The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  The dull sun showed itself through cloudy gauze in the southern sky late in the afternoon, then, without warning, popped out, hot and white. Raina came out in her waders and stood, assembling a two-piece rod. The glare off the snow was white as an atomic core and equally blinding.

  Afternoon and still light. On the Mibra Onty she’d led the others to believe that the hatch would be after midnight. She had set us all up masterfully, being ever careful, the commander of all details, focused on getting her edge. She had Key’s manuscript.

  But now the edge was mine.

  When she came out of the trailer and headed upstream, I followed at a discreet distance.

  Maybe she was overconfident, maybe not. It would not be out of character for her to double back on her track. I would not underestimate her. Not this time. I veered away from the creek and paralleled it by a quarter mile. There were several places upriver where there was high ground with secure views. I found her below the first overlook.

  She was squatting on a mound of upturned tree roots. Ice was stacked along the bank. She was watching something.

  Flies were rising. Black, not white. And small, though they fused into smoky clouds. Midges, I guessed. I saw fish rise, but they were small. The old saw: Small flies, small fish. Besides, big fish fed almost exclusively on other fish, white flies the possible apparent exception to the taste for cold flesh.

  When the sun went down, it got dark fast. I had to get closer to maintain my watch and carefully climbed down to the river.

  Raina remained where she had been. Her concentration was eerie.

  Later, the moon crawled up, illuminating the snow, casting pale light.

  Still she squatted.

  By the time I saw more flies I realized they had been hatching for a while. They were white, but nowhere near as large as I had anticipated. More plentiful than on the Mibra Onty, but not anything like a full hatch. Here and there, now and then, sporadic, almost teasing. But I could hear fish after them.

  Raina stood, then squatted again. Stretching, I guessed.

  I studied the water. There was a long run across from her and, below us, the stream shifted ninety degrees to the right and narrowed, gathering speed, the force giving it voice.

  Hours went by. I could hear her talking to herself. Cursing. The hatch continued sporadically, never getting heavy, often ceasing.

  She prowled anxiously back and forth along the bank like a cat. Each time the hatch restarted there were several minutes of splashing, slurping fish.

  I smiled. It was not at all what I had imagined, and, just as obviously, not what she had imagined. I could feel her anxiety, but felt no sympathy. I thought of Red Beard, Test Tube, Val, and the others looking for something that did not exist on the Mibra Onty. How many wounded were left in the wakes of her lies and their own misshapen dreams?

  Finally Raina had waited long enough. When a hiatus came, she splashed into the current. When the flies began to rise again, she began to cast. She caught three fish and each time shouted unintelligibly, slapping the creature angrily against the water, stunning it, killing it. Her actions sickened me. Raina was a headhunter, a killer.

  I had followed her to confront her. I had dreamed all day about such a potentially triumphant moment, but the thought of besting her was suddenly gone. She was pathetic to let a myth drive her life and I was not any better. The shame was mine as much as hers.

  I decided to leave and climbed back up the rocks.

  Below me I heard her screaming, “Goddammit, goddammit.” The echo of her voice flew up and down the creek.

  I left her with her anger, crossed the ridge above her, and cut back toward the river. I didn’t care anymore if she saw my tracks or even me. I was done with this insanity. I hoped Ingrid could not see me.

  When I got downriver, I stuffed my gloves in my jacket and lit a cigarette.

  Then I heard splashes.

  To my left, then past me. Flailing arms. A dark shadow under a white moon, breaking the surface of fast water.

  Raina.

  I ran frantically along the creek, but she was out of reach. Once her head came up and I felt her eyes lock on mine and she shrieked, “Mine, mine!”

  It was instinctive to want to go in after her, but I knew this water would put both of us in jeopardy. The safest place to get her was at the pool below the old house. If she lived that long. I ran, thinking of the floater hung on our rocks when I was a child and imagined Raina there and ran harder.

  I would get only one grab at her. If I could catch her in the upper pool and hang on, I could steer us both to downstream safety. If is always the hooker in risk.

  I waited much longer than the time she needed to drift down to me. Had she managed to get out? Or had she gone under and gotten hung on a snag? I kept turning my head, but the moon was nearly down and the light was failing fast. I waded closer to the channel and reached out with my arm. If I didn’t see her, I might snag her by feel. It was down to luck, pure ­desperation.

  I felt something smack my arm and instinctively clawed it with my hand and held tight. It was a fly rod. When I lifted it, the end of the line suddenly peeled out like a runaway freight, and the rod snapped out of my hand as the leader broke with a distinct crack. It had been not just a fish, but a huge one.

  Raina Chickerman did not float down Whirling Creek that night and she did not walk down and, when the sun began to rise, I was alone with the fact that those who sought the impossible often found it. I felt empty and sick.

  •••

  There was nothing to be gained by searching alone. I drove out to a phone, summoned help, and returned to the homestead to await its arrival. While I waited, I went through her Airstream. Key’s manuscript was on a small table. I remembered some words of Izaak Walton: No man can lose what he never had. I did not open the manuscript, but a hardbound copy of Richard III was open to this line: “And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover . . . I am determined to prove a villain.” Why? I would never learn. I took the manuscript to the river’s edge and used it to start a fire to keep me warm. I no longer wanted to know what was in it. I had seen its terrible effect and that was enough.

  There were a couple dozen people in the search party. Raina’s body was found close to where I had last seen her. She had gone under and gotten stuck under a sweeper. There would be a coroner’s report, but scientific observation would not tell us more than we already knew. She was dead.

  I only glanced at the body, which had turned blue. Sitting in the open air, her hair had iced and turned white, like some sort of monster. Her face was frozen in fear and anger.

  A conservation officer in a green uniform came over to me.

  “She was fishing out of season,” he said.

  “Back off,” I told him.

  “The law is the law,” he said.

  He had a thick red nose. I punched him with all the anger I could raise, which at that moment was considerable.

  •••

  I didn’t want a lawyer, but the court appointed one anyway. Striking an officer was a felony. My lawyer advised me to apologize and throw myself on the mercy of the court. I told him to fuck off.

  The judge asked how I would plead.

  The conservation officer had pink skin, two black eyes, and an annoying smile. He was enjoying his moment.

  I looked at the judge. “I’m not sorry,” I said. “I should’ve killed the ­bastard.”

  I was a local. The felony was dropped to a misdemeanor and I got fourteen days, including an afternoon under escort for Raina’s funeral, shackles on my ankles and wrists. There was a small turnout. There was no sign of Val or the others whom I had last seen on the Mibra Onty. I had expected this.

  But there was one man there I had not expected to see.

  Lawyer Eubanks wore a black cashmere overcoat with the collar turned up. He fingered
the brim of a black fedora as he walked over to me.

  “Raina lit the fire that killed her parents,” I said. “M. J. Key was a professor in England, but he was an American.”

  Eubanks nodded solemnly, but avoided looking at me. “Gus bought Key’s property in Pinkville.”

  “I’m sorry about Raina,” I told him. And I was.

  “She had her strengths,” he said, “but mercy was not one of them. You did what you could,” he said.

  “Did I?”

  “She was a sick woman. She had a splendid education and a future, and threw it all away. For nothing.”

  “The snowfly,” I said.

  “Fiction,” he said. “Deadly fiction.” There were tears in his eyes, and mine.

  •••

  The night before the county released me, I had a dream.

  There were no visual elements, just a fragrant and intoxicating scent that awoke me and left me blinking wildly, my nostrils flaring.

  When I walked out of the jail, Janey was waiting. She was driving Buzz’s old station wagon and looked tiny behind the giant steering wheel.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” she said. We hugged hard and drove north.

  I said, “I like how you smell.”

  “I’m not wearing perfume,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Some things become obvious when you least expect them.

  •••

  Valoretev and the group had moved to the Mibra Onty after Hemingway’s death but I had no idea where they were now. I suspected Buzz would never allow himself to lose touch with his flock, crazies included. It was his job, he said. I say it was his life.

  “Where are they, Buzz?”

  “Near the source of the Tahquamenon, a place called Eagle’s Nest.”

  “Take us,” I said. “Janey and me.” From that point forward I never wanted to be apart from her again.

  •••

  We hauled snowmobiles on a trailer and drove west to a railroad spur called Serendipity. There we left the truck and rode the snow bugs west into the wilderness. We pulled supplies on toboggans. Buzz knew right where to go.

  The men were living in shelters built under uprooted cedar trees. We stopped the machines and turned the motors off. Gas fumes lingered in the frigid air. The silence was heavy and penetrating.

  Valoretev came out of one of the shelters. He was wearing snow goggles made from a piece of canvas wrapped around his head.

  “Key’s dead,” I said.

  The Russian removed his jury-rigged goggles and squinted at me. His eyes were red from smoke, his skin ashen.

  “She went after the snowfly and drowned. I was there. She set all of us up to keep us away from where she thought the hatch would be, but I found her. There was no hatch, only some flies, small. She died for nothing. It’s time you stopped, Val. There is no life to be had here, chasing and living a lie.” I did not tell him about the fish that had broken off Raina’s line.

  I never told anyone about that, until now.

  The Russian went to speak to his compatriots. Buzz, Janey, and I unloaded supplies.

  Val eventually came back. He had his gear with him.

  “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “You cannot kill a dream with a fact,” he said.

  “What about you?”

  “It is time I found another dream,” he said with a weary sigh.

  Val came back to Grand Marais with us and remained there. He died not long ago, a proud husband, father of three, grandfather of five, and fished nearly every day until the very end. We were friends.

  PART IV

  He who doubts from what he sees will ne’er believe, do what you please.

  —William Blake

  25

  There are a lot of theories about what makes a marriage work. I don’t put much stock in theory, but in retrospect olfactory attraction seems as reasonable an explanation of success as any.

  Janey and I were married in Grand Marais one year and four months after Ingrid died. We lived with her children in the apartment over the Light and became a family. Hannah Wren managed to clear her claim on her father’s estate and together we resurrected the column. Hannah visited often and became one of Janey’s closest friends. I traveled most summers and spent winters in Grand Marais. Angus had been right about headhunting and I took sublime pleasure in meeting people who loved fishing for its simplicity and inherent beauty.

  Despite the travel required by the column, I made it a point to fish Whirling Creek several times a year. Janey and I even built a simple one-room cabin where the old house had stood. We built it ourselves, with no outside help. Janey didn’t care for fishing, but her kids did and I made a concentrated effort to teach them what I could. Carl, our eldest, loved it as much as I did and was often with me. Sometimes I took one of the kids with me on my trips. And sometimes Janey and I met alone together for a couple of days at the cabin. The fires that burned hot in us from the beginning have remained so all these years.

  We were at the cabin together late one September. There was a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and a mass of warm air had pushed north in a singular weather pattern that left Michigan drowning under monsoonlike conditions. The fishing was awful; we stayed inside, which was all right with me.

  We made love that afternoon and later she went out for a walk while I toyed with some columns. When she came back, she shook off her rain slicker, spraying me.

  “Isn’t it late for lightning bugs?” she asked.

  “Did you get into the beer without me?”

  “I’m serious, Bowie. There are some lightning bugs down by the river,” she said.

  They were usually done by July, August at the latest, but it was unseasonably warm and humid and nature frequently violated man’s expectations. I had never seen lightning bugs in heavy rain, much less in autumn.

  Janey tossed me my raincoat. “I’ll show you,” she said.

  I didn’t want to go out, but I had questioned her veracity and she would not let up until her honor was restored. All marriages pivot on such conventions.

  “Is this really necessary?”

  She pushed the jacket at me again. It was.

  We walked down to Whirling Creek and then I saw. Some lightning bugs? There were clouds of them blinking wildly and brilliantly. I had never seen so many in one place.

  “See,” she said, sliding her arm around my waist. “We might have missed this.”

  The lightning bugs were stretched up and down the stream, but they seemed to be concentrating over the pool, forming a ball that grew brighter and brighter until it was nearly overhead. The amount of light it shed was stunning.

  The ethereal cloud began to flatten on the bottom and dissipate into a thin layer of flickering mist. I was so focused on the light that I did not see the first white flies rise off.

  It was not like the night Raina had drowned. The insects rose to the surface like white bubbles and lifted straight up, wildly flapping their wet wings. And they were huge, some of them as large as my hand.

  Dozens turned to hundreds, turned to thousands, turned to a solid wall, filling the air, denser than a whiteout, and the water began to boil below them as trout slashed at them, slapping their tails, twisting, surging greedily, their mouths open, all caution gone, the water alive with flies and trout, illuminated by a layer of lightning bugs. I sank to my knees in disbelief on the bank and felt Janey pulling on me and handing me my fly rod, which I took numbly and stared at the fluffy snowfly on the end of the leader and looked at her.

  “Where? How?”

  She pushed me toward the water. “Fish,” she said. I waded in, dumbfounded. The yellowed, dusty fly was one of those that Hannah Wren had given to me many years before.

  “Throw, hon,” Janey said. “Throw.”

 
And I did, upstream and across with a little lift at the end to create a mend. I felt a strike immediately and snapped the tip upward with a firm flick and the fish took off upstream. Janey squealed and I held on as the line peeled out of the reel with a pained clatter and I thought, I can’t stop it, and started upstream in pursuit and Janey ran beside me when the fish turned and shot back downstream. I turned with it and reversed direction and the flies continued to hatch and covered me like huge feathers, and the trout danced upstream again and I went blindly with it, unable to see the umbilical in my hand, the muscles in my forearm searing. When I thought it was lost, it turned again and sounded and parked and I slid to my knees and there we sat, at an impasse. My chest heaved.

  When I tried to move the creature, it resisted.

  “Is it there?” Janey asked from nearby. Her face was lit white by the light of the insects but began to fade, and I looked at the water and the lightning bugs were beginning to blink out and the surface began to calm and something heavy rammed hard into my thighs and splashed like a depth charge and I tried to lift it again, but without effect. The river that had boiled with trout was calm.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I told Janey.

  “Just hang on,” she said.

  I did. For two more hours, by which time night had asserted itself and it was black around us, but I could still feel the bend in the rod and the incredible force beyond.

  “It may have wrapped me,” I said. “Circled around a limb or rock.”

  “No,” Janey said resolutely.

  I don’t know how long it was after that, that I felt the rod tip communicate life stirring.

  “It’s moving,” I said. It had descended into the hole and current and had held me off. I was in awe.

  But it did not move far. Its weight had the rod nearly doubled. I pawed at the reel, lifted the rod, felt sluggish resistance, took in line. Was it coming in? I lifted again and recaptured more line. Progress. Not a lot, but some. Statistically significant. How much torque could the rod handle? Or the reel? Or me?