The Clinch Knot (25 page)

Immersed, Together, Breathing

 

Imagine Sneed then. That poor kid was tickled and disgusted and confused and excited—and all of this taking place inside a brain full of sink holes and dead ends and infused with a high degree of loopiness.

“Argawagawbbk!” he said, coming at us with apparently violent intent—though if he was violently angry or violently happy was hard to tell.

But then, mid-assault, balance and gait problems paid Sneed a visit. He listed to his downriver side and walked into my lawn chair. Unable to change course, he trampled it flat, dragged it around his ankle beyond the circle of firelight. Over there, in the darkness by the Cruise Master, he started to laugh, and then, free of the chair, he wrenched open the Cruise Master door and stumbled inside.

“There are so many barriers in life,” Aretha mused, keeping her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her, felt warm muscle, hard rib, and the inward squeeze of her elbow. “And most of those barriers we can’t even see.”

I agreed with that. “And sometimes the things that we see aren’t actually barriers.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” She traced the bones on the back of my hand. “I’m sad, Dog. I’m sad that certain things have happened to me. I’m sad that I got into drugs and that I screwed up as a mother. I’m sad that D’Ontay suffered and that he’s like this now. It’s gonna be hard. Real hard. I’m gonna have to give up a lot to take care of him. None of this needy radical professor bullshit twisting my mind around, I’ll tell you that. I’m sad about that too, though. I’m sad about my time, my options tightening up. I’m sad about all the experiences, all the memories lost to D’Ontay that he may never share with me …”

“That kid jumped off a bridge. I don’t think I ever told you that.”

“What?”

“I mean for fun. As the perfect way of quitting his job. I couldn’t say no when he asked to go fishing with me. My guess is he’ll still have that spirit, no matter what.”

“And maybe die any moment,” Aretha said. “That scares me so much. Oh my Lord, Dog, that scares me. But couldn’t we all die at any moment? Really? Isn’t that exactly the way life really is?”

“Especially when you wade big rivers.”

She sighed. “Dog, this is all big rivers. Layers of big rivers, going every which way. Some day one is gonna get you. But you know what?”

She was looking at me, so close. I squeezed her. “Fortunately, I’m never quite sure what I know, with you. So tell me.”

“Inside all this trouble I feel happy. And the reason is that for the first time in my life, I feel like I see.”

She was so close. I turned and we were eye to eye, one hand span apart. She reached and brushed something from my cheek.

“You know?” she said. “I mean, I see somebody, and I understand something.”

Of course we were caught kissing when Sneed lurched back out of the Cruise Master with the ratty pup tent and the spare sleeping bag I kept under the galley bench.

“Don’t mind me,” he said, kiting off into the darkness with a false agility that raised his mother out of my arms.

We caught up with him pitching the tent on a scrubby rise from which the road was visible but the Cruise Master was not. Out there toward Livingston, a few stray cars moved through the darkness, past the gash in Tucker’s fence, and onward in their private directions.

“You’re a good kid,” his mother told my buddy Sneed. “You always were.”

He pounded stakes with a rock. The ground was dry and hard. A stake bent. Sneed dropped everything. He looked up. “You like Dog?” he asked his mother.

She nodded. “Isn’t that funny? It turns out that I do.”

Sneed picked up the bent stake, sharp at the point. He picked up the heavy rock he used as a hammer. He placed the rock in front of him, focused the center of the stake’s concave surface over the opposite arc of the rock, and he bent the stake straight.

He told his mother, “I didn’t think so about you, not really, not at first. But you have a lot of potential.”

Then he turned away and resumed his efforts with the tent.

“It’s going to be cold, Baby.”

“I’m fine.”

“You didn’t eat much, either.”

“I’m fine.”

I moved and stood beside her, gathered her shoulders in my arm.

“Baby, don’t you want help putting up that tent?”

“Mother,” he said sharply,
“I’m fine.”

“Is it going to be cold in here too?”

I lifted Aretha’s shirt away from her waist, touched her beneath. “I never use the heat in here. And I especially don’t think we’ll need it tonight.”

She pecked me on the forehead, raised her arms overhead. “Go on,” she said. “See what I got on.”

It was a brassiere in green-brown camouflage, and I, of course, was speechless.

“I bought it to piss off the professor,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Does it work for you too?”

“So much,” I said, “that I’m going to have to remove it right away.”

In my bunk, after a long time just nuzzling, kissing, taking our time because it felt like we had known each other for years, we finally went just so far as to move me to my knees between her, my hands and her hands tangling up as we put pieces together, and then something—a barrier? a non-barrier?—something stopped us, and in rushed the sound of the Roam.

In that silence, the first true silence of our time together, the river roared in our ears. But it roared with a delicate complexity, a denseness and a cool warmth, truly not one sound but a weave of sounds, as if there were a thousand rivers out there, a million rivers out there, and we were in them, immersed, together, breathing.

“Do you hear that?” I whispered.

“I can’t hear anything else.”

Her hands moved again, found me pulsing.

She said, “I don’t ever want to hear anything else.”

Then she found center. I moaned.

“Except that,” she said. “Come on, Dog. Let me hear some more of that.”

Knocked Around in the Clown Barrel Too Much

 

We dozed a bit, and I dreamed that the river was a highway. Aretha and I needed roadside help. We were trying to have a picnic but we had no peanut butter. Cars whipped past us until finally one stopped. In my dream I spent the longest time trying to stand up, see who it was, but I could not find my balance and Aretha kept pulling me down, pulling me down, trying to make love right then and there.

“Why don’t we do it in the road?”

“Not on the highway.”

“Huh? What?”

She was sitting up, for real, over me. “Nothing. Stupid dream.”

We did make love then, for real, a second time, but it was strangely unlike our first. Something felt off-center in our bodies. Somehow the flesh felt distant, like we were touching each other with protective mittens across a glass divider. Aretha tried to take me from the top. I do remember that. I remember the seasick feeling. I remember Aretha’s strokes felt erratic and faintly painful. And I remember a weird numbness in my mouth when she came down to kiss me, murmuring, “Dog? Sweetie? You okay? Tell me what you like.”

I remember that I felt panicky. I couldn’t feel much. I didn’t know what I liked. I could not form words. I don’t remember what Aretha did about it, but I know that at some point she soon became a blank, a dumb weight that smacked down on top of me—but that is all I can pull back from those early, telltale moments. I still shake and sweat when I try.

When it happened, it happened fast. It happened inside me on the level of instinct, with the kind of headlong adrenaline magic that sends a trout up a waterfall.

Something woke me. It may have been Aretha gagging against my chest. Or it may have been the jolt to the Cruise Master when Hilarious Sorgensen jammed a two-by-four under the outside door latch and began to kick the other end down into the hard dirt.

But I turned Aretha off me and sat up in a head-spinning lunge. The heater gas was on but the pilot wasn’t lit. That was the insight of instinct. I never meant to use the heater. I never touched it. Therefore the pilot valve had been opened already, sometime before, and the valve on the outside tank was open now. That one small string of logic appeared from nowhere into my hampered brain and sent me naked over the edge of the bunk.

My legs collapsed beneath me. I tore skin from my back against the corner of the galley table. I got onto hands and knees and spent a weird ten seconds looking for my instant Folgers—somehow I thought making coffee would solve the problem—and then for an even more bizarre stretch of time, having found my jar of Folgers, I crawled around the floor looking for matches. It was the most frightening kind of accident that I did not find them. It was blind luck that I spiraled back to an earlier thought: the heater gas was open and the pilot wasn’t lit.

I hurt Aretha, the way I yanked her off the bunk and to the floor. She cried and mumbled and looped a fist at me. Then she threw up between my hands and knees and I crawled right through it. But the Cruise Master’s side door wouldn’t open. Something blocked it.

I crawled back through the galley and into the cab. Sorgensen blurred through moonlight past the windshield and put his weight against the passenger door as I tried to push it open. I was weak, impaired. The monster checked me easily. Then, desperate, my mind skipped rails. I thought Sorgensen was helping me—the good man—but the job was just too tough for the two of us.

I think it was the appearance of little Lyndzee—running into my vision, screaming at Sorgensen, hitting him, kicking his legs and knocking him down—that tipped me off to the true nature of our situation.

I bulled the door open and staggered out. Real air was a shock, like cold water, and now Lyndzee was screaming at me, shoving me along the outside of the Cruise Master while she tried to keep Sorgensen on the ground with a flurry of sharp-booted kicks. He caught her leg finally, pulled her down with him in the dust.

“Forget me!” Lyndzee screamed. “Get her out!”

I kicked out the two-by-four. My side door swung open. I wasn’t smart enough to move aside and so took a massive hit of propane that dropped me to my knees. But I saw Aretha’s hand reach out. I grabbed it. I pulled, and it seemed that she came to me like a heavy, lovely, played-out fish. Still alive.

Stupid me: I took the time to kiss her.

And now Hilarious Sorgensen had broken some piece of Lyndzee, made her shriek in pain, and the sloppy fat man had wallowed upright. Where his shotgun came into the picture, I have no idea. It must have been there, on the dirt between us, knocked loose by Lyndzee and for me to pick up while I was kissing Aretha.

Sorgensen aimed it at me. He could barely breathe. “Both … of you … stand … together.”

I had no idea I was naked. I kneed up shakily, stood in front of Aretha, understanding, somehow, that
she
was.

“Give me that,” I said, and I wobbled straight into the shotgun barrel, solid proof that natural gas causes brain damage.

Sorgensen’s beard ruffled with each word. “I’ll … give you … this.”

Anyone’s guess where my next words came from: “You musta got knocked around in the clown barrel too much.”

“Git back and … go stand next to her.”

I was pure blind synapses, fish up a waterfall: “I guess you only got one shell in there, huh? That’s why you need us together?” Maybe Sorgensen hadn’t understood his own logic. Now he saw it. Uncertainty made those buried pig eyes begin to reach and dart. “There’s three of us here,” I threw out. “Four if you count my buddy. Look.”

Sneed had awakened and come to the rim of the rise above us. He was a dark shape. “Go back to the tent,” I hollered at him. “Get your … weapon.”

Of course Sneed was confused, frightened—what weapon?—at a loss for what to do next. So was Sorgensen.

“Lyndzee!” he bellowed, not daring to turn and look for her. “Go to the van!”

She was moving, crawling. But I said, “She can’t help you.”

Aretha began to vomit behind me. Sneed had taken my order and gone back toward the tent. I took a nude step toward Sorgensen, freezing him. Meanwhile, Lyndzee had lifted herself from the dirt. Hopping like an injured bird, she had made it to Sorgensen’s van.

I took another step, staying on the fat man’s mind.

“Better shoot me soon. Sneed’ll be back any second. And you know his brain is damaged. His boundaries are down.”

“Lyndzee, damnit woman, get my sidearm!” Sorgensen began to tremble with the ferocity of panic and rage. One more step closer for me.
“Now!
”

But Lyndzee had the sidearm already, was hopping out with a heavy pistol, aimed square on Sorgensen’s back. I worried about angles. Behind me Aretha had risen to her knees, bleeding freely from one arm, and she began to rant about fire safety in a tone that was both loopy and vicious, as though she were on a public service visit to the Ku Klux Kindergarten. “Look,” I said to Sorgensen. Across rangeland from the highway bounced headlights, coming fast.

“Just lay it down,” I said. “Spare us. Lyndzee’s about to blow a hole in all that.”

Sorgensen jerked around to look at her. She was only ten feet behind him. I had the reptile sense to dive beneath the Cruise Master and pull Aretha with me. Hilarious Sorgensen began, “You stupid, crazy little—” and she pulled the trigger.

Wham!
The sound nearly cracked my head open. Lyndzee flew back one way and Sorgensen blew apart in the other direction and it was over.

Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe filled the next few dreamlike moments by slamming out of his cruiser with pistol drawn, barking commands that nobody followed except for Sneed, who dropped the stick he had carried over the ridge.

Then in gasping bursts Lyndzee said to all of us, “Just because I’m a drug addict doesn’t make me a bad person. Nobody can make me a bad person. Nobody can do that. I decided that. It won’t happen.”

None of us objected. But she repeated her resolution three times before she limped up and shot Sorgensen again.

No Harm Done?

 

Sheriff Roy Chubbuck, vanquisher of Dane Tucker and liberator of the Roam River, and Hilarious Sorgensen, behemoth, beast, outfitter, ex-clown, and dealer of substances A-Z, died on the same day and with approximately opposite degrees of grief and fanfare.

Sheriff Chubbuck died predictably and quietly with his wife and grown-up daughters at his side, causing murmurs of sorrow and relief to ripple through Park County and beyond.

What a story, people said. Their Sheriff was a good, quiet, hardworking man who with his last stores of energy had managed a successful counterattack against several kinds of evil and pulled it off. Over the next few days, the national media would discover the Dane Tucker bust and come in sniffing and prodding, pontificating from Livingston street corners into their wind-baffled microphones. Folks just walked on by.

The sheriff’s funeral at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Livingston drew six hundred people, including a shell-shocked yours truly, plus a shell-shocked Aretha and Sneed, as among those who could not fit into the church and so participated from outside, listening through the windows and soaking in the first day of a slow, blessed, three-day rain that drowned out the forest fires for good.

Sorgensen died alone under a surgeon’s racing fingers in a scarcely human puddle of blood and guts and fat, disappointing no one but a small cadre of local death penalty advocates who were regrouping after the loss of Sneed as their poster boy. I saw in the newspaper that Sorgensen’s funeral was in Big Timber. I cannot tell you who was there.

And poor Lyndzee Peterson, only twenty-seven after all, had crossed her Rubicon, drug-wise, all over state and local newspapers and television with her “story”—her confessions of crime and addiction and her promise to herself and to God and to her family (Clyde Park, Ringling, and Belgrade) to clean up her life. For good this time.

In the details, the drug story was a new one entirely, interesting for everyone involved.

Lyndzee came clean on her part. She was the one who stole drugs for Sorgensen. Not the
only
one, she was quick to point out, because she and Hilarious had only been together two years, and there were plenty of other girls before her who took those quick-hitting trips around the country to raid the clinics and pharmacies and pet hospitals of Sorgensen’s fly fishing clients.

As for the rest, Acting Interim Sheriff Russell Crowe invited me and Sneed and Aretha to visit him in Chubbuck’s office, whereupon he revealed a multi-layered agenda that began with an overreaching description of combat wounds to his head (bruised eye socket) and left arm (not a break, fortunately, but painful, and in the sling for a couple weeks).

“But you folks are okay, I hope, no harm done?”

“You mean no harm done by you?”

Russell gave a little shrug and tried to charm us with a smile. “You know what I mean. Things have worked out okay, right? Why shouldn’t we just leave things as they are?”

A long, long silence. I could sense Aretha’s blood heating up. I gazed around the office at Chubbuck’s artifacts from a lifetime of enmeshment with the land. Then, “Russell,” I said, “just how are things, exactly?”

He sat back in the sheriff’s chair. He put his hands—both—behind his head and his boots on the desk corner. Then he quickly dismantled all that, realigned his sling, and leaned over the desk to press the intercom button. “Ms. Park-Ford?”

“What.”

“Could we get a round of sodas in here?”

There was no answer, just a click of static. Moments later Chubbuck’s fireplug receptionist bustled in and out, leaving four wet Sprites on the desk exactly in front of Russell. “No thanks,” all three of us said to his offer.

He cracked his can, refreshed himself with a sip.

“We’ve been onto Sorgensen for a long time.”

Aretha and I traded glances at the “we.” Crowe caught it, read it, forged on with the sale.

“Of course we knew he was dealing. He was dealing as far back as twenty years ago on the rodeo circuit. But something about his set up at the Fly ‘n’ Float seemed different to us. And so we—”

“Russell,” I interrupted, “you made those injuries to yourself, right? After you let Sneed out of that transport ambulance?”

He tried to off me with a silly-Dog smile. His Sprite can clanked against his teeth.

“And speaking of we, your mother picked Sneed up in Billings, drove him around until you were ready, then set him down in Livingston. Chubbuck was going to look incompetent. You were going to catch Sneed on Main Street and look like a wounded hero. And you just missed him, right? Tick Judith snapped him up before you saw where he went.”

“That’s over,” Crowe said.

“Do you plan to run for real sheriff, Russell?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because if you do, and we hear about it, it is most definitely
not
over.” I traded looks with Aretha. “I think we’ll see to that.”

Nothing from Russell. He looked down at the Sprite rings on Chubbuck’s desk.

“What happened with your father, Russell?”

We waited. Russell said to the desk: “He built Ma a nice place in the Paradise Valley, next door to Michael Keaton. The county board accused him of embezzlement.”

“Of course he was innocent.”

A long pause, now fingerpainting with the water on the desk: “So I hear.”

“He was set up, I’ll bet. By his enemies. Is that also what you hear? And that therefore all this is okay?”

Russell didn’t answer. Finally he pushed the intercom again.

“Ms. Park-Ford?”

“I’m here. I’m here every day all day long.”

“Great. And how about Investigator Collins? Is he still here?”

Silence again on the other end—and our end too until this Collins came in. He was a handsome young black man, wearing an expensive suit and looking as if he had been pulled away from something more important. He was FBI from Denver, Crowe informed us. “Because, you know, this is interstate. Probably Investigator Collins is the best person to answer your questions. I mean, instead of you making a lot of assumptions.”

I smiled inside. We had him. Russell Crowe was ours. Sneed was out of legal trouble. Meanwhile Collins looked around in dismay as if to say
answer whose questions why?
But Russell offered him a Sprite, and Collins, ever-so-slightly gracious, proceeded wholesale to get the Sorgensen story over with.

What was different with Sorgensen, he said, was the drugs. The variety, he said. I saw him glance at Aretha. She nodded.

Collins said, “Most guys deal coke, or weed, or meth—you know, they specialize, they have basically a vertical network. You bust someone at the right place on the totem pole, you can bring the whole thing down.”

He checked on Aretha: still nodding.

“But Sorgensen was like a black market pharmacy. He could sell you morphine, oxy-contin, amphetamines, animal tranquilizers, growth hormones, Prozac, Viagra, I forget the name of some crap they inject bulls with, you name it. And he seemed to have no chain, no one above or below him. Local law enforcement would bust a user, like …”

“Like Jesse,” Aretha helped out.

Collins seemed unclear who that was. The dead girl, Aretha told him. He smiled.

“Yes. Like Jesse. Local would bust a user and get nothing, no story, no ups. None of his users knew a thing except to see this Sorgensen about taking a float down the river. He would say his guides were all out and did you want him to go inside and call this retired guy he knew. Your Sheriff Chubbuck, smart man that he was—” and here the acting interim cleared his throat, found a tissue, began to wipe Sprite circles off Chubbuck’s desk—”was determined to bring the whole thing down, so rather than scare Sorgensen into inactivity, he backed off.”

Collins looked at Aretha and provided a footnote: “We weren’t in this yet. It was a local matter.”

“I see.”

“We come in when crimes cross borders.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “I see. Sure.”

“The sheriff here just let it ride for a while, keeping his eyes open. That was the smart thing to do. Then one day, about a year-and-a-half ago when he still felt decent, he was at a law enforcement conference in Phoenix and heard about a supply of drugs missing from a veterinary clinic with no sign of a break-in and no employees they could clearly suspect. Now the sheriff had something to look into. Turns out the vets from that same clinic were up here at that same time for a week of fishing. Their outfitter? The guy who had access to their wallets, keys, all that?” Investigator Collins raised an eyebrow for Aretha. “Hilarious Sorgensen.”

Crowe’s eyes were skimming Aretha too, neither of those scavengers imagining that she had dressed for the Dog. She wore a white silk top, short-sleeved, tightish, and v-necked. She crossed her legs in pale orange capris and she very faintly clapped a thin leather sandal against a foot tipped with freshly painted, pale orange toenails.

My face was getting hot. I suggested a shortcut: “So Lyndzee Peterson explained how they did it?”

I hardly got a glance from the FBI guy. But I had cut Collins to the chase.

“Yes,” he said. “Sheriff Chubbuck contacted us with part of the picture, and our involvement produced several more of these mysterious, unsolved thefts. But Ms. Peterson filled in the blanks. Sorgensen advertised heavily in medical and veterinary publications. And his business here, the fishing thing …”

He faltered and Russell jumped in. “You know how shuttle drivers have the keys to the guides’ vehicles. You know how clients show up in their pants, with wallets, keys, hotel passcards.” He spoke rapidly, as if he feared Collins would cut him off. “All that stuff ends up in a guide’s vehicle, which sits at a boat ramp all day. Sorgensen knew where everybody was floating every day, knew where they were taking out, knew where the drivers left the keys.”

When Aretha declined to nod or smile for him, Crowe shut up, letting Collins tell us that according to Lyndzee, Sorgensen used the internet and made phone calls around the country, probing, looking for business hours, vacation closures, one or two-man operations. He liked to pick places that had young employees or someone else who might be easy to blame. Sometimes, based on his research, he sent Lyndzee out to go through certain vehicles. He trained her to recognize the kinds of keys that might open clinics and pharmacies and so on. He trained her to swap out hotel passcards for dummies, and sometimes he sent her to raid hotel rooms. She brought the keys back to Sorgensen, he made copies on his own key cutter, and then Lyndzee put everything back the way it was. When Sorgensen thought he had a go, thought everything was right, he sent his girl, immediately, with copied keys, to the location in question—usually a smallish operation in a logistically feasible location. Lyndzee arrived in town, located the clinic, entered, filled suitcases, locked back up, and flew straight home.

“Flew back home with suitcases full of drugs?” I interrupted. “Through airport security?”

“No.” Once more Collins spoke to Aretha instead of me. “She would ship boxes. UPS. FedEx, so on. She would find the clearances and manifests that those people have for shipping controlled substances. She was trained how to fill them out. The boxes came to Sorgensen’s shop, which used to be a dental clinic years ago and remains on the federal list. And because these crimes occurred in an apparently random fashion, in completely unrelated parts of the country, nobody caught on. Unlike a lot of criminals, Sorgensen was a smart man. But, of course … not smart enough.”

Collins had finished. He stood. “Are we good?” he asked Crowe with strained cheer in his voice.

“We’re good. Thanks.”

“If you have any more questions,” Collins told Aretha warmly as he passed her his card, “just let me know.”

The door closed behind him. Aretha studied the card. “Hmm,” she said. “Nice guy. Helpful.”