The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “People lose interest in science,” she announced to me at our first session, “because too many teachers learn by rote and pass it on the same way and that’s a shame. A newspaper’s a business,” she added. “You’ll hear a lot of righteous, pompous piffle about public service, but it’s the bottom line that drives news. People ought to be interested in science because it’s at the root of understanding life. I want to produce reporters who understand how science works so they can cover it properly. If reporters can write interestingly about science, it’ll become an important part of the news.”

  Professor Chidester was in her midthirties. She had worked for papers in Miami and Sacramento before going back to school for her master’s and doctorate at Northwestern. She was tall, a shade over six feet, thin, and not unattractive. I had grown an inch the year after I finished high school, topping six-five, and her reedy figure made her seem nearly as tall. She always wore high-heeled shoes and baggy dresses. When she talked, she looked right into my eyes, and she seemed to sense my curiosity early on and did all she could to encourage it. Her class was one of the few I had that didn’t seem like a class. It was more like we were colleagues trying to understand things together.

  The first week we met in her office in the journalism building. After that it was at her house or on the road. We drove every other weekend to Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland to attend scientific symposia or trade shows.

  We usually stayed with friends or colleagues of hers, which kept expenses down. She took me to an autopsy and seemed pleased when I ­didn’t flinch. She took me to an Air Force museum near Dayton where a retired colonel gave us a half-day lecture on aircraft design.

  In October we drove down to Kentucky, where she took me to a church in a small town on a Saturday night. A gnarled minister with bad breath explained something called creationism. We met with the Reverend for an hour after the service. His name was Jerboam and though he didn’t have a beard, there was something about him that reminded me of Abraham Lincoln. He was passionate in his beliefs and tried his best to use logic to convince us, but his arguments didn’t work for me.

  We had rooms in a boardinghouse in a town called Greenhill, which was in a gray, hilly area denuded of trees and vegetation by strip miners. After our meeting with the minister, we went to a small restaurant where the food was greasy but the servings large.

  “Do you believe in God?” Luanne asked over dinner.

  “I don’t know.”

  She smiled. “You don’t give up much of yourself.”

  “It’s the truth. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it, but I just don’t know.”

  “Religion is like science,” she said. “There’s a central hypothesis. Believers test the hypothesis by making observations and trying to prove what they believe. Do you buy this creationism thing? I’m afraid it’s just getting up a head of steam again after several decades in hibernation.”

  “Well, it runs counter to evolutionary theory, doesn’t it?”

  “Evolution is fact, Bowie. A lawyer might say we have an evidentiary trail. There is no scientific basis for creationism. Still, people believe it. Why do you think that is?”

  “I guess people want to believe in something. They want somebody to tell them this is how it is.”

  “Why not believe in science?”

  “Because it keeps changing. We know one thing today and another thing tomorrow. Science is the search for answers. Religious beliefs are answers. Or what passes for answers. And they don’t seem to change.”

  “Why aren’t you a believer?”

  “I don’t have enough information to believe in the literal creation, but I believe some things.” Queen Anna believed and never questioned. This always bothered me, but I never felt it my place to question her.

  “Such as?”

  “I think life’s precious. We only have so much time and we ought to do what we think is important. We ought to use our lives to make things better, not just for ourselves, but for everybody.”

  “What’s guilt, Bowie?”

  “To me?”

  She nodded. “Do you ever feel guilty?”

  “Not really.”

  “That doesn’t worry you?”

  “No.”

  “Some would say that guilt is a signal from your conscience. Sort of a go slow sign on a dangerously curving road. There’s pathology connected to the total absence of guilt. It can be sociopathic. Do you heed traffic signs?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Why?”

  “Common sense.”

  “Do you always use common sense?”

  The conversation was making me uncomfortable. Was she trying to dig into me? “Do you?” I asked her. We had never talked so personally. Usually there were other people around us and my job mostly was to listen to what they had to say.

  “Not always,” she said. Then she chuckled. “Sometimes not at all.”

  She stared at me a long while and I stared back and sometime during that long look I began to see her as pretty and to think of her not just as a professor, but as a woman. I wondered what she thought of me.

  We left long before daylight on Sunday. She had to get back to East Lansing for some sort of late-afternoon meeting. We trooped silently out to her station wagon and she tossed me her keys. “Will you drive?”

  “Do I have to obey the traffic signs?”

  She clutched my arm and laughed. “You have definite charm, Bowie Rhodes.”

  We weren’t far out of town before she was asleep against my shoulder. She had a soft snore. It felt good to have her so close.

  It was still dark when she awoke and rubbed her eyes. She was still on my shoulder and snuggled closer. “Need a break?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. She closed her eyes and soon her breathing told me she had fallen back to sleep.

  I had a fair number of fantasies about Luanne Chidester after that drive, but our relationship remained formal. I got an A from her and she sent a letter to the dean of the College of Communications Arts & Sciences recommending me for a scholarship that would pay for my entire senior year. My job out west had earned me a sizable nest egg, which had taken the pressure off for a couple of years, and if I got the new scholarship I knew I would get through without much worry. I would still have to work, but mostly for expenses.

  The class finished before Christmas and I moved on to other courses with other teachers, but I made it a point to stay in touch with Luanne. About once a month, usually on a Sunday afternoon, I was her guest for brunch. These were wonderful sessions, filled with discussions of arcane science and an incredible range of tangential subjects. Over time, we became friends. By late March I was bubbling with anticipation for the opening of trout season.

  “Tell me about this fishing,” she said. We were in her solarium. She had her legs tucked beneath her and she was settled in a huge soft chair. “You have a passion for it?”

  “I love it.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I never thought about it that way.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I just like to fish for trout.”

  “You say ‘trout’ a certain way, as if there’s a distinction and hierarchy between trout and other fish. Is this a snobbish thing?” She flashed a mischievous grin.

  “Probably.”

  She smiled. “Are trout good to eat?”

  “Yes, but I usually don’t kill them.”

  She sat up. “What’s the point then?”

  “The search, I guess. The pursuit.”

  “You catch them to let them go.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You don’t like to eat fish?”

  “I like fish fine.”

  “Is it that you feel sorry for them?”

  “No. I don’t have any feelings for them. T
hey’re just fish.”

  “Then why let them go?”

  “To catch them again.”

  She giggled. “How would you ever know if you caught the same fish?”

  “I wouldn’t and it doesn’t matter. I let them loose so they can be caught again by somebody. It doesn’t have to be me. It’s just so they’re there. I guess I like knowing that.”

  “But somebody else will probably kill them.”

  “I can’t make decisions for others. All I know is that I don’t want to kill them.”

  “It seems to me that if you really cared about their well-being you wouldn’t catch them at all. You’d just leave them alone.”

  I couldn’t argue. “Okay, it’s a selfish act. I get what I want, but the way I see it, the trout also benefits. Each time a fish is caught and released, it gets harder to catch. Trout learn and pass their lessons on. In England they say that brown trout pass along their experience genetically.”

  “That’s not possible. Mutations are critical to evolutionary theory, but they don’t work like this.”

  “I don’t know what the science is. I don’t think anybody really knows for certain, but if one fish is better at recognizing food than another, it’s going to thrive, and if it thrives it will pass this on. Look at athletes. How many times are the sons of great athletes also good at their fathers’ sports? All I know is that in England and other places there are trout that are extremely difficult to catch.”

  “But people still try.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Do you think you could show me?”

  The following Sunday she met me at my place. We went to a parking lot behind the house. I used a black cast-iron skillet as a target, strung up the old bamboo rod, and demonstrated the cast. At twenty yards the fly landed in or close to the pan about half the time.

  “Wanna try?”

  She cast until her elbow got sore.

  After about an hour, she said, “I want to do this for real.”

  “You mean it?”

  “I mean everything I say,” she said solemnly.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “The season opens at the end of the month, but it’ll be crowded then and the weather’s usually lousy, especially up north.”

  “I don’t care at all for crowds,” she said.

  We settled on a Thursday in mid-May. She had no classes to teach and I was happy to cut mine.

  I took her north to the Brother River. It was shallow, wide, open, a good place for a beginner. Luanne swam in my waders, which were far too large for her.

  She hooked her first fish on a tan caddis soon after we started. These were hatchery fish reared on pellets and hand-fed, so they weren’t picky about food. I had her play the trout to the shallows and got my hand on it. She got down on her knees and stared, openmouthed.

  “Bowie, it’s fantastic.” The eight-inch rainbow squirmed. “The color is indescribable!”

  “Shall we keep it?” I asked her.

  “What do you mean, ‘keep’?”

  “Kill it, gut it, cook it tonight.”

  “I can’t kill anything this beautiful.”

  I held it in the stream, keeping its head into the current and moving it back and forth to get water moving through its gills; when it was sufficiently revived, it flitted into deeper water with an energetic spurt and disappeared.

  Luanne sat down on a rock. “Now I want to watch you.”

  I caught four fish out of the same run, the first one a fifteen-inch brown. She didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “Stop,” she said. “Please.”

  When I turned, she splashed clumsily over to me, threw her arms around my neck, and kissed me so hard we both collapsed onto the gravel bar. “I understand now!” she said. “It’s not just the fish. It’s the music of moving water, the smell of clean air, the scenery, the pull on the line, it’s the whole thing. You’re a romantic, not a sociopath!”

  She did understand. Rather, she had a start at understanding. On the other hand, I kept wondering if she had really considered that I might be demented. A sociopath? It was a disturbing thought.

  “I want to do this again sometime! Can we?”

  Of course we could. The heat of her kiss had inflamed me and I seized on the thought that maybe our friendship could get more intimate.

  She looked at the bamboo rod. “How old is this?”

  I told her the story of the floater on the way back to East Lansing. When we got to her place she kissed me again and I thought I might get invited in, but that was not to be.

  In early June she went to New Orleans for some kind of academic conference. After she was gone, I came home to find a package. It contained a new fly rod made of fiberglass, and a new reel. There was a note inside. It said she was taking a job at Tulane and that she was sorry to see our relationship end so impersonally, but she hoped we’d always be friends and she thought it was time I stopped fishing with a dead man’s “pole.”

  I felt abandoned and sad to lose her friendship. Maybe I still hoped for more and this was the source of my disappointment, but all I knew was that her news left me swimming in self-pity.

  She called me in late June. Her words slurred. Sleep, emotion, booze, all of this? I couldn’t be sure.

  “Bowie? Did I wake you? I’m sorry, but I wanted you to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  I felt a knot in my stomach. “That’s good.” She had moved to New Orleans early in the month and she was already getting married? It hit me that she had had a boyfriend there all the time and this bothered me, though I knew I had no right to such feelings.

  “I hope so,” she said. “I truly hope so.”

  What more was there to say?

  “Have you tried the new pole?”

  “Yes,” I lied. I didn’t know why, but I had put the new rod in a closet and left it there. It’s never been used.

  “I’m so glad,” she said. “Listen, there’s something I forgot to tell you in my note. There’s a professor in the entomology department. His name’s Nash. I hear that if there’s anything to know about trout, he’d be the one to know it.”

  Another silent interval followed.

  “Well,” she said, finally breaking the silence, “I guess that’s it. Bowie, there’s a force inside you. You can use it or it can use you. Remember, we all get to choose.”

  •••

  After I entered college, I never went home to live, but I did visit every few months. After talking to Luanne for the last time, I headed home to spend several days with my folks. On Independence Day the old man and I fished the creek below the cabin and Queen Anna sat on a cedar log on the bank, shucking corn, telling us how hungry she was for fresh trout.

  Dad used worms and I used the old bamboo rod with an Adams on a long leader and caught nice-sized browns more often than I deserved and Queen Anna complained bitterly that releasing the fish was “stealing from her stomach.” My old man laughed out loud at her and told her to watch me and she’d see that I had become an “artiste” with my rod and artistes didn’t concern themselves with their bellies. He added that he had eight browns in his creel and she wasn’t going to starve.

  “I don’t recall anything in the Good Book about letting God’s fishes go,” Queen Anna proclaimed in her own defense.

  “That Good Book of yours don’t say anything about V-8 engines, airplanes, or apple pies with sharp cheddar cheese neither,” came his rejoinder.

  She was quiet after that and I was amazed to witness him challenge her and prevail.

  Roger and Lilly came over late that afternoon with their year-old son, Roger Junior. Roger brought beer and when we opened a couple of bottles, Queen Anna scrinched up her face and declared for all to hear that “college
is leading my son astray.”

  Roger said, “I never went to college.”

  My mother looked over at him and rolled her eyes. “You were always a lost cause.”

  Roger laughed and held a bottle up to her in salute. Queen Anna stomped into the house.

  During dinner, Lilly asked what I had planned after college and I told her I’d probably look for a job with a newspaper.

  “Gossip chasers,” my mother announced. “You can’t believe anything you read unless it’s in a book. Newspaper people drink and have loose morals.”

  I held up a beer bottle. “I guess I’m halfway there.”

  My mother grimaced, my father laughed out loud, Lilly looked shocked, and Roger Ranger slapped my back in good fellowship.

  I expected verbal retaliation, but instead my mother came over to me and kissed the top of my head and patted my hair and said, “You were born good to the core and that will never change.”

  “What about me?” Lilly asked in mock indignation.

  “We’ll deal with you later,” my mother said in a jocular tone. I never remembered her kidding around before and it made me happy.

  Lilly and I did dishes after dinner. She and Roger lived only a few miles away from the folks and I knew she would be up on local goings-on.

  “Anybody hear where Raina is these days?”

  Lilly frowned. “You still carrying a torch for that one?”

  “No, I’m curious.”

  Lilly let the denial pass. “She left when you left and nobody’s seen or heard from her since. Gus says she’s off ‘chasing the dream,’ whatever that means.”

  “The” dream, not “her” dream? Odd language, but that was Gus for you. “Well, I hope she catches it.”

  “All that one’s likely to catch are nightmares,” Lilly said. “More likely, she’ll be the cause of them for others.”

  “That’s pretty harsh,” I said.

  My sister turned to face me. “I know you thought she was your friend, but her kind doesn’t have friends. She kept you close to make sure you ­didn’t beat her out of anything. You never thought with your brain when it came to her.”