The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  “My sister works nights,” he said as I came through the door. “Packing boxes out at Lands End. Works her ass off. She ain’t up yet.”

  The proprietor of Mobile Fly Shop half-turned from a fly-tying desk that was heaped shoulder-deep with necks and pelts and spools of thread and little plastic boxes. The mess continued off the side of the desk and onto the floor, where I noted an open box of Friends of Black Earth Creek brochures. His bed was a nest of tangled sheets and pillows. A large box fan sat right on the bed, whirring away across the scalp of an ancient bull terrier. Above the bed was an apparatus for strong-arming your way in and out of it, like a piece of gymnastic equipment. Bart Starr and Brett Favre posters covered the walls, except for the spot claimed by the Matco Tool girl. The TV was playing a war movie. I held out two fifties. Dickie Pee took them. “Hang on,” he murmured at me, his eyes sliding to the TV. “You gotta catch this. This is awesome.”

  We watched a World War II bomber drone over dense jungle. Seconds later a bridge blew up and collapsed into the river below.

  “Yeah!” celebrated Dickie Pee. He turned to me. My two fifties were in his shirt pocket already. “Sorry man, I don’t have change right now.”

  “Then I’ll take it out in tackle. I need some tippet spools.”

  “Well shit,” he said. “Then we gotta go out to the van.”

  “Then never mind,” I said. “I’ll take it in a fly tying lesson,” I told him. “Show me how you tie that upside-down Jake’s Sally.”

  He shook out a cigarette and lit it. He flicked his hair out of his glasses. “That’s proprietary, man. I’m trying to make a living here.” He caught me glancing around—checking out the living. “Hey, man. I’m serious. I support myself. I got a place,” he said. “My own place. I got eleven acres up the coulee and I’m gonna build a house on it when I get the money together. I can’t help it if a piece of defective merchandise gave out and I broke my fucking C-eight.”

  It took me a second. Okay. So Darrald’s tree stand was defective. That was his story. And the C-eight was a vertebra. I moved on.

  “How many sallies did you sell to Jake?”

  “Sell to Jake? Shit, I gave to Jake. Man, I supported that dude.”

  “A dozen?” I said. “Two dozen?”

  “Six.”

  “Six dozen?”

  “One-two-three-four-five-six flies. Total. He wanted any more, he was going to have to buy them. I’m already giving my time.” He nodded at the box of FOBEC brochures on the floor.

  I did a quick calculation. If Jacobs had been killed earlier in the day, when he wasn’t fishing the sally, then his killer had taken off, say, an elk hair caddis, and tied on the sally that Junior tossed. That would leave five Jake’s Sallies in his box. Now another had been tied on his tippet. If the killer had access to Jake’s fly box—Bud Heavy, for example, along the stream—there should be four sallies left. If there were five left, or six, then Jacobs’ killer had supplied his own yellow sallies—and that killer could be sitting right here in front of me.

  “Does anyone else know how to tie a Jake’s Sally?”

  Dickie tossed hair from his eyes and squinted at me through smoke.

  “Man, you got a lot of questions.”

  I managed a little Dog smile. I thought I’d figured out how to work with him. “You owe me twenty bucks. How many can I afford?”

  He tossed his hair again. Maybe he was thinking of his property up the coulee when he glanced at the video. On cue, a tank exploded. “Five bucks a question,” said Dickie Pee. “No guarantee I’ll answer.”

  I did the smile again. “Deal. So what was it that you liked so much about fly fishing?”

  I had surprised him. Myself too. But back in the corporate security days, a guy in assembly steals, say, a crate of product, sells it to a fence to pay for his kid’s hockey equipment—that’s your hypothesis—you don’t start out with “Mister Schultz, did you steal the product?” No. You start with, “Hey, Schultzy—you see McMurphy’s hat trick last night? I missed it. Hadda be at PTA.” Make him want to talk to you. Then when suddenly he doesn’t want to talk to you any more, you know something.

  The movement, Dickie Pee told me. He liked the movement. The water coming down against you, and you working up against it. Plus the beauty of a live trout in your hands.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I hear you.” I pointed at the cuff around his ankle. “So speaking of movement, what happens if you’re not at home when the computer calls?”

  He snorted. His cigarette was done. He pushed the butt through the lid into a Pêche Tôt cup. Hiss. “I fuck up my probation. They can call me in for re-sentencing.”

  “Hey,” I said, “I was just over there, at the Pêche Tôt. Great coffee.” He was looking at me oddly though his big smudged glasses. My tone was off. I was rusty.

  “I saw a tying bench in there. Does anyone besides you know how to tie a Jake’s Sally?”

  “Nope. And that’s three questions. Fifteen bucks.”

  I pointed back to the cuff around his bone-thin ankle. “The phone rings after dark and you’re not here, you could end up in jail. So you were taking a pretty big risk, going to the village board meeting the other night when there was no treasurer’s report on the agenda—all just to second a motion to adjourn.”

  He scowled at me, patting his shirt pocket for smokes. “That’s four questions,” he said. “I’m done.”

  “That wasn’t a question,” I said back evenly, and watched him pause a cigarette just beyond his lips.

  “So what did Ingrid Jacobs mean,” I asked him, “when she said I’m next at the campground?”

  What Ingrid Jacobs meant

  I banged on the Pêche Tôt door but got no answer. I stepped back and looked up. There were two windows above, framed in brick and straddling a mortared inset that read 1921. In the right hand window, I saw blinds sway. I banged again.

  The orange cat sat upright on the fly tying bench, swished its tail back and forth.

  A small sign taped in the corner of the door said Deliveries in the Rear. When I looked back up, the cat had disappeared.

  I walked to the end of the block and then up the alley. The surface was sparse gravel over hard dirt. Dumpsters lined one side, picket fences and back yards the other. At the rear of the Pêche Tôt sat a homely pile of belongings, toppled into the outer wheel ruts of the alley: a Scooby Doo sleeping bag, a pair of scuffed black pumps, a cardboard box, a clock radio, a soiled blue goose-down parka. I looked to the door. It was a replacement for the 1921 original, and the job was poorly done. Rear entry to the Pêche Tôt was guarded by a hollow-core door, unfinished veneer peeling, hung with long, opposite-matched isosceles triangles of space on top and bottom. Behind it, the cat mewed.

  I turned at the rumble of an engine in the alley. An El Camino approached at reckless speed and stopped in a swirl of dust and gravel beside the pile of belongings. The vehicle was probably thirty years old, and it was in bad shape. In the back rode White Milkerson’s yellow electrofishing generator, along with nets, jugs, gear boxes, boots and gloves, and assorted trash.

  “Hello, Shelly,” I said, as the driver stepped out.

  The girl used both hands to tug her cut-off jeans out from where the car seat had pushed them, at the same time stepping forward in dirty flip-flops—one pink, one blue—two steps, snap-snap.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Dickie Pee just told me about you. We’re neighbors down at the campground.”

  “Yeah?” “Yeah.”

  She sized up the Dog. As always, my inner mirror showed me the pasty skin and the gut, the cheap uniform, the wallet fat with kid pictures, the dutiful gold band, the good Dog. Dog the factotum. The Fetch King. As for her, Shelly Milkerson had her Dad’s funny round face and too-blue eyes, but otherwise Manfred Milkerson had dipped his wick into a deeper gene pool. The daughter was a little blonder, a little taller, a little bit better looking. She was tanned to an odd butterscotch color, tattooed around the nave
l, pierced in the ears and left eyebrow. She was skinny and muscular—everything but her breasts, which were too big and slung about beneath a blue bikini top in a made-you-look kind of way. Dickie Pee had told me she was eighteen. He said she looked like her mother. He said she was a good time. He said that’s what Ingrid Jacobs meant, you’re next.

  “You’re a fisherman?”

  “The guy in the RV.”

  “Cool,” she said, offhand. “You gotta give me a ride sometime.”

  She stepped past me. As she heaved up the cardboard box, I smelled a gust of unmetabolized alcohol. She dropped the box in the back of the El Camino. It tilted off the side of her dad’s yellow electrofishing pack and spilled a small avalanche of framed pictures and loose bits of jewelry.

  “Shit.”

  She vaulted into the El Camino’s bed. Curling the toes of her right foot inside its pink flip-flop, she shoved her dad’s stuff aside. Her left flip-flop, I noticed again, was blue.

  “Okay,” she said. “You want to hand that to me?”

  I gave her the Scooby Doo sleeping bag, the blue parka, the clock radio. Her hands were rough, dirty around the nails.

  “You were staying here?”

  “Off and on.”

  “Looks like you’re moving out.”

  “Yeah?” She looked up at the rear windows above the Pêche Tôt. “Well, whatever.”

  “Back to the campground?” She jumped down.

  “Whatever,” she repeated. “Listen, you got a few bucks?” “Not on me.”

  “Yeah, right.” She looked at me like she had never met an out-of-town fly fisherman without more than a few bucks to spare a girl like her. I imagined she hadn’t. She watched me long enough to figure out I wasn’t biting. Then she rolled her eyes away. She stared at the back door of the Pêche Tôt for a long time. When she looked back at me, her eyes were bloodshot and teary.

  “Whatever,” she said vehemently. “I mean, really.” “Really, what?”

  “I’m not in the mood anyway. So what’s your name?”

  “Dog.” “Dog?”

  “Dog.”

  “You heard about Jake?” “I found Jake.”

  She looked away at the coffee shop again.

  “Whatever. I mean, I’m sorry for her, but Ingrid’s such a bitch. She thinks I did something with Jake. She treated me like shit.”

  “But she let you stay here? She let you work here?”

  “Jake did. Jake let me. I was in that little camper last winter and Jake got me out. I was freezing my ass off. But he and Ingrid always fought about it.”

  “But you weren’t at the Pêche Tôt last night?”

  Her eyes narrowed on me. They were rheumy now like her father’s. It was amazing how much he and she looked alike. Shelly Milkerson wore her impossible breasts the way her father wore his impossible moustache—like a part of each of them that was beyond their control.

  “I was in the shop this morning,” I told her, “when you called Ingrid about working today.”

  She glanced toward an upstairs window. “I … I have some other places … where I sleep. Sometimes.”

  “Like your dad’s?”

  No reply.

  “Sorry. I guess I’m being nosy.”

  “So welcome to Black Earth,” she said. “Everybody’s nosy.” “Dickie said the same thing. He also said you two go way back.”

  “I’m eighteen. How far back could we go?”

  I didn’t have a chance to answer that. From above us, the old sash window dragged open and around the blind thrust a hand holding a large black tool box. The hand let go. The tool box fell fast and square. Plastic shattered and tools flew and spun around our ankles.

  “Fuck,” said Shelly.

  The hand reappeared and flung a battered sliver t-square. The thing nose-dived like a wingless airplane into a gravel chuckhole behind the El Camino. A brace of drywall tools followed.

  “Fuck,” said Shelly as the window closed.

  She bent to pick up tools. “What a bitch,” she fumed. I smelled alcohol again. “I was fixing Jake’s office. But she’s got a one-track mind. Everybody’s after Jake. The whole world exists to take Jake away from her.”

  “Somebody did take Jake away from her,” I pointed out.

  Shelly’s eyes had teared up. She stooped around in a bizarre display of tits and ass and tools. Here, in the flesh, was Dickie Pee’s MATCO tool girl, though a little young, a little tipsy, a little smudged. “Jake was leaving Ingrid,” she said. “She didn’t appreciate Jake when he was alive. She drove him completely nuts. People wouldn’t have hated Jake half as much without Ingrid.”

  As she straightened with a fistful of fitted wrenches, the surge of an engine made us both look down the alley. Here came B.L. in his police cruiser.

  His amber mirrored lenses didn’t tell whether his eyes slid over us as he got out—didn’t let on if he was checking out Shelly’s poster girl pose or if he had been successful in getting a warrant to search the Cruise Master.

  He banged on the flimsy back door of the Pêche Tôt. I knew what he was there for. Jake’s rod. The rod with the bogus yellow sally on it. Maybe last night’s empty tippet could be forgotten about. Maybe the killer was getting his set-up back. A faked death, followed by a faked investigation. Who was going to protest? Me? Junior?

  He banged again. The cat mewed. But the police chief got no other answer. He stood back a step, put his hands atop the fat rolls on his hips, rocked a little in his cowboy boots, and muttered.

  “Said she’d be here. Goddamned crazy daisy.”

  Behind him, Shelly flip-flopped up, slinging a dirty-white macramé purse. She reached inside and brought out a set of keys. She found the one she wanted easily and fit it into the lock.

  “You got crazy right,” she said to B.L., and she let him in.

  I was watching B.L. stumble over the orange cat when I felt her hand slip into mine. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Back on the leash

  “Your shithole,” said Shelly back at the campground, “or mine?”

  She had to leave the El Camino at the gate. After ferrying her belongings to the pop-up camper, she had hauled a twelve pack of Miller Lite from the passenger seat. She put a can in my hand. The can was air temperature, about eighty-five degrees.

  “Uh,” I said, “no place. Thanks.”

  I handed the beer back. She seemed disappointed more than angry. She wore a variation of her father’s look of wounded amusement.

  “Look, I want to take a closer look at this dam Jake was so upset about. I’m going to walk over there. Wanna come along?”

  Shelly Milkerson sat down on the step of her pop-up, in the shade of its moldy little awning, and snapped open a beer can. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned into the warm foam, suckling at the can. “I’ll wait,” she said.

  Beyond the pop-up, a pair of crows contended noisily over something in the grass. They timed my arrival, then flew cawing off to a cottonwood down by the dam, leaving behind a small brown trout, pecked apart and stiff. I glanced back at Shelly. I saw the bottom of her beer can.

  I retreated into the heavy summer afternoon. Cicadas reamed from the cottonwoods, and grasshoppers snapped into flight at my feet. The air smelled of black dirt, hay, heat, and rain. Gray clouds had massed in the western sky, over the far shore of Lake Bud. On President Bud’s land, strips of orange tape circled trees to be cut down. I could also see the white squares of the Lots for Sale signs. If the dam went out, I remembered Junior telling me, then this was a stream again, and a setback law went into effect. No development within a quarter mile of the stream. That was good work by Jacobs. Bud must have felt trapped.

  But the dam surprised me. I hadn’t expected the Grand Coulee, but the Black Earth mill pond dam was little more than a long heap of earth cornered on the far bank by a cracked and pitted concrete slab that twisted toward the downstream side. A two-inch sheet of water slipped over its mossy rim. Stacked up against th
e dam were several decades of flotsam—tree branches and fence posts and hunks of Styrofoam, woven with fishing line and bobbers and bound up in a grimy, sudsy, sun-encrusted sludge. The graffiti-splotched foundation of the old mill lay crumbled on the bank beyond the slab. Downstream of this, the creek ran wide, shallow, and straight through a quarter-mile wasteland of overgrazed Sundvig pasture before it slipped into a concrete jacket behind the lumber yard that marked the far edge of the Village of Black Earth.

  It was a sad end to a beautiful trout stream. And without an actual mill to use the pond, it was pointless, too, unless you meant to develop “lakefront property.”

  Before me, a disused dirt road emerged from a tangle of dogwood saplings and ended atop the concrete slab. The shoreline was soupy and brush-snarled, thick with mosquitoes, but I slogged my way over. The road hadn’t seen traffic in years, and the shore around the slab was littered with the usual detritus left by bait fisherman—including one carp, long dead. But the high weeds and dogwoods were freshly hacked back, as if with a machete, to widen the road toward its original single lane. Thin tire tracks had rutted it and dried in the mud, as though someone had ridden a bicycle back and forth to the dam.

  I stepped onto the slab. The splash pool was about fifteen feet down, wide and frothy. A pair of blue-winged teal poked for food at the margins. Then the stream sheeted out over pasture, ankle deep and clogged with milfoil. A hundred yards down, cattle stood in the water.

  I wondered if a person could walk across the mossy rim to the dirt mound on the other side. The water was no more than a few inches deep as it poured out of Lake Bud and into the pasture below, and the concrete spout of the dam was no more than twenty feet across. From there, and easily it seemed, one could descend the earthen mound through a manageable tangle of grass and sumac. One could get at the base of the dam—or easily into President Bud’s lakefront lots on the other side.