The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  Someone intelligent. The phrase kept running through my head. The next thing I found, midway through an IN basket on top of the president’s desk, was a copy of White Milkerson’s study, The Effects of Lake Bud on Black Earth Creek. I flipped through it. Not that I knew anything about scientific methodology, but Milkerson seemed to know what he was doing. He talked about his data from his many years of shocking the stream. He described his process in layman’s terms—his variable voltage backpack unit, his wand-electrode, the way the fish rose stunned but unharmed to the electrode and could be measured, tagged, whatever was necessary. Since the dam was raised and reinforced in 1985, he reported, naturally reproducing brook trout had declined precipitously, followed by an increase in brown trout, followed next by a decrease in all types and sizes of trout and an increase in rough fish like suckers, chubs, red horse, and, lately, bluegill and pike. As Lake Bud filled up and spread and became a shallow, muddy pond, its continued presence had increased stream temperature, siltation, heavy metal and phosphate concentrations, and it had decreased overall dissolved oxygen. The dam, and Lake Bud, were slowly strangling the stream.

  I flipped ahead to the end of Milkerson’s report. My eyes were drawn to a circle in red pen around a single phrase from the Summary and Options section. Smallmouth bass fishery. “While dam removal is risky and its effects on the stream uncertain,” wrote Milkerson, “current conditions, projected into the future, appear ideal for the development of a hatchery-supported smallmouth bass fishery.”

  Out of the entire report, one phrase had caught the attention of village president Bud Bjorgstad. Smallmouth bass fishery. The stream could warm up, silt up, weed over, suffocate its natural trout population. That was okay with him. Just pitch a bunch of bass in it and watch them grow. Lakeside lots on a trophy smallmouth bass fishery. I supposed that sounded just dandy to President Bud.

  Grimly, and wondering if Jacobs had been killed on behalf of the smallmouth bass, I opened a door between the restroom and the rear exit and found a stairway to the basement garage. It was a mess down there. Two car bays hosted an extra patrol car and a massive snowmobile. Cluttered around the margins of the room were traffic cones, yard tools, sidewalk salt, lost-and-found bicycles, backlogs of Lots for Sale and Bjorgstad for Village Chair signs.

  B.L.’s evidence locker was just that: a locker. A pair of them, actually, looking like they had been salvaged from a grade school remodeling project. The left hand locker had a combination padlock on it, and through my mind ran Havlicek, Silas, Havlicek … 17-35-17 … the Celtic jersey numbers that opened my high school gym locker.

  That didn’t work, though. I pinched my LCD and shined it in through the grid of the door. B.L. had impounded Jake Jacobs’ fly rod. I scanned up and down to be sure it was the right one. It was the beautiful bamboo rod, with the Orvis reel, the brand new Orvis Wonderline. I winked my light at the fly. It was the upside down Jake’s Sally—the eighth of those in existence, if I could believe Dickie Pee. I slid my light up the leader. There I was startled. I hadn’t noticed before. The leader was tied on to the line with a nail knot. A good nail knot. A perfect nail knot.

  As I registered this, I began to smell the fish food, dissolving in my wet pocket. The other locker was unlocked and I opened it. More fish food—bags more of it, crammed and slumped like small fat bodies in the locker: Fred’s Grow-Boy Fish Feed.

  President Bud was growing smallmouth in the lake. That’s what I figured.

  And Jacobs found out.

  But as I came back up the stairs I couldn’t hold the thought. And as I looked fruitlessly up and down Main Street for Junior, my mind rebelled.

  Jake Jacobs discovered smallmouth bass? I wondered. And died for it?

  A friend of the Dog

  He saw me coming. As I pushed into the Dew Drop Inn, President Bud gave me a nod and a smile and hitched his stool back a notch.

  “Hey, fella,” he said. “Good to see you. How’s fishing?” Elbows braced against the bar, back swayed, he swirled a cola-colored high ball. “Milt,” he said, getting the attention of the elderly bartender. Milt looked away from the television. President Bud nodded my way. “Set the fella up.”

  I sat. I asked for a beer and Milt didn’t ask what kind. He just tapped one up.

  “Guy who found the body,” Bud told anyone in earshot.

  Milt set the beer in front of me. I’d seen urine specimens more appealing. But alcohol was alcohol in the Dog’s world. Over the rim of the glass I saw a half dozen other drinkers looking my way. Beyond the bar was a dark lounge with high-backed, black-vinyl booths and a pool table under a plastic Grain Belt light. Domestic game trophies, deer, ducks, pheasants, lined the walls, and the Packers were playing a preseason game against the Jets on the television. Along the bar were arranged warm little lamps from Coca-Cola and Jack Daniels, set up alternately, each beside a Grain Belt ash tray. That’s what I was having, I decided. A Grain Belt. And President Bud was having a Jack and Coke. The guy at the end of the bar was playing bar dice. Rattle, rattle, rattle …

  WHAM!

  “So you like fishing?” said the village president. “Hell, now there’s a dumb question.” He laughed. “But I’m gonna ask it anyway. Milt’s used to my dumb questions, aren’t you, Milt? You really like fishing do you?”

  I told him I liked fly fishing.

  President Bud wet his lips on Jack and Coke.

  “Yup,” he said. “Yessir, I’ve heard that’s the real deal. Fly fishing. Really catching on lately.”

  He watched a replay. Fumble. He turned back to me. Rattle, rattle, rattle … .

  “So you must like fly fishing for—” WHAM! “—for smallies too.”

  No, I said. I didn’t care much for smallmouth.

  The president cocked his flabby head like I’d said something deeply ironic.

  “But he don’t like fishing for smallies, Milt.”

  The bartender ambled over and laid a long cigarette in my Grain Belt ashtray. He gave the bar a wipe, leaned on it, and looked to his right out the neon-cluttered window.

  “They’ll fight,” he said. “Smallies. Harder than largemouth.”

  Rattle, rattle, rattle … Bud said, “Now bluegill are—” WHAM! “—I’ll bet if you like fly fishing, you like to fish for gills. We got a real nice crop of them on the lake out there.”

  I said I’d pass on the bluegill, too.

  Now the president put on a look of dismay. He swirled his Jack and Coke and took a sip.

  “Now you’re confusing me here,” he said. “Milt, he’s confusing me. Says he likes to fly fish.” Bud reached out with his finger tips and gave my beer a nudge, reminding me to drink. “But it don’t sound like you’re all that crazy about it after all. Hell, a guy with a fly rod can take thirty, forty bluegill off that lake out there, one-pounders, do it in a couple hours. They’ll hit anything that moves.”

  “They fight good too,” said Milt. “In circles.” “And good eatin’” said the president. Rattle, rattle, rattle … “I’ll have a glass of water,” I said. WHAM!

  Milt moved off to hose seltzer over ice. The village president said to me, “Something wrong with your beer?”

  Actually there was, even by the Dog’s standards. “It sat around,” I said. “Like that lake. It got flat.”

  “So you’re a pretty sensitive fella, it turns out.”

  “If you say so.”

  That made him laugh. He wet his rubbery lips again with the drink and slapped my shoulder.

  “See, what I’m saying here is that for a real fly fisherman, it wouldn’t matter. Smallmouth bass, bluegill, trout—makes no difference to guy that really loves fly fishing. Ain’t that right, Milt? Fella, you see what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” I said. “You make a good point.”

  That seemed to please him.

  “What I like is fly fishing for trout,” I said. Rattle, rattle, rattle … “In places like this, Black Earth, where it can still happen on its own. Because it—” WH
AM! “—because it means something. The existence of a trout here means something.”

  President Bud guffawed. “God almighty you sound like Jacobs!” He looked down the bar. “The soul lives on, folks. Another nut job like Jacobs.”

  The rattling stopped. The guy with the bar dice—big guy, clumsy-looking, thick glasses and a beard—said, “Jacobs got murdered, Bud. That ain’t funny.”

  Chastened, the president drained his Jack and Coke and shoved it out for a refill. He looked hurt. I leaned in to console him.

  “You know,” I said, “I don’t believe you really thought Jacobs was a nut job.”

  His small eyes darted to mine.

  “No,” I said. “I think you were afraid of him. I think he kind of had your number. Am I right?”

  That shifted his gears. He looked past me toward the window.

  “So who the hell are you?”

  I pondered that. I guess I had been pondering that for a couple of years now. Funny I should feel like answering suddenly. “A friend,” I said.

  And we sat there, eyes locked, both of us wondering, friend of whom?

  I could have said Junior. I could have said Jake Jacobs. Both felt true suddenly. But I leaped over all that. Or I went back. Christ, suddenly the social fabric was all over the place, and it all webbed back to one center.

  “A friend of the Dog,” I told the muttering old man beside me.

  And then I laughed.

  Because there I was, getting something right, finally, something that had eluded me, and I was doing it in front of exactly the kind of asshole who could never appreciate it.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said out of nowhere. “You’re gay. You’re a goddamned pervert. Jacobs too.” “If you say so.” He shook his head sadly. “Now I’m all confused,” he said.

  I put my head close to his. “You’re about as confused as a coyote with his foot on a jackrabbit,” I told the Black Earth village president. “Jacobs was making life real difficult for you. And now he’s dead. That’s not too confusing.”

  He took a long drink and looked into the mirror behind the bar.

  “I didn’t do nothing to Jake,” he said. “I was at the meeting. In fact, that night, me and Ronnie Hellenbrand were planning on Jake being at the meeting too. The minutes’ll prove that. We had a group we wanted him to join. Hell, we were at the meeting.”

  “I know what you’re trying to tell me.”

  “Damn right,” he said. “The sally hatch. Eight o’clock. And Jake had a sally on to prove it. Meanwhile, I was right over there in the president’s chair. You can read it in the minutes.”

  “I read the minutes.” He didn’t like the sound of that. “But who’s to say someone didn’t kill Jacobs at five o’clock and just retie his fly. Seeing as the whole town seems to know what time the sallies come up.”

  He nodded. He worked his rubbery lips at himself in the bar mirror. “Say,” he said, turning to me with an eyebrow raised. “That’s clever.” He rattled his Jack and Coke and tossed a wink at the Milt bartender. “You’d better tell that to the police chief.”

  “Oh,” I said, and I dribbled a smelly handful of fish food pellets across the bar. I set down my special Jake’s Yellow Sally amidst them. Then I snatched the fly back. “My guess is the chief knows all about it.”

  Something was amiss

  But Junior hadn’t returned in twenty minutes. Or even thirty. Hurrying up the hot county highway in the dark, I knew something was amiss, and I began a stiff-kneed trot that broke down opposite the campground, when I realized the Cruise Master had been torn apart.

  I rushed across the black, dew-soaked grass. Someone had gone through the rear door with a tool that had worked to the effect of a giant can opener. Out onto the dark grass were strewn various of my meager possessions—including my quaint little strong box.

  I rushed straight to the box. Beside it lay the campfire rock that had smashed it open.

  I knelt beside it. I was startled to find my cash still inside, all eight hundred. And my Glock. Only Jake Jacobs’ ponytail was missing.

  No.

  The ponytail and the earring from the big trout’s gut. They were both gone.

  Coming up Junior’s driveway, I could see the lights were on and the front door was wide open. From somewhere within or behind the house came a sizzling sound, followed by a curse.

  I climbed the porch. The television played Dad’s video. Mary Poppins was just leading her brood on a mad carousel ride. A tub of vanilla ice cream lay upended and leaking across a threadbare throw rug. A patch of knitting hung discarded on the runner of the rocking chair.

  “Junior?”

  I continued into the kitchen. Soap bubbles popped in the sink. The bathroom was dark and empty. I pushed open Junior’s bedroom door. Three hundred angels—dolls, ceramics, ornaments—watched from shadowy perches around her perfectly made bed.

  “Junior? Hey—anybody home?”

  I continued to the back porch and from there beheld a bizarre and wholly unexpected sight. A stocky old woman—this had to be Mrs. Sundvig, Dad’s babysitter—stood braced at the dark maw of the barn, holding someone at bay inside with a cattle prod. And that someone was dodging and feinting about—in a wheelchair—trying to get out.

  So it was an old woman with a cattle prod versus a sad case in a wheelchair. Not being sure which side to take, if any, I watched in horror for a moment. Dickie Pee’s entire upper body was straining and thrashing—which gave him a outside chance against Mrs. Sundvig, who wielded the prod with authority.

  She zapped him squarely in the chest, turning back a charge. Dickie Pee spun and disappeared into the barn. A moment later he reappeared holding a shovel. They jousted for a frightening moment. Then the prod clattered down and Dickie Pee spun past into the open drive, bouncing madly over tractor ruts. I saw he had something pinched between his legs. When he hit the county highway, heading downhill, he let the wheelchair roll—down the coulee, around a corner, out of sight.

  As I approached Mrs. Sundvig, she aimed the prod at me.

  “I’m a friend of Junior’s,” I said, raising open palms. “What’s going on?”

  She looked me over—small, black eyes, squinting for lack of eyeglasses—and lowered the prod. I could hear her lungs working, each breath like water over gravel.

  “You ain’t the other one,” she told me.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “The other one … was little. Ran out the back of the barn. Now they both got away.”

  “What happened, Mrs. Sundvig?”

  She looked grimly toward the road where Dickie Pee had vanished. Her right hand was bleeding.

  “Well,” she said, “after all the commotion at the house … I stuck around to pick up. All that fighting made a mess, you know. And the police … they just walked away and left it. About a quarter hour later I heard some noise out in the barn. So I came out to check. Found them two back in the storage, messing around.”

  “Mrs. Sundvig … what commotion at the house? Where’s Junior? Where’s her dad?”

  She eyed me. “O’Malleys you mean?” She wiped a bloody knuckle on the hem of her faded house dress.

  I nodded.

  She looked toward the empty house. “Them two,” she said, “been arrested.”

  Some trouble now

  “Ya,” said the old woman. Her knuckle wouldn’t stop bleeding. She looked at it dispassionately, then dismissed the whole hand to drip onto the barnyard dirt.

  “Them two.” She shook her balding old head. “Some trouble now.”

  I asked her what happened. She turned and aimed her cattle prod toward the end of the driveway.

  “Police chief,” she told me. “Come up here on foot, looked around in the barn for a minute. Then he then come banging on the door and cussing. But Mel don’t take cussing. He don’t like his video show interrupted either. Mel tossed that kid right off the porch.” She seemed proud of the old man. “Then all them sheriff’s cars came in.”
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br />   “Mrs. Sundvig, you’re bleeding pretty badly there. Let’s get you into the house and wash that.”

  I steered her into the kitchen. The wound was deep, and I realized that Dickie Pee had caught her with the blade of the shovel. As I cleaned and bandaged Mrs. Sundvig’s hand, she told me the story of Mel and Junior’s arrest. After Dad had shoved him off the porch, B.L. had gone away and come back later with a pair of deputies from the Dane County Sheriff. They had just gotten Mel subdued on the porch when Junior arrived home from our date at the cheese factory. Mrs. Sundvig sounded proud again as she described Junior’s reaction, the upshot of which was that B.L. had a bloody nose.

  “But Missus Sundvig,” I said, “You don’t hit cops. You never hit cops. No—not even if you grew up with them. No, Missus Sundvig. Not even if you’ve been slapping their red asses around since third grade.”

  A sheriff’s deputy had pepper-sprayed Junior and led her away in handcuffs. Then B.L. and the other deputy had searched the farm, and they had carried away what Mrs. Sundvig described as a “small, furry-looking black thing.” She looked at me, suddenly bug-eyed with worry.

  I guess we both knew what it was.

  B.L. had “discovered” Jake Jacobs’s missing pony tail.

  I raced to town in Junior’s pickup. Finding no one at the village office, I backtracked to confirm what I thought I had seen as I passed the Pêche Tôt.

  I had seen right. Ingrid Jacobs was at the table in the back, tying flies. I banged on the glass.

  She was dressed in a man’s button-down shirt and a pair of jeans. Her breath smelled like coffee. She said, “Yes, I heard it from Bud, who just came over from the bar to give me the news. He said B.L. got a tip. Someone called him, said look in Mel O’Malley’s barn, by the milk cooler.” The dead man’s wife gave me her closed-lip smile. “Did you want to come in?”

  I followed her back to the fly tying table. She picked up her bobbin where it hung and began to tie down deer hair on a large stone fly imitation. Ten or twelve finished flies were stuck around the rim of a foam coffee cup. I stared in disbelief: Ingrid Jacobs, tying flies?