The Snowfly (3 page)

“Neither,” I said. “Let me have one.”

She raised an eyebrow, flipped her pack of Luckies to me, and studied me while I lit one. “I am at a loss for words,” she said, “which is truly rare. That is obviously not your first coffin nail. How long you been on the weed?”

“Long enough, but I always quit during basketball season. How'd you find me?”

“The mere fact that we are co-located geographically does not mean that I am following you. Geography is often a false explanation of intent. Do you also swear off screwing during basketball?”

I laughed. “You don't have to quit what you haven't started.”

She chuckled. “Don't lose heart, Rhodes. You know what they say about big dogs.”

“No.”

“Big dogs walk last, but they walk best.”

It seemed a bizarre metaphor. “Why are you following me?”

“Not for kissing practice,” she said. “So how'd you do?”

“Not bad. You?”

“Just pulled in. I like to fish after dark.”

“Kind of risky.”

“Only for a gimp,” she said.

“I'd think your parents would worry.”

“Of course they worry. All parents worry about their progeny. But they don't stand in my way. They know I am going to do what I do. You're out here. Why shouldn't I be?”

“I'm leaving at dark. You're just starting.”

“We could always fish together,” she said.

“Queen Anna expects me back.”

“She would.”

“Besides, I can't see well enough to fish at night.”

“Blind people fish,” she said in her lecturing voice. “Doesn't matter to them if it's night or day. If the eyes don't work, the ears do.”

“Bull.”

She said, “My father knows a blind man who fishes alone at night, from a boat.”

As usual, I wasn't sure if I should believe her. She was not above fabricating facts to carry an argument or make a point. “You're full of it,” I said. It's funny how the mind works, but years later I would remember her telling me about the blind man her father knew and it would help confirm my suspicions in the mystery that dominated a great part of my life.

Raina stared down at the river. “Yes, I suppose that's true. You and I are so alike, Bowie. And we're so different and I don't refer simply to the obvious plumbing disparities. You like order and predictability. I like excitement and living life in big chunks. Circumstances conspire to hem women in. If we pick a safe, narrow trail at the start, we'll end up at a safe, narrow destination. I'm not going to be trapped like that.”

Did Queen Anna feel trapped? I doubted it. “Like a beatnik?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Beatniks have their own narrow paths and never mind what others say about them. I don't plan to fit any category.” She slid off the fender. “Time to get wet,” she said, “no innuendo intended.”

Innuendo? What did she mean now?

Raina walked several steps, stopped, leaned forward, and thrust out her behind. “The adjective is
callipygian
and it's top drawer, you agree?”

I nodded. Context was all I needed to understand.

I half followed her to the water's edge. “You remember that dead guy back when we were kids?”

She looked over her shoulder. “I never got to see him.” Her tone said she still had hard feelings about this.

“His wife came down to identify the body and she was mad as a hornet that he drowned. She drove a red El Do. She said he was after something called a snowfly. You ever hear of that?”

“No,” she said curtly and waded silently into the river, not looking back.

Punky and I had known each other all our lives. This time I knew she was lying, but I could not imagine why.

 

•••

 

Raina was indifferent about grades and grade points, at least on the surface, and had little tolerance for other school measures that she referred to as “pedestrian pseudo-academic trifles.” She also had a perfect four-point all the way through school.

At graduation I got the Markham Award for writing. It brought with it a scholarship that would go a long way toward paying for college. With work and the scholarship I figured I could get through. There was no way my parents could afford it. The prize was one of the few gewgaws not collected by Raina, but I knew she was miffed and no doubt offended. She had her exquisite vocabulary, which she used like a weapon, but I could write things that my teachers could comprehend and even enjoy. Others couldn't see Raina's anguish over my winning the prize, but I could and I liked knowing I had bested her at something. It had happened only one other time, in the elementary school spelling bee when she missed
systalic,
mistaking it for
systolic
and forever after blaming the teacher's mispronunciation. I got
syzygy
on pure guesswork and won and was never forgiven. Raina was not the sort of person who could live with losing.

She was, of course, our valedictorian and gave a curious speech about dreams and determination, the hidden but polite competition between genders, and how no genuinely educated person ever got much from formal schooling, which played to the middle, unable to recognize—much less serve—the gifted. Then she thanked her father and mother and named every teacher she had ever had and all of us were left to wonder if this was gratitude or one of her subtle put-downs. With Raina there was a fine line between the two.

We all scratched our heads, but we were all of a common mind about one thing: Raina Chickerman was headed somewhere to be someone. Only where and what were up in the air.

My parents and the Chickermans held a joint graduation party at the store. Raina and I hung to the side while our parents basked in the glow of hearing what fine young people they had raised.

We slipped outside during the festivities. It was a muggy night with a white moon covered with gauze. As she had years before, Raina removed her blouse. Only now the buds of then had grown firm and prominent and her breasts glowed in the moon's reflected light.

“Since this seems to be a night for finishing, I thought you should see how my girls turned out.”

“Nice,” I said, fumbling for something to say.

“Just
nice
? That's all you can say? God, you are such a jerk when it comes to women, Bowie.” With that she turned away from me.

It was one of those clumsy moments in life and I tried to recompose myself. “Have you decided on a college yet?”

“Didn't you hear anything I said at graduation?”

“Of course I heard.”

“If you did, you would know that there are certain people who cannot possibly benefit from the stilted education imposed by institutions. Life is education, Bowie. Learning is a way of life.”

“Well, what kind of living will you do?”

“The most that I can,” she said. “Remember that woman who said something about a snowfly?”

I remembered and I had searched the library and talked to people, but nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. Eventually I'd written it off as the ramblings of a sad and angry widow.

“I remember.”

“Tell me exactly what she said,” Raina said, turning back to face me.

I did, leaving out nothing.

“She hiked her skirt?” Raina asked.

“She did.”

“Was she wearing drawers?”

“Nope.”

“Have you followed her advice?” she asked. Then, just as quickly, “No, don't answer. It doesn't matter. I think the snowfly is actually a white mayfly,
Ephoron leukon.
”

This was the second time we had talked about snowflies. The first time, I had opened the subject and she had claimed ignorance. But this time it was her initiative and I wondered why. She had long ago passed me in the entomological knowledge needed to fish flies.

“So what?”

She shrugged and her breasts rippled in the light. “I thought you would want to know. Think of it as a graduation gift.”

“Some things I prefer to discover on my own.”

“Don't get into one of your snits,” she said, sliding her blouse back over her head.

Her tone bothered me. “I'm sorry.”

“Apology accepted. You remember that night you cut yourself ­shaving?”

I grinned. “Yeah.”

“I would have gone all the way with you that night, Bowie. If only you had shown the courage to take the initiative. That night is both a wonderful memory and a great disappointment to me.”

“I'm sorry.” She had me groveling again.

“It's just as well. With our luck, we'd have had a dead rabbit to contend with.”

“What?”

“I would have gotten pregnant, dummy. I thought for the longest time we were meant to be together, but now I know that's not true . . . at least not yet. There's too much we each have to do and we'd just get in each other's way and be holding the other one back. I think maybe we're too much alike. We have too much fire in our hearts, but I doubt you realize that about yourself yet.”

These were disconcerting words. Was she declaring the end of our friendship? “We'll always be friends,” I said.

She sighed and the sound was barely audible. “‘Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.'”

“Shakespeare,” I said.

“That's not a citation.”

“Richard the Something.”

“Second,” Raina said. “‘And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover. . . .'”

“I don't know that one.”

“Look it up sometime.”

She kissed me chastely on the cheek and went back inside.

It would be a long time before I remembered this quote again.

 

•••

 

The day I left for college Queen Anna was cutting scallions and green peppers and brandishing her knife like Toscanini with his baton. College was not going to be easy financially. I had the small scholarship, which would help, but I was going to have to work as well and I needed to find something that would provide a good hourly rate so that I would not be tied up working all the time.

“Keep your nose in your books,” she said. “It took your father and me a lot of effort to make you who you are and I don't want it undone
down there
”—this her term for anywhere she wasn't.

I had once heard her tell my sister, Lilly, to “keep your knees together and your mind on Jesus.”

To me she said, “Jesus taught us to fish, that we might feed others. College is where you're going to learn to fish in the waters of life, and life's filled with temptations.” She looked me in the eye. “Steer clear of women, Bowie.”

“But you're a woman.”

She gave me a rare smile and a gentle touch on the cheek. “I'm not a woman, Bowie. I'm your mother.”

I supposed that every freshman in America would be having similar talks with parents, but the Queen's send-off left me feeling uneasy. She went to the bus with me and handed me something wrapped in brown paper, tied neatly with purple string, and a cloth sack filled with apples.

On the bus I opened the package to find an old and worn copy of Izaak Walton's and Charles Cotton's
The Compleat Angler.
I wondered where she had found it and where she found the money for it, but it was one of my favorites and the gift made me teary. Inside the front cover she had written, “Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing,' and they said, ‘We also will go with thee.'” She added, “We are all with you, Bowie, wherever you go.”

After my freshman year at Michigan State, I went west to Idaho to fight fires for the summer. I had done all right with my grades and scraped by financially. The chance to go west offered me an opportunity to bank enough money to take care of a couple of years of school. When I wasn't on fire duty, I was fishing for rainbows and cutthroats and hanging out with a twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher named Rose Yelton. We met in a bar. In Idaho the legal age was still twenty-one then, but the reality was that if you were tall enough to stand at the bar you could get served. I wasn't yet nineteen.

“You must be a virgin,” a woman said to me.

“What?” I felt my neck go red. How did she know?

“Your hair hasn't been singed. Obviously you haven't had your fire-cherry busted yet.” She had a mesmerizing smile and the diaphanous hair of an angel.

We left the bar together that night and I admitted to her that it wasn't only my fire-cherry that was intact and she kissed me and told me that she couldn't do anything about the fires in the woods, but she could do plenty with other kinds of fires and she proved true to her words.

Her father ran beef on a scruffy, open-range ranch near Weippe and was also a trout fisherman. When I asked him about the snowfly he grinned and shook his head.

“It's a destroyer, son. Some men go plumb crazy chasing the snowfly.”

“Then it's real?”

“I can't honestly say.”

“Where can I find out?”

“I don't know, son. You might better put that question to Red Ennis.”

Ennis, I learned, was a professor emeritus of history from the University of Idaho in Moscow. He had retired to a cabin on Peavine Creek up in the panhandle near Pierce. Rose and I went to visit him.

Peavine Creek was not large by Rocky Mountain standards, but it was clear and quick, with moss-covered boulder steps and deep pools gathering wads of foam. The professor's clapboard cabin was built at the edge; a platform jutted out to the lip of a dark pool and Red Ennis sat on the platform in a metal rocking chair, which had so oxidized to rust it looked like it might turn to powder any second.

“Professor Ennis?”

He did not look toward us. “You hear him?” he asked, gesturing toward the pool.

Rose said, “Far side.”

The old man smiled. “Howdy, Rose.” He had white hair and slow, gentle eyes.