The Snowfly (52 page)

21

Spring in northern Michigan comes only after a long, painful labor, and like any difficult delivery its arrival is greeted with a combination of joy and exhaustion, followed by postpartum blues. Ingrid and I had settled in and, by the time the first robins showed, we were both ready to fish. The day after I first told Ingrid I loved her, I called Fred Ciz, gave him my new address, and told him I'd be up to visit sometime that summer.

I took Ingrid to meet my sister, Lilly, and after that they were on the phone at least once a week. Lilly and her children came down to visit at Easter. Ingrid's big house on the upper Dog River was overrun with little bodies in sleeping bags. We cooked hamburgers over charcoal and I was at peace.

“There's more to a relationship than this,” Lilly said, softly scolding.

“I'm discovering life.”

Lilly said, “You look happy.” I could tell she meant it.

A week after Easter Fred called.

“Amp's dead,” he said. The deputy, who had been in Vietnam, had gone down with a heart attack trying to referee a domestic dispute and died on the spot. I hadn't known Amp that well, but he had always seemed competent, an integral part of the fabric of Grand Marais. Amp enforced the law with common sense and care and I admired him.

“When's the funeral?”

“Next Tuesday.”

“We'll be there.”

“We?” he asked.

“You'll see.”

Ingrid went with me. We had the wake at Staley's, which was packed with cops and DNR people in uniform and Amp's friends and relatives from fifty miles around. CO Service was there and we talked and decided that we would try to get together sometime other than at funerals. As it happened, I would know Grady Service for a long time.

It became clear at the funeral that Amp had been a hero. He had won the Distinguished Service Medal, two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star with a V for valor, three Purple Hearts, and never said a word about his military service. The Army had wanted to send a ceremonial burial detail up from Detroit, but Buzz and Fred refused and said they would take care of it, which they did. Some vets from the Newberry VFW post handled the detail. “Taps” was played, rifles fired, the flag folded into a smooth triangle and presented to Amp's mother. Wet eyes everywhere.

The wake was rowdy. Karla, Buzz, and Fred were all over Ingrid. Janey circled cautiously around her but seemed to warm to her by the end of the evening. At one point I saw Karla pigeonhole Ingrid. There was an animated discussion punctuated by bursts of laughter and it unnerved me.

In the bedroom at Fred's that night, I wanted to know what Karla had told her, but couldn't bring myself to ask. Ingrid had been able to read me from the first moment.

“It's none of your business. Woman talk.”

In the morning we had slight hangovers and a visitor. Luce County sheriff Donal Hammill had a red face, a mashed-in nose, and small ears that stuck out like buds. Fred served up breakfast and Hammill drank six cups of coffee and ate six fried eggs and six pieces of buttered white bread, toasted dark. He must have had the metabolism of a shark because he couldn't have weighed more than 160, firearm included.

“Most important meal of the day,” he said when he was done.

“Breakfast?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said with an impish grin. “The one you're eating at the moment.”

It was easy to see why Amp had been hired. His boss had the same direct and easy manner. Eating done, he turned his attention to Ingrid.

“Rumor has it you pack a badge.”

“Rumor is fact,” she said. “Which is rare.”

“I might as well get to the point,” Sheriff Hammill said. “I've got an opening. Pay's crap, and so's the work. You interested?”

“Maybe I'm not qualified.”

Hammill grinned. “I talked to your chief last night. I talked to people in Detroit too.”

“You've been busy,” Ingrid said.

“Are you interested or not?” Hammill asked.

Ingrid looked at me. “It's your decision,” I said.

“I'm interested,” she told the sheriff.

“Good. Come see me tomorrow afternoon and we'll talk.”

“What about your house?” I asked her when we were alone.

“I don't let things define me, Bowie. The house will keep. You love it up here and I've got a feeling I will, too. What's to think about? You think your friend Karla can find us a place to live?”

Which is how we came home to Grand Marais and thoughts of Raina Chickerman and the snowfly slowly faded. I had love, friends, and money in the bank. In time, I knew the snowfly would be behind me.

 

•••

 

By the middle of July the blackfly infestation had subsided. Ingrid worked a regular day patrol in the northern county, but anytime anything happened up our way, she got the call. It was High-T season, meaning a long ton of tourists in camper trucks doing stupid things.

We rented a small log cabin a block from Staley's and though we were happy, we never talked about marriage.

The phone rang on a Wednesday night as we were making love in the kitchen. This wasn't unusual. Ingrid was spontaneous and passionate. Her work often butted in.

“Damn,” she said when she hung up the phone.

“Gotta go?”

She nodded. “I hate those words.”

Ingrid did not talk a lot about her work and only occasionally felt the need to vent.

“Got a body,” she said. “More like a skeleton, I imagine. Been there a while, they say. Could be a hunter from last fall.”

“Somebody known to be missing?”

“That would be too easy,” she said.

She returned about four a.m., woke me, took my hand, led me into the kitchen, and started undressing. “Now,” she said, “where were we?”

 

•••

 

A week later I was using a dry Royal Coachman on the West Branch of the Fox River. Ingrid, Buzz, and I were only five or so miles north of Seney, whose infamy had peaked before the turn of the century, when white pine was king, loggers terminally thirsty, and the town boasted fifty bars strung out along two miles of nasty dirt road. Now the road was paved, there were only three taverns, some Mennonites looking to homestead, and a few remaining loggers jobbing pulp for a couple of local mills. Pulping was beer money to add to the dole.

Ingrid had waded upstream ahead of me. She believed in covering as much water as she could, while I preferred to go slowly and study the river and let its secrets unfold at a more leisurely pace. There were plenty of brookies and a few browns in this part of the Fox, each with its own niche. Of course, it didn't escape me that Ernest Hemingway had been up here long ago, maybe stood at the same bend, freshly returned from his stint with the ambulance service in Italy, where he had been wounded, gotten hepatitis, and come back to the States to lick his wounds and bask in self-­proclaimed glory. He came up to Seney by train and camped along the river with a couple of pals and caught fish and brooded and maybe dreamed of greatness or killing himself. Unless you believed Carl Collister, and I wasn't buying his fantasy one bit.

From what I had read about Hemingway, there were two things always on his mind, be great or die, or be great
and
die, the line of demarcation never too clear to me. I had seen soldiers with the same dementia in Vietnam. The only soldiers I knew who conjured greatness out loud usually ended up dead soon thereafter. But Hemingway wasn't a soldier, then or later. He was more like a USO doughnut dolly or a Red Cross hireling and later he was a war correspondent, the same as me, which was definitely not a soldier. Reporters watched and soldiers
did,
a much greater divide than mere words can convey.

Of course Hemingway had killed himself; suicide ran in his family the way six toes, tiny peckers shaped like plantains, or a propensity for contracting upper respiratory infections afflicted others.

“I thought we were fishing?”

Ingrid's voice snapped me back to reality. She had returned silently and eased down beside me on a sturdy cedar sweeper.

“I was daydreaming.”

“About me?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Right answer, honey.”

Buzz eventually came back, surprising us by arriving overland, making a great deal of racket and tumbling the last six or eight feet down the steep sandy embankment.

“No hills in the river,” I said when he had recovered. “It's easier walking down here in the water. You might want to try it.”

He was in no mood for banter. In fact, he got up and trudged sullenly down the river ahead of us and did not speak. Maybe the fall had put him in a bad mood. Or he had not caught fish. He hated to get skunked. My musings certainly hadn't helped my mood. The Hemingway thing gave me the creeps. He faked his suicide to pursue the snowfly? I shook my head at my own gullibility.

•••

 

It took quite a while to identify the body that had been found south of Grand Marais weeks before. The dead man was Mickey O'Brien, an elementary school principal from Red Hook, New York. His wife told Ingrid that her husband had gone on a fishing trip three years before and never returned. She had filed a missing persons report, but until the body was found there had been no trace of him. He was supposed to have been fishing on the Au Sable River in lower Michigan.

In the back of my mind though, I remembered Ingrid telling me that the mysterious trespassers had left the area. The body was identified through dental records, which was a good thing, because there wasn't much else to go by. The dead man's wife told Ingrid that he had become increasingly obsessed with “some stupid fishing thing.” She also asked if the remains could be shipped to New York and Buzz stepped in to help her make the arrangements.

I reminded Ingrid of the story she had told me about a couple of snowfly chasers freezing to death near the Au Sable and asked her if she thought the events were connected. She said, “The Au Sable's hundreds of miles away. If he was fishing down there, what's his body doing up here?”

I was tempted to call the woman and talk to her about her husband, but I refrained. Was the snowfly involved? Maybe. Did I care? No, I told myself. Maybe he had been with Hemingway, I thought, making a joke of the whole thing.

 

•••

 

Ingrid was called out early in the morning to a traffic accident. A flatbed truck had struck a Ford camper head-on, with predictable results.

Buzz came by at midmorning, looking washed out. He asked for a cup of tea and was uncharacteristically quiet.

“You look like they just made you bishop.”

The priest managed a weak smile.

“Friends talk to each other,” I told him.

“So now you're Mister Garrulous,” he grumbled.

Whatever was on his mind wasn't going to be pried out. We sat in silence. Eventually he looked up at me. “That time on the Fox?”

“Which time?” Ingrid, Buzz, and I had been to the Fox River several times.

“The time I fell on my tookus.”

“What about it?”

“I got lost.”

“That happens to all of us.”

“You're happy?” he asked.

I thought the subject was going to be his terrible sense of direction, which was legendary. “Don't I look it?”

“Ingrid's a fine woman.”

“I know. What are you getting at?”

“You haven't married her.”

“Is this going to be a morality lecture, Father?”

He stared at me. He wanted another response, but I didn't have one and I resented his butting in.

“What the hell do you want, Buzz?”

“To be sure,” he said, “of you and Ingrid, that the bond is strong enough.”

“Buzz, what are you saying?”

He looked at the ceiling as if he was trying to decide something. Had he looked for God's guidance? “That day on the Fox,” he said, “I saw someone.”

“What's that got to do with Ingrid and me?”

His eyes were piercing as they locked onto mine. “It was
that
woman.”

“
What
woman?”

He paused before he spoke. “Smith. Key. Whatever her name is.”

My stomach fluttered. “On the Fox?”

“I saw her get out of the river ahead of me. She had a fly rod. I tried to follow her.”

I closed my eyes. Buzz had come down the east bank. “Where did she go?”

“Into the bush. I lost her. I thought maybe she was headed for a vehicle, but there are no roads back that way, not even a grown-over tote road.”

Raina Chickerman. Again. I had tried to repress the whole thing. Would Raina never leave me alone? “Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“I wasn't sure it was her,” the priest said.

“Why're you telling me now?”

“Because now I'm sure, is why,” he snapped. “I saw her again.”

“When?”

Buzz chewed his lower lip. “Yesterday. She was headed into the headwaters of your river.”

“The No Trout?”

The priest nodded solemnly.

My mind was running in multiple directions. Snowflies? Not till next season, Sturdivant said. Of course, Gus Chickerman had toyed with his mind. This year, next year, ever: Who knew? Raina was headed for
my
river.

I couldn't afford to wait for Ingrid to come home. Buzz had seen Raina Chickerman from the road. She had been on a trail leading toward the river. She had a backpack and bedroll and a rod tube tied to her pack. The trail was way upriver, in an area I had never gotten to. Maybe it wasn't Raina. Buzz could've been wrong, and said so, but I had to know and I couldn't wait around to discuss it with Ingrid. Raina had a twenty-four-hour lead. I felt guilty about running out, but some things you just have to do. If Raina was here, I imagined I had a new window of opportunity and I had to hurry to get through it before it closed. Obsession at its worst.