Free Black Fly Season by Giles Blunt Page A

said. ‘But me, I don’t think the black flies did that.’

CHAPTER 8
    Kevin Tait picked up the fly-swatter and moved with great stealth to the window. The fly that had just taken a piece out of his ankle was trying repeatedly to fly through the glass. Kevin brought the fly-swatter down, and the fly went to its reward. Using the swatter like a spatula, he scooped up the tiny corpse and carried it to the cabin door. He opened the door just long enough to fling the dead fly outside without inviting any of its cousins to the Kevin Tait smorgasbord.
    He cleaned the little smear from the windowpane with a Kleenex. Across the field, Red Bear was arriving in his black BMW. You had to hand it to Red Bear, the guy knew how to live. Dressed in white from head to toe, all six feet of him, and then he’s got that glossy black hair down to his shoulders and the Wayfarers dark as outer space. He climbed out of the Beamer and two nifty-looking babes got out with him, a blonde and a brunette With the kind of bodies that spoke of hours in the gym. The three of them walked across the former
     
    baseball diamond to Red Bear’s cabin, by far the nicest in this crumbling old camp. Kevin watched them from his window, the tall Indian all in white, like Elvis in his last years, an arm around each of the women. Red Bear wore so many beads and bracelets he rattled as he walked. Somehow he overcame the vulgarity with his good looks and his aura of power.
    Kevin Tait was not the kind of young man who believed in personal power or charisma, perhaps because he sensed that he possessed none. Oh, he knew he could be charming. Women have always had a weak spot for penniless poets, and the erotic power of melancholy is well known.
    Kevin flopped across the bed and opened his notebook. He pulled out the black pen Terri had given him for his twenty-first birthday. He thought he might start a poem about misery and lust, but the pen remained inert.
    He flipped through the notebook, browsing through jottings he’d made over the past months - musings, observations, bits of verse.
     
    Her first love was a captain For whom she would become The muse of Navigation The smoke of opium
     
    Just a fragment, and too Leonard Cohenish at that.
     
    A wizard turning wisdom into wine…
     
    God knows where he had been heading with that one. It seemed ages since he’d finished anything substantial. There had been a poem in March, but he hadn’t bothered to send it out to the small magazines; it needed another polish or two. The last few months he’d been conserving his strength, lying fallow, waiting for just the right idea; he’d know it when it came along. It would go off like a roman candle, sparks pinwheeling across the jet-black sky of his mind.
    ‘Kevin Tait, good to have you on the show.’
    Kevin liked to do this thing in his head where he was being interviewed by David Letterman, even though he knew Letterman never interviewed poets. He figured he would be the first.
    ‘Kevin Tait,’ he said again. ‘Here you are, your last volume of poems sold a gazillion copies. People quote your lines to each other day in and day out. You’re not just a poet, any more, you’re a force in the culture. And - I don’t know how to put this gently - you’re hanging out with scumbags. N’er-do-wells. Drug dealers. What are you thinking?’ Letterman’s fratboy grin took the sting out of the question.
    ‘Drug dealers, Dave, provide a much-needed service to a, let’s face it, under appreciated crowd. People have used drugs down the centuries, and they always will. Look at Coleridge. Look at Rimbaud. A little disorder in the senses never hurt
     
    anybody. And not just artists. It’s a long dark night out there, Dave, and everyone needs a little help getting through.’
    (Applause. Letterman ignored it.)
    ‘But you’re a poet. And you’re hanging out with thugs. Doesn’t that make you nervous?’
    ‘Nervous? Not really.’ Kevin gave it a beat. ‘I’m actually