The Clinch Knot Read Online Free PDF Page A

place to go.
    It was hot, mid-nineties. The foreman was pissed. Assorted ethnics reeled around high on oils and thinners, their ages and races difficult to determine through all the masks and bandanas and silver dustings of paint spray. They clanked around in their safety harnesses like sloppy robots, like bizarre Christmas ornaments. This was one miserable-ass job, I remember thinking as I tried to back up. “No, no, no, goddamnit,” the foreman yelled. “Just stay put. We’ll get you through here.”
    I did get through, eventually. But from up high, waiting, I had spotted a good hole beneath the bridge, big trout feeding in it, and so I drove only as far as the end of the bridge, where I parked behind the extended-body van that transported the painting crew. I rigged up, skidded down a steep embankment, and waded chest deep into that clear, cold water.
    I had worked that hole downstream for maybe fifteen minutes—long enough to cover fifty yards or so and forget the goings-on sixty feet above—when I was startled by a banshee yell and turned to look. Down from the bridge plummeted a thin silver body.
    There was no time for concern or disbelief. No time to retreat out of the way. The body was streamlined, knife-straight, and screaming. About halfway down a paint-caked hardhat separated from a dark brown head—just a kid, I saw, screaming, holding his nuts—and
splash!
    This, of course, would be my buddy Sneed, tendering his resignation from the bridge painting crew.
    The kid stayed under some time. Maybe he was knocked out. Guys yelled Spanish and perhaps other languages over the bridge rail. His silver shape spun toward me along the scrambled edge of a big, slow eddy. His hard hat floated ahead, past me, and out of reach. I was pinned in heavy water. Nothing I could do except to wonder how it would feel.
    Then this kid corked up to the surface. He was sputtering and wild-eyed, with silver ears and neck, laughing and coughing and cussing and dogpaddling like a guy who couldn’t swim ten feet to save his life but would rather die than paint another bridge.
    But then the eddy let go, and he thrashed into reach, and so that kid’s life, fortuitous Dog, I had the luck to save it for him.
    I drive up the dusty logging road toward that mountain pond, thinking how Jesse came into our lives more-or-less like that too. It was a couple weeks of fishing lessons later, me and Sneed townside, getting a beer and a burger on Sneed’s last paycheck, and this pretty girl just parachuted in, landed drunk on a bar stool next to Sneed, started touching his arm and making talk about parents and prison and who was I and how long was he going to be around town?
    The ensuing three weeks, I admit, were more like an actual life than anything I had experienced in my four years of trout-bumming. I’m not sure who was the bigger rip-snorter, Sneed or Jesse, but they seemed made for each other, and I experienced the oddness of pride in the way they flaunted their racy love around town. Screw it. Life is short. Get your own excitement. That was my position, and I sheltered them. I thought.
    The logging road forks about a mile up and narrows after that. It is not wise, I know, to push the Cruise Master up this far. We left my beast at the campground and took Jesse’s car, that traumatized Oldsmobile sedan, dust-on-gold, a gift to Jesse from someone she always referred to as “this guy.”
    Somehow, though, I’m pushing up this mountain anyway. Soon enough, as these things happen, I’m a thousand feet up an eight-foot-wide dirt road in a four-ton recreational vehicle with bad brakes, and there is no good place to turn around. I’m jittery now, mashing a Swisher, spewing smoke. I wonder why, if life is short, I am doing something so obviously stupid. It seems like I’m doing it for Sneed and Jesse, like those notes just didn’t get at it—but what sense does that make?
    A small turn-out appears on the inside of a straight climb about two