The Clinch Knot (19 page)

Pretty Good Short Term

 

I pulled Sneed under a narrow ceiling of overhanging rock. Cliff swallows swerved and chittered around us, defending their holes. Once more, in a final spasm, hail pulsed across the scene in front of us, pocking the river, rattling and bouncing off the rocks, then letting up for good, making way for a brilliant stroke of sunlight that glittered every surface in the canyon.

I stayed hard on Sneed for an hour or more, monitoring. I knew nothing about his type of brain damage, only that many things were possible, few of them good. I feared that any moment a circuit would shut down and those bright eyes—weren’t they brighter now?—would melt away like the hailstones in the river rocks around us.

I prodded him. I shook him. I talked to him. I avoided an answer to
where is she,
knowing that one
she
was dead and fearing for the other. I talked about—what else?—fishing. “You know after a storm like this, Sneedy, the water level rises. And I don’t know why for sure, but trout feed good in rising water. My guess is they are masters of anticipation.”

He repeated me: “Masters of anticipation.”

“Right. I mean, how else would a trout know that a hatch is about to happen?”

“About to happen.”

“Yeah. Not happening.
About
to happen. They sense it. They take their stations. Then it happens. I’ve seen it a thousand times. They don’t eat my damn fly—”

“Damn fly.”

“—earlier in the day, because they anticipate something better later.”

“Later.”

“Yeah. Later. What are you, some kind of parrot?” I gave him a nudge on the shoulder. He gave me one back. I said, “Eventually, rising water washes food into the river. Worms. Spiders caught napping in the rocks. Ants and beetles on streamside grass that is suddenly pulled under. See?”

Yearling trout slapped the fast edge of the mirrored pool before us, where a seam of earth-stained foam steadily bulked itself one bit of fluff at a time. “They better watch out,” I said. “Big old Uncle Brown Trout’s gonna come up and eat them.”

Sneed waited about thirty seconds. “They better watch out,” he said then, seeming to listen to himself. “That’s pretty good short term, huh Dog?”

“Yes, it—”

But he broke into violent hiccups. He choked. He slammed his fist against his sternum. When finally he caught his breath Sneed slumped against me, slid down until his head was on my lap. “God damn it,” he sobbed, and threw an arm over his face.

I felt his lungs expand and contract against my legs. After a few minutes, I tried a joke.

“So this big brown trout we all talk about, what’s his first name?” I jostled him. “Huh, Sneedy? What about James Brown?”

He tried a slow breath that worked okay. He tried to laugh.

“What about Cleveland Brown?”

“Foxy Brown,” Sneed managed.

“Girl fish. Sure. But how about Charlie? Charlie Brown. I think I caught that guy a few times.”

This time Sneed managed a faint but legitimate laugh. “And John Brown,” I said. “Know who he was?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Abolitionist.”

“Huh-uh. But what about Encyclopedia Brown. Can’t catch that guy, Dog. No how. Too smart for you.”

Now I laughed. I added, “Hubie Brown. Larry Brown. Gilbert Brown. Paul Brown. Jim Brown. Dee Brown.”

“Huh?”

“Sports.”

“I don’t do sports, Dog. I … I think I paint bridges.”

“And sometimes water towers.”

“Yeah.” His chest heaved up and down. “Yeah. Water towers. Hey, what about Bobby Brown?”

“Don’t know him.”

“Singer. R&B. I like that. And Foxy Brown.”

“You said Foxy Brown.”

Sneed posted a long silence before he said, “I know. Just checking your short term, Dog.”

“You like Foxy Brown?”

“Like to catch her one time,” Sneed said. “That’s all.”

“Yeah? What fly? Wooly bugger? Humpy? Bead head scud?” Sneed pulled that arm off his eyes, looked at me. He grinned. “Damn, Dog. You’re a sick old man.”

“And you, my friend, might be a good bit better.”

The possibility of this seemed to dawn slowly on Sneed as well. He sat up, leaned his back against the warming rock, tipped his face into the sun. “But all the time I feel like puking,” he told me. “Or you ever been real carsick, Dog?
Real
carsick? Like you don’t care, you ready to jump out the window at sixty miles per hour? That’s what it’s like.” He gulped. “Don’t give me a gun, man. I don’t know what I’d do.”

I stared at him, thinking of the dead pronghorns, thinking of Jesse on the ground. Sneed blinked back. “What?” he said.

I let my breath out. “Nothing. But your thinking’s coming back a little, Sneedy. I can tell. Your memory.”

“Well—”

His confidence seemed to waffle. At least that’s what I guessed. Maybe the fatigue, the nausea, those waves he talked about had washed out brain function. I watched him carefully. He stared past me toward the river. Should I tell him about Jesse? Ask him about Jesse? Now? But something was moving inside him. He winced. He squinted. He twitched. Then he said, “Well … my memory … maybe so. Cuz I know that’s my mama.”

It was. She was. Up that sparkling canyon battled Aretha Sneed, negotiating a rocky downstream bend with Cord Cook’s tattered boat half on her back, half snagging behind.

“Hey!” I hollered. I waved an arm. “Aretha! Over here!”

She looked our way and stopped. She let down the boat and I saw her shoulders droop. Then she sat down hard in the rocks. I stood. Sneed struggled to his knees beside me. “Hey!” Aretha had just dropped her face into her hands when the first shot rang down from the canyon rim.

Atta Boy, Hoss

 

Rock dust jetted up behind her. The second shot hit a chamber of the boat, fizzled it down to a limp yellow sack.

“No!” I screamed as by instinct Aretha crawled under the remainder of the boat. A third shot pierced the thick rubber bottom. “Get out and run!”

I caught Sneed from the back, hooked his armpits, dragged him back to the canyon wall.

“Stay.”

“Dog—”

“Damn it, Sneed. You’re not that better. Listen to me. Don’t move until I come back.”

I charged out across an ankle-twisting chaos of wet rocks. Aretha hadn’t reappeared from beneath the boat. A fourth shot hit the bulbous prow, popped it like a balloon. I glanced over my shoulder, saw the pink pickup on the rim, two gunmen standing up on the hood. The fifth shot—as I flung the boat off Aretha—hit me and I went down.

I lay face to panting face with Sneed’s mother in the rocks. “I got him,” I gasped. “I got your boy. He’s okay. He’s over there, warming up in the sun.”

Her eyes went wild.

“He’s out of sight,” I said. “They’re above him.”

I rolled over. We were in the wide open, no cover nearby, but the hood of the pickup was free of gunmen. I tried to figure where I was hit, but the whole left side of my torso was buzzing into numbness. “You okay? They didn’t hit you?”

Aretha nodded. “You?”

“Not sure.”

She felt along my left side, found pain and blood around my shoulder.

“You’re hit.”

“Not much.”

She made a face at me—incredulous, mocking, hopeful. “Really,” I said. “Flesh wound.”

She peeled back my torn sleeve, winced on my behalf. I took the wet red shred from her fingers and ripped it free. “Turn around,” I said. “I have an idea how we’re going to get out of this.”

Aretha sat still as I dabbed and smeared my blood across her back and neck. As she lay face down in the rocks, her voice was fierce and grim.

“Atta boy, Hoss.”

Playing dead is an easy thing to talk about, but a harder thing to do. Aretha and I stayed face down in those rocks watching the last of the hailstones melt for what seemed like hours before the skinheads made it down to the river bottom.

We could hear them. They came bitching all the way—the gist being that they were supposed to pop the boat and not hit us, this derived from verbal vomit in the configuration that Denny, goddamnit, should have held his fire because he couldn’t hit a nigger in a barbeque shack—or alternately, that Gunter—and here the fat radish received a proper
nom de Nazi
—should have quit bugging Denny while Denny was trying to shoot because Denny could hit that big fucking boat already—who couldn’t?—except that some mudpuppy like Gunter was assing up inside Denny’s ear like some kind of Jewboy fag.

I heard a rock click between Aretha’s clenched teeth, suppressing a snarl. Not a bad idea, I thought.

“Well now they’re fucking dead, you asshole, and we’re in trouble.”

“They were gonna drown anyway.”

“Exactly, you moron.” Gunter was spitting mad. “That’s why we don’t need to shoot them. What did this bitch call you? A cave fungus? Jesus Christ, Denny. You don’t make much of a case for white power.”

“Well … they’re dead, ain’t they?”

“You see this one?” Gunter toed me. “This one here, this is what we call a
white man,
right here.” Gunter gave me stiff, steel-toed shot to the ribs. “He may be a nigger lover, Denny, but we still
do not shoot white people.
Got it?”

Denny dodged lateral. “I’m gonna finish off this boat now,” he announced, and this drove Gunter wild. “Do we
need
to shoot the boat now? Huh? If they’re dead? Think about it, Denny, do we—”

We had a signal, Aretha and I. My thumb was an inch from her face, and when I twitched that thumb, we jumped.

She took Denny’s legs out, me Gunter’s, and the two skins slapped face against rock and had rifles in their necks before either one could blame the other.

“Well … that … was easy.”

I caught my breath. I carefully fit the snout of Gunter’s rifle over the bump of Gunter’s seventh vertebra. Aretha did pretty much the same with Denny. But she also worked her foot up under Denny’s crotch, found a testicle and made ready to pop it like a grape.

I said, “You fellas think this would be a good time to have another chat?”

We All Drowned in the Canyon

 

I didn’t know where Aretha got her next idea—it had to be
Bonanza,
didn’t it?—but she found each boy his own forty-pound river rock to hold with two hands or else we would head on back to crushed testicles, bullets to the spine, all that. This kept the children busy.

“That rock is ancient sea bed,” I told them. “About forty million years old. Isn’t that fascinating?”

Then, after collecting Sneed, we marched them, holding their bits of ancient sea bed, up a narrow trail to the faded-red Ford pickup on the canyon rim. Up there, all that rain and hail had accomplished little. It had balled up dust around a mini moonscape of raindrop craters, no more.

“No, you cannot put your rock down.”

Aretha snapped this in response to Gunter’s fat boy whining. Without discussion, she had assumed the position of supervisor in all matters pertaining to confinement and coercion.

“No, you cannot sit down. Oh, you’re tired?” She got in Gunter’s face. “Well, how about if you stand there about another two hundred years, so you can get some idea how tired the rest feel about you all?”

She gave me a nod. “Go ahead, Hoss. Ask away. But talk slowly.” Denny groaned.

“And use a lot of words,” Aretha added.

The sentiment was right, but I tried to make it quick, efficient. I was not done bleeding, and there was more to Tucker’s game, surely, than Denny and Gunter. So my first question constellated the film star, his affairs on the ranch, the fanatic denial of trespassers, and this fence that seemed to come up over and again in various contexts.

“We don’t know nothing about a fence,” Gunter averred eagerly, ignoring the other dimensions of my inquiry and thus giving me focus.

“Really?”

“What fence?”

“Does Tucker have a deal to let the sheriff on his land? For fishing?”

“The sheriff? Fishing? Hell no.”

“So who else is in here, besides Tucker and you boys?”

He didn’t want to say. Not at all. Neither of them. But Aretha solved that by stacking on additional samples of Ordovician sea floor.

“Bunch of whatyacallums—natives,” Denny offered in a whimper over his rocks.

“Natives?”

Gunter grunted a correction: “Nativists.”

“Which are?”

Rushing at it now, getting it over with. Nativists represented the real Americans, Gunter huffed out. The original white people who built the country. “They come together with Mister Tucker to fight off the Aztlan conspiracy.” He flicked a dark glance at me, managed a simper of disgust at my confusion. “And the North American Union. All that shit that’s coming over the border.”

Aretha and I traded looks. “I guess we haven’t been visiting the right websites,” I told Gunter. “You want to fill that in a little?”

“No.”

I shrugged. Aretha collected additional sea floor. “We’ll wait.”

“Mexicans!” Denny blurted. He hiked one knee up under his rocks, struggling desperately against Aretha’s reminder of a rifle at his chest. “Illegal immigration! It’s a plan to take over everything from Colorado to Texas and give it back to Mexico—”

Gunter sneered. “That or make the U.S., Mexico, and Canada all one country.” He hunkered defiantly under his own rock pile. “Change the dollar to the ‘Amero.’ Bullshit like that. Mister Tucker’s against it—”

“He might be governor of Arizona—”

“He’s got a ranch in Arizona but all these fucking wetbacks, they, they—”

“He clears all this shit up once and for all, Mister Tucker’s gonna run for president,” Gunter concluded. “We’ll be Secret Service.” Sweat ran down his fat cheeks and tattooed temples. He hitched up his rocks and spat defiantly. “Folks like you probably ought to learn to suck dick before then, that’d be my advice.”

I took another look at Aretha. “I’m having a hard time believing people like this exist.”

“Yeah?” Her return glance cut me no slack. “Well it’s about time you got over it.”

Gunter enjoyed that. He spat again. I gun-nuzzled a pudgy spot just above his rocks. “So there’s nativists in here? At Tucker’s place? Why?”

“Training camp,” he grunted.

“Para-military,” Denny squeaked. “They go down in units and do cockroach control on the border. Cuz the government—” he nearly dropped his load, looked up in pleading at Aretha, which was a mistake that brought another rock “—the government won’t do the job. Won’t protect us. So Mister Tucker … Mister Tucker …”

I waved him off. Next topic. “Who’s in the airplane?”

“Mexican spies.”

“Who sent you to burn my buddy’s tent and leave him that note?”

“The—”

“Shut up, Denny. We ain’t been paid yet.”

“The lawyer,” Denny gasped. “That guy that used to work for Mister Tucker but got fired for building the fence. Gray Henderson.”

“Henderson Gray.” I glanced at Aretha. She wasn’t buying it either. “Why?”

“Because he promised to pay us.”

“Why did he promise to pay you?”

“I don’t know.”

“We don’t know.”

“But we didn’t do it right away. We were busy working for Mister Tucker. Then when we did it, the lawyer said it was too late, they were dead already, and he jewed us.”

I nodded for Aretha to cover both specimens. I walked over to the pickup. “You following any of this, Sneedy?”

He nodded. “Uh-huh. My mama’s going to kill some crackers.”

“I hope not.” I found what I wanted in the truck box—a greasy rope about thirty feet long—and in the cab—a two-way radio.

I dropped the rope at Gunter’s feet. I opened a channel on the radio and put it to the side of his head. “Call in. Tell whoever that it looks like we all drowned in the canyon, and you’re out here just making sure. You’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Nearly broken, Gunter did as instructed. Then I had those boys move back to back. I tied them tightly that way, like two bits of fishing line, one thin, one fat, cinched up in a giant nail knot. Aretha permitted me to take her rifle and stow it, unloaded, in the truck box. She permitted the boys, at that point, to drop their rocks.

“Watch your toes.”

“Ouch! Fuck!”

“You’re free to go,” I told them. They fell in a squabbling heap that was quickly enveloped in dust as Sneed and his mother and I drove off downstream in the pickup.