As I considered the possibility of crossing, I saw something lodged in the foam crust around the pool below. The object was pinkish and pulpy, bobbing as the foam worked its way around the muddy edge.
A guy like me—a hundred rivers waded—should have known better, but I tried to walk across the dam spout. I got halfway over when the push of the lake became too strong and suddenly I feared to lift a foot. I stood there cussing, both boots planted in six inches of water atop slick algae, a thousand tons of water bearing down on my ankles. Too late, I realized that the slightest crack between my boot sole and the dam spout would let a lever of water under my feet that would flip me. I actually gave up a derisive snort—the Dog, back on the leash again—stuck in another well-intentioned, idiotic pose—trapped with his feet on the slipperiest possible ground, unable to move, unable to do anything but await disaster. Classic, classic Dog.
But something felt different this time. Hell—I was going down anyway. We were all going down eventually, right? I jumped.
The teal blew upward as I hit the splash pool—one duck right through my air space. In the instant before I went under, I felt the dry rasp of a wing across my face—then the shock of cold spring water. The pool was deep enough not to kill me, but shallow enough to jar my spine and collapse my legs and pitch me forward in a painful skid over limestone rubble.
When I washed up in the outer foam, I saw what I had jumped for: Shelly’s lost pink flip-flop.
I wondered how she had lost it. Walking on water? But she was gone from the step of her camper. Her beer can and mine too were tossed on the grass. The El Camino was gone from the gate. When I pushed open the camper door, a musty, canvas-scented heat came pouring out. She had set up housekeeping inside. The Scooby Doo sleeping bag was unrolled on the narrow bunk. The down jacket was folded up like a pillow. On the foldout table she had arranged the contents of the cardboard box. In the center of the table, she had propped a group of small framed photographs. In the center stood a professional portrait of a blonde-haired young woman, wearing dark lipstick, a tight-fitting black sweater, a necklace with a crucifix, and large, showy earrings. A half dozen other old snapshots showed the same woman with a child—in a stroller, on a beach somewhere, at a highchair with a spoonful of food, the usual stuff. Arranged around these pictures were several objects, oddly disconnected. A slotted enamel serving spoon, blue, well-used. A faded aqua shower puff. A pair of sunglasses. A pumice stone.
Who was she? I wondered for a moment. But of course: Shelly’s mother. Shelly had to have a mother. White Milkerson, at some point, had to have a wife. So … the question was … where was she?
The sound of a car on County K made me drop the salvaged pink flip-flop for Shelly and back out.
But the car passed. The road was empty. The heat was heavy, the sky pulsing with dark clouds. I felt exhausted. Out of nowhere, I felt bereft, confused—hungry, maybe, but most of all tired. I retreated to the Cruise Master. I stripped off my wet clothes and lay on my bunk, listening to the cicadas and the drone and clank of a tractor.
I needed sleep, but as usual my veins seemed to widen and hum with a kind of gnawing, hollow energy—like tracks with trains approaching from the near distance of the day my family ended. If I fished enough, and drank enough, the trains went slow, usually, and most times I could drift off before they collided inside and I found myself in the dream-scrambled train wreck of the past. But I hadn’t fished at all that day. I thought of vodka but didn’t have the energy. The Dog just lay there inside the tin can of the Cruise Master, listening to a storm build outside, waiting for the vein-trains to start.
Hey, trout guy
“Hey … hey, trout guy.”
Someone was in the Cruise Master, wiggling my leg. I sat up groggily.
“Nice skivvies,” said Junior. “You missed supper.” She held up a take-out bag. “Today’s A&W Day. Every Thursday. Dad’s a bit regular.”
I swung my legs off the bunk. Funny thing—bizarre and unfamiliar thing—I’d slept hard—deeply, fishless and alcohol-free. I could tell by the strong light in the Cruise Master that a storm had passed. The sun was full and low.
“You know,” said Junior, “tightie-whities went out of style about twenty years ago.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about until I saw where she was looking. My underwear—thereabouts. She stood a little jauntily, grinning at me just inside the Cruise Master door, dressed in her usual boots and blue jeans, sweat-smudged white T-shirt with the sports bra under, a John Deere cap with her stiff little pony tail sticking out the back. She’d had her sunburn touched up by the long, hot day, and her lips were parched, with white crusts in the corners. She played with the dead watch around her neck.
“But you don’t care, do you? Darrald didn’t care either. That old boy was J.C. Penny all the way, bless his heart.” She rattled an A&W bag. “So. You hungry? You wanna come up and eat with us?”
She drove her blue pickup fast into the first curve. “Whoa,” she said as Lumen Bostock’s milk truck came barreling down the coulee. He blew his horn. She blew hers back. A hail of gravel lashed the pickup. “Little prick,” she muttered, leveling onto a flat stretch where the stream ran alongside in a sleeve of purple asters. After a quarter mile she said, “So—Mister Dog—I guess my hunch was on about you. You haven’t left yet.”
I looked at her.
“You must be having fun, right?”
I didn’t answer that. But I told her somebody had gotten to the fly rod she had altered and altered it back. Now the rod had a yellow sally on it again—a Jake’s Yellow Sally, just like the one she had pulled off.
She seemed excited. “No shit? Someone tied a sally back on there? That narrows it, right?”
“Could be. Could have been Bud Bjorgstad,” I said, “except Bud Lite didn’t seem to know about it. He seemed surprised as hell, Ingrid said.”
She slung the pickup into another corner. This time it was a hay wagon coming the other way. “That’s my hay,” she said. “I sell to Elmer Sundvig, who doesn’t have enough acreage of his own now because he sold good farm land to Bud—who will mess with anyone, by the way. Especially B.L. So how did this rod thing happen?”
“B.L. gave the rod back to Ingrid last night. This morning, she called him to point out there was a sally on it. As in, Jake died around eight o’clock.”
Junior straightened the pickup and the road climbed through a hump of sugar maples and hickories, leaving the stream behind. “Somebody’s working hard to make that point,” she said. “Or to see,” I said, “if you’ll argue it.”
That slowed her. She drove thoughtfully through the last turn and up her driveway. “B.L.,” she concluded at last, “is not that smart.” She turned the engine off and seemed to ponder a bit more. Her dad was on the porch, flipping a bobber into the grass with a bait rod, reeling it up, flipping it again, glaring at us with his lips offset.
“But Bud is,” she said.
On her way across the yard, Junior called, “Let it soak, Daddy! Burgers are here!”
Melvin O’Malley propped his rod against the porch rail and gathered a bacon cheeseburger into his huge hands. Junior set a soda on the porch beside his chair. He ate like a man who had crops rotting on the vine. In a matter of seconds, he was done with the burger. He began snorkeling into his soda. “Oh, Daddy,” Junior sighed, sitting down on the step beside me.
“Ice cream,” he replied.
“In a minute. Let your belly rest.” She handed me a burger. “So what do you eat usually?” she said. “Dog food?” Pretty much, I told her. “Vegetables ever?” “I eat cress from the streams.”
She nodded, chewing. I changed the subject, told her Shelly Milkerson had a key to the Pêche Tôt. So, probably, did Dickie Pee. And of course there was Ingrid. As for the second yellow sally on Jake Jacobs’ line, that knot, I said, was amateur, the work of a non-fisherman. Which, I declared, along with the wheelchair, left out Dickie.
“You’d be surp
rised about Dickie,” she replied. “He still plays softball. Left field.” I tried to picture this—and succeeded. I saw him tossing hair from his eyes, backing up under a fly ball. “But you’re right,” Junior said. “Dickie does know knots. He used to fish the creek a lot. As for me, I don’t have a clue. So show me,” she said, “the knot you mean.”
She took Dad’s rod and reeled it up. “Shush,” she said over his protests. “They’re not biting anyway.”
She swung the bobber up and I caught it. I showed her the hook.
“Like that,” I said.
She bit off a French fry and bent in closer. The monofilament was piled in six neat wraps above the hook eye, a small tag end sticking out. Dad tied a decent knot. Or someone did.
“Does that knot have a name?”
“A clinch knot. A textbook clinch knot.”
“And what’s on Jake’s rod now?”
“A mess. A granny. Somebody just trying to fasten a fly on there as fast as possible.”
She mused, “Too bad I didn’t see the knot I broke.”
I agreed. She flipped the bobber back into the grass. Her dad began to grunt and mumble. Junior reeled up and cast farther, to the edge of a toppled woodpile. The old man went quiet.
“Daddy’s real precise,” she told me. “He likes things a certain way. He sat here all day,” she said, indicating that very spot on the porch, now occupied by the hulking old man in his scallop-backed metal lawn chair. “He was watching that hayfield, making sure I cut it in the right pattern.”
I looked across the highway, across the pasture and the stream, to the field on the hill. The hay rows were horizontal, nicely ruled against the tree line. Junior stretched her back as she looked with me. “I’ve been sitting crooked on that hill all day,” she said, and she scooted across the step and put her back against her dad’s right foot. “Go on, Daddy,” she said, “you owe me now,” and he began to dig his huge, sock-clad toes into her spine. She writhed against him, sighing a little, getting back to our previous conversation. “Well, as for someone getting into the Pêche Tôt, Shelly slept in there, I heard. She was living in that camper down by you in the park, but Jake and Ingrid took her in.”
“Jake took her in,” I corrected. “That’s what Shelly said. Jake and Ingrid fought about her. Now Ingrid’s kicked her out. She thought Jake and Shelly were sleeping together.”
Junior sighed. “Poor Shelly. She’s got a bit of a reputation with men.”
“Deserved,” I guessed.
“Yup.” Junior shifted on her dad’s foot. She leaned back and slid higher into his weight. “If you mean she makes it with a lot guys, including married guys, old guys, you name it. But can you blame her? Really?”
Lumen Bostock thundered back the other way. Gravel strafed Junior’s mailbox. It was that time of day, I figured, in the milk business.
I said, “Where’s Shelly’s mother?”
“She and White had a hard time,” Junior said. “White—” She pulled away from her dad’s foot. She lifted the dead watch sideways and drew the chain unconsciously through her teeth. “Well, you probably noticed White was half-plowed the other day. He had a pretty rough time with his family, oh, what was it, about ten years ago, more like fifteen I guess. He …”
She increased her volume. “Manfred, Daddy. I’m telling him about Manfred and Nanette and Shelly.”
Melvin Senior gazed out at his bobber in the yard. Just as I was about to wonder how, two weeks ago, he could have been coherent enough to threaten Jake Jacobs, and then remember the threat, he cleared his baggy old throat and said, “White’s a good man. You don’t do that to a good man. She ruined him.”
He gave me the eye.
“It’s sad what happened,” Junior went on, “and it doesn’t matter now. I mean, we have to get over stuff. Right? But he married Nannette Margolis, this girl who—. Well, everybody but him knew it was a bad idea. She was a lot younger. I mean, a lot. Really pretty. Really wild. And they had a kid and all. Shelly. Then one day Nanette and this guy from the Harvestore company, the guy that sold Daddy that tractor out there, he and Bridget just took off, left White with their daughter to raise on his own. And White—”
She glanced at her dad, who had both hands clenched, trembling, around his rod butt.
“Poor White, he botched it, obviously. Shelly hates his guts, acts out, makes trouble. They both drink. Shelly won’t live with him, but she takes whatever she needs. She does a lot of crazy stuff,” Junior said. She glanced at her dad. “Trying to hurt White, I guess. I guess we all do some of that.”
She slapped her dad on the knee. “Hey,” she said, “Big Guy … ice cream?”
Into the dusk, she brought out three bowls of mint chocolate chip and three giant multi-vitamins. Her dad’s ice cream was gone in four bites. Junior wiped his jowls and said, “Ready for Poppins?”
I watched as they went inside. The TV sparked on, still set at its massive volume. A minute later I heard the voice of Julie Andrews as she sailed singing through the London sky under her umbrella.
“There,” said Junior, returning to the porch. “He’s all set.” She looked at me. She tilted her head. She kept looking at me.
“What?” I said.
“Well, Mister Dog, you know what I was thinking today?”
“I imagine you think about a lot of things on that tractor all day long.”
“You’re right. I do. Just like you and fishing. But you know what I was stuck on today?” I didn’t know.
“Eat your vitamin,” she advised me.
Then, as I choked the pill down, Junior looked up into the deepening sky, where swallows flashed beyond the barn roof. The sun had slipped behind the hill she had just mowed, and a stunning pink light sprayed through the treetops. A whippoorwill was calling from near the stream, and a whitetail deer had just stepped from a woody wrinkle in the coulee and into Junior’s pasture. Somewhere in there, in its groove below the closing asters and sunflowers, Black Earth Creek flowed timelessly on.
“That yellow sally hatch,” Junior said. “It must be pretty special.”
I said it was.
“It must be a rush.”
I said it was.
“Kind of, I don’t know … spiritual?” I was quiet on that one.
She took my hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s fish it.”
Show me how it’s done
She was clumsy with a fly rod. Everybody is at first. The stroke is not what you think. It takes a while to feel the tight little space inside of which you have to be decisive and powerful at the butt of the rod. It takes a while to feel the line, to connect the fly at the end to the subtle twists in your wrist and elbow. It takes longer than a while to get your weak hand working, stripping and feeding line on the way out, collecting slack on the way in, keeping perfect pace with the stream flow.
Junior cursed her incompetence, then shrieked and laughed when, out of nowhere, a big trout rose, green-backed and silky-silent, to suck in her sally. For an instant, the fish had her fly, but she couldn’t touch it. The rod was empty in her hand, the line slack, the trout just as instantly gone. She had seen the moment of truth, but, disembodied by surprise, she had failed to connect.
“Son of a buck knife!” she hollered. “Damn it, Junior!”
The yellow sally hatch was a thick one, and as we had hurried to the stream in the minutes previous, we had seen the hatch begin in the alertness of birds. Towhees tipped on branch ends, eager as sprinters in their blocks. Barn swallows killed time, mapping their long, looping circuits across the pre-night sky. Thrushes flitted on the stream banks.
I had brought a second rod and reel. I sat on the bank to attach a leader. “What’s that?” Junior, at my shoulder, asked about the knot.
“A nail knot.”
“It’s different than what you showed me on Daddy’s line.”
“Completely different,” I said. “Different purpose. The one you saw before connects hook to leader, a clinch knot. It�
��s simple. Any fisherman can tie it. This one, the nail knot, is for connecting two pieces of line together. I’ve got this leader butt, thin but stiff, and very slippery.” I showed her the thick end of the clear, tapered, monofilament leader. “And I’ve got the tip of my fly line,”—I showed her the hollow, orange, polymer line that performs the cast—“which is thicker, limper, and just as slick. The two have to connect in a knot no bigger than a rice grain but capable of taking about two hundred pounds of tension.”
I rambled on, quoting an instruction manual from somewhere. But Junior looked enthralled. I coiled the leader butt along an eight-penny finish nail from my vest pocket, then fed the leader tag back through the coils. I took my habitual deep breath. Then I worked the orange line end the opposite way through the coils. I tucked and tamped and yanked suddenly. The nail fell free into my lap. I trimmed my ends. A nail knot.
“Wow. And you all can do that?”
“All …?”
“All you fly fishermen?”
“No. Most need it so rarely they forget how. So there’s shortcuts,” I said. “Braided loops, cheater knots, that kind of thing. Because most fly fishermen can’t tie a nail knot. Or won’t bother.”
We both stopped, because a yellow sally had landed on the back of my hand. It was an odd insect—a giant in its miniature world, at once preposterous and beautiful. Like all mayflies, it had upright, sailboat wings, but the sally’s wings were pure gossamer, impossible flakes of tissue that caught the sunset and held it in a dozen glowing, veiny prisms. The tail strands were impractically long, flickering at the end of a plump yellow abdomen, banana-shaped and criss-crossed with black bands like Mexican gunbelts. It stood up on six legs, each one thin and blonde as baby hair, and it goggled around with out-sized, green-hued eyes. Then it flew.
Side-by-side, Junior and I watched the insect flutter and climb, veering and dipping erratically against the backdrop of a pink-struck box elder and a blue-black sky. Then—zip!—a towhee darted from an upstream willow and got it. And the trout had begun to slurp.
The Nail Knot Page 12