The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  I nodded and let him continue. I’d seen the exotic trophies in Bud Bjorgstad’s Village President office. I’d found the number in Jake Jacobs’ stream log. Hanson’s Safari.

  “Some of those same guys,” said Milkerson, “like to think of themselves as fly fishermen. But nothing’s a fish to them until it’s three feet long. So Bud had this idea of raising some big brownies in the lake down there, then letting them go for his pals to catch in the creek. They pay him five hundred bucks for every inch over twenty. Five-fifty an inch, and Bud takes care of the taxidermy.”

  “And you?”

  “I get a little cut. Retired state worker, you know, I gotta make a living.”

  “A little cut for what?”

  He squinted through smoke at me. He aimed the flask under his moustache and took a long pull.

  “You know. Big trout like those find a home real quick and just hunker down. They hunt at night, but then they go right back to home base. I find where they live. I mark the spot.”

  I remembered Jacobs’ little notebook—maps and checkmarks, measurements and fish counts. Milkerson was marking big fish. Jacobs was figuring it out.

  Milkerson said, “If one of Bud’s clowns still can’t catch one, I come out, turn this sucker up,” he patted his yellow shocker, “and I pull that big old hog up to the surface.” He laughed. “Shit. Some guys, they’ll just grab it and take it home right there. Never even put a fly on the water. Other guys, they stick their fly in the jaw and wait for the fish to wake up. Then they have a fight. Shit. One guy hands me his goddamn camera. Kicks the fish downstream until it’s bending his rod. Gets himself all lined up, his hat just right, and says, ‘Okay, shoot!’ Hell—that’s probably the same guy who’ll be building a golf course under our asses in about ten years.”

  “And you’re helping them out.”

  He shrugged again. “I’m scum. I’m a moral waste product. Just ask my daughter.”

  We sat there a while. He finished another cigarette, did the dip and tuck into his ashtray-pocket.

  “Now I guess you want your trophy,” he said.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “But guess you’ve got sense enough just to leave us all alone.” “Well …” I felt my face curl into an odd little smile. “I guess you kind of caught me at the wrong life moment.” “Nobody gets hurt in this.”

  “Like hell.”

  “You’re going to make some noise.”

  I nodded. “A man died over this, White. You’re daughter is involved. I don’t think it’s just about a big-fish scheme. What happened is I suppose Bud paid Shelly and Dickie Pee to remove Jacobs and place the blame on Junior’s dad. Bud wanted to keep that dam at all cost.”

  Milkerson shook his head sadly. “No,” he said. “That’s not quite it.”

  “But close,” I said. “I guess I left out Lumen Bostock. He knows about it. He’s out here trying to catch those big ones for himself, and you can’t exactly say anything about it. But Jake did. He got Bostock in trouble for it. So Bostock helped kill Jacobs. He was the one who snuck into the Pêche Tôt and slop-knotted another yellow sally onto Jake’s tippet.”

  “No,” said White Milkerson quietly. He was shaking out yet another cigarette. “You still don’t have it.”

  “Then there’s something else out there in Lake Bud, out there where those cones for the Jet Ski thing take a detour. Something that’s worth killing to protect. Maybe I ought to dive down and take a look.”

  He looked at me.

  “I’ve been learning to dive,” I said. “Down in New Mexico. That big reservoir above the San Juan River tailwater. Gives me something to do when the dam flow is too high to fish.”

  Milkerson lit the cigarette and aimed it upstream, past the fence to the next big hole. There seemed to be surrender in his movements.

  “Can I show you something?” he asked me.

  And I said he could—he could show me something.

  Chapter 41

  “After you,” said White Milkerson at the fisherman’s ladder, and I led him up and over Junior’s slumping barbed wire. At the top rung—the ladder was wobbly aluminum—I heard a faint hiss and smelled what I thought was burning rubber. I jumped down. Milkerson was just plugging his cigarette into his mouth and using both hands on the ladder rails. I figured he had just burned his shirt sleeve, or his moustache, or something.

  “You take the net,” he instructed me, and he pointed into the deep pool ahead.

  “Go on,” he said, “farther.”

  He started his shocker motor and I waded in. I was about crotch deep and sinking into mud when I started to feel the water coming in—a cold spot in my waders first, then a trickle absorbed in my trousers—but within seconds my entire leg was filling up.

  I looked back at Milkerson. He was still at the bank, adjusting something on his shocker. A moment more and I was standing in a bag of frigid water. In the instant before Milkerson’s shock probe touched the water, I understood. He had lured Jacobs out here.

  He had burned that perfect round hole in Jacobs’ waders with a cigarette. Three days ago, Jake Jacobs, too, had found himself suddenly standing in bag of cold water up to his waist, uninsulated from electricity.

  Milkerson had used the maximum power on his shocker—the big fish setting. The rest, the murder itself, I couldn’t quite picture. But I was about to experience first hand.

  “You killed Ja—”

  My voice stopped as the probe hit the water, and in that same millisecond, I belonged to White Milkerson. I belonged to him utterly. I wasn’t shocked hard. I don’t think I was even injured. But I was tingling, stunned and jellied, unable to move. A yell for help stopped cold in my throat.

  Milkerson wasn’t even looking at me. He was poking around in the streamside brush. I felt oddly hot, and at the same time freezing cold, and for a long moment my heart did not beat. I had been looking at my attacker when the current hit, and I could not so much as redirect my eyeballs as Milkerson found a stick on the bank and waded deliberately toward me. My heart began to skitter and thrash. I knew suddenly where Shelly Milkerson had learned to tie a nail knot. Her dad had taught her. He had taught her well. But all she had done with the skill was to repair her camper ropes. It was Milkerson, stalking toward me, who had kicked off the Respect Landowner’s Rights sign in order to tie on Jake Jacobs’ leader. That was his nail knot. Milkerson was the killer. The snapping turtles I’d seen feeding on small, dead trout—those trout had died when Milkerson turned up his shocker to the highest setting. I knew all that—but like Jake Jacobs, Founder and President, Friends of Black Earth Creek, I could not raise my hands. I could not cry out. I could not fall over. Nothing.

  Knowing he shouldn’t touch me, Milkerson worked the stick under my shirt collar and used that leverage to shove my head under. What might have been panic was electrically mixed up into something like relief. Movement was relief. Cold was relief. My face touched water and my body followed, until I was face down in the creek with my assassin gently holding me under, finishing his cigarette, I imagined, waiting for me to breathe.

  I could not struggle. I would have no marks. It was perfect. I was drowning. I was gobbling water … gobbling knowledge at last … the heart of my little boy, Eamon, racing again beside mine … the two of us seared together in icy panic.

  Except the feeling was calm. It was calm—drowning, dying. As a bubble of bizarre pain rose through my aorta, I felt myself drift free and scrape the limestone rubble of the bottom. I heard gunshots. And I was calm enough to wonder: why?

  Chapter 42

  Junior helped me figure out the rest. Shelly Milkerson had tricked me out of the Cruise Master as her way of getting her hands on my Glock again. She had held the weapon once before, when she had broken in to steal the ponytail and the earring, but she must have hoped for something better and put the pistol down. But when Melvin O’Malley was arrested for the murder of Jake Jacobs, she had wanted the Glock back. She had wanted to kill her father.


  “I had no idea anything was happening,” Junior told me. She was jittery and smelled of burnt hair. “I had just gotten home, walked into the barn, ready to milk some very unhappy cows, when I look up and here comes your RV, up the drive, then off the drive, through that fence, through the chicken house, then right into the side of my propane tank.”

  I stared numbly at the wreckage. Shelly had driven clear to the top of the coulee, ten miles, before she could find a spot wide enough to turn the Cruise Master around. Then, coming back, she had seen her father trying to drown me. She had jumped out with the Cruise Master still in gear and rolling downhill. Struck with a four-ton blow, Junior’s propane tank had spouted gas like a blow torch. The blast had tossed the Cruise Master on her side and melted her brand new tires. She was beat-up good. Junior was damaged too. The back side of her ponytail was singed short, and her elbows were red.

  At first, she told me, she had thought I was in the Cruise Master. Then, finding me about fifty yards downstream of where I’d been shocked, she thought the blood that pinked the creek was mine. She had hauled me to the bank. She had gone up and down me, looking for an injury. Nothing. And after a minute or two I was breathing fine. Then she had fanned out her perspective a little. She had spotted Shelly Milkerson huddled upstream under a box elder, curled up in a ball, sobbing. My Glock was on the ground before her. Her father, Manfred Milkerson, was washed up and moaning across the creek, shot through the gut, both arms, one leg, a hip. Shelly had emptied the Glock. But she had failed to kill him. Moments later, B.L.’s siren was screaming up the road. The Black Earth Volunteer Fire Department was about five minutes behind him.

  “But, why?” Junior was saying at my side. She slung a towel around my neck and left her arm there. “Why would White kill Jake? Why would he frame Daddy? Why does Shelly hate him so much?”

  I didn’t know yet. “Hey, wait a minute,” I said. I shifted on the porch steps to look at her. “Where did you come from?”

  “Bailed out.” She nodded toward the road, where Dickie Pee’s blue van had arrived among the squad cars—two more from the county sheriff now—plus an ambulance. “Dickie bailed me out this morning. Friends of Black Earth Creek money.” She aimed a thin, worried smile across the coulee. “He said if anybody was a friend of the Black Earth Creek, it was me and Dad, sitting on this land all this time when we could easily sell it.”

  “So,” I said. “I guess you might forgive Dickie now?”

  “I guess I might.”

  “I guess that could kind of move you ahead on the Darrald thing.”

  “I guess it might,” she said. She stared at me. “Okay then,” I said.

  We watched quietly out at the road, our legs brushing sometimes. Junior went inside and made coffee. She called her lawyer and he said her dad would be out soon. After a while, Milkerson left in an ambulance. He was still alive enough to warrant more sirens, along with a county escort, and long after the vehicles were gone, we watched Junior’s spooked cattle gallop in fits and starts across the pasture, tongues lolling, udders flapping. Then, voluntarily it seemed—nobody led her—Shelly stumbled into the back seat of a sheriff’s squad car and sat numbly.

  “She could have stopped,” Junior said. “She didn’t have to shoot him all those times.”

  I didn’t know. Maybe she did have to. She understood things we didn’t.

  “There’s more to it,” I said. “Milkerson didn’t have to drown me either. Not based on the little I know.” I sipped hot Folger’s, the kind from the red can. It tasted better than my instant, better than Ingrid Jacob’s Brazilian shade-grown, better than any coffee I had ever tasted before. “All I know is that he was helping President Bud run a trophy trout operation.”

  “Oh,” said Junior said beside me. “That.”

  I looked at her in surprise. “You knew?”

  I felt her fingers at the base of my neck, kneading in a worried fashion, like she was feeling for injuries. But I was okay. Better than okay. Nothing like nine hundred volts and a lung wash, I guess.

  “I knew,” said Junior.

  “Everybody knew?”

  She shrugged and gave me her wrinkle-nosed little smile.

  “Well, kind of.”

  “What about Jake Jacobs?”

  “Jake found out,” she said, “but he couldn’t really prove anything. He never saw anybody walking on whatever out there on Lake Bud, feeding those fish, I guess, and he needed Milkerson for the study. So I guess he never felt like ratting on White. Nobody really cared anyway. Those guys who came up here for trophies, they spent a lot of money. And for poachers like Bostock, it was kind of a game for them to catch one of Bud’s big fish. It’s old news. Jake finally figured that out and kept his focus on getting the dam removed.”

  “Then why would White kill him?”

  Junior shrugged and sighed. She didn’t know either.

  I sipped my coffee and watched Bud Lite heel-toe up Junior’s drive toward us. “How many years ago did Shelly’s mother run off?” I asked Junior.

  “Twelve or so. I think she was five.”

  “And those big trout,” I said, “have been in here only a couple years.”

  Junior gave me a puzzled look.

  “Which makes it hard to understand how an earring belonging to Shelly’s mother could end up in the belly of one of Bud’s trout.”

  B.L. had entered earshot and I stopped. He aimed a pudgy finger at me. “You stick around here,” he said. “We’re gonna talk.”

  I nodded. He tugged his belt a bit and worked his chew at Junior. She waited until he turned to walk back. He got halfway down the drive. Then she said, “Hey, B.L.”

  “What?”

  She made him wait. His dad was coasting up in his red Suburban. B.L.was pulled in both directions. “What?”

  I watched her nose wrinkle. “Sorry I gave you a nosebleed.” He glared at her.

  “Sure was easy, though,” Junior added.

  The Black Earth police chief turned and spat and stalked back toward the road. President Bud flopped out of the red Suburban.

  “Tell me again,” I said to Junior, “about that flood. The one that washed your farm buildings down into Lake Bud.”

  She repeated her story. She was a girl in grade school. The creek had come all the way to County K, picked up a corn crib, a hog house, and a half-mile of fence and carried them down into Lake Bud, where they sank somewhere and were never seen again. “That’s why we moved the summer kitchen and we don’t build over there anymore,” she concluded, nodding at the other side of the road. “Pasture only.”

  But I had stopped listening. The walking on water—I’d figured it out.

  “Come on,” I told her. “Get your tractor. And some cable.” She looked at me.

  “The stuff you haul out stumps with. Get it.” She was waiting for an explanation. “I’m going diving,” I told her. “In Lake Bud.”

  Chapter 43

  We made a grim convoy down County K that afternoon. Junior took the lead in her big Case tractor, rumbling down the center stripe so that nobody could pass. I followed in Junior’s blue pickup. Getting enough diving gear from the Cruise Master was easy: the windows were busted, and stuff was spilled all over. I had loaded a reduced version—a waterproof flashlight, a mask, and a pair of flippers—into the bed of Junior’s pickup. It was okay, I told myself. I could hold my breath. I didn’t figure Lake Bud to be more than ten or fifteen feet deep.

  Behind me on the highway, restless and irate and trying to get around, followed President Bud in his red Suburban and B.L. in his cruiser. Junior and I had gotten out on the road before they could find out what was going on. Dickie Pee brought up the rear.

  As we came down County K past Lake Bud and the campground, Dickie Pee peeled off down the campground drive. I watched him go, and I wondered, but I had other things on my mind.

  We progressed at Junior’s heavy-cleated pace down Main Street to the left turn between the Lunch Box and the Hardware
Hank. Soon enough, we were moving up the far side of Lake Bud, past the cheese factory road and into the dirt lane that led through oak and birch forest down into President Bud’s lakeside lots for sale.

  Junior stopped about a foot from a brand-new, three-pipe gate. I could tell by the way she flared the big Case engine that I had her full cooperation. Her faith, I guess it was, since I hadn’t told her what I hoped to find. I wasn’t exactly sure myself. From the truck bed, arranging my meager gear, I watched the village president humpty-dumpty out of his Suburban and storm up. He braced a hand on Junior’s side mirror.

  “Now what in hell is going on. This is my property here.”

  “We can open that gate with a key,” I said, “or we can open it with a tractor.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.” His face wobbled with rage and panic. “There’s nothing out there. Fish. There’s fish out there. What’s wrong with that?”

  When I jumped out in flippers he seemed so startled he nearly fell over. B.L., meanwhile, had made his way to the front of the tractor, where he and Junior appeared to be reenacting a scene from fifth grade.

  “No!” he hollered. His voice was whiny. “Damnit, Junior! Stop!”

  Junior grinned back at him. She gunned the big Case engine until it made a noise like an avalanche in a junkyard. Then she opened the gate with the tractor.

  Finning out into Lake Bud, I used the orange buoys for the Jet Ski Jam as my guide. President Bud had laid them out, and they swung unnaturally wide around a point about one hundred yards north and west of the cheese factory. That was where the big brown trout were farmed—in Melvin O’Malley’s old corn crib, I figured, which had been washed down by the flood.