The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  Dickie Pee was wheeling through the slashing rain toward the back door of the Pêche Tôt. He had something on his lap—a heavy piece of plywood, wheels screwed onto the bottom. There was a step up to the coffee shop’s back door, but I lost sight of the wheelchair beneath the window, so I didn’t know how he managed it. But in no time he was inside, rolling across the creaky café floor. I heard dishes crash to the floor. Then something hummed in the wall, where a large open cabinet hollowed out the wall across from Jacobs’ desk. I stared at the cabinet as the space filled with grunting and clattering from below.

  Then I had it. A dumbwaiter. Dickie Pee was coming upstairs in a dumbwaiter.

  I stepped back into the closet behind the desk, pulling the door shut on the smells of sawdust and drywall mud. This was where Shelly had been with her tools, making a space for Jacobs’ fishing gear. I stumbled across an impressive collection of extra rods and reels, all cased and labeled J. Jacobs.

  The dumbwaiter rattled to a stop. Through a crack in the door I caught a fleeting slice of Dickie Pee as he scooted past, cross-legged on his wheeled square of plywood.

  He shoved in behind the desk, knocking the long box to the floor again. I heard a desk drawer roll open. Then another. “Sonofabitch”, he cursed. He pawed. He dropped things on the floor. Then the sounds stopped, all except the delicate sound of pages turning.

  After a minute, Dickie Pee scooped papers back into the desk drawers and closed them. He scooted past the door crack again. As the dumbwaiter rattled down, somewhere in the wall between the first and second floors, a lighter snapped. Cigarette smoke drifted up into Jacobs’ office. A minute later, the outer door slammed. At the window, I watched the blue van pull away into the storm.

  As I made my way back toward the desk, I saw them. The Jake’s Yellow Sallies, tied by Dickie Pee, were in a small, clear, plastic box atop a filing cabinet between the desk and the window.

  Jacobs hadn’t used them. He had received them. He had set them aside. Maybe he had forgotten them. Jake and me had cracked the hatch, I recalled Dickie Pee telling me on the road the other day. Like he and Jacobs were a team—in Dickie’s eyes. But maybe they never were.

  Dickie’s gift, the box of Jake’s Yellow Sallies, were well beyond the sight and reach of the man on wheeled plywood. Beside the plastic container was the empty box and spool of a brand new line—a top-drawer Orvis Wonderline and the receipt for it, dated August 10, 11:17 a.m., the morning of Jacobs’ death.

  So Jacobs, that day, had bought a new line and gone fishing with it. But he had left his special sallies at home. All six of them.

  Both the first and second Jake’s Sallies had come from somewhere else. That is, if Dickie Pee told the truth.

  A twenty eight inch brown

  The thunderstorm was on full wash when I left the Pêche Tôt, and my walk back to the Cruise Master felt more like sailing. I had to flatten out, bend into the wind or it would knock me over. If I caught it just right, I was carried along at a dangerous speed—eyes nearly closed against a new onslaught of hail. I hit the ditch twice. Then I saw color—real, alive color for the first time—when lightning struck the road ahead of me.

  Shakily, I stripped inside the Cruise Master. There was my shower for the week, I decided. As my home-on-wheels rocked and rattled under driven hail, I toweled off and looked out the back window. My chance to see a tornado on the approach had passed. The sky was on the ground. The air was black-green. Trees thrashed and broken branches cartwheeled through the air.

  I could see no further than Shelly’s pop-up at the far end of the campground, and as I watched, the wind got beneath it, snapped the ropes of her little awning, and slowly tipped the little trailer onto its side. Suddenly comprehending my own fate, I scrambled naked into the driver’s seat and buckled myself in. It was all I could think of. I was on my way to Oz, but at least I had my seatbelt on. Christ, I thought next, they’ll find me dead—dead and naked. Jesus, Dog.

  Then the storm abruptly stopped. It just stopped. What seemed like a lull, a pause for wind-shift, simply and neatly attenuated to a clean-scrubbed nothing, into a revelation of still, fragrant air and a spray of sunlight over the western bluffs. Then a gleam caught my eye, and the sight of a silver milk truck, bouncing and splashing down the campground road, gave me ten seconds to get my bare butt out of the driver’s seat and put some clothes on.

  Stumbling into trousers at my rear window, I watched Lumen Bostock pass me by and park his rig down by Shelly’s pop-up. He left the engine running. He hopped down and strode like a bantam through the soupy, stick-littered grass to the rear of the upended camper. It was tipped back at a forty-five, supported precariously by the decomposing picnic table behind it. Bostock sprang nimbly on top of the table and pushed the camper back onto four wheels. Then he strutted back to the front and hammered on the door. Almost instantly, the door flew open and out tore Shelly, clad in a plaid bathrobe, cursing and flailing, knocking Bostock’s hat off and screaming, “Asshole!”

  Bostock was pale bald on top, and his head appeared strangely small. He puffed his little chest and twanged curses back at her, string of cancerous little words that inspired Shelly to haul back and spit in his face. Then, wild-haired and puffy-faced, she lunged to the brink of a fire pit and picked up a large, charred stone. Bostock began to backpedal. He stepped on his hat. Shelly kept coming.

  “You touch me with that, I’ll kill you,” warned Bostock, his back against the milk truck. “You hear me, girlie?”

  “Go ahead!” wailed Shelly, and she hurled the rock with all her strength.

  Bostock ducked, but he didn’t need to. The rock missed broadly and clanged off the silver tank. Bostock sneered. He said, “Gimme them keys.”

  Shelly glared at him, at once enraged and bereft. She glanced toward the Cruise Master—or toward the fire pit again, I couldn’t tell. She drew in the plaid robe and put her arms around herself. Her shoulders slumped.

  “I don’t have them.”

  “You gimme them keys, girlie. I asked your old man. He says you got ‘em.”

  “I don’t have them. I lost them. That bitch attacked me at Jake’s wake and I lost my whole fucking bag.”

  Bostock sized her up. He shook his head in disgust.

  “Well that’s just too bad for you,” he said finally. He recovered his hat and climbed into his cab. “I’m gonna be back after my route tonight. You have them keys ready. And you tell that dough-boy Hellenbrand to stay at home, so I don’t have to kick his ass again.”

  Shelly stared at the wet grass. “Asshole.”

  Toot-toot, responded Bostock, backing out.

  Shelly didn’t watch. She turned to look at her camper. One corner of the canvas roof was torn at right angles where it had fallen back against the picnic table. The support lines for her awning were snapped.

  She picked up a stick from the wet grass. She broke both ends to shorten it and stripped the leaves. Then she bent over her lines, pulled the broken ends together around the stick, and in a minute they were both repaired. She tossed the stick aside, glanced once more at the Cruise Master, and went inside the pop-up.

  I believe I pictured her accurately: she was going back to bed.

  I mixed a straight Tang and opened Jake Jacobs’ little notebook on my galley table. The dead man’s notations proceeded neatly about halfway in, and then the rest of the pages were blank. I backed up to the beginning. The man’s handwriting leaned left—a lefty’s stylish scrawl. I looked hard at the initial set of notations. They looked familiar. First, a date. Then 6 bn, 2 bk, 0 rb, 8-14, cdpup. Jacobs was a fish counter. He meant that on a certain date—in this case, one day in the May of two springs ago—he had caught six brown trout, two brook trout, no rainbows, all in a range of eight to fourteen inches, on caddis pupae. The dead man went on like this, keeping meticulous records, until that fall, when suddenly an entry broke rank.

  1 bn 28!!!! he wrote in large letters, triple underlined. wb!!!

  A twenty-ei
ght-inch brown on a wooly bugger. A behemoth like the one that Bostock had jugged up and slaughtered under the bridge, or like the one Junior and I had fooled into taking a sally.

  Jacobs had let his big fish go, I gathered, but he had carefully diagrammed the spot on the stream. It was about halfway between the two County K bridges, in a corner that he triangulated with Junior’s farm and a limestone outcrop on the west edge of the coulee.

  From then on, the dead man’s journal changed tone and form. It began to carry notes and lists and phone numbers and hand-made stream-section maps, terminating finally with a half-drawn diagram of Lake Bud. He had drawn a grid over the lake, as if he were a scientist, measuring something, or searching for something.

  Curious, I dug out my little cell phone and called the number Jacobs had penned neatly on the Lake Bud page.

  “County Supervisor’s office,” said a woman’s voice on the other end.

  I stammered. “You mean Ronnie Hellenbrand’s office?” I said finally.

  “Ronnie’s out today,” the woman said, “at a funeral. Would you like his voice mail?”

  I hung up.

  I chose another number randomly—a long distance number that Jacobs had put down beside the phrase client pool?

  “Hanson’s Safari,” barked a man on the other end.

  “Uh, where are you located?”

  “Route fifty-six west outa the city, left on Turner Road. Follow the high fence. We only take appointments.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean what state?” “Huh? This is Texas. You want something, fella?”

  “I’m calling about Jake Jacobs.”

  “Say what?”

  Again I hung up. I stepped outside, needing a greater space for my puzzlement. What was Jake Jacobs doing with the number of a Texas game farm? And the number of a Bud Bjorgstad confidant like Ronnie Hellenbrand? What did he mean, client pool? And why had everything changed after he had caught the big brown trout?

  In the panorama before me, a pair of small motor boats plied Lake Bud. In my three days in Black Earth, I had never seen a boat on Lake Bud before—and now, suddenly, two.

  Each boat had a driver and a person in the bow, and they moved deliberately, like insects laying eggs, leaving behind twin trails of bright orange buoys. I looked through my binoculars. There was no mistaking Village President Bud Bjorgstad at the helm of one boat, and the uniformed man in the bow had to be B.L. The other boat was too distant for a good reading. Two shapes. One in purple. That was all I could tell.

  “Hey!” said a voice right beside me.

  Startled, I put down the glasses. Shelly stood beside me in dry clothing, this time a ratty pair of cargo shorts and a tank top. She had a can of beer in each hand. She was barefoot. She was about half-fresh, about half-smiling.

  “I checked about your tires,” she told me. “I can get them here day after tomorrow. If not that, then the next day for sure. No problem.”

  She looked out at the scene on Lake Bud and back at me. She put a warm beer in my hand. She nestled against me. “Which is okay,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  When the going gets tough

  You understand by now that the Dog is no philosopher. The Dog is not, nor has he ever been, the kind of healthy, well-adjusted soul who just naturally makes the right decisions on behalf of the oneness and goodness of human kind. At the top of my game, I was a good Dog, a follower and a bet-hedger, just barely smooth enough to make it look like I knew what I was doing. I was hoping for no bad things. Which I know now is different than believing in good things. And different from truly living. But I suppose I’ve already revealed the psychology of the Dog.

  Still, now and then a cliché comes through for you. You’ve heard it: when the going gets tough, the tough go fishing.

  Granted, going fishing for three solid years is perhaps matter for another discussion. But I’m talking about the short term now. I’m talking about fishing—any kind of fishing, even ice fishing, probably—as a better use of a grown man’s time than, say, accepting a head job from a drunken and desperate teenager.

  Which allows me to admit that this is quite nearly what next befell the Dog. Shelly invited herself into the Cruise Master and I followed, meaning to root her out and get back to my analysis of Jake Jacobs’ final notebook entries. But she barely let me clear the top step before she pressed herself against me again and mashed her lips sloppily against mine.

  “Whu—?” I said.

  She sloshed her beer can down on the galley table and went incisively at my crotch with both hands. In no time flat she had my zipper open and my woebegone member was rising nicely in her beer-sticky little hands.

  Then I pushed her away. I was honestly, foggily puzzled. Funny thing, though, so was Shelly, it appeared. Puzzled. We stared without comprehension at one another for a long moment. Then she went back to work.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “I’m going to get you off,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  “But why?”

  She shrugged, dropped one hand to cradle my nuts. “That’s what I do,” she explained. “Guys want to fuck me at first, especially older guys, but usually I don’t even like them, and anyway I don’t want to get knocked up or get some disease. So I just give them head and everything works out fine.” She looked at me quizzically. This whole intermission was making no sense to her. “I’m not even charging you. You mean you don’t want me to?”

  I’m not sure what I said. But Shelly didn’t believe it, whatever it was. I guess she must have heard all the perfunctories before. Anyway, the next moment I was looking at the back of her head, and I was slipping, sliding, feeling good and feeling awful … and then suddenly I had hold of something so solid I could pull myself to safety.

  Just like that.

  It was Junior. It was Junior’s weird faith in me. Maybe it was crazy, delusional, a fantasy of health, like Harvey’s wheat grass smoothies, like dream catchers and multi-vitamins. Except there it was suddenly, real enough to use. Junior thought more of the Dog than this. And so the Dog was more. It was that simple.

  I separated as gently as the girl would allow. She looked up in bafflement edged with a trace of orneriness. “What’s wrong?”

  Nothing, I told her. I zipped up.

  “Come on. You got a wife, right? So what? Everybody’s got a wife.”

  I told her, “No wife.” I guess that was an insult. She rose in a fury and grabbed her warm beer off the galley table. She leaned against the bench back and chugged.

  “Shelly,” I told her, “I’m going fishing.”

  Her eyes watered as she glared at me.

  I lifted my vest and waders from their hook behind the door. There would be high and muddy water from the storm, I imagined, but what the hell. I reversed the door and tossed my gear out on the grass. Strange, but it seemed new—it seemed a celebration of something, this fishing. I gave Shelly a squeeze around the shoulders. She twisted away.

  “Hey,” I said to her anyway. “You wanna come with me?”

  Poor, ruined father

  “And?” said Junior, giving me her crinkly little grin. It was eight p.m. We were bouncing out the campground road in her mud-spattered blue pickup, en route to our stake-out of Jesus at the cheese factory. I had related an abridged version of my afternoon, throwing in at the end that I had bumped into Shelly in the campground and invited her along.

  “She came along for a while,” I said. “Grousing about the heat, the bugs, the mud. She’d already done too much of that with her dad, I guess. Said she hated the creek, hated fishing, hated water—and especially hated her dad. I’ve always heard that’s how grown kids behave for awhile. They go opposite.”

  Junior pulled out toward town on County K. Then she slapped me on the shoulder in a congratulatory way.

  “But she went with you. That’s great.”

  “For a while,” I answered. “We ran into her dad sampling fish upstream a ways and she took off.” Junior sighed. �
��How was White?”

  “Tipsy,” I said. “And sad looking.” As Junior sped her pickup toward the village of Black Earth, I thought back to my second meeting with White Milkerson. Shelly and I had come upon the biologist fumbling with a large brown trout in midstream. The water was soupy and high with runoff, and Milkerson’s elbows were dripping. He wore his yellow electrofishing backpack. The probe trailed him in the current. His net was twisted across his shoulders and under his arm. He was cussing as the trout thrashed in his hands. Then he lost it. He raised up, his vest attachments swinging and flapping.

  “Hey, Babe,” he said, surprised to see his daughter.

  “Screw you,” Shelly retorted from behind me.

  I turned to watch her flip-flop off through the high grass and disappear into the cornfield between us and the road.

  “Thanks for bringing the car back!” her father called after.

  He chuckled morosely around a cigarette, snapping at it with a dying lighter.

  “If she visits me,” he said, “stays overnight, takes care of herself for just one damn night, then she gets to have the car for a day.” We watched her crawl under the fence at the other side of the cornfield and set off in a jerky, hurried stride back toward the Lake Bud campground.

  Now, to Junior, slowing her pickup for the village limits, I said, “White Milkerson asked about you and your dad. And he worried about Ingrid Jacobs too. He seemed real upset by this whole thing.”

  “He and Jake were pretty close,” Junior said. “Jake was working with him on stream studies. And this evening, when I came in from milking, White was sitting with Dad on the porch. Had his arm around Dad. Neither one of them saying a thing. Just staring at Dad’s bobber in the grass, kind of like old times. White’s an emotional guy. I guess that’s why he drinks so much.”