The Snowfly (49 page)

“Troopers in Royal Oak,” she told me. “They called the post office in Southfield.” She handed me her pad. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

Her note said, Ovid Merchant, Sandflea Island, Florida.

“How would you like to go to Florida?” I asked.

She rolled away. “First St. Ignace. Now Florida. This is going a little too fast.”

“Can you get off?”

She studied my face for a long time. “Not a problem so far,” she said, chucking my arm and pulling me out the door toward the motel. “I feel a touchdown approaching.”

 

•••

 

Ingrid arranged for time off and we stopped at her place for clothes then drove to Detroit, where we left her car. We flew from Detroit to Atlanta then on to Mobile, where we rented a car, bought maps, and drove east. Sandflea Island was aptly named. It was just off Florida's panhandle, a small spit of white sand, scrub brush, and mangroves on the landward side. The only way out to it was by boat. I rented one with a small outboard from a marina called Wilbur's. The engine putt-putted confidently, swirling tendrils of stinking blue exhaust. Terns followed our tiny wake, skimming the water.

There was only one house on the island, and no security apparent, in stark contrast to how difficult it was to get a message to Merchant by telephone. We trudged across the scrub flats and saw blue roof tiles flashing through the brush and trees.

It was a sunny day with a timid Gulf breeze. I spied my drift in a faded beach chair on a lawn that was more sand than grass.

“Mister Merchant?”

He stared out into the Gulf, which was coated with a Technicolor slick.

“You people!” a female voice shouted from the house. “You people get away from there!”

An elderly woman with frightened eyes appeared, brandishing a dust mop.

“I'm Bowie Rhodes,” I said. “This is Ingrid Cashdollar. I fished with Mister Merchant at Sturdivant's last fall.”

The woman lowered her weapon. “Oh my! I apologize. We weren't expecting anyone. He talked about you,” she said. “You're much younger than I expected.”

“We were in the area and thought we'd stop for a visit. I'm sorry we didn't call ahead.”

She looked sad and perplexed. “A call wouldn't have made a difference,” she said.

I looked at Ovid Merchant for the first time. Spittle covered his chin. His mouth hung open.

“He had a stroke,” the woman said. “He's here, but not here. I asked the doctor where a mind goes when this happens. He said, ‘Looking for Jesus.' I said, ‘We're Jews.' The South,” she added disgustedly. “Ovid and I fought over this place. I said, ‘Jews belong in Palm Beach.' He said, ‘This is the Redneck Riviera and we're redneck Jews.' Ovid had a unique view of the world that helped make him a success, I suppose, but I never understood him.”

“He was supposed to get some information for me,” I said.

“He was quite a trader,” she said, nodding in his direction. “I give you this, you give me that. He should've traded horses. I used to tell him that. He said, ‘Horses eat.' See what I mean about his mind, how it was?”

Ingrid and I exchanged glances. “He had girlfriends,” the woman said. “Oh yes, a real schtupper, he was, collecting his cutie pies. I always meant to tell him what I thought of that,” she said. “Now this. Damn him.”

She aimlessly dabbed at the sand with the mop, then looked up. “Wait here!”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She came back with a tray and two tall glasses. “His favorite.” She held them out to us. Unsweetened grapefruit juice. Ingrid sipped politely and put the glass back, hardly touched.

“Thanks for the drinks. We're sorry we barged in.”

“He wouldn't know,” she said.

Ingrid looked at me and rolled her eyes. We started to walk away.

“You're Rhodes,” the woman said. “Right?”

I turned. She was holding an envelope, which she held out to me.

“I can't believe I forgot to mail this.” She sat down beside her husband and spoke slowly and loudly as if volume could drive her words into his injured brain. “There,” she said. “I did it. Now don't kvetch.” She patted the back of his hand tenderly.

Ingrid and I were back on the mainland before we spoke again.

“She shouldn't be out there alone like that,” Ingrid said.

I thought: In one way or another we're all out there alone like that.

I didn't open the envelope for a long time and Ingrid didn't ask. Our ease with each other brought me unexpected and sublime comfort. We fit each other.

Eventually I could no longer ignore the obvious and pulled the car over to the shoulder of the road. There were white birds with long necks in the low branches of dead trees at the edge of leafy swamp water.

I pointed to the birds. “Witnesses.”

Ingrid smiled.

There was a note inside, folded once. My name was on the outer fold. Inside it said, “Chickerman. Box 45. Rhinecliff, New York.” Not a city girl after all.

 

•••

 

Back at the Mobile airport, Ingrid seemed antsy. “This was it, Florida, one day, scoop and run?”

“This is Alabama. The real Florida is next,” I said.

“You who've never been there before.”

Ingrid made me smile. Her jabs were playful. There was a delicious tension between us. “In my mind I've been a lifelong resident.”

She squeezed my arm and shook her head. “You're batty, Rhodes.”

We flew from Mobile to Miami and on to Key West; all seats sold out on all flights. We were pasty white, snow geese migrating single-mindedly toward the caresses of the winter sun, which camped resolutely over the equator.

It was late and dark when we thumped down on the runway in Key West, Ingrid asleep against my left arm, which, in turn, had gone to sleep and tingled. We walked slowly across the ramp. The air was thick with the ocean, a mixture of life and death in varying ratios.

“
Real
Florida?” she asked sleepily.

“Smell it,” I said, inhaling.

“Do they have beds?” she mumbled.

We rented a small Ford, drove up the archipelago, found a vacancy at the fourth or fifth motel we came to, and checked in.

Passion has its own moods and timing, spooned together, our breathing in sync. By morning we were standing together at the sliding glass doors, sun streaming in. “The real Florida,” she said. “I hear the sun calling my name. I always wanted pink boobs in March.”

“Work first,” I said.

“Spoilsport,” Ingrid said.

We drove to a hamlet above Marathon. I knew Carl Collister lived nearby at Jeannie-Gone Key, but the maps showed no such place. The village where we stopped was called Drift Bay, but there was no bay in sight. I went into a place called BAIT-N-BEER-N-BOATS. The fishy odor inside confirmed that the establishment was what it purported to be. There was a nicked Formica counter with a woman behind it. She had a plate of fish sticks in front of her and was dipping them into a jar of tartar sauce. She looked at me, kept chewing, her jaw working sideways, defying its hinges.

“I'm looking for Carl Collister.”

She blinked several times. “You'd be wantin' Jeannie-Gone Key,” she said.

“Where's that?”

She lifted a foot, took off a faded pink flip-flop, rubbed between her big and second toes, dropped the flip-flop, speared it with her foot, picked up a fish stick, and used it as a pointer. “Half mile south, dusty road right, all the way to the end.” She bit off the end of the fish stick.

When we turned onto the road Ingrid took off her clothes and wriggled into her bathing suit. Jeannie-Gone Key consisted of a trailer on a low bar of crushed coral and sand. The trailer was in bad shape and looked like a discard from a hurricane. An unpainted wooden footbridge led out to the trailer. Collister's Olds was parked by the bridge.

We crossed over and Ingrid whispered, “I need sun,” and left me.

I knocked on the door. Collister appeared. “I'll be damned,” he said when he saw me. “It's Crash himself.” He didn't look happy to see me. He hadn't shaved in a while and was carrying a can of beer.

“I need to talk to you.”

“So talk,” he said.

There was a screen door between us.

“I quit Sturdivant,” I said.

“He fired my ass,” Collister said.

“I didn't know.”

“Fucking Sturdivant. The lowest-rated guides get the gate. Another example of pure Sturdivant bullshit capitalism. I never should have gone up there. We do dumb things in the hunt for moola.”

I didn't know what had happened to any of the guides. “He offered me the head guide job,” I told him. Not only had he tried to recruit me into his personal snowfly hunt, he had paid me outside the rules. We were supposed to remain until the end and I had departed one day early. Meaning the pay was a soft bribe to encourage me to someday write favorably about the place. Sturdivant rarely missed an angle. He would probably be a killer chess player.

“We heard. That had all of us puzzled. Some of them were mighty pissed.”

“Snowfly,” I said.

Collister rolled his eyes. “
That
shit again. What the fuck is it with you Yankees? You want big fish? Try the damn ocean. It's full of them.”

“Sturdivant thinks there'll be a snowfly hatch in two years.”

“Like I could care,” Collister said. “All you assholes sneaking off at night. I just didn't get it. Still don't.”

“All who, sneaking off?”

Collister's brows furrowed. “You. Them. All of you.”

“Not me.”

“Your cabin was always dark, just like the rest.”

“Not because I wasn't there.” I looked over at Ingrid who was sliding down her suit top. She was sitting on the sand, looking out at some scruffy mangroves, facing the sun.

My former colleague studied me for several seconds. Half grin, nod of the head. “Ginch? Who was it?”

“No, it's called sleep.”

“With one of the guides?” he asked. “Or one of the flunkies. They were fine.”

I said, “Alone.”

Collister studied me. “Maybe I was wrong about some things. You never did fit in, catching those big fish, with the rule and all.”

“There was no such rule,” I told him.

He sucked in his breath and frowned. “Fuckers told me there was.”

“It was the guides' rule, not Sturdivant's.”

“Bastards,” he said. “Why?”

I shrugged.

“Bastards,” he said again. “Bastards.”

“I need help,” I told him.

“You should've told me about the rule.”

“I didn't know about it until I was done.”

“Bastards,” he repeated. “What help?”

“The snowfly.”

Collister closed his eyes and snorted. “It's so much
bullshit!
You fish for specialties, you always get nut cases. There's always some half-assed legend. With bonefish, it's the silver squid. Supposedly come up on the flats every five years, but there's no such thing. You hear this kind of baloney everywhere in this business. Reality isn't enough for some people. The best education and brains in the world don't make some people immune from idiocy.”

“All I said was ‘snowfly.' I didn't say I believed it. I just want to pin it down.”

Collister shook his head. “Big fish are an addiction. People lose touch with reality, people who're otherwise perfectly reasonable.”

“I'm telling the truth, Carl.”

“I was a cop before I went professional,” he said. “Junkies and perps all swear they're telling the truth.” He sounded like Ingrid.

I decided to change tactics. “Don't you ever want to take one of those jerks aside, tell them, here it is . . . in black and white . . . no silver squid.”

“Rules of logic,” Collister said. “You can't prove a negative.”

“It's not a negative if the legend started somewhere, if you can nail down where it started, who started it, and maybe why.”

“The squid's not like that.”

“I think the snowfly is.”

“If you know it, why come all the way down here to bug me?”

“I think maybe you could know somebody who knows somebody, drifts, other guides, outfitters, whatever.”

“Yeah, what's in it for me?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“Hmm,” Collister said. “What is it you want to know?”

“I'm looking for a comprehensive trout-fishing library.”

“Yale,” he said. “That's the biggest and the best.”

Ingrid would not be happy about going back north. “What's down this way?”

“York,” he said, not missing a beat. “York Gentry guided everybody who was anybody and everybody who thought they were somebody. He had a nose like an anteater, an ungodly big nose and as ugly a sumbitch as ever was born. He was Hemingway's favorite. They were real pals. They used to go out on the
Pilar.
Once Hemingway brought a Cuban floozy with him and introduced her as his fiancée. He was between wives at the time. Only this wasn't his fiancée, she was a hooker from Havana. The whole time she's on the boat she's pawing Yorkie's Tootsie Roll and Hemingway's growling about some Spanish dude who diddled one of his girlfriends when he lived in Spain and how he shot off the Spaniard's dick! He didn't tell Yorkie the truth for two years.” Collister laughed heartily. “Yorkie had a shitpot full of books on trout fishing.”

“Where does he live? Gentry, right?”

“Another time Yorkie was in Iceland with this Saudi prince? The guy was a big-time asshole and he was missing Atlantics left and right. Hopeless case. Yorkie takes the guy's rod, makes one cast, a fish hits, he sets the hook, hands the rod to the guy, and says, ‘He's all yours, Sinbad. Don't bother to rebook next year.' Old Yorkie stomped off and left the guy there and when a check came in the mail, he sent it back. He and Papa were like that, men of principle, and hardheaded to boot.”