The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  At thirty-two Lilly looked barely out of her teens unless you looked into her eyes; being married to a cop and trying to raise three young children was no picnic.

  “I’d kill for your tan,” Lilly said.

  You could get killed for my tan, I thought. “How’s Dad?”

  She shook her head. Her eyes were dry. “They wanted to keep him in Traverse City, to treat the pain, but you know how he is.”

  Lilly gave me the medical details as we drove home. Our father’s cancer was inoperable, which meant terminal unless a miracle happened. It rarely did in such cases. Not too many years later impending deaths would be described in much more refined detail and this would be hailed as progress. I did not ask how long he had to live. In the war I had seen doctors succeed and call it skill, and fail and discard it as bad luck. Ballyhooed advances aside, the practice of medicine remained largely a crapshoot.

  The house looked larger without my mother filling the space. The old man was splitting wood outside. He paused to glance at me and went back to work.

  At dinner he hardly ate. His face was drawn. “Returned for the wake, I see.”

  “A bit early, I’d say.”

  He grinned and nodded. “Staying long?”

  “Thought I’d take it a day at a time.”

  “Only way it can be. I’m glad you’re home from that mess.”

  The old man refused pain medication and went about dying the way he went about living, one thing at a time and when everything was done save dying, he did that.

  I had been home nearly three months. Lilly had gone back to Alpena with her children. Her husband, Roger Ranger, had moved up in the world and was a trooper in the Michigan State Police, an agency well known for taking only the best. The old man and I settled into a routine. He chopped wood most mornings, but one morning I heard only silence. Cutting wood, I knew, was his way of showing that he would not knuckle under to the disease, but some mornings he could hardly move and it was rare when he split more than a few small logs. I found him by the woodpile, sitting on a stump. It was snowing and his face was blue.

  “Dad?”

  His eyes flickered.

  “You need to get inside, Dad.”

  “I’m fine right here,” he said in a barely audible voice.

  I squatted beside him and we looked down on Whirling Creek.

  “Burn the house when I’m gone,” he said. “Only the land has value. And no reading from your mother’s Good Book.”

  I didn’t offer supportive words. There was no point and I didn’t know how.

  “You never listened,” he said in a mildly scolding tone. “You went up the creek.”

  “No, Dad.” It was his one rule that I had never broken.

  “Your life is going up the creek,” he said. “I always admired that and feared it too.”

  “I love you, Dad.”

  His hand touched my shoulder. I could not draw a breath. And he drew his last.

  We buried my father beside Queen Anna. I could imagine her demanding to know where he had been and him shuffling his feet. They had had their differences, which came and went, but they had also had love, I supposed, from start to finish. I wondered if I would ever be so lucky.

  All the neighbors came to the funeral, including Gus and Ruby Chickerman. All of the visitors hauled food for the customary potluck and many of them spoke fondly of my dad and none of them used the Bible. Father Luke was there and said my father had had his own ways, but was a man to be counted on when it mattered.

  After the funeral, I returned to the house. Lilly and Roger took what they wanted and after they left, I burned the place. The house had been my parents’ creation and now they were gone. I thought I understood my father’s reasoning. It did not deserve to outlive them.

  I stood by Whirling Creek and watched the flames.

  A dark-haired woman appeared nearby. “Bowie,” she said. “Your father was a wonderful man.”

  Raina Chickerman had grown even more beautiful. “I was too late for the funeral,” she said. “I am really sorry, Bowie. You’re all alone now.”

  I don’t know why, but I didn’t want her pity. “I still have Lilly.”

  Raina smiled the way she smiled when we were kids. It meant I was nitpicking and she would not descend to my level.

  “How are you?” I asked. I had a million questions but all that I managed was, “What’re you doing these days?”

  “Living life the best I can.”

  “The most or the best?” I asked.

  “It’s the same thing, Bowie. You should know that, running off to a war. I’d say senseless or stupid war, but that would be redundant.” She tilted her head slightly. She was as arrogant as ever. “What will you do now?” she asked.

  “Go up the creek,” I said.

  “Don’t forget your paddle,” she said with the hint of a smile.

  A crash of collapsing timbers from the fire caught my attention and I turned to make sure it wasn’t getting out of control. I wanted to talk to her, get to know her again, but when I turned back she was walking with her purposeful stride into the forest near the creek and although I tried to follow, I did not catch up and could not find her. Had she really been there?

  In some ways I was more disturbed by her departure than by my father’s death. There had been no choice for him and I had resigned myself to his passing, but I had never dealt with my feelings for Raina and how we had drifted apart. Standing there by the roaring fire I realized I had always loved her and I mourned my losses, all of them at once.

  7

  Grady Yetter was waiting for me in the dimly lit La Guardia terminal. My father had passed away in mid-November and I’d spent Thanksgiving with Lilly, Roger, and their kids, but I needed to get back to work and I wanted time and space alone to mourn my father. Northern Ireland seemed just far enough away. I had called Yetter and he asked me to come to New York. I shouldered my way through the crowd in the narrow brown hallways and found him leaning against a wall of dented, gray public lockers, reading the Daily News, which he had meticulously folded vertically into two-column sections. Yetter was an inveterate reader with an unerring nose for news in the form of emerging hot spots; he was called Spook behind his back at UPI, and so accurate were his predictions that it was not uncommon for employees to wonder out loud if he was on the CIA’s payroll.

  Grady’s other gift lay in his ability to recognize talent for UPI’s insatiable human pipeline. Wire service work burned out reporters fast, which made turnover a perennial problem. It was Grady’s job to find new blood for UPI and to pick places and situations about to emerge as newsworthy. Some bureau chiefs saw Yetter as a meddler in their domains, but the company brass had him pegged as their chief talent scout, and as long as he kept producing they would keep listening to him.

  Nobody talked about mentors in those days, but I felt like Yetter was my personal booster at UPI and, for reasons I could not understand, I was his anointed protégé.

  “Have you had that suit cleaned since the last time I saw you?”

  He lowered his paper and squinted at me. “How long’s it been? More’n two years? I probably had it cleaned at least once since then.” He carefully folded the paper into a small square and extended his hand. “You did a damn fine job,” he said.

  “Too many of my stories got spiked in Manila.”

  Yetter grimmaced. “It’s just politics, kid. You can’t take the bullshit personally. Your job is to get the story and get it down as good as you can. Everybody has a boss, even the free press. This country wasn’t ready for reality, but they’re getting hit right in the kisser with a shitpot-full now. You wanna grab something to eat?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I do,” he said. I followed him outside the terminal to a hot dog vendor with a battered pushcart. Grady had two greenish franks slathered with p
ale brown mustard and seared blue-gray onions dredged out of grimy, tarnished metal boxes. I had rancid black coffee. Light snow fluttered around us, like spinners falling back to the river, their cycle complete. I remembered something Lloyd Nash had told me. “Bugs are born to die,” he said. “Just like people, only faster.”

  “Sorry about your father,” Yetter said, interrupting my reverie.

  Cabs were lined up. Horns honked. The air was filled with a haze of blue exhaust. People shouted angrily at each other in several languages. Aircraft departed in the background, their engines roaring as they lifted off the ground.

  With his mouth full, Grady said, “There’s a story going around that you burned down your house with your old man’s body inside. People think you’re crazy.” He glanced at me for a reaction. “The way I see it, crazy’s an asset in this racket.”

  “There wasn’t anyone in the house.”

  “Which says you torched it.”

  “Yeah. It’s what my old man wanted.”

  He picked at a piece of food caught between his upper lip and gum. “Is this like some sort of Indian thing?”

  Yetter was one of those New Yorkers who looked upon the Midwest as still being populated by savages. “Something like that.”

  “You like basketball?” he asked between mouthfuls.

  “No.”

  Yetter grunted. “Contrary prick, aren’t you? Sure you do. You scored seventy-six points in a high school game. You were first-team all-state two years in Class D.”

  “You’ve been snooping.”

  “That’s what they pay me for, pal.”

  “I just played to attract the girls.”

  “Guy scores seventy-six points in a game ain’t ambivalent about the game. B-ball get you a lot of cooz?”

  “Some,” I said. Which was a lie, of course, but in the male world, such lies are permissible.

  “I was never a jock,” Yetter said. “I had to work for ginch my whole life. Still do. Hookers are more efficient. You pay, you do, you move on.”

  We took a cab into Manhattan.

  Crossing the Tri-Borough Bridge, I asked him, “Why Northern Ireland?”

  “Because I think there’s a helluva storm brewing up there,” he said, with his voice tapering off, “only you’re going to London.”

  “London?” This was a surprise and I noticed that he avoided my eyes. There was a gob of mustard at the corner of his mouth.

  “Yeah, there was a real nasty debate about what to do with you. Your story on the hospital ship yanked a lot of political chains. And this thing about burning your old man’s house down doesn’t help. What I’ve never understood is how you got out to that damn ship in the first place.”

  “I told them I wanted to do a story on how surgical practice jumps ahead during wartime.”

  He looked at me with what I took to be admiration. “Tell them what they want to hear,” he said, flashing a grin and nodding supportively. “Misdirection is the cardinal rule of investigation. Smart. Point one way, go another. Just like a fake in basketball.”

  He made it sound Machiavellian. “Why London?” I asked again.

  “It’s a great assignment, lots of good stuff happening. You know, youth movement and that bug band?”

  “The Beatles?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, grinning at his own lame joke. “You’re gonna cover cultural changes and that includes the peace movement.”

  “In England?”

  “Right.”

  “What happened to Northern Ireland?”

  He said animatedly, “Hey look, we’re at your hotel and I gotta run. We’ll talk tonight.”

  The hotel was the Tudor on Forty-Second Street, a few blocks west of UPI’s offices. It was seedy by city standards and palatial in a Vietnam context. My room was in back, away from the boisterous street.

  I had agreed to meet Yetter at Madison Square Garden for the Knicks-Celtics game that night, which gave me the better part of the afternoon alone. I was glad for the time. After the River of Trout, Key’s manuscript and the story the two crazy Marines had told me, my curiosity about the snowfly had grown into a hunger; I was like a famished trout rising to a hatch after an endless, barren winter. I needed to find out more about the snowfly and to do that, I needed to know more about M. J. Key.

  It was a cold, blustery day and the acrid stench of garbage wafted down brick and stone canyons, but it smelled positively civilized compared to what I had experienced the past two years.

  The New York City Public Library was a landmark, reputed to have a collection that surpassed many major universities. Unfortunately, it was closed. With dozens of other people, I sat on the steps in a brief respite of sunlight and smoked. A woman examined me carefully before sitting down nearby. She wore a full-length charcoal gray car coat and black wool scarf tied under her chin in a nondescript knot. After so many years of fishing with flies I paid attention to knots and it occurred to me that noticing the knot on a woman’s scarf before looking at the woman wearing it was not a particularly healthy sign. She opened a sandwich wrapped in reddish brown butcher paper.

  “Come here often?” she asked.

  She had a soft, friendly voice. “Just today, but it’s closed.”

  “It’ll be open tomorrow. You can come back then.”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be here. It’s one of those now-or-never things.”

  She smiled. “Passing through?”

  “More or less.”

  “Ah,” she said, “ a man of mystery.” She flashed a toothy smile between bites of her overstuffed sandwich.

  I smiled back, wondering if we had entered some sort of negotiation. I had to remind myself that I was no longer in Asia, where there were no rules about anything.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” she asked. “In the library,” she added.

  An interesting distinction. “It’s pretty obscure.”

  “I’d like to know,” she said.

  What the hell, I thought, and told her some about M. J. Key. I told her I’d heard about the possibility of a manuscript, but nothing of my experiences on the River of Trout or that I’d held the Key manuscript in my hands. She listened attentively while she steadily whittled the sandwich down to nothing.

  “You’re a fisherperson?” she asked.

  It was a stange way to put it. “Yes, but I don’t get a lot of opportunity.”

  “It’s not healthy to let your life become unbalanced.” She neatly folded her sandwich wrapper and placed it in the huge bag slung over her shoulder. “I’m Danny,” she said. “I work here and I’d love to let you in, but I can’t. There’s a dreadful plumbing problem and we’ve been closed by Public Health for a couple of days. I could do some looking for you.”

  “You’re a librarian?”

  “A law student masquerading as a librarian,” she said in a whisper. “The work is similar, when you think about it. I’d love to help. It sounds interesting.”

  “It’s a long shot,” I said. I didn’t want to put her to the trouble.

  “Well, there are no patrons inside today, so I have plenty of time on my hands and I hate to just sit around. Where are you staying?”

  I gave her the name of my hotel; she said she would call me there and I thanked her again for her willingness to help me.

  “A library’s main product is service,” she said with mock pride.

  We shook gloved hands to seal the arrangement. As we started to separate, she said, “You have a great tan. Have you been down south?”

  “Asia,” I said.

  “I see,” she replied pensively. “The war?”

  I nodded.

  “Soldier?”

  “Reporter.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then stepped closer, put her arms around me and gave me a hug. “Welcome home.
”

  •••

  This was my first time in New York and as I wandered the cold and windy streets, it struck me how people went about their business as if there were no war in Vietnam. I moseyed around for the rest of the afternoon, taking in the sights of the city. Near the UN building there was a small, loud crowd carrying signs. stop the war now. They chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” I moved on, knowing full well that there would never be demonstrators in Hanoi chanting, “Oh no, Uncle Ho, how many more of our kids will have to go?”

  •••

  The game that night was a sellout. The New York fans seemed to hate the Celtics. Boston scored off the opening tip-off and went on an eighteen-to-two-point run.

  “Fucking spastic sadsacks,” Grady muttered. “Let’s go find a brew.”

  There was a short beer line in the upper concourse. We leaned against a nearby wall. The crowd’s moaning and shouting gave life to the building, the sound passing through in anguished, ragged waves.

  “Why London?” I asked him.

  “Because you’re my go-to guy. I don’t want you in another Manila crossfire. Your bureau chief in London is an old hand and one of my boys. His name’s Daly and he’s a Mick and don’t be asking me which flavor because I don’t know and don’t give a shit.”

  “What if I’m not interested?”

  Yetter coughed and grinned confidently. “London, the city of youth and free love. Don’t be an asshole. They’ve all got dirty feet, but who cares when you’re in bed, right?”

  “Level with me,” I said.

  Yetter didn’t respond right away. After a long pause, he patted his belly. “Northern Ireland is gonna go hot. I can feel it. It’ll become a bloody cesspool and you’ve just gotten out of one. You don’t need another war, kid. I don’t want you to become a blood junkie.”

  “I hated covering that shit,” I said defensively.

  He glowered at me. “That’s what junkies always say.” He raised his chin, as if his mind was set. “Go to London, kid. It’s a sweet assignment and it’ll give you a chance to see what Americans didn’t want to become.”