The Clinch Knot (21 page)

And Then What?

 

“Sneed!”

“Baby, no!”

But he jacked the gear shift into drive and spun the tires, slung the box around so hard that his mother and I had to bail or be crushed. He squared the truck in Gray’s direction and floored it. “Jump in the back!” I hollered at Aretha, and we just made it.

“Baby!” She pounded on the cab window, clawed at it. But it was an old truck. Nothing moved, nothing opened. A jolting swerve threw her down beside me. “What do we do, Hoss?”

“I guess we hang on.”

The next several minutes were wild enough that no real thoughts entered my head except this one: Gray could outrun the truck over rough terrain, like a pronghorn could easily outpace a human, but for short distances only, and the truck had as much endurance as it had fuel—and the gasoline gauge, visible over Sneed’s shoulder, said plenty. Sneed would catch him. And then what?

Aretha and I hung on to the box sides and dodged the various sliding pieces of skinhead junk—some iron fence posts, a bale of wire, a few dozen empty beer cans, and the two empty rifles. A toppled oil drum sloshed and slammed side to side each time Sneed slung around a rock pile or pounded through a gully in pursuit of Henderson Gray.

Twice Sneed had the grill six feet from Gray’s bony ass, was about to bury him under the truck until Gray zagged like antelope and escaped.

“He’ll cross the river,” I predicted, and soon after, Gray did just that, slogging in, then falling in, then wallowing with a spastic overhead crawl to the far bank.

Sneed did not hesitate. He gunned down a long sand spit until he found a marginally shallow spot, where he plunged the truck into the Roam and fishtailed across. Emerging at the far bank, he buried the truck’s grill in a dirt hump and had to reverse. I jumped out, tried to rip his door open. But Sneed saw me coming, cranked the window up, hammered down the button lock. He rooted the truck free with a to-and-fro motion that spat dirt and rocks back into the river. Just in time, Aretha caught my arm and hauled me back in.

“I told him his girlfriend was dead,” she shouted half in wonderment at one point. She watched Gray stumble up a rise through sage brush. “So he killed her? And hurt my baby?”

“Looks like they both know it,” I shouted back, “don’t they?”

I yanked her aside as Sneed bucked up the rise and the oil drum skidded down from the tailgate.
What the hell, Dog?
I kicked the tailgate open, jerked the barrel around, and on the next uphill the damn thing spun out and bounced free, spewing loops of oil down a dusty draw.

“He’s going to get away,” Aretha hollered.

“That’d be good,” I hollered back. “We wouldn’t get our necks broken and he’d be caught soon enough.” At that I pounded on the cab roof and pleaded for the tenth time, “Sneed! It’s okay! Let him go!”

But the chase went on. There was little time to wonder how Sneed stayed focused for so long, but he did. He and Gray played out their crazy crisscross over the entire western floodplain of the Roam until at last Tucker’s roadside fence rose on the horizon, with Gray having opened a good half-mile lead.

“This will do it,” I told Aretha, and for an entire ten seconds I was sure of Gray’s escape. But the ground leveled out and Sneed gained velocity. He was only a few hundred yards behind when Gray decided to take the fence. The deer runner cut right, tried to hurdle the four-strand barbed wire. He snagged his back foot and fell hard. Gray recovered, hobbled away—and not a half-minute later Sneed blew right through the fence and summarily closed the distance to a few frightening yards.

Gray had made a terrible error, obviously. Now the chase was down the highway, down a corridor of heavy fencing that Gray was too exhausted and too injured to hurdle a second time. Still he labored along the shoulder on the right side, his runner’s gait a broken, desperate catastrophe. “Just pull alongside him, Sneed!” I reached around the cab and hammered on the window. “Just stop the truck and I’ll grab him!”

Sneed slowed and looked at me once—that was it. He was flooded with adrenaline, looked fully alive. Then he turned back to Gray, regained his losses, and swerved the truck onto the narrow, sloping gravel shoulder and nipped at Gray’s heels. Gray’s head hung, flapped to the right, and his gaze remained locked on the road three feet ahead even when a sedan and then a panel van flashed by in the opposite lane.

Now I knew this would end in blood. A third vehicle, a school bus, lumbered around a curve toward us. I prayed without hope that Gray would look up, would wave, appeal for help, for mercy. I pleaded into the barren wretchedness of that doomed moment that Sneed would be contained, would lose focus or pass out, that order would be restored, and justice would come through for us. But instead Sneed seemed to be calculating, timing something, maybe waiting for a flat stretch of shoulder, or one so steep that it would force Gray back onto the pavement. “Gray! Sneed! Damn it, stop!”

Aretha pounded the cab roof. “Baby, stop!”

She had just turned back to me, aggrieved and desperate, when I slammed an iron fence post through the cab’s back window. Glass popped, hailed against Sneed’s head and onto the dashboard. I shoved my legs through, wrenched the rest of me after.

“Sneed, you don’t need to do this!”

I fought him for the wheel. The swerving truck lost ground—ten yards, twenty yards, then a cushion of forty that might have given Gray a few moments to collect his wits, dodge back the other way, stop some traffic and get help.

But Henderson Gray plowed on, his head dangling down as if on a broken neck, even as a fourth chance, a black SUV, sped toward him.

Sneed caught me good on the bridge of the nose, knocked me back. He flattened the gas pedal. That old pink Ford roared up to speed, dragging a hundred feet of fence and poles. Gray’s new lead disappeared in seconds and the roadway narrowed into a chute of rock. His problem was insurmountable now—until he solved it, neatly and with horrible suddenness, by darting into the grill of the oncoming SUV.

A Pair of Café Americanos

 

Tom Gorman was the name of the hulking, phlegmatic U.S. Border Patrol agent who fetched us at the Geyser Motel the next morning in a Park County Meals-on-Wheels van because his federal-issue SUV had been totaled.

“I’ve hit deer before,” he announced to Aretha and me as we sat touch-close, still traumatized, in his back seat. “But never a deer runner.”

Aretha took my hand for the hundredth time, squeezed it and held on. The van smelled like lasagna.

“Gosh,” Tom Gorman said. “What was that guy thinking?”

I was still seeing the loose sack of skin that was Gray’s body as he sprawled in the center of the road. Sneed had slammed the brakes and spun the truck. With that iron fencepost in hand, he had vaulted from the skinheads’ truck. But his legs had crumpled beneath him the moment his feet touched the pavement. He lay on his back, gasping at the sky.

Now he was back in custody, in the hospital, and neither his mother nor I had slept. After a lengthy period of questioning by law enforcement agencies from the FBI all the way down to a frazzled and fumbling Russell Crowe, we had sat up side by side on Aretha’s motel bed, staring at the television and sometimes talking. Around dawn, I managed to tell her, finally, what it was she needed to know about me and my family, and Aretha thanked me for filling her in, told me how sorry she was and how things didn’t feel quite so terribly awful for her after hearing it. Her son was alive and would get off without any too-serious charges, she decided, whereas my son, well … you know … and it was shortly after that wordless moment, as the sun came up on the Crazy Mountains, that this touchy-feely hand-squeezing thing got started. And damn did I like it. I really did.

Tom Gorman rumbled on. “Went up the mountainside this morning to give my condolences to the widow. Hell’s bells, that’s an awful thing to have to do, you know?”

He looked at me in his mirror. He had taken a pretty good shot from the airbag and wore a faint racoon mask of bruises around his eyes. But I gathered that a man of his phenomenal obtuseness had taken worse hits from the various doors in his life.

“It’s not like, hey, sorry, I ran over your dog, you know? But then again, dogs don’t murder people … so hey, what are you gonna do?”

He gave us a second to post the silence that a man like him took for agreement.

“I told the woman her husband didn’t suffer. I figured that would help.”

He pulled the van into the Livingston hospital parking lot. “Helluva thing though, all this from top to bottom. Your Sheriff Chubbuck’s going to be a hero around here, if he makes it. Hell, even it he doesn’t make it. Posthumously, right?”

Aretha let go of my hand was we climbed from the van. She whispered in my ear, “Hoss, can you translate?”

Sheriff Roy Chubbuck had collapsed in his driveway the morning before. Now he wanted to talk to us. It was slow going. There were no tubes in his nose, just one large one, withdrawn from his windpipe so he could talk. His wife, in a chair beside the bed, fed him ice shavings to lubricate his voice. As the sheriff wheezed and whispered from his hospital bed, the various events that had made my last seven days a baffling mosaic began to come into focus, and Chubbuck resolved before my eyes as a man of startling vision and courage.

Toxicology tests on Sneed had taken time, he told us, and despite the public rush to judgment, despite his public statements to the contrary, he had never closed out the option that someone other than Sneed had killed Jesse. Nor had he let on that he was still considering other suspects. Including me. Only when I wouldn’t leave Livingston did he check me off as someone who was simply going to be in his way.

We had to wait while a nurse came in to take Chubbuck’s pulse and blood pressure. He would need the breathing tube in a few minutes, she said.

When the result came back that Sneed had traces of animal tranquilizer in his system, Chubbuck said he had suspected Henderson Gray, whose efforts to run down a pronghorn had disturbed the sheriff for some years.

“Asinine,” Chubbuck wheezed, and he used precious breath to add: “How was he going to prove it? I asked him once. He was going to have to photograph the animal before, then somehow show himself side by side with that same animal, clearly alive, in a different place, later. And those little buggers all look alike don’t they? How was he gonna prove anything?”

He went on, exhausting himself on speculation. I told him about the doubtful scientist and the ear tag, and how Gray would have to show the placement of that in corroborating video before, during, and after the deer was up and moving again. But no pronghorn, the sheriff figured, no matter how tired, was going to sit still as long as it would take Gray to set up a camera shot and tag its ear. So a syringe of the same tranquilizer found yesterday in Gray’s fanny pack spoke plainly for Sneed’s innocence. When Gray’s wife had retracted her support for his alibi, the deal was done.

He asked for my hand and gripped it. I think it was a handshake. “Those skinhead punks were never suspects,” Chubbuck whispered, “because we were watching them. We knew where they were when Jesse Ringer was killed. I didn’t want you to get mixed up in it and spook the operation on Tucker’s ranch. I worked on that too long.”

He rested a while. His wife left the room for more ice shavings. Chubbuck made a painful sound to clear his throat. “And I got it. The Roam River is ours again. Dane Tucker’s land …” was on its way into a public trust, he managed to explain over the next precious half hour. Fishermen would be able to access public water, the way it was intended. Montana boys and girls could grow up fishing the Roam again—”fishing the best river God ever made,” the sheriff said, “like I did.”

I said with my eyes to Aretha:
No, this isn’t clear to me either.
Across the room, Tom Gorman fiddled with the pump on a blood pressure cuff until a new nurse arrived and took it away from him.

“Grief—” The sheriff startled us with a loud rasp. He tried to lift his head from the pillow. His buzzard eye was fixed on Aretha. “Grief … is like …”

He couldn’t finish the statement. But he couldn’t let it go. He fought it for a long and pathetic moment until his wife put an ice chip to his lips.

“I’m gonna miss the land,” he whispered.

He closed his eyes as they teared up. He swallowed with difficulty.

“So much. Damn it all. That’s my grief. This land. This water. The fish. The birds. The goddamn wind. I’m going to miss all of it so much.”

The nurse tried to re-insert his respirator tube, but Sheriff Chubbuck batted it away. She turned up the drip into his left arm. He worked his feeble hands and squeezed his red-rimmed eyes.

“Go fishing for me,” were his last words before the faintest smile shaped his dry lips and he faded into morphine dreams.

“Well, yeah,” Tom Gorman said with a shrug in the hallway.

“We’re keeping this out of the media for now. But probably the gal from Alabama can explain it best.”

Agent Gorman dropped us at Chad’s on Main Street, rumbled off toward God knows what destination in that Meals-on-Wheels van.

The gal from Alabama was Melissa Pines, a hefty young woman of apparently mixed race who sat down with us on one of Chad’s funky sofas.

“Sheriff Chubbuck brought us all together this last year and a half,” she said. “He got a tip that Dane Tucker was using his land for paramilitary training. Vigilante border patrol, actually. It’s all the rage lately. The sheriff might have gone in on weapons charges, but that would have done nothing vis-à-vis the land. He wanted the land.”

She smiled. Her hair was reddish and kinky. Her skin was caramel. She wore jeans and a flawlessly ironed men’s shirt. There was pretty handmade jewelry on her hands, wrists, and ears. She backed up to clarify for us.

“I’m an attorney with something called the Southern Poverty Law Center. I don’t know if you’ve heard of us?”

We hadn’t.

“Our civil lawsuits have bankrupted more than ten major hate groups. We kick ass and take assets.” She smiled at Aretha. “When Sheriff Chubbuck learned that Dane Tucker was running a ‘border patrol’ training camp on his ranch, he got in touch with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Arizona State Police. They didn’t know about this particular group. But they started watching for them.”

Melissa Pines sipped her latte, leaving a faint stripe of steamed milk on her lip.

“It’s the latest thing these days, nativism and vigilante border patrol. There are probably ten or twenty groups like Tucker’s roaming the Mexican border right now, going after anything with brown skin. They tend to shoot first and ask questions later. It’s just plain murder, mostly. Hate crime. But these guys are legends in their own minds.”

Another sip. Another smile for Aretha. “So that big guy, Tom Gorman? He was assigned to track Tucker’s group. Meanwhile Sheriff Chubbuck got in touch with us too, and we worked in an advisory capacity as to how this could all go down.”

In the interest of form, Aretha and I also had ordered our own special coffees. Clueless, we had copied each other, going for a pair of Café Americanos. Now neither of us was really sure what to do with what we had. We watched each other, waiting for the first move.

“As they always do,” Melissa Pines said, “one of the units trained on Tucker’s ranch eventually committed a crime, along with a serious civil rights violation. They attacked a man named Jose Rafael Ramirez, a U.S. citizen who ran a farm machinery repair business and was driving from Douglas to Nogales—this is in Arizona, along the border—to fix an irrigation pump. His truck broke down and he tried to hitchhike back to Douglas. He was shot once, stabbed twice, and beaten. Mister Ramirez died of his injuries last week.”

She glanced at her watch. She scooted up to the edge of the dingy corduroy sofa.

“So it goes like this. In civil rights and hate crimes law, the actions of that unit go back to Dane Tucker. He’s accountable. The raid by the feds yesterday put that beyond any question. Since Mister Tucker’s property was essentially used in the commission of this crime, our lawsuit on behalf of Mister Ramirez’s family will ask for Mister Tucker’s ranch property, all of it, to be confiscated in the judgment, and the family has agreed to sell that land to the state of Montana, who has agreed to buy it and put it into a trust that stipulates public access.”

I picked up my cup. So did Aretha. I sniffed. She did too.

“The vision behind all of this is Sheriff Chubbuck’s,” Melissa Pines said. “And all of this is specified in our lawsuit.” Her cup was empty.
“My
lawsuit,” she clarified. “Which I will win.”

She looked at us in puzzlement. “Is your coffee not good?”