The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “And sold his claims.”

  “First he staked his claims. Then he tipped another group, chums of sorts, who sent in their own stakers. He wanted major competition against the first group. After claims became public, speculators poured in, trying to buy property all over the area. That shot the prices up.”

  “Then Bolt sold.”

  “For a bloody fortune. You saw the emblem on his gate?”

  I had. A black cat with a dollar sign.

  “Pussy money,” she said, disgustedly.

  “A true romantic,” I said and she smiled in response. From her description Bolt did not seem the type to be interested in rare and arcane books.

  “He’s an opportunist,” she said. “And a pure predator.”

  “And this makes him unpopular?” Ordinarily such people were folk heroes.

  “No, people don’t much mind how he made his money, but now that he’s got his, he’s found religion,” she said.

  “A godhead.”

  “No, it’s not like that. It’s got nothing to do with churches and such. He says the uranium makes people sick. There are mine tailings in the water system. He says there’s poison everywhere.”

  “Is he right?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  A curious response. “What is?”

  “Uranium’s what’s here. It’s all that’s here. One of the papers in Ottawa called us nuclear whores, which is about the truth of it.” She fell silent.

  “The town looks pretty empty,” I said.

  “It still has life. Maybe a lot of life. People here say ‘Thank you, A-rabs.’ That oil embargo business helped us. Now Ottawa says Canada’s got to become self-reliant for power. No more Arab oil.”

  “A conversion to nuclear?”

  “That seems to be the consensus.”

  “The phoenix could rise again.”

  “It would be a new boom. The Japs have already been here. The French too. Fuel’s an even worse problem for them.”

  “Which makes Bolt’s position a threat to Ottawa and the local powers.”

  “There you have it in a nutshell.”

  “What’s your own position in all this?”

  The lifted brow again. “A girl has to work.”

  “Where?”

  “I have a job at the mine, the only one still open, but not underground. They pay well and they’ll pay even better if demand goes up.”

  “Supply and demand.”

  “Right you are.” There was a catch in her voice.

  “What if Bolt’s right about the effects of the mines?”

  “It’s a dilemma,” she said sadly. “I have a kid, a nice kid. She thinks I sell real estate.”

  “She’s here?” There was no sign of a child in the house.

  “No, she lives down in Espanola with my sister and her brood. I go back and forth. I can’t risk her living here.”

  I could see Espanola on my mental map. It was south and farther east of Elliot Lake. And not close at all. “Are there mines there?”

  “No, but Bolt says there’s radiation in the water there too. He says it starts here and goes elsewhere. How far is far enough away to be safe?”

  I had no idea. “What will you do?”

  She propped her left foot on her right knee and rubbed her toes. “My church has always been the path of least resistance. You get accustomed to a certain standard of living. A few more years and I will have socked away plenty for my kid and me. Then I’ll get her and we’ll move somewhere we don’t have to worry about all this.”

  It was a sickening gamble.

  “So,” she said. “You still want to see Bolt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  I’m still not sure why, but I told her everything I knew about M. J. Key and the snowfly, leaving out only the cryptography history and the fact that I had been thrown out of the Soviet Union and warned by the Brits to steer clear of Key.

  When I was done, she cracked a smile and shook her head. “This is about fish? I’ll never understand men.”

  “I’m not sure what it’s about,” I confessed. All I knew was that I could not let go.

  “Chances of seeing him aren’t good. He stays to himself.”

  “I have to try.”

  “Effort always matters, even for fish,” she said. “It may take a while.”

  “I’m rich in time.”

  “Let me make some calls,” she said, getting up. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  I put my feet up on her coffee table and sank into her couch. I heard her voice on the phone, then the shower running. When she came out of the bedroom a while later she was wrapping a towel around her wet hair. “We’ll have to drive down to Cutler,” she said. “There may be a way for you.”

  It was late afternoon before we headed for Cutler in two cars. Pierrette had a half sister, June, who had a half brother, Luc Brokendog. June had some sort of job in Iron Bridge and Luc lived north of Cutler on the Serpent River. We had to cross a wooden bridge with a sign that said danger: unsafe. Pierrette didn’t even slow down and I inched my way across behind her with an iron grip on my steering wheel. Once across, we climbed a hill covered with thick stands of yellow and paper birches and skinny poplars. We left the vehicles on the hill and walked up a trail to a clearing on top of a granite outcrop. Below was the dark, clear water of the Serpent and, to our left, a smaller stream that tumbled down the steep hillside to form thick yellow foam in the main river. Blackflies hovered overhead in carnivorous clouds. A pile of wood was stacked to the eaves beside a house, which was covered with weathered tar paper. Several dogs bayed from an area back in the woods. A small raccoon was on the front porch and clacked its jaws as a warning. It bared its teeth at me, but retreated after the show, its self-respect intact.

  We did not mount the porch. We stayed back and Pierrette called out and after a time a woman came out. She was short with black hair and brown skin and an oblong face. Behind her stood a man, shirtless, short, thin, with a too-delicate face. His black hair was loose and long, down to his shoulders, and he had hard lumps of muscle that pushed against skin the color of burnished oak. He examined me with dark, neutral eyes.

  “You’re the one wants to see Bolt?” the Indian woman asked.

  “June,” Pierrette said, looking over at me.

  I nodded.

  The man stepped forward. “Could take a week, two weeks, maybe more, eh? Everybody rags on Indi’n time, but Bolt time is worse.”

  “But you have a rough idea of how long?”

  “None a-tall. That one’s crazy for fish. That’s all he cares about. His place is on good spec water, but there’s a lot of beavers, eh? Coupla times a year he calls me in to take out the beaver works. I call some of the boys and off we go. He’ll call anytime now.”

  Bolt was crazy for fish! So Bolt’s acquisition of the Oxley collection might be more than an investment. I was mildly encouraged. Maybe I was getting somewhere after all.

  “I thought he could stay with you,” Pierrette told Luc, who shrugged.

  “Can you pay?” he asked me.

  “How much?” I sensed a little game.

  Luc considered for a moment. “Twenty a week.”

  A bargain was struck. There was no handshake. I walked Pierrette back to her car.

  “I hope it works out,” she said.

  “Time will tell. Thank you.”

  She shook my hand before she got into her car. “This isn’t good-bye,” she said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  I had a lot of time on my hands. I visited several area towns and went through their newspaper morgues, looking for more information about Bolt. I also talked to UPI and Reuters reporters in Toronto, but Bolt was a secretive man and I could see that there was no point in further research. I tried calli
ng him on a private number Luc gave me, but got no response.

  I went to his place several times, but each time the guards refused me entry. The only choices were to try to sneak in or go in with Luc and his crew, and I decided the latter was the more sensible course of action. Luc didn’t ask me to share the chores around the cabin, but I did and my life soon settled into a routine built on hard work. Like a lot of bush folks, Luc Brokendog survived by being able to do many things well. He reminded me of Staley. We cut wood every day. Sometimes we drove up to the mines close to Elliot Lake and hauled barrels of trash marked caustic to a dumping area northwest of town. Some days we went to Spanish or Blind River to buy bits and pieces of hardware, or groceries.

  A week turned into two. Blisters began to harden to calluses, a workingman’s scales. We saw neither Pierrette nor June, who slipped away that first day. Just Luc and me, monks on a work farm among deciduous trees and flying carnivores.

  Once a week we drove across the TransCan highway to the Ojibwa reserve and got into a sweat lodge built of willow and covered with dark plastic and tarps. Outside the lodge, which was shaped like a turtle’s back, there was a wall of stones, waist-high, built in a circle. The fire was in the ring. Hot stones were brought into the dark lodge and dropped into a tub of water, raising plumes of steam.

  One evening I bought lamb chops and fixings in town and cooked them in a black skillet over an open fire outdoors. Luc ate an entire jar of mint jelly.

  “No need for you to pay from now on,” he announced after our dinner. “You’re a help.”

  Like virtually all the Indians I had met, Luc lived on the edge, acquiring most of what he got by work and barter.

  “You think Bolt will call?” I asked.

  “He will or he won’t.”

  “What’s on tomorrow?”

  “Had enough work,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Early the next morning we drove north then west, parked his truck, and walked a couple of miles through the woods. We eventually reached a river with raucous white water where a dozen Indians were setting up camp. We smelled wood fires long before we found the camp. “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “Indi’n fishin’,” Luc said.

  It was done with nets. Eventually there were nearly a hundred people strung out along the river. The nets were weighted, cast out, retrieved by hand. There was no distinction for species. Only size counted. I saw two brook trout that would go ten pounds, true greenbacks with vermiculated markings on their backs.

  “They’re huge,” I told Luc.

  “There’s bigger hereabouts,” he said.

  June came to camp the second night. We had numerous fires and a lot of smoke rising and hanging over the camp like fog. Insects everywhere: blackflies, mosquitoes, chiggers, deerflies, all bloodsuckers and meat eaters. The Indians talked and laughed and laughed more, social beings freed of conventions and stereotypical expectations. The fish were gutted, split, and laid across makeshift sawhorses over smoking fires, like sooty bats in repose.

  Whiskey arrived in brown crock jugs and clear Mason jars and was passed around. Children ran around shouting, giddy with freedom. Dogs skulked. A black bear approached the smoking fish at sundown and was driven off with stones.

  A cow moose was found upriver from the encampment, shot, butchered, and shared with the group. Everything we were doing was illegal.

  On the third night June and I sat by the river. I looked for Pierrette but didn’t see her.

  “Luc says you work hard,” she said.

  “Your people work hard all the time.”

  “It’s that or we don’t make it,” she said.

  “What about the mines?”

  “When there was work in Elliot Lake, they mostly brought in outsiders. The owners don’t want to waste the money on training. They brought in all the skills they needed. Economics, they said. Indians are used to this.”

  “Pierrette works for the mine.”

  “Most of us don’t look like her,” June said.

  There was no rancor in her voice. It was a simple statement of fact.

  •••

  It was a Sunday. Luc had been out and when he came back, he told me Bolt wanted his crew.

  “Will we see Bolt?”

  He nodded. “He’ll come out with us, show us what he wants us to do, and come back at the end to check how we done. If we don’t do it right, we won’t get paid.”

  The crew consisted of three Indians, Luc, and me. We drove Luc’s truck north and were ushered through the gate with the cat and dollar-sign emblem before sunrise the next morning. From there we drove several miles on a smooth, narrow road bedded with reddish green gravel before stopping at the shell of an A-frame built on the tip of a peninsula that split a fast river in half. We ate moose jerky and drank lukewarm coffee from thermoses.

  Bolt arrived in a pickup truck. It had once been dark green but was now patched with Bondo and various splashes of dull gray primer. Lockwood Bolt was not what I expected. He wore leather hunting boots up to his knees, heavy trousers, and a faded red-and-black-checked Mackinaw over a stained T-shirt. He was balding, but wisps of white hair stuck out to the side. He had a huge belly that protruded and pushed his belt down. His eyes were bloodshot and his nose and cheeks red, showing a lattice of blue veins.

  There were no greetings. Two of the other men began to unload boxes from the back of the pickup. Cans of hash. A sack of potatoes. Canned vegetables. Supplies. Bolt walked slowly to the edge over the river. “Beevs been busy,” he announced. “Upstream they’ve got four solid dams and five more in the works. I figure a week.” He stood there for a while, breathing laboriously, then shuffled back to his truck. “Week tomorrow. I’m gonna be down to Tarana for a few days. Draw gear from Butch.”

  Luc stepped up to me as Bolt got into his truck and drove slowly away.

  “How you pictured him?” Luc asked.

  “Not at all.”

  Luc grinned. “Hard to believe he’s got all that dough, but he’s smart enough and mean enough to get whatever he wants. Truth is, he didn’t find anything. What he did was nose around and find out what other fellas had discovered, then he quick-like filed claims in the middle of them. Called a doughnut and he was the center. See, Bolt never had an original thought, but he knows a good thing. Ping over there has a nose for moose.” He nodded toward one of the Indians in our crew. “When nobody can find ’em at all, Ping can. And if others can find ’em, Ping goes right to the biggest bull every time. Bolt’s the same way with money.”

  “You sound like you admire him.”

  “I know he’s good for his word. He’s just a bush bastard like the rest of us, but he seen him an angle and played it. And I think he knows now what all this done to us.”

  “So he wants to close down what’s left?”

  “It won’t happen.”

  “Pierrette says he has evidence.”

  “She’s a woman with a good job and she doesn’t want to lose it. She’s trying to balance her purse and her heart, eh?”

  “Do you think this place is poisoned?” If they knew the water and land were dangerous, why didn’t they move? Or raise a ruckus in Ottawa? I ­didn’t understand their complacency.

  Luc grunted. “We’ll see.”

  I had seen beaver dams around home, but had never really examined one. From a distance they looked sloppily made, walls barely holding water back; up close they were engineering marvels, veritable fortresses made by creatures with brains the size of pecans. There were five of us and it took endless hours to break the dams and free the water. Luc’s companions worked the way we had worked at the fish camp, silently, without complaining. At night we repaired to the A-frame, ate, and slept. I had never worked so hard in my life and I understood that, while I would eventually move on, this was their life. It was summer and we worked the week straight throu
gh, sixteen-hour days. My hands were raw, my muscles and joints numb. The river water was in the midforties and for three straight days there was a relentless cold rain. We were in the water and wet and frigid, but we worked on, troubled by insects beyond description.

  It seemed a miracle when we finished midday on Monday. We all collapsed where we were.

  “Where’s Bolt’s house?” I asked.

  Luc looked at me for a long time. “Back down the road we come in on. Three miles, then left.”

  “Security?”

  “Only what you seen at the front gates.”

  He gripped my arm when I started to get up. “It’s your business,” he said. “But I brought you in here.”

  His message was clear. If I caused a problem, Luc and the others would lose work. I realized that, as much as I wanted to find M. J. Key’s works, I could not jeopardize the people who had unexpectedly become my friends. I was not that much of a jerk.

  Bolt arrived at sunrise on Tuesday. A warm front had ridden up the jet stream from the southern U.S. and collided with the cool Canadian air. The air was warming and wispy blue fog clung by tendrils to the dark river valley below. Luc and Bolt went down to the river and disappeared into the fog. They did not come back until noon. The sun was up by then, the fog burned off, the air still, mosquitoes sailing around us.

  “Fair work, fair wages,” Bolt announced as he walked over to us. To me he said, “You the one looking for books?”

  I glanced toward Luc, who remained impassive. “Yes, sir,” I told Bolt.

  He shook hands with Luc. “See you next year.”

  Luc nodded.

  “You ride with me,” Bolt said. It was not a request.

  I watched the others disappear down the gravel road in Luc’s truck, raising a lingering rooster tail of stone dust.

  Bolt’s house was made of logs creosoted black. It was a simple house made to look larger by an open verandah around three sides. It was in the woods at the base of the hill. There was no view.