The Dogs of Winter (21 page)

She could not, even with the help of the moonlight, say exactly what it was that trailed her along the river. Her first impulse was to believe it was a car being followed by a house. She supposed it was something someone had made at home. One saw such outlandish vehicles now and again around the reservations—school buses converted to house cars, worn-out Cadillacs pressed into service as pickup trucks. Whatever was following her seemed particularly absurd, a tall peaked roof wobbling along before the starry sky as the headlights followed her own through the curves above the water.

Clearly her truck was the more nimble of the two vehicles. She might have pulled away quite easily, and yet she lingered, watching
the house chase the car through one more curve. It was, she concluded, a bit like watching the dish running away with the spoon. T’was the wine, again, she thought. Already it had done her wrong once tonight. She helped herself to one more tiny sip.

“Now go,” she said. The woods, after all, were no place for games. Suppose she had a flat? The thought was marginally sobering and she rolled down her window, ushering in the cold night air, then reaching out with one hand, and turning it, that she might wave with her fingers. “ ‘Bye, you all,” she said. And she pushed in the clutch and shifted to fourth, leaving the headlights behind.

D
rew Harmon had installed an outdoor shower on his dock. There was nothing fancy about it, no shower head, just an open pipe. Cold water only. When the girl had left him, Fletcher used it to wash away the salt. That he had been unable to issue Travis’s warning seemed only one more feature of a day gone obscenely awry. He peeled off the wet suit and stood naked in the freezing stream, remaining there for some time, as if to spite himself, or as if the water might somehow wash away the sight of the boy in the boat, alone on the face of the wave. When that didn’t work, he threw on his sweats, got into his medicine bag and washed down a sampling of what he found there with a pair of Drew Harmon’s beers.

He was sleeping unsoundly in the back of the old Dodge when he heard them come. He heard an engine, the slamming of doors. A light swept the windows. He thought suddenly of what Travis had told him, that there would be trouble. Voices issued from the forest.
He fumbled in the darkness for something that might serve as a weapon. He was crouched there with a tire iron, bathed in sweat, when the back door swung open and the light rushed in.

“Look here,” a voice said. “The Doc’s finally cracked.”

The voice belonged to Drew Harmon. Fletcher put down his tire iron and crawled outside. There was a vehicle of some sort on the road. Fletcher believed it to be a truck, but all he really saw were the taillights vanishing among the trees. He was still trying to shake the adrenaline pump to which he had wakened, standing barefoot in the muddy lot. “Where did you come from?” he asked.

Harmon nodded toward the road. “Town. We had to hitch a ride back.”

Drew Harmon was dressed as he had been that morning, in the parka and shorts. The hiking boots had been replaced by sandals.

“Glad to see you made it,” Drew told him. “The kid here seemed to think you might’ve drowned trying to get off that rock.”

“I had help,” Fletcher said.

“Told you.” Drew was looking over his shoulder at Robbie Jones. The kid walked past them and took something from the van.

“How did I know?” Robbie asked. “The motherfucker looked like an Indian to me.”

“He told you what he was there for,” Fletcher said.

“Yeah, well, the motherfuckers packed my bro, dude. I saw it.”

Fletcher shook his head. “You could’ve killed him,” he said.

Robbie shrugged.

“He’s right,” Drew told him. “The one guy tryin’ to help us and you hit him with a rock. From now on, you watch it with that kind of shit.”

“Or what?” Robbie asked him.

“If you’d pulled that shit in front of me, I would’ve torn your fucking head off. That’s what, chrome dome. We understand each other?”

“You can try,” Robbie said. “Anytime.”

Drew Harmon watched him for a moment, then turned to Fletcher and laughed out loud. “Pity the fool,” he said.

Robbie Jones strode off in the direction of the landing, where he squatted in the glow of an outdoor light affixed to the side of
Drew’s shack. He set about eating a power bar, his eyes fixed on the river.

“He’s really something,” Harmon said. It was hard to tell if he was amused or pissed off.

Fletcher looked around. “Where’s Sonny?” he asked.

“He’s okay. Head took a couple of stitches. He wanted to go home so we took him to the bus station.”

“Why the bus station? We got a van right here.”

“That wasn’t it,” Robbie Jones said. He was passing them once more, headed for the van and another power bar.

Fletcher watched him, aware of a spasm somewhere back of his breastbone. “What does he mean?” he asked.

Drew Harmon smiled at him in the moonlight. “He means you still got some pictures to take.”

•  •  •

The surfers took council in Drew Harmon’s shaping shack. Propane lanterns burned among the stacks of old wood. A map of the California coast lay spread upon the floor, anchored at the corners by cans of beer sweating in the muted light of the lanterns that had been set to low. The sound of the river raged beyond the clapboard walls and boarded windows.

Drew Harmon had shed the parka. He was bare-chested, seated in his baggy shorts on the floor, his legs tucked beneath him. He stabbed at the map with a thick finger, speaking enthusiastically of buoy readings and swell direction. Fletcher studied him with some wonderment. Looped on pain pills and beer, bone weary, he was as yet unable to reconcile this scarred and leering figure before him with the drowned boy. Surely, he thought, these images could not partake of the same reality.

“We’re in the window,” Drew was saying. “There’s no question about it. Look at this.” He placed a ruler upon the map, angling it in opposition to the coast. “Buoys are already starting to show. Weather report says winds in excess of a hundred and thirty miles an hour. You know what that means.”

Fletcher found that the big man was looking at him. “Category five . . .” he began.

“What it means,” Harmon said, cutting him off, “is that ye’d better have some big balls on ye.” He bent once more to the map. “This is coming our way,” he said. “And there’s not a motherfucking thing in front of it.”

Fletcher followed the line with his eye. He could see where Harmon had marked the mouth of the river, and he could see that the point at which the ruler intersected with the coast was some ways north. What, in fact, Drew Harmon was really pointing at was that finger of land Jack Fletcher had studied in his van, the westernmost point on the westernmost piece of real estate the state of California had to offer.

“What you’re trying to tell me,” Fletcher said, at length, “is that what we saw today . . . that wasn’t Heart Attacks. Heart Attacks is . . .” He waved at the map. “Up here someplace.”

Harmon just laughed at him. “What do you think?” he asked. “You think you can drive up some country road, walk up a path and find Heart Attacks?” He laughed once more. “People have been looking for this place for years. Christ. You were the one telling me about the rock field . . . The Devil’s Hoof . . . Shit, man, I’ve seen that book. And yeah, those two assholes came close. They’d had a swell to show them they might’ve even found it. Open your eyes, brah. Look around and smell the roses.”

Fletcher could not quite bring himself to speak. The man was right, of course. He had been a fool. He had, after all, said it himself. “He likes to fuck with people a little,” he had said. What he could not know was whether the man was fucking with him before or fucking with him now. The blue eyes gave away nothing.

“Listen, man,” Harmon told him, “the river mouth gets good. It gets big too . . . in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Fletcher heard Robbie Jones laugh. The youth had been quiet till now, wrapped in sweats, knees drawn up, eyes intent upon the map. The trouble, Fletcher saw, was Robbie’d had his taste. Fletcher had seen it, seen him bucking down that face, and he saw as well that Peters had called it . . . “The real thing,” Peters had said. Like the Drew Harmon of old, and here was Fletcher caught between them, a pair of junkies on a drug run. Once he might have been right there with them, ready for anything. At the moment, he felt little more than tired, alone somehow with the death of the boy.

“You’d gotten here when you were supposed to, we would’ve been there, man. Way it was . . . I got a look at how the river mouth was handling the swell. It was perfect. Plus, the weather was working out. We had a shot at clear skies, morning glass . . . Why not go for it? I figured it would be a good test run. How did I know . . .”

“Mr. Pill Head was going to fall out of the boat and lose the fucking kid,” Robbie said. He looked at Harmon. “That what you were going to say?”

Fletcher picked up the first thing he found. It was a bar of wax, and threw it at Robbie Jones. The article bounced off the kid’s bald head and skidded across the room.

Robbie Jones lunged for him across the map. The only thing that prevented him from getting there was Drew Harmon, who seemed to catch him in mid-flight with one arm and set him back down. “Whoa,” he said. “Save it, both of you. You want to fight when we’re done, be my guest. Right now, I need you healthy. You came for Heart Attacks and I can get you there. I can guarantee we’re gonna get it big. We may even get it clean.”

As he was saying these things, he pulled another piece of paper from the hip pocket of his shorts. Robbie and Fletcher continued to glare at each other. Fletcher supposed he should have been happy that Drew was there to stop the thing. Clearly, he was in no condition to be fighting. Still, visions of choking the life from Robbie Jones’s simpering face remained to tempt him.

“Look at this,” Drew told them. He had spread what appeared to be a weather map cut from the newspaper across the larger map of California. Fletcher was still staring at Robbie Jones. He could see that a red welt had risen on the kid’s head where the bar of wax had struck him.

“I said look at this,” Harmon said. “Check the fucking isobars. And now check this.” He moved his hand in a circular motion some ways inland. “They’re calling for more high pressure, just like we had today. You can see it setting up.” He slapped the map with the palm of his hand. “All just for you, Doc. This doesn’t give you a hard-on, go kill yourself.”

Fletcher looked at the map. He looked at Drew Harmon. “You should’ve told us,” he said. “You should’ve laid this out before.”

“Why?”

Fletcher went looking for an answer. None presented itself.

“I liked that kid,” Harmon said at length. “It’s too bad he fucked up. So boo-hoo, fuck you. Now what I need to know is if you’re gonna go home with your tail between your legs, or if you’re gonna get your butt out at Heart Attacks and take some pictures?”

Fletcher was aware of Robbie Jones snorting derisively in the background. “What with?” Fletcher asked. “I lost the only rig I had.”

“I got a camera.”

“What? A Brownie?”

“A Minolta.”

“What kind of lens?”

“It’s not one of those big motherfuckers, if that’s what you mean, but I got a housing.”

“What you’re telling me is that I’m gonna have to shoot from the water.”

Drew Harmon sighed. “What I’m telling you is this. When the shit hits the fan, a man need make accommodation. Way it was supposed to work was, we were going to strap that Zodiac to the van. We were gonna drive up here.” He poked at the map. “We were going to hike in from Neah Heads. It ain’t going to work that way now. We’re going to avoid Neah Heads like the plague. We’re going to hike up the coast. It will take longer, but we can get there. You’re gonna pack an extra board. You can paddle out and shoot from that if you’ve got the balls for it. If not, you can shoot from the rocks. Least you’ll get something. You don’t have the balls for that, then say so now. We’ll drop your ass off at the local bus depot and you can sit there with Sonny Martin and feel sorry for yourself. We’ll take the fucking pictures ourselves.”

“Is this still Indian land?” Fletcher asked.

“Tolowans.”

“You think that’s smart? These people are pretty pissed off.”

“Shit. These people are always pissed off. It’s a full-time job.”

“This guy from the Indian Development Center seems to think this is something special.”

Harmon dismissed the idea with a wave of the hand. “Shit, man. You been listenin’ to me or not? We’re in the window, bro.” He
pointed once more at his homemade map. “You got a swell. You got Heart Attacks, and you got talent in the water. You want to lose your shit to a few drunken Indians and go home empty-handed, be my guest. But I’ll tell you this, you may as well get happy with the weddings, ’cause that’s all you’re gonna get.”

Fletcher sat before Drew Harmon’s map, in the muted light. He stared into the darkness beyond the door.

“What about your wife?” he asked.

“What?” The man seemed genuinely surprised.

“It’s gonna be safe here, for her?”

The man just looked at him. “They don’t come around here,” he said. “They tried. I slapped a couple of ’em silly and now they stay away, but as far as that goes, I can leave her a note. She can stay with friends in town. That make you happy?”

Fletcher shrugged. “Who told you about the weddings?” he asked.

Drew Harmon was a moment in responding. He was busy folding his map. “Word gets around,” he said.

Fletcher nodded. The man was right, of course. Word did. He thought of the long drive home. He pictured himself in the alley in back of his apartment, bone-tired and empty-handed. He tried to imagine what would be next. The truly frightening part was that he could imagine it all too clearly.

“When do we go?” he asked.

“Ten minutes do you?”

Fletcher felt slightly ill. He had been counting at least on a night’s sleep.

“It’ll take me that long to get my gear and leave a note. We’ll camp on the beach and start in the morning. We’re gonna have to make tracks to do this right.” The man looked at him. “I hope you’re up for it.” Fletcher expected some crack from Robbie Jones, but the boy’s eyes were focused on some middle distance known only to himself.