The Clinch Knot (16 page)

You All Have a Nice Couple of Days

 

The camera was hard-cased, locked, impenetrable. So we were caught. As soon as someone from Tucker’s place rode out to check the disk, we would face whatever defense the actor could bring to bear.

Grimly now, our whiff of amusement gone, we moved on to Plan B. We would keep advancing downstream. We would push hard, gambling on the next few hours as a window to get into what I figured was a steep canyon about ten miles ahead.

“What’s that canyon going do except trap us?”

I was guessing wildly: “If we can get that far and escape actual contact with Tucker’s people, the canyon should hide us until dark. Then a good night’s float ought to bring us to this mark on the map.”

I tucked the map back under me. I was sitting on it now. We could not lose it.

“And won’t they just be waiting there?”

“Maybe.” I stroked the oars hard. “If they know where we’re going. But maybe not.”

She scowled. “Then how long until we get out the other end, off the man’s property?”

“Into the Yellowstone?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t know. It’s about thirty miles. And there’s a lot of kinks in this. Maybe two days.”

She said nothing. She just looked at me like I had invented rivers and designed this one, drunk. Thinking maybe he knew, I said, “Sneed? Hey, buddy. Hey, Sneed.”

He said nothing either. He didn’t even move.

We rode a while in high tension. Maybe two miles into our race to the canyon, Aretha lost patience and stuck a toe into her son’s side. She said, “Baby, that look on your face is getting old.”

She toed him a little harder.

“I know I’ve changed, but can’t you remember anything? Can’t you remember Grandpappy’s place, old sour apples Pappy smelled like his own poop and that dog used to lick your face? Can’t you remember I used to sing you that chariot song? We had one good time. That was Pappy and Gramma Francine’s place, after Atlanta when we went to Little Rock, remember? I am your
mother,
Baby.” Another toe jab. “Tell us what we’re doing out here.” She shoved him, not quite roughly, with her whole foot. “You know me. Don’t pretend. That’s why you won’t look at me.”

Sneed twisted away from her.

“Dog?”

“Right here, buddy.”

“Dog, where’s Jesse?”

“Uhhhh!” exploded his mother. “Where is
who
?”

I shot Aretha a warning look to no effect. “Where’s some trampy little white girl you knew for three weeks?” She had lunged forward, over him, tipping the boat. Her head worked side to side like a cobra’s. “All blonde and smiley, skinny little ass like a weasel, little tiny voice like
I got jungle fever, can you help me?
Where is she? What are you talking about?”

Sneed hung his head. I could hear his breathing over the rush and slap of the water.

“Where is she? Child, let me tell you something: that bitch is
everywhere.”

Sneed’s mother slammed back against the boat’s bulbous prow and burned holes in the back of her son’s skull. “And your mother is right damn here.” We floated along like that for a few hundred yards, cresting and dipping over a long run of submerged glacial boulders, some cream-colored, some black, some salt-and-pepper granite—and every damn one of them ready to rise up and kill us.

Then Sneed’s mother said, “Well.”

Her voice was tight with defiance.

“Well,” she said again. “Everybody. Here it comes. I sure am sorry. But clearly you don’t understand—”

Sneed’s head snapped around to look at her squarely for the first time. I couldn’t see what was in his eyes that stopped his mother, that held her emotions in limbo for a long moment until he turned away again.

“Oh, Baby …” Tears streaked her face. “I am sorry. For so many, many things. I am so sorry. I really am.”

He let her touch his back.

“Oh my baby …”

I kept us floating, kept oaring that boat downriver, trying to realize our figment of safety in a canyon. I kept my eyes away from the two of them, tried to give what privacy was available between three people trapped inside twenty square feet of rubber and air, surrounded by pouring, pouring water. I became vigilant Hoss-Dog, keeping watch over everything: snags and rocks and shallows that would beach us; riders, gunmen on the river banks; signs of a lighting storm building in the smoke-clotted sky.

But nothing else came up through that long, tense morning—nothing but scrappy yearling cutthroat trout gleaning the dregs of the trico hatch, plus a few peckish rainbows jumping at phantoms, and once—just achingly once—a monster German brown trout, butter-flanked and kipe-jawed, that ascended to nip a frantic spider from the scrambled currents of an eddy.

Nor were we spied on from above except by red-tailed hawks in high thermals, and by occasional small clots of Tucker’s hobby bison sucking water at the bank. Once, where the river spread and slowed, the spectacle of our passage spooked a mother pronghorn off into a dry, vast grassland.

“Hey, Sneed!” I hollered, waking him, and I swiveled the boat around, dragged the oars to slow us down, hoping he could watch as the doe circled back, sniffing the wind, to recover her rattled fawn.

But he couldn’t rouse himself in time, couldn’t focus. When he lay back down on the boat bottom, his mother said, “Has he told you?”

“About what?”

“About pronghorns.”

“He hasn’t told me much of anything,” I admitted.

“And what he did tell you, it was all my fault?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well,” she said, leveling her eyes on mine. “My mother’s boyfriend raped me. So my motherhood just didn’t get off to the best kind of start.”

“He did allude to that.”

“Did he now? Well, that’s something.” She kept my eyes locked. “Okay. Well, Hoss, there’s been a lot of anger in my life, a lot of things I shouldn’t have reacted to in the ways I did. But I did what I did and I’m sorry and I need to be forgiven.”

I broke the grip of her eyes. I looked off where the mother pronghorn had gone. She had sniffed out her fawn in the high grass, was goading it away from us according to her own figments of danger and safety.

“Well.” I heaved a sigh that seemed to come from some tight, dark place at the root of me. “I guess we all need to be forgiven.”

“Mm-hmm.” Aretha’s eyes had calmed a little. She looked at her son. “Him too. I know he’s been suffering about what he did.”

She waited for a reply from me, an acknowledgment. I oared on silently.

“But I guess he didn’t tell you what this thing with the pronghorn is all about.”

“Nope.”

“Not a word?”

“Seemed like he would once. But I thought he was embarrassed, he didn’t want Jesse to hear it.”

I cringed as I said that. I figured Sneed’s mother would bust up again, rake her anger once more over poor dead Jesse. But she checked it.

“Mm-hm. I can imagine that. If he cared for that girl, if he wanted her to like him, I can surely imagine that.”

Sneed shifted, oblivious. He was mending, I hoped. All this sleep—or whatever it was—he was rebuilding brain cells, preparing for rebirth. That’s what I hoped for, suddenly, wildly, at that moment. Hell, was that possible?

“So what is it?” I asked. “What is he sorry for?”

“He killed them.”

“What?
”

“He told you about his foster family? That funky old white man that raised deer? D’Ontay loved those animals. He took care of them. He would go absent from school and it was all like, where’s this bad black boy, he must be out doing drugs, stealing stuff, committing all kind of crimes but no, that was me, that was his mother doing that shit. The school truant people would get their pants all up under their chins and every time,
every
time, they’d find out he just missed the bus on purpose and spent the day with those animals. I didn’t know then but I guess they were pronghorn—little things, horns like a beetle, white on their chest and neck. They were like D’Ontay’s friends, his family, until one day he killed them all.”

I let the oars drop. My entire face must have shown my shock and confusion. “But he said …”

I couldn’t finish. I didn’t want to. This was all going to make some horrible kind of sense, but I didn’t want to hear it.
They just stood there,
Sneed had told me, out of the blue, as we drove down from Great Falls one day and saw pronghorn on the range.
They just stared at me …

Aretha said, “Well, Hoss, we were upstairs in the house fighting, me and that white family. See, I used to come once a week for a visit, one hour. I had a man friend would get me high and then drop me off, sit outside in the car and wait for me, maybe drive around a little, you know, sightsee how the white folks live. Then one time there’s some burglaries in the neighborhood and guess who’s busted for it? Because guess who tells the cops about this black man’s been prowling the neighborhood? Mmm-hm. All righteous as hell, trying to take away my visitation cuz I’m in on the crime, you know? And maybe I was. I don’t really remember. But that was this man Andre. He did me bad, that’s for sure. I probably even knew he was casing places, driving around in there. But I just came storming into those white folks’ house and I was gonna take my son. I’m screaming bloody murder. I don’t care about the law. He’s coming with me. Bitches. Raising my boy to be some tight-ass little snitch.”

She caught her breath. With a wince, with a rueful shake of her head, she downshifted to her current self and spoke to the other one.

“Of course those people said no. Damn, ‘Retha. They cared about him. At least more than you. But you—” she shook herself out of it “—but I said no, I’m taking him. I said they just wanted him for the comp money, the county foster allowance, and I starting screaming about he’s mine, about how I’m gonna claim him on
my
welfare, I’m gonna take him away …”

She touched her son, then withdrew her hand. Sneed rolled groggily in the boat bottom, staring up into the sky.

“D’Ontay was downstairs, somewhere, hearing all this. And we were screaming back and forth about the law and about money, not paying attention to him. It wasn’t even about him. And the cops were on their way. I was in trouble. I was going to be guilty of those burglaries too, going to jail again. I guess he figured all that, because that’s just how I was.”

The boat scraped a gravel shoal. I shoved, shoved, shoved us off, remembering how Sneed had told me:
I took care of them all that time. They were my friends, my family. But when I needed them, when I needed help, when I needed to know what do to, they just stood there. Doing nothing. Just fucking stupid animals, Dog. They just stared at me …

“He sliced their throats.”

Aretha’s voice was hoarse suddenly, struggling to cut through grief.

“This poor boy did. I guess something snapped in him. He killed every one of them. He sliced their throats. Then he ran away while we were still fighting, and we never saw him again.”

When I could manage, I took up the oars and tried to guide us. But there had been a shift, a slip. A half-mile of river had swept us along, but I hadn’t noticed what dangers we had been lucky enough to avoid. In broad daylight, I suddenly felt blind, felt dread slide under and carry the boat.

The full scare caught up with us in just a few more minutes. We bumped along toward another rapids, heading for rocks that stood up like sentries in a maze of scrambled water. “Better hang on,” I was telling Aretha, just as a boulder funneled the boat shoreward into shallow water and from behind the next rock flushed one of Tucker’s skinheads.

“Grab them!” the fat radish bellowed, charging wild-eyed through waist-deep water to snatch our spinning prow. “Come on! Grab these motherfuckers!”

Out from the next boulder splashed the scrawny skin—Denny. The boat caught Denny square in the chest, plowed him under, but the impact slowed us enough for his partner to get one hand through the border-rope on the prow. I swung an oar but couldn’t reach him.

“Got ‘em! Mister Tucker! We got ‘em!”

Aretha never hesitated. She twisted, made a fist, tried to hit his face but he went under. She pounded the fat skin’s wet glove. He popped up, tried to punch Sneed’s mother with his free hand, but Aretha was too quick. She grabbed that hand and bent it back while she hammered away at his grip. “Nigger bitch!” he tried, but that did not sit well. Aretha scissored her legs and lashed one foot across the gunwale, kicked the punk hard in the side of the head with a solid wet splat.

He shook himself like a mad dog. “Mister Tucker!” Now bleeding from the ear, the fat skin shot desperate looks toward the bank. As the boat slung out of his control, Comrade Denny popped up within my reach. His eyes went wide as my oar came down between his brows. He disappeared in swirl of pink water. Now it was just the fat kid, hanging on, swinging wildly and airing out his entire rancid storehouse of racist epithets as he tried to withstand Aretha and drag us ashore.

Aretha gave it back. “Peckerwood!” She pounded at his grip. “I’ll break your damn arm, square-dancing motherfucker!”

A sharp whistle sliced the mash of churning water. A husky, broad-hatted rider crested the canyon rim on a sweating chestnut mare. Seeing us, he unsheathed a rifle and repeated the whistle as he goaded the horse onto a dicey switchback trail. Down they came, the rider yipping through his teeth. During this, perhaps inspired by it, the fat skinhead ducked behind Aretha and gained purchase on the river bottom. He beached us with one great heave, then backed away as if from a rattlesnake and rasped desperately at Aretha: “Coon!”

“Cave fungus!”

“Fuckin’ porch monkey!”

“Saltine!”

“Hey!” shouted the rider. “Cut that out!” When his horse reached river cobble, the rider dismounted and approached us, aiming that rifle at me, stopping just before his fancy boots got wet. Close up, there was no mistake: this was the cut-rate star himself, the B-movie hero, Dane Tucker. He had the skin tucks, the sun tan, the brand new hat, the big white teeth in a bullshit grin around a stagecraft lip of chaw—Dane Tucker. “This nigger bitch—”