The Clinch Knot by John Galligan Page B

through the anvil crack in my brain.
    Now, on Sneed’s words, I see a dark bedroom. I solve his double sounds and see his life begin. I see Sneed’s mother’s
mother’s
man friend, drunk and tearing sheets, tearing bedclothes, tearing the girl and planting Sneed.
    “Go on, Sneed. Keep talking.”
    “So that’s her excuse for everything. Like therefore she can be a crack whore and ignore me. After about ten years of that bullshit I ended up in foster care with a white family in Little Rock. Church people that smelled funny. Lady smelled like mothballs. Dude smelled like he shit his pants. They didn’t like my name so they gave me a new one. Charlie. They fucking called me Charlie.”
    Sneed presents this for laughter. This Dog, this moral feeb, goes along chuckling at tales of soup and crackers, made beds, clean clothes, pews and catechism, chores, haircuts, lectures, prayers—and every day at school in a sea of white kids, waves of them, rip tides and reefs, Sneed re-drowning daily, dead by noon, washing up at “home” with “family.”
    The Dog looks around the bar, suppresses a gargantuan sadness. Sneed orders another beer. “The dude had this weird business, mostly retired. He bred ungulates, deer and antelope and sometimes elk, for zoos. He had a big lot, a couple acres, tall fence around it, at that time just a little herd of pronghorn left in there. Seven of them. My chore was food and water. And man, every day those animals would hear me coming a mile away, come snuffling up to me and bumping me with their noses and whistling to me, stepping on my damn feet, licking me, fighting for my attention. Man, we got like a real family, me and them. Me and those animals loved each other. Up until I ran away, that’s how I survived.” He looks around. Jesse is
still
in the restroom. At least twenty minutes now. “That’s why I just about went upside the head of her lawyer friend,” Sneed says. “Greg Henderson? Henderson Greg? I forget.”
    “Never met him.”
    “Don’t bother.”
    “He helps her with her dad’s case?”
    Sneed shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “But damn, she is really stuck on that. She idolizes her old man. She showed me a bunch of his stuff, you know his medals and all, for rodeo? Weird scene, Dog.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I tried to touch one of those medals? You know? Just touch it?”
    I bolted up from my theater of half-sleep, dropped in a panic from my bunk. Outside, it was broad daylight, hot already. I pissed on pine needles. Drift boats glided past on the ‘Stone, telling me it was mid-morning. I was too late to catch Cord Cook at Sorgensen’s.
    “I don’t give out that information,” Sorgensen told me when I asked where Cook was fishing. Since yesterday, his tone was nasty and short. I had the sense he might be missing Lyndzee.
    “Why not? It’s confidential?”
    “Yes it is.”
    “You’re not a doctor. You’re not a lawyer.”
    Sorgensen rattled a handful of peanuts into his mouth and mashed them, observing me with a sense of hidden, whirring activity. At last he said, “Friend, you look like you could use a little pick-me-up.”

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.