The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  “Sorry. This is a boring story. It’s stupid. Everybody in America goes through this.”

  Junior didn’t bat an eye. “Not me,” she said. “I milk cows.” She expected me to continue.

  “We did okay,” I claimed about Mary Jane and me. “We processed a lot of decisions. We coped. Of course things flared up now and then. Then the fights started coming more and more often. Suddenly it seemed like no one was happy.

  “We had a fight one night after dinner. I wanted to leave the dishes. She said it was my turn to wash them. I said I know it’s my turn to wash them. That’s why I’m leaving them. If it’s my turn to wash them, it’s also my turn to decide when they’re going to get washed—that kind of thing.”

  I felt Junior squeezing my hands. She was looking at me with teary eyes. From her distance, I’m sure it all looked so small, so quaint, so cozily tragic—but the moment itself was infused with inexplicable rage.

  “So … Mary Jane went up and ran a bath for Eamon. He loved to play in there. He had this whole zoo of water animals. Then she came back down mad as a hornet. I dug in and fought back. Mary Jane had a real temper by then. She yelled. I stayed on her. I got logical. She wasn’t making sense. Eventually she tore out of the house to take a walk. I went upstairs … to take a leak. And my … our boy … he … well, I told you.”

  Junior was releasing silent tears down her sunburned face.

  “He fell? Or something?”

  I shrugged. We had no idea. He was just dead, his little body curled on its side in five inches of water. And everything came apart after that.

  I’m not sure how much background I gave to Junior, but Eamon’s death came just at the time when corporate security was getting real techie—server security, internet firewalls, email snooping. I just didn’t have the heart for it. I let myself get bought out, then marginalized in the new company, and finally, when the market crashed, I was downsized. Mary Jane and I—there just wasn’t any point in being together anymore. She wanted the house, the cars, everything. Because I was the one at home when Eamon drowned. I just didn’t care anymore. She could have it all. Things, objects, didn’t matter. People didn’t matter. They all looked ugly to me. I wanted nothing to do with the whole idea of human connectivity—this web I thought had so much meaning just meant nothing without Eamon. I could take every human relationship and dissect it to its shallow, selfish, pathetic core. I could look at every past action of my own and break it down into its components of greed, fear, and stupidity. Only one thing, I told Junior, made me feel calm and positive.

  “And what was that?”

  “Ah, shit,” I answered, “nothing really.”

  “But you like fishing.”

  “It fills me up,” I said, “and tires me out.” Probably she didn’t understand. I explained about movement, water, change, the road, the cycles of insects, the feel of a wet and heavy trout in my hands—and most importantly, the exhaustion that allowed me to sleep. I told her I had a little money left after it all blew up. I explained how I saw Harvey Digman, my tax guy back when I had taxes to pay, and Harvey had saved me. Harvey had set me up.

  “These last couple years, I’ve been fly fishing my way through the season. I bought this book, the hundred best in the country. I did them all. I’m on my way through the smaller streams now, the lesser known. Black Earth is in there. Anyway, I fish my way through the season, down to New Mexico, where I’ve been learning to dive in the winter.”

  “Dive?” Junior looked puzzled.

  “Scuba. Snorkel. I got the stuff—it’s all under the bench seat back in my RV. I just have to be around water.” Junior smiled. “Can you walk on water?”

  Now we both looked toward the window. Nothing moving so far.

  “There’s something out there to walk on,” I said. “A log or something. Just under the surface. I don’t think Jesus would have chosen Lake Bud.”

  She laughed. She got up, served me Limburger on onion, with beer. I guess I had gotten used to the smell. It must have been everywhere and without contrast. Junior started eating heartily, washing it down.

  “Oh, God, that’s good.” She looked out the window—and that’s when I saw what was different. No sport bra. Different bra. And rather flattering. “You’re damn right there’s something out there,” Junior said. “And now I’ll tell you a story. Back in the seventies sometime, I was in grade school, we had a flash flood that took out three or four of our buildings, some of our livestock, washed it all right down into this reservoir. Timber, fences, corn cribs, everything west of the highway.”

  Jake Jacobs had talked a lot about that flood, Junior said. Jacobs said that flood reflected the misuse of land in the watershed. That was exactly the kind of thing made her Dad furious. O’Malleys, after all, hard farmed the Black Earth coulee for seven generations and nobody told them they were doing any wrong. And then on top of it, Jake wanted to take the dam out, when it was the dam, Dad said, that saved the village. What the dam was saving, Jake said, was enough water to wash the village away when it finally broke. Dad said, hell no, the dam broke before, in ‘35, and all it did was fill up Sundvig’s pasture and drown a bunch of cattle. Then how, Jake countered, was the dam protecting the village?

  “They had some doozies about it, when Dad was still a little more with it,” Junior said. “But you’re just looking at my tits.”

  “No,” I claimed.

  “Yes,” she countered. “And thank you.”

  In the awkward space after that, I tried the cheese. I bit, spilled Limburger and onion down my front, then doused the shocking taste with too much beer and came up choking.

  “Damn,” I said. “That is good.”

  Junior broke out laughing. “Hallelujah,” she cried. She reached out her beer can and bumped mine in a toast.

  “What?” I said.

  Her crunchy grin seemed as wide as Lake Bud itself. “You know what? Sitting here, listening to you, looking at you, looking at you look at me, seeing you try to eat … you know, I think I just got over Darrald.”

  Our lovemaking was about what you’d expect for a man and a woman who hadn’t done it for a combined twelve years. We had to undress ourselves, seeing as the other party was too clumsy to do it right. For a long time we just stood together, ribs against ribs, patting each other on the back like long-lost relatives. Finally Junior had the sense to walk me back to the sofa, park me there, and turn off the lights.

  That eased the harshness somehow of being a forty-two-year-old born-again virgin, buck naked on a strange and nappy sofa. Junior lay out beneath me, solid and shapely and hungry as a woman could be. She was no linebacker in this view. I matched up and tried not to gouge her with my elbows. And we started.

  But our bodies were too long for the sofa. I bent one leg up and hung the other off. I must have been pushing with it, though, because the next thing I knew the sofa was all the way across the floor and hammering against one of the stainless steel coolers.

  That’s when Junior saved us again. She had the common sense to sit me down and get on top. “Oh,” I moaned, and I nearly settled down. But then she bore down with her arms around me and nearly broke my neck. I had to fight her, fight for air, and in no time, raggedly, in the midst of our struggle to get comfortable, we both erupted.

  For a long time after, Junior pressed my head to her chest and sighed through the top of my hair. She was facing the window.

  “That could have been different,” she said after a while. She paused a long time. “But it couldn’t have been better.”

  After another minute she sighed again and said, “So now, who’s going to get up and get the binoculars?”

  You’re not going to believe it

  Junior and I had developed a plan for the moment the light appeared on Lake Bud, but that plan didn’t include being naked. We watched long enough to realize the feet were heading back towards shore. The light had appeared long before we noticed it, and it was too late for binoculars. “Keep your eye on tha
t spot,” Junior said, kissing me on the lips one last time. Then she hurried out the door carrying her hat and her boots. Her job was to get out to the road and see who drove by.

  I felt almost too good to move. But my job was to fix the spot on the lake where the legs were now retreating and get to it. As I struggled into my pants, I noted some kind of a brushy lump near the shore, caught in the beam of the light as the legs came out and disappeared into the woods.

  But by the time I had found my way around the back of the cheese factory to the shoreline, I had lost my bearings. I was facing a blank, black lake and a muddy, tangled shoreline. An engine started up a quarter mile away. I stumbled along until I found what might have been the black lump, and from there I felt my way into the water. About knee-high in, about fifty feet out, I bumped into something warm, slick, and wide. I stood on it. Barely stood on it. It felt ribbed, corrugated, rounded—but I couldn’t quite find the center of it. I took a step forward. Then another.

  Then I fell.

  By the time I slipped and squished my way back to Kussmaul Butter Käse, Junior had returned from the road. Her blue pickup was waiting for me in the lot out front.

  “You ready for this?” she asked me. “You’re not going to believe it.”

  I got her seat wet and muddy. She didn’t notice.

  “That was President Bud’s red Suburban.”

  Sure I believed it. Why not? Why didn’t she?

  “Okay,” said Junior, gunning down the factory drive to the road and turning left. “Right. But now think about what Einer said: heavy-set, purple, lots of hair.”

  That part I didn’t get. Junior let me muse on it while she attacked a dark country road at eighty miles per hour. Just to help me think.

  “Who does all Bud’s dirty work?” she asked me. “B.L.?”

  “Besides him,” Junior said, sending me into her shoulder with a hard right. “Tonight, it was Mary Malarkey, the village clerk.” She passed another pickup. “You know Mary?” I didn’t. “Mom’s old bud,” she said. “Nice lady. But she’d do anything for Bud. Anything.”

  Junior tore down the last straightaway and rattled to a stop at Main Street. There, at the stop sign, her hurry dissipated. “Oh,” she said. “All Mary did was come back to the village office. Bud must be in there.”

  She cruised by. The lights were on in the clerk’s office and also behind, in Bud’s office. The red Suburban was parked in the back beside B.L.’s police cruiser. Junior turned around and pulled to the curb next to the Pêche Tôt.

  “It’s almost ten o’clock,” she told me. “Listen—I’m going to dash home and check on Dad. I’ll see if Missus Sundvig can stay and watch him a little longer. I’ll be back in twenty.”

  I got out. Junior reached after me, her hand scarred and chapped, straining for a final touch. I squeezed it.

  My first stop was the air conditioning unit on the north side of the building. With my pocket knife, I took the cover off. I tripped the shut-off switch. On a sweltering night like this, fifteen minutes and somebody would be outside looking to see what was wrong with the cooling unit. They would find nothing they could fix. Five minutes after that, the windows would be open. It was a classic corporate break-in scheme.

  I spent my first five of the fifteen minutes in the back lot, checking the doors on President Bud’s red Suburban. Mary Malarkey had left the rear gate unlocked. I moved fast over the back bench and into the driver’s seat, where I turned off the interior lighting. Then I slowed down. I had a tiny LCD flashlight on my keychain, and I used that to scan the contents of the president’s glove box. Nothing special. Then I went through the door pockets, under the visors, beneath the seats. Nothing but car wash coupons, road maps, ice scrapers, the usual stuff. I checked the ashtrays, cup holders, wheel wells. Nada. I scrambled over the back seat into the trunk space, landing on a five mil plastic bag half-stuffed with something of a gravelly texture.

  I backed off the bag, glancing out above the sidewalls to make sure no one was watching me from inside the village president’s office. Then I drove a hand into the heavy contents and lifted out a streaming handful of pellets—pill-sized, oily, smelly, dark-colored … fish food.

  I stuffed a handful into my wet hip pocket. Then I snuck out of the Suburban and into the landscaping behind the back door to the village office. It was time. From inside, I heard President Bud bellow, “Mary!”

  In a minute more, the village clerk came hulking out in wet purple stretchies, puffing and muttering, propping the door open and aiming a flashlight toward the air conditioning unit. As she ankled across the crushed stone, fighting the spider webs knit between the shrubbery, I slunk in behind her. I was inside the Village of Black Earth office.

  I took the first dark doorway and found myself sitting in the village board meeting room, staring up at a plat map and hearing Bud Bjorgstad in the next office, grumbling profanities.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn what they said in cop school,” the village president was telling someone. “You’re not working for the damn ACLU. You’re working for me.”

  It was B.L. He sounded sullen. “I’m not supposed to break the law,” he said through gritted teeth. “And we have to make sure it’s his first.”

  “It’s his, for chrissake.”

  “I know that. But I keep telling you, if we get it illegally, we can’t use it as evidence …”

  “Mary!” bellowed the president.

  The clerk trundled in, the heavy door slamming behind her. “That’s my name,” she said sourly as she passed the meeting room door. “And the unit’s busted.”

  “Then open some windows,” Bud ordered her.

  “You mean there’s too much hot air?” she retorted distantly, from the front as a window crank squeaked.

  Bud and Bud Lite were quiet as she made the rounds. I knew when she had reached Bud’s office, because B.L. said, “Ouch!”

  “Then move,” said the clerk. “You seen me coming.” She cranked open a window.

  “What they do on N.Y.P.D.,” she said, “is they add somebody intelligent to the plot.” Her voice trailed away to the front reception area, then came back down toward the rear door. “So anytime you guys feel like telling me what’s going on, I’m available. Good night, now.”

  They let her leave without comment. A half-minute later, she poked her head back in the door. “I forgot to ask,” she said. “You fellas want Danish in the morning? Or kringle?”

  B.L. was silent. Bud said kringle. B.L. sighed.

  “Now listen,” said the president, moving his boy past me down the hallway, “you let me worry about the right and the wrong moves. That’s my department. I got lawyers. You get the county in behind you, close in, and you do it. I’ll be waiting over at the Dew Drop Inn.”

  The door slammed. Engines started. I was alone.

  A perfect nail knot

  I studied the plat map for a while. My eyes had adjusted, and in time I could orient myself by using the stream, which flowed out of the north, swelled into Lake Bud, then continued along the west flank of the town and into the Mallard River.

  It was easy to see both the past and the future of Black Earth. The simple sketch of blue lines on white paper told it all. The properties around Main Street were small, mostly square or rectangular lots that could hold a hardware store and six parking stalls, or a two bedroom cracker box house and a yard with a maple tree and a swing set. On one street there were some double and triple lots—where the half dozen wealthy Black Earthlings had built their clapboard castles at the turn of the century. These would house the gentry now. Jake and Ingrid Jacobs. Those folks. Plus maybe an antique shop and a bed and breakfast.

  The outskirts framed the action. The big farm plats south of town had been annexed—marked in red—and carved up into cul-de-sacs with vast, pie-shaped lots fed by sewer and water and cable TV lines. The streets were wider. The geometries were sleeker. Up on the north side of town, President Bud had done the same thing. His side of Lake Bud
was all pruned up into long “lakefront” lots, with the roads, sewer, power, everything all drawn in. The red line of annexation strapped his parcel to the village, straddling the gap of Sundvig’s pasture below Lake Bud and hooking in Junior’s place to the northeast.

  When I was sure no one was coming back into the village office, I rose and entered the president’s office. My first inspection took in an array of big game trophies on the walls. There was a cape buffalo, a boar, some kind of a mountain goat, a kind of African deer, a bighorn sheep. I wondered if Bud had bought them at a flea market. I pulled a chair over and stood. I lifted the goat head from the wall and squeezed my little keychain light onto the back of the mounting plate. It said, Hanson’s Safari, Turnerville, Texas.

  I placed the goat head back against the wall. Jake Jacobs had written the Hanson’s Safari phone number in the notebook I had found inside his fishing vest. I had called that morning from the Cruise Master. But the man answering the phone at Hanson’s hadn’t seemed to know Jake.

  Musing on this, I stepped down off the chair and began to open desk drawers. What was on my mind, funny thing, was not Bud Bjorgstad or Bud Lite, but more Mary Malarkey, the village clerk, and her comment about someone intelligent coming into the plot. Jake Jacobs had come into a plot, I felt certain. And now the Dog was sniffing his way down the same path.

  President Bud’s top drawer held a copy of Jake Jacobs’ lawsuit against the Village of Black Earth for concealing insurance premiums as ancillary maintenance costs in the village budget. I read with an open mouth. A million dollars in premiums over the last twenty years, for what the company described as “coverage against flood and other damages potentiated by an unsafe, unfit containment structure upstream from the village.” The suit had been filed three months ago. The village had petitioned for time to respond. The case was pending.