The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “Did he come to fish at other times?”

  “Just that year Sturdivant closed up.”

  “Do you remember the man’s name?”

  “Never heard one. I asked Sturdivant who he was and he told me to mind my own business.”

  “The big fish hanging in the lodge. The one by the fireplace.”

  Another nod. “That came after that season closed.”

  “Was it really caught in the Dog?”

  “He never said and I never asked.”

  The conversation petered out after that. She and Ingrid swapped a few memories and the old woman said she was tired. She went with us to the door.

  “If you think of anything else about the man who fished with Sturdivant, I’d like to know.”

  “You can call me,” Ingrid told her.

  “There’s nothing else to remember,” the woman said. She tugged on Ingrid’s sleeve and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

  In the jeep Ingrid said, “Gertie said the man who fished with Sturdivant? He carried a cane. It was black, she said. And crooked, whatever that means. It had an ivory handle with a design.”

  I had a hunch. “Gold inlays, in the shape of three diamonds?”

  She stared at me. “You know him?”

  “Less and less,” I said.

  It had to be Gus Chickerman.

  •••

  There was only one day left in the lodge’s season. The state trout season had closed six weeks before, but our water was catch-and-release and would stay open all winter. Years before, Sturdivant had convinced the DNR to leave the river open and they had agreed. This classification on the Dog was an experiment, but years later rivers all over the state would follow suit and operate year-round under special regulations. Even with the water legally open to fishing, Sturdivant closed the lodge just before deer season in mid-November and did not reopen until spring. I assumed part of the strategy was to limit supply in order to increase demand. But there could be other reasons as well.

  My last drift was a surprise: Sturdivant himself. I had thought it was to be the president of the University of Virginia. “What’s this all about?”

  “I thought it was time we talked man to man.”

  Medawar drove us west to the get-in Kelli and I had seen. “I haven’t fished this stretch before.”

  “Private property,” he said. “Mostly mine.”

  We put the boat in and started downstream.

  “Anchor her,” Sturdivant said. I did as I was told. “You went to see Gertie Gally,” he said. “She called me. I don’t like snoopers, Rhodes. I know who the hell you are. You worked with Angus Wren.”

  “I never hid who I was.”

  “You damn well didn’t declare it either,” Sturdivant said with an accusatory grunt. “Why the hell are you digging around?”

  “You asked me to stay, remember?”

  He heaved a deep sigh. “You’re just like the rest of them.”

  “Who?”

  “Your erstwhile colleagues,” he said. “Did they tell you it was my rule that you don’t put drifts on big fish?”

  “I heard that.”

  “But you didn’t ask me for verification.”

  “I didn’t need to. I put my drifts on big fish.”

  Sturdivant laughed. “Twenty-pounders? You think those are big?” The boat rocked in the current. “Twenty is a pipsqueak.” Sturdivant was immense, three hundred pounds, at least.

  “Big fish,” I said. “Like the one over your fireplace.”

  “Yes, big fish. Real fish. Like that.”

  “Which you didn’t catch.”

  He squinted at me and looked disgusted. “What does it matter who caught it? It was caught and that’s the only fact that counts.”

  “But not by you and that sticks in your craw.”

  Sturdivant glowered at me. “M. J. Key caught it,” he said. “On a snow­fly.”

  “M. J. Key who used a black cane with an ivory handle?”

  Sturdivant nodded and I thought, I’ll be damned. Gus Chickerman was M. J. Key. At least one of them.

  “But he didn’t catch it here,” Sturdivant added. “He’s a devious bastard, that one. It’s true, he came and fished here. I first met him in Canada, way up in Northern Québec. I flew in to a river with a bush pilot and he was already there, and on his own. He told my guide and me about the snowfly. Hatches every ten years or so. At night and for only a couple of hours. Never before fall and never after spring. Key said he knew all about the snowfly hatch, even the schedule. He knew places where the hatch had happened. I thought he was full of shit, but after fishing in that river with him I decided maybe he knew something after all. He called me one year, said the next year would be the one.”

  “So you shut down for the season.”

  “I had no time for business. I wanted the summer to prepare myself. I had to be on the water and I didn’t want to be distracted.”

  “That’s the year he came.”

  “We caught fish, but we didn’t catch the fish. There was no hatch.”

  “But you learned something about white flies.”

  “They work at night, dusk, dawn. It’s sporadic. I have no idea why. Could be a hatch now and then, the way you’ll see olives a month before their regular hatch. Or hex flies here and there, even in September, months after the main hatch is done. You don’t see white flies on every river. Key traveled around. Kept a book. He was methodical, I’ll give him that.”

  “Your data board in the guide house. You got the idea from Key?”

  “I learned a lot from him. Why not?”

  “He made you think the hatch would be here, but he came only a few times.”

  “One morning I got up and found the big fish on dry ice in a wooden box outside the lodge.”

  “Red herring. He wanted you to think the hatch was here so he could have the real hatch site to himself.”

  Sturdivant chewed his bottom lip and nodded. “And I fell for it.”

  “But the flies did hatch.”

  “Somewhere, and not far away, I’d guess. The fish he left was fresh.”

  “But such hatches come only once to a river.”

  “Who the hell knows the truth? He could’ve lied about everything.”

  “Ten years later you closed again.”

  “I couldn’t take the chance that there wasn’t a real ten-year cycle. That’s how disinformation works. He had hooked me.”

  “When is the next cycle?”

  “Season after next, if you’re a believer.”

  “Why’d you hire me?”

  “I recognized your name from the column. I knew Angus Wren. I was at his funeral, I saw you there. Wren and I had some differences of opinion and we stopped talking.”

  “He didn’t like headhunters.”

  Sturdivant grunted. “Purity is a much-overrated commodity.”

  “Okay, Angus and I worked together. So what?”

  “I had a hunch. This season I wanted to check you out. If Angus hired you, you had to be good. If you were, next year I’d get you back and we’d get into the night routine.”

  “To get ready for the hatch.”

  “I confess that I did have that in mind.”

  “But you want the fish yourself.”

  Sturdivant’s voice iced over. “I don’t give a shit about who catches the damn thing just as long as we get the big one from the Dog. The fish will bring the business, not who caught it.”

  “Promotional leverage.”

  “There it is.”

  “It’s all money to you.”

  Sturdivant laughed. “What else is there?”

  “But the chances of the hatch happening here are slim.”

  “I talked to all the old-timers. Know them all. Plenty
have seen some snowflies, but never a full hatch. The flies are here, down in the mud, sleeping, waiting. It’s just a matter of time until the hatch happens.”

  “It may never happen in your lifetime. It may never happen at all.”

  “It will happen and you’ll want to be here. You could make a fortune. You think you made a bundle this year? Peanuts, a drop in the bucket.”

  “I won’t be back next season.” The decision was made on the spot and I knew it was the right one. The snowfly had been pushing me around most of my life and now I saw how it drove Sturdivant’s life. I wanted no part of it.

  “That’s it then,” he with a grunt. “Let’s go.”

  We drifted all the way back down to the lodge in silence. Sturdivant seemed morose. There was a final dinner that night, but I stayed away. In the morning there was a check waiting for me in the office. All of the tips there, including interest.

  I considered calling Ingrid to ask her for a ride to the bus stop, but I decided at the last moment not to bother her. I didn’t call her to say good-bye either. What would I say? It felt too awkward and given that, I did what I often did, I fled.

  Kelli drove me to a crossroads called Vermilion to await a Trailways bus going north. It was snowing hard. There were red-clad deer hunters all over the place, giddy over the snow, which would make it easy to follow blood trails.

  Kelli and I kissed good-bye and she said, “Last chance. My backseat’s huge.”

  But we left it at that one kiss and I got my gear out and watched her drive away.

  The snowfly thing had been in and out of my life for as long as I could remember. Like malaria, flaring up when I least expected it. In two years there would be a hatch. I told myself I didn’t care.

  19

  I got off the bus in Mackinaw City and went into a restaurant called the New Bridge. It was snowing and across the street, the community buck pole was accumulating grisly trophies, shadows dripping blood that coagulated and cooled black on the snow. The restaurant walls were decorated with saltwater seashells, the closest salt sea a thousand miles north or east, seashells displayed alongside shellacked deer antlers on plaques.

  Two booths down a man in a red plaid hunting coat was telling several companions how his wife “came up on” a twelve-point buck mounting a doe on the edge of a pond and she couldn’t bring herself to shoot until they had finished.

  Said the man, “I told her the doe don’t get no pleasure from it. And his wife said, ‘Don’t I know it.’” Hearty laughs all around. I laughed with them.

  Fort Machilimackinac was in view across the street, below the approach to the bridge. Queen Anna had given me Kenneth Roberts’s novels to read when I was in high school and one of these, Northwest Passage, had been made into a movie with Spencer Tracy as Major Robert Rogers, who led his rangers against the Abenaki Indians. I was in college before I learned that Rogers had not only been real but also had commanded the fort I was looking at. I never stopped at the straits without thinking about Rogers, who lived adventure after adventure but never seemed to fit in anywhere.

  Decor and conversation as non sequiturs, seashells, buckhorns, and the battle of the sexes. The nonfits shoehorned into my mood. I had a room in the motel next door courtesy of a hunter’s no-show. I was determined to make a plan.

  Coffee was served by a six-foot amazon with close-cropped white hair. She had saucer-sized hands with giant red knuckles and refilled my cup only if I held it above the table and said, “Please,” a reminder that the battle for control raged everywhere.

  I used a paper placemat and ballpoint pen to jot notes.

  “Are you a nimrod?” my amazon asked.

  Nimrod of Genesis, hunter and king: I was neither. “Not really.”

  “Each to his own, I always say. I don’t eat what I don’t kill and I won’t kill what I won’t eat,” she declared, a philosophy packed with ambiguity. A life based on presumed balance. I envied her.

  I had kissed Kelli and the guiding life good-bye. Several stops and five hours later I was sitting among Coxey’s Army trying to write down what I knew about the snowfly mystery. I saw it as a way of ridding my system of the Key virus.

  The notes did not come easily because the thinking didn’t come easily. It had been a long road, complicated by many sudden switchbacks and no satisfactory answers along the way.

  I remembered the floater’s widow in her red Caddie ragtop. She had started it all, snowflies and flashing beaver, in her mind an either-or proposition. I had passed on Kelli and not hit on Ingrid. Was I growing up? Queen Anna would be proud, and this thought somehow depressed me.

  Red Ennis, thousands of miles west in a state of emeritus, held the opinion that those myths that persisted were usually based on something real. The question was what that something was, the qualifier buried deep in the pronoun.

  Rose Yelton, bless her, had gone back to Red Ennis, written down the legend, and sent it to me, a parting gift. Or curse. It took time to get perspective on which was which and the jury on this was still out. My snowfly trail had nothing but question marks and dead ends for road signs.

  The legend as I knew it:

  Certain insects hatch on a ten-year cycle (or fifteen?), never rising twice on the same river (allegedly), between fall and spring (maybe), which took in a whole lot of months at northern latitudes. Meaning only on rivers? Some rivers. Some trout lived forty, fifty years? Not likely. Yet Angus and I had seen a hint of long-lived trout in Parley Finger’s spitwad pond in southern Ohio. Trout rising only to a fly few people knew about? It was nonsense on the surface, but my interest had always been real, if not rock steady. I would tell Red Ennis that some myths rested mostly on some people wanting to believe.

  Lloyd Nash had shown me M. J. Key’s 1892 and 1943 books. Lloyd knew of Key, a reclusive professor in the college’s distant past. And there had been the Collection Room: White flies found, white flies lost. Probably snowflies, and probably they had once been Key’s.

  Danny, my Good Samaritan at the New York Public Library, had given assistance, then been chased off the hunt by the government. Why? Before she abandoned the search she had been really helpful, verifying Key, his mysterious departure from MSU (then MAC) and his interest in codes. A spy perhaps? Nash had suggested this. Why else this government pressure decades later? Or General Centre warning me off the search when I probed Key’s relationship to wartime codebreakers in England. Or Charlie Jowett’s late aunt, wartime denizen of Bletchley Park, who was cagey in answering my questions. Key had been driven out of the university because he was a Nazi sympathizer. Maybe. This could just as easily have been government disinformation. Maybe they wanted him for their own uses. I had seen the government’s little games after my departure from the Soviet Union. The government was like a river, always making ripples disappear.

  The Goodwins, Dickie and Gillian, owners of the Trout House on the River of Trout, South Vietnam, Republic of. Planted by the eccentric Englishman Sir Thomas Oxley. Talk about non sequiturs and coincidences. There I had seen Key’s unpublished manuscript, Legend of the Snowfly. It had been in my hands, then it was gone. Misfortunes of war. It had been real, but I would never know its value, if any, to my search. You couldn’t follow a map you didn’t possess.

  Raina Chickerman had appeared after my father’s death. Why? More puzzling: Raina as Miss Smith in Grand Marais in winter. Father Buzz. Raina Chickerman. Second coming. Why had she been there? I seesawed between certainty and uncertainty. Ovid Merchant could assist on this. He had promised to try, and his appearance on the Dog River as my drift was as strange as all the rest of the threads in this damn thing. I needed Merchant’s help. No way around that.

  I had tracked the remainder of Oxley’s collection to London, but it had been sold to the Russians. I stubbornly pursued, and look where that had led: My search had cost a man his life and nobody seemed concerned about that but me. The Soviet
s had panicked and dumped everything. I was lucky to get out. Thank Valoretev for that. I wondered where he was. He and I might have become close friends. Queen Anna had said, “When elephants dance, it’s the grass that suffers.” I had wandered into the periphery of an ideological clash. Perhaps even prompted it, though this seemed unlikely.

  Oxley had been brokered to Lockwood Bolt, Elliot Lake, the outer reaches by any definition, ultima Thule. Cold trail, hot tailings, Cold War. Extremes and diametrics when you cared to look. For Bolt, purely an investment, like soybeans or hog futures. Oxley moved again, from Bolt to M. J. Key! Ghost as investor or meddler? Who was Key? And what? Gus? Raina? All of the above?

  Izaak Walton had written, “That which is everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” I wondered if the converse applied.

  Angus Wren bought snowflies so people would not be tempted, one man’s futile effort to halt a viral obsession. I had never seen any for sale, but Angus had been eighty-eight when he died and had been traveling for decades. Fact: Some people tied the flies. And had for a long time. Why? Because they believed in the hatch. No other explanation possible, unless the flies were tourist jokes, like jackelopes you could find in Texas.

  The Chickermans died, consumed by fire. And their only child never bothered to show up. Again, why? Lawyer Eubanks stonewalled me on her whereabouts and on white flies. From Maria Idly’s contacts I had learned that some sort of federal protection program was linked to the Chickermans, but no rationale or details. Much less context. But Eubanks had his own flies on display in his office, which was more like a museum. Smoke after the real fire. A literal fact sequence here. I was reminded of Red Ennis. Myths that persist were likely to have substance.

  My sister, Lilly, confirmed that the late Roger Ranger used to see Gus Chickerman crawling out of local streams. And that Gus used to travel a lot, both of these facts previously unknown, and both wholly unexpected. Gus gone, long trips, where a mystery. He fished? Why did he keep this a secret? And way up Whirling Creek, a documented killer. Who was Gus Chickerman? And what?

  Buzz had helped me get the link of Miss Smith = M. J. Key = Raina Chickerman? A suggested loop, a would-be circle lacking evidence for closure.