The Clinch Knot (13 page)

“Okay, but—”

He dropped to a strangled, airless rasp: “And when that didn’t work, she brought that kid to my office, trying to make us enemies. That kid really hated the idea of me chasing pronghorn. He had some hang up about them. Thought he was the defender of pronghorn or something. He said I was stressing them out or something, driving them toward extinction. I told them both to fuck off.” He seethed his way through a messy gulp of beer. “And that is the last time I saw Jesse.”

I pushed the hook and a curl of tippet toward him. “If you can tie a clinch knot on that, we’d be inclined to believe you.”

“And you—” he glared at both of us “—you fuck off too.”

“You’d better have an alibi, Gray.”

His eyes stung, then closed. Soon, very faintly, he began to nod, as if massaging a thought. Then he scraped his chair back, stood to his full skeletal height. “You know what, asshole? I do. I do have an alibi.”

He punched a key on his cell phone. Here came a different voice, like sugar on a turd. “Sweetheart? Can you and Peter make it inside? There’s some friends of yours here.” He listened a moment. His brow furrowed. “You signed the prenup, Charlotte,” he said. “It’s done. No. No you won’t. I’ve got the keys.”

He sat back down. He put a palm to his chin, cracked his neck in both directions, gave us an unfortunate smile. “She’s snockered. Blotto when I got home from my evening run. I couldn’t leave her home with Peter. They’re out in the car.” Henderson Gray was all lawyer now, a gamer, feeling in command as he sat back down and made stupid chitchat with Aretha about Houston for the minute and half it took for his wife to lurch into the Stockman with the little boy on her hip, wide-eyed and sucking a binky.

Gray said, “Sweetie? Over here.”

His wife looked exhausted, tense, and none of this, as I should know, had been alleviated by all the alcohol that had scrambled her systems. Her eyes narrowed, tracked her grinning husband like a horse waiting for a chance to kick. As she came forth unsteadily, the child began to fuss and reach for his father. Charlotte Gray stopped at a distance, but the kid did a scary backbend in her arms to stay in view of Gray and resumed his crabbing from upside down.

“Do you remember, Honey, where I was a few days ago, around the time that Ringer girl died?”

That Ringer girl.
Charlotte Gray flinched. She snuck a sullen look at me and pulled it back. Little Peter mewled behind the binky, pulled her off balance with another lunge toward Gray. “C’mere buddy,” Gray said, and now he tried to take the child. Charlotte snarled and held on. There followed a truly awful moment where both parents pulled, little arms stretched, the binky fell to the floor, and the child began to screech, turning heads in the tavern. The struggle went on, Gray and his wife peeling one another’s fingers, hissing low invective past the child’s red ears, until at last Peter gripped his father’s shirt with tiny fists. He kicked his mother in the chest, Gray lifted, and at last the transfer was made.

“Sweetheart,” Gray repeated then, and he spoke slowly, “do you remember?”

But Charlotte Gray was frozen. She could only tremble, staring at the binky on the tavern floor as if she meant to pick it up but couldn’t move.

Gray cradled his son inside a bony elbow. “Charlotte? It’s important. These people suspect me of a terrible thing.”

Still his wife wouldn’t, couldn’t, speak. Gray waited, shushing the boy. Aretha and I waited, passing grim glances. In this span of tavern time, as the Livingston night life resumed around us, little Peter reprised his habit of dissatisfaction. He wanted his binky back. He whimpered, squeezed his fists at the floor, began to squirm in his father’s grip. “What is it, Tiger? Oh. That?” Gray bent. As he picked the binky up, Charlotte Gray spoke at last.

“That was on the floor,” the woman mumbled. “That’s dirty now.”

Gray daubed the rubber nipple against his shirt sleeve. He returned the binky to his son’s lips. “Everything’s dirty, Sweetheart.” He held his gaze on his wife until she looked up through her hair. She looked frightened now. “Everything,” Gray said.

Now casual, supporting the happy boy in his arm, Gray erected a frame: “So from the morning of the twenty-first, through, say, evening of the following day? The twenty-second? Do you remember where I was? Charlotte? Darling? Or have you been snockered all week?”

Charlotte Gray had paled. She stared down where the binky had been on the floor. Then her head jerked up as Peter began to coo and giggle, wet sounds around a dirty pacifier. Her boy was grabbing at Gray’s chin. As his father dodged and batted the tiny fists, the happy boy persisted. At last she said, “Sure. Yes. Of course you were at home, with us.”

“Really? I’ll have to trust you. Was that after I nearly caught that doe? And then I stepped in a hole and had to ice my ankle for a couple days?”

Before his wife could answer, Peter changed his mind and wanted back with his mother. He made gimme fists in the air, whimpered and squirmed. Henderson Gray held on, turned a sudden gummy grin on Aretha. “Kids. Aren’t they great? It must have been terrible, being separated from your boy all those—”

“Yes,” his wife blurted. Now she glared. All the slop had left her voice. “I told you I remember. You were home with us. The whole damn time.”

Gray smiled benignly as he returned custody of Peter to his mother. Charlotte Gray clutched the child. She hung her head, began to shake, never looked up even when Sneed’s mother took my arm and brushed past her. “Don’t take that, sister,” Aretha muttered as she swept me outside and into the night.

A Traffic Stop

 

At the Geyser Motel, I took one pillow and one bath towel and used the floor beneath the air conditioner. I had slept on harder surfaces, but never one grimier or more conducive to lurid dreams. About half the night I yearned for the Cruise Master and my path east, but in the long hours I began to crave the motel bed and Sneed’s mother too, and so I rousted myself before dawn and fled into the nearest neighborhood, and there, thinking
look like a local,
I stole a truck.

At that relic Kwik Trip payphone, I found the sheriff’s name in the book. The address was Big Timber and turned out to be a devolving ranchette a few hundred yards from Sweet Grass Creek.

I waited at a distance. By seven a.m., the sheriff had strapped on the O
₂
cylinder and hobbled out to his cruiser, seeming to leave behind an argument with a younger-looking woman who lingered on the front porch, hands on hips, watching him go.

I followed Chubbuck back to Livingston on the interstate, then through town to his office. He did not leave the cruiser. Instead, he waited until Deputy Russell Crowe strolled from the station with a foam cup and a pastry. The sheriff accepted these items through his cruiser window and the two of them had a short meeting. Crowe took direction, apparently, and returned the empty cup inside.

Chubbuck headed out the way I hoped. He moseyed through the south end of town and along the ‘Stone toward the park. It was too early for tourists. The highway was without issue except for a strew of fast food litter and beer cans just before Carter’s Bridge. The sheriff slowed to inspect this mess while I eased around him into the awakening vault of the Paradise Valley.

The big river curved ahead through mountain shade cast upon the east flank of the valley, then swung west between fields of rolled hay, steaming in a new hot sun. I found a freshly graveled ranch road and turned around.

The sheriff crossed Carter’s Bridge and just after Pine Creek headed up State 217 and from there into the Roam River valley. Not a mile in, at a turnout opposite the gated terminus of Tucker’s twenty-five-mile fence, waited two black SUVs. I couldn’t say if they were the same ones I had seen at the campground, but they were close.

Chubbuck stopped for a chat and I pulled up short beside the mailbox of a double-wide on the off-Tucker side, several hundred yards back. I dismounted, just for show, and as I circled the truck box I discovered I was bearing five bound stacks of today’s
Bozeman Chronicle.

What the hell—perfect.
A flick of my pocket knife loosened one stack. I put a paper in the mailbox and drove on.

Now I played leapfrog with the sheriff as he maundered another three miles up the highway, driving as if he could not sustain pressure on his gas pedal. Somewhere just short of Tucker’s gate, I stopped to deliver a newspaper to another across-the-road neighbor of the movie star. When I caught Chubbuck again, he had made a traffic stop.

The sheriff had the skinheads pulled over beside a spot where the Roam River snaked through bison-studded rangeland, reflecting the sky’s pink-gray twizzle of sunlight and smoke. A portable dash light strobed in the window of Chubbuck’s cruiser. The sheriff had found the energy to leave the vehicle. He wavered at the driver’s window of the bleached-red Ford, hanging on to the side mirror as he appeared to chat with the boys inside.

I passed by with some idiotic face-blocking gesture, then glanced back to discover no interest in me whatsoever. I found a ranch road to ascend, turned my stolen truck around at enough altitude to see down as the chat went on. The two vehicles were dwarfed against the endless fence line and the entirety of Tucker’s territory behind it. The Roam burrowed out of steppes and canyons to the south, and downstream it lazed open into the great grassy lap-folds of the Absaroka mountains. Dane Tucker’s main gate was just south of the vehicles, and the movie star’s ranch mansion was somewhere out of sight but directly east, ahead of me, where the miles-long driveway followed the river out of sight behind a hogback ridge.

Chubbuck’s chat went on and on. At last the sheriff tottered away. He appeared to cast back a friendly wave to the skinheads before he toppled into his cruiser, turned it around, and headed back in the direction of Livingston and his buddies with the SUVs.

But the SUVs were gone now. Or not quite gone—but nearly so, jouncing fast across Tucker’s land as if they had jumped the gate, which remained closed and locked behind them. Stunningly, they crashed across a shallow stretch of the Roam and rooted up the far bank, tires throwing sand. In a few seconds more, the vehicles were out of sight behind a ripple of land, no traces remaining but a gout of muddied water and a drifting cloud of dust.

Chubbuck never paused. He drove on. He drove all the way back into Livingston and then through town to a small private airstrip a few miles toward Bozeman. There he parked and seemed to rest for a bit before he climbed out, crossed the dirt runway, clawed his way into a battered single-engine Cessna, and promptly, expertly, put the damn thing into the sky.

I watched in wonder as the sheriff gained altitude and then banked the plane back the direction he had come from, over Tucker’s land and the Roam River.

I left the truck there. I took a newspaper for my hike back to town.

An Avid Fly Fisherman

 

Trust Me

 

Deputy Russell Crowe’s cruiser was parked at a jaunty angle in the Geyser Motel parking lot, engine running, A/C pumping, condensate dripping from the tailpipe. The deputy himself was nowhere in sight until Aretha Sneed’s door flew open and she shoved him clear. “Get out!”

“Ma’am, please listen.”

“I know what you’re going to do!”

“Ma’am, please—”

“Don’t ma’am me. You’re gonna kill my baby. Don’t come in here talking all that liaison shit. And no, I never did think you were related to Russell Crowe the actor. What kind of fool would think that? Huh? You got the same damn name. All that makes you is an accident trying to jock somebody’s style.”

Sneed’s mother was barefoot and her hair was unfixed. For a heart-leaping moment, I mistook the flatiron in her hand for the Smith and Wesson. 38.

She wasn’t done. “You think I must be related to some other famous Aretha? That make sense to you?”

Crowe raised his hands in defense. “I’m just here in my capacity as a representative of the department. I’m just conveying the news. The ambulance will be leaving the hospital shortly. I asked the sheriff if you could ride along. He said no.”

Aretha glared at him, beginning to chew her un-glossed bottom lip. Crowe sensed me coming up behind him. He filled his chest with air, gave the space between me and him a little nudge with his Neanderthal jaw.

“Stand back, Mister Oglivie.”

“What’s up, Russell? Nice piece in the paper today.”

“I haven’t seen the paper.”

“Sure,” I said. “Okay, Russell.”

“Stand back,” he told me. “Ma’am, I am a trained law enforcement officer and I will be with your son the entire way. It will be just the nurse and me in the ambulance. I’ll keep a good eye on him.”

Sneed’s mother dismissed him with a look of murderous disgust. To me she said, “They’re gonna kill my baby!”

“We would never do that,” Russell persisted. “We’re doing everything possible to help him recover.”

“They’re gonna gas him,” she told me.

“It’s hyperbaric treatment,” Russell tried to explain. “They’re going to put him in a chamber—”

At that word,
chamber,
Sneed’s strong and lovely mother wilted as if the whole of the Big Sky country had come down upon her. Her sharp shoulders gave up their edge, and her body seemed to sag into the mold of the middle age awaiting her. For a long moment, she seemed to drift through pain toward numbness. I touched her shoulder. “Aretha?” When her eyes found mine they were sunken and darkly circled, bruised by lack of sleep, perfect emblems of despair.

“They gonna put my baby in a gas chamber and kill him!”

Russell kept at it. “Not to worry,” he said. “They’re going to transport her son to Billings where they have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. They force oxygen into the blood cells under high pressure. I guess it might reverse out some of the carbon monoxide damage. The doctor feels he’s on the verge of making some improvements, so the sheriff feels it’s worth a try—”

She lunged at the deputy. “Did you just say not to worry?” Russell touched his gun belt, backed up. “You have to trust us. Trust the justice system.”

“Black people know all about the justice system.”

“I mean trust the doctors. The hospital.”

“We know all about doctors, too. And hospitals. You ever heard of the Tuskegee Experiment? I know you didn’t.”

Russell took another step closer to his cruiser. “Well, hey,” he jittered out, and incredibly, he smiled—at Aretha, at me, back at Aretha. “If anybody understands all that, it would be me.” He panted a little, as if his brain were chasing his mouth. “So forget everything else, you guys, you know, and just trust me.”

I stepped between to buffer. But Sneed’s mother could not begin to process this. I watched her shut down rather than permit that nonsense inside.

“Oh … my … Lord.”

She gripped herself in a hug and turned a circle—parking lot, heat-scorched range, distant Crazy Mountains—then tilted her head to the vast and empty smut-brown sky.

I walked Russell the rest of the way to his cruiser. I tucked the newspaper under my arm and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Nice piece. Seriously.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You got a day off coming up soon, Russell?”

He wouldn’t look at me. His jaw was red. His voice was thin. “Sure. Tomorrow. Why?”

“You and me, we oughta go fishing.”