The Dogs of Winter (19 page)

Beyond the dance sight, a door stood open at the side of the house and Travis could see there were people inside. The blue light of a television flickered among the shadows. Snatches of organ music drifted across the sagging steps to inhabit what spaces there were between the sawing of the bow and the beating of the drum. Travis watched as a number of men exited the door and passed among the shadows on their way to the smokehouse. He studied their movements, trying to decide if there were any he knew, but the Moke had finished his dance and come to stand beside him, clapping him on the arm by way of a greeting.

“Travis McCade,” the old Indian said. “What brings you to the river in the middle of the night?”

Travis turned to the man before him. “Bone told me there was a party. I came to see why I wasn’t invited.”

The old man laughed at him. He waved at someone beyond the ring of firelight, calling loudly for beer and fish. In a moment a young girl appeared. Travis was offered a can of Budweiser and a stick of smoked salmon, which he accepted, then followed the Moke toward the steps and the door through which the men had just exited, as the old man was suddenly eager that he see the Polaroids they had taken of the elk before they had skinned it, so that he might appreciate the magnificence of the beast which had been
unfortunate enough to wander onto the parking lot of Ted’s Bucket of Suds and get himself shot by three men on a beer run, allowing them to skin him and dance over him, to imagine for a night, at least, that the old ways still lingered along the banks of the big river.

•  •  •

The house was dark except for the light of the television and smelled of tobacco and pot and beer and salmon. Moke went to a lamp near the big propane heater and soon a dim light fell upon the shadows. He passed a stack of photographs to Travis.

Travis thumbed through them, admiring the size of the elk. At his back, the television continued to blare, a game show in which the contestants tried to win money by answering questions.

There were a pair of high school–aged girls in the kitchen and a young boy Travis recognized as one of the Moke’s nephews. Moving a bit to his right, he saw Bean Dip there as well. The boy was sporting a bruised cheek and talking to a pair of men Travis did not know.

The men leaned against a yellow, smoke-stained wall. Travis made one for a Tolowan. He was of medium height, thin and wiry with the narrow pointed features Travis associated with that race. They were a coastal people from north of the Yuroks. This man had a particularly unwholesome appearance. His hair was long and straight and hung about the sides of his thin face as might the locks of some witch in a child’s fairy tale. The man’s hair was almost completely gray, though Travis guessed the man was not much older than himself.

Travis looked for a moment at the Tolowan, but it was the second man who interested him. For this man was clearly Hupa, and Travis guessed he was from upriver. He had that look about him, thick, powerfully built. A capable man. His black hair was pulled back into a long ponytail. He had a somewhat wispy mustache and another patch of hair beneath his lower lip. His eyes were sullen, dark and quick, and when he saw Travis checking him out, he straightened and turned so that just his shoulder was still touching the wall. Travis finished with the pictures and handed them to the Moke.

“He’s a good elk,” the old man told him.

Travis nodded. When he looked back into the kitchen, he was in time to see Bean Dip nod in his direction. He saw the thin man
smile. The Tolowan was missing his two front teeth. In their absence, the man’s smile became quite demented. The Hupa was only staring, his eyes showing nothing at all, save a smoldering insolence.

When Bean Dip saw that Travis was looking at them, he favored him with an insolent smile of his own.

“
Wagay
’s in deep shit,” Bean Dip said. He said it loudly enough that his voice might carry above the music and the television. “Elk’s a sign, man. We gonna take back what’s ours. Make it plain to the people.”

Bean Dip was slurring his words, swaying slightly in the light of the kitchen, as from the television in the living room there came a wild burst of applause together with organ music. An excited white woman jumped up and down on the screen as several Indians watched impassively from the Moke’s couch.

“Bean Dip’s got a troublin’ mind,” Moke said.

“We don’t need more trouble.” Travis said. He said it loudly enough to be heard by everyone in the room, but he was staring at the Hupa. The man held his gaze, a slight smirk playing around the corners of his mouth.

Travis was aware of someone talking but he did not bother to look. He was suddenly light-headed with hatred, with the possibility of physical violence.

The intensity with which this feeling took him was, in fact, quite surprising, no doubt dangerous as well. Slapping down a pup like Bean Dip, as he had done on the beach, was one thing. The Hupa in the kitchen was something else, and probably more than Travis was up for. Still, he could feel the sweat breaking about his temples and he was aware of a new silence, as if others were just now becoming aware of this exchange of vibes, and watching to see what would come of it. What Travis knew was that it had slipped beyond his control. His physical condition not withstanding, he would go with this man if that was what it came to, as if, in fighting him, he might assault that which was most pernicious among his people.

It was only Bean Dip who seemed to miss what was happening. He took the bait as if this were only a thing between himself and Travis.

“We didn’t bring trouble,” Bean Dip said. “They did.” He waved at the darkness beyond the walls.

“Same as it ever was,” intoned the Moke, as if this were the final word. And just that quickly the moment had passed. People turned away, resumed conversations. There would be no fight between Travis and the Hupa, not just now.

“Take a beer,” Moke said, passing him another. “Party with us.”

Travis took the beer. “You know they’re meeting tonight,” he said. There was no challenge in this, only a certain weariness, and yet he felt compelled to say it, addressing himself to the Moke.

The Moke only smiled at him. “What they need me for,” he asked, lapsing into a kind of false Indian speak, giving Travis to understand his arguments would get him nowhere, for, in fact, they had been down this road many times and always to the same end.

“You could be of help,” Travis said. It was pointless, of course, but he would play it out. He would have his empty gesture. “You could lead. You’re a man of influence.”

Moke continued to smile, as if this were some merry surprise. “Me?” he asked.

Travis smiled back at him. There was little else one could do. “You,” he said.

“No way, I’m too dumb.”

Several people laughed.

Moke saw that he had his audience. “That’s what they tell me. They tell me I’m a dumb motherfucker. Dumb Indian, they say.”

“Who says?”

“Everybody says. But now we have this elk.”

The old man put a hand on Travis’s arm, ending the debate.

Travis allowed himself to be turned from the kitchen. As he did so, he heard a screen door slam. He looked back into the yellow light but Bean Dip and the strangers were gone. In another moment, there was the sound of an engine starting on the yard. When Travis moved to look, however, the old man prevented it, his hand tightening upon Travis’s arm with a grip that belied his age.

“Bean Dip’s been upriver,” the old man whispered, as if this were a thing meant for Travis’s ears alone, though, in fact, Travis suspected everyone on the premises knew as much and had since that afternoon.

“He’s come back with some bad men.”

From beyond the door, Travis could hear the sound of tires in the mud, and he knew that should he look now, the house car would no doubt be gone. The old man had slowed him just enough, as if its departure was something Travis was not meant to see. One might, of course, ask the Moke about it. But then one might ask the river as well.

“There’s bad people upriver,” the Moke continued. “I don’t like them. You know that. You know what they do up there. I’ve told them I don’t want any of that here.”

“Who’s in the house car?” Travis asked.

Moke shrugged. “Still, they come here. What can I do?”

Travis looked at the old man. There was a light in the old man’s face, the silent laughter.

“If those men were some kin to David Little, would you tell me?”

“How would I know?”

“Don’t give me that. I’m serious about this. You know what trouble will mean.”

The Moke smiled at him. “You worry too much,” he said.

“So who was in the house car?”

“Ask them yourself. They’ll be back. Just another beer run. Maybe they’ll get themselves another elk, huh?”

Travis looked into the blackness beyond the door.

“Come on,” the old man said. “We have an elk. Dance for him. This is where those assholes at the council ought to be. They ought to be dancing.”

They went outside by the fire. Travis saw that the house car was indeed gone. He found Mousey seated on the log where he had first seen him. He nodded after the departed car. “Where’d they go?” he asked.

Mousey looked at the Moke then at Travis. “Beer run,” Mousey said. “They’ll be back.”

“Go down to the smokehouse,” Moke said. “Bring me my pipe.”

Mousey went off among the shadows. In a few moments, Travis saw him coming back with the Moke’s bowl. The old man lit up, drew deeply, and offered it to Travis. The sweet scent of dope rose on the damp night air.

Travis looked at the offered pipe.

“Come on, Cousin.” Moke said. “We have an elk. Party with us.”

Travis sighed. He took the pipe, drawing as deeply as the old man before him. The men would be back, he told himself. They had an elk to party over. And who could say, but that this might not be just the ticket, open the old inner eye, as it were. It had been a long day and the thought of Drew Harmon and the sorry photographer and the geek who had hit him made him suddenly more tired than he could say, so that partying with his mother’s people was perhaps the thing after all, and before long he imagined he would even dance. It would not be anything like the Jump Dance to which his true cousin had invited him. It would, in fact, be its opposite number, performed without sense or meaning, an ode to nothing. Under the circumstances, however, Travis deemed it appropriate to the day’s events and in fact he found the Moke’s weed much to his liking, and in time he drank more beer and ate more salmon and stripped off his shirt and danced half-naked around the fire with the night air and the dampness of the river cool upon his sweating flesh, and at some point, just before the sky had begun to pale above the trees and the moon lay half-devoured upon the broken spine of the Moke’s smokehouse where the salmon hung in coral-colored-strips like so many icicles the color of human flesh, it occurred to him that the house car bearing the bad men from upriver had not returned, and that it was against his better judgment he had gotten stoned and danced like a fool around the Moke’s dead Roosevelt elk that had itself been fool enough to get itself shot in the parking lot of Ted’s Bucket of Suds.

A
s was her custom, Kendra slept past noon. She woke to light streaming through one of the trailer’s narrow, rectangular windows. The room’s other window remained covered with a thick shade. She lay for a moment on her back. She was trying to decide if she was alone. It was a dangerous little game. In time, however, she concluded that she was indeed alone. It likes the fog, she thought. It’s stronger in the dark. At which point, it occurred to her that she had no clear idea of what she meant by “It.”

She propped herself on one elbow and peered from the window. The sun had come to rest upon the crest of the ridge opposite her own. As a consequence, the river had been turned to gold flecked with shadow.

She rested in this position, struck by the impossible nature of what lay before her. For it was a thing not always apparent. Hidden in fog, cloaked in precipitation. And then there were those moments when the shroud parted and the landscape lay naked to
the eye, and there was nowhere, she thought, where the collision of land and sea appeared more recent or had given birth to a more violent beauty.

In time she got out of bed. She had slept fully clothed and added only a silk bomber jacket with a dragon on the back that Drew had bought for her in Bali, and that she had found to be a good weight for hiking. She used this to cover the black silk blouse and black pantaloons with the red stitching that had been the property of Amanda Jaffey.

Pulling on the jacket, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror hung upon the closet door. When the girl in Eureka had done her hair she had finished with a comb and gel, telling Kendra that, really, she had such good bones, she could get away with anything. She supposed that with the comb and styling gel she had looked rather trendy, but she had not bothered with them since and had no desire to do so now. She would go about ragged and unkempt and if there were good bones there, they were lost to her. She thought of that photographer from the magazine, Jack Fletcher, the one who had wanted to take her picture. She wondered what he would want if he could see her by the light of day. Would he see good bones? Or would he see what she did? Still, she thought, the look suited her and when she had collected her gear—her lantern, her knife and gunnysack and water—she went with them into the golden light.

She was halfway down the stairs when she caught sight of the man at the dock. In time, she saw that it was the photographer, Jack Fletcher. He was quite alone, seated with his face to the sun, his legs in the water.

It did not immediately strike her as odd that the photographer was alone. She assumed the others would be somewhere nearby, coming in, perhaps, by another route, as everything would be done according to some plan of Drew’s, and she had seen a long time ago that his were worked out in accordance with thoughts all his own to which none were privy, save perhaps the elements of wind and tide with which his life was bound.