The Clinch Knot (9 page)

White Fang and Top Gum

 

“How’d you find me?”

Cord Cook appeared less than happy to see me hiking out to the spit where he had moored his drift boat for lunch.

“I just drove along the river with my windows open. People say you can hear dentists fly casting from a mile away.”

Cook eyed me. On cue, one of his clients howled, “Argggh! Buck! Mother Tucker! Sonofabutterknife!”

Cook strode muttering off the sand spit and over heavy cobble to unwind leader from the howler’s terrific hat. He cut the fly out of the fellow’s cherrywood landing net. From behind, he spooned himself to the caster. He pushed one elbow, lifted another, squared the guy’s hips to match his own, and in this fashion, somewhat like insects mating, Cook and his client made a few decent casts together.

When Cook disengaged, however, the howling resumed. “What the hell is going on?” the dentist demanded. He looked at his rod in disbelief, betrayed.

The guide rubbed his college-kid stubble. He looked into the sky, snatched down the eternal scapegoat. “Crosswind, Kevin. I under-rodded you. It’s not your fault. You’re doing awesome. Just keep working that seam out there and I’ll rig another rod.”

Cook disengaged, hollered to the other one, thirty yards downstream: “Gary? Can I ask you to slow down your backcast a little? Let the rod do the work? You’re not serving a tennis ball. That’s it. Thanks, Gary.”

The kid came back needing to talk: “Dentists from Toledo. Said they could fish. They been here all week. We’ve been calling these guys White Fang and Top Gum. Jim Rideup had them yesterday. He called in sick today.”

“You’re doing everything you can.”

“No,” he said. “I could shoot them. I got a pistol in my first aid box.”

He felt my eyes linger, maybe felt the bad taste of Jesse’s death.

“I’m kidding,” he said. “I mean, I do have a pistol, but …”

I smoothed it over. “People are good at different things. I mean, not to get too philosophical, but how are you at filling cavities? Anyway, I figured you’d pull up for lunch about here. What’s cooking? Is that elk on a skillet?”

The kid grunted, “Yup.”

“Where?”

“Shot him in the Little Belts last November. Me and my dad.”

The elk steaks sizzled in a pan on a little propane stove beyond Cook’s Clack-a-Craft. He had set up a folding table with a wine bottle and glasses, bread, olives, a tomato half-sliced on a cutting board with yellow jackets buzzing above.

“So?” Cook said. “What do you want me for? I don’t know anything. I only loaned her my boat.”

Doors just open sometimes. Cord Cook puffed up like prairie chicken, reddened in the face, then wheeled away to tend his elk steak. I lingered, surprised, watching dentist Gary perform a root canal on a pocket of water about ten feet out. Then I followed Cook around the Clack-a-Craft to the kitchen. The elk was a touch overdone, powerful in the nose.

“Let me guess. You used to go out with Jesse.”

“Look, man. I’m in college now. I declared a major. I’m keeping my grades up, staying clean. I don’t need any trouble.”

“I saw her dad’s rodeo medal in your truck. She normally doesn’t let anyone touch those.”

He shoved his skillet off the fire. “Doesn’t matter now. She’s dead.”

“What boat? This one?”

“My rubber boat. For small stuff, whitewater, all that.”

“What for?”

Cook wiped the knife on his pants and rose sharply. “Gary! Slow down!”

The downstream dentist—knock-kneed in a foot of water—ceased casting entirely. His line convulsed in the air, then collapsed in squiggles onto the water at his feet. As Gary turned, sending a hurt look toward Cook, the Yellowstone’s strong current grabbed his line and straightened it downstream into deeper water. “Top Gum, shot down again,” Cook muttered.

“She must have told you where she was going with it.”

“She didn’t.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“Didn’t want to know.”

“Where is it now?”

He waved away yellow jackets. “Shit if I know. Gone.”

“The rodeo medal was collateral?”

“Was.”

“She really wanted that boat.”

He twisted his corkscrew in to the hilt, ripped out the wine cork. “Look, man. I know exactly nothing.” He splashed red wine into the glasses. He wasn’t having any. His was a liter bottle of Mountain Dew propped in the cobble where a trickle of the ‘Stone kept it cool.

“I believe you.” I waited for Cook to look at me. “I believe you. But I guess you also think there’s something out there beyond what’s already known.”

“Maybe,” he said, looking away—and just then the upstream guy, White Fang, screeched, “I got one! Hah! Screw you, Gary! I got one! I got the first fish!”

White Fang clodhopped laterally through knee-high water, clutching after a chaos of slack line while a good-sized rainbow tail-walked about twenty feet out, thrashing with the burden of our collective disbelief.

“What the—” Cook said, heading out to assist.

“Drinks on you tonight!” White Fang screeched. “I got one!”

Cord Cook eased up behind his combatant, spoke like Mister Rogers to a pre-schooler. “Kevin? Right behind you. Gonna help you if you need it. Now, can I ask you to get your rod tip up? Good. Excellent. Now can I ask you one more thing? Can I ask you to—”

“Sonofabutterknife!” Top Gum howled. “I got one too!”

And it was true. It does happen sometimes. Mother Nature falls asleep at the wheel. Gaia gets bored and looks away. The Great Turtle takes a dump. Anyway, there we were, with a double, Top Gum’s hook-up appearing to be a big brown, digging against the dentist into the depths beyond.

“Okay,” Cord Cook soothed. “Okay—listen—guys?”

“Mother Tucking sonofabutterknife!”

“Let’s take it easy, guys. Keep our rod tips up. Keep our lines tight.”

But their guide was caught between them, and suddenly situations devolved badly in both directions.

“Let’s just stay—Gary! What the hell! Don’t horse him! Get him on the reel!”

Cook charged downstream, looking like he was going to tackle Top Gum. But then he reversed field, plodded back against the current as he implored his upstream dentist: “Kevin! Never let a fish get behind you! Not downstream
and
behind you. Jesus, Kevin—”

“What should I do? Jump?”

“Cord!” wailed Top Gum, “I lost him!”

“No you didn’t!” Cook roared. “Turn around and get him on the reel!”

“Oh yeah, I guess I didn’t.”

“What the buck! Should I jump? Cord, he’s tangled around my legs.”

I was waiting. Finally Cook looked at me in bewilderment and distress. “Can you help?”

“Say please,” I told him. “Screw you,” he said.

“Close enough,” I said. “I’ll take Top Gum.”

Celebratory cigars, then, after lunch, for everyone but me. “I only brought three,” Cook said.

“Don’t worry about it.” I sparked a crumbly Swisher. “I only smoke the good stuff.”

“Cord’s a helluva guide,” White Fang declared. He clapped Cook on the shoulder. “This was the spot. This was the spot where they were hitting. Bam. Bam. A double, just like that.”

“Good call, Cord,” Top Gum said. “You put us right on the fish.”

“Shit. I put a cast
right there,”
White Fang fantasized. “Perfect. Right
on
that big old bastard.”

“That was a female,” Cook said.

“Me too.” Top Gum blew a smoke ring. “Perfect cast.”

“Bam,” White Fang said. “Game over.”

“I stuck that bitch,” Top Gum said. “Yours was a male, bud.”

“Yeah! Toledo! Toledo rocks! Toledo kicks ass, baby!”

“Gentlemen, could you excuse us for a second?”

Cook walked me upstream, out of earshot at the head of the little sand spit. “Hey,” he pleaded, “it’s good money. It’ll get me through school.”

“Sure. Maybe you’ll become a dentist.”

“Shoot me if that happens.”

“So I believe you,” I said. “You don’t know why Jesse wanted a boat or where it is.”

“I don’t. No idea.”

“But you loaned it to her.”

“Yeah. I sure did.”

“She must have had some leverage.”

Cook rubbed the blond stubble below his right ear. He gazed across the Yellowstone at the buff-colored hills of tinder dry grass. Across a distant dry gulch stepped a pronghorn, then another pronghorn, the pair disappearing with dainty steps into stones and brush.

“Yeah, well, what else would it be?” Cook said at last. “Drugs. A bunch of us from high school were still partying pretty hard together all the way up to last year. I heard Jesse got busted by the sheriff about a month ago and was getting pressured to turn people in. I didn’t want to be one of them.”

“You were dealing?”

“Just staying alive,” he said. “Not much for jobs around here.”

“What drugs?”

He swallowed, glanced at me. “All kinds of shit. You know. Anything you wanted.”

“And you’re not a pharmacy. So you had a source?”

“Of course I did.”

“Can you tell me?”

“I got things going now, man, I want to stay alive.”

“Hey, Cord!” White Fang hollered. “Let’s go stick some fish!”

“So you think someone might have killed Jesse to keep her quiet?”

“I’m not going to talk about it, man, I told you.”

He tried to turn away. I grabbed his arm. “Cord.” I waited for his nervous gray eyes. “If that’s true, you think you might be next?” I waited. “Look, kid. The sheriff has thrown me out of town. Twice. We’re not on speaking terms. Anything you tell me goes straight into figuring out what happened to Jesse. Period. And maybe toward keeping you alive too.”

“I’m changing flies.” Top Gum crowed this from the riverbank. “How in heck does that clinch knot happen again?”

“Sorgensen,” Cook relented. I let his arm go. “He supplied me, Jesse, some other people. I don’t know where he gets the shit. But maybe Jesse did.”

“Maybe she did.” He was edging away, using the pull of his clients. “So, listen, Cord. I know Jesse wasn’t going to forget about her dad’s medal, so when was she going to give your boat back?”

Cook looked at his watch for the date. “Three days ago,” he said.

“A good inflatable, that’s a couple thousand bucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So what are you going to do if you can’t get it back? Give up fishing small water?”

He squinted downstream at his dentists. He glanced upstream at a drift boat bobbing along the opposite bank. Then he looked at me and let go of something in a hot blast of air that ruffled his bangs. From the waterproof pouch on his lanyard he extracted his fishing license, his guide’s license, some cash, and then what he wanted, a ratty-edged photograph.

“No. I had an idea. For a couple thousand dollars, maybe some punk is gonna have to ante up for this.”

It’s Not Montana Everywhere

 

Sneed’s room was on the third floor of Livingston Memorial Hospital, all the way to the southwest corner where traffic could be controlled. In the freight elevator on the way up, Deputy Russell Crowe whined at me in protest.

“That was a long time ago.”

“There’s a date on the photo, Russell. It was last year. Cord Cook said it wasn’t the first time, either.”

“That’s not Jesse.”

I leaned on the elevator wall, tired and dizzy, sick in record time from the hospital smell. And I had just bartered away the Cruise Master.
So what now, Dog? Hitchhiking? Walking around like John Muir?
My legs felt almost too weak to stand.

“Okay,” Crowe admitted. “It is Jesse. But that picture’s in a bar, you know, that’s nothing, like, not a private party or anything.”

“Cord Cook says it was your house.”

“No. No way.”

“He remembers your mom was in here, in the hospital.”

“Cord’s a liar.”

“He doesn’t seem like one.” The elevator pinged. Third floor. “I mean, not compared to you.” I held Cook’s photo in front of him. “Look carefully. Right above your arm where it goes around Jesse’s shoulder. Isn’t that a pine cone grizzly bear in the background?”

Russell jammed his thumb into the
DOOR CLOSE
button. “We all went to high school together. That’s all. Old friends.”

“That’s cocaine, Russell.”

“It’s not.”

“Okay. It’s what? Jesse’s chopping something. Vicodin capsules? Oxy? Amphetamines? Seems like this crowd had access to just about anything. And you’ve got a straw, buddy, but no lemonade.”

“Come on. It’s a party. It’s just what people do sometimes. It’s normal.”

“I’m not judging you, Russell. I’m playing you. And I just want into my buddy’s room. Without you there.”

The deputy on guard at the end of the hall was an older guy, a hypertensive baldy with sticks for arms and legs, bored to the point of sudoku and pleased to have some action.

“Hey, Russell.”

“Hey. Hey, uh, Schmitty.” Russell unveiled belated horse teeth. “You—you old—damn—scissorbill. How’s our boy?”

The deputy tipped his gleaming head toward the door. “Talking up a storm. Sheriff ordered him ziplocked to the bed.

Who’s this?”

“You—” Russell faltered, glanced at me, scratched up a welt along his preternatural jaw.

“Schmitty, you heard the sheriff was trying to round up Sneed’s next of kin? Heard we thought we might have a lead on a firefighter down in Houston?”

“Well, uh, sure.” The deputy’s tiny blue eyes twinkled with the pleasure of inclusion. All day out of the loop on his ass in a hush-hush hospital hallway, babysitting, but now he knew the score. “Right. So how’s that going?”

Russell took a slow, unsteady breath. “It went,” he said. “And here he is. The kid’s father. Cornelius Sneed.”

Deputy Schmitt’s good cheer froze in mid-air. His neck went stiff and he could not look at me.

“But … but …”

I couldn’t afford to blow this. I had coached Russell intensively on the next one: “Come on, Schmitty. It’s not Montana everywhere. Don’t be so … Don’t be so …
provincial.”

“I … Huh? … I’m sorry … I wasn’t …”

I handed Cord Cook’s photograph to Russell. He tucked it into his breast pocket. He cleared his throat. Now came another transaction. Deputy Schmitt owed him one, Russell had told me. A big one. Bigger than letting me in. Russell had been saving that debt for something special, had whined about spending it on my needs. Now I eyed him hard. He sighed. “They’re getting rid of day-old peach cobbler down in the cafeteria, Schmitty. Giving it away.”