The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

“Including you?”

  “It’s my first season in sweetwater,” he admitted, “but it shouldn’t be a problem. I can see the fish. The rest is detail. You’re the mystery man, you know? They’re all trying to figure out what your game is. You have no background—from their perspective. That makes you an unknown.”

  None of it made any sense to me either. “Right time, right place.”

  He laughed softly. “Bullshit. Nobody ever heard of you, Rhodes, and Sturdivant never employs unknowns. To get here you have to prove yourself elsewhere first. You need a reputation. Sturdivant is very selective.”

  “They can’t expect to know every guide in the world.”

  “They wouldn’t want to,” he said. “Just the best ones and your name ain’t on that list. That’s the rub.”

  “With good reason,” I said. “I’ve never guided before.”

  “Never?” His voice betrayed his surprise.

  “Tomorrow’s the first day of the rest of my life.”

  “Sturdivant explain the game?”

  “I know the procedures.”

  “You don’t show them the big fish,” Collister said.

  I had not been told this. “What if they see them on their own?”

  “That qualifies as an act of God. Help them, but don’t put them on gorillas and don’t tell them anything. You say, ‘Tie on the Muddler, pulse it through there.’ If they want a reason, you tell them, ‘That’s just how it is.’”

  “That’s cheating them.”

  “You’ve got it backward,” he said. “Putting them on big fish is cheating because it makes them think they’re something they aren’t. Anybody teach you the ropes?”

  “No.” It had been trial and error mostly and a lot more days without fish than with until I began to learn from my mistakes.

  “There it is. The drifts give us a chance to plan. You help them stay out of trouble, let them catch a few fish, they pay big, go home happy, and the world is in harmony.”

  “Everybody operates this way?” A chance to plan what?

  “This isn’t about romance. It’s about making a living. Tomorrow we start with the hard drifts, those with big money. Everything changes. So far it’s just been soft drifts, the wannabes, wrench twisters and firemen who’ve saved up, housewives trying to see what it is that keeps pulling hubby away on weekends, people looking to get started. They have plenty of time for learning. Not a lot of expectations from such people, but now it gets serious. You mind my asking how much you’re getting from Sturdivant?”

  “With all due respect, I don’t think that’s any of your business,” I said.

  “He starts most of us at two hundred a week. Don’t worry, he’ll bump you up when the drifts pick up.”

  I was surprised. I was starting at double the normal salary. I decided to keep this to myself. “I have to make the drifts happy in order to move up the pay scale, but I can’t put them on to big fish? It’s a catch-twenty-two.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “The soft drifts only want a sense of the thing. They think an eighteen-incher’s a whale. The hard drifts have big bankrolls, spend to get what they want, and most of them know what they’re doing. Not at our level, but close enough.” He paused and sighed. “The problem with hard drifts is that they think they know it all. Still, they’re not stupid and you have to be careful. Sturdivant treats the hard drifts like close family.”

  “At the same time we’re to deny them what they pay for?”

  “Capitalism,” he said. “Profit requires a gap between what the seller sells and the buyer buys. No gap, no profit, and the buyer’s out in the cold because there’s nothing worth selling. The truth is, these people need us only because they think they need us. It’s all an illusion. Pure service, which makes it tenuous. There’s no product in this. Nature owns the fish. We simply provide the service. The fish are there for anyone who cares enough to figure them out. Life as a series of transactions. General Motors and Sturdivant’s Guide Service, same-same.”

  “Some world,” I said.

  “I didn’t make it,” Collister said wistfully. “I just want to live in it the best I can.”

  •••

  My first hard drift’s name was Samuel Creamer of Morristown, New Jersey; he owned textile factories in Calcutta, India, and created fabrics for designers in New York, Paris, and Milan. He was fortyish with white streaks in wavy black hair.

  Per procedure, I met Creamer for breakfast, which consisted of a buffet with several kinds of meats and potatoes, smoked fish, plain yogurt, fresh fruits, omelettes made to order, blueberry pancakes, fresh muffins, and sweet rolls. Creamer took some fruit slices and black coffee and ordered a four-minute soft-boiled brown egg, which he cracked open on an unbuttered whole-wheat English muffin. “Fishing been good?”

  “Not really. It was cold and rained all summer, then it turned hot and dry and that slowed it down even more.” I observed a certain precision in his hand movements.

  “Hatches?”

  “Nothing we can count on. Some tricos in the morning, caddis in the evenings, some small BWOs if the clouds sock in. We’ll have to search with nymphs and attractors. We’ll need to fish deep.”

  “Sounds good to me. Sturdivant says there are twenty-pounders in the Dog. I told him I’d be happy with a ten. I saw that fifty-pound thing in the main lodge. Is that the old man’s idea of promotion? The Dog doesn’t seem like it holds enough water for that size of fish. Growth slows in winter. Hell, I’ll be happy with a ten-pounder,” he repeated. Creamer delicately dabbed the corners of his mouth with a linen napkin. “I prefer realism to fantasy. It flattens the lows and makes the highs better.”

  I gave him the drift menu, which allowed him to pick the foods he wanted served on the river. Hard drifts chose their own meals, which Sturdivant’s Hungarian chef prepared in the dining hall for the girls to deliver to the river. Lunch would be ready and waiting when we arrived, and the girls would stay to act as servers. Soft drifts could choose from a menu of gourmet box lunches, which the girls delivered but didn’t stay to serve. Sturdivant’s concept was upscale before the concept found currency across the land.

  Creamer made his choices quickly, circling what he wanted, and pushed the paper back to me.

  I checked my watch. “I’ll grab our gear.” If we weren’t supposed to put drifts on big fish, why was Sturdivant whetting their appetites with that damn mount?

  “How far’s the get-in?” Creamer asked.

  “We’re putting in here, right at the lodge.”

  “Last night everybody was talking about Thunderwood Bridge,” Creamer said. It was not designed as a direct challenge, but he clearly wanted a rationale. I guessed that Creamer was a consensus manager.

  “Too many small fish.”

  “You really think we can get into a ten-pounder?”

  I tried a smile. “I can’t say we won’t.”

  “Be great if we got a big one and the others were skunked.”

  Competitive fires burned quietly in Mr. Creamer. I tried to imagine him seeing the sights of Calcutta for the first time, starving people, corpses, sacred cows wandering loose, the sick-sweet scent of funeral pyres blending with the acrid smoke of cook fires and noxious fumes of open sewers. And, having experienced all this, going back. Creamer looked soft, but there had to be strength there and the sort of courage required to go your own way.

  In the kitchen, which was the largest and best equipped I had ever seen, a girl with light brown hair was arranging luncheon settings in picnic baskets. Her name was Kelli; she wore dangling earrings, upside-down cats. “Where’s your stop?”

  There was an annotated river map stretched across an entire wall. I thought about the float and tried to assess Creamer. I had told him we would take it slow and he hadn’t objected. I tapped the map. “Holy Island.”

  “That’s not v
ery far down the river,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “Most guides go farther down.”

  “We’re gonna take it slow.”

  She shrugged. “Noon okay?”

  “We’ll be there. There’s a place on the west end, in the pines above the sandstone.”

  “Very cool spot,” she said. “I’ll be ready for you guys by noon. Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” I said, stopping at the door.

  “Sure,” Kelli said. She was young, easy on the eyes, midtwenties tops. In fact, all the girls who worked as servers were attractive and young, all similar in appearance, and all outgoing and at ease with people.

  Sturdivant was at his usual station inside the walls of display cases. “Have you met your drift, Mister Rhodes?”

  “Breakfast by the book.”

  “Creamer’s a generous man when he’s pleased,” Sturdivant said.

  From which I inferred the reverse. “I’ll keep that in mind. Any other words of advice?”

  “Dark day, dark, sunny day, bright,” Sturdivant said.

  This was the sort of simplistic advice that was regularly printed in fishing magazines. Most of the contributors to such journals were better at writing than fishing, but nobody seemed to understand this or, if they did, to care. “Thanks. I’ll guard the secret with my life,” I said.

  Creamer handled his nine-foot rod pretty well, waded quietly and carefully, rarely disturbing the water, and worked his flies with impressive accuracy. Seeing that he was self-sufficient, I concentrated my energy on locating fish. It had been my experience that fluctuations in water temperature produced increased feeding activity; the sharper the changes, the more active the fish would be. Flat temperatures, even those considered ideal by fish biologists, just didn’t excite the trout. Given the month’s rain and the high water level, I guessed that the steepest part of the warming curve would occur between ten a.m. and noon. We had had hot weather for a short time now and the water levels were dropping, but the river remained high.

  There was still an hour before lunch and we were less than ten minutes from the island. Creamer had brought three small fish to the net but spent too much time trying to make sure I approved of what he was doing. The overcast had blown off suddenly, leaving a brilliant blue sky. We were beached on a gravel bar across from a steep wall of staggered slate. I had never taken a fish in either the head or tail of the long pool, but I’d picked up some fish in the middle, below a cluster of sumac.

  “This could be the spot,” I told Creamer. I gave him a small orange Muddler. When Creamer got the fly connected to the tippet, I squeezed a bead of lead onto his tippet above the fly. “Make short casts,” I explained. “Bounce it off the rocks if you can, let it sink, pulse your rod hard, then strip the line. Let the rod tip move the fly; strip to recover line, not to move the fly, and keep the loose line in front of you so it doesn’t tangle. The weight creates an erratic, sharp movement if you let it work. Go fast. If you see a follow, pulse the rod faster. Make the fish make a decision. They’ll be deep in crevices at the base of the rocks and they won’t come out unless they see an easy meal. Don’t be in a hurry. You may make a hundred casts along here, maybe more. Get your mind set on a six- to eight-foot section of the wall, work it with a few casts, and move to the next section. Be methodical and thorough. Cover all the water. If you hit a good fish, don’t horse it and don’t let it get back to the rocks, because it’ll try to rub you off. The center of the pool is fairly clean; just keep the fish off the wall. That’s home and that’s where it’ll want to be. When it’s played out, work your way onto shore and swim it in. Don’t screw around with the net.”

  “It’s not very elegant,” Creamer said.

  “You can have big fish or you can have elegance,” I told him. “You seldom get both. Little fish are predictable. Big fish aren’t and no two of them fight alike. You need to reduce the elements that can go wrong. Nets are usually trouble. With big fish you have to do whatever is required. Trust your instincts.”

  Creamer attracted a twenty-inch, three-plus-pound fish after only a few casts and obediently drew it into shallow water before releasing it with a shaking hand. “You’re going to hit a big one,” I told him. “I’ll walk overland to make sure our lunch is set.”

  “What if I hook a big one?” Creamer asked, obviously edgy about being left alone.

  “Do what you just did. You don’t need me,” I added.

  “What about the pictures?”

  Nearly all drifts come for trophies, but you couldn’t take fish from a no-kill stretch. Instead photographs and measurements were taken and sent off to a taxidermist in Pennsylvania, who used fiberglass to create a lifelike replica of the take. The taxidermist could estimate weights accurately with photos and good dimensions. The idea was to get a trophy without killing a fish. Sturdivant paid for hard drifts’ trophy mounts and often had duplicates made for the lodge. It was all part of the service and the hustle, and I wondered what Sturdivant would do if we pulled in a monster bigger than the mount in the lodge. I pointed to the shore rocks where I had placed two cameras, a Polaroid and a German-made thirty-five millimeter. “Loaded, on, and totally automatic.”

  “It’ll stress the fish to take it out of the water.”

  “Big ones don’t stress like smaller ones. Don’t worry about it. Catch one first and you can worry about the details afterward.”

  Creamer hesitated. “I’m not sure about this. I paid for a guide for a full day.”

  “Can I be straight?”

  “Of course.”

  “The first time you went to India. Did you have a guide?”

  “Of course. It’s not possible alone, not the first time.”

  “But you kept going back and eventually you didn’t need help, am I correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the same thing. You don’t need me around. I’ve watched. You know what you’re doing; now just do it. You trust yourself with fabrics, why not out here?”

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose a customer?”

  “If you land a big one, you’ll come back, but I won’t be your teacher. I’ll be more in the role of caddy.”

  Creamer chuckled and shook his head. “You’re one of a kind, Rhodes.”

  “We all are,” I said, checking my watch. More time had slipped by. “I’ll push lunch back to one. I’ll be back later.” I flipped a small plastic container of streamers to him. “Switch to gold or chartreuse if you don’t get hits or you don’t catch a larger fish. Give the orange another half hour.”

  Creamer stuffed the box into a vest pocket and gave me a crisp salute.

  Kelli was where she said she would be. A table and folding chairs had been set up. There was a linen tablecloth with silver threads, bone china, and place settings for five courses. A deck umbrella lay furled on the ground. The girl was dressed in a white peasant’s dress with a pale yellow smock. White flats lay in the grass beside a log where she had stretched out. The dress had been pulled down her shoulders and tucked into her crotch to allow her legs to catch the sun. She sat facing the river, her back against a log, taking long pulls on a cigarette.

  “Kelli?”

  She immediately lowered the cigarette and raised her other hand to her chest, which sent her tumbling sideways.

  I ran to her, but when I looked over I found her laughing silently. “You scared the shit out of me!” she said.

  I held out a hand and pulled her up, but when she landed on her feet I jerked her off balance and grabbed the hand with the cigarette, which was hand-rolled, small, with an unmistakable odor.

  “Wacky weed.”

  “You got me,” she said. “I’m not hurting anyone, but Sturdivant’s death on anybody who doesn’t follow his rules. He’s like, old fashioned? You gonna narc on me?”

  “Your secret’s safe,” I said, releasing her wrist.

&n
bsp; She held the joint out to me. “Want a hit?”

  “I’m high on life,” I said, “and equally old fashioned.”

  “Me too,” she said with a happy squeal. Then, turning serious, “Where’s your drift?” She looked past me toward the river.

  “We’re going to push lunch back. Will that mess up your schedule?”

  “No prob,” she said, taking a deep hit. “My schedule? All that counts are guides and drifts.”

  “I want the drift kept happy. He’s about to catch a big fish and he’s going to arrive thinking this has been perfect and I don’t want to ruin his moment.”

  “How do you know he’s going to catch a big fish?”

  “I just do.” Which was true. I couldn’t explain it, but minute by minute I felt the certainty growing.

  “Are you psychic or something?”

  “I seriously doubt it.” If I was, I would have solved M. J. Key a long time ago.

  “You could be,” she said. “It’s weird knowing stuff before it happens. That happens to me sometimes.”

  She was pleasant and attractive in a wholesome, home-town-girl way, but she had hard brown eyes that tracked my every move. “Where are you from?” I asked her.

  “Bloomington, Indiana. IU?” she said. “Basketball, Go Hoosiers?” She raised two arms like a halfhearted cheerleader. “This job is a stepping stone,” she said. “Someday I’m going to open a gourmet catering service in Oregon. I’ve researched it. There’s scads of sportsmen out west with money to burn. It’ll be like Sturdivant’s, only classier.” Her face suddenly lit up. “I’ll call it the Classy Lady. Do you like that?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Everybody wonders about you,” she said. “You know, like all the girls in the kitchen? Like all the other guides. Everybody. Nobody can figure you out. The guides, they all know each other and they say none of them know you. ’Course, they’re real jerks. It’s like sick how they act, you know, their shit doesn’t stink?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “The girls think you’re sort of delicious looking,” she said. “When you came in this morning I thought you were nice. Not bossy or anything. I like that.”