The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “You helped her a lot,” I said. “Not many people would have.”

  He frowned. “Priests are the worst, enamored with hopeless causes.”

  I said, “But Janey wasn’t a lost cause.”

  The priest nodded solemnly. “I have plenty who are. Do you look better or is that a mirage?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  “That’s good,” he said, pushing back. “I feel terrible about what happened to you.”

  It was a strange statement. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I should’ve been out there with you.”

  “So we both could’ve gotten the crap kicked out of us?”

  Janey smiled and waved on her way out. A woman named Mona would close.

  I got increasingly antsy as each day passed. Yetter remained silent. Snow blew down from Alberta. Hunters went out and killed their bucks. On Thanksgiving we hosted most of the village at the Light and ate several geese and venison brought in by Buzz. On December 1 Deputy Amp stopped to examine an abandoned pickup during a snow squall and was hit by a seventy-two-year-old man in a hand-painted Studebaker. The man was legally blind without his eyeglasses on, and of course he wasn’t wearing them. Not that it mattered: He was drunk, his heater fan broken, and his windshield iced over. Amp was in the hospital for more than a month and Buzz was sworn in as a deputy while Amp was on the mend. There seemed no limit to what Buzz would do for the town.

  December 10 Karla got her kids back and told me we would have to be more discreet. I took this as a burden lifted. I cared about Karla, but we were more close friends than lovers, two ships opting for the port at hand. We were both lonely and made good company.

  On Christmas Eve day several of us went to see Janey and her kids. I had gone to Marquette the day before and loaded the car with presents. Janey hugged me tight and I hugged back. Janey’s kids swarmed over me and I relished their attention.

  That night I headed for Lilly’s. Snow fell straight down, rendering the world black or white in my headlights. I encountered few vehicles on the snowy roads. The villages and collections of crossroads houses that served as informal communities were decorated with Christmas lights muted by snow that left them with a warm glow in contrast to the frigid air. My life, such as it was, had taken many strange turns, which I accepted as fate, but my sojourn in Grand Marais was beginning to complicate my life in unexpected ways. Staley, who was gone, Buzz, Fred Ciz, Amp, Karla, and Janey represented my first set of enduring friends; I had always walked and stalked my own path and oriented myself primarily or exclusively to my needs, but friendships altered this formula.

  I worried about my effect on the community. At its worst this was pure arrogance on my part, because the community had no expectations of me; nor had it anointed me. Yet I understood that my circle of friends and I did affect other lives. Fred Ciz was their link to the outside world and he was the thread that sewed the community together in a secular way while Father Buzz tended the spiritual needs of the flock and served as a one-man social service agency, artfully flitting in and out of lives at opportune moments. Staley’s contribution had been more commercial than the others, but the Light also served an important social function as the gathering house. Karla’s place was not yet certain, but her personal commitment to launch a business in a most unlikely place could, with success, have profound effects on the community.

  And Janey, how did she fit? She was elusive and brooding, always on the defensive, yet she was courageous and passionate. Intelligent and beautiful, Janey was like the town itself, a hidden jewel, both strong and weak. Love was not a word I attached to myself, yet I did love my friends. With Karla the love was overlaid with intimacy, now dissipated. For Karla lovemaking was a social activity—sex as a natural expression of an emotional tie. Sometimes when I was with Karla I would think of Janey and I didn’t know what to make of this except that it was not healthy. It was time for me to get away for a while.

  I wished Yetter would call.

  My job was in jeopardy and in my mind the Light’s future in part rode on my ability to continue to provide for the mortgage. This weighed heavily on me. Passing through the western fringe of St. Ignace, I noticed more and more houses and laughed out loud when I realized that in some ways I was now as staked to the ground as they were.

  My sister, Lilly, and her family had left Alpena to live in a house trailer on a two-acre lot in the pine flats east of Vanderbilt, a town settled after the Civil War on property that had been part of the vast holdings of the commodore. She and Roger planned to build their dream home on the site and I envied them their shared dreams.

  It fascinated me that some of the country’s oldest families had vast tracts of land in the state and that by and large such ownership, forged long ago, should now lead to huge areas available to the public. The contemporary rich were adept at mouthing the conventions of stewardship and noblesse oblige, but the old guys like Vanderbilt and McCormick and even the Nazi-loving Hank Ford himself had taken stewardship seriously and because of it, woods and streams were the public’s to use and enjoy. When they died, they gave their lands back to the state.

  Lilly and I had always been close when we were kids. As the elder Lilly naturally took to the role of assistant mother, and there were times when her demands made Queen Anna’s look paltry. Lilly tried to rule with an iron hand, but when Queen Anna was on a tirade, as she often was, it was Lilly who intervened or shielded me. Nowadays I did not see Lilly often, but on those occasions when we were together I was grateful that she was my sister. She was Queen Anna without the sharp edges.

  I arrived in early morning, making a grand and loud entrance with bags of presents. It didn’t take long for her three children to be awake and ripping wrappings off gifts. Lilly stood close to me, smiling and clinging to my arm, patting the top of my head like I was seven. I sensed that she was upset about something and I knew her well enough to not pry. If she decided to share, she would.

  It was midmorning before the children finally settled down. Lilly and I sat in her small kitchen and drank coffee.

  “Where’s Roger, on road patrol?”

  Lilly’s lips quivered. “I’m worried, Bowie. He was supposed to be home at midnight. Delays are part of being a cop, but Roger always calls if he’s going to be late.”

  “Did you try calling him?”

  She made a sour face. “He’d hate that. Cops are too macho to have the little wifey worrying and checking up on them.”

  “He’ll be along,” I said, trying to soothe her.

  Lilly wanted to be distracted.

  “The gifts are wonderful, but they’re too much,” she said. “You can’t afford all this. You’re living up there in the middle of nowhere and you’re not working.”

  “Living here is the middle of somewhere?”

  “You always gave everything away,” she said. “Queen Anna would carp that you were empty headed and that Punky Chickerman was using you and that women would always use you.”

  My sis. I could only smile. “UPI is still paying me.”

  “They pay you not to work?” She was shocked.

  I shrugged. “It’s a pretty strange world out there.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” my sister said, squeezing my hand.

  •••

  Just after we cleared the lunch dishes off the table, a blue state police cruiser pulled up beside the trailer. Two troopers got out and moved as if they had artificial legs. Lilly sagged when she saw them. Then she sank into a chair and asked me to open the door.

  The trooper with sergeant’s stripes looked into my sister’s face. He had red eyes. The other trooper stared at the floor.

  “Lil,” the sergeant said, “I’m so sorry, but Roger’s dead.”

  Lilly let loose a loud and violent sob. A lump rose in my throat and I knelt beside her chair.

  “He was s
hot, Lil,” the sergeant said, his voice catching. He looked at me with hard eyes. “Who’re you?”

  “Her brother.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

  Lilly cried quietly. The kids stood watching us from a doorway. The oldest, a boy of eight named for his father, asked, “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  Lilly said, “Can you take the girls in the other room, Roger?”

  My nephew did as he was asked.

  When the children were out of earshot, Lilly sucked in a deep breath, exhaled, and looked the sergeant in the eye. “What happened, Al?”

  “You don’t want the details right now, Lil.”

  “Tell her,” I said.

  The sergeant nodded.

  “He never came in after his shift. Dispatch tried to get him on the horn, but he was silent.”

  “I never got a call,” Lilly said.

  “We were all supposed to check in at the post. We didn’t want to worry you when he didn’t show. Roger’s a good cop. He’d been off his horn for three hours. The lieutenant sent us out to look and started calling extra people in. His vehicle was found off Calcut Road, west of Flanders. He wasn’t in the car.” The sergeant paused. “A trapper found him this morning in the park at Ocqueoc Falls.”

  Lilly looked up.

  “Thirty miles away,” the sergeant said, nodding.

  “Tell me the rest,” Lilly said quietly. I was amazed at her composure.

  “His hands and feet were tied. He was shot once in the back of the head.”

  “Execution,” I said, the word slipping out before I could think.

  “You a cop?” the trooper asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “We don’t know any more, Lil. We’ve got people going over the car and where Rog was found.”

  “It was an execution,” I repeated.

  “It looks that way,” the sergeant said.

  Lilly held it together until the troopers were gone, then she broke down. I held her in my arms while she sobbed and in a quiet moment I asked if she wanted me to tell the children, but she only patted my cheek and wiped at my tears.

  When we looked up, Roger Junior was standing there. “Dad’s dead, isn’t he, Mom?”

  “Yes, honey. I’m so sorry,” Lilly said.

  It was a week before we could hold the funeral. The killing has never been solved. Rural areas are no less susceptible to unexplained mayhem than cities. More than two hundred uniforms attended the ceremony. The ground was too frozen for a burial in winter and bodies were collected in a warehouse in town to await the thaw.

  Lilly and her children were surrounded by friends at the funeral home in Vanderbilt and as I stood there I saw two men I recognized and went over to them. The white man wore a conservation officer’s dark green uniform and the black man was in the navy blue of a Detroit cop.

  “You guys remember me? Bowie Rhodes.”

  “You still fishing in minefields?” Treebone asked with an infectious smile.

  “No, and the photo you gave me, it’s a species unknown to eggheads.”

  “Told you,” Conservation Officer Grady Service said. “You here to write a dead-cop story?”

  “The dead cop is my brother-in-law.”

  “We’re sorry,” Service said. “We both knew him. Rog was a good cop.” Cops and COs often worked together and in northern Michigan they all seemed to know each other.

  “I’m glad you guys made it out alive.”

  Service pressed his lips together. “Sometimes Tree and me wonder which is real life, this shit or that?”

  I understood. After Vietnam they had both become COs with the DNR. But Treebone hated being a “fish cop” and moved to a job in Detroit. He was in vice. A natural talent, Service said. Service was a CO near Escanaba. I was pleased to see them and had a feeling we would meet again.

  Fred Ciz, Buzz, Karla, and Janey came to the funeral service and back to Lilly’s afterward. Janey wanted to know if I was okay and when I would be back. I didn’t know.

  Later in the day Lilly and I sat on her couch together, the room crowded with people in uniforms, all talking softly with each other, the way people do at reunions, which is what funerals always are. “I could kick myself,” she said. “I never said good-bye to him. It’s not fair.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “The first time I saw him, I fell in love and I never lost that. How do you live when the center of your life has been cut away?”

  I envied Lilly her love, but not her pain.

  She rested her head against my shoulder. “You loved Punky, didn’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well, you’ll love again and when you do, you’ll understand that part of the power of love is knowing you can lose the other one. It makes every moment precious. You know the worst thing? I don’t know if I can sleep alone.”

  Rose Yelton’s words came back to me, her prediction that I’d never be comfortable without a woman beside me. I wanted to tell Lilly that the pain would pass, but that would have demeaned her grief. Besides, I couldn’t imagine then what it would be like to lose someone so close to you.

  •••

  I drove down to the old homestead a few days later. What remained of the house was buried under a blanket of crusted snow, but the stone dams were still in the creek as well as memories that resided there. The old man and Queen Anna had always seemed content with the life they had made. By contrast, my life was chaotic and unfocused and if I had a purpose, it had not yet revealed itself.

  Chickerman’s General Store had not changed, though there were houses at the four corners now, including an Arctic Cat snowmobile dealer and a place called Muggs’ Cones, which was closed now and apparently catered solely to seasonal tourists. The idea of my home as stomping grounds for tourists made me shake my head.

  Gus Chickerman was seated on his barrel. He stared out at me through thick glasses but did not seem to recognize me. My hair was much longer now and I had grown a beard since my trouble in the woods.

  “How ya doin’, Mister C.?”

  He squinted, then smiled. “Bowie Rhodes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He thundered toward the back. “Ruby, Bowie Rhodes is here.”

  Mrs. Chickerman came out behind a walker. She looked frail, her skin jaundiced. But she smiled warmly when she saw me.

  “Roger Ranger died,” I told them.

  “It was in the paper,” Mrs. C. said. “A terrible thing, all the violence in the world. We couldn’t get up there. Are Lilly and her children all right?”

  “They’re trying to cope.”

  “We thought you were off over some ocean,” Mr. C. said. “Pokin’ your nose into other people’s business. Your ma was like that, too,” he added. “You get that from her.”

  “The place looks good,” I said.

  “It looks like what it is,” Mr. C. said. “Old.”

  “We have tourists now,” Mrs. C. said. “In the summer.”

  “We’re quaint,” Mr. C. said sarcastically. “A fella told us we were like a time capsule.” He looked at me. “What’s that mean, a time capsule?”

  “Your hair’s long,” Mrs. C. said.

  “They all got it long nowadays,” Mr. C. said. “You come out from the back more often, you’d know that.”

  She made a face of disapproval. It reminded me of the faces Queen Anna fired at my old man.

  “You still a newspaperman?” Mrs. C. asked.

  “Between assignments,” I said. “How’s Raina?”

  “Fine,” Mrs. C. said. “Fine.” Her tone suggested something different.

  “It’s funny, but a few years ago I though I saw her in the U.P. I called you about it. Remember?”

  “She’s a city woman now,” Mr. C. said, looking past me.
/>   I saw them exchange glances. “She moves around,” Raina’s father said evasively.

  “We don’t see her much,” Mrs. C. said. “Because she’s in the city.” It had the ring of a rehearsed line.

  I thought of the woman I saw that day with Buzz. I had no doubt it was Raina. I felt sad for the Chickermans. They seemed to have lost Raina too.

  •••

  I had been staying with Lilly for nearly a month since the funeral. She needed a break and was invited by friends to a party. I volunteered to look after the kids. I built a fire outside and we bundled up and had s’mores and later I made popcorn inside and Roger Junior and the girls and I watched television and we all cuddled on the couch and fell asleep. I awakened to a soft tug on the shoulder and a test pattern on the TV. Lilly and I moved the kids to their beds. I was ready to turn in, but Lilly had been drinking and was feeling loquacious. I made coffee and told her about my visit with the Chickermans.

  “I heard Raina went to some bluenose college out east,” she said. “The Chickermans are funny people, Bowie. They’re generous and friendly, but only so far. The store is their public face. I doubt anybody really knows anything about their private lives. I heard Daddy tell Queen Anna that Gus traveled a lot and would be gone not just for days, but sometimes for weeks, even months. Gus would just go off alone and if people asked where he was, Ruby would say it was just business and that would be the end of that.”

  This was news to me. As a kid it seemed that the Chickermans were always there and never even went on vacations, not even to see relatives. Raina never said anything about her father traveling.

  “Were you ever in their house?” Lilly asked.

  The house was attached to the store by a breezeway. There was also an apartment above the store.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Then you’re the only one.”

  When I thought back, though, I couldn’t actually remember being in the house. I had been on the porch and I thought in the kitchen, but the rest was a blank.