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.”
White Fang and Top Gum
“How’d you find me?”
Cord Cook appeared less than happy to see me hiking out to the spit where he had moored his drift boat for lunch.
“I just drove along the river with my windows open. People say you can hear dentists fly casting from a mile away.”
Cook eyed me. On cue, one of his clients howled, “Argggh! Buck! Mother Tucker! Sonofabutterknife!”
Cook strode muttering off the sand spit and over heavy cobble to unwind leader from the howler’s terrific hat. He cut the fly out of the fellow’s cherrywood landing net. From behind, he spooned himself to the caster. He pushed one elbow, lifted another, squared the guy’s hips to match his own, and in this fashion, somewhat like insects mating, Cook and his client made a few decent casts together.
When Cook disengaged, however, the howling resumed. “What the hell is going on?” the dentist demanded. He looked at his rod in disbelief, betrayed.
The guide rubbed his college-kid stubble. He looked into the sky, snatched down the eternal scapegoat. “Crosswind, Kevin. I under-rodded you. It’s not your fault. You’re doing awesome. Just keep working that seam out there and I’ll rig another rod.”
Cook disengaged, hollered to the other one, thirty yards downstream: “Gary? Can I ask you to slow down your backcast a little? Let the rod do the work? You’re not serving a tennis ball. That’s it. Thanks, Gary.”
The kid came back needing to talk: “Dentists from Toledo. Said they could fish. They been here all week. We’ve been calling these guys White Fang and Top Gum. Jim Rideup had them yesterday. He called in sick today.”
“You’re doing everything you can.”
“No,” he said. “I could shoot them. I got a pistol in my first aid box.”
He felt my eyes linger, maybe felt the bad taste of Jesse’s death.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “I mean, I do have a pistol, but …”
I smoothed it over. “People are good at different things. I mean, not to get too philosophical, but how are you at filling cavities? Anyway, I figured you’d pull up for lunch about here. What’s cooking? Is that elk on a skillet?”
The kid grunted, “Yup.”
“Where?”
“Shot him in the Little Belts last November. Me and my dad.”
The elk steaks sizzled in a pan on a little propane stove beyond Cook’s Clack-a-Craft. He had set up a folding table with a wine bottle and glasses, bread, olives, a tomato half-sliced on a cutting board with yellow jackets buzzing above.
“So?” Cook said. “What do you want me for? I don’t know anything. I only loaned her my boat.”
Doors just open sometimes. Cord Cook puffed up like prairie chicken, reddened in the face, then wheeled away to tend his elk steak. I lingered, surprised, watching dentist Gary perform a root canal on a pocket of water about ten feet out. Then I followed Cook around the Clack-a-Craft to the kitchen. The elk was a touch overdone, powerful in the nose.
“Let me guess. You used to go out with Jesse.”
“Look, man. I’m
in college now. I declared a major. I’m keeping my grades up, staying clean. I don’t need any trouble.”
“I saw her dad’s rodeo medal in your truck. She normally doesn’t let anyone touch those.”
He shoved his skillet off the fire. “Doesn’t matter now. She’s dead.”
“What boat? This one?”
“My rubber boat. For small stuff, whitewater, all that.”
“What for?”
Cook wiped the knife on his pants and rose sharply. “Gary! Slow down!”
The downstream dentist—knock-kneed in a foot of water—ceased casting entirely. His line convulsed in the air, then collapsed in squiggles onto the water at his feet. As Gary turned, sending a hurt look toward Cook, the Yellowstone’s strong current grabbed his line and straightened it downstream into deeper water. “Top Gum, shot down again,” Cook muttered.
“She must have told you where she was going with it.”
“She didn’t.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Didn’t want to know.”
“Where is it now?”
He waved away yellow jackets. “Shit if I know. Gone.”
“The rodeo medal was collateral?”
“Was.”
“She really wanted that boat.”
He twisted his corkscrew in to the hilt, ripped out the wine cork. “Look, man. I know exactly nothing.” He splashed red wine into the glasses. He wasn’t having any. His was a liter bottle of Mountain Dew propped in the cobble where a trickle of the ‘Stone kept it cool.
“I believe you.” I waited for Cook to look at me. “I believe you. But I guess you also think there’s something out there beyond what’s already known.”
“Maybe,” he said, looking away—and just then the upstream guy, White Fang, screeched, “I got one! Hah! Screw you, Gary! I got one! I got the first fish!”
White Fang clodhopped laterally through knee-high water, clutching after a chaos of slack line while a good-sized rainbow tail-walked about twenty feet out, thrashing with the burden of our collective disbelief.
“What the—” Cook said, heading out to assist.
“Drinks on you tonight!” White Fang screeched. “I got one!”
Cord Cook eased up behind his combatant, spoke like Mister Rogers to a pre-schooler. “Kevin? Right behind you. Gonna help you if you need it. Now, can I ask you to get your rod tip up? Good. Excellent. Now can I ask you one more thing? Can I ask you to—”
“Sonofabutterknife!” Top Gum howled. “I got one too!”
And it was true. It does happen sometimes. Mother Nature falls asleep at the wheel. Gaia gets bored and looks away. The Great Turtle takes a dump. Anyway, there we were, with a double, Top Gum’s hook-up appearing to be a big brown, digging against the dentist into the depths beyond.
“Okay,” Cord Cook soothed. “Okay—listen—guys?”
“Mother Tucking sonofabutterknife!”
“Let’s take it easy, guys. Keep our rod tips up. Keep our lines tight.”
But their guide was caught between them, and suddenly situations devolved badly in both directions.
“Let’s just stay—Gary! What the hell! Don’t horse him! Get him on the reel!”
Cook charged downstream, looking like he was going to tackle Top Gum. But then he reversed field, plodded back against the current as he implored his upstream dentist: “Kevin! Never let a fish get behind you! Not downstream and behind you. Jesus, Kevin—”
“What should I do? Jump?”
“Cord!” wailed Top Gum, “I lost him!”
“No you didn’t!” Cook roared. “Turn around and get him on the reel!”
“Oh yeah, I guess I didn’t.”
“What the buck! Should I jump? Cord, he’s tangled around my legs.”
I was waiting. Finally Cook looked at me in bewilderment and distress. “Can you help?”
“Say please,” I told him. “Screw you,” he said.
“Close enough,” I said. “I’ll take Top Gum.”
Celebratory cigars, then, after lunch, for everyone but me. “I only brought three,” Cook said.
“Don’t worry about it.” I sparked a crumbly Swisher. “I only smoke the good stuff.”
“Cord’s a helluva guide,” White Fang declared. He clapped Cook on the shoulder. “This was the spot. This was the spot where they were hitting. Bam. Bam. A double, just like that.”
“Good call, Cord,” Top Gum said. “You put us right on the fish.”
“Shit. I put a cast right there,” White Fang fantasized. “Perfect. Right on that big old bastard.”
“That was a female,” Cook said.
“Me too.” Top Gum blew a smoke ring. “Perfect cast.”
“Bam,” White Fang said. “Game over.”
“I stuck that bitch,” Top Gum said. “Yours was a male, bud.”
“Yeah! Toledo! Toledo rocks! Toledo kicks ass, baby!”
“Gentlemen, could you excuse us for a second?”
Cook walked me upstream, out of earshot at the head of the little sand spit. “Hey,” he pleaded, “it’s good money. It’ll get me through school.”
“Sure. Maybe you’ll become a dentist.”
“Shoot me if that happens.”
“So I believe you,” I said. “You don’t know why Jesse wanted a boat or where it is.”
“I don’t. No idea.”
“But you loaned it to her.”
“Yeah. I sure did.”
“She must have had some leverage.”
Cook rubbed the blond stubble below his right ear. He gazed across the Yellowstone at the buff-colored hills of tinder dry grass. Across a distant dry gulch stepped a pronghorn, then another pronghorn, the pair disappearing with dainty steps into stones and brush.
“Yeah, well, what else would it be?” Cook said at last. “Drugs. A bunch of us from high school were still partying pretty hard together all the way up to last year. I heard Jesse got busted by the sheriff about a month ago and was getting pressured to turn people in. I didn’t want to be one of them.”
“You were dealing?”
“Just staying alive,” he said. “Not much for jobs around here.”
“What drugs?”
He swallowed, glanced at me. “All kinds of shit. You know. Anything you wanted.”
“And you’re not a pharmacy. So you had a source?”
“Of course I did.”
“Can you tell me?”
“I got things going now, man, I want to stay alive.”
“Hey, Cord!” White Fang hollered. “Let’s go stick some fish!”
“So you think someone might have killed Jesse to keep her quiet?”
“I’m not going to talk about it, man, I told you.”
He tried to turn away. I grabbed his arm. “Cord.” I waited for his nervous gray eyes. “If that’s true, you think you might be next?” I waited. “Look, kid. The sheriff has thrown me out of town. Twice. We’re not on speaking terms. Anything you tell me goes straight into figuring out what happened to Jesse. Period. And maybe toward keeping you alive too.”
“I’m changing flies.” Top Gum crowed this from the riverbank. “How in heck does that clinch knot happen again?”
“Sorgensen,” Cook relented. I let his arm go. “He supplied me, Jesse, some other people. I don’t know where he gets the shit. But maybe Jesse did.”
“Maybe she did.” He was edging away, using the pull of his clients. “So, listen, Cord. I know Jesse wasn’t going to forget about her dad’s medal, so when was she going to give your boat back?”
Cook looked at his watch for the date. “Three days ago,” he said.
“A good inflatable, that’s a couple thousand bucks.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So what are you going to do if you can’t get it back? Give up fishing small water?”
He squinted downstream at his dentists. He glanced upstream at a drift boat bobbing along the opposite bank. Then he looked at me and let go of som
ething in a hot blast of air that ruffled his bangs. From the waterproof pouch on his lanyard he extracted his fishing license, his guide’s license, some cash, and then what he wanted, a ratty-edged photograph.
The Clinch Knot Page 10
