The Snowfly (58 page)

She was dressed, her pack high on her back, and she wore a black rain slicker and boonie hat. She also had her shotgun in hand.

“What won't be here?”

“Did we ever make love?” she asked.

“No.”

“I thought we must have.”

“No.”

“I guess it wasn't meant to be,” she said. “Are you certain?”

“Yes.” I would have remembered this. I had fantasized enough about it during our high school days.

She smiled. “Some things aren't meant to be,” she said again. She looked back at me and adjusted her pack frame.

“You're leaving?”

“I always know when it's time.”

“Because Hemingway's dead?”

She smiled darkly at me. “Some things and some people never die. Ideas count, my dear Bowie, not names and personalities.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “Though there is no longer any need. You know about Key and the snowfly. You should be satisfied now.”

I was suspicious as I watched her walk briskly through the rain, which was letting up. She did not look back and I had a strange feeling that she had deflected me again. From what, I was not at all certain.

My gear was piled neatly on her bed. I grabbed everything and went out into the camp. The crude huts and dwellings were empty, abandoned. Only Valoretev remained and looked ready to go.

“They're gone?” I said.

“Exile is change,” he said. “The woman says this isn't the place and not the time.”

“For what?”

“Snowfly,” the Russian said. “The search continues.”

“You're all here after the snowfly?”

He smiled. “It is our life,” he said. “It is heroic,
da?
”

“You do what Key tells you to do?”

“Of course,” Val said. “She is the one who knows.”

It was crazy. “Where will you go?”

He held up his hands. “Ah,” he said. “Names are unimportant. We're all searching for the same thing, each in our own way. All that matters is to know when you've found it.”

The Russian held out his massive hand. We shook and then we embraced.

He started to walk away, but stopped. “We took Brezhnev's trout,” he said.

“Brezhnev's trout?”

“
Da,
we poached his private preserve! No matter what else, we have that. God go with you, my friend.”

Valoretev jogged into the thick haze clinging to the forest and disappeared.

I was almost to the river when Raina appeared briefly on the far bank. She did not wave and it seemed to me that she was looking at me for the last time. My instinct was to follow, and I took a step toward her but heard a sound behind me and, when I turned around, Ingrid was sprinting toward me and there were men trailing behind her. She leaped the final distance and wrapped herself around me, smothering me with kisses and just as quickly backed away and began pounding my chest with her fists.

 

•••

 

We were in the graveyard in the forest.

Sheriff Donal Hammill stared at the blackened, exhumed remains of Ernest Hemingway.

“What the hell do we have here?” he asked me.

“Nothing to worry about now.”

“I'll decide that,” he said.

The body was never identified and is buried near Grand Marais.

 

•••

 

Ingrid and I were in our house in Grand Marais. I stood in the shower until my skin wrinkled.

“How did you know where to look for me?” I asked her.

“Buzz,” she said. “He thought you might have hiked toward the headwaters of the No Trout.”

He hadn't told her about Raina.

I would deal with him later. But first I had to make amends to her and I began by apologizing.

“What happened out there, Bowie? Why were you there?”

Our reunion had been hot, then cold. She was angry, hurt, and confused, and I couldn't blame her. I had not only been stupid; I had been a selfish asshole.

“I'm not really sure,” I told her. And then I told her everything, leaving nothing out, and she listened until I was finished.

“None of that makes sense,” she said when I had finished.

“To us,” I said.

She appraised me for a long time, then walked toward me, shaking her finger. “I was so worried, Rhodes. Scared to death.” She poked me in the chest with her finger. “You're never leaving me again, Rhodes. Do you understand?”

“Yes, dear.” It never occurred to me that I could be the one left alone.

 

•••

 

Buzz was in the sacristy of his makeshift church. “The prodigal returneth,” he said. He opened a cabinet, took out a bottle of red wine and two glasses, and filled them up. “The sacredotal grape. To your safe return,” he said, lifting a glass. I did not reach for mine.

“You were their connection,” I said.

“They're harmless.”

“They're psychos. Gentry tried to kill me.”

The priest nodded. “I'm sorry. I went to see them, told them that if they ever let anything like that happen again, I would not only no longer help them but also bring the wrath of the law down on them.”

“Why
did
you help them?”

Buzz sighed. “It's what I do. Besides, God most loves fools and fanatics.”

“Even if the devil breeds them?”

“That's one side of the argument. You played dumb with the sheriff.”

“Maybe I've spent too much time around you,” I said, reaching for my glass.

“Better with me than with souls lost to obsession.”

PART III

Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself.

—William Blake

 

23

Trout are classified taxonomically in the family Salmonidae. The oldest fossils go back fifty million years or so, though some experts estimate one hundred million as closer to year zero. There is a line of scientific opinion that in our millennia,
Homo sapiens
has not mutated as much or as effectively as might be expected, which may suggest the difficulty the so-called superior species faces in quest of its piscine elders.

Base genes persist. Males are built for sex with our females on all fours in front of us and we are programmed to perform quickly, a question of guards dropped and readiness for collective defense. We continue to be attracted to fire, though we have little need for the raw form anymore. The modern concept of romantic love is thought to have the strength needed to override our baser urges; but it is modern marriage that is the glue, as couples find themselves enmeshed in matrixes of obligations and expectations. Man was not made to be alone, though by and large, we have no choice in the matter, one way or the other.

 

•••

 

Ingrid and I were married by Father Buzz in early October. We did not honeymoon. Our home became our refuge. We wove ourselves into the fabric of Grand Marais and it into ours.
Sports Afield
offered me a monthly column and I accepted. We were happy and life was full and I was certain that this would go on forever. We hardly noticed the winter.

In May we had fine spring weather. The trees were blooming, ferns were eagerly peeking from the forest floor, and early wildflowers were radiant. Ingrid was in East Lansing for a weeklong seminar at the Michigan State Police Training Center. She was supposed to return late Friday afternoon. I filled vases with forget-me-nots and cooked spaghetti sauce all day. I ­couldn't wait for her to get back, but evening came and there was no sign of her and no word. Cops lived peripatetic lives and I was getting accustomed to it. Sooner or later I knew she would slip into the house in darkness, float into bed, and cover me with her love.

There was a knock on the back door just before eleven p.m. Sheriff Donal Hammill and Father Buzz were outside. I remembered when two lawmen came to my sister, Lilly's, door to tell her Roger was dead. My blood went cold, my brain numb. I smiled like an idiot.

“It's Ingrid,” the sheriff said. “I'm sorry.”

People can talk about death with specificity in the abstract or when it applies to strangers, but when it refers to people close to us we can rarely say the word. The more personal it is, the more circuitous the language. We expect our parents to die before us, not our spouses.

“It was instantaneous,” Hammill said.

Wasn't all death instantaneous? One second you were among the living and the next you were somewhere else. I felt strange, more confused than shocked. I wondered if Ingrid had a map for where she was. She loved maps. I walked back to the bedroom to see if she was there. I even said her name. Buzz followed me. She loved hide-and-seek.

“She stopped at an accident near Topinabee. She tried to direct traffic around the mess, but a truck lost its brakes.” Hammill mercifully skipped the remaining details.

I sat on the edge of the bed and patted the covers. Not there. I went to my closet, then her closet. I needed her scent close to me.

Buzz added. “Do you want me to stay?”

“Sure, we can have spaghetti. Ingrid will be here any minute.”

I heard Father Buzz say, “Donal.”

The house filled with people, Karla and Van, Janey, Fred Ciz, others. “The pasta's for Ingrid,” I told them.

Somebody gave me pills.

If Ingrid wore clothes at all around the house, she wore a ratty gray sweatshirt. I had bought it for her in Key West. I found it, rolled it up, lay with it under my head, and wondered how long it would be before she came home.

We buried her west of Grand Marais, in a remote area where voyageurs had allegedly buried their dead in unmarked graves three centuries before. It was one of her favorite places to picnic and make love. Hemingway was close to her.

When the funeral was over, I took my gear and hiked up the No Trout from the mouth. I did not bathe or shave and hardly slept. I did not want to remember the past or think about the future.

Buzz, Fred Ciz, and Janey came out to the river after I had been there nearly two weeks.

“Fish biting?” the priest asked.

I had no idea if I had been catching or not.

“We couldn't find your camp,” Fred said.

There was no camp. When I was exhausted I simply got out of the water and slept, a hyperactive animal lacking purpose. I was covered with blackfly and mosquito bites.

“It's time for you to come home,” Buzz said. “Grief is natural. Grief heals. This doesn't. You need to be with people.” Fred nodded agreement and he and Janey took my arms.

I did not argue with them.

 

•••

 

I spent the summer in the house. Janey stopped in every day to bring food. On Independence Day there were fireworks over the harbor and Janey came with fried chicken and slaw and three-bean salad and cold Strohs. I ate in the dark while she sat across from me and the windows flashed spectacular colors. Sometime that night I crawled into bed and Janey took off her clothes and slid in next to me, whispering, “You can call me her name if that helps.” I couldn't do it.

My editor at
Sports Afield
was named Vairo. He was in his early sixties and nearing retirement. He loved scatterguns and dogs, wingshooting and people who wrote crisp sentences. He was an artful blend of patience and insistence. In August I started writing again. On Labor Day I had dinner at Staley's. Donal Hammill and his wife drove up from Newberry and Janey's kids and Karla and Van and their children joined in. I had little to contribute to the lively conversation, but the company gave me strength and when Lilly and her kids made a surprise appearance, I sobbed, not for what I had lost, but for what I still had. Buzz called this progress, adding, “About damn time.”

Janey continued to hover close by and I was glad to have her there. She slept with me occasionally. In bed she said, “ Maybe if you make your body happy it will help your mind.” The motto of animal trainers and behaviorists. Therapeutic sex. But I could not do it. Janey was an affectionate and caring woman, and I suspected she was curious about Ingrid and me, but she did not ask and I did not volunteer.

I led a mostly solitary life. I fished and I wrote. In October Buzz went to Wyoming for a month's retreat and vacation. Snow came the day he left and it kept coming and the air turned frigid and the ground froze six feet down and winter settled on Grand Marais six weeks earlier than customary, and some weeks before the
Farmer's Almanac
had predicted it. I taped plastic over windows to seal them and spent days in the woods sawing deadwood and hauling it back until I had enough for two winters.

At night I wrote and read and stared at the radio. On Sundays Fred, Janey, her kids, and I ice-fished and watched the Packers. Lombardi was gone and with him the pride and edge of the Pack and it struck me how much impact one man could have on so many strangers. Some people are gifts, people like Fred and Buzz and Lombardi. And then there were the rest of us who tend to take far more than we give.

Ingrid had gotten me into the habit of going around the house without clothes. I wrote in the nude at the kitchen table. Sometimes Janey would drop by for a visit and find me this way. She just laughed as I scrambled. Clothes encumbered me. I knew it was a silly notion, but writers tend to indulge their idiosyncrasies as sops to creativity. Clothes took my juice. I thought Papa would understand that we each had to do what worked for us.

It was in the third week of November, six months after Ingrid's death, and I was writing a column about jigging for winter walleyes. I wrote on tablets of legal paper. False starts got wadded up and dropped on the floor. I discarded a page and saw it flit across the linoleum as a frigid breeze filled the room.

My eyes shifted to the open door.

Raina Chickerman stood in the doorway, wearing knee-high white mukluks, black cords, a white parka, white mittens that reached up to her elbows like medieval gauntlets, and a huge gray-white fur cap with snow on it. She took off the hat and whacked it on her leg, spraying snow on the floor.

She looked at me and said, “Nice outfit.”

She had never been one for social conventions, like knocking on doors. Queen Anna had thought her rude, but it wasn't that. Punky simply did not recognize arbitrary boundaries.

I was too startled to speak.

She circumnavigated the kitchen, walked over to me, and looked at my lap. “Looks like puberty finally caught up,” she said.

“Nice to see you, too.”

She rubbed her hands together and blew on them. “This is the year,” she said.

“Go away,” I said. “I'm done chasing.”

Marriage is a wonderful institution and the bond of love an endless source of comfort. But marriage does not erase the baggage you carry into it. I had fought hard to forget the snowfly; you cannot suppress the irrational. Some of us have things inside us that cannot be explained, urges that boil continually in or out of our genetic soup. I had kept my gear packed and ready since Buzz and Fred found me on my river after Ingrid's funeral. I did not look at it and never went into the room where it was stored, but I knew it was there and could feel its presence and spirit. The room had been like a mine waiting to be stepped on.

Raina went to the door. “If you stay, you'll always wonder,” she said sharply. “The only regrets are for things not done.” She left the door open. Snow billowed in.

I had walked away from Ingrid without a word. This would be different. I wrote a note to Janey and the others and told them I had gone away to fish.

I pulled on my clothes and grabbed my gear and went out to Raina's black truck. I stood in the snow beside the passenger window. She came around, took my gear, tossed it in the back, and I got in.

“I was sorry to hear about your wife,” she said.

“Just drive,” I said. I thought again about how I had left Ingrid and then lost her. Had that been my fault, some sort of divine retribution? Now I thought of Janey and my friends and felt a shudder, but I could not turn back. I had to do this.

 

•••

 

Snow swirled around us. There was little traffic. Raina stuck to back roads, which were icy and rutted. She drove fast, with one hand on the steering wheel, but she kept a sure and steady line.

“It's real, you know.”

“If so, it would be better known.”

“One's existence is not predicated on somebody else knowing it. There are millions of unknown species of insects that live and our not knowing about them does not change the fact.”

Of insects, of cats, of fish, I thought.

When we were children, Raina's delicate features had reminded me of the porcelain dolls my mother collected. She was still beautiful, but in the dim light of the cab I saw that hard lines were forming. The light made her face into a mask.

“Do you know of Shoumatoff's hairstreak?” She glanced at me.

“A new beauty aid?” I said laconically.

“It was discovered by a Russian in Jamaica in 1933. The locals, of course, already knew of them, but the butterfly was not officially found until science classified and named it. Before the Russian came, did it exist or not? Mankind imposes its order on nature, but that doesn't mean the order is real.”

When we were children, Raina and I had lain in fields at night and watched for shooting stars and, when we saw one, we would give it a name. “Like our stars.”

“Which weren't stars at all,” she said. “Hairstreaks have azure wings, which makes them distinctive. In nature bright or unique coloring usually points to a mating scheme, but hairstreaks mate by scent, not by color.” She looked over at me. “I confess, I still have your scent, have been able to recall it all my life. Can you still smell your wife?”

“No.”

“I don't mean her soaps and perfumes. I mean
her.
”

I didn't want to talk about Ingrid. Raina had always been adept at going directly to my innermost thoughts.

She said, “There's an erudite psychologist in Australia who studies forms of ignorance. He talks about denial, meaning hurtful things that we will not allow ourselves to think about. Then there are taboos, all those things our tribes say are too dangerous for us to know. From there it gets gray. Tacit knowledge refers to all sorts of things that we know, but aren't really aware of. Error is another level. These are the things we think we know, but don't. Then there are known unknowns, all the things we know for sure that we don't know, and finally, at the pinnacle of ignorance, the unknown unknowns, all the things we don't know that we don't know. Most of our ignorance resides there.”

“The snowfly?”

She smiled. “It's real.”

“You've seen it?”

“No,” she said matter-of-factly. “Not in the way you mean.”

“Maybe you're wrong.”

“‘The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it,'” she said, adding, “Nietzsche.”

She had always been an intellectual show-off. I countered, “Nietzsche also said, ‘Without beer, life would be a mistake.' I'm thirsty.”

“You made that up.”

“Prove it,” I said. It felt almost like we were children again.

We stopped at a crossroads village at an establishment called the No-Moon-Saloon, a name open to several interpretations. The walls were covered with deer heads with glass eyes. The menu was a litany of high fat. Though technically in the Temperate Zone, our annual temperatures could swing through 170 degrees, whereas equatorial climates seldom varied 20 degrees in a year, these facts strong evidence of the weakness of labels. In the Temperate Zone ectomorphs have a low life expectancy. Up here you ate fat and died slow from accumulated arterial plaque or you ate sensibly and died young and thin, vehicular mayhem and bar brawls notwithstanding.