The Clinch Knot (10 page)

Like an Escher Print

 

Sneed looked ashen and diminished, like he had aged forty years in the last five days. But beyond that was a bigger shock: he didn’t know me. He mistook his buddy Dog, I guess, for a nurse in a Huckleberry Finn costume.

“Gotta pee,” he croaked.

He had oxygen in his nose, like Chubbuck. His ankles were zip-cuffed to one another, and the plastic cuff between them was zip-cuffed to the end rail of the bed. His wrists were zip-cuffed to the canvas strap that held down his torso.

“Pee.”

His hands had just enough play to reach the call button resting on his stomach. He twisted his right arm inside the zip cuff and reached for the button. I stopped his hand.

“Sneed. It’s me. Dog.”

He struggled against me. He had lost some strength, but not all of it, not the raw part. I held his hand back, but his body bucked hard beneath the strap. The bed skidded. His head and shoulders rose up. His neck bulged. His eyes strained with a glassy, blank ferocity. “Gaahh!” he raged. Then abruptly he was still. A spreading wet spot appeared below his hands, and the smell of medicated urine rose in the room. The spot widened to the circumference of a dinner plate and stopped.

“I’m sorry, Sneedy. But I’m not supposed to be in here.”

He mumbled, eyes closed.

“It’s Dog.” I poked him up and down the ribs. “Come on. It’s me. Talk to me.”

“She just wanted the check,” he replied. “Who? Jesse?”

“For the welfare money. For drugs.”

“Sure. I hear you, Sneedy.”

“So did they. The wanted the government money.” Tears seeped out. “That’s all it was about.”

I still held his hand. I squeezed it. “Who is they? Sorgensen? Gray? The sheriff’s people?”

“Kellers.”

“Kellers? Who’s Kellers?”

He opened his eyes. For a long moment I thought he stared emptily, tasting the salt from the tears on his lips. Then he startled me. “Dog?”

“Yeah? Right here, buddy.”

“I’m all mixed up, Dog.”

“You’re going to be fine, Sneedy. Just hang in there.”

“Did Jesse drop the boat?”

“I can check. Where should I look?”

“No. She dropped it already. I remember.”

“Where?”

He shut his eyes, was quiet a long moment. “I … I’m all mixed up.”

“We’ll sort it out. Don’t worry.”

“But that’s why I killed them.”

I leaned over him, stopped his mouth, whispered into his ear. “Sneed. Don’t say that. Wherever that comes from, I don’t care,
don’t say it.
Can you remember?”

He looked at me, his eyes teary and desperate. “Am I in trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For something you didn’t do. So don’t say anything. Nothing. You got it?”

“Dog …” He sighed. He shook his head and nearly smiled. “Dog, I think … I think I been talking all day.”

I squeezed his hand again. “That wouldn’t surprise me, Sneedy. Not at all. But from now on you gotta shut up.”

“Okay, Dog.”

“I’m going to figure out how to get you a lawyer.”

“Mmmm.”

“And there’s somebody coming from Houston. Someone from your family.”

“I got no family. I remember that.”

“I think it’s going to be your foster family. Used to be from Little Rock. The people with the pronghorn. That’s all I can figure.”

“Kellers?”

“Is that the name?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes closed again. More tears leaked. “Yeah. I’m mixed up in trouble.”

“What is it, Sneed?”

“Did Jesse drop the boat?”

“You said she did.”

He looked around his room. “Then where is she?”

“She’s … Do you remember where you saw Jesse the last time?” He tried. I saw the effort, saw his head come forward, his jaw clench and tremble. “In … in … at the fence?”

“What fence? Whose?” He looked at me: “What?”

“A fence.”

“No. A picnic.”

“A picnic? Where? When, Sneedy?”

His head fell back. For a good while he was silent. When he spoke again, I knew the inside of his head was like an Escher print, pathways leading up and down at the same time, right and left simultaneously, his thoughts traveling in impossible, nonsensical circuits through damaged brain tissues. I saw how much he suffered.

He cleared his throat. He opened his eyes. He looked at me squarely, deceptively clear-eyed. He said, “All you wanted was the welfare check.”

And then, while I squeezed Sneed’s hand and touched his face, the door opened. I didn’t bother to turn because I knew. I heard the hum of Sheriff Chubbuck’s electric tricycle coming into the room. I heard Deputy Russell Crowe’s voice.

“He’s in here,” Russell said. “I thought so. And gosh, Sheriff, I don’t know where Deputy Schmidt might of went. I guess he just walked off.”

Up in the Damn Ponderosa

 

My tax guy, Harvey Digman, on the phone from Boston, said, “Bail you out? Again?”

“It’s only five hundred bucks, Harvey. Or a thousand property.”

“How about give them the title to your whatsis?”

“I just sold it to someone else.” My legs went weak again.

“Well then you’ve got money. That vehicle had to be worth a couple thou in vintage parts anyway. Wooden wheels and whatnot.”

“I exchanged it for a photograph.”

The old man sighed and smacked his lips on something. Soup. Or a cocktail. “You mean for an Ansel Adams, first printing. Yosemite. Something like that. Am I right, Dog?”

“No.”

“One of Avedon’s cowboy portraits then.”

“A guy at a party, lining up some coke. That got me in to see my buddy in the hospital, and that got me obstructing justice.”

Ice tinkling now: a cocktail. Harvey liked the Shirley Temple, et al. “Your doings are a mystery, Dog.”

“Five hundred, Harvey. Come on. I’ll pay you back.”

This initiated the long silence it deserved.

“Harvey, please. This is different.”

“It’s always different, Dog. Therefore it’s the same.”

“I tie flies for a guy out here. It’s good money.”

“You can’t even come home now. You don’t have a vehicle. So where’s my investment?”

“Where’s your investment?”

“Three cherries, Doll, in the next one, please.”

“Where’s the love, Harvey? That’s my question.”

“The love is in the no.”

“The what?”

“The no.”

“Harv.”

“Not you, Sweetheart. Yes, to you. Absolutely yes.
Ja. Oui. Hai dozo.”
Harvey had his hand imperfectly over the mouthpiece. “The no is to this former client of mine who—”

“That’s it,” the jailer said when I hung up. “That’s your call.”

He was stocky and cross-eyed, concentrating on his work, breath whistling through his nose.

“You gonna need a blanket?”

But it was for a different purpose that he returned shortly along the dim and empty hallway, looking down as if perplexed by the squeaky overkill of his shiny black boots.

“Uh—” he was reading from a printout “—Mister Og-Log … Vee?”

“Oglivie.”

“O-glow-vivee?”

“Dog,” I said.

The jailer turned around, a little startled, confronting me with a rearview of pistol and cuffs. He turned back. “This is a secure area. There are no animals allowed.”

I noticed he was sweating as he revisited his printout. “Your bail,” he announced, “has been posted.”

In the reception area, waiting for me with unconcealed irritation, was a handsome black woman, thirty-five maybe, tallish and sturdy, dressed in tight jeans and a polo shirt that exploded pink-pink-pink off the dark brown of her skin.

The jailer clicked the door shut. I was startled. He had to shoo me out.

“How—” I began.

“I forgot his name. Some guy said he was related to an actor.” She measured me with clear suspicion. “Or else he wasn’t. I forget. He pulled me over coming in from the airport. I thought it was DWB, but he knew it was gonna be me and he recommended I get you out.”

I glanced at the jailer. His eyes were all mixed up, looking everywhere and nowhere. This stunning woman held a cell phone in one hand and it was buzzing, blinking red through the gaps of her fingers. I don’t know why, but the concept of a grenade came to mind. “He said you would need a ride,” she said. “Let’s go. And you owe me five hundred bucks.”

I said it again: “I’ll pay you back.”

“That’s right,” she said. “You will.”

Outside, sun and smoke concocted a brilliant brook trout sunset. Beneath this, mainly oblivious, this woman answered her phone.

“Yeah? Well you wouldn’t come up here with me. That’s the kind of support you are. What? Don’t you call me that! What? I’ll tell you exactly what kind of man I think you are.
What?
”

She turned her back on me, stormed off into the landscaping. Moments later, she seemed to forget herself, came pacing back.

“Yes, I saw him. They got him shackled to the bed. He has no idea who I am. Because last time he saw me I was someone else, remember? This whole thing seems like a damn dream. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I just walked out the fire station. I didn’t have time for paperwork. Here I am suddenly up in … up in the damn Ponderosa.”

She glanced at me, gave a little shiver.

“I gotta go.” She listened, sighed. “Yeah. Sure you do. Whatever you said and me too only more and all that. I won’t. I won’t let them do that. Don’t worry.”

A pickup rumbled past blaring honky-tonk. Her eyes followed that past the railroad depot and the grain elevator and off into fathomless rangeland toward sunset on the Crazy Mountains.

“Just like on
Bonanza.
I’m not kidding. Oh yeah? You ought to get out of your ivory tower and watch a little TV sometime. Get a picture.”

She shoved the phone into her jeans pocket. Then she strode past me toward a jade-green rental car at the curb. “Aren’t you coming?”

When I was on the passenger seat beside her, engine running, she said, “Okay, listen. My name is Aretha. Aretha Sneed.”

I blinked at her. Her eyes were vivid hazel. Her lip gloss had sparkle. Her accent was deep south but not warm.

“You know,” she said, “his mother?”

And then, with a sigh and a quick survey through the windshield of prospects ahead, she went one further: “And you are who again? Eustace Crabb?”

Long Enough to Hang Him

 

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

Purely, I believed, for the sake of manners, Sneed’s firefighting mother forced this disclaimer out through gritted teeth as we pulled away into greater Livingston.

“I’m upset. Of course you’re not Eustace Crabb. I just hoped for a little more support on the home front.”

We were heading north on Park Street, past Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop, past the Murray Hotel, past the rail yard and the depot and the grain elevator—and then we ran out of town.

“Oh, my Lord.”

Aretha Sneed hit the brakes and turned around in the lot of a taxidermist/tanning studio/archery range.

“Oh … my … Lord in heaven. My poor baby. What was he doing here?”

We headed back into Livingston’s evening lights, smoldering up against a low and smoky sky. In no time flat we had drizzled out the other end of town beneath the interstate bridge. Before she could reverse directions we were out into the skanky scatter of entrepreneurial conversions that would eventually lead to Hilarious Sorgensen’s Fly ‘n’ Float.

“Your baby was in love.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

She turned around again in the lot of a realtor who promised affordable farmettes in the Paradise Valley.

“Do not tell me he was in love with some cowgirl white chick.”

I observed this guideline in silence as she gunned that little Geo Metro like it was a pumper truck and we streaked back in past the Pamida and Town and Country Foods, coming up fast behind a cattle truck that had strayed in off the interstate. Now it was hue and yaw, hoof-scatter and stench, Aretha Sneed trapped in it with a log truck behind us and a steady drain of tourists down the opposite lane. Blowing the horn of her rental car, she discovered, produced nothing more helpful than a stream of panicked cow shit out through the ovals of the truck’s back gate.

“Oh, my Lord—”

I glanced at her. Her bottom lip was between her teeth. She gripped the wheel like she would snap it.

“He was in love not just with her,” I said. “With this whole place.” A steer brayed. Hooves clattered. The truck lurched, giving hope, then stopped again.

“Do not tell me that,” she said unevenly into the windshield. “I have been looking for my boy, hoping and praying for the past five years. And when I finally find him—” her voice cracked “—he’s half dead in the damn territory, and the plan here in Virginia City, as I understand it, is to keep him alive long enough to hang him.”

“I’ve been working on that.”

“By the neck.”

“I have some ideas.”

“From the gallows.”

The cattle truck jolted into motion. But the scale of it in front of us, given her city driver’s habit of tailgating, obscured the fact that we had once more traveled out the north end of town into rangeland.

She cussed unbecomingly, slung the car around once more. I let her head back into Livingston a third time before I asked finally, “So who is Eustace Crabb?”

She was biting her lip again, gripping the wheel too tightly.

“He’s the town drunk on
Bonanza.”

“And what are we looking for?”

“I …”

But she seemed short of breath, suddenly needed to think about where she was. She pulled over. We sat at the edge of a gun shop parking lot, pickups straggling past. She closed her eyes.

“I left as soon as they called me. I just walked off my shift. I have been traveling all day to get here.”

She looked at me. Startled tears formed, and she began to shake, taking huge, slow breaths in the hope of pulling it all back together.

“I think … Oh, my Lord … I think I’m just hungry.”