The Clinch Knot

by John Galligan

  But nothing else came up through that long, tense morning—nothing but scrappy yearling cutthroat trout gleaning the dregs of the trico hatch, plus a few peckish rainbows jumping at phantoms, and once—just achingly once—a monster German brown trout, butter-flanked and kipe-jawed, that ascended to nip a frantic spider from the scrambled currents of an eddy.

  Nor were we spied on from above except by red-tailed hawks in high thermals, and by occasional small clots of Tucker’s hobby bison sucking water at the bank. Once, where the river spread and slowed, the spectacle of our passage spooked a mother pronghorn off into a dry, vast grassland.

  “Hey, Sneed!” I hollered, waking him, and I swiveled the boat around, dragged the oars to slow us down, hoping he could watch as the doe circled back, sniffing the wind, to recover her rattled fawn.

  But he couldn’t rouse himself in time, couldn’t focus. When he lay back down on the boat bottom, his mother said, “Has he told you?”

  “About what?”

  “About pronghorns.”

  “He hasn’t told me much of anything,” I admitted.

  “And what he did tell you, it was all my fault?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Well,” she said, leveling her eyes on mine. “My mother’s boyfriend raped me. So my motherhood just didn’t get off to the best kind of start.”

  “He did allude to that.”

  “Did he now? Well, that’s something.” She kept my eyes locked. “Okay. Well, Hoss, there’s been a lot of anger in my life, a lot of things I shouldn’t have reacted to in the ways I did. But I did what I did and I’m sorry and I need to be forgiven.”

  I broke the grip of her eyes. I looked off where the mother pronghorn had gone. She had sniffed out her fawn in the high grass, was goading it away from us according to her own figments of danger and safety.

  “Well.” I heaved a sigh that seemed to come from some tight, dark place at the root of me. “I guess we all need to be forgiven.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Aretha’s eyes had calmed a little. She looked at her son. “Him too. I know he’s been suffering about what he did.”

  She waited for a reply from me, an acknowledgment. I oared on silently.

  “But I guess he didn’t tell you what this thing with the pronghorn is all about.”

  “Nope.”

  “Not a word?”

  “Seemed like he would once. But I thought he was embarrassed, he didn’t want Jesse to hear it.”

  I cringed as I said that. I figured Sneed’s mother would bust up again, rake her anger once more over poor dead Jesse. But she checked it.

  “Mm-hm. I can imagine that. If he cared for that girl, if he wanted her to like him, I can surely imagine that.”

  Sneed shifted, oblivious. He was mending, I hoped. All this sleep—or whatever it was—he was rebuilding brain cells, preparing for rebirth. That’s what I hoped for, suddenly, wildly, at that moment. Hell, was that possible?

  “So what is it?” I asked. “What is he sorry for?”

  “He killed them.”

  “What?”

  “He told you about his foster family? That funky old white man that raised deer? D’Ontay loved those animals. He took care of them. He would go absent from school and it was all like, where’s this bad black boy, he must be out doing drugs, stealing stuff, committing all kind of crimes but no, that was me, that was his mother doing that shit. The school truant people would get their pants all up under their chins and every time, every time, they’d find out he just missed the bus on purpose and spent the day with those animals. I didn’t know then but I guess they were pronghorn—little things, horns like a beetle, white on their chest and neck. They were like D’Ontay’s friends, his family, until one day he killed them all.”

  I let the oars drop. My entire face must have shown my shock and confusion. “But he said …”

  I couldn’t finish. I didn’t want to. This was all going to make some horrible kind of sense, but I didn’t want to hear it. They just stood there, Sneed had told me, out of the blue, as we drove down from Great Falls one day and saw pronghorn on the range. They just stared at me …

  Aretha said, “Well, Hoss, we were upstairs in the house fighting, me and that white family. See, I used to come once a week for a visit, one hour. I had a man friend would get me high and then drop me off, sit outside in the car and wait for me, maybe drive around a little, you know, sightsee how the white folks live. Then one time there’s some burglaries in the neighborhood and guess who’s busted for it? Because guess who tells the cops about this black man’s been prowling the neighborhood? Mmm-hm. All righteous as hell, trying to take away my visitation cuz I’m in on the crime, you know? And maybe I was. I don’t really remember. But that was this man Andre. He did me bad, that’s for sure. I probably even knew he was casing places, driving around in there. But I just came storming into those white folks’ house and I was gonna take my son. I’m screaming bloody murder. I don’t care about the law. He’s coming with me. Bitches. Raising my boy to be some tight-ass little snitch.”

  She caught her breath. With a wince, with a rueful shake of her head, she downshifted to her current self and spoke to the other one.

  “Of course those people said no. Damn, ‘Retha. They cared about him. At least more than you. But you—” she shook herself out of it “—but I said no, I’m taking him. I said they just wanted him for the comp money, the county foster allowance, and I starting screaming about he’s mine, about how I’m gonna claim him on my welfare, I’m gonna take him away …”

  She touched her son, then withdrew her hand. Sneed rolled groggily in the boat bottom, staring up into the sky.

  “D’Ontay was downstairs, somewhere, hearing all this. And we were screaming back and forth about the law and about money, not paying attention to him. It wasn’t even about him. And the cops were on their way. I was in trouble. I was going to be guilty of those burglaries too, going to jail again. I guess he figured all that, because that’s just how I was.”

  The boat scraped a gravel shoal. I shoved, shoved, shoved us off, remembering how Sneed had told me: I took care of them all that time. They were my friends, my family. But when I needed them, when I needed help, when I needed to know what do to, they just stood there. Doing nothing. Just fucking stupid animals, Dog. They just stared at me …

  “He sliced their throats.”

  Aretha’s voice was hoarse suddenly, struggling to cut through grief.

  “This poor boy did. I guess something snapped in him. He killed every one of them. He sliced their throats. Then he ran away while we were still fighting, and we never saw him again.”

  When I could manage, I took up the oars and tried to guide us. But there had been a shift, a slip. A half-mile of river had swept us along, but I hadn’t noticed what dangers we had been lucky enough to avoid. In broad daylight, I suddenly felt blind, felt dread slide under and carry the boat.

  The full scare caught up with us in just a few more minutes. We bumped along toward another rapids, heading for rocks that stood up like sentries in a maze of scrambled water. “Better hang on,” I was telling Aretha, just as a boulder funneled the boat shoreward into shallow water and from behind the next rock flushed one of Tucker’s skinheads.

  “Grab them!” the fat radish bellowed, charging wild-eyed through waist-deep water to snatch our spinning prow. “Come on! Grab these motherfuckers!”

  Out from the next boulder splashed the scrawny skin—Denny. The boat caught Denny square in the chest, plowed him under, but the impact slowed us enough for his partner to get one hand through the border-rope on the prow. I swung an oar but couldn’t reach him.

  “Got ‘em! Mister Tucker! We got ‘em!”

  Aretha never hesitated. She twisted, made a fist, tried to hit his face but he went under. She pounded the fat skin’s wet glove. He popped up, tried to punch Sneed’s mother with his free hand, but Aretha was too quick. She grabbed that hand and bent it back while she hammered away at his grip. �
��Nigger bitch!” he tried, but that did not sit well. Aretha scissored her legs and lashed one foot across the gunwale, kicked the punk hard in the side of the head with a solid wet splat.

  He shook himself like a mad dog. “Mister Tucker!” Now bleeding from the ear, the fat skin shot desperate looks toward the bank. As the boat slung out of his control, Comrade Denny popped up within my reach. His eyes went wide as my oar came down between his brows. He disappeared in swirl of pink water. Now it was just the fat kid, hanging on, swinging wildly and airing out his entire rancid storehouse of racist epithets as he tried to withstand Aretha and drag us ashore.

  Aretha gave it back. “Peckerwood!” She pounded at his grip. “I’ll break your damn arm, square-dancing motherfucker!”

  A sharp whistle sliced the mash of churning water. A husky, broad-hatted rider crested the canyon rim on a sweating chestnut mare. Seeing us, he unsheathed a rifle and repeated the whistle as he goaded the horse onto a dicey switchback trail. Down they came, the rider yipping through his teeth. During this, perhaps inspired by it, the fat skinhead ducked behind Aretha and gained purchase on the river bottom. He beached us with one great heave, then backed away as if from a rattlesnake and rasped desperately at Aretha: “Coon!”

  “Cave fungus!”

  “Fuckin’ porch monkey!”

  “Saltine!”

  “Hey!” shouted the rider. “Cut that out!” When his horse reached river cobble, the rider dismounted and approached us, aiming that rifle at me, stopping just before his fancy boots got wet. Close up, there was no mistake: this was the cut-rate star himself, the B-movie hero, Dane Tucker. He had the skin tucks, the sun tan, the brand new hat, the big white teeth in a bullshit grin around a stagecraft lip of chaw—Dane Tucker. “This nigger bitch—”

  “Hey,” Tucker repeated. There was acid in his voice. He grabbed the fat skinhead by his sopping shirtfront. “I said cut that out.” He threw the kid away from us. “Go help out Denny. He’s bleeding.”

  Tucker’s rifle stayed on me, I noted, but his eyes went straight to Aretha. He drooled a short string of brown juice into the Roam. Guy needs a stunt man for the snoose, I was thinking. Not a star really, up close. More of a red dwarf.

  “So golly,” he lump-lipped, upending Sneed’s mother as he yanked the boat another yard ashore. “I thought you all knew this is private land.”

  Aretha looked at me. “We’re not on your land.” I was out of breath, my voice tight. “We’re on the water. The water’s public. That’s Montana law.”

  Tucker treated that bit of populism with a disgusted chuckle and then ignored me. “You,” he said to Aretha, “have my deepest apologies. Please forgive these idiots. You are not deserving of such filthy language.”

  Her eyes blazed at him.

  “You bet,” he said. “You’re a proud one. That’s what I mean.”

  Aretha’s right hand inched toward Big Louis where her Smith and Wesson was concealed.

  “I detest that kind of language,” Tucker said. “So unnecessary. So disrespectful.”

  I swung a leg over the gunwale, intending to shove us off. Tucker cocked the rifle, chased me back.

  “That ancient tribal dignity,” he purred at Aretha. “That’s what you got.”

  He walked around the prow, appraising her from behind.

  “And I’m guessing Watusi. Am I right? Mixed with some of that good West African Mandingo? Lovely stuff.” Tucker grinned at her. “See, I don’t get into this whole conflict. It’s not necessary.

  You people enslaved your own. That’s where it started. We all need to let it go.”

  Having reached the other side of the boat, he used his boot to poke at Sneed, who slumped in a daze against the gunwale. “Who’s this boy? He a retard?”

  “Don’t you touch him.”

  “Oh, we could wrestle, Sugar, you and me.”

  “Get away from him.”

  Tucker prodded Sneed with the rifle barrel. I felt the jolt of Aretha’s tension down at my end of the boat. She had Big Louis’s zipper halfway open.

  “Back off,” she warned him.

  Tucker swung the rifle into her face. “Throw that bag on shore.” He jerked his head toward the cobble behind him. “Go on.”

  I let a breath out as she tossed it. Tucker picked up Big Louis. He unzipped the bag the rest of the way and dumped out the pistol and all her things. Then he hurled Big Louis over my head into the Roam. It floated briefly, then filled and disappeared. Tucker kicked the Smith and Wesson up the red scree below the bluff. Then he zeroed back in on Aretha.

  “So you got a name, Princess? Huh?”

  The two wet skins crowded around.

  “Come on. What is it? LaShaquille?” He savored it. “That’d be real pretty. Or how about Sha-Kobe? But I’m in the wrong time zone, huh? Let’s see. Ebony? Diamond? Jazmin?”

  “Maybe it’s Whoopi.” Denny liked this, slugged his buddy and snuffled amusement through his bloody nose.

  “Shut up,” Tucker told the pair. “Hang on to this marshmallow boat.” He kept his gaze on Sneed’s mother. “Hosanna? Tawanda?”

  Sneed sat up suddenly, a massive scowl on his brow. “Aretha,” his mother blurted as if to stop him from lurching into a bullet.

  The skins fought snorts of delight. Tucker, too, seemed to be suppressing a jolt of amusement.

  “Aretha.” He played it around his mouth. “Yeah. Sure. Why not? Give it to me. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. You got it, baby.”

  Then abruptly he bent over the boat and plunged an arm between her legs. Aretha’s thigh muscles jumped into sharp relief inside her pants. But she held back, watching Sneed closely as the film star came up with a sack of our supplies. Tucker hurled the sack ashore. As it tumbled, the bag spilled jerky and water bottles, plus a roll of toilet paper that bounced and unraveled among the rocks about twenty feet up.

  “Now that up there, Princess Aretha,” Tucker said, pointing to the bank where the supplies lay strewn, “is private property. My private property.”

  He leaned close. “You want permission to come aground, Sweetheart?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Tucker drew back, sighed. “Stuck in the past,” he sighed. “Oh well. So here’s the deal. You so much as set one foot out of this river to wipe your pretty pink puss and I’m on you. You’re a trespasser. You’re mine.”

  Aretha kept her head down, her eyes now square on Tucker’s chest.

  “Captain Ahab or that retard touch my ground I’m just gonna shoot them dead and say they tried to rob my place.”

  Sneed began to take huge, hiccupping breaths. He began to mutter. But Aretha no longer looked his way. Her stillness was unsettling—a lot of things I shouldn’t have reacted to the in the ways I did—and it bothered Tucker, too. He watched her carefully, inching back. “We’re legal,” I took the occasion to tell him. “We got on legally, upstream on Forest Service land, and we’re legal all the way down to the Yellowstone.”

  Tucker’s bronze cheeks puffed out. A droning in the sky made him look up—a small plane, high to the south. Then he lunged in, split Aretha’s legs again and yanked up the other supply sacks and sent those to the same scattered fate among the rocks. He jumped back, this time the rifle on Sneed. He spoke to me.

  “Okay, Captain. You’re legal. But here’s the deal. You’re gonna get hungry, but you’re not gonna eat. And you better not drink any of this water because my bison shit all up it. Mistress Imani here is going have to hang her pretty one off the boat. Wish I could be there, but oh well. The next place you can legally touch dry ground is twenty-seven miles down the river on the Yellowstone. And I will have someone watching.”

  I glanced at the skinheads. They had their eyes on the airplane as it banked over the western flank of the Absorakas. The chubby skin said something into Tucker’s ear.

  “I don’t care why they’re here,” Tucker responded. He snatched up Galen Ringer’s fly rod, snapped it on his knee, threw the pieces ashore. I tucked the oars out of his reach—
or at least he would have to get his boots wet. He took another look down the rifle barrel at Sneed and found Sneed staring back at him.

  “What do you want?”

  “Dane Tucker,” said Sneed.

  “I said what do you want?”

  Sneed, as if in the middle of a conversation, as if in his perfectly thoughtful and cogent self, as if he had struck a gold mine of brain tissue, answered, “Fences keep your bison in. But they only survive because you feed them in the winter. Those fences are bad for deer and antelope. You don’t feed them and they can’t migrate. They’re going to starve.”