The Clinch Knot

  The Dog is in Livingston, Montana, daydreaming about fishing the ‘Stone and, as usual, subsisting on Swisher Sweets, vodka-Tang, and the hope that pretending to forget will be enough.

  He’s forged a few tenuous friendships, and now finds himself watching from the bank as troubled local girl Jesse Ringer leads D’Ontario Sneed into the swift current of young love. It’s sweet, really … but some of the locals object to the relationship on the basis of Sneed’s skin color.

  Then the unthinkable: vibrant, wild Jesse is found shot in the head, and Sneed is passed out in her car, gun beside him, window seams taped, and engine running. Sneed is hospitalized for severe carbon monoxide poisoning and can’t string together a sentence to defend himself, so it falls to the Dog.

  If only the Dog could run from his life without ending up in the tangle and snarl of the lives of others. A man who wants to lose himself in the current must be careful of his backcast; it’ll always keep him tethered to a life he’s trying to forget.

  Also by John Galligan

  Red Sky, Red Dragonfly

  The Nail Knot

  The Blood Knot

  The Wind Knot

  THE CLINCH KNOT

  A Fly Fishing Mystery

  John Galligan

  In memory of Leroy Aserlind,

  that he might read this in the Big Sky.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by John Galligan

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Always the Question

  The Radishes Clarify

  The Actual Sheriff

  A Chump, An Old-Timer, An Uncle

  Private Water

  Howl

  Severe Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

  Can Pronghorn Jump?

  Hell and Back

  Black from Both Directions

  We Work for the County

  The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Jess

  Yes. Now. Jesse.

  A Likely Sneed

  A Desperate Tangle, A Wishful Mess

  The Bozeman-Livingston Guide War

  Imagine Dentists

  Pronghorn Are Not Deer

  White Fang and Top Gum

  It’s Not Montana Everywhere

  Like an Escher Print

  Up in the Damn Ponderosa

  Long Enough to Hang Him

  What Kind of Pie Do You Have?

  God Knocked Backwards

  Hell on Trespassers

  A Traffic Stop

  An Avid Fly Fisherman

  Trust Me

  Chicken Neck Down at the Bottom

  They Just Said

  A Roomful of Helpless Sumbitch Bear

  Let’s Just Go Find Out Why

  Looks Like We’re On Our Way

  Redundant Security

  You All Have a Nice Couple of Days

  A Million Pounds of Warer

  Flotsam

  This is the End of Us

  Again and Again and Again

  Pretty Good Short Term

  Atta Boy, Hoss

  We All Drowned in the Canyon

  Maybe I Am

  That Bastard … That Cheater

  World-Record Brook Trout

  And Then What?

  A Pair of Café Americanos

  Dropping Like Flies

  Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe

  Sudden Inexplicable Death

  Let’s Not Go Backwards

  I Am Telling You I Am Innocent

  Why Don’t We Fish the Roam?

  Obvious to a Woman

  Immersed, Together, Breathing

  Knocked Around in the Clown Barrel Too Much

  No Harm Done?

  What Real Love Feels Like

  Powerful Somehow

  Acknowledgments:

  About the Author

  FWCRIME.com

  Copyright

  Always the Question

  And then my kid fishing buddy, D’Ontario Sneed, shakes his head, rotates his beer bottle. He says, “Not my mama. My mama’s nothing to me. My mama went to prison.”

  And this drunk girl, this local girl, this white girl, Jesse, says, “Hey! Really?” She lurches closer to Sneed. She sinks her fingers into the darkness of his arm. “This is wild. You’re not going to believe this. This is so wild. My daddy’s in prison!”

  As for me, the Dog, when I think back to that moment—the Stockman tavern, Livingston, Montana, in the hot shank of August—I can’t determine whether to laugh or cry. I guess when two people decide to fall in love, any reason will do.

  And Sneed and Jesse were in love, I guess, depending on how you define it. I still want to believe that.

  But isn’t that always the question?

  What is love?

  Is this it?

  Right here?

  Now?

  The Radishes Clarify

  “So … uh …”

  The young man’s mouth goes sticky-dry. He shifts the fly rod to his shoulder, like a rifle. But that doesn’t feel right, so he bombs the reel to the toe of his left boot. I hear the clunk and observe that it’s a steel-toed boot. As in Earth to Dog: he’s going fishing in steel-toed boots. But I’m deep in composition—I’m writing a goodbye note to Sneed and Jesse—and I think nothing of steel-toed boots. The young man stares down toward his boots and his reel. I stare too, yet I fail to notice there’s no line on the reel. His nervous throat pumps.

  “So … uh … you would, I mean, if you … were me …”

  “In this heat I’d go after some cutthroat.”

  “Cutthroat …”

  “Sure. They’re easier to catch.”

  He looks up. Above us is the wide Montana sky, blurred and freighted with the smoke from a half-dozen forest fires. I focus on my scrap of grocery sack. I’m thinking to start like this, Dear Friends. It’s been a great three weeks. You ran the old Dog hard … But this raw kid before me stammers, “How … how … how …”

  “Where?”

  “Yeah. Where.”

  Distracted, I lift my gaze to the mountains around us. There are a hundred streams, a thousand. What kind of question is where? The kid flinches and looks behind for the truck that brought him here. It’s a red Ford half-ton pickup from the 80’s, faded to pink. But his partner has followed the campground track and looped the truck around the back side of my Cruise Master RV, out of sight.

  You ran the old Dog hard. I had the time of my life …

  But this sounds mealy mouthed, doesn’t it? I back up. The truth is I’ve become a third wheel. Sneed and Jesse are going at it like jackrabbits. They hardly fish with me any more. Jesse’s using the Cruise Master like her personal walk-in closet. They’re calling me Uncle Dog—goddamn it—and they say they’re kidding and I try to believe it, but I’m starting to drink in the mornings, starting to drink on the stream, drinking everywhere. I guess there is something about happiness, about love, and family, about time passing around me that makes me sad.

  Dear Sneed and Jesse. I’m moving on. Thanks for everything. Good luck …

  But that sounds like sour huckleberries, and this fool kid in steel-toed boots still waits on the mystery of where to fish. He is raw and ugly as a pulled-up root, pale white with sunburned ears and neck. Because I am drinking, in fact, at this very moment—a mid-morning vodka with Tang—this kid strikes me as looking very much like a radish.

  This makes me laugh inside. I feel better. I point toward the Gallatins, down by Wyoming. “Go up in there, any creek. Far as you can go. Most of it’s Forest Service land. No fires yet that I know of. You park and hike.”

  He clears his throat and squirms. As I look the radish over, wondering why he will not leave, I somehow miss the wrongness of the fly rod matched with the shaved head.
I gloss right over the tight Wrangler jeans and the wife-beater tee-shirt stenciled in crossed claw hammers. I stare at all of this. My eyes connect. But I just don’t see it. I am a trout bum, not a fashion critic, and a person can fish in just about anything. Hell, Jesse, bless her troubled heart, fishes in a bikini, sunscreen, and Tevas. That works. But those boots, black leather, laced almost to the knee—I’m not sure.

  So I swallow v-and-T and I ask the radish, “Those boots are steel-toed?”

  He gapes down at his boots, then clenches his jaw. His temples pulse.

  “Is there a problem with that?”

  “Heavy.”

  “So?”

  “You won’t hike very far in those. Plus, you walk in the water all day they’re going to rust.”

  He looks for the buddy, the truck. Then his eyes skid back to me. I think he’s trying to read my note to Sneed and Jesse. “I’m good,” he says. “It’s not a problem.”

  I take a warm orange sip of v-and-T from my tin cup, tasting all the vitamins.

  “I’m just suggesting those aren’t the best boots for fishing.”

  “I said I’m good.”

  He jerks his head around, looking for his buddy. But the pink pickup is still hidden behind the Cruise Master, its engine noise lost beneath the heavy purl of the Yellowstone River, water flowing on and on behind me, an eternal freight train of water. I wonder if the old pickup has stalled back there, behind the Cruise Master, and a stalled vehicle gets me thinking of Sneed and Jesse. Jesse’s battered Oldsmobile is a compendium of maintenance failures, among them a coolant leak. Did they break down?

  How about this? Kids: Gotta go. Take care. Safe sex and all. Uncle Dog.

  Sure. Capture that jauntiness. Devil may care. But a bolt of sadness clobbers me, right there in front of the radish. My vision blurs, my chin quivers. I have to close my eyes and breathe like some verklempt old dame, and while doing this a voice asks me: Why can’t you just tell them the truth?

  The radish is still there. He raises a hand to scratch a botched tattoo on his shoulder. The tattoo is an Iron Cross. I see the Iron Cross—but I don’t see it. All I say is, “So good luck to you.”

  Then I look at my watch. It is now one o’clock. I have been laboring for three hours on a ten-word note. Sneed and Jesse drive guide-shuttle for a local outfitter, this shady operator named Hilarious Sorgensen, and they should have been back to camp an hour ago, ready to spend their fifty bucks a day on beer and takeout, condoms, weed and fishing tackle.

  The truth being this: I have come to care for them, Sneed and Jesse, and in this state of sentimentality I have lost focus and momentum. I am stuck and all too close to happy. And lately, I mis-read water. I miss takes. I fish the wrong flies, too distracted or too lazy to change. My loop collapses in the thinnest of breezes, and I wrap line, daily, around my own dizzy head. I’m hooking whitefish, chubs, huckleberry bushes, my own ears. And I am laughing about it all, like it doesn’t matter, sitting in the sun and laughing while fish rise around me. This has to stop. It has to. It confuses me.

  And so it will stop. I chuck the rest of my vodka-Tang down the hatch. “Good luck,” I say to the kid again. I put a shove in my voice: “Have a good one.”

  But still he stands there, this scrawny, quivering, steel-toed radish who wants to fly fish.

  “But which … which … which …” the radish stammers, glancing toward the Cruise Master.

  “Cutthroat don’t care which fly. Here.”

  I pluck a Madame X from the mess-kit dish on my picnic table. This outfitter, Hilarious Sorgensen, has me groping for cash too. I’ve tied a hundred Madame X for the big man on spec, a buck apiece. There is even some chance, Sneed and Jesse say, that Sorgensen will live up to the deal and pay me.

  So cash in, Dog. Gas up. Go.

  I push the big attractor fly across the table. I glance over my shoulder to see if finally the pink pickup has emerged around the Cruise Master.

  But no.

  I stand.

  “Tie this on for you?”

  The radish tilts the rod out of my reach. Now, finally, I comprehend that his reel has no line. He says, “I’m good.”

  “Your reel has no line.”

  “I said I’m good.”

  I shrug. I put the Madame X in his palm. There is a different tattoo in there—under green-white skin—but he keeps his fingers bent and the tattoo crunched up.

  I ask him, “You know the clinch knot?”

  “Yeah.” He shoves the hook point into the rod cork.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah I’m sure.”

  I say, “That’s a beautiful old rod. They don’t make them like that anymore. Can I take a quick look? Thanks. Wow. Lovely.”

  To which the young man mutters a word that I swear sounds like faggot. But this can’t be right. This is not possible, I think. What cause? I’m a faggot because I like his rod? Probably it is this: always, my ears are the first ones drunk. The river is loud behind me. I believe I have misheard the radish.

  But now, at last, the pickup noses out from behind the Cruise Master, and I get a better look. The truck has rusted wheel pits, an oil drum in the bed, a confederate flag decal on the box window. The driver is a bigger, rounder radish. I smell smoke suddenly, acrid, like plastic burning. The driver wears a flushed and lurid grin. He hollers, “Come on, Dumbshit. We’re outta here. Get in the truck.”

  The radishes clarify for me suddenly. The driver is the chief radish. Assistant radish jerks and twitches before me, conflicted because I now hold his rod as a hostage. “What the hell is going on?” I demand. Because something is wrong here. Something has gone down, back behind the Cruise Master.

  The assistant radish lunges, reaches out that tattooed hand and snatches at the rod. He gets the tip. Fiberglass snaps, he gets half the rod, runs.

  “Hey—!”

  My legs are trapped between the bench and the picnic table. I have to unwind and step high. I’m a little wobbly and way too late to grab him. Assistant radish gallops around the pink Ford, kicking up dust. He chucks the ruined fly rod into the truck bed, where it cartwheels over the oil drum and disappears with a clatter.

  “Hey! What the—?”

  Chief radish hits the gas. The pickup spews gravel along the campground track, fishtails up the drive, and roars off down the highway in the direction opposite those easy cutthroat trout. For good measure, chief radish lets go of the wheel. Both hands out the window, flips me a double bird as the pickup thunders away.

  Dog damn it.

  I wobble to the Cruise Master and then around it. Skinheads. That’s what they were. Skinheads. And Sneed’s little tent is on fire—has already flared down to a ring of smoldering nylon around a flaming heap of clothes and blankets, ground pads melting beneath.

  The galley door to my Cruise Master RV is open. My meager trout bum possessions are strewn. Jesse’s things have been yanked off their hangers. Bras and tops and panties, cargo shorts and t-shirts have been slung across my gritty floor and down the portable steps. All these things are wet and smell funny, as if they have been—I sniff—sure enough, Jesse’s clothes have been peed on.

  Those were skinheads.

  Then, kicking dirt over the fire, I see the text of their message. Against the hot rocks the skinheads have left an orange-black sign that screams NO TRESPASSING.

  I flip it over.

  The message continues. The reverse side, in handwritten marker, tells someone—Sneed and Jesse I presume, black boy and white girl—Turn back now!

  The Actual Sheriff

  I flag a motorist, borrow a cell phone, and wait forty minutes. During that awful patch of time, I discover that the fat skinhead, the driver, has been under my sink too, into my lock box, and has taken my last two hundred bucks and my Glock semi-automatic pistol—all while I dithered over vodka-Tang, farewell phrasings, and the other punk’s now-obvious inability to feign interest in fishing.