The Dogs of Winter (18 page)

It was to this end that, when Travis had finished with the boat and loaded his truck, he did not go home as he would have liked, for he was tired and his head hurt. He drove instead to the Golden Ox, the establishment being a bar on the outskirts of town frequented by Indians. For if he was to monitor the situation he needed to know the talk on the river, and the Golden Ox was as good a place as any to start.

•  •  •

The Golden Ox was a single-story structure set well off the road among a stand of redwood. The bar’s owner was an old Indian logger named Bone. Bone lived in a small trailer in back of his bar, and on this particular afternoon was himself his only customer, a situation Travis was inclined to read as a bad sign, as it was quitting time, and though not many of Bone’s regulars had jobs to quit, Travis would have expected a few more in attendance.

Bone was seated on a stool as if awaiting service when Travis came
into the room, which was low and dark and usually smoky as well, but which this afternoon was only poorly lit and smelled of beer, spilled and gone sour.

The old man regarded him as might an aging parrot, his head tilted to one side, his face shaped around a certain brand of laughter Travis found peculiar to many of the older Indians along the river, as if they were privy to some joke of which you happened to be the butt. The thing to do, he had learned, was to laugh along with them. Sometimes the laughter was silent. Sometimes, particularly in public, and particularly if there were strangers present, the laughter was loud and rude and accompanied by a good deal of pointing and name-calling, as if indeed each of you were the butt of some joke and each knew it, and knew what it meant, and knew as well there was little one could do but laugh, as if this were the last act of courage to which one had been reduced, though whether Travis was alone in this assessment or had company he could not say, because it was not something one talked about but only something one did, and so it was that he went about aping as best he could the old man’s grin and seated himself next to him and requested a beer.

Bone slapped the bar with the flat of his hand and limped off to fish in his cooler for a bottle of Budweiser, which he opened and placed before Travis.

Travis nodded. Bone got a beer of his own and sat down next to him. The men drank their beers in silence and Bone got up and got them two more and they drank those. It was not, Travis knew, Bone’s way to come immediately to any point. Nor would he do so himself.

“Frank was in here this morning,” Bone said at length. “Wants me to come upriver for the dance.”

“You going?”

“Shit. Nothing up there but bugs and poison oak. He says you’re going, though. Says you’re going to bring your grandmother’s beads. Says you’re going to dance.”

Travis drank his beer.

Bone laughed at him. “You got to lay off that shit, you’re going to dance.”

“If I’m going to dance.”

“Frank says you are.”

“There are some things Frank don’t know.”

“He knows,” Bone said. The men sat for some time in the silent bar, working on their beers.

“So where is everybody?” Travis asked.

“Big do up at the Moke’s.”

Travis nodded. He could not say that he was pleased with this news. Nor could he say that he was surprised by it. The people of the reservations were splintered into many factions. On one very basic level, however, there were two. There were those willing to work for change within the system. And there were those who would take things as they were, who would collect their food stamps and tend their weed and wait on the apocalypse. The evening in question would find one of these groups at the gathering of the tribal council where the matter of the new constitution was up for debate. The others would party at the Moke’s. And then there were the ones like old Bone, who Travis knew would attend neither, but would pass the dark hours alone, retiring only when the alcohol had done its work. For they considered the one gathering a waste of time and the second, evil.

For Travis, the course seemed clear enough. In thinking about it, he supposed the Golden Ox would have been too easy. Still, he was in no immediate hurry to be gone. The long drive upriver in the dead of night was not something he looked forward to. As a consequence, he sat with Bone and watched in silence as the old man shuffled around the bar for more beer, which Travis received in silence and drank in silence, watching as the last of the light drained from the narrow slice of sky made visible through the front door set ajar before it, until finally, it was the old man himself who spoke, saying no doubt what had been on his mind since Travis had sat down beside him.

“I hear you was out there today,” Bone said.

Travis nodded. “I was with one of them just now,” he said.

“Which one was that?”

Travis sighed. “The one that lost the boy,” he said.

•  •  •

An hour later found Travis deep within the Hupa reservation. The forest rose on either side of him, climbing toward the crests of
distant ridges, hiding the moon, casting the narrow road which skirted the river in abject darkness. As a consequence, he drove slowly, with time to think. He thought about his conversation with Kendra Harmon on the day she’d come to ask about Marvus Dove. He had tried to frighten her with bits and pieces of the old stories. He had given her the books, saying that what he knew was so contained. But in this he had lied. The stories were not just in books. They were in the blood, and blood was deep here, old and swift like the river itself, so that driving its bank, he heard once more the voices of his people. The voices did not come to him in his office, in the light of day. Or if they did, they came only as memory, faded by time. It was different here, by this river, beneath these trees, in this darkness. The voices were rude and strong once more.

The Hupa had once been known as the Romans of the Pacific Northwest. The Yurok, the Tolowa, the Tataten had all paid tribute to the Hupa, and the cold-blooded nature of the raids in which they had swept down the river to carry away captives had long been a great source of terror to the other tribes. Among themselves, however, direct confrontation with an enemy was often avoided. They preferred the black magic, the invisible arrow, the incantatory chant. Some preferred them still. It was yet one more source of division among his people.

The drowning of the boy would prove no exception. At the council meeting, there would be talk of litigation and high-priced attorneys. On this night, however, that was not the talk which interested Travis. Though he had not said as much to the photographer, he knew something of the boy’s family. They came from a remote part of the reservation where the black magic still flourished, where the dried salmon hung in the smokehouses, where the graffitied rocks read “Hupa Stoners” and “Fuck the Police.” And while the talk of litigation would no doubt come to naught, the bad talk might well bear bad fruit. It was talk of a lost past, an apocalyptic future painted bright on crank and Budweiser, and harm was what came of it.

•  •  •

Eventually, a handful of lights appeared among the trees. Travis turned onto a narrow gravel road at the end of which he came
upon the ruins of what someone had once intended as a fishing resort but which had been taken by sloth and the river, so that all that remained now was a bare concrete slab and a brick wall across which someone had spray-painted the words “Hupa Stoners.”

Travis parked in front of the bricks and got out of his truck. As he did so, the darkness closed in around him. It was a cloying thing, filled with dampness and the sounds of the river. There was a stand of trees some fifty yards from the spray-painted ruins. The river curved there and the trees touched its bank. A faint light issued from their midst, and Travis knew them to mark the home of an old Hupa known as the Moke.

The Moke was a clan leader of some repute, noted principally for two things: his smoked salmon and his righteous weed. He was pushing seventy, still fit and trim though how exactly this could be after all his years of bending the elbow and chasing skirt Travis could not quite understand. All he was certain of was that the old man would outlast him. He had been seventy years on the river and he knew its ways better than most. There were some who said he was a
hee-dee.
A rumor which, in the light of day, at the edge of the strip mall which housed Travis’s office, might elicit a smile. In the darkness of the forest, at the side of the Moke’s river, such a smile would be hard to come by.

As Travis started toward the light, he heard music. It was the music of the tribe, of the drum and bow. He passed between two junked cars, a rusted Trans Am and a Plymouth Duster whose colors had long ago worn down to the metal, and which, by the light of the moon, appeared identical in color and had been so for just about as long as Travis could remember.

In time he was greeted, first by a pair of dogs and then by a young woman he knew to live with the Moke. The woman’s name was Delores and she was college-educated and not unattractive, though alcohol had begun to make her fat. He spoke to her and she to him. They were standing now beneath the mountain alder that ran to the house, and he could see that between the house and the shed used for smoking fish, someone had strung up a big Roosevelt elk that had been skinned. There was a fire near the animal, and he could see what looked to be several painted figures dancing about
the flames. It was a primitive little scene. An apparition from the past, conjured out of ectoplasm on the breath of the river.

Travis stood with the young woman in the shadows.

“That’s some Roosevelt,” Travis said.

Delores took a cigarette from the pocket of her T-shirt and put it to her mouth. As she lit it, she cupped her hands about the match, briefly illuminating her face from the underside, allowing Travis to see there a wry smile and hard lines he had not noticed when he had seen her last. He watched her nod as the light went out, blowing smoke toward the sky.

“Who got it?”

“Jimmie and Deke.”

“How far did they have to go?”

Delores took another drag on her cigarette. “About as far as Ted’s Bucket of Suds.” She gave him the wry smile and he saw that she had broken a tooth. Not long for the Moke, he imagined, and he supposed that she knew it too. “They were on a beer run. Elk was nosing around a Dumpster in back of Ted’s. Jimmie jumped out and shot him.”

Travis looked toward the firelight, the dancing shadows. As he did, he noticed for the first time a vehicle parked on the far side of the flames. It sat beneath the trees not far from the smokehouse, and he saw that it was some variety of homemade house car. He took it for the remains of an old American-made station wagon someone had thought to convert to a truck by cutting away much of the rear end. In the resulting bed, they had erected a kind of cabin, complete with a steeply pitched roof along whose spine one might discern the edges of wooden shingles, like the dark teeth of a saw before the moon. In another time or place, Travis might have found the sight a comic one—an Okie shack put to wheels. On the evening in question, the car’s effect was quite the opposite and he viewed its black and crooked silhouette with some degree of dread, for it struck him as just the kind of thing one might well expect from upriver. When he turned to ask Delores about it, he found that she had already moved off, that she was scolding a half-naked child, holding to the child’s arm with one hand while balancing the beer can and cigarette in the other. Travis found the pose a
prophetic one and when he had seen there would be no further conversation between them, he left her and went closer to the fire.

That he was able to move freely among these people was one of the few things he had accomplished here. He had managed a reputation. He had found many of these men work, though few had kept it. Still they knew him to be fair-minded and they knew that he was not afraid of a fight. An ex-con by the name of Davies had shown up at the office early on. The man had ostensibly come looking for work, but he’d come drunk and rude as well and Travis had gone after him, right over the top of his desk, and driven him off with his fists. Of course that had been nine years ago, and Travis had been more enthusiastic and wilder then himself, in love with a Hupa woman and inclined to party—all traits which had made him welcome or at least tolerated in most corners of the reservation. He had taken some pride in this. He had thought it an auspicious beginning. But it was nine years and two wives from where he stood just now, and much to his remorse, the old fire had dwindled considerably. The job was a job, and he had not gone over his desk for anyone in some time.

Thinking these things, he nodded to a number of men as he moved among them. It was well, he thought, that they had not been there today, on the island, to see him beaned by some bald-headed
wagay
with a slingshot. He was working his way around the perimeter of the fire for a better look at the car when a hand took him by the wrist.

“Got us an elk,” someone said.

Travis reached down to shake the man’s hand. He had gotten close enough to the car to see the plates were so old they were black with yellow letters.

“Got us a big elk,” the man repeated.

The men around him nodded. There were four of them seated on a log. They were dressed in workboots, khakis, and flannel. The man who had spoken was named James. He was seated next to a man named Bob and another man called Mousey, who had done time at the correctional institute at Scorpion Bay. Travis looked at the fourth man as well but the man was not known to him.

“James,” Travis said. He let go of the man’s hand. “You still working at the yard?”

James laughed. “I flunked my test,” he said.

By this, Travis assumed he had failed a drug test. The other men laughed.

“Elk’s got a lot of fat on him,” Bob said. “Gettin’ himself ready for winter.”

Travis looked once more at the skinned animal. He saw indeed that its body was heavy with fat, white and waxy by the light of the fire, and it was then that he spotted the Moke.

The old man was among the dancers. As Travis watched, the Moke came swooping toward him, his arms spread as if in flight. A carved eel hook swung from one hand trailing a feather, describing an elongated figure-eight upon the cool night air, and he saw the paint on the old man’s face and his white hair which he wore long and braided, and his dark eyes, and he saw the old man was laughing at him.