The Clinch Knot (15 page)

Let’s Just Go Find Out Why

 

Our silence lasted for an agonizing five minutes, until into that mute and anxious scramble penetrated the wail of a distant siren and Sneed offered, “Jesse dropped the boat.”

“Where did Jesse drop the boat?”

“At the place.”

“What place?”

“Over the line.”

“Where is the line?”

“On the map.”

“Where is the map?”

“In the locker.”

“What locker?

“Jesse’s.”

Aretha jumped in, shook him by the shoulders: “Where is Jesse’s locker? Come on, Baby. Tell us where it is.”

Her words, her presence, her hands on him, the hardcore alertness, all of this seemed to tilt Sneed into mental freefall. His eyes glazed. “Oh, Baby,” said his mother as a wet spot formed at the center of the robe and then the robe began to drip. The smell of urine on shag carpet rose strongly.

Then Uncle Judith broke in with, “Oh fer chrissake, I know where that sumbitch locker is at.”

The headlights of Uncle Judith’s pickup led us through the maze of a mini-storage facility on the far west end of town. Those same lights, if Uncle Judith stood aside just right, helped him key open the lock. They lit up an astonishing scene.

Someone had arranged the narrow interior of the storage locker like a living room that had been compacted. The headlights blazed upon a settee, paisley and frayed, that framed the rear of the space and was backed by a bookshelf with its trophies neatly arranged. Cramped at the sides of the locker were wing chairs, unmatched, that carried dirty lace doilies on their arms. All of it was powdered with dust and webbed by spiders.

“Holy hoosegow,” Uncle Judith muttered. “I rented this to get Galen’s stuff out of the house cuz I couldn’t stand to look at it. Didn’t tell nobody. I guess she found a key.”

As I stepped inside the cramped and musty space, the taste of Jesse’s grief rose in my throat. The girl had leaned framed photographs against the seats of the furniture, and in every one of those photographs, under my hand swipes, was a handsome bull rider in full regalia, or that same man and his little daughter, on horses, or in drift boats with fly rods, or at a soda counter, or on top of a massive hydroelectric dam. I wiped my hand on my pants. The dust would not come off.

“Ah, Jess,” Uncle Judith moaned. He had opened a cedar chest. “You just couldn’t get over it.” He straightened painfully. “Shoulda burned it all, that’s what. Shoulda tampered with the mail.”

I moved deeper into the spray of the headlights. Crammed in the gap between the settee and a wing chair sat a poured-glass sideboard with liquor bottles glinting out through thick grime.

“Here come the sirens,” Aretha said. “Once those boys get their noise on, they gotta do something. We have to get him out of here, hide him somewhere. Us too. Come on, Hoss. Quit gawking. And Baby, stop messing in there. Let’s go.”

I turned back to the foreground, where Sneed bent over a small heap of supplies, his hands moving aside dried food, water bottles, bedrolls. He searched slowly but certainly until he found what he was looking for: pants.
His
pants. He had only one hospital slipper by now, on his left foot, and this he kicked off into the dark outside the headlights. I knew a little about carbon monoxide poisoning from an industrial case in Brockton. In and out. On and off. Stable, then tippy. Or none of it, or all of it, prospects of a good recovery, or not, and not much—nothing, really, except the hyperbaric chamber—that anyone could do about it. I moved beside my buddy for support. First one hand gripped me, then the other, until he had the pants on. Then he went into the pile again and raised up with some small stretchy pink thing of Jesse’s. With that in his hand, Sneed appeared to struggle with his thoughts for a long moment. Then he bent to the pile once more.

“I will be damned,” Uncle Judith said, watching this, then toeing into the pile from the other side. “Looks like they were going on a trip. Errands, that girl said. She said she needed my truck for errands.”

“Jesse dropped the boat,” Sneed said, extending a map toward me.

I tipped it into the headlights. It was a section of a Forest Service topographic map, laminated, covering Tucker’s property and the Roam River from its entire length, top to bottom. There was a black Sharpie circle far upstream on what looked like swampland, south inside Wyoming, near the boundary of Yellowstone Park. “What’s this, Sneed?”

“The boat.”

“Rubber one? Jesse borrowed it from Cord Cook?”

He blinked at me.

“Never mind.” I pointed at a second black circle, thirty-some miles north from the first circle and a mile or two east of the Roam in the final downstream third of Tucker’s property. “What was supposed to happen here?”

As Sneed frowned at the map, that glaze came over him. I cursed myself.
Pay attention, Dog. Learn. Learn fast.
Sneed had been somewhat tuned in—until I asked him to retrieve a past thought about a future event that would happen in a place he had never been. Now he trembled under the weight of his confusion.

“What is it, Baby?”

He turned his back, hung his head. The sirens had stopped. Moths ticked against Uncle Judy’s headlights.

“Them sumbitches are at the motel,” the old guy muttered. He was back into that cedar chest, working a huge cud of snoose and sifting what looked like letters.

I put a hand on my young buddy’s shoulder. “Where were you going in the boat, Sneedy? Why?”

Tears had formed in his eyes when he looked up at me.

“Dog?”

“Yup. It’s me.”

Sneed nodded. Then he raised open hands, dropped Jesse’s pink thing, shook with the pain of forgetting everything else.

“Crazy,” muttered Uncle Judith. He let the chest lid fall with a loud clap and a cloud of dust. He straightened up, all of us looking at him. Under this scrutiny, he became the Miss Manners of snoose. He turned demurely, spit in his hand, wiped it on his pants. “Them sumbitches think we’re armed. They’ll be shooting.”

I looked at Sneed’s mother. I saw the fire in her eyes, the spring in her posture. Her hand went into Big Louis. As a matter of fact she
was
armed, and there
would
be shooting, so there was only one thing left.

“Sneedy,” I said, “never mind. Jesse dropped the boat. You and Jesse were going down the river.”

I took his open hands in mine. I closed them. “Let’s just go find out why.”

Looks Like We’re On Our Way

 

We shoved off an hour before dawn from Sneed and Jesse’s circle on the map, forty miles south on Forest Service land at the headwaters of the Roam River.

Tick Judith, having chosen to take his chances with the law rather than Dane Tucker and the river, cautiously toot-tooted goodbye and backed out the fire lane. Nervous brown jets squirted from his window. He was the Hansel and Gretel of snoose, leaving a trail as he disappeared into the woods—except on the Roam there would be no going backwards.

“Hoss?”

I couldn’t see Aretha. For a long moment after the headlights were gone nothing remained but the hoots of swamp owls, the baying of a million billion frogs, and Sneed’s heavy mouth-breathing.

“Yeah?”

“Can you swim, Hoss?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you swim good?”

“Last time I checked.”

The smells seeped back in—the piney muck, the coppery bog water—and as my eyes adjusted I saw that the first bluish threads of daylight had knit through a low fog to backlight the tamarack and red cedar as they rose jaggedly from acres of still black water.

“Well,” Aretha said, “that makes one of us.”

She resolved for me out of the darkness. She gripped her injured son by the tail of his new Jose Cuervo gimme shirt, outfitted by Uncle Judith from dregs behind the seat of his pickup. In her other hand, she gripped Big Louis. Her eyes gaped wide at the scene around us.

I shoved Cord Cook’s yellow twelve-foot inflatable to the edge of the swampy black water. “Okay, let’s go. See if you can get him in the boat.”

“This ain’t no boat, Hoss. This is some damn whoopee cushion.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It will bounce off the rocks.”

“Rocks?” Her voice echoed out of the swamp.
“Rocks?
”

I grabbed the last of Sneed and Jesse’s gear: some plastic sacks from Food Country, stumpy little oars and an anchor, somehow no life jackets. Last in were a vest and a fly rod from the storage locker. Property of Galen Ringer, I was guessing. But if the Dog was going down, the Dog was going down fishing.

Aretha got Sneed on the boat bottom between the fore and aft rigid seats. She positioned herself in the casting chair, then leaned forward to straighten Sneed’s shirt against the cool air. He twisted free, showed his back to her.

“Baby—what? It’s your mama.”

Sneed ignored this. He fingered Galen Ringer’s fly rod as I laid it along the gunwale. “Dog?”

“Right here, buddy.”

“We’re going fishing?”

“You bet.”

He smiled. I stowed gear around him. I felt Aretha’s glare as I laid down the toy-like oars beneath their toy-like oarlocks. “What are they hitting on, Dog?”

“They’re swimming on their backs, Sneedy, slurping up grasshoppers.”

This initiated a long pause. Then suddenly his eyes flooded, dropped tears, his expression abruptly desperate.

“Dog?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

He trembled. “What … what size … what size grasshopper?”

“They’re on a feed, Sneedy. Any size you want.”

“Okay.” He seemed enormously relieved. Then his expression changed once more. “Shit, Dog.” His face crumpled. He looked scared. “Listen to me. I’m … I’m like a … like a baby.”

In ten more minutes I was ready. Sneed’s mother still fixed me with what was most likely a jealous stare for keeping up a patter with her son while I slogged to the bow and yanked us off the boggy shore. The boat bottom dragged under Sneed’s weight. I spun the stern toward me and shoved us out. Mud sucked at my boots. Swamp water climbed my legs as I broke off with Sneed and made an announcement: “We’ll try to get across Tucker’s property line in the next couple hours and then hide until dark. We’ll float all night. By tomorrow morning we ought to be close to that spot on the map.”

“You tell ‘em, Pa.” Aretha’s tone was testy.

Now it’s Pa?
My retort: “Not my fault if he trusts me.”

“And you’ve known him for all of what? All of three weeks?” She distributed her glare between the two of us. “I gave birth to this child. This child gave me a damn hemorrhoid longer than three weeks.”

“Thanks for the information.”

“You are just too damn welcome.”

I looked at her. She straddled the seat, facing sideways so that she could be turned away from the two of us. I said, “Now here’s some information for you.”

“What?”

“Sit facing me in the middle of the seat with your feet spread apart.”

“What for?”

“So you don’t fall out.”

“Okay,” she said huskily, stomping her feet down in the center of the boat bottom. “Sure thing, Pa.”

I shoved the boat ahead of me
—Really? Pa
?—four hundred pounds of payload under the strain of my back. As the sky grew lighter, the swamp around my hips grew deeper and colder. The bottom hardened. I shoved us through a vast reef of buckbean, and on the other side I sensed here and there the faintest push of water with someplace to go. Then, at once, the floor bottomed out and I dipped to my chin, my feet wheeling emptily in the flow of a river.

I kicked and clawed as the boat spun out of control and began to undulate on the wave forms of a heavy current. My head dunked once. My legs thrashed and scissored without effect upon the great gust of water. Then at last I found my wits, rested a moment, drifted, made a truce with my total lack of control—and then I heaved an arm over the gunwale and caught the webbing of my seat.

“Sonofabitch!”

I hauled my chest and then my belly over the pillowy stern. I threw a leg over. I toppled in, slopping cold water over Sneed and, as Aretha’s shriek made clear, her too.

“Pretty smooth, Hoss.”

“How about if you at least make up your mind?” I said back with gritted teeth. “Is it going to be Pa or Hoss?”

Her eyes were moving up and down the soaked shape of me. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“On how I feel.”

“Those are the choices?”

“So far.”

I pawed the oars up from the boat bottom, fumbled them into the locks. I pried us around so I could see downstream. I was hacked off. “No Adam? No Little Joe? I can’t be one of those guys?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Purnell Roberts? Michael Landon? Those boys were fly. I mean, for white boys.”

Hell with that. Dog damn it. I cut the oars into rushing water. What I could make out ahead was that the river funneled toward a canyon, a strew of thinly submerged rocks in my path. I jabbed an oar too late. We bounced off a chalk-brown rock that skimmed the surface. I backpaddled the other oar to straighten the boat.

“And that defines the range, I take it, of your experience with white men.”

“Except for cops,” she said, “and jailers.”

“Then I should consider myself lucky, really—” another bump and spin “—to have such a high-up station in your life.”

Aretha regarded me with her head tipping one way, then the other. “Looks like we’re on our way,” was her comment.

“Yes, it does.”

I fought the oars to keep us lined up for more dangerous water. “And so what, if I may ask,” she said, “is the range of your experience with black women?”

Redundant Security

 

An hour later at daybreak I was still mulling my answer as we portaged around a second, larger rapid. We led Sneed around first, sat him down on cool sand. Then we packed our gear around: three plastic sacks of beef jerky, Gatorade, bottled water, Snickers, packs of cigarettes, toilet paper, and a pair of fencing pliers—all the stuff left by Sneed and Jesse in her storage locker. Aretha carried her Smith and Wesson inside Big Louis, which also, she informed me, contained her “things.” That was it.

Then we lifted the boat on our shoulders—one hundred-and-fifty pounds, but Aretha every bit the firewoman—and we hucked its awkward bulk over heavy cobble and masses of flotsam, thickets of nettle and huckleberry, all of it enough of a struggle in the end to make me consider floating the next big rapids, if they didn’t come in darkness.

I was still considering various replies to Aretha’s question as we set the boat on a skin of glass-clear water over multi-colored pebbles. The day was fresh and not yet scorching hot. It would have been a good time to fish, and the Roam looked receptive. I cracked a Gatorade, swigged, passed it to Sneed’s mother.

“Well,” I surrendered at last, “me and Pa and Hop-Sing once saw a colored woman get off the stage over in Nevada City.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She reached into Big Louis and surprised me with a lacy handkerchief. She wiped any trace of me off the rim of the Gatorade bottle. “That’s about what I thought.”

The float was peaceful then, for an hour or two, except for the
Fish, Dog, fish
chant that was mounting in my brain. The Roam slowly gathered itself in springs and rivulets through high-country meadows sparked with asters and thistles and joe-pye weed. Mayflies—they looked like pale morning duns—began to rise from the tails of long, clear pools, and a few small trout slapped after them. The big fish were staying down, it seemed, and Dog mind was busy seeking trout mind. Had there been a full-moon crayfish hatch? Were the big bellies full? I didn’t think so. No—because for a long glide through riffle-run-riffle the whole river felt cocked, ready to go off. I knew the feeling. I needed to rig up, get ready. But I fought myself. For once this was truly
not
a fishing trip. Thinking of Sheriff Chubbuck, of what that man would do to fish this water, I kept my anxious mitts on the oars. Aretha trailed her fingers in the water, her eyes three-quarters closed. Poor Sneed slumbered hard in the boat bottom.

“So your professor friend, I take it, is a black man?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “Just ask him.”

I oared close to a cut bank, looking for trout of heft. I thought I saw one dart beneath the boat. “Would I need to ask him?”

“Just a glance in his direction is usually enough. He’ll put all that in your face.”

I set the oars, let us drift on gentle current between wide banks. Okay. I couldn’t help myself. I was rigging the fly rod. I was just getting ready. That was all. That didn’t mean I was going to fish.

“And your wife?” Aretha asked me. “She’s a white woman?”

I glanced up. “More than you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Aretha said. “I do know.”

She watched me fit the rod pieces and string the line and build a leader. “Pass me a chicken neck,” I said when I was ready. She laughed. I saw her pretty teeth, saw the green flare in her eyes. “We do have beef jerky,” she said. “How about that?”

“How about—” I snapped open one of Galen Ringer’s old fly boxes, reached over Sneed “—one of these?”

“Wow,” she said.

“Wow,” I said too, startled by the tight, perfect rows of hand-tied flies. “This guy … wow.” Then Aretha’s pink-tipped finger was in there, probing through the tiny forest of hackles and wing posts and dubbings and tails—a hundred, maybe two hundred bristling Montana dry flies. “White folks sure can make things complicated,” she murmured.

Now I laughed. “Your boy loves this stuff,” I told her. “He just laps it up. Inside two weeks he knew which one of these to pick and how to put it on the water.”

“He likes this? Really?”

“He loves it.”

“So which one?”

“Any time now, I think we might see these.” My finger entered the box beside hers. I tickled the tiny wingpost on one of Galen Ringer’s trico mayflies, about a size 24, little more than black thread, a mote of white fluff from a duck’s butt, and two long tail strands.

I nicked the fly out of the foam and balanced it on the tip of her finger.

“I see,” Sneed’s mother said. “So you all are trying to catch guppies.”

I took the fly back. I tied it onto a 7x tippet with a clinch knot. Now I
was
going to fish. How could I not? “Okay,” I said, “stay tuned for guppies.”

We drifted down. I kept the rod ready. The Roam now flowed easily through a shallow canyon with spindly timber up the sides.

Larger trout had begun to dimple pocket water and spook from the shallow tails of the biggest pools. “Any time now,” I said, and just then I saw the first cloud of insects, skimming and spiraling over the next pool. I was right about tricos. A minute or two later, I discerned noses of substance pushing through the glassy current. “Here we go.” I raised the rod and began to play line out in false casts. I was picking out my guppy—about a sixteen-incher—when through a gauzy twister of mating insects I spotted a tiny green light on the trunk of a pine about fifty yards ahead.

And I confess at first I did nothing. Like the skinhead’s tattoos, I saw this unnatural thing, this anomaly, and I didn’t see it. Then I looked purposefully away. I muffed my first cast to the target fish, landed the line downstream too far and dragged the fly like a drunken water skier over the trout’s lie. So that fish was down.

Now I had to look up for the next fish. There again, closer now, was the green light. I should look at it, some part of me thought.
Dog, that means something.
But between the light and the raft, a heavy cutthroat was porpoising through a current seam where spent insects massed up. There was an easy mark. I had a chance for two, maybe three quick drifts along the seam before we slid past into a tunnel of pines. But again I botched the cast. An easy one. Yet somehow I closed my back loop and my line jerked out short and tangled, a mess on the water. So I looked hard, at last, at the light.

“Shit.” I dropped the rod. I dug in with the oars. “We gotta pull out.”

Sneed jerked awake in the boat bottom.

“This is Tucker’s property line. That green light, that’s a camera mounted on a tree. It’s got an infrared motion sensor—”

But now the easy current was defeating me, sucking me on a risky tangent toward the camera’s sight line. I had wasted time and had no more to fuss with. I chocked the oars and rolled over the gunwale, splashing down into thigh-high water, a human anchor. I leaned against the current and let my feet drag bottom. Still the water pushed me, but I had flattened the angle. We were going to make it to shore without intersecting the beam.

“Laser.” This was Sneed. Aretha said, “Say what?”

“Laser,” he repeated.

“Baby, how do you know that?” No reply. She appealed to me as I chugged through shallow water.

“Hunters use them to scout game—to get pictures of animals they want to shoot later. But this one is aimed across the river, to let Tucker know if anyone crosses onto his ranch. We’re legal on the water. That’s public. Montana law. But we can’t let Tucker know we’re here. We’ll have to go around the camera.”

I dragged up onto the last stretch of National Park land, ninety degrees out of the camera’s line. Then I left Sneed and his mother and picked my way ashore, studied the camera from the back, across a four-wire fence hung with
NO TRESPASSING
signs and extending to a point of prohibitive steepness.

From my former life I knew a little about this technology too. It was very much like the high-tech junk I had once aimed down the hallways of a suburban Boston aerospace contractor: tamper proof box, laser trigger, digital memory card and playback screen. There were no wires on Tucker’s camera, no instant relay, but a well-used narrow trail led down from high ground to the camera, so I was pretty sure our movie hero had a man ride out to look at the playback and radio in, or at least swap video cards and bring the used one home to download and view on a computer. By mid-day, I told Aretha, Tucker would have seen us coming.

“Good work, Hoss.” She hesitated, looked away from me. “Or Pa,” she said. “Or both. Whichever you like.”

“Well, it’s a big job, being all the white men in your life.”

She returned her attention to me. “And for sure a thankless one, as well.”

I shrugged. I looked where she had been looking. Her son was pissing in the river.

“Bladder control,” I noted. “That’s progress.”

A hundred yards upslope from the Roam, we dropped our gear over the fence, eased the boat over barbed wire onto private land. Then we hiked further upslope into cool piney shade and eventually into rock rubble at the base of a bluff. Here, as I expected, Tucker’s fence elided the steepness and picked up again on the mesa above. Maybe this was why Sneed and Jesse had packed the fencing pliers. I knelt with the intention of cutting the bottom two fence wires. But Sneed’s hands intruded. He grabbed the pliers. Decisively, he cut the wires.

“There,” he said, and we rolled under.

“Now we’re illegal,” I said.

“Good job, Baby,” Sneed’s mother said, trying to brush his back off as he walked away.

“Sneed,” I said. He stopped. “Let your mother brush your back. She won’t hurt you.”

He waited. But she was pissed now. She marched right past him. “Who says I won’t hurt nobody?” she called back as the steep slope grabbed her legs and made her skid, pitch her arms, and finally run.

When we were afloat again, legal, the sky was wide and blue above us, no traces of smoke in our view, and even though the trico hatch was over I felt like celebrating. I splashed water on my face. I filled my hat with the Roam and slopped it over my head. I cracked us a fresh Gatorade, this one pink, took a slug off the top, handed it to Sneed.

“Now pass it to your mama,” I told him.

“Except his mama ain’t thirsty.”

“You’ll get dehydrated.”

“Hell I will.”

“That’ll make you cranky,” I dared to say.

“I’ll tell you what makes me cranky,” she offered, but then she didn’t disclose. Instead she let a mile of water pass, knifing her finger tips through the Roam, and finally she said, “So how come you’re not home with your wife?”

“Because I’m on a fishing trip.”

Sneed started a geeky laugh. “Four years long,” he said, and I looked at him, gave him a shove with my foot. “Give me a warning, will you, when you’re about to tune in?”

“I don’t know, Dog. Sometimes I’m here and sometimes I’m not. But it’s like there’s a … like I’m a …” He looked crestfallen. “I don’t know what it’s like. I can’t find the thought. And then I forget what I’m thinking about. I already have.”

“Do you see where we are?”

He looked around, bewildered. “I’ve never been here?”

“That’s right. We’re on the Roam. Do you know why we’re here?”

For a long moment he looked down at the boat bottom. “Dog,” he said at last, “I’m really sorry. I … maybe … maybe I’ll know when we get there.”

“That’ll be good enough, buddy. Don’t worry. Okay?”

No answer. “Sneed?” He raised his head. I looked in his eyes. Gone. I had two shirts on. I laid one over his head to keep the sun off. We bounced and drifted and then the land flattened and the current backed up into a marshy lowland. I was allowing myself to think about casting beetles or crickets off the banks when Aretha spoke.

“You might have made a good father,” she told me. She shaded her eyes and looked away into the marsh. I looked there too. Deep bog. My eyes stung.

“I thought I was.”

“So what happened?”

“I wasn’t good enough.”

Aretha let out a long, low, and sympathetic sigh. “Whatever good enough is,” she murmured. “Wherever the hell that place is. And can we get even close?”

“I wonder—”

But abruptly she raised a hand, made a downward motion to shush me and stop me from rowing. I followed her gaze. We had startled a bull moose grazing on arrowhead in a side channel. I stopped the boat and we watched him.

“I’ll be damned,” Aretha whispered. “Bullwinkle.”

A breeze kicked up and the bull swung his head our way, his snout dangling a ream of arrowhead. His shoulder muscles twitched. His nostrils opened in a snort. Then he turned and sauntered away at a retreating angle, looking back as he reached solid ground. His legs just kept coming up and coming up out of the water—two full yards of legs—and when he had all that skinny bone beneath that massive body, those legs did nothing more than twitch—barely visible—and the bull leaped high over the trunk of a downed fir and vanished into boggy forest.

What I wondered was if I could ever go back, start over, make good enough. I had never even imagined it, truly, soberly, until now. But I kept quiet. I oared into the flow. I stared ahead at the point where the buckbean and the feathery swamp hemlocks gave way again to rangeland, current, dirt banks and sandbar willow.

Then, “Another one,” Aretha said.

“Where?” I said, looking for moose.

“No,” she said, pointing, and my heart sank. A second game camera. Redundant security. Serious stuff. And we were squarely in its sights.