The Clinch Knot (23 page)

Sudden Inexplicable Death

 

“I’ve got money. Why don’t we all go out for a good old ranch-style supper?”

This was Aretha’s suggestion after Cord Cook delivered the Cruise Master to the Geyser Motel and took off on a jog toward home.

“I mean steak … and what? Beans? And whiskey? And hmm, what else to they have on
Bonanza?”

I didn’t answer that right away, could not read the sincerity of her tone in my current mood, so I just stepped in and hauled my buddy Sneed off the bed and hugged him long and hard.

“Be careful!” Aretha scolded me as she separated us. “Headache, dizziness, confusion, convulsions, kidney failure, respiratory arrest, memory loss, dementia, irritability—” she recovered the doctor’s handout from a spanking new hand bag, Big Louis II, and shoved me further away from Sneed “—blindness, gait and balance problems, speech disturbance, loss of higher intellectual function, heart arrhythmia—”

She stopped short. She gripped me rather desperately by both arms, hustled me into the bathroom and closed the door so Sneed couldn’t hear. Her hazel eyes popped with color. She shook me.

“Sudden inexplicable death!
” she whispered.

Peering through dim light at my menu in the swanky Livingston Bar and Grill, I decided to say, “Well, isn’t it true about
Bonanza
that Hop Sing could make damn near anything?”

Aretha looked at me over her menu. I said, “Don’t I remember lobster bisque and Yorkshire pudding?”

“Were you in juvie too or what?”

“Why do you ask?”

“All that time for television.”

I shrugged. “For white boys, the equivalent is college.” I tapped my menu. “That’s what I’m having. Lobster bisque and Yorkshire pudding.”

Sneed started banging his silverware together like a three-year-old, as if the sound was new. Aretha took the fork and knife away and gave him a piece of sourdough bread—and a kiss on the temple. She looked well satisfied as she returned her attention to me.

“Did I ever tell you that my mother is now in Seattle? No? Why do I mention it? Because that’s where lobsters come from. Not Montana. You eat a lobster here, Hoss, that thing’s got frequent flier miles.”

“Well, actually lobsters come from Maine,” I said. “But your point is well taken.”

She sighted me in with a scowl. “My mother eats lobster in Seattle.”

“Crab?”

“She says lobster.”

“Then maybe you ought to go straighten her out.”

Aretha raised the menu in front of her face. “What do you know, you old coffee boiler.”

“I know that only a greenhorn shave tail mixes up the coasts.”

From behind the menu: “Aw, hobble your lip, you durn flannel mouth.”

“Curly wolf.”

“Four flusher.”

“Mudsill.”

“Odd stick.”

Sneed let out a snort of sourdough crumbs. Me too. “Odd
stick?
” I pulled her menu down. “All right,” I demanded, “out with it.”

And so Aretha finally told me the
Bonanza
story over her Thai charred-beef salad, my grilled Montana squab, Sneed’s burger and fries, and the bottle of 1996 Domaine du Caillou Reserve Chateauneuf-du-Pape that our waiter somehow finessed onto the tab.

She was fifteen when she got pregnant. Aretha began here while we waited for our food. It was unclear if Sneed—in-and-out at her side—was listening, but she seemed to hope so this time as she detailed in plain, calm language an act of midnight violence in her bedroom that was every bit as gruesome and barbaric as something from the true wild West.

She touched her son’s arm. “So you see, at first, I didn’t want you. I was scared, I was angry, and I was ashamed. There was no person inside me then, just a problem that I didn’t know how to solve. Can you understand that, Baby?”

Sneed nodded. But then his nodding didn’t stop.

Aretha sighed. She stopped him gently. Here was the wine. “What makes you think I’m not paying for it?” she asked the waiter when he offered me the cork. “Because I am.”

She went on through the terrible first months of her secret until the moment when a school friend came to her in tears and blurted out, “Retha, help me, I’m pregnant!”

“So we ended up together in this home for bad girls that weren’t allowed to embarrass everybody by staying in school. That home was supposed to be a school itself, but we girls, all we did was eat and talk and watch TV and feel our babies growing.”

Our food came. For a while, the taste of it made us monosyllabic, like cave people, gulping it down on five-dollar swallows of wine. Aretha was afraid that Sneed would choke, so she carefully cut his burger into bits, then his fries, until Sneed raised doubt about his “loss of higher intellectual function” by blurting out, “Nobody here has a job, right?”

He looked at his mother. “Right? Did you ask for a leave?”

“No, Baby. I just left.”

“And Dog, you …” He frowned. As if he had forgotten how to describe it, how to describe
me
in relation to employment, he just raised his hands and started to laugh. He laughed right through his next question: “So what are we going to do?”

Aretha and I traded looks. Do? We? There wasn’t any answer. There wasn’t even any question. All that
do
and
we
stuff was worlds apart and miles ahead, in a realm his mother and I could not access.

“Well, what do you think, Baby?”

“I think we should stay here,” Sneed pronounced. “I like this place.”

He looked from me to his mother, then suddenly he was crestfallen. “I had a plan,” he said, “for staying here, but I can’t remember it.”

Lost in private thoughts, we ate quietly until were full as ticks and poking around the last precious remnants of our meals. Privately, knowing Aretha wasn’t interested, I was still working over possibilities involving Russell Crowe, and Crowe’s mother, and Jesse. So—what had happened? Had Sneed punched Crowe in the eye, smashed the service pistol out of his
left
hand—the one that was splinted now? And then Sneed—a black man, in hospital dress?—had gotten picked up hitchhiking? And dropped off on Main Street in Livingston?

At last I shook it all away and said, “So that’s where you got into
Bonanza?
At the bad girls’ home?”

Aretha chewed slowly and then smiled, warming from the memory.

“Those girls,” she said, “were wonderful. They were my first real friends, and my last ones for a long, long time. I am
still
looking for friends like that.” She sighed and pushed away her plate. “You want the rest?”

“Oh, God. I’m stuffed. But I’ve been eyeing that this whole time.”

“Go ahead.”

I took a forkful of Thai beef. “Much obliged.”

“I remember it was winter and that was the one time it did snow in Arkansas. But that big old house was warm, and full of girls and their babies, and we were eating and laughing and watching old re-runs on TV and then what happened with us black girls, see, is we started goofing a little. You know, the truth is there are a few good-looking white men out there. We black girls are just not supposed to think so. But there were no black men on TV anyway, and we were naughty girls already, and that house was like some cruise ship at sea. We were alone, nobody watching us, no idea where we really were or where we were going. So we started hunting around the TV for cute white men we could play a crush on. It took some damn work, I’ll tell you. They had to be on a series, because we had to see them enough to really check them out, so we’re looking at Hogan and Gilligan and Maxwell Smart and this was just
not
working out.”

She poured the last of the Chateauneuf-du-Pape into my glass and waved the bottle in the air like you might a beer glass in a saloon. “Are you sure—”

“Yes, I’m sure.” She looked at me square, didn’t seem one bit drunk. “It’s just sinking in to me, right now.
Sudden inexplicable death.
It could just as well be me.” She smiled somewhat sadly as she encouraged me to finish the wine. “Or you. Or any of us. Really, couldn’t it?”

I wasn’t so sure about
inexplicable,
in my case, but I nodded. There was my boy Eamon, after all—how would I ever manage to explain, to my own satisfaction,
that?

“Oh, yeah.” She was moving again. “And we tried out Hawkeye and Trapper and Radar. He got a few nibbles—Radar did. But we weren’t looking for teddy bears, you know. We were looking for some
ummph.”

She confirmed that we were having another bottle, giving the waiter’s look right back at him.

“He’s decided my check is going to bounce,” she told me. “But anyway, then,
then,
we find
Bonanza.
We find Adam, that’s Purnell Roberts, and we find Little Joe, that’s Michael Landon, and those boys are fly. They got those silky cowboy clothes, nice and tight in the back, with their shirts open. They got curly hair and nice smiles. Pretty soon that is
all we watch,
girls screaming when their boys come on, crying when they get hurt, fighting with each other when Adam and Little Joe get into it on the TV. It was a scene, oh my.”

Her eyes glittered from the memory. “I’ll let my assistant do it this time,” she told the waiter, vis-à-vis the cork.

“We had the Adam camp and we had the Little Joe camp,” she said.

“And you?”

“And I,” she said, “had a secret.”

Let’s Not Go Backwards

 

A secret, mind you, that she withheld for the purpose of toying with the Hoss-Dog—but withheld also, I could tell, because she was stuck on something else, something serious inside her.

She looked a little troubled as she paid out five crisp fifties onto the bill tray, failing to take full and proper appreciation of the effect this had on our waiter.

I asked her outside, “Not to be nosy. But where did you get the cash?”

“Russell Crowe,” she answered. Her pace quickened and she spurted ahead.

“Aretha, what the hell? Russell Crowe personally?” I caught up, grabbed her arm. “Or Russell Crowe sheriff?”

“He said he was still my liaison.” She was stiff to my touch. “He said it was money to help us get back home.”

I stopped her. “Aretha, listen. Did anyone see him give you the money? Were you with anyone? Do you know if it’s his money or the county’s?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Were you alone with him?”

“I was at the motel. About an hour before you got there. He knocked on the door. D’Ontay was asleep. He said he paid off the motel bill and then he gave me the cash.”

“How much?”

She walked ahead without an answer.

“Aretha, this may not be over.”

“It’s over for me.”

“Aretha, how much?”

“You are an odd stick.
Sudden inexplicable death,
Hoss. Don’t you get it? Money is money. Let’s not go backwards.”

“Aretha—”

She faced me. “I have come a long way,” she said, trying to control a tremulous voice. “A
long
way. And I am very, very close to a place I never thought I would be.”

Then she wheeled and walked away, all the way up to the corner of Main and Park, and turned right toward the Geyser.

Sneed trailed behind. I grabbed him, shook him a little. “Sneedy, are you with me?”

“What’s up, Dog?”

“I need you to tell me about your ride back to Livingston, after the ambulance. Do you remember? You think so? My guess is Deputy Crowe suddenly pushed you outside, is that right? Can you remember?”

He shook his head. “I was in an ambulance?”

“Yes. Then you were outside. Then a lady picked you up and drove you here.”

He thought a moment. Then he nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

“I need you to think about that ride with the lady. Anything you can remember. Anything at all. Sights, smells, something you heard. Just relax and try to be in there again.”

He closed his eyes. He was trying. He backed up against the Livingston Bar and Grill, slid down the bricks until he sat on the sidewalk.

I turned a circle, attempting to calm myself.

“Sure,” Sneed said behind me.

“What is it, Sneedy?”

“Dog, I think … pine cones?”

I Am Telling You I Am Innocent

 

Backward I went then, at full tilt. I walked Sneed home to the Geyser and returned downtown by Cruise Master, parked in an alley and came up behind Uncle Tick Judith locking up the liquor store. “Hey.” He was the greater Montana sage grouse of snoose—startled, ballistic, spit flying into the window.

“Sumbitch … you … thought you’d left town.”

“I’m still here.”

Inside, he thumped a fifth of Smirnoff’s vodka onto the counter.

“Bet you need a … big old sumbitch … jug for the road.”

“I need some basic facts,” I said. “Some history.”

In ten minutes we were back at Jesse’s mini-storage, lit by Uncle Judith’s headlights. “Just about every letter she ever got from some point, whether it be from her dad or a boyfriend, seems it’s gonna be in here.” Uncle Judith rapped his knuckles on the top of the cedar chest. He coughed in a sad attempt to laugh. “Guess she’s had that key a while. So much for my supervision.”

I opened it: Jesse had tossed letters and other keepsakes in randomly, it seemed, until her memories were at least a foot thick and jumbled.

“Probably cuz I snooped a little, opened things.”

Uncle Judith went in deeper. He stopped in front of the little glass-faced china cabinet, back left, and said, “Move your shadow, will ya?” From the cabinet he brought forth a statuesque bottle of Galliano and flopped down on the settee. He put his boots up on an ottoman. Now I saw that he had carried forth an old Colt pistol from his truck. He laid the pistol on the settee beside him. Then he wiped dust off that fancy high-top bottle, took a pull. “You always was a fancy pants,” he muttered, as if someone sat beside him. He held the Galliano out for me.

“You’re gonna find this out anyway,” he said on a gust of what sounded like regret. “You’ll know from reading all them letters. The way he denies it every chance he gets.”

I declined the bottle. Uncle Judith took another gulp of yellow liqueur. He was the David Copperfield of snoose. Where had that brown gob gone to? How could he drink with it in there? And what was it that I would know?

“Read them letters I’m guessing what you’ll find out is that Bozeman guide down at Otter Creek didn’t read Galen exactly right and called him a faggot. And Galen will swear to his girl that being no such thing as a faggot, he had no cause to kill the man. Therefore he is innocent.”

He took another swash.

“And that is one part true. Galen Ringer sure as hell is no faggot.” He snuck a timid glance at me. “This sumbitch world has always been confused between a homosexual and a faggot. No man likes to be called a faggot. Sure as hell not Galen. And not yours truly one bit neither.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What?”

Now Uncle Judith straightened up, eyed me as if I’d offended him. My gaze skipped to the Colt. He said, “A faggot’s another thing. I know plenty of faggots that go with women. It ain’t about that. Me and Galen is real men.”

Then abruptly he tipped his hat down over his face and said from behind it, “Now I done said it. I guess I surprised ya.”

“Well … I never gave it much … yeah, you did.”

“We raised that girl, me and Galen. Her rightful mother wanted nothing to do with it. Galen went with that woman before … you know, before he … well, see, I …”

His chest began to shake. From under his hat he said, “Now I lost them both. I lost my entire family.” He sputtered. “I been carrying this pistol around these last couple days everywhere I go. It just seems to end up in my hand.”

I waited. But that was it. He seemed to be done talking. I offered a conflicted and stillborn “I’m sorry” toward the snuffling behind the hat.

“Uncle Judith, who did kill that guide at Otter Creek? Do you know?”

“Galen did. For chrissake, who the hell else?”

Now the hat trembled. His gnarled hands gripped the knees of his jeans. I could reach the Colt, and I did so, unopposed. I unloaded it.

“I do thank you for that,” Uncle Judith managed.

He was silent for so long then that I tried to refocus: what mattered here, why I came, was to see where Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe fit into the Jesse picture. I began to sort the letters and memorabilia: father in one stack, boyfriends in the other. I looked for Crowe among the notes and scraps and movie stubs and sometimes red-hot missives of love or hate or restraining orders from boyfriends. Nothing came up right away. This was going to take a while. I had decided this just as there came a great gasp and Uncle Judith’s hat fell off, landed on the neck of the Galliano bottle.

“Well that’s that,” he concluded, wiping a sleeve across his nose. “All the rage these days, of course, sumbitch movies and all.”

He looked every place but into my eyes. I needed to say something: “You wanna help me read these?”

“I do not read,” he pronounced. He recovered his hat. He sniffed the Galliano, put the cap on. “Galen read a magazine now and then. Myself, I recognize, but I do not read.”

That clarified, he turned sideways on the settee. His compact body fit just right with his boots up and crossed on the far arm.

“Turn those headlights off, willya? There’s a flashlight in the cubby.”

Then he was the sandman of snoose. He raised up to access the can in his back pocket. He packed in a goodnight pinch the size of a minor cow flop. In ten seconds he was snoring.

After two hours I had found no trace of Russell Crowe among Jesse’s mementos. Many of these keepsakes, I thought, came to seem like evidence, like testimony as to how much Jesse Ringer mattered to a wide assortment of men and boys. Henderson Gray was one among several to say that he loved her. But her letters from Gray delineated a steady retraction of that love, terminating in a blunt demand that Jesse back off and leave him alone.

Gray hadn’t lied about the relationship—not to me, anyway. Clearly, Jesse mistook him as someone who could lawyer up on the state and free her father. Clearly, she felt Gray had promised to do so. But he wrote at one point, “Fucking is not a promise. Fucking is fucking.” I dropped the letter and turned away, too sad for Jesse to continue.

Anyway, Crowe was not in the Jesse Ringer boys club. Could I let it go then?

I tried.

I told myself that all the games Crowe and his mother had played around the margins of the Sneed-Jesse tragedy were moves in an opportunistic scheme to embarrass and discredit Chubbuck and return the mantle of Park County Sheriff to the Crowe family—for whatever reasons they had. And the scheme had worked, more or less. But so what? Was this my concern? Russell and Rita Crowe did not cause the tragedy. I was certain. They simply, clumsily, successfully exploited it.

As Uncle Judith snored into the early morning hours, I moved on to the father-daughter correspondence—or at least Galen Ringer’s half of it, stamped by the Deer Lodge prison. What startled me right away was the shallowness of Ringer’s tone, the paucity of specifics in the claims he made to his daughter. He was innocent. This was the central declaration in each and every letter.
I am telling you I am innocent.
This was the phrase he repeated. And:
why would I care what anyone called me if it wasn’t true?
Jesse had to believe him. She was his daughter. This was the logic. Apparently she begged him for proof, facts, names, people who could help her, but Galen Ringer always replied
Faith is stronger than facts Jesse you know that and your my daughter you just have to trust me.

God help me if this did not go on and on—months, years—the poor girl graduating from high school, planning to go to college but backing out for lack of funds, getting hired as a bartender, a smokejumper, a camp counselor, a mini-stop cashier, a bartender again, getting engaged, once, twice, and at each of these junctures her father echoing her accomplishments back at her, setting them up in scoffing capital letters, replying,
PROMOTION TO NIGHT MANAGER. Well thats fine and good about your big success but here I am an innocent man in prison so what is happening with my defense?