The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  Feeling cold, I hauled myself onto the bank and into the new sun. I walked a while, smoking another little Swisher and taking in the bigger picture. Yes—striding along above quiet water, you could hear a car on the highway at least a mile down the coulee. You could even hear Junior’s cows, across the road, jockeying for trail space as they ambled from the barn toward the pasture. Jacobs would have known if anyone had parked at the road and approached him. If he was any kind of fisherman, few sounds would have caught his attention like the slam of a car door, like the approach of another fisherman.

  I ducked the yellow tape and walked in circle around the crime scene. Yesterday, I had watched B.L. the village police chief order his officer to do the same thing, but the kid had proceeded with one hand on his pants, keeping the cuffs out of the mud, and the other hand above his brow because it was early evening and the sun was gunning right up the coulee. I thought I might do a better job.

  But I couldn’t find much. I covered the immediate pasture. Then I rooted around in suckholes and marshy spots where springs bubbled up to join the creek. Nothing but the usual oddities—a thirty-year-old Schlitz beer can, five hundred feet from the road; the muddy lid of a washing machine, sheltering crayfish and sculpins in at the mouth of a feeder creek. Jacobs’ killer had left nothing behind.

  I was about to move on upstream when I saw a snapping turtle the size of a steering wheel. He had lifted his leathery snout out of a slip of coontail weed and he was eying me. Then he sank back down and I watched him burrow into the weed, mud puffing behind him. I thought nothing of this until a second, smaller snapper emerged ahead of him, driven out. Then the first turtle came back up with a bloated trout in his jaws. The trout was a small brown, pale and puffed in death, its tail gone and half it guts chewed out. When I stepped toward the creek, a third snapper startled me, slipping into the water ahead of my foot with a surly backward stare. At my feet, lodged in the mud, was a second little trout, nearly chewed up to the head.

  I stepped in, shoved my net around the coontail. A third little trout rose belly first and drifted along in a puff of mud. The smaller, vanquished snapper paddled cross-current and took it down.

  A meaningless distraction, I told myself. I walked upstream a quarter mile until I hit barbed wire fences on either side. Grasping, I studied the barbs, a hundred yards east and west, finding nothing but cow hair. On a post at the fisherman’s ladder, a sign reading Respect Landowner’s Rights hung upside down, its top nail missing. That was it. Dead trout. Hungry turtles. Cow hair. A broken sign.

  Nothing, I thought—and in my dissatisfaction, the Dog did a most unusual thing. The Dog sat down to think.

  The guy who got him killed

  I eased myself down on a bank of head-high nettles and asters and waited for despair to sweep in.

  By necessity and habit, I never stopped moving in daylight. I never sat down and let my mind off the tether of movement until after dusk, when I collapsed into my lawn chair under the night sky with a sandwich in one hand, a vodka-Tang in the other, my feet sore, my ears still full with stream sounds, my bunk only steps away.

  In thirty-three months on the road, I had reached this point close to a thousand times. Half the time I slept in the lawn chair itself, waking up in the small hours to stumble dew-soaked and mosquito bitten into the warmth of the Cruise Master. I never just sat down and let the thoughts come. Never.

  But my last few hours in Black Earth had nudged things way off-base. It was just after six in the morning, and I was in streamside repose. Not comfortable, mind you—but nevertheless I was not hitching and thrashing along upstream, covering a lot of ground, as Junior had put it. Here, in Black Earth, a man had drowned, and there was a reason. Someone had drowned him. Someone was at fault. I could solve it. I felt oddly relaxed. I felt weirdly and momentarily content. The Dog was still—but the Dog was moving.

  I stretched back and worked a hand down inside my waders into my hip pocket. That earring was a puzzle. I tried to remember the last time I had seen one like it. My own mother, perhaps. Thirty years ago. Sometime around when I was in high school outside Boston, girls had started piercing their ear lobes, and about that time it seemed to me that older women, clearly outdone, had dropped the whole idea of clipping gewgaws the size of tea saucers to their ears. But maybe I was wrong. I didn’t notice things like that too well—or so I’d been told, back when I had a wife around to point out the things I failed to see.

  But the bigger puzzle was how, and when, and why the trout had swallowed the earring. Try as I did, I could make no headway on that, other than to suppose that the earring had somehow been in motion and therefore had looked and felt like food, long enough to get past the sphincter in the back of the huge trout’s mouth. But when had this happened? And where? And so what?

  I was mulling this over unsuccessfully, fighting the urge to sweep it away by covering some ground, when I heard the liquid trill of a meadowlark. I couldn’t find the bird. But I sat up, wanting to see it, and gradually the bird came closer, singing with startling volume. Then abruptly the song changed. Out of the same direction came the unmistakable gurgle of an Eastern bluebird. That kept up for a few minutes. Then the bird called again in the voice of an oriole—then I heard a curse and a heavy splash—a two-hundred-pound oriole?—followed by, “Well suck my nuts …”

  A flask went floating by—a battered silver thing, hinged open—sinking.

  “Say, grab that, will you? And have a snort if you like.”

  I lurched up in the asters and got my net under the flask, which was spewing amber fluid into the coontail weed. I righted the flask and capped it, smelling whiskey.

  “Appreciate it,” called a voice.

  Down the center of the current about ten yards upstream waded a stocky old fellow who looked more creek than man, like a piece of the bank that had broken free and was moving to a new location.

  “Handy with a net, I see. Good man.”

  He sloshed over. He was decked out in scabby hip waders and several layers of frayed, multi-pocketed shirts that were soiled to a crusty, burr-stuck brown. He wore a sweat-stained blue bandana around his neck and a floppy leather hat tipped back on his head. As for his face—that was a squint inside a sunburn around a cigarette, with a long and sloppy moustache draped over.

  Now here, I told myself, was a trout hound.

  But he had no rod. He had no vest full of gear. Instead he was draped with a clanking array of thermometers, dip nets, waterproof tubes, a pen on a string. On his back was a kind of hard-plastic backpack, muddy yellow, with knobs and dials, a pull cord like a lawn mower, and a long, wand-like instrument clipped to the side.

  “Tagging fish,” he grunted as an explanation. “Doing a study. Go ahead. Knock yourself out.”

  I pulled whisky thinned by stream water and tossed the flask back. He caught it—“Gotcha!”—and partook himself.

  “Goddamn fumbled,” he explained, tucking the flask back into a shirt pocket. He eyed me through his squint. “You’re the guy who found Jake.”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he said. “I’m the guy who got him killed.” He waded over beside me. “Yeahhh,” he sighed, and he didn’t look first as he sat down heavily on the bank. He just sort of slopped back on one elbow against mud and stinging nettles as if the whole bank were an old porch sofa. His legs stayed in the water. The current lapped at his knees. “Yeah,” he sighed again. “Poor Jake. I might as well have painted a target on his back.”

  He put his hand out. “Manfred Milkerson, retired Regional Fish Biologist, Department of Natural Resources. I just go by White. Jake used my studies to piss a lot of people off.”

  I nodded. White Milkerson was a trail-worn, chain-smoking, hard-drinking sixty-five or so. The Dog, I guessed, in another twenty years.

  “Yeah,” he went on, “we’ve seen the trout numbers go down on this creek over the last decade. Native brookies are just about gone. Jake, well, if you knew the kind of guy he was, he thought h
e could stop it. He thought he could make people change. Young guy, you know. Full of hope.”

  He shifted in the nettles and uncapped his flask again. The sun had just cleared the bluff behind Junior’s farm and shone down strongly on us. The hard-plastic pack on White Milkerson’s back propped him up just right. He stuck the flask under his dirty moustache and tilted his head.

  “So he took your studies?” I prompted clumsily. “And fish counts are down….” He wiped his mouth. “Poachers.”

  I nodded. “I met the guy who drives the milk truck.”

  “Bostock,” Milkerson said. “Lumen Bostock. A real red-ass, that one. Catching him in the act was like nailing Jell-o to a tree, but Jake finally did it.”

  He paused to see if I was interested. I gave him a nod.

  “Jake caught Bostock raising a jug line about a month ago. Got him busted by the DNR for a five hundred dollar fine. I don’t expect Lumen ever paid it, though.”

  I pretended to think over my next question. It was question built on what stuck with me: what did it take to drown in shallow water? Would Lumen Bostock kill somebody?

  Milkerson fluffed his moustache with a snort. “Hell, yes, Lumen would kill somebody. His own dad killed his own mom. Burnt the house down on her. One of his brothers is up at Oxford for shooting a game warden out in Green County. The whole brood of those Bostocks is mean as weasels.”

  “You think he killed Jake Jacobs?”

  White Milkerson shook his floppy hat as passed me the flask. “Who knows? Jake got himself hated by everybody. The poachers, the president of the village, the farmers, the developers. Jake loved this creek. He went after everybody he thought was hurting it. Hell, though, if I’d known he would die over it, I’d have queered the data. I’d have made the stream look better, helped Jake relax a little.”

  He shifted on the bank, twisting the tank-like pack on his back so he could face me with his sunburned squint. For a moment I imagined his eyes were searching me, making a cold analysis of my response to queered data. But I couldn’t really see his eyes. And after a moment he chuckled uneasily.

  “Data doesn’t matter anyway,” he told me finally. “My studies don’t matter in the big picture.” He was gazing up into the rapidly thinning blue sky. “Every acre of new asphalt takes a million gallons out of the aquifer. Every pretty green yard adds in a thousand pounds of poison. The construction of one road shifts fifty thousand tons of sediment into the watershed. Meanwhile, global warming is going to heat the groundwater eventually. But all that’s moot anyway. Another decade or two, this valley is gonna be in condominiums. This stream will hold carp. Jake wasn’t going to stop it. Not with a few puny facts and figures from an old nut like me.”

  He blew out his moustache and whistled expertly back at a towhee in the box elder across the stream. Drink-your-tee … drink-your-tee! He took another nip. After a minute he sighed and said, “But Jake didn’t buy that….”

  Reflexively, I made a floundering attempt to agree with Jacobs. Humankind wasn’t hopeless, I maintained—which of course was a bizarre position for the Dog to assume. And White Milkerson just puffed his moustache and shook his head. His old leather hat flopped. He laughed at me, but not unkindly.

  “You belong to one of those groups, I’ll bet. Trout Unlimited. They do some good work. But they’re pissing into the wind. Limits are what nature is all about. Nature is one big and ever-shifting mess of boundaries. We humans are going to push ourselves right to the edge of collapse. See this?”

  He held his flask out on its side. He dripped stream water on it and flicked off all but one drop. The boundaries of the drop held, but I saw them shrink as he turned the flask to the sun, which was low but already hot. The shrinkage was inexorable. In a minute the drop was gone.

  “Trout water,” he said.

  Then as unceremoniously as he had joined me on the bank, he stood, shedding mud and crushed nettle leaves. He hitched his pack off his shoulders to the bank.

  “I heard they locked you in down at the park,” he said. He squinted at me, shaking a Winston from a rumpled pack. “So Bud and B.L. must think you’re helping Junior.” He lit the cigarette. “That true?”

  “Helping Junior do what?” was my answer.

  He guffawed smoke and ended up coughing. “She’s got you,” he managed through his mirth. “She’s got you. Must be she’s getting over Darrald.”

  Darrald again. B.L. had mentioned Darrald—yesterday, on the stream, when Junior had backed him off me. Who the hell was Darrald?

  White Milkerson recovered a little. “So you’re working for Junior?”

  “Helping Junior do what?” I insisted.

  “Listen,” he said, and he put a sun-fried hand on my shoulder. “The Milkersons and the O’Malleys go way back. Melvin Senior and I have been friends for decades. Hunting buddies, drinking buddies, you name it. I love that nutty old bastard. And Junior’s my goddaughter. I hate to see them in a mess like this.”

  By mess, I gathered White Milkerson thought Mel Senior had killed Jake Jacobs. He seemed like a guy who shot straight, so I asked him that directly.

  Milkerson looked at me sadly. “He said he would. And Mel’s one of those guys, once he says something, he does it. And Junior, too, she’s about as stubborn as a tick. She believes what she wants to believe, and that’s that.” He let his hand drop. His eyes had become rheumy and troubled. “Folks are saying Junior probably took the ponytail out of Jacobs’ mouth and did something with it. She shouldn’t have done that, I guess. Not even for her own dad. I just hate to see her go down with him.”

  “Junior thinks the village president might have done it.”

  Milkerson shook his head. “Might have. But didn’t. Hell, Bud was chairing the village board meeting at the time.”

  “At which time? You mean the coroner has a time of death?”

  He shrugged. “What I heard at the coffee shop this morning, they’re putting the time of death any time from three to nine p.m. day before yesterday, which includes the sally.”

  “But why would a guy like Jacobs skip a village board meeting?”

  “You ever fished the sally hatch?” White Milkerson asked me. I said I hadn’t hit it yet.

  “Thing like a sally hatch has a tendency to change your plans,” Milkerson said. He took a long draw on his Winston and exhaled over the creek. “There’s a guy or two around here who planned to stay married too,” he said wistfully. “Until he met sally.”

  “But what about the poacher?” I said. “Lumen Bostock?”

  “Lumen was at the village board meeting.”

  “The developers?” “Board meeting.”

  “What about Jacobs’ other enemies?”

  Bending to make some adjustment to his yellow plastic pack, he said it again: “Board meeting.”

  Sensing he was about to move on, I dug down past my wader belt and pulled up the earring. I told him how I had found it. White Milkerson looked it over without a lot of curiosity. “Now how,” I asked, “could that end up in a trout’s gut? And anyway, what’s a fish that size doing in Black Earth Creek? The thing could hardly turn around.”

  “Bluegills,” said the fishery scientist. “And snowmobile races.”

  He gave me back the earring. I waited for an explanation.

  “About twenty years ago,” he said, grunting over his rig, “about the time Bud took over as village president, he had some buddy of his dump a truckload of bluegill in behind the dam. Now the trout eat big all winter. Some of the browns get like you saw.” He flipped a switch and pumped a black rubber nipple. The thing was a generator, I realized. “As for the earring, hell, you get a few barrels of beer and some snowmobiles out on the lake in winter, Bud calls it jamboree or some damn thing. Everybody gets good and ripped, plenty of stuff gets lost in the snow. Wallets, keys, change, earring or two. Come spring, I guess it falls through the water column and now and then a trout strikes.”

  He looked up at me and shook my hand.

 
“Be too noisy to talk in a minute,” he said. “So you take care.”

  He pulled a starter cord, causing me to jump. The pack was a little generator, maybe five horsepower. He slung it snarling and sputtering onto his back. He turned toward me.

  “You’re thinking about helping out Junior,” he hollered over his rig, “you might oughta talk to Jake’s wife. Runs that new coffee shop in town. The Pêche Tôt. Ingrid’s her name. Ask Ingrid about the time old Melvin O’Malley came in the Pêche Tôt with a shovel. Put it through the pastry case. Walked back out.”

  He gave me a nod and moved along then, unsnapping the aluminum prong. As he waded toward the deep corner, sweeping back and forth, the prong’s faint electrical field conjured up a steady stream of small brown trout, stunned and swimming oddly, sailing off-kilter and dreamlike toward the probe. White Milkerson let the little fish pass. Downstream, around my legs, they flipped and darted, recovered and disappeared. Then a larger trout sailed up and Milkerson snared it in his net. He bent over it, attaching a tag to the dorsal fin, his probe trailing in the current.

  I thought I should feel the charge too. Stepping into his wake, hot sun on my face, the smooth, cold pressure of water against my legs, I imagined I would feel a tingle of electricity seeping through my waders, but I didn’t.

  Jake’s yellow sallies

  I was hiking downstream along County K toward Junior’s farm when a familiar blue panel van tooted softly and pulled up beside me.