“In a coma,” she said. Her eyes were red and puffy.
The doctor looked younger than me. “This is normal,” he said. It struck me that experts of the abnormal always lost perspective. “These things tend to resolve themselves in forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” he added.
“Resolve themselves?” If so, why did we need a doctor?
He nodded. “One way or the other. Our options are limited. His body and God will decide the outcome.” He checked his watch. I wondered if he had a tee time. If the doctor required the help of God, Angus was doomed.
Angus came out of his coma at four-seventeen the next morning. He tore away his tubes and sat up on the side of the bed. A nurse’s aide was in the room. The rest of us were asleep in the lounge.
“Sir,” the aide said.
Angus pulled up his dressing gown and fumbled with his testicles. “You wanna see a big one?”
The aide was thirty and single, a Jehovah’s Witness from Lubbock. All she could do was stare and begin quaking.
“Dammit, I mean trout!” Angus said. “Big goddamn trout.”
“I’m calling the doctor.”
“Snowfly!” Angus shouted, raising a fist. “The devil’s, the devil’s. . . .”
By the time we saw him he was under a sheet. The aide’s account was relayed through an intermediary.
His fourth ex-wife, Hannah’s mother, was with us. “Fish,” she said disgustedly after hearing the account. “At the end, on the threshold of God and eternity, he was still thinking about those damn fish!” Disgust (or disappointment?) aside, she cried hard. I remembered the same anger in the red-haired woman in her Cadillac many years before.
Angus was cremated and the crowd at his funeral was immense, despite the difficulty of getting to the place. There were notables from every walk of life, but more impressive were the hundreds of regular people from all over America, many of them paying tribute to Angus by wearing fishing vests and waders. I wrote his obituary. The lead went this way. “Angus Wren spent his life chasing trout in unlikely places and taught us that fishing was about people, not fish. At his funeral, former Supreme Court justice Brennan said that if God was not a trout fisherman, he soon will be.”
Schmaltz, but I cried when I wrote it.
•••
That night Hannah and I sat by the river and drank a six-pack of her father’s favorite beer. The rest of the family had decided to build a memorial on that spot.
“That isn’t what he’d want,” Hannah said.
“I’m with you,” I told her.
She asked, “All the way?”
“Press on.”
We went through the main house into a little annex. The door had six locks on it. Hannah went and got a crowbar and snapped the locks off like they were paper and glue.
When we stepped inside, she flicked on the light and my jaw dropped. There were hundreds of immense white flies, in shadow boxes, hanging from nails on beams, in jars, in boxes. It looked like it had snowed in the room.
“This is unbelievable,” I said.
“He hated all Key stood for and I think this was his way of trying to keep people from following his big-fish ways.”
I didn’t follow.
“If Dad saw white flies in a shop or found somebody who tied ’em, he bought every last one of ’em, and put ’em here. I’m sure he tied a lot of these on his own. He locked them up to remove temptation.”
“He told you this?”
“No, I sort of figured it out. I think he’d want us to get rid of them all.”
“Are you sure?”
She put her arms around my neck and rested her head on my chest. “I’m not sure of anything.” She cried quietly.
We ended up stuffing the flies into boxes and paper bags, took the urn with his ashes, loaded the raft in silence, and ran downriver. The sun was rising as we walked up the canyon. I made several trips to get all the flies, then dug a hole behind the shack and dumped them all in, covered them with dirt, and burned the boxes and bags in the potbelly stove in the cabin. I felt like I had finally buried something that had given me nothing but frustration for so much of my life.
When the disposal was done, Hannah put the urn beside the river. We sat together and watched the water.
“We’ll wait till the gilas rise,” Hannah said.
I saw Rathead come down from the shadows of the rock. She advanced cautiously to the urn, sniffed at it, and lay down, curling herself around it.
When the first fish rose, Hannah took the urn and poured the ashes into the clear green creek. Rathead stood beside her. When it was empty, Hannah threw the urn into the water. It hardly made a splash. Rathead waded into the river and slapped her head against the water several times. I put my arms around Hannah and we stood there like that for a long time and that night we slept in the same bunk, with our clothes on, entwined with each other, friends, not lovers.
I had a schedule to keep and convinced myself Angus would want it that way.
At the airport in Tucson I found three snowflies stuffed in my briefcase. They were in waxed paper with a note taped to the package. “Just in case!” the note said. I laughed out loud and wondered if she’d kept a few for herself.
•••
While I was in Bend, Oregon, a few weeks later, I read in the paper that a strange catlike animal had been shot by a prospector in Arizona, but the corpse had disappeared and he could not prove his claim.
Two weeks later I was in Five Jills, Colorado, and got a telegram from a lawyer informing me that my contract was terminated. I called Hannah from a town called Star Range.
“What’s going on?”
“Coup,” she said. “I tried to call you. The whole family’s fighting over Dad’s little empire. The will’s being contested. We have several camps. I can’t deal with this bullshit.”
“What will you do?”
“I have my memories. I don’t need his stuff and I can’t stay here. I won’t stay here. I have a friend in Albuquerque. He needs a guide.”
“That’s it?”
“Not with a bang,” she said with a pained laugh, “but a whimper. What will you do, cowboy? Wanna try Albuquerque?”
“To guide?”
“Sure, and we can hang out.”
Me a guide? I laughed. “You’re wonderful, Hannah. But I don’t think guiding’s the thing for me. I guess I need time to think. I read about Rathead.”
“Rat and Dad are both beyond trouble now,” she said, adding, “I’m sure they’re together. I’m so sorry this didn’t work out for you. Angus was fond of you, Bowie. And proud, as well. Use your gifts wisely, Bowie. And if you pass through Albuquerque, I know where you can find an enthusiastic guide. Free of charge.”
I went into the hotel coffee shop and ordered breakfast. The waitress had round red cheeks and thinning gray hair tied in a bun.
“You look like somebody just run their Chevy over your best bluetick,” she said.
It was true that I’d been taken by a case of the long face. Angus Wren’s death had hit me hard; the loss of the job was secondary. I believe Angus had anticipated the turmoil that followed his death because my contract had a clause providing a year’s pay in the event of termination, regardless of reason or cause. Ordinarily contracts were voided by death, but Angus had written the document so that I would not have to file a claim in probate. I didn’t know when the money would come, but I knew it would and, because of it, money would not be a concern for a while. Angus hated Key and shunned the temptation of big fish. I told myself I should follow Angus’s example and be done with that foolishness forever. As often happened in my life, fate had other plans for me.
17
I was jobless, disconnected, and felt adrift. I wanted to see Lilly and her kids and the gang in Grand Marais, but I wasn’t up to either. I had no plan
s and no prospects and after Angus Wren’s death I had heard nothing from Yetter, which surprised and bothered me. Maybe I expected Yetter to be my safety net, as he had been in the past, sitting in the wings, watching out for me. Or claiming to. This was the first time since joining UPI that I felt totally alone and it was taking time to get adjusted to the feeling.
I drove northeast from Durango to Estes Park to fish the Big Thompson and from there headed over into the Snowy Range in Wyoming to fish nameless creeks and float the North Platte in a green johnboat I rented from a man named Slim. I caught fish everywhere I stopped and thought about nothing else. And despite the insatiable hunger for catching trout, I did not once think about the snowfly. Sometimes I went two or three days without eating. After Wyoming it was the Black Hills, and from there to some rivers I didn’t know the names of, or care. After meandering, I felt the undeniable pull of Michigan. I didn’t think about it then, and only realized much later in my life that Michigan was a magnet for me.
I was driving away from the fight over Wren’s empire, not toward anything, violating a cardinal principle of life—that you should always advance toward, not regress. The pathologically brave said, “Charge, don’t retreat.” I wasn’t brave. We can sometimes dictate directions, but rarely actual destinations. I was moving, I found fish, I was alive, and this was enough for now.
North, I knew down deep, was where I belonged, north being as much a philosophy as a direction or destination. You knew when you were there, or you didn’t. Those who couldn’t feel it and embrace it generally only tried it once. You fit or you didn’t. The basic law of nature was the law of the unexpected. In the woods, or on a fast river, you were attuned to this; at home, in a job, in relationships, you were not, yet nature pertained in all settings to all species in one way or another. North was the home of the unexpected. North spawned chilled chaos, yet warmed my heart.
I tried to sort through my past, but all that registered were lessons learned long ago—that no matter how docile life seemed, it was a temporary game and a cruel one at that, the ultimate contest that everybody lost. It seemed to me that God had set the universe in motion for reasons we are not likely to ever know and promptly packed off to a cosmic bowling tournament. If there were a holding tank for sinners on the mend, it was life itself. I had been to wars, hot and cold, rickety as their moral underpinnings might have been, and found no meaning. War was death, and life just a form of war slowed down.
I had seen death in many forms and came to understand that some people were destined for the bag early. Others, like Angus, were lucky enough to live long, full lives. And yet I mourned the passing of Angus Wren as I couldn’t mourn the deaths of my own parents. I was happy working with Angus and now understand that my mourning then was as much for what I had lost as for his actual death. We humans tend to be self-centered, this another genetic default, our genes ever pushing us to actions we think we have chosen when we are merely flesh-and-blood marionettes.
The worst part of being unemployed was lack of purpose. In the war and during my sojourn in Russia I had been adrift, but this was different. What it was that work defined was not clear, except that it provided context in one scheme or another.
I was weary and knew I needed change, but not continuous change. Nature abhors a vacuum. Emptiness is destined to be replaced eventually by something with only the appearance of choice.
I found myself late one afternoon standing on a riverbank in northern Michigan, a spray of fine rain peppering my face, and needing a piss. The river was red, colored by tannin and who knows what else. The water was high and fast. To my surprise, there came a wooden driftboat with a fat fellow standing in the bow and a red-haired man standing amidships, the rower feathering his oars as they rounded the bend to my right and shot over toward me.
Proximity on a river entails certain courtesies.
“Looking for big ones,” Redhair announced, somewhat disconsolately. “Maybe too cold today, though.”
At this juncture they were no more than thirty feet away. The oarsman suddenly stiffened his back. “Jeepers!” he said with a squawk as the driftboat veered sharply to starboard, popped over a partially submerged sweeper, and pitched on its side, dumping both men with hardly a splash into an ominous dark hole.
I had no memory of events from then until I awoke wet and shivering. I knew I had been in the water, but this might have been the steady rain falling on me. Redhair was on his back on the ground nearby, breathing shallowly. The fat man had also developed a red head—it had struck something that peeled back his scalp. Twins. Lights flashed more red. People stepped around the men, pawed at them, poked at them. Medical instruments clinked and backboards rattled. A radio crackled.
“You got breathers out there?” a voice inquired. I smelled hot brakes, cigarette breath, wet wool.
“Three breathing,” a voice reported. “So far.”
“Good thing you were here,” another voice reported. “Willis had himself a dandy coronary. Client’s head got stoved in. You pull both of ’em out?”
Was this voice directed to me? “I cannot tell a lie,” I announced, the only fact to which I could testify. I felt fire in my chest and clogging in my throat and began coughing and retching and someone rolled me onto my side and held my head while I vomited.
The same voice. “He’s clear. Move him out.”
And another voice. “Fucking lucky you don’t got three floaters.” A kibbitzer, I decided, my last thought for a while. I remember closed space and molecules of air pressed together. A gun barrel pointed at my head. Rose squeezed in tight against me, wrapping her arms around me. Gillian hissing “godfather” when she came, her lips pressed away from her teeth like an animal in pain. Hallucinogenic non sequiturs. Rathead keening as Angus’s ashes floated downstream to eternity.
•••
The doctor was bald and had clumps of copious port-wine stains spotting his scalp like schooling smelt. The light was too bright for me to fully open my eyes. I listened instead of looked. “You hear me, Mister?”
“I hear somebody,” I reported.
“I can’t find anything wrong with you. Other than you swallowed half the river and dang near drowned.”
Chest pains told me he was obviously looking in the wrong places. “I need sleep.” Medical science still had no generally accepted treatment for an injured soul.
“How about a night with us?”
“I can pay cash.”
“Your money’s no good here, friend. Not for a man who saves two lives.”
“Two lives?” I recalled nothing.
“Had to be you. Client says it was you, and there were the three of you up there on the bank, wet as laundry. They went over and you went in after them. People here are impressed.”
I suspected that they were erroneously adding two and two. “Where is here?”
“Wolverine Emergency Room. We call it the Meat Shack.”
The room reeked of antiseptic. The sheets were slippery. Somebody taped a call button to my left wrist and coughed.
“Any allergies?”
Did life qualify? “No.”
“This will make you a new man.”
“Must be great medicine,” I mumbled. I felt the prick of a needle. All in all, it was unexpected good news, the first in a long while.
The mayor was short, legless, and strapped to a wheelchair. He rolled in just as my breakfast was served in a tray that straddled my lap. “People appreciate what you done,” he said.
“I’m afraid I remember nothing,” I said.
“That don’t matter. It was you. Nobody else was around. There’s no other explanation and one of the saved remembers you tugging him ashore. You plunged yourself into the spate and saved two souls from perdition. You’ve earned yourself an official Well Done.”
Life rendered us all well done eventually. I plucked a strip of crisp baco
n off my tray and pondered it. Nitrates. Fats to close my arteries. Bacon was odd hospital fare. The flavor was excellent. And the aroma. “Is there more where this came from?”
“We towed your vehicle over to Sturdivant’s.”
“Where’s that?”
“Two miles south of town, where the river shoots under the highway.”
What town? A woman in a plaid shirt and bright pink lipstick brought me more bacon. I laid a slice over my tongue to let it swell with saliva, and studied the eggs, imagining cholesterol, blood sacs, and random embryos lurking inside the golden aureoles. Wheat toast, brushed with pure butter. I liberally peppered my eggs, ignoring salt.
“He’s a hungry one,” Plaid said.
“What were you doing down by the river?” the mayor asked.
“Passing by.”
“Good thing you stopped. Must’ve been God’s doing. Headed where?”
“Undecided.” The eggs oozed sun-yellow under the edge of my fork. I toyed with answering no preference, but that would be misleading.
“What sort of work do you do, drive around looking for lives to save?”
It was more like driving around waiting to be saved. “Consult,” I said, making it as ambiguous as I could. I was in no mood for explanations and would not admit to unemployment.
“Consulting on what?”
“Whatever needs consulting on.”
“Sounds soft as unchilled pudding.”
I sluiced my eggs down with orange juice, freshly squeezed and filled with pulp that stuck between my teeth. “Not once you get the hang of it,” I told the mayor. The best way to defeat an interview is to reverse roles, meet questions with questions. “What about you?” Most people couldn’t resist talking about themselves.
“Insurance game and politics.”
“Tricky?”
The mayor smiled knowingly. “Not once you get the hang of it. You fish?”
“From time to time.”
“The Dog?”
I looked at him blankly.
The Snowfly Page 36
