The Clinch Knot

by John Galligan

  “You could try.”

  Rita Crowe stiffened. She drew in a wheezy breath. “Russell, go downstairs and get me a jar of them cling peaches.”

  Russell shot me a little grimace. “Hey, Ma, how about instead we thaw out that huckleberry pie? You know, the one Aunt Shureen dropped off a while ago when you weren’t feeling good. I know right where it’s at in the freezer.”

  The woman deflated. Her eyes sank in her head. She rubbed her temples. She sighed as if this child of hers had just tapped the very dregs of her strength. “Russell … please.”

  None too soon we were seated at the Crowe family table around Hot Pockets and pickles, rustled up by the deputy, along with the canned peach halves and a huge bowl of potato chips that Rita Crowe said were not stale.

  I started with the novelty of a pickle, spearing it with a plastic fork and counting it as my first vegetable in weeks. Rita Crowe opened with a cigarette and these words: “So I hear you’re not so happy with our wonderful sheriff.”

  Russell bit a Hot Pocket, head down. “Ow,” he mouthed.

  “You always do that.”

  “I do not.”

  “The man is on them cancer drugs,” she continued to me. “Heavy. Not that he would step down, of course. Not with all he’s got going on.”

  The pickle tasted like paint thinner. Or maybe I was just out of the loop, taste-wise. I put the thing down on my paper plate and tried a chip. Stale.

  “Ma did EMT for twenty years.” Russell supplied this around a juggled mouthful of Hot Pocket. “Now she’s finally on the county board.”

  “Russell, get him some coffee.”

  I put my hands up fast. “I’m fine.”

  “Russell …”

  “Okay, Ma.”

  Russell set down black coffee in a foam cup. Rita Crowe went deep into her cigarette. She filled the room with smoke. “Of course it’s a pity,” she said at last. “The whole thing. I don’t mean to say it’s not. But now there’s people coming in and out of that office got nothing whatsoever to do with Park County business.”

  “Ma thinks Sheriff Chubbuck should step down.”

  “Russell.”

  “Sorry, Ma.”

  She nudged the bowl of potato chips toward me. I tried another one. “They’re fine,” she said.

  “Ma—”

  “They are absolutely fine.”

  I twisted, glanced toward the Russell Sr. photo over the fireplace. A hundred googly-eyed pine cone creatures turned me back around.

  “I’m not popular on the county board,” Rita Crowe said. She shot a plume of smoke toward a dark spot on the ceiling. “But that man should step down. And he should have someone ready to take his place, someone who deserves it. That’s how it’s supposed to happen.”

  “It’s emphysema, Ma. Not cancer.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Probably to him.”

  “You want to be smart,” she said, “you can go to your room and be smart.”

  Now this was awkward. The deputy’s jaw turned red. He kept his eyes down on his plate while his mother served him a handful of chips. Russell’s chair squawked as he shoved away from the table. He stormed off all of ten feet to a chest freezer beside the porch door. Out came a frozen pie. Into the microwave it went. Through the endless awful droning that ensued, I discovered that the Hot Pockets were excellent and I decided if nothing else to fill my tank.

  But then—ding!—there was something else. “So I hear tell,” Rita Crowe said, “that the sheriff has something going with Dane Tucker.”

  “I’ve been around three weeks. I wouldn’t quite know.”

  Russell brought the pie to the table. He tried a knife on it. Rock hard.

  “But why?” I said. “Do you have some reason to think so?”

  Her stream of smoke just cleared the top of Russell’s head as he probed unsuccessfully with the knife. “I’ve been around a long time. I have reason to think a lot of things. Lately he goes out alone. He sends his deputies off to the far corners of the county and has Ms. Park-Ford keep him appraised of the GPS readings on their cruisers. Then he takes off for hours.”

  Russell, defeated, dropped the knife and said sulkily, “So Ma came up with an idea.”

  “Put the pie on the counter, Russell. You can eat it when you come back from work.”

  He looked at her warily. Her smile opened like my wing window, narrow and stuck at the wrong angle, but Russell looked as though he had been baptized in the breath of life.

  “Yes!” he celebrated.

  “Put it on the counter, Russell.”

  “Which counter, Ma?’

  “Left of the sink. No, Russell. Left of the sink.”

  “Got it.”

  Now a phone began to ring from the wall at the other side of the kitchen. You don’t much see phones like that anymore, beige slimlines, hard wired. Rita Crowe said, “Excuse me” and carried the handpiece away to the end of a long and kinky cord that placed her in the living room, out of earshot.

  “It was a good idea.” Russell was rejuvenated. He hunkered toward me, speaking in a low voice. “It basically would have worked. My mom followed me out to Ringling where I was supposed to pull a dead horse off the road. There was no horse. There never was. So Ma stays with the cruiser like it’s me on speed patrol. I drive her truck back to town. I get there in time to catch the sheriff heading south on 89 and then up by Tucker’s place. He stops by the side of the road and just sits there. Then these other vehicles show up and I’m waiting to see what the sheriff does, and then—”

  He stretched away to take a look at her. She had the TV on, was listening on the phone and looking for something through the channels.

  “Must be a George Clooney sighting,” Russell said. “Ma’s fan network has been alerted.” He gave me a real-looking grin. “So I’m waiting there by Tucker’s place to see what the sheriff does, and then some drunk guy—”

  He double-checked the living room. “Huh,” he said. “There’s Dane Tucker right there. That’s Force Down. I guess it came up on dish. And Ma’s watching, so there must be some early George Clooney in there somewhere.”

  Russell rolled his eyes a bit. “Sorry about the pie.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Some drunk guy comes along 294 at about eighty miles an hour using both lanes. And guess what she does? She turns on the siren and takes off after him. She puts the damn cruiser in the ditch at the 89 intersection. Ms. Park-Ford picks it up from her screen and radios the sheriff. The sheriff heads for the scene. Now I have to race him in my mother’s pickup and get back there before he does.”

  Russell paused. This was thin ice, this story. In the living room, Rita Crowe murmured into the phone while a buff and sweaty Dane Tucker rappelled from a helicopter into some foreign embassy compound. The knife in Tucker’s stunning teeth turning out to be just the ticket to cut the bonds from the wrists and ankles of some dark-skinned beauty who then spat in Tucker’s face. No George Clooney that I could make out. Rita Crowe advanced one more channel to a talk show. White boys, ugly ones with shaved heads and jackboots, slouched in the pillowy guest chairs. Russell and I both stared at this for a minute.

  “And I made it,” Russell said finally. “I beat the sheriff to the scene. Just.”

  The TV screen went black. Rita Crowe hung up the phone and returned to the table. She said to me, “You’re right. Those boys are hammerheads. I’ve seen them at the liquor store on Main.”

  “Skinheads, Ma.” Russell was grinning at her. “Or hammer-skins. Not hammerheads.”

  Rita Crowe had started another cigarette. She set it down in a Yellowstone Park ashtray. She gathered up the paper plates and plastic forks and Styrofoam cups, put them in a pile, pushed the pile toward Russell.

  “We’re not supposed to burn, Ma. It’s too dry. There’s a county ordinance against it.”

  “We work for the county, Russell.”

  “Right, so—”

  She stared hi
m down. Eventually Russell gathered the stack of trash into his hands.

  “So,” she said as her son rose to obey, “the question is this: if those are skinheads and they work for Tucker, and our wonderful sheriff is hands off, then why? If the man is looking the other way, what does he get out of it?”

  After a pause wherein I awakened to the fact that this question was not rhetorical, I said, “Well, isn’t that easy?”

  Both Crowes looked at me, eager but clueless. But they were talking about a dying fly fisherman, for God’s sake, and they were talking about the Roam River, pristine, lovely, trout-choked and un-fished, locked in behind Tucker’s fences. In the face of that, as far as Chubbuck was concerned, what was a little corruption of justice?

  I shrugged and said the obvious: “Wouldn’t it be access to fish?”

  The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Jess

  I fixed one for the road, torched a remnant Swisher, and I drove directly back to Livingston, to the liquor store.

  Uncle Tick Judith had become the Jackson Pollack of snoose. Loosed by his grief over Jesse, the grainy brown stains went everywhere, in streaks and splats and dribbles on his shirt front, his chin, his boots, the counter, the newspaper he was reading, even on the Crown Royal gift boxes shelved behind the counter and three feet in back of his spittoon.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sumbitch sorry don’t get me nothin’.”

  There went effluent out the corner of his mouth into the stubble on his chin. He sniffed, dragged a sleeve across the general area, adding to that canvas.

  “I’m responsible,” he said.

  “You’re not.”

  “Ize her sumbitch guardian. That girl’s daddy—” a gobby, no-look spurt in the general direction of the spittoon “—is my good friend and he asked me to watch out for her.”

  “Jesse was an adult,” I said. “A pretty wild one, too.”

  The old bull rider hoisted a plastic half-gallon of Smirnoff’s from beneath the counter. He addressed the register. “That one’s half gone,” I pointed out.

  “Thennis half price,” Uncle Judith slurred. “Twenty-nine by half.” I watched the math confuse him while the register beeped.

  “Point of information,” I said. “How do you know those skinheads work for Tucker?”

  Tick Judith pulled back and stood mutely bowlegged, regarding me as if for the first time. He worked that quid beneath his lip as tears welled into eyes that looked set by a shovel and red-rimmed from an intense stretch of anguish. He didn’t process the skinhead question. Instead he fixed a shattered index finger in my direction.

  “Now, you …”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I brought Sneed around here.”

  “So maybe you’re responsible.”

  “Yeah. I am. That’s what I mean when I say you’re not.”

  If this was harder than twenty-nine by two, Uncle Judith didn’t show it. In fact he bunched his quid up with a grizzled face-pinch, squeezed it hard a couple times, and tried to self-talk around the precipitate. “Sumbitch owned up,” he dribbled. “I am talking to a goddang man.”

  He knuckle-punched the register: NO SALE. Then the cap was off the Smirnoff’s—”Here’s to ya, friend”—and we were passing it back and forth, a pair of good slugs each, throats on fire.

  “When Galen went to prison,” he gasped, “that left Jesse in my care. She was coming up on fifteen. Grown men was sniffing around her like coyotes on a yearling deer. I was by myself with it. I put down some sumbitch rules.”

  “I hear you.”

  “And that girl broke every one of them.”

  Uncle Judith hoisted the half-gallon again. Vodka hit him in the face. “Shiticks.” He mopped himself with a bandana, pried out his snoose and flicked it into a trash can, tried to get himself organized.

  “I’m sure you did your best.”

  “You can see about how good I did.”

  “You did all right.”

  He skidded the jug across the counter. “What the sumbitch hell do you know?”

  “Not that much.”

  “Okay then.”

  I swallowed a mouthful. “About those skinheads—”

  “Dwayne Hood told me.”

  “Who’s Dwayne Hood?”

  “Buddy of mine. Used to be ranch boss for Tucker. Got himself fired over some fence that was too expensive.”

  Suddenly, Uncle Judith was the Marcel Marceau of snoose. His mouth worked convincingly, but nothing was in there. He searched pockets for his Cope can.

  “Dwayne Hood said Tucker has a whole new crew now, including a couple of little dirtbags from Spokane that was supposed to watch the fences, keep out fishermen.”

  I nodded. Okay. So the skins did in fact work for Tucker. “Let me ask you something.”

  But the jangling here produced a summer person—short pants, sandals, sunglasses—who took some care in selecting a ten-dollar six-pack of beer. Uncle Judith killed the time locating his snoose can, rapping it loudly and violently with his thumb, then one-handing the lid off and letting out a smell like wet bat guano. Now he was the Julia Child of snoose, taking a deep and critical sniff, then a short corroborative nip. He wrinkled his busted nose. He pronounced the can “rotten as a goddang Monday morning,” and then he foisted in a hefty pinch.

  Ten-dollar six-pack paid with plastic and left us. “My question is delicate,” I went on.

  “I look like I’m made of sumbitch piecrust?”

  “I know you loved Jesse.”

  We traded vodka punches. I was getting wobbly. Uncle Judith dabbed his eyes.

  “So I wonder what you think about Sneed.”

  “The colored boy? What about him?”

  “You’ve seen a lot of Jesse’s men. I just wondered where he fit in the general outline of things.”

  “That sumbitch,” Jesse’s guardian began. He squeezed back what looked like the impulse to cry. “I don’t care what anybody says. That sumbitching colored boy was the best thing that ever happened to Jess. Just the other day I said to Galen—” He broke off, squeezed harder. “I went up there. ‘What’s Jess up to,’ he says, ‘who’s she running with,’ and I can’t never lie to him so I told it. Then Galen got going on that subject and I said he ought to shut his goddamn—” Uncle Judith’s own mouth closed involuntarily. He shook some thought from his head, and his voice became scratchy and airless. “You mark my words, fella. I seen the other thing plenty of times. That colored boy loved Jess. And I suspect that’s why …”

  He broke off into full-on tears, dripping and drooling like the Salvador Dali of snoose. I bit my lip and stared away toward the beer cooler. That Frangelico didn’t make sense, I was thinking suddenly. A syrupy hazelnut liqueur, on a hot summer day, between two avid beer drinkers?

  As was my way, I let Uncle Judith cry out my ration too, let him honk around inside his bandana enough for both of us while I found Frangelico on the shelf behind the counter: the bottle was unmistakable, tall and shaped like a friar in a cowl, white cord around the waist, a price tag below that said $44.95.

  When Uncle Judith recovered, I asked him, “Who was Jesse’s last boyfriend? Before Sneed?”

  He did not hesitate. He jerked his hat brim toward the window. “Nut case across the street. Tucker’s lawyer. Had Jess on the QT, supposedly. Everybody knew except the guy’s wife.”

  “Henderson Gray?”

  Suddenly a mad gulp of vodka, a vicious near miss at the spittoon. “That dumb girl was always spreading for a lawyer. She thought a lawyer could get her dad off. Galen wrote her letters like that—Jess, get a lawyer, tell him I’m innocent—leading her on like that. Hell, she’d do about anything.”

  “Does he know she’s dead? Jesse’s dad?”

  “Galen beat up a guy about a week ago. Colored fella. He’s in the hole right now.”

  I waited a moment, sick and considering, and then I made a leap and hoped for luck. “You sell any Frangelico in here?”

  “Winter. Ski season.
”

  “Lately, I mean.”

  Uncle Judith’s eyes narrowed. He jackhammered the wad in his jaw. He was weaving now, hanging onto the counter.

  I filled him in. “There was an empty at the crime scene.”

  “The monk?”

  “Yes.”

  Seesawing words around a mouthful: “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”