The Clinch Knot Read Online Free Page B

pine screes, Tucker’s fences and NO TRESPASSING signs persist, driven and strung and posted all the way south to a sign on a pitted dirt road that says
National Park Boundary
and means, I believe, that I am now entering Yellowstone Park.
    So I quadruple back downstream,
Dog damn it,
to what must be Dane Tucker’s main gate. I take a medicinal bellyful of v-and-T as I look the structure over. Molded concrete pillars support a roll-away Tymetal gate on a remote-controlled motor. A covered box contains the key pad and the intercom. Cameras watch from the tops of the pillars, tented under sheet metal and aimed down at me.
    I was in this business once, so I know. This is the whole high-security embassy gate package. This is what my company, Oglivie Secure, once installed for House Speaker Tip O’Neill in the Boston suburbs.
    But why here?
    Beyond the gate stretches an access road, arcing across an expanse of desiccated rangeland where a few hobby bison graze listlessly in the heat. A plank bridge bears the road over a slow stretch of the Roam where trout make lazy dimples. Then the road turns upstream and winds with the river into a deep draw out of sight.
    I press the intercom button.
    After a long wait the speaker crackles: “Can I help you?”
    “I want to speak to Dane Tucker.”
    The voice comes back twangy and harsh: “What you want to do, Pedro, is get your bug-ass off this property.”
    Pedro?
I say, “Is this Dane Tucker?”
    Silence. I look at the camera on the left-hand pillar. Its eye stares back, blank and dusty.
    “I’d like permission to fish the Roam.”
    The speaker crackles. “This is private land.”
    “But the river’s public. I’ve got a right to fish it. Are you Dane Tucker?”
    Silence again, like this is a hard question to answer.
    “Because if you are Dane Tucker—”
    I pause here to wonder if I have had too much vodka. But this cannot be clearly established, so I continue: “Because if you are Dane Tucker, I’d like to discuss my riparian rights with you. I’d like to know the basis on which you feel justified in denying me and everybody else—”
    The speaker goes dead with an obvious click. For a moment I feel disoriented. I turn a full circle. The Yellowstone River is no more than a few miles west as the crow flies, but it’s a rugged and forbidding few miles, with the Roam and the ‘Stone separated at this point by an ancient volcanic ridge, grizzly bear country, thick with pines stands and huckleberry tangles. I think:
isn’t that the ridge, near the top, where Jesse showed Sneed and me a little spring pond with big wild cutthroats? Isn’t up there where she stripped down to panties and went topless into the pond, then rode around on top of Sneed’s shoulders, laughing at my tighty-whities that weren’t very white or tight at all?
    I turn back, jam a finger into the intercom button. Bring on the skinheads. But nothing.
    I buzz again. The speaker snaps on. I open my mouth to speak for the masses, for all of us fly fishermen denied, but the guy inside beats me to it, his voice harsh and preemptive.
    “You wanna see Dane Tucker, buy a movie ticket, asshole.”
    And the system goes dead.
    But now I’m feisty and drunk and alive with memories, and I decide that I’m going to fish that mountain pond once more, strip naked and swim, leave behind my underwear on a stick for Jesse to find, as a joke. I’m going to miss those two. I’m going to miss my buddy Sneed, especially, and I drive off from Tucker’s gate knowing I will never make a friend like that again.
    I was in Idaho when it happened. I was exploring the upper north fork of the Snake River. Crossing that river on a bridge, I had become entangled in the sprawling, messy efforts of a bridge-painting crew. Paint-glazed and zombie-like, the crew was moving things—barrels, cones, hoses, compressors—to the other side of the bridge. The flagman was awol and the Cruise Master was enmeshed before I realized there was no