The Clinch Knot

by John Galligan

  “You’re a good kid,” his mother told my buddy Sneed. “You always were.”

  He pounded stakes with a rock. The ground was dry and hard. A stake bent. Sneed dropped everything. He looked up. “You like Dog?” he asked his mother.

  She nodded. “Isn’t that funny? It turns out that I do.”

  Sneed picked up the bent stake, sharp at the point. He picked up the heavy rock he used as a hammer. He placed the rock in front of him, focused the center of the stake’s concave surface over the opposite arc of the rock, and he bent the stake straight.

  He told his mother, “I didn’t think so about you, not really, not at first. But you have a lot of potential.”

  Then he turned away and resumed his efforts with the tent.

  “It’s going to be cold, Baby.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You didn’t eat much, either.”

  “I’m fine.”

  I moved and stood beside her, gathered her shoulders in my arm.

  “Baby, don’t you want help putting up that tent?”

  “Mother,” he said sharply, “I’m fine.”

  “Is it going to be cold in here too?”

  I lifted Aretha’s shirt away from her waist, touched her beneath. “I never use the heat in here. And I especially don’t think we’ll need it tonight.”

  She pecked me on the forehead, raised her arms overhead. “Go on,” she said. “See what I got on.”

  It was a brassiere in green-brown camouflage, and I, of course, was speechless.

  “I bought it to piss off the professor,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Does it work for you too?”

  “So much,” I said, “that I’m going to have to remove it right away.”

  In my bunk, after a long time just nuzzling, kissing, taking our time because it felt like we had known each other for years, we finally went just so far as to move me to my knees between her, my hands and her hands tangling up as we put pieces together, and then something—a barrier? a non-barrier?—something stopped us, and in rushed the sound of the Roam.

  In that silence, the first true silence of our time together, the river roared in our ears. But it roared with a delicate complexity, a denseness and a cool warmth, truly not one sound but a weave of sounds, as if there were a thousand rivers out there, a million rivers out there, and we were in them, immersed, together, breathing.

  “Do you hear that?” I whispered.

  “I can’t hear anything else.”

  Her hands moved again, found me pulsing.

  She said, “I don’t ever want to hear anything else.”

  Then she found center. I moaned.

  “Except that,” she said. “Come on, Dog. Let me hear some more of that.”

  Knocked Around in the Clown Barrel Too Much

  We dozed a bit, and I dreamed that the river was a highway. Aretha and I needed roadside help. We were trying to have a picnic but we had no peanut butter. Cars whipped past us until finally one stopped. In my dream I spent the longest time trying to stand up, see who it was, but I could not find my balance and Aretha kept pulling me down, pulling me down, trying to make love right then and there.

  “Why don’t we do it in the road?”

  “Not on the highway.”

  “Huh? What?”

  She was sitting up, for real, over me. “Nothing. Stupid dream.”

  We did make love then, for real, a second time, but it was strangely unlike our first. Something felt off-center in our bodies. Somehow the flesh felt distant, like we were touching each other with protective mittens across a glass divider. Aretha tried to take me from the top. I do remember that. I remember the seasick feeling. I remember Aretha’s strokes felt erratic and faintly painful. And I remember a weird numbness in my mouth when she came down to kiss me, murmuring, “Dog? Sweetie? You okay? Tell me what you like.”

  I remember that I felt panicky. I couldn’t feel much. I didn’t know what I liked. I could not form words. I don’t remember what Aretha did about it, but I know that at some point she soon became a blank, a dumb weight that smacked down on top of me—but that is all I can pull back from those early, telltale moments. I still shake and sweat when I try.

  When it happened, it happened fast. It happened inside me on the level of instinct, with the kind of headlong adrenaline magic that sends a trout up a waterfall.

  Something woke me. It may have been Aretha gagging against my chest. Or it may have been the jolt to the Cruise Master when Hilarious Sorgensen jammed a two-by-four under the outside door latch and began to kick the other end down into the hard dirt.

  But I turned Aretha off me and sat up in a head-spinning lunge. The heater gas was on but the pilot wasn’t lit. That was the insight of instinct. I never meant to use the heater. I never touched it. Therefore the pilot valve had been opened already, sometime before, and the valve on the outside tank was open now. That one small string of logic appeared from nowhere into my hampered brain and sent me naked over the edge of the bunk.

  My legs collapsed beneath me. I tore skin from my back against the corner of the galley table. I got onto hands and knees and spent a weird ten seconds looking for my instant Folgers—somehow I thought making coffee would solve the problem—and then for an even more bizarre stretch of time, having found my jar of Folgers, I crawled around the floor looking for matches. It was the most frightening kind of accident that I did not find them. It was blind luck that I spiraled back to an earlier thought: the heater gas was open and the pilot wasn’t lit.

  I hurt Aretha, the way I yanked her off the bunk and to the floor. She cried and mumbled and looped a fist at me. Then she threw up between my hands and knees and I crawled right through it. But the Cruise Master’s side door wouldn’t open. Something blocked it.

  I crawled back through the galley and into the cab. Sorgensen blurred through moonlight past the windshield and put his weight against the passenger door as I tried to push it open. I was weak, impaired. The monster checked me easily. Then, desperate, my mind skipped rails. I thought Sorgensen was helping me—the good man—but the job was just too tough for the two of us.

  I think it was the appearance of little Lyndzee—running into my vision, screaming at Sorgensen, hitting him, kicking his legs and knocking him down—that tipped me off to the true nature of our situation.

  I bulled the door open and staggered out. Real air was a shock, like cold water, and now Lyndzee was screaming at me, shoving me along the outside of the Cruise Master while she tried to keep Sorgensen on the ground with a flurry of sharp-booted kicks. He caught her leg finally, pulled her down with him in the dust.

  “Forget me!” Lyndzee screamed. “Get her out!”

  I kicked out the two-by-four. My side door swung open. I wasn’t smart enough to move aside and so took a massive hit of propane that dropped me to my knees. But I saw Aretha’s hand reach out. I grabbed it. I pulled, and it seemed that she came to me like a heavy, lovely, played-out fish. Still alive.

  Stupid me: I took the time to kiss her.

  And now Hilarious Sorgensen had broken some piece of Lyndzee, made her shriek in pain, and the sloppy fat man had wallowed upright. Where his shotgun came into the picture, I have no idea. It must have been there, on the dirt between us, knocked loose by Lyndzee and for me to pick up while I was kissing Aretha.

  Sorgensen aimed it at me. He could barely breathe. “Both … of you … stand … together.”

  I had no idea I was naked. I kneed up shakily, stood in front of Aretha, understanding, somehow, that she was.

  “Give me that,” I said, and I wobbled straight into the shotgun barrel, solid proof that natural gas causes brain damage.

  Sorgensen’s beard ruffled with each word. “I’ll … give you … this.”

  Anyone’s guess where my next words came from: “You musta got knocked around in the clown barrel too much.”

  “Git back and … go stand next to her.”

  I was pure blind synapses
, fish up a waterfall: “I guess you only got one shell in there, huh? That’s why you need us together?” Maybe Sorgensen hadn’t understood his own logic. Now he saw it. Uncertainty made those buried pig eyes begin to reach and dart. “There’s three of us here,” I threw out. “Four if you count my buddy. Look.”

  Sneed had awakened and come to the rim of the rise above us. He was a dark shape. “Go back to the tent,” I hollered at him. “Get your … weapon.”

  Of course Sneed was confused, frightened—what weapon?—at a loss for what to do next. So was Sorgensen.

  “Lyndzee!” he bellowed, not daring to turn and look for her. “Go to the van!”

  She was moving, crawling. But I said, “She can’t help you.”

  Aretha began to vomit behind me. Sneed had taken my order and gone back toward the tent. I took a nude step toward Sorgensen, freezing him. Meanwhile, Lyndzee had lifted herself from the dirt. Hopping like an injured bird, she had made it to Sorgensen’s van.

  I took another step, staying on the fat man’s mind.

  “Better shoot me soon. Sneed’ll be back any second. And you know his brain is damaged. His boundaries are down.”

  “Lyndzee, damnit woman, get my sidearm!” Sorgensen began to tremble with the ferocity of panic and rage. One more step closer for me. “Now!”

  But Lyndzee had the sidearm already, was hopping out with a heavy pistol, aimed square on Sorgensen’s back. I worried about angles. Behind me Aretha had risen to her knees, bleeding freely from one arm, and she began to rant about fire safety in a tone that was both loopy and vicious, as though she were on a public service visit to the Ku Klux Kindergarten. “Look,” I said to Sorgensen. Across rangeland from the highway bounced headlights, coming fast.

  “Just lay it down,” I said. “Spare us. Lyndzee’s about to blow a hole in all that.”

  Sorgensen jerked around to look at her. She was only ten feet behind him. I had the reptile sense to dive beneath the Cruise Master and pull Aretha with me. Hilarious Sorgensen began, “You stupid, crazy little—” and she pulled the trigger.

  Wham! The sound nearly cracked my head open. Lyndzee flew back one way and Sorgensen blew apart in the other direction and it was over.

  Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe filled the next few dreamlike moments by slamming out of his cruiser with pistol drawn, barking commands that nobody followed except for Sneed, who dropped the stick he had carried over the ridge.

  Then in gasping bursts Lyndzee said to all of us, “Just because I’m a drug addict doesn’t make me a bad person. Nobody can make me a bad person. Nobody can do that. I decided that. It won’t happen.”

  None of us objected. But she repeated her resolution three times before she limped up and shot Sorgensen again.

  No Harm Done?

  Sheriff Roy Chubbuck, vanquisher of Dane Tucker and liberator of the Roam River, and Hilarious Sorgensen, behemoth, beast, outfitter, ex-clown, and dealer of substances A-Z, died on the same day and with approximately opposite degrees of grief and fanfare.

  Sheriff Chubbuck died predictably and quietly with his wife and grown-up daughters at his side, causing murmurs of sorrow and relief to ripple through Park County and beyond.

  What a story, people said. Their Sheriff was a good, quiet, hardworking man who with his last stores of energy had managed a successful counterattack against several kinds of evil and pulled it off. Over the next few days, the national media would discover the Dane Tucker bust and come in sniffing and prodding, pontificating from Livingston street corners into their wind-baffled microphones. Folks just walked on by.

  The sheriff’s funeral at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Livingston drew six hundred people, including a shell-shocked yours truly, plus a shell-shocked Aretha and Sneed, as among those who could not fit into the church and so participated from outside, listening through the windows and soaking in the first day of a slow, blessed, three-day rain that drowned out the forest fires for good.

  Sorgensen died alone under a surgeon’s racing fingers in a scarcely human puddle of blood and guts and fat, disappointing no one but a small cadre of local death penalty advocates who were regrouping after the loss of Sneed as their poster boy. I saw in the newspaper that Sorgensen’s funeral was in Big Timber. I cannot tell you who was there.

  And poor Lyndzee Peterson, only twenty-seven after all, had crossed her Rubicon, drug-wise, all over state and local newspapers and television with her “story”—her confessions of crime and addiction and her promise to herself and to God and to her family (Clyde Park, Ringling, and Belgrade) to clean up her life. For good this time.

  In the details, the drug story was a new one entirely, interesting for everyone involved.

  Lyndzee came clean on her part. She was the one who stole drugs for Sorgensen. Not the only one, she was quick to point out, because she and Hilarious had only been together two years, and there were plenty of other girls before her who took those quick-hitting trips around the country to raid the clinics and pharmacies and pet hospitals of Sorgensen’s fly fishing clients.

  As for the rest, Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe invited me and Sneed and Aretha to visit him in Chubbuck’s office, whereupon he revealed a multi-layered agenda that began with an overreaching description of combat wounds to his head (bruised eye socket) and left arm (not a break, fortunately, but painful, and in the sling for a couple weeks).

  “But you folks are okay, I hope, no harm done?”

  “You mean no harm done by you?”

  Russell gave a little shrug and tried to charm us with a smile. “You know what I mean. Things have worked out okay, right? Why shouldn’t we just leave things as they are?”

  A long, long silence. I could sense Aretha’s blood heating up. I gazed around the office at Chubbuck’s artifacts from a lifetime of enmeshment with the land. Then, “Russell,” I said, “just how are things, exactly?”

  He sat back in the sheriff’s chair. He put his hands—both—behind his head and his boots on the desk corner. Then he quickly dismantled all that, realigned his sling, and leaned over the desk to press the intercom button. “Ms. Park-Ford?”

  “What.”

  “Could we get a round of sodas in here?”

  There was no answer, just a click of static. Moments later Chubbuck’s fireplug receptionist bustled in and out, leaving four wet Sprites on the desk exactly in front of Russell. “No thanks,” all three of us said to his offer.

  He cracked his can, refreshed himself with a sip.

  “We’ve been onto Sorgensen for a long time.”

  Aretha and I traded glances at the “we.” Crowe caught it, read it, forged on with the sale.

  “Of course we knew he was dealing. He was dealing as far back as twenty years ago on the rodeo circuit. But something about his set up at the Fly ‘n’ Float seemed different to us. And so we—”

  “Russell,” I interrupted, “you made those injuries to yourself, right? After you let Sneed out of that transport ambulance?”

  He tried to off me with a silly-Dog smile. His Sprite can clanked against his teeth.

  “And speaking of we, your mother picked Sneed up in Billings, drove him around until you were ready, then set him down in Livingston. Chubbuck was going to look incompetent. You were going to catch Sneed on Main Street and look like a wounded hero. And you just missed him, right? Tick Judith snapped him up before you saw where he went.”

  “That’s over,” Crowe said.

  “Do you plan to run for real sheriff, Russell?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because if you do, and we hear about it, it is most definitely not over.” I traded looks with Aretha. “I think we’ll see to that.”

  Nothing from Russell. He looked down at the Sprite rings on Chubbuck’s desk.

  “What happened with your father, Russell?”

  We waited. Russell said to the desk: “He built Ma a nice place in the Paradise Valley, next door to Michael Keaton. The county board accused him of emb
ezzlement.”

  “Of course he was innocent.”

  A long pause, now fingerpainting with the water on the desk: “So I hear.”

  “He was set up, I’ll bet. By his enemies. Is that also what you hear? And that therefore all this is okay?”

  Russell didn’t answer. Finally he pushed the intercom again.

  “Ms. Park-Ford?”

  “I’m here. I’m here every day all day long.”

  “Great. And how about Investigator Collins? Is he still here?”