The Moose Jaw (39 page)

‘Where is that asshole?’ I thought.  I said, “Thanks Sally, I’ll catch up with him later.”

“If it’s urgent, why don’t you try his cell phone; he always has it with him.”

‘Of course!’ I thought.  To Sally, I said, “I’ll try that.  Thanks again, Sally.  Bye.”

I hung up and immediately dialed Haywood’s cell number.  He answered on the first ring.

“Haywood!” I was breathless.  “Where’s my fly tying kit?”

“What?”

“My fly tying stuff – from the cabin!  Where is it?”

He was silent for a moment.  “It’s still up at the cabin.  I didn’t bring it out with me.  I remember seeing it over by the wall in one of those boxes.  One of them was open and your vice and scissors and some feathers and shit were on top.  I figured you’d want to keep it up there, so I left it.”

“Did you see a little clear plastic box with one fly in it anywhere?”  I was frantic and I’m sure he could hear it in my voice.

“Sorry, don’t remember anything like that. What’s this all about anyway?”

“Physical evidence.”  I quickly told him about Morgan’s special flies.

“She tied one of her pubic hairs in a Caddis?” He was incredulous.

“Yes! Goddamnit!  And there was still one left in the box.  She tied three.  I lost one and the other one…HOLY SHIT!  Did you bring out my rod?”

“Of course!  I’m not daft, you know.  I brought out the guns and ammo too. ”

“Never mind them!  My rod!  It was still rigged with one of her Specials!  Where is it?!”

“It’s in its rod case, which is standing in the corner of the goddamned guest room where you slept last night!  Where the hell do you think I’d put it?”  He was clearly losing his patience with me.

“Sorry, Haywood, it’s just… Ah, shit, you know.  Sorry.”

“It’s O.K.  I know.  Anyway, whatever you had on it is still there.  I just broke down the rod, folded it in two and put it in your case, reel and all.  I’m leaving the butcher shop as we speak.  I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.  I gotta hear more about these Specials.”

We hung up and I bounded down the stairs to my bedroom, grabbed the rod case and took it back to the living room where the light was better.  I knelt on the floor and unzipped the case.  The Special was still there, secured to the hook keeper.  Thank God!  I remembered seeing a pair of fingernail clippers on the kitchen island, so I fetched them and snipped the line just above the fly.  Then I took my prize over near the window and put on my glasses.  I held it up to the light and examined it.  My heart skipped a beat when I caught the flash of red within the deer hair body.  It was still there.  I’d had a moment of anxiety when I thought it may have broken off during the fight with the grayling, but luck was with me.  I had her hair.  She had, without question, been real.  She had, without doubt, been with me in my cabin.  She had, perhaps intentionally, left me this tiny memento of our time together.  My heart was, literally, filled with the joy of knowing.  It didn’t matter that she may have – probably did – exist in a different dimension.  Somehow our worlds had, for a little while, merged like the circles of feeding rings on the water.

My mind went back to that evening when I had waited in the canoe for darkness to fall and watched the fish jumping and the eerie, unworldly glow in the air as the mist rose off the water.  The trout – the Rainbows – they were the key.  Morgan hadn’t come to my world; I had, somehow gone back to hers.  I had gone back to 1959 and loved a woman and killed a man.  It was the bear that puzzled me, old Trilogy.  He had left his mark on Morgan, and some mystic bond had been formed between them.  Together they had left a message in the hearth slab.  Why?  For whom?  For me I supposed.  I’d washed it and rubbed it like the genie’s lamp, and they had come – or I had gone to them. 

I thought about the morning after I’d found her, and Trilogy appeared across the stream.  And he was always about the cabin.  Was he guarding her?  Is that why the McCaslins never came close after that one attempt?  Was the bear protecting us from them?  Yes.  That was the way it looked.  He’d even guided my steps home through the snow the night the wolves almost got me.  Was he keeping me alive so I could complete my mission?  Was it my destiny to kill Roy?  Had Roy been just another pawn?

I remembered Morgan’s kiss,
and her parting words when we stood by the canoe before I left that afternoon, “…some things are preordained.”  Incredible.  And her, there on the bank like a pagan goddess commanding the wind to carry me upstream to kill the man who had violated her.

But Trilogy hadn’t attacked me in 1959.  Haywood had not flown back to 1959.  When he arrived Morgan and the McCaslins had vanished.  That must have been the moment I returned to the present.  But the bear had, somehow, followed me.  He had followed me and put his mark on me, and now he and Morgan and I were all bonded together in some ancient, mystic way.  And I had killed him – or had I?  Perhaps I had merely sent him back.  Perhaps he was back there keeping watch over Morgan right now.

Haywood’s pickup turned into the driveway and rolled to a stop on the gravel.  I was surprised to see it was snowing.  Big, lazy flakes were drifting slowly out of the sky. There was already a little covering the blacktop of the road.  I watched him climb out the driver’s side and crunch across to the steps.  He looked up through the falling snow and saw me at the window and waved.

I left the Morgan Special on the windowsill while I put my rod case back in the bedroom.  When I came back to the living room Haywood was hanging his jacket on the hall tree in the entry. 

He ran up the last five steps to the main level.  “Did you find it?  Where is it?”

I walked across the carpet to the window and lifted the fly into the light.  He went to his desk and brought over a magnifying glass.  I handed him the fly; he took it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger and brought it under the glass.  He turned it this way and that, so it would catch the light. 

He let out a low, appreciative whistle.  “I’ll be damned.  You weren’t kidding.”

I realized I’d been holding my breath.  I exhaled, relieved that he’d seen it.

“You going to show this to Hard Case?  He might be able to run some DNA tests or something.”

“And compare it against what?”

“Hmmm,” he frowned.  “I see what you mean.”

He gave me back the fly and laid the magnifying glass on the table.  “In any event,” he said, “the hair proves she existed.  She was real, and you didn’t just make her up.  That’s something.”

I nodded.  “Yeah.  I’ve been thinking about that.  I told him what I’d been thinking.

He went over and sat at the table and began fiddling with the magnifying glass.  Finally he looked me straight in the eye.

“Fergus,” he said, then took a deep breath and continued.  “You may be right.  Maybe not.  But if you ever told that to anybody but me they’d have you locked up.  I think you better let it go.  You don’t really know what happened out there and neither do I.  But if you dwell on it you definitely will go crazy.  You went out there to get away from all the madness.  At first I thought you may have taken a little back in there with you.  I’m still not sure, maybe you did.  When I brought you back and took you to the hospital I was pretty certain you’d gone off your rocker out there.  After the thing with the bear, I just didn’t know anymore.  Then Hard Case drops this 1959 shit on us and you find a hair that proves your Morgan was real.  I say, O.K.  You went through some weird shit out there, but you’re not crazy – yet.  Now, it’s time to quit while you’re ahead.  Forget it happened and get on with your life.”

It was a long speech for Haywood.
  I knew he’d been thinking about it all the way home.  He was worried about me, for good reason.  His advice was sound, but I knew I couldn’t take it.  I set the fly back on the windowsill and went over to the table.

“You’re probably right, Haywood.  You are right.  It’ll take me some time, but I’ll put it behind me.  Whatever happened out there, I’ll leave it out there.”

He studied me carefully for a while, then said.  “Good.  I hope you mean it, Gus.”

I didn’t, but I gave him my most reassuring smile.

“I do.  You can relax.”

He studied me for a few more moments and then slapped a palm down on the table.  The wind from his hand ruffled the papers lying loose on top of the open folder.  He jumped to his feet.

“O.K.  First thing we gotta do is reintroduce you to the game of pocket billiards! Let’s drive out to Skinny Dick’s, have beer and burgers for dinner, and shoot a few games of pool!  With your cracked rib, I ought to be able to kick your ass!” 

I laughed.  “Not on the best day of your life, Haywood.  Let’s make it best of five, and loser buys dinner.”

He laughed too.  “You’re on!  Let me feed Bosworth and we’ll hit the road.”

***

Skinny Dick’s is a roadhouse twenty miles south of Fairbanks on the main highway to Anchorage.  Even in the steadily falling snow, it only took a half hour to get there from Haywood’s house.  I’d been there a couple of times before.  Anywhere else, it would have been nothing more than a biker dive, but here in Alaska it had a mixed clientele.  On any given day you would see patrons ranging in age from toddlers to octogenarians, and in lifestyle from backwoods trappers to yuppie hairdressers.  Dick welcomed all.  He had the pictures on the wall to prove it.  His walls were covered with photographs of Dick with every VIP in Alaska from 1966 to the present.  He also had shots of himself with any female he could get to show her tits to the camera.  He had quite an impressive collection of – shall we say, trophy racks.  It was a relatively large place by Alaska standards.  The open floor plan accommodated two pool tables, the mandatory video games, several eating booths, a dining island, and a full bar.  Haywood and I liked the place because it served great burgers and fries, the beer was cold, and the pool tables were, more or less, level.

   Despite the arrogance of my challenge, I wasn’t as good as I had once been.  I won the first game when Haywood sunk the eight ball a little early.  He swept the next three games, so dinner was my treat.  It was a fun evening and it served to take our minds off, what we had come to call, the Moose Jaw Mystery.  Nevertheless, it did keep popping up in our conversation.  We couldn’t help it.

Halfway through the second game Haywood paused to chalk his stick and said, “Well, at least the goddamned moose was real.  The butcher says it’ll be ready next Tuesday.  I didn’t have a chance to check with you, but I assumed you wanted the same percent of cuts and sausage as usual.”

I nodded.  “Yep, that’s perfect.” 

We both realized, at that point, it was going to be hard to avoid thinking about it.

Nevertheless, I knew now what I was going to do, and it was time to start laying the groundwork.

“I plan on flying home day after tomorrow.  You can just have him ship my share of the meat to Morning Rock when it’s ready, and bill me direct.  I want to travel light anyway.  I don’t know how much I can carry with this rib.”

He said that would be fine, and set about running the table.

It was still snowing when we left Skinny Dick’s.
  There was already about four inches on the ground, and the snowplows were busy on the highway.  On the way back to Fairbanks, Haywood said he’d see if he could get his Piper out of the maintenance hangar so he could fly me down to Anchorage Tuesday morning. 

“Don’t bother,” I said.  “Alaska Airlines has a flight every two hours, and they’re dirt cheap.  I’ll just take one of them.”

“We’ll see how it goes.”  He wasn’t usually evasive in his answers.  When he was, you knew he’d rejected your suggestion.  If his airplane was ready, he’d insist on flying me down.  I didn’t pursue the issue.

After a short silence he said, “By the way, you want those moose antlers?  I dropped the head off at a taxidermist’s.  I asked him to mount it European style.  Something about those enormous antlers sticking out of a naked skull appeals to me.  Trouble is, I don’t have anywhere to hang it.

“Sure. I’ll have the whole thing made into a hat.  When Sylvia and Gaspard come to visit, I can meet them at the airport wearing it.  They’d appreciate the irony of the gesture.”

Haywood chuckled.  “At least you can joke about it.  I don’t think I could be as gracious as you’ve been about that whole situation.”  Then he laughed and shook his head. “Ah, boy – sorry.  I just had a vision of you standing in the arrival hall down at DIA wearing a sixty-eight inch rack of moose antlers; you’d cause quite a stir.”

He laughed again and then went on, “Seriously though.  I’d like you to have them.  You could hang them over the big stone fireplace in the main room.  You’d have something to remind you… Oh, shit.  I’m sorry.  I keep stepping in it.”

“It’s O.K.  I haven’t really stopped thinking about it either.  It’ll take some time.  Anyway, yes, go ahead and have it sent down to Morning Rock when it’s mounted.  I’ll store it for you, over the big fireplace, until you get a house with higher ceilings.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Thanks.”

It was only eight thirty when we rolled into his driveway.  He had an invitation to spend the night at Donna’s house, so he dropped me off out front, pressed the button on his automatic garage door opener and said he’d see me sometime tomorrow.  I got out and waded through the new snow to the garage.  I had worn my low top ducks and I got a shoe-full on the way.  I kicked them off, stepped over and around all the boxes and bags scattered on the garage floor, pushed the button to lower the door and went upstairs.

I logged onto Haywood’s computer and checked my email.  There were several in the Bulk Mail Folder, which I promptly blew away, and only two in the Inbox.  One was from Uncle Jack reminding me to let him know when I’d be arriving, the other was from my old boss in England, asking me how things were going.  I answered both of them.  I told Uncle Jack I couldn’t give him a return date yet, but not to worry, I’d check in with him when I could.  I also answered my old boss and told him everything was fine.