The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  I dove there. Five feet down, I felt the heavy wire walls of the corn crib, slimy now and stuck with flotsam. I came up for air and dove again. This time I felt the thrumming energy of big trout darting inside as I ran my hands across the top. The crib was on its side. I found the place where Milkerson must have cut an opening and then wired it back shut.

  I came up for air a third time. Across at the campground, Dickie Pee had managed to get Shelly’s little pop-up camper onto his ball hitch. His wheels spun grass as he hauled it up and out. The sight put an odd little panic into me that ballooned when I got underwater on a shallow breath. I popped back up. Dickie Pee and the camper were gone. Shit, I told myself, use the light.

  I used the light. I drove myself deep along the slimy wire arc of the corn crib, watching big browns spook and dart through the dark water. There must have been twenty of them, not one under two-and-a-half feet long. Smaller fish, blue gills and perch, darted out through the crib into the wilderness of water beyond.

  I was running out of breath. Fighting it, I hooked my fingers in the crib and pulled down. My light sprayed wildly around as I wrestled buoyancy and bursting lungs. Twice in one day I was on the verge of drowning, only this time I was courting it, clawing my way to the murky bottom of Lake Bud. I was at the dim fire of surrender when my knees grazed the bottom. I held tight to the crib’s slimy mesh with my left hand and aimed the light inside. What I saw there tore the last bit of breath out of me. I saw a mud-crusted suitcase, and then … I let go of the crib and thrashed for the top.

  “Ahhhgggg!” I treaded water, gasping and choking in the soft slap of waves. Junior said later that she had waded in as if to help me, I was down so long. I didn’t notice. I wasn’t seeing anything but the spotlight image burned into my oxygen-starved mind. I had been looking for it all along, I guess. The return to elements, the whole gruesome surrender of the human body to water. And I had finally seen it. I still see it.

  I swam to shore. I heard voices. But I wasn’t answering questions. Maybe at that moment language itself had dissolved to elements. Junior said I was weeping. Okay, so the Dog was weeping. Weeping for little Eamon. Weeping for Mary Jane. Weeping for myself. Weeping for Shelly Milkerson. Weeping for Shelly Milkerson’s mother. I didn’t even remember her name.

  I’ll say this for Bud Heavy and Bud Lite. They were silent. They stood there like two bad boys in church. They really hadn’t known jack about White Milkerson’s orchestrations. After all, they were flat-out stump-ignorant. White Milkerson had played them. Preserving the dam meant even more to him than to the Bjorgstad real-estate fantasy.

  I asked Junior for the winch hook and swam it back out. Her dad’s old corn crib had steel ribs that connected the wire base to the tin-cone roof that was sunk at an angle into the bottom mud. I slung the hook around the lowest rib and back onto the cable. Junior would have to pull from the bottom, I figured, or the rusty crib might split and spill its horrid cargo across the muddy lake bed.

  Junior gunned the big Case engine and her six-foot wheels dug into the bank. She eased twenty feet forward and then, with a watery gasp, the crib broke the surface, shedding muddy froth as Junior drew it slowly toward the shore.

  At shallow water, the crib stuck. The tractor strained and rumbled. Junior got down and looked things over, mumbling and cursing to herself, lost in a farmer’s calculations. Then she jumped back into the tractor’s big snow-shovel seat. She backed up ten feet, creating slack. I watched the crib relax against the weedy shallows.

  Then Junior surged the tractor forward. Her gambit worked—at least for a stunning moment as the crib breached and skidded nearly to shore, huge trout slapping and wiggling in the mud and air. But then the crib snagged again, rolled until the winch hook was on top. Then it rose, the entire thing, like it was being re-erected, then listed, fell, and split, spilling mud and weeds and trout and finally a sloppy clatter of human bones.

  The forensics people would later tell us they were the bones of an adult female, shot once through the head. Around those bones, vomiting out of the split corn crib—rotted, spilling—came the remains of clothing, shoes, jewelry, toiletries—all of the woman’s suitcases.

  I know her name now. Junior’s been saying it, over and over in disbelief. Her name was Nanette. Nanette Margolis Milkerson.

  She had been running away from her husband all right, fifteen years ago. Maybe she had even been running away with a farm equipment salesman, as the story went.

  But Nanette Margolis Milkerson had never made it out of Black Earth.

  Chapter 44

  It took the better part of a week for B.L. and the county sheriff to sort things out, and by the end of that time, Melvin O’Malley was cleared of all charges and released to Junior. That was on a Monday morning. By Wednesday afternoon, Manfred John “White” Milkerson, guilty of two murders fifteen years apart and draining away in Madison Saint Mary’s Hospital, had laid himself bare to anyone who would listen, apologized to all, and passed on.

  I stayed in the old summer kitchen at the edge of Junior’s barnyard, and I have to say those seven days were about the best week of my life since—well, isn’t it stupid to go backwards? Love, life, joy—those are forward-looking things.

  On each of those seven days, I had breakfast and supper with Junior and her dad. On each of those seven days, I made love to Junior. On each of those seven days, we laughed and cried in each other’s arms.

  Funny thing, though. Junior never invited me to sleep in the house. She worked like a dervish all day. She milked and fenced and cut hay like there was no tomorrow—because I guess when you farm, there isn’t any tomorrow. Go fishing, she kept telling me. Go fishing. She gave me that cute squinchy-nosed grin every time. No more bodies out there, she kept telling me. Nothing you can do around here. Try Teal Creek, Flynn Creek, Frye Feeder. After supper, after the Mary Poppins video, she bathed her dad and put him to bed. Then, if I was outside on my lawn chair in the barnyard, smoking one of my so-called cigars, sipping a lemonade and watching bats catch moths in the yard light, I could count on hearing the shower start up, seeing the light-infused sweet steam start to drift out of the little window in the back of the house. She showered for an entire hour, until the whole night smelled like Melvina “Junior” O’Malley.

  Then, between ten and midnight, at the precise moment when I would give up on her—at the exact inner instant when I would start to backslide, thinking my luck had run out, thinking it was time to fix the Cruise Master and roll, Junior would come to me. She would tickle the summer kitchen’s screen door with her finger tips and whisper, “Ned?”

  That’s my name. Not Dog. Ned. Ned Oglivie. Stodgy goddamn name, I know. But what can I do? And I hope every other man out there gets a chance to hear his name sound as right as mine did on those Black Earth summer nights, drifting on the sweet barnyard air from the lips of a woman who saw me right to the core, and seemed to love me anyway.

  “Yeah? Who’s there?” I would respond as if groggy and surprised, as if I hadn’t been thinking about Junior’s every move in that long and fragrant shower.

  Beside me on my narrow bunk she told me about her own real name. Melvina. She hated it. The only name she hated more was Junior. Or Mel. But she loved her dad. So whatever could she say? “I just thank God they didn’t name me after Mom, anyway,” she said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Racheletta.” “Come on.”

  “I’m serious. It’s my middle name.”

  Then she told me about Darrald—Darrald with the “d” on the end—and how for a long time that “d” just made her giggle every time she thought of it. Until the time Darrald blushed and then got mad at her, stormed off and wouldn’t talk to her for a month. “I did some serious falling in love after that,” she said.

  But that kind of talk came later. What with both of us having so much stored up, and what with both of us feeling the need to correct the ineptitude of our initial grapple in the cheese factory, we always started with a fast
and hot one, the kind lovemaking where the old kitchen rocked on its cinderblocks and stuff fell off the shelves and the cattle lowed back from the barn. The challenge in those first few heats was to keep Junior from hurting me. Then, later, in the wee hours, we would make love again, this time so long and slow and lazy and complete that the release for me was always directly into a sleep like I hadn’t felt in—well, there I go again. It was just good.

  And in between all the lovemaking was the talk.

  We talked about everything, and I guess most of us know what that means. Beautiful, beautiful everything. Junior was always gone when I awoke in the morning. Sometimes, if I stirred in the predawn, I could hear her clanking in around in the barn, milking, the radio going, Junior talking to her cows. Teal Creek, a place she had told me about, had so damn many fish in it that I started killing a couple, bringing them home for our eight o’clock breakfasts of frozen waffles, bacon, coffee … and trout.

  In our long talks upon the summer kitchen bunk, Junior and I wrapped up the Jake Jacobs murder into a pretty tight package. White Milkerson had killed Jake in the hope of keeping his secret safe beneath the water held back by the Lake Bud dam. He had set up Junior’s father because he could, because the opportunity presented itself, and because he had convinced himself that both Junior and her dad would be better off with the old man in a mental facility. Then Junior could get on with her life. Milkerson had told an investigator this, who in turn told Junior, who told me, with a snort of rage. “Imagine White Milkerson,” she said, “trying to improve my life.”

  Milkerson had been clever to change Jacobs’ fly, putting on the Jake’s Yellow Sally—which he had seen from Jake and tied up himself—so that everybody would assume Jake died around eight at night, giving Milkerson the alibi of the village board meeting. What Milkerson hadn’t counted on was that Jacobs would have a brand new line on his reel, with no leader connected. And so after he had shocked and drowned his victim, after he had sawed off Jacobs’ ponytail and stuffed it in his mouth, he had climbed out of the creek and kicked down the Respect Landowner’s Rights sign, and he had used the nail to tie on a leader. He never guessed that Jacobs couldn’t tie a nail knot, or that a guy like me would be around to notice.

  Junior and I wrapped it all up except the Shelly-Dickie Pee connection. What was she doing with explosive cable and instructions in her pop-up camper? What was Dickie Pee doing in Junior’s barn? What had he stolen? And why had he been so intent on hauling Shelly’s camper up out of the Lake Bud campground?

  “What have you heard about Shelly?” I wondered at breakfast near the end of the week.

  “Missus Sundvig has a daughter working at the county hospital,” Junior told me over waffles and trout. “She says Shelly’s mostly just sleeping. They’ve got social workers coming in, shrinks, cops, everybody trying to figure out what to do next, but Missus Sundvig’s daughter says Shelly sleeps about twenty hours a day, eats like a horse and watches TV in between. She won’t talk to anybody.”

  “God. I’m sorry for her.”

  “She’s tough,” Junior said. “She’s got some answers now.” “She killed her dad,” I pointed out.

  “Her dad killed himself,” Junior replied. I looked at her. She looked away. She wasn’t going to cry. She never cried with sun up or the lights on. But we both knew we had just summed things up for Shelly. The daughter of White and Nannette Milkerson would see her way through life now … or not. For my part, sad as I felt, I had hope. People could recover. I knew that finally. And Junior had hope too, of course. Junior always had hope. She didn’t know any other way.

  “I dropped her off some vitamins,” she said. “Big-ass horse vitamins, I mean. The kind that burn your stress up. And this really cool book.” She glanced at me. “Crop circles. Puzzles we can’t explain. Kind of lets you there’s something out there, maybe, setting things up. Things happen for a reason. Even bad things.”

  We sat quietly on that one a while.

  “And where did Dickie disappear to?”

  “Dickie,” Junior said, sighing and shaking her head at another chapter in the life of Darrald’s old buddy. “Dickie’s AWOL. Shelly’s camper is missing too. Nobody knows.”

  “And your dad.” I nodded at the old man. Melvin O’Malley sat across from me, working on about his tenth slice of bacon, wiping his fingers on his coveralls. “He’s doing okay?”

  Junior squinched her nose at me, giving me the grin. “Never better.”

  And so we passed a period of waiting during which most of the big questions around Black Earth were answered, and it finally became clear to Junior and me that what we were waiting for was something else entirely. We weren’t waiting on the fate of Shelly. That one was long-term, and life went on. And Dickie Pee was going to come back or not. So it wasn’t that, either. We had figured out who had gotten into the Pêche Tôt and tied on the second yellow sally. It was President Bud, so eager was he to see Melvin O’Malley go down. And he had planted Jacobs’ ponytail in Junior’s barn too, after Shelly showed up to turn it in, wanting to talk about her father. So President Bud Bjorgstad was in a bit of trouble with the law, which was just fine with everybody, especially B.L., who had the unique privilege of busting his father for what must have been a lifetime of harassment and meddling. So it wasn’t that, either.

  No, it was something else, building inside the both of us, and it flared up at supper on the seventh day.

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Junior said abruptly.

  We were having meatloaf, creamed corn, and some sugared beefsteak tomatoes that Mrs. Sundvig had dropped off. I had brought in a fistful of watercress from the creek. Junior’s old man puffed like a brick mason, spreading ketchup over a slab of meatloaf.

  “Am I leaving?”

  “I asked you.”

  “You haven’t asked me to stay.”

  “Well,” said Junior, looking down at her plate, “you got your insurance money on the Cruise Master.”

  “I don’t have it yet. Harvey said I’d get it tomorrow.”

  “Right. So basically you have it.”

  “I don’t yet. But that doesn’t seem related exactly.”

  “How could you leave without the money? To fix your RV?”

  “True. There is a connection. So I guess maybe I’m leaving.”

  “Well …” Junior looked at me darkly. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “I’m not telling you. All I did was ask Harvey to settle my insurance, and you decide I must be leaving. I don’t know. Am I?” We went around like that for a while until I had an idea. I rose to the old yellow telephone on the wall between the kitchen cupboard and the door to Junior’s bedroom. I lifted off the receiver and dialed my tax guy. Of course I was interrupting something—this time Harvey was getting rolfed on his living room floor by the ex-girlfriend of his nephew—but I persisted in explaining our dilemma.

  Harvey released a long draught of inter-fascial tension and asked a clarifying question.

  “You mean you want to be with each other, but neither one of you has the guts to say it?”

  I repeated his impression aloud. Junior seemed to confirm it by looking down at her plate.

  Then my tax guy started to laugh. He laughed so loudly I had to move the receiver away from my ear. Then, because I guess that laugh was the entire reason I had called, I stretched the grimy yellow cord out and laid the receiver upside down on the middle of the kitchen table, where it spun like a turtle on its back, belting out the laughter of Harvey Digman.

  Junior looked at me like I was nuts. But that didn’t last long. Because the bug caught old Mel O’Malley and soon enough he was laughing too—big, sloppy, meatloaf guffaws that got Junior and me going until we were all pitching and snorting over our plates. We never even noticed that Harvey himself had stopped. When we finally caught up with Harvey’s silence, the voice in the middle of the table was saying, “Hey Dog? Dog? You there, pal?”

  “Yeah, Harv.”

  “Good t
o hear you laugh. But just an FYI, partner. Dog?”

  “Yeah?”

  “On that vehicle, I had to keep your premiums low. You knew that, right?”

  “Sure, Harv. I knew that.”

  “So that vehicle of yours. As far as collision, it wasn’t insured for a whole lot.”

  Junior was looking at me.

  “Um. Okay. How much, Harv?”

  “Two fifty,” said my tax guy. “Two hundred fifty. Sorry, pal. I know it’s just lunch money. Not enough to fix the thing. Not right away.”

  I sat down. I was mute for a while.

  “Uh, Harv?” “Yellow!”

  I didn’t know what I was asking. I couldn’t even remember why we had been laughing, a long, long time ago. I was lost as hell for a good long moment—lost with the sudden realization that the Dog … the Dog wanted to stay … but the Dog wanted to go, too.

  “Yellow!” barked my tax guy again. “We talking or walking, pal? What’s it going to be? There’s a young lady here with her knee bone in my … what is it darling? … ahhhh … yes … in my goddamn scapula.”

  I let him go. I carried the phone back to its hook. When I returned to the table, Junior was bussing the dishes. She leaned over me from behind, her strong hands crossing my chest, locking, and holding me tight.

  “Bad news?”

  “Maybe.”

  She squeezed me.

  “Need an idea?” she asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “How about I take you and Dad up to the bluff—watch the Jet Ski show?”

  Chapter 45

  The bluff Junior meant was the one I had often gazed at from the creek. Rivers pouring from the tongues of glaciers had converged around Black Earth an epoch ago, carving the ancient limestone seabed into a great snakehead of rock that rose above Lake Bud and the coulee to the west, down past the Sundvig farm.

  We had to drive halfway across the county to get at the bluff along a dirt road that ran up the ridge from the back. Junior parked her pickup on a flat spot littered with beer cans and old campfires.