The Clinch Knot

by John Galligan

  “I told you, he’s taking a bath.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “He’s okay.”

  “You know that?”

  “I’ll check in a minute.”

  She scowls at me.

  “Finish your sad story,” I say.

  “I cut them. My red tulips, Ned. I didn’t want to, but I believed that Mother would be pleased, so I cut them and I took them to the hospital in a vase. I gave them to my mother. And she says, ‘Oh, red tulips. More red tulips. It must be red tulip day. Neddy’s father dropped off

  some red tulips just like that. Now I’ve got more red tulips than I know what to do with. ‘Jesus, Ned. Thanks a lot.” I stand up.

  I can be enormously more sensitive than my wife will ever bother to know. It is me now—not my wife in her tulip rage—who senses that things have taken a fatal turn.

  “Mary Jane,” I say, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

  Halfway up the stairs that afternoon in April I stop, overwhelmed by a dread all out of proportion to a fight over tulips. No one in our family is more sensitive than little Eamon. That boy’s skin can change five shades in a minute. That boy will crawl into my lap, feeling my sadness before I do. He just knows. And how long have Mary Jane and I been fighting? How many hours, months, years?

  I bellow from the steps, “Eamon, answer your mother!”

  From the entire upstairs comes a vaulted silence, drifting down on the iron smell of Boston bathwater. Then a single blink of sound—one drip from that old faucet onto a skin of perfect stillness.

  “Eamon!” I roar.

  I take the last flight of steps in threes. That sweet little boy has left the door wide open, the way he does when he poops, because he isn’t ready for privacy yet, not even when—

  “Oh, God! Eamon!”

  “Ned,” Mary Jane calls from downstairs, “what is it?”

  I skid on his discarded t-shirt. The hand I fling for balance rakes toothbrushes and deodorants and cosmetics from the vanity. Our crap flies everywhere. A pink plastic razor hits the water and breaks the perfect seal beneath which lies our boy in a white-skinned embryonic curl.

  “Ned? What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, God. Mary Jane—”

  “There’d better not be a mess all over.”

  I tear our boy from tepid water. His skin is cold. His green eyes fix randomly on the direction from which his mother will arrive. His little body fits in the sink. The inside of his mouth is warm. I shove my own desperate breath in there. Snotty warmish water spews from

  his nose. I stick a finger between his little ribs and feel no movement. I have no idea what I’m doing. I haven’t rehearsed this. Nothing like this can ever happen.

  No!

  I whip around and slam the bathroom door. I lock it. This is the end of us. The end of me. This is the end.

  “Eamon,” I whisper, “please …”

  Again and Again and Again

  Dawn, bottled up by the storm, now tore through a cataclysm between cliff and sky. Sneed spun slowly in the eye of a foam-flecked eddy against a shallow rung of sun-red rock. Then he rolled himself over, spouted faintly, and sank beneath the swirl of his Jose Cuervo shirt.

  I fought to the outer seam of the eddy, but the current pulled me past him. I stopped my thrashing and dove.

  Underwater, my eyes stung and blurred, but there was light and I saw the shape of him—curled and sinking into the bottom of a hole where a pod of big trout finned aside in silhouette as he settled gently down. I burrowed hard into the swirling water, but Sneed’s limp arm slipped through my grasp and the river pulled me downstream.

  I got air and whipped my head around. This picture is fixed forever: The rain had lifted. The air was cold. A spotlight sunrise beamed beneath the bulbous, skidding clouds to illuminate Sneed’s mother and the boat as they drifted through a long, smooth bend and out of sight.

  And meanwhile the relentless current spun me, shoved me into chest-deep water where the bottom cobble was slick as bowling balls. I kicked at those stones, backpedaling. I saw Sneed come up again—slow and still, passive as death—but as his face cycled through the world of air, he spouted again and sucked air feebly before he went back down to join the fish.

  There had to be a way. I smashed ashore. Downstream of the eddy, the cliff had crumbled and laddered into a skree that I could I climb. Breathless, I squished across a treacherous shelf of rock and came even with Sneed, then upstream of him, trying to read the current, trying to time it and lead myself—Go, Dog, go!—he wouldn’t last another minute.

  I gathered a fifty-pound flake of sandstone in my arms, raised it overhead against the twirling, green-and-silver sky. Then I tipped into an awkward plunging dive that keeled my legs over and buckled my spine and slammed me straight down to murky mid-depth in the eddy. Everything slowed down. The water chilled. I seesawed to the river bottom.

  Big trout bumped me as they glided aside. I let go of the rock and snatched Sneed by the back of his pants. I kicked up and clamped an arm across his chest, which now heaved and hiccupped with startling strength. We went under again. For a long moment I had no traction, no direction. Then I kicked for the fast lane at the margin of the eddy and let the thrusting water have its way, tumbling us into the bowling-ball zone where I got my feet down and steered with desperate tiptoes.

  Down the Roam we bounced and twisted, downstream, downstream, Sneed puking water across the side of my head and gripping my neck so strongly that when we finally struck shallow water I took two zigzag staggers toward shore, tore his hands off, and dropped him I pounced on him then. I jammed my fingers through his teeth and saw the blood as he bit me. I cracked his mouth like a nut and rammed my lips inside and pinched his nose. I had forced myself to study CPR after Eamon’s death. I pounded breath against Sneed’s throat. Water—cold and acidic—pushed back and I spilled him over, yanked him on his belly, drained his lungs into the cobble.

  Then I fought his clenching jaws again. I blew air in, fast and hard. I pulled back, rolled him again, just in time as he puked bile and Gatorade and river water across my arm. Again I forced my air, again and again and again, until at last I felt his chest push back and I raised up, my brain black and tangled, to spit and take my own deep breath.

  The sky boomed. A cold gust. Now it hailed. A stinging sheet of white advanced across the river as I watched over Sneed. He was taking air—and then, as hail lashed his face, he hiccupped violently and stopped. I blocked the onslaught with my body and burrowed back through his defenses. Hailstones stung my back, bounced madly about our faces as I stayed in for ten breaths, then fifty, then a hundred. Then at last, pressed together, we calmed. A rhythm came. The nipping, clattering hail settled around us like a blanket, a screen that closed out all else, and Sneed focused, worked with me. He pulled in my air, timed it, relaxed the clenching of his chest. I stayed … stayed … then eased away and sat back.

  Sneed pulled air in … out … in … out. His eyes opened. At first, and for many minutes, he looked at nothing. Gradually the storm lidded past, opening a scrubbed blue sky over rapidly warming air. Sneed looked around. He hiccupped twice, then seemed to find the off switch. He found rocks with his hands and pushed himself up. He looked at me in puzzlement. I thought it was the old shakes again, the ones I couldn’t control.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  Pretty Good Short Term

  I pulled Sneed under a narrow ceiling of overhanging rock. Cliff swallows swerved and chittered around us, defending their holes. Once more, in a final spasm, hail pulsed across the scene in front of us, pocking the river, rattling and bouncing off the rocks, then letting up for good, making way for a brilliant stroke of sunlight that glittered every surface in the canyon.

  I stayed hard on Sneed for an hour or more, monitoring. I knew nothing about his type of brain damage, only that many things were possible, few of them good. I feared that any moment a circuit would shut down and those bright eyes
—weren’t they brighter now?—would melt away like the hailstones in the river rocks around us.

  I prodded him. I shook him. I talked to him. I avoided an answer to where is she, knowing that one she was dead and fearing for the other. I talked about—what else?—fishing. “You know after a storm like this, Sneedy, the water level rises. And I don’t know why for sure, but trout feed good in rising water. My guess is they are masters of anticipation.”

  He repeated me: “Masters of anticipation.”

  “Right. I mean, how else would a trout know that a hatch is about to happen?”

  “About to happen.”

  “Yeah. Not happening. About to happen. They sense it. They take their stations. Then it happens. I’ve seen it a thousand times. They don’t eat my damn fly—”

  “Damn fly.”

  “—earlier in the day, because they anticipate something better later.”

  “Later.”

  “Yeah. Later. What are you, some kind of parrot?” I gave him a nudge on the shoulder. He gave me one back. I said, “Eventually, rising water washes food into the river. Worms. Spiders caught napping in the rocks. Ants and beetles on streamside grass that is suddenly pulled under. See?”

  Yearling trout slapped the fast edge of the mirrored pool before us, where a seam of earth-stained foam steadily bulked itself one bit of fluff at a time. “They better watch out,” I said. “Big old Uncle Brown Trout’s gonna come up and eat them.”

  Sneed waited about thirty seconds. “They better watch out,” he said then, seeming to listen to himself. “That’s pretty good short term, huh Dog?”

  “Yes, it—”

  But he broke into violent hiccups. He choked. He slammed his fist against his sternum. When finally he caught his breath Sneed slumped against me, slid down until his head was on my lap. “God damn it,” he sobbed, and threw an arm over his face.

  I felt his lungs expand and contract against my legs. After a few minutes, I tried a joke.

  “So this big brown trout we all talk about, what’s his first name?” I jostled him. “Huh, Sneedy? What about James Brown?”

  He tried a slow breath that worked okay. He tried to laugh.

  “What about Cleveland Brown?”

  “Foxy Brown,” Sneed managed.

  “Girl fish. Sure. But how about Charlie? Charlie Brown. I think I caught that guy a few times.”

  This time Sneed managed a faint but legitimate laugh. “And John Brown,” I said. “Know who he was?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “Abolitionist.”

  “Huh-uh. But what about Encyclopedia Brown. Can’t catch that guy, Dog. No how. Too smart for you.”

  Now I laughed. I added, “Hubie Brown. Larry Brown. Gilbert Brown. Paul Brown. Jim Brown. Dee Brown.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sports.”

  “I don’t do sports, Dog. I … I think I paint bridges.”

  “And sometimes water towers.”

  “Yeah.” His chest heaved up and down. “Yeah. Water towers. Hey, what about Bobby Brown?”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “Singer. R&B. I like that. And Foxy Brown.”

  “You said Foxy Brown.”

  Sneed posted a long silence before he said, “I know. Just checking your short term, Dog.”

  “You like Foxy Brown?”

  “Like to catch her one time,” Sneed said. “That’s all.”

  “Yeah? What fly? Wooly bugger? Humpy? Bead head scud?” Sneed pulled that arm off his eyes, looked at me. He grinned. “Damn, Dog. You’re a sick old man.”

  “And you, my friend, might be a good bit better.”

  The possibility of this seemed to dawn slowly on Sneed as well. He sat up, leaned his back against the warming rock, tipped his face into the sun. “But all the time I feel like puking,” he told me. “Or you ever been real carsick, Dog? Real carsick? Like you don’t care, you ready to jump out the window at sixty miles per hour? That’s what it’s like.” He gulped. “Don’t give me a gun, man. I don’t know what I’d do.”

  I stared at him, thinking of the dead pronghorns, thinking of Jesse on the ground. Sneed blinked back. “What?” he said.

  I let my breath out. “Nothing. But your thinking’s coming back a little, Sneedy. I can tell. Your memory.”

  “Well—”

  His confidence seemed to waffle. At least that’s what I guessed. Maybe the fatigue, the nausea, those waves he talked about had washed out brain function. I watched him carefully. He stared past me toward the river. Should I tell him about Jesse? Ask him about Jesse? Now? But something was moving inside him. He winced. He squinted. He twitched. Then he said, “Well … my memory … maybe so. Cuz I know that’s my mama.”

  It was. She was. Up that sparkling canyon battled Aretha Sneed, negotiating a rocky downstream bend with Cord Cook’s tattered boat half on her back, half snagging behind.

  “Hey!” I hollered. I waved an arm. “Aretha! Over here!”

  She looked our way and stopped. She let down the boat and I saw her shoulders droop. Then she sat down hard in the rocks. I stood. Sneed struggled to his knees beside me. “Hey!” Aretha had just dropped her face into her hands when the first shot rang down from the canyon rim.

  Atta Boy, Hoss

  Rock dust jetted up behind her. The second shot hit a chamber of the boat, fizzled it down to a limp yellow sack.

  “No!” I screamed as by instinct Aretha crawled under the remainder of the boat. A third shot pierced the thick rubber bottom. “Get out and run!”

  I caught Sneed from the back, hooked his armpits, dragged him back to the canyon wall.

  “Stay.”

  “Dog—”

  “Damn it, Sneed. You’re not that better. Listen to me. Don’t move until I come back.”

  I charged out across an ankle-twisting chaos of wet rocks. Aretha hadn’t reappeared from beneath the boat. A fourth shot hit the bulbous prow, popped it like a balloon. I glanced over my shoulder, saw the pink pickup on the rim, two gunmen standing up on the hood. The fifth shot—as I flung the boat off Aretha—hit me and I went down.

  I lay face to panting face with Sneed’s mother in the rocks. “I got him,” I gasped. “I got your boy. He’s okay. He’s over there, warming up in the sun.”

  Her eyes went wild.

  “He’s out of sight,” I said. “They’re above him.”

  I rolled over. We were in the wide open, no cover nearby, but the hood of the pickup was free of gunmen. I tried to figure where I was hit, but the whole left side of my torso was buzzing into numbness. “You okay? They didn’t hit you?”

  Aretha nodded. “You?”

  “Not sure.”

  She felt along my left side, found pain and blood around my shoulder.

  “You’re hit.”

  “Not much.”

  She made a face at me—incredulous, mocking, hopeful. “Really,” I said. “Flesh wound.”

  She peeled back my torn sleeve, winced on my behalf. I took the wet red shred from her fingers and ripped it free. “Turn around,” I said. “I have an idea how we’re going to get out of this.”

  Aretha sat still as I dabbed and smeared my blood across her back and neck. As she lay face down in the rocks, her voice was fierce and grim.

  “Atta boy, Hoss.”

  Playing dead is an easy thing to talk about, but a harder thing to do. Aretha and I stayed face down in those rocks watching the last of the hailstones melt for what seemed like hours before the skinheads made it down to the river bottom.

  We could hear them. They came bitching all the way—the gist being that they were supposed to pop the boat and not hit us, this derived from verbal vomit in the configuration that Denny, goddamnit, should have held his fire because he couldn’t hit a nigger in a barbeque shack—or alternately, that Gunter—and here the fat radish received a proper nom de Nazi—should have quit bugging Denny while Denny was trying to shoot because Denny could hit that big fucking boat already—who couldn’t?—except t
hat some mudpuppy like Gunter was assing up inside Denny’s ear like some kind of Jewboy fag.

  I heard a rock click between Aretha’s clenched teeth, suppressing a snarl. Not a bad idea, I thought.

  “Well now they’re fucking dead, you asshole, and we’re in trouble.”

  “They were gonna drown anyway.”

  “Exactly, you moron.” Gunter was spitting mad. “That’s why we don’t need to shoot them. What did this bitch call you? A cave fungus? Jesus Christ, Denny. You don’t make much of a case for white power.”