The Snowfly (60 page)

“We just left them there.”

“There's no rule against that.”

“The big hatch isn't going to be there, is it? You didn't see any flies, did you?”

“There were a few,” she said. “There are some on most rivers this year.”

“You deliberately misled them,” I said.

“You figured it out,” she said, turning her back on me as she undressed.

“They could die out there!”

I was tired, disgusted, dumbfounded, and sick of her lies. I grabbed her and spun her around. She fought to get loose and we fell onto the bed. My hands wrapped around her throat.

“Goddamn you!” I screamed at her.

Her eyes locked on me as she began to gasp for air. I wanted to hurt her. She had driven me to this.

“Key's manuscript,” I said, trying to regain my composure. “Why did you have to have it?”

“It was my father's work. It was supposed to be published, but the OSS stopped it because they feared it would somehow get linked to what my father was doing from Germany. The OSS killed it and they got what they thought was the only manuscript, but a copy got made and ended up in England. They belonged to my father,” she said angrily. “To me.”

“Two copies,” I said. “I found one and you got the other. What's in the manuscript?”

“Not codes,” she said. “No government secrets.” She flopped in the other direction, and was immediately asleep.

I knew she was lying about the manuscript. There might be no government secrets in the document, but I knew that it contained something about the snowfly that she was determined to keep from the world, and to herself. This was the Raina I had always known, interested only in herself and using everyone for her own purposes. I lay down on the other bed and fell into a troubled sleep.

I had a strange dream. Three angry, bearded men were pointing deer rifles at me. I opened my eyes. It was not a dream but a bone-chilling version of reality.

“Look what I found sleeping in my bed,” one of them said. I used my eyes to search for Raina. Her bed was empty, her things gone. She had misled the group and, now, she had bailed on me.
Goddamn her!
I kept thinking, “Maniac Manor.” This was not the moment for histrionics.

“Forest Samaritan Rule,” I said, groping for something, anything.

“What the fuck is he talkin' about?” one of the men asked.

I said, “People in dire trouble have the legal right to use any cabin they need. It's law.”

“Only law here is what I say it is,” the first man said. He thrust the rifle forward for emphasis.

“Failure to comply is two years in jail, twenty thousand dollars, and confiscation of the property. Ignorance of the law is not a legal defense.” I was desperate. Bullshit against a gun feels absurdly inadequate.

The man took aim. “Fuck your law,” he said. “This is
my
place.”

I closed my eyes.

“Wait, Harry.” Another voice. “He ain't done no harm. Maybe he's tellin' the truth.”

“You shoot him, Harry, and I'm tellin' the cops.” Another voice of reason.

I opened my eyes.

“I can't have jerk-offs takin' over my camp.”

“I was just using it,” I said. “I was freezing.”

Two of the men pointed their rifle barrels at the floor.

“Let him get dressed and get out. We came to hunt, not fuck with cops.”

I said, “Sorry, Harry. If you were me, what would you have done?”

The one called Harry had a thick black beard and shaggy gray hair. “I sure as hell wouldn't be walkin' the boonies in a blizzard.”

“Leave him be,” one of Harry's companions said.

Harry lowered his rifle. “Get your shit and get out.”

There was only one set of tire tracks in the lane, and they attached to the hunters' green pickup truck, which meant Raina had been gone a while. When I got out to the road I turned east, glad to be free and full of rage, Raina's sucker again. She had spun such a tale about her parents that now I wondered what was real and what was not.

I walked a long time before I managed to hitch a ride to town. I had a lot of time to think. Gus Chickerman didn't want the manuscript. If it had been that sensitive, the government would not only have stopped the project but also confiscated the materials, the original, and all copies. I doubted even that Gus had written it. It seemed more likely to have come from the pen of the original M. J. Key, somehow ending up briefly in Gus's hands. Why, I had no idea, but I was certain Raina wanted it for one reason: She was addicted to the snowfly and determined to do what her father had once done. If she had the secret, she wanted to keep it to herself. I thought of the huge fish at Sturdivant's. And just as Gus had misled Sturdivant, Raina was misleading everyone, me included. The mysteries surrounding the manuscript would have to wait. Raina was not going to beat me. I found a telephone and called Fred Ciz.

“Where are you?”

“Sidnaw.”

“It's going to take me some time to get all the way over there. Are you all right?”

“Time is only the arithmetic expression of position in the space-time continuum.”

“Stay inside,” he said. “It sounds like your brain's froze.”

24

During World War II, there had been a camp near the village of Sidnaw housing thousands of Nazi POWs. A handmade sign on the door of the town's only restaurant proclaimed
whitetails for jesus/we make our own pasties and krauts.
I did not seek an explanation; we are not intended to understand some things. I had a “special breakfast pasty,” which tasted like every other pasty I'd ever eaten: dry and bland. Cornish miners had warmed their pasties on shovel blades. Almost all the mines in the U.P. had gone belly-up. The miners and their shovels were gone; only pasties remained. Pasties and me. Raina was gone, too. White flies remained a jump ball.

Why had Raina come to me this time? This time was neither accident nor coincidence. She had intentionally sought me out and knew about Ingrid. She had been keeping track of me and she had come to get me, not because she wanted me with her. For years she had blocked my way. Maybe Gus had helped her. There was no way to tell on that count. She had misled Val and the others, then gone out of her way to get me out of her way. Why?

As a child, the Raina I felt I knew did everything with a purpose.

I had a good idea what she intended. If I was here, I couldn't be ­elsewhere. Raina wanted the snowflies to herself. There was no other ­conclusion.

“This is the year,” she had said in Grand Marais.

There had been a few snowflies on the Mibra Onty, but there would be no hatch. “A few on most rivers
this year,
” she'd said.

Not on the upper reaches of the Lesser Trout.

Nor on the Dog. Sturdivant was sure it would be there this year, but he had been duped by Gus. Like father, like daughter, I guessed. Sturdivant was headed for more disappointment.

When we were kids Punky could outperform us all, but she always begged for a head start, an edge. Not from a dearth of confidence. Rather, as insurance. She played all angles.

We are who we are after a certain point in life, which is more or less how the Jesuits viewed it. Raina was evidence. What had she asked me? Had I ever gone all the way in anything?

She had seized me on the No Trout. Her captive. The others had been unhappy with her, meaning my capture had been her idea. Again, I had to ask why. What exactly was she up to? Head start? Misdirection? Getting to know the competition was more likely. Sizing me up, taking my measure.

The Mibra Onty was near the Wisconsin border.

Wanted an edge. Me, out of the way.

As kids it had been Punky and me, neck and neck in love and competition. I had only twice beaten her at anything, getting the senior writing award and beating her in the fourth-grade spelling bee, and after that she had not talked to me for a month. We had always been in competition, but outcomes had always seemed more important to her than to me.

She had come after my old man's funeral, seen me, and gone. Why?

Had ignored the death of her parents. Some absences are easier to explain than others. I couldn't get it out of my mind that she had set the fire that killed her parents; she said only that it was what her parents wanted. They were dying. What a terrible decision to face. I felt sorry for Raina. And I was beginning to loathe her.

The Soviets read
Izvestia,
which means “truth,” of which it was largely devoid in the standard sense. The real truth was in what was not written. A captain I'd met in Vietnam had told me the best read on the enemy is where they didn't seem to be.

What was between Raina's lines?

She liked to have the biggest advantage she could manage. She thought she knew where the snowfly would hatch and wanted me as far away as possible. She had been in the U.P. for months, Fox, No Trout, Mibra Onty. Putting down her scent? All in the U.P.

Then it hit me. She had steered entirely clear of the Lower Peninsula and the best trout fishing was there, not here. Always had been.

None of this was an accident.

 

•••

 

Fred arrived late that afternoon. I borrowed some money from him, got change, called information, got a number in East Lansing, and made the call. When I hung up I told him we needed to get back to Grand Marais to get my car.

“We found the door standing open, you gone, and only a note. Janey was worried, Bowie. We all were.”

“It couldn't be helped,” I said. My stomach churned. I did not want to hurt Janey, but this had to finish. I wanted it over, once and for all. And I had to hurry.

The sky was clearing when we reached the coast of Lake Superior. The snow and lights made Grand Marais look like a storybook village.

“Where are you going?” Fred Ciz asked.

“All the way,” I said.

 

•••

 

Lloyd Nash had introduced me to M. J. Key's work. Key-Chickerman, former agricultural college professor. It had been Nash I called long distance from Sidnaw.

“M. J. Key,” I said to him.

“You can't be him.”

Nash was shouting like he had gone hard of hearing. “This is Bowie Rhodes. White flies, remember?”

“Which Bowie Rhodes?”

“How many have you known?”

“I don't like telephones,” he shouted.

“I cleaned the specimen room.”

“And did a damn lousy job,” he said. “It was still a hopeless mess the last time I saw it.”

“Professor, where was M. J. Key from?”

“In what context?”

“Where was he born?”

“I don't know when.”

“Where, not when,” I shouted.

“Stop Thirty-Six,” he bellowed. “Are you deaf?”

One of us was. “Where's that?”

“Upstate, on the railroad.”

“Are you sure?”

“Beulah Reddiger is from Cat's Breath, Indiana.”

An unexpected tight turn in an enfeebled brain. Who the hell was Beulah Reddiger?

“What's that got to do with Stop Thirty-Six?”

“Cat's Breath, Stop Thirty-Six, you don't forget names like that. There's no file in the brain to lose them in. Tend to stick and stand on their own, even when the memory turns to mush. Are you with the bank?”

“Thanks,” I said. Poor Nash.

What had Raina said? That I had gone to a lot of trouble to learn something I should have known on my own. I stopped at the library in Gaylord on the way south in the morning and checked old maps of the region. The answer had been literally out my back door, which maybe explained all the drownings above the house. Stop Thirty-Six was subsequently named Whirling Creek and then Pinkville. I had never known. There all the time. Born on it, to it, with it, ignorant of it. The real Key had been born there. That's why Chickerman settled there. For the snowfly, which he had learned about from his friend Key. Raina said Key was American. I had always assumed he was English. He went to Europe all the time. Something I should have known on my own, Raina had said repeatedly. Whirling Creek had been home, an extension of my existence, home ground, my spawning waters, the crucible where the old man and Queen Anna had shaped my sister and me.

But Raina was not up the creek. Instead, there was a small Airstream parked on the flats between where my old house had been and where the floater had hung up on the rocks.

Gus had come to Whirling Creek for a reason, because it had been Key's home water and Key had written about the snowfly. It had to be this way. Only this scenario made sense. Roger Ranger had seen Gus Chickerman prowling upper Whirling Creek in the dark. The answers were in the past and closer to the present than I ever imagined. Every fisherman had his home water, the place he knew best, the place where secrets unfolded under constant vigilance.

Whirling Creek had been M. J. Key's home water, Gus Chickerman's, Raina's,
mine.

I wanted to shout at her, “I've figured it out and I'm still dogging your ass!”

 

•••

 

City and country clans alike have little sense of the night skies overhead, one because it's obscured by too much light, the other because there's too much there to comprehend. It was one of those nights that could shrink you into nothing if you looked up too long. Relativity as leveler: I doubt Einstein had this in mind with his theoretical tinkerings.

I was warmed by anticipation. Too often we end up in places without purpose. In Song Lai I had asked a Marine how he felt about where he was. “Everybody's gotta be somewhere,” he said.

I built a primitive shelter in the woods and watched the trailer for two days. Raina stayed mostly in her Airstream. Several times each day she came out, walked to the river, and stood there with her arms crossed. Each time she stomped back and slammed the door. She was visibly perturbed. Each slam reverberated like a rifle report.

Before Queen Anna died she got clear headed. “Those fish he put back all those years,” she whispered to Lilly. “Someday they'll get big.” Prescience?

The dull sun showed itself through cloudy gauze in the southern sky late in the afternoon, then, without warning, popped out, hot and white. Raina came out in her waders and stood, assembling a two-piece rod. The glare off the snow was white as an atomic core and equally blinding.

Afternoon and still light. On the Mibra Onty she'd led the others to believe that the hatch would be after midnight. She had set us all up masterfully, being ever careful, the commander of all details, focused on getting her edge. She had Key's manuscript.

But now the edge was mine.

When she came out of the trailer and headed upstream, I followed at a discreet distance.

Maybe she was overconfident, maybe not. It would not be out of character for her to double back on her track. I would not underestimate her. Not this time. I veered away from the creek and paralleled it by a quarter mile. There were several places upriver where there was high ground with secure views. I found her below the first overlook.

She was squatting on a mound of upturned tree roots. Ice was stacked along the bank. She was watching something.

Flies were rising. Black, not white. And small, though they fused into smoky clouds. Midges, I guessed. I saw fish rise, but they were small. The old saw: Small flies, small fish. Besides, big fish fed almost exclusively on other fish, white flies the possible apparent exception to the taste for cold flesh.

When the sun went down, it got dark fast. I had to get closer to maintain my watch and carefully climbed down to the river.

Raina remained where she had been. Her concentration was eerie.

Later, the moon crawled up, illuminating the snow, casting pale light.

Still she squatted.

By the time I saw more flies I realized they had been hatching for a while. They were white, but nowhere near as large as I had anticipated. More plentiful than on the Mibra Onty, but not anything like a full hatch. Here and there, now and then, sporadic, almost teasing. But I could hear fish after them.

Raina stood, then squatted again. Stretching, I guessed.

I studied the water. There was a long run across from her and, below us, the stream shifted ninety degrees to the right and narrowed, gathering speed, the force giving it voice.

Hours went by. I could hear her talking to herself. Cursing. The hatch continued sporadically, never getting heavy, often ceasing.

She prowled anxiously back and forth along the bank like a cat. Each time the hatch restarted there were several minutes of splashing, slurping fish.

I smiled. It was not at all what I had imagined, and, just as obviously, not what she had imagined. I could feel her anxiety, but felt no sympathy. I thought of Red Beard, Test Tube, Val, and the others looking for something that did not exist on the Mibra Onty. How many wounded were left in the wakes of her lies and their own misshapen dreams?

Finally Raina had waited long enough. When a hiatus came, she splashed into the current. When the flies began to rise again, she began to cast. She caught three fish and each time shouted unintelligibly, slapping the creature angrily against the water, stunning it, killing it. Her actions sickened me. Raina was a headhunter, a killer.

I had followed her to confront her. I had dreamed all day about such a potentially triumphant moment, but the thought of besting her was suddenly gone. She was pathetic to let a myth drive her life and I was not any better. The shame was mine as much as hers.

I decided to leave and climbed back up the rocks.

Below me I heard her screaming, “Goddammit, goddammit.” The echo of her voice flew up and down the creek.

I left her with her anger, crossed the ridge above her, and cut back toward the river. I didn't care anymore if she saw my tracks or even me. I was done with this insanity. I hoped Ingrid could not see me.

When I got downriver, I stuffed my gloves in my jacket and lit a cigarette.

Then I heard splashes.

To my left, then past me. Flailing arms. A dark shadow under a white moon, breaking the surface of fast water.

Raina.

I ran frantically along the creek, but she was out of reach. Once her head came up and I felt her eyes lock on mine and she shrieked, “
Mine, mine!
”

It was instinctive to want to go in after her, but I knew this water would put both of us in jeopardy. The safest place to get her was at the pool below the old house. If she lived that long. I ran, thinking of the floater hung on our rocks when I was a child and imagined Raina there and ran harder.

I would get only one grab at her. If I could catch her in the upper pool and hang on, I could steer us both to downstream safety.
If
is always the hooker in risk.

I waited much longer than the time she needed to drift down to me. Had she managed to get out? Or had she gone under and gotten hung on a snag? I kept turning my head, but the moon was nearly down and the light was failing fast. I waded closer to the channel and reached out with my arm. If I didn't see her, I might snag her by feel. It was down to luck, pure ­desperation.