According to Hannah, Angus Wren probably never knew Key and surely loathed his values. Headhunter, seeker of trophies. Angus = pure. Key = not pure? Whose definition? Angus knew Sturdivant too, but this wasn’t a surprise. Angus knew a lot of people, big and small, presidents and peasants.
Sturdivant knew someone named Key, carrying the same cane as Gus. The Key whom Sturdivant knew was definitely a headhunter; the gigantic stuffed trout in the lodge attested to this. Not caught in the Dog. Then where? Sturdivant, the blind man in a boat, whistling in the darkness in pursuit of profit. Used his whistle and sound to navigate the river at night, walk in the woods. I had figured this out all on my own. Chickerman as Key had misled Sturdivant. Sleight of hand, applied to greed. Supports contention of Angus Wren. Key = not pure. Nor Sturdivant. Any of us? I couldn’t say.
“You’re wasting paper,” my amazon said, interrupting me.
I presented my cup for the fourth time. “Please.”
“Men’s is down the hall, left,” she said.
Key: published 1892 and 1943. A Key (probably Chickerman) fished the Dog in the late 1950s, said Sturdivant, confirmed more or less by the woman named Gally, Ingrid’s friend, who’d promptly informed Sturdivant. I had no idea why other than that he was “the” man in the area and people tended to want to stay on the good side of people with power.
Don’t dare think about Ingrid now, I told myself. I should have called her. Keep plowing along.
Key as multiple personality? Was there such a thing? A cat, maybe. How many lives were left?
The unpublished manuscript. This existed. A second copy, last acquired by M. J. Key (damn loops), gender unknown. Burying evidence of herself, himself, themselves? Raina? Smith = Key = Raina = Smith. My eyes had seen Raina as Smith. Cops always said eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable. Reporters included? Yes. Gus as fisherman. The things you never know soon enough.
Two avenues remained: Raina Chickerman and the unpublished manuscript. Correction: Make that one avenue, obscured, grown over, covered. But real. Had to be. Find one, find the other? Ovid Merchant as loose end to be spliced in? He was a strand of hope, maybe my last one. What were the odds of him remembering his promise?
The draw of a liberal arts education: Get a little of a lot, B.D., Bachelor of Dabbling. The downside: Facts whip through the mind like jellyfish in a riptide. Occam’s razor: If you get two satisfactory solutions to a problem, take the shorter, simpler one. But this wasn’t math and there were no obvious answers, long or short. Life refuses to adhere to formulae.
Resolve, absent direction, equaled chaos. This was reality, not theory. For now, the only answer seemed to reside with Ovid Merchant. He was not my best bet; he was my only one.
My brain was beginning to skip and dart. Time to quit. I folded my notes, paid my bill, and went outside where a crowd had gathered at the buck pole, snow gathering equally on hats and corpses. A flatbed truck was parked nearby. Curious onlookers were staring at an immense carcass with snow piling up on it. A conservation officer in a shapeless green horse blanket addressed a small man in a flaming red snowmobile suit. They stood by the flatbed.
“It’s an elk, you fucking mutant!” the angry CO said.
Replied the hunter, “Can you eat it?”
“Not from jail,” the CO said.
Some mysteries are more easily solved than others.
•••
I called Fred Ciz from Mackinaw City and caught a Trailways bus to Newberry. Fred met me in front of the Lumberman’s Hotel. He looked thinner, older.
“You look like a right-hand foot in a left-hand shoe,” I told him.
“You don’t look so peachy keen yourself,” he said.
We embraced like brothers.
The first order of business when coming home is the ritual catch-up.
Fred began immediately. “Subscriptions are up eight hundred from all over the state. Thanks to Karla. That gal’s a born promoter. And forty-two new building permits last summer. Selling and building now, since she hooked up with a fella named Van from the Soo. He builds, she sells.” Fred glanced at me in the passenger seat. “They’re an item,” he added. “Is that the right lingo nowadays?”
“Close enough.”
“That too,” Fred Ciz said. “Buzz is Buzz, as busy as ever.”
“Janey?”
“Some answers you’ve got to get on your own.” He looked straight ahead and changed subjects. “I read about Angus Wren. I’m sorry. The column not work out after that?”
“Family disease. Greed.”
Fred cracked a smile. “Looking for work?”
“I wouldn’t mind helping. No pay.”
“Grab the brass ring, did you?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
We had dinner at Staley’s. Fred, Buzz, Karla, and her boyfriend, Van, Janey, and me. Van wore an ill-fitting blue corduroy suit and white socks that looked like they were purchased a dozen pairs at a time from the Monkey Ward catalog. He was tall and heavy, older, and he doted on Karla. Janey wore a dress that hung nearly to the floor and was terminally wrinkled. Her hair was long and straight. No makeup. Her clunky sandals over wool socks seemed to make her tilt backward like she was walking into an eternal wind, which for her life was an apt metaphor. She did not look at me. I answered some questions and asked others and we all got caught up. It was a true Staley’s dinner, steaks rare, scallions and ’shrooms, baked potatoes, thick sour cream with chives, a metal-capped bottle of red wine.
Buzz had been offered a diocesan job in Marquette and turned it down. “Little enough time for trout as it is,” he explained.
Karla’s kids had settled in and Van had two of his own, girls in their late teens. I gathered they were cohabitating, blending offspring, seeking cohesiveness. I was happy for them. And only a bit envious.
A young, wealthy entrepreneur from Cleveland had bought four thousand acres in the county and was fencing it in. The townies yanked down the fence sections as fast as they could be put up. Fences in the U.P. were taken as an act of war: The interloper’s money would not guarantee success. The same as in Vietnam.
Newberry High had a halfback recruited by Wisconsin. Michigan and Michigan State had ignored him. Never mind that the Yoopers had more of an affinity for dairy herds to the west than car makers to the south. The kid’s snubbing was a point of honor.
Last winter a woman named Delilah had shot a 650-pound black bear that had been raiding her garbage. One shot, in the left eye, with a .222 Hornet, the small caliber and accuracy a source of immense local pride.
Steelhead and salmon were running up the Little Two Hearted, attracting snaggers by the hundreds.
The rivers had been high all summer and Buzz bemoaned the smallness of the trout. “Petty ’bows,” he said. “God’s dinks.”
An albino buck had been seen several times near Lake Mitawichen. Popular opinion held that scavenging Indians would kill it and eat it. There was no romance about Indians up here, and even less sympathy. They’d barbecue a white buffalo just as fast. Food first, gods later, as anticipated by Maslow. I understood both views, but most admired practicality.
All the trivia of home, half facts pulled through the screen of collective identity. I loved it all, took comfort in the pointless detail.
After dinner Buzz headed for church and Fred for the office. Karla and Van didn’t announce their destination but their eyes told the tale. I faced Janey alone.
“How’re your kids?”
“Older,” she said. “Doing fine. You’ve been gone a while.”
“It didn’t work out the way I planned.”
“What does?” she said. “Fred showed me some of the columns you wrote. They were good. I like what you do with words.”
“And you, how are you doing?” I asked.
“I like the job. For a long time I felt li
ke I was stumbling along.”
“And now your feet are solidly under you?”
“Getting that way,” she said. “Thanks to you.”
“All I did was nudge an idea.”
“Don’t interrupt me,” she said with surprising force. “If Staley’s hadn’t been continued, I don’t know what might have happened to the town. You and Karla came in and made some things happen. I see pride again and I like it. This is no small thing. For the town—or for me.” She reached for my hands. “Thank you, Bowie.”
It was the first time she had ever used my given name. I quickly changed the subject and got up and fetched fresh coffee for us. We made more small talk, catching up on her kids and the problems and challenges of running the Light and when I departed she gave me a chaste hug.
•••
I was living at Fred’s place again and helping him with the paper. It was February and we had an immense pack of snow, close to two hundred inches, mounting and counting. The snowbanks had risen to ten feet and the county sprayed them with purple dye to help drivers see them. We hung purple ribbons on vehicle antennas to keep the county snowblowers from eating them. In mid-January there had been a three-day whiteout, all of us buried and marooned in place. It made me think of Pompeii, only at the other end of the temperature spectrum.
All the while I worked hard and time passed and I brooded about the snowfly and Raina Chickerman. The two subjects did not dominate my every thought, but neither were they far away.
On February 1 I called Southfield and learned that Ovid Merchant and his spouse had gone to Florida until the northern ice broke up, which could be months ahead. I talked to one of Merchant’s employees, a man named Allen, an accomplished prick.
“Mister Merchant promised he’d call,” I explained. “He was going to get some information for me.”
“Then I’m sure he will.”
“But I need to talk to him now.”
“Do you take business calls on your vacation?”
I told him I did.
“Pity,” Allen said. He was an effective gate guard. I had no choice but wait for Merchant to call me.
True winter, no hope from any direction. I was hunkered down until spring could force its way in. I saw Janey almost every day and learned she had a great sense of humor to go with her smarts. We became friends and a couple of times when the weather allowed we drove into Newberry to take in a movie. It was strictly platonic.
I drove west to Houghton on February 14. The old mining town was snowed in, like the rest of the north. And hilly, which made it worse. I visited the library at Michigan Tech and talked to an old fellow named Pelkie. He was an acquaintance of Buzz, a retired railroad engineer who worked as a volunteer at the library. I looked in the card catalog for Key’s books, but there were no listings. I asked Buzz’s pal to check his other sources and he came back shaking his head, saying there were no listings anywhere, which struck me as odd, and I ascribed this to Pelkie’s being old and a little addled. Besides, I knew that libraries discarded old books from time to time. I asked him where I could find the best library on fly fishing. He’d have to noodle it, he said, get back to me. This was becoming a familiar refrain. He never did.
On the way back to Grand Marais I began to think about Ingrid. I had no intention of calling her, but as I drove through the snow and darkness the idea got rooted in my mind and by the time I got to Marquette whim had transformed to overwhelming need. It was midnight and she was home, asleep.
“If this turns out to be a dream, I will be seriously ticked,” she said.
“Meet me in St. Ignace,” I said. The invitation was out before I could debate it, an example of the subconscious asserting its needs. “I’d like to see you.”
“Jesus, Bowie Rhodes. You want! You want? Just like that? You bug out and don’t say good-bye or kiss my ass, and not a word since, not even a card on Valentine’s Day, which was yesterday, and Christmas, which was months ago, and now it’s meet me? What is it with you men?”
“What do you say?” I was in no position to argue for the honor of the entire gender. Besides, I was guilty as charged. Her voice sounded wonderful.
“When?”
“Tomorrow in St. Ignace at the Wanderer Motel.”
A long pause. “I’ve got a lot of sick days in the bank, which is apropos, because I must be sick to agree to this.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Don’t give me reason to rethink it.”
•••
I sat in the café of a truck stop, north of the off ramp of the Mackinac Bridge across U.S. 2 from the motel. The Wanderer had several units built in the approximate likeness of tepees. I was waiting for housekeeping to finish cleaning two of the units.
There was not much traffic coming north across the bridge that joined the state’s two peninsulas. The Ojibwa, who had lived here when the French arrived in the seventeenth century, had not lived in tepees, but Ojibwa and Mohawk had died building the bridge centuries later.
Ingrid arrived at noon and joined me in the café. She seemed smaller than I remembered, her neck long and firm, her hair short and swept back to give the impression of constant motion. She gave me a half smile when she saw me and slid into the booth across from me.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Butterflies. That’s supposed to be a sign.”
“Of what?”
“I haven’t got a clue,” she said nervously.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About the sudden call.”
“I’m here,” she said, “and I have to say this to you: I rarely let my impulses have their way.”
“But this time you’re making an exception and I’m glad.”
“I didn’t think it through and now I don’t want to. What’s your agenda, Rhodes? Be direct.”
I pointed. “I have rooms across the street.”
“That’s damn direct,” she said quickly.
“I didn’t mean—.”
She was blushing. “That’s not what I meant either,” she said.
“We can sit here and talk.”
“The room’s good. I want to get these boots off. I hate cold weather. I go barefoot at home most of the summer.”
“There are two rooms,” I said.
“You’re a gentleman. Let’s take a look at those rooms.”
The rooms adjoined in Tepee Number Fourteen; the rooms were numbered ninety-one and twenty-two, the logic of this escaping me. They were minuscule, each with twin beds, a small table, two chairs, and a three-year-old calendar with photographs of clumps of forget-me-nots.
“Opulent,” she said, setting her small bag on the floor. She went to the window, stared out, then drew the curtains closed. “Why did you call after all this time?” I saw her eyes examine the small beds. She said, “I didn’t hear anything from you for . . . how long? Six months. And here we are. This isn’t me. It can’t be.”
“I was thinking about you. And then I was calling.”
She carefully took off her jacket, sat on the edge of the bed, kicked off her boots, and rubbed her feet. “Okay, both of us can be impetuous, but what’s your motive, Rhodes?”
“I’m sorry,” I began to say.
“I’m not and, besides, cops hate apologies and denials. Everybody’s always sorry for what they didn’t do. It’s a miracle human beings ever take responsibility for anything. ‘I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t do it.’ What the heck does that mean?” She jerked her shirttails out of her jeans. “You left Sturdivant’s without a word. Then what?”
I sat down on the bed facing her and began. I told her I had been a columnist before I came to Dog River. UPI had been cutting people and I had been lucky to get the job and had loved it. Then Angus died and the legal war began and I was out and I ended up in Dog River purely by accident.
; “Those men I saved? I don’t remember a thing about it.”
“You saved them,” she said. “And nearly drowned.”
What to say next? “All my life,” I began, “I’ve been chasing something.”
She rolled her eyes. “The snowfly. You think you’re the only one?”
There were others? I had never considered this before. “What do you mean?”
“You asked me that day at my house if I tied snowflies. Only believers ask this. Over on the Au Sable a few years back there were a bunch of bums living along the river and the USFS kept chasing them off and they kept coming back. They were waiting for the snowfly hatch. A couple of the bums froze to death that winter. When spring came, they were gone.”
Others chasing the snowfly. And they were there during winter. Evidence or wishful thinking on my part? I felt a charge of anxiety. “You don’t believe the legend?”
She listened attentively. “No, but there are worse things to believe,” she said. “All people need dreams.”
“What if the dream’s a nightmare?”
“You don’t look any worse for the wear,” she said. She ran a hand through her hair. “People say God doesn’t make junk, but he sure does seem to pitch a lot of it. Curveballs, screwballs, dropballs, sinkers, sliders, even spitters, the whole divine mess. God, fate, call it what you want, doesn’t make life easy, but I think people ought to finish what they start.”
“Philosopher cop.”
“Who better to philosophize than somebody who gets a daily look at the real price of life?”
“It must be nice to know who you are and what you want.”
A wry smile formed. “Right, and then one night you get a phone call and you’re up early the next morning splashing Shalimar between your boobs and driving north fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit. Explain that.”
“I can’t.”
The Snowfly Page 44
