The Clinch Knot (3 page)

Private Water

 

Dear Sneed and Jesse: I decided to hit the road. It’s been great. Your tent was burned by a couple of skinhead punks and the sheriff doesn’t seem at all concerned, so I’d watch out. Jesse, I washed your clothes and dropped them off with Uncle Judith at the liquor store. Take care. Keep your flies on the water. Your friend, Dog.

But this doesn’t feel right either. This voice feels glib, disembodied from the secret gravity of my leaving, dismissive of the sediment amassing in my gut.

I park on a side street to avoid the sheriff. I hike to the liquor store down Main Street with an unwieldy armload of Jesse’s clothing. I spill a stiff burgundy bra onto the sidewalk and have to kick it along when no one is looking.
You’re botching this, Dog. You’re botching it.

Old Tick Judith, clerk at the liquor store, is the Arnold Palmer of snoose. He sees me coming through the door and nails his spittoon, drops it right in the cup, from a difficult lie among the cordials. “So they broke up, huh?”

“No. I’m leaving. Jesse’s stuff was in my vehicle. I don’t know where they are.”

“Figured they’d break up soon.”

“Well,” I said, “they didn’t.”

“Jess ain’t over the last guy,” says Uncle Judith. “Not by a long shot. So I figured this would happen.”

“Except it didn’t.”

He scrapes out his lip, tees up a fresh one, wipes his fingers on his Levis. He’s a Copenhagen man, fine cut, old school, takes pinches big as walnuts, and is thus a spitter not a swallower. He sets a plastic fifth of Smirnoff’s vodka on the counter, drops a routine putt into the spittoon to clear his voice. “Twenty-nine bucks. Jess and that colored fella have a fight or something?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Bound to happen.”

I give Tick Judith a look-over, wonder about his hearing. He is not Jesse’s real uncle. He is a close pal of her father’s from the bull riding days, a short, wiry, hot-tempered scrapper who hung on to his bulls like a tick—trophies back among the Grand Marnier and the Galliano to prove it. Uncle Judith is like her other father, Jesse has told me. He is her guardian, provided her crash pad until she was eighteen, all that. And sure enough, the old bull rider accepts the girl’s laundry like it’s part of the deal.

“She’s an adult now,” Uncle Judith tells me, folding a tube top. “I can’t do nothing but watch.” He now has a bit of a dogleg from the end of the counter to the spittoon beneath the register. He spits with a slice and bangs it in. “But I assure you that I do watch. Anybody hurts Jess is gonna answer to me. I promised that to Galen.”

I pay for the vodka out of Sorgensen’s money. I figure I’m going to need it. I figure, also, that this is the man to ask: “You know anything about skinheads around here?”

He grins, juicy and brown, over a handful of Jesse’s panties. “You mean them two dickheads with the pink truck that bought twenty-five cases of Heinekens on Tucker’s account the other day?”

“I probably do.”

“Tattoos?”

“Yup.”

“Knee-boots like a couple of prairie whores?”

“Yeah. What do you mean, Tucker’s account? Those two little Nazis work for Dane Tucker?”

Uncle Judith clears the queue with a lazy wedge shot that splats to the floor an inch or two short. He turns away, disinterested in the gimme.

“The two of them come in here to get about twenty cases of beer. Only one explanation for that. Dane’s at the ranch with a bunch of his Hollywood friends, doing their drug parties or their orgies or whatever. And those punks work for him.”

“Come on. Hollywood sent skinheads to get beer?”

Uncle Judith shrugs this off. Old news to him, apparently. But me, I have only recently learned that Dane Tucker owns a two-hundred-thousand-acre spread in the Paradise Valley, a new-age western empire assembled from foreclosed family ranches. I have only begun to process the fact that the star of
Epic Force, Force Factor,
and
Force Down
hoards an entire river, the storied Roam River, a public waterway and a fly fishing gem, inside his fences. But
skinheads?

Uncle Judith handles Jesse’s panties with gnarly certitude, gets them in a nicely managed bundle. Her father went to prison, I remember, when Jesse was fifteen. Her mother has never been mentioned—except that Tick Judith, she claims once in a while, basically
is
her mother.

“Word is Tucker has those Nazi punks watching his fence lines,” Uncle Judith tells me, setting those panties down inside a Jack Daniels box he carries up from the back hallway. “When they’re not making beer runs.”

He does something Arnold Palmer never tried, a fairway shot on the move. For this he employs the gap between his front teeth, drills one low and hard with crisp
zzzt!
and a resonant
ping!
on brass.

“Lotta beer going out to that place lately. Fancy liquor too.”

Uncle Judith gets a girly pink tank top spread out in front of him, getting it oriented, nipping it in under his chin to get both hands on the job, and just then a customer—a big, raw night shifter, thirsty-looking—jangles through the door.

“Hey, old man,” this guy brays, “you finally got that pretty girl’s clothes off her, did ya?”

Uncle Judith folds that shirt up real nice, starts a new pile. His ears are red as he sets a pint of Jim Beam on the counter. He says, “Four ninety-five.”

“I hear she’s running with one of them reverse Eskimos.”

“There be anything else?”

“Well, gee. Lemme see.” The night shifter fairly drools over Jesse’s panties. “You got anything in a size four?”

These could be fighting words. Uncle Judith would like to spit in his face, I can tell. But now he becomes the Mahatma Gandhi of snoose. I see how much he loves Jesse. I see incredible restraint. Eyes down, he just swallows, and swallows, and swallows again. As he makes change, I lean across the heap of Jesse’s unfolded clothes and I ask him quietly, “Hey. Do me a favor? Can I leave them a note?”

Howl

 

Dear Sneed and Jesse: Two skinheads burned your tent. They work for Dane Tucker and drive an old red Ford with an oil drum in the box. They left a no trespassing sign that said turn back now, so if that means anything to you, I’d do it. You never know about people like them. As for me, I’ve moved on, which is my sad answer to what the two of you made me feel. Love, Dog.

Yeah, well, I guess that’s it. The sky looks like a dirty sock when I step out of the liquor store. The Canyon Ferry Lake fire has pushed a smutty wrinkle up beneath the jet stream, and the smoke sprawls out over Livingston, stinking and trapping heat. I feel bad leaving. I just feel bad. But here I go.

Inside the Cruise Master one block behind Main Street I get ready to ride. I decant Smirnoff into a travel cup, shake in Tang, stir with my finger, give it a healthy taste test and then lodge the cup in its holder. I rip open a pack of Swisher Sweets, find matches, and set these in readiness on the little ledge in front of the odometer. I’m ready to pull out. I’ll head down Main toward the BP station on Park Street for seventy-one bucks of gas. That’s how far I’ll make it toward my dark deep on the Big Two-Hearted River before I’ll have to stop again and do life. I’m deciding between interstate and local when a shrill whistle makes me hit the brake.

“Trying to kill me?” huffs the jogger at my window as he passes down the middle of the street.

I’m in a bit of daze as I watch this guy. He is lean to skeletal, shirtless and freckled, in scant silky yellow shorts and a red ball cap. A large fanny pack rides one hip, a holstered water bottle the other. Dust coats his ankles like a pair of raw umber socks. He kinks along like he’s in pain, his left leg splaying wide, his right hand jerking up and down like a band leader’s to keep things balanced. All this and he still manages to flip me my third bird of the day.

It is one of those moments, to be sure. I am a split second from a particularly nasty fit of road rage.
Try running on the sidewalk, turkey-butt.
I yearn to flatten him with the Cruise Master. But I check it and watch, thinking I’ve seen this guy before.

At the next storefront—law office, I think—he stops. He’s done running, is ready to collapse, but this phase too must be done centrally in the public arena. He spreads his legs across the sidewalk, puts his hands on his knees and then heaves, gobs on the sidewalk, a string of saliva yo-yoing from his chin. Then he straightens up. Hands on hips, head thrown back, he staggers in gaudy circles, gulping air. Off comes the harrier’s cap and next comes the water bottle, its last few ounces dumped over the top of his stiff, reddish hair. From his next gesture—he fires the empty bottle to the pavement—all of us among his audience are to understand that he is unsatisfied, that he thinks he should have done better, and we are to discover therein how driven, how heroic this man is. Or something.

Instead I’m thinking:
As a matter of fact, I
have
seen this lunatic before. Someone Sneed pointed out as one of Jesse’s former men friends.

And:
Can I drive on the sidewalk? Could I get up enough speed to run him down?

The jogger enters the office and the moment passes. I’m over it. I turn the Cruise Master around and realize I’ve decided on a detour.

I am leaving Livingston to the south. The Big Two-Hearted can wait a bit. I’m going to drive down along the Roam River, check out this movie star Dane Tucker’s place, check out his fences and his skinhead watchdogs. I am going to look, I have decided, for a little slip-through in the fence, a little recreational trespassing. Scoot in, fish the bastard’s stolen water.

But instead this happens. I drive the entire length of Tucker’s property, twenty-five road miles, looking for a weakness, a way in. There is no such thing.

I double back. All the access roads are gated and chained. All the rangeland is fenced tight with four-strand barbed wire and posted
NO TRESSPASSING.

I triple up, wasting precious gas now. For long stretches, the lower Roam River is a full-bodied and sinuous dream, taunting me from the road—and then it disappears entirely into upstream canyons that force the pavement several miles west. Yet still here, along glittering rhyolite cliffs and non-negotiable jack pine screes, Tucker’s fences and
NO TRESPASSING
signs persist, driven and strung and posted all the way south to a sign on a pitted dirt road that says
National Park Boundary
and means, I believe, that I am now entering Yellowstone Park.

So I quadruple back downstream,
Dog damn it,
to what must be Dane Tucker’s main gate. I take a medicinal bellyful of v-and-T as I look the structure over. Molded concrete pillars support a roll-away Tymetal gate on a remote-controlled motor. A covered box contains the key pad and the intercom. Cameras watch from the tops of the pillars, tented under sheet metal and aimed down at me.

I was in this business once, so I know. This is the whole high-security embassy gate package. This is what my company, Oglivie Secure, once installed for House Speaker Tip O’Neill in the Boston suburbs.

But why here?

Beyond the gate stretches an access road, arcing across an expanse of desiccated rangeland where a few hobby bison graze listlessly in the heat. A plank bridge bears the road over a slow stretch of the Roam where trout make lazy dimples. Then the road turns upstream and winds with the river into a deep draw out of sight.

I press the intercom button.

After a long wait the speaker crackles: “Can I help you?”

“I want to speak to Dane Tucker.”

The voice comes back twangy and harsh: “What you want to do, Pedro, is get your bug-ass off this property.”

Pedro?
I say, “Is this Dane Tucker?”

Silence. I look at the camera on the left-hand pillar. Its eye stares back, blank and dusty.

“I’d like permission to fish the Roam.”

The speaker crackles. “This is private land.”

“But the river’s public. I’ve got a right to fish it. Are you Dane Tucker?”

Silence again, like this is a hard question to answer.

“Because if you are Dane Tucker—”

I pause here to wonder if I have had too much vodka. But this cannot be clearly established, so I continue: “Because if you are Dane Tucker, I’d like to discuss my riparian rights with you. I’d like to know the basis on which you feel justified in denying me and everybody else—”

The speaker goes dead with an obvious click. For a moment I feel disoriented. I turn a full circle. The Yellowstone River is no more than a few miles west as the crow flies, but it’s a rugged and forbidding few miles, with the Roam and the ‘Stone separated at this point by an ancient volcanic ridge, grizzly bear country, thick with pines stands and huckleberry tangles. I think:
isn’t that the ridge, near the top, where Jesse showed Sneed and me a little spring pond with big wild cutthroats? Isn’t up there where she stripped down to panties and went topless into the pond, then rode around on top of Sneed’s shoulders, laughing at my tighty-whities that weren’t very white or tight at all?

I turn back, jam a finger into the intercom button. Bring on the skinheads. But nothing.

I buzz again. The speaker snaps on. I open my mouth to speak for the masses, for all of us fly fishermen denied, but the guy inside beats me to it, his voice harsh and preemptive.

“You wanna see Dane Tucker, buy a movie ticket, asshole.”

And the system goes dead.

But now I’m feisty and drunk and alive with memories, and I decide that I’m going to fish that mountain pond once more, strip naked and swim, leave behind my underwear on a stick for Jesse to find, as a joke. I’m going to miss those two. I’m going to miss my buddy Sneed, especially, and I drive off from Tucker’s gate knowing I will never make a friend like that again.

I was in Idaho when it happened. I was exploring the upper north fork of the Snake River. Crossing that river on a bridge, I had become entangled in the sprawling, messy efforts of a bridge-painting crew. Paint-glazed and zombie-like, the crew was moving things—barrels, cones, hoses, compressors—to the other side of the bridge. The flagman was awol and the Cruise Master was enmeshed before I realized there was no place to go.

It was hot, mid-nineties. The foreman was pissed. Assorted ethnics reeled around high on oils and thinners, their ages and races difficult to determine through all the masks and bandanas and silver dustings of paint spray. They clanked around in their safety harnesses like sloppy robots, like bizarre Christmas ornaments. This was one miserable-ass job, I remember thinking as I tried to back up. “No, no, no, goddamnit,” the foreman yelled. “Just stay put. We’ll get you through here.”

I did get through, eventually. But from up high, waiting, I had spotted a good hole beneath the bridge, big trout feeding in it, and so I drove only as far as the end of the bridge, where I parked behind the extended-body van that transported the painting crew. I rigged up, skidded down a steep embankment, and waded chest deep into that clear, cold water.

I had worked that hole downstream for maybe fifteen minutes—long enough to cover fifty yards or so and forget the goings-on sixty feet above—when I was startled by a banshee yell and turned to look. Down from the bridge plummeted a thin silver body.

There was no time for concern or disbelief. No time to retreat out of the way. The body was streamlined, knife-straight, and screaming. About halfway down a paint-caked hardhat separated from a dark brown head—just a kid, I saw, screaming, holding his nuts—and
splash!

This, of course, would be my buddy Sneed, tendering his resignation from the bridge painting crew.

The kid stayed under some time. Maybe he was knocked out. Guys yelled Spanish and perhaps other languages over the bridge rail. His silver shape spun toward me along the scrambled edge of a big, slow eddy. His hard hat floated ahead, past me, and out of reach. I was pinned in heavy water. Nothing I could do except to wonder how it would feel.

Then this kid corked up to the surface. He was sputtering and wild-eyed, with silver ears and neck, laughing and coughing and cussing and dogpaddling like a guy who couldn’t swim ten feet to save his life but would rather die than paint another bridge.

But then the eddy let go, and he thrashed into reach, and so that kid’s life, fortuitous Dog, I had the luck to save it for him.

I drive up the dusty logging road toward that mountain pond, thinking how Jesse came into our lives more-or-less like that too. It was a couple weeks of fishing lessons later, me and Sneed townside, getting a beer and a burger on Sneed’s last paycheck, and this pretty girl just parachuted in, landed drunk on a bar stool next to Sneed, started touching his arm and making talk about parents and prison and who was I and how long was he going to be around town?

The ensuing three weeks, I admit, were more like an actual life than anything I had experienced in my four years of trout-bumming. I’m not sure who was the bigger rip-snorter, Sneed or Jesse, but they seemed made for each other, and I experienced the oddness of pride in the way they flaunted their racy love around town. Screw it. Life is short. Get your own excitement. That was my position, and I sheltered them. I thought.

The logging road forks about a mile up and narrows after that. It is not wise, I know, to push the Cruise Master up this far. We left my beast at the campground and took Jesse’s car, that traumatized Oldsmobile sedan, dust-on-gold, a gift to Jesse from someone she always referred to as “this guy.”

Somehow, though, I’m pushing up this mountain anyway. Soon enough, as these things happen, I’m a thousand feet up an eight-foot-wide dirt road in a four-ton recreational vehicle with bad brakes, and there is no good place to turn around. I’m jittery now, mashing a Swisher, spewing smoke. I wonder why, if life is short, I am doing something so obviously stupid. It seems like I’m doing it for Sneed and Jesse, like those notes just didn’t get at it—but what sense does that make?

A small turn-out appears on the inside of a straight climb about two miles up. A careful Y-turn, shavings of road taken about a hundred times, might do it.

But I keep on. The road worsens. The Cruise Master bucks and shudders a full mile upgrade until at last another opening signals the little spur to the pond. I have made it. I can swim now, reminisce, leave my underwear, maybe even get the Cruise Master turned around and down the mountain.

Why am I not relieved?

Maybe it’s the altitude, or my aging nerves, or all the forest fire smoke in the sky. Or maybe it’s too many Swisher Sweets and too much vodka. I can’t figure out the bad feeling I have. As I hike that spur along the shoulder of the mountain, I can’t suck a breath down past the top half of my chest. And then my breath stops completely when I see Jesse’s car.

The girl’s golden Oldsmobile is parked on the piney bank above the pond, nosed into a little thicket of huckleberry brush. I see Sneed’s dark head inside the car. I see a liquor bottle spun out across the pine needles, just beyond the passenger door. Then I see Jesse about thirty feet away—Jesse face down. I am running—arms and legs spread like she’s getting a suntan, except with no towel under her, only a wide, dark stain.

I skid to my knees. “Jesse!” Her face is split open at the nose, stuck in a black crust of blood that has soaked into the dry ground. Her wild blond hair parts just slightly behind one ear where a bullet has entered.

I freeze. Everything—heart, breath, thought—stops.

The car, Sneed, everything else, is at my back. But I cannot turn. My whole body wants to vomit, wants to jerk itself inside out, but I am as rigid as the hard ground, eyes fixed on Jesse’s lifeless body until they burn out and stray away for relief to the liquor bottle drawing ants just beyond her left foot. The bottle is empty.
Frangelico,
it says.
Premium hazelnut liqueur,
it says.
Enjoy!
it says.

Then I lose it. I stand and stumble backwards, coughing, spilling bile across my front and calling, “Sneed … Sneed …”