The Snowfly Read online

  “Lotta wand for a kid,” the old man said. I caught my first trout on an Adams that May. It was a nice thirteen-inch brown. It rose as a gray shadow, a submarine from below the boulders in our swimming hole. The family witnessed my catch and they all looked at me like I was crazy when I let it go.

  “Why’d you go and do that?” Queen Anna demanded.

  “So I can catch him again.”

  She grunted, which was her well-established signal of disapproval. “First, you don’t know it’s a him. Second, you can’t catch the same fish twice.”

  I had no idea why I’d done what I’d done and I didn’t care. That day, at that moment, having caught my first fish on a fly, it felt right to let it live. From that day on I spent my every spare moment casting flies for trout, letting most of them go and still wondering what a snowfly was. I asked a lot of people about it, but nobody seemed to know, and it would be a long time before I found anyone to even bunt at an answer.

  Some days after I found the rod and caught my first trout with it, Punky biked over to our house and saw me practicing casts with the bamboo rod. “Want me to show you how?” she asked. She was always cocky.

  I thought it was pure bravado, but with Raina you never knew. I wasn’t sure I wanted to surrender the rod, but I ended up handing it to her.

  I saw right away that she could cast a lot better than I could.

  “You fly fish?” I asked her.

  “No law against it,” she said, “and I’m good at it.”

  I did not doubt her for a moment.

  •••

  My mother was big-bone tall and towered over the old man. She was one of those people certain that God had ordained her to provide direction to the rudderless and exquisitely ruddered alike. She had the answer to everything and quixotic and mercurial methods; her natural voice was loud, her tone hectoring. With her voice she could rattle windows and freeze the most facile minds with terror, but she could also modulate to a tone as soft as cumulus, pat a cheek with love tender enough to melt the hardest skin, then backhand it black and blue in a wink. We simultaneously loved her and feared her, praised and cursed her, emulated and scorned her, followed her and fled her, but we never messed with her. She believed in matriarchal power, meaning raw female force, fully exercised. She did not suffer fools or pay heed to any view but her own. As would be said of such individuals in later years, she walked the talk.

  Only the old man would stand up to her and sometimes Lilly and I, cast as spectators, would watch and with certainty know the old man had carried the day, but Queen Anna would never cave to defeat. I once thought I heard her tell him that perhaps they both had valid points. I no longer remember the subject being debated, but the Queen’s admission was tantamount to conceding defeat and I headed for cover. A draw with the old man presaged a burning need for a victory elsewhere and I didn’t care to be a conquest of convenience.

  She was not cruel, just unpredictable. She would catch houseflies midflight between her forefinger and thumb, then catapult them carefully out the kitchen window. She would not kill until food was at issue and then she would kill with the steady hand of a practiced assassin. She raised chickens and named them, but when it came time to eat she would helicopter them and take the cleaver to the remains. Whatever name the bird had worn would never be used again, her way of paying homage, I supposed.

  When I was six or thereabouts, she shot a spikehorn through the kitchen window. The old man was off hunting and the buck had wandered under the clothesline and she popped a slug in the .16-gauge and blew out the windowpane, dropping the animal and severing the clothesline all with one round. This happened without warning and gave Lilly and me nightmares for days afterward. By the time the old man got home, the venison was gutted and hung, the lines and pane replaced.

  “Like the damn Queen of the Amazons,” the old man had declared proudly.

  The name stuck.

  Queen Anna was partial to long-bladed sharp knives and could dice and chop and slice and hack while she scolded and lectured. Talking was important to her. At meals she’d take a portion of everything, cut it up, and mix it all so that she didn’t have to look at what she was eating or make choices. She didn’t want anything to interfere with her monologues.

  We were a family of few means, meaning we lived on the margin, but the old man and Queen Anna were frugal and clever and Lilly and I never truly went without. The old man never had a steady job; I doubt he could tolerate laboring for the same person for too long. But he always had work, especially when we needed something. Queen Anna shopped the way a trophy hunter passed up bucks in anticipation of finding the biggest, and she made it clear that our poverty did not demean us. “There is no shame in being poor, as long as you are clean.”

  I used to go along with the old man to hunt, but he always carried the weapon. He had taught me to shoot and said I had a real knack, but the killing part never set well and he did not press it. I gladly ate whatever he managed to get, but I could not shoot at living things.

  One autumn he shot three deer, a buck and two does, and as we cleaned them he lit a smoke and looked troubled. The law entitled him to one deer.

  “Ordinarily, I follow the rules,” he said. “But the winter ahead feels like a bad one and we’ll be able to use this meat.”

  “What will Queen Anna say?”

  “She’ll huff and puff and say a prayer for me leading you astray, but she knows our need as well as I do, and in the end she will take the meat and move on. Your mother has some strong notions about right and wrong, but she’s not the kind to follow a rule if it might hurt someone, especially her kin. Do you well to remember that.”

  “You could say I shot one of the deer.” I thought this would ease the Queen’s anger.

  “I could, but your mother knows you as well as I do. If you can’t kill, you can’t. But you need to understand, Bowie, that there’s all sorts of hunting, and killing is a relative thing. I’ve watched you out there in Whirling Creek and you hunt trout as hard as I hunt other things. Sometimes it’s the hunting that does the real damage, not the killing. That’s just sort of the end of the road.”

  At the time I thought he was saying that I hurt trout by hunting them. Later I would realize that by hunting he meant pursuit, that anytime you pursued anything with unswerving purpose, damage would be done. It took me a long time to learn this.

  It was my sophomore year of high school. I had discovered basketball in the fourth grade but had always been gangling and more than a little clumsy before I finally began to grow into my body. The old man had rigged a backboard and hoop near the house and I spent years shooting away. I still could not kill, but I loved to win. I made the varsity as a tenth-grader, but barely. A couple of games into the season I got put into a game at the start of the fourth quarter when we were down twenty points, and I took this as a sign that the coach was throwing in the towel. But I viewed no game as ever lost and I went into a frenzy and potted twenty-four points in one quarter. We lost the game by three, but that eight minutes changed my life. I was moved off the bench into a starter’s job, which I never relinquished except for one game in my junior year, and that because of Raina Chickerman.

  Raina and I were only a month apart in age, her being the elder, and she held this over my head just like every other edge she had, imagined or otherwise. While we both had our licenses to drive at sixteen, she had her own car, a wallowing black Buick she called White Whale. I was curious about the name, but she refused to answer most of my questions and I was left to guess.

  Raina had been a skinny kid and a certifiable tomboy, but by tenth grade she had developed into a shapely young woman who seemed more mature than anyone in our school, including most of our teachers. They just looked old. She often drove me to basketball games while the Chickermans hauled my family. Some years we had a junker for transportation, and some years we didn’t. The Chickermans moni
tored our current state of wheels and stepped in to help when we were vehicleless.

  Just before Christmas of our junior year, the team had reeled off eight straight wins with no losses and we had climbed to eighth in the state polls.

  We were to play Gaylord, which was ranked second in the polls, and even the Detroit Free Press did a little write-up on the showdown.

  Raina arrived early that night and I threw my gym bag in the backseat and we headed for town. It had been a light fall and there was little sign of winter, which meant she could take dirt roads all the way to town. Given her choice and cooperating weather, Raina would always drive the dirt. This night she headed down a narrow two-track and suddenly stopped, dropping the gearshift into neutral.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she said.

  “Watching me what?”

  “Your butt, stupid. You’ve filled out nicely.”

  I blushed. “You too,” I managed to mumble.

  I had virtually no experience with girls. We lived in the woods and Punky was my only close female friend. In fact, she was my only friend.

  “C’est l’heure bleu,” she said, staring at me.

  “What?”

  “That’s French. It translates to ‘the blue hours’ but means dusk or twilight, which the French say is the best time for romance.”

  “You’ve been to France?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I read.”

  “I read too,” I said in my own defense. Though my reading tastes ran toward Tom Swift.

  “All you read are your press clippings.”

  This made me uneasy. How did she know? It was true: I read everything written about me, which wasn’t much but seemed to be growing.

  “Physiologically, we’re grown up, Bowie. Emotionally, women mature before men. But physically we’re both there. In two years you’ll be at your sexual peak and the rest of your life it will never be as good. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  I didn’t know where she was heading with this, but my stomach was fluttering and I was sweating. “You’re crazy.”

  “I won’t dispute that possibility,” she said. “But that’s off the subject. I have in mind that we should engage in some osculation, perhaps in the French style.”

  “Some what?” It was not unusual for Raina to bring some strange subject out of left field. And to do the unexpected.

  When we were thirteen or so Raina came over to the house and was waved upstairs by Queen Anna. She entered my room without knocking and flopped on my bed, her eyes dark and cloudy.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She answered by peeling off her T-shirt to reveal budding breasts with coral-pink aureoles. “What the hell am I supposed to do with these?”

  I could not take my eyes off them. “All girls have them, even my sister.”

  “Well, I ought to have a choice,” she said. “You want to touch them?”

  I declined, but still remembered that moment when something began to change between us. Until we reached the end of junior high school we had been inseparable, best friends, coexplorers, competitors, but always thinking of ourselves as a team.

  That was then. “Osculation is kissing,” she said. “God, Bowie! How will you get into college with such a lackluster vocabulary?”

  I heard only one word in this statement: kissing.

  Which we clumsily attempted and stayed at until my mind melted and I felt like gravity had abandoned the earth.

  “Oh shit,” Raina yowped in the middle of a long kiss, “we’ve got to get you to the gym!”

  At that moment I would have junked my basketball career and everything else I held dear, but Raina had other ideas and once her mind was set, you had no choice but to go along.

  On the way into town she asked, “You dated anybody yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “No coitus then.”

  “Caught us?” I looked around with paranoia.

  “Gone all the way,” she said. “Done the deed, made the beast with two backs.”

  I stared straight ahead. Why was she like this?

  “You don’t have to answer,” Raina said. She looked over and winked. “Your secret’s safe, but this is so sweet, Bowie. Tonight I am going to watch you run up and down that court and all the girls and even some grown women are going to be watching your butt and lusting for you and I’ll know that your lips have never tasted any but mine.”

  “I didn’t say I hadn’t kissed a girl.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Actions speak, Rhodes. You’re a virgin by all counts.”

  “And you aren’t?”

  “Wouldn’t you love to know.”

  The whole thing left me out of sorts. Part of me was still with Raina and the other part was trying to get me focused on basketball.

  Coach stared at me from across the room. “What the hell is that on your collar and neck, Rhodes?”

  I didn’t know until I stood up and looked in the mirror. Lipstick. Smeared all over my shirt and neck. “Blood,” I said. “Must’ve cut myself shaving.”

  Coach grunted skeptically.

  We returned to the dressing room after warm-ups and Coach went over the game plan. He didn’t look at me until he had finished. “Find yourself a seat on the bench, Rhodes. A man who’s lost that much blood can’t play a big game like this. I’d be morally remiss to risk your health for a mere sporting event.”

  I was sick. I was angry. I was also still thinking about Raina’s kisses.

  At halftime we were down seven points. “Still bleeding?” Coach asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Okay, you’re going in, but don’t ever cut yourself shaving before another game or I’m gonna have to tell your folks to have you checked for hemophilia.”

  I played like a demon and we won by fifteen and jumped to the top of the polls, but of that night, it is the kissing that still stands out in my memory.

  After the game, I dumped my soiled shirt in my bag and wore a basketball warm-up jacket.

  Raina was standing with her folks and my parents. Queen Anna gave me the once-over. “How come you sat so long? You feeling okay?”

  I said I was fine and when Raina and I got in the White Whale I told her what happened and I thought she was going to pass out laughing. Her laugh was like a hyena’s bark.

  A week after school ended that year I went down to the Rock Socket River and had a great evening on gray drake hatches. I didn’t consider myself an expert fly fisherman, but I was learning and most times I could get into fish if I just thought through what I was seeing. When I got back to the old man’s latest beater, I found Raina Chickerman sitting on the right front fender, her fly rod across her lap. She wore a black bathing suit and hip boots and was smoking a cigarette.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Jocks look down their crooked noses at smokers, or is it just at women who smoke?”

  “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.”