“Your baby was in love.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
She turned around again in the lot of a realtor who promised affordable farmettes in the Paradise Valley.
“Do not tell me he was in love with some cowgirl white chick.”
I observed this guideline in silence as she gunned that little Geo Metro like it was a pumper truck and we streaked back in past the Pamida and Town and Country Foods, coming up fast behind a cattle truck that had strayed in off the interstate. Now it was hue and yaw, hoof-scatter and stench, Aretha Sneed trapped in it with a log truck behind us and a steady drain of tourists down the opposite lane. Blowing the horn of her rental car, she discovered, produced nothing more helpful than a stream of panicked cow shit out through the ovals of the truck’s back gate.
“Oh, my Lord—”
I glanced at her. Her bottom lip was between her teeth. She gripped the wheel like she would snap it.
“He was in love not just with her,” I said. “With this whole place.” A steer brayed. Hooves clattered. The truck lurched, giving hope, then stopped again.
“Do not tell me that,” she said unevenly into the windshield. “I have been looking for my boy, hoping and praying for the past five years. And when I finally find him—” her voice cracked “—he’s half dead in the damn territory, and the plan here in Virginia City, as I understand it, is to keep him alive long enough to hang him.”
“I’ve been working on that.”
“By the neck.”
“I have some ideas.”
“From the gallows.”
The cattle truck jolted into motion. But the scale of it in front of us, given her city driver’s habit of tailgating, obscured the fact that we had once more traveled out the north end of town into rangeland.
She cussed unbecomingly, slung the car around once more. I let her head back into Livingston a third time before I asked finally, “So who is Eustace Crabb?”
She was biting her lip again, gripping the wheel too tightly.
“He’s the town drunk on Bonanza.”
“And what are we looking for?”
“I …”
But she seemed short of breath, suddenly needed to think about where she was. She pulled over. We sat at the edge of a gun shop parking lot, pickups straggling past. She closed her eyes.
“I left as soon as they called me. I just walked off my shift. I have been traveling all day to get here.”
She looked at me. Startled tears formed, and she began to shake, taking huge, slow breaths in the hope of pulling it all back together.
“I think … Oh, my Lord … I think I’m just hungry.”
What Kind of Pie Do You Have?
“I am in fact a drunk.”
I confirmed this for Sneed’s mother as our waitress at the Stockman set down a screwdriver and a Diet Pepsi.
“But I am not the town drunk. I don’t have a town.”
“Poor you.” Every eye in the place was on her. She masked herself in a scowl, hunched her muscled shoulders around her ears, chose a table with her back to the wall, too close to the jukebox for easy talk.
“Reuben and fries,” she told the waitress.
“I’m a traveling drunk. Kind of like the bookmobile.”
Her eyes narrowed on me, then flicked away toward the keno machines. There, a whiskery old coot was wrenched around to stare at this astonishing black woman while his machine, unattended, posted numbers. Sneed’s mother lowered her gaze and fit her lips around the straw. Her brow creased as she sucked down a third of her diet Pepsi. “So who’s this white chick? She blonde? Blue eyes?”
“All of it.”
“So where do you fit in?”
“Camp counselor.”
“Meaning what?”
“Your son and I met in Idaho a few weeks back. We fished together. Jesse came into the picture later. After that I more or less just led the singing and washed the dishes.”
“Jesse.” Aretha Sneed gave a mournful shake of her chiseled head. Her hair was straightened and pasted down in swoops and wing-like constructions. Small gold hoops swung from her ears. “Her name was Jesse. Big surprise that is.” She stabbed ice with her straw. “Listen.” She met my eyes, wincing as the jukebox kicked in with some manner of boot-stomping boogie. As she leaned closer, I caught whiffs of worry, of the sourness of anxious travel cutting through the Lady Speed Stik. “Tell me. Did he talk about me?”
Tricky. Slow, Dog, slow. “I admit I had a different image of who you might be.”
I watched this cause a pain she tried to hide. But her explanation was clean and strong, unflinching: “When I lost that boy, my world changed. I’m different now.”
Nothing could make more sense to the Dog. Same here, only backwards. Still, my nod of understanding caused her jaw to tighten.
“I mean my world changed.”
“I know.”
“I don’t mean I was so sad I had to go shopping.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Or go recuperate in Cancun.”
“I know.”
Her eyes bore into me, aflame with suspicion and possibly rage. I lifted my hands away from their busy realignments of my screwdriver glass. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let’s drop that. Let’s move forward. Now you’re here.”
“Right.” She wouldn’t let my eyes go. “Here on the set of Bonanza. With Eustace Crabb.”
“That attitude isn’t going to help.”
“Which attitude is?”
She sat back and tried a different one. She bulled her pretty neck, stuck her tongue into her cheek, hitched and swayed to the country music for a mocking few seconds, pulling it back just an instant before it could have been a problem with the folks along the bar. She was good. She knew where the edge was.
“Yep,” she muttered in a low and stumpy drawl, squinting along her straw like it was a rifle barrel broke out for cleaning. “Put it down, ‘Retha. That one’s property of white folks.”
Next her rueben plate cracked down in front of her, then a clatter of silverware. “That be all?” breezed our waitress, not meaning it, a big and pasty girl skimming away before Sneed’s mother could answer.
“You’re going to need friends here,” I told her. Aretha Sneed looked at the rueben. She looked at me, still doubting her outlay of five hundred bucks. “True friends,” I said. “And I’m a start.”
She cast a glance toward the bar, but a chorus of stares chased her back to the reuben.
“I’m in this,” I said. “On your side. Whether you like the looks of me or not.”
She tried to stare me down. I wouldn’t go. After a long and fruitless attempt she unhooked, looked down and said through her teeth, “Okay, Hoss.” She set her cell phone down beside her plate and began to pick kraut off the reuben.
I said, “Hey, now I’m Hoss. I got an upgrade.”
By the last bite of her reuben, Sneed’s mother was filled in on Jesse’s murder, on her son’s supposed culpability and his alleged suicide attempt, and finally on Jesse’s assorted paramours and antagonists, her party friends and any possible defenders of her racial cleanliness. She had heard the names Henderson Gray, Hilarious Sorgensen, Dane Tucker, Cord Cook, Tick Judith, Deputy Russell Crowe, and Sheriff Roy Chubbuck, and she had processed the existence of skinheads within a stone’s throw of the French fries that lay in a droopy mass on her plate. And she knew about the Oldsmobile, the fold-back seat, the theory.
“So this cinch knot—”
“Clinch knot. It’s a fly fishing knot.”
“Fly fishing?”
I explained about artificial insects made from fur and feathers. I made a couple back-casting strokes, laid one down into the flow of the Stockman, outlined catch and release—all this to the effect of confusion and dismay.
“Okay.” She wanted to move on. “So the one who did this was not a fly fisherman? Wouldn’t that be most of the sane world as we know it?”
“Not around here.”
“Had to be. At least one of them. If there were more.”
“And you’re sure about all this.”
“I’m sure your son didn’t kill Jesse. The rest of it’s the best guess I have.”
She was quiet a while. She flipped open the cover of her cell phone, frowned at something, flipped it shut again.
“Okay,” she said at last, squirting zig-zags of ketchup over that slag heap of fries. “Now let me tell you where I’m coming from.”
She had to lean close as the jukebox re-charged with Merle Haggard, “Oakie from Muskogee.” A spontaneous sing-along at the bar forced me to focus on her lips, trying to read them.
“The last time D’Ontario saw his mama—” they were puffy lips, wide and active, shiny with glitter gloss and reuben grease—”I was some banger’s little crack whore.”
She waited, dared me to come up six inches and face this fact right in its lovely green-brown eyes. She held me there, testing. I gave her a little shrug. Tell me something I didn’t know.
“I didn’t look like this,” she relented finally. “I didn’t talk like this, proper and truthful, and sure as hell not to a white man.”
I nodded. Fine. She pushed the plate of fries away untouched, tossed her napkin on top.
“I wanted that boy back because somebody told me I could get a hundred-and-twenty-five dollars a week from the county welfare office.”
“He told me,” I said. “He knew that.”
“That’s right. He did. He knew it. That’s why he did what he did.”
She had to swallow here, and then again. She pressed a napkin to her lips and held it until something relaxed inside her.
“And that’s right about where I stopped lying to myself. But he was already gone.” Now clicking her short French nails on the table. “And I could not, for the longest time, get myself together.”
“That be all?” The waitress, retreating fast, offered us her broad, blue-jeaned ass to contact in case it wasn’t.
Aretha saw me frowning.
I explained. “What kind of service is that?”
“You never ate out dinner with a black person before?”
“I guess not. Just up at the bar.”
She sat up straight and raised her voice: “Ma’am?” She smiled. She had lucky teeth, like Sneed’s. Our service slumped back. “I just wondered if by chance you had any pie.”
That big sour Montana gal looked over her shoulder toward the kitchen. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“Pecan?”
“We don’t got that.”
“Peach?”
“We don’t got that either.”
“What kind of pie do you have?”
“I could check.”
“Will you do that?”
“When I get a chance.”
“Thank you so much.”
But the waitress went away opposite the kitchen on some other errand that turned out to be a desultory chat with a mean-looking hulk at the bar, complete with glances our way.
Sneed’s mother said to me, “If that bitch comes back here at all, it’ll be to tell you what kind of pie they have.”
She picked up her cell phone again, flipped it open and shut, set it back down.
“But eventually I got myself together. I completed a program. I got a waiver to enter public service. I passed that damn firefighters’ course. Then I looked for my baby, but that didn’t work out. There was no record of him anywhere. He must have been working illegally the whole time. He never paid a tax or got a license or even got arrested, nowhere that I could find. I gave up two years ago. Then when this happened—” her voice cracked “—and they, these people up here, they got his name and all from you. They checked it out, found my name on his birth certificate. When the phone rang I was changing wiper blades on a ladder truck.”
She picked the phone up a third time, set it down, picked it up and opened it, closed it and set it down and looked at me with angry, tear-slick eyes.
“His brain is damaged.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what this means?”
“I—”
She didn’t give me a chance. “You heard of Ricky Ray Rector?
Walter McMillian?”
“No.”
“Barry Lee Fairchild? Earl Washington?”
“No. Sorry.”
She sniffed, erased her tears with a quick swipe of a finger. “Of course not. But you know it’s a tradition in southern law enforcement. Catching a retard black man is like hitting the jackpot on one of those gambling machines over there. They can make him say anything. They can clean off the books of any unsolved crimes. They can—”
“We got apple.” The waitress interrupted Sneed’s mother, and sure enough that big gal aimed her eyes and her order pad at me. “Or cherry.”
“No thanks.”
Aretha’s eyes followed ornery hindquarters back to the bar before she returned her attention to me.
“This state is like Texas, isn’t it? They have the death penalty?”
“Yes. But let’s focus on this: he didn’t do it.”
She shook her head like I was crazy. “Listen, Hoss. The doctor tells me D’Ontario could have heart trouble,” she said, “and/or kidney failure, blindness, skin lesions, balance problems, dementia, sudden death. Any of that. So let’s say he doesn’t talk at all. Or he talks but won’t confess. He says what they don’t want to hear. You know what then?”
I shook my head, not sure.
“He just dies in the hospital, snap, just like that, and nobody ever wonders. Do you see?”
“Well—”
“I don’t really care, I’m saying, whether he’s innocent or not. I don’t have time for that. That’s not going to matter.”
I watched her, wondering where she might go with an end game like that. I said, “Give me a couple days.”
“I owe that boy my life.”
I nodded.
“I would do anything to keep him alive.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t mean writing a check to some foundation.”
“I know what you mean.”
Once more her eyes narrowed on me in suspicion. “You may have a bad habit,” she said, “of agreeing with people you know nothing about.”
“Try me.”
She kept her gaze on me for a long moment. Then she rolled her eyes as her phone began to warble. She snapped it open. Instantly her brow creased.
“Am I with someone? What kind of question is that?”
As she listened, she pressed her eyes shut and shook her head, no-no-no-no. When she had an opening, her voice was tight and cold: “That’s how you support me? Getting jealous? Even when I’m up here doing what I’m doing for why I’m doing it and all it means to me? Lord in heaven, what kind of bullshit is that?”
Willie Nelson started up on the juke box. Another patch of listening made her squint at me and mutter something. Her fingernails began to tick-tick her annoyance on the table top.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “As a matter of fact I am with someone. Mmm? Hoss. Yeah. Hoss. Hoss Cartwright. He’s helping me with D’Ontay. Mm-hmm. Yes, as a matter of fact he is white. Oh, maybe that demonstrates an issue with me? Does it now? Mm-hmm, cuz I’m disassociated from my anger? Oh really? What I really want is a chance to boss the man around? Cuz I come from slavery? Well, Cornell, go ahead and believe whatever you want to believe, cuz you gonna believe it anyway. All right then. You find one too. White girl. Little bitty chicken butt. You do that.”
She pinched a button on the phone and snapped it shut. She slipped it away through a tight breach in the hip of her jeans. Then she cleared the air.
“My latest mistake is a goddamn professor. Needs me home to change his emotional diapers.”
I was already standing, turning away to hide a grin.
“Where you going, Hoss?”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get
busy on your issues. Start bossing me around.”
God Knocked Backwards
“Okay, Hoss,” she said. “Here is what we do. We find those people who might have done this. We get them alone. We ask them to tie this clinch knot. We go vigilante on their cowboy butts.”
The Clinch Knot Page 12
