The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “I’ve never heard any of this.” I was astonished by the information, but retained a modicum of skepticism. Trout in Vietnam? I thought about the two Marines and their claims of unknown animals in the north. Perhaps war made people’s imaginations run amok.

  “I’m not the least surprised,” Gillian said. “But it is a matter of public record that the Poms and Krauts put their beloved trout everywhere they could. Our little River of Trout is no doubt the only place on the subcontinent that could sustain them, but sustain it has for a good long while now. And, I must say, our dear fish rise to a dressing as politely as one could ask.”

  I remembered Dickie Goodwin mentioning in Bangkok that his rubber plantation was near Da Lat. This was a resort area developed by the French at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was the place where Vietnamese royalty went to escape the heat of the lowlands. It was also rumored to serve as an in-country R&R center for combatants on all sides, and there was said to be tacit agreement by belligerants to leave it alone. So far, all sides had. The only military connection I knew of was that South Vietnam’s version of West Point was located in the area.

  She stood up, hooked her arm though mine, and made a pooch-face. “This geography conversation is becoming exceedingly boring, Bowie. Aren’t you glad to see me? Let’s have a sexploration of Gillian’s geography, shall we? I’ve come a long way in bloody awful heat and a nice fuck would settle me nicely. Yes?”

  “Does Dickie know you’re here?”

  “Not technically,” she said sheepishly. “Here, yes. With you, no. He said to check the spread and the spread’s in Vietnam. You’re also in Vietnam, which makes for a wonderful coincidence, yes?”

  The whole thing seemed ludicrous, but ludicrous was often the norm in Vietnam. We started undressing on the way to my bedroom.

  After making love frantically, we sat on my roof and smoked in the middle of the night. Saigon was never silent. Trucks with bad brakes wheezed through the streets. Horns honked. Military and civilian police sirens wailed plaintively. Motorcycles and Vespa scooters without mufflers roared up and down the streets, howling like wild animals. Formations of helicopters pounded overhead. The afterburners of departing F4 Phantoms rumbled in the distance as attack formations left Ton Son Nhut, the airfield that served military and civil aviation in Saigon. We heard the chuk-chuk of artillery batteries putting rounds out from the edges of the city—rounds leaving, not arriving, a good sign. The prevailing scent was tropical, all things rotting.

  “Like to pop over to the Trout for a look?” Gillian asked.

  “You bet. When do we go and how do we get there?” Getting around in the country was not easy unless you were connected to the military.

  She rested her head on my chest and chewed my left nipple. “Leave the details to Gillian, darling.”

  She had a driver deliver us to Ton Son Nhut early the next day. We were dropped at an unmarked Huey piloted by an Australian with a waxed handlebar mustache. He was busy with checklists and not introduced. There were two blond door gunners wearing Bermuda shorts, distressed green-and-yellow aviation helmets, and flak vests. Somebody had painted surf or die on the backs of the vests. The gunners were suspended from umbilicals that let them swing 180 degrees to get a good look at the ground below. Fortunately, there was no shooting en route. We flew more or less northeasterly out of the city, the prevailing terrain slowly gathering altitude as we got farther north. Eventually we began to pass over a series of rugged valleys, most with silvery ribbons of streams gleaming deep at the bottoms of them. The area was dotted with many small reflective lakes. About an hour into our journey the sun went away and we moved into islands of rain clouds with tattered bottoms and continued dodging our way north in limited visibility. This was an area I had never visited; there was very little action here.

  The scenery below was attractive, but I couldn’t see it that well through the rain and in any event, scenery no longer held any allure for me. At the heart of rich green beauty below was the ugliest of realities.

  The Goodwin “spread” amounted to twenty thousand acres on terraced ground ringing the Blue Flower Mountains. The house was a sprawling one-story affair with stucco walls painted a soothing turquoise with pale yellow shutters and awnings. The roof tiles were also yellow with some orange ones here and there. A lawn was manicured down to the river. There were wide stone paths along both banks. The river itself was wide, perhaps one hundred yards by the house, and gently riffled with vegetation undulating in the flow. Behind the house and across the river a mountain rose precipitously into mist. Above me I saw enormous outcrops of white and gray rock. The sides of the hills were packed with fragrant straight-trunked pine trees and the scene about as peaceful as I had seen in the war-torn country. A convoy of civilian trucks was gathered around the main house and several outbuildings, and dozens of Vietnamese men and women were loading them.

  I walked down to the river and watched several fish feeding among the riffles. Gillian was squatting Asian style on the lawn, engaged in an animated conversation with an old woman with an ancient double-barreled shotgun slung over her back. When the talking was done, Gillian joined me. The mist was thickening into a cool drizzle and I was cold, a first for Vietnam.

  “You speak the language?” I asked her.

  “Just pidgin really, a little Viet, a little French, a little mountain lingo. They’re Montagnards. Some of the families have been with the Trout since Oxley’s time. They’re hardworking and loyal. That’s Granny Rat,” Gillian said with a nod toward the woman she had been talking to. “She’s a tough old girl. The ’Yards love fresh rat and she’s the main provider for her tribe, which has a village up the mountain. Her shotgun shells are packed with rice, not shot. Doesn’t shred the meat so bad,” Gillian said with a grin. “Granny says that the North Vietnamese are gathered about eight kilometers up the valley. Fourteen tanks and several hundred men. Apparently they’ve been up there several days and seem to be waiting for something; Dickie was right, of course, but the ’Yards are taking care to remove things and we don’t need to concern ourselves with such matters at the moment. It’s just as well because we have our own things to do. Are you ready to cast feather bits on Asian waters?”

  I was curious about the enemy troops, but I had come with Gillian to fish and I had never been readier. All the gear was stored neatly in a stone hut with a thatched roof beside the river. There was no need for waders or hip boots; the riverbanks had been sculpted and shaped to accommodate dry-fly fishing and we had nets with six-foot-long handles. The drizzle intensfied as we selected and assembled bamboo rods.

  “How high are we?” I asked.

  “About sixteen hundred meters,” she said. It was easy to see why the hoi polloi used to flee up this way in the warm season down below.

  “English rules,” Gillian said, false-casting her rod to limber her arm. “One must present only to a rising fish. Upstream only. Dries, please. A fish in net must be killed.”

  “There’s no point in killing them.”

  “Sorry love, but tonight we will dine on my trout from my river. Perhaps for the last time,” she added, a bit teary. “Makes me feel crook and quite sad.”

  Her casts were more accurate than mine and I saw that she mended automatically and effortlessly to give her fly long drag-free drifts. We were using small orange-and-red attractors, flies she called Hens.

  Rarely did ten minutes pass without a fish on, but at least half of them fought their way free by breaking off the tippets on sharp-edged green rocks in the river.

  At our latitude, and with so many mountains around us, there was little twilight. The sun set with a sort of no-notice, perfunctory plop. By dark we had ten fish and the surrounding forests were alive with the screams of insects, birds, and monkeys.

  Gillian cooked the two largest trout over coals with bacon and fresh lemon slices. We had a chilled Sancerre with the fish and, afterwa
rd, a sweet yellow fruit in thick clotted cream and syrup.

  We did not talk a lot. Gillian was pensive and sad. It was downright cold after darkness came. The servants (I assumed they were servants) made a fire in a bedroom that looked down on the river. We made love on a mat in front of the fireplace; Gillian was usually in a hurry, but this time she took her time and seemed to make the moment last and, afterward, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  I rolled around restlessly, couldn’t sleep, and finally got up. I tried to get Gillian to move into the bed, but she sleepily waved me away and muttered, “Bugger off, Yank.”

  I found a light blanket and covered her. I needed to stretch tight muscles and I was curious about the Trout House.

  There were several lanterns hissing in the house; outside, the drizzle had melted into a thick night fog that diffused the light and made it shimmer. The house was filled with shadows.

  There was a study off the bedroom and a lantern in one corner that cast a golden glow through the room. Two walls of the study had books on shelves made of a fragrant, shiny wood that smelled of incense. The shelves were packed with books and I perused them halfheartedly until I discovered one entire shelf lined with books on angling and trout flies. I couldn’t resist.

  I began to reach for a book but stopped myself. These were ancient tomes, with faded bindings, some of them in leather. Many had no titles on the spines, and some of the books lay on their backs rather than standing upright. One section of a bookcase was built into cubicles into which the books fit. Custom-made, I decided, with each book measured by the carpenter. I had never seen anything like it and, after getting up my courage and hoping I was not transgressing, I began to pick up the books and look at them. It was hard to believe. The titles were in modern English, Old English (maybe it was Middle English; I had never been able to distinguish the two), French, Latin, Greek, and other languages I couldn’t recognize because of the strange and antiquated type fonts. Reliquiae Antiquiae, 1845. Livre de Chasse. The Book of St. Albans, whose faded date read MCDXCVI, or 1496. Could it be I was holding a book created only four years after Columbus blundered into the Americas? My heart was pounding. The miracle of old books had always fascinated me, how knowledge could be imparted over centuries. I next picked up A Booke of Fishing with Hooke and Line. It was dated 1590 and in fragile condition, and I carefully replaced it after examining the flyleaf. There were also editions of Ovid, Pliny, Socrates, Thoreau, and Shakespeare.

  Trouting on the Brule River, 1880. Driffield Angler, 1890. The Fly-Fisher’s Entomology, 1836. W. J. Turrell, Ancient Angling Authors, 1910. Hills’s A History of Fly Fishing for Trout, 1920. The books all seemed to be original printings, first editions. I had never seen a collection like this, never imagined such a thing existed. I was fascinated.

  Then I saw M. J. Key’s books and I felt a strange light settle around me like a caul. M. J. Key: From Lloyd Nash’s study in East Lansing to a coffee plantation in Vietnam. It was unreal. I pulled the two volumes out of their places and set them on a table. The room had a stone floor with thick reed mats and a huge divan made of rattan and covered with thick cushions. I wished for an electric light but knew there was no hope for this. I went back to the shelves.

  Several minutes later my hand settled on a manuscript that had been inserted between two hard leather slabs. It had once been bound by string, but that had broken.

  I lifted the leather cover and read the title. It was typewritten. The Legend of the Snowfly. The author was M. J. Key. There was no date. I felt a catch in my throat. Key? Something by Key never published? About the snowfly. My hand trembled and my heart raced as I stared at the title. I lay the book gently on the table and started to carefully lift the title page, but it was brittle and I did not want to damage it. Not now, not at the moment when a dream was within reach. How could I do this safely?

  Before I could decide, an explosion shattered the windows in the study and rocked the foundations of the house; I stumbled into the other room to find a dusty, angry, and disoriented Gillian on the floor, tangled in the blanket I had put over her.

  “Bloody fucking savages,” Gillian cursed, hacking and coughing to clear her lungs as she clawed frantically at the blanket.

  I freed her, hoisted her to her feet, and tried to brush her off. “Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not ready to go,” she said. “It’s my night. Ours. Bloody bastards can’t just walk in and take over.”

  Another explosion rattled the walls. Bits of stone zinged around like angry wasps. More explosives popped outside and I heard several incoming artillery rounds strike close. “There’s no choice,” I said. “We have to get out now!” The distinct sharp crackling of AK-47s peeled in the distance.

  “There’s always a choice, darling,” Gillian said calmly.

  She was wrong. “Not this time.”

  Another round hit near us, knocking a wall down and filling the room with a nearly impenetrable cloud of gray plaster dust and flames.

  Gillian looked at me with tears in her eyes. “Well, we did try to do it right, didn’t we?”

  I slid my arm around her waist and moved her along. “Yes, we did.”

  We hurriedly stuffed our feet into our boots and fled the burning house carrying our clothes. As we passed the study, I stopped. The room was an inferno and in it I saw faces of fear and laughter, faces I thought were mocking me. The Key manuscript and all those wonderful books would soon be ashes and lost forever. Gillian jerked me by the arm and we made our way out of the burning house to the chopper, whose rotor was screaming.

  We clambered aboard and Gillian shouted, “Eddie, give us a spin over the old place!” The helicopter leapt off the ground. The pilot bent the Huey in a tight, ascending turn to the north, then veered back south.

  Both door gunners shot white flares into the darkness. I watched them ignite and sputter as they floated earthward under tiny parachutes.

  I saw a dozen tanks fording the river adjacent to the Trout House. Hundreds of infantrymen were wading resolutely across shallow riffles in the wakes of the tanks. There were sparkling star-shaped muzzle flashes from the river and the area around the house. I wondered about the servants, Montagnards, and other people I had seen loading vehicles when we arrived. I could only conclude that what I was seeing was the start of a major military operation, perhaps even the major uprising feared so long in Saigon and Washington, D.C.

  “Throw them some candy?” one of the door gunners shouted.

  Gillian answered angrily, “Bloody fucking right! Give it to the bastards!”

  Ejected brass cartridges rattled around the belly as the gunners strafed troops caught in the shallow river. The cool night air raced through the open bay and I smelled gunpowder and aviation fuel and my own sweat.

  I begged a drop-off at an artillery camp about twelve miles south of the Trout House. My gut told me that the enemy action was huge and I wanted desperately to file a story and beat the competition. The Huey bumped the ground hard. Gillian kissed me quickly and pushed me away.

  “Bloody fools, you men,” she shouted before the helicopter smothered her voice and climbed away.

  The firebase was built on a treeless ridge and surrounded by wire, fire pits, and bunkers that stretched along the spine as far as I could see.

  “Who the fuck’re you?” a sergeant asked. His M-16 was pointed at my head.

  “Rhodes, UPI. Get on your radio. NVA tanks are crossing the River of Trout.”

  “The River what?”

  “Get me a map.”

  He looked at me with bulging eyes. “Man, you might want to holster your Johnson.”

  Only then did I realize I had on my boots and nothing else. In other circumstances, it might have been funny.

  •••

  It was several hours after I was dropped at Camp Gates before there was an attack, but once it bega
n, it was brutal and the camp took a terrible pounding. I had no way to call in a story, and it didn’t take long for me to forget about journalism and concentrate on staying alive.

  A Russian tank fired at the camp and the camp fired back. A light colonel shouted frantically into a PRC radio, “Get that tank, get that tank!” It became his mantra.

  I couldn’t separate the tank’s gun from other incoming rounds, but I sensed waves of violence. First came heavy incoming, followed by a pause, then even heavier outgoing. I had no doubt that the North Vietnamese had us zeroed in, and I suspected our outgoing fire was mostly guesswork and helter-skelter in its effect. The ground around me shook like a continuous earthquake, raising a huge cloud of dust in the bunker where I took cover. Outside it was like a fireworks display on an unlimited budget. A lethal show.

  Shrapnel sometimes whizzed by the opening to the bunker and smacked dully into things outside.

  The dust inside was so thick that I soaked a kerchief and held it over my nose and mouth to keep from choking. I crawled cautiously outside during one of the brief lulls between artillery exchanges and made my way over to a pair of troopers in a slit trench firing an M-60 at the treeless rim of a clearing slightly downhill of us. I watched spouts of dirt erupt under the machine gun’s steady pounding. The ammo feeder’s face was red with dust and sweat and he had loud hiccups that sounded like mortar rounds going out.

  I never saw anybody get hit, but I saw the results. A soldier farther down in the slit trench was holding his left arm in his right hand. The left arm was no longer attached and he looked puzzled more than hurt. I had seen enough wounded during the war to recognize shock.

  Journalists pride themselves stupidly on their professional neutrality. We’re supposed to be dispassionate observers and seekers of facts that lead to the truth, not participants. I heard my voice yelling, “Medic! Get me a fucking medic!”