The Clinch Knot (20 page)

Maybe I Am

 

I had to work from memory. We were along the lower third of the Roam River now, and my sense was that the black circle on Sneed and Jesse’s map was maybe another ten or so miles north as the crow flies and then a mile, at least, east of the river. Maybe. I could only drive and hope. I held on to the thrashing wheel as the truck hammered over raw rangeland in a way that spoke well for the Fords of yesteryear. Meanwhile Sneed and Aretha, squeezed together on the bench seat beside me, engaged in a prickly kind of rapprochement.

“I’m not going to bite you.” Aretha glowered at her son from frighteningly close range. “I’m your own mother, for God’s sake.”

Sneed maintained a forward gaze on a stiff neck planted between pinched-in shoulders. “There’s no money in me now,” he said.

“Funny how out of everything, you remember that. But since you do remember that, let me tell you about—”

“Dog!” Sneed blurted, appealing for help. “Hang in there, Sneedy. Just listen.”

“—while I—”

“Tell me all about yourself.” Sneed piped this hotly and then covered his ears.

Aretha drew her head back and narrowed her eyes. She moved her head side to side, that cobra again, looking to strike.

“Well,” she said. “Well, well, well. Listen to you.”

He lowered his hands. “Why
don’t
you listen to me?”

“You sound like an angry little child.”

Now Sneed made fists in his lap. “Maybe I am.”

The truck pounded onward another hundred yards, lurching over prairie dog holes and mowing down sage brush, me looking for a place to cross the river.

“Maybe I am,” Sneed blurted again. “And maybe you are too.”

His mother gathered those words into a long and stony silence. Meanwhile I found some long-gone rancher’s poured-gravel ford across the Roam River. I ripped through about a foot of water to the eastern bank, an eroded dirt scarp that the truck angled up with a great amount of revving, spinning, and clanking along the undercarriage.

“Glad it’s not my truck,” I put in, hoping to lighten the mood.

We had to be getting somewhere close—but close to what? Sneed was insensate with stress right then. I let him be. I glanced at Aretha, thinking I would need her shortly. She was biting her lower lip, digging absently with her painted thumbnail at some hardened piece of ranch muck glued to the wing window in front of her. Stalemate. Dog running solo.

“Well,” Sneed’s mother said again after another half mile, and she blasted us with a sigh. “Well, well, well.”

“Well what?” her son said.

“Well, maybe I am what you said. Maybe you’re right. Maybe both of us just had the world cave in on us at about the same time.” She bit her lip again, hard, and let it go.

“I’m okay now.” This sounded like a claim, tenuous, but submitted for Sneed to believe. “I built my health back up. I have a job that’s hard but I got another woman in the fire station with me and so don’t mind it too much. I make decent money. I’m taking classes at a college. I’m meeting lots of smart people—” she glanced at me “—who say I might make law school.”

I just smiled at her. Why not? She released another, lighter sigh while I steered up a stump-littered hogback ridge.

“But I think I should start by talking about you, D’Ontay, and how what you did, no matter how much pain it caused you or how bad you feel about it, talking about how what you did saved me. I mean, child, you don’t realize that you saved my—”

“There they are!” shouted Sneed, cutting off his mother and nearly jumping off his seat. “Dog! There they are! It’s not too late!” He thrashed side to side as if looking for something. Then he struck a fist down on the dashboard.

“Damn it! We lost the fence cutters!”

That Bastard … That Cheater

 

From the crest of that hogback ridge I witnessed a sight that I will credit to the grit and compassion and guilt of my young buddy D’Ontario Sneed for the rest of my life.

From the narrow piece of flat land below the ridge, along a fence line to the north for nearly a quarter mile, stretched a milling mass of pronghorn antelope—hundreds in all, so crowded and so close below that we could smell them, could hear their grunts and whistles and scrapings along the barrier of the fence.

“Dog, I knew it,” Sneed was blurting into my ear. “They’re not herding animals. That’s one way they avoid disease and starvation. They travel in small family groups. This is not a herd. They’re just piled up here. They’re stuck. They can’t move.”

“Travel where?” his mother wanted to know.

“They’re migrating … trying to migrate … to the Red Desert in Wyoming.”

He was breathing too hard. I saw the hiccups strike him, then the dizziness. His eyes glazed and for a moment, I thought Sneed would pass out. “Shit,” he muttered. “Oh, shit. Why?”

I opened the door, pulled him out across the bench seat, made him lie down in the thin hot shade of the truck box. I could read the demand in Aretha’s eyes.
What the hell is going on?

“They’re stuck at Tucker’s fence,” I told her. “It went up last year on Henderson Gray’s orders. Tucker got in trouble with activists and Gray lost his job over it. Then Tucker got stubborn and wouldn’t take it down. Gray and Sneedy—”

I gazed down at the milling pronghorn. Their distress was palpable. The air buzzed with animal energy.

“When Jesse introduced those two, Gray and your son, D’Ontay must have heard about the fence. Gray said they clashed. This is why. D’Ontay didn’t like it.”

“But it’s just a little fence.”

“Mama, pronghorn can’t jump,” mumbled Sneed, trying to sit up. “That fence … it blocks the corridor. They can’t … they have to …”

I raised up to study the landscape. Where the pronghorn wanted to cross was a dry wash that led up into the lap of the Abrosakas, the rugged, snow-capped range they would have to cross to reach their lowland winter grounds in Wyoming. Not that a human eye could tell, but up there somewhere had to be the easiest route through this part of the mountains, a route discovered and made into memory by a million years of tightly threaded pronghorn steps.

“They hit this fence and have to backtrack?”

I was asking Sneed. He nodded.

“But they don’t want to backtrack,” I said. I could feel this now. It was so simple, really. It was like salmon with a dam in their way, contemplating the unknown of a fish ladder. “They stall and stress,” I explained to Aretha. “They waste time and energy. They don’t want to take a different route that’s not as good. They’re conflicted.”

“Yes.” Sneed was staying with me through a mighty mental effort. “They can’t stay here. Wolves will get them. They can’t run … in so much … snow.”

Aretha had figured it out—not just the animal behavior, but now, fully, our mission down the river, the injured soul of her son.

She knelt beside and cradled his head. “Oh, Baby.” She blew a horsefly off his face. “I see, Baby,” she murmured. “I know.”

I called back from the cab, “No problem with the cutters, Sneedy. There’s a pair right here in the glove box.”

Sneed limped between his mother and me like an injured athlete to the fence. The pronghorn shied and scattered, leaving behind the half dozen or so that had tried to crawl under, had gotten snagged, and were dead or dying.

“That bastard,” Sneed muttered. “That cheater. He runs them up against here.”

He did not observe the symmetry or the ceremony of the moment as he labored with his weak grip to cut through the six strands of overzealous barbed-wire. But I felt it. I know Aretha felt it. Her tears fell silently as she helped him, peeling away each wire strand on her side, tugging it back twenty feet to the next steel post, where it could be crudely wrapped and kept out of the way.

I did the same on my side. We did not speak.

Then Aretha went to her son. She sat beside him in the dirt. She enveloped him in her arms. I stepped away, giving space, heading for the truck. I planned to wait for the creatures to settle and sniff and process what had happened. I hoped it would not take too long and that we would see them move. We could linger for an hour, I figured, but not much more before we would have to clear off Tucker’s land.

But the eager pronghorn surprised me. They didn’t wait. Not even one minute. A bold pair skittered through, yards from human mother and son, and then turned, nostrils flaring, flanks twitching. Then through that proven breach sprinted a juvenile buck, kicking dust on Sneed as he passed, and off into a joyful, grass-munching zig-zag went this little family group on their long trek to the winter grounds.

It was beautiful. Another family followed, then another, and another, until a stream of hooves and flanks and horns flowed around Sneed and his mother, on and on, the animals both nervous and bold, picking their way precisely around the two strange creatures entwined and weeping in the dust.

On and on this went—and on, it seemed, for an eternal moment that stretches now across my entire memory, my entire imagination, and infuses every scrap of my time, past and present, with a new type of end-all river, with loveliness and hope and above all, for me, with the miracle of sadness.

I could cut loose and cry at this. I could. I could just fucking weep.

And I would have—except just then across the rangeland appeared the twisted sprinting shape of Henderson Gray.

World-Record Brook Trout

 

Gray at first was a speck, an odd neon bug crawling across the vast landscape with his scooting, arm-flapping, ultra-marathoner’s gait. But in truth he came on with desperate speed over the hogback ridge, down the near side, and into the wild dispersion of pronghorn.

Once immersed among the animals, he zipped open his fanny pack and withdrew a camera. He photographed, even seemed to take video. Having captured their images in his camera, Gray charged at various juveniles—and once at a gimpy older buck—trying to split them out. But each of these animals simply squirted away in the direction of the general migration. Each of these animals pogo-hopped for a hundred yards or so, then turned to inspect Gray with placid ungulate curiosity.

Gray persisted. Time and again amidst the moving mass he singled out an animal, photographed it, stashed the camera in his fanny pack and lit out after the antelope. But time and again that pronghorn sprang away easily in the direction of the herd, leading Gray to abandon a chase that should have gone on—if I understood deer-running correctly—for several miles until the animal collapsed and surrendered to the Blackfoot brave or the Tarahumaran warrior.

Not without the fence, though. Not for Henderson Gray. Not without the confusion and stress of animals forced to go against their prehistoric grain.

Gray threw his red harrier’s beanie to the ground and stamped toward me, shouting something long before I could hear him, shouting it again and again until he kinked right up into my face. “What the hell?” he squawked. I gripped one scrawny, freckled arm and slammed him against the skinheads’ pickup.

“You tell me.”

“Who the hell cut this fence?”

“We did. Who the hell put it up? That’s the question. And why?”

“You’re trespassing,” Gray sputtered at me.

“So are you. Tucker fired you a year ago.”

He tried to wrestle free, but I had him. He gave up pulling and tried to shove me off my feet. But I could hold my ground in some of the biggest rivers in America. Core strength, I believe they call it these days. I didn’t budge. Not for that jerking weasel. Not a bit.

“Now I see it,” I told him.

“See what?” he panted.

“You had your thing with Jesse. She wouldn’t let you go. She wanted you to do something for her father. She stalked you, bothered you, whatever. Poor guy. You can have that. Jesse was like that. It’s all true.”

Gray stopped wriggling. He tried to reassemble the game face of a big-time lawyer. “This is aggravated assault,” he tried out for size. “This is an unprovoked attack.”

“I saw the same TV show,” I told him.

“You’ll be sued to the bone in civil court.”

“You’re looking at the bone, pal. This is it.”

We stayed nose to nose. Meanwhile I began to hear a faint low thumping, like the drumming of a prairie chicken.

I nodded toward Sneed and his mother. “Down there too. Bone. We got nothing to lose. So let’s talk about something else.”

Aretha noticed us. She stood up, grabbed her son beneath the armpits and hauled him up too. As they began to make their way in our direction, Gray thrashed hard, made me catch him up by his chicken neck.

“Here’s how I see it. Correct me if I’m wrong. Jesse thought maybe she could use Sneed to make you jealous. Then you’d come back to her, at least as far as helping her appeal her father’s sentence. But that didn’t work out. Instead what happened is that you told Sneed about your deer running. Probably Jesse told you about his interest in pronghorn. You sensed his interest, and so you told him about this fence. He didn’t like it.”

“I … I …”

I eased up on Gray’s throat. He spat. “I didn’t know about the whole migration thing. Until he told me.”

“Like hell you didn’t. You knew they would pool up here and get weak. Then all you had to do was pick one out and chase it back in the direction it didn’t want to go. That would make it easy.”

His temper flared at that. “Easy? It’s not easy. It’s never been done, never been proven to have been done. Only stories. That’s how easy it is.”

“So you’d be famous. You’d be a real hero.”

“I already am. In some circles.”

The thump-thumping grew louder. It came from the sky in the direction of Livingston. I glanced back. There was nothing in the air.

“Really? You’re famous? For what, for
almost
running down a pronghorn? Like I’m famous for
almost
catching a world-record brook trout?”

He glared. No effect on the Dog.

“My guess is that you’re more famous for being a fool and a liar, for hacking off a bunch of scientists who want you to prove your stupid idea, and to get that monkey off your back, you decided to cheat.”

Down the ridge, Aretha was now wrestling with Sneed. “No, Baby. Just take it easy. Dog is going to handle it. Baby, take it easy.”

“It’s not cheating,” Gray claimed, keeping an eye on mother and son.

“No? And I guess it wouldn’t be cheating if I trapped that world-record brook trout behind a dam, let it starve a couple weeks, then tossed in a nightcrawler? How would that look? Because that’s what people are going to know about you when we get out of here.”

“Let me go,” he seethed, and I saw no reason not to. But I stayed in front of him while he shook out his legs and began to jog minutely in place. The thump-thumping grew louder in the sky.

“You didn’t anticipate that Sneed would react to your fence the way he did. Then you figured out he was either going to expose you, or he was going to stop you by cutting the fence and letting the pronghorn out. First Jesse was a problem, now Sneed too. You paid those skinheads to scare them off, but it didn’t work. So you found a way to get rid of them both.”

By now, Sneed and his mother had reached the truck. She had him contained, she thought. “You wait in there.” With an application of her firewoman’s brawn, she stuffed him in.

Then we all looked up. The thumping was helicopters, two of them, government maybe, skimming fast up the Roam River from the Paradise Valley. As they hammered toward us, the pronghorn bolted en masse to the south. On came the copters until the down-draft from the rotors enveloped us in a stinging, blinding dust storm—and inside of this storm, Henderson Gray broke past me and darted off across the scrubby rangeland.

And there would be no catching him—not now, I thought—until Sneed started the pickup.