The Nail Knot Read online

  That last part made me jump. I hadn’t seen that coming.

  “My daddy wanted to kill him, too,” she went on. “He even talked about it.”

  She took my arm. “That’s why I need your help,” she whispered. She squeezed. Her grip hurt. “Do me a little favor? Please?”

  That was it. Hell—I had my driver’s license back. What was I waiting for? I was out of there. Puke behind those willows, I told myself. Stumble away through those purple asters. Big Two-Hearted River by sunup.

  “Hey!” Farmer Jane called after me.

  Her real name was going to be Melvina.

  Melvina Racheletta O’Malley.

  I was going to call her Junior. And sometimes in my sleep. “Hey!” She called after me. “Hey!”

  But I leaned on my ugly attitude and kept my legs pumping. Right, I told myself. Hay. And corn. And soybeans. Look at all the lovely hog feed. Say good bye to Black Earth. I was out of there.

  In the cave of the Cruise Master

  If you’ve ever hauled ass two miles over asphalt on a hot day in chest waders, you know how poached I felt by the time I reached the Cruise Master. If you haven’t had the pleasure, imagine wrapping yourself in heavy-duty black garbage bags up to the armpits and then setting the Stairmaster on eighteen for a half hour—in the sun.

  I collapsed straight into my lawn chair. Panting and blind from sweat, I tore at my wading shoes, compounding the knots. Finally I just pitched a pan of dishwater over my head, peeled everything down to the ankles, and sat there glistening like a half-shed snake. The ambient air, about eighty-five degrees, felt like refrigeration.

  It was an oddly mixed-up glance I cast about the campground then. I hoped to hell no one was watching the Dog. The campground was a narrow sprawl of rough-mowed grass, and the amenities totaled a handful of warped picnic tables, a few old fire rings, his-and-her pit toilets, plus all the hazardous garbage you could step on. An iron gate stood open where the dirt lane met the county highway. Down at the dead end of the lane, about fifty yards toward the village, camped the only other occupant, a slumped and mildewed pop-up trailer that appeared deceptively abandoned. Come nighttime, there was action down there. Pickups came and went. People laughed and shouted. A radio blared. Pot smoke sweetened the air. It looked like the trailer had been there all summer, maybe longer. At least the lawnmower had been working around it for a good long time I slowed down finally and got the shoes off. Then I removed my waders, tossed them over the bench seat inside the Cruise Master. I stowed my tackle, kicked out the wheel blocks, rolled up the awning, strapped the lawn chair over the spare tire, and went inside.

  I had parked in the shade of massive old burr oak, and it was passably cool in the galley of the Cruise Master. I rinsed the vomit taste out my mouth and changed my sweaty pants. I poured a vodka and Tang. I lit one of my so-called cigars. Now that was better. In the cave of the Cruise Master, leaning over a map, plotting escape and getting a cheap buzz on, I felt like myself again. I felt like a proper trout hound.

  That’s right. If you can imagine a Roger Tory Peterson Guide to Human Beings, then go a step further and picture me under Eastern Trout Hound. Order Human Drop-Outs. Species Nomadic Fly Caster. Identifying marks: permanent squint, bizarrely patterned sunburn, cigar-breath, soggy underwear, erratic movement….

  You expect a life story, I guess. Well, too bad. The Dog had lived and lost. Now I was off the tether and out of the pack. With the help of my tax guy—I mean my tax guy from back in the day when I paid taxes—I had set up something that worked for me. It was about solitude and movement. It was about long stretches of new water, about stiff legs, exhaustion, vodka, and sleep. That was the way of the Dog, and I was sticking to it.

  So there I was swilling a v-and-T over the road map, giving the Cruise Master another smoke bath, almost calm enough to drive away, when I heard a vehicle turn off the highway into the campground.

  I was sure it was the village chief of police. He’d done such a half-assed job of questioning me, I knew he had to come back for more. I cursed myself for not leaving sooner. I had lingered over the map, spacing out in the womb of the Cruise Master and allowing the cop time to think back to whatever ten-week police-training course he had squeezed in between bowling league and rotating the tires on his monster truck.

  But when I fingered back the curtain I saw it wasn’t the cop. It was her, Farmer Jane, and she was clod-hopping off the running-board of a mud-spattered blue Ford pickup.

  For the second time that day, I stared in something like taxonomical confusion. They did not make women like her in the tony suburbs of Boston. Women just did not cover ground like that where I came from. Their arms did not swing hands-open at their sides as if ready to shear sheep. And when a proper suburban Boston lady knocked on a door, it was a tidy little rap-rap, not the full-sized WHAM-WHAM-WHAM! that Farmer Jane laid on the Cruise Master door.

  I was backing up, stumbling downstream through the galley over the detritus of a three-year road trip, planning to hide in the bunk, when she hollered.

  “Hey!”

  I was startled. My ugly attitude was shot. I couldn’t find it. “Hey!” hollered Farmer Jane again.

  WHAM-WHAM-WHAM!

  “I know you’re in there! And I hope you’re decent, ‘cause I’m comin’ in.”

  A woman called Junior

  Like I said, Melvina Racheletta O’Malley was proper name, but she said I should call her Junior, like everybody else in Black Earth. Not that she was happy about the whole Junior thing, she wanted me to know, but that was another story.

  “B.L. can’t see me here,” she continued, out of breath. “He’s already got ideas. Can we talk?”

  What I had done is plunked down abruptly behind my little fold-out table, faking a studious immersion in the topography of the Middle West. My map was open to Iowa.

  “Sure,” I blurted. “Come on in. Nice to see you again.” The Dog groped for the proper convention. “Get you a drink?”

  She raked a wrist across her sweaty forehead, exposing a muscular underarm that had been shaved about a week ago. She puffed and looked around the Cruise Master.

  “I’ll take a beer if you got one.”

  I popped the cooler. At my last stop, the Letort River in Pennsylvania, the sight of a kid fishing with his dad had triggered in me the urge to have a trout hound’s party—me, my fly tying kit, and a twelve-pack of Iron City beer. But I had run out of hackle feathers and passed out in my lawn chair, and I still had four cans left. I set one on the table and reached toward the cabinet. I was intending to find a clean cup and pour my visitor a beer when a snap turned me. All I saw was the woman’s freckled throat—pumping once, twice, three times. She set the can down empty.

  Wow. There followed a brief and almost religious moment of quiet, where her skin flushed and her green eyes watered and I felt very close to the primal root of language. Quench, I was thinking. Slake. Christ, six feet away, I could feel that beer go down.

  Then Junior squeezed the can precisely flat with her bare hands and handed it back to me. Midwestern manners, I guessed.

  “So you wanted to talk about something?”

  “Like I said on the stream, I think I’m going to need some help.”

  She tipped up her cap and glanced about the place, waiting for me to track down an excuse and wound it. “I was just leaving town,” I told her.

  “Right,” she said. “That’s what I thought. That’s why you can help me.”

  She lifted the curtain and checked the highway. Then she got right down to the business of horrifying me. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the black, fibrous stuffing she had extracted from the dead man’s mouth.

  She laid the thing on the table. “You know what that is?”

  I had no idea. The thing was wet and black—gummed together with mucous and uncurling messily on my table like the ruined nest of some hideous bird.

  She said, “Had you ever met Jake?”

 
I said I hadn’t.

  Junior cracked her knuckles and cast another glance through the folds of my curtain. She didn’t seem to notice the mildew spots across the sun-bleached fabric.

  “Okay,” she said, dropping the curtain. She gnawed her bottom lip. “Well, Jake was a bit of a special case. One look at him, you could tell that. He just moved in one summer, he and Ingrid, his wife, and right away they wanted to change the way things are run in the village. And you know how that goes usually.”

  I opened my own beer.

  “I mean, Jake meant well,” she said. “He really did. Ingrid is a different story. But Jake … well … he just didn’t….” I waited. She checked the road again.

  “Dad hated Jake,” she told me, her fists clenching. “The way Jake blamed farmers for messing up the creek … that made Dad real angry. He made his threat on Jake, and everybody knows it. But a lot of other people had it out for Jake too. And this … Dad would never … I mean, I don’t think …”

  The fibrous mass had uncurled on my galley table, revealing a green rubber band at midpoint. “Dad wouldn’t do this. I know he wouldn’t.”

  I had kept my eyes mostly off the thing, but now my gaze lingered long enough to acknowledge the obvious: Jake Jacobs’ mouth had been crammed with hair, and when I actually looked at the hair for a moment, noted its fineness and luster … it was obviously hair from the human head.

  “I mean …” Junior paused and took a huge breath. “I know Dad said he would do it … I know Dad threatened Jake … but …”

  She lifted and dropped the curtain.

  “And see,” she said, “B.L. is such a sucker. He’s going to fall for it.”

  I raised my hands in surrender. “What is it you want from me?”

  Junior O’Malley fingered the dead wrist watch that hung between her small, tight bosoms. She studied me.

  “I’ve been watching you out there,” she said. “You cover a lot of ground. You catch a lot of fish.”

  I shrugged. There was no need to tell her she had just covered the Dog’s entire list of strong points. I could fish myself into solitary exhaustion, seven days a week, with the best of them. I had done it, all over the country, for nearly three years straight. I was going for feral—going for lone wolf—and I thought I’d nearly made it.

  “So this is what happened with Jake and Daddy,” she continued, deciding for some reason that I was worthy of a story. “Last month at the village board meeting, Jake stood up like he usually does and starts going on and on about mud in the creek and how it was doing something or other to the larva of the insects and how that was hurting the trout and so on, getting everybody all stirred up, like he usually does. And he was blaming the fields and the cattle and the tractor crossings—you know, blaming us farmers.”

  She crinkled her sunburned nose and looked at me. I was supposed to be caring about this.

  “Jake blamed other people too. Politicians, poachers, developers. That’s the thing to remember.” I nodded as if I meant to remember. “So I took Dad there, to the meeting. I always do—at least until this last time. Usually he just sits there whittling and staring out the window. But this time Jake went on and on about cattle in the stream. I guess Dad had just heard enough. Suddenly he reared up and he hollered—”

  She was flushing, breathing through her nose and fingering the useless watch. She took another quick look around the Cruise Master.

  “You should put some crystals in here,” she told me out of nowhere. “They break up stagnant energy. And maybe a dream catcher over that bunk window. You know, because I’m sure some good ideas flow through here—some good energies—but you’re just not catching them.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “You move so fast on the stream,” she said, “I kind of wonder …”

  “You don’t need to wonder.”

  She made a funny, downcast smile. She spun the crushed beer can on the table between us.

  “Well, anyway,” she went on, “Dad wasn’t the only one on Jake’s case. Everybody talked about the fancy-chicken way he looked. If you’re from around here, it you’re a Black Earthling like the rest of us, Jake was real different. I don’t mean messed-up different, like B.L. our police chief. I mean like from a different planet.”

  While Junior struggled to gather her next thoughts, I pictured the dead man and felt my sick confusion again. Jake Jacobs, in his fly fishing garb, had looked like a Dog from a better pack—richer, younger, handsomer, more secure—and yet even more dead. There was a message there—maybe—but I wasn’t sure what it was.

  “So at the village board meeting,” she continued, “Dad reared up, and he yelled at Jake to shut up. Of course Jake kept talking. Well, Dad’s had a couple of strokes, but he’s still pretty strong. And his dementia can make him a little unpredictable sometimes. He knocked a half dozen people out of the way trying to get to the front of the room. When I caught him—”

  She raised her thick arm, put her hand to her ear and pinched, to show how she had caught her dad. That was the first time I noticed her tiny stud earrings—just the faintest, shiest touch of femininity, but it was quickly lost in a whiff of sweat and the startling image of her knocking chairs over, corralling an angry old farmer by the earlobe.

  “—Dad had his pocket knife out, waving it around. Jake was still talking about mud in the stream and Dad hollers, ‘Shut up or I’m gonna shut you up. Then I’m gonna cut that goddamn thing off and shove it in your mouth!’”

  She hung her head. Both of us looked at her old leather work boots, worn to the steel in the toes.

  “I didn’t take Dad to the meeting this month,” she told me. “That meeting was last night, seven o’clock. I left him home and went alone. Dad didn’t even notice. Lately he’s been back thirty years or so, talking like I’m his wife, like I’m Mom, and we’re about to have me.” She sighed. “Talking about me like I’m a boy already.”

  Junior. Now I got it. She was Melvina. Only girl-son of Melvin. The default Mel Junior. She stared down and picked at a rough spot on the back of her hand.

  “But Dad’s attack on Jake has been all the talk around town ever since. And now Jake is dead with this stuffed in his mouth. If B.L. finds this, he’s going to blame Dad. But Dad didn’t do it. So listen,” she blurted. “Could you just take it away?”

  I gaped at her. Take what away?

  “It’s his,” she said. “It’s Jake’s.”

  Jake’s what?

  “Oh,” she said. “Right. You never saw Jake.” “I never saw him.”

  Melvina “Junior” O’Malley looked at me. It was a look that begged the Dog to grasp things, to wake up and smell the Black Earth.

  She touched the thing that had been stuffed in the dead man’s mouth.

  “Jake’s ponytail,” she told me, and waited for my answer.

  The yellow sallies hatch at eight

  So there sat the Dog, half-tanked inside a 70’s-vintage RV, with a woman called Junior, and a dead man’s pony tail on the galley table. She fingered back the curtain once more, then looked at me eagerly, ready for my answer.

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay. Then I’ll pay you to take it away.” I refused again.

  “Look,” she said. “Jake was a big friend of the stream. Somebody killed him, and tried to frame my dad.” “Who would do that?” “Plenty of people.”

  “They hate the stream?” I asked. “Or they hate your dad?” “Neither. They hated Jake. Practically everybody in Black Earth hated Jake. Dad’s threat gave somebody the perfect opportunity.”

  “Or maybe your dad did what he promised.”

  She glowered out beneath her hat brim, scorched me with a look. “I’m telling you. He wouldn’t.”

  I don’t know why I kept talking to her. Old habits die hard, and maybe I thought I needed to solve her problem. But I told myself I was just stalling. If I used up enough time, she would just bolt. Then I would simply slip away. Big Two-Hearted by sunup.r />
  “How about letting the cop do his job?” I suggested.

  She gave that a dismissive snort. “You know why we call him B.L.? Because his daddy is Bud Bjorgstad, the village president. Bud wants to develop land on the creek. And B.L. is short for Bud Lite. He does whatever his daddy tells him.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I said it didn’t look that way. I said the son, on the stream, seemed to buck the father hard.

  “He fights it,” Junior said. “For show. But Bud always wins.” She looked around like she needed a crystal to break up her energy. She fingered the dead watch around her neck. “Then B.L.,” she said, “he takes it out on the rest of us. You don’t pay that camping fee, B.L.’s gonna be on your ass like a duck on a June bug.”

  Jesus, I thought. Welcome to the heartland.

  “But you have a county sheriff, right?” I asked her. “Why can’t you just go around your local cop and give this … give the ponytail … why can’t you just talk to the sheriff?”

  In her exasperation at this, a patch of dewy sweat bumps sprouted across her sunburned nose.

  “Because,” she said. “The sheriff and President Bud bowl together.”

  I said nothing for a moment, during which I pictured the keg-bellied man mowing down a three-ten split and lurching back to his beer.

  “They shoot skeet together, for crissake.”

  Now I pictured the village president beered up, with a shotgun.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you realize you’re withholding evidence in a murder case. You’re obstructing justice.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What’s the justice in framing Dad?” She fixed me with a sullen gaze. “Look,” she said, “I own a bull that’s wanted very badly by Gareth Kaltenburg. This bull has balls like grapefruits. I could give you a thousand bucks cash in about an hour.”