The Snowfly (7 page)

“Do I look okay?”

“That has to be your call, not mine.”

He chewed his top lip. “It's New Year's Eve. I'm going to a costume party.”

I said, “Good for you. Missus Graham got the night off?”

He gave me the once-over. He looked puzzled. “You mean Spruce?”

“Right, Missus Graham.”

“She's in back, doing inventory.”

“I thought inventory was done on the floor.”

“Every department except jewelry.”

I didn't ask where to find her, but felt his eyes on my back as I walked away. I didn't know why, but I had doubts about whether she would want to see me. More important, I wasn't sure I wanted to see her. Our last conversation had left me shaken, yet here I was seeking her out. I was Icarus ascending. I pushed all the alarms aside and decided I needed company.

Our night manager was a former navy petty officer and retired Oldsmobile worker named Jolson. People were always saying “Mammy” under their breath when he went by. Most nights he stayed in his office, but tonight he was on the floor and cruising directly at me.

“Mister Rhodes, there you are. I can't find Mister Fistrip. Hike back to the cage. Missus Graham has informed me that there's a problem with the lighting. Skeleton staff tonight, Mister Rhodes. You know where the electrical panels are?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Go and do your duty, Mister Rhodes.” He dismissed me with a wave of his hand, pivoted, and swooped back toward his office.

The cage was a secure room surrounded by floor-to-ceiling walls of heavy-gauge black wire. The warehouse was even larger than the sales floor and one side seemed to be dark, but there were a few lights on nearest the cage. I wondered what the problem was.

I had no key for the secure room. “Spruce?” I rattled the wire walls with the palms of my hands.

“Don't be making such a dang racket.”

The voice was behind me, in the darkness. “Spruce?”

“Hush and come on over here.”

“I've got a flashlight.”

“We won't need that.”

“Mammy said you had a light problem.”

“I made that up so you'd come on back.”

“Coulda been Fistrip as easily as me.”

“God, Bowie. You are so dang
thick
sometimes. Rick clocks in and leaves the store. Then he comes back to punch out,” she said. “He gets paid for workin' when he's not even here.”

I stared at her for a long time, trying to grasp all that she was telling me.

She rolled her eyes. “You're
so
blind, Bowie.”

“He leaves every night?” I still couldn't believe it. Didn't want to accept it. How had I missed this?

“Just about. He's a real creep, Bowie. Do you know he's gonna be an officer in the army when he graduates?”

“I thought he was going to be a cop.”

“He wants to be an army hero first and get what he calls merit badges.”

Queen Anna and the old man had taught us that when you worked for someone, you did the job to the best of your ability. To do less, they said, was theft, which by their measure made Fistrip, the would-be cop and officer, a practicing thief.

Spruce Graham smelled of fresh lilacs and was so close I felt cocooned by her perfume.

“How's your husband?” I asked.

“Not here,” she whispered.

The alarms sounded in my head again. I was shaking. “He's not Superman.”

“Not hardly,” she said. “He can't see through cinder-block walls.”

I could barely hear her.

“Alone at last, but we can't smoke,” I said, trying to make a joke.

She didn't say anything. We were both tense with anticipation and lightheaded. I needed words, the
right
words.

“Maybe there's something we could do here that we couldn't do in the car.”

“Could be,” she said. “Were you thinking of something in particular?”

You learn by experience. With some women, it's the man's job to make the first move.

I put my finger under her chin and lifted gently.

Our kiss was soft and sweet and long. When it was finished, she put her hands on my chest and pushed me gently away.

“Sorry,” I said. A programmed response.

She touched her finger to my lips. “Hush,” she said. “I never cheated before.”

I felt a surge of guilt and tried to apologize again, but she stopped me. “It's not like it feels like a sin or anything. I just don't want to get caught. Can you understand that?”

I understood her husband was trained in the use of weapons. I didn't want to get caught either.

“Bowie, my husband hasn't touched me since last June. Do you think I'm ugly?”

“No way.”

“All he thinks about is school and becomin' an officer. Here it is New Year's Eve and he's
studyin'.
Dammit, I've got needs, Bowie. Big needs. It's healthy to have needs. Maybe when school's finished, things'll be better for him and me, but right now I've just got these-here needs and he's studyin'. Y'all understand?

“I got this girlfriend,” she went on. “Julianna? Her hubby's also a Bootstrapper and she's goin' through the same thing so she took her a boyfriend on the side? She keeps tellin' me go ahead and do it, but I just don't want to get caught.”

“Well, if you're not sure,” I muttered, stepping back. What was I supposed to say?

“Geez, Bowie.” She let out a loud sigh. “You're thick as cold chicken fat.”

Which was her final comment of the evening. I had blown it. She retreated a few steps and tripped the circuit breaker so that the warehouse was bathed in light. She went back to her inventory and I went off to patrol the floors with rubber legs and a pounding heart.

Nash returned three days later and invited me over to his house on Friday night to eat some redfish he had brought back with him. I went to the Collection Room to retrieve the white flies. I looked at the hiding area and it looked undisturbed, but when I dug down into the pile, I could not find the wooden box. At first I thought I'd misplaced them, but that couldn't be. I tried to remain calm and began moving everything in sight, but the flies were gone. I had Nash's key. As far as I knew, only the janitor had another key. There was no other conclusion: Somebody had broken in and stolen the fly box.

When I got to Doc Nash's house I was in a lousy mood. I should have stolen the white flies. At least I would still have them.

Nash grilled the redfish and told me about fishing he'd done in Florida. “Bonefish,” he said. “Talk about energy and efficiency. Like catching an artillery shell.”

This was as lyrical as I'd ever heard him on the subject of fishing. He was peeling from sunburn and his hair seemed whiter.

I told him about the white flies.

“What species?”

“Not specimens, trout flies. Huge things.”

“In with the specimens?”

“In a wooden box marked on the bottom with the letters MJK.”

He nodded solemnly. “It's been a long time since I was familiar with exactly what's in there. A lot of my colleagues dump stuff there. Always have. Entomological detritus. All faculty members have keys.”

My assumption of a break-in wasn't necessarily right. Still, they didn't fly off on their own:
Somebody
took them. That fact was indisputable. I got paper and rendered some sketches.

He looked at them and shook his head. “Insufficient data,” he said.

“They were there,” I said. “Now they're gone. I thought they might be snowflies.”

I watched him closely to gauge his reaction. Nash grinned, “Snowflies, eh? Maybe it's nothing, but a scientist learns to embrace coincidence.” We went to his library and withdrew two thin volumes from a shelf. The first was called
On the Habits of Trout & Their Environs.
The author was M. J. Key and the publication date was 1892. The second volume was called
Trouts of the Americas
and dated 1943. The author was also M. J. Key.

The publication dates were more than a half century apart.

“Key,” he said, “was a controversial professor here when we were still an agricultural college. That's about all I know about him. Key's trout works were ahead of their time. Barbless hooks, light tackle, catch-and-release, and habitat management rather than hatchery fish. He was a genius and outspoken in his views, and because of this, a lot of people thought he was a nut case. Maybe he was.”

What did this have to do with white flies? I said, “He wrote two books, fifty-one years apart?”

“Who knows? There aren't many people left now who knew him, but those who did say Key was a mistrusting and almost pathologically secretive individual. He left the college under some kind of scandal in the late nineteen-thirties. Some say FDR called him to government duty, and others say he was run out. Nobody knows for certain. The college was informed by the government that he died during the war, but there were no details, not even a date. He was a foreigner and spoke German, so maybe he was a spy or in the intelligence business. His second work could've been posthumous. I guess we'll never know.”

“The flies could have been his.”

Nash nodded solemnly. “That's one hypothesis among many possibilities.”

“Did he write anything else?”

“Nothing I've read,” Nash said. “You can borrow my copies of his books if you like.”

I did.

Several weeks passed and I had worked hard to get more information on M. J. Key, but I hadn't assembled all that much. On microfilm at the university library I managed to find some clippings from the
Lansing State Journal
saying that Key had been accused of Nazi sympathies and had been asked to leave the college. While there wasn't much on Key the man, his work—despite its consisting of only two books—was cited and quoted just about anytime somebody wrote seriously about trout fishing. I read the books rather quickly because they were pretty thin with tight, sparse sentences. Whoever Key was, he seemed to be a shade, a figure from the past, lost forever. But I kept thinking there had to be more about him somewhere. There was no mention of the snowfly in his books, but I had found the flies and the box with his initials; it had to be more than a coincidence.

The state of Michigan had a massive central library in downtown Lansing. I often went there for books because it was closer to my apartment and a lot less crowded than the university's facility. Buddy Wilihapulus worked in the research section. He had come to East Lansing to play football for Duffy Daugherty, the first recruit out of Duffy's fabled Pineapple Pipeline, but Buddy had blown out a knee, which ended his football career. He had lost weight since his football days but remained an astonishing specimen at six-four and 250 pounds Coke-bottled around a narrow waist. Buddy's hair was cut short in a severe flattop, and he had bad skin but a perennial smile and a soft voice. We had been in some journalism classes together.

“Bruddah Bowie,” he greeted me. “What're you thinking about this Vietnam business?”

I knew Kennedy had sent a bunch of army advisers into the country and that some sort of civil war was going on. “I haven't,” I said.

“Maybe you should. They could draft your
haole
ass.”

Draft? I had done two years of mandatory ROTC, my class the last to have to suffer through it. We had taken it as a joke and massive waste of time.

“Head of the state draft board comes in here to hide from his old lady. He say numbers be goin' up, bruddah. Serious numbers. Blood gonna flow.”

My last night at Discount City Spruce Graham sought me out. We had not smoked together in weeks and had barely talked. She looked tired.

“It's nearly graduation?” she asked.

“End of the term.”

“What're you gonna do afterward?”

“I'm not sure yet.” The truth was that I was so caught up in classes, M. J. Key, and the subject of snowflies that I hadn't really gotten around to looking for a job. I could smell her lilacs.

She hesitated. “This is your last night?”

I nodded.

“Do you think I can have your address?”

“Are we going to be pen pals?” I blurted out. It was a cheap shot, born in frustration, but she ignored it.

“I was thinkin' I can get tomorrow night off from work and come on over to your place. I promise I won't go loony. About six be okay?”

I nodded dumbly.

Spruce arrived promptly at six and ten minutes later we were undressed and in bed, where we stayed until midnight. We made love like neither of us would ever get another chance. We both knew, without talking about it, that this was our one time and we made the most of it.

On her way out she said, “My husband's not gonna go through the graduation ceremony. He says he has the paper and that's all that matters. We're headed out a week after the last exam is done. Back down to Texas. He's got more trainin' ahead of him.”

I wished her well and meant it. I learned from Spruce that people can be very different in different circumstances and that some people become trapped in their own lives. Back then I thought maybe that getting trapped was more a problem for women, but I was young. Now I know it can happen to anybody. And that there are all sorts of traps, the snowfly being just one of them.

Queen Anna died suddenly the day after Spruce and her family left for Texas. She and the old man had made it to East Lansing for my graduation and she had cried all weekend and gone home and died. Her heart stopped and her death nearly stopped mine as well. Doctors could not figure out why she died and in the end, what did it matter?

The call came from my sister, Lilly.

We did not go to a church for the funeral.

Father Luke was a retired Episcopalian priest who lived a mile down Whirling Creek. He drove up at noon, still wearing his waders. The grave would be on a knoll on the north end of the property. The old man said it was what Queen Anna wanted. Lilly and I had our doubts because, unlike our father, our mother was a regular churchgoer, but we were not willing to challenge the old man. He'd let her have her way as long as we could remember and now he wanted to have his way and that seemed fair. Besides, he knew her better than anyone.