The float was peaceful then, for an hour or two, except for the Fish, Dog, fish chant that was mounting in my brain. The Roam slowly gathered itself in springs and rivulets through high-country meadows sparked with asters and thistles and joe-pye weed. Mayflies—they looked like pale morning duns—began to rise from the tails of long, clear pools, and a few small trout slapped after them. The big fish were staying down, it seemed, and Dog mind was busy seeking trout mind. Had there been a full-moon crayfish hatch? Were the big bellies full? I didn’t think so. No—because for a long glide through riffle-run-riffle the whole river felt cocked, ready to go off. I knew the feeling. I needed to rig up, get ready. But I fought myself. For once this was truly not a fishing trip. Thinking of Sheriff Chubbuck, of what that man would do to fish this water, I kept my anxious mitts on the oars. Aretha trailed her fingers in the water, her eyes three-quarters closed. Poor Sneed slumbered hard in the boat bottom.
“So your professor friend, I take it, is a black man?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “Just ask him.”
I oared close to a cut bank, looking for trout of heft. I thought I saw one dart beneath the boat. “Would I need to ask him?”
“Just a glance in his direction is usually enough. He’ll put all that in your face.”
I set the oars, let us drift on gentle current between wide banks. Okay. I couldn’t help myself. I was rigging the fly rod. I was just getting ready. That was all. That didn’t mean I was going to fish.
“And your wife?” Aretha asked me. “She’s a white woman?”
I glanced up. “More than you know.”
“Oh, I know,” Aretha said. “I do know.”
She watched me fit the rod pieces and string the line and build a leader. “Pass me a chicken neck,” I said when I was ready. She laughed. I saw her pretty teeth, saw the green flare in her eyes. “We do have beef jerky,” she said. “How about that?”
“How about—” I snapped open one of Galen Ringer’s old fly boxes, reached over Sneed “—one of these?”
“Wow,” she said.
“Wow,” I said too, startled by the tight, perfect rows of hand-tied flies. “This guy … wow.” Then Aretha’s pink-tipped finger was in there, probing through the tiny forest of hackles and wing posts and dubbings and tails—a hundred, maybe two hundred bristling Montana dry flies. “White folks sure can make things complicated,” she murmured.
Now I laughed. “Your boy loves this stuff,” I told her. “He just laps it up. Inside two weeks he knew which one of these to pick and how to put it on the water.”
“He likes this? Really?”
“He loves it.”
“So which one?”
“Any time now, I think we might see these.” My finger entered the box beside hers. I tickled the tiny wingpost on one of Galen Ringer’s trico mayflies, about a size 24, little more than black thread, a mote of white fluff from a duck’s butt, and two long tail strands.
I nicked the fly out of the foam and balanced it on the tip of her finger.
“I see,” Sneed’s mother said. “So you all are trying to catch guppies.”
I took the fly back. I tied it onto a 7x tippet with a clinch knot. Now I was going to fish. How could I not? “Okay,” I said, “stay tuned for guppies.”
We drifted down. I kept the rod ready. The Roam now flowed easily through a shallow canyon with spindly timber up the sides.
Larger trout had begun to dimple pocket water and spook from the shallow tails of the biggest pools. “Any time now,” I said, and just then I saw the first cloud of insects, skimming and spiraling over the next pool. I was right about tricos. A minute or two later, I discerned noses of substance pushing through the glassy current. “Here we go.” I raised the rod and began to play line out in false casts. I was picking out my guppy—about a sixteen-incher—when through a gauzy twister of mating insects I spotted a tiny green light on the trunk of a pine about fifty yards ahead.
And I confess at first I did nothing. Like the skinhead’s tattoos, I saw this unnatural thing, this anomaly, and I didn’t see it. Then I looked purposefully away. I muffed my first cast to the target fish, landed the line downstream too far and dragged the fly like a drunken water skier over the trout’s lie. So that fish was down.
Now I had to look up for the next fish. There again, closer now, was the green light. I should look at it, some part of me thought. Dog, that means something. But between the light and the raft, a heavy cutthroat was porpoising through a current seam where spent insects massed up. There was an easy mark. I had a chance for two, maybe three quick drifts along the seam before we slid past into a tunnel of pines. But again I botched the cast. An easy one. Yet somehow I closed my back loop and my line jerked out short and tangled, a mess on the water. So I looked hard, at last, at the light.
“Shit.” I dropped the rod. I dug in with the oars. “We gotta pull out.”
Sneed jerked awake in the boat bottom.
“This is Tucker’s property line. That green light, that’s a camera mounted on a tree. It’s got an infrared motion sensor—”
But now the easy current was defeating me, sucking me on a risky tangent toward the camera’s sight line. I had wasted time and had no more to fuss with. I chocked the oars and rolled over the gunwale, splashing down into thigh-high water, a human anchor. I leaned against the current and let my feet drag bottom. Still the water pushed me, but I had flattened the angle. We were going to make it to shore without intersecting the beam.
“Laser.” This was Sneed. Aretha said, “Say what?”
“Laser,” he repeated.
“Baby, how do you know that?” No reply. She appealed to me as I chugged through shallow water.
“Hunters use them to scout game—to get pictures of animals they want to shoot later. But this one is aimed across the river, to let Tucker know if anyone crosses onto his ranch. We’re legal on the water. That’s public. Montana law. But we can’t let Tucker know we’re here. We’ll have to go around the camera.”
I dragged up onto the last stretch of National Park land, ninety degrees out of the camera’s line. Then I left Sneed and his mother and picked my way ashore, studied the camera from the back, across a four-wire fence hung with NO TRESPASSING signs and extending to a point of prohibitive steepness.
From my former life I knew a little about this technology too. It was very much like the high-tech junk I had once aimed down the hallways of a suburban Boston aerospace contractor: tamper proof box, laser trigger, digital memory card and playback screen. There were no wires on Tucker’s camera, no instant relay, but a well-used narrow trail led down from high ground to the camera, so I was pretty sure our movie hero had a man ride out to look at the playback and radio in, or at least swap video cards and bring the used one home to download and view on a computer. By mid-day, I told Aretha, Tucker would have seen us coming.
“Good work, Hoss.” She hesitated, looked away from me. “Or Pa,” she said. “Or both. Whichever you like.”
“Well, it’s a big job, being all the white men in your life.”
She returned her attention to me. “And for sure a thankless one, as well.”
I shrugged. I looked where she had been looking. Her son was pissing in the river.
“Bladder control,” I noted. “That’s progress.”
A hundred yards upslope from the Roam, we dropped our gear over the fence, eased the boat over barbed wire onto private land. Then we hiked further upslope into cool piney shade and eventually into rock rubble at the base of a bluff. Here, as I expected, Tucker’s fence elided the steepness and picked up again on the mesa above. Maybe this was why Sneed and Jesse had packed the fencing pliers. I knelt with the intention of cutting the bottom two fence wires. But Sneed’s hands intruded. He grabbed the pliers. Decisively, he cut the wires.
“There,” he said, and we rolled under.
“Now we’re illegal,” I said.
“Good job, Baby,” Sneed’s mother said, trying to
brush his back off as he walked away.
“Sneed,” I said. He stopped. “Let your mother brush your back. She won’t hurt you.”
He waited. But she was pissed now. She marched right past him. “Who says I won’t hurt nobody?” she called back as the steep slope grabbed her legs and made her skid, pitch her arms, and finally run.
When we were afloat again, legal, the sky was wide and blue above us, no traces of smoke in our view, and even though the trico hatch was over I felt like celebrating. I splashed water on my face. I filled my hat with the Roam and slopped it over my head. I cracked us a fresh Gatorade, this one pink, took a slug off the top, handed it to Sneed.
“Now pass it to your mama,” I told him.
“Except his mama ain’t thirsty.”
“You’ll get dehydrated.”
“Hell I will.”
“That’ll make you cranky,” I dared to say.
“I’ll tell you what makes me cranky,” she offered, but then she didn’t disclose. Instead she let a mile of water pass, knifing her finger tips through the Roam, and finally she said, “So how come you’re not home with your wife?”
“Because I’m on a fishing trip.”
Sneed started a geeky laugh. “Four years long,” he said, and I looked at him, gave him a shove with my foot. “Give me a warning, will you, when you’re about to tune in?”
“I don’t know, Dog. Sometimes I’m here and sometimes I’m not. But it’s like there’s a … like I’m a …” He looked crestfallen. “I don’t know what it’s like. I can’t find the thought. And then I forget what I’m thinking about. I already have.”
“Do you see where we are?”
He looked around, bewildered. “I’ve never been here?”
“That’s right. We’re on the Roam. Do you know why we’re here?”
For a long moment he looked down at the boat bottom. “Dog,” he said at last, “I’m really sorry. I … maybe … maybe I’ll know when we get there.”
“That’ll be good enough, buddy. Don’t worry. Okay?”
No answer. “Sneed?” He raised his head. I looked in his eyes. Gone. I had two shirts on. I laid one over his head to keep the sun off. We bounced and drifted and then the land flattened and the current backed up into a marshy lowland. I was allowing myself to think about casting beetles or crickets off the banks when Aretha spoke.
“You might have made a good father,” she told me. She shaded her eyes and looked away into the marsh. I looked there too. Deep bog. My eyes stung.
“I thought I was.”
“So what happened?”
“I wasn’t good enough.”
Aretha let out a long, low, and sympathetic sigh. “Whatever good enough is,” she murmured. “Wherever the hell that place is. And can we get even close?”
“I wonder—”
But abruptly she raised a hand, made a downward motion to shush me and stop me from rowing. I followed her gaze. We had startled a bull moose grazing on arrowhead in a side channel. I stopped the boat and we watched him.
“I’ll be damned,” Aretha whispered. “Bullwinkle.”
A breeze kicked up and the bull swung his head our way, his snout dangling a ream of arrowhead. His shoulder muscles twitched. His nostrils opened in a snort. Then he turned and sauntered away at a retreating angle, looking back as he reached solid ground. His legs just kept coming up and coming up out of the water—two full yards of legs—and when he had all that skinny bone beneath that massive body, those legs did nothing more than twitch—barely visible—and the bull leaped high over the trunk of a downed fir and vanished into boggy forest.
What I wondered was if I could ever go back, start over, make good enough. I had never even imagined it, truly, soberly, until now. But I kept quiet. I oared into the flow. I stared ahead at the point where the buckbean and the feathery swamp hemlocks gave way again to rangeland, current, dirt banks and sandbar willow.
Then, “Another one,” Aretha said.
“Where?” I said, looking for moose.
“No,” she said, pointing, and my heart sank. A second game camera. Redundant security. Serious stuff. And we were squarely in its sights.
You All Have a Nice Couple of Days
The camera was hard-cased, locked, impenetrable. So we were caught. As soon as someone from Tucker’s place rode out to check the disk, we would face whatever defense the actor could bring to bear.
Grimly now, our whiff of amusement gone, we moved on to Plan B. We would keep advancing downstream. We would push hard, gambling on the next few hours as a window to get into what I figured was a steep canyon about ten miles ahead.
“What’s that canyon going do except trap us?”
I was guessing wildly: “If we can get that far and escape actual contact with Tucker’s people, the canyon should hide us until dark. Then a good night’s float ought to bring us to this mark on the map.”
I tucked the map back under me. I was sitting on it now. We could not lose it.
“And won’t they just be waiting there?”
“Maybe.” I stroked the oars hard. “If they know where we’re going. But maybe not.”
She scowled. “Then how long until we get out the other end, off the man’s property?”
“Into the Yellowstone?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t know. It’s about thirty miles. And there’s a lot of kinks in this. Maybe two days.”
She said nothing. She just looked at me like I had invented rivers and designed this one, drunk. Thinking maybe he knew, I said, “Sneed? Hey, buddy. Hey, Sneed.”
He said nothing either. He didn’t even move.
We rode a while in high tension. Maybe two miles into our race to the canyon, Aretha lost patience and stuck a toe into her son’s side. She said, “Baby, that look on your face is getting old.”
She toed him a little harder.
“I know I’ve changed, but can’t you remember anything? Can’t you remember Grandpappy’s place, old sour apples Pappy smelled like his own poop and that dog used to lick your face? Can’t you remember I used to sing you that chariot song? We had one good time. That was Pappy and Gramma Francine’s place, after Atlanta when we went to Little Rock, remember? I am your mother, Baby.” Another toe jab. “Tell us what we’re doing out here.” She shoved him, not quite roughly, with her whole foot. “You know me. Don’t pretend. That’s why you won’t look at me.”
Sneed twisted away from her.
“Dog?”
“Right here, buddy.”
“Dog, where’s Jesse?”
“Uhhhh!” exploded his mother. “Where is who?”
I shot Aretha a warning look to no effect. “Where’s some trampy little white girl you knew for three weeks?” She had lunged forward, over him, tipping the boat. Her head worked side to side like a cobra’s. “All blonde and smiley, skinny little ass like a weasel, little tiny voice like I got jungle fever, can you help me? Where is she? What are you talking about?”
Sneed hung his head. I could hear his breathing over the rush and slap of the water.
“Where is she? Child, let me tell you something: that bitch is everywhere.”
Sneed’s mother slammed back against the boat’s bulbous prow and burned holes in the back of her son’s skull. “And your mother is right damn here.” We floated along like that for a few hundred yards, cresting and dipping over a long run of submerged glacial boulders, some cream-colored, some black, some salt-and-pepper granite—and every damn one of them ready to rise up and kill us.
Then Sneed’s mother said, “Well.”
Her voice was tight with defiance.
“Well,” she said again. “Everybody. Here it comes. I sure am sorry. But clearly you don’t understand—”
Sneed’s head snapped around to look at her squarely for the first time. I couldn’t see what was in his eyes that stopped his mother, that held her emotions in limbo for a long moment until he turned away again.
“Oh, Baby �
��” Tears streaked her face. “I am sorry. For so many, many things. I am so sorry. I really am.”
He let her touch his back.
“Oh my baby …”
I kept us floating, kept oaring that boat downriver, trying to realize our figment of safety in a canyon. I kept my eyes away from the two of them, tried to give what privacy was available between three people trapped inside twenty square feet of rubber and air, surrounded by pouring, pouring water. I became vigilant Hoss-Dog, keeping watch over everything: snags and rocks and shallows that would beach us; riders, gunmen on the river banks; signs of a lighting storm building in the smoke-clotted sky.
The Clinch Knot Page 17