The Wind Knot

by John Galligan

  And she murmured, for some reason, “Seahorse …”

  The knock on the door a few minutes later was Margarite, in uniform, looking fatigued and in pain, her cruiser idling at the curb.

  “Hey der,” the deputy said.

  “Hey der.”

  “How ya doin'?” the deputy said.

  Esofea widened her eyes and whispered. “I’m doin’ it. Ya know?”

  Margarite smiled at that. “Ok, den.” Wincing, she dropped the language lesson to deliver her message: “I’m the acting sheriff. You obstructed justice. I have to arrest you.”

  “I’ll turn myself in tomorrow morning.”

  “Promise?”

  “Oh, you betcha.”

  “Ok, den,” Margarite said, smiling again. “Tanks.”

  27

  The closed-casket funeral for Sheriff Bruce Andrew Lodge occurred on a morning that thick frost crusted the windows of the Luce Country motor pool, such as it was. Margarite’s cruiser was still in the shade of the bookmobile at ten and she couldn’t figure out where the scrapers were kept. She walked the six blocks to the Newberry United Methodist Church, knowing all the way that this was something she should never do as long as she was sheriff. Anything happens, she was thinking, she loses the ten minutes required to run back to her vehicle.

  So this was it. This was her big dice-rolling walk through town. And tonight, the cruiser had to go inside the county garage.

  Maybe she just ought to sleep in the office, she was thinking, until Julia cleared out of the house. Or maybe she ought to buy a used RV and go fishing. Or Milwaukee was always hiring. She just didn’t know. It was hard to know how to heal.

  Fritz Shunk was a little bewildered after the funeral to find the acting sheriff on foot and in tears. She didn’t tell him how she had been reliving, the whole time, her father and his funeral. Double whammy. Shunk drove her in his Subaru to the burial, then back to the office.

  “Are you ok?”

  She said yes.

  “Should I have some coffee and egg sandwiches sent over from the restaurant?”

  Yes to that, too.

  They ate from either side of what had been Lodge’s desk. Margarite had clumsily filled two boxes with the sheriff’s personal effects and then not known what to do with them. A son came from Atlanta, a daughter from Denver, both looking distant and rushed. Neither seemed good a fit for the stuffed northern pike and the U.P.-themed coffee mugs, and definitely not for the old cat, Goldie, nor the plastic tackle box strewn with swivels, battered Daredevils, and an empty spool of twenty-pound test. Margarite had felt oddly protective. Bruce Lodge, she realized, had been all alone when she showed up in Luce County. She had tilted his world, but he had tried to get his balance back. It was just too sad to think about.

  For lack of anyone else, the new acting sheriff reported to the county attorney. She told Shunk that the hefty black kid, Michael Wilson, from Chicago, had a little bit of a record in the drug trade but nothing felonious or violent. All he knew: he made his pickup at O’Hare by holding up a sign that said Quality, the nickname of the first victim. Nobody next to Quality would make a peep. And that was all.

  Margarite believed Michael Wilson. She believed Danny Tervo less when he told her he had recognized Billy Rowntree after meeting him briefly at a botanical garden in Phoenix. That was all, he said. He had no idea why Rowntree was in the U.P. If she caught him lying, Margarite warned Tervo, she and Shunk were going to make one hundred percent sure he got a chance to hone his tea-bag wisdom and general smart-assery in a State of Michigan prison.

  “What I don’t believe,” she told Shunk, “is that Rudvig lost our guy out there in the swamps.”

  “I don’t believe it either.”

  “I think he killed him.”

  “Me too.”

  They both chewed egg sandwich for a while, grappling silently with the large and obvious questions. What was in the best interest of justice here? What was worth the county investment? The egg sandwich settled into Margarite’s stomach with only minor incident.

  Shunk said, “Let’s act like we know something and charge Rudvig with homicide. Start some fingers pointing. See what shakes out. We may get something on the Pine Stump case too.”

  “Ok. I guess.”

  Shunk gave her his bristly woodchuck smile, alert to energies. She looked away. “You know,” he said, “I have to tell you, a lot of us were surprised about you, and not necessarily why you think. I think the big shock was that a person of your quality would come up here to be with Julia Inkster, knowing her as we do.”

  Great. Now Margarite wouldn’t be able to eat any more. It was Pepto time.

  “I’m sorry,” Shunk said. “I feel bad for you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Too late. I felt bad for you the moment I knew. You were here about a month and I saw you two shopping at the food co-op up in Marquette. I go up there every Friday to play hoops with the kids at the university gym. Or Ultimate on the grass at Harbor Park. I scare the shit out of them. You and Julia were buying bulk grains and debating organic or not.”

  Margarite had to smile a little. “Dead giveaway. Yeah, I remember.”

  “You didn’t try to hide it, though.”

  “I just don’t advertise it. I guess I should been warned when Julia found the organic beer.”

  “Poor Bruce the Moose had it bad for you.”

  “I’m sorry. I reminded him of his wife. Which gender I sleep with wasn’t a question in the interview.”

  “And better not be in the future, either,” Shunk said.

  They were silent a bit. Margarite couldn’t see it yet, could not yet construct the scene, but she had begun to feel the exact moment when she should have told her father who she was, what was happening inside her—but then she didn’t and then it was too late for anything but remorse—and a life, she realized, of trying to have him back. There was movement in the memory. They were going fishing in his truck. She knew she was sixteen. She knew she had felt anxiously happy. She knew now that her father had been sick from liver failure, but in the memory he was whistling with the radio—about to declare “here we are,” and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt him, hadn’t wanted the moment to stop. Ever. Eleven days later he was gone.

  Shunk said, “Julia cares for you. I’m sure. Who wouldn’t? But for a person like her, the whole idea of love is pretty warped. When you’re a kid and you get burned by love, it’s pretty hard to handle the whole concept after that.”

  “You’re telling me,” Margarite agreed. She put a napkin over her egg sandwich, unable to look at it.

  “I assume Julia shared the story with you about the time her father and one of her uncles spent some time in prison because they—”

  “No. She didn’t.” Margarite forced a smile. “Let’s leave it at that.”

  She drove down to The Log Jam later because, after all, talking to Shunk had felt good to her. He was tending bar. It wasn’t busy. After Labor Day Louise went home and the Luce County attorney kept a waiter, a cook, and himself.

  Margarite decided on the Cobb salad. She ate slowly, trying one morsel at a time, egg, ham, lettuce, carefully chewing and then dropping each softened bite into her empty, worn-out stomach.

  “Back to Tervo,” she said when Shunk had time to come down and lean on the bar. “He admits he took one tanker load of water out of Lake Superior and drove it down to Arizona, sold it to a guy in Tucson. Then he took a down payment of two grand from the gardener in Phoenix. But if that was all, what was Billy Rowntree doing in Luce County?”

  Shunk grinned, raised his eyebrows. “Chasing Danny?”

  “What else?”

  “Why?”

  “Not sure. But look at the numbers. Tervo told me he was projecting a profit of around fifteen grand per load as long as the drought lasted. You run only one truck once a week and the gig lasts a year, you’re coming up on a million dollars. Maybe Rowntree was a partner, and Danny ripped him off.”

&
nbsp; The avocado felt best. Generous and silky in her stomach.

  “Hmmm. That’s some math,” Shunk said. “Christ, though, what gets me is I can’t figure out if Tervo is a genius or an idiot. I guess both—but water is water, so why not get it out of the Mississippi in St. Louis, or some other place that’s much closer?”

  Another chunk of avocado. Smooth touchdown. Margarite felt her whole bruised chest relax.

  “Danny’s plan was to call on high-end water users, ornamental gardeners with rare plants and million-dollar koi collections. I don’t think he made the pitch to car washes. He sold the purity of Lake Superior. The water chemistry. The word ‘superior’ itself.”

  “And people bought it.”

  “Danny himself bought it.” Margarite added what a helpful professor at UNM had told her. “And it’s completely true, actually. His product was premium, as far as water goes. It’s just one of those situations where premium just doesn’t make much difference—except to a mind like Tervo’s.”

  Shunk appeared quizzical. Margarite, having contemplated the phenomenon of Danny Tervo at some length, offered her private solution out loud: “The guys smokes organic cigarettes.”

  “Oh,” Shunk said, and then he guffawed.

  “So speaking of that,” Margarite said, “and never mind that taking a few tankers of water from Lake Superior makes no difference whatsoever to the lake. Is it a crime?”

  Shunk limped in his assertive and shocking way down to his home base at the other end of the bar. He limped back with a folder of pages from the internet.

  “Any significant diversion inside or outside the watershed without the combined permission of—get this—the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, and the Canadian province of Ontario—that’s illegal. Export is also not allowed. In the eighties, some Canadian actually loaded a super tanker and tried to take it through the Soo and out the St. Lawrence Seaway to Dubai.”

  Shunk looked at her, knowing she would have a hard time believing.

  “No shit. This is true. He and Dubai had a contract. The guy got busted. Stopped, really. There were no applicable laws. The Great Lakes Water Compact came after that. But there are loopholes for beer, bottled water, possibly other containers, and agricultural products like apples or celery or Michigan blueberries, all of which move net amounts of water out of the basin, never to return. A lot of gray areas—that’s the point—new legal territory, and a lot of wrangling.”

  He closed the folder. “You want my wisdom?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Forget it. We’re a small county with more muskrats than people. We as public servants plow snow and sit in dunk tanks at carnivals and serve child support warrants. It’s not our fight.”

  That seemed right. When the avocados were gone from the Cobb salad, Margarite stopped eating. The situation seemed somewhat stable down there. Now she wanted Shunk to tell her one more thing.

  “You think that’s the big thing in life? Knowing what to fight?”

  “Hey.” Shunk gave her his bristly eager woodchuck look, drumming fingers on the bar. “That’s what I’m doing up here. I got tired of fighting battles I couldn’t win. I’m a guy who needs to win. Or stop fighting. That’s just me. So I left Detroit.”

  And so Margarite made her mind up. She was leaving the U.P.

  “You shouldn’t go yet,” Esofea advised Dog. “It’s not the right time.”

  But by now she was loved up to the brim and heavily biased, if Dog might say so himself. He couldn’t stop talking, storytelling, laughing. He couldn’t stop touching her, couldn’t leave any part of her alone. He couldn’t—well, you know how dogs can get. He promised her he was coming right back, and he meant it.

  “You still have some infection. The birthday you were worried about is long gone. Plus, your ex never believed you were coming anyway. And she didn’t want you to. Another week is not going to matter.”

  Dog had reserved one fact as getaway material: “This guy Ray is abusing her.”

  “That’s terrible. I’m sorry. But how is that your problem?”

  Dog didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t about a problem anymore. He was going home to substantiate his recent insight that going home was not the answer—that was no answer except the choice not to suffer. He was going back to tell Mary Jane this, to offer it, because he felt he had to out of kindness, welcome or not, and to tell her she would never erase her grief with suffering—and, yes, he would rope-a-dope Cocaine Ray if he had to. But pain proved nothing, and he would avoid it. Enough. And no matter what day he got there, it would be the anniversary of a day when Eamon was alive. And that’s what he planned to focus on.

  But he delayed leaving a couple more days. He got a little stronger. He fixed the damage in the Cruise Master. With Esofea still in the spirit of literary reassessment, they tracked down Conrad Belcher and invented a “Hemingway tour.” Danny’s old pal took them up the Fox River with tents and bedrolls, with whiskey, bread, cheese, canned kidney beans, and cigars in a rucksack. Dog ate painkillers as they hiked through ghost stands of giant white pine, imagining. They passed a lot of good water because the old-school guys like Hemingway fished downstream. They camped and cooked on a fire. They each told their Heimo Kock stories. Belcher set his tent up a bashful quarter mile away and no doubt heard them make love anyway. It was good.

  In the morning, Dog and Belcher used fly rods with live hoppers, caught after the grass dried and kept in baking powder tins with holes in the top. They stalked and flipped and drifted hoppers into trout lies under a hot September sun. They caught a few little yearlings, not much to crow about, and carefully put them back under Esofea’s stern supervision. The big trout were mostly gone. They went to Seney afterward. In the museum they saw a picture of Hemingway in front of a tent with nine dead brook trout laid out on his jacket. The largest brookie was easily two feet long.

  It had been like that, obviously, once upon a time.

  Once more Dog left the Upper Peninsula too late at night to take the bridge into Michigan. He drove to Chicago. He got clover-leafed again in Schaumburg, pulled into a truck stop to get gasoline and check his bunk. He was alone. No dead bodies. He drank coffee and drove on into daylight.

  By Cleveland he didn’t feel so good. He felt hot. His fingers felt puffy around the wheel. Sweat dripped from his armpits and his eyes dried and itched. His body kept running out of fluid.

  He checked a map. He dropped down into central Pennsylvania, figuring there were better places to stop if he needed to. Through the back of his mind flowed some still-unexplored trout water. But what he craved was the wet, the cold—the water, not the fishing. The water.

  By late afternoon he needed to stop. He was shivering. He was seeing things. He was just nervous, he figured, that was all. A little freaked out to be really heading home. He needed to lie down under his sleeping bag. His heartbeat needed to level off. These visions of little Eamon riding his tricycle in circles on the driveway, crawling on a lap to read a book—these needed to stop their exact progress through time, allow him to focus on each one. He just needed to slow things down a bit. Cool off and rest, touch some water, get his legs back. Eat some warm, enormous pancakes like Esofea had cooked for him. That was all.

  He found a little campground on a little stream. He parked and closed the curtains and crawled into his bunk. When he was level, blood galloped through his veins. His brain, infused with strange hot energies, performed spectacular trout bum burlesques. His mindspace tilted and cleaved and zoomed, an electronic atlas with a drunken pilot. He held things that held him. He said words that said him. He found things that found him. Familiar voices waited in circular silence, saying nothing.

  At some point after the sun went down, every person Dog ever loved rose fully dressed out of a bathtub. Then he caught one. A nice one. He landed it. He embraced a fish so large that it pulled him through and embraced him back, his skin burning
in the alien air, embraced him, his lungs burning to breathe, embraced him, his legs and arms jumping in the heat, held him and held him, and held him, until he said “Yes” and fell back where it was cold.

  Alone in the office, Acting Luce County Sheriff Margarite DuCharme said aloud, “No way.”

  She was on Craigslist, browsing condo prices in far-away places. She had completed her resignation letter minutes before and saved it on a minimized screen, planning to read it over one more time before she printed. Stalling, just messing around, doubting she could live in a place without water, she was scrolling through the Craigslist entries under Arizona, Miscellaneous. There it was: an ad for “premium organic water” in thousand-gallon minimums, five bucks a gallon, weekly delivery to the Phoenix area. One number with a Phoenix area code said ask for “All-Star.” The other, with an Upper Peninsula area code, said ask for “Fry Cakes.”

  Margarite copied the telephone numbers. She saved her resignation letter in a folder called Now What?

  She called Esofea and rescheduled their daily Sanka moment. They had done it every day for three weeks straight now, Esofea rigorously refusing to worry about Dog, focusing on healing the pre-Dog portion of her life, Margarite sworn not to complain about Julia, who was such an easy and irrelevant target. Margarite enjoyed the affection between them, found it deflated the hurt of Julia and let her focus on her real pain, which acted out its secret existence from some dark and fatherless place inside her—an inner place that Esfoea, nodding, smiling, touching her hand, had called “your own Villa Villekulla.”

  “As in, symbolically, Pippi’s mansion. Some crazy shit goes on in there. Not to get too grad school on you,” Esofea apologized.

  Which was an idea, Margarite thought. Grad school. Maybe.

  Needing her Craigslist call to be untraceable, she checked around. True Value couldn’t help her. Nor Snyders Drug Store. She was still getting used to a town this small. She could not buy a TracFone anywhere in Luce County. She would have to wait for her day off duty, when calls were routed to Schoolcraft County, and go for a drive.