The Clinch Knot by John Galligan Page A

announces. “Galen Ringer is
so fucking innocent.”
    Later, next day, this Jesse Ringer girl can fish. She can pick flies. She can handle line on big water and she can set the hook. She can play and land and show and release. She credits it all to a bull rider turned Yellowstone fishing guide turned death row inmate, her father, Galen Ringer. Who is innocent. She never lets you forget that.
    She wet-wades too, and she looks very, very good.
    “I don’t know, Dog,” Sneed says, clearly troubled. “This girl is teeing it up. But man, I just don’t know.”
    “Hey,” this slipshod friend, this careless mentor, gives back, “I would.”
    Which is all too goddamn true.
    Later still, this rough and lovely girl, generally stoned, says she has a place to live, but her car looks slept in.
    This brown and barefoot girl, this lite beer champion, has a golden Oldsmobile, about ten years old, and she has this guide-shuttle partner, this earnest and besmitten virgin man-child named Kenny she knew in high school, and when Sneed comes into her life, this fire-in-the-belly girl Jesse Ringer flicks poor unrequited Kenny like a chub back into the stream of lonely and bewildered young men.
    Together then, Jesse and Sneed drive for Hilarious Sorgensen, every morning, ferrying vehicles and trailers downstream to takeout points, teaming back and forth, seven days a week. This Dog character? Sleeps late. Ties flies. Nips a little v and T. Smokes the second half of last night’s Swisher. Studies maps. Makes pancakes. Misses warning signs.
    In the afternoons, fishing, Sneed and Jesse bitch and joke about Sorgensen. The cheap bastard gobbles peanuts and speed while his brain works overtime, finding ways to squeeze his guides, short his drivers, bilk his suppliers, ways to hornswoggle his clientele of doctors, dentists, vets, ways to keep poor little Lyndzee hooked and hopping.
    But the thing is, Jesse then suggests, if anybody needs anything—you know,
anything
—she can talk to Sorgensen. She can get it. No problem.
    And this inattentive dumb Dog, where is he? What is he thinking?
    He is thinking:
Anything? Really? Would Sorgensen have Cuban cigars? How would they taste next to a Swisher?
    I thrashed and mumbled but could not wake, could not stop this relentless indictment.
    Inside a week, Jesse and Sneed have bought a tent and are “living together” within earshot of the Cruise Master. Dog’s ears burn, his head spins, and he does not sleep. Every morning when the kids are gone he tells himself,
Drive away now. Right now. Go, Dog, go.
    But no. There is inertia. And there is thrall. There is Jesse’s skin by firelight. There is this fascinating kid Sneed, so oddly but so passionately lecturing nightly on the pronghorn antelope: physiology, habits, plight. “Pronghorn are not deer. They have gall bladders. They have horns, not antlers. They can’t jump. They come to a fence they have to crawl under. Or turn around.”
    “Then I,” announces Jesse, “have a friend you have to meet.” She pauses, tries to word this carefully. “Just a guy I know. Older guy. Lawyer. Who is into pronghorn. Really into them. He chases them.”
    “What?”
    “On foot. He chases them.” Sneed scowls. “What? Why?”
    “He says the Indians did it. He says if they can do it, a white man can do it too.”
    “White man?”
    “He’s a white man, this guy that I, um, know.”
    “Chase antelope?”
    “And catches them. Tries to. He hasn’t yet.”
    “Pronghorn are the fastest mammal in North America.”
    “This guy. Well. He says antelope are fast but they tire out. After five or ten miles they give up. You can walk right up and slit their throats.”
    Sneed’s spine straightens, his eyes narrow, the way it happens when someone mentions his mother.
    “You want to meet him?” Jesse asks.
    Sneed says, “Yeah. Yeah I do.”
    At the campground, dew descended around the Cruise Master, smoky, low, and cold. The river muttered. Pictures flowed out