The Clinch Knot (17 page)

“Hey,” Tucker repeated. There was acid in his voice. He grabbed the fat skinhead by his sopping shirtfront. “I said cut that out.” He threw the kid away from us. “Go help out Denny. He’s bleeding.”

Tucker’s rifle stayed on me, I noted, but his eyes went straight to Aretha. He drooled a short string of brown juice into the Roam. Guy needs a stunt man for the snoose, I was thinking. Not a star really, up close. More of a red dwarf.

“So golly,” he lump-lipped, upending Sneed’s mother as he yanked the boat another yard ashore. “I thought you all knew this is private land.”

Aretha looked at me. “We’re not on your land.” I was out of breath, my voice tight. “We’re on the water. The water’s public. That’s Montana law.”

Tucker treated that bit of populism with a disgusted chuckle and then ignored me. “You,” he said to Aretha, “have my deepest apologies. Please forgive these idiots. You are not deserving of such filthy language.”

Her eyes blazed at him.

“You bet,” he said. “You’re a proud one. That’s what I mean.”

Aretha’s right hand inched toward Big Louis where her Smith and Wesson was concealed.

“I detest that kind of language,” Tucker said. “So unnecessary. So disrespectful.”

I swung a leg over the gunwale, intending to shove us off. Tucker cocked the rifle, chased me back.

“That ancient tribal dignity,” he purred at Aretha. “That’s what you got.”

He walked around the prow, appraising her from behind.

“And I’m guessing Watusi. Am I right? Mixed with some of that good West African Mandingo? Lovely stuff.” Tucker grinned at her. “See, I don’t get into this whole conflict. It’s not necessary.

You people enslaved your own. That’s where it started. We all need to let it go.”

Having reached the other side of the boat, he used his boot to poke at Sneed, who slumped in a daze against the gunwale. “Who’s this boy? He a retard?”

“Don’t you touch him.”

“Oh, we could wrestle, Sugar, you and me.”

“Get away from him.”

Tucker prodded Sneed with the rifle barrel. I felt the jolt of Aretha’s tension down at my end of the boat. She had Big Louis’s zipper halfway open.

“Back off,” she warned him.

Tucker swung the rifle into her face. “Throw that bag on shore.” He jerked his head toward the cobble behind him. “Go on.”

I let a breath out as she tossed it. Tucker picked up Big Louis. He unzipped the bag the rest of the way and dumped out the pistol and all her things. Then he hurled Big Louis over my head into the Roam. It floated briefly, then filled and disappeared. Tucker kicked the Smith and Wesson up the red scree below the bluff. Then he zeroed back in on Aretha.

“So you got a name, Princess? Huh?”

The two wet skins crowded around.

“Come on. What is it? LaShaquille?” He savored it. “That’d be real pretty. Or how about Sha-Kobe? But I’m in the wrong time zone, huh? Let’s see. Ebony? Diamond? Jazmin?”

“Maybe it’s Whoopi.” Denny liked this, slugged his buddy and snuffled amusement through his bloody nose.

“Shut up,” Tucker told the pair. “Hang on to this marshmallow boat.” He kept his gaze on Sneed’s mother. “Hosanna? Tawanda?”

Sneed sat up suddenly, a massive scowl on his brow. “Aretha,” his mother blurted as if to stop him from lurching into a bullet.

The skins fought snorts of delight. Tucker, too, seemed to be suppressing a jolt of amusement.

“Aretha.” He played it around his mouth. “Yeah. Sure. Why not? Give it to me. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. You got it, baby.”

Then abruptly he bent over the boat and plunged an arm between her legs. Aretha’s thigh muscles jumped into sharp relief inside her pants. But she held back, watching Sneed closely as the film star came up with a sack of our supplies. Tucker hurled the sack ashore. As it tumbled, the bag spilled jerky and water bottles, plus a roll of toilet paper that bounced and unraveled among the rocks about twenty feet up.

“Now that up there, Princess Aretha,” Tucker said, pointing to the bank where the supplies lay strewn, “is private property.
My
private property.”

He leaned close. “You want permission to come aground, Sweetheart?”

“Fuck you.”

Tucker drew back, sighed. “Stuck in the past,” he sighed. “Oh well. So here’s the deal. You so much as set one foot out of this river to wipe your pretty pink puss and I’m on you. You’re a trespasser. You’re mine.”

Aretha kept her head down, her eyes now square on Tucker’s chest.

“Captain Ahab or that retard touch my ground I’m just gonna shoot them dead and say they tried to rob my place.”

Sneed began to take huge, hiccupping breaths. He began to mutter. But Aretha no longer looked his way. Her stillness was unsettling—
a lot of things I shouldn’t have reacted to the in the ways I did
—and it bothered Tucker, too. He watched her carefully, inching back. “We’re legal,” I took the occasion to tell him. “We got on legally, upstream on Forest Service land, and we’re legal all the way down to the Yellowstone.”

Tucker’s bronze cheeks puffed out. A droning in the sky made him look up—a small plane, high to the south. Then he lunged in, split Aretha’s legs again and yanked up the other supply sacks and sent those to the same scattered fate among the rocks. He jumped back, this time the rifle on Sneed. He spoke to me.

“Okay, Captain. You’re legal. But here’s the deal. You’re gonna get hungry, but you’re not gonna eat. And you better not drink any of this water because my bison shit all up it. Mistress Imani here is going have to hang her pretty one off the boat. Wish I could be there, but oh well. The next place you can legally touch dry ground is twenty-seven miles down the river on the Yellowstone. And I
will
have someone watching.”

I glanced at the skinheads. They had their eyes on the airplane as it banked over the western flank of the Absorakas. The chubby skin said something into Tucker’s ear.

“I don’t care why they’re here,” Tucker responded. He snatched up Galen Ringer’s fly rod, snapped it on his knee, threw the pieces ashore. I tucked the oars out of his reach—or at least he would have to get his boots wet. He took another look down the rifle barrel at Sneed and found Sneed staring back at him.

“What do you want?”

“Dane Tucker,” said Sneed.

“I said what do you want?”

Sneed, as if in the middle of a conversation, as if in his perfectly thoughtful and cogent self, as if he had struck a gold mine of brain tissue, answered, “Fences keep your bison in. But they only survive because you feed them in the winter. Those fences are bad for deer and antelope. You don’t feed them and they can’t migrate. They’re going to starve.”

We all stared at Sneed. Again he started the deep, hiccupping breaths. Finally Tucker broke the silence. “I heard all that, but it don’t mean shit to me, Buckwheat. None of it. Never will.”

Sneed’s eyes blurred as his own air rose to choke him. The movie star put a boot on the boat’s prow. He took a last look at Aretha. “Let it go, troupers,” he told his skinheads, and he kicked us out into the current.

“You all have a nice couple of days,” Dane Tucker said.

A Million Pounds of Warer

 

“For the record,” I began, after an hour of rage and rumination, after maybe three miles of wide and sluggish water, “I think Aretha is a damn fine name.”

“Well,” she retorted, “I think that we’re screwed.”

“Oh, we were screwed a long time ago. Now we just know how.” I took an oar stroke. “You know what my real name is? Ned. Can you believe that? Ned Oglivie. Now that is an example of what a name should never be.”

Aretha feigned interest, barely: “And that’s why you’re Dog then?”

“Almost.”

“What would you rather be?”

“I don’t know. Ike. Elvis. Satchmo. Carlos.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Go on. You think I haven’t heard it all?”

“I mean it. Aretha. That is a kick-ass name.”

“Next,” she said, “you’re gonna tell me how sexy it is.”

“Well, I could.” I performed an oar-shrug. “If it would brighten your day.”

She squashed that with an angry frown. “What would brighten my day right now is some kind of damn plan.”

I had been watching the sky.

“Okay,” I said. “You want a plan? Here it is.”

By means of stubby oar I maximized our speed through another five miles of river as meanwhile the temperature dropped twenty degrees under storm clouds and the Roam grew brawny and rough. Around us, the diorama had flipped by the quarter-mile: a searing jackpine scree became a shadow-cool matrix of angular volcanic stone, and that became a gusty plateau of brown bristlegrass, and now, as Aretha clawed at goosebumps on her arms, we plunged at a quickened pace toward a canyon where the river pitched and frothed beneath bulking thunderheads. “Here,” I said just inside the mouth of the canyon, and I pulled us over where the river split around an island of rock rimmed with drifted wood and brushed with hawthorn and buffaloberry. Tucker’s man, watching from horseback on the canyon rim, stopped with us.

Aretha did her part, collecting firewood while I hiked ahead along the treacherous riverbank to scout the X-factor of the canyon. It didn’t look too bad, I decided. It looked dangerous but not impossible to navigate in the dark. Our plan was to light a fire and keep it burning a good hour or two into darkness, then build it up and leave it ablaze, holding our minder on the ridge while we slipped downriver, hopefully invisible, all the way to Sneed’s mark on the map by dawn. With the heavy clouds—maybe even better with a storm—it was going to be
dark
dark at the bottom of the canyon. Our minder would never see us, never guess we’d gone.

I said when I returned, “You know what they say about the weather in Montana?”

“No, Hoss, I don’t.”

“You don’t like it, just wait a few minutes.” Aretha dropped a heap of sun-bleached pine branches. “That’s the same thing they say about the weather in Arkansas.”

“Well, see, we’re all one people.”

“Mm-hmm.” She moved off to collect more wood. “United by bullshit about the weather.”

We raised the blaze to about six feet high sometime after midnight and then shoved off. Sneed lay as instructed in the bottom of the boat, half aware and three-quarters confused. Aretha twisted her arms through the side ropes and hung on. In this manner, graced by lucky bounces and timely spins, we endured a five-mile sequence of minor rapids and emerged an hour before a stormy daybreak into a long riffle, a smooth and speeding bullet train of water.

“We made it.” Aretha yawned, shook the kinks out of her arms. “Good call, Hoss.”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure yet. The speed of the water was new, beyond my capacity to control the boat. I kept my eyes front. Overhead I felt the pressure of a storm about to break loose. I saw the next big rapids, felt its yank beneath me, just as thunder cracked and finally the rain came down.

“Hang on!” I shouted.

I back-oared, trying to slow us down and get a look ahead.

“Get him to hold something! Or sit on him, and you hold on! I think we can make this.”

But in the downpour I could barely see beyond Aretha, and this new current felt like a knife blade under the boat that wanted to peel us up and flip us aside into the rocks.

I bent an oar. “Damn it!”

Aretha screamed as we hit a rock and spun one-eighty, giving her the view ahead as we sluiced into the rapid. She screamed again, sat down hard on her son and clutched the gunwale rope. I tucked the oars rather than lose them completely. This was a new game. This was pinball for our lives. “Two hands, everybody! Hang on!”

The boat bounced and spun. Lightning showed me sandstone cliffs collapsed to a thirty-yard span, with Cruise Master-sized slabs of rock strewn in the river’s path and drifted timber hung up like spikes and claws—then all was black and slashing rain.

There was no stopping, no control. We slung helplessly into the mess ahead.

Aretha’s ragged voice reached me through the smashing water. “Hoss, what are you doing!”

“Nothing! I can’t do anything!”

Not until we were upon it did I see the first big pine snag, wedged between behemoth stones in the center current, its dead limbs whipping and shaking in the water’s frenzied onrush.

“Get down!” I roared at Aretha as we slid through a gap of air beneath the butt end of the snag.

A shattered branch-tip caught and snapped off in Aretha’s hair—she shrieked and smothered Sneed—and an instant later the same branch, trimmed to a lethal thickness, tore my hat off but left my head where it was.
Lucky Dog.

Then we were clear of that snag and spinning into the next danger. In the following instant there came a stomach-dropping lunge—a roller coaster plunge, as if the river were inhaling us- and then the boat slammed a rock broadside and careened into a new tangle of water and wood.

We did not luck through this one. We slammed in between branches and stuck fast, pinned by a million pounds of water. We were allowed one full breath of sickening stasis. Then the current simply pried the boat up into a vertical ass-stand and hung us there.

Aretha shrieked like a threatened cat. She and Sneed came slopping down through the mash of spray and water and vibrating rubber and landed hard upon me. Aretha grabbed me around the neck. “Baby! Where’s my baby?” She wailed into my ear as the water levered us over into a full cartwheel. “Where is my baby?” she demanded.

But I felt the absence of Sneed as the boat flopped over us topside-down and darkened everything.

Flotsam

 

I fought my head outside the boat. Lightning struck the cliff ahead and gave me a glimpse of Sneed clutching at a rock as he was swept past just yards ahead.

“Sneedy! Turn around! Grab the boat!”

But the Roam shoved us both along, converging, separating, converging one last time before suddenly the boat hung up once more in timber. “Sneed!” I yelled as he spun away into froth and slashing rain.

I ducked under the boat into Aretha’s wail of terror. “He’s okay,” I lied. “He’s fine. Let’s get this thing flipped over. Hang on right here.”

I left her at the flapping upstream edge of our predicament and hand-over-handed along the gunwale rope. The upside-down prow had jammed flush against a thick snag. Heavy current bowed my back around the snag, swept my legs beneath it. All around me the river raged and tore and sucked, and under this pressure the boat jittered madly. But all was in stasis, stuck in a balance of tremendous forces. I was flotsam now, a driftwood stick, or a shred of pondweed, Aretha and I both, and the boat, and we would stay right there, whipping and trailing in place until the river moved us along. We could be snagged there for hours, weeks, months. The levers of the river had locked. I had to unlock them.

“D’Ontay!”

“Stay there!”

“Where’s my baby?”

“Hang on!”

I tried to bend my stomach muscles against the current. I couldn’t. I tried to pull my legs through the rush of water to join the rest of my body on the upstream side of the log. I couldn’t.

Flotsam, Dog. Flotsam.

I had to use my puniness. I had to leverage my frailty, not fight it. Hand over hand, letting my body trail limply, I worked my way back up to Aretha. There I spanned my arms to grab the rope on both gunwales and added my weight to hers to pull the flapping stern down against the current. “Go down to the other end and hold on,” I rasped at Aretha. “No matter what. Hold on.”

When she was in place, I worked one arm free of the gunwale rope. That side of the boat bounced up in the current, caught air and nearly tore out my still-bound arm before I caught the rope in my free fist and yanked the boat down flush.

Slowly, fearing a broken back or worse, I worked the other arm out of its engagement with the rope. Now I was in the same position as my original hang-up, but I was holding the upside-down boat against the water—my grip and nothing else.

So there we were. I held the mighty lever. I checked Aretha. She held on at the downstream end. “Son of a
bitch!
” I screamed, and I thrust my arms up and let the boat go.

The boat lifted away in a backbend over the snag with Aretha scooped up inside while my body, now in free float, swept out beneath the log. I raked through underwater branches and popped up on the other side just as the boat sailed over me and splatted face-up, Aretha jumbled inside, on a short patch of fast, smooth water. In an instant, streaked by a sideways crackle of lightning, Aretha and the boat were gone, safely or not, downstream.

“Son of a
bitch!
” I screamed again, kicking with numb legs toward an eddy on the east canyon wall where Sneed floated face down.