The Clinch Knot (5 page)

Black from Both Directions

 

“I am no relation to the actor of course.”

Chubbuck’s deputy discharged this complete non sequitur into my exhausted brain as he pulled his cruiser past a dusty, neatly parked black SUV and swung from the lot.

“You know, Russell Crowe? The actor?”

My silence provoked him: “Deputy Russell Crowe. It’s just my name. I can’t help it. I’m not, like, an actor or anything.”

This not-actor deputy had glossy black hair, exactly one centimeter too long for law enforcement. He had a distinctively oversized jaw that appealed in the general direction of handsome but did not quite arrive. He grinned at me with large yellow teeth proportioned for the mouth of a small horse. “Trust me,” he said. “It’s weird, but I’m actually no relation to Russell Crowe the actor.”

We were headed for Sacagawea Park, where I had left the Cruise Master in the shade of cottonwoods. The deputy ran the windows down and spun the steering wheel with the palm of his right hand. He laid his left arm out the window and used that hand to designate greetings upon a sun-beaten old rancher limping across Park Street.

“What’s the good word, Walt? We gonna get some rain?”

Walt scaled the curb, pushed his ten-gallon up and looked back in dismay as we rounded onto Main Street. So perhaps I spoke for Walt too. “Well, why would you be any relation? If you were related, you wouldn’t have the same name. Unless you were the guy’s son.”

“I’m not. I swear.”

“Of course you’re not.”

Deputy Crowe laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s confusing.” He sent greetings to an underdressed older woman leaving the flower shop with a bouquet. She smiled and waved.

“Hello, Russell.”

“Hey, baby girl.”

“Working hard or hardly working?”

“You know me.”

“Oh, Russell.” She rolled her eyes. Russell gave her a little salute and took an unnecessary left turn.

“But you’d be totally surprised how many people don’t pick up on the name thing like you did. They think I’m related to the actor.” He hit the brakes. “Hey, there’s Ivan.”

The deputy eased up wrong-side to the curb. “Ivan, my brother!” This salutation startled a young man in grungy bermudas and a goatee who looked stoned and therefore sorely undecided about approaching a sheriff’s cruiser.

“Ivan’s a writer,” Russell Crowe told me. “Hey, Ivan, how’s that novel coming along?”

Mortified, this Ivan shifted a paper sack under his arm and made some noises, possibly also some words.

“Attaboy, Ivan. Never give up. And then you gotta write the screenplay, remember? You promised me.”

We took another left at the next corner, Second and Geyser, accomplishing a one-eighty now, heading back in our original direction along a street with three saloons and five art galleries. Deputy Crowe said, “My bad. Gotta make a stop.”

He pulled into the angle parking in front of a craft shop. A minute later he was back, showing me the contents of a bulging plastic sack.

“Pine cones,” he said, stating the obvious. “You’d be surprised how much these cost. Two bucks apiece for something you can pick up off the ground.” He tossed the sack in the back seat. “But the boss lady, she’s gotta have ‘em.”

Two more lefts and we were taking a second tour down Main Street. The deputy confused a tourist couple with his vivid salutations. Then he froze to the hot sidewalk a deeply inebriated old gentleman with one wet pant leg. This man stood as motionless as he could manage, as if he and the deputy were playing red light-green light.

“That’s Elmer Sorgensen.”

Russell Crowe pulled over, hopped out and opened his back door. “Come on, Elmer, get in.”

The frail old man sluiced himself in across the backseat and lay down. The smell of urine filled the cruiser until Crowe put up his safety window. “Sorgensens are a clan of sheep-herding Swedes from the old days.” He swung me a jaw that looked heavy with information. “There’s a ton of them around here, various states of falling apart. None of them went to school at all. Elmer’s brother does okay, though, runs the outfitter Jesse worked for. Hilarious Sorgensen. I bet you know him.”

Yes I did, I said, and Crowe celebrated his acumen with a horse-toothed smile. Then, as he eased away from the curb, he said, “So you don’t think your black friend popped Jesse? Is that it?”

“Is that what?”

“Is that the basic problem?”

“The word black in that sentence,” I said, “is the basic problem.”

“Huh? Oh.” He gave me a falsely contrite look. “African-American. I mean, no offense.”

“It doesn’t belong in the equation,” I said, “unless you’re going to look into black from both directions.”

Deputy Russell Crowe drove a half block in utter puzzlement. At last he said, “Black from both directions?”

“Meaning my friends Sneed and Jesse were threatened by skinheads the day of Jesse’s murder.”

That jaw extended. “I didn’t know that.”

“The sheriff knew it and did nothing. He came out alone, never even left his car. He has a hate crime staring him in the face, and he never even questioned the skinheads.”

Crowe had slowed down to a studious five miles per hour, trying to follow. We passed by Tick Judith in the window of the liquor store. He stared out, crumpled and bereft.

I said, “So does the sheriff have something going with Dane Tucker?”

“Dane Tucker?”

“Those two punks work for Dane Tucker.”

Here came even more jaw. “They do?”

“I should think the sheriff’s department would know that.”

“Well … you said they made a threat?”

“They burned Sneed’s tent. They left a note that said turn back now.”

“Huh,” the deputy said. He scratched along the hairless run-up to his chin. “But why would the sheriff take the call himself? He never does that. He’s got emphysema, bad. He’s pretty weak. He saves his energy for fishing.”

“Maybe someone should ask why.”

“Huh,” the deputy said. “Yeah. That’s right. And hey, lucky, here’s my man Henderson Gray.”

Crowe slowed again, veered to the wrong-side curb in front of a familiar law office. So Henderson Gray was the nasty little marathon man who flipped me off a few hours before I found Sneed and Jesse. He wore a summer suit now, looked wealthy, full of purpose and importance.

“Yo, Mister Gray!”

Russell Crowe yipped this out the window. The man looked annoyed.

“Is Dane in town? I mean, is he out at the ranch?”

Gray flicked a glance through the cruiser at yours truly. He moved internally, like running in place at a stop light. “Yes. Dane is at the ranch. Is there something I can help you with, Russell?”

“The sheriff been out to, like, see Dane? Or anything? Lately?”

“Not that I know of.” I could see Gray grinding his teeth.

“Why?”

“Nah. Just wondered. Hey—you run down that deer yet?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Hah,” the deputy laughed. “You do that. Show me the picture. I’ll buy you a beer.”

Henderson Gray looked like he might hurtle the cruiser in another second or two. But Russell Crowe, no relation, showed a surprising sense of timing. “Gotta scoot,” he said, and he pulled away. He left Gray scowling at his watch.

“That’s Dane Tucker’s attorney,” Crowe told me. “Great guy. Ultra-marathoner. Trying to be the first man to run down a pronghorn antelope.”

I felt the bump of that—pronghorn antelope—but my brain was done and slipping into distraction.

“So Dane is at the ranch.” I heard Crowe musing as he drove on toward the place where I could sleep. “So the sheriff …”

Elmer Sorgensen, the drunk, moaned and babbled in the back seat. The sounds reached me faintly through the safety glass. They lulled me toward my own dark deep.

“Huh. Really. Skinheads? Working for Tucker?” Deputy Russell Crowe accelerated. “And the sheriff did nothing?”

We Work for the County

 

Chubbuck’s deputy ladled Elmer Sorgensen onto a bench in the shade at Sacagawea Park and then followed the Cruise Master east on I-90 to a point just short of the Springdale exit at the Sweetgrass County border. There he signaled me to pull over. He swaggered up in my mirror, holding his campaign hat down against the semi-trailer gusts. I figured after he signed off, I would sleep a while and then loop around, park the Cruise Master somewhere out of sight, and ask some more Dane Tucker questions.

“Mind following me for a couple of miles?” the deputy asked instead. “Something I’d like to show you.”

The deputy skipped ahead and we took the Springdale exit. From there we took a local road back under the interstate, headed southwest toward the Absorakas and the mountain peak the locals call Baldy. About fifteen miles and several turns later, we passed a sign that said: and then another that said:

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING PARK COUNTY
NO FIRES

 

ABSAROKA-BEARTOOTH WILDERNESS
NO FIRES

 

Finally, just after Smokey the Bear concurred with
ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES
, we turned into a long gravel driveway that terminated at a run-down family home tucked into a slope of aging Douglas fir. At the side of the house, a frail-looking woman tended an ash-spewing bonfire of household trash. Seeing us, she dropped the rake and slipped inside.

Deputy Russell Crowe strolled back to the Cruise Master, hitching at his loaded utility belt.

“Welcome to my home,” he said. He gave me his ass-jawed grin.

“You look like you could use a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.”

“Here’s your pine cones, Ma.”

Rita Crowe, Russell’s mother, was about my age, but despite a clear effort to spruce up for company, the woman was listless and spot-skinned, with injured, sunken eyes. She was good-looking once, though, and from her Russell had inherited his dark components and his ability, at a glance, to suggest handsome. That crowbar chin came from his father, Russell Sr., the subject of an official law enforcement photo portrait on the fireplace mantel. I veered closer to parse insignia. Senior was once a Park County Sheriff.

Rita Crowe saw me looking. Her voice startled me, grated like a fly reel with sand stuck in it. “Twenty-five years of service, then railroaded by the politicians.”

“He’s retired?”

“Rusty? Ha! He never had the chance.”

“My dad’s no longer with us,” Russell said. “Come on, Ma. Here’s your pine cones. Look if I got your order right.”

As she inspected his delivery, Russell directed my eyes. “Check it out.” From surfaces throughout the house, pine cones craftily done up as assorted woodland creatures peered back at me through the kind of googly eyes they fix to saltwater streamers.

“Ma is just awesome at this.”

“I wanted ten, Russell. This is a dozen.”

“Sorry, Ma. I got you a couple of freebies.”

Her voice came out like the swing of my galley door, fricative dry aluminum. “There are no freebies, Russell. Not in this world.”

Russell fought off defeat and nudged me. Look. Her cone creatures were everywhere. Owls and more owls and spiders with pipe cleaner legs and hot-glued constructions of cones and cone scales amounting to deer and moose and skunk and porcupine and squirrel. There were even grizzly bears, rearing with a fair amount of malice despite their wibble-wobble eyes.

“She does almost one a day since we lost my dad. That’s over two thousand. She goes to the schools and shows the kids how to do it.”

“Ha,” she said. “The schools.”

“He’s a fly fisherman, Ma. You think you could make a pine cone trout?”

“I do not do fish.”

“You could try.”

Rita Crowe stiffened. She drew in a wheezy breath. “Russell, go downstairs and get me a jar of them cling peaches.”

Russell shot me a little grimace. “Hey, Ma, how about instead we thaw out that huckleberry pie? You know, the one Aunt Shureen dropped off a while ago when you weren’t feeling good. I know right where it’s at in the freezer.”

The woman deflated. Her eyes sank in her head. She rubbed her temples. She sighed as if this child of hers had just tapped the very dregs of her strength. “Russell …
please.”

None too soon we were seated at the Crowe family table around Hot Pockets and pickles, rustled up by the deputy, along with the canned peach halves and a huge bowl of potato chips that Rita Crowe said were not stale.

I started with the novelty of a pickle, spearing it with a plastic fork and counting it as my first vegetable in weeks. Rita Crowe opened with a cigarette and these words: “So I hear you’re not so happy with our wonderful sheriff.”

Russell bit a Hot Pocket, head down. “Ow,” he mouthed.

“You always do that.”

“I do not.”

“The man is on them cancer drugs,” she continued to me. “Heavy. Not that he would step down, of course. Not with all he’s got going on.”

The pickle tasted like paint thinner. Or maybe I was just out of the loop, taste-wise. I put the thing down on my paper plate and tried a chip. Stale.

“Ma did EMT for twenty years.” Russell supplied this around a juggled mouthful of Hot Pocket. “Now she’s finally on the county board.”

“Russell, get him some coffee.”

I put my hands up fast. “I’m fine.”

“Russell
…”

“Okay, Ma.”

Russell set down black coffee in a foam cup. Rita Crowe went deep into her cigarette. She filled the room with smoke. “Of course it’s a pity,” she said at last. “The whole thing. I don’t mean to say it’s not. But now there’s people coming in and out of that office got nothing whatsoever to do with Park County business.”

“Ma thinks Sheriff Chubbuck should step down.”

“Russell.”

“Sorry, Ma.”

She nudged the bowl of potato chips toward me. I tried another one. “They’re fine,” she said.

“Ma—”

“They are absolutely fine.”

I twisted, glanced toward the Russell Sr. photo over the fireplace. A hundred googly-eyed pine cone creatures turned me back around.

“I’m not popular on the county board,” Rita Crowe said. She shot a plume of smoke toward a dark spot on the ceiling. “But that man should step down. And he should have someone ready to take his place, someone who deserves it. That’s how it’s supposed to happen.”

“It’s emphysema, Ma. Not cancer.”

“Does it matter?”

“Probably to him.”

“You want to be smart,” she said, “you can go to your room and be smart.”

Now this was awkward. The deputy’s jaw turned red. He kept his eyes down on his plate while his mother served him a handful of chips. Russell’s chair squawked as he shoved away from the table. He stormed off all of ten feet to a chest freezer beside the porch door. Out came a frozen pie. Into the microwave it went. Through the endless awful droning that ensued, I discovered that the Hot Pockets were excellent and I decided if nothing else to fill my tank.

But then—
ding!
—there
was
something else. “So I hear tell,” Rita Crowe said, “that the sheriff has something going with Dane Tucker.”

“I’ve been around three weeks. I wouldn’t quite know.”

Russell brought the pie to the table. He tried a knife on it. Rock hard.

“But why?” I said. “Do you have some reason to think so?”

Her stream of smoke just cleared the top of Russell’s head as he probed unsuccessfully with the knife. “I’ve been around a long time. I have reason to think a lot of things. Lately he goes out alone. He sends his deputies off to the far corners of the county and has Ms. Park-Ford keep him appraised of the GPS readings on their cruisers. Then he takes off for hours.”

Russell, defeated, dropped the knife and said sulkily, “So Ma came up with an idea.”

“Put the pie on the counter, Russell. You can eat it when you come back from work.”

He looked at her warily. Her smile opened like my wing window, narrow and stuck at the wrong angle, but Russell looked as though he had been baptized in the breath of life.

“Yes!” he celebrated.

“Put it on the counter, Russell.”

“Which counter, Ma?’

“Left of the sink. No, Russell.
Left
of the sink.”

“Got it.”

Now a phone began to ring from the wall at the other side of the kitchen. You don’t much see phones like that anymore, beige slimlines, hard wired. Rita Crowe said, “Excuse me” and carried the handpiece away to the end of a long and kinky cord that placed her in the living room, out of earshot.

“It was a good idea.” Russell was rejuvenated. He hunkered toward me, speaking in a low voice. “It basically would have worked. My mom followed me out to Ringling where I was supposed to pull a dead horse off the road. There was no horse. There never was. So Ma stays with the cruiser like it’s me on speed patrol. I drive her truck back to town. I get there in time to catch the sheriff heading south on 89 and then up by Tucker’s place. He stops by the side of the road and just sits there. Then these other vehicles show up and I’m waiting to see what the sheriff does, and then—”

He stretched away to take a look at her. She had the TV on, was listening on the phone and looking for something through the channels.

“Must be a George Clooney sighting,” Russell said. “Ma’s fan network has been alerted.” He gave me a real-looking grin. “So I’m waiting there by Tucker’s place to see what the sheriff does, and then some drunk guy—”

He double-checked the living room. “Huh,” he said. “There’s Dane Tucker right there. That’s
Force Down.
I guess it came up on dish. And Ma’s watching, so there must be some early George Clooney in there somewhere.”

Russell rolled his eyes a bit. “Sorry about the pie.”

“It’s all right.”

“Some drunk guy comes along 294 at about eighty miles an hour using both lanes. And guess what she does? She turns on the siren and takes off after him. She puts the damn cruiser in the ditch at the 89 intersection. Ms. Park-Ford picks it up from her screen and radios the sheriff. The sheriff heads for the scene. Now I have to race him in my mother’s pickup and get back there before he does.”

Russell paused. This was thin ice, this story. In the living room, Rita Crowe murmured into the phone while a buff and sweaty Dane Tucker rappelled from a helicopter into some foreign embassy compound. The knife in Tucker’s stunning teeth turning out to be just the ticket to cut the bonds from the wrists and ankles of some dark-skinned beauty who then spat in Tucker’s face. No George Clooney that I could make out. Rita Crowe advanced one more channel to a talk show. White boys, ugly ones with shaved heads and jackboots, slouched in the pillowy guest chairs. Russell and I both stared at this for a minute.

“And I made it,” Russell said finally. “I beat the sheriff to the scene. Just.”

The TV screen went black. Rita Crowe hung up the phone and returned to the table. She said to me, “You’re right. Those boys are hammerheads. I’ve seen them at the liquor store on Main.”

“Skinheads, Ma.” Russell was grinning at her. “Or hammer-skins. Not hammerheads.”

Rita Crowe had started another cigarette. She set it down in a Yellowstone Park ashtray. She gathered up the paper plates and plastic forks and Styrofoam cups, put them in a pile, pushed the pile toward Russell.

“We’re not supposed to burn, Ma. It’s too dry. There’s a county ordinance against it.”

“We work for the county, Russell.”

“Right, so—”

She stared him down. Eventually Russell gathered the stack of trash into his hands.

“So,” she said as her son rose to obey, “the question is this: if those are skinheads and they work for Tucker, and our wonderful sheriff is hands off, then why? If the man is looking the other way, what does he get out of it?”

After a pause wherein I awakened to the fact that this question was not rhetorical, I said, “Well, isn’t that easy?”

Both Crowes looked at me, eager but clueless. But they were talking about a dying fly fisherman, for God’s sake, and they were talking about the Roam River, pristine, lovely, trout-choked and un-fished, locked in behind Tucker’s fences. In the face of that, as far as Chubbuck was concerned, what was a little corruption of justice?

I shrugged and said the obvious: “Wouldn’t it be access to fish?”