The Wind Knot Page 2

  He walked out. He tossed the Pflueger into a kindling box inside the front door, thinking: blackmail?

  Back at his own site, Dog knifed open an ancient package of Krazy Glue. The glue was still good. He squeezed the entire contents of the tube onto the flat nose of the Cruise Master. He gobbed that glue on right between the wipers. He attached his beloved fly reel, the only thing he was keeping, in the hope that it would spin and click in the wind when he got up to speed.

  It did. It spun and clicked all the way down through Seney, Manistique, Rapid River, Gladstone, Menomonie, and Marinette.

  Later, as the Cruise Master leaned through a cloverleaf in Fond du Lac, Dog had the idea that he was spiraling inward and backward toward some essential center, some fiery forge where, hand-in-hand with Mary Jane, everything would be destroyed and remade.

  He would phone her in the East Coast morning. Let her know he was coming.

  There was no place on earth less like a trout stream than ex-urban Chicago, Dog observed at sunup. He entered a bland, nesting-doll landscape as he curled off the interstate, one no-place inside another no-place, inside another no-place, until he parked the Cruise Master in the outer lot of a Road Ranger truck stop. There he faced a fence that faced another fence that faced another fence. The fences seemed to keep patches of dead grass and concrete from trespassing against each other. This was the outer ring of agony, Dog thought.

  The reel stopped spinning and he got out. He rattled a fistful of quarters, yawning and snapping his knee joints. Out of the Cruise Master behind him wobbled the last few U.P. mosquitoes, drunk on Dog blood. They were in trouble now, he thought. This was different. This air would kill them.

  He stood for a minute. He watched people traverse asphalt. The surface appeared smooth. Yet these people appeared to struggle, like into current. Dog shook himself. When he stepped toward the red-glowing Road Ranger mini-mart, he felt like a man on the moon, bounding through zero gravity, moving almost too easily.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” He got the attention of the young woman clerk inside. “I can’t seem to locate your pay phone.”

  “My what?”

  “Your public phone.”

  “My what phone?”

  Dog rattled his quarters and smiled. She called security.

  “Oh, they took them things out years ago,” the old Per-Mar gentleman said. “Them’re long gone.”

  “Depends where you are,” Dog said.

  The old gentleman put a shaky hand on Dog’s elbow. He made a gesture toward the great outdoors. Dog caught his own reflection in the glass. The image startled him. “So let’s just move along,” the gentleman said. “Heckuva day outside here. There we go.”

  This was Schaumburg, Illinois. At that one moment, six airplanes plied the sky. A thousand cars and trucks streamed and swirled, pursued by the next thousand. The headlines in the newspaper boxes were all about the drought in the southwest. Golf courses were dying, and apparently this was a national concern.

  Dog took a walk around the chain-link perimeter. The truck stop featured a play area with a weedy sandbox and swings, a rusty slide caked with road smut. One bloated kid about ten slumped on a landscape timber, thumbing a device.

  Dog made an offer. “All these quarters if I can make a phone call with that thing.”

  The boy squinted up. Dog went to a squat and stacked out four dollars and seventy-five cents on the tarry timber.

  “Are your hands clean?” the kid asked him.

  “I’ll go wash them.”

  In the Road Ranger men’s room, Dog washed his face too. He strained a few bits of cobweb from his patchy beard. He rinsed a smashed and bloody mosquito from his temple and tried to put a little fluff into his hat-bent hair. There was another dead mosquito on his neck. His skin had gone to dark jerky everywhere except where his sunglasses had preserved a goggle-shape of nude flesh. He had fished himself into quite the handsome specimen.

  The kid had to dial for him. At Mary Jane’s number, a man answered and went to fetch her. Dog could hear him calling out “sweetheart” and “baby” and “Hey, what the hell? You gonna answer me?” but getting no response.

  “She must be in the can,” he told Dog. His voice was all Boston. “I take a message?”

  Dog swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Tell her I’m going to be there at the cemetery this time so we can do it together. Tell her I’m on my way.”

  M.J.'s man was silent. Dog too. Both of them reflecting. Then from Boston: “This who I think it is?”

  “More or less.”

  “Your ex don’t want to see you, pal. Get it? Your ex.”

  It was true. He and M.J. were official. Harvey Digman had sent him the final papers last winter in New Mexico.

  “It’s not about what she wants,” Dog said.

  “She don’t need it neither.”

  “I called a year ago,” Dog informed this one. “It wasn’t you that answered. It was a guy with a British accent. Believe he said his name was Colin. The time before that, middle of the night, it was my old friend Patrick. I guess you’ve been around M.J. what, a couple months?”

  “Five.”

  “So you’ve got no idea what she needs,” Dog said. “But a few weeks from now when the locks change, you’ll get a better idea of what she doesn’t.”

  “How about you eat me, jerk?”

  The phone changed hands. Mary Jane was there, sounding hoarse and exhausted.

  “You’re on the way home, to stand with me at the grave? That old story again?”

  “I’m really coming this time.”

  “Ned,” she said, “you are such a—”

  “Just hang up,” said M.J.'s man in the background.

  “Hands off, Ray.” She continued to Dog: “Seriously, you are such a …”

  “Gimme the phone. I’ll tell him what he is.”

  “Get away!”

  “I said hang up!”

  Was that a slap?

  Dog said, “I’m on my way, M.J.”

  “You are not.”

  “I am,” he said, but she was gone.

  Such a dog, he finished for her. I know. Bad. Lost. Feral. Runaway. But now I’m homeward bound.

  He was nearly at the Cruise Master when the kid yelled, “Hey, mister! Some guy called you back!”

  Dog put the device to his ear. A frail and grizzled voice said, “So you’ve finally fished your mind away?”

  “Harvey?”

  “M.J. just called me. You’re coming back, fine, but coming back to see her?”

  It was good to hear Harvey Digman’s voice, his Boston accent getting sharper, like cheese. The old man was Dog’s tax accountant, counselor, sole believer, and overall spiritual irritant. He was nearing ninety.

  “And this is how I find out? From the beast herself?”

  Dog glanced down. This fat kid had his hand out. Dog shrugged: no more coins.

  “I was going to call.”

  “You were going to call. And I was going to grow my teeth back.”

  Dog heard muffled voices away from the phone. Harvey had cut out of the conversation to tell some young lady—an elbow therapist, a macrobiotic bowel coach, a private hula teacher—where the no-fat yogurts were in the refrigerator.

  He returned now. “M.J.'s a mess, Dog. She’s toxic. Christ, I talked to her six months ago—she wants alimony that you don’t have—and afterward I had to get my liver flushed. Burdock and dandelion root. You ever try that?”

  The fat kid had begun to circle, whining for his device back. Dog turned away.

  “Harv, listen. Did you read that Hemingway story I told you about? The two-part one, where fishing heals the guy?”

  Dog endured a silence. Vaguely, he tracked the kid’s urgent waddle toward the Road Ranger.

  “You didn’t read it. Well, anyway, I don’t feel better. It’s not happening.”

  “Oof,” Harvey said. “Thank you, dear. That was lovely. No, I did read the story.” He said starry. “I read it
a couple times. Here’s my analysis. It’s a starry.”

  “Of course it’s a story. But come on, Harvey. Don’t you see how fishing makes the guy better? I tried that. Now I have to try something else.”

  “I see. Like extreme—oof!—and pointless suffering.”

  “Come on, Harvey …”

  Dog heard a shriek from outside the Road Ranger. A large woman in Illini sweat clothes plodded toward him, her lump of a son wrenched along by his arm. Her other arm ended in an index finger that jabbed across the blacktop at Dog.

  “I figured out that I need M.J. to get over Eamon’s death,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying. And she needs me.”

  “Oh … my … Lord,” Harvey Digman grunted out. “And what starry is that from?”

  Dog surrendered the device and his entire collection of toll booth change, leaving just his ten hundreds from Cook. He needed to rest now. He emptied his bladder inside the mini-mart, earning a third and clearly less cordial defenestration from the Per-Mar gentleman.

  Inside the Cruise Master’s galley kitchen, Dog fixed himself a vodka-Tang and smoked a nap-time Swisher. He walked a tired circle, pulling shut his curtains. He took his socks off, wrinkled his nose at the reek. He had to go outside and pin the socks beneath his wipers in the sun.

  When he came back inside the Cruise Master, the bad smell was still there. It puzzled him. Five years of road was its own sour and musty thing. This smelled like river mud and body odor.

  Dog thought about it. Maybe it was the mosquito protection he had hung across his bunk area. The netting was salvaged from a wind-wrecked screen tent, dredged from a swampy corner of the Two Hearted downstream of the campground. He had cut out a wide piece of mesh, rinsed it and dried it. Duct taped around his bunk, the tent-shred had become the perfect sleep shield. It was bug-proof and opaque, but it breathed. Now it stunk too, apparently. He had to get rid of it.

  Dog finished his vodka-Tang in one gulp. He pinched back a curtain, checked the lay of the land. About a hundred yards away against the back of the mini-mart was a dumpster. But the gentleman from Per-Mar Security seemed to be pointing from the gas pumps straight toward the Cruise Master. Beside him was a police officer.

  Dog yawned. Hell. Just stuff the mosquito net in a trash sack for the time being, set it outside the door. He didn’t need trouble. He needed rest.

  He peeled up a corner of duct tape, ripped it sideways, and down came the net.

  In his bunk lay a man.

  Dog froze, his mind stunned and blank except for one thought: no pistol.

  The man was big-shouldered. He lay on his side facing away, half covered with Dog’s sleeping bag.

  “Hey …”

  No movement. He made himself jostle the man.

  “Hey … pal … come on.”

  Dog clenched a fist and held it like a club. He rolled the man. The sleeping bag came around too, stuck to skin and clothing. The fetid body odors billowed out. The man’s face was bruise black. His neck was encircled with fly line wrapped about a dozen times, cutting into skin. He was way dead.

  Dog’s mind slung itself backward. How had he missed this?

  His fingers moved on their own. The fly line that killed the man was an ancient one, pale orange and cracked. From its end trailed a damaged leader, bumpy with wind knots created by the gruesome casting of an unskilled fisherman.

  He rolled the body over and—it was Dolf Cook.

  How?

  The blocky silver-haired head. The blue eyes. The jug-handle ears and stiff gray moustache. The drunk’s nose.

  But no.

  It was not Dolf Cook.

  This man was bigger. Firmer. This man wore an Evinrude jacket and a Skoal belt buckle and had presence, even dead. This was the “Governor of the U.P.,” the big-shot guide, the one who kept his Finnish name and stayed home to nail Miss Michigan and fish with Bobby Knight.

  This dead man in Dog’s bunk was Cook’s brother, Heimo Kock.

  2

  Outside Sheboygan, at a beach on Lake Michigan two hours north of Chicago, Dog pulled over and threw up.

  He dragged out his sleeping bag, his fouled foam mat and its stained plywood support sections. He lit all this afire in the sand and drove on. He had other plans for the body. In the scrambled civics of the moment, Dog clung to this: he had paid too much for death already. This one was on Dolf Cook.

  With every backward mile, Dog became more enmeshed in his course of reaction—and more uncertain of it. But what else could he do? His deadline was fixed in his mind. His primordial re-beginning wouldn’t wait. He pictured Eamon’s headstone, the timeless engraving, the horrible date. And he pictured M.J. sprawled on a floor, her face swelling. Never mind Harvey Digman. It wouldn’t work unless she stood with him.

  The corpse of Heimo Kock, swaddled in a plastic tarp, slid on the corners. Miles trickled through Dog’s odometer. His gut seared. He could not stop the chatter.

  Do what instead? Call over that City of Schaumburg policeman?

  Tell him what? “Hey, I brought this stiff down from the U.P. Didn’t know I had him, honest. You guys can take it from here. I gotta go. I’m innocent. Promise.”

  He would be tied up in no-man’s land for days. Maybe even weeks.

  If Dolf Cook had done a half decent job of framing him, he could be tied up for a lifetime.

  The Cruise Master broke the tape into Upper Peninsula Michigan at mid-afternoon. Desolation followed. Dog chewed a Swisher stump, trying to stay awake another fifty miles.

  By the Seney Swamp, he was certain he could dump the body anywhere. Bears and coyotes would take the flesh. Flies would oviposit. Maggots would scour the bones. Porcupines would gnaw for salts.

  Dog could visualize the entire procedure, right down to Heimo Kock’s massive set of photogenic teeth, perched for eternity atop a hummock of bog sedge, preserving the fishing guide’s wide and boastful grin.

  He pushed on. He had to play it as straight as he could. At least he had to leave the body where it could be found. His plan was to unload Kock upstream from Dolf Cook’s cottage, give justice and closure a floating chance. Wasn’t that half right anyway? Inside his plastic cocoon, Heimo Kock was silent, shifting ever-so-faintly on the corners.

  Luce County occurred, to the indifference of the landscape. It began to rain. Fat drops steamed on asphalt. Then the road was awash, Dog’s wipers unable to cope. Then it stopped.

  Runty pines blurred the roadside. Dog needed nourishment and relief. He dropped rocks of Tang straight into Smirnoff’s. He nursed on the jug, moonshine-style, getting good and logical. Keep moving. Here was the upper North Fork of the Two Hearted. Getting close.

  At about Mile 37 on State 410, Dog picked out a logging road that looked wider and less sandy than average. He eased in, knowing this was his biggest gamble, an eight-ton RV on a sand road with no turnaround. But he had managed it before. He had to do it again.

  Getting in was not bad. The road hit the river at a high bank about a quarter mile upstream of the Reed and Green Bridge Campground, where he had spent the last week. This was the same distance, approximately, from Dolf Cook’s cottage. River depth and current were decent. The rain had helped, putting more push in the river. The Two Hearted was swollen, almost red.

  Heimo Kock made egress from the Cruise Master with his head banging down the steps like a rock. Dog grabbed the tarp, dragged the body. With his boot prints straddling, the course to the high sand bank left a track like a colossal turtle. He would have to wipe that out.

  At the edge of the bank, Dog maneuvered Heimo Kock sideways. He held onto the tarp’s open end and let it unroll, launching the body into a thirty-foot tumble and then a splash. The river did its work. Heimo Kock floated out and away.

  Dog shook the tarp. He cut out the grommets with his Leatherman and threw them in the river. He marinated the remaining tarp in diesel and lit it afire. It burned well, but with copious black smoke. Dog looked up. Visible for miles no doubt. Go, Dog, go.

/>   He scouted the area for an exit plan. He backed the Cruise Master onto a crackling scrum of deadfall branches that gave good traction. He pulled forward onto a rocky knoll just wide enough to support his front wheels. He eased back into the deadfall once more. He pulled forward, now turning, one wheel up on the rocky knoll and the other sinking into sand. He goosed it. His rear tires spun. A dead branch shot back, shattered against a tree trunk. The Cruise Master tilted, engine racing and tires spitting sand. Then the old RV jerked forward, punched its nose into a tangle of sumac. Dog’s windshield was shrouded with serrated red leaves. Calm down. Calm down or else.

  His rear wheels—where were they? He got out. His rear wheels had emerged solidly into the narrow roadway. They should be ok. But the burning tarp would get involved if he backed his gas tank into it.

  Dog worked two rocks loose from the sand. He measured, positioned, then backed up the Cruise Master until the rocks stopped his tires.

  He got out again. His front end had ripped out a mustache of sumac leaves. He cleared these, feeling the ground ahead with his boots. Very soft. He wished he had waited to burn his plywood bunk supports.

  He used his galley table and bench top instead. He tore them out and shoved them under the front tires. He heard them crack and splinter as he pulled forward. He tried to stop just before he came over the front end. He got out to look.

  He needed to do the same thing again. He tore off his cupboard doors, discovering he had forgotten, last night, to immolate his collection of roadkill fly-tying materials and his leader-building kit. Later. Backing, he eased onto the doors, listening carefully to their slow ruination. He stopped just right. He forwarded the busted galley table and bench. Then the cupboard doors once more. Then with a risky spurt of gas he was out, facing home.

  But there were all those tire tracks and footprints behind him. He parked the Cruise Master a short distance up the road, walked back and found a bristly deadfall that worked like a giant broom. He swept in circles around the fire to the high bank. He looked over at the river. The body had hung up on a sand spit about fifty yards downstream.