The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  “Gonna be a hot one,” the driver remarked.

  I mumbled something and kept walking. The guy had said the same thing yesterday. Besides, the Dog didn’t do weather. It’s gonna whatever. That was my position. But the blue van idled along beside me.

  “Gonna get hotter than a tail pipe out here. Wind’ll kick up in a couple hours. Hopper weather.” He turned his radio down. “You set for hoppers?”

  I looked over at him. Yesterday was cloudy and he had tried to sell me crickets. He was a young guy, maybe thirty, burly in the shoulders, with longish dirty-blonde hair and photo-sensitive wire-rimmed glasses that even the Dog could see were a lap or two behind the fashion curve. His skin was pale, his shaving was spotty, and his eyes were intense. He was smoking a cigarette no-handed because his hands were busy—one on the wheel, the other opening a fly box against his chest. “Need hoppers?”

  He drove along beside me, spilling smoke and ashes, holding the open box out the window. Inside were tidy rows of hair-and-feather grasshopper imitations. I didn’t have to be that close to tell they were exquisitely tied. They were large, stylish and neat.

  “Buck fifty,” he said. “Fifteen bucks a dozen. Can’t beat the price.”

  He was a pest, but he was right. You couldn’t beat the price. Still, I wasn’t carrying money.

  “Common problem,” he said, undaunted. “Here’s my card. You get home, you mail me a check. You don’t like my flies, then screw it. Throw the damn things away and fish what you like. That’s what it’s all about, right? That’s why we’re out here.”

  I crunched along. He stayed with me.

  “Long hot day ahead,” he said. He set the hopper box down and held another out the window. “Sallies should come up tonight. You’re going to want to be set up for it. Some big browns up here sucking sallies this time of year.”

  He held the box out. They were pretty sallies—parachute ties, long yellow bodies, tall white wing posts.

  So I relented. I stopped walking and took a dozen sallies. I received a business card. Dickie P. Johnsrud was his name. Mobile Fly Shop—“Meet Me on the Road, Thank Me on the Stream.” He thrust a powerful hand out the window.

  “These days the bastards around here call me Dickie Pee in a Bag. Nothing I can do about it. Gotta be a good sport, you know. You got enough hoppers?”

  I took a dozen hoppers too.

  “You’re down at the campground,” he told me. “I’ll swing by later, you can pay me. Maybe we’ll have a beer.” I grimaced. “Say,” he said, “I guess you’re the guy who found Jake.”

  I said I was and started walking again. Dickie Pee in a Bag crept his van alongside me. There was something odd about the way he moved, the busy motions of his driving, the way his neck and shoulders moved in a stiffly muscled block.

  “Big goddamn shame,” he said. “That old teat-puller Mel O’Malley dunking Jake like that. Jake was going to save this stream. Jake was going to get that dam out.” He paused awkwardly, gazing in the direction of Lake Bud. “Say—you know about Friends of Black Earth Creek?”

  I said I did. Junior had mentioned it. The stream conservation group.

  “Right. Jake and me’s group.” He surged the van a little ways ahead of me and braked with a jolt. “You mind holding on a bit?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. With an odd clattering motion, he disappeared from the driver’s window. At the same time, the van’s side door clicked and heaved open as if by magic. Inside were tiers of hand-made shelves, drawers, and display racks, crammed with lines and tippet spools, fly display cases, hand-built rods, hats, sunglasses, insect repellent—everything a fly fisherman could need or want. As I stared at these, a ramp hummed down, and Dickie Pee in a Bag, seated in a wheelchair, yanked through and centered himself. The ramp lowered him to the road.

  He faced me, puffing around his cigarette. His legs dangled off-kilter, undersized and pale, from voluminous cargo shorts. Some kind of broad, black, plastic bracelet encircled his thin left ankle. One of his powerful fists clenched a brochure.

  “Fifty bucks,” he told me. “Annual membership. Money goes to stream work, education, programs, legal fees, that kind of stuff. You get to help keep a place like this from going to shit any faster than it already is.”

  His cigarette was down to a nub. It looked painful between his fingertips, but he wasn’t letting it go. With a flick of his head, he tossed hair from his eyes.

  “Plus you get a weekly stream report by e-mail.”

  He passed me the brochure. It was slick. Color pictures of the stream. Bulleted agenda items. Membership application.

  “It says here membership is thirty-five dollars a year,” I said. “Not fifty.”

  “Yeah.” He pinched the butt and sucked it. “Well, Jake was going to raise the price.” “You work for Jake?”

  “I got over two hundred memberships for Jake.”

  I was still looking over the brochure. A picture of the Lake Bud dam was on the final fold, X-ed out over a heading that said DAM IT, NO!

  “My idea there,” said Dickie Pee, jabbing his hot cigarette stub at the picture. “I gave it to Jake. I said, go ahead and use it. Whatever helps the stream. I don’t gotta have credit for everything.”

  He coughed and suddenly said, “Fuck. You know what it’s like, not being able step on a goddamn cigarette when you’re done with it?”

  He looked at me almost defiantly, flicking hair from his outmoded glasses again. He was a potentially handsome guy who hadn’t looked in the mirror in a good while. I guess that made two of us.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  He tossed the butt to the road. He watched me crush it. Then he sat back in his wheelchair and let some of the air out of his shoulders.

  “Gonna be a hot one,” he said finally. “Hot as a whore. Hey—you mind grabbing my coffee. It’s in the cup holder.”

  I opened the driver’s door and reached into the van. There were clamps for the wheel chair. He accelerated and braked with a joy stick. The wheel had a knob for one-handed steering. The coffee was in a tall paper take-out cup that said Pêche Tôt. I accessed my high school French and got a lucky hit. Fish Soon. This was the “fancy coffee shop” White Milkerson had told me about, run by the dead man’s wife. Inked on the side of the cup were the words triple latte.

  “I guess Ingrid Jacobs’ place is open today,” I remarked.

  “If Inkie’s place wasn’t open,” Dickie Pee said, “I’d have to kill somebody.” He chucked the hair out of his glasses and fit his lips around the hole in the cup lid. He took a slug. “I need this shit.”

  “No period of mourning for the dead man’s wife?”

  He took another slug.

  “Major shit like this,” he said, “it takes a few days to realize what the hell just happened to you. You don’t have a clue for a couple days. Take it from me.”

  I thought this over a while, watching a pair of yellow goldfinches chase among the pink-tipped thistles beyond the fence. I, too, had gone to work after my disaster. But not the day after. Still, Dickie Pee had a point.

  “Let me guess,” I said finally. “You used to fish.”

  He stared at me—bloodshot blue eyes behind the big wire frames. His glasses were glasses—I mean, like slabs from a beer schooner, the frames rectified with what appeared to be fly-tying wire. “I used to fish every fucking day”, said Dickie Pee. He stared at me as if to say, Next question. I didn’t have one.

  “I could fish this stream left-handed with my eyes closed,” he told me. “When Jake came to town and started talking about taking care of the stream before we lost it, I said, ‘No shit. Here’s what we gotta do. We gotta blow that fucking dam out of there.’ But Jake was all mellow about it, you know, work within the process, one step at a time kind of stuff.” He shook out a new cigarette and lit it. He squinted through smoke at me. He nodded at the FOBEC brochure. “Jake was going to change that membership fee to fifty bucks a year,” he said. “I promise. Couldn’t talk him i
nto blowing up the dam, but I finally talked him into raising the membership. So what do you say?”

  “I’m on a pretty fixed budget,” I told him. “Must be rough,” he responded flatly.

  “Listen,” I said. “You really think Melvin O’Malley killed Jacobs?”

  “He said he would.”

  “But Jacobs had a lot of enemies. If you were working for him, you must have known something about that.” “When’d I say I was working for him?” “You just—”

  “I was working with Jake. Goddamn it. See, once a guy’s in a chair, he can’t be in charge of anything anymore. But we can be nice and let him help out. Well, fuck that. I built FOBEC just as much as Jake did. I talked up about a thousand people out here these last few years. And now, look what I’m doing. Jake is dead and I’m still out here, raising money. Does that look to you like I was working for him?”

  Abruptly he lurched his chair back toward the van. He finished his Pêche Tôt triple espresso and tossed the empty cup inside. His movements were jerky and violent. “Hey,” he said vehemently, “okay, so Jake’s a hero now. A martyr for the movement. Fine. Jake was a good guy. He was a warrior for this creek you’re fishing. I ain’t saying anything against him. So I just got an idea. See these sallies?”

  He thrust out a new box of yellow sallies. There were different than the ones he had just sold to me. They were tied upside down, with fancy forked tails and pink hi-vis wing posts.

  “These are Jake’s sallies. I tied these special order for Jake just the other day. How about I sell these as memorials to Jake? Sell these for fifty bucks apiece, then maybe build some kind of tribute out here, a sign, a bench, something like that. Sell about a hundred of these things. Five grand oughta do something.”

  I picked a fly from the box and looked at it more closely. It was the yellow sally I had seen on the end of Jacobs’ line, the one Junior had snapped off and tossed into the stream.

  “Maybe …” mused Dickie Pee, and I looked up to see that his face had changed. He was looking downstream, a hardness in his eye. “Maybe, hey, guy, listen—maybe, you know how they name dams after people. You know, like Hoover Dam? How about naming a non-dam after somebody? I mean—get this—a non-dam, the absence of a dam, the Jake Jacobs Used-To-Be-A-Fucking-Dam. Big sign. Ha. I like that. You like that, guy?”

  He was rather desperately shaking out a fresh cigarette as if to toast himself. He had a crooked grin aimed at me.

  “You tied these for Jake when?”

  “About a week ago. Not even that. But Jake and me’d been talking about it before then. And you want to know my guess?” He lit up, held up the fly. “This sucker was working. Jake was cleaning up. That’s why he didn’t make it in to the village board meeting. Me and Jake had finally cracked the sally.”

  I turned the odd-looking fly upside down in my hand. Now it looked right side up.

  “Hell, that’s right,” said Dickie Pee to himself, blowing smoke straight up. “I’ll sell those things for fifty.”

  I knew why Jacobs and Dickie Pee had designed the fly like that. The yellow sally was a spindly insect and too big to be a good flier. Typically—from what I had seen—the wing sets would separate on lift-off, one pair still stuck in the surface film while the tail strained upward and the second wing pair beat the air a quarter inch above the water. It was these emerging insects, trapped but tantalizingly active, that the trout keyed on. Maybe one in fifty bugs got stuck like that, but a feeding trout would get picky and wait for it, and find it every time. The upside-down tie looked like stuck wings, body lifting, yellow sally in distress. It was clever.

  “I heard they can’t pin down Jake’s time of death,” said Dickie Pee beside me. “Three to nine p.m., like hell,” he scoffed. “B.L. gave Jake’s gear to Ingrid. So check his tippet. There’s gonna be one of my sallies on there. Should be simple as that. Jake was out fishing the sally. Eight o’clock. And Mel O’Malley got him.”

  He sucked hard and stared off toward the stream, holding the smoke in for a long time. He had the right idea. So far everybody in Black Earth seemed to have the right idea. And either Junior was dead right—someone killed Jacobs earlier and had framed her dad—or she was dead wrong—Jacobs was fishing the sally, and her dad had done the deed himself. There wasn’t any middle ground, and the fly Junior had snapped off was gone forever.

  “I’ll take one of these Jake’s Sallies,” I told the man in the wheelchair. “And a membership.”

  “Comes to eighty,” Dickie Pee said, handing me the fly. “Eighty bucks even.”

  I hesitated. I couldn’t figure the price.

  “Membership is fifty,” he reminded me. “As of today.”

  A little more faith would be appreciated

  Junior’s face was tight. No grin. “I saw who dropped you off,” she told me as she set down a cup of coffee. “What did Loser have to say?”

  I guess Dickie Pee in a Bag wasn’t a strong enough epithet for her. Her whole posture had changed. She looked older. She bit her sunburned bottom lip as she put a plate down for me.

  “Loser thinks your dad killed Jacobs.”

  “He’s entitled to his opinion,” she said stiffly. “And what did White Milkerson think?”

  I stared at my plate a moment. A trio of fried eggs over easy, a half dozen thick strips of bacon, a gooey store-bought cinnamon bun, and a huge multi-vitamin. It was beautiful. “How do you know I talked to Milkerson?”

  Junior set a plate down for Dad. “You smell like whiskey.”

  “Maybe I’m just a bum.”

  She sat in front of her own plate. She had the same amount of food I had, plus a protein shake. She had told me she was going to spend the day stacking hay in the barn loft. “You’re not a bum,” she informed me. “Half the guys in Black Earth are bums. But you’re not.”

  “You don’t even know my name.”

  “You haven’t told me.”

  “Dog,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I shrugged. “You probably will, eventually.” “I’ll try not to,” she said.

  She reached over and stopped her father from overflowing his coffee cup with cream. “So what did White tell you?”

  The same, I told her. He suspected her dad had killed Jake Jacobs, just like he said he would. I watched her redden. “But he was upset about it,” I added. “He said he was an old friend.”

  “Daddy,” Junior said loudly, “how long have you known White?”

  “Eh?” the old man jerked his head up, dripping egg yolk down his chin.

  “Manfred Milkerson. Your friend. My godfather.” She nearly yelled at him. It occurred to me that Dad had good and bad days. “How long have we known White?”

  The old man rumbled for a moment. He slurped coffee. I saw he was pleased to be engaged, thinking of a friend and working back to the day. But by the time he located the answer, he seemed to have forgotten the question. He glowered at me. I looked down and forked an egg into quarters.

  “Well, that ticks me off just a little bit,” Junior said quietly. I could tell she was understating her feelings. “A little more faith would be appreciated.”

  She said her own grace, slowly and somberly, and we ate a while. I chewed eggs more alive with flavor than any I could remember, meanwhile sneaking looks around the kitchen. The sink was a deep, glazed-iron tub set into buckling gray countertops that had been wiped of their original color. The cabinets were a soiled and buttery white, worn to the wood around the pulls. The curtains and floor had once picked up the forget-me-not blue in the Dutch girl wallpaper, but that effort had been made long ago, no doubt by Junior’s mother in better days. It was easy to see that Junior herself was in a survival mode. Her sole decorating touches amounted to a crystal in one window, a God’s eye in the other, and a giant vitamin bottle on the counter. Nothing was a speck cleaner than it had to be. Every non-essential bit of counter and floor space spilled over with newspapers and mail and tools and heaps of clothes, folded and
otherwise. On the table near my elbow rested a box of spark plugs. The television chattered from the living room behind me. A Madison station reported the weather. Hot. Humid. Chance of thunderstorms later.

  But it was still cool in Junior’s kitchen. I put down a pair of over-easies in a hurry and slowed down to savor the last one, dumping on Lawry’s seasoning salt from the shaker in the middle of the table. I was crunching through my bacon when Junior sighed and said, “Okay, so come on, Dog. What did White tell you?”

  I met her anxious green eyes. “That Jake probably got caught up fishing the sally hatch. And everyone else was at the village board meeting. He told me that, and …”

  I glanced at the old man. Was he listening? It was hard to say. He was mopping egg yolk from his plate with a fistful of cinnamon bun.

  “I know,” Junior sighed. “Daddy threatened Jake. In front of everybody. And then exactly one week later, Jake shows up dead with his ponytail stuffed in his mouth, just like Daddy said.” She leaned in. The dead watch swung away from her chest and hit the table. “So don’t you see? It’s too neat. Daddy doesn’t remember things from one minute to the next, let alone over a period of days. Lately it’s not like Daddy to follow through.” Then she startled me. “Daddy!” she hollered. “Do you remember Jake Jacobs?”

  The old man’s eyes slid beneath his great white eyebrows. Those eyes were rheumy and weak, milky with cataracts, but they found mine.

  “The man with the ponytail?” Junior hollered. “You cussed him out at the village board meeting a couple weeks ago?”

  The old man looked down and his daughter looked at me. “See? He doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. Jake was blaming farmers for mud in the creek, and Daddy was mad as a hornet, but now he’s thinking about what’s on TV.”

  On cue, the huge old man rose and limped across the dog-eared floor tiles to the off-orange shag carpet of the living room. He sank into a brown vinyl recliner and picked up a remote. The volume zoomed.

  When I looked back, Junior was grinning hopefully at me. “Isn’t he cute?” she said. “He loves that remote. We only get three channels, and two of them are fuzzy, but he loves to surf anyway. More coffee?”