The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  The cow rolled her big brown eyes and shook.

  “So Jake got White Milkerson, the retired DNR guy, to do a study on the effect of Lake Bud on the creek, and it was bad news. Then Jake filed a lawsuit—”

  I was staring horrified at the cow, her bulging, bleeding organ, her sweat-foamed pelt and bulging eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” Junior told me. “Darl always does this. She lies down so much on the hillside her calves always get turned around. Anyway, for a while we all wondered why President Bud wouldn’t want the dam out. His land would only get larger. But Jake was one step ahead of him. With the dam gone, the water flows. That whole part of the valley would be creek again, and Jake had already gotten a setback written into county zoning laws. We’re the only county in the state with a law like it: no new construction with fifteen-hundred feet of the creek. So if it’s creek again, all Bud’s got himself is a bunch of muskrats, herons, and trout. And B.L…. I’ll tell you right now, B.L.’s not going to—”

  She stopped to check the tension on the rope. The calf’s hind end appeared, its little tail twitching, its pink anus spilling black sludge. Junior didn’t need to finish her explanation. Obviously, Bud Lite wouldn’t be inclined to look beyond a frame up in the case of Jacobs’ death. But I asked Junior why the village president would want to set up her dad.

  “Around here,” she said, “land values have gone up three hundred percent in the last decade. Land around the stream has gone up five times. Last year Bud got all this land up here annexed into the village—over Daddy’s dead body, practically. He and Bud used to be friends, but now they hate each other. And if Daddy goes bye-bye, that leaves only me on top of all this streamside real estate up in the coulee here. Then maybe Bud figures he can press me into selling.”

  With a grunt, she reinserted her arm. This time she fished around hard, forgetting me completely while I stood there in a sweat, aware that I was believing her. What was I thinking? Hadn’t Melvin O’Malley threatened to cut off Jacobs’ ponytail and stuff it in his mouth? Hadn’t the old man been at home while Jacobs was on the stream and the rest of the village was at a meeting? Hadn’t Junior nipped his fly off and swiped the ponytail? What the hell was I doing, standing there listening to her?

  “Okay, Daddy,” Junior said. “Heave ho.” In my distress, I managed to notice she now had the second pair of hooves pointing out. “If you can stand to look,” she told me, “this is pretty cool.”

  Then before I could turn away, the O’Malleys, Junior and Senior, hauled on that rope, threw their backs and haunches into it and reefed and yanked until the cow bawled mournfully and out on a slippery gout of blood and tissue rafted a baby boy calf, encased in mucous and struggling dumbly on the dirty barn floor.

  We were all silent a long moment. The air smelled oddly, bloodily sweet, and Junior puffed it in and out. Her dad gasped raggedly. Then the old man kicked the iodine bucket over into the barn gutter and sat on it. The cow, Darlene, moaned and twitched and ran her long purple tongue in and out.

  “Cheer up, sweetheart,” Junior told her. “You got family.”

  Finally Mel Senior rose. He straddled the calf and hoisted it into his chest. He gave a grunt and one hard squeeze. A plug of greenish phlegm popped from the calf’s mouth onto the floor. Immediately, the wet, awkward creature began to stagger around. A minute more and Darlene the cow struggled to her feet. The calf began to nurse.

  I don’t know how long I stood there before the old man backhanded me hard in the shoulder. I looked at him. He wore a loopy smile. He opened a grimy, round-shouldered refrigerator by the tool room door and got us all Pepsis. When we raised our cans together, the old farmer winked at me and said, “Here’s to screwing in the pasture.”

  Junior slugged his arm. “Daddy.”

  “’Bout time you came back,” the old man told me.

  “Daddy! He is not Darrald.”

  Junior looked at me, flushed, her squinchy-nose grin a little forced. She was coated in blood, straw, mucous, and sweat. Her hand encircled the dead wrist watch that hung around her neck.

  “Thank you,” she told me then. “Now please go on. You wanted to leave and we’re holding you up. After you’ve done so much for us.”

  Still I hesitated.

  “Really,” she said. “Don’t worry. You’ve been a tremendous help. Everything is going to work out just fine. Right, Daddy? Everything is going to work out. It always does.”

  I took a couple of steps toward the barn door and stopped. She took another shot at the grin and got it right this time.

  “Thanks. And you can keep those cutters. Maybe you’ll need them again.”

  There followed a long and awkward pause. Then she dropped the watch, turned from me, and spread her arms. “Daddy, look at me,” she laughed. “I’m going to have to take my shower all over again.”

  The way of the Dog

  I didn’t leave. I sat in my lawn chair, staring out at Lake Bud with the bolt cutters across my lap, and then I got drunk. And by morning, I had decided. Stay.

  For a while. See how things turned out.

  I snagged Jake Jacobs’ ponytail out of the cattails in Lake Bud and locked it in my little safe box with my Glock pistol and Junior’s money. I put the safe box under the sink. Then, apropos of further introspection, the Dog went fishing.

  It was still half-dark and chilly when I slipped into my waders, tied on a big deer-hair cricket, and stepped into the creek at the first County K bridge, just up from the campground. Here the stream swung in a wide meander through the upper Sundvig pasture, then back beneath a second bridge into Junior’s turf. I took a long look at it and felt myself relax a little. The big western rivers tended to frazzle me with their noise and thrust, and the eastern brook trout water tended to give up tiny its fish too easily. But the stretch of Midwestern spring creek ahead of me—sparkling runs and deep pools, tight corners under box elders, meadow runs flanked in purple asters and green hillside pastures—I took a long, slow breath of it. Then I bore down and fished hard, one cast in fifty picking a good-sized brown off the cut-back bank. I released each fish, dried my cricket, and went after the next. I got in a rhythm. Cast, step, cast … fish … look up … look around … and plunge back in. I fired up one of my so-called cigars and hard-wired that rhythm into every muscle I had. I took that stream apart.

  There it was: the way of the Dog. In two-plus years I had done this to a hundred streams. I rolled in and set up camp in the Cruise Master, then fished a stream stem to stern and to the brink of exhaustion, day after day, until the place became familiar, until I could tell myself I had cracked it like a nut. Then the trick was to leave fast, because I knew next I would begin to drift back into myself, talk to myself, or I would meet someone, begin to talk to them—and I knew the noise of human interaction as the noise of death. But there I was, staying.

  Backsliding, I worried. Caretaking. I knew it all derived from being a good boy too long. I was nearly forty-three years old. For forty of those years, I had tried to please. Loyalty, hard work, sacrifice … the Dog was not to be outdone. I got good grades, went to tech college in small business management, and built a modest career in corporate security, in the protection of things. I married a modest wife. I remodeled a home and grew a lawn. When I became a father, I pulled the sled, I growled at the bad guys, I peed at the corners of my turf, and I walked around the house, three times, every night, before falling into my shallow, one-eyed sleep. When my son was only two, I was dutifully looking ahead. I was already challenging for pack position in the PTA, the Boy Scouts, and the neighborhood soccer club. I woofed and groveled and snarled and nipped and thought I was happy. Everything—everything—mattered.

  Then everything came apart. One day, suddenly, nothing mattered. Nothing was ever together in the first place, except in my own mind. And after that day, in the short space of three years, I lost family, house, savings, friendships, job. I howled at the moon for a couple years. I roamed around. I tried to join new pack
s. But hell, at my nadir (I took a security position at a paint factory), I was still trying to protect things. I was trying to protect paint.

  That’s when the Dog went feral. Or so I told myself. If I cashed in my meager insurance holdings, I had sixteen thousand bucks left to my name. I picked up the Cruise Master for four grand. It needed a ring job and tires. I bought a pistol, a fly rod, and a cell phone. Then I saw my old tax guy, Harvey Digman, and I gave him the ten grand I had left. I told him I couldn’t trust myself to carry it. I told him I wanted three years at a hundred bucks a week. I told him I’d call and tell him where to send the money. I told him when it was over, it was over.

  Harvey wagged his spotted old head. “Okay, Dog. What is it? You’re going out to soak some worms?”

  “I’m going fly fishing.”

  “What fishing?”

  “Fly fishing. You float imitations of insects on the water. You catch trout.”

  “Dog—you can get trout at the market.” “Harvey, please. Can you set it up for me?” He sighed. “Where are you going?” “Wherever. Until the money runs out.” “I’m worried about you,” he said. “Thank you,” I answered.

  Harvey set his black plastic half-glasses atop his nose and looked again at the sum I’d handed him, at the title to the Cruise Master, at the scrap of paper with my cell phone number. But I don’t imagine he had ever seen a more desperate set of numbers.

  But good old Harvey, he smiled and cleared his mossy throat. I had seen that smile and heard that sound a thousand times. He had coached my father into solvency through the fifties and kept him afloat in the seventies. He had steered me through funeral expenses, divorce, bankruptcy. Now, boldly, hopelessly, I was asking him to be my lifeline.

  Harvey shrugged. He stacked some papers.

  “I’ll take care of it, Dog,” he said, rising to shake my hand. “Good luck.”

  And if luck meant catching fish, I guess I’d had some. I’d been back and forth between the coasts twice, fished every one of the Hundred Best Trout Streams in a book I had bought in Boston. I was headed back on a third zig-zag, fishing favorites, trying “second tier” streams that hadn’t made the book but in truth were a good deal more satisfying than most that had. I had weathered a bit in the process. I didn’t know it really, as I hadn’t looked in mirrors much, but my face was lined and tan, my hair was a brown thicket held down by a scrap of bandana and a bent straw hat, and I had burned forty pounds of suburban tallow off my six-foot frame. Somewhere in my haze I knew I was running out of time and streams. My three years was nearly over. I would have to do something, get into something, soon. But if I could keep my feet moving, my fly on the water, and vodka in my old tin cup, I didn’t have to think about it much.

  That morning, though, felt different. I was staying. Death. Drowning death. But I was staying, and my mind kept wandering, back to the scene with Junior and her Dad in the barn. What was Junior going to do if and when they came for her dad?

  That’s where I was when I saw something moving in the creek about a hundred yards up. I kept a small pair of field glasses in my vest, and I raised them to my face. I struggled for a long moment before I centered on something large and whitish, bobbing up and down in the center of a big pool.

  My heart snagged. The object was pale and round and twitching … just the size of a human head … bobbing through an eddy and out of view behind a dark knot of nettles and woodland sunflowers.

  By the time I found the object it had moved up into the next hole, and my first look at it took away what breath I had left. It was exactly the size of a human head, and it twitched and thrashed just below the surface in a bend of the stream, bashing with a hollow rattle against the limestone boulders that bulwarked the corner. Reluctantly, I came closer. When I made out the object to be nothing more than a plastic milk jug, I relaxed—but only slightly. It was still a creepy and disarming sight. I couldn’t make sense of it. Why was it moving as if alive?

  I put my rod in my teeth. I waded in and grabbed the jug, tugged on the line tied to its handle. The jug tugged back mightily. I heaved. Up—rolling and tail-whipping—came a giant brown trout. I mean shockingly big. I mean a fish that was close to thirty inches long—all out of the proportion to the setting—a record-type trout like you see coming out of a tailwater in Arkansas, or cruising around with the muskellunge in an aquarium. Too big.

  I stared in astonishment. The fish was hooked deep behind the tongue by a large bait hook. To prevent the trout from sawing its way to freedom, the poacher had used a leader of at least 50-pound test. But somehow the trout had snapped a different line—the line connecting the jug to its anchor line—and the jug trailed about ten yards of what looked like deep-sea braided nylon.

  No sooner had I put all this together than the brown put on a burst, tore the line from my hand, and took off powerfully downstream, dragging the jug.

  I waded sloppily after, out of breath, staggering over the stream bottom and feeling strangely frantic. Maybe every fisherman understands this. Maybe it’s just me. But forget Jake Jacobs for a minute. Forget who killed him. Forget Bud and Bud Lite, and Junior and her dad. I had to catch that fish.

  I chased the jug. The fish felt me coming and streaked away. I stumbled through a limestone riffle, caught the jug again, but the fish tugged me off balance and I had to let go or fill my waders in the next big hole. So I circled, came upstream at it—but the trout streaked past, dragging the jug just beyond my reach into a wide, flat, sticky-bottomed stretch that sucked my boots and slowed me to a Frankenstein stagger. On and on we went, downstream, upstream, then downstream again and nearly back to the campground before the fish conceded and held in a deep hole beneath the first County K bridge. I got hold of the jug again, waded to the muddy bank, and sat down among the coon prints, gasping for air.

  It was just dawn. The mud smelled cold. Swallows dipped in and out of the dark hole beneath the bridge. Slowly, I drew the giant trout toward me. She rolled up sideways, a blunt-nosed female, gulping water through her gills. I cut her free.

  But she was exhausted, unable to stay righted in the shallows between my boots. She was breathing mud, so I pushed her back out, but she floated up sideways and began to drift with the current. I waded in to the rim of my waders and grabbed her tail. I put my other hand under her belly to steady her and began to work her back and forth, forcing water through her gills. She was coming around, I thought. I gasped as the stream slopped in over my wader tops. I was in too deep. But maybe she was coming around. Maybe I could save her.

  Then the bridge rumbled above my head. Brakes hissed. A door slammed. I kept working the fish, at the same time trying to back out of the hole. But the mud was slick and I couldn’t find the incline I had come in on. Somehow every baby-step seemed to take me another millimeter deeper, until I could feel that my boots had filled up to the ankles. Now my feet felt heavy, and just as totally as I had once pursued the giant fish, I now strained desperately for just a finger’s height more elevation. When the fish tugged me back toward the hole, I let her go. I heard boots crunch on gravel above. People die like this, I realized suddenly. People die like this.

  Something touched me on the head—landed roughly and scratched across my skull. Skidding and slipping, I looked up. It was a tree branch, dry and flaky with old bark, jerking about just above my face, and at its other end, over the bridge rail, extended a hairy wrist. My panic doubled. One more little jab and I was under. Whoever he was, he could finish me.

  People die like this!

  “Well, go on,” said a twangy voice. “Grab it.”

  I raised an arm and felt my opposite shoulder dip to let in about twenty more pounds of cold water. I flailed my hand above my head and I swear the guy up there was playing with me. Everywhere I reached for the branch it was gone. Finally it clubbed me in the side of the head.

  “Shit,” I cursed.

  “Don’t you shit me,” twanged the voice. “I’m trying to haul your ass out of there.”

>   I grabbed the branch. My feet left the bottom and I spun into the hole.

  “Both hands,” he said impatiently, like I was some kind of fool. Leaning over the bridge now, exerting himself, my savior towed me until I could stand in hip-deep water. I staggered water-stuffed to the bank and collapsed like a leaky, shivering sausage.

  A moment later the man with the stick appeared under the bridge. He was a feisty-looking character, no more than five-six, wearing tight denim jeans, a Harley Davidson T-shirt, and a clean yellow cap that said Black Earth Dairy. He had a neat black beard with no moustache, Abe Lincoln-style.

  I sputtered, “Thanks.”

  No answer. He didn’t even look at me. He stepped around me, reached out with the branch and hooked in the giant trout. The fish wallowed helplessly into his grasp.

  “I think …” I puffed, “I think she’ll make it. She needs help breathing. Pump her gills a little, she’ll make it.”

  Again no answer. But now with the trout by the gills he was looking at me. A miniature Abe Lincoln with a very ugly smirk. He reached into his back pocket and snapped out a long Bowie knife. The blade flashed in the shaft of sunrise that had pried its way under the bridge.

  “You can’t do that,” I told him. “This part of the stream is no-kill.”

  But the knife was already through slick green skin behind the trout’s eyes. Mini-Abe drove the blade deep and with a faint crunch the fish flapped hard twice, quivered, and was still. With astonishing speed he spilled her voluminous, eggy guts out across the mud. He flushed out the body cavity with stream water, thumbed clear the mud line, rinsed the knife, and stood.

  “Say what?” he asked me then.

  “You can’t kill fish here. It’s against the regulations.”