The Clinch Knot

by John Galligan

  “I said who the hell has that much family?”

  “You do,” the big man replied, rattling his peanut jar. “You got family all over. They’re dropping like flies.”

  “I swear, Larry. I’m not going.”

  Sorgensen shrugged, tossed peanuts into his mouth. He side-saddled down the porch steps. He opened the rear doors of his van and waited. Lyndzee stood her ground on the deck for a full five seconds. Then she lifted her suitcases, tossed back her frazzled mess of coppery hair, and marched to the van.

  “God damn,” Cook muttered beside me, “am I glad to be out of that.”

  His eyes followed Lyndzee into the van. He shook his head. “That buzz. You get to be a slave to it, you know?”

  Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe

  Ninety percent is money for drugs. The rest is just for fun.

  I had no grounds to debate Aretha’s premise. I just didn’t want to believe it. It didn’t seem right. I had a sense of drug crimes as being obvious, impulsive, brutal, and stupid—not like the subtle set-up of Jesse’s death—and I had a fatigue for the whole drug excuse as well. The world had become a television show, I was thinking, and everything was about drugs, even falsely stolen fly rods.

  Hilarious Sorgensen held his cell phone to his ear, shifted painfully foot to foot beside his van for a full five minutes while inside Lyndzee reamed through radio stations before latching onto Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon.”

  Finally Sorgensen snapped his phone shut. He nearly flattened his shocks getting into the van. As he was turning around, Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe pulled in off the highway. He circled Aretha’s jade-green Metro before parking in front of it, blocking my way out.

  Sorgensen matched him window to window. They chatted for a half-minute before Sorgensen squirted gravel behind him and headed for the Bozeman airport with “Rhiannon” sailing out the window.

  Cook was watching as I reached down into Sorgensen’s dumpster. Down among the beer cans and yellowjackets, I picked out the discarded baggage tags: Toledo. Not Memphis. Toledo.

  “Isn’t Toledo where your dentists the other day were from?” I asked Cook. “White Fang and Top Gum?”

  “Yup.”

  “But wasn’t Sorgensen talking about Memphis?”

  “Dunno. Don’t listen to the man.”

  Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe strolled up. He had a minor black eye and a bandage on his forehead. Fingers on his left hand were splinted and wrapped. “Evening, boys. How’d you do on the river today, Cord Cook?”

  “Not bad. Even the veterinarians caught fish.”

  “I never asked you, Russell,” I said. “Do you fish?”

  The acting interim sheriff frowned, swung the jaw bone my way. “Yes, you did ask me. And yes, I do fish.”

  “Really?” Cook was surprised. “I never heard that before, Russell.”

  Russell levered open a smile. “Well, boys, you’re hearing it here. Grew up fishing the Missouri River.”

  Again Cook was startled. “Really? What section?”

  “Pretty much all of it.”

  Cook nodded. His cool grey eyes—the ones that must have attracted Jesse—stayed on Crowe’s face. “I’ll bet your favorite stretch is west of Holter Dam toward Wolf Creek.”

  “Absolutely,” Crowe said. “Beautiful water. Caught an eight-pound brown in there.” He turned to me. “Now, Mister Oglivie, I am sorry but this is your fourth offense driving without a license. That’s automatic jail time without bail.”

  He tossed his shock of black hair, still smiling. He touched the side of his black eye and winced.

  “Just to show you what a good guy I am, though, I’m gonna let you drive away. But lax enforcement is not going to fly anymore with the county board. They’ve had enough. I see you behind the wheel in Park County again, I’m afraid I’ll have to—”

  Cord Cook stopped him. “This isn’t necessary, Russell.”

  Acting Interim Sheriff Crowe switched jaw angles. “Huh?”

  “There is no stretch of the Missouri River west of Holter Dam toward Wolf Creek,” Cook said. “The river runs north-south through there, and it’s sheer rock up to Flesher Pass.” Cook paused. “You always tried too hard to be a man, Russell. But just to show you what a nice guy I am, I won’t tell anyone how full of shit you still are.”

  Crowe put his splinted hand to his belt, fixed his eyes on the mid-distant Yellowstone River, striking a pose that attempted an Andy Griffith-style affectionate weariness with the shenanigans of his people. But it played as a smirk—and I slapped it off him with a stiff clap to the shoulder.

  “Now I remember what it was I never asked you,” I said. “Guy like you, Russell, I’ll bet you had a go or two at Jesse, huh? Am I right? And she dumped you?”

  Crowe’s eyes closed to slits. His chin moved side to side on the twin booms of his fabulous jaw bone. We waited. He offered no answer, so Cord Cook told me, “Actually, I heard his mother said he couldn’t get anywhere near to Jesse. So I wonder how that party picture would sit with her.”

  Now Cook clapped the acting interim sheriff on his other shoulder.

  “But anyway, Russell, what vehicle?”

  “Uh—” Russell stuck his chin at the little green Metro. “Oh, that’s me,” Cook said. “I drove that one. And whatever else after this point you think my friend Dog here might be driving.”

  Sudden Inexplicable Death

  “I’ve got money. Why don’t we all go out for a good old ranch-style supper?”

  This was Aretha’s suggestion after Cord Cook delivered the Cruise Master to the Geyser Motel and took off on a jog toward home.

  “I mean steak … and what? Beans? And whiskey? And hmm, what else to they have on Bonanza?”

  I didn’t answer that right away, could not read the sincerity of her tone in my current mood, so I just stepped in and hauled my buddy Sneed off the bed and hugged him long and hard.

  “Be careful!” Aretha scolded me as she separated us. “Headache, dizziness, confusion, convulsions, kidney failure, respiratory arrest, memory loss, dementia, irritability—” she recovered the doctor’s handout from a spanking new hand bag, Big Louis II, and shoved me further away from Sneed “—blindness, gait and balance problems, speech disturbance, loss of higher intellectual function, heart arrhythmia—”

  She stopped short. She gripped me rather desperately by both arms, hustled me into the bathroom and closed the door so Sneed couldn’t hear. Her hazel eyes popped with color. She shook me.

  “Sudden inexplicable death!” she whispered.

  Peering through dim light at my menu in the swanky Livingston Bar and Grill, I decided to say, “Well, isn’t it true about Bonanza that Hop Sing could make damn near anything?”

  Aretha looked at me over her menu. I said, “Don’t I remember lobster bisque and Yorkshire pudding?”

  “Were you in juvie too or what?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “All that time for television.”

  I shrugged. “For white boys, the equivalent is college.” I tapped my menu. “That’s what I’m having. Lobster bisque and Yorkshire pudding.”

  Sneed started banging his silverware together like a three-year-old, as if the sound was new. Aretha took the fork and knife away and gave him a piece of sourdough bread—and a kiss on the temple. She looked well satisfied as she returned her attention to me.

  “Did I ever tell you that my mother is now in Seattle? No? Why do I mention it? Because that’s where lobsters come from. Not Montana. You eat a lobster here, Hoss, that thing’s got frequent flier miles.”

  “Well, actually lobsters come from Maine,” I said. “But your point is well taken.”

  She sighted me in with a scowl. “My mother eats lobster in Seattle.”

  “Crab?”

  “She says lobster.”

  “Then maybe you ought to go straighten her out.”

  Aretha raised the menu in front of her face. “What do you know, you ol
d coffee boiler.”

  “I know that only a greenhorn shave tail mixes up the coasts.”

  From behind the menu: “Aw, hobble your lip, you durn flannel mouth.”

  “Curly wolf.”

  “Four flusher.”

  “Mudsill.”

  “Odd stick.”

  Sneed let out a snort of sourdough crumbs. Me too. “Odd stick?” I pulled her menu down. “All right,” I demanded, “out with it.”

  And so Aretha finally told me the Bonanza story over her Thai charred-beef salad, my grilled Montana squab, Sneed’s burger and fries, and the bottle of 1996 Domaine du Caillou Reserve Chateauneuf-du-Pape that our waiter somehow finessed onto the tab.

  She was fifteen when she got pregnant. Aretha began here while we waited for our food. It was unclear if Sneed—in-and-out at her side—was listening, but she seemed to hope so this time as she detailed in plain, calm language an act of midnight violence in her bedroom that was every bit as gruesome and barbaric as something from the true wild West.

  She touched her son’s arm. “So you see, at first, I didn’t want you. I was scared, I was angry, and I was ashamed. There was no person inside me then, just a problem that I didn’t know how to solve. Can you understand that, Baby?”

  Sneed nodded. But then his nodding didn’t stop.

  Aretha sighed. She stopped him gently. Here was the wine. “What makes you think I’m not paying for it?” she asked the waiter when he offered me the cork. “Because I am.”

  She went on through the terrible first months of her secret until the moment when a school friend came to her in tears and blurted out, “Retha, help me, I’m pregnant!”

  “So we ended up together in this home for bad girls that weren’t allowed to embarrass everybody by staying in school. That home was supposed to be a school itself, but we girls, all we did was eat and talk and watch TV and feel our babies growing.”

  Our food came. For a while, the taste of it made us monosyllabic, like cave people, gulping it down on five-dollar swallows of wine. Aretha was afraid that Sneed would choke, so she carefully cut his burger into bits, then his fries, until Sneed raised doubt about his “loss of higher intellectual function” by blurting out, “Nobody here has a job, right?”

  He looked at his mother. “Right? Did you ask for a leave?”

  “No, Baby. I just left.”

  “And Dog, you …” He frowned. As if he had forgotten how to describe it, how to describe me in relation to employment, he just raised his hands and started to laugh. He laughed right through his next question: “So what are we going to do?”

  Aretha and I traded looks. Do? We? There wasn’t any answer. There wasn’t even any question. All that do and we stuff was worlds apart and miles ahead, in a realm his mother and I could not access.

  “Well, what do you think, Baby?”

  “I think we should stay here,” Sneed pronounced. “I like this place.”

  He looked from me to his mother, then suddenly he was crestfallen. “I had a plan,” he said, “for staying here, but I can’t remember it.”

  Lost in private thoughts, we ate quietly until were full as ticks and poking around the last precious remnants of our meals. Privately, knowing Aretha wasn’t interested, I was still working over possibilities involving Russell Crowe, and Crowe’s mother, and Jesse. So—what had happened? Had Sneed punched Crowe in the eye, smashed the service pistol out of his left hand—the one that was splinted now? And then Sneed—a black man, in hospital dress?—had gotten picked up hitchhiking? And dropped off on Main Street in Livingston?

  At last I shook it all away and said, “So that’s where you got into Bonanza? At the bad girls’ home?”

  Aretha chewed slowly and then smiled, warming from the memory.

  “Those girls,” she said, “were wonderful. They were my first real friends, and my last ones for a long, long time. I am still looking for friends like that.” She sighed and pushed away her plate. “You want the rest?”

  “Oh, God. I’m stuffed. But I’ve been eyeing that this whole time.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I took a forkful of Thai beef. “Much obliged.”

  “I remember it was winter and that was the one time it did snow in Arkansas. But that big old house was warm, and full of girls and their babies, and we were eating and laughing and watching old re-runs on TV and then what happened with us black girls, see, is we started goofing a little. You know, the truth is there are a few good-looking white men out there. We black girls are just not supposed to think so. But there were no black men on TV anyway, and we were naughty girls already, and that house was like some cruise ship at sea. We were alone, nobody watching us, no idea where we really were or where we were going. So we started hunting around the TV for cute white men we could play a crush on. It took some damn work, I’ll tell you. They had to be on a series, because we had to see them enough to really check them out, so we’re looking at Hogan and Gilligan and Maxwell Smart and this was just not working out.”

  She poured the last of the Chateauneuf-du-Pape into my glass and waved the bottle in the air like you might a beer glass in a saloon. “Are you sure—”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” She looked at me square, didn’t seem one bit drunk. “It’s just sinking in to me, right now. Sudden inexplicable death. It could just as well be me.” She smiled somewhat sadly as she encouraged me to finish the wine. “Or you. Or any of us. Really, couldn’t it?”

  I wasn’t so sure about inexplicable, in my case, but I nodded. There was my boy Eamon, after all—how would I ever manage to explain, to my own satisfaction, that?

  “Oh, yeah.” She was moving again. “And we tried out Hawkeye and Trapper and Radar. He got a few nibbles—Radar did. But we weren’t looking for teddy bears, you know. We were looking for some ummph.”

  She confirmed that we were having another bottle, giving the waiter’s look right back at him.

  “He’s decided my check is going to bounce,” she told me. “But anyway, then, then, we find Bonanza. We find Adam, that’s Purnell Roberts, and we find Little Joe, that’s Michael Landon, and those boys are fly. They got those silky cowboy clothes, nice and tight in the back, with their shirts open. They got curly hair and nice smiles. Pretty soon that is all we watch, girls screaming when their boys come on, crying when they get hurt, fighting with each other when Adam and Little Joe get into it on the TV. It was a scene, oh my.”

  Her eyes glittered from the memory. “I’ll let my assistant do it this time,” she told the waiter, vis-à-vis the cork.

  “We had the Adam camp and we had the Little Joe camp,” she said.

  “And you?”

  “And I,” she said, “had a secret.”

  Let’s Not Go Backwards

  A secret, mind you, that she withheld for the purpose of toying with the Hoss-Dog—but withheld also, I could tell, because she was stuck on something else, something serious inside her.

  She looked a little troubled as she paid out five crisp fifties onto the bill tray, failing to take full and proper appreciation of the effect this had on our waiter.

  I asked her outside, “Not to be nosy. But where did you get the cash?”

  “Russell Crowe,” she answered. Her pace quickened and she spurted ahead.

  “Aretha, what the hell? Russell Crowe personally?” I caught up, grabbed her arm. “Or Russell Crowe sheriff?”

  “He said he was still my liaison.” She was stiff to my touch. “He said it was money to help us get back home.”

  I stopped her. “Aretha, listen. Did anyone see him give you the money? Were you with anyone? Do you know if it’s his money or the county’s?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Were you alone with him?”

  “I was at the motel. About an hour before you got there. He knocked on the door. D’Ontay was asleep. He said he paid off the motel bill and then he gave me the cash.”

  “How much?”

  She walked ahead without an answer.
>
  “Aretha, this may not be over.”

  “It’s over for me.”

  “Aretha, how much?”

  “You are an odd stick. Sudden inexplicable death, Hoss. Don’t you get it? Money is money. Let’s not go backwards.”

  “Aretha—”

  She faced me. “I have come a long way,” she said, trying to control a tremulous voice. “A long way. And I am very, very close to a place I never thought I would be.”