The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  •••

  I awoke to a room flooded with narrow shafts of red-orange light and Angus Wren sitting in a rickety chair beside my head, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder.

  “You always catch like that?”

  “No.” What day was this?

  “Damn good thing. Half-dozen fellers like you could empty the world’s rivers. Didja have yourself a dandy bender?”

  My brain felt the size of a watermelon. “Tequila.”

  “Get the worm?”

  “I think.”

  He grinned. “Gives me the shits.”

  I tried to sit up, but couldn’t move. “What do you want and how did you get in?”

  “I just walked on in. Your door was as open as a whore’s legs. I came to apologize, which don’t come easy. Nobody outfishes me on my water. What you did knocked me back. I couldn’t fish for squat when I first started out. And the writing came even harder, and still does, but I worked like a dog at both of ’em. Then you come along, better at both than I’ll ever be, and just a whippersnapper. I guess I threw myself a tantrum like when I was three. Didn’t really understand till today, but my day’s done and now it’s your time. The job’s yours, Rhodes, on one condition. We work together till next spring. Don’t get this wrong, it’s not a test, not that at all. I just thought I’d show you my ropes and we’ll have us some fun. You’ll do the job your way, but I’d like to be along one final season.”

  I did not expect an apology, much less to get the job. “Guess I went off half cocked, too.”

  Angus Wren grinned. “Hot fish in a cold river can make any man crazy. You want a lift out to the ranch?”

  “I think I’d best stay here and heal.”

  He nodded solemnly. “There’s no substitute for common sense. Hannah will fetch you in the morning.”

  He got up slowly and ambled to the door. “Want some advice?”

  I tried to nod.

  “In bed and on the river, eight inches is all that counts, son. Any more is pure wastage.”

  •••

  I awoke the next morning tired and without a headache, but my limbs were heavy. The bathtub had rough-textured turquoise and pink plastic footprints glued on the bottom. The water was rusty and came out in a trickle; it left my skin slippery even before I used soap, which was mostly pumice and peeled off a layer of skin. The towels were tiny and threadbare and did not wrap all the way around. When I walked into the bedroom, the door was open again and Hannah Wren was sitting where her father had sat twenty-four hours before.

  “Um,” she said.

  “Don’t they teach people around here to knock?”

  “And miss the sights?” she said.

  “Enjoy,” I said, removing the towel. I was in no mood for modesty.

  “I surely am, cowboy,” Hannah said with a hoked-up twang. “Glad to hear you got the job. I’ve never seen my father the way he was on the river the other night.”

  “He’s been Angus Wren a long time,” I said as I pulled on my jeans.

  She smiled and nodded. “He dearly loves his work.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “Guess you’ll get the opportunity to know. What fly were you using? I saw green.”

  “It’s called a Patrickson.”

  “Does it make a buzz sound or do you drag it over the top of the water?”

  “You put it in the right spot and let it do the job.”

  Hannah grunted. “You tie it yourself?”

  “Got it in England.”

  “But you do tie?”

  “No. I buy them where I am. I’d rather spend my time on the water.”

  “Just like Angus,” she said. “Do you collect?”

  “Nope.”

  “Angus has a thing for whites.”

  I perked up. “White flies?”

  “He’s got a room full of them. Big fluffy things, in double-oughts and ones. I used to sneak in to look. I asked him once what they were for. He said, ‘Fools.’ He put extra locks on after that.”

  I remained silent. White flies. Again.

  “My jeep’s outside,” she said. “Ready when you are.”

  She watched me finish dressing, and when I had gathered my stuff we drove out to the ranch. She was thirty-four, Wren’s youngest child by his fourth wife. Hannah had an ex-husband, no children, a degree in fish biology from Arizona State, and a daughter’s unswerving admiration for a legendary father.

  “Angus showed me your writing,” she said as we drove along. “Don’t you think fishing stuff will be a little tame for you?”

  “We’ll see,” I told her.

  “Are you always so frank?”

  “It tends to be situational.”

  She smiled. “I doubt that.”

  Lunch was all business. Technically I would be an employee of Angus Wren Enterprises (AWE), not UPI, which only contracted for the column. Yet another Yetter prevarication. AWE included a print and publishing business, a video production company, two lines of trout-fishing tackle, including a famous red spoon called the Wren Wobbler, a half-dozen fly-shop franchises in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and a small ad agency in Phoenix. AWE had twenty employees, all of them Wren’s relatives and offspring. The other businesses employed about a hundred more. I would be employed by Angus Wren Adventures, a new unit.

  I could write under my own name or another, if I wanted it that way, but until Angus actually retired the column would be called “Angus Wren with . . .” Line drawings of both of us would appear on the column’s header. The salary was more than I was making at UPI, and the operating budget to cover our travel expenses was generous. Income was based on the number of subscribing papers. Angus would not allow himself to be bought by the big fishing enterprises. His focus, our focus, was the little guy, which meant we covered our own expenses and the little guys’ too when that was necessary.

  After lunch, we spent the afternoon going through his files. He had several Rolodexes and card files, all full. Story ideas were kept on three-by-five cards tacked to a cork wall. Our contract called for forty-two columns a year. What we wrote about was our business. The contract was renewable annually. All we had to do was to keep our readership, which UPI tracked with more interest than its own fiscal house. One-off assignments were negotiated separately. My AWE contract did not preclude me from taking freelance assignments from magazines and newspapers. I liked the setup.

  In the late afternoon we went out to the verandah and had cold beer. Angus said, “You know Ray Kroc?”

  “Of him.” He had invented McDonald’s.

  “Ol’ Ray says, ‘Feed the rich and die poor. Feed the poor and die rich.’”

  I understood. Angus was talking about our audience.

  “You can live where you want,” Angus said. “The job will take you all over hell and back and we can meet on location. We can put you up right here for as long as you want, or go on your own. It’s your choice. Shall we wet a line tonight?”

  “You bet.”

  I was even hotter this night than our first time, but now Angus was smiling and full of questions. “Why’d you put the fly over there?”

  “Felt like a fish,” I said.

  He cackled happily. “You do have the gift.”

  The next morning I worked my way though story ideas and made some telephone calls and roughed out a schedule.

  Yetter called just before lunch. “So?”

  “I got the job.”

  “Told you.”

  “It’s not with UPI.”

  “What’s your beef? I hear he’s a quirky old coot.”

  “He doesn’t bullshit people.”

  “That hurts.”

  “I guess I should say thanks.”

  “Damn right you should. Stay in touch, kid.”

  I rem
ained at the ranch for three weeks, fishing every evening with Angus and Hannah and other members of the clan until one cool afternoon it was just Hannah and me.

  “Just us today?”

  “Dad’s on his way to Denver. We don’t have to fish,” she added.

  “We’re here,” I said.

  She said, “Great. Want to see some new water?”

  Few trout chasers could pass up such an offer. “You’re the captain.”

  We floated several miles to where another stream dumped into the river, and we dragged the raft onto the stony shore. The feeder came down a canyon with sheer sandstone walls, leaving only a crack of sky above. The water was as clear as crystal. The current moved but not all that fast. A quarter mile up the canyon there was a one-room shack. Inside were stacked bunks, a woodstove, kerosene lanterns, shelves with cans, some fishing gear, and a two-way radio with a small gas-powered generator, which Hannah cranked up.

  “Base, this is Hannah.”

  “Base here.” The base was the ranch.

  “Bowie and I are at Rathead’s. We’ll take the raft down to Carlysle’s Bridge tomorrow afternoon. Can you fetch us there?”

  “Three o’clock?” the voice at the base asked.

  “That should work,” Hannah said.

  “Seen Rathead?” the voice asked.

  “Not yet,” Hannah said.

  “Who’s Rathead?” I asked when she had finished.

  “You’ll see,” she said mischieviously. “Let’s lasso us some trouts, cowboy,” she added with a grin.

  We did not have to go far. A short walk above the shack, the stream cut along the base of the cliff. There was a run close to two hundred yards long.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “And how,” she said, stripping line and loading her rod for her first cast.

  We fished for nearly three hours, into the darkness. The fish were small, ten to twelve inches, but thick bodied and strong. They were bright gold with orange and black spots and fought hard and long.

  “Gilas,” she said when she caught the first one. “Pure strain. Left in only three or four places. And here, which even the Fisheries people don’t know about.”

  The fish weren’t finicky, but neither did they come easily to the net. They seemed hungry for anything and everything, but our casts had to land on top of them or they let the flies pass. There was no vegetation along our shore or in the water. In Michigan such fish would never have been caught. Too little cover. They would’ve come out only at night.

  “Beautiful,” Hannah said, releasing a perky twelve-incher.

  “It looks barren,” I said.

  “Looks can be deceivin’, cowboy.”

  I laughed.

  “It has good temp, steady year-round inflow from lots of springs, the right pH, enough food, and there’s great cover under the ledge so the birds can’t get at them. Fish are where you find them,” she said.

  “Thank you, Professor.”

  “You’re quoit welcome, I’m shu-ah,” she said with a mock accent and a laugh.

  I liked watching her. She handled the rod with a minimum of effort and had lightning reflexes and soft hands. She also filled out her waders in a memorable fashion and her long brown hair hung loose and free.

  We were both tired when we decided to call it quits after nightfall. We did not talk during our walk back up to the shack. It was clear that we both enjoyed being ourselves together and we were content. There was no need for conversation. It felt like a friendship in the making.

  But when we neared the shack she said, “You’d better wait out here.”

  I heard her open the door. A shriek shattered the silence and I ran for the shack and found her in the doorway with a flashlight.

  She was mumbling. “God dang you, Rathead. You sneaky little bitch.”

  “What was that?”

  “Wait,” she said, blocking my way with her arm. “Rat, it’s me, Hannah.”

  I tried to see past her.

  “There,” she said, steadying the light.

  I saw two tiny green eyes. A throaty growl sent a chill up my spine.

  “She’s mostly show,” Hannah said. “Let me get a light on.”

  Hannah went inside, lit two lanterns, and wicked them up. The room glowed yellow. The eyes were gone.

  “What was it?”

  Hannah held her hand out to me. “Come on.” She took my hand firmly and said, “Be still and don’t move.”

  Something brushed firmly against the back of my leg.

  “Steady,” Hannah whispered.

  The thing pressed against me again, growled low, and sidled between us.

  The animal was a foot high and two feet long, not counting a two-foot-long tail. It had a tiny conical head with triangular ears on a long neck. The body was thick with short fur marked with spots and smudges of stripes.

  “What is it?”

  “Rathead, meet Bowie.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “She’s something, isn’t she?”

  “Is ‘something’ a species?”

  Hannah laughed and Rathead hissed menacingly and leapt effortlessly to the top bunk where she stood staring down at me, ready to pounce.

  “Cat?” I asked.

  “Mostly,” Hannah said. “The Apache called them devil cats. Officially they don’t exist.”

  “Extinct?”

  “Rumored, but unproven. She fits with the gilas, I think, things that cling to life where they aren’t supposed to be and science says isn’t possible.”

  The creature extended a paw and flashed her long claws.

  “Strangers make her edgy,” Hannah said.

  “The feeling’s mutual,” I said.

  “Be glad she’s here. When she’s around, there’re no snakes, no scorpions, no mice, no rats, and no gila monsters.”

  The animal growled and stared.

  “She’s fine now. She thinks this is her place. She’s territorial and typically female,” Hannah added.

  “It’s hers, if she wants my vote.”

  “Let’s rustle up some grub,” she said.

  “I love cowgirl talk.”

  “You’d better hope that between you and me, you can cook. Angus ­didn’t push us anywhere except toward rivers.”

  “We’ll make out,” I said.

  She laughed. “We just might, cowboy. We just might.”

  But we didn’t. Instead we talked almost all night about everything and anything. Her marriage, she said, had been a “dumb-ass” mistake. She had married a “pretty boy,” but beauty was only skin deep and there wasn’t much inside him and what was inside was only interested in his needs and money.

  “Figured I’d better divorce him before I killed him.”

  We didn’t sleep much. Rathead growled and purred contentedly from the top mattress on the bunk bed across the room. I imagined her saying, “Anything is possible.” My Lurp pals from Vietnam would understand that.

  It was a memorable start to a new phase of my life. Lessons had been learned as they are always learned, and observations made as they are always made, all of it sinking quietly into that primordial swamp called the subconsciousness, there to meld and perhaps to rise as something new.

  15

  Munchhausen Sink was less than a hundred yards across, a hole filled with black water inside the Cincinnati city limits, a curious wet spot in the center of Floating Rose Salvage, a twenty-acre compound piled with two-foot rust cubes that had once been Volkswagens and Pintos. Our host was Parley Finger, who operated the compactors that rendered discarded automotive produce into dense steel blocks. There was a trail through the mounds, but only our intrepid guide could see the way. It was Independence Day and Mr. Finger promised we’d have the best junkyard trout fishing we’d ever known. We went in bef
ore sundown because after dark, we’d risk breaking a leg on the trail, our host said.

  On the water’s edge cubes of steel had been assembled into benches and draped with army-surplus tarps. Finger put long-necked beers into a metal milk basket and lowered the basket into the dark water. He built a small fire in a trash barrel with a grate on top, filled a huge pot with water, which he set to boil, and threw some other ingredients into another cast-iron black pot.

  “Sun’s gotta get below the mounds,” he said, taking a seat.

  Angus and I unsheathed and assembled our eight-foot four-weights and slid the reels into place.

  “These are sorta like them English rules,” Parley Finger said. “Dry flies to rising fish and no damn priests. I run a sustainable fishery here.”

  Priests were wooden clubs used to kill large fish, a form of last rites.

  The sun hung on for a long time. Angus dozed and snored evenly in the lingering heat.

  Parley Finger watched his pots and when the water boiled, he dumped in spaghetti. “Cincinnati specialty,” he explained. “Spaghetti and chili. Ain’t he kinda old?” our host asked with a nod toward Angus.

  “He gets younger when the fish rise.”

  Parley Finger nodded. “Ain’t that the truth. Johnny Bench come here once, him and that Pete Rose, but Ol’ Charlie Hustle, he can’t sit long. Never caught a thing and the next day Pete went oh-fers and swore off fishin’ forever. There was a city councilman come over once, diddled his administrative assistant over there.” He pointed. “It was night and dark, could see the stars on the water, and she squealed all the time he was pokin’ her. No fish that night, neither.”

  There were lessons in the stories, I assumed, but they weren’t immediately apparent.

  When the sun was low enough, Parley Finger turned his grimy baseball cap backward and picked up his own fly rod. “Twelve-foot leaders, fine as hair. My trout are partial to teensy skeeters.”

  I tied a size twenty mosquito on my line and nudged Angus, whose eyes fluttered. “What’d I get?”

  I laughed at him. “Forty winks. Put on a mosquito.” At age eighty-eight he could tie on a small fly in near-darkness and do it in a wink.