The Snowfly (6 page)

We did not care for each other and over several months we rarely spoke. The funny thing was that even though we worked the same shifts I never saw him from punch-in to punch-out. It was one of life's small mysteries, the sort that make you scratch your chin for a moment before you move on to other concerns.

One Friday night I was in the break room when a woman from the jewelry department came in. Her name was Spruce Graham. She was thirty-one and had three kids. She didn't look much over twenty. She had a fully developed figure, with a soft-roundedness I found appealing. Her husband was a Bootstrapper at the university, an Army enlisted man of promise sent off to get a college degree at taxpayer expense. Spruce had never finished high school. Married at sixteen, she was clearly awed by her husband's current undertaking. She was from rural Alabama and had a slow drawl and relaxed air.

“Nice uniform,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Her long fingers had perfect nails.

“Clown suit,” I said.

“No, it looks real nice, you bein' so tall and all. I like a man in uniform.”

I smiled and thanked her.

“Seen your partner lately?” she asked.

“Fistrip? He's around somewhere.”

It would be some time later before I would realize that she had been trying to tell me something.

Spruce and I didn't run into each other every night at first, but eventually we seemed to arrive at breaks at the same time. When she wasn't there I wondered what happened to her.

“Had a sick kid,” she'd say the next night. Or, “The cellar flooded.” She talked a lot about her children, three boys; the oldest was fifteen. She worked part time, six to midnight, Monday through Friday. “My man's home by six. I make supper, but he feeds the boys and puts the youngest to bed and then he studies. He has to study hard. I can pick up a few dollars to help out and he gets the quiet he needs to hit the books.”

At the end of the shifts, I'd change out of my uniform and walk out to the nearly empty parking lot. I began to notice that after work, Spruce would go out to her car and sit there alone, smoking.

I asked why.

“Well, I sit here another hour to give my husband his space. School comes first, after the kids. It's his future.” His, not ours, a curious word choice.

I invited myself to smoke with her after work one night. A few days later we repeated the episode. By then I knew her pretty well. Her father owned a paint store in Eufaula and was a part-time Baptist minister. She had enjoyed high school, had been a cheerleader, two years varsity, “before I got knocked up.” I sensed unspoken regrets.

She lived in married-student housing in a section reserved for Bootstrap families. The government paid their rent, which helped the students immensely. Of military life Spruce said, “It has its points. I can't complain.” They had lived in Spain and Panama and in Texas just before her husband got his Bootstrap assignment.

Several times she came to work with puffy, red eyes and was less talkative than usual.

Nash, meanwhile, had stopped lecturing me. Instead he gave me books and handed over his dog-eared fishing log, in which he had recorded every detail of his outings, including sky conditions, wind direction (and sometimes velocity), air temperature, hourly water-temperature readings, estimates of water level, flow (in feet per second), and clarity, for which he had his own descriptions. He did not reveal where he caught fish. All streams and rivers were coded and the key wasn't in the log, which I observed with interest. Nash meticulously used a stomach pump to check the feeding habits of his take and gave the usual details about length and girth. He did not specify which artificial flies he used; rather, he recorded which species were actually hatching and when and on what kind of water. It was a journal devoid of color and touched by paranoia. Passionate trout fishermen, I was learning, did not willingly give up their secrets.

I continued my efforts to return order to the cluttered Collection Room in the Natural Sciences Building. I tried to convince myself that I was driven by simple curiosity, but the truth was that I hoped that somewhere in that chaos lay a specimen called a snowfly and, if it was there, I was convinced I would find it. I wanted to ask Nash about the snowfly, but couldn't bring myself to do it. He was a gentle, scholarly entomologist who liked to cogitate before he talked. It was as if words were too expensive to spend thoughtlessly. He seemed feeble and cautious and I had a hard time picturing him in a trout stream, much less feeling in his gut what gripped me when I was thigh-deep in fast, clear, cold water.

The collection of specimens was immense, but I was patient and methodical, starting just inside the door and working my way along the east wall. I pulled out every case, opened it, cleaned it, and made a list, numbering each box and specifying its contents. Some were already labeled; I used Nash's texts and reference books to verify these as accurate and several times found mistakes and reported these to him, which seemed to please him. “Becoming a real bug man,” he told me. I also used the references for unlabeled specimens but many times I had to take these to Nash. He wouldn't tell me what they were; rather, he would take me through an entomological checklist so that I could get the family and then he would leave it to me to go from there. It was slow going and it consumed me.

I was barely into the mess when I hit several boxes of arachnids, mostly tarantulas collected in Central America. In another case I found a family of mice that scampered for cover, but eventually came back to see what I was up to. I talked to them as pets. It occurred to me that I should get somebody in to eliminate them, but they were doing no harm I could discern. Those were the days when the term
peaceful coexistence
was in vogue, and I simply extended the concept down the evolutionary ladder.

Despite it being my senior year, I was also having second thoughts about college. I had been busting my ass for four years and it was not at all clear where this was going to take me, and I naturally began to wonder why the hell I had endured it. I had completed the basic J-school courses, which were heavy on writing, English literature, poly sci, and history, all of which required a lot of tedious reading. I also decided early on to learn Russian and was in my fourth year with the language. The Cold War was on, and it was real to all of us. As far as the world was concerned, there were only two major countries, the Soviet Union and the U.S. It made sense that if I wanted to travel as a journalist, I ought to speak Russian. But it was a grueling routine: sleep, school, Nash, work, study. Balanced, it wasn't. And there were days when the point of all the effort eluded me.

One night I joined Spruce in her car after work. She was chain-­smoking, which was unusual.

I was getting to know her pretty well and I liked being able to read her moods.

“Problem?”

She glanced at me then looked straight ahead. “I don't think we should be doin' this,” she said. “Anymore.”

I thought she was joking. “Sitting in the car together?”

“Yes.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don't think it's best.”

I was amused as much as anything.

“Best for what?”

“You ask too many questions, Bowie. I think it would just be best if we don't.”

She was nervous and tight. “What's going on, Spruce?”

“
Him,
” she whispered.

I had to think. “Your husband?”

“Right.” She rolled down her window, tossed the butt, and lit another. “He's crazy.”

I suddenly had no further curiosity. “Okay.” When I reached for the door handle, she caught my arm and pulled me back.

“He's real jealous.”

“Of me?” I felt queasy.

“He doesn't even know you exist.”

This was good news in an otherwise bleak moment.

I didn't have a lot of experience with married women. There was Lilly, but she was about all, and Spruce seemed at least as happy as my sister. I'd never heard anything but respect for her man in Spruce's voice.

“He thinks I'm foolin' around. Somebody told 'im that every night I sit in my car with a man. I think maybe it was Rick.”

“Fistrip?”

“Yeah, he's been hustlin' me and I haven't given him the time of day and I think he's seen us and he's jealous.”

“Fistrip? What is that guy's problem? We haven't done anything,” I said.

“Facts don't matter to jealous men, Bowie.”

I felt uneasy again and quickly said, “It's not like we sit together every night.” Panic can make us nitpickers. I hated riding the guilty seat when I was totally innocent.

“Don't worry,” she said. “He doesn't know your name. I said you were just a friend, but he's always been real jealous. He scares me when he gets like this. He was a sniper in the Army and you know what they're like.”

I said, “I don't want to be the source of a problem for you. If this is misinterpreted, then that's easy enough to fix.”

She looked at me. “You don't understand. I like talkin' with you. I love sittin' here with you. You always listen to what I've got to say, as if you're really interested in me, and part of me would surely like to do more than just talk.”

Full panic set in. I opened the door. “I'll just get out. I'm sorry about this.”

She grabbed my arm again. “I'm real sorry. I wish there was somewhere else we could go.”

It took a few seconds for her words to sink in. I looked back at her, but she was fumbling with the key. It was time for me to go.

 

•••

 

New Year's Eve afternoon I was back in the secure environs of the Collection Room.

I breathed in the musty air and found it mildly calming. I spent most of the day checking the identities of grasshoppers (Acrididae, Tettigoniidae, et cetera) and took a lot of time looking at them and thinking about what Doc Nash had said about them as trout bait. They start to show up in late June and tend to be dark and small, and by summer's end they tend to be light in color and large. Nash loved hoppers and called them “caviar for trout.” He reminded me to always make sure a hopper fly had some red in it, and sure enough I found that all the naturals had some red. It was fascinating to see the reality of insects beginning to merge with my knowledge of artificial flies. And to begin to recognize cycles: Fish grow over the course of the season, and so do the crustaceans, minnows, and insects they eat.

About ninety minutes before I had to report to work I found a box with six unlabeled, very large artificial flies. The box was on the floor in the corner along the west wall, buried under a pile of cardboard boxes filled with specimen boxes and capture jars. I saw the corner of the box because it threw a knife-shaped shadow onto the floor, seemingly out of darkness. Naturally, I had to find out what it was. The bugs were white and a little yellowed with age but way too big for
Ephoron leukon.
There were no labels. Between my Sundays in the library back home as a kid and my time with Nash I had a pretty good sense of what was what. I searched all around for labels but all I found, scored into the bottom of the case with a woodburner, were the initials
mjk
.

I opened the box and studied the six flies; they were very different from each other and all of them old. A couple of them were attached to flimsy-looking green hooks. After a few minutes, I realized the hooks had to be made of brass. Somewhere I had read that brass hooks were used around the turn of the century, which convinced me these flies were ancient. One of them still had a couple of inches of gut attached to it as well, and gut bodies had gone out—when, the 1930s? Not academic specimens, but a box of fishing flies. Not much value scientifically, perhaps, but they'd have worth to a tackle collector or museum. What were they doing here? I imagined one of the bug docs had been in a hurry one day and left them in the room, and I laughed when I thought how pissed he would've been when he got to the river and had no flies. I toyed with the notion of liberating the flies, but decided that this would violate Doc Nash's trust. What I did was bury the box in the clutter. As far as I knew, nobody but me went into the Collection Room, but I had a hunch about the gargantuan white flies and I wanted them safe until I could talk to Nash. I hid them in such a way that nobody was going to accidentally find them: I placed the box inside a box inside a box and then stacked other debris on top.

I spent a lot of time thinking about them after they were hidden. What weight of line and leader would be needed to cast such things? More important, what size of fish would rise to them? Maybe the flies were an elaborate joke from a former time. Or not a joke at all. I had never seen a fly in nature even a third the size of these. Even the huge and nocturnal
Hexagenia limbata,
what Michiganders called a “fishfly” or “Michigan Caddis,” were dwarfed by the mysterious white flies. Nash and his wife were in Florida for the holidays; I couldn't wait for him to get back to campus. Surely he would know what they were.

There were days in the years ahead when I would wish I had never found the damn things.

I was in a pretty fair mood when I got to work. As soon as I punched the clock I went looking for Spruce, but she wasn't in the jewelry section. It was a night when we were shortstaffed in anticipation of low customer interest. It didn't make sense to be open at all, but the company was willing to pay and I was happy to accept its money.

All the sales clerks were wearing party hats to put customers into a celebratory state of mind. My uniformed status made me exempt, which pleased me. I had never been one for forced joviality; in fact, I had always found that fun and trout fishing had much in common, not the least being that the best times seemed to arrive by serendipity.

At break there was still no sign of Spruce. I went back to the jewelry department. The clerk there was a young, rotund student with a pink party hat. He was wearing makeup, including blazing red lipstick, false eyelashes, and earrings. He saw me staring.