The Clinch Knot (14 page)

Chicken Neck Down at the Bottom

 

“Hyperbaric oxygen is a real medical procedure,” I told Aretha after she had thrown herself face down on the motel bed, after her lungs had stopped heaving. “I don’t think it’s even dangerous. And look at it this way. If he makes some improvement, maybe he’ll tell us what happened.”

“Us
?” Her voice was a retch into the bedcovers. “He’ll tell
them,
and they’ll twist it into whatever
they
need.”

“Don’t they have what they need already?”

She was silent. Her neck and shoulders quaked. I ached to touch her again but didn’t dare.

“If his case is as bad as you say, why bother with the procedure?”

“To kill him! Without a trial! Don’t you see it?”

I passed a long moment that felt like floating in deep space.
What?
There was no air in this, no vision.
Could she truly mean those words?
Unknowns fell open between us, dark and cold, gulfs in experience and perception beyond my strength in knowing.

But I was who I was, and at last I had to speak: “No. I don’t see it. I don’t see it like that. Not at all.”

Sneed’s mother whipped around, knocked her hand bag over. Her face was wet. With naked hope she croaked, “Really? Really, you think I’m wrong?”

“We didn’t ask those boys enough questions,” I told her as we drove that little Metro out along Tucker’s fence once more, picking our spot to bait the skinheads.

“Maybe they can tell us if Sheriff Chubbuck has a deal with Tucker to fish the Roam. Maybe if we scare them enough they’ll tell us why they threatened Jesse and your boy and burned his tent.”

“Or maybe they won’t fall for it again.”

“Fair enough. Perhaps they learn.”

“Though if you can’t learn from Nazi Germany,” she said, “then probably not.”

She set back in to chewing hungrily. To allow her space, I had walked downtown from the motel, bought burgers and onion rings and Pepsi, walked back nursing a Swisher Sweet and studying the patterns of smoke across the sky. By the time I returned to the motel, Aretha had recovered, fixed her hair, refilled herself with a mother’s rage and purpose. Now she drove with an onion ring in one hand and her pistol in the Louis Vuitton handbag, which rode like a third passenger between us.
Big Louis,
I decided to call the bag. I felt like smiling but held it back.

“I bet my fly rod those morons will fall for it again.”

“But I don’t want your fly rod.”

“How would you know?”

“I don’t care for fishing.”

“What kind have you done?”

“My professor friend,” she said, “likes to get out on this big reservoir outside Houston and sit there all day in a boat with a chicken neck on a hook down at the bottom while he quotes Farrakahn and cusses at some big old catfish he lost one day that never comes back.” She took a bite of onion ring. “He calls that catfish Stravinsky.”

“Hmm.” Now I did smile. “Interesting.”

“No, as a matter of fact it is not interesting. Not one bit.”

“And that means fishing to you?”

She glanced at me, chewing. She didn’t answer. Then, as her eyes moved back to the road, the onion ring flew from her hand and she shrieked.

A body, maimed and bloody, hung from Tucker’s fence about fifty yards ahead. Aretha jerked the car over, then gassed it, then jerked it again toward the shoulder. “Oh, no. Oh, my Lord.”

My pulse had jumped but I caught it. “It’s okay. It’s just a deer,” I told her, fixing on the long brown torso that hung through the middle of the fence. I reached across, put the car in park to stabilize her.

“Nothing we can do. It’s just a deer. It tried to clear the fence and got caught.”

“Okay.”

She gulped air. She put the car back in drive and we continued.

I told her, “Happens all the time, all these fences.”

But the initial fear was still a coppery taste in my throat as I watched the carcass slide by. The animal had snagged on the top strand of the fence and become woven into barbed wire by its struggle. One haunch hung loose from the body, sliced almost clean. The tongue hung down. A crow hopped back from the eyeball, flew off ten feet and watched us pass.

“Just a pronghorn,” I said, and watched Sneed’s mother grip the wheel, murmur
pronghorn
and stiffen as she drove on, slow and silent, as if the car were made of lead.

At that awful pace we drove the entire twenty-five miles of Tucker’s fence and then back again, pounding the intercom button both times without any sign of the skinheads and their pink truck. As the hours passed, the Roam River, where I could see it, became a beacon of shifting, heartbreaking beauty, the kind of water I fished in my mind.

“Odd,” I said at last, when our final miles had failed to produce any trace of neo-Nazi fence minders.

“What isn’t odd around here?”

“And this too,” I said, as we backed up in tourist traffic on 89 in front of Sorgensen’s Fly ‘n’ Float. “This surprises me.”

Hilarious Sorgensen’s rusty conversion van waited in the opposite lane for a chance to turn in. The big man was at the wheel, jabbering away, chucking peanuts in like punctuation marks. The odd thing, to me, was that his girl Lyndzee—represented by a plume of cigarette smoke and a tangle of too-bronze hair—rode in the passenger seat.

“Short trip to Memphis,” I said. “Travel time, she couldn’t have been there much more than twenty-four hours. Not much for a family visit.”

“Hmm,” Aretha said, seeming distracted. “Maybe they weren’t home.”

Then traffic loosened up and she said, “So that’s not what you do? When you go fishing? You don’t sit on a lake with a chicken neck down at the bottom?”

They Just Said

 

We picked up my fly rod at the Cruise Master, which was parked in Cord Cook’s mother’s driveway across from Sacagawea Park, Cook having agreed that my stuff could remain inside the vehicle until whenever.

Aretha and I spent a little time under a flood light on the grass. She wasn’t bad for a true beginner. Most of such, in my experience, handle a fly rod like a hammer, with the water like a nail they just can’t hit straight enough or hard enough. Sneed’s mother—perhaps in her overload of worry and grief—had the advantage of paying no attention to my instructions. She rendered me lip service and went purely by feel, getting the line up okay and loading the rod a bit, and after a few minutes she was throwing a decent loop about twenty feet ahead.

“Not bad,” I said.

“Except it’s even more boring than the chicken neck.”

“Well, it helps to have water.”

“Where’s your boat?”

“I stand in the water.”

She let the loop drop. “You
what?
”

I reeled her up, walked her back over to the Cruise Master. Cord Cook came out, beer in hand, for minor pleasantries, mentioned second thoughts about our deal—did I know there was a pressure problem in the master cylinder?—and then the kid ambled back inside, left me hoping. I pulled my waders off the back of the galley bench and held them up. “I wear these and walk in the water.”

Aretha shook her head. “Ain’t nobody, nowhere, should wear a thing like that. Not even riding in a fire truck.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t even try to get me into a pair of those.”

We spent a long moment trying to read each other through the dim light across a pair of patched-up, smelly waders. At last I said, “Okay. Well, not everybody has the guts to be that sexy,” and she came back with, “Hoss?”

“Yeah?”

“You know something?”

“I probably don’t.”

“Well,” she said, “sometimes you’re kinda funny.”

“You want to grab one too?” She paused at the motel door. “A shower?”

My heart giddied up. “Thanks. I’ll dunk in the river.”

“The river? Down where all those chicken necks are sitting?” She frowned at me. “Get in here,” she said. “Take a shower. Let’s order a pizza.”

She went first. I yanked that swampy motel chair around, wedged it in between the air conditioner and the bed, where I could see the TV. From this position, I waited out one of the world’s longest showers, a real marathon that seemed to reach deep into the local aquifer.

Or maybe I just hadn’t been around a woman in a while. Maybe four years alone on the road, rinsing off in trout streams and encountering women mostly in the abstract, had shaved from memory some of the stickier pleasures of man-woman affiliation.

Always have a book to read, Dog. Maybe put a PhD in progress. Learn, and re-learn, to wait.

In any case, this is where we were—Aretha showering in triplicate, the Hoss-Dog ruminating, then giving in to a mildly incredulous scrutiny of the local ten o’clock news, on low sound—when Sneed appeared on the screen.

I jerked forward in the chair. The face was hardly recognizable—it was a booking shot, done with the poor kid all ashen and dopey in his hospital bed. I turned up the sound. From the talking bufflehead came real news: “…
escaped from medical custody around eight o’clock this evening after receiving treatment in a Billings hospital, leaving an injured deputy and a frightened community in his wake …”

I sprang up and pounded on the bathroom door.

“Do it outside!” Aretha hollered.

“He escaped! He’s on Channel 2!”

“Dig a hole then!”

“…
what doctors termed a successful treatment … armed and presumed dangerous …
.” intoned the bufflehead, his forehead gleaming, his smile turned upside-down, “…
do not confront … contact authorities immediately … and now, as Tracy Minor’s going to tell us, that wasn’t the only kind of breakaway in the news today, as high school football got underway this evening across the tri-county area …
”

The broadcast was over by the time Sneed’s mother emerged fully dressed on a cloud bank of peach-scented steam, and she didn’t believe me. I raced through the channels, trying to catch the story on another station, but it was all high school football, Dodge clearance, Subway low-carb sandwiches.

“How could that happen? Didn’t they shackle him? Guard him? Are you sure?”

“I saw it.” My pulse pounded, my brain scrambled. “They just said.”

“He escaped from where?”

“They said the ambulance. After the treatment. Somewhere in Billings. They said he overpowered the deputy, who was injured.”

“That … that …
him?”

“Who else?”

“You’re crazy. You must put crack in those cigars of yours.”

“It was just on the news.”

That stupid room, we were too close, yelling at each other from point blank like stiffs on a sitcom. Glistening drops flew from the nap of Aretha’s hair and struck me as she shook her head. “I must be dreaming.”

“Well, wake up. Half the people in this state are packing a gun. He’s gonna get shot any minute now.”

That stopped her. Now she believed me. I saw the buzz of panic rise inside her, widen her eyes and shorten her breath.

“Well … isn’t that convenient … for them.”

I stared at Sneed’s mother. “Isn’t it?” she demanded.

“I …”

“Shit.” She circled the bed frantically. She came back. She reached into Big Louis. Out came that pistol. “We have to find him.”

“Billings is an hour-and-a-half away. A hundred thousand people live there.”

She was hopping into her sandals, aiming the gun around. “They said armed?”

“I guess he took Crowe’s weapon.”

“That’s all the excuse they need. Hell, an actual gun in a black man’s hand, they could send the military. Does he even know where he is?”

“How could he—” but tires squealed outside as I spoke “—he’s never been to Billings, and his brain is—”
bang, bang, bang!
hammered a fist on the door.

A Roomful of Helpless Sumbitch Bear

 

“Baby!”

Aretha jumped at Sneed as he hesitated in the doorway. He flinched away and she stopped herself. “Baby, it’s me. It’s your mother.”

“Come on, come on,” panted Uncle Tick Judith, shoving Sneed in the back. “Get inside and close the sumbitch door.”

I yanked Sneed by the arm, slammed the door behind Uncle Judith. “Is there a gun? Didn’t they say he took a service revolver?”

Uncle Judith struggled to catch his breath. He was the Love Canal of snoose. A massive lip-bump had been buried and forgotten, sent a rich brown slime oozing unnoticed down his chin. “I threw that sumbitch down a sewer grate.”

“You’re bleeding. Oh, Baby, you’re bleeding. Come here. Your mama’s got first aid training.”

Sneed shied away from his mother’s attention. When she caught his arm, tried to find his injury, he struggled with what looked like real fear.

“Looked out the window,” Uncle Judith went on, “saw that sumbitch wandering down the middle of Main Street with a gun in his hand.”

“Main Street Billings?”

“The hell, Billings. Right here. Five minutes ago.”

Sneed looked stronger. His color was better. The ashy-purplish skin of two days ago had made progress toward his normal rich brown. He looked somewhat agile despite the too-small slippers on his big feet. His arms and legs and butt stuck out powerfully from a pale green hospital robe as his mother, thwarted, raised her hands and backed away.

“You’re hurt. Baby, who hurt you?”

“Said some lady drove him around then dropped him off.” Uncle Judith shook his head at his own words. “Hell if I know.”

The old bull rider gasped for air as he worked his brow with a bandana. Sneed’s blood had streaked him everywhere.

“How hurt is he?”

“He ain’t hurt at all.” Instinct made Uncle Judith chuck a shirt cuff across his chin, approximately cleansing it without any sense of cause. “He’s strong as hell.” Immediately, the dribble of snoose returned. “I wrestled that sumbitch into the beer cooler for a minute so I could get the store closed up. He’s bleeding from one or t’other of his hands but it don’t seem to bother him much.”

Aretha reached for Sneed’s wrist. He put it behind him.

“Oh, Baby, please, it’s me. It’s your mama.”

“He’s not the same feller, though,” Uncle Judith observed. “All that beer nearby and he didn’t touch of a one of them.”

“They’ll come here.” I said this to the group in general. “State Patrol, sheriff’s deputies, whoever, they’ll come right to this motel room and they’ll be loaded for bear.”

I made an anxious survey of the tiny space, thought the better of pinching back the curtain.

“And there’s a roomful of bear right here.”

“I ain’t done nothing wrong,” Uncle Judith said.

“You didn’t turn him in.”

Uncle Judith accidentally discovered his lump of Cope as he considered this. One could see both confusion and relief. His tongue sent word to his brain, upon receipt of which he spit neatly into his shirt pocket and tamped it flat. “Well you and she ain’t done nothing wrong.”

“Not yet. But we’re not going to turn him in either.”

“Damn straight we’re not,” Aretha confirmed. “That’s right, Hoss.”

Now everybody, even Sneed, looked at me like Hoss had a follow up, a plan, which Hoss did not.

“A roomful of helpless sumbitch bear,” Uncle Judith summed up, wetting his pocket again.