The Snowfly (39 page)

“Got one,” I called over to her.

“Liar,” she answered.

By the time I got to her she had cream on her nose to keep the sun off.

“Frustrated?” she asked. “The fish are there, Bowie. I promise. What haven't you tried?”

“Dynamite.”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “Spoilsport.”

I tried to think. Most fish struck for food and out of anger or aggressiveness. Bass fishermen sometimes pulled their lures quickly across the surface, what they called buzzing. You could do this with a caddisfly to make it look like an emerger with a problem as well. But bass lures were mostly downsized to look like minnows and other small fish and would no way look like an insect. Why a small fish would skitter across the surface was beyond me. I knew that bluefish would circle baits and drive them in schools onto sandy beaches to escape. But here in a mountain lake? A trout wasn't a bluefish. Could I buzz a streamer? More important, why would I?

I loaded the rod and shot the line no more than twenty feet out and started hauling almost before the streamer landed, and the water almost immediately turned into a boil. I felt several bumps and raw flashes of bright red, but nothing took.

“Damn,” I said.

Hannah was beside me, talking calmly. “Make a longer cast,” she said. “They need time to track it and line it up.”

I made the cast and after the fly traveled ten feet I had a fish, an arm-long slab of muscle that came out of the water and skipped along on its tail, angrily and desperately shaking its head before it sounded. It was a big fish and when it went airborne I lowered the tip to provide slack, and when I felt the weight again I pulled the tip sideways and buried the hook deeper and the fish began to take line, but I knew I had it, and if the leader and my knots held, it was only a matter of time.

When the fish was finally in the net, I could only stare at it. The head was dark green, the body scarlet. No markings. There was little doubt it was a trout, but what kind?

“It's a red,” Hannah said.

I let it go and we sat on her towel.

“Weird,” I said.

“A fisheries guy showed Dad this place a long time ago. They have no idea where these trout came from, or even what they are. There's a small team at Arizona State studying them. There may be more lakes with them, but they only hit streamers the way you fished them. The biologists can't explain any of it.”

“But they
are
here.”

“Exactly, and you figured it out first time. Dad came here twenty times before he solved it.”

“I had help,” I said. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Because I wanted you to see this. There are a lot of places with fish that nobody can catch. There are a lot of fish living in small, delicate habitats that nobody knows about. Freaks of nature, maybe. Evolutionary leftovers. Dad says any fish can be caught if the time is right and you know what you're doing. Dad says you have the gift. I guess I wanted to see that for myself.”

“There's no gift, just luck.”

“Real cowboys make their own luck,” Hannah said. “You thought your way through the problem, step by step. Dad's job let him see a lot of remarkable things. It will do the same for you. Dad told me about Cincinnati. He was real proud of you. He says you understand how precious all this is. He says you understand the responsibility. I think he can retire now and be happy.”

“What're you trying to say, Hannah?”

“There's more of this kind of thing than most people can imagine. For the few that know, it can become a disease.”

“M. J. Key,” I said.

She poked my chest. “You're purty quick, cowboy. Key had the gift, but he couldn't control it.”

I thought of Fireheart.

“How do you know this?”

“Dad told me about Key.”

“He knew Key?”

“I don't know.”

“Key was a headhunter.”

“Exactly. He made sure people knew what he was after and what he got.”

“But he also made a lot of important contributions to the sport.”

“Early on, yes, he did.”

“Did Angus know Key?” I asked again.

“I honestly don't know, Bowie,” she said. “Logically, I'd say no. Key must've been dead before Dad could've known him.”

“But you're not sure.”

She shook her head. “Maybe there never was an M. J. Key,” she said.

“And maybe he's immortal,” I said, making a joke.

She smiled, but her tone was serious. “Some people believe that. They say he gave his soul to the devil, that he would live until he got whatever it was that he was after. Lotta hogwash, I'd say, but there's no doubt there's an aura around his name. I guess people need their gods,” she added. “Large and small, real and imagined, and they always get the gods they deserve.”

Darkness fell as we climbed back to the line shack. We spent the night while wolves barked and howled outside and I wondered if their voices were intended for me.

16

Angus had a stroke in late August. He was at the ranch and had gotten up in the middle of the night to take a leak and, instead of going into the bathroom, had wandered onto the front porch. A niece found him the next morning at the foot of the steps, still clutching his penis. Hannah called me in Crow Loop, Nebraska, where I was interviewing an alfalfa farmer who had built an eight-foot-deep trout pond in his tavern. I drove to Omaha to catch a flight, but there were thunderstorms all across the Great Plains and air traffic control centers were holding all flights. The terminal was overrun with angry passengers and surly airline employees and I did not get out until the next morning.

Hannah met me at the airport in Tucson. “How is he?” I asked.

“In a coma,” she said. Her eyes were red and puffy.

The doctor looked younger than me. “This is normal,” he said. It struck me that experts of the abnormal always lost perspective. “These things tend to resolve themselves in forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” he added.

“Resolve
themselves?
” If so, why did we need a doctor?

He nodded. “One way or the other. Our options are limited. His body and God will decide the outcome.” He checked his watch. I wondered if he had a tee time. If the doctor required the help of God, Angus was doomed.

Angus came out of his coma at four-seventeen the next morning. He tore away his tubes and sat up on the side of the bed. A nurse's aide was in the room. The rest of us were asleep in the lounge.

“Sir,” the aide said.

Angus pulled up his dressing gown and fumbled with his testicles. “You wanna see a big one?”

The aide was thirty and single, a Jehovah's Witness from Lubbock. All she could do was stare and begin quaking.

“Dammit, I mean trout!” Angus said. “
Big
goddamn trout.”

“I'm calling the doctor.”

“Snowfly!” Angus shouted, raising a fist. “The devil's, the devil's. . . .”

By the time we saw him he was under a sheet. The aide's account was relayed through an intermediary.

His fourth ex-wife, Hannah's mother, was with us. “Fish,” she said disgustedly after hearing the account. “At the end, on the threshold of God and eternity, he was still thinking about those damn
fish!
” Disgust (or disappointment?) aside, she cried hard. I remembered the same anger in the red-haired woman in her Cadillac many years before.

Angus was cremated and the crowd at his funeral was immense, despite the difficulty of getting to the place. There were notables from every walk of life, but more impressive were the hundreds of regular people from all over America, many of them paying tribute to Angus by wearing fishing vests and waders. I wrote his obituary. The lead went this way. “Angus Wren spent his life chasing trout in unlikely places and taught us that fishing was about people, not fish. At his funeral, former Supreme Court justice Brennan said that if God was not a trout fisherman, he soon will be.”

Schmaltz, but I cried when I wrote it.

 

•••

 

That night Hannah and I sat by the river and drank a six-pack of her father's favorite beer. The rest of the family had decided to build a memorial on that spot.

“That isn't what he'd want,” Hannah said.

“I'm with you,” I told her.

She asked, “All the way?”

“Press on.”

We went through the main house into a little annex. The door had six locks on it. Hannah went and got a crowbar and snapped the locks off like they were paper and glue.

When we stepped inside, she flicked on the light and my jaw dropped. There were hundreds of immense white flies, in shadow boxes, hanging from nails on beams, in jars, in boxes. It looked like it had snowed in the room.

“This is unbelievable,” I said.

“He hated all Key stood for and I think this was his way of trying to keep people from following his big-fish ways.”

I didn't follow.

“If Dad saw white flies in a shop or found somebody who tied 'em, he bought every last one of 'em, and put 'em here. I'm sure he tied a lot of these on his own. He locked them up to remove temptation.”

“He told you this?”

“No, I sort of figured it out. I think he'd want us to get rid of them all.”

“Are you sure?”

She put her arms around my neck and rested her head on my chest. “I'm not sure of anything.” She cried quietly.

We ended up stuffing the flies into boxes and paper bags, took the urn with his ashes, loaded the raft in silence, and ran downriver. The sun was rising as we walked up the canyon. I made several trips to get all the flies, then dug a hole behind the shack and dumped them all in, covered them with dirt, and burned the boxes and bags in the potbelly stove in the cabin. I felt like I had finally buried something that had given me nothing but frustration for so much of my life.

When the disposal was done, Hannah put the urn beside the river. We sat together and watched the water.

“We'll wait till the gilas rise,” Hannah said.

I saw Rathead come down from the shadows of the rock. She advanced cautiously to the urn, sniffed at it, and lay down, curling herself around it.

When the first fish rose, Hannah took the urn and poured the ashes into the clear green creek. Rathead stood beside her. When it was empty, Hannah threw the urn into the water. It hardly made a splash. Rathead waded into the river and slapped her head against the water several times. I put my arms around Hannah and we stood there like that for a long time and that night we slept in the same bunk, with our clothes on, entwined with each other, friends, not lovers.

I had a schedule to keep and convinced myself Angus would want it that way.

At the airport in Tucson I found three snowflies stuffed in my briefcase. They were in waxed paper with a note taped to the package. “Just in case!” the note said. I laughed out loud and wondered if she'd kept a few for ­herself.

 

•••

 

While I was in Bend, Oregon, a few weeks later, I read in the paper that a strange catlike animal had been shot by a prospector in Arizona, but the corpse had disappeared and he could not prove his claim.

Two weeks later I was in Five Jills, Colorado, and got a telegram from a lawyer informing me that my contract was terminated. I called Hannah from a town called Star Range.

“What's going on?”

“Coup,” she said. “I tried to call you. The whole family's fighting over Dad's little empire. The will's being contested. We have several camps. I can't deal with this bullshit.”

“What will you do?”

“I have my memories. I don't need his stuff and I can't stay here. I won't stay here. I have a friend in Albuquerque. He needs a guide.”

“That's it?”

“Not with a bang,” she said with a pained laugh, “but a whimper. What will you do, cowboy? Wanna try Albuquerque?”

“To guide?”

“Sure, and we can hang out.”

Me a guide? I laughed. “You're wonderful, Hannah. But I don't think guiding's the thing for me. I guess I need time to think. I read about Rathead.”

“Rat and Dad are both beyond trouble now,” she said, adding, “I'm sure they're together. I'm so sorry this didn't work out for you. Angus was fond of you, Bowie. And proud, as well. Use your gifts wisely, Bowie. And if you pass through Albuquerque, I know where you can find an enthusiastic guide. Free of charge.”

I went into the hotel coffee shop and ordered breakfast. The waitress had round red cheeks and thinning gray hair tied in a bun.

“You look like somebody just run their Chevy over your best blue­tick,” she said.

It was true that I'd been taken by a case of the long face. Angus Wren's death had hit me hard; the loss of the job was secondary. I believe Angus had anticipated the turmoil that followed his death because my contract had a clause providing a year's pay in the event of termination, regardless of reason or cause. Ordinarily contracts were voided by death, but Angus had written the document so that I would not have to file a claim in probate. I didn't know when the money would come, but I knew it would and, because of it, money would not be a concern for a while. Angus hated Key and shunned the temptation of big fish. I told myself I should follow Angus's example and be done with that foolishness forever. As often happened in my life, fate had other plans for me.

17

I was jobless, disconnected, and felt adrift. I wanted to see Lilly and her kids and the gang in Grand Marais, but I wasn't up to either. I had no plans and no prospects and after Angus Wren's death I had heard nothing from Yetter, which surprised and bothered me. Maybe I expected Yetter to be my safety net, as he had been in the past, sitting in the wings, watching out for me. Or claiming to. This was the first time since joining UPI that I felt totally alone and it was taking time to get adjusted to the feeling.

I drove northeast from Durango to Estes Park to fish the Big Thompson and from there headed over into the Snowy Range in Wyoming to fish nameless creeks and float the North Platte in a green johnboat I rented from a man named Slim. I caught fish everywhere I stopped and thought about nothing else. And despite the insatiable hunger for catching trout, I did not once think about the snowfly. Sometimes I went two or three days without eating. After Wyoming it was the Black Hills, and from there to some rivers I didn't know the names of, or care. After meandering, I felt the undeniable pull of Michigan. I didn't think about it then, and only realized much later in my life that Michigan was a magnet for me.

I was driving away from the fight over Wren's empire, not toward anything, violating a cardinal principle of life—that you should always advance toward, not regress. The pathologically brave said, “Charge, don't retreat.” I wasn't brave. We can sometimes dictate directions, but rarely actual destinations. I was moving, I found fish, I was alive, and this was enough for now.

North, I knew down deep, was where I belonged, north being as much a philosophy as a direction or destination. You knew when you were there, or you didn't. Those who couldn't feel it and embrace it generally only tried it once. You fit or you didn't. The basic law of nature was the law of the unexpected. In the woods, or on a fast river, you were attuned to this; at home, in a job, in relationships, you were not, yet nature pertained in all settings to all species in one way or another. North was the home of the unexpected. North spawned chilled chaos, yet warmed my heart.

I tried to sort through my past, but all that registered were lessons learned long ago—that no matter how docile life seemed, it was a temporary game and a cruel one at that, the ultimate contest that everybody lost. It seemed to me that God had set the universe in motion for reasons we are not likely to ever know and promptly packed off to a cosmic bowling tournament. If there were a holding tank for sinners on the mend, it was life itself. I had been to wars, hot and cold, rickety as their moral underpinnings might have been, and found no meaning. War was death, and life just a form of war slowed down.

I had seen death in many forms and came to understand that some people were destined for the bag early. Others, like Angus, were lucky enough to live long, full lives. And yet I mourned the passing of Angus Wren as I couldn't mourn the deaths of my own parents. I was happy working with Angus and now understand that my mourning then was as much for what I had lost as for his actual death. We humans tend to be self-­centered, this another genetic default, our genes ever pushing us to actions we think we have chosen when we are merely flesh-and-blood marionettes.

The worst part of being unemployed was lack of purpose. In the war and during my sojourn in Russia I had been adrift, but this was different. What it was that work defined was not clear, except that it provided context in one scheme or another.

I was weary and knew I needed change, but not continuous change. Nature abhors a vacuum. Emptiness is destined to be replaced eventually by something with only the appearance of choice.

I found myself late one afternoon standing on a riverbank in northern Michigan, a spray of fine rain peppering my face, and needing a piss. The river was red, colored by tannin and who knows what else. The water was high and fast. To my surprise, there came a wooden driftboat with a fat fellow standing in the bow and a red-haired man standing amidships, the rower feathering his oars as they rounded the bend to my right and shot over toward me.

Proximity on a river entails certain courtesies.

“Looking for big ones,” Redhair announced, somewhat disconsolately. “Maybe too cold today, though.”

At this juncture they were no more than thirty feet away. The oarsman suddenly stiffened his back. “Jeepers!” he said with a squawk as the driftboat veered sharply to starboard, popped over a partially submerged sweeper, and pitched on its side, dumping both men with hardly a splash into an ominous dark hole.

I had no memory of events from then until I awoke wet and shivering. I knew I had been in the water, but this might have been the steady rain falling on me. Redhair was on his back on the ground nearby, breathing shallowly. The fat man had also developed a red head—it had struck something that peeled back his scalp. Twins. Lights flashed more red. People stepped around the men, pawed at them, poked at them. Medical instruments clinked and backboards rattled. A radio crackled.

“You got breathers out there?” a voice inquired. I smelled hot brakes, cigarette breath, wet wool.

“Three breathing,” a voice reported. “So far.”

“Good thing you were here,” another voice reported. “Willis had himself a dandy coronary. Client's head got stoved in. You pull both of 'em out?”

Was this voice directed to me? “I cannot tell a lie,” I announced, the only fact to which I could testify. I felt fire in my chest and clogging in my throat and began coughing and retching and someone rolled me onto my side and held my head while I vomited.

The same voice. “He's clear. Move him out.”

And another voice. “Fucking lucky you don't got three floaters.” A kibbitzer, I decided, my last thought for a while. I remember closed space and molecules of air pressed together. A gun barrel pointed at my head. Rose squeezed in tight against me, wrapping her arms around me. Gillian hissing “godfather” when she came, her lips pressed away from her teeth like an animal in pain. Hallucinogenic non sequiturs. Rathead keening as Angus's ashes floated downstream to eternity.

 

•••

 

The doctor was bald and had clumps of copious port-wine stains spotting his scalp like schooling smelt. The light was too bright for me to fully open my eyes. I listened instead of looked. “You hear me, Mister?”

“I hear somebody,” I reported.

“I can't find anything wrong with you. Other than you swallowed half the river and dang near drowned.”

Chest pains told me he was obviously looking in the wrong places. “I need sleep.” Medical science still had no generally accepted treatment for an injured soul.

“How about a night with us?”

“I can pay cash.”

“Your money's no good here, friend. Not for a man who saves two lives.”

“Two lives?” I recalled nothing.

“Had to be you. Client says it was you, and there were the three of you up there on the bank, wet as laundry. They went over and you went in after them. People here are impressed.”

I suspected that they were erroneously adding two and two. “Where is here?”

“Wolverine Emergency Room. We call it the Meat Shack.”

The room reeked of antiseptic. The sheets were slippery. Somebody taped a call button to my left wrist and coughed.

“Any allergies?”

Did life qualify? “No.”

“This will make you a new man.”

“Must be great medicine,” I mumbled. I felt the prick of a needle. All in all, it was unexpected good news, the first in a long while.

The mayor was short, legless, and strapped to a wheelchair. He rolled in just as my breakfast was served in a tray that straddled my lap. “People appreciate what you done,” he said.

“I'm afraid I remember nothing,” I said.

“That don't matter. It was you. Nobody else was around. There's no other explanation and one of the saved remembers you tugging him ashore. You plunged yourself into the spate and saved two souls from perdition. You've earned yourself an official Well Done.”

Life rendered us all well done eventually. I plucked a strip of crisp bacon off my tray and pondered it. Nitrates. Fats to close my arteries. Bacon was odd hospital fare. The flavor was excellent. And the aroma. “Is there more where this came from?”

“We towed your vehicle over to Sturdivant's.”

“Where's that?”

“Two miles south of town, where the river shoots under the highway.”

What town? A woman in a plaid shirt and bright pink lipstick brought me more bacon. I laid a slice over my tongue to let it swell with saliva, and studied the eggs, imagining cholesterol, blood sacs, and random embryos lurking inside the golden aureoles. Wheat toast, brushed with pure butter. I liberally peppered my eggs, ignoring salt.

“He's a hungry one,” Plaid said.

“What were you doing down by the river?” the mayor asked.

“Passing by.”

“Good thing you stopped. Must've been God's doing. Headed where?”

“Undecided.” The eggs oozed sun-yellow under the edge of my fork. I toyed with answering no preference, but that would be misleading.

“What sort of work do you do, drive around looking for lives to save?”

It was more like driving around waiting to be saved. “Consult,” I said, making it as ambiguous as I could. I was in no mood for explanations and would not admit to unemployment.

“Consulting on what?”

“Whatever needs consulting on.”

“Sounds soft as unchilled pudding.”

I sluiced my eggs down with orange juice, freshly squeezed and filled with pulp that stuck between my teeth. “Not once you get the hang of it,” I told the mayor. The best way to defeat an interview is to reverse roles, meet questions with questions. “What about you?” Most people couldn't resist talking about themselves.

“Insurance game and politics.”

“Tricky?”

The mayor smiled knowingly. “Not once you get the hang of it. You fish?”

“From time to time.”

“The Dog?”

I looked at him blankly.

“Dog River, the one you had your swim in yesterday.”

The Dog? The Dog River was one of fly fishing's great meccas, a destination of fantasy. One did not simply drive to the Dog River and fish it. I had always believed that one had to earn a place there. “Just swimming.”

“It's a sweet life,” the mayor said. “For some.”

Ah, a clan hinted at. Life was filled with clans, mostly unnamed and untitled. Time to move the conversation on. “How do I get down to this . . . what's it called?”

“Sturdivant's.”

“Right.”

“You could walk it, but we sure won't allow that. You're gonna ride in style, Mister. Get yourself dressed and you'll find our police cruiser out front.”

The mayor departed on squeaky wheels. I finished my coffee and couldn't remember enjoying a breakfast so much.

 

•••

 

“You the hero?” The deputy had mirror sunglasses, thick brown hair, no jewelry, no makeup, full lips, high cheekbones. I looked past her into the cruiser. Her cap was on the passenger seat, a shotgun was standing upright between the seats, the usual radio gear, a frayed clipboard. The shotgun was a Remington with a short barrel. The deputy's brass name tag said
cashdollar.

“I'm Rhodes.”

“Good for you. Hop in,” she added, stuffing some of the gear under her seat. “You see Hizzonor?”

“He stopped in.”

“The man gives me the creeps,” she said, wheeling the car in a tight U. “Not the chair,
him.
” Then, “
Both,
truth be known.”

The village was called Dog River. She gave me a tour. I knew about the river, but I'd never known there was a town of the same name. How was this possible? Not that it merited knowing. It consisted of two dilapidated churches, four well-lit taverns, a small municipal building, an outdoor basketball court with netless, rusted rims, and two huge fly shops directly across the street from each other.

“Owned by the same guy,” Cashdollar said. “If it's got to do with money up here, you can bet it's got to do with fish. People come from all over the world, pay cash, a big bill a day for top guides, not including tips. River's open year-round, most of it no-kill and always that at Sturdivant's.”

I was glad to let her talk.

“A few people make a wad, but most up here don't have a pot to pee in. It's probably that way everywhere,” she added.

She talked a lot for a cop.

“Here we are, a county on a shoestring and tourists paying a fortune a day to chase fish.”

I nodded and remembered that wars had been fought for this, the freedom to maintain economic disparities.

There was an edge to her voice and something told me to steer the conversation to new ground. “Been a cop long?”

“College, five with the state, five here. I'm thirty-three and unattached, if that's where you're headed.”

“I never hit on a woman better armed than me.”

“Being a woman and a cop,” she said with a pause, “one doesn't automatically cancel out the other.”

Eventually we pulled into a gravel lot in front of a pale log lodge with a huge red-and-gold sign,
sturdivant's.
I looked for my car, but it was nowhere in sight.

“It's not here,” I said.

“I'll be go to hell,” Cashdollar said.

Her tires skidded on loose gravel and the emergency brake made a rasping sound when she engaged it. When I got out I saw that her cruiser's tires were nearly bald.

“Sturdivant's people probably stuck it somewhere,” she said.

As plausible an explanation as any. “Thanks,” I told the deputy, who touched two fingers to her forehead as a farewell.

The back entrance of the silver cedar log lodge opened into a towering great room with a cathedral ceiling and circular skylights. There was a fieldstone fireplace, three stories tall. The walls were paneled, not with the usual faux boards from Handy Andy but varnished cedar halves that stopped me in my tracks. The floor was hardwood, covered with an acrylic polish to make it shine. There were huge fish mounted on the walls. One of the specimens drew my attention. It was a brown trout, a great fat sow with orange spots as big as my thumbnails and teeth like a bone saw, a great hooked jawbone, eyes like silver dollars. A brass plaque underneath.
dog river, salmo trutta. l:
47.25
g:
29.75
wt:
54.6
.
No date, no name. The monster looked vicious. The reality of the mount aside, I knew there were no such things as fifty-pound-plus brown trout, definitely not in Michigan and probably not in the world.