The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  She re-filled me. “Let’s go on the porch,” she said.

  “Here you go,” she said, sitting down beside me. The steps were narrow and we were close enough to bang knees. Her knee was round and solid beneath faded denim. Mine was bony—damned near gaunt as it poked through my threadbare wading pants. Junior passed me a few sheets of paper.

  “These are the minutes from the last two village board meetings,” she told me. “I got them for you. My mom’s old friend Mary Malarkey is the clerk. Mary dropped them off this morning.”

  I hesitated. In my hand I held about five pages in ten-point, single-spaced type, detailing the minutia of the Village of Black Earth, Wisconsin. Driveway permits. Contested parking tickets.

  Plans for the Jet Ski Jamboree on Lake Bud. I wasn’t exactly sure what the point was.

  “What you do,” Junior said, “is you find who was there two meetings ago to hear Daddy threaten Jake—”

  “But everybody heard the rumor.”

  “If you were there,” Junior explained, “it was pretty convincing. You’d more think to take it seriously. Daddy had his nuts twisted up real good and everybody there believed him except me. Then—” she paged deeper for me “—you see who came back the next week and got read into the record to set themselves up an alibi. That shows you who to focus on.”

  “But doesn’t everybody go the meetings? The whole village?”

  “Not in summer,” she said. “Between haying and softball, not many people have the time. So those that do go, they really have an interest.”

  She looked at me over her coffee cup, as if to say, See? Simple.

  “Think about it,” she went on when I hesitated again. “Whoever killed Jake, they purposely made it look like he was out fishing during the meeting. Therefore, the killer went to the meeting. For an alibi. Right? I mean, otherwise, why go to the trouble to tie on a yellow sally? To set yourself up as unavailable, at the meeting when Jake died, while he fished the sally, supposedly. There’s no other point.”

  Her certainty made me squirm. It still seemed a lot more likely that Jacobs was fishing the sally—and that her dad had dunked him. I decided to change directions. “Who’s Loser?” I asked her.

  She frowned. “Dickie P. Johnsrud. He sells stuff to fishermen.”

  “I know. But who is he? What’s his story?”

  Her hand went to the watch she wore as a necklace. She took a deep breath and looked out over the coulee, where her cows grazed among tall, blooming thistles. “Well,” she said, “we all used to call him Ditchard. You know—his given name is Richard … so, because of his drunk driving, all the accidents, Ditchard…. Now he’s Dickie Pee. As in Dickie Pee in a Bag, which is what he does.”

  That was cruel, I thought. But Junior seemed utterly without her usual sympathy.

  “He finally hit a tree or something?”

  She answered me flatly, “No,” and looked away, fingering the watch.

  My vest hung on the porch newel. I plucked the upside-down yellow sally off my drying patch.

  “You snapped one of these off Jake’s tippet and threw it in the water. Right?”

  She looked at the fly. “I guess.”

  “How did you know it was a yellow sally?”

  “It’s yellow.”

  “It’s an unusual way to tie the fly.”

  She sighed and got up. A minute later she returned with a book on trout flies. It was beat up, water stained, and opened to a page on yellow sallies. There was something on there like it. Not as stylish as Dickie Pee’s fly—but inverted, with the tall pink wing post. For night fishing, the text said.

  “Darrald was always talking about getting into fly fishing,” she said. She sat down beside me. She lifted her cup to drink before she noticed it was empty. “But Darrald was the kind of guy who always tried to know every fact about a new thing before he started it, so he wouldn’t make mistakes. As a result, Darrald never started anything. Nothing in his whole life. He just had to know everything before he jumped in. And Daddy was always teasing him, telling him just get some dynamite out of the barn if he wanted to catch some trout.”

  She had her fingers around the defunct wristwatch again.

  “Okay,” I said after a minute of silence. “So who’s Darrald then? What’s his story?”

  “His story,” she said, “is he’s gone.”

  She was picking at her boots. The leather on the toes had dried and scuffed up into little curls, and she plucked at those, flicked them out into the yard. A kitten wandered out from under the porch to sniff at my wading socks.

  “We were engaged for about two years,” she finally said. “Darrald, for once, just wanted to jump in and do it. But it was me holding out, saying let’s wait, thinking maybe one day I’d end up someplace besides Black Earth, this farm. You know. So Darrald went out bow hunting for deer one day in October. Darrald and Ditchard. They were old buddies. Drinking buddies. Toking buddies. They hadn’t seen each other much since me and Darrald got together. They went back up there.”

  Junior pointed a thumb over her shoulder at the house. Behind it was about a hundred acres of corn, and then a thickly wooded hillside.

  “Darrald wouldn’t get messed up and hunt generally. He never did by himself. But with Dickie, of course, he did. Drunk, stoned, the works. And Darrald fell out of his tree stand. I mean his tree stand fell out of the tree. I mean—.” She stopped and cleared her throat. Then she got up, went through the screen door again, and came back with the coffee pot.

  “I get so mad,” she said, sitting back down, “I can hardly say what really happened.”

  I waited. A blunt silver milk truck roared down the coulee, engine noise beating off the hillsides, a wake of air and gravel spewing blackbirds from the ditches. A quarter mile down the coulee, the truck jake-braked to a stop and matched windows with Bud Lite’s police car coming up the other direction.

  Junior was back to picking at her boots.

  “You shouldn’t hunt shit-faced,” she said. “And that’s Darrald’s own fault. Nobody made him do anything. But he was minding his business up in his tree stand. I know that. Then Dickie Pee in a Bag gets the idea they need to smoke another bowl. So he climbs out of his stand and comes over to Darrald’s. He climbs up there with Darrald, starts packing a bowl, two big, two-hundred-pound guys in one tree stand rated for three hundred pounds, and the whole thing comes down.” She straightened up. She blew out a breath and shook her hands in the air like she was sick of herself picking at her boots. “I’m glad you’re here right now,” she told me. “Every time I tell someone the story, I feel a little tiny bit less pissed.”

  I nodded. The conversation down the road—Lumen Bostock and B.L.—continued.

  “Dickie fell on Darrald,” she said. “Dickie came down on top of him. Neither one of them could move. It was real cold. They were out there until the next morning, until I went looking. And Darrald just didn’t make it.”

  She swiped at her face in tomboy discomfort. She gripped the dead watch.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah? Well, no shit. Me too. Sorry, and mad. That loser. I can’t forgive him.”

  A while passed. Finally she tapped the Black Earth village board meeting minutes on my lap. “Anyway, thanks. I looked through it, and I’ve got my ideas. But let me know what you find out. I’ve got twenty-five acres of hay to get in and get stacked before it rains.”

  As she stood, I stared blankly at the official record of a repavement request and the ensuing debate. Maybe the thrill of my breakfast was wearing off. Or maybe I’d had too much real coffee. I rose to a rare moment of verbal courage. I felt I had to. For my sake, I guess, as much as hers.

  “Listen,” I said to Junior. “Is there the slightest possibility that your dad did do this?” Her pink cheeks ballooned in an angry puff, but I kept going. “Is there a chance that your idea about somebody retying Jacobs’ fly is just too much of a long shot? And that because you love your dad so much you’re just not
seeing it?”

  She had stiffened. She set her cup down hard.

  “You don’t trust me.”

  “I didn’t say that. I guess I’m asking if you trust yourself.” “I’m not losing Daddy,” she said. “I trust myself on that.”

  “But …”

  “Look,” she said. “If you don’t believe me, that’s fine. You choose. If you don’t think I’m right, just drive away with the money and have a nice life. I’ll work this out myself.”

  I didn’t move. I felt stunned by Junior’s stubborn faith. She needed to believe, so therefore she did. I didn’t understand, and it stopped me cold. Meanwhile, the conversation down the road had broken up. The police car rolled toward us up the coulee. “Go on,” she said, taking a step toward the barn. “I got to stack hay while Daddy’s quiet.” She made an unconvincing grin. “It’s all going to work out anyway.”

  I watched B.L. crawl his car upstream on County K. He drove deliberately, like he was looking for something.

  “Listen,” I said, “your police chief’s coming up the road. It’d be best if he didn’t find me here.”

  Junior looked up. B.L. was making progress, but slowly. He rolled his patrol car over the road-hump of a little feeder creek, then between the green pasture flanks groomed by Junior’s dairy cattle. That moment, as I looked at her face, I saw past the burnt-cheeked, square-jawed, can-do tomboy. I saw a woman. And at that same moment, I heard an engine surge.

  “You know what?” Junior said, leaping up the steps beside me. “You know what—Dog? Right now, if you’re not going to trust me, I don’t really give a fat goddamn where he finds you.”

  With that, she strode across the porch and pulled open the squeaky screen door. “Daddy,” she said sharply. Then the screen door closed and the big door closed after it. The lock snapped. The television went off. The old man bawled a protest and Junior cussed him fiercely. Curtains rattled shut. “Hey Massachusetts,” called B.L. I turned back to the driveway. He was stepping from the car. “Are we having fun yet?”

  It was the two of them. The village president, Bud Heavy, was winching himself out of the passenger seat. They both wore amber mirrored sunglasses.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” said the president. “How’s fishing?”

  “Nobody’s home,” I answered.

  “Heh, heh,” said the president. “Funny answer. Funny kind of fishing report.” “Nobody’s home,” I repeated.

  “Well then,” said B.L., rocking a little in his cowboy boots. “Okay … Well … then …”

  The village president hitched over and stiff-armed the corner of Junior’s house. He leaned hard. “Well then, what?” he asked his son. He gave me the rubber smile.

  “Well then we’ll just have a look around.”

  “Atta boy.”

  I stepped in front of the chief as he moved toward the steps. “You’d better have a warrant then.”

  I had surprised myself as much as them. A stranger in bare feet, holding a coffee cup, his waders hung like spent rubbers on the porch rail, defending the lady inside. I knew how it looked. The dogs were on the linoleum now.

  “You hear what I just heard?” the president asked the cop.

  “I did.”

  “You heard it? The guy protecting Junior?” “I heard it.”

  “Same guy who said he didn’t see Junior do nothing yesterday.”

  B.L. sounded peeved. “I heard it.”

  “Kind of a hard guy to believe then, huh Dwighty?”

  B.L. stared at the driveway.

  “Well then …?” Bud Bjorgstad twisted, cricked the sway in his back. He shifted his feet and leered at his son. He looked like a man about to carnalize a goat. His son had begun to sweat.

  “He’s thinking,” President Bud told me with a wink. “He’ll get it.”

  “What I was gonna do all along,” said the Black Earth village police chief finally, sullenly, “was ask for two warrants. One for this place. One for that RV of his down in the campground.”

  He glared at his father. His father slapped his back.

  “Atta boy,” said the president.

  At the Pêche Tôt

  In my thirty-three months on the road, the Cruise Master had been violated twice, once outside Philadelphia, and once at a turn-out on an Appalachian brook trout stream near Shady Valley, Tennessee. Both times I’d lost a week’s worth of vodka and all my tools. The Tennessee folks took my Red Wing boots too. But my safe box was never touched. I wasn’t afraid of a warrant. I had a strategy.

  I checked inside the box. I had a Glock .40 caliber pistol and Junior’s thousand bucks in cash. I peeled off four fifties and stuffed them in my pocket. I put the earring in the box. I double-bagged the box in bread sacks, in case of rain, and set it on top of the Cruise Master, out of view to anything but a bird. Then I walked to town.

  The dead man’s wife stood behind the counter at the Pêche Tôt. Ingrid Jacobs. There could be no doubt about that.

  Just as they did not make women like Junior in the suburbs of Boston, they did not make women like Ingrid Jacobs in Black Earth. She was tall and lean and elegantly Bohemian. The closed-lip smile she gave me was a very polished affair—an expression not of welcome or even grief, but of flawless technique, like a guy casting a fly perfectly into the far corner of an empty swimming pool. She was absolutely air-tight pretty, and she knew it.

  She tipped her head—vaguely impatient. So what would I have? I stared so long at the densely lettered chalkboard menu that she turned her backside to me and began wiping down some kind of multi-nozzled machine. Maybe Junior had got my sap running, I don’t know. But it occurred to me that Jake Jacobs, at some point, had been a very happy man.

  “So, do you need some help choosing?”

  Her back still to me. Wiping. The wife of a dead man, I reminded myself. Just order any damn thing.

  “Our special coffee today,” she told me, “is a Brazilian shade-grown.”

  “Okay, that,” I said. I looked at the food. I remembered White Milkerson’s story. I pictured Melvin O’Malley putting a shovel through the pastry case. “And an elderberry scone.”

  She turned. Her smile, still all lips, had shifted very subtly to a different corner of the swimming pool. I noticed her clothes—studiously tattered jeans, a tight T-shirt with the face of Malcom X glowering out past the buttons of long-tailed mechanic’s work shirt that said, drolly over the pocket, Chucky. She was about thirty. Her hair was a luxuriant nest of black curls.

  “I’ll bring that right out.”

  I sat down at a table near the window and spread the Village Board notes out before me. The coffee shop appeared to be an old general store that had been aggressively stripped to its elements—brick and pipe, oak floorboards and pressed tin ceiling—and then painted in bulky earth tones. Everywhere, unusual plants hung nakedly in tall antique bottles. The fishing theme emerged subtly in the prints and photographs that traveled gallery-style around the room above the wainscoting. The napkin holder on my table was an empty classic fly reel, cleverly mounted. And the reading rack had Isaac Walton, Hemingway, fishing magazines, brochures for Friends of Black Earth Creek. A table in the rear was set up for fly tying. A large orange cat slept beneath the vise among the feathers.

  Ingrid Jacobs set down my order.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her before she could glide back to the counter.

  She stopped. What did you do? said her puzzled expression. “I heard about your husband. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh.” She looked away. When her gaze came back to me, she had laid another perfect lip-smile over empty water. “Thank you.”

  “It’s a good idea,” I persisted. “Keeping busy here in the shop. You must be devastated.”

  “Yes. Thank you so much. Should I know you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Just a trout bum. Passing through.” “Oh. Well, thank you so much.”

  She escaped behind the counter. I sipped my coffee and picked at my scone
. It was too rich for me, this stuff, after two-plus years on instant Maxim, Tang, and peanut butter sandwiches. These were Jake Jacobs’ rations, though—the beautiful woman included—the rations of a guy who knew exactly how to have it all. That didn’t go down easily in a place like Black Earth, I imagined, where people knew how to have exactly what they had.

  I focused on the notes. The Black Earth Village Board meeting had been called to order at 7:03 p.m., around the time the first few yellow sallies had begun to stir in the creek. But Junior had me thinking. Had Jacobs really lingered on the stream as the meeting started? Nearly every agenda item intersected his issues somehow.

  Zoning, jet ski races on Lake Bud, a village-commissioned stream study …. Had the pull of the sally hatch been that strong? What kind of man was Jacobs, anyway?

  I sipped my coffee and watched Jacobs’ widow grind beans. She was almost catatonically graceful. I supposed the rhythms of grief into her movements, but her face showed nothing.

  I looked back to the village board minutes. Ingrid herself had been the first to speak at the meeting, petitioning for permission to serve Pêche Tôt fare at tables on the sidewalk. President Bud Bjorgstad wondered why Ingrid Jacobs had not previously presented the idea to the Downtown Planning Committee. Bud Lite (the minutes called him Police Chief Dwight Bjorgstad) then spoke against the petition, citing public safety. A lengthy wrangle followed, and the petition had been tabled for review. I looked back at the agenda. Ingrid Jacobs, first up.

  I remembered what Junior had said. See who got read into the record … to set themselves up an alibi. That shows you who to focus on. I nibbled my scone, wondering.

  Manfred Milkerson, the retired fisheries scientist, had spoken next. He had answered questions about funding for his study on Lake Bud. Yes, he reported, the study had been paid for by Friends of Black Earth Creek, Jake Jacobs’ organization. Didn’t that discredit the study’s findings, asked the president. To which Milkerson had replied, Why? Because Jacobs wanted the dam out, answered the president. He paid for the study, replied Milkerson, not the results. But then couldn’t the village pay for its own study and report its own results? Be my guest, replied Milkerson. The idea was referred to committee for consideration. Milkerson was thanked by the president for volunteering to speak to the board. I made a note to myself: see the study.