We had to wait while a nurse came in to take Chubbuck’s pulse and blood pressure. He would need the breathing tube in a few minutes, she said.
When the result came back that Sneed had traces of animal tranquilizer in his system, Chubbuck said he had suspected Henderson Gray, whose efforts to run down a pronghorn had disturbed the sheriff for some years.
“Asinine,” Chubbuck wheezed, and he used precious breath to add: “How was he going to prove it? I asked him once. He was going to have to photograph the animal before, then somehow show himself side by side with that same animal, clearly alive, in a different place, later. And those little buggers all look alike don’t they? How was he gonna prove anything?”
He went on, exhausting himself on speculation. I told him about the doubtful scientist and the ear tag, and how Gray would have to show the placement of that in corroborating video before, during, and after the deer was up and moving again. But no pronghorn, the sheriff figured, no matter how tired, was going to sit still as long as it would take Gray to set up a camera shot and tag its ear. So a syringe of the same tranquilizer found yesterday in Gray’s fanny pack spoke plainly for Sneed’s innocence. When Gray’s wife had retracted her support for his alibi, the deal was done.
He asked for my hand and gripped it. I think it was a handshake. “Those skinhead punks were never suspects,” Chubbuck whispered, “because we were watching them. We knew where they were when Jesse Ringer was killed. I didn’t want you to get mixed up in it and spook the operation on Tucker’s ranch. I worked on that too long.”
He rested a while. His wife left the room for more ice shavings. Chubbuck made a painful sound to clear his throat. “And I got it. The Roam River is ours again. Dane Tucker’s land …” was on its way into a public trust, he managed to explain over the next precious half hour. Fishermen would be able to access public water, the way it was intended. Montana boys and girls could grow up fishing the Roam again—”fishing the best river God ever made,” the sheriff said, “like I did.”
I said with my eyes to Aretha: No, this isn’t clear to me either. Across the room, Tom Gorman fiddled with the pump on a blood pressure cuff until a new nurse arrived and took it away from him.
“Grief—” The sheriff startled us with a loud rasp. He tried to lift his head from the pillow. His buzzard eye was fixed on Aretha. “Grief … is like …”
He couldn’t finish the statement. But he couldn’t let it go. He fought it for a long and pathetic moment until his wife put an ice chip to his lips.
“I’m gonna miss the land,” he whispered.
He closed his eyes as they teared up. He swallowed with difficulty.
“So much. Damn it all. That’s my grief. This land. This water. The fish. The birds. The goddamn wind. I’m going to miss all of it so much.”
The nurse tried to re-insert his respirator tube, but Sheriff Chubbuck batted it away. She turned up the drip into his left arm. He worked his feeble hands and squeezed his red-rimmed eyes.
“Go fishing for me,” were his last words before the faintest smile shaped his dry lips and he faded into morphine dreams.
“Well, yeah,” Tom Gorman said with a shrug in the hallway.
“We’re keeping this out of the media for now. But probably the gal from Alabama can explain it best.”
Agent Gorman dropped us at Chad’s on Main Street, rumbled off toward God knows what destination in that Meals-on-Wheels van.
The gal from Alabama was Melissa Pines, a hefty young woman of apparently mixed race who sat down with us on one of Chad’s funky sofas.
“Sheriff Chubbuck brought us all together this last year and a half,” she said. “He got a tip that Dane Tucker was using his land for paramilitary training. Vigilante border patrol, actually. It’s all the rage lately. The sheriff might have gone in on weapons charges, but that would have done nothing vis-à-vis the land. He wanted the land.”
She smiled. Her hair was reddish and kinky. Her skin was caramel. She wore jeans and a flawlessly ironed men’s shirt. There was pretty handmade jewelry on her hands, wrists, and ears. She backed up to clarify for us.
“I’m an attorney with something called the Southern Poverty Law Center. I don’t know if you’ve heard of us?”
We hadn’t.
“Our civil lawsuits have bankrupted more than ten major hate groups. We kick ass and take assets.” She smiled at Aretha. “When Sheriff Chubbuck learned that Dane Tucker was running a ‘border patrol’ training camp on his ranch, he got in touch with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Arizona State Police. They didn’t know about this particular group. But they started watching for them.”
Melissa Pines sipped her latte, leaving a faint stripe of steamed milk on her lip.
“It’s the latest thing these days, nativism and vigilante border patrol. There are probably ten or twenty groups like Tucker’s roaming the Mexican border right now, going after anything with brown skin. They tend to shoot first and ask questions later. It’s just plain murder, mostly. Hate crime. But these guys are legends in their own minds.”
Another sip. Another smile for Aretha. “So that big guy, Tom Gorman? He was assigned to track Tucker’s group. Meanwhile Sheriff Chubbuck got in touch with us too, and we worked in an advisory capacity as to how this could all go down.”
In the interest of form, Aretha and I also had ordered our own special coffees. Clueless, we had copied each other, going for a pair of Café Americanos. Now neither of us was really sure what to do with what we had. We watched each other, waiting for the first move.
“As they always do,” Melissa Pines said, “one of the units trained on Tucker’s ranch eventually committed a crime, along with a serious civil rights violation. They attacked a man named Jose Rafael Ramirez, a U.S. citizen who ran a farm machinery repair business and was driving from Douglas to Nogales—this is in Arizona, along the border—to fix an irrigation pump. His truck broke down and he tried to hitchhike back to Douglas. He was shot once, stabbed twice, and beaten. Mister Ramirez died of his injuries last week.”
She glanced at her watch. She scooted up to the edge of the dingy corduroy sofa.
“So it goes like this. In civil rights and hate crimes law, the actions of that unit go back to Dane Tucker. He’s accountable. The raid by the feds yesterday put that beyond any question. Since Mister Tucker’s property was essentially used in the commission of this crime, our lawsuit on behalf of Mister Ramirez’s family will ask for Mister Tucker’s ranch property, all of it, to be confiscated in the judgment, and the family has agreed to sell that land to the state of Montana, who has agreed to buy it and put it into a trust that stipulates public access.”
I picked up my cup. So did Aretha. I sniffed. She did too.
“The vision behind all of this is Sheriff Chubbuck’s,” Melissa Pines said. “And all of this is specified in our lawsuit.” Her cup was empty. “My lawsuit,” she clarified. “Which I will win.”
She looked at us in puzzlement. “Is your coffee not good?”
Dropping Like Flies
Change at the Park County Sheriff’s Department was in the news the next day. I grabbed a Bozeman Chronicle at the motel office and brought it back.
The county board of supervisors, including Rita Crowe, had put Sheriff Roy Chubbuck on indefinite medical leave and initiated an investigation of departmental priorities and procedures. Clearly nothing of Chubbuck’s play for Tucker’s land had been disclosed to county office holders.
The paper said the new Acting Interim Sheriff, Deputy Russell Crowe, was recovering well from minor injuries sustained in the recent escape of detainee D’Ontario Sneed, formerly a suspect in the murder of Jesse Ringer. Charges against Sneed had been reduced by the Park County DA from first-degree murder to resisting an officer, and Sneed would be released on signature pending investigation into a further charge of reckless vehicular endangerment. Acting Interim Sheriff Crowe, the paper said, had been the sheriff’s loyal right-hand man and was the presumed fr
ont-runner in a special election for sheriff to be held in the coming months.
“Maybe that coffee-drinking chica can sue this bunch of goofballs too,” Aretha suggested.
“Do you really think—” there was something bothering me “—that D’Ontay could have overpowered Russell Crowe? A trained and armed sheriff’s deputy? And wasn’t there also a nurse in that ambulance, an orderly, anyone? And how did he end up in Livingston so fast? On Main Street? Right where Tick Judith would find him?”
“At this point, do I really care?” Aretha asked. “That’s the better question.”
We were private enough—at a picnic table in Sacagawea Park, practicing knots—that when my mind wouldn’t settle she grabbed my hand and squeezed it. Damn. I liked that.
“Come on, Hoss. It’s over.”
She had the clinch knot down. It was easy. Gray just wasn’t a fisherman. We were moving on to the surgeon’s knot. But I couldn’t let it rest.
“Do you remember Hilarious Sorgensen saying D’Ontay and Jesse stole a fly rod? And that’s why he fired them? Why would they do that?”
Aretha rolled her eyes. “That girl did drugs, Hoss. Where I’m from, that explains about ninety percent of all bad shit that happens. Money for drugs. The other ten percent is just for fun.”
I was thinking of Cord Cook being minus a boat, looking across the park at my Cruise Master gathering dust in the kid’s driveway, when Aretha gave me a stiff but playful shove.
“What’s the point in being a trout bum,” she wondered, “if you’re going to carry the world around on your shoulders? Come on. It’s over. Let’s get busy here. I want to get the hang of this fly fishing game before D’Ontay gets out of the hospital. He thinks he’s something. I am going to blow that child away.”
We stood at the bank of the Yellowstone. “See, grass in the park just sits there, but water moves. It never stops. No time outs. That’s the challenge.”
“You’re saying I’m not ready for it?”
“You’re not ready for it.”
“So get me ready.” She waded barefoot in ankle-deep water, her jeans rolled up, hot sun striking white shirt against brown skin, sweat on her forehead and a smile for me.
“I … this is awkward … do you mind?”
“Should I mind?”
I moved stiffly behind her and matched my arms to her arms, fit my hands over hers, and we began to cast and strip, cast and strip, until we found a rhythm together.
“You got it?”
“Hmmm,” she said. “Not quite yet.”
When I left Aretha at the Geyser in the late afternoon she was threatening to freshen up for supper. It seemed okay now to drive her rental car out to Sorgensen’s Fly ‘n’ Float to catch the arrival of the guides and their clients.
There were no fisticuffs today. Instead there was the general giddiness of a good day on the river. When the fish were on, there was water for everyone. I picked Cord Cook out of a small crowd around a tailgate and a beer cooler.
“Hey,” he said, raising his can as I approached. “How you doing?”
“Hey,” slurred one of his new clients, raising his can as well, “how you doing? I do everything Cord does, see? Guy’s a helluva guide. Do what Cord does, that’s the ticket. Jesusmaryandjoseph did we stick the fish today. Cord was right on ‘em. How you doing guy? You catch any?”
“My veterinarians,” Cook said.
“Veterinary surgeons,” the second guy corrected, and guffawed.
“Brad Verona and Brad Hawn. Great guys. From Minneapolis.”
“Saint Paul,” the second guy corrected, and guffawed louder.
“Still haven’t driven that vehicle of yours.” Cook seemed apologetic.
“That’s all right. Can I talk to you just a minute?”
“Don’t give away our secret spots!” one of them bellowed at our backs as we moved away toward the dumpsters beside Sorgensen’s shop.
“Don’t know if that was a fair deal,” Cook continued. “Especially seeing as I can reprint that photo. Hell, I can put it on the internet. Russell Crowe is mine for life. Plus I’m not even using the vehicle.”
“You’re a good guy, Cord. Sorry about your boat. Does that even things up?”
“I don’t know. What’s that vehicle worth?”
I shrugged. “Scrap.”
He laughed. “I hated that boat. It rode too low. The oars sucked.”
“I noticed that.”
“Season’s over for me anyway. School starts next week. Next summer I’m probably going to intern at a place in Denver.” He reached into his pocket. He tossed me the keys to the Cruise Master. “Here. Gas just went up to three-fifty a gallon. She’s all yours.”
We were quiet a moment, watching Cook’s veterinary surgeons root in a cooler for more beer. It was a sweet evening, cool enough that the forest fire smoke had a pleasant campfire essence, slightly crisp. The sun had plunged behind the Gallatins and we were in shadow beneath a pink-ribbed sky. For a change, the tall spruce windbreak out-fragranced Sorgensen’s dumpsters.
“I guess things worked out okay for your friend,” Cook said. “The black dude.”
“If he gets his health back.”
“I mean. Yeah. And it doesn’t surprise me about that lawyer. Jesse had a way of snagging guys like that. She didn’t mean to, she just …”
“Is Gray the one she dumped you for?”
Cook toed the gravel. “Yeah.” He looked off toward the ‘Stone. “Well. He was one of them. You never really knew with Jesse. But oh well. So what do we need to talk about?”
I told him I had come to follow up on Sorgensen’s story about Sneed and Jesse stealing a fly rod. Had he heard about that?
“Oh, sure,” Cook said. “Sorgensen announced it to the whole world. He made sure every guide in the business heard they were stealing from our vehicles. That’s a huge deal with us, you know, because we trust the shuttle drivers with our keys. Shit, half the time it’s the car key, the house key, everything, we hand it over to them on the faith they’re going to do nothing else but drive the vehicle, park it, and hide the keys where we ask them to.”
He finished his beer and tossed the can into the dumpster. He nodded toward his veterinary surgeons. The Brads were raising toasts to their fishing success.
“Hell, Dog, half these knuckleheads bring along their own keys too, their wallets, their credit cards, their hotel pass cards, the five-thousand-dollar bamboo rod that they just want to show off, it’s all sitting there available to the shuttle driver. If something gets stolen, we all know who did it.”
I thought about it. “So it’s a serious trust thing, like bonded workers, only—”
Cook laughed. “They’re mostly just college kids or drunks or both. But, knock-on-wood, it tends to work out.”
“So Sneed and Jesse ruined their reputations?”
“More like Sorgensen did.”
“Doesn’t it hurt his too?”
“Somewhat, I guess. Funny thing was, none of us had a rod stolen that we knew of. None of the clients either. And I mean, because it was Jesse—”
His eyes followed the St. Paul Brads. They were bumping chests. “Well, she was in enough trouble, so I asked around. I was going to blame the black dude and stick up for Jesse. That’s what everybody thought anyway. But it turned out that nobody had lost anything. Not that I could find out.”
“So why …?”
Cord Cook shrugged. “Maybe he made it up,” he said, looking over as the door to Sorgensen’s Fly ‘n’ Float banged open and out flung Sorgensen’s girl Lyndzee with her battered suitcases. “Like one time this Blackfoot driver Ronny Beaver got accused of siphoning gas. Sorgensen just didn’t want him around.”
Cook and I were out of sight and yet close enough to hear Lyndzee grumbling as she hauled the suitcases across the porch, where she ripped off old baggage tags and tossed them in the dumpster. Her voice sounded like a rake on gravel.
“Who the hell has that much family?”
“What?” challenged Hilarious Sorgensen as he swayed onto the porch with his peanuts and his van keys.
I could see up through the slats of the deck rail—more than I wanted to. This girl Lyndzee had pale, bruisy legs and not a stitch of underpants. This close, she vibrated with what looked like rage or fear—or maybe it was a just a screaming amphetamine high.
The Clinch Knot Page 23