The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  Very deliberately, he dried the knife on the thigh of his tight jeans. He was chewing tobacco, and he worked his quid, then spit tidily onto the mud. His mouth dry now, he blew moisture from the crevices of the knife, and I imagined the long blade slicing through Jake Jacobs’ ponytail. Clean. Easy. Fast.

  He snicked the knife shut and slid it into his back pocket. He squinted at me, up and down.

  “No-kill, my ass.” He spat again. “You’re probably going to go home and have a goddamn steak.”

  “I—”

  “I live here,” he said. “Save the sermon. I grew up here. My daddy and my granddaddy grew up here. We been fishing this creek a hundred years.”

  “If you call that fishing,” I said.

  He looked me over. I was rigged to be out all day: waders, vest, water bottle, a dozen fly boxes, hemostats, nippers, leaders and tippet spools, fly gink, net, the whole deal.

  “Hell yes, I call this fishing,” he retorted.

  The man’s tight and twangy voice made me think of a settler—some half-starved homesteader confronting a stranger from his porch, rock salt jammed down into his musket. But this man seemed as much like a mall shopper and an internet surfer, neat to a fault, cocksure and preening. He had just poached a trout, and his T-shirt was still tucked in. With a hooked finger he cleared the snuff from his lower lip. He reloaded from a tin of Copenhagen. “Fella just like you, name of Jacobs, got dunked in here the just the other day,” he told me around the fresh bump in his lip. “Out fishing the sally.” He grabbed the big trout under the gills. It was half as long as he was.

  “This Jacobs fella had a problem with the way things work around here. Kinda stepped in too deep, if you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Farmer up the road here, O’Malley, is getting all the credit in the bars,” he said. He gave a little smile. “Folks are drinking shots to the man. Gives you a sense, don’t it?”

  “A sense of what?” I said.

  “A sense of what you can do with your rules.”

  He looked me over real good then: once more, up and down the necessary accoutrements of a fly fisherman. “Where you carry fish?” he wanted to know.

  “I don’t.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said with a smirk. Then: “So you’re helping Junior, like I heard?” He spat brown juice into the mud. “Elmer Sundvig seen you up at Junior’s barn last night, coming out of there with bolt cutters. Then you didn’t leave.”

  I didn’t respond. But he thought he had his answer. “Well then I’ll tell you what,” he said, spitting again. “Mel O’Malley is going to prison. Junior too if she don’t stop fiddlin. No pansy ass fly fisherman is going to help that.”

  With that, he disappeared up through the riprap to the road. I stepped back far enough to see a long silver milk truck pull away across the bridge.

  Something caught my eye then. The trout’s guts gleamed among the coon prints, and through the white viscera of the stomach something bulged oddly. I thought it was a large snail. That was the shape of it. But it distended the stomach tissue in a strange way, and through the translucent flesh I made out a metallic sheen.

  Mosquitoes pestered my hands as I pulled the stomach free from the eggs and other tissues. I felt the object—hard, round, with a smooth, raised center.

  With my hemostats, I chewed open the wet, pearly stomach tissue. I rinsed insect shucks and half-digested crayfish parts from the object and held it squarely in the sun.

  No pansy ass fly fisherman is going to help that, the poacher had said.

  What I had found, in big trout’s stomach, was a large and gaudy woman’s earring.

  Things might not work out

  I leaned my rod outside the doorway of O’Malley’s ancient rock barn. The radio was on. Junior was inside. She was milking.

  I watched her a while before she saw me. I had not understood correctly how a person milked these days. Like a good city Dog, reading bedtime books to my little boy, I had cultivated a Rockwellian scene that included a three-legged stool and a pail, complete with a brawny, teat-squeezing farmer and a circle of mewling kittens.

  But this was different. Somewhere a pump hissed and clanked and shuddered its pneumatic suction along a network of pipes that bungled through the web-clogged ceiling beams. The cows were stalled-up and stamping, restless. Junior moved through this with a darting, efficient energy, knowing just where to duck and step through the cluttered space. She worked an alternating pair of udder clamps that fastened mad-scientist-style to the teats and sucked powerfully. Over all this racket and motion the radio blared—not the weather report, not hog prices, but heavy metal. Zeppelin. And Junior sang along badly.

  Been a long time since I rock and rolled….

  “Oh. Hi.”

  You couldn’t startle her, apparently. Or embarrass her. She raised up and gave me the squinchy-nosed grin. She was dressed exactly the same as she had been the day before: boots, jeans, T-shirt with the sport bra showing through, John Deere cap with her stiff strawberry hair stuck out the back. The dead watch hung around her neck.

  “See?” she said to the cow beside her. “I told you he wasn’t done here. Didn’t I tell you?” She nudged the cow with her knee. “Didn’t I tell you? Huh? Huh?” She gave it a playful swat on the nose. “Everything happens for a reason. But you’re a pessimist, Frieda. That’s what you are. Always mooning around, thinking the worst. Poor Frieda.”

  Junior stepped through a stanchion toward me. She turned down the radio.

  “Frieda’s smart, but she’s got this hang-dog attitude.” She looked me over. I was wet and a little shaky.

  “You okay?”

  I said I was.

  “Good,” she said, “because last night, when Daddy and I were saying bedtime prayers, I saw you doing something even better than taking that ponytail away from here. I saw you coming back one more time. For your own sake,” she said, “more than me and Daddy’s.” She dug a chapped hand into her jeans pocket. She held out a pinkish stone. “I’m giving this to you. It’s a rose crystal. Wherever you park that RV next, put the rose crystal in the window to the east. It’ll break up the sunlight into streams of energy. It’ll kind of loosen things up for you a little.”

  I just stared at her. The milk pump chugged away. “And the next time you stop at a drugstore,” she added, “get some multi-vitamins. Big as your finger if you can find them. Screw the directions and take three a day.”

  I cleared my throat. I was feeling something shift inside. Words came up like sharp bones.

  “Thanks,” I managed. “But listen. I thought I’d tell you. Last night, when you said things were going to work out fine for you and your dad?”

  She waited eagerly. “Yeah?”

  “Well … they might not.”

  “But they might,” she countered.

  “I guess I wouldn’t count on it.”

  She tipped her head a bit. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask a fly fisherman. Does it just feel good? You know, to touch the flies? To tie the knots? To hold the rod? To walk in the water. It seems like it would just feel good.”

  “I like it pretty good,” I said. “But listen. I just met a guy on the stream. Milk truck driver. From what I gathered, he thinks your dad killed Jake Jacobs. From what I gathered, it seems like everybody thinks that.”

  “Well, there you go,” responded Junior. “That’s just too perfect, isn’t it? Whoever set up Daddy had it worked out just right.”

  She stepped past me, uncapped a liter of Pepsi she had set on the dirty floor, and took a big, thirsty swig. She moved one milking appendage to the next cow. The pipes hissed and sucked. She came back to me.

  “You gave me a thousand bucks,” I said, “to tamper with evidence. That doesn’t look right.”

  “I’ve been told a hundred times that nothing about me looks right.” She grinned at me. “So I gave up trying to look right a while ago.”

  “You o
ughta just—”

  “What? Tell B.L.? Or the sheriff? I told you. Those boys are nothing but a bunch of suck-asses. I can’t trust them.” “But you trust me.”

  Junior shrugged. “Last night, I couldn’t really sleep. So I took a little walk. I went up that hill there.” She pointed toward the cobwebby window to the east, hung across with hanks of old rope and tack and so clogged with dust and straw and cow hair that even the sunrise could hardly penetrate. But I knew the hill she meant. There was a mowed hayfield, interrupted by rock outcrops, then steepening into sumac and shrubby evergreens before finishing with a crown of hickories.

  “And you know what I saw?”

  I did not.

  “Stars,” she said. I chewed my lip and waited uneasily for the significance. “I saw every star in the whole dang sky,” she said. “And do you know what I thought?” She blew at a fly that was pestering her lips. “I thought, you know, anything is possible. Anything! And yet here we are. I happen to be near the stream when you find Jake. You happen to be a guy with some guts. Gareth Kaltenburg happens to be not full of shit for a change and actually does give me a thousand bucks for my bull. All these things happen despite all the possibilities, the supposedly random whatever that puts the odds against them, and so I figure, why can’t things keep going my way?”

  I looked at my feet and said, “Yeah, well, I tossed that ponytail in the lake.”

  She was silent a while. She leapfrogged the second milker to the next cow.

  “And then I fished it back out,” I said.

  I felt the earring again. I had studied it on the walk up to Junior’s. It was the kind women didn’t wear any more—a petaled cup of faux-gold with a button of pearly white plastic in the middle and a painful-looking clamp on the back. It was badly tarnished. It was a lot older than the fish itself. But it couldn’t have been inside the trout for long without killing it. It didn’t make sense. And anyway, how had a fish eaten an earring? I plunged forward.

  “And then … I wondered … maybe I could stick around a day or two,” I said, “look around a little bit.”

  When I glanced up, she was beaming. “That’d be great.”

  “I mean … I’m not a cop or anything. I’ve got a few skills, I guess, but I … well, I’m basically just a fisherman, who …”

  “Who believes me,” Junior finished. “Hot damn.”

  Jesus—what the hell was I doing? Why, Dog, why?

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “Don’t expect … I mean, probably … your dad may have actually done … and this guy I met … so … things might not work out….”

  Junior stepped through a stanchion and popped me with a flat hand, hard in the chest, like we were a couple of football players celebrating a touchdown. “Don’t you see?” Her grin looked a little wild. “Like heck things might not work out,” she said. “Don’t you see?”

  The Dog did not see. Junior popped me again. “Don’t you see?” She grabbed my shoulders.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” she said. “Which means things work out! They always do!”

  All possibilities remained open

  I was a hundred yards up the road when she put her fingers in her teeth and whistled like a drill sergeant. “Hey!”

  I turned. I had a view of the whole O’Malley farm in dawn light. The house appeared to be sinking like an old ship into waves of shaggy lawn. Out front was a statue of the Virgin Mary, enshrined beneath the top of a bathtub buried in the grass. A couple of giant woodpiles flanked the run-around porch. A tool shed between the house and old stone barn was decorated with the dried tails of a dozen unfortunate beavers, nailed to the siding.

  “Hey, Trout Guy!” Junior hollered at me. “Breakfast’s at seven! Bacon and eggs!”

  I waved uneasily and walked on. Trout Guy. What the hell was I doing?

  I lurched up the road—waders, vest, hat, rod, lighting one of my so-called cigars—groping for a version of my ugly attitude. Understand that when you grow up in a large and famous city on the East Coast you are trained to dismiss the entire rest of the country as secondary, and the Midwest as particularly retarded, both socially and geographically. So for a few strides I tried out the idea that the Dog was simply doing business. I knew a little about investigation. Twenty years worth of employee theft, plus the odd assault in a warehouse and a little corporate espionage—my career had to be worth something. How hard could it be? I would clear up the death of Jake Jacobs, earn my thousand bucks, and blow little Black Earth, Wisconsin—all by nightfall.

  So picture the Dog, chugging along in wet waders, talking shop to himself, waving cheap tobacco. I can tell you now that the air smelled of mowed hay, and meadowlarks trilled from the fence posts. Oak, hickory, birch, sumac—all these were in full midsummer leaf. Chicory starred the roadside, and the road humped and cracked every two hundred feet where a culvert let under a chuckling rivulet of spring water. But the Dog didn’t catch a bit of it. Not then. The Dog was seeing an earring in a trout’s guts. The Dog was seeing a dead man’s severed ponytail, a dead man’s yellow sally floating off downstream. The Dog was seeing a campground gate swing shut. The Dog was hearing Junior: everything happened for a reason.

  I stopped. Everything happened for a reason … so therefore things always worked out? That’s what I was doing business with—I realized—that idea. Junior’s idea. I realized I wanted to believe her. I realized I needed to believe her. But I had to wonder: how?

  In a few minutes more I was under the second bridge, breathing the cold and earthy air, looking for mayflies in the spider webs. Back in the days of the good Dog, before my world blew up, the corporate security business had put me around a good deal of employee theft, some break-ins, an assault in a warehouse. I had watched detectives do their stuff, and as I recalled, you eliminated things. You formed a theory and then tried to disprove it. And you started with the basics.

  So if Junior was right—taking that theory first—then the killer had set things up to look like Jake Jacobs was fishing a hatch of the yellow sally mayfly—a big mayfly, easily identified, easily caught by streamside spiders. But hatches were unpredictable. I’d been downstream on Black Earth Creek for two days and hadn’t hit the hatch. I hadn’t seen a single yellow sally mayfly. Who knew exactly why? Insects hatched on spring creeks according to a complex alignment of factors that fly fishermen only pretended to understand. What if there had been no sally hatch on the stretch of the creek where Jacobs died? What if the substrate, the light, the water temperature—what if conditions weren’t quite lined up? What if the yellow sally nymphs were still in the mud at the bottom of the creek, waiting? Then just like that, Junior would be right. The yellow sally on Jacobs’ line would have been a fraud. The plot—someone’s plot—would be exposed. The spider webs would tell me.

  I crawled through the mud and coon prints, looking for an intact web in the undergirding of the bridge. The swallows had tattered most of them. When I found one at last, I shined my little flashlight through the silky spans. Yellow sallies. Dozens of them. Dried, fresh, more than an army of spiders could eat. The web was heavy, twisted up with yellow sallies.

  I crawled back out and stood in the sun. So there had been a hatch up this far on the creek. A big hatch. Last night, the night before, and maybe the night beyond.

  Then all possibilities remained open. Junior’s dad could have dunked Jacobs during an actual sally hatch. Or a killer could have nailed him earlier and set the scene. As I walked upstream toward the corner where I had found the body, I began to wonder: how could someone drown a healthy grown man in three feet of water? What kind of man was Jacobs? Was he easy? I felt the firmness of my own legs in the limestone rubble of the creek bottom. What would it take to drown the Dog?

  That question stopped me. I didn’t know why. But it moved me.

  What would it take to drown the Dog?

  I put on a searching fly—a cricket again—so I could keep my head up and fish the banks, and I began to move slowly ups
tream toward the place where Jacobs had died. What would he have walked through? Black mud, limestone rubble, coontail reefs, asters and sunflowers and nettles on the banks. What would he have seen, I asked myself. The view was clear here. Beyond the flowered banks, there was pasture on either side. Corn on the distant east, a half-cut hayfield on the distant west. Hardly enough cover for a man to hide in—certainly not a man of the magnitude of a Melvin O’Malley or a Bud Bjorgstad. These were both huge and awkward men who, if they had dunked Jacobs, had not used stealth to do it.

  Fishing absently, I hooked a nice brown, about fourteen inches and fat, and I wondered if Jacobs could have been taken by surprise while fighting a fish. After tens of thousands of trout, each one still stopped time for me, as if the creature’s dancing weight unrooted my whole consciousness and washed it in the stream. Was Jacobs the same? Maybe—yet it still seemed unlikely he could have been ambushed. But what about in the heat of a major mayfly hatch? Didn’t all but the fishing senses shut down? It could get wild. Some nights the insects came up thick as a snowstorm. The birds went crazy. The bats came out early. The trout got real choosy, and a fisherman could go through a thrilling kind of hell. All over the country, I’d seen guys staggering back toward their cars after a heavy hatch, looking dazed and beat up, as if they weren’t quite sure what had just happened to them.

  Then suddenly, by projection, I had an image of Jake Jacobs out on the stream the night before last. What if he had planned to be at the Village Board meeting? But then the sally hatch had come on early, and strong. He would have been able to feel it coming on. The nymphs would have begun to move in the water, and Jacobs would have seen trout tails as the fish backed up to snatch the nymphs on their way to the surface. Birds—towhees, red-winged black birds, thrushes—would have lined up in the trees, waiting. So there was Jacobs, I imagined, telling himself, I’ll just catch one trout. Then I’ll quit and go to the meeting. Just one. Meanwhile—he couldn’t quite get that one fish—and before he knew it, the sallies had popped and swarmed. Birds and bats knifed through the air. The water boiled with trout, but not one of them would so much as swirl at his fly. Just one damn fish! Come on! And he became stuck. He entered a mental quicksand where time stopped and focus narrowed and the casts piled up by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands … awareness of the outside world shrank to a primal race with darkness, and nothing, not even the approach of his own killer, could heave Jake Jacobs up from the mud of his obsession. Just one fish! And meanwhile the Village Board meeting was gaveled into order….