The Nail Knot Read online

  “Be sure now, fella,” he said. “‘Cause I’m going to ask you a question.”

  I waited.

  “You saw her, right? That farm gal, Junior, she took that ponytail out of Jake’s mouth, didn’t she?”

  “No,” I lied. “She didn’t.”

  He repeated himself. “Be sure now, fella.”

  “I’m sure.”

  I swear I wasn’t helping her. I was helping myself. The Dog was five minutes from gone. The village president shook his head and regarded me sorrowfully for a long moment. His son the chief spat and breathed aloud. “Well, then, come on, boy,” said Bud. “The fella says he’s sure. So let’s carry on. Lead the way.”

  I watched them drive up the dirt lane and out onto the county highway, where they both stopped and climbed out of their vehicles. Then, side by side, Bud and Bud Lite walked back and swung the iron gate closed on the campground with a loud clang. I could be sure if I wanted, I guess. I could play games.

  But so could they.

  I heard the ring of a chain and the snap of a lock as they shut me in. The Dog, they were saying, was going to be part of this, property of the Village of Black Earth until this thing was solved.

  This man is here to help us

  Like hell I was. I tossed that bag of hair. I did a piss poor job of it, too, but at least I put an end to my part in whatever crime was taking place. I crossed the black grass to the soupy shore of Lake Bud and prepared to fling the bag as hard as I could. While my arm was rushing back, though, the weight of the ponytail caused the bag to flop back and under my wrist, so that when I fired forward, the geometries were all mixed up. The energy went more up and sideways than out, and the bag flew a mere fifteen feet before rattling in among some cattails. A real shitty toss. But anyway, I was rid of it.

  My next step was to take out that iron gate. For a dizzy while, I was actually convinced I could do it with the Cruise Master at about thirty miles per hour. I would drive down around the popup camper, floor that big old eight-cylinder engine, and pound my way through—or die trying.

  But some deeper instinct made me walk up and look the situation over the first. The gate poles were forged steel pipe, about eight inches in diameter, set in concrete footings. The chain wasn’t much, but gate was back-blocked against the poles from the inside, and the piping was heavy-gauge and narrowly spaced. It was difficult to imagine that gate sprawled out on the highway in front of me. It was much easier to imagine myself stamped like a waffle through the steering wheel of the Cruise Master. And though the truth is that a big part of me still wanted to die, I guess I didn’t quite want it that bad.

  So I kept walking, across the highway and down the black chute of a driveway leading to the farm opposite the campground. Sundvig, said the mailbox. The place was dark, and I thought I knew enough about farms to imagine some serious tools in the barn—blowtorches, sledgehammers, maybe even dynamite. I could steal something. I could take down the gate. I could be gone in an hour.

  I was about three steps up the long, pitted drive when a pair of mutts tore from beneath a manure spreader and cancelled my plans. In cartoons you’ll see now and then the kind of dogs who run so fast that their back legs get ahead of their front legs, as if their passion to tear out an asshole was a greater force than any known to physics. These were those dogs, and I was that asshole. I got back across the road before they caught me, and they skidded to a stop on the shoulder, whining with savage disappointment. A light went on at the farmhouse porch, and I moved on up the road.

  The next farm was more than a mile upstream, about halfway to where I’d found the body. This time I avoided the driveway. Two hundred yards from the mailbox, I rolled under barbed wire and followed the last row of corn to the back of the field. From there, I skirted inward, illuminating the ground with my tiny flashlight, pushing quietly through the coarse leaves. Creatures scuttled ahead of me, darks shapes with glowing eyes, coons, possums, gargoyles, I don’t know. I was rashy and bathed in sweat by the time I emerged behind the barn, fists full of dirt clods, ready for more dogs.

  But the farm was quiet. I could hear cows inside the barn, shifting, sighing, their joints cracking, their manure slopping on the barn floor. The house was smallish and set beside a stand of ragged cottonwoods that stretched into the deep, starry sky. I could see the light of a television flickering in the front room. At the side of the house, another window let out light and the sound of running water. The air smelled sweet and lush above the aromas of dirt, manure, and hay.

  I killed my light and snuck around to the barn’s big, slumping gape of a door. Inside, the moment my light shone again, I saw that the ceiling was low, scarcely above my head, and the beams were clotted with bird nests, little igloos of swallow mud, and what seemed like a century of spider webs and dust. The floor was a hay-strewn path between gutters clogged with a foul black compost of cow piss and anything else that could fall off or out of an animal. A few startled cattle struggled awkwardly to their feet. A scrawny tabby cat sidled toward me, mewing hoarsely, her swollen teats nearly dragging. Barn swallows, beady-eyed, followed my progress.

  At the back of the barn one cow caught my eye. She sprawled in a corner. Foam clogged her nostrils and she breathed heavily. Her gut was distended, her tail was peeled back, and from her vagina protruded a tiny, bloody hoof. Startled by my flashlight, she bawled mournfully, and several sisters in the barn answered. I killed the beam, but she kept on bawling, looking moon-eyed in my direction. “Sorry,” I muttered. “I’m not a vet.”

  In the tool room, only ten steps away, all manner of powerful looking implements hung on a rough-hewn wall. At the tool room door, on a fifty-gallon drum top, sat a box of dynamite. Stump-Blaster, the box read. Its top was torn open, but it hadn’t been moved in decades—or however long a solid half-inch of black dust indicated. But it looked dry, and I meant to grab it.

  And that’s when the barn light snapped on. A rough voice said, “Whoosere?” Scuffling footsteps proceeded down the central alley of the barn. I ducked past the suffering cow and beneath the pipes of a milking stall. Down low, through the shifting legs of the cattle, I glimpsed plaid house slippers plowing through dirty straw. Above that, clean coveralls, and two gnarled old hands closed around something I took to be the stock of a shotgun.

  “Come on outta there,” growled the voice. “’Fore I pop ya.”

  I thought I had a plan. The farmer would search his way to the end of the barn and see the cow in trouble. Meanwhile I would work my way around him into the tool room. He would see me then, but he wouldn’t fire into his animals, I figured, so I was safe. And then I would escape into the cornfield.

  I crouched at the back of a milking stall, my heart like a bubble in my throat, and a cow’s tail slapping me across the top of the head. A city boy like me, I never saw the hoof coming. It caught me in the hip and sent me clattering over a stack of plastic buckets, bellowing in pain. When I looked up, he was over me.

  I’m not sure what I hoped for. First aid, maybe. Or sympathy. Hell, how about a hearty guffaw and some salty advice from an old stump of a gentleman who looked like Robert Frost and had an extra blowtorch he was looking to get rid of. Anything but the massive old warrior who towered over me in a trembling rage. Anything but a red-eyed, bent-nosed, hump-backed, messy-haired old giant, wielding a shovel blade as wide as a tractor seat and fully ready to knock me dead and scoop me out of his barn like so much cow flop.

  I scrambled as the shovel crashed down. Cows scattered as best they could in the narrow spaces and the old man limped after me. “Git,” he muttered. “Step out.” And the cows seemed to know what he wanted. They made way for his slow, dragging step. But they kept me in confusion, stamping and shying erratically around me, eyes rolling, hooves ready to strike.

  Near the front of the barn, his huge head plowing through spider’s webs, the farmer lunged in and caught me with a blow to the mid-back. I sprawled against a feed bin and slumped down, gasping, my wind knocked out, m
y arms wrapped desperately around my head. I felt the wind of the shovel as he just missed me. I rolled and the next blow thundered off the feed bin.

  Then “Daddy!“ shrieked a voice. Everything became still. I peered out between my forearms. She had him—I mean Melvina “Junior” O’Malley, wet-haired, in a bathrobe and barn boots—had her old man, Mel Senior, by the ear.

  “Daddy,” she said more calmly. “This man is here to help us.”

  Everything is going to work out

  “No,” I panted. “No, I’m not. I’m not here to help you.”

  She didn’t seem to hear that. She made her wrinkle-nose grin at me. She smelled like shampoo—a wet-haired, sun-burned, sweet-smelling female linebacker in shit-crusted boots and a white terry cloth robe, grinning like she was glad to see me.

  “This is him, Daddy. This is the guy.”

  “He shoulda been back a long time ago,” seethed the old man, his pale blue, bloodshot eyes darting around the barn.

  “He’s not Darrald, Daddy. Look.” With a tug on his giant ear, Junior brought his focus back to me. She took the shovel away and tossed it along the floor toward the dark maw of the barn. “See? He’s the man from the campground. The fisherman who found Jake. I gave him the ponytail. He’s helping us.”

  She let go of the ear. The old man felt his pinched spot like a child, his attention drifting.

  “I’m not helping you,” I repeated. “I got locked in down at the campground. I was leaving and they shut that gate on me.”

  “Who shut the gate on you?”

  “The village president,” I told her. “And his son, the cop.”

  “Figures,” said Junior. She tipped her head, squeezed her wet hair. “Anyway, I was going to come down to the campground after my shower. I got your money already. Hang on a sec.”

  Just like that, still acting on her premonition that I was full of manure, that I wasn’t really leaving, she galumphed briskly away toward the house in her big boots, leaving me alone with the old man who less than five minutes before had tried to smack my brains out with a shovel. I tensed. I plotted my escape from his next homicidal lunge. But Mel O’Malley Senior stared vaguely at a spot somewhere on my mid-chest and said, “Dance.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What I like,” he said, his voice a high-pitched rasp. “I like the dancing.”

  I nodded carefully. “Me too.”

  The old man nodded back. “Ice cream,” he added eventually. “Sure,” I said. “Ice cream is good stuff.”

  He pulled at his saggy ear. The pregnant cow released a snuffling sigh from the back of the barn. “What kind of ice cream do you like?”

  As though this were the wrong thing to say, the old man glared at me beneath his great, shrub-like eyebrows. His mouth hung open.

  “I see you two had a chat,” said Junior, galumphing back into the barn, carrying a fist full of cash and a pair of long-handled bolt cutters. She put a finger under her father’s chin and closed his mouth. “Is he making any sense? Kind of a rummage sale up there sometimes.”

  Then she counted out twenty fifty-dollar bills into my hand. “I told you Gareth Kaltenburg wanted that bull,” she said cheerfully. She handed me the bolt cutters. “There you go. Just nip that chain and swing the gate open to the inside. Daddy,” she said, “move aside and let him out of there.”

  She gave the old man a shove. He moved over stubbornly. I got as far as the barn door and Junior said, “You call me in a week, all right? Everything should be all straightened out by then, and I expect Jake’s poor wife is going to want his hair back. He did have beautiful hair.”

  I hesitated, thinking about that Ziploc bag somewhere on the muddy bottom of Lake Bud. I wasn’t going to call Junior. The dead man’s wife would never see his hair again. Those decisions had already been made.

  “Thanks again,” Junior urged me. “Go on. Don’t worry. Everything is going to work out just fine.”

  I still couldn’t move. She looked at me curiously. Her reddish-blonde hair had started to dry to its odd, stiff length. Even after washing, it was slightly bent above the ear from being under a cap all day. That dead wrist watch still hung from her neck, but it was inside against her skin, tucked under the thick collar of the bathrobe. I guess she never took it off. I guess I was noticing things about her.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked me.

  “Uh … you might want to look in the back of the barn. There’s a cow back there—I think she’s in trouble.”

  Junior’s eyes widened and she roused her old man with a stiff nudge. “Daddy. Darl’s in breach again.” Her eyes came back to me. “See? You did come here to help us. Hey—what’s your name?”

  “Dog.”

  “Your real name.” “That’s as real as it gets.”

  She gave me the grin again. She didn’t buy that, I could tell. More manure. But she was playing along. Then she turned and trooped off with her dad in tow to help the cow.

  “Thanks, Dog!” she hollered over her shoulder. “We’ll talk in a week.”

  That was my chance. I had a pair of bolt cutters. I had a thousand bucks cash, which meant another fifty days on the road. The Dog was free again. But I stood there. I just stood there under the beady eyes of the barn swallows, a damaged Dog, midstream in a reckless, asinine, beautifully mixed up attempt to re-dissolve myself in waters. Upstream, I urged myself. Upstream.

  And then I did move—only I moved deeper into the barn, my mind and my feet in trancelike disconnection, following Junior and her dad. The why is clear to me only now. The Dog was drawn to them, father and child, and to the idea of getting to the truth behind a drowning that could ruin of their little family. The Dog had his needs, his buried bones.

  I found them in the rear of the barn. They had mustered to save the cow and her calf. The old man was uncoiling a dusty rope. Junior was running water into a five-gallon plastic bucket and dumping in what looked like iodine. Then she rolled up the sleeve of her robe and dipped her right arm in to the shoulder. The curled robe sleeve came out wet and stained. She saw me as she raised up, and she grinned.

  “More help?” she said. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Now my house is on fire.”

  She shook her arm dry and squeezed iodine water out of the sleeve. Her dead watch was hanging out now, flopping around. She cinched her robe sash into a square knot. “No? Then … my goats are in the road?”

  I cleared my throat. “Why,” I asked. “Why did they lock me in the campground?”

  “Oh,” she shrugged, and she lifted the cow’s tail. “That would be classic Bud.” Casually, she inserted her arm into the cow’s birth canal, working her way all the way into the shoulder as she talked and I stared in a city-boy horror. Sure, I had gutted fish. But Junior was wiggling her fingers half way across the insides of a thousand-pound live animal.

  “See,” she said, “Jake Jacobs moved out here three years ago from Madison. He bought the old Krauthammer mansion on Main Street. Fixed it up. Painted it, hell, I don’t know, celery, mauve, and goose-shit, something like that. His wife, Ingrid, poor thing, she really suffered here at first. She couldn’t get any decent coffee in town.” Mel Senior broke into hacking laugh. “This other leg is folded,” Junior grunted to him, changing her angle.

  Blood had begun to seep from the cow’s vagina and soak into the white robe, but Junior didn’t seem concerned. The old man stepped forward and pushed a toe into the cow’s abdomen, working it around until Junior said, “Got it. Anyway,” she went on, pulling a second small hoof into view, “the coffee’s been just fine with us Black Earthlings all these years—but what do we know, right? So Ingrid opens up a coffee shop right across from the Lunch Bucket, which has only been there about two hundred years. And Jake decides the creek needs protection. And we’re all wondering … protection from what? You know what it turns out? Protection from us! The creek needs protection from us!”

  Junior pulled her arm out. She stuck it back in the bucket. The water turned
pink from blood.

  “Funny thing is,” she said, dropping about six feet of the rope into the bucket, “Ingrid and Jake, they were newcomers and all, but they were both right in what they brought to Black Earth. I mean, don’t tell anybody, but those espressos Ingrid makes are great. They’re worth about ten cups of that Lunch Bucket junk. When I take Dad in to the clinic on Wednesdays, I grab one of those every time.”

  She grinned at me, stirring the rope around. Now the water was mauve—dust and blood—afloat with animal hair. Mel Senior had gone to the nose of the cow to stroke her.

  “And the truth is,” Junior told me, “Jake was right, too. Between all the poaching that goes on around here, and the pollution, and the development, we’re on a course to ruin the creek in no time. Daddy doesn’t know it, but Jake sold me on that. He really did. About two years ago he formed this group, Friends of Black Earth Creek, and …”

  She paused to instruct herself in whispers on the tying of a slip knot at the end of the wet rope. She seemed happy to get it on the first try.

  “Anyway, my point was that Jake managed to hack a lot of us off in a very short period of time, most of all President Bud. Jake wanted the Lake Bud dam out. He said it was a hazard, and it was slowly destroying the stream. He filed an open records request, and that’s how we all found Jake was right about the safety hazard. We found out what we had been paying all these years to keep the dam maintained and insured.”

  She looped the knot around the cow’s hooves and drove it back inside the cow until she caught hold of something. Then she tugged on the rope. “Okay, Daddy,” she said. The old farmer took the rope end back around a post and pulled it tight. “Go slow,” his daughter instructed him.

  She watched her dad pull, walking around the post, until she seemed satisfied with the tension. “Okay, now, Darlene, sweetie, you push.” She turned to me. She spoke as she rinsed her arm again. “Turns out Bud had been spending a hundred grand a year on insurance premiums alone, tucking it into the general liability budget. Because that’s his land across there, opposite the campground. And he’s trying to develop it as lakefront property. Pull Daddy. More. And Darl, honey, I know it hurts, but you gotta get busy.”