“How were things in Denver, Zee-Zee Doll?”
“Mile high.”
“And Uncle Irvin?”
She turned, started toward the house. “Uncle Who?” she said, sounding like the gravel had risen from her feet to her throat.
Sorgensen laughed. “She’s got so much goldurned family.”
More peanuts ensued, flying into that great shaggy head. He tried to pass the jar around. I said, “Why don’t we fish the Roam?”
Sorgensen looked doubtful. Aretha too. Even Sneed.
“We know a spot where the fence is down,” I said. “And the ground is flat and hard a good mile back in there.” I was talking to Aretha, really, wanting to persuade her. “Then there’s a rancher’s road that’s better than a lot of places my vehicle’s been. We can fish our way down and then park by the river, sleep to the sound of it.”
I read her mind. “I don’t think Tucker’s going to bother us. He wouldn’t dare now.”
Sorgensen intervened: “You set up properly to camp, the three of you?”
“We’re good,” I told him, though the truth was we would need to take Aretha’s credit card to Pamida and pick up a few things.
“Got heat?” Sorgensen persisted. “The weather’s turning. It’s gonna get down to forty tonight and then rain later tomorrow. Probably knock these fires back finally.”
Aretha had her eyes wide, her mouth open. “Forty? Forty degrees? Hoss, we better have heat in that thing.”
Body heat ran through my mind. But I checked the thought and unhooked my eyes from Aretha. Sorgensen took it upon himself to inject his huge body through the side door of the Cruise Master, apparently to check the status of my long-dormant gas heater.
“Well, it’s all there, so you’re good to go, heat wise.” He left the Cruise Master rocking on its sloppy shocks as he side-stepped down.
I relented. “I’ll take a tank of LP.”
Sorgensen heaved off to provide. “On me,” he puffed when he had the tank secured on its bracket. “You folks are good people,” he said, “and I wish you the best.”
Obvious to a Woman
Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe pulled the Cruise Master over at one half mile after Carter’s Bridge and executed such a perfect chin-first saunter up to my window that I decided he had forgotten about my immunity in his deal with Cord Cook.
But instead his voice had an ornery pipsqueak edge to it: “You all didn’t say goodbye!”
“We’re not leaving.”
“Oh,” he said. “Not yet. Right.”
“Maybe not ever,” Aretha said.
“Oh.”
“My baby likes it here. We’re going into that guide shuttling business.”
“But—”
“We talked to Sorgensen. He said take it.”
Crowe had sunglasses on. The clue was in the chin. It zoomed out another quarter inch, like something from a 3-D movie screen.
“So where you all headed now?”
The Roam was the stuff of any fly fishermen’s dreams: sinuous and slick, reflecting the gorgeous pinks and purples of a smoke-addled sunset sky, trout rising everywhere. I struck out in a performance mode, cocky for Aretha, dropping long and lovely show casts into feeding lanes, launching drifts to break a hard man’s heart.
Nothing. Not a bump.
I changed flies. I went to a thinner tippet.
No.
Dog damn it.
I shortened up. I trailed a nymph.
Nyet.
“What’s the matter, Hoss?”
“Hang on just a minute. I think it’s an emerger. I’ll figure it out.”
But I continued emptily upstream, unable to reproduce even inklings of the hook-ups I had imagined. Now I was just trying to find anything that worked—parachutes, comparaduns, floating nymphs, midge clusters—trying to pry the lid off the cookie jar before I turned Sneed and his mother loose.
Nothing.
The trout kept rising. They rose everywhere, and then they rose in everywhere’s face, pummeling the surface. It didn’t help me to hear Aretha yelling, “There’s one, Hoss! Get it!” every time a nose came up. And there was the distraction of Sneed, veering and stumbling along the bank badly enough to make me think he would break either the fly rod I loaned him or his ankle, and quite possibly both.
Dog damn it. Bear down.
I lit a Swisher and dropped the mental flaps. I went back to basics, back to first intentions, made good offers. I shot cast after loving cast across that perfect, pink-on-pewter water, insinuating a pale evening dun into the feeding lanes of large, rising trout—every one of which nosed fussily around my offerings as if it were an old spinster rejecting bummed fruit at the supermarket.
I bit through my Swisher and then Aretha gave up on me. “I’m going to fish right here!” she called, wading into a run I had fished about forty yards ago.
Grunt.
“I’m going to use this fuzzy-butt pink thingy!” Snort.
“Tie a clinch knot, right?” Whatever.
I did not even turn around to watch it happen. I didn’t need to, because it happened so vividly, so perfectly, in my mind. I just stood there crotch-deep, scowling upriver, sucking on my broken Swisher and cussing through the countdown. And sure enough, it was not quite three minutes before Aretha began to yell—”Hoss! Hoss, I got one!”—whereupon I unsnapped my net and waded back to corral her trout and tweezer the bead head Pink Squirrel from its big kipe jaw.
“That’s a rainbow?”
“That’s a rainbow.”
“Oh … my … Lord. It is so pretty!”
I slipped a hand beneath the trout’s belly and swept the net out. Sneed came clomping to us with two good ankles but, as predicted, a broken rod.
“He’s a nice one.”
“Your mama caught him, Sneedy.”
“Damn right.” Aretha wanted high fives. “Hoo!”
I held his tail, moved the trout forward and back to send water through his tired gills.
“It’s a boy?”
“It’s a boy.”
“Oh … my … Lord,” Aretha said again, but this time she had straightened her back and widened her vision to take in the scene. This time she was seeing it—seeing the whole fish in the earth and sky and water. She was seeing the landscape that bled silver and pink and blue into her fish, that built those great straps of live muscle. She was gazing in awe at the snowcapped mountains that bred speed and instinct and brilliance into her fish as it faced upstream, upstream, like the twitching tail of a dream.
“Oh … my … Lord. Baby … look!”
“What, Mama? Where?”
“Everywhere, Baby!”
“Now watch this,” I said, and I let the trout go. “What did you do!” Aretha shrieked. She slugged me flat in the chest. “What in the hell did you just do?”
She was still fuming when I handed her a partitioned aluminum mess kit plate with a sausage, some macaroni and cheese, and baby carrots. A significant vodka-Tang could not assuage her.
“Some pig died for this,” she ranted with the sausage on the end of her fork. “Some innocent animal got trucked around the country, got its throat cut, got itself ground up and mixed with its own damn feet and ears, got wrapped in Styrofoam and cellophane—but you won’t kill a fish right out of pure clean water? Lord help me. White people sure are crazy.”
I sat on a flat, sun-warmed river rock. Actually, she had me laughing. I wanted her to go on and on, chopping me up like another doomed pig, but that lovely jilted fisherwoman just tensed there in my lawn chair, in firelight, and wanted push-back, wanted to fight, so I said, “You are about ninety-nine percent right,” and sure enough, Aretha Sneed wanted to excavate the other one percent, using very sharp tools.
My reply: “I just can’t kill them.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
“I see. You need somebody that looks like me to do your killing for you, that’s what you need.”
She waved the sausage in my face. “Dead,” she said. “Correct? And I’m not political, but let’s take Vietnam, Iraq, any of that, and you’re saying you are off the hook because you, you personally, don’t kill? And you can sleep on that?”
“Well, I do drink a lot.”
Now she was laughing—but just a little. “This stuff is actually not so bad,” she admitted, raising her tin cup for another sploosh of vodka-Tang.
“You make false analogies,” I told her. Silently, I called myself a fool for prolonging this. But my self surprised me, came back with It’s okay, Dog, trust her …
“People aren’t commodities. There’s no market for them.” Her eyes flashed hot. “Anymore,” I tacked on. “Not as food anyway.” And more: “Those hogs are raised to die.”
Jesus, Dog. Are you drunk?
Yes, I am.
Then shut up.
No, it’s okay, really. Trust her.
“I … okay, listen, please … there are explanations … biological … you know, resource issues … conservation, fish don’t feel pain, studies, all that … but at a time like that … at a time like that one we just had, that beautiful rainbow in my hands, remember it?”
“Mm,” she said.
“At a time like that, I cannot take life. I can only share it. I can touch it, feel it. I can come so close to something that is just so much like this thing inside me … are you listening?”
“Mm.”
“I don’t know, a wild trout is this perfect live thing that is … it’s like the spirit of something inside me … but inside me that spirit is trapped … it can’t speak … it can’t live enough, can’t get enough to eat, can’t jump like it should … but the trout does, the trout lives all that … and I … I have enough trouble, Aretha, really … and I just can’t kill … can’t kill that.”
I looked at her. “Can I?”
She was completely still and silent. Sneed’s eyes were wide upon me from across the fire, sausage grease reflecting from his lips.
Oh, shit. Dog damn it. Drunken bum speaks gibberish, appeals for meaning from listener. It’s okay. Trust her.
No, it’s not okay. Why don’t we just all go to a bar and yell at faces?
Because it’s different out here. Things change. They open up. Sure they do. I think I’ll just drink a bunch more and hibernate until it’s over.
You don’t need to. It’s fine.
Who the hell are you, anyway? Where did you come from all of a sudden?
I thrashed myself free. “Never mind,” I blurted into the glowing, honey-brown side of Aretha’s head. “You’re completely right,” I told her. “One hundred percent.”
She turned. She smiled.
“You know what, Hoss? So are you.”
She rose a bit unsteadily from the lawn chair and sat down beside me on my warm, flat rock. She took my hand but didn’t squeeze this time. This was a different touch. My mouth went dry.
She said, “And now I think you deserve to know a secret.” This intruding inner voice persisted: In. Out. In. Out. Breathe, Dog. Do it now.
“Yeah?” It was barely a squeak, all I could do. “So what’s your secret?”
“The first part is who it’s a secret from.” She held on to my hand as she drew her knees up and knocked gently against my shoulder.
“A secret from me?”
“Absolutely. But not originally.”
Wait. Breathe. That’s all you have to do.
“The original secret was a big one. I mean, I could not let it out. Those girls at the bad girl home, they would have teased me to death. But we watched about a hundred episodes of Bonanza, and after all that, in my mind, and my heart, if I was to give myself to any one of those boys …”
Wait. Breathe. Count. Whatever.
Aretha sighed, shook her head. Firelight gleamed in her eyes. “Oh, my girlfriends would have laughed. And I was so embarrassed, calling myself crazy, and believing I was crazy right up to a pretty short time ago. But … you know?”
“No,” I managed in a whisper. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I don’t.”
“You’ve seen the show.”
“I have.”
“Adam was gay. Good Lord, anybody could see that. He was going to sneak out on a girl and you-know-what. And Little Joe was spoiled. Little Joe wasn’t ever gonna grow up. Some poor woman was gonna have to powder his precious ass her whole damn life. So really, a person watches enough Bonanza, men-wise, it becomes obvious.”
She put her head to my shoulder.
“I mean, obvious to a woman.”
She let out a breath she might have been holding twenty years. I held mine tight.
“My secret choice,” she whispered to my neck, “was Hoss.”
Immersed, Together, Breathing
Imagine Sneed then. That poor kid was tickled and disgusted and confused and excited—and all of this taking place inside a brain full of sink holes and dead ends and infused with a high degree of loopiness.
“Argawagawbbk!” he said, coming at us with apparently violent intent—though if he was violently angry or violently happy was hard to tell.
But then, mid-assault, balance and gait problems paid Sneed a visit. He listed to his downriver side and walked into my lawn chair. Unable to change course, he trampled it flat, dragged it around his ankle beyond the circle of firelight. Over there, in the darkness by the Cruise Master, he started to laugh, and then, free of the chair, he wrenched open the Cruise Master door and stumbled inside.
“There are so many barriers in life,” Aretha mused, keeping her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her, felt warm muscle, hard rib, and the inward squeeze of her elbow. “And most of those barriers we can’t even see.”
I agreed with that. “And sometimes the things that we see aren’t actually barriers.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” She traced the bones on the back of my hand. “I’m sad, Dog. I’m sad that certain things have happened to me. I’m sad that I got into drugs and that I screwed up as a mother. I’m sad that D’Ontay suffered and that he’s like this now. It’s gonna be hard. Real hard. I’m gonna have to give up a lot to take care of him. None of this needy radical professor bullshit twisting my mind around, I’ll tell you that. I’m sad about that too, though. I’m sad about my time, my options tightening up. I’m sad about all the experiences, all the memories lost to D’Ontay that he may never share with me …”
“That kid jumped off a bridge. I don’t think I ever told you that.”
“What?”
“I mean for fun. As the perfect way of quitting his job. I couldn’t say no when he asked to go fishing with me. My guess is he’ll still have that spirit, no matter what.”
“And maybe die any moment,” Aretha said. “That scares me so much. Oh my Lord, Dog, that scares me. But couldn’t we all die at any moment? Really? Isn’t that exactly the way life really is?”
“Especially when you wade big rivers.”
She sighed. “Dog, this is all big rivers. Layers of big rivers, going every which way. Some day one is gonna get you. But you know what?”
She was looking at me, so close. I squeezed her. “Fortunately, I’m never quite sure what I know, with you. So tell me.”
“Inside all this trouble I feel happy. And the reason is that for the first time in my life, I feel like I see.”
She was so close. I turned and we were eye to eye, one hand span apart. She reached and brushed something from my cheek.
“You know?” she said. “I mean, I see somebody, and I understand something.”
Of course we were caught kissing when Sneed lurched back out of the Cruise Master with the ratty pup tent and the spare sleeping bag I kept under the galley bench.
“Don’t mind me,” he said, kiting off into the darkness with a false agility that raised his mother out of my arms.
We caught up with him
pitching the tent on a scrubby rise from which the road was visible but the Cruise Master was not. Out there toward Livingston, a few stray cars moved through the darkness, past the gash in Tucker’s fence, and onward in their private directions.
The Clinch Knot Page 26