. “Ok. Com, with, passion, to suffer. To suffer with another. So, do I suffer with you? Hell-no-are-you-kidding-me is my answer—I mean, if I listen to my best friend intuition. They’re gonna confiscate your tanker, Danny. Property used in the commission of an interstate crime. An impressive one, I have to admit—but not admire. You’ll probably do some time. And I do not feel your pain.”

  He wanted to argue this: trucking water—that part—was not for sure a crime.

  Ignoring the topic, dripping yarrow juice across his legs on the way from the sink, Esofea said, “And by the way, you can keep your clipped nuts. I don’t want them. Your testicles, yourself.”

  “Ok. That was bogus. I should have discussed it with you.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “If you had, I might be stuck with you for life.”

  She let this drag on because she wanted it all out and finished. She let Danny toke her up with some new Canadian junk and take her for drinks at The Log Jam so she could perform her liberation drama over again, as ripped as he could get her, thus eliminating that old Tervo favorite as a future strategy.

  Fritz Shunk, one of Esofea’s new heroes, was there behind the bar. “Hey, kids.”

  Danny, placing his silver Navaho money clip on the bar, said, “Legal opinion. Let’s say there’s a questionably ratified international agreement—”

  “Nope,” Shunk said. “I’m tending bar, Danny. After that I’m the county attorney, not the state attorney general or the FBI. You want a legal opinion, find somebody qualified and pay money for it. What’re you kids having?”

  “Same as you,” Esfoea said and giggled. “None of Danny’s shit.”

  She ordered a Bloody Mary. Tervo sucked silently on a Dos Equis with lime squeezed down its neck. He gave Esofea-plus-alcohol five minutes and then slung an arm around her shoulders. She bit his hand, hard as she could.

  “Ow! Sofi! What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Less than before, that’s for sure.” She nipped the end off her pickle to clear the taste of his skin. “If you wanna beg me, Danny, let’s get started. I repeat: you suck. You and I are history.”

  “Give me a break. We’ve been history about a hundred times before.”

  Esofea crunched her marinated celery. She loved the way her mind was working. “Actually, those were all times when I was just mad at you.”

  “Well—what are you now?”

  “I’m Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter.”

  “And Heimo Kock’s daughter.”

  “It skips a generation. Haven’t you heard that?”

  “You’re a nut job, Sofi.”

  “No—you’re a nut job.”

  “Fuck you, Sofi.”

  “Fuck ya back, bub.”

  He left his beer half-finished. Esofea took the rest of her celery to-go and walked back home to Dog.

  Fritz Shunk had a quiet hour behind the bar, and then the Smithbacks, Rush and Daryline, came in with Caroline.

  Shunk found himself gripping a damp towel as if he could break it. After a family catastrophe, this was the pair’s concession to proper parenting: bring the child to the bar with them.

  Shunk kept his mouth out of it as long as he could. He limped down to serve them. The girl’s mom and dad seemed to feel quite grand in ordering the girl a burger and fries, setting her up where she could scowl at them in the bar mirror as they sucked down beers.<
br />
  In a drawer at the other end of the bar, Shunk kept a sign that said THIS ESTABLISHMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. The sign had been taped to the mirror when he bought the bar. A guy like him, a civil liberties veteran, despised that kind of thing. A sign like that was a lawsuit waiting to happen, and rightly so. Nevertheless, Shunk retrieved the yellowed card, carried it down the bar with a marker and crossed out ESTABLISHMENT and SERVICE TO, replacing them with YOUNG WOMAN and ABUSE BY and handed it to Caroline, who just barely smiled under her bangs. Shunk smiled back and said, “High school next year?” She nodded.

  “Long bus trip down here from where you’re at. About an hour each way?”

  She shrugged.

  “Some kids stay with a friend or a relative who lives a lot closer to the school, at least during the week.”

  Shunk had mentioned this idea to Louise, who said she would think about it. Or maybe Esofea, with all her extra space in the celery mansion, would be willing. Shunk was just floating the idea for now, guessing it would appeal to lazy parents.

  “Sir? What are … hey … Sir, what are …”

  Rush Smithback leaned over the bar, trying to speak without slurring.

  “Yes, Rush?”

  “Sir, excuse me for interrupting your work, but you got any idea what the charges against us are gonna be?”

  They didn’t have a lawyer. Shunk knew that. They were going to get Kathy Medlar from the Marquette Public Defenders Office. Kathy would take proper care of them. Shunk and Kathy had already met on the phone and discussed his intentions as attorney for Luce County.

  Nothing for Caroline, he told the Smithbacks. She had reasonably defended herself from an assault.

  For the grandmother, Tiina Smithback, Shunk was going to file for voluntary manslaughter. Two to twenty years was the sentencing guideline, but there was age, dementia, and the arguable threat of continued assault on a minor in her care. She would get supervision, Shunk predicted. She would move to a nice facility in Marquette.

  “Ya, ok, but then, you know, there was me and the missus. We didn’t do nothing wrong, right, sir?”

  “You two are accessories after the fact to a voluntary manslaughter. Which doesn’t amount to much.”

  Rush looked at his wife. She raised her beer. He raised his. They hit each other’s bottles too hard.

  “But we’ll see what else we can throw in,” Shunk said, wiping up.

  Dog awoke on a sunny September day that was chilly at the edges. Esofea’s cat, Mr. Nilsson, had curled up in his armpit. He found a well-read newspaper under a pair of funky purple eyeglasses on the bedside table.

  He rose to his elbows. Trying not to stretch the skin on his back, he pulled the newspaper onto the bed and worked it around to the front page, quickly updating himself on two topics. The lead national news was that drought in the southwest had rung up a tally of over fifty billion in economic losses. That was a shocker for a moment, and then on second thought it wasn’t. The number was undoubtedly low. Irrigation sources had run dry. Tourism had dropped off. Investment was pulling out. Governors seeking cash for dams and desalination plants had begun to raid funds for social services, city infrastructure, and education. Migrant workers and illegal aliens, stranded with no work, festered in waterless tent cities. Fingers pointed. Legislatures gridlocked. Crime was up. So were taxes. That fifty billion, Dog estimated, was just the loose change on the floor.

  The local news of relevance was that Dog’s fantastic miss with the punt gun had triggered a manhunt that was still unresolved.

  What?

  Dog went back and read the item again. Acting Sheriff Margarite DuCharme identified William Rowntree, eighteen, of Phoenix, Arizona, as the triple murder suspect, still at large. The posse of Kock-loyalists that had chased Dog with terrifying efficiency all over Luce County had been unable to track down a city kid in slick-soled shoes who had no more than a ten-minute lead on eager bear dogs, and who couldn’t have had the vaguest idea of where he was or where he might go.

  “He got away from us somehow,” said local professional hunter Paul Rudvig, senior guide for Superior Adventures and leader of a volunteer search team that Friday ended its efforts in frustration. “We’re stumped. We have no idea where he got to. But bear season opens this week and we have to get back to paying work.”

  The Michigan State Police Special Units K-9 Search Team was scheduled to retrace the suspect’s assumed flight path beginning sometime Sunday. “It’s like D.J. Cooper or something. All we can do is show them where we lost the trail,” Rudvig said.

  “Yeah, right,” Dog commented to Mr. Nilsson, who switched his tail at the sound of sarcasm. “Vanished into thin air. Swallowed by a giant wolverine. Something like that.”

  “What?” said Esofea.

  She breezed through the bedroom’s doorway in a green robe. She had wet hair and two coffee cups on a tray.

  “Hey, you’re up.”

  “Hey, you brought two cups.”

  “Hey, I was going to going to tickle you until you woke up. I was getting bored.”

  She pulled what looked like a nineteenth century armchair close to the bed. She kicked her slippers off and put her feet right up on the peak of Dog’s rear end.

  “Make yourself at home,” he said.

  “I am at home. I don’t know how a person can sleep like that on his stomach for so long.”

  “That wasn’t sleep,” Dog said. “That was a coma.”

  She shifted one ankle over the other, bouncing a little. “Me and my feet have been wanting to do this since yesterday. Dog is no good. I think I’ll call you Otto. Short for ottoman. So, what is this about giant wolverines?”

  “I read they couldn’t catch the suspect. They can’t find him. All that.”

  “You know what I think?” she said.

  “Probably.”

  “I think what you and everybody else thinks.”

  “Those guys that were chasing me, they caught the guy and shot him—”

  “—cut him into pieces with a dressing saw—”

  “And dumped the pieces into five different swamps,” Dog concluded, “each one at least twenty miles from where they’ll send the State Police to look.”

  “That could be you, Otto,” Esofea reminded him. “Instead you’re here. I bagged you and made a footstool.”

  “I guess I appreciate it.”

  “I guess you should.”

  Mr. Nilsson decided to wake up. He arched his spine, extended one rear leg, then the other, then hopped onto Dog’s back with claws open and began to knead.

  “Mr. Nilsson! Bad monkey!”

  Esofea kicked at him. He walked over Dog’s head and jumped off the bed. Dog rolled onto his side and sat up. His face felt suddenly hot, his stomach twisted. Esofea studied him for a moment and said, “Let’s have a look.”

  She kneed across the bed to get behind him. She lifted the shirt that he guessed had belonged to Danny Tervo. Esofea said, “Oh, boy. More tea tree oil for you.”

  She kept watch and made Moroccan lentil soup and wondered. Was she doing her Tervo thing all over again? Falling for the dodgy one? The project? Shouldn’t she be up at the Blind Sucker, looking after Caroline and Mummo Tiina, jabbing sharp sticks in the direction of Uncle Rush and Aunt Daryline?

  Don’t.

  That simple, common word had stuck with her. He had tried to save her with it. Not save her in an abstract or spiritual sense, he hadn’t meant it like that. But it hit her in that way, like an oracle. It hit her like Whatever you are doing, Esofea, don’t.

  She sighed and stirred the soup as the afternoon turned cold. Had there ever been a single day in her life when she wasn’t lost, passionately lost, and overcompensating with deeds and exploits and adventures? She felt enormously sad.

  What Would Pippi Do?

  Pippi would bake a cake so big it wouldn’t fit out the door and so therefore a house party would be necessary and she would sing and dance and whip herself into a fi
t of preposterous activities involving a horse, a monkey, a policeman, a thug, and a Christmas tree in September.

  Her Danny Tervo, Esofea guessed, had been all these things in one. Maybe her dog Otto was more of the same.

  But she hated quitting. That was another thing.

  And, to be honest: she was exactly the horny brat that Danny always said she was, and the very practice of loving a complete piece of work like Tervo—the difficulties, the regular bouts of hatred—had put some boundaries on how far she might go, had kept her somewhat wary and conservative and safe. God forbid, she mused, that Pippi Longstocking should hit puberty and get the itch. Bring on the horse, the monkey, the policeman, the thug—oh, boy—one just had to stop imagining.

  Esofea sighed some more and stirred the soup until the lentils were soft. She took a bowl in to Dog. He woke up and she fed him some and he said he felt ok, and after she crawled over the bed and examined his back, she kissed his neck and said, “Hey, Otto.”

  “Hey what?”

  “There’s a wocket in your pocket.”

  And then, easily, calmly, they fell into making love, just as she knew-feared-hoped they would.

  They whispered as if they knew some great secret. They arranged careful positions. They looked each other in the eye. They lost track.

  They chose a simple place to honor grief and let it rest.

  Sometime long after it was fully dark and the room was quiet and cold, Dog came up to his hands and knees, between Esofea’s legs and over her heaving freckled chest, his eyes glowing in the last flickers of a candle she had lit hours ago, and he told her: “Oh, the sea is so full of a number of fish, if a fellow is patient, he might get his wish …”