The Clinch Knot (26 page)

What Real Love Feels Like

 

“But what about Gray?”

Acting Interim Sheriff Crowe tossed a magazine across the top of Chubbuck’s desk. The familiar shape and colors spun toward me. It was that month’s
National Geographic,
addressed to Chubbuck and already dog-eared from circulation. I fluttered the pages. About halfway through, Henderson Gray appeared—pictures of Gray running, pictures of pronghorn on the land that Chubbuck loved, pictures of Gray and family smiling on the new deck, all of this wrapped in lofty talk—by Gray, by poets, by biologists and anthropologists, one by the great Walt Whitman, then more verbiage by Gray—about man and nature, about spiritual quests, the Blackfoot brave and the Tarahumaran warrior, the timeless tests of manhood.

I shoved the magazine back toward Crowe. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. Pride kills. Maybe I’d eat a truck grill too.”

Crowe blinked at me, then nodded. “So anyway,” he told us, “Sorgensen was not going to give up that shuttle business. No way, to no one.”

We understood already, but Crowe went on. “If he said so, he didn’t mean it. Several guides came out and said Sneed told them he was setting up his own shuttle business. They said they would have used him in a heartbeat. He would have crushed the shuttle side of Sorgensen’s business. And that’s why Sorgensen tried to kill Sneed.”

“Wait a minute—” Because here, suddenly, was something I hadn’t processed:
tried to kill Sneed?

All along
Sneed
was the target? Sneed was not the fall guy for Jesse, the girl with a hundred reasons to die? All along I had centered everything on the
wrong victim
?

I looked at Sneed. He was glassy-eyed, appeared tuned out. “Sorgensen was really after …”

“Yes. He meant to kill Sneed. Jesse was mop up.”

“But—” I was struggling. “Didn’t Jesse get arrested? And offered a deal?”

“She fingered somebody in Bozeman. She got her deal. That was over.”

Aretha said, “Then who shot Jesse?”

Crowe was liking this now, back in the driver’s seat, Aretha needing his attention. He played out the moment and appeared to briefly consider putting his boots back up on the desk. At last he said, as if it were obvious, “Sorgensen shot Jesse.”

“But then who set up Sneed and crawled out of the car?” I was baffled. “Not Sorgensen. Not Lyndzee because she would have tied the knot for Sorgensen, and it would have been a clinch knot—or at least something better than what it was. So who—” And then I had it. My heart surged, choked me. Crowe watched me cough out the name.

“Jesse?”

He nodded.

Aretha: “Jesse?”

“Lyndzee told us she cut a deal with Sorgensen. He told Jesse he had information that would get her father out of prison. But her friend was causing a problem and she had to kill him to get it.”

We were stunned each into our own silence. Aretha’s glare was aimed out the window at big sky country. Sneed mooned up at one of Chubbuck’s big stuffed rainbows, tears filling his eyes. I stared into the past. Did I always have to be so wrong? Always?

It hurt to speak, to think. It hurt to overcome that awful surge of doubt. To believe was such a risk. To know was so impossible. “But she loved him,” I blurted. “I saw it. I was there. I mean, I know it when I see it.”

Crowe gave a jaunty little shrug. “I knew Jesse pretty well, too. I went to high school with her. After her father went in, I’m not sure Jesse had any real stable boyfriends. I’m not sure she was capable of loving somebody. More like she used people who either used her back or got out.”

Now Aretha wrapped her arms around her son. He buried his face against her shoulder. I saw his gut convulse, his fingers curl to fists. When my voice returned, it was hard on Crowe.

“This kid didn’t use her. I was there. He cared for her. And she cared for him.”

“Yeah.” Crowe gave me that shrug again.

“I mean it.”

I stared him down.

“Okay, yeah,” he agreed, and this time he seemed earnest. “He’s a good guy. I saw them around. I never quite saw Jesse like that before. She did look different. She looked happy.”

“She was happy. She was in love.”

Aretha fought for control, her voice shredding. “And still that … that girl still tried to kill him?”

“Jesse’d do anything if she thought it would clear her father. We all knew that. That was her purpose in life, to defend her dad. I don’t think she could help it.” He nodded at Sneed. “She got him drunk on that sweet liquor with some animal tranquilizer in it that Sorgensen gave her, the same stuff that Henderson Gray bought from Sorgenson for those pronghorn. That junk made your son, your buddy, pass out. Sorgensen was already up the mountain in his van, a little further than that pond, waiting. He made Lyndzee hike down and watch for a signal from Jesse, but she walked right past and kept on going, which got her beat up pretty good later. Meanwhile Jesse taped the windows. She lit that little grill and she crawled out.”

“She could fit?”

“It was tight. The ME found scrapes and bruises on her back and hips. So now those are explained.”

Crowe’s lips parted, sticky and dry. They closed again, parted once more, and he lifted an open file from Chubbuck’s desk. He read for a few moments. Then, as if the whole thing had overwhelmed him suddenly, he made a troubled gulp and closed the file.

“Jesse made it out of the car, and then Sorgensen played the card she didn’t know about. He never meant to give her information about her father. He didn’t have any. Galen Ringer killed that guy at the boat ramp. Everybody knows that. Galen Ringer kicked the crap out of plenty of people who looked at him wrong or said the wrong thing. Jesse’s dad was just kinda funny that way.”

Crowe had more trouble swallowing. He looked around Chubbuck’s office, at the lifetime represented. He looked at Sneed and his mother side by side in their chairs, heads down, rocking together.

“So … Jesse crawled out the trunk and right away Sorgensen shot her in the head. He … he … wiped the pistol, your pistol—Jesse took it from you—and threw it in through the trunk. Then he realized without Jesse, without Lyndzee either, he couldn’t get the seat shut … and then the rod, the fly broken off in back of the seat, the knot that got your attention, all that. Just this morning I found the metal pieces of Sneed’s rod in Sorgensen’s burn barrel.”

He shook his head. “That’s about the only thing I’ve done right …”

The acting interim gave his head a woeful shake. But I bit off any sympathy for Russell Crowe. He was no relation to a lot of things, especially not to the kind of young man who ought to graduate to sheriff. But the grim truth was that blame ran wide. All of us were fools and had been fooled. All of us—even Chubbuck—had the crime turned inside-out. And my poor damaged fishing buddy was now turned inside-out and sideways, for life, by Jesse. She had done her best to murder Sneed, who at that moment stood up out of his mother’s arms and told Aretha angrily, emphatically, “Because I never knew what real love feels like!”

No one spoke for a long and awful moment. Outside the window, pickup trucks rolled past, clouds floated in the big blue sky. Aretha had lost it. She was weeping.

Then I said, “No.” I gripped Sneed’s hand. “She loved you. I know she did.”

“But she—”

“I’m sure.”

“Dog—”

“I’m sure, Sneedy. She loved you. I saw it. But it’s just not that easy.”

Powerful Somehow

 

“Like you said,” Aretha murmured to me after lovemaking a few days later. “It’s just not that easy. Like, the fact that I’m in love with you doesn’t necessarily mean that I should hook up with you, you know, for the long term.”

Her head was in my lap, her eyes closed. A rain-replenished mountain creek scurried and laughed beside us. We were naked on top of my rain coat on top of a scratchy bed of moss and dead pine needles. We had been laughing at ourselves. My back was stuck in pitch against a pine trunk, and my hands flailed to keep the horseflies off my precious, precious sweetheart. Making love outside always seems like a good idea—doesn’t it?—always looks good in movies and sounds good in books. But here’s some advice: stand up if you can, get it done, and get dressed before the insects find you.

“Dog? Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Did I hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Really? Ouch! You hit me! What was that for?”

“Horsefly.”

I did understand. For one thing, the Sneed picture became clearer day by day as he went through a series of tests and scans and laboratory analyses. Parts of his brain would not recover. Others might. Still others certainly would come back whole, but there would always be the issue of imbalance and its effect on personality and behavior. Sneed’s rapidly recovering motor skills, the specialists told Aretha, could be difficult to manage and possibly even dangerous without the full faculties of adult judgment and the restraints of accurate social awareness. His memories, they said, were valuable only so far as they came within context, which was often very sketchy. Sneed’s injured brain was still somewhat in flux, to be sure, but they cautioned his mother that very soon the newness of the whole situation would be gone, the young man’s status would be fixed, the doctors and therapists would step back, and Aretha would have to work very,
very
hard.

Actually, I realized, she was thinking of me. Didn’t I have my own burdens, in my own life? Should I really put aside my problems to help solve hers?

No, she was telling me, I should not. More specifically, as a pro-active measure against undue density, denial, or neediness on my part, she was telling me, kindly, that she would not allow the Dog to hang around.

Okay.

Yeah.

Sure. Makes sense. Dog damn it.

The guide-shuttle idea, anyway, was wildly unrealistic. Sorgensen and Jesse had seen to that. Sneed would never drive again. Nor would he be able to keep things organized. And Aretha had somewhat warmed to the Nevada Territory, but not enough, for sure, to stake a claim.

Instead she tracked down her mother in Renton, a blue-collar suburb of Seattle. In a phone call that I was allowed to overhear because Aretha was gripping my hand as she made it, she told her mother, essentially,
You are going to help me with this. Yes, you. Me and your grandbaby will be there in a week. Get ready.

So off we went, west, the three of us in the Cruise Master with a credit card and a week to kill. We fished the Beaverhead, the Big Hole, the Clark Fork, the Clearwater, the Spokane and the Yakima. Sneed was a handful and a delight, like a child with a Swiss cheese adult IQ and a slow left side. Perhaps most remarkable was his fishing, which improved to the extent that he regularly out-fished the Dog and made a lot of noise about it. It helps, apparently, to think less logically, to let your loop fall and your mind wander. Who knew?

“Yeah,” I’d counter in my defense, “well, I have the handicap of making sure the two of you don’t drown. That’s why I’m always fishing downstream in your leftovers. In case you or your mother comes floating by, screaming for help.”

“Excuses, Dog, excuses.”

“Shall I go upstream then?”

“Hell no!” Aretha would pipe up. “I’m not fishing your backwater!”

In this manner, in a week, we achieved Seattle, where Aretha became nervous and stalled around in a fancy Sixth Street hotel for two days, getting up her courage. We visited the Space Needle and the Science Center, and we ate fresh crab—yes,
crab
—down around Pike Place Market.

After surf and turf and drinks on the third day, when Aretha stopped at the hotel desk and bought Sneed his own room for the night, I knew it was over.

In the morning, we unstuck ourselves and showered separately. I went outside with them to wait at the curb for Aretha’s mother and her man to pull up. Aretha cried. I tried. Sneed banged his knuckles on a street sign pole and then punched me in the shoulder.

Finally the ride came. Aretha took a huge inhale and a last look at the Hoss-Dog, and they left.

Within an hour I was standing for some unknown reason at the edge of the ocean, a fly fisherman with wet boots and wet cheeks, against water too big to fish, under a heavy sky watching waves roll in.

It was strange, though. All that water, around me, from me, ahead of me, and yet I felt powerful somehow. I felt bigger. I felt afloat. I felt like this, at last, was my turn from the dark deep toward home.

Acknowledgments:

 

For this book I owe Chris Miller, friend and first-class fishing guide out of Livingston, for his patience, knowlege, and generosity—and for several good days of fishing over the years. Thanks to Miya, too, for loaning me Chris and giving me a place to say. I am also grateful to the Aserlind family for their wonderful hospitality out on Ninth Street Island over the years and to Kristy for her skills as a reader. Jerry Kustich also loaned me his time and expertise in reading an earlier version of this book. Thanks to my neighbors, Bob and Amanda, for taking care of Earl during my writing time, and most of all thanks to my family, once again, for living with a writer.

 

Author photo by Ya-Ling Tsai

 

John Galligan
lives and teaches in Madison, WI. He is the author of the Fly Fishing mystery series, including the award-winning
The Blood Knot.
He is also the author of
Red Sky, Red Dragonfly,
a novel set in Japan.