The Night Watchman: Log Jam 26 Summary & Analysis

When Wood Mountain is about to leave the train at Fargo, he copies down the addresses where Patrice is going to check for Vera. Patrice gives him two addresses but has another address that she doesn’t tell Wood Mountain about. That address is for Bernadette, Wood Mountain’s half-sister. When Wood Mountain gets off the train, he walks toward a bar. If he goes in, Patrice thinks, she’ll never speak to him again, but he walks past.

When Patrice arrives in Minneapolis, she doesn’t know how she’ll get to the first address where she wants to go. She asks a woman working at the ticket window, who says that she can take a taxi, and Patrice thinks, of course, just like in a story in a magazine. After she sits down on a bench by the curb, a car pulls up. She shows the address to the driver and asks how much it will cost. The driver says it will be free because he’s going there anyway. The driver tells Patrice to sit up front, but that doesn’t seem right to her, so she sits in the back. The man smells like Barnes, Patrice thinks, but also like he’s already had a drink.

The driver says his name is Earl. He pulls up to a place with neon letters over the door that say Log Jam 26. To Patrice, it looks like a bar, and she says she doesn’t go into bars. The man says it’s not a bar. When Patrice gets out, the man tries to push her forward, and then another man comes, and the two of them hold her by the elbows and force her through the doors. In the middle of the club, Patrice sees a lighted tank of water.

Patrice crumples on the floor and yells out that the men are trying to kidnap her. A third man approaches and asks Earl if that’s true. The third man apologizes to Patrice and introduces himself as Jack Malloy. Patrice tells the man that her name is Doris Barnes, and Jack offers Patrice a hamburger. He also offers her a job and explains that it would be swimming in the tank of water wearing a costume like an ox. He tells Patrice that it’s 50 dollars a night plus she gets to keep her tips every other night. Patrice says she’ll look at the outfit just for fun. Jack takes her to a dressing room and shows her a blue wetsuit with the hands and feet painted white like hooves. When Jack asks if she’ll try on what he calls the “waterjack” costume, Patrice says that she certainly won’t.

When Patrice brings up finding her sister again, Jack offers to help her look and says that she can stay in the dressing room at Log Jam 26. The whites of his eyes are yellow. Eventually, Patrice says that she’ll let Jack drive her where she wants to go. Jack says they’ll part ways if Patrice finds her sister, and if not, Patrice will do the waterjack show. As she goes to get in Jack’s car—the same car Earl had been driving before—she thinks that more new things have happened to her in the past day than in the rest of her life.