The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  When I got back to the newspaper office, I found Grady Yetter arguing loudly with Fred Ciz about the layout of a page.

  “Wire service guys,” Fred said playfully. “Know-it-alls.”

  Yetter grinned at me. He was wearing a shiny new fire-engine red parka with a mad bomber hat whose flaps stuck out like wrinkled wings. A price tag still dangled from the hat. “Geez, kid. Five miles from here you can drive off the edge of the earth.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  Yetter held out his hands. “Hey, I’m a reporter. Or used to be.”

  “Go home, Grady. Crawl back under your company rock.”

  He held up several issues of the paper. “These obits are good, kid. Obits are an art and writing is a gift. You don’t wanna waste talent cause it don’t last forever.” He rattled the papers.

  I lit a cigarette and sat down.

  “You wanted Moscow,” Yetter said. “I got it for you. Center of the Cold War, a real plum.”

  “I quit, remember?” Since arriving in Grand Marais my desire to go to Moscow to hunt the Key manuscript had ebbed. My search for the snowfly had too often brought injury and misery to others. I just wanted to get on with my life and to live normally.

  “Yeah, yeah. Only you’re still on the UPI payroll.”

  “I’m still on the payroll?” I was astounded.

  “Yeah, we banked your dough. I figured you’d surface sooner or later. I gotta beg?”

  “Do what you want, Grady. I’m not interested.”

  Yetter shrugged and pointed at Fred. “You’ve got a great little paper, pal. Thanks for the coffee.” He then turned to me. “You know where to find me. Take some time to think about it.”

  After I returned to the newspaper office, I placed a call to Gus Chickerman.

  “Bowie Rhodes?” he said, when I announced who it was.

  “Yes, sir. I’m up in Grand Marias and I think I saw Raina up here, but we never got to talk. Can you tell me how to reach her?”

  “It couldn’t have been our Raina,” he said. “She works in Washington now.”

  “D.C.?”

  “No, Washington State.”

  “Doing what?”

  “We’re not really sure,” Gus Chickerman said with palpable sadness. “We’re worried about her, Bowie. She has changed.”

  Her own parents worried? That added to my concern, but what could I do? I asked him for her number and address, but he seemed so reluctant to give them to me that I found myself apologizing and hung up.

  Though I sometimes thought about Raina that summer, I was content in Grand Marais.

  In July, after the blackflies finally died off or went wherever blackflies go after they torture humans, I found a river that dumped into Lake Superior. It was twelve miles west of town on rutted dirt roads and difficult to reach; at the big lake it spread out into a swampy lowland before it reached a beach delta of gravel sprinkled with a rainbow of agates.

  Upriver from the mouth at Lake Superior it was fast and wide, but at the mouth there was a flat trickle of gentle clear water. There were no fishermen’s trails along the banks, no discarded worm cartons or rusting beer cans, no coils and bird’s nests of monofilament. It was pure wilderness with clouds of mosquitoes.

  Buzz didn’t know much about the river. “It’s called the No Trout because there’s no fish in it.”

  “Baloney! I caught dozens of brook trout on a size sixteen female Adams. The fish were short, but some of them went a pound or more.” The priest acted disinterested, which was entirely out of character; Buzz loved trout fishing and my finding a hot spot, especially in a place he thought was dead, should have lit him up. It always had before. I knew Staley would open up, but he was in Marquette for a few days. He had long since sworn off marriage but was reputed to have lady “friends” all over the U.P. He spent time on the road making what he called “visitations.”

  Over the course of the summer I went back to the river every day I could, staying longer and longer each time, exploring, making my own mental maps. By the end of September when the trout season legally closed, I had worked my way about ten miles upriver and found trout all along the way. The farther I got from Lake Superior, the more the river was stained dark orange by tannin, which made the bottom inky and wading dicey. The week before the season ended I camped for a week on an oxbow carpeted with bright green moss. It was a hot and sunny fall and shade was afforded by tilted white cedars that had somehow escaped the eyes of timber cruisers decades before.

  Just about any fly I threw out seemed to raise a fish, which suggested they were natives and not hatchery plants.

  I dug a shallow fire pit and lined it with stones and each afternoon I got my fire set for a fast start when I got back from my evening fish.

  I had just awakened on my last morning and rolled out of my sleeping bag when I sensed movement to my left. I had no weapon other than a small knife. “Who is it?”

  A deep, gutteral growl issued from the underbrush and I imagined I heard words that sounded like, “Our land” or something like that.

  It wasn’t a dog or a bobcat or a lynx. No bear made such a sound and, whatever it was, man or beast, I had no desire to find out. As I hastily packed my equipment I thought I heard the sounds of human footsteps crunching the brush nearby. I stood up abruptly and the sound stopped. Or I never heard them at all. The woods can do funny things to a man’s mind. They had never spooked me before, but this was different. Something or someone was out there and I felt an eerie pall settle around me.

  I returned to Grand Marais and checked in with Fred Ciz. “Catch any fish in your river?” he asked.

  “No,” I lied. I didn’t know why I was holding back information.

  “Told you,” Fred said with a smile. “Place is fish-dead. Logging killed it a long time ago and it never came back.”

  I went to Newberry to check land records. I was sure I had been on state land, which turned out to be true, but I also learned something else that stopped me in my tracks. The river and most of the land along it had once belonged to the American Oxley Foundation, “a subsidiary of the Oxley Trust of London.” The AOF had sold a huge land parcel to the state in the 1950s for one dollar, with the stipulation that it “forever remain wild and undeveloped.” Why would Oxley have wanted to own this land in the first place? What the hell was this?

  Most trout strike because they are hungry for a particular food and in this condition they tend to be finicky about what they eat and when. But sometimes a trout will strike out of anger to protect its own territory or out of sheer annoyance. I wasn’t a trout and I wasn’t protecting my turf, but I was plenty annoyed and confused. This damn snowfly thing was like a mirage. There, not there. Things seemed to lead forward and go nowhere. I wanted to know how Oxley fit, why the Russian bought the collection and manuscript, who Key was, and what the hell was going on. I made a decision on the spot.

  I called Grady Yetter. “Okay on the Moscow assignment, but under my conditions.”

  “Which would be?”

  “First, where’s my money?”

  “In the bank.”

  I told him to send me some of it.

  “It’s on the way.” I intended to repay Fred and Buzz and the others for their kindnesses. I also wanted to leave extra cash with Buzz, specifically for Janey and her children.

  “Next, I’ll need tutoring in Russian when I get there.” I knew better than to think my college Russian would carry me.

  “No problem. When can you leave?”

  “Don’t I need a visa?”

  “Hell, the Soviet consulate is practically next door. We have an arrangement with the bastards. I bribe the comradeskis and they expedite. All devout Reds like making a buck on the side.”

  “Next week, then. And I want a layover in London on the way.”

  “I’ll mail you ev
erything you need.”

  The bribe must’ve been inadequate. It took nearly a month to get the visa, which didn’t let me head for Moscow until November. While I waited, I tried several times to call Anjali Toddywalla, but never connected. I wanted to see her while I was in London and understood that maybe she wouldn’t be so eager to see me. Father Buzz had a parishioner called Hutamaki who searched the forest for old, wormy maples and used the wood to make bird’s-eye maple decorations. I bought a brace of candlesticks and a set of boxes, peace offerings to Anjali.

  When the details were finally set, Fred Ciz and Buzz took me to Newberry to catch the bus to Pellston. “You’ll always have a place with us,” Fred said. I did not have the words to thank them for their friendship and many kindnesses.

  I spent a couple of days with Lilly, who had gotten pregnant again but miscarried.

  “Use the Pill,” I said.

  “The Church forbids it,” she said.

  “You’re not Catholic.”

  “Don’t quibble,” she said. “Russia’s our enemy,” she said at the Pellston Airport.

  “So was England, but that changed.”

  “This is different,” she said. “Can’t you work in Tahiti or somewhere nice?”

  •••

  It was November and London was gray, perpetually damp, and stinking of gasoline and mildew. The streets glistened in the constant drizzle and the chill ate into bones and nobody complained because the English were inured to it, bred not only to endure but also to overcome, carry on, and rarely brag about it.

  I had a ten-hour layover to await my connecting flight so I took a chance and grabbed a cab to Charlie Jowett’s place. Anjali came to the door, shoeless, wearing a baggy sweatshirt and jeans. She looked at me and the packages under my arm and laughed delightfully.

  I felt bad for having not been in contact, but seeing her in front of me sent my heart racing. I blurted out, “ ‘Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear. Having nothing, nothing can he lose.’ ”

  Her left eyebrow arched approvingly. “‘I am not in the giving vein today,’” she countered.

  “ ‘Harp not on that string.’ ” I hoped this didn’t go on too long or my quote account would be overdrawn.

  She cracked a slight smile. “ ‘O! what a war of looks was then between them.’ ”

  I stammered. “Er, uh . . . ‘the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye.’ ”

  “ ‘Your wit’s too hot, it speaks too fast, ’twill tire,’ ” she said.

  I had hit the end of my Shakespeare. “You look wonderful.”

  “I look like a hag,” she said, opening her arms and inviting me inside.

  When I told her I was headed for Moscow, she did not welcome the news.

  “That horrid place and those horrid people?” She sounded like my sister.

  “The manuscript is in Moscow and I intend to find it.”

  “You’ve been honing your ruthless side,” she added. “Why is this snowfly thing so bloody important to you?”

  “I don’t know.” This was the truth.

  “You are a frighteningly intense man, Bowie Rhodes.”

  “Intensity gets things done.”

  “It certainly seemed to fail your General Custer.”

  I knew better than to keep on. “Can we drop this subject?”

  She said, “Can you?” She had to get the last word in.

  Charlie was in Egypt on a freelance job for National Geographic.

  “He’s still working?”

  “Hasn’t even been to the House of Lords yet. Charlie will always be Charlie.”

  “Will I always be me?” I asked, half joking.

  “It’s too early to tell,” Anjali said ponderously.

  When I left Heathrow for Moscow, I was alone. Anjali and I had said our final farewells without actually saying the words and I was sad, but also excited to be moving forward. The manuscript was in the Soviet Union and I was determined to find it.

  9

  The UPI office in Moscow was not a one-man show. There were three correspondents. Our chief was Susanna Ovett, the daughter of ­Russian parents who had fled the Soviet Union before the war. She was a graduate of NYU and Columbia and fluent in the language. She was a colorless woman, hardworking, deliberate, and calculating, her Russian blood giving her the perfect temperament for dealing with the obfuscatory Soviets. She was also single, but we never socialized. The other member of our triumvirate was Charles “Beany” Anderson, a redhead from Boise, Idaho, who had a Ph.D. in Russian studies from Stanford. Beany was our main bird dog at the defense ministry. Susanna covered the political events at the Kremlin. My beat was what we called Soviet life, the everyday life of simple comrades.

  I met my Russian tutor the morning after I reached Moscow. Lydia Yonirovna was sixtyish, trim, well dressed, and all business. She gave me a copy of Izvestia to read out loud and after a while proclaimed that my comprehension was adequate but my pronunciation and accent were “atrocious and unlikely to be corrected in a lifetime.” She then set about to correct my deficiencies. Her standards and goals were somewhat higher than mine, but I worked hard and was satisfied with my own progress. The more I used the language, the easier it became. It had been a hindrance not to know the language in Vietnam. I was determined not to have to operate with this disadvantage again and in the Soviet Union I knew I needed to know what people were saying, even if I never let on that I could understand.

  It was difficult making contact with the sort of people I was most interested in. There were plenty of allegedly rebellious young people eager to talk, but I didn’t trust their motives and wanted to meet and understand people who lived simple lives and had no visions of grandeur. I learned to troll: the farmers’ market, sporting events, museums, trolleys, and buses. Day after day I returned to write stories about cab drivers and bus jockeys and grave diggers and street sweepers. I did not compare their lives to counterparts in the West and I did not use last names. I simply told their stories, the facts of how they lived, their hopes and dreams. It was the approach I’d learned in Vietnam and refined in Britain.

  I had been in the Soviet capital less than a month when I made a formal request for an interview with the officials in the Kremlin responsible for purchasing antiquities in the West. My request was ignored, which was pretty standard. A few weeks later I requested an audience with Brezhnev and this was refused before being processed. He was far too busy for journalists. All during this time I refrained from making inquiries specifically about Mikhail Peshkov. As driven as I was to solve the mystery of the snowfly, it was apparent to me, even before I arrived, that I needed to tread lightly in the USSR, at least until I understood how things worked and figured out how much leeway I really had.

  In summer the Moscow River was a magnet for people. I had arrived in November and struggled through the slashing winter. By May, with the barest hint of sunshine, the grassy banks filled with the fish-belly white bodies of Muscovites in scanty bathing garb. Fishermen, swimmers, picnickers, bird-watchers, strollers, and sunbathers all shared space, a practice in peaceful coexistence. The kiosks along the river sold inexpensive kvas and ice cream and loaves of sweet black bread.

  In a nation as spacious as the Soviet Union, it was hard to comprehend its overcrowding, but people could not move freely and were constrained by laws overlapping, interconnected, and almost always conflicting. Moscow was crammed beyond its holding capacity with five or six people shoehorned into space designed for two. When the weather warmed, people spilled into the city’s parks and green areas. When the sun began to sink, the wooded areas filled with lovers and, though the uniformed militia were ubiquitous, there seemed to be an unspoken rule that summer belonged to the people and the police left them alone. Summer gave people the chance to depressurize from the frustrations of a seemingly endless winter. Those in power or with connections escaped to their
dacha communities in the birch forests outside the city, but most citizens had to find their retreats within the city limits.

  It had been a particularly long winter and a dismal, rainy, and muddy spring. With spring came a lengthening of days and I felt the familiar urge to find moving water and fish. I was partially successful. There were fishermen all along the banks of the river in the city; where they got their equipment remained a mystery. There weren’t many stores in the city and none had sporting goods. Most of the gear I saw looked homemade.

  During my first forays along the Moscow River I was given the cold shoulder, a default for Russians with outsiders. My clothes, especially my shoes, immediately marked me as a foreigner, and contact with foreigners was risky business. After the war, Stalin had sent tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers into the gulags simply because they had seen the West and were therefore assumed to be contaminated. Stalin was dead, but his lessons and far-reaching paranoia lived on.

  Once summer turned serious, I visited the river regularly and began to observe a group of five fishermen. I had no idea what they did for a living, but they seemed to have time to come to the river every day. Eventually mutual curiosity took hold and we struck up a dialogue in mixed pidgin English-Russian. There was no ideology on the river and interest in catching fish transcended cultures. They were bait-and-bobber fishermen and we talked of fish caught and to be caught, of food and drink, of weather, and of women. We came to call ourselves the Anglo-Soviet Piscatorial Society. Nicolai, Pavel, Ivan, Georgi, Misha, and me. They were all veterans of the Great Patriotic War, men who had proven themselves against terrible odds and, having done so, felt no need to relive the doing. We fished for lethargic mirror carp, which were greenish brown in the Moscow River. I got hold of canned corn, marshmallows, and Vienna sausages and showed them American baits and ways. I never talked about fly fishing, which seemed light-years beyond what they were interested in. Somewhere in the Soviet vastness I knew there had to be trout, but I was pretty much stuck in Moscow and there were no trout there.