At night I wrote and read and stared at the radio. On Sundays Fred, Janey, her kids, and I ice-fished and watched the Packers. Lombardi was gone and with him the pride and edge of the Pack and it struck me how much impact one man could have on so many strangers. Some people are gifts, people like Fred and Buzz and Lombardi. And then there were the rest of us who tend to take far more than we give.
Ingrid had gotten me into the habit of going around the house without clothes. I wrote in the nude at the kitchen table. Sometimes Janey would drop by for a visit and find me this way. She just laughed as I scrambled. Clothes encumbered me. I knew it was a silly notion, but writers tend to indulge their idiosyncrasies as sops to creativity. Clothes took my juice. I thought Papa would understand that we each had to do what worked for us.
It was in the third week of November, six months after Ingrid’s death, and I was writing a column about jigging for winter walleyes. I wrote on tablets of legal paper. False starts got wadded up and dropped on the floor. I discarded a page and saw it flit across the linoleum as a frigid breeze filled the room.
My eyes shifted to the open door.
Raina Chickerman stood in the doorway, wearing knee-high white mukluks, black cords, a white parka, white mittens that reached up to her elbows like medieval gauntlets, and a huge gray-white fur cap with snow on it. She took off the hat and whacked it on her leg, spraying snow on the floor.
She looked at me and said, “Nice outfit.”
She had never been one for social conventions, like knocking on doors. Queen Anna had thought her rude, but it wasn’t that. Punky simply did not recognize arbitrary boundaries.
I was too startled to speak.
She circumnavigated the kitchen, walked over to me, and looked at my lap. “Looks like puberty finally caught up,” she said.
“Nice to see you, too.”
She rubbed her hands together and blew on them. “This is the year,” she said.
“Go away,” I said. “I’m done chasing.”
Marriage is a wonderful institution and the bond of love an endless source of comfort. But marriage does not erase the baggage you carry into it. I had fought hard to forget the snowfly; you cannot suppress the irrational. Some of us have things inside us that cannot be explained, urges that boil continually in or out of our genetic soup. I had kept my gear packed and ready since Buzz and Fred found me on my river after Ingrid’s funeral. I did not look at it and never went into the room where it was stored, but I knew it was there and could feel its presence and spirit. The room had been like a mine waiting to be stepped on.
Raina went to the door. “If you stay, you’ll always wonder,” she said sharply. “The only regrets are for things not done.” She left the door open. Snow billowed in.
I had walked away from Ingrid without a word. This would be different. I wrote a note to Janey and the others and told them I had gone away to fish.
I pulled on my clothes and grabbed my gear and went out to Raina’s black truck. I stood in the snow beside the passenger window. She came around, took my gear, tossed it in the back, and I got in.
“I was sorry to hear about your wife,” she said.
“Just drive,” I said. I thought again about how I had left Ingrid and then lost her. Had that been my fault, some sort of divine retribution? Now I thought of Janey and my friends and felt a shudder, but I could not turn back. I had to do this.
•••
Snow swirled around us. There was little traffic. Raina stuck to back roads, which were icy and rutted. She drove fast, with one hand on the steering wheel, but she kept a sure and steady line.
“It’s real, you know.”
“If so, it would be better known.”
“One’s existence is not predicated on somebody else knowing it. There are millions of unknown species of insects that live and our not knowing about them does not change the fact.”
Of insects, of cats, of fish, I thought.
When we were children, Raina’s delicate features had reminded me of the porcelain dolls my mother collected. She was still beautiful, but in the dim light of the cab I saw that hard lines were forming. The light made her face into a mask.
“Do you know of Shoumatoff’s hairstreak?” She glanced at me.
“A new beauty aid?” I said laconically.
“It was discovered by a Russian in Jamaica in 1933. The locals, of course, already knew of them, but the butterfly was not officially found until science classified and named it. Before the Russian came, did it exist or not? Mankind imposes its order on nature, but that doesn’t mean the order is real.”
When we were children, Raina and I had lain in fields at night and watched for shooting stars and, when we saw one, we would give it a name. “Like our stars.”
“Which weren’t stars at all,” she said. “Hairstreaks have azure wings, which makes them distinctive. In nature bright or unique coloring usually points to a mating scheme, but hairstreaks mate by scent, not by color.” She looked over at me. “I confess, I still have your scent, have been able to recall it all my life. Can you still smell your wife?”
“No.”
“I don’t mean her soaps and perfumes. I mean her.”
I didn’t want to talk about Ingrid. Raina had always been adept at going directly to my innermost thoughts.
She said, “There’s an erudite psychologist in Australia who studies forms of ignorance. He talks about denial, meaning hurtful things that we will not allow ourselves to think about. Then there are taboos, all those things our tribes say are too dangerous for us to know. From there it gets gray. Tacit knowledge refers to all sorts of things that we know, but aren’t really aware of. Error is another level. These are the things we think we know, but don’t. Then there are known unknowns, all the things we know for sure that we don’t know, and finally, at the pinnacle of ignorance, the unknown unknowns, all the things we don’t know that we don’t know. Most of our ignorance resides there.”
“The snowfly?”
She smiled. “It’s real.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“No,” she said matter-of-factly. “Not in the way you mean.”
“Maybe you’re wrong.”
“‘The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it,’” she said, adding, “Nietzsche.”
She had always been an intellectual show-off. I countered, “Nietzsche also said, ‘Without beer, life would be a mistake.’ I’m thirsty.”
“You made that up.”
“Prove it,” I said. It felt almost like we were children again.
We stopped at a crossroads village at an establishment called the No-Moon-Saloon, a name open to several interpretations. The walls were covered with deer heads with glass eyes. The menu was a litany of high fat. Though technically in the Temperate Zone, our annual temperatures could swing through 170 degrees, whereas equatorial climates seldom varied 20 degrees in a year, these facts strong evidence of the weakness of labels. In the Temperate Zone ectomorphs have a low life expectancy. Up here you ate fat and died slow from accumulated arterial plaque or you ate sensibly and died young and thin, vehicular mayhem and bar brawls notwithstanding.
Raina ate deep-fried pork rinds, a burger with the works, onion rings, fries, and a wedge of chocolate silk pie, all of this washed down with two bottles of Strohs and three cups of coffee loaded with sugar and Pet milk from a can.
I sipped my beer and watched in amazement.
“I don’t eat breakfast,” she said by way of addressing my disbelieving stare.
I offered to drive.
“I do my own driving,” she said. “Get in.”
We eventually got to a village called Trout Creek and veered off on a two-track in the hump of a bend in the road and hustled down the narrow track, throwing white rooster tails. Branches whacked the sides an
d roof and we glanced off several small trees. I had a premonition of death.
“You get your license out of a Crackerjack box?”
“Same principle as life, keep moving or bog down,” she said, clearly enjoying herself.
We finally stopped at a cul-de-sac carved out of an area of tightly packed hemlocks.
We had no sooner come to a halt than she was out and strapping on her pack. I didn’t ask questions; I quickly collected my gear and followed her into the trees. She moved with the grace and speed of a pronghorn.
The river was fast, its flow broken by huge granite boulders. The water flowed heavily and fell over a series of steps to form frothy cataracts and an immense din that drowned all competing sounds. Raina stayed back from the river’s edge and trotted sure-footedly along the icy rocks. I followed as best I could.
I smelled wood smoke before we topped a low ridge. On top, under some cedars, there was a line of lean-tos and canvas tents.
Raina entered the camp without hesitation and headed directly to a large tent.
Red Beard and Val stood when we entered.
“So,” Val said. “It’s true.”
Raina beamed aloofly.
“We figured it was here,” Red Beard said. “Your presence is proof.”
Raina only smiled.
We ate and drank and talked. There was only one topic: A few white flies had been seen at several locations on the river. The tone was respectful and reverent and, as I listened, I understood that all of these men had walked away from whatever lives they once had to singularly pursue the same myth that had pulled me in starts and stops the better part of my life. I had leaned in and leaned out and only circled the fire, but they had stepped into the flames and had been consumed. Was this my future? It was a disconcerting thought.
We were given a small lean-to near the river. Balsam boughs were piled on the floor for insulation. A sheet of stiff canvas hung down the front as a door and flapped in the gusting wind. The roar of the nearby water was oddly soothing.
Raina unrolled a large sleeping bag.
I started to unroll mine.
She patted her bedroll. “Us,” she said. It was cold. Breath vapor hung in the air. Raina took off her clothes and slithered into the bag.
“Now you,” she said. “Keep your clothes on.”
When I slid in with her, I let my hand graze her buttocks and felt desire leap in me. She jerked in surprise, shifted away, and growled icily, “This is only for warmth.”
But I could still feel the warmth of her flesh in my hand.
•••
Raina and I slept for three hours before returning to the main tent.
The men had peculiar names. The man with the distinctive beard was Red Beard, for obvious reasons. Foot Long was a former butcher. Numbers had been a CPA. Wheelie had owned Ford dealerships in central Illinois. Silk was a retired army Green Beret. Test Tube had been a pharmacologist for Parke-Davis in Ann Arbor. Funnel had been the Today Show’s weatherman in the early 1960s. There were others as well, all with similar stories of previous lives in more or less normal jobs and careers, and Val, whom they called Comrade.
“I saw a pair two nights ago and six last night,” Test Tube informed the assembly.
Some had seen none, others had seen more, but there seemed to be general agreement that tonight there would be more white flies. Test Tube gave us a brief lecture on progressions and probabilities. His observations were crisp and clinical, his tone dispassionate. I thought it odd that a man so devoid of emotion would be so obsessed with something as soft as trout and hatches.
“How long you been doing this?” I asked him.
“Full time? Seventeen years. It only counts when it’s full time,” he said.
“You quit your job for this?”
Test Tube looked surprised. “Quit? Of course not. It’s more in the nature of a sabbatical. When this is done, I’ll go back.”
After seventeen years? I had heard once that the half life of a new postdoc was two years, meaning half of what he had learned in almost thirty years in school was obsolete in those twenty-four months. Did he really believe what he was telling me?
Red Beard had been “in,” as they put it, twenty-five years. Foot Long, twenty-one. Val was the newest of the group. I saw no sign of York Gentry and didn’t ask about him.
Together the men talked through their tactical plan. The river was the Mibra Onty. The watch would run from one a.m. until an hour or so after sunrise. I asked the reason for this timing and was ignored. Each of us would have an assigned stretch. If a sustained hatch came off, we were to signal the others. I understood: After years of failure on their own, the men had bonded together out of shared obsession and sheer desperation. The myth of strength in numbers.
Only Test Tube seemed calm. The others were restless, antsy, jacked up, and trying to contain their anxiety. They were like grunts setting up a night ambush, their nerves raw and exposed, plugged into the universe at an atomic level where there was only energy begging release.
Raina and I were assigned adjacent positions. I started to assemble my rod when we got to the river, but she stopped me.
“Don’t bother,” she said before she walked away.
I thought she was telling me to avoid stringing the rod until I needed it. I took my position above a long, flat slick.
The trick in winter fishing is to dress in layers under your waders and get into the water as quickly as you can. Extremities tend to freeze first, but if you’re dressed right the constant temperature of the water stabilizes the lower limit of cold for your lower body. Your upper torso still has to contend with windchill, but half of you is constant. I didn’t know what else to do. You take what edge you can get. In winter safety and comfort margins were shaved thin.
Only we didn’t get into the water and I felt the chill before my feet went numb. I was not insulated for standing on the bank in snow. I walked around stamping my feet, earning only a periodic and faint tingle, but the outcome was already decided. If I didn’t find a way to warm them, my feet would freeze. I gathered dead branches from under the trees and dug down through the snow to pine thatch and deeper yet to find dry material and nursed a small fire to life between some rocks and put my feet over the flames and withdrew into myself. I had met a grunt in Vietnam who said he would write a novel based on where his mind traveled when he was on guard duty. I wondered if he had lived to write his book.
Raina come down to my position after it was light. My back ached from the cold. I offered her a cigarette.
“Coffin nails,” she said. “I quit. I’ve got too much life left to live.”
Invincible as a child, she remained invincible as a woman.
The men had prepared a huge breakfast of sausages, eggs, and biscuits the weight of sinkers. I was starved, but Raina did not eat. Instead she drank several cups of black coffee. Afterward, the group dispersed. It had started to snow hard.
“I like this,” Raina said, catching flakes on her tongue.
We went back to our tent, burrowed into our bag, and slept again. The heat of her body ignited long-held lust in me, but I had to be content with the warmth our bodies created.
It snowed all day and the wind picked up and blew across the rift where the river cut through the hills. Trees rattled against each other, squealing under the assault, and Raina got out of her sleeping bag and pulled back the flap of the lean-to and stood naked in the face of the wind and looked over at me.
“Just what the doctor ordered,” she said.
•••
We met the others again after dark. The wind was hard out of the north and it was nearing a whiteout. There was no way to fish in such conditions.
The white fly count from the previous night was assembled. I reported no sightings. Raina reported at least two dozen and four rises. Had she gone after them? N
o, not time yet, she assured the others. This earned some discussion. Clearly, she was the expert and her words excited them. Flies had been seen above Raina’s position, but not below. Tonight all positions would be adjusted upriver. Raina and I would anchor the downstream boundary. I thought it likely we’d all freeze to death before the night was over.
“How are we supposed to see?” I asked them.
They all looked at me.
“White fly, whiteout. How do we see a hatch?” No response. “How do the fish see it? They can’t see a hatch in rain.”
As before, they ignored me and went back to talking among themselves. People with obsessions tend to ignore details that don’t fit their expectations.
“Eat big,” Raina whispered to me when food was ready.
We repaired to our shelters after the meal, walking past our own twice before we located it. I had to look at my feet to keep my eyes from freezing.
In the bag she turned her back to me. “Conserve energy,” she said. She was breathing evenly and asleep almost immediately.
Queen Anna had always told us that people who slept fast were either all good or all bad. Which was Raina?
“This is crazy,” I told her before we went out to our icy stations around midnight.
“Think of it as part of the allure,” she said.
“I still don’t understand how the fish can see a hatch in zero visibility. Or us see the fish.” Much less how a hatch could happen in such extreme weather.
She ignored my remarks. “Let’s go.”
I lasted only minutes beside the river, then gave up and climbed uphill into a grove of balsams and cut and piled branches to give me a mattress and air space for insulation. I curled up in the fetal position and slept in fits.
The Snowfly Page 53
