The Clinch Knot Page 2

  Dog damn it.

  And where, by now, are Sneed and Jesse? They should be back.

  Park County sends the big hitter. At first, when he pulls that blue-on-bronze cruiser up too close to my toes and rasps at me, “Roy Chubbuck, Sheriff,” I take this as a sign that this kind of thing matters in the county, that heads will roll. Hate crime, right? Under the guise of fly fishing. What could be more sordid, more wrong? Bring on the actual sheriff.

  “Skinheads,” I tell him. “They were skinheads.”

  Sheriff Roy Chubbuck wheezes at the window of his cruiser, pants faintly through thin, cracked lips. The man looks like a turkey buzzard on life support. He is skeletal and red-faced, stooped at the neck. On his back, wedged against the seat, he wears an oxygen pack. Tubes, thin and clear, lead into his nostrils.

  “Well, now … let’s start with who you are. You got a driver’s license?”

  “I still can’t believe it,” I go on. “They had the haircuts, the tattoos—”

  Something in the sheriff’s manner stops me, tells me we are not exchanging astonishments or pleasantries, not even for five seconds. He cocks his head, fixes me with his furthest eye, the right one, imperious blue inside its dropsied red lid. His cruiser remains in drive, engine humming, front tire not six inches from my feet.

  “Driver’s license?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Hang on.”

  As I reach for my wallet, I hear gravel crunch. I look away toward the road. I am hoping to see Jesse’s golden Olds. Maybe Sneed saw pronghorns and they stopped to watch. But as I hand in my license to Sheriff Chubbuck, I see instead a black SUV up where the campground road meets the highway. The vehicle is brand new. It has tinted windows, multiple antennae, themeless bland-blue plates that could be government. It turns around in the campground driveway and lingers, sun glinting off its south-facing windshield.

  “You’re a long way from home,” the sheriff tells me.

  “Fishing trip.”

  “Not enough fishing out East?”

  I wonder how to respond to that. The sheriff keeps that sharp blue eye on me, taking oxygen through his veined and scabby nose, waiting for an answer.

  “As a matter of fact,” I decide to say, “no. Not for the number of people. But that’s not really why—”

  “Just giving you a hard time,” he cuts in, with no trace of humor. “We’re proud of our fishing out here.”

  He returns to his study of my license. Only that right eye seems to work, drawing a bead on my real name—Ned Oglivie—and below that upon assorted other claims, mostly false. I no longer reside at 223 Thurber Lane in West Newton, Massachusetts, but instead in the 1984 Cruise Master RV, strung with laundry and baking in the sun and dust just behind me. My once-brown eyes are mostly red now, and I can no longer assert myself at a healthy one-hundred and ninety pounds, not even with my waders full of water. It is also no longer true, obviously, that I wear suits and groom myself and smile for the camera.

  Nope. I am the Dog now. I am a trout hound. I fish, I drive, I fish, I drive, I fish. I follow my nose. Not to wax poetic about it, but I dig holes. I scratch myself. I howl at the moon, and I know where I will go to die. I am also, for the record, a pretty decent fly fisherman.

  “Well,” the sheriff rasps finally, looking from me to the picture on the license and back again, “you’ve still got your height.”

  “They were skinheads,” I tell him. “They got my pistol and my cash, but that’s not what worries me.”

  No answer except to file my license between two knobby knuckles and put the Park County cruiser in reverse. He makes an adjustment of about fifteen degrees in the angle of the car’s long snout and then begins to navigate at low speed along a vector between the picnic table and the Cruise Master.

  I pace alongside. “See, my buddy Sneed is a black man.”

  “Good for him.”

  I squeeze ahead around the corners of the table. “And this local girl, Jesse—”

  “I know Jesse.”

  “She—”

  “Everybody knows Jesse.”

  He feathers the brake, pauses alongside the front end of the Cruise Master. He turns his neck to keep that right eye in play. As it happens, it’s laundry day for the Dog. A ragg wool sock dries over each extended wiper. The side mirror wears my extra boxers. My spare pants hang wet by a belt loop over the radio antenna.

  “Been out a while, Mister Oglivie?”

  “Four years.”

  “Hmm,” the sheriff says. “Catch anything?”

  “A few.”

  Again he starts the cruiser rolling. I hear another crunch of gravel on the high road—but it is more false hope. It’s that same black SUV, pulling ten feet ahead, keeping us in sight while the sheriff does more geometry with the car nose, cutting closely between the bug-spattered grill of the Cruise Master and a lodge pole pine grievously wounded by the hatchet of a previous camper. Now, without leaving his vehicle, the sheriff is in full view of the crime scene.

  I tell him, “The truck came around here, paused for a long time, five minutes maybe, and then—”

  He interrupts. “Dry season—” his nose pulls at the tubes”—no fires.”

  “Sure. Okay. But—”

  “Looks to me like an illegal camp fire got out of control.”

  “But my friends didn’t—”

  “Aren’t those marshmallows?” the sheriff rasps. That sharp right eye is on the crusts of Jesse’s Jet-Puffs from last night, melted over the fire-blackened stones. My heart jumps a little. I glance about as if in search of a witness. What’s going on? But there are only trees, stones, the Yellowstone River, that glinting black vehicle up at the road.

  “Sheriff, I smelled the smoke. The tent was burning when I came around here. And what about the sign? They left a message, for God’s sake.”

  He pulls the cruiser forward so he can look out his window directly down on the melted ruins of Sneed and Jesse’s little love nest. Then he pulls farther forward and painstakingly turns around beneath the wounded pine, as if to take another angle. I realize this: he does not plan to leave the vehicle. Not for skinheads.

  “Could have been roots,” he says. He coughs. “They smolder underground.”

  “What the—?”

  “Where’d you find that sign?” he wants to know.

  I’m dripping sweat now, my jaw clamped tight. I show him. The sign was propped on the fire pit rocks—and this proves, doesn’t it, that the fire didn’t spread from there to the tent? At least over-ground? And that root theory is asinine, a fraud.

  He says, “You moved the sign. Picked it up. Is that correct?”

  I glare back into that beady blue eye.

  “Did you witness them leave the sign there, Mister Oglivie, where you said it was?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Well, then …”

  “I was talking to the other guy. He was distracting me. Pretending he wanted to fish. Listen, Sheriff—”

  But his window hums up, closes tight. Not listening. I watch him make a call on his radio, speak back and forth for about a minute. I’m looking up at the SUV on the road, wondering, when another one pulls up, this one midnight blue and streaked with Montana’s powdery dust. The two vehicles pair up opposite, like horses swatting each other’s flies. The sheriff’s window hums down.

  “Mister Oglivie, was your pistol registered?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time you knew for certain—” he pauses, needs O2 “—for certain that your pistol was where it was supposed to be?”

  I want to lie to him. I should lie to him. Something is wrong here. But my mouth skids ahead of my brain and my answer comes out straight. I haven’t opened my lock box, haven’t needed cash or laid eyes on the Glock, for two or three days.

  “So it could have been taken yesterday,” says Chubbuck. “Or the day before.”

  He exhales through his dry, pursed lips, watching me squirm. Then he looks at my license again. He
moves his head to read, scans like a bird tracking ants back and forth across the ground. He passes my license back with a trembling hand.

  I blurt, “Well?” I open my arms to the crime scene, implying the concurrence of factors here, the undeniable entirety. “Are you going to do something, Sheriff?”

  “Yes, I am,” he says. His radio squawks and he turns it down. “Mister Oglivie, I’m going to give you a warning.”

  “What?”

  “Your license is expired. More than a year ago. You’re driving illegally.”

  I stare at the damn license. So I’m the problem here. I’m the lawbreaker. Suddenly I could spit on the man, strike him, but I command myself not to.

  “Pretty sizable ticket in that,” the sheriff says.

  “Yeah. Well. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “But I’m gonna let you drive out of here with just a warning.” The Park County Sheriff takes a sniff from his tubes. “And here is that warning: from the look of you, you got some water that needs fishing at home. So go home, Mister Oglivie. Directly. And fish your own water.”

  He hits the button and his window starts up.

  “But what about the—”

  His window fits me neatly out. At the wheel, patiently, the sheriff executes a sine, cosine, arc-tangent maneuver and somehow inches out between the injured pine and a steep scree of brush and rock that climbs to the heat-struck highway, where the SUVs have unpaired and split to flank the campground drive.

  Chubbuck pulls his cruiser up between them. For a long moment he hesitates there. At last he pulls out and trails the dusty blue vehicle south, toward Yellowstone Park, while the clean black one speeds away toward Livingston.

  “—what about the skinheads?” I finish.

  Then I answer myself.

  Sneed and Jesse. Before you leave. Warn them.

  A Chump, An Old-Timer, An Uncle

  “I’m looking for Sneed.”

  “You got my order done?”

  “Count ‘em.”

  I submit a family-size Tang can, net contents one hundred Madame X. These are large dry flies, terrestrials, Gothic grasshoppers on steroids. An outfitter like Hilarious Sorgensen gets two-fifty each from his clientele of mostly dentists and doctors and veterinarians from mostly the east and the Midwest.

  “A hundred exactly?” Sorgensen, like all cheaters, is by nature suspicious. “You know I’ll have Lyndzee count ‘em.”

  I look for Lyndzee, his wasted little harpy, but today she doesn’t seem to be around among the fly bins and landing nets and racks of hats and sunglasses.

  “Go ahead. Count. You owe me a hundred bucks.”

  “End of the month,” he tries.

  I take the can back. “Okay. If I can’t sell them to Armstrong’s or Bailey’s by then I’ll be back.”

  “Sheesh! Godalmighty!” Sorgensen is an ex-rodeo clown. He goes over the top in a hurry. “I’m a businessman, not a cash machine! Crimenently, fella! Why don’t you just come in here with a gun and stick me up?”

  This guy makes me tired. Jesse says a speed habit causes his fat. Pain from broken bones keeps him inactive, so he eats incessantly, mostly peanuts, to knock down the amphetamine buzz. These cling to his lips now, fragments of peanut, they hang in his beard. I have to look away.

  “I’ll come back if the others don’t want them.”

  “Seventy-five bucks,” he offers.

  “You promised a hundred.”

  “Sheesh. I tell you.”

  He opens a drawer beneath his cluttered desk and counts out my money, relieving himself of tattered ones and wrinkled fives and finishing me off with a foursome of Canadian quarters.

  I push the quarters back. “Actually, it’s only ninety-nine. I gave one fly to a skinhead. So where’d Sneed and Jesse go today?”

  Hilarious Sorgensen swivels in his groaning desk chair, peers red-eyed over his reading glasses, then chucks a handful of Planters into his maw and struggles to stand. I step back. He wears some kind of filthy culottes made at a tent shop. He uses plastic leg braces and a burl-wood cane, his bare legs like shaky columns of cottage cheese.

  “Sneed? And Jesse? Crimenently.”

  This morning, upright, Sorgensen looks jittery and more soiled than usual, like he’s fallen down and been stepped on by a bull. Maybe Lyndzee’s out of town then, as she so often seems to be. When that happens, Sorgensen has to track everything himself: match the clients with the guides, assign the shuttle drivers, confirm the drop-off points, distribute the lunches, pay out his shuttle drivers when they finish: fifty cents a mile—minus haggling, cheating, odometer disputes, all of Sorgensen’s tricks.

  “Didn’t them two tell you what they did?” he asks me.

  “Apparently not.”

  “I fired those kids nearly a week ago.”

  “What?”

  “They stole a rod from a guide’s vehicle. A custom-made Sweetgrass bamboo, worth a couple thou. Trust is everything in this business, what with us handling everybody’s keys. I had to let them go.”

  “They didn’t tell me.”

  I flounder for a moment. This hurts me. It humiliates me. Sneed and Jesse didn’t say a thing. They kept “going to work” in the morning, treating me, I guess, like a chump, an old-timer, an uncle, no kidding about it. Oh well, I manage to tell myself after a moment or two, all the more reason to go, Dog, go.

  I ask Sorgensen, “You tell the cops?”

  “The cops?” In goes a handful of Planters. “Hah. Never.”

  “You got a pen and paper?”

  “What for?”

  “In case they come back for some reason. I want to leave a note. Let them know about the skinheads.”

  Sorgensen looks uncommonly reflective for a few seconds. Or maybe a peanut is stuck in his teeth. Then I realize that while he does have pen and paper, those items are on his desk, and he has just stood up. This would be akin, I guess, to arranging several hundred pounds of books on a shelf and then discovering that the shelf needed moving.

  “Lyndzee’s out of town?” I ask him.

  “Yeah. Death in the family.”

  “Another one?”

  “Yeah. It’s tough.”

  I try to picture Lyndzee with a family, wearing a funeral dress, with her squinty eyes and her mad voice, her sad dry-gulch cleavage and her cloud of Parliament smoke. But the picture, like Lyndzee herself, never quite comes to focus.

  “Stay put,” I tell Sorgensen. “I’ll grab what I need.”

  I find a pen and a scrap of paper on his desk. Behind me Sorgensen mutters faintly skinheads, then chuckles over the idea, then just waits and breathes hard and smells like sweat and grime and burped-up peanuts while I try again to write the note.

  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. “No
t 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?”