“Just a cat fight,” he grunted, batting peanut crumbs from his filthy beard. “My old man was a sheepherder. You know what that’s like? That means he was bat-shit crazy and made exactly enough cash to stay drunk between the good grass.”
These comments with respect to what, I wondered. Sorgensen lumbered to the porch’s side railing to flick his Planters jar into a dumpster below. He barely made it back to me with enough breath left to continue.
“Swore I was going to have a better life. But hell, working with these goofballs, I don’t know.” Those empty pinpricks again, right on me. “So how’s our buddy Sneed?”
“He’s alive. Talking.”
“Hmmm. What’s he saying?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Confession?”
“Not if he didn’t do it.”
“Hmmm.” At this point, Sorgensen had expended his capacity to stand. He ballooned to the rear in his huge culotte-shorts and leaned his forearms on the porch rail, making it creak. He jingled a set of keys, tapped the ring on the railing. Even at my safe distance, he smelled like the underside of a door mat, plus something close to creamed corn. “Woman!” he bellowed suddenly. “Get a move on!”
He swung his bison head toward the shop and back. Tap, jingle, tap-tap-tap. “Gonna miss her flight.”
“Lyndzee’s traveling again?”
“Death in the family.”
“Again?”
“They come in threes, don’t they?”
Out on the lot, Russell was making some progress. A fisherman had approached the wounded man and knelt beside him. Around this, most of the skirmishes had attenuated to jousting and shouting, all except the madman with the helicoptering oar.
“So what’s this about?” I ventured at Sorgensen.
A snort. “A bunch of girls pissing in my parking lot, mostly.”
Not the real answer, of course, so I waited. “Hell,” he grumbled on eventually, jabbing a key into the wood of the railing, “with the guide rates up so high, and the shuttle drivers nicking me—” His head again swung suddenly. “Damn it, woman! You’re gonna miss your flight!”
Lyndzee’s harried voice struggled to reply. “If you’d give me some time to get ready …”
Sorgensen grumbled, “This time her uncle in Memphis.” He shook his wooly head. “Woman and her damn people are bleeding me dry. As for this out here, this is an outbreak of the Bozeman-Livingston guide war. Every couple of years the Bozeman guides get the idea the fishing must be better over here and they show up by the dozens. They clog the boat ramps, jam up the river, acting like a bunch of spoiled little prom queens. Even though they got the Gallatin, the Madison, the Beaverhead, all that water over there. Pisses off the Livingston guides, these two girls have a fender bender and off we go.”
Before us now, a brave pair of perhaps orthodontists or veterinary surgeons had stepped in to try to curtail the flailing oar. As for one other remaining hot spot, a shoving match over near the Cruise Master, Russell seemed to be getting results with a taser.
“Jesse’s dad—” I began.
“You’re looking at it, Pal. Galen Ringer killed a Bozeman guide one day in a fight down at Otter Creek.”
“Jesse believed he was innocent.”
“Yeah.” The big man ejected breath. “Loyal to the death. Poor girl.”
Lyndzee clattered onto the porch with a pair of hardshell suitcases, pre-wheel. She set them down and yanked at a leather mini skirt, tried for bright.
“Oh, hello. I’m so sorry about your friends.”
“I’m sorry about your family.”
“You’re okay?”
“Not really. You?”
She had a voice like a squeaky pencil sharpener. “Oh … I … um … I’m …”
“You’re late. Get in the van.”
Her eyes clouded over. Now muttering, head down, she lifted her suitcases and carried them off the porch toward a battered conversion van beyond the dumpster. I repositioned myself and blocked Sorgensen before he could get moving.
“Jesse told me her dad cut the guy’s anchor rope and let the client go floating away down the river. She said her dad and the Bozeman guide fought, something about a cut-off on a boat ramp, but the Bozeman guide was alive and well when her dad drove off.”
“That’s Galen’s story.” Sorgensen watched Lyndzee into the van. “It took the jury eighteen minutes. They saw pictures of that poor sonofabitch trailing like a water weed with his skull busted and that anchor rope around his neck.”
“Jesse said somebody showed up just as her dad left.”
Lyndzee turned on the radio. Rush, maybe. Guitars and voice screeching off toward the Yellowstone.
“Jesse’d believe the pope did it.” Sorgensen wanted to move around me. He was not a tall man, was actually small when you looked inside the fat. He had tiny hands, tiny ears, narrow shoulders. This man had once fit inside a barrel. Thwarted, he considered me with those buzzed-up eyes. “I hear you’re asking a lot of questions about Jesse’s death.”
“Just a few,” I said.
“You got one for me? That’s why you’re here?”
“Actually, I do.”
He nodded slowly, waiting, whistling air out through his nose.
“A couple days ago,” I framed it, “when I was looking for Sneed and Jesse, you said you’d fired them. You said they’d stolen a rod. So whose rod did they steal?”
But while I asked the question, Sorgensen’s face transformed. He infused a cheesy lightness into his cheeks and eyes. Now he clown-smiled at me—crinkly eyes, grotesquely and falsely jolly—as he bulled out some space toward the porch steps. Passing, he reached out in a half-successful attempt to slap me on my stiffening shoulder.
“You take care.”
“Whose rod?”
“Crimenently, fella. I don’t know what you’re getting at. Believe me, it broke my heart—” Sorgensen gripped the rail, side-stepped off the porch “—to fire those kids.”
I tried once more, uselessly, at the mute slab of his back: “Did they steal a rod or not?”
He did a flaccid little jig-step, kept walking.
Imagine Dentists
The ambulance came and went. Russell busted someone. His cruiser followed the other out the driveway and turned right toward Livingston. From the deck of the Fly ‘n’ Float, I watched the guides and clients split from their klatches, depleted beer cans in hand, and head for vehicles, hotels, homes. I picked out a stocky kid with an older model Chevy pickup that was in dire condition. As if to forestall the truck’s collapse, he had backed his trailer to the corner of the lot. Now he got out to unhitch his boat and leave it for tomorrow.
“Lot of miles on that truck.”
“Hundred and fifty-nine thou.” He raised up and recovered his beer from the truck box. “Not bad for a Chevy.”
“Yeah. Well, I’m trying to get one more season out of her. Don’t know if she’ll make it.”
“Not the best for hauling clients, is it? A pickup?”
“Naw,” he said. “If I got more than one, as I usually do, we have to squeeze in like we’re back in high school going to a party.”
“I’m Dog,” I said.
“I’m Cord. Cord Cook.”
He had a good grip and a good smile, longish blond hair and a sunburned nose. He started guiding, he volunteered, right out of high school, three years now. If things went right in the summer months—weather, trout, truck—he could make enough to fund tuition and housing at U of M in Missoula. “You?” he said.
“Trout bum.”
“Awesome.”
“You see that RV over there? That’s mine. Imagine dentists in the back of that.” He grinned at the picture. I pushed the sale. “Coffee and the New York Times on the way to the water.”
“Beverages on the way home,” he said.
“It’s even got a trailer hitch.”
“I see that.”
“Hell, on a long morning haul, to the Boulde
r or something, to the Smith, the dentists could go back to bed in there.”
“Dentists are never tired. Vets either. But the doctors I get can be pretty burned out. And oh, yeah,” the kid said, raising a sun-bleached eyebrow, “I get couples all the time.”
“There’s a curtain between the cab and the living space. So who knows?”
Cord Cook rubbed his stubbled chin.
“A straight up trade?” I proposed. I laid a hand on his last-gasp Chevy. “Your truck for my RV?”
“Damn. Really? Maybe.”
“Or how about a trial period? You take it for a week. You try it, drive some clients around. See what you think. I’ll drive yours.”
“Can I test it?”
“Of course. I’ll try yours.”
There was a break for the Dog. But as Cord Cook pulled the Cruise Master out on 89 and headed toward Yellowstone Park, exhaustion hit me like a cartoon anvil.
I blanked out for twenty minutes in the driver’s seat of that pickup, blinking at nothing and chewing the inside of my mouth, craving sleep, hoping Cook would trade me. I would grab my stuff, my vodka and Tang, my fishing gear, my sleeping bag, and I would crash at some campground in the box of the truck. It wouldn’t rain. It never did. The law, such as it was, would leave me alone. And I imagined if I slept hard enough, if I traveled to my dark deep and made good at the Big Two-Hearted, then Sneed and Jesse could come back good as new.
It took all this time for me to pay attention to the rodeo medal hanging on Cord Cook’s rear view mirror. Then for another bleary five minutes I figured Cook was a cowboy too—maybe on the college rodeo team. But in ten more minutes, when the kid still hadn’t returned with my Cruise Master, I felt an edge beneath my exhaustion, and I began to fiddle with the medal. I looked at it more closely. I shook myself. I re-laminated. Come on, Dog.
The engraving said:
FIRST PLACE
BULL RIDING
BULL-A-RAMA
BUTTE, MONTANA
1998
GALEN RINGER
I let the medal fall back and swing above the dashboard as the Cruise Master appeared on the drive and skidded to a stop. I got out.
Cord Cook got out.
We approached each other in the dusk light. The kid was frowning, scratching his head. The Cruise Master’s engine ticked. It was one of the belts, maybe, that smelled a little bit like burning rubber. He handed me the keys.
“What do you think?”
“Naw,” he said, moving past me. “I guess not. Thanks.”
Pronghorn Are Not Deer
It wasn’t so much my dark deep then—at the closest campground—as it was an epic vodka-Tang and then the blow of another, bigger anvil: memory.
I was only half-asleep when the chaos of images resolved into one nucleus of recall that spun and bumped and then cracked wide open. A vivid, Technicolor Dog floated out onto the black screen of the night to perform for me, and to perform badly. I should have known. This was my theme. I should have foreseen. Of all people, me. I should have stopped it.
“Hey! Really?”
This drunk girl says she’s Jesse Ringer, says it three or four times. But who cares? She is meat to the Dog’s hungry eye. She is young but not too young. She is small and tan and wiry. Her hair is kinky, long, and wild, the color of cornbread crust, and she is not overly well groomed, which is a very nice thing in a girl, Dog-wise.
“Hey! Really?” She slugs Sneed in the arm. “You’re not just shittin’ me?”
Her clothes are skimpy summer stuff. But the summer seems like 1976 or so. She wears fraying cut-off Levis over a pair of lean brown thighs that insinuate their way effortlessly into the hot zones of personal bar-stool space. She wears an actual halter top—when have you seen that?—and she fills it to the brim, with a knot between her shoulder blades that would be oh so easy.
She is after Sneed, of course, not this mangy old Dog. She hardly looks the Dog’s direction, and in this way she implicitly assigns him to the shit-faced mumbling hag at the Dog’s left elbow, the one with the white wine spritzer, the queen-size cigarette, and the stupid red cowgirl hat perched atop a frosty perm.
“Whassyername?”
The Dog goes with “Cornelius.”
“Wha—?”
This drunk girl, Jesse Ringer, leans in on Sneed. Upon his dark forearm she lays an envoy to her whole flesh, this hand—strong and sun-chapped, fingernails cut short and a little dirty.
“This is wild,” says Jesse Ringer to D’Ontario Sneed. “You’re not going to believe this. This is so wild. I can’t believe this connection. Your mother’s in prison? Well, get this. My daddy’s in prison!”
Sneed catches the Dog’s eye. The Dog discharges a shrug of affirmation, bluntly covetous, as the next-door hag jabs him with an elbow. “Huh, Corneliush? Where’d you find your interesting friend there? He fall off a Greyhound?”
Sneed ignores this and smiles at the drunken white girl, looking a little stiff. “My mama was in prison.”
He hoists a Budweiser to free his arm from her too-forward grip.
“Jail, actually. I don’t know where she’s at now.”
He sets the bottle down.
“I don’t care either. I’m an orphan, far as I’m concerned.”
“Oh,” the girls laments sloppily. “Oh, that’s so sad.” She hooks that arm again, gives it a squeeze. “What did she do?”
Sneed tells her exactly what he’s told me: Nothing. His mama didn’t do a damn thing. Not really.
“I mean to get in jail.”
His face clouds. “Oh. Stole, I guess. Robbed a house in the neighborhood of my foster parents. Sold the stuff for drugs.”
“‘Cuz my dad,” this Jesse rushes in, one-upping, “supposedly murdered a guy.”
This stops everything. Jesse Ringer glugs warm beer from her plastic cup. Her breasts stir beneath the halter as she jars the cup back down and leans closer to Sneed.
“But he didn’t do it,” she tells him. Then her voice gets too loud. “He is so fucking innocent.”
The bar tender, the hag, the players at the keno machines, this benumbed and negligent Dog, everybody stiffens and looks the drunk girl’s way.
“That’s right people,” she announces. “Galen Ringer is so fucking innocent.”
Later, next day, this Jesse Ringer girl can fish. She can pick flies. She can handle line on big water and she can set the hook. She can play and land and show and release. She credits it all to a bull rider turned Yellowstone fishing guide turned death row inmate, her father, Galen Ringer. Who is innocent. She never lets you forget that.
She wet-wades too, and she looks very, very good.
“I don’t know, Dog,” Sneed says, clearly troubled. “This girl is teeing it up. But man, I just don’t know.”
“Hey,” this slipshod friend, this careless mentor, gives back, “I would.”
Which is all too goddamn true.
Later still, this rough and lovely girl, generally stoned, says she has a place to live, but her car looks slept in.
This brown and barefoot girl, this lite beer champion, has a golden Oldsmobile, about ten years old, and she has this guide-shuttle partner, this earnest and besmitten virgin man-child named Kenny she knew in high school, and when Sneed comes into her life, this fire-in-the-belly girl Jesse Ringer flicks poor unrequited Kenny like a chub back into the stream of lonely and bewildered young men.
Together then, Jesse and Sneed drive for Hilarious Sorgensen, every morning, ferrying vehicles and trailers downstream to takeout points, teaming back and forth, seven days a week. This Dog character? Sleeps late. Ties flies. Nips a little v and T. Smokes the second half of last night’s Swisher. Studies maps. Makes pancakes. Misses warning signs.
In the afternoons, fishing, Sneed and Jesse bitch and joke about Sorgensen. The cheap bastard gobbles peanuts and speed while his brain works overtime, finding ways to squeeze his guides, short his drivers, bilk his suppliers, ways to hornswoggle his clientele
of doctors, dentists, vets, ways to keep poor little Lyndzee hooked and hopping.
But the thing is, Jesse then suggests, if anybody needs anything—you know, anything—she can talk to Sorgensen. She can get it. No problem.
And this inattentive dumb Dog, where is he? What is he thinking?
He is thinking: Anything? Really? Would Sorgensen have Cuban cigars? How would they taste next to a Swisher?
The Clinch Knot Page 9