The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “How does Nick Adams fit?”

  The Russian looked at me blankly, then snapped his head down in an understanding nod. “Da, the poor boy whose face you broke. He is Harkie’s illegitimate grandson.”

  I had to ponder this concept. “Harkie and Raina work together?”

  “No. Harkie is with us.”

  “But Nick Adams came to Key West to get in my way. Raina must’ve sent him.”

  “Raina? Why do you say this name?”

  “Raina Chickerman.”

  “Her name is Key,” Val said.

  “Her name is not Key,” I said emphatically. “I have known her since we were children.”

  Now Val looked confused, but he quickly shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, her name. She has arrived only recently. She does not stay with us. She comes, she goes. I love the freedom in America. Why did you follow her?”

  “That’s between her and me.”

  “Why?” he repeated.

  “Mind your own business,” I said. “Comrade.”

  He patted my back affectionately. “It will be all right, my friend.”

  “What happened with you and the CIA?” I asked him.

  Val laughed. “They are babushkas. They talk and talk and talk. So many debriefings, so much repetition. I grew weary of the games and said good-bye.”

  “They let you go?”

  “It was not their place to decide,” he said indignantly. “I was not a prisoner.”

  “They’ll find you.”

  He grinned. “Let them look. Did I not get us out of the Soviet Union? It is easier to evade your CIA than to get your girlfriend alone when the KGB is interested. Your people are boy scouts.”

  “Why are you here, Val?”

  “Catching trout,” he said, with a huge grin. “Fine American fish in free and clean American water, just as my friend Bowie told me. I choose to ignore the German origins of these beautiful trout,” he added. “This is why I left the Soviet Union. To catch trout and to live free and to tell the truth. This is truth. Men who live lies cannot recognize truth. This side, that side, all sides are same. I will never live a lie again.”

  “You used me to get to freedom,” I said.

  He flicked a huge hand in the air. “I did not need you to accomplish this. I chose to help you, my friend.”

  “Your people killed a man.”

  “Both sides kill.”

  “The man died because of me.”

  Valoretev looked hard at me and grasped my shoulders. “He died because of the system, not because of you.”

  His words did not salve my conscience. “Both sides will hunt you down,” I said.

  Val grinned and whispered, “Who dares hunt the hunter?”

  A small breeze skittered up from the south, tantalizing us, then lay down. The air was viscous, the weight of atmosphere on Mercury. Life as nightmare. I had come a long way and a lot of years in my on-again, off-again quest for Raina and the snowfly, and I felt I had somehow gotten exactly where I deserved to be: nowhere. Val and I returned to the cabin where he retied me with deep apologies. “When Key returns, she will release you.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Fishing, of course. She is always fishing. Alone,” he added.

  Mosquitoes drained my blood and I worried about Ingrid. At first I was certain that a search for me would be mounted immediately. Then I remembered my gear. When Ingrid saw that my rods were gone, she would assume I had gone off to fish. She would not like being left behind—in fact, she would be pissed off—but I also knew that she would not assume the worst, at least not right away. Would Buzz tell her about Raina? Why had he told me?

  I did not see Raina again until that evening. The sun was low and brilliant, backlighting the trees.

  I wanted her to talk to me, to answer my questions. “This is the same group that was down on the Au Sable and had the authorities up in arms.”

  She looked at me disinterestedly.

  “A couple of them froze to death. The body of a man named O’Brien was found up here this summer, south of Grand Marais, a man from New York missing from his home for three years.”

  “You think you’ve fallen in with kidnappers?” She didn’t try to hide her amusement.

  “Raina, what are you doing here?”

  “Hunting,” she said with a tone I had once known well. She would talk when she was ready to, and not before.

  •••

  Later that night Val awakened me. Raina wasn’t in her bed. He took me through the forest to a building that was no more than a roof under the trees. It was lit by lanterns and tallow candles.

  “Please show respect,” Valoretev whispered in my ear as we entered.

  There were more people than I anticipated, but no Raina. I saw a man sitting on a rusty lawn chair. I couldn’t make out his face.

  “You’d be Rhodes,” he said.

  I nodded. When I got into better light, I saw his face and gaped openmouthed. The sparse hair on the head was snow white, his beard thick and white and yellowing, his eyes pale brown, like beer diluted by water.

  Ernest Hemingway stared at me through sunken, hollow eyes. He was older, his face puffy and red. Veins showed in his nose and cheeks. Liver spots dotted the backs of his hands. He wore faded, baggy canvas shorts. His bird legs showed webs of varicose veins. His huge feet were stuck in torn moccasins and a threadbare blanket was wrapped around his shoulders like a shawl.

  “People know you’re alive,” I said.

  “Loose lips,” he said. I was shocked at the high, almost adolescent voice. I had somehow always imagined a deep bass. “Certain people could never keep secrets, but so many lies have been told about me, who the hell would believe another improbable tale?” The famous author still had a substantial frame, but no shape. All his bulk had collected in the middle of his torso. There was a nasty scar on his forehead and his nose was bent, like someone had twisted it and it hadn’t come undone.

  “Harkie says you were after the woman.”

  “Not Harkie,” I said, “York Gentry.”

  Hemingway nodded. “Bad business, dames. They get your blood up or turn you snow-cold. I took shrapnel in the groin once. Jesus, my testicles swoll the size of grapefruits and I kept the inventory, but there were sure times I wished I hadn’t. This woman is not my type. Maybe she’s nobody’s type. What do you want with her?”

  “That’s my business.”

  He was a slow, deliberate talker, his tone relaxed and conversational. “Here, your business is our business. I never had much use for commies, but the Red bastards were right about the strength of community, sport. Go to Africa and you’ll see it in the animals. Interconnectedness. One for all, all for one.”

  “What happened to rugged individualism?”

  I thought I detected the beginnings of a sneer. “I was what I was and now I am what I am. Which is to say, I’m none-a your business either, kid.”

  “Quite the friendly crew you’ve got here.”

  He said, “You’re just sore because you got yourself snatched by a dame. I would be too, and believe me, I got taken by lots of them!” A smile formed and his eyes suddenly twinkled before darkening again. “The men here are committed, Rhodes. They’re the real thing, the purest concentrate of American stew, cooked slow and long in the melting pot, reared on self-reliance.”

  I said, “They look to me like they should be committed.”

  Hemingway laughed so hard that he began to cough; several people rushed to him to slap his back and give him water.

  When he recovered, he asked, “What the hell are you doing here, Rhodes? You think I went to all this trouble just to be tracked down by some bumbling amateur?”

  “This isn’t about you,” I said. I doubt he believed me.

  He sipped his water. “There somet
hing between you and the dame?”

  “Not in the way you think.”

  “There’s always something between a man and a woman,” he said. The old man closed his eyes and put his head back. “You’re in a pickle, kid. We’re a private concern here. If you’re here for the dame, that’s peaches with me, but I don’t make the decisions. Were it up to me, I’d say fine, but it’s not up to me. The men here don’t want to be found. We have a mission and nothing is gonna get in our way. That’s the whole point, see?”

  I didn’t see at all.

  Two men helped Hemingway to his feet and tried to hold his elbows to provide support. He pushed them away and growled.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked.

  He cinched the blanket around his shoulders. “Lost my juice,” he said. “Nobody’s one person. The one that used up pencils went away. The one that remained needed something else.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You’re here for the snowfly.”

  He grinned crookedly. “We all have a word for what it is that we’re after. Suit yourself, feel free to pick the one that pleases you.”

  He started to shuffle away, but lifted his elbows to halt his escorts and looked back at me. “A woman’s a good thing or a bad thing. She can lead you places and you won’t even know you’re being led. That’s the hell of it. I wrote every one of my books for my women, now look at what they say about me. This dame we got here, handsome as she is, she might take you places you’re not ready to go. All good-lookin’ dames eventually get old,” he added wistfully.

  I saw Val exchange whispers with Hemingway at the edge of the shelter and then he was gone.

  Valoretev narrowed his eyes when he came back to me. “Papa is a great man. In Russia great men do things common men cannot understand. Mathematicians, theoretical physicists.” He tapped his left temple. “Great men live up here, unencumbered. For Papa, it is trout. This is noble, yes?”

  I had heard enough of Hemingway.

  •••

  Val returned me to the cabin at daybreak. “Morning,” Raina Chickerman said as we walked in. She was waiting there, just out of reach, and she looked tired.

  “Why am I here?” I asked.

  She said. “You wanted this. I heard your voice, saw your face, kept seeing you. There were too many intersections. Then you followed me and I knew. Actions outspeak words.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but have you had your thorazine today?”

  She smiled. “Got you here, but I don’t have you, not yet.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Have me’?”

  “I think you know,” she said. “Inside.” She tapped her chest lightly. “If you have the courage to look in there.”

  “I don’t know anything anymore,” I said. Perhaps I never had.

  She smiled. “That’s as good a starting place as any. Get dressed.”

  “I’m not undressed.”

  She paid no attention and vaulted gingerly to her feet. “Here we work before we eat.”

  I followed her to the river. The water was the color of beef stock, the current sluggish. If the river had been wider I would have guessed I was downstream of where I had been previously, but it wasn’t wider. There was a path worn along the river. Raina crawled down from the embankment to a pile of rocks and felt around with her hand, then caught a line and tugged until a pike splashed to the surface. She took the fish by the tail, swung it up past me, reached into her pocket, rebaited the hook, and let the weight carry it back down into the water.

  The fish continued to flop.

  She climbed up and tossed me a cord. “Pick it up.”

  “Yes, Mistress.” I strung the cord through the fish’s gills and mouth and looped the cord around my hand. She looked at me and shook her head.

  We walked for nearly an hour, collecting seven fish, the largest in the range of a few pounds. I dragged them behind me and they gathered leaves as they fought for life.

  “Now what?”

  “We trade.”

  “For what?”

  “All you need to know is inside you,” she said. “It’s always been in there.”

  There was no sun, the sky blocked by the gauze of high cirrus clouds drifting south.

  After the river walk, we went back to the open building, where Hemingway had sat, the aging king on his makeshift throne. There were a dozen men already there. Raina took the fish, removed one, and put the rest on the ground. There were other piles of dead animals. Hares, a fawn with spots, several small coons, a large possum, more fish (some trout, but mostly white horse suckers), some piles of small red twigs, a gunnysack filled with the stringy roots of wild carrot, other things I didn’t recognize. Flies everywhere, on everything.

  Raina moved through the piles, picking a few things, then motioned for me to follow her.

  We went back to her cabin.

  “You must have a lot on your mind,” she said when we got inside.

  “Situational paranoia.”

  She looked at me and smiled. “They’re not what you think.”

  “Vets?” I asked, this a desperate guess. I had heard rumors of communities of Vietnam vets, so-called bush vets. Feeling betrayed by society and their country, they supposedly fled into the country’s forests and wildernesses to live as they wanted to, making their own laws. The rumors struck me as myth, but now I was not so sure.

  “Some undoubtedly are vets, but as usual you’re groping,” she said. “You’re not even close. They just want to live their way. There have never been that many of them and there aren’t that many of them left. They live in the bush and rarely go out into the world. There used to be more of them and new ones came along every so often, but this is a hard life and it takes its toll. They live free and die the same way.”

  “The authorities allow it?”

  “There have been confrontations. You were right about the Au Sable, but the government always gives up. America is no good at trapping shadows and it isn’t worth the effort or expense to drive them off. They just move to another place and settle in.”

  “This is no way to live,” I said.

  “As bad as yours?”

  The question took me by surprise. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “You’re psychic?”

  “Something like that,” she said softly.

  We had filleted northern pike fried in a pan, flatbread, and thin slices of potato cooked with the fish. She poured tea.

  “It’s made from bark,” she said. “It tastes putrid, but there’s vitamin C in it. Out here you sacrifice taste for efficiency.”

  “It would take a while to develop vitamin deficiency.”

  “You’d be surprised how quickly a body falls apart if you don’t take care of it.”

  “You make it sound like I’m going to be here a while.”

  She looked across the table and fixed her eyes on me. “Are you?”

  “I didn’t choose to remain here. Remember?”

  “If you say so.” Obstinate as a child, obstinate as an adult. And still beautiful. Having thought this, I immediately thought of Ingrid and was ashamed.

  “That’s the reality,” I told her.

  “Reality is much overrated,” she said. “You were tracking me. Not just here. For years. Why?”

  “You cut me off from Key at every opportunity.” I pushed my plate away, but she pushed it back. “When there’s food, eat. There’ll be times when there’s nothing.”

  “I’m not going to be here that long.”

  “You say,” she said.

  •••

  That next afternoon I split wood with a sledge and steel wedge and lugged it back to the cabin. I was sore, achy, and hungry beyond description.

  Raina Chickerman watched me work, making
no effort to help.

  “Tell me about M. J. Key,” I told her. “You owe me that.”

  “Do I?” she asked.

  I had nothing to lose. To encourage her, I told her how I had learned of the snowfly and followed it over the years. She listened raptly and when I had finished, she craned her neck and stretched.

  “Have you ever gone all the way in anything, Bowie? Just once? When we were kids, you always held back. You had so much fire inside you, but you never gave it air. You were good at everything, but did you ever want to be the best? Did you ever feel the fire get so hot that you thought you’d die if it went away? I think you’ve always been afraid of falling short.”

  I said, “M. J. Key.” I wasn’t in the mood for one of her lectures.

  Raina gave me a cold stare. “You think life’s hard? It can be a lot harder.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You haven’t earned the answer.”

  The rest of the day I worked in silence, driving the wedge with all the muscle I could summon, and by the time I was done my only thought was for food.

  When we got back to the cabin, Raina said, “You cook.”

  A small hunk of red meat and several carrots and onions were by the woodstove. “Venison?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “They don’t grow the carrots and onions out here.”

  She looked amused. “They have outside help.”

  Meaning they either went out from time to time, or someone came to them. Buzz, for example.

  “There are no answers in mere logistics,” Raina said. “You want to be here.” Stated with the certainty that had always been in her voice when we were children.

  My cooking skills were marginal, but so were the circumstances and the food. I worked slowly. This was the first time Raina had seemed willing to talk and I wanted to make it last.

  “How do you fit in here?” The men seemed to accept her, albeit grudgingly, but she didn’t seem to be a full member of the peculiar community.

  Raina grinned. “I expect opinions of how I fit would differ.”

  “Answered like a politician.”

  “We’re all politicians,” she said. “Let’s leave it at I choose to be here, same as the others. Why did you follow me?”