The Clinch Knot (8 page)

Imagine Dentists

 

The ambulance came and went. Russell busted someone. His cruiser followed the other out the driveway and turned right toward Livingston. From the deck of the Fly ‘n’ Float, I watched the guides and clients split from their klatches, depleted beer cans in hand, and head for vehicles, hotels, homes. I picked out a stocky kid with an older model Chevy pickup that was in dire condition. As if to forestall the truck’s collapse, he had backed his trailer to the corner of the lot. Now he got out to unhitch his boat and leave it for tomorrow.

“Lot of miles on that truck.”

“Hundred and fifty-nine thou.” He raised up and recovered his beer from the truck box. “Not bad for a Chevy.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m trying to get one more season out of her. Don’t know if she’ll make it.”

“Not the best for hauling clients, is it? A pickup?”

“Naw,” he said. “If I got more than one, as I usually do, we have to squeeze in like we’re back in high school going to a party.”

“I’m Dog,” I said.

“I’m Cord. Cord Cook.”

He had a good grip and a good smile, longish blond hair and a sunburned nose. He started guiding, he volunteered, right out of high school, three years now. If things went right in the summer months—weather, trout, truck—he could make enough to fund tuition and housing at U of M in Missoula. “You?” he said.

“Trout bum.”

“Awesome.”

“You see that RV over there? That’s mine. Imagine dentists in the back of that.” He grinned at the picture. I pushed the sale. “Coffee and the
New York Times
on the way to the water.”

“Beverages on the way home,” he said.

“It’s even got a trailer hitch.”

“I see that.”

“Hell, on a long morning haul, to the Boulder or something, to the Smith, the dentists could go back to bed in there.”

“Dentists are never tired. Vets either. But the doctors I get can be pretty burned out. And oh, yeah,” the kid said, raising a sun-bleached eyebrow, “I get couples all the time.”

“There’s a curtain between the cab and the living space. So who knows?”

Cord Cook rubbed his stubbled chin.

“A straight up trade?” I proposed. I laid a hand on his last-gasp Chevy. “Your truck for my RV?”

“Damn. Really? Maybe.”

“Or how about a trial period? You take it for a week. You try it, drive some clients around. See what you think. I’ll drive yours.”

“Can I test it?”

“Of course. I’ll try yours.”

There was a break for the Dog. But as Cord Cook pulled the Cruise Master out on 89 and headed toward Yellowstone Park, exhaustion hit me like a cartoon anvil.

I blanked out for twenty minutes in the driver’s seat of that pickup, blinking at nothing and chewing the inside of my mouth, craving sleep, hoping Cook would trade me. I would grab my stuff, my vodka and Tang, my fishing gear, my sleeping bag, and I would crash at some campground in the box of the truck. It wouldn’t rain. It never did. The law, such as it was, would leave me alone. And I imagined if I slept hard enough, if I traveled to my dark deep and made good at the Big Two-Hearted, then Sneed and Jesse could come back good as new.

It took all this time for me to pay attention to the rodeo medal hanging on Cord Cook’s rear view mirror. Then for another bleary five minutes I figured Cook was a cowboy too—maybe on the college rodeo team. But in ten more minutes, when the kid still hadn’t returned with my Cruise Master, I felt an edge beneath my exhaustion, and I began to fiddle with the medal. I looked at it more closely. I shook myself. I re-laminated.
Come on, Dog.

The engraving said:

FIRST PLACE
BULL RIDING
BULL-A-RAMA
BUTTE, MONTANA
1998
GALEN RINGER

 

I let the medal fall back and swing above the dashboard as the Cruise Master appeared on the drive and skidded to a stop. I got out.

Cord Cook got out.

We approached each other in the dusk light. The kid was frowning, scratching his head. The Cruise Master’s engine ticked. It was one of the belts, maybe, that smelled a little bit like burning rubber. He handed me the keys.

“What do you think?”

“Naw,” he said, moving past me. “I guess not. Thanks.”

Pronghorn Are Not Deer

 

It wasn’t so much my dark deep then—at the closest campground—as it was an epic vodka-Tang and then the blow of another, bigger anvil:
memory.

I was only half-asleep when the chaos of images resolved into one nucleus of recall that spun and bumped and then cracked wide open. A vivid, Technicolor Dog floated out onto the black screen of the night to perform for me, and to perform badly.
I should have known.
This was my theme.
I should have foreseen. Of all people, me. I should have stopped it.

“Hey! Really?”

This drunk girl says she’s Jesse Ringer, says it three or four times. But who cares? She is meat to the Dog’s hungry eye. She is young but not too young. She is small and tan and wiry. Her hair is kinky, long, and wild, the color of cornbread crust, and she is not overly well groomed, which is a very nice thing in a girl, Dog-wise.

“Hey! Really?” She slugs Sneed in the arm. “You’re not just shittin’ me?”

Her clothes are skimpy summer stuff. But the summer seems like 1976 or so. She wears fraying cut-off Levis over a pair of lean brown thighs that insinuate their way effortlessly into the hot zones of personal bar-stool space. She wears an actual halter top—when have you seen that?—and she fills it to the brim, with a knot between her shoulder blades that would be oh so easy.

She is after Sneed, of course, not this mangy old Dog. She hardly looks the Dog’s direction, and in this way she implicitly assigns him to the shit-faced mumbling hag at the Dog’s left elbow, the one with the white wine spritzer, the queen-size cigarette, and the stupid red cowgirl hat perched atop a frosty perm.

“Whassyername?”

The Dog goes with “Cornelius.”

“Wha—?”

This drunk girl, Jesse Ringer, leans in on Sneed. Upon his dark forearm she lays an envoy to her whole flesh, this hand—strong and sun-chapped, fingernails cut short and a little dirty.

“This is wild,” says Jesse Ringer to D’Ontario Sneed. “You’re not going to believe this. This is
so
wild. I can’t believe this connection. Your mother’s in prison? Well, get this. My
daddy’s
in prison!”

Sneed catches the Dog’s eye. The Dog discharges a shrug of affirmation, bluntly covetous, as the next-door hag jabs him with an elbow. “Huh, Corneliush? Where’d you find your interesting friend there? He fall off a Greyhound?”

Sneed ignores this and smiles at the drunken white girl, looking a little stiff. “My mama
was
in prison.”

He hoists a Budweiser to free his arm from her too-forward grip.

“Jail, actually. I don’t know where she’s at now.”

He sets the bottle down.

“I don’t care either. I’m an orphan, far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh,” the girls laments sloppily. “Oh, that’s so sad.” She hooks that arm again, gives it a squeeze. “What did she do?”

Sneed tells her exactly what he’s told me: Nothing. His mama didn’t do a damn thing. Not really.

“I mean to get in jail.”

His face clouds. “Oh. Stole, I guess. Robbed a house in the neighborhood of my foster parents. Sold the stuff for drugs.”

“‘Cuz my dad,” this Jesse rushes in, one-upping, “supposedly murdered a guy.”

This stops everything. Jesse Ringer glugs warm beer from her plastic cup. Her breasts stir beneath the halter as she jars the cup back down and leans closer to Sneed.

“But he didn’t do it,” she tells him. Then her voice gets too loud. “He is
so
fucking innocent.”

The bar tender, the hag, the players at the keno machines, this benumbed and negligent Dog, everybody stiffens and looks the drunk girl’s way.

“That’s right people,” she announces. “Galen Ringer is
so fucking innocent.”

Later, next day, this Jesse Ringer girl can fish. She can pick flies. She can handle line on big water and she can set the hook. She can play and land and show and release. She credits it all to a bull rider turned Yellowstone fishing guide turned death row inmate, her father, Galen Ringer. Who is innocent. She never lets you forget that.

She wet-wades too, and she looks very, very good.

“I don’t know, Dog,” Sneed says, clearly troubled. “This girl is teeing it up. But man, I just don’t know.”

“Hey,” this slipshod friend, this careless mentor, gives back, “I would.”

Which is all too goddamn true.

Later still, this rough and lovely girl, generally stoned, says she has a place to live, but her car looks slept in.

This brown and barefoot girl, this lite beer champion, has a golden Oldsmobile, about ten years old, and she has this guide-shuttle partner, this earnest and besmitten virgin man-child named Kenny she knew in high school, and when Sneed comes into her life, this fire-in-the-belly girl Jesse Ringer flicks poor unrequited Kenny like a chub back into the stream of lonely and bewildered young men.

Together then, Jesse and Sneed drive for Hilarious Sorgensen, every morning, ferrying vehicles and trailers downstream to takeout points, teaming back and forth, seven days a week. This Dog character? Sleeps late. Ties flies. Nips a little v and T. Smokes the second half of last night’s Swisher. Studies maps. Makes pancakes. Misses warning signs.

In the afternoons, fishing, Sneed and Jesse bitch and joke about Sorgensen. The cheap bastard gobbles peanuts and speed while his brain works overtime, finding ways to squeeze his guides, short his drivers, bilk his suppliers, ways to hornswoggle his clientele of doctors, dentists, vets, ways to keep poor little Lyndzee hooked and hopping.

But the thing is, Jesse then suggests, if anybody needs anything—you know,
anything
—she can talk to Sorgensen. She can get it. No problem.

And this inattentive dumb Dog, where is he? What is he thinking?

He is thinking:
Anything? Really? Would Sorgensen have Cuban cigars? How would they taste next to a Swisher?

I thrashed and mumbled but could not wake, could not stop this relentless indictment.

Inside a week, Jesse and Sneed have bought a tent and are “living together” within earshot of the Cruise Master. Dog’s ears burn, his head spins, and he does not sleep. Every morning when the kids are gone he tells himself,
Drive away now. Right now. Go, Dog, go.

But no. There is inertia. And there is thrall. There is Jesse’s skin by firelight. There is this fascinating kid Sneed, so oddly but so passionately lecturing nightly on the pronghorn antelope: physiology, habits, plight. “Pronghorn are not deer. They have gall bladders. They have horns, not antlers. They can’t jump. They come to a fence they have to crawl under. Or turn around.”

“Then I,” announces Jesse, “have a friend you have to meet.” She pauses, tries to word this carefully. “Just a guy I know. Older guy. Lawyer. Who is into pronghorn. Really into them. He chases them.”

“What?”

“On foot. He chases them.” Sneed scowls. “What? Why?”

“He says the Indians did it. He says if they can do it, a white man can do it too.”

“White man?”

“He’s a white man, this guy that I, um, know.”

“Chase antelope?”

“And catches them. Tries to. He hasn’t yet.”

“Pronghorn are the fastest mammal in North America.”

“This guy. Well. He says antelope are fast but they tire out. After five or ten miles they give up. You can walk right up and slit their throats.”

Sneed’s spine straightens, his eyes narrow, the way it happens when someone mentions his mother.

“You want to meet him?” Jesse asks.

Sneed says, “Yeah. Yeah I do.”

At the campground, dew descended around the Cruise Master, smoky, low, and cold. The river muttered. Pictures flowed out through the anvil crack in my brain.

Now, on Sneed’s words, I see a dark bedroom. I solve his double sounds and see his life begin. I see Sneed’s mother’s
mother’s
man friend, drunk and tearing sheets, tearing bedclothes, tearing the girl and planting Sneed.

“Go on, Sneed. Keep talking.”

“So that’s her excuse for everything. Like therefore she can be a crack whore and ignore me. After about ten years of that bullshit I ended up in foster care with a white family in Little Rock. Church people that smelled funny. Lady smelled like mothballs. Dude smelled like he shit his pants. They didn’t like my name so they gave me a new one. Charlie. They fucking called me Charlie.”

Sneed presents this for laughter. This Dog, this moral feeb, goes along chuckling at tales of soup and crackers, made beds, clean clothes, pews and catechism, chores, haircuts, lectures, prayers—and every day at school in a sea of white kids, waves of them, rip tides and reefs, Sneed re-drowning daily, dead by noon, washing up at “home” with “family.”

The Dog looks around the bar, suppresses a gargantuan sadness. Sneed orders another beer. “The dude had this weird business, mostly retired. He bred ungulates, deer and antelope and sometimes elk, for zoos. He had a big lot, a couple acres, tall fence around it, at that time just a little herd of pronghorn left in there. Seven of them. My chore was food and water. And man, every day those animals would hear me coming a mile away, come snuffling up to me and bumping me with their noses and whistling to me, stepping on my damn feet, licking me, fighting for my attention. Man, we got like a real family, me and them. Me and those animals loved each other. Up until I ran away, that’s how I survived.” He looks around. Jesse is
still
in the restroom. At least twenty minutes now. “That’s why I just about went upside the head of her lawyer friend,” Sneed says. “Greg Henderson? Henderson Greg? I forget.”

“Never met him.”

“Don’t bother.”

“He helps her with her dad’s case?”

Sneed shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “But damn, she is really stuck on that. She idolizes her old man. She showed me a bunch of his stuff, you know his medals and all, for rodeo? Weird scene, Dog.”

“Yeah?”

“I tried to touch one of those medals? You know? Just touch it?”

I bolted up from my theater of half-sleep, dropped in a panic from my bunk. Outside, it was broad daylight, hot already. I pissed on pine needles. Drift boats glided past on the ‘Stone, telling me it was mid-morning. I was too late to catch Cord Cook at Sorgensen’s.

“I don’t give out that information,” Sorgensen told me when I asked where Cook was fishing. Since yesterday, his tone was nasty and short. I had the sense he might be missing Lyndzee.

“Why not? It’s confidential?”

“Yes it is.”

“You’re not a doctor. You’re not a lawyer.”

Sorgensen rattled a handful of peanuts into his mouth and mashed them, observing me with a sense of hidden, whirring activity. At last he said, “Friend, you look like you could use a little pick-me-up.”