The Snowfly Read online

  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.

  “Nice fish,” he said.

  Rose nudged me. “Professor Ennis, I came to ask you about the snowfly.”

  “Did you? And who might you be? A friend of Rose? One of her curled-toes club?”

  Rose looked at me and rolled her eyes. She had told me during the drive to the cabin that Ennis was “not all there.” His specialty was the history of the Rockies. He had spent a lifetime tracing the movements of mountain men, spending several winters alone in the Rockies to better understand his subjects.

  “What’s he mean?” I whispered.

  “Talk to him,” she said impatiently.

  “I’m Bowie Rhodes.”

  Ennis smiled and cocked his head in my direction. “Any relation to Grizzly Rhodes?”

  “No, sir,” I answered without knowing who he was talking about.

  “He came out of Pennsylvania around 1800. Merchant family, well-to-do people, but he was the black sheep and a bad fit for the self-styled civilized East. He lived to be ninety and he was quite a man. Unusual in that he could write, but he didn’t much bother. Married a Crow woman and taught her. They had a dozen kids, all of whom lived, which was unusual in itself. The woman’s name was Red Face. She and those kids were writing fools. I located forty journals written by various members of the family. What we know about the lives of mountain men sits squarely on the shoulders of Red Face Rhodes and her spawn. Helluva lady, she was. Sure you’re not a relation? The Rhodes family had iron blood and molten fire in their hearts, that’s for damn sure.”

  “Not aware that I’m related.”

  “Too bad for you,” he said. “Why do you want to know about the snowfly?”

  “I heard about it once.”

  “Par for the course. It’s one-a those things that doesn’t get much talked about. Lotta people say it’s myth, but me, I say myths’re usually based on something. Smoke from fire, right? That’s what history’s taught me.”

  I wanted more, but Ennis only stared out over his pool.

  “You believe it’s real?” Some people needed prompting.

  “Doesn’t much matter what I believe.”

  “But I’d like to know more.”

  “Someday maybe you will and maybe you won’t. The snowfly’s a peculiar slice of life. Some are meant to know. Most aren’t and those who do know usually end up sorry for the knowing. The snowfly’s a burden, son, and I wouldn’t put it on so young a man. Best keep your attention on Rose there.”

  In August my roommate, Larry Showly, was killed during a fire in the Bitterroots. We were bunked two to a room and Larry was a quiet guy from Kansas who wanted to be a forester, did his job, and got along well with everyone on the fire team. He’d crossed a log in his corks, which was against procedure. The rotted bark gave way, he fell seven or eight feet onto a stob, was impaled and bled to death. I was the one who found him and the vision of him lying there with his unseeing eyes staring up into the heavens would not leave me.

  I did not fish much after that. Rose and I spent most of my free time in her bed. Rose taught me about making love. “It’s like basketball,” she said. “You can’t win in the first five minutes. You need to play the whole game.” When I got into my VW in September for the trip back to East Lansing, I had pretty much forgotten the snowfly. It took forty-nine hours to make the drive. Life lay ahead and I was eager to get on with it. I arrived just as registration began, secured my classes, and headed for a friend’s house to sleep. I had an apartment leased, but was too early to take possession. I felt empty without Rose. There had never been anything like what I imagined to be love between us, but we had been fine companions. The last thing Rose said to me was that I would never be comfortable again sleeping without a woman at arm’s length. She laughingly called it her legacy. She also said that wherever life took me, no matter how many women I loved, I would always think of her.

  I slept for twenty-four hours after I got back to East Lansing and then went to claim my apartment, the top floor of an old house on Michigan Avenue. It didn’t take long to unpack, but it was another day before I found the envelope stuck between two shirts. It smelled of Rose and made me smile.

  •••

  Sweet Bowie: I guess I get the last word in. I know how bad it was for you on the Bitterroot fire. It changed you. I like to think I changed you, too. You changed me. I guess that makes us even. While you were in the Bitterroots I went to see Red Ennis. He says the snowfly legend is probably baloney, but here it is. The snowfly hatch takes place every ten to fifteen years. Nobody knows where it will happen or when. Never the same place twice. You know that trout don’t live that long. That’s what the fish biologists say. But Red says they do. He says some fish with particular genes can live forty, fifty years. They find themselves
a great place where nobody can find them and grow fat and old. Only the snowfly brings them out. They risk their lives then. Nobody knows why, but it’s prolly no diff than college boys trying to keep a bunch of trees in nowhereland from burning up. Knowing you, there’s a hundred questions you’d like to ask, but I’ve given you all that Red gave me so it’s in your hands now. I worry about you, Bowie. I keep thinking what Red told us about Grizzly Rhodes and I wonder if the blood of that family flows in you. You have certainly got a fire in your heart and it’s a thing that keeps people from ever getting too close. I suppose that will never change, which is sad. We are all who we are. I won’t say be careful because I know you will, to the extent you can, but I also realize that when a man so young seeks out fires to fight, he will probably be fighting one sort of fire or another for the rest of his life. I wish you a great life, Bowie. And true happiness. I don’t know about this snowfly thing. Please know what it is that you want, my darling. Life is too short to waste. My love forever. Rose (P.S. We sure didn’t waste our summer!)

  •••

  I spent the day in my front window watching the traffic pass. I wanted to know more about the snowfly. During the next few years I didn’t think about it all the time. But there were moments. Which is how an obsession takes root.

  2

  Long before I arrived at Michigan State I knew I wanted to write. I didn’t tell people about it, but I knew and the Markham Award had strengthened my conviction. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my writing, but I had bested Raina Chickerman at it, which reinforced both my interest and my resolve. I did not resent the life our parents had given Lilly and me, but neither did I want to relive it. They were happily rooted to Michigan, but something inside me wanted more and to have a job that gave me the means to enjoy it. I settled on journalism as a major and in my junior year at the university I signed up for a course in science writing; it turned out that I was the only student and I figured the class would be canceled, but Professor Luanne Chidester was a woman with a mission and if there was only one student, so be it.