The Snowfly Page 7

  “They were there,” I said. “Now they’re gone. I thought they might be snowflies.”

  I watched him closely to gauge his reaction. Nash grinned, “Snowflies, eh? Maybe it’s nothing, but a scientist learns to embrace coincidence.” We went to his library and withdrew two thin volumes from a shelf. The first was called On the Habits of Trout & Their Environs. The author was M. J. Key and the publication date was 1892. The second volume was called Trouts of the Americas and dated 1943. The author was also M. J. Key.

  The publication dates were more than a half century apart.

  “Key,” he said, “was a controversial professor here when we were still an agricultural college. That’s about all I know about him. Key’s trout works were ahead of their time. Barbless hooks, light tackle, catch-and-release, and habitat management rather than hatchery fish. He was a genius and outspoken in his views, and because of this, a lot of people thought he was a nut case. Maybe he was.”

  What did this have to do with white flies? I said, “He wrote two books, fifty-one years apart?”

  “Who knows? There aren’t many people left now who knew him, but those who did say Key was a mistrusting and almost pathologically secretive individual. He left the college under some kind of scandal in the late nineteen-thirties. Some say FDR called him to government duty, and others say he was run out. Nobody knows for certain. The college was informed by the government that he died during the war, but there were no details, not even a date. He was a foreigner and spoke German, so maybe he was a spy or in the intelligence business. His second work could’ve been posthumous. I guess we’ll never know.”

  “The flies could have been his.”

  Nash nodded solemnly. “That’s one hypothesis among many possibilities.”

  “Did he write anything else?”

  “Nothing I’ve read,” Nash said. “You can borrow my copies of his books if you like.”

  I did.

  Several weeks passed and I had worked hard to get more information on M. J. Key, but I hadn’t assembled all that much. On microfilm at the university library I managed to find some clippings from the Lansing State Journal saying that Key had been accused of Nazi sympathies and had been asked to leave the college. While there wasn’t much on Key the man, his work—despite its consisting of only two books—was cited and quoted just about anytime somebody wrote seriously about trout fishing. I read the books rather quickly because they were pretty thin with tight, sparse sentences. Whoever Key was, he seemed to be a shade, a figure from the past, lost forever. But I kept thinking there had to be more about him somewhere. There was no mention of the snowfly in his books, but I had found the flies and the box with his initials; it had to be more than a coincidence.

  The state of Michigan had a massive central library in downtown Lansing. I often went there for books because it was closer to my apartment and a lot less crowded than the university’s facility. Buddy Wilihapulus worked in the research section. He had come to East Lansing to play football for Duffy Daugherty, the first recruit out of Duffy’s fabled Pineapple Pipeline, but Buddy had blown out a knee, which ended his football career. He had lost weight since his football days but remained an astonishing specimen at six-four and 250 pounds Coke-bottled around a narrow waist. Buddy’s hair was cut short in a severe flattop, and he had bad skin but a perennial smile and a soft voice. We had been in some journalism classes together.

  “Bruddah Bowie,” he greeted me. “What’re you thinking about this Vietnam business?”

  I knew Kennedy had sent a bunch of army advisers into the country and that some sort of civil war was going on. “I haven’t,” I said.

  “Maybe you should. They could draft your haole ass.”

  Draft? I had done two years of mandatory ROTC, my class the last to have to suffer through it. We had taken it as a joke and massive waste of time.

  “Head of the state draft board comes in here to hide from his old lady. He say numbers be goin’ up, bruddah. Serious numbers. Blood gonna flow.”

  My last night at Discount City Spruce Graham sought me out. We had not smoked together in weeks and had barely talked. She looked tired.

  “It’s nearly graduation?” she asked.

  “End of the term.”

  “What’re you gonna do afterward?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” The truth was that I was so caught up in classes, M. J. Key, and the subject of snowflies that I hadn’t really gotten around to looking for a job. I could smell her lilacs.

  She hesitated. “This is your last night?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you think I can have your address?”

  “Are we going to be pen pals?” I blurted out. It was a cheap shot, born in frustration, but she ignored it.

  “I was thinkin’ I can get tomorrow night off from work and come on over to your place. I promise I won’t go loony. About six be okay?”

  I nodded dumbly.

  Spruce arrived promptly at six and ten minutes later we were undressed and in bed, where we stayed until midnight. We made love like neither of us would ever get another chance. We both knew, without talking about it, that this was our one time and we made the most of it.

  On her way out she said, “My husband’s not gonna go through the graduation ceremony. He says he has the paper and that’s all that matters. We’re headed out a week after the last exam is done. Back down to Texas. He’s got more trainin’ ahead of him.”

  I wished her well and meant it. I learned from Spruce that people can be very different in different circumstances and that some people become trapped in their own lives. Back then I thought maybe that getting trapped was more a problem for women, but I was young. Now I know it can happen to anybody. And that there are all sorts of traps, the snowfly being just one of them.

  Queen Anna died suddenly the day after Spruce and her family left for Texas. She and the old man had made it to East Lansing for my graduation and she had cried all weekend and gone home and died. Her heart stopped and her death nearly stopped mine as well. Doctors could not figure out why she died and in the end, what did it matter?

  The call came from my sister, Lilly.

  We did not go to a church for the funeral.

  Father Luke was a retired Episcopalian priest who lived a mile down Whirling Creek. He drove up at noon, still wearing his waders. The grave would be on a knoll on the north end of the property. The old man said it was what Queen Anna wanted. Lilly and I had our doubts because, unlike our father, our mother was a regular churchgoer, but we were not willing to challenge the old man. He’d let her have her way as long as we could remember and now he wanted to have his way and that seemed fair. Besides, he knew her better than anyone.

  The Chickermans came in the company of a dark-haired beauty with wild blue eyes and sharp features. It was Raina and I could not take my eyes off her.

  Father Luke read a prayer and once stopped to pick a large yellow stonefly off the Good Book. He held it up and examined it studiously before flicking it away. When the prayer was done, he looked up.

  “Anyone care to speak?”

  There was an astonishingly large crowd at the ceremony. My mother had done good deeds all her life and only then, at her funeral, did I realize the impact her life had had on others. People began stepping forward one after another and after a while I had to sit down. My mother hadn’t been a queen; she’d been a saint.

  When the last person had spoken, the priest looked expectantly at my father.

  “Poor bastard,” my old man muttered.

  “Who?” Father Luke asked. He looked worried.

  “God. She’ll turn Heaven to Hell.”

  “You have no cause to say that,” the priest said.

  “What do you know?” the old man shot back. “I lived it.”

  Lilly and I just smiled at each other. After we got through greeting mourner
s, I looked for Raina and the Chickermans but they were gone. I drove over to the store hoping to catch them, but they weren’t there either.

  Raina’s sudden appearance and disappearance left me wanting to reconnect with her. I didn’t care what Lilly thought of her. She had been my friend. I knew that in my heart. In the years to follow I would learn that what’s in our hearts may not be in others’.

  4

  It was early August 1966, nearly midnight on a Saturday night. The temperature had been in the nineties for ten days, humidity thick as Saran Wrap, unrelenting even after sunset. I was working part time at an auto parts store called Sulac Automotive and also getting sporadic assignments from the Lansing State Journal. It was stringer’s work, paid by the published inch, but I thought it would look good in my portfolio. Other professions emphasized résumés and academic records, but if you wanted a reporting job you had to have proof that you could write. And the only proof that mattered was what actually made it into print.

  A small flat roof outside my bedroom served as a porch. Some nights I slept right there, where a little movement in the night air made the humidity tolerable. I had a phone installed illegally by an acquaintance in electrical engineering.

  I was in no mood to go out when the call came, but neither was the heat conducive to sleep.

  “Rhodes?”

  “Talking.”

  “Madill. Get your ass down to the Bellamy Building. You know where that is?”

  “Yep.” Madill was an assistant city editor and my benefactor at the ­Journal.

  “Got your credentials?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “Find them and go get me a story, Rhodes.”

  The Bellamy Building was the major landmark a few blocks north of the Capitol. The area had once been home to Lansing’s elite. Now it was the anchor of a sort of quasi-middle-class neighborhood, a mix of black and white families, some on their way up, others headed in the opposite direction. I found trucks and buses unloading dozens of cops who formed a serpentine single file, making their way past dozens of anodized trash cans stuffed with new ax handles. They looked like cans of kindling. Each cop took a handle out of a can and moved on. The cops wore military helmets with stainless-steel covers, heavy black leather jackets, and black gloves. Shoulder patches told me that the officers were from departments all over the area. Something big and sinister was unfolding. There is no sweeter scent to an aspiring reporter.

  I saw Reg Bernard, a Lansing cop I knew.

  “What’s up?” I asked him.

  “Race riot.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means some boofers have fucked the pooch. There was a party. It got noisy and out of hand. Deputy Chief Williams went over there to tell them to keep it down and some splib hit him with a brick. Fractured his skull.”

  There were cops strung out to the left and right of me. Every fifth or sixth man carried a powerful flashlight. The cops with the ax handles were banging them on the asphalt.

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Sweep the area,” he said with a shrug. “Our orders are to disperse the crowd and collar resisters.”

  The area west of us looked dark. House lights were out and many streetlights weren’t working.

  “Don’t get out in front of the line,” Bernard warned me. “This will not be pretty.”

  The sweep commenced with a babel of whistles to my left and right.

  The cops continued to hammer their clubs on the street, against trees, on everything in their path. The vibrating clamor reminded me of a rattlesnake’s final warning to intruders.

  Cops in the street waited for those going through yards to re-form the line, which advanced quickly and relentlessly.

  To my right I heard shouts and some shrieks, and the ever-present tattoo of ax handles.

  Ahead there was darkness.

  Eventually I left the main formation and worked my way into a group of cops moving through backyards; from there I raced ahead of them to see what it was they were actually after.

  I ran to get breathing room and didn’t stop until I was a block ahead.

  “What the hell you doin’, kid?” a voice asked nervously from a driveway.

  “I’m a reporter.”

  “You fucked. Shiny hats be catchin’ your ass out here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It got to have a name? It the same thing always goin’ down here.”

  “I heard a deputy chief got hurt.”

  “Hear lotta shit when big sticks be goin’ bip-bap, man. Ain’t no hurt depatee chief. They just got the bloods worked up. You best step on over here wid us.”

  What happened next has never been entirely clear to me. Behind me there was a fracas, several scuffles, curses, the sounds of sticks. Police lights knifed through the darkness. I had always imagined that a head struck by something solid would have a mushy, hollow sound. It didn’t. It sounded like the ax handles were striking oak beams.

  The sound of struggles grew steadily like a night hatch of skittering flies and hungry fish. Shadows melded with shadows. I sensed hurried movement all around me, but no sounds of fear. Men cursed and shouted, grunted and barked, all the sounds muted and workmanlike, the sounds of commitment. On both sides.

  A light beam swept me seconds before someone shoved me from behind, knocking me down, then there was the leaden stamp of feet around me and I could smell hate and sweat and a light beamed into my face and an angry and surprised voice said, “Rhodes? You piece of shit! Still porking that good old southern poon? Hold that asshole right there.”

  There was no mistaking the voice or the message. Rick Fistrip. I had no time to contemplate my recognition because fire erupted in my forearms. Then in my head.

  I awoke in white. A man in white speckled with blood sat in a chair nursing an unlit pipe. “How you feelin’?”

  “I’m not.”

  “That’s the dope,” he said. “You will. Concussion. Both your arms are broken. No ID. Who are you?”

  I gave my name, explained that I was a reporter.

  “How’d you get caught in that mess?”

  I wasn’t sure I could explain it. I had pushed out ahead and gotten myself enmeshed.

  “Gonna have to get positive ID on you,” the man said apologetically.

  I gave him the name of my contact at the paper.

  Madill showed up with his tie tucked between the third and fourth buttons of a starched white shirt. He had yellow-green sweat stains under his arms. “He’s mine,” he told the doctor and a cop, who was standing at the door.

  He turned to me. “I said get the story, Rhodes. Not be the story. They really worked you over, son.”

  I told him to write down what I said. The lead began, “Tonight police swept side by side through West Lansing, using pristine ax handles to club anybody in their path. They came, they claimed, to restore peace. From where I stood, it looked like they destroyed it. A lot of people are concerned about our deepening involvement in Vietnam, but it looks to me as if the real war could be right here, and just as nasty.” It was one of the most prophetic statements I ever authored.

  Madill looked at me. “Jesus Christ, kid. I like the ‘me’ angle. Keep it rolling.”

  I did.

  The story made the Journal’s front page. It wasn’t the precise story I wrote, but my facts and most of my observations were there and I got a check for fifty dollars and a prognosis of full recovery, casts off in eight to twelve weeks. I left out the part about Fistrip. I wanted to handle that separately.

  The paper covered all my medical bills. The morning I got out of the hospital I went directly to the police station and learned that Fistrip, who was part of some sort of police auxiliary that had been mobilized for the event, had indeed been involved. I filed a complaint. I told a lieutenant that Fi
strip had put a light in my face, spoken my name, and then I had been beaten. I also told him what Fistrip had said about reporters when we first met at Discount City. I said nothing about Spruce Graham. The lieutenant nodded with mock interest and nothing more came of it. At least not then.

  I had seen the heart of two mobs in my short life; I didn’t like either one and had no inkling that the worst was yet to come.

  •••

  Labor Day week I got my draft notice and called home. The old man talked to a friend at the local draft board, told him what had happened, and got my government physical postponed until I had a medical release from the riot injuries.

  A week later I had another visitor.

  Grady Yetter wore a suit like it was a vise. The fingers of his left hand were yellow from nicotine, his voice hoarse.

  “You Rhodes?”

  I nodded.

  “Madill called me. We did Korea together. Read me the story you wrote. Piss you off, they didn’t use it the way you wrote it?” He didn’t pause for my answer. “That’s a local rag for you,” he said with a sarcastic chuckle. “Guard the status quo like a virgin’s cherry. The first-person wrinkle threw them for a loop. It was a damn good story, Rhodes. I talked to Joe Lawler out at the college. He said you’ve got talent. You want a job?”

  Joe Lawler was my academic adviser at MSU. “Doing what?”

  “UPI, Rhodes. War correspondent. You say yes, we’ll ship your young ass to Vietnam. Nothing like a war to kick-start a career. I should know.”

  “I got my draft notice.”

  “Good, that makes your decision easier. Either way, Rhodes, when your arms heal, your ass is headed for Asia. You can go and find out what the fuck is going on, or you can go over there and have some pimple-faced brown bar from Bumfuck, Iowa, lead you through the jungle.”

  “If they draft me, I’ve got to go. That’s the law.”

  “Horseshit. The law don’t apply to everyone equally. You say yes to us and we’ll take care of Uncle Sam. Whaddya think?”

  “How much does it pay?”

  Yetter grinned crookedly. “Some days you’ll wonder why you’re not paying us. Other days you’ll think about coming back and slicing my throat.” He cited a figure and detailed benefits and other arrangements. He also gave me the name of another doctor who would look after my injuries.