The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

I had worked every day. I found the work easy enough; I was tanned and fit, eating haute cuisine and banking salary and accumlating tips, running fourteen hundred to three thousand dollars a week, not counting the small fortune from Creamer.

  All of the guides went to the river on their off days, but when they were off and I had a drift, I never saw them and wondered where they went.

  A heat wave arrived in late September, and with it came Indian summer. The river was low, evaporated by ninety-plus-degree days, and fish of any size were hard to come by. Some of the drifts wanted night trips, but Sturdivant’s rules forbade them; he said insurance was high enough as it was. Night drifts with amateurs could be dangerous, he said. Some of my drifts had tried to cut private deals with me, but I adhered to Sturdivant’s policy. More often than not, those who wanted to run by night were the most incompetent by day. The risk wasn’t worth a few dollars. Still, brown trout fishing was better after sundown because the big fish tended to be nocturnal, and I remembered Kelli telling me that Sturdivant himself was slipping onto the river at night. It was his right, of course, but how did a blind man negotiate a fast, winding river alone? Maybe Kelli had seen something and jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  Finally I had a two-day hiatus and no clients. By my calculation it had been nearly ten weeks since my arrival. It had been months since I had been intimate with a woman and although Kelli was becoming more and more overt in her flirtations, making her availability and interest about as clear as they could be made, I had ignored the openings she created, which was not easy to do. The truth was, I was horny and lonely.

  My first night off I stayed at the lodge, ate with those who didn’t have clients, had a couple of beers, and retired to my cabin to read. I went to sleep early and woke up the next morning knowing that I had to get out and do something.

  I borrowed one of the lodge’s pickups and spent the evening of my second day off drinking slammers in a tavern north of town. There was plinkety-plunkety-twangalang music, the patrons waddling the two-step, all pairs, near as I could tell, and mostly older folks. There was something obscene about septuagenarians in fringed mini skirts and white slouch boots. The bartender was a red-headed woman of fifty, lean and rawboned. She wore a plastic name tag. It said earleene.

  “Earle the Girl,” I said. “What time do you get off work?”

  “Way too late for you,” she said with a practiced smile and the warmth of an Arctic winter. “Bub.”

  “You don’t find me charming?”

  “I find you extremely shit-faced. You might try sometime when you’re sober, though I doubt the result will change. A drunk jerk is still a jerk when the booze wears off.”

  “But you don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “I’ll try to live with my loss,” Earle the Girl said.

  “I wan’ ’nother drink.”

  “You’re cut off, Bub.”

  •••

  I became semiconscious in a chicken coop of iron mesh as thick as my thumb with a clean, pale blue cement floor and a sparkling white urinal in the corner. My first thought: The chickens here must be housebroken. Disinfectant hung in the air like gas. I was no stranger to hangovers, though it was not at all clear that I had yet passed to the pure hangover stage. Insanity was a possible explanation. Or abduction. I rubbed my eyes and rolled to the floor on all fours. Not a chicken coop; the belly of a destroyer. Family lore: Uncle Jess had gone to sea in a tin can and come home with lungs filled with asbestos and a blind hate for closed spaces, no explanations given. How had Jess fit in a tin can? I had been six then and my question ignored. At his daughter’s wedding reception Jess had risen to offer a toast and, instead, informed the celebrants that when the ship crossed the equator, the crew had shed their clothes and “rubbed their peckers” on a cook named Rafael. Jess spent a lot of time visiting the VA hospital in Battle Creek. I hoped my ship was not nearing the equator.

  “Praying?” It was Cashdollar.

  I tried to look up, but someone had pounded a nail into my medulla. “Are we nearing port?”

  “It seems that you have a real talent for extremes.”

  “Where am I?”

  “County jail.”

  With effort I managed to look up at her. “Why?”

  “Driving while intoxicated, although technically I would call it crashing while intoxicated. You wrecked your vehicle, which should’ve killed you, but God seems to favor fools and blind drunks.”

  “Not mine. Borrowed from the lodge.” I remembered needing to piss. “I don’t remember much,” I said.

  “You hit your head, which seems to have the resilience of a stainless-steel bowling ball.”

  “Obliged,” I said, sinking back to the floor.

  “Still drunk?” she said.

  “I’ll take the fifth.”

  “I think that’s what got you here.” She was grinning.

  The judge sat behind a card table. He had the face of a frog and no neck. “No priors,” he said. “No infractions. What’s a man of your stature doing stone-cold drunk behind the wheel of a motor vehicle?”

  I had no idea. “No excuse, Your Honor.”

  “Good attitude,” he said with an emphatic nod. “I’d suggest you take this as a message from God. People are frail. Sometimes the train that is their life jumps the tracks. Put yours back on the tracks, Mister Rhodes. A man who saves lives of strangers ought not to be standing in front of me like a common sot. People like you and me, we’re role models. I’m gonna fine you two hundred dollars and costs. Driving privileges suspended for fourteen days. Shoe leather will help you get your feet back on the ground. You stay clean for six months and your record will be expunged. Do you understand that word and does that sound fair?”

  “Yes, sir, and yes.”

  “Then get the heck out of here, son. I’m going bow hunting and you need to see the cashier.”

  My head ached. The cashier volunteered four aspirin tablets and a paper cup with water.

  Deputy Cashdollar was waiting outside, standing beside a dented and faded green jeep. She opened the passenger door as I approached.

  “Did they tell you there’s a slight concussion?”

  “They could have,” I said. “There was a lot of information flying around and not much landing. Sort of like caddisflies.”

  She burst into a laugh and said, “Get in.”

  “This isn’t necessary.”

  “It’s better than walking thirty miles, which is moot because you’re grounded for two weeks and your pickup has gone to parts hell.”

  I was incapable of arguing. It made me dizzy to close my eyes.

  She drove a few miles and pulled over, making me get out and look into a ravine. There were tire marks on the lip and not again until a considerable piece downhill. Two poplars at the bottom were shattered and propped up by the branches of surrounding trees, a lesson in the value of extended family.

  “You must’ve fallen asleep, slowed, and drifted over the edge. Even at the speed limit, you’d have gone airborne.”

  “Lucky me,” I said.

  Five miles down the road she showed me the remains of the pickup I had borrowed from the lodge. It had become a flatbed. “I lived through that?”

  “You were on the floor. We had to cut you out.”

  “We?”

  “The romance of the road patrol. Dead bodies and broken cars. It’s nice to have the order reversed for once.”

  “You sound almost happy to see me,” I said.

  “I have a well-established record of questionable judgment,” she said with a chuckle.

  She asked if I minded a stop at her house. I didn’t. Her house sat on a bluff overlooking the river. It was a huge place, sort of what I thought of as Queen Anne–ish, with at least a dozen rooms and a spacious widow’s walk on top. Only two or three rooms had furniture; most w
ere in varying stages of reconstruction.

  “It belonged to a heart surgeon from Ann Arbor. His wife used to spend summers up here and he’d come up to join her now and then. One time he walked in and found her doing squats on a naked carpenter’s vertical joist. Threw him out, beat her to death with a crescent wrench. Second-degree murder. He did his time and moved to Colorado where he bankrolled a clinic that fixes rich women’s noses. He can’t practice medicine, of course, but he can still make money. That’s America. He had two miles of frontage, which he deeded to the state in exchange for back taxes. The state was going to tear the house down, but I bought it cheap and had it moved here. It cost me so much to move it, there wasn’t much left to recondition it. It was empty for ten years and it wasn’t a pretty sight. I’ve put everything I have into it, but it’s a slow go when you do your own work and you’re infected by perfectionism.”

  “I like it,” I said, which was true. I had always preferred old houses with character to modern slapdash throw-’em-up-and-sell-’em-quick construction. “I don’t recognize this part of the river.”

  “We’re nine miles west of Sturdivant’s. He owns five miles of frontage over here, on both sides of the river. It’s worth a fortune.”

  “Do you have river frontage?”

  Her face turned sour. “My dad sold the river property to Sturdivant a long time ago.”

  Whenever I turned, I confronted Sturdivant’s uncanny knack for acquiring wealth. “The old man seems to have a lot of irons in the fire.”

  She nodded solemnly. “He considers the river to be his and a lot of it is.”

  “You don’t sound happy about that.”

  “It’s none of my business.” She opened a steamer trunk and groped in it. “Lose those clothes,” she said over her shoulder.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’m not. You peed your pants when you ran off the road. You stink, Rhodes.”

  The loaner shorts were a size too large, and I wondered who they belonged to. Cashdollar led me up to the widow’s walk and hand-cranked the windows open. There was a daybed along one side and a fly-tying workbench along the other.

  “Yours?” I asked.

  “My dad’s,” she said.

  She seemed ready to say something, but turned away. “I had a long night,” she said from the stairs. “A nap will do us both good.”

  As her head disappeared, I walked to the stairs. “What’s your first name?”

  She looked back at me. “Ingrid.”

  “I sort of remember getting into the truck to drive back to the lodge last night, and that’s about it.”

  “That’s what a whack on the head will do for you.” She gave me a sympathetic look. “Take a nap.”

  “I will. Ingrid?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  She smiled. “Think of it as your tax dollars at work.”

  Before I could sleep, I needed to talk to Sturdivant. There was a phone in the widow’s-walk room. It had been stupid to get drunk the night before a client, but I had the desperate wants, couldn’t bring myself to give Kelli a tumble, and ended up in the bar. Not smart at all, and now I knew I had to face the music.

  “Where the hell you at?” Sturdivant wanted to know. It was odd how his vocabulary seemed to shift with his mood. “Whipkey had to take your drift. Lucky for us, she had a no-show. You know my rules. Miss a drift and you’re history.” He was on his high horse, boss-on-a-box, and I had no defense.

  “I was in jail.”

  Silence. “Explain.”

  “I wrecked the pickup. I had a few too many drinks last night, fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the road.”

  “Are you injured?”

  “Bumps and bruises. They jerked my driver’s license for two weeks, but it could’ve been worse. I’ll be back tonight.”

  “Do you require a rescuer?”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got a ride. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll call.”

  “Check with Mister Medawar when you return,” Sturdivant said. “You’ve got a demanding drift tomorrow. You will, of course, meet your drift for breakfast and you will be charming, am I understood?”

  “You are.”

  “I’m a forgiving man, Mister Rhodes, but I assure you that a repeat of this episode will leave you on the outside looking in.”

  “I appreciate your understanding.”

  Sturdivant grunted gutterally. “You make money for me. That’s what I understand. Sorry you had trouble, but the river doesn’t like fickle lovers. Stay on the river and you’ll have no problem. Get away from the river. . . .” He didn’t finish. “I’m relieved that you’re okay, Rhodes. It would be a distinct inconvenience to replace you now, but I will if that’s what it comes down to. You’ll do well to remember that.”

  Could it all boil down to money for him? I still did not understand why Sturdivant had hired me; now I had broken a major lodge rule and he was giving me another chance. I stared at the telephone.

  •••

  I awoke in the sun, sweating. Cashdollar was at the fly bench, her back to me. She wore a halter top and jean shorts, which revealed a figure heretofore entirely hidden by her uniform.

  “I thought the bench was your dad’s.”

  She looked over at me. “It’s mine now. He passed away two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Feeling better?”

  “I think I’m on the mend.”

  “You can’t rush body chemistry. There’s nothing like time and sleep for a hangover.”

  I got up and looked over her shoulder. She was tying a caddis emerger. “Do you tie the snowfly?”

  She laughed out loud. “Yeah, and snipes too!”

  I let the subject rest. She obviously didn’t believe.

  Ingrid made BLTs on toasted white bread for us. Afterward we walked down the back of her property, along the Dog River. The trail curved along a towering bluff covered with jack pine and scrub oak. Several whitetails kicked up ahead of us, showing their flags as they fled. The woods were covered with brown ferns. Eventually we hit a fence.

  “It’s Sturdivant’s from here on. Downriver, too.”

  The river was narrower here than below the lodge.

  “Interesting water.”

  “Miles and miles of private,” she said. “No access for the unwashed public.”

  She drove me back to Sturdivant’s late in the day. “I’d like to pay you back,” I said. “Dinner?”

  She seemed to think about it. “I think I’d like that. When? I don’t like things open ended.”

  “Not sure. I work every day there’s a customer. It might not be until the rush is over.”

  She said, “That would make it mid-November. It’s a date. If something comes open before then, give me a call.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  •••

  On October 13 I had a drift from Detroit, an elderly man nearly incapacitated by arthritis.

  “I don’t know how much fishing I can do,” he announced, “but it’s a nice day to float down a beautiful river. I used to fish the Dog in the nineteen-thirties and I had it pretty much to myself in those days.”

  “You’re paying a lot of money for a ride down the river.”

  “You get to a point in life where money loses meaning. I’ve had a lot of luck in real estate. At my age, trading money for any good experience is a fair deal.”

  The drift’s name was Merchant, a name that seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  We had a pleasant day. I moved us from hole to hole and held the boat out in the current so he could fish weighted flies deep. We had some luck, twenty fish, some of them reaching fourteen inches. He was a happy man.

  Kelli, who more and more managed to be the one to cover my clients and me, brought us
lunch, setting up on a grass-covered flat island in a huge bend. Merchant took a nap after lunch. Kelli hauled a load up the hill to her vehicle and I followed with the folding table. I was tired when I got to her.

  “There’s not much season left,” she said. “Did I tell you me and Rick called it off?”

  “No. Was it a joint decision?”

  “Nope, it was my decision and Rick, he didn’t argue,” she said. “I didn’t feel sad afterward, which I guess is a pretty good sign that it was over.”

  “You’ll go back to school when the season’s over?”

  “No, I’m heading out to Colorado,” she said. “Ski resort in Steamboat Springs. Assistant manager for catering. The pay’s not all that good, but it’s a great place.”

  “Gathering more ideas for the Classy Lady?”

  She smiled at me. “I guess you’ve got to circle some dreams for a while. I thought you’d want to know something else,” she added in a conspiratorial voice. “Sturdivant’s going out at night.”

  “On the river?”

  She nodded emphatically. “I followed him. He goes in upstream way west of the lodge and gets out about a half mile above. Medawar meets him.”

  “Maybe he’s not blind.”

  “More likely he’s not human,” she said in a whisper.

  I put the table in back of the truck and helped her load and pack the gear. Afterward we sat on the edge of the downhill trail. My drift was curled up on a blanket by the boat.

  “You always make your drifts happy,” she said. “That’s a real gift.”

  “It’s not that tough. If they catch fish, they’re happy.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple. There’s something about you that makes people feel relaxed and comfortable. You’re not like the other guides.”

  “I just give them what they want.”

  She went silent. After a long time she said, “What do you want?”

  It wasn’t a rhetorical question.

  “I’m not one to look into the future.”

  “I mean right now.”

  I stared at the river.

  “How come you haven’t hit on me?” she said.