The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

Raina was suddenly there beside me, a ghost poking at me. It was still dark and snowing hard, the wind roaring through the trees like an oncoming locomotive. “Time to go,” she said, shouting to be heard over the wind.

  “Is there a hatch?” I looked around. “It’s not light yet. What about the hatch?”

  She plopped my pack beside me and yelled, “I’m going. You do what you want.”

  I grabbed my gear and followed her though the drifting snow. We immediately left the river and veered into the forest. When I caught up to her, she gave me the end of a nylon cord.

  “Wrap it around your wrist.” To be heard, she had to put her mouth against my ear and shout. Her breath was hot against my freezing skin. I was too tired and numb to resist. I did as she said and followed like her prisoner. We were tied to each other by shared insanity. Or something. There is no way to describe the effect of a whiteout. Eyes and ears die. Your inner compass spins endlessly, unable to fix. My whole world was in my wrist. Raina led and I followed, the same as it had been when we were children. Queen Anna would scold me: “That girl would tell you to jump off the roof and you’d do it.” I stood mute in the face of such charges. It was true: I had always been mesmerized by Raina. I had no idea how she could see, much less maintain a particular direction. Or keep the pace. I had no choice but to cling desperately to the umbilical.

  I was certain we were going to die, but we didn’t. Once again Raina brought us through.

  In her truck the heater fans blasted us. I was semiconscious. Her headlights made circles in the wall of blowing snow ahead of us. Watching made me dizzy. When I closed my eyes, I slept.

  •••

  It was still snowing hard at daybreak, but the wind had died down. We were nosing our way along a narrow two-track, plowing through drifts. The snow fell straight down.

  “Where are we?”

  She didn’t bother to look at me.

  She got out of the truck and ran up the road and out of sight. The wipers loudly flicked back and forth, leaving slushy arcs. When she came back, Raina jerked open the door and said we should go.

  “It’s warm right here.”

  She glared at me. “I’m not going to tell you twice.”

  “You like getting your way,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I insist on it.”

  I walked stiff-legged up the drifted lane behind her. The sky was beginning to lighten. We came to a trailer with an unpainted plywood entry shed attached. Somebody had nailed a board to the vestibule and painted maniac manor on it. The trailer’s interior was cool, but there were space heaters clicking busily and the edge was coming off the air quickly.

  “Nice place you’ve got.”

  “It’s not mine,” she said. “Let’s sleep. We’ll worry about food later.”

  “Not yours?”

  “We’re borrowing it,” she said. “Forest Samaritan Rule.”

  I thought for a moment. “You mean we’re breaking in.”

  “You’re the wordsmith,” she said. “I need sleep.”

  She threw her sleeping bag on a double bed. When I started to get on the bed with her, she squeezed down the opening to the bag. We were standing next to each other.

  “I sleep alone,” she declared.

  “What about the other nights?”

  “Different place, different rules.”

  There was the sharp edge to her voice that Punky’s used to have, only now the edge was like a razor. I had always backed down when we were children. Not this time.

  “We abandoned the others at the river.”

  She looked at me and yawned. “We all choose to be where we are.”

  “We just left them there.”

  “There’s no rule against that.”

  “The big hatch isn’t going to be there, is it? You didn’t see any flies, did you?”

  “There were a few,” she said. “There are some on most rivers this year.”

  “You deliberately misled them,” I said.

  “You figured it out,” she said, turning her back on me as she undressed.

  “They could die out there!”

  I was tired, disgusted, dumbfounded, and sick of her lies. I grabbed her and spun her around. She fought to get loose and we fell onto the bed. My hands wrapped around her throat.

  “Goddamn you!” I screamed at her.

  Her eyes locked on me as she began to gasp for air. I wanted to hurt her. She had driven me to this.

  “Key’s manuscript,” I said, trying to regain my composure. “Why did you have to have it?”

  “It was my father’s work. It was supposed to be published, but the OSS stopped it because they feared it would somehow get linked to what my father was doing from Germany. The OSS killed it and they got what they thought was the only manuscript, but a copy got made and ended up in England. They belonged to my father,” she said angrily. “To me.”

  “Two copies,” I said. “I found one and you got the other. What’s in the manuscript?”

  “Not codes,” she said. “No government secrets.” She flopped in the other direction, and was immediately asleep.

  I knew she was lying about the manuscript. There might be no government secrets in the document, but I knew that it contained something about the snowfly that she was determined to keep from the world, and to herself. This was the Raina I had always known, interested only in herself and using everyone for her own purposes. I lay down on the other bed and fell into a troubled sleep.

  I had a strange dream. Three angry, bearded men were pointing deer rifles at me. I opened my eyes. It was not a dream but a bone-chilling version of reality.

  “Look what I found sleeping in my bed,” one of them said. I used my eyes to search for Raina. Her bed was empty, her things gone. She had misled the group and, now, she had bailed on me. Goddamn her! I kept thinking, “Maniac Manor.” This was not the moment for histrionics.

  “Forest Samaritan Rule,” I said, groping for something, anything.

  “What the fuck is he talkin’ about?” one of the men asked.

  I said, “People in dire trouble have the legal right to use any cabin they need. It’s law.”

  “Only law here is what I say it is,” the first man said. He thrust the rifle forward for emphasis.

  “Failure to comply is two years in jail, twenty thousand dollars, and confiscation of the property. Ignorance of the law is not a legal defense.” I was desperate. Bullshit against a gun feels absurdly inadequate.

  The man took aim. “Fuck your law,” he said. “This is my place.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Wait, Harry.” Another voice. “He ain’t done no harm. Maybe he’s tellin’ the truth.”

  “You shoot him, Harry, and I’m tellin’ the cops.” Another voice of reason.

  I opened my eyes.

  “I can’t have jerk-offs takin’ over my camp.”

  “I was just using it,” I said. “I was freezing.”

  Two of the men pointed their rifle barrels at the floor.

  “Let him get dressed and get out. We came to hunt, not fuck with cops.”

  I said, “Sorry, Harry. If you were me, what would you have done?”

  The one called Harry had a thick black beard and shaggy gray hair. “I sure as hell wouldn’t be walkin’ the boonies in a blizzard.”

  “Leave him be,” one of Harry’s companions said.

  Harry lowered his rifle. “Get your shit and get out.”

  There was only one set of tire tracks in the lane, and they attached to the hunters’ green pickup truck, which meant Raina had been gone a while. When I got out to the road I turned east, glad to be free and full of rage, Raina’s sucker again. She had spun such a tale about her parents that now I wondered what was real and what was not.

  I walked a long time before I m
anaged to hitch a ride to town. I had a lot of time to think. Gus Chickerman didn’t want the manuscript. If it had been that sensitive, the government would not only have stopped the project but also confiscated the materials, the original, and all copies. I doubted even that Gus had written it. It seemed more likely to have come from the pen of the original M. J. Key, somehow ending up briefly in Gus’s hands. Why, I had no idea, but I was certain Raina wanted it for one reason: She was addicted to the snowfly and determined to do what her father had once done. If she had the secret, she wanted to keep it to herself. I thought of the huge fish at Sturdivant’s. And just as Gus had misled Sturdivant, Raina was misleading everyone, me included. The mysteries surrounding the manuscript would have to wait. Raina was not going to beat me. I found a telephone and called Fred Ciz.

  “Where are you?”

  “Sidnaw.”

  “It’s going to take me some time to get all the way over there. Are you all right?”

  “Time is only the arithmetic expression of position in the space-time continuum.”

  “Stay inside,” he said. “It sounds like your brain’s froze.”

  24

  During World War II, there had been a camp near the village of Sidnaw housing thousands of Nazi POWs. A handmade sign on the door of the town’s only restaurant proclaimed whitetails for jesus/we make our own pasties and krauts. I did not seek an explanation; we are not intended to understand some things. I had a “special breakfast pasty,” which tasted like every other pasty I’d ever eaten: dry and bland. Cornish miners had warmed their pasties on shovel blades. Almost all the mines in the U.P. had gone belly-up. The miners and their shovels were gone; only pasties remained. Pasties and me. Raina was gone, too. White flies remained a jump ball.

  Why had Raina come to me this time? This time was neither accident nor coincidence. She had intentionally sought me out and knew about Ingrid. She had been keeping track of me and she had come to get me, not because she wanted me with her. For years she had blocked my way. Maybe Gus had helped her. There was no way to tell on that count. She had misled Val and the others, then gone out of her way to get me out of her way. Why?

  As a child, the Raina I felt I knew did everything with a purpose.

  I had a good idea what she intended. If I was here, I couldn’t be ­elsewhere. Raina wanted the snowflies to herself. There was no other ­conclusion.

  “This is the year,” she had said in Grand Marais.

  There had been a few snowflies on the Mibra Onty, but there would be no hatch. “A few on most rivers this year,” she’d said.

  Not on the upper reaches of the Lesser Trout.

  Nor on the Dog. Sturdivant was sure it would be there this year, but he had been duped by Gus. Like father, like daughter, I guessed. Sturdivant was headed for more disappointment.

  When we were kids Punky could outperform us all, but she always begged for a head start, an edge. Not from a dearth of confidence. Rather, as insurance. She played all angles.

  We are who we are after a certain point in life, which is more or less how the Jesuits viewed it. Raina was evidence. What had she asked me? Had I ever gone all the way in anything?

  She had seized me on the No Trout. Her captive. The others had been unhappy with her, meaning my capture had been her idea. Again, I had to ask why. What exactly was she up to? Head start? Misdirection? Getting to know the competition was more likely. Sizing me up, taking my measure.

  The Mibra Onty was near the Wisconsin border.

  Wanted an edge. Me, out of the way.

  As kids it had been Punky and me, neck and neck in love and competition. I had only twice beaten her at anything, getting the senior writing award and beating her in the fourth-grade spelling bee, and after that she had not talked to me for a month. We had always been in competition, but outcomes had always seemed more important to her than to me.

  She had come after my old man’s funeral, seen me, and gone. Why?

  Had ignored the death of her parents. Some absences are easier to explain than others. I couldn’t get it out of my mind that she had set the fire that killed her parents; she said only that it was what her parents wanted. They were dying. What a terrible decision to face. I felt sorry for Raina. And I was beginning to loathe her.

  The Soviets read Izvestia, which means “truth,” of which it was largely devoid in the standard sense. The real truth was in what was not written. A captain I’d met in Vietnam had told me the best read on the enemy is where they didn’t seem to be.

  What was between Raina’s lines?

  She liked to have the biggest advantage she could manage. She thought she knew where the snowfly would hatch and wanted me as far away as possible. She had been in the U.P. for months, Fox, No Trout, Mibra Onty. Putting down her scent? All in the U.P.

  Then it hit me. She had steered entirely clear of the Lower Peninsula and the best trout fishing was there, not here. Always had been.

  None of this was an accident.

  •••

  Fred arrived late that afternoon. I borrowed some money from him, got change, called information, got a number in East Lansing, and made the call. When I hung up I told him we needed to get back to Grand Marais to get my car.

  “We found the door standing open, you gone, and only a note. Janey was worried, Bowie. We all were.”

  “It couldn’t be helped,” I said. My stomach churned. I did not want to hurt Janey, but this had to finish. I wanted it over, once and for all. And I had to hurry.

  The sky was clearing when we reached the coast of Lake Superior. The snow and lights made Grand Marais look like a storybook village.

  “Where are you going?” Fred Ciz asked.

  “All the way,” I said.

  •••

  Lloyd Nash had introduced me to M. J. Key’s work. Key-Chickerman, former agricultural college professor. It had been Nash I called long distance from Sidnaw.

  “M. J. Key,” I said to him.

  “You can’t be him.”

  Nash was shouting like he had gone hard of hearing. “This is Bowie Rhodes. White flies, remember?”

  “Which Bowie Rhodes?”

  “How many have you known?”

  “I don’t like telephones,” he shouted.

  “I cleaned the specimen room.”

  “And did a damn lousy job,” he said. “It was still a hopeless mess the last time I saw it.”

  “Professor, where was M. J. Key from?”

  “In what context?”

  “Where was he born?”

  “I don’t know when.”

  “Where, not when,” I shouted.

  “Stop Thirty-Six,” he bellowed. “Are you deaf?”

  One of us was. “Where’s that?”

  “Upstate, on the railroad.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Beulah Reddiger is from Cat’s Breath, Indiana.”

  An unexpected tight turn in an enfeebled brain. Who the hell was Beulah Reddiger?

  “What’s that got to do with Stop Thirty-Six?”

  “Cat’s Breath, Stop Thirty-Six, you don’t forget names like that. There’s no file in the brain to lose them in. Tend to stick and stand on their own, even when the memory turns to mush. Are you with the bank?”

  “Thanks,” I said. Poor Nash.

  What had Raina said? That I had gone to a lot of trouble to learn something I should have known on my own. I stopped at the library in Gaylord on the way south in the morning and checked old maps of the region. The answer had been literally out my back door, which maybe explained all the drownings above the house. Stop Thirty-Six was subsequently named Whirling Creek and then Pinkville. I had never known. There all the time. Born on it, to it, with it, ignorant of it. The real Key had been born there. That’s why Chickerman settled there. For the snowfly, which he had learned about from his
friend Key. Raina said Key was American. I had always assumed he was English. He went to Europe all the time. Something I should have known on my own, Raina had said repeatedly. Whirling Creek had been home, an extension of my existence, home ground, my spawning waters, the crucible where the old man and Queen Anna had shaped my sister and me.

  But Raina was not up the creek. Instead, there was a small Airstream parked on the flats between where my old house had been and where the floater had hung up on the rocks.

  Gus had come to Whirling Creek for a reason, because it had been Key’s home water and Key had written about the snowfly. It had to be this way. Only this scenario made sense. Roger Ranger had seen Gus Chickerman prowling upper Whirling Creek in the dark. The answers were in the past and closer to the present than I ever imagined. Every fisherman had his home water, the place he knew best, the place where secrets unfolded under constant vigilance.

  Whirling Creek had been M. J. Key’s home water, Gus Chickerman’s, Raina’s, mine.

  I wanted to shout at her, “I’ve figured it out and I’m still dogging your ass!”

  •••

  City and country clans alike have little sense of the night skies overhead, one because it’s obscured by too much light, the other because there’s too much there to comprehend. It was one of those nights that could shrink you into nothing if you looked up too long. Relativity as leveler: I doubt Einstein had this in mind with his theoretical tinkerings.

  I was warmed by anticipation. Too often we end up in places without purpose. In Song Lai I had asked a Marine how he felt about where he was. “Everybody’s gotta be somewhere,” he said.

  I built a primitive shelter in the woods and watched the trailer for two days. Raina stayed mostly in her Airstream. Several times each day she came out, walked to the river, and stood there with her arms crossed. Each time she stomped back and slammed the door. She was visibly perturbed. Each slam reverberated like a rifle report.

  Before Queen Anna died she got clear headed. “Those fish he put back all those years,” she whispered to Lilly. “Someday they’ll get big.” Prescience?