Then she wheeled and walked away, all the way up to the corner of Main and Park, and turned right toward the Geyser.
Sneed trailed behind. I grabbed him, shook him a little. “Sneedy, are you with me?”
“What’s up, Dog?”
“I need you to tell me about your ride back to Livingston, after the ambulance. Do you remember? You think so? My guess is Deputy Crowe suddenly pushed you outside, is that right? Can you remember?”
He shook his head. “I was in an ambulance?”
“Yes. Then you were outside. Then a lady picked you up and drove you here.”
He thought a moment. Then he nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
“I need you to think about that ride with the lady. Anything you can remember. Anything at all. Sights, smells, something you heard. Just relax and try to be in there again.”
He closed his eyes. He was trying. He backed up against the Livingston Bar and Grill, slid down the bricks until he sat on the sidewalk.
I turned a circle, attempting to calm myself.
“Sure,” Sneed said behind me.
“What is it, Sneedy?”
“Dog, I think … pine cones?”
I Am Telling You I Am Innocent
Backward I went then, at full tilt. I walked Sneed home to the Geyser and returned downtown by Cruise Master, parked in an alley and came up behind Uncle Tick Judith locking up the liquor store. “Hey.” He was the greater Montana sage grouse of snoose—startled, ballistic, spit flying into the window.
“Sumbitch … you … thought you’d left town.”
“I’m still here.”
Inside, he thumped a fifth of Smirnoff’s vodka onto the counter.
“Bet you need a … big old sumbitch … jug for the road.”
“I need some basic facts,” I said. “Some history.”
In ten minutes we were back at Jesse’s mini-storage, lit by Uncle Judith’s headlights. “Just about every letter she ever got from some point, whether it be from her dad or a boyfriend, seems it’s gonna be in here.” Uncle Judith rapped his knuckles on the top of the cedar chest. He coughed in a sad attempt to laugh. “Guess she’s had that key a while. So much for my supervision.”
I opened it: Jesse had tossed letters and other keepsakes in randomly, it seemed, until her memories were at least a foot thick and jumbled.
“Probably cuz I snooped a little, opened things.”
Uncle Judith went in deeper. He stopped in front of the little glass-faced china cabinet, back left, and said, “Move your shadow, will ya?” From the cabinet he brought forth a statuesque bottle of Galliano and flopped down on the settee. He put his boots up on an ottoman. Now I saw that he had carried forth an old Colt pistol from his truck. He laid the pistol on the settee beside him. Then he wiped dust off that fancy high-top bottle, took a pull. “You always was a fancy pants,” he muttered, as if someone sat beside him. He held the Galliano out for me.
“You’re gonna find this out anyway,” he said on a gust of what sounded like regret. “You’ll know from reading all them letters. The way he denies it every chance he gets.”
I declined the bottle. Uncle Judith took another gulp of yellow liqueur. He was the David Copperfield of snoose. Where had that brown gob gone to? How could he drink with it in there? And what was it that I would know?
“Read them letters I’m guessing what you’ll find out is that Bozeman guide down at Otter Creek didn’t read Galen exactly right and called him a faggot. And Galen will swear to his girl that being no such thing as a faggot, he had no cause to kill the man. Therefore he is innocent.”
He took another swash.
“And that is one part true. Galen Ringer sure as hell is no faggot.” He snuck a timid glance at me. “This sumbitch world has always been confused between a homosexual and a faggot. No man likes to be called a faggot. Sure as hell not Galen. And not yours truly one bit neither.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What?”
Now Uncle Judith straightened up, eyed me as if I’d offended him. My gaze skipped to the Colt. He said, “A faggot’s another thing. I know plenty of faggots that go with women. It ain’t about that. Me and Galen is real men.”
Then abruptly he tipped his hat down over his face and said from behind it, “Now I done said it. I guess I surprised ya.”
“Well … I never gave it much … yeah, you did.”
“We raised that girl, me and Galen. Her rightful mother wanted nothing to do with it. Galen went with that woman before … you know, before he … well, see, I …”
His chest began to shake. From under his hat he said, “Now I lost them both. I lost my entire family.” He sputtered. “I been carrying this pistol around these last couple days everywhere I go. It just seems to end up in my hand.”
I waited. But that was it. He seemed to be done talking. I offered a conflicted and stillborn “I’m sorry” toward the snuffling behind the hat.
“Uncle Judith, who did kill that guide at Otter Creek? Do you know?”
“Galen did. For chrissake, who the hell else?”
Now the hat trembled. His gnarled hands gripped the knees of his jeans. I could reach the Colt, and I did so, unopposed. I unloaded it.
“I do thank you for that,” Uncle Judith managed.
He was silent for so long then that I tried to refocus: what mattered here, why I came, was to see where Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe fit into the Jesse picture. I began to sort the letters and memorabilia: father in one stack, boyfriends in the other. I looked for Crowe among the notes and scraps and movie stubs and sometimes red-hot missives of love or hate or restraining orders from boyfriends. Nothing came up right away. This was going to take a while. I had decided this just as there came a great gasp and Uncle Judith’s hat fell off, landed on the neck of the Galliano bottle.
“Well that’s that,” he concluded, wiping a sleeve across his nose. “All the rage these days, of course, sumbitch movies and all.”
He looked every place but into my eyes. I needed to say something: “You wanna help me read these?”
“I do not read,” he pronounced. He recovered his hat. He sniffed the Galliano, put the cap on. “Galen read a magazine now and then. Myself, I recognize, but I do not read.”
That clarified, he turned sideways on the settee. His compact body fit just right with his boots up and crossed on the far arm.
“Turn those headlights off, willya? There’s a flashlight in the cubby.”
Then he was the sandman of snoose. He raised up to access the can in his back pocket. He packed in a goodnight pinch the size of a minor cow flop. In ten seconds he was snoring.
After two hours I had found no trace of Russell Crowe among Jesse’s mementos. Many of these keepsakes, I thought, came to seem like evidence, like testimony as to how much Jesse Ringer mattered to a wide assortment of men and boys. Henderson Gray was one among several to say that he loved her. But her letters from Gray delineated a steady retraction of that love, terminating in a blunt demand that Jesse back off and leave him alone.
Gray hadn’t lied about the relationship—not to me, anyway. Clearly, Jesse mistook him as someone who could lawyer up on the state and free her father. Clearly, she felt Gray had promised to do so. But he wrote at one point, “Fucking is not a promise. Fucking is fucking.” I dropped the letter and turned away, too sad for Jesse to continue.
Anyway, Crowe was not in the Jesse Ringer boys club. Could I let it go then?
I tried.
I told myself that all the games Crowe and his mother had played around the margins of the Sneed-Jesse tragedy were moves in an opportunistic scheme to embarrass and discredit Chubbuck and return the mantle of Park County Sheriff to the Crowe family—for whatever reasons they had. And the scheme had worked, more or less. But so what? Was this my concern? Russell and Rita Crowe did not cause the tragedy. I was certain. They simply, clumsily, successfully exploited it.
As Uncle Judith snored into the early morning hours, I moved on to t
he father-daughter correspondence—or at least Galen Ringer’s half of it, stamped by the Deer Lodge prison. What startled me right away was the shallowness of Ringer’s tone, the paucity of specifics in the claims he made to his daughter. He was innocent. This was the central declaration in each and every letter. I am telling you I am innocent. This was the phrase he repeated. And: why would I care what anyone called me if it wasn’t true? Jesse had to believe him. She was his daughter. This was the logic. Apparently she begged him for proof, facts, names, people who could help her, but Galen Ringer always replied Faith is stronger than facts Jesse you know that and your my daughter you just have to trust me.
God help me if this did not go on and on—months, years—the poor girl graduating from high school, planning to go to college but backing out for lack of funds, getting hired as a bartender, a smokejumper, a camp counselor, a mini-stop cashier, a bartender again, getting engaged, once, twice, and at each of these junctures her father echoing her accomplishments back at her, setting them up in scoffing capital letters, replying, PROMOTION TO NIGHT MANAGER. Well thats fine and good about your big success but here I am an innocent man in prison so what is happening with my defense?
Why Don’t We Fish the Roam?
Okay, Dog. Your wheels are spinning. It’s sad. It’s over. Let it go.
I slumped at my galley table in the Geyser Motel parking lot. I parted my grimy curtain to watch the sun come up through a stand of yellowing cottonwoods over the top of Aretha’s room.
Time for vitamins, Dog, and rest.
I fixed a whopper v-and-T.
Time to go, Dog, go.
I took my socks off. The cup was empty.
She woke me around noon, banging on the door and then coming right in. I sat up to Aretha tugging on my foot and telling me, “This place needs room service, Hoss.”
She looked good. She smelled good. I sat up in my bunk, hit my head like I hadn’t slept there more than two thousand nights.
“He remembered,” she told me gaily.
Confusion. “Remembered what?” I had to piss like a Russian racehorse. My mind scrambled for options. Cottonwoods, I thought. Or the room. “Where is he?”
“Watching Oprah.”
I was urgent. “Can we talk in there?”
“What’s going on?” she demanded, looking under the bunk and into the cab. “Hoss, you got a lady in here?”
The box of Sneed’s personal property, recovered from Jesse’s car and dropped off by Aretha’s liaison, Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe, had produced a paid receipt for a Livingston business called Printing for Less.
I could think now, my bladder empty. But I could not connect. Printing what for less?
She had taken Sneed there, his mother said, and they had picked up a finished order of fliers advertising a new guide shuttle service, Sneed’s Car Ferry, and giving Jesse’s cell phone number as the contact.
“That’s my plan,” Sneed told me, his eyes bright, “for how I’m gonna live here.”
“Obviously we’re going to help him,” Aretha informed me.
That we hung there. She sent up another one.
“And also,” she said, “we’re going on a fishing trip. I am going to show off my skills.”
I turned the flier over. Orange paper, blank on the back. The front said Cheap Rates! Reliable Drivers! Satisfaction Guaranteed!
“Don’t look so troubled, Hoss. D’Ontay explained it to me. The service is essential. There’s no skills or overhead. You just drive the vehicles wherever the fishing guides want, park and leave the keys, drive back and do it again until you’re done. They call D’Ontay, they don’t have to go through the outfitter, so it’s cheaper. It’s a simple business.”
“What about Sorgensen?”
“Nobody likes him,” Sneed said.
“I don’t mean that. What about his business?”
“It’s a free country,” Aretha said.
“Inside a small town,” I said back.
Her head went side to side, like she was about to go cobra on me. But then she nodded.
“Then let’s talk to him.” She snapped off the TV. “Life is ninety percent money. Let’s just cut him a deal.”
Sorgensen was amped up and jolly. It was mid-day. All his guides were out. All his shuttles had run. There was rain on the way, and you could not drive along any road outside of town, could not take all that bug meat on glass, and miss the fact that the grasshoppers were in. Therefore the guides now worked hopper-droppers and everyone caught fish. Life could not be a whole lot better in the outfitting business.
We found Sorgensen grease-smeared and heaving for breath beside the propped-up hood of his van, but not even engine trouble could darken the revival of some particularly antic smile from the rodeo days.
“Good to see you folks again.” Sneed took a slap on the shoulder. “How you doing, kid? You look like new.”
Sneed had the orange flier in his hand. But he was carsick and seemed to struggle to recall the purpose of our visit.
“Say, one of you mind reaching in the engine here and grabbing that wrench? Dropped that little shit and couldn’t get to it.”
He gusted a peanuty laugh. I easily recovered the wrench from a crevice behind the oil cap. All it took was a regular physique.
“Ah, you’re a lifesaver. You folks looking to fish today?”
Aretha said, “Actually—”
“All my guides are out by now, but what say I call this retired fella I know and you folks do a little thing like Emigrant to Grey Owl?”
Aretha said again, “Actually—”
“You want I call this retired fella? Why don’t you come into the shop? Let’s get you what you need.”
“We don’t want to fish. We want to talk.”
Aretha might have been a bull. Sorgensen’s mouth began to run in crazy zig-zags.
“Hell, I was supposed to be someplace an hour ago but my carburetor has some dang thing flopping open too wide and flooding the engine—You folks ought to fish today. They’re on—Or maybe it ain’t the carburetor, heck I ain’t a mechanic—One of you got the time?—You think they’d make a watch band for larger people? Heck no—Noon?—Goddurnit, I’m way late. I gotta go. You’re looking good, kid. You folks weren’t interested in fishing?”
I just stood back, watched the speed work and the peanuts fly. Eventually Aretha got Sneed’s flier into Sorgensen’s hands and the idea into his head: he had competition on the shuttle end of his business. That was the off switch.
“Hell I do.”
He nearly handed the flier back. Then he seemed to actually read it, his lips moving, his pupils no bigger than pencil tips, sliding back and forth. It took a while.
“Hell now. Ain’t that a thing. Well.”
Managing the flier in a slit between fingers, he rattled a handful of peanuts, mashed them, gobbed them down and went for more. He mumbled as he chewed. About a thousand calories later he handed the flier back with his odd and unexpected response. “Blessings upon you then.” A magnanimous clownly bow, utterly difficult to look at. “It ain’t actually a business so much as a pain in my ass. You can have the durn thing.”
“We’ll give you a cut,” Sneed piped up, tuning in too late and drawing a sharp elbow from his mother. Her scowl said keep your loss of higher intellectual function to yourself.
“A cut? Will you now?” Sorgensen said, ruffling a greasy, peanuty hand up through his beard.
I didn’t listen, but after thirty minutes Aretha had somehow wrestled Sorgensen down from his ridiculous opening position at half of all profits to ten percent for the first season, five for the second, and none after that. Then a Bozeman taxi pulled into the lot. A cigarette end-over-ended out the window. Lyndzee skittered out in a denim mini skirt and clip-clop heels that were dicey on gravel.
I was there when the trunk popped. I lifted out her suitcases, getting a look at the baggage tags. “How was Saint Paul?” She looked grimly surprised. “Heavenly.”
> “Hilarious had engine trouble.”
“Fucker’s got more trouble than that,” she rasped, and wobbled off between the suitcases.
I followed her back to the scene of negotiations and found that Aretha and Sorgensen had settled and were now on amicable terms, discussing our prospects for a fishing trip in the Cruise Master.
Lyndzee’s voice dragged out. “Hello. I’m back.”
The Clinch Knot Page 25