“Well … they’re dead, ain’t they?”
“You see this one?” Gunter toed me. “This one here, this is what we call a white man, right here.” Gunter gave me stiff, steel-toed shot to the ribs. “He may be a nigger lover, Denny, but we still do not shoot white people. Got it?”
Denny dodged lateral. “I’m gonna finish off this boat now,” he announced, and this drove Gunter wild. “Do we need to shoot the boat now? Huh? If they’re dead? Think about it, Denny, do we—”
We had a signal, Aretha and I. My thumb was an inch from her face, and when I twitched that thumb, we jumped.
She took Denny’s legs out, me Gunter’s, and the two skins slapped face against rock and had rifles in their necks before either one could blame the other.
“Well … that … was easy.”
I caught my breath. I carefully fit the snout of Gunter’s rifle over the bump of Gunter’s seventh vertebra. Aretha did pretty much the same with Denny. But she also worked her foot up under Denny’s crotch, found a testicle and made ready to pop it like a grape.
I said, “You fellas think this would be a good time to have another chat?”
We All Drowned in the Canyon
I didn’t know where Aretha got her next idea—it had to be Bonanza, didn’t it?—but she found each boy his own forty-pound river rock to hold with two hands or else we would head on back to crushed testicles, bullets to the spine, all that. This kept the children busy.
“That rock is ancient sea bed,” I told them. “About forty million years old. Isn’t that fascinating?”
Then, after collecting Sneed, we marched them, holding their bits of ancient sea bed, up a narrow trail to the faded-red Ford pickup on the canyon rim. Up there, all that rain and hail had accomplished little. It had balled up dust around a mini moonscape of raindrop craters, no more.
“No, you cannot put your rock down.”
Aretha snapped this in response to Gunter’s fat boy whining. Without discussion, she had assumed the position of supervisor in all matters pertaining to confinement and coercion.
“No, you cannot sit down. Oh, you’re tired?” She got in Gunter’s face. “Well, how about if you stand there about another two hundred years, so you can get some idea how tired the rest feel about you all?”
She gave me a nod. “Go ahead, Hoss. Ask away. But talk slowly.” Denny groaned.
“And use a lot of words,” Aretha added.
The sentiment was right, but I tried to make it quick, efficient. I was not done bleeding, and there was more to Tucker’s game, surely, than Denny and Gunter. So my first question constellated the film star, his affairs on the ranch, the fanatic denial of trespassers, and this fence that seemed to come up over and again in various contexts.
“We don’t know nothing about a fence,” Gunter averred eagerly, ignoring the other dimensions of my inquiry and thus giving me focus.
“Really?”
“What fence?”
“Does Tucker have a deal to let the sheriff on his land? For fishing?”
“The sheriff? Fishing? Hell no.”
“So who else is in here, besides Tucker and you boys?”
He didn’t want to say. Not at all. Neither of them. But Aretha solved that by stacking on additional samples of Ordovician sea floor.
“Bunch of whatyacallums—natives,” Denny offered in a whimper over his rocks.
“Natives?”
Gunter grunted a correction: “Nativists.”
“Which are?”
Rushing at it now, getting it over with. Nativists represented the real Americans, Gunter huffed out. The original white people who built the country. “They come together with Mister Tucker to fight off the Aztlan conspiracy.” He flicked a dark glance at me, managed a simper of disgust at my confusion. “And the North American Union. All that shit that’s coming over the border.”
Aretha and I traded looks. “I guess we haven’t been visiting the right websites,” I told Gunter. “You want to fill that in a little?”
“No.”
I shrugged. Aretha collected additional sea floor. “We’ll wait.”
“Mexicans!” Denny blurted. He hiked one knee up under his rocks, struggling desperately against Aretha’s reminder of a rifle at his chest. “Illegal immigration! It’s a plan to take over everything from Colorado to Texas and give it back to Mexico—”
Gunter sneered. “That or make the U.S., Mexico, and Canada all one country.” He hunkered defiantly under his own rock pile. “Change the dollar to the ‘Amero.’ Bullshit like that. Mister Tucker’s against it—”
“He might be governor of Arizona—”
“He’s got a ranch in Arizona but all these fucking wetbacks, they, they—”
“He clears all this shit up once and for all, Mister Tucker’s gonna run for president,” Gunter concluded. “We’ll be Secret Service.” Sweat ran down his fat cheeks and tattooed temples. He hitched up his rocks and spat defiantly. “Folks like you probably ought to learn to suck dick before then, that’d be my advice.”
I took another look at Aretha. “I’m having a hard time believing people like this exist.”
“Yeah?” Her return glance cut me no slack. “Well it’s about time you got over it.”
Gunter enjoyed that. He spat again. I gun-nuzzled a pudgy spot just above his rocks. “So there’s nativists in here? At Tucker’s place? Why?”
“Training camp,” he grunted.
“Para-military,” Denny squeaked. “They go down in units and do cockroach control on the border. Cuz the government—” he nearly dropped his load, looked up in pleading at Aretha, which was a mistake that brought another rock “—the government won’t do the job. Won’t protect us. So Mister Tucker … Mister Tucker …”
I waved him off. Next topic. “Who’s in the airplane?”
“Mexican spies.”
“Who sent you to burn my buddy’s tent and leave him that note?”
“The—”
“Shut up, Denny. We ain’t been paid yet.”
“The lawyer,” Denny gasped. “That guy that used to work for Mister Tucker but got fired for building the fence. Gray Henderson.”
“Henderson Gray.” I glanced at Aretha. She wasn’t buying it either. “Why?”
“Because he promised to pay us.”
“Why did he promise to pay you?”
“I don’t know.”
“We don’t know.”
“But we didn’t do it right away. We were busy working for Mister Tucker. Then when we did it, the lawyer said it was too late, they were dead already, and he jewed us.”
I nodded for Aretha to cover both specimens. I walked over to the pickup. “You following any of this, Sneedy?”
He nodded. “Uh-huh. My mama’s going to kill some crackers.”
“I hope not.” I found what I wanted in the truck box—a greasy rope about thirty feet long—and in the cab—a two-way radio.
I dropped the rope at Gunter’s feet. I opened a channel on the radio and put it to the side of his head. “Call in. Tell whoever that it looks like we all drowned in the canyon, and you’re out here just making sure. You’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
Nearly broken, Gunter did as instructed. Then I had those boys move back to back. I tied them tightly that way, like two bits of fishing line, one thin, one fat, cinched up in a giant nail knot. Aretha permitted me to take her rifle and stow it, unloaded, in the truck box. She permitted the boys, at that point, to drop their rocks.
“Watch your toes.”
“Ouch! Fuck!”
“You’re free to go,” I told them. They fell in a squabbling heap that was quickly enveloped in dust as Sneed and his mother and I drove off downstream in the pickup.
Maybe I Am
I had to work from memory. We were along the lower third of the Roam River now, and my sense was that the black circle on Sneed and Jesse’s map was maybe another ten or so miles north as the crow flies and then a mile, at least, east
of the river. Maybe. I could only drive and hope. I held on to the thrashing wheel as the truck hammered over raw rangeland in a way that spoke well for the Fords of yesteryear. Meanwhile Sneed and Aretha, squeezed together on the bench seat beside me, engaged in a prickly kind of rapprochement.
“I’m not going to bite you.” Aretha glowered at her son from frighteningly close range. “I’m your own mother, for God’s sake.”
Sneed maintained a forward gaze on a stiff neck planted between pinched-in shoulders. “There’s no money in me now,” he said.
“Funny how out of everything, you remember that. But since you do remember that, let me tell you about—”
“Dog!” Sneed blurted, appealing for help. “Hang in there, Sneedy. Just listen.”
“—while I—”
“Tell me all about yourself.” Sneed piped this hotly and then covered his ears.
Aretha drew her head back and narrowed her eyes. She moved her head side to side, that cobra again, looking to strike.
“Well,” she said. “Well, well, well. Listen to you.”
He lowered his hands. “Why don’t you listen to me?”
“You sound like an angry little child.”
Now Sneed made fists in his lap. “Maybe I am.”
The truck pounded onward another hundred yards, lurching over prairie dog holes and mowing down sage brush, me looking for a place to cross the river.
“Maybe I am,” Sneed blurted again. “And maybe you are too.”
His mother gathered those words into a long and stony silence. Meanwhile I found some long-gone rancher’s poured-gravel ford across the Roam River. I ripped through about a foot of water to the eastern bank, an eroded dirt scarp that the truck angled up with a great amount of revving, spinning, and clanking along the undercarriage.
“Glad it’s not my truck,” I put in, hoping to lighten the mood.
We had to be getting somewhere close—but close to what? Sneed was insensate with stress right then. I let him be. I glanced at Aretha, thinking I would need her shortly. She was biting her lower lip, digging absently with her painted thumbnail at some hardened piece of ranch muck glued to the wing window in front of her. Stalemate. Dog running solo.
“Well,” Sneed’s mother said again after another half mile, and she blasted us with a sigh. “Well, well, well.”
“Well what?” her son said.
“Well, maybe I am what you said. Maybe you’re right. Maybe both of us just had the world cave in on us at about the same time.” She bit her lip again, hard, and let it go.
“I’m okay now.” This sounded like a claim, tenuous, but submitted for Sneed to believe. “I built my health back up. I have a job that’s hard but I got another woman in the fire station with me and so don’t mind it too much. I make decent money. I’m taking classes at a college. I’m meeting lots of smart people—” she glanced at me “—who say I might make law school.”
I just smiled at her. Why not? She released another, lighter sigh while I steered up a stump-littered hogback ridge.
“But I think I should start by talking about you, D’Ontay, and how what you did, no matter how much pain it caused you or how bad you feel about it, talking about how what you did saved me. I mean, child, you don’t realize that you saved my—”
“There they are!” shouted Sneed, cutting off his mother and nearly jumping off his seat. “Dog! There they are! It’s not too late!” He thrashed side to side as if looking for something. Then he struck a fist down on the dashboard.
“Damn it! We lost the fence cutters!”
That Bastard … That Cheater
From the crest of that hogback ridge I witnessed a sight that I will credit to the grit and compassion and guilt of my young buddy D’Ontario Sneed for the rest of my life.
From the narrow piece of flat land below the ridge, along a fence line to the north for nearly a quarter mile, stretched a milling mass of pronghorn antelope—hundreds in all, so crowded and so close below that we could smell them, could hear their grunts and whistles and scrapings along the barrier of the fence.
“Dog, I knew it,” Sneed was blurting into my ear. “They’re not herding animals. That’s one way they avoid disease and starvation. They travel in small family groups. This is not a herd. They’re just piled up here. They’re stuck. They can’t move.”
“Travel where?” his mother wanted to know.
“They’re migrating … trying to migrate … to the Red Desert in Wyoming.”
He was breathing too hard. I saw the hiccups strike him, then the dizziness. His eyes glazed and for a moment, I thought Sneed would pass out. “Shit,” he muttered. “Oh, shit. Why?”
I opened the door, pulled him out across the bench seat, made him lie down in the thin hot shade of the truck box. I could read the demand in Aretha’s eyes. What the hell is going on?
“They’re stuck at Tucker’s fence,” I told her. “It went up last year on Henderson Gray’s orders. Tucker got in trouble with activists and Gray lost his job over it. Then Tucker got stubborn and wouldn’t take it down. Gray and Sneedy—”
I gazed down at the milling pronghorn. Their distress was palpable. The air buzzed with animal energy.
“When Jesse introduced those two, Gray and your son, D’Ontay must have heard about the fence. Gray said they clashed. This is why. D’Ontay didn’t like it.”
“But it’s just a little fence.”
“Mama, pronghorn can’t jump,” mumbled Sneed, trying to sit up. “That fence … it blocks the corridor. They can’t … they have to …”
I raised up to study the landscape. Where the pronghorn wanted to cross was a dry wash that led up into the lap of the Abrosakas, the rugged, snow-capped range they would have to cross to reach their lowland winter grounds in Wyoming. Not that a human eye could tell, but up there somewhere had to be the easiest route through this part of the mountains, a route discovered and made into memory by a million years of tightly threaded pronghorn steps.
“They hit this fence and have to backtrack?”
I was asking Sneed. He nodded.
“But they don’t want to backtrack,” I said. I could feel this now. It was so simple, really. It was like salmon with a dam in their way, contemplating the unknown of a fish ladder. “They stall and stress,” I explained to Aretha. “They waste time and energy. They don’t want to take a different route that’s not as good. They’re conflicted.”
“Yes.” Sneed was staying with me through a mighty mental effort. “They can’t stay here. Wolves will get them. They can’t run … in so much … snow.”
Aretha had figured it out—not just the animal behavior, but now, fully, our mission down the river, the injured soul of her son.
She knelt beside and cradled his head. “Oh, Baby.” She blew a horsefly off his face. “I see, Baby,” she murmured. “I know.”
I called back from the cab, “No problem with the cutters, Sneedy. There’s a pair right here in the glove box.”
Sneed limped between his mother and me like an injured athlete to the fence. The pronghorn shied and scattered, leaving behind the half dozen or so that had tried to crawl under, had gotten snagged, and were dead or dying.
“That bastard,” Sneed muttered. “That cheater. He runs them up against here.”
He did not observe the symmetry or the ceremony of the moment as he labored with his weak grip to cut through the six strands of overzealous barbed-wire. But I felt it. I know Aretha felt it. Her tears fell silently as she helped him, peeling away each wire strand on her side, tugging it back twenty feet to the next steel post, where it could be crudely wrapped and kept out of the way.
I did the same on my side. We did not speak.
Then Aretha went to her son. She sat beside him in the dirt. She enveloped him in her arms. I stepped away, giving space, heading for the truck. I planned to wait for the creatures to settle and sniff and process what had happened. I hoped it would not take too long and that we would see them move. We could lin
ger for an hour, I figured, but not much more before we would have to clear off Tucker’s land.
But the eager pronghorn surprised me. They didn’t wait. Not even one minute. A bold pair skittered through, yards from human mother and son, and then turned, nostrils flaring, flanks twitching. Then through that proven breach sprinted a juvenile buck, kicking dust on Sneed as he passed, and off into a joyful, grass-munching zig-zag went this little family group on their long trek to the winter grounds.
The Clinch Knot Page 21