The Clinch Knot (24 page)

Why Don’t We Fish the Roam?

 

Okay, Dog. Your wheels are spinning. It’s sad. It’s over. Let it go.

I slumped at my galley table in the Geyser Motel parking lot. I parted my grimy curtain to watch the sun come up through a stand of yellowing cottonwoods over the top of Aretha’s room.

Time for vitamins, Dog, and rest.

I fixed a whopper v-and-T.

Time to go, Dog, go.

I took my socks off. The cup was empty.

She woke me around noon, banging on the door and then coming right in. I sat up to Aretha tugging on my foot and telling me, “This place needs room service, Hoss.”

She looked good. She smelled good. I sat up in my bunk, hit my head like I hadn’t slept there more than two thousand nights.

“He remembered,” she told me gaily.

Confusion. “Remembered what?” I had to piss like a Russian racehorse. My mind scrambled for options. Cottonwoods, I thought. Or the room. “Where is he?”

“Watching Oprah.”

I was urgent. “Can we talk in there?”

“What’s going on?” she demanded, looking under the bunk and into the cab. “Hoss, you got a lady in here?”

The box of Sneed’s personal property, recovered from Jesse’s car and dropped off by Aretha’s liaison, Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe, had produced a paid receipt for a Livingston business called Printing for Less.

I could think now, my bladder empty. But I could not connect. Printing what for less?

She had taken Sneed there, his mother said, and they had picked up a finished order of fliers advertising a new guide shuttle service, Sneed’s Car Ferry, and giving Jesse’s cell phone number as the contact.

“That’s my plan,” Sneed told me, his eyes bright, “for how I’m gonna live here.”

“Obviously we’re going to help him,” Aretha informed me.

That
we
hung there. She sent up another one.

“And also,” she said, “we’re going on a fishing trip. I am going to show off my skills.”

I turned the flier over. Orange paper, blank on the back. The front said
Cheap Rates! Reliable Drivers! Satisfaction Guaranteed!

“Don’t look so troubled, Hoss. D’Ontay explained it to me. The service is essential. There’s no skills or overhead. You just drive the vehicles wherever the fishing guides want, park and leave the keys, drive back and do it again until you’re done. They call D’Ontay, they don’t have to go through the outfitter, so it’s cheaper. It’s a simple business.”

“What about Sorgensen?”

“Nobody likes him,” Sneed said.

“I don’t mean that. What about his business?”

“It’s a free country,” Aretha said.

“Inside a small town,” I said back.

Her head went side to side, like she was about to go cobra on me. But then she nodded.

“Then let’s talk to him.” She snapped off the TV. “Life is ninety percent money. Let’s just cut him a deal.”

Sorgensen was amped up and jolly. It was mid-day. All his guides were out. All his shuttles had run. There was rain on the way, and you could not drive along any road outside of town, could not take all that bug meat on glass, and miss the fact that the grasshoppers were in. Therefore the guides now worked hopper-droppers and everyone caught fish. Life could not be a whole lot better in the outfitting business.

We found Sorgensen grease-smeared and heaving for breath beside the propped-up hood of his van, but not even engine trouble could darken the revival of some particularly antic smile from the rodeo days.

“Good to see you folks again.” Sneed took a slap on the shoulder. “How you doing, kid? You look like new.”

Sneed had the orange flier in his hand. But he was carsick and seemed to struggle to recall the purpose of our visit.

“Say, one of you mind reaching in the engine here and grabbing that wrench? Dropped that little shit and couldn’t get to it.”

He gusted a peanuty laugh. I easily recovered the wrench from a crevice behind the oil cap. All it took was a regular physique.

“Ah, you’re a lifesaver. You folks looking to fish today?”

Aretha said, “Actually—”

“All my guides are out by now, but what say I call this retired fella I know and you folks do a little thing like Emigrant to Grey Owl?”

Aretha said again, “Actually—”

“You want I call this retired fella? Why don’t you come into the shop? Let’s get you what you need.”

“We don’t want to fish. We want to talk.”

Aretha might have been a bull. Sorgensen’s mouth began to run in crazy zig-zags.

“Hell, I was supposed to be someplace an hour ago but my carburetor has some dang thing flopping open too wide and flooding the engine—You folks ought to fish today. They’re on—Or maybe it ain’t the carburetor, heck I ain’t a mechanic—One of you got the time?—You think they’d make a watch band for larger people? Heck no—Noon?—Goddurnit, I’m way late. I gotta go. You’re looking good, kid. You folks weren’t interested in fishing?”

I just stood back, watched the speed work and the peanuts fly. Eventually Aretha got Sneed’s flier into Sorgensen’s hands and the idea into his head: he had competition on the shuttle end of his business. That was the off switch.

“Hell I do.”

He nearly handed the flier back. Then he seemed to actually read it, his lips moving, his pupils no bigger than pencil tips, sliding back and forth. It took a while.

“Hell now. Ain’t that a thing. Well.”

Managing the flier in a slit between fingers, he rattled a handful of peanuts, mashed them, gobbed them down and went for more. He mumbled as he chewed. About a thousand calories later he handed the flier back with his odd and unexpected response. “Blessings upon you then.” A magnanimous clownly bow, utterly difficult to look at. “It ain’t actually a business so much as a pain in my ass. You can have the durn thing.”

“We’ll give you a cut,” Sneed piped up, tuning in too late and drawing a sharp elbow from his mother. Her scowl said
keep your loss of higher intellectual function to yourself.

“A cut? Will you now?” Sorgensen said, ruffling a greasy, peanuty hand up through his beard.

I didn’t listen, but after thirty minutes Aretha had somehow wrestled Sorgensen down from his ridiculous opening position at half of all profits to ten percent for the first season, five for the second, and none after that. Then a Bozeman taxi pulled into the lot. A cigarette end-over-ended out the window. Lyndzee skittered out in a denim mini skirt and clip-clop heels that were dicey on gravel.

I was there when the trunk popped. I lifted out her suitcases, getting a look at the baggage tags. “How was Saint Paul?” She looked grimly surprised. “Heavenly.”

“Hilarious had engine trouble.”

“Fucker’s got more trouble than that,” she rasped, and wobbled off between the suitcases.

I followed her back to the scene of negotiations and found that Aretha and Sorgensen had settled and were now on amicable terms, discussing our prospects for a fishing trip in the Cruise Master.

Lyndzee’s voice dragged out. “Hello. I’m back.”

“How were things in Denver, Zee-Zee Doll?”

“Mile high.”

“And Uncle Irvin?”

She turned, started toward the house. “Uncle Who?” she said, sounding like the gravel had risen from her feet to her throat.

Sorgensen laughed. “She’s got so much goldurned family.”

More peanuts ensued, flying into that great shaggy head. He tried to pass the jar around. I said, “Why don’t we fish the Roam?”

Sorgensen looked doubtful. Aretha too. Even Sneed.

“We know a spot where the fence is down,” I said. “And the ground is flat and hard a good mile back in there.” I was talking to Aretha, really, wanting to persuade her. “Then there’s a rancher’s road that’s better than a lot of places my vehicle’s been. We can fish our way down and then park by the river, sleep to the sound of it.”

I read her mind. “I don’t think Tucker’s going to bother us. He wouldn’t dare now.”

Sorgensen intervened: “You set up properly to camp, the three of you?”

“We’re good,” I told him, though the truth was we would need to take Aretha’s credit card to Pamida and pick up a few things.

“Got heat?” Sorgensen persisted. “The weather’s turning. It’s gonna get down to forty tonight and then rain later tomorrow. Probably knock these fires back finally.”

Aretha had her eyes wide, her mouth open. “Forty? Forty degrees? Hoss, we better have heat in that thing.”

Body heat
ran through my mind. But I checked the thought and unhooked my eyes from Aretha. Sorgensen took it upon himself to inject his huge body through the side door of the Cruise Master, apparently to check the status of my long-dormant gas heater.

“Well, it’s all there, so you’re good to go, heat wise.” He left the Cruise Master rocking on its sloppy shocks as he side-stepped down.

I relented. “I’ll take a tank of LP.”

Sorgensen heaved off to provide. “On me,” he puffed when he had the tank secured on its bracket. “You folks are good people,” he said, “and I wish you the best.”

Obvious to a
Woman

 

Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe pulled the Cruise Master over at one half mile after Carter’s Bridge and executed such a perfect chin-first saunter up to my window that I decided he had forgotten about my immunity in his deal with Cord Cook.

But instead his voice had an ornery pipsqueak edge to it: “You all didn’t say goodbye!”

“We’re not leaving.”

“Oh,” he said. “Not yet. Right.”

“Maybe not ever,” Aretha said.

“Oh.”

“My baby likes it here. We’re going into that guide shuttling business.”

“But—”

“We talked to Sorgensen. He said take it.”

Crowe had sunglasses on. The clue was in the chin. It zoomed out another quarter inch, like something from a 3-D movie screen.

“So where you all headed now?”

The Roam was the stuff of any fly fishermen’s dreams: sinuous and slick, reflecting the gorgeous pinks and purples of a smoke-addled sunset sky, trout rising everywhere. I struck out in a performance mode, cocky for Aretha, dropping long and lovely show casts into feeding lanes, launching drifts to break a hard man’s heart.

Nothing. Not a bump.

I changed flies. I went to a thinner tippet.

No.

Dog damn it.

I shortened up. I trailed a nymph.

Nyet.

“What’s the matter, Hoss?”

“Hang on just a minute. I think it’s an emerger. I’ll figure it out.”

But I continued emptily upstream, unable to reproduce even inklings of the hook-ups I had imagined. Now I was just trying to find anything that worked—parachutes, comparaduns, floating nymphs, midge clusters—trying to pry the lid off the cookie jar before I turned Sneed and his mother loose.

Nothing.

The trout kept rising. They rose everywhere, and then they rose in everywhere’s face, pummeling the surface. It didn’t help me to hear Aretha yelling, “There’s one, Hoss! Get it!” every time a nose came up. And there was the distraction of Sneed, veering and stumbling along the bank badly enough to make me think he would break either the fly rod I loaned him or his ankle, and quite possibly both.

Dog damn it. Bear down.

I lit a Swisher and dropped the mental flaps. I went back to basics, back to first intentions, made good offers. I shot cast after loving cast across that perfect, pink-on-pewter water, insinuating a pale evening dun into the feeding lanes of large, rising trout—every one of which nosed fussily around my offerings as if it were an old spinster rejecting bummed fruit at the supermarket.

I bit through my Swisher and then Aretha gave up on me. “I’m going to fish right here!” she called, wading into a run I had fished about forty yards ago.

Grunt.

“I’m going to use this fuzzy-butt pink thingy!”
Snort.

“Tie a clinch knot, right?”
Whatever.

I did not even turn around to watch it happen. I didn’t need to, because it happened so vividly, so perfectly, in my mind. I just stood there crotch-deep, scowling upriver, sucking on my broken Swisher and cussing through the countdown. And sure enough, it was not quite three minutes before Aretha began to yell—”Hoss! Hoss, I got one!”—whereupon I unsnapped my net and waded back to corral her trout and tweezer the bead head Pink Squirrel from its big kipe jaw.

“That’s a rainbow?”

“That’s a rainbow.”

“Oh … my … Lord. It is so pretty!”

I slipped a hand beneath the trout’s belly and swept the net out. Sneed came clomping to us with two good ankles but, as predicted, a broken rod.

“He’s a nice one.”

“Your mama caught him, Sneedy.”

“Damn right.” Aretha wanted high fives. “Hoo!”

I held his tail, moved the trout forward and back to send water through his tired gills.

“It’s a boy?”

“It’s a boy.”

“Oh … my … Lord,” Aretha said again, but this time she had straightened her back and widened her vision to take in the scene. This time she was seeing it—seeing the whole fish in the earth and sky and water. She was seeing the landscape that bled silver and pink and blue into her fish, that built those great straps of live muscle. She was gazing in awe at the snowcapped mountains that bred speed and instinct and brilliance into her fish as it faced upstream, upstream, like the twitching tail of a dream.

“Oh … my … Lord. Baby … look!”

“What, Mama? Where?”

“Everywhere, Baby!”

“Now watch this,” I said, and I let the trout go. “What did you do!” Aretha shrieked. She slugged me flat in the chest. “What in the hell did you just do?”

She was still fuming when I handed her a partitioned aluminum mess kit plate with a sausage, some macaroni and cheese, and baby carrots. A significant vodka-Tang could not assuage her.

“Some pig died for this,” she ranted with the sausage on the end of her fork. “Some innocent animal got trucked around the country, got its throat cut, got itself ground up and mixed with its own damn feet and ears, got wrapped in Styrofoam and cellophane—but you won’t kill a fish right out of pure clean water? Lord help me. White people sure are crazy.”

I sat on a flat, sun-warmed river rock. Actually, she had me laughing. I wanted her to go on and on, chopping me up like another doomed pig, but that lovely jilted fisherwoman just tensed there in my lawn chair, in firelight, and wanted push-back, wanted to fight, so I said, “You are about ninety-nine percent right,” and sure enough, Aretha Sneed wanted to excavate the other one percent, using very sharp tools.

My reply: “I just can’t kill them.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“I see. You need somebody that looks like me to do your killing for you, that’s what you need.”

“I
can
kill,” I claimed. “I just don’t.”

She waved the sausage in my face. “Dead,” she said. “Correct? And I’m not political, but let’s take Vietnam, Iraq, any of that, and you’re saying you are off the hook because you, you personally, don’t kill? And you can sleep on that?”

“Well, I do drink a lot.”

Now she was laughing—but just a little. “This stuff is actually not so bad,” she admitted, raising her tin cup for another sploosh of vodka-Tang.

“You make false analogies,” I told her. Silently, I called myself a fool for prolonging this. But my self surprised me, came back with
It’s okay, Dog, trust her …

“People aren’t commodities. There’s no market for them.” Her eyes flashed hot. “Anymore,” I tacked on. “Not as food anyway.” And more: “Those hogs are raised to die.”

Jesus, Dog. Are you drunk?

Yes, I am.

Then shut up.

No, it’s okay, really. Trust her.

“I … okay, listen, please … there are explanations … biological … you know, resource issues … conservation, fish don’t feel pain, studies, all that … but at a time like that … at a time like that one we just had, that beautiful rainbow in my hands, remember it?”

“Mm,” she said.

“At a time like that, I cannot take life. I can only share it. I can touch it, feel it. I can come
so close
to something that is just
so much
like this thing inside me … are you listening?”

“Mm.”

“I don’t know, a wild trout is this perfect live
thing
that is … it’s like the spirit of something inside me … but inside me that spirit is trapped … it can’t speak … it can’t live enough, can’t get enough to eat, can’t jump like it should … but the trout does, the trout lives all that … and I … I have enough trouble, Aretha, really … and I just can’t kill … can’t kill
that.”

I looked at her. “Can I?”

She was completely still and silent. Sneed’s eyes were wide upon me from across the fire, sausage grease reflecting from his lips.

Oh, shit. Dog damn it. Drunken bum speaks gibberish, appeals for meaning from listener. It’s okay. Trust her.

No, it’s not okay. Why don’t we just all go to a bar and yell at faces?

Because it’s different out here. Things change. They open up. Sure they do. I think I’ll just drink a bunch more and hibernate until it’s over.

You don’t need to. It’s fine.

Who the hell are you, anyway? Where did you come from all of a sudden?

I thrashed myself free. “Never mind,” I blurted into the glowing, honey-brown side of Aretha’s head. “You’re completely right,” I told her. “One hundred percent.”

She turned. She smiled.

“You know what, Hoss? So are you.”

She rose a bit unsteadily from the lawn chair and sat down beside me on my warm, flat rock. She took my hand but didn’t squeeze this time. This was a different touch. My mouth went dry.

She said, “And now I think you deserve to know a secret.” This intruding inner voice persisted:
In. Out. In. Out. Breathe, Dog. Do it now.

“Yeah?” It was barely a squeak, all I could do. “So what’s your secret?”

“The first part is who it’s a secret from.” She held on to my hand as she drew her knees up and knocked gently against my shoulder.

“A secret from me?”

“Absolutely. But not originally.”

Wait. Breathe. That’s all you have to do.

“The original secret was a big one. I mean, I could
not
let it out. Those girls at the bad girl home, they would have teased me to death. But we watched about a hundred episodes of
Bonanza,
and after all that, in my mind, and my heart, if I was to give myself to any one of those boys …”

Wait. Breathe. Count. Whatever.

Aretha sighed, shook her head. Firelight gleamed in her eyes. “Oh, my girlfriends would have laughed. And I was so embarrassed, calling myself crazy, and believing I was crazy right up to a pretty short time ago. But … you know?”

“No,” I managed in a whisper. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t.”

“You’ve seen the show.”

“I have.”

“Adam was gay. Good Lord, anybody could see that. He was going to sneak out on a girl and you-know-what. And Little Joe was spoiled. Little Joe wasn’t ever gonna grow up. Some poor woman was gonna have to powder his precious ass her whole damn life. So really, a person watches enough
Bonanza,
men-wise, it becomes obvious.”

She put her head to my shoulder.

“I mean, obvious to a
woman.”

She let out a breath she might have been holding twenty years. I held mine tight.

“My secret choice,” she whispered to my neck, “was Hoss.”