The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  Rain came in the night and it was a frog strangler, leaving me drenched, cold, and shivering. I curled my legs sideways and tried to sleep sitting in standing water, which eventually bled away. I slept in fits. I dreamed of food, a roast turkey with stuffing. I screamed at and for Luc. Begged Pierrette to get me out.

  Night passed to day. I went from cold to sweltering. At midday the sun was overhead and I couldn’t escape it. More sleep. Confusion. I tried to jump out, smacked my face on the wall, bled from the nose, got giddy. Then night finally came. Then day. Then something else. I imagined sin, drowning in every one ever committed. I fought for air, imagined sin could raise me up, but the sin was heavy and had no buoyancy. Snakes came, black shapes with heads shaped like trowels. They had bright red, yellow, and green stripes and dropped heavily, thudding on me. Not real, I told myself. Then they struck and I screamed. I went from fire to ice. The flames did not heat and the ice did not cool. My flesh became loose, like a robe, and sluffed off my bones. A raven came and took my eyes and told me they were only dressings for humans who were born and lived blind and since I was in darkness and had no need to see, he had hunger and he apologized for taking my eyes and when he had flown away I could feel the sockets where my eyes had been. There was no pain. If this was death, it was soothing. Life had never been so serene. My body was gone. I levitated, then passed into a sweet void, awakening only when my heart caught fire and blue flames leapt from my chest and there was an aura of light around me and I was burning hot and felt unafraid and powerful and voices were around me and in me, my voices, then different ones, all talking gibberish, all the parts convened from their secret places inside me.

  I awoke beside the lip of the hole with no idea how I had gotten out.

  I saw Polaris above and, below it, the glow of a fire. I crawled toward it and tried to touch the fire to be sure it was real, but my wrist was grabbed firmly and kept away.

  Pierrette gave me a cup of cold water. “I welcome you home,” she said.

  “Fireheart,” I said.

  She looked concerned.

  “Fireheart,” I repeated. Long ago Raina said we both had fire in our hearts. I hoped hers was taking her to better places than mine. I kept this to myself.

  “Eat,” Pierrette said, handing me a bowl of warm mush.

  When I had eaten, she helped me onto a thick bed of spruce branches and draped a blanket over me and I slept.

  I awoke with her in my arms. We were undressed, our hair damp, our bodies slick with perspiration.

  “Am I still hallucinating?” I asked in a whisper.

  She giggled softly. “If so, I think we’re sharing the same dream.”

  We made love again, slowly, deliberately, neither of us hurrying, and I felt her arms loose around my neck and our hips undulating with short slow thrusts and the sun throwing yellow-white shafts across us and time did not exist and I could not tell where my body ended and hers began because it was all one thing, sweet and unending.

  Afterward, we slept.

  Later we gathered the blankets and rolled them and tied them to her packboard and started back out of the canyon and when we got to the stream, we drank with our hands. In the distance I heard a raven sounding his alarm and the sky turned blue as sapphire and everything around me seemed beautiful, every detail crisp and I knew I could see, not as before, but truly see and I did not want to leave where we were or let go of the moment.

  But let go we did. I took her pack and we resumed our walk. We made the long climb out of the canyon and reached the yellow-gray lake. We smelled smoke. Then we saw a camp ahead and Luc was there smiling, surrounded by others. His people touched me and rubbed my back and I was guided to a campfire and invited to sit down with several old men who gave me food. Behind us a drum began and the sound blended with smoke and voices chanted a high-pitched song with no words.

  “Fireheart,” one of the old men said. “The woman told us. This is a powerful name. It is the name of a man who must know himself or burn up. Gitchee Manitou gives us our names and there is great glory in yours and great peril. We will each go to the spirit world to join our ancestors when it is our time, but you must mind the fire inside you, my son. It could take you into danger.”

  We shared a cigar that was passed around. And then there was a feast. I felt as if I belonged, and Pierrette sat close to me and smiled.

  Later I saw Turk. “Ready to fly back?” he asked.

  “Fuck off,” I told him. We both laughed and he gave me an affectionate shove that sent me sprawling.

  Luc and Pierrette led me down to the dead lake that afternoon. We followed a rocky trail to a cave and Luc turned on a flashlight and we went inside and there on the ground was the skeleton of a small bear. It had three heads and a spine shaped like a Y and at least six legs. All the bones were laid out in proper order and the skeleton surrounded by red-painted rocks and several sticks with partridge feathers.

  There was no need for an explanation. The uranium mines had caused this. The sight sickened me.

  “This is also happening to your people?”

  “It’s not so dramatic for people,” Luc said, “but the effect is the same. The land gave us life and sustained us. Now it gives death.”

  “You should fight the mines,” I said.

  “The poison is in the ground,” Luc said. “How do we fight an enemy that is everywhere and invisible?”

  I had no answer. People asked the same question in Vietnam.

  Pierrette and I went by boat across a huge lake to where her car was waiting. She told me I had been in the spirit hole for five days and that this was a long time and had worried the people and that there had been discussions about my safety. An argument ensued. The elders thought I was too strong and would die before I gave in to a vision, but Luc had intervened.

  Pierrette drove us to Luc’s place. He did not return and we spent the night together. I asked her to tell me her spirit name and she whispered, “Slippery Beaver.”

  I laughed so hard that she pushed me out of bed, which made me laugh all the harder until it got her too, and we laughed together and I got back into bed and we slept the sleep of satisfied lovers and friends.

  Luc came back in the morning as we were brewing coffee. He sat at the table in his small kitchen and put an envelope on the table and yawned and said he needed sleep. “Bolt,” he said with a nod at the envelope. “He said you’d want this.” I opened the envelope. There was a piece of paper inside, folded once.

  I opened it.

  “What’s wrong?” Pierrette asked. She took the paper. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Written on the paper was: “M. J. Key. The Legend of the Snowfly.”

  The imbecile had given me the name of the author whose books I sought! Did he think he could yank my chain? I was pissed.

  Pierrette and I drove into Cutler to a bar called the Kettle. I used a pay phone to call Lockwood Bolt. This time I was put through to him.

  “This is Rhodes.”

  “Yeah, you got that name? I sent it myself.”

  “It’s wrong,” I said. “I don’t need to know who wrote the damn thing.”

  “Son, you wanted the name of the person I sold to and the name of the book and now you’ve got both.”

  “But you sent me the name of the author,” I said.

  “It’s also the name of the buyer,” he said, snapping back.

  “But they’re the same.”

  “Bloody phone books are filled with same names,” Bolt said, hanging up.

  11

  I couldn’t explain it then, and I still can’t explain it, but I felt different when I left Canada. I had gotten my car from Luc’s and followed Pierrette back to her place, where I lingered for several days. There was a creek in the valley below her place. It was wide in places, narrow in others, and cut its way through willows where I saw fr
equent signs of moose. I took out my Russian fly rod and put one of my fly lines on it; while Pierrette worked I explored the creek. The area might be contaminated with radiation, but it did not seem to affect the trout. There were lots of them and quite a few with good size for brookies. They took nearly any fly I tossed their way. I might have stayed with Pierrette a long time, but I awoke one morning feeling an overpowering urge to move on. The next morning she dressed for work and walked out to my car with me and we held each other for a long time.

  “Fireheart,” she said.

  “Slippery Beaver,” I said.

  When we separated she said slowly. “Fire can make your heart burn pure or it can consume you. Manka pikkisi,” she added.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You must grow larger.” She tapped my chest. “In there.”

  “The snowfly,” I said.

  She nodded solemnly. “You must conquer it.”

  “How?” I had hit a stone wall and saw no clear route to moving ahead.

  She pressed both hands to my chest. “When it is time, you’ll know.”

  •••

  I left Elliot Lake and drove toward the Soo still buoyed with a sense of calm from my experience in the spirit hole. I was also still perplexed by Bolt’s message, but decided that as crazy as it seemed, he was telling me the truth. An M. J. Key could be the buyer of M. J. Key’s books. The questions were who and how. There were more switchbacks in my life than an Idaho logging road.

  It had been months since my unceremonious exit from the Soviet Union and I still had a bit of the summer left to fish. I took the ferry across the St. Mary’s River and telephoned New York from a restaurant in the Soo called the Antlers. The elder had never said it, but I knew the fire in my heart had something to do with the snowfly.

  The phone sat on the bar beside a stuffed anaconda with an open, garish pink mouth. The snake was looped around a steel post to make it look like it was descending and the pose must’ve worked on drunks because the carcass had been abused; pimples of sawdust showed where fork tines had punctured it. I thought immediately of the reptilian rain that had deluged me during my vision and turned my back on the thing. I asked Yetter to wire money to a bank in Newberry, where I picked it up later in the day.

  I reached Grand Marais in the evening and Fred Ciz wasn’t home, so I dropped my suitcase and drove west toward the No Trout with growing excitement. There was no time to hike inland or upriver so I contented myself with the holes and tight runs near the spot where the river dumped into Lake Superior.

  No fish came to the surface, but I wasn’t discouraged. Insect hatches on most rivers range from sporadic to nonexistent, but deep in the rivers where there are trout, they are almost always eating. Crawdads, worms, beetles, other fish, even their own spawn. As finicky as trout writers make them out to be, the truth is that a trout will eat virtually anything it can find in water, but it won’t come far to food. The trick is to get the mountain to Mohammed. I rigged a gray leech with two split shot and began striking brookies and some browns every few casts. I preferred the effortless cast of a dry fly on a long leader, but at least I was catching and for the moment results outweighed style. It had been too long since I had been on this river, which I had come to think of as my own.

  Fred Ciz was at home when I returned. We embraced like brothers.

  “How was life among the moose humpers?”

  I didn’t even know where to begin, and I didn’t try. Something was bothering Fred.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Staley died,” he said. “We didn’t know how to find you,” he said apologetically. “Cancer filled him up. His doc said he shoulda died ten years ago, but Buzz says God wasn’t ready for him. You staying for a while this time?”

  Staley’s death deeply saddened me. I had not known him as well as Fred and Buzz, but I respected the kind of man he was. He lived hard, but he gave back.

  “At least through September, if you don’t mind.”

  “You and your fish,” he said with a sympathetic smile. “I’m glad for the company.”

  This is how it always would be with Fred. I would slide in and out of his life and the town’s and over the years they would think of me as theirs and they as mine. Home is an elusive concept. My sister and I still owned the folks’ land but no longer thought of it as home. Grand Marais had become my home, the place I ventured forth from and always returned to, not an accident of birth and providence, but chosen. My center.

  We visited Staley’s grave as the sun went down. There was a simple gravestone with staley engraved on it. The grave itself was covered with fresh flowers and there was a piece of construction paper attached to a stick like a flag. There was a child’s drawing on the paper, a crude hockey player in a red uniform.

  “One of Janey’s kids,” Fred said and I teared up.

  “I think I’d like to buy a house here,” I announced over dinner, the news surprising me nearly as much as Fred.

  “Karla Capo’s the one to talk to,” he said.

  “Capo? Is she new?”

  “Just talk to her. She’s good people.”

  “What’ll happen to Staley’s place?”

  “It’ll be sold. He’s got no kin. It’ll go in an estate auction. Why?”

  “Just wondering.” Thoughts and ideas often start as feelings without logic.

  I went to see Karla Capo in the morning. She was forty-two, divorced, the mother of three girls, and new to town. She had moved in since I left. Her ex was a Ford dealer in Traverse City. They’d had a camp in the woods on Pike Lake and she’d gotten it as part of her settlement. Her kids were in T.C. for the summer with their dad and she was trying to build a real estate business and make a new life for herself. She was a tall, muscular woman with a long jaw and a liquid smile. Her house overlooked the harbor. It was small with a freshly painted white picket fence around it. There were books and clothes and boxes strewn around. We took to each other right off.

  “Pardon my mess,” she said, “but I was never much of a housekeeper and now that my former is my ex I don’t have to feel guilty about it. The man was anal about clutter. What sort of a property intrigues you?” She wore baggy denim shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals.

  “I want to know about Staley’s.”

  She seemed to study me. “Are you a breakfast eater?”

  The kitchen, unlike the other parts of the house I saw, was spotless. We fried bacon and eggs and toasted slices of rye bread. She ate twice as much as I did. I was still not back to a normal appetite after my time in the spirit hole. It would be a long time before I could eat a full meal in a sitting.

  “Why Staley’s?” she asked.

  “I worked for him and I liked him and I don’t like the idea that it might go under. It’s more than just a business for people around here.”

  “Somebody will snap it up,” she said. “Downstate’s filled with little men with cash-register minds and the hots for the backwoods. I guess they figure the north country will put some lead back in their pencils. I’ve seen this trend coming. People are gonna escape north in big numbers. At least I’ve convinced myself of that enough to take a flier on real estate. The thing is that Staley’s margins weren’t all that great if it’s an investment you’re looking for.”

  “But it was in the black.”

  “You could do a lot better playing the stock market poorly.”

  “What if it was reorganized as a nonprofit? Like a club or something.”

  She screwed up her mouth. “Why would anybody want to do that?”

  “To keep it alive. I wouldn’t need profit, and this would help keep costs down. Might even draw in more people. Maybe we could spruce up the food. There’s a chef’s school over in Madison. We could invite students up for six months or a year as an internship.” As I thought out loud, I could see that she was list
ening.

  “Fred Ciz says you’re a foreign correspondent, which means you’ll be an absentee owner. Who’ll run the place?”

  “Let me worry about that.” Fred had told her about my job. I wondered what else he had said.

  She poured coffee. “Well, it’s a pretty, uh . . . creative notion.”

  “Do you have a lawyer who can set it up?”

  She nodded. “You haven’t mentioned price.”

  “Whatever it takes,” I said, big-timing it. I had been saving most of my salary for years and I could think of no better way to invest it.

  Buzz joined me fishing the next night. We drove out to the Blind Sucker River east of town in his antique Ford and he tramped upstream with a cloth sack of worms hooked to his belt, a canvas creel over his shoulder, and a pack on his back filled with ice and beer; he fished back toward me and I slid into the river and worked up slowly, looking for rising fish. We met at a bend at dusk. The river was an ugly rubicund-and-cream color, with moderate current and finicky fish, but Buzz had seven brown trout in his creel. We popped two cans of beer and saluted each other.

  He said, “Jesus ate of fish and I mean only to emulate my Savior.”

  Father Buzz was a singular man, collar or not. I asked him, “How’s Janey?”

  He peered over his beer and belched. “Not pregnant,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously.

  •••

  Janey Pelkinnen stared at me through the screen door. Two kids eyed me from behind her. She had the sort of face that invited rubbernecking. It was the face of an angel who had lived hard.

  “Hi,” I said by way of a greeting. I was inexplicably nervous.

  “You came back.”

  “Like a boomerang. Can I come in?”

  She didn’t answer right away, but she was shaking her head. “I don’t think it’s good to let strange men into the house. No offense, but I’ve got kids to think about.”

  I wondered if there was a difference between strange men and male strangers. “How’d you like a job?”