The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “You’re engaged.”

  “Not anymore.”

  I didn’t want complications, but I was weakening.

  “I’m not pretty enough for you?”

  “That’s not it.”

  “What, then?”

  She wanted more of an explanation, but there was nothing I could say that would make sense.

  “Well,” she said. “I’ve done all I can except rip off my clothes and jump your bones. You’d best stay alert for an ambush,” she said with a laugh.

  She got up and went to the vehicle. I heard the door open. I also saw that my drift was sitting up and looking around and that it was time to get back to work.

  “Good nap?”

  Merchant smiled. “Comes a time in life when a good sleep beats just about everything.”

  At three p.m. Merchant got a very large fish that threatened to run the backing off his reel, but luck and shallow water intervened and the trout, seeing the bottom slanting upward, turned and came back to deeper water. I breathed easier.

  It was a substantial hen with a huge girth, a ten-pound fish. Merchant stared at the trout.

  “Photo?” I asked.

  “The memory’s plenty for me,” he replied. “Do you see many fish of this size?”

  “Rarely, but they’re in here and some are larger.”

  “Larger?” He seemed exhausted. “I’d like a little rest.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I had three thermoses on every float trip and some days they were not enough. The thermoses were made by a company in Pittsburgh and could hold heat for twenty-four hours. Determined that equipment failure would never stand in the way of customer satisfaction, Sturdivant equipped us with the best. Even the boats were custom-made, lighter, higher riding, and more maneuverable than most driftboats on this river or any other.

  Merchant held the thermos cup in both hands. “Do you take pleasure in your work? I think you must. You’re very good at it.”

  It was a job, but was this work? I had never really thought about it. “It’s got its points.”

  “It’s your passion, I suppose. Mine is land and real estate.”

  “You’re a developer?”

  Merchant smiled. “Goodness, no. There’s far too much risk in that, and even if you turn a profit it can take a long time to see it. I buy what’s already there. It’s not very exciting, but there’s an element of art in knowing a fine property. I used to look at every one myself, but now I have people to do that for me. Still, I insist on photographs and reserve the veto on all property acquisitions. I’d like to say I had a vision, but this all just sort of happened. I loved to hunt and fish when I was young. I had no money then, so it was tents or sleeping bags under the stars. But it seemed to me that if there were more and more people and the same amount of land, there would be increasing demand. We have a beautiful state and it always impressed me how people stay in state for vacations. I also knew a lot of people who owned cottages and passed them on, generation to generation. Most people don’t want the cost or trouble of maintaining a place year-round. And if they head north, they don’t want to be packed into fleabag motels or cabins two feet apart. So I started buying. I make good money now, but I think I also provide something of value. Like you.”

  Vacation places! Ovid Merchant. Now I remembered. “You’re from Southfield?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking slightly surprised.

  “You have places near Grand Marais?”

  “You’ve stayed in one? I prefer Lake Superior to Lake Michigan. It’s the purer experience.”

  “Some time back there was a woman who stayed in one of your properties near Grand Marais. Her name is Key. I mean, that’s the name she used.”

  “I don’t know the people who rent. I used to, but now there’re too many for that.”

  “She and I grew up together and sort of lost contact. I had someone check with your management company in Marquette, but they said she paid cash in advance. There was no address for her, no way to contact her.”

  “That’s unusual,” he said, looking slightly perplexed. “That’s not my policy. I believe in direct-mail follow-up. If we don’t have the address, how can we market and get return business?”

  I wasn’t interested in his technical problem. “I would really like to locate her.”

  He poured out his coffee. “Well, I can’t promise anything, but it would be a pleasure to look into it for you.” He looked around.

  We did not fish the rest of our float to the get-out point. At dinner that night the ten-pound fish raised eyebrows. So did our total catch, which was triple that of any of the others.

  Merchant tipped me five thousand dollars and left the group shaking their heads again.

  After dinner, Sturdivant pulled me aside. “You have had a remarkable season. Ordinarily I do not extend reemployment offers until the season is over and official evaluations completed, but tonight I am making an exception. I want you back, Mister Rhodes, and because you’re first to be asked, that will make you my senior guide, affording you first choice of everything. Every one of your drifts has rebooked for next season. This is unprecedented. What say you?”

  Next season? “I think we should keep tradition and talk again after the season is finished.”

  He was not happy with my answer. “As you wish,” he said.

  I had a drink with Ovid Merchant and thanked him for his generosity. “I’ve signed up for next year,” he said, “but at my age, who knows what a year will bring? All I can promise is that I will look into the matter we discussed earlier. Where will you go when you’re finished here?”

  I told him how to contact me in Grand Marais.

  •••

  At midnight Kelli knocked lightly on my screen door. “Bowie, are you awake?”

  “I was just finishing my drift plan for tomorrow.”

  “Sturdivant’s gone out again. You want to see?”

  “You bet.” The unexpected job offer for next season had me puzzled and intrigued. It seemed to me that he wanted something from me, but I could not figure out what. I grabbed my windbreaker.

  “I’ll meet you up at the highway,” Kelli said. “By the bridge. Ten minutes?”

  “See you there.”

  She drove me to where Sturdivant had put his boat in. His truck and trailer were still there. “Somebody will bring Medawar to the rig in the morning and then he’ll drive the rig downriver to meet him.”

  “You’ve followed him before?”

  “The Bible says, ‘Be not curious in unecessary matters: for more things are shewed unto thee than men understand,’ but I guess I can’t help myself. You wanna know who’s sleeping with whom?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well, you’re not sleeping with anybody.”

  I laughed quietly. “Maybe you should join the CIA.”

  I wanted to see what Sturdivant was up to. I wanted to know how a blind man negotiated a river in a boat, but there was no way to know where he was. The best I could do was to go into the river above his get-out and hope for an intercept, preferably at sunrise when we could actually see.

  “Shall we try to see what he’s doing?”

  “I’m game,” Kelli said. “For everything,” she added in a whisper close to my ear.

  We parked her car on a two-track several hundred yards above Sturdivant’s pickup point and walked cross-country over private land heavily posted with no trespassing signs.

  “This is neat,” Kelli said as we walked through the dark.

  “If we run into trouble, split up and meet at the car.”

  In the darkness her eyes were better than mine. I let her lead.

  We heard the river before we saw it. There was a sliver of moon low in the clear sky. We climbed down to the river and went upstream
and down, looking for places to beach a boat. There were only two spots and one of these was just above a wide bend in the river.

  “Let’s park it here.”

  We found a spot behind a tangle of driftwood and settled in.

  The nights were cooling. We sat close to each other. There was dew forming. “A fire would be nice,” Kelli said.

  “It’s private land.”

  “We could make another kind of fire.”

  “We might miss Sturdivant.”

  “That would be okay by me.”

  We both laughed.

  Insects buzzed all around us. I had no worries about oversleeping; the ground was hard and cold.

  As the sun came up, Kelli snuggled under my arm and we watched the river.

  We heard a whistle before Sturdivant came around the bend. He blew the whistle every few seconds and looked straight up into the morning sky, which fanned pink and gray in the east. The boat slid onto the gravel beach and the huge man stepped out and made sure his chains were set.

  Sturdivant retrieved his rod and waded into the river. The fly was large and white, like a wad of fresh-picked cotton. He made short casts into a run, but there were no takes and after a while he clambered back into the boat, started tooting his whistle, and disappeared downstream.

  “That was like, totally weird,” Kelli said.

  I thought: Why the white fly? Why here and why now?

  We took another route back to the lodge so as not to encounter Medawar. Kelli dropped me at the bridge and I cut through the woods to my cabin. I knew I had to get Sturdivant aside, but I needed to pick the right time.

  When I went to meet my drift I was tired. He was a young guy from Fort Wayne with a Canadian accent.

  “You look happy,” he said. “Does that mean a great night behind or a great day ahead?”

  “A little of both,” I lied. I knew the day would be a struggle and I would be fighting sleep. When I saw the transplanted Canadian cast, I knew it would be even worse. He bent his wrist, went too far back with his backcast, and slapped the water like Lash LaRue with a whip. It was an awful day. But we caught a few fish and the drift was happy.

  •••

  I had dinner with Ingrid Cashdollar on Halloween. I was supposed to have a drift, but my client suffered a heart attack on the flight from Oklahoma City to Detroit. Sturdivant tried to get a replacement but without success, and I was glad because it would give me a couple of unexpected free days.

  My driving suspension was long past, but I still had no car of my own. Collister, who had taken to calling me Crash, reluctantly loaned me his Oldsmobile. “Hope the bastard starts,” he said. Of all the guides, he was the only one I could relate to.

  The restaurant was at the end of a gravel road twenty miles from Dog River and the lot was packed. I arrived early to get our table, but Cashdollar was already there. She wore a tight angora sweater and a short skirt. She was a muscular, compact woman with wide shoulders and an inordinately small waist; she knew how to dress to favor her figure. She greeted me with a friendly smile.

  She ate sparingly and apologized. “I’ve got the sort of body that could go square in a New York minute.”

  I laughed. “I doubt that.”

  “How’s the fish business?”

  “Busy. Can you tell me more about Sturdivant?”

  She played with the swizzle in her drink, a plastic wand with a pineapple on top. “Not much. He’s been here forever. He arrived after the war and built the lodge from scratch.”

  “Was he blind then?”

  She nodded. “From the war, people say.”

  “What does Sturdivant say?”

  “Nothing. People thought he was crazy when he first came, but every year he seemed to have more and more business. In the nineteen-fifties a few people started recognizing that there was money in fish. Over the years businesses came and went. Only Sturdivant has lasted.” She looked across at me. “Why the interest?”

  “Do you have any idea how it all works?”

  She shook her head. “His people don’t much mix with townies, present company excepted.”

  “We’re supposed to make sure our clients catch fish, but not big ones.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope, that’s the rule.”

  “Do you follow the rule?”

  “Not at all, but he’s asked me back for next season. As his lead guide, no less.”

  She whistled softly. “After just one season? You must be good.”

  “I don’t think that’s the reason.”

  “Then what?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  After dinner we went into the bar. The band was all female, the Fishnets, costumes to match. We danced and nursed drinks. I told Ingrid about Sturdivant’s night forays.

  She had never seen Sturdivant at night, but she had heard the whistle below her house.

  “Must’ve been him,” I said.

  “Sort of like a bat,” she said. “He’s really strange.”

  “We can’t take clients at night, but he goes out alone after dark. Blind.”

  “Maybe he just wants it all to himself.”

  “He fishes at night with huge white flies.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen him.”

  “Ah, spying on the boss?”

  “I was curious.”

  “You know where that can lead.”

  “It seems like a cop would be at more risk of that than me.”

  She nodded. “Don’t think cops don’t worry. Every time I pull somebody over or go up to a house, I think this could be it. Really bugged me when I first started. The trooper job was the worst. Too many locos out on the interstates. This is better, a lot more predictable.”

  “But not entirely safe.”

  “What is?” she asked. “I’ve learned how to be careful,” she added.

  “I’ve never met a woman cop before,” I said.

  She gave me a pained but playful grimace and fluttered her eyelids to mock me. “What’s a nice girl like me doing with a big old gun, right?”

  I laughed. “Something like that.”

  “Dad was a cop. I guess I just followed him. You watch, down the road there will be more female cops. Being a good cop isn’t about being tough and kicking ass. It’s about listening and talking and calming people down and solving problems. A lot of women are better at that part than men. I like working as a deputy in the country. In this job a cop is a friend, not an enemy to people.”

  I had never heard a better description of police work.

  We danced close on the slow dances, pressed to each other, her head lightly on my chest.

  “Sturdivant was sick a couple of times,” she told me when we were off the dance floor, between numbers. “Each time he closed up for the whole season.”

  “Must’ve been serious.”

  “No, it was more like bullshit. He was there the whole time. People saw him fishing from time to time.”

  “When was this?”

  “Once sometime in the late nineteen-fifties and again in the sixties. I don’t know the exact years.”

  We danced through the final set, not talking, enjoying the rhythms and closeness. It was one a.m. She looked at her watch first.

  “Gotta go?” I asked.

  She said, “Last call, so to speak.”

  “It’s been a great time,” I said. I felt nervous and had a reasonable idea why.

  She turned around. “I know somebody who could tell you more about Sturdivant.”

  “Who?”

  “She lives in Manistee. She worked for him a long time.”

  “How do I get in touch?”

  “I’d have to take you,” she said. “I don’t think she’ll ta
lk to a stranger cold.”

  “When can we see her?”

  “We could go tonight,” she said, with a smile.

  “It’s pretty late.”

  “She won’t mind and you’ll be safe with a cop.”

  I laughed and said, “Okay.”

  We went in her jeep and didn’t talk much. It took us nearly ninety minutes to get to Manistee. The house was on a tree-lined street, east of the center of town. There were lights on in the house.

  “She’s a confirmed insomniac,” Cashdollar said.

  The woman’s name was Gally and she looked to be in her seventies. “Damn, is that you, Ingrid?” she said when she opened the door. “Don’t you look the pretty picture,” she said, looking Ingrid over.

  I was introduced. “This is Bowie. He’s my friend. He wants to know about Sturdivant.”

  The woman made a face. “Come on in here. I’m freezing with the door open.”

  It was an old house with a musty smell. We sat in the parlor. “Sturdivant’s mean,” she said.

  “Is he blind?” I asked.

  The woman grinned crookedly. “Legally blind, but he can see some and if you ask me, maybe he can see a whole lot. It sure seems he can always see what he wants to see. You seen him at night on the river, have you?”

  “With his whistle. How did you know?”

  “I remember when he started that.”

  “It’s a put-on?”

  “With Sturdivant anything is possible.”

  “Ingrid says he closed the place for a couple of seasons.”

  The woman nodded. “I was there the first time.”

  “Was he sick?”

  “Not that I ever seen. He just didn’t want people around his place. He fished every night and I cooked for him and he was in a foul temper the whole time. He said, ‘You want to keep getting paid, you just keep telling people I’m sick.’ So I kept my mouth shut.”

  “He fished alone?”

  “Yep, usually he did, but there was a fella used to drop by sometimes and the two of them would go out. Had an accent. Little fella, heavyset.”

  “You met him?”

  “Just seen him. Sturdivant got real edgy whenever he was coming. Nervous. I could always tell.”