The Snowfly (44 page)

The food was beautifully presented, served by the same girls who served lunches on the river. After the table was cleared, Kelli and the other girls brought trays of cognacs and boxes of cigars, and circulated among the guests distributing them.

Samuel Creamer had moved next to Sturdivant, keeping the old man nodding attentively to a steady stream of conversation. Eventually Sturdivant struggled to his feet and held out his hands, silencing the congregation.

“I trust our kitchen has proven satisfactory,” the old man began. “To our old friends we say welcome back and to our first-time guests we say welcome. At Sturdivant's we have no other reason for existence than to satisfy our guests. There are grander and more elegant lodges and there are more beautiful settings, but nowhere in the world do trouters receive higher esteem, and nowhere in the world will you find finer fish than our beloved Dog trout. You pay dearly for this, but how dearly is largely up to you. Assembled at this table are the finest guides in the world, but that is only my view. I acknowledge my biases,” he said, pausing for effect.

“When I created this establishment,” he continued, “I realized that only the finest of everything could assure success. I pay my people well, but pay alone is not sufficient to maintain excellence. I said to myself, there must be incentives, but incentives from me could become entitlements. What we needed here would be pure competition, with the customer making the final judgment. My investment guarantees the best people; your rewards guarantee their undivided attention and effort. If they serve you well, you reward them accordingly. If you are unsatisfied, well, that's the way of the world. In order to maintain competition, I insist that rewards be distributed publicly. It is now time to see how clever Sturdivant has been, yes?”

This drew polite applause and smiles all around.

“Sturdivant is a gentleman,” he said. “Sturdivant does not embarrass his guests. I would ask you to retire to the garden deck, where our young ladies will see to your needs. We would ask you to come in one at a time and to evaluate your day. You must be candid. We welcome your criticisms; only by acknowledging our shortcomings can we improve your experience. At the conclusion of your presentation, you will give me the envelope provided upon your arrival. When this transaction is complete I would ask you to retire. My house is your house,” he added. “Checkout time is noon. When you are gone, I hope you will take fond memories and that you will come again next season.”

He sipped his cognac before continuing. “I am frequently urged by many of you to allow guests more than one day a season, but I recognized long ago that a single day of the greatest value is superior to a longer visit. You, my friends, get one try at the river a year. My guides get one try at you. Such delicious tension affords a mutual effort toward excellence. It is the Sturdivant way, unique in the world. It is, my dear friends, the purest experience in the angling world, among we Brothers and Sisters of the Angle, as the eminent Mister Walton recorded it so long ago.”

A hard drift, even a king, could come to Sturdivant's only one day a season. In this way Sturdivant created demand among people whose resources assured they would rarely face such limiting circumstances. I was surprised when he first laid this out to me. I decided then that my employer, however ipse-dixitistic, was a brilliant promoter. Nothing so far had happened to change my mind.

I wondered again why Sturdivant had chosen me, a drifter without credentials, to sit among this group.

The first hard drift to come was the woodpecker. “I'm new to all this,” she told us. “I caught twenty gorgeous fish. They were small, I'm told, but size in many things is not the point.” She emphasized this with a lascivious grin. “I'll be back,” she said in Collister's direction. “Next season.” Having passed her envelope to Sturdivant she raised her glass in salute and glided across the carpet and out the door.

This was how it went, one drift at a time, until Mr. Samuel Creamer stood before us, looked at me, shook his head several times, silently passed his envelope to Sturdivant, and departed without uttering a single word.

I felt all eyes on me. “What happened?” Collister asked.

I shrugged. The final two drifts talked eloquently of their experiences. Phaedra Allen had connected one of them to a seven-pounder; Edmann, the Montanan, had seen his client net a half-dozen fish in the five- to six-pound category and had hooked him to a larger fish, which had broken off.

“It is my most fervent hope,” Sturdivant said after the last presentation, “that you will not let your rewards prevent you from being hospitable. We are professionals here. No need to say more. You may now open your envelopes, ladies and gentlemen. Let us see how you have done.”

I checked the time. The long night had left me edgy. I watched the ­others open their envelopes and announce the amount of their tip. ­Collister's woodpecker had rewarded him with four hundred dollars, twenty a fish. “Not bad,” he said. Bennett's drift, who had complained sharply about his guide's fly choices, had coughed up $650. Edmann got a thousand, as did Phaedra Allen. Dusty Whipkey got a mere hundred, but laughed it off. “It's a hundred more than I had in my pocket this morning,” she said.

“Mister Rhodes,” Sturdivant said. “Would you care to share your fortunes with your colleagues?”

“I haven't looked,” I said.

“Please do so now.” Sturdivant's voice had the raspy edge of sandpaper pushed across pumice. There were forced smiles all around. What had Kelli said? The other guides talked about me?

I tapped the envelope on the table, tore off the end, and blew into it. When I saw the number on the check I blinked.

“Well?” Sturdivant asked.

The note read, “Better than Beluga caviar and worth the price.” “Twenty-three thousand,” I announced, reading it again to be sure it was real.

Sturdivant slumped back into his chair, slapped the table, and bowed his head. “Excellence, Mister Rhodes. My God,
excellence!
We congratulate you.” The guides lifted their glasses, but there was no pleasure in their eyes.

“This is fucking crazy,” I told Creamer when we met on the deck.

“It's only money, Rhodes. It costs me that much to ski for a couple of weeks in France with my wife every year and she's a hell of a lot less fun. You get me a twenty-pounder next year and I'll buy you a damn palace in India. That's a promise.”

Creamer had one drink. “Sorry to be a party-pooper, Coach, but I have to get out of here early in the morning. It was a hell of a day,” he added as we shook hands. We had gone from Rhodes to Coach in one day, all because of fish. What a strange and inexplicable world.

The party was going strong when Kelli sidled up to me.

It was a cool night with a clear sky. I could see stars blinking through the trees.

“Is it true—how much you got?” she asked. “Everybody is talking about it.”

“Yes.”

“Damn. Is this a screwed-up world, or what?”

“It has some peculiar wrinkles.”

“You want something to drink?” She held up a small tray with snifters of cognac.

“No thanks.”

“Are you married?”

“No.”

“Ever been?”

“No.”

“I'm engaged,” she said. “His name's Rick.”

“Congratulations.”

“It's probably a mistake,” she said. “I've been here all summer and the only time we talk is when I call him. I'm thinking this is not a good thing. Have you got anything against marriage?”

“No?”

“I've got doubts. You know, like being with one person for the rest of your life? Can people really do that?”

“Some do.” I thought of my father and Queen Anna, the Chickermans.

“Do you like what you're doing?”

“It's pretty good so far.”

“Are you going to stick with it, you know, come back next season?”

“I don't know yet. It's getting late. Maybe I'll wake up one morning soon and think it's time to go.”

Kelli frowned. “You mean after the season's over.”

“Whenever it's time. Tomorrow, in a week, who knows?”

“And leave your money behind?”

I tried to see her face in the dark. “How's that?”

“You don't know?”

“I must not.”

“If you leave before the season ends, Sturdivant keeps your tips.”

“He can't.”

“Did you sign a contract?”

“Some papers.”

“Then it's legal. It's the same for all of us.”

“Why?”

“To keep us here. He makes a fortune because of us. No us, no fortune. Actually,” she said, correcting herself, “no guides, no fortunes. We girls are just accessories. He's real picky about his help.”

“I have the check.”

“Look at it. It's not signed. Sturdivant gets the signed checks. You think it's possible to make a lot of money without being ruthless?” she asked.

“I've never made a lot of money.”

“You did today.”

“But it's not mine yet.”

She laughed. “Sturdivant gives me the heebie-jeebies,” she said. “Do you know that he takes boats down the river alone at night? I've seen him.”

“How does he do it?”

“I don't know and I don't think I want to know,” she said.

We stood in silence and I could feel her staring at me. “Got a drift tomorrow?” she asked.

“A New Yawkah,” I said, mimicking the city accent.

“They're the worst,” she said, squeezing my arm.

When Kelli left to help with cleanup I walked over to the guide house, where there was a room for the guides in the basement. There we had reports of insect hatches and every fish caught during the season. Guides with the most seniority got first pick of the runs. I looked over the reports, saw where the others were headed, and decided to take my New Yorker to the same section of river as Collister, following him down by two hours to give the fish a chance to settle.

 

•••

 

I had worked every day. I found the work easy enough; I was tanned and fit, eating haute cuisine and banking salary and accumlating tips, running fourteen hundred to three thousand dollars a week, not counting the small fortune from Creamer.

All of the guides went to the river on their off days, but when they were off and I had a drift, I never saw them and wondered where they went.

A heat wave arrived in late September, and with it came Indian summer. The river was low, evaporated by ninety-plus-degree days, and fish of any size were hard to come by. Some of the drifts wanted night trips, but Sturdivant's rules forbade them; he said insurance was high enough as it was. Night drifts with amateurs could be dangerous, he said. Some of my drifts had tried to cut private deals with me, but I adhered to Sturdivant's policy. More often than not, those who wanted to run by night were the most incompetent by day. The risk wasn't worth a few dollars. Still, brown trout fishing was better after sundown because the big fish tended to be nocturnal, and I remembered Kelli telling me that Sturdivant himself was slipping onto the river at night. It was his right, of course, but how did a blind man negotiate a fast, winding river alone? Maybe Kelli had seen something and jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Finally I had a two-day hiatus and no clients. By my calculation it had been nearly ten weeks since my arrival. It had been months since I had been intimate with a woman and although Kelli was becoming more and more overt in her flirtations, making her availability and interest about as clear as they could be made, I had ignored the openings she created, which was not easy to do. The truth was, I was horny and lonely.

My first night off I stayed at the lodge, ate with those who didn't have clients, had a couple of beers, and retired to my cabin to read. I went to sleep early and woke up the next morning knowing that I had to get out and do something.

I borrowed one of the lodge's pickups and spent the evening of my second day off drinking slammers in a tavern north of town. There was plinkety-plunkety-twangalang music, the patrons waddling the two-step, all pairs, near as I could tell, and mostly older folks. There was something obscene about septuagenarians in fringed mini skirts and white slouch boots. The bartender was a red-headed woman of fifty, lean and rawboned. She wore a plastic name tag. It said
earleene.

“Earle the Girl,” I said. “What time do you get off work?”

“Way too late for you,” she said with a practiced smile and the warmth of an Arctic winter. “Bub.”

“You don't find me charming?”

“I find you extremely shit-faced. You might try sometime when you're sober, though I doubt the result will change. A drunk jerk is still a jerk when the booze wears off.”

“But you don't know what you're missing.”

“I'll try to live with my loss,” Earle the Girl said.

“I wan' 'nother drink.”

“You're cut off, Bub.”

 

•••

 

I became semiconscious in a chicken coop of iron mesh as thick as my thumb with a clean, pale blue cement floor and a sparkling white urinal in the corner. My first thought: The chickens here must be housebroken. Disinfectant hung in the air like gas. I was no stranger to hangovers, though it was not at all clear that I had yet passed to the pure hangover stage. Insanity was a possible explanation. Or abduction. I rubbed my eyes and rolled to the floor on all fours. Not a chicken coop; the belly of a destroyer. Family lore: Uncle Jess had gone to sea in a tin can and come home with lungs filled with asbestos and a blind hate for closed spaces, no explanations given. How had Jess fit in a tin can? I had been six then and my question ignored. At his daughter's wedding reception Jess had risen to offer a toast and, instead, informed the celebrants that when the ship crossed the equator, the crew had shed their clothes and “rubbed their peckers” on a cook named Rafael. Jess spent a lot of time visiting the VA hospital in Battle Creek. I hoped my ship was not nearing the equator.