The Clinch Knot

by John Galligan

“They’ll come here.” I said this to the group in general. “State Patrol, sheriff’s deputies, whoever, they’ll come right to this motel room and they’ll be loaded for bear.”

  I made an anxious survey of the tiny space, thought the better of pinching back the curtain.

  “And there’s a roomful of bear right here.”

  “I ain’t done nothing wrong,” Uncle Judith said.

  “You didn’t turn him in.”

  Uncle Judith accidentally discovered his lump of Cope as he considered this. One could see both confusion and relief. His tongue sent word to his brain, upon receipt of which he spit neatly into his shirt pocket and tamped it flat. “Well you and she ain’t done nothing wrong.”

  “Not yet. But we’re not going to turn him in either.”

  “Damn straight we’re not,” Aretha confirmed. “That’s right, Hoss.”

  Now everybody, even Sneed, looked at me like Hoss had a follow up, a plan, which Hoss did not.

  “A roomful of helpless sumbitch bear,” Uncle Judith summed up, wetting his pocket again.

  Let’s Just Go Find Out Why

  Our silence lasted for an agonizing five minutes, until into that mute and anxious scramble penetrated the wail of a distant siren and Sneed offered, “Jesse dropped the boat.”

  “Where did Jesse drop the boat?”

  “At the place.”

  “What place?”

  “Over the line.”

  “Where is the line?”

  “On the map.”

  “Where is the map?”

  “In the locker.”

  “What locker?

  “Jesse’s.”

  Aretha jumped in, shook him by the shoulders: “Where is Jesse’s locker? Come on, Baby. Tell us where it is.”

  Her words, her presence, her hands on him, the hardcore alertness, all of this seemed to tilt Sneed into mental freefall. His eyes glazed. “Oh, Baby,” said his mother as a wet spot formed at the center of the robe and then the robe began to drip. The smell of urine on shag carpet rose strongly.

  Then Uncle Judith broke in with, “Oh fer chrissake, I know where that sumbitch locker is at.”

  The headlights of Uncle Judith’s pickup led us through the maze of a mini-storage facility on the far west end of town. Those same lights, if Uncle Judith stood aside just right, helped him key open the lock. They lit up an astonishing scene.

  Someone had arranged the narrow interior of the storage locker like a living room that had been compacted. The headlights blazed upon a settee, paisley and frayed, that framed the rear of the space and was backed by a bookshelf with its trophies neatly arranged. Cramped at the sides of the locker were wing chairs, unmatched, that carried dirty lace doilies on their arms. All of it was powdered with dust and webbed by spiders.

  “Holy hoosegow,” Uncle Judith muttered. “I rented this to get Galen’s stuff out of the house cuz I couldn’t stand to look at it. Didn’t tell nobody. I guess she found a key.”

  As I stepped inside the cramped and musty space, the taste of Jesse’s grief rose in my throat. The girl had leaned framed photographs against the seats of the furniture, and in every one of those photographs, under my hand swipes, was a handsome bull rider in full regalia, or that same man and his little daughter, on horses, or in drift boats with fly rods, or at a soda counter, or on top of a massive hydroelectric dam. I wiped my hand on my pants. The dust would not come off.

  “Ah, Jess,” Uncle Judith moaned. He had opened a cedar chest. “You just couldn’t get over it.” He straightened painfully. “Shoulda burned it all, that’s what. Shoulda tampered with the mail.”

  I moved deeper into the spray of the headlights. Crammed in the gap between the settee and a wing chair sat a poured-glass sideboard with liquor bottles glinting out through thick grime.

  “Here come the sirens,” Aretha said. “Once those boys get their noise on, they gotta do something. We have to get him out of here, hide him somewhere. Us too. Come on, Hoss. Quit gawking. And Baby, stop messing in there. Let’s go.”

  I turned back to the foreground, where Sneed bent over a small heap of supplies, his hands moving aside dried food, water bottles, bedrolls. He searched slowly but certainly until he found what he was looking for: pants. His pants. He had only one hospital slipper by now, on his left foot, and this he kicked off into the dark outside the headlights. I knew a little about carbon monoxide poisoning from an industrial case in Brockton. In and out. On and off. Stable, then tippy. Or none of it, or all of it, prospects of a good recovery, or not, and not much—nothing, really, except the hyperbaric chamber—that anyone could do about it. I moved beside my buddy for support. First one hand gripped me, then the other, until he had the pants on. Then he went into the pile again and raised up with some small stretchy pink thing of Jesse’s. With that in his hand, Sneed appeared to struggle with his thoughts for a long moment. Then he bent to the pile once more.

  “I will be damned,” Uncle Judith said, watching this, then toeing into the pile from the other side. “Looks like they were going on a trip. Errands, that girl said. She said she needed my truck for errands.”

  “Jesse dropped the boat,” Sneed said, extending a map toward me.

  I tipped it into the headlights. It was a section of a Forest Service topographic map, laminated, covering Tucker’s property and the Roam River from its entire length, top to bottom. There was a black Sharpie circle far upstream on what looked like swampland, south inside Wyoming, near the boundary of Yellowstone Park. “What’s this, Sneed?”

  “The boat.”

  “Rubber one? Jesse borrowed it from Cord Cook?”

  He blinked at me.

  “Never mind.” I pointed at a second black circle, thirty-some miles north from the first circle and a mile or two east of the Roam in the final downstream third of Tucker’s property. “What was supposed to happen here?”

  As Sneed frowned at the map, that glaze came over him. I cursed myself. Pay attention, Dog. Learn. Learn fast. Sneed had been somewhat tuned in—until I asked him to retrieve a past thought about a future event that would happen in a place he had never been. Now he trembled under the weight of his confusion.

  “What is it, Baby?”

  He turned his back, hung his head. The sirens had stopped. Moths ticked against Uncle Judy’s headlights.

  “Them sumbitches are at the motel,” the old guy muttered. He was back into that cedar chest, working a huge cud of snoose and sifting what looked like letters.

  I put a hand on my young buddy’s shoulder. “Where were you going in the boat, Sneedy? Why?”

  Tears had formed in his eyes when he looked up at me.

  “Dog?”

  “Yup. It’s me.”

  Sneed nodded. Then he raised open hands, dropped Jesse’s pink thing, shook with the pain of forgetting everything else.

  “Crazy,” muttered Uncle Judith. He let the chest lid fall with a loud clap and a cloud of dust. He straightened up, all of us looking at him. Under this scrutiny, he became the Miss Manners of snoose. He turned demurely, spit in his hand, wiped it on his pants. “Them sumbitches think we’re armed. They’ll be shooting.”

  I looked at Sneed’s mother. I saw the fire in her eyes, the spring in her posture. Her hand went into Big Louis. As a matter of fact she was armed, and there would be shooting, so there was only one thing left.

  “Sneedy,” I said, “never mind. Jesse dropped the boat. You and Jesse were going down the river.”

  I took his open hands in mine. I closed them. “Let’s just go find out why.”

  Looks Like We’re On Our Way

  We shoved off an hour before dawn from Sneed and Jesse’s circle on the map, forty miles south on Forest Service land at the headwaters of the Roam River.

  Tick Judith, having chosen to take his chances with the law rather than Dane Tucker and the river, cautiously toot-tooted goodbye and backed out the fire lane. Nervous brown jets squirted from his window. He was the Hansel and Gretel of snoose, leavi
ng a trail as he disappeared into the woods—except on the Roam there would be no going backwards.

  “Hoss?”

  I couldn’t see Aretha. For a long moment after the headlights were gone nothing remained but the hoots of swamp owls, the baying of a million billion frogs, and Sneed’s heavy mouth-breathing.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you swim, Hoss?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you swim good?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  The smells seeped back in—the piney muck, the coppery bog water—and as my eyes adjusted I saw that the first bluish threads of daylight had knit through a low fog to backlight the tamarack and red cedar as they rose jaggedly from acres of still black water.

  “Well,” Aretha said, “that makes one of us.”

  She resolved for me out of the darkness. She gripped her injured son by the tail of his new Jose Cuervo gimme shirt, outfitted by Uncle Judith from dregs behind the seat of his pickup. In her other hand, she gripped Big Louis. Her eyes gaped wide at the scene around us.

  I shoved Cord Cook’s yellow twelve-foot inflatable to the edge of the swampy black water. “Okay, let’s go. See if you can get him in the boat.”

  “This ain’t no boat, Hoss. This is some damn whoopee cushion.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “It will bounce off the rocks.”

  “Rocks?” Her voice echoed out of the swamp. “Rocks?”

  I grabbed the last of Sneed and Jesse’s gear: some plastic sacks from Food Country, stumpy little oars and an anchor, somehow no life jackets. Last in were a vest and a fly rod from the storage locker. Property of Galen Ringer, I was guessing. But if the Dog was going down, the Dog was going down fishing.

  Aretha got Sneed on the boat bottom between the fore and aft rigid seats. She positioned herself in the casting chair, then leaned forward to straighten Sneed’s shirt against the cool air. He twisted free, showed his back to her.

  “Baby—what? It’s your mama.”

  Sneed ignored this. He fingered Galen Ringer’s fly rod as I laid it along the gunwale. “Dog?”

  “Right here, buddy.”

  “We’re going fishing?”

  “You bet.”

  He smiled. I stowed gear around him. I felt Aretha’s glare as I laid down the toy-like oars beneath their toy-like oarlocks. “What are they hitting on, Dog?”

  “They’re swimming on their backs, Sneedy, slurping up grasshoppers.”

  This initiated a long pause. Then suddenly his eyes flooded, dropped tears, his expression abruptly desperate.

  “Dog?”

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  He trembled. “What … what size … what size grasshopper?”

  “They’re on a feed, Sneedy. Any size you want.”

  “Okay.” He seemed enormously relieved. Then his expression changed once more. “Shit, Dog.” His face crumpled. He looked scared. “Listen to me. I’m … I’m like a … like a baby.”

  In ten more minutes I was ready. Sneed’s mother still fixed me with what was most likely a jealous stare for keeping up a patter with her son while I slogged to the bow and yanked us off the boggy shore. The boat bottom dragged under Sneed’s weight. I spun the stern toward me and shoved us out. Mud sucked at my boots. Swamp water climbed my legs as I broke off with Sneed and made an announcement: “We’ll try to get across Tucker’s property line in the next couple hours and then hide until dark. We’ll float all night. By tomorrow morning we ought to be close to that spot on the map.”

  “You tell ‘em, Pa.” Aretha’s tone was testy.

  Now it’s Pa? My retort: “Not my fault if he trusts me.”

  “And you’ve known him for all of what? All of three weeks?” She distributed her glare between the two of us. “I gave birth to this child. This child gave me a damn hemorrhoid longer than three weeks.”

  “Thanks for the information.”

  “You are just too damn welcome.”

  I looked at her. She straddled the seat, facing sideways so that she could be turned away from the two of us. I said, “Now here’s some information for you.”

  “What?”

  “Sit facing me in the middle of the seat with your feet spread apart.”

  “What for?”

  “So you don’t fall out.”

  “Okay,” she said huskily, stomping her feet down in the center of the boat bottom. “Sure thing, Pa.”

  I shoved the boat ahead of me—Really? Pa?—four hundred pounds of payload under the strain of my back. As the sky grew lighter, the swamp around my hips grew deeper and colder. The bottom hardened. I shoved us through a vast reef of buckbean, and on the other side I sensed here and there the faintest push of water with someplace to go. Then, at once, the floor bottomed out and I dipped to my chin, my feet wheeling emptily in the flow of a river.

  I kicked and clawed as the boat spun out of control and began to undulate on the wave forms of a heavy current. My head dunked once. My legs thrashed and scissored without effect upon the great gust of water. Then at last I found my wits, rested a moment, drifted, made a truce with my total lack of control—and then I heaved an arm over the gunwale and caught the webbing of my seat.

  “Sonofabitch!”

  I hauled my chest and then my belly over the pillowy stern. I threw a leg over. I toppled in, slopping cold water over Sneed and, as Aretha’s shriek made clear, her too.

  “Pretty smooth, Hoss.”

  “How about if you at least make up your mind?” I said back with gritted teeth. “Is it going to be Pa or Hoss?”

  Her eyes were moving up and down the soaked shape of me. “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how I feel.”

  “Those are the choices?”

  “So far.”

  I pawed the oars up from the boat bottom, fumbled them into the locks. I pried us around so I could see downstream. I was hacked off. “No Adam? No Little Joe? I can’t be one of those guys?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Purnell Roberts? Michael Landon? Those boys were fly. I mean, for white boys.”

  Hell with that. Dog damn it. I cut the oars into rushing water. What I could make out ahead was that the river funneled toward a canyon, a strew of thinly submerged rocks in my path. I jabbed an oar too late. We bounced off a chalk-brown rock that skimmed the surface. I backpaddled the other oar to straighten the boat.

  “And that defines the range, I take it, of your experience with white men.”

  “Except for cops,” she said, “and jailers.”

  “Then I should consider myself lucky, really—” another bump and spin “—to have such a high-up station in your life.”

  Aretha regarded me with her head tipping one way, then the other. “Looks like we’re on our way,” was her comment.

  “Yes, it does.”

  I fought the oars to keep us lined up for more dangerous water. “And so what, if I may ask,” she said, “is the range of your experience with black women?”

  Redundant Security

  An hour later at daybreak I was still mulling my answer as we portaged around a second, larger rapid. We led Sneed around first, sat him down on cool sand. Then we packed our gear around: three plastic sacks of beef jerky, Gatorade, bottled water, Snickers, packs of cigarettes, toilet paper, and a pair of fencing pliers—all the stuff left by Sneed and Jesse in her storage locker. Aretha carried her Smith and Wesson inside Big Louis, which also, she informed me, contained her “things.” That was it.

  Then we lifted the boat on our shoulders—one hundred-and-fifty pounds, but Aretha every bit the firewoman—and we hucked its awkward bulk over heavy cobble and masses of flotsam, thickets of nettle and huckleberry, all of it enough of a struggle in the end to make me consider floating the next big rapids, if they didn’t come in darkness.

  I was still considering various replies to Aretha’s question as we set the boat on a skin of glass-clear water over multi-colored pebbles. The day was fresh and not yet scorching ho
t. It would have been a good time to fish, and the Roam looked receptive. I cracked a Gatorade, swigged, passed it to Sneed’s mother.

  “Well,” I surrendered at last, “me and Pa and Hop-Sing once saw a colored woman get off the stage over in Nevada City.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She reached into Big Louis and surprised me with a lacy handkerchief. She wiped any trace of me off the rim of the Gatorade bottle. “That’s about what I thought.”