The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  “Okay,” I told Junior. “Let’s do it. It will be over in thirty minutes.”

  I put the rod in her hands, and those thirty minutes passed like five, as they always do during a hatch. Junior waded in her blue jeans, shivering, stream water wicking up her T-shirt until it was pasted pink against her skin below the wide band of her bra. When she snapped a sally off behind her on the head of an aster—and a second time on my hat—I handed her the backup rod and, under flashlight, tied on another.

  Junior hung in there, spooking fish with her short, slashing casts, snapping flies off, cussing herself and laughing. Time and distance collapsed on us in the gathering darkness, and somehow I remembered past lives, remembered bicycling in the Brookline dark, around my block, my father calling me in, and how fast and smoothly the bike seemed to move in the black gaps between the streetlights. I remembered the dutiful suburban Dog, thirty years later, taking himself outside for a run, trying to work the flat spot off his ass and the baggage off his belly—gamely chugging along a tree-lined street in West Newton, feeling, in the dark, like he was flying, like he was going somewhere, like he was hanging in there, like everything connected and everything mattered and it was a hard but good thing to be a human being.

  “Okay,” relented Junior at last through chattering teeth. “Show me.”

  I was slow on the upstake, lost in the past. “Show me how it’s done.”

  I passed her the backup rod. I took hers and numbly reenergized the slush of her last cast. While the line was airborne, paused horizontally behind me, I assessed the hatch. It was nearly finished. Sated, the birds were still, though a lone bat still prospected in jagged figure eights between the stream banks. It was too dark now to see fish or insects, but as my loop rolled out behind me I heard a heavy slurp from the right bank, about forty feet up.

  I laid the fly down well short, knowing the timing was off. That fish would go down, work the big insect through the sphincter at the back of its mouth, then refocus on the next bite. The current was deep and slow, and I counted to ten while Junior grunted, unsticking her boots from the mud, and moved around behind me. “Left side,” I murmured. “Stay on my left side.”

  She disappeared behind me. I couldn’t see her. I raised the fly and backcast, stripped out another twelve feet of line, and laid the sally down ahead and instream of the fish. I took one long breath as the fly drifted toward the overhanging jewelweed on the bank. I couldn’t see where it went. But I guessed. I raised the rod just as the slurp came, and the hook set. I was fast to a big, nighttime brown trout.

  “Oh, yeah!” whooped Junior, and she moved up tight to my elbow. I felt her hot breath on my neck. Somehow the rush of that sensation was even stronger than the thrill of the big trout digging against me for the safety of the bank. Junior encouraged me in grunts and gasps, peering along with me into the cold, flowing ink ahead. I couldn’t see the trout. I could only hear it and feel it, just as I could hear and feel the woman at my back, and for the moment I felt an embrace of energies like I only distantly remembered. I felt a ballooning of joy in my heart—and at the same moment, in the service of some dark and unknown truth, I felt all heat leave me. I felt naked in the cold and streaming blackness.

  Shuddering, I turned the trout and unclipped my net. The big brown shook its head across the surface and rolled away. I wagged it side to side, tiring its lateral muscles. Then I turned it abruptly and filled its mouth with the push of the stream.

  Junior gasped as the trout coasted into my net. I hurled my rod to the bank. I clicked on my flashlight and fit it between my teeth. We gazed at the fish—a giant male, more than two feet long, hump-necked and kipe-jawed, sleek and glistening, sheathed in exquisite skin with blue spots inside red aureoles. Junior grabbed the back of my vest for balance and leaned to touch the fish. She ran a wet finger along the pale scales beneath his flaring gills.

  I felt calm and warm again, holding that fish. Then he thrashed, tore my thumb with his teeth. I pulled my hook, turned him into the current, and let him go.

  The trout vanished instantly, and Junior’s squawk filled the night.

  “What? Aren’t we going to eat him?” “We just did,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’m full now.”

  I felt her eyes on me. She had a knife out. She had been ready to clean the fish. I was shaking. I felt her green eyes cutting through the night air between us.

  “What?”

  I stood there rigidly in the current. Indeed, What? What had I just said? I’m full now. Like a guy who knew something. As if a fix of animal energy, pushing water, and fleeting loveliness—as if these moments from the stream were enough not only to keep the Glock from my head, but enough to satisfy me. Since when, I wondered. What was going on?

  That’s when I felt Junior’s arms close around me. The sensation was startling—and not because I hadn’t felt a woman in so long. No—it was more like I had never felt strength like that—sureness, an easy, unconscious strength, the touch of someone who moved thousand-pound animals with the casual grace that came from knowing what was good for them. As she gripped me from behind, Junior felt weirdly solid, stunningly massive, and utterly undeniable. Her hands clasped around my chest. Her chest pressed my back. Her hat brim raked my ear and her cheek arrived against my neck.

  I bent and staggered under her embrace. She didn’t let up. She didn’t know her own strength. Or maybe she did. And I didn’t know where the knife had gone. This woman could kill me, I thought suddenly. This woman could drown me.

  I struggled. Junior hung on. I felt her chin dig in between my shoulder blades. I pried at her hands and staggered for the bank. She rode me. She clung and muttered something against my neck. A prayer, a curse? A ferocious sweet-nothing? I couldn’t make it out. Not until I hit slick clay at the bank edge and slipped underwater could I wrench out of her grip. I rolled and stumbled and came up sputtering in water-stuffed waders a few yards downstream.

  Junior had already scrambled onto the bank. She looked back at me.

  “I was so cold,” she blurted. “Sorry. I was just so cold.”

  I panted at her, spitting water. She had tucked the knife back into her pocket.

  “Really,” she said. She looked flustered. “I just felt so cold and I just … I just kind of lost it.” She squeezed water from the tail of her T-shirt. Her cap was gone. I flailed my feet at the ice-slick clay for a minute, trying to get out. “Well …” she said at last, “I can’t leave Daddy there alone any longer.”

  Then she pushed off through the asters and I watched the white of her shirt as she hurried across the pasture. I heard her pickup start. I heard her roar off. I listened for direction. She wasn’t heading toward Daddy.

  She was heading toward town.

  Leap of faith

  And when I returned to the campground, the Cruise Master wallowed on her rims. Her tires were slashed, all four of them, neatly knifed through the sidewalls.

  I had to talk to somebody.

  “Harv!” I hurried into my little cell phone. I pulled it away from my ear and looked at it, still not quite believing it wasn’t a toy.

  “Yellow!” he repeated. “Whozit?”

  “Harv,” I said, “it’s Dog. In Wisconsin. I think I’m into something here.”

  My tax guy chuckled. In the background, I heard a woman’s voice, and the whir of a blender.

  “No. Harv—listen. I mean really into something.” I was still in my waders. The blender stopped. Knowing Harvey as I did, I formed a picture. The old bean counter had probably lured some sweet girl from his yoga class to his place in Back Bay for a wheat grass smoothie.

  “Somebody did a Roxbury tattoo on my tires,” I told Harvey. “And this young woman who … I’m kind of working for her … but she’s got a few things going on.”

  “Excellent,” he purred. “Excellent.”

  I looked at the phone again, like it was playing tricks on me. The blender started up again. My tax guy nickered som
ething away from the phone. I think he said wheat germ.

  “No, Harvey. What I’m saying is that she may not be what she seems to be. She may be playing games with me.”

  Harvey cleared his cluttered old throat—the sound he always made when he was just about to steer me in the right direction. But as I waited for him to speak, something caught my eye across Lake Bud. “Uh … Harv, hang on …”

  Far out toward the opposite shore, a ghostly light panned the water’s surface.

  “Hang on, Harvey.”

  Of course he ignored me. “Hey Dog,” he said, “you say this gal’s playing games? So what’s wrong with playing games?”

  I scrambled into the Cruise Master and found my binoculars. I aimed them about in blackness, seeing nothing.

  Harvey said something I didn’t hear. He called my name through the phone’s tiny earpiece. The woman in his apartment laughed giddily: Dog? His name is Dog? I focused on a building window on the far side of the pond. From there, I found the light over the lake. My hands jumped and blurred the image, but I breathed again and calmed them.

  The light was aimed down, at a pair of feet swishing cautiously along just under the water’s surface. I held, followed. I stared until I was entirely sure of it. The ankles, the lower legs—they had been bare before, last night, when I had ventured out to sink Jake Jacobs’ ponytail. Now they were clad in boots and blue jeans. I put the binoculars down. There came a faint swish and pitter-patter, like hail over water. Then the light retreated and went out.

  “Harvey,” I said, “she’s … she’s …”

  My tax guy interrupted me in a stern near-whisper.

  “She’s human, Dog. For chrissake. Enjoy the ride.”

  “No, Harv—I think she’s out there, walking on the water—“.

  “You’re in love,” he told me, and he laughed happily.

  “Damn it,” I said. “Can you listen to me?”

  “Is she cute?”

  “She’s plain. And she’s built like a fucking linebacker. She could break my back.”

  “Mmmmm.” The old man breathed in deeply, like he was smelling good soup.

  “Harvey, listen to me.”

  “Why don’t you listen to yourself.”

  “Harvey, somebody slashed my tires. At night, somebody walks on the lake. The trout are way too goddamn big for the stream. And some guy named Jacobs gets dunked in it. She says her daddy didn’t do it. But the old man’s a nut case, Alzheimer’s, something. But she has this total faith in him. He can do no wrong. And this strange faith in me, too. But—then she nearly drowns me—do you see, Harvey?”

  I thought I was making sense. Perhaps I wasn’t.

  “Dog,” he cut in, using the gravelly whisper again. “I appreciate the call. It’s nice to hear from you. I’m glad you’re having fun. But can this wait just a few hours?”

  Headlights panned the far side of the lake. Then tail lights receded.

  “See, Dog, I’ve got someone here. Someone really special. She’s not perfect, in fact I’m sure she’s playing the old Harvster for something. But she’s special. And you see, when you’re with someone special, and you’ve opened everything up, all the doors of the heart, there at last arrives a certain moment. A certain leap of faith. Okay? Dog? You know what I mean?”

  I was silent. I was thinking.

  “Dog?”

  He hung up.

  The time was now

  The party at the pop-up camper started just about the time I had juiced myself with enough vodka to drift off. The first sounds were a pickup engine, doors slamming, giggles, and then the unmistakable sound of piss against a tree. But not just any tree. My tree. Somebody was pissing on the tree I was parked under.

  I sat up and looked at my watch. Two-fifteen a.m.

  “C’mon, Ronnie,” called Shelly Milkerson, “leave ‘im alone. He’s leepin’.”

  “I’m jus checkin’ it out.” He zipped and took a deep breath. “Massa … massachewshits,” he slurred, and I fingered back my curtain in time to see a heavy man in a golf shirt and slacks stagger back toward the popup.

  I lay back and listened to the party gather force: someone had cut the chain around the campground gate, and two tall pickups rumbled in. Next, a radio, and one particularly gnawing voice—fucking this, fucking that, gimme another beer, haw-haw-haw—hardly enough noise to hold down a Boston street corner, really, but in the quiet country night, it was plenty. I listened until the voices began to repeat themselves and take on a rhythm that I could sleep to. But just as I was finally drifting off, a new voice—nasal, twangy—began to contest for air space, and a new rhythm shook up the night. In no time at all a fight had broken out. I rose to watch dark shapes flail inside the arena of pickups—I made out three men, one trying to break up the other two, with Shelly circling, heaving beer cans at the fray and shrieking, “Assholes!”

  It lasted no more than thirty seconds, ending at precisely the moment when the heavy guy in the golf shirt howled, “She’s got a knife!” Then three pickups started up and roared away. Shelly shrieked after them, full-throated into the night, “Assholes!”

  I lay back and watched dawn creep into the Cruise Master.

  When the knock came about an hour later, I put on pants and opened the door. There stood Shelly, barefoot in the dewy grass, open beer can in one hand, closed beer can in the other. “I notice your tires are slashed,” she slurred at me. Her voice was hoarse. “Thassa a real bummer.” She raised the unopened beer and smiled.

  I sat her at my galley table, where she sipped warm beer while I whipped up some Tang. But Shelly kept getting up, lurching in tipsy excitement around the Cruise Master, showing me her young body from every angle.

  “This is so cool!” she croaked, twirling, opening cabinets, squeezing past me and looking back from the driver’s cab with her arms spread from bucket seat to bucket seat and her heavy breasts lifting the thin blue fabric of a halter top. “This is so perfect!”

  “Have some Tang,” I urged.

  She downed it. “Yuck,” she said cheerfully, and looked around again. “This is so excellent!”

  It was like she knew the Dog had spent the night anchored to the vodka bottle, having visions of Junior. Like she sensed the drift of Harvey Digman and knew just how to ride it. She stood on the galley bench and peered into my pantry, giving me the run of her suntanned thighs, all the way up to the white curve of underpants beneath her cut-off jeans. Then she dropped down on the seat and leaned over the table toward me.

  “Will you lemme drive it?” she said, barely in control of her words. “Fi fixem for ya?”

  “Fix what?”

  “Your tires, silly.”

  I wondered how.

  “I knowaguy, okay? I get the tires. I put um on.”

  I must have still looked skeptical. She climbed halfway over the table, knocking over her beer, and grabbed me by the shoulders. “I grew up fixin stuff,” she announced. “Every kind of stuff. Okay? My dad made me learn all this shit. So I know how. Okay? Now don’t be an asshole. I had enough assholes. I’m fixin your tires.”

  She slid back through the puddle of beer into her seat.

  “Hey,” she said. “Hey wait a minute. You know what today is?”

  She was still wearing her drunken smile, but her good mood had abruptly slipped. She was re-focusing, zeroing in on something. While I waited, studying the pout on her Milkerson face, I understood the fight at the pop-up as the basest kind of male instinct. The daughter of White Milkerson was never going to get any healthier, any cuter, any easier. In the blink of an eye she was going to be crazy, bitter, knocked up, ugly, dead. The time was now. Now, now, now.

  “Today is Jake’s wake,” she said. “Ten o’clock.”

  She righted her beer can. She took a half-hearted sip.

  “So I fix your tires,” she said, reaching for the Tang, “and you do something for me.”

  Jake’s wake

  By the time we set out for the funeral home, S
helly Milkerson was half-sober and nervous, shivering on my arm. The sun had shone for about an hour after dawn, and then black clouds and cool air had bubbled up out of the southwest. Another thunderstorm was brewing, the sky rumbling distantly, and Shelly was clinging to my side like a sparrow seeking shelter.

  Having no other way, we walked into town. She had stopped by her pop-up camper and grabbed her reunited pink flip-flops and the dirty macramé purse. Halfway in, she surprised me by fishing a cell phone from the purse. She called someone about the tires. Whomever she called didn’t seem to welcome the call. But Shelly hung in there, got a promise for four RV-grade radials by afternoon. She knew what kind of tires I needed.

  “That was Ronnie,” she told me stonily.

  “Who’s Ronnie?” I asked her.

  “A friend. Ronnie Hellenbrand. He’s sort of a big guy in the county. I’ve got a lot of friends,” she assured me.

  “But you need me to be with you at Jake’s wake,” I observed.

  She didn’t get it.

  “I’m a stranger,” I said. “You feel better with a stranger.”

  She held on tight as we crossed Main Street near the village office and headed past the Pêche Tôt, then down a side street to the block east of Main.

  “Okay,” she sighed, relenting to an explanation. “Boyfriends. Mostly married guys. Not the kind of guys who are going to stick up for me. And Ingrid’s going to see me and freak.”

  The funeral home was a low brick structure, new and soulless. The lot was jammed, and the parking had spilled out along the surrounding streets. The mourners seemed mostly from elsewhere: they had lined three village blocks with their minivans and Saabs, Volkswagen campers, a sprinkling of Beemers, a lot of Trout Unlimited and Sierra Club stickers and more than a few out-of-state plates.

  Shelly found lip balm in her dirty bag and put it on. She finished and dropped the tube into the bag.