The Snowfly (26 page)

This was a priest who didn't fit any definition I knew except that he lived the way I thought any person, priest or not, ought to. Fred Ciz had told me Buzz was a remarkable man and I had to agree.

We distributed groceries all day. Our last stop was at a cabin several miles west of town. Buzz said I should stay in the car for this one and I agreed, though his request made me curious and I rolled my window down. I watched him pull his American Flyer sled up to the front stairs. The house was made of huge logs. I smelled smoke from a wood fire. There were snowshoes leaning against the trunk of a white pine and a woodpile with layers of sawdust mixed with snow. Buzz did not go to the door and knock. Instead he kept back from the front porch and yelled.

Even from the car I recognized her immediately. I wasn't thirty yards away. Her hair was cut severely short now and she was gaunt but it was, without question, Raina Chickerman and she was carrying a shotgun. She did not look toward the car and I sat in silence, stunned.

I heard Buzz talk to her. “Sorry to intrude, Miss.”

“I told you before, Father. I don't need help. I am just fine and I will continue to be just fine.” Her self-confidence permeated the air.

“We're a community up here,” Buzz said, trying to open a dialogue, but she cut him off.

“I'm my own community. I'm here to work and I will not tolerate disturbances, well intentioned or otherwise.”

Buzz left the boxes at the foot of her steps.

In the wagon Buzz was sullen. He was unaccustomed to failure. I didn't mind the silence, but I was more than a little curious. “Who is she?” I asked. I could barely contain myself.

“Smith,” he said, gripping the huge steering wheel. “A pseudonym, no doubt. I heard she was out here and alone. I've tried several times to establish contact. Same outcome every time. She's a hard case, that one.”

Hard case:
That fit Raina Chickerman. I could still see her at the creek after the old man's funeral. I tried to think how she could possibly have come to live here as a recluse. As a child she had had no social life, joined nothing, did nothing with other kids, a true loner. I had been her only friend and now I felt like I had never really known her. She had shown up after I burned the homestead and promptly disappeared. And now she was here and it seemed too bizarre a coincidence to reconcile.

It was three days later before I got up the courage to go back out to her place. I had sweaty palms and a rolling stomach, but the effort went for naught. The place was empty and she was gone.

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 everything 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.”