The Clinch Knot (12 page)

Hell on Trespassers

 

Aretha Sneed had that pistol to the temple of the chief radish skinhead before I could even form intelligible notions toward talking her out of it. So instead I said to the scrawny one, trembling with his back against the blaze of his own truck lights, “A couple days ago you told me you knew the clinch knot.”

I handed him a hook and a length of tippet.

“So tie me one.”

“F-f-fuck you.”

“Watch your language, Hochstetter.” This was Aretha. Now she had the fat senior skinhead on his face in the ditch.

“That’s all you have to do,” I said. “Tie the knot and she doesn’t shoot Sergeant Schultz over there.”

“It-it’s dark.”

“Turn around. There. Now it’s light.”

“What’s this?” Aretha jammed the barrel against some tattoo on the back of the fat one’s neck. “A target?”

“He can’t do it,” that skin blurted into gravel and dust. “Denny can’t do shit. But I can tie one. I tied a million of them.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Denny? A Nazi named Denny?”

“I guess it’s Nazi Lite,” Aretha said.

I grabbed the little shit, spun him around so Aretha and the. 38 could switch necks. I stood up the chief radish, gave him the hook and tippet. “Tie,” I said.

As his fingers fumbled at the job, I prayed for no traffic. It had been simple to summon the faded pink pickup to that spot along Tucker’s fence. I had simply pounded on the intercom button, screeched some angry truths about my right to fish all that water that Dane Tucker had fenced off. After that we waited beside a
NO TRESPASSING
sign a half mile down until the pickup arrived. It took five minutes.

“There,” said the chief Nazi Lite radish skinhead.

His hand trembled toward me through the headlights. Aretha pressed the barrel into Denny and Denny whimpered.

But his buddy had it right, a perfect clinch knot. “Whu … whu … what’s this about?”

“History,” I told him. “You heard of that?”

Aretha scowled, let Denny go, said, “Auf Wiedersehen, punks.” And then, grimly, driving us away, she added, “Shit.”

“Hogan’s Heroes
too?” I said as we came to a quiet stop beside a trailered drift boat in the Fly ‘n’ Float parking lot.

“Just a little. Mostly
Bonanza.
That’s my speciality.”

“Let me guess. You and the professor? Re-runs late at night?”

“Hell no.”

“Fire house?”

“I read.”

“I’m way off?”

“Mm-hm. Miles away.”

Hilarious Sorgensen was buzzed on something supplemental. He was extra bloated, glassy-eyed and uncertain on his feet. We had gone behind the shop to the attached house. Sorgensen had not answered his door right away. The zeppelin shadow of the man had lunged about the walls inside until it became evident he was arming himself against the hazards of the drug trade.

Now, dangerously short of breath, he filled his doorway, fumbling an over-under shotgun in his fat fingers and whistling like an elk through his nose. He didn’t recognize me at first. He was agitated and very dangerous until Aretha darted out of his desiccated shrubbery and stripped his weapon. Accordingly, the big man’s first ten words were impairments of “Huh?” And all of this was back-lit by a porn movie flickering into noisy culmination on a plasma screen behind him.

“Just an informational visit,” I assured him.

“What’s she got a gun for?”

“Same reason you did. Personal safety.”

I cannot bring myself to share openly the most precise analogy for the sight of Sorgensen’s clotted purple lips, straining inside the hair circle of his dirty beard to produce the foulness that came out.

“Get the motherfuck off my property.”

“I’m not seeing why you’d react that way.”

“I’ll call the sheriff.”

“I’ll bet not.”

He changed tack. “Well, Godalmighty. I still got a few good things in stock,” he wheezed back at me. “You don’t have to rob me. You can have it.”

“Calm down,” I said. “It’s none of that.”

He stepped back into the light of his cluttered foyer. Sorgensen’s eyes were knife slashes through cushions of flesh. He wore boxer shorts. Below these, he was held up by jellied-leg molds inside white vinyl braces under Velcro straps. A tent of a shirt—Denver Broncos, home jersey, 00—covered the rest. He looked from me to Sneed’s mother and back, got his bearings, and I saw the switch take place:
clown mode.

“Hoo-wee,” he blared. “Good to see you folks. You just startled me. That’s all.”

He pawed the wall, hit a light switch. Behind him rodeo figurines pitched and bucked from every surface, plaques clogged the walls, trophies and ribbons stood in for books on the shelves. “You about gave old ‘Larious a heart attack.” I could have sworn those were Lyndzee’s bruisy legs spanning the plasma before he zig-zagged across the carpet and snapped it off.

“Why don’t you folks come on in. Have some drinks. See how I can help you.”

I took the shotgun from Aretha, cracked it, dropped the shells in my pocket. I tossed the weapon onto a sprung old velvet settee.

“That’s all we wanted in the first place,” I said.

Sorgensen yammered out colorful distractions about Lyndzee’s dying uncle in Memphis as he served something sweet and yellow and potent-smelling over a chalky ice cube in a jelly glass. Aretha and I sat like chess rooks at opposite ends of a complex and symmetrical living room set that was thirty years old and all in powder-blue velour. I caught her with a look: no.
Don’t drink that.
She rolled her eyes:
as if.
But where to take it from there, with Sorgensen blowing smoke, clowning from inside a barrel, was an open question.

“The guy’s got three kidneys or something. Christ, her family’s weird. The guy’s got goddamned ovarian cancer for all I know. Do I have pants on?” He did a pirouette—or more of a Y-turn. “No, I do not. I’m sorry, little lady. Avert your gaze. Whooee, I swear to old Jim Bridger you’re a lovely one. Say—would you folks care for something stronger? I wasn’t kidding earlier. I got some good stuff around here.”

“No thanks.”

“Anything?”

“No.”

He toppled back into a recliner. He popped his feet a few inches into the air as if he had bounced, comic-like, which he hadn’t. One of his dirty slippers fell off.

“You wanna watch a film?”

Hell, just dive in, I decided. Sorgensen was ripped, and in fantasia, you never knew. Plus, we were the party with the loaded weapon.

“We just want you do us one simple favor.” I held up the hook and tippet for him to squint at. “Tie a clinch knot if you can.”

“Huh?”

“A clinch knot. Can you demonstrate it?”

“You’re a fisherman,” he countered. “Don’t you know?”

“I … I’m blocked. It happens. You know? Sometimes I start thinking too much.”

His eyes darted from me to Aretha, trying to figure us out. Aretha smiled at him, the Smith and Wesson primly across her lap, pointing benignly off toward a certificate of appreciation from the Wyoming Rodeo Authority.

“Hell,” said Sorgensen at last, “I can’t even tie my own shoes.” He wiggled his sausage fingers. “Gotta wear slip-ons.” He grunted as if trying to rise. “Now the girly, if she was here …”

I felt Aretha’s look.
Here it is.
“Oh,” I said, like casual. “Can Lyndzee tie knots?”

Sorgensen grunted, bared his teeth. “You think I let that girly sit around and watch shows all day?”

He tried to get up. What I didn’t see coming was the electronic tilt function that activated the chair and finished the job. He lumbered straight through the path of Aretha’s pistol to a closed door at the end of the living room. He opened the door. He flicked on stark white lighting and backed out of the way, revealing a fly tier’s bench under a carefully organized mountain of material.

“Girly ties for the shop,” he grunted, swinging his girth sideways to squeeze in, “eight hours a day. She’s got real good fingers. She can whip finish one-handed. She wraps rods. She braids lanyards. Hell. Lemme show you …”

As he maneuvered inside, I looked at Aretha, ready to shake my head, no. As in
Not them. Lyndzee wouldn’t tie that knot.
But Sneed’s mother already had her
shit
scowl on, was up with her pistol and angling like a chess bishop for the door.

“Let’s go,” she hissed at me.

I looked back through a window from outside. Sorgensen was spinning slowly in the middle of his living room set, looking for us, meaning to show us, apparently, the entire panoply of knots.

“Now Henderson Gray,” I advised Sneed’s mother as she drove us back into town, “is a lawyer and more-or-less a normal citizen. He’s not a Nazi or a drug dealer.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the pistol in that fancy bag of yours. We can’t just barge in and wave a gun in his face. We don’t have that kind of leverage.”

“Then how about this pronghorn thing?”

“What about it?”

She was getting smarter, in vehicular terms, staying back from a truckload of sheep that lurched off the freeway and rumbled away in a cloud of exhaust toward some dark ranch to the north.

“You said he chases them up to twenty miles,” she said. “Across Dane Tucker’s land. But he doesn’t work for Tucker any more. He got fired. So does he have permission?”

“I don’t know.”

“Early
Bonanza
episodes,” she said, “Pa is hell on trespassers. He’s always sending Hoss and Adam and Little Joe out to chase some poor goober off the Ponderosa. Guy shot a rabbit one time. One rabbit. Pa chewed his butt and ran him off. The guy came back. Pa had Sheriff Roy Coffee come out and arrest him. The guy did jail time. It wasn’t for laughs, either. Pa hated anybody on his land unless they asked permission.”

I glanced at her sleek profile against the lights of outer Livingston. “This
Bonanza
thing has gone too far to be ignored.”

But ignore it she did. She went on, “When you told me about Henderson Gray, you said he used to be Tucker’s lawyer. You said he got fired. You also said Dane Tucker is hell on trespassers. So how come those skinheads are all over us, but they don’t stop Henderson Gray?”

“That’s it,” I told her. “You nailed it.”

Thirty minutes later Gray sat at our table at the back of the Stockman, flushed and shaky. Charlotte Gray, I assumed, had informed him of my visit.

“I know why we’re here,” he said. He could not quite meet Aretha’s eyes. “You don’t work for Tucker. This is not about my gate key.”

“No,” I said. “But it could be. We could let Tucker know you’re still using his property.”

He gulped red-faced at a beer I had pre-ordered for him. He was dressed in neither running togs nor a suit but rather in a country-clubber’s leisure ensemble, his spindly, freckled arms and legs sticking out of white crew cuffs. He wore his running hat though, salt-stained, sun-bleached red, pulled down as if it would hide him.

“Listen,” he said. “I haven’t laid eyes on Jesse for months.”

He chased that lie with a slick little laugh that bared his small, even teeth.

“Except for that night right here in the Stockman,” I corrected. “About two weeks ago.”

Gray’s whole face pinched into a frown. He didn’t know me back then, wouldn’t have seen me apart from the hundred other drunks in the place. Jumpy and talkative, Jesse had disappeared “to the restroom” for a while that night. When she returned, she had attached herself to Sneed more than usual, had worked that poor kid over like a cat on a scratching tree.

I told Gray, “You came in. Just like tonight. Home still clinging to you. Angry wife left behind.” I pointed. “There you stood, over at the keno machines, that same hat pulled down. Jesse was with Sneed up at the bar.”

As I spoke, Gray tried to smile and nod like now he had this thing under control.

“Sure. Now I remember. She called my cell in tears. She said she had to see me.”

“In a bar?”

Aretha’s words startled him. Gray took another gulp of beer. Aretha said, “And you got a baby, too?” She kept a cool gaze on him until Gray lunged across the table at me, fairly spat. “Jesus Christ—You bastard—That’s why Charlotte—Do you know what I do for a living—I can’t believe you—I’m a goddamn attorney—I’m gonna—”

I put my hands up. “You’re gonna sue me? I have nothing but what I’m wearing. Plus a little fly fishing tackle. Do you fly fish?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. So you went to meet Jesse? At midnight? In a bar? A week before she died?”

“Because she—because I—
shit!
”

Gray’s eyes now burned with a plea as they met mine. “Look. That girl was crazy. Period. Sure, I got involved with her when I shouldn’t have. But she came after me. She knew I was a lawyer, okay? She thought I could do something to help her father, Galen Ringer. He’s on death row for—”

“We know.”

“I tried to end the relationship. She wouldn’t let it go. She claimed I promised to help her, promised to draw up some kind of bullshit appeal for a stay of execution. I did not promise. We discussed it. Jesse always heard what she wanted hear. But I did not promise.”

He rocked back, gripped the grimy wooden arms of his chair. He clamped his jaw together. He closed his eyes and groaned a choked obscenity at the ceiling. Aretha and I traded glances. I laid the clinch knot components on the table.

“I know you don’t fish, but anyway—”

Gray could not turn himself off. He raged through his teeth. “She would not leave me alone. She called me, she stalked me, she tried to make me jealous—anything to get me back—and that’s what that time here was about. She called me from a toilet stall. She set that all up to make me jealous. She was crawling all over that black kid.”

I recalled the moment again. Now I saw Jesse casting Sneed in an act of bar room theater. But still, she loved him. Right? “Why did you agree to meet her at all?”

“She said
—shit!”

Gray fought to contain himself, finally conscious of the eyes on our table. A lot of bar talk could be confirmed right here. He lowered his voice.

“Jesse told me she was pregnant. Okay? What was I going to do? I was supposed to walk through here, just through, without looking at her, and she would meet me in back. Instead she was up there at the bar dry humping this black kid. I was supposed to get mad, I guess, and come back to her.”