The Dogs of Winter (24 page)

“Yeah, well, this time they got the whole place.”

Travis stared at him.

“You want a look, come with me.” He put his shades back on. “I wouldn’t mind a walk-through without those guys looking over my shoulder.” He nodded once more in the direction of the town, then
seemed to remember something and turned to his deputy. The young man had been standing to one side, listening intently to the talk.

“Why don’t you take the Bronco and follow Charlie in,” he said. “I want to make sure they put that van where we can keep an eye on it. Travis here can bring me back.”

“Right,” Lemon said. He snatched the keys from Blacklage’s hand and walked quickly toward the Bronco.

Travis watched him go. “You ought to let that kid do something once in a while,” Travis said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Blacklage told him. “I’m afraid he will do something. Makes me nervous every time I let him out of the office. He has ideas.”

“He’s young,” Travis said.

“That’s my point. I’d like to see him get old.”

•  •  •

Travis and Blacklage rode together in Travis’s truck back down the gravel road. They parked at the landing. The shed was partially burned. Higher up, however, Travis could see that the trailer had been burned out completely, the trees around it scorched.

The chief pointed at the blackened remains. “Butane tanks hadn’t been empty, the fucker would probably have blown.”

“That could have been one hell of a fire.”

“Could have been anyway, somebody hadn’t of seen it, we’d had wind instead of fog.”

“Christ. Who would do such a thing?”

Blacklage shook his head.

“You find any graffiti?”

Blacklage shook his head once more. “I found this,” he said. He went into his shack. When he came back, Travis saw that he was holding something in his hand. His first impulse was to believe it was a severed finger. Upon closer inspection, he saw that it was a piece of dried salmon.

“You don’t get stuff like this in the stores,” Blacklage said.

“No, you don’t.”

Travis looked at the dried fish. It came, he was quite sure, from upriver. Perhaps from the Moke’s smokehouse.

“Where’d you find it?”

Blacklage nodded at the shack. “Was in a beer can I found sitting there.”

The two men walked to the shaping room together. The wreckage was quite complete. Shredded books and tapes littered the floor, some of it burned, some of it turned to confetti by the water that had put out the flames. The sight made Travis slightly nauseous. He went to a fallen television set and VCR. He saw there was still a cassette in the box. He reached to pull it out, but found it jammed, perhaps fused by the heat. Looking at the back, he saw Jack Fletcher’s name on the spine. He stood and went outside.

“I don’t think this was the Posse or the Stoners,” Travis said. He told Blacklage about being upriver. He told him about the men he had seen at the Moke’s.

“Crankster gangsters.”

Travis shrugged. “Up there, who knows. I would say they were some kin to David Little.”

“You ask the Moke?”

“Sure.”

Blacklage heaved a sigh. “Yeah, well, there’s no sign anybody was hurt here. I would say Drew must be out on one of his trips.”

“What about his wife?”

“She ever go with him?”

“She has.”

“There you go.”

Travis said nothing.

“Looks to me like we’re just going to have to wait for them to come back. We’ll find out if they know anything then.”

Travis had no immediate response. He was bone tired, and he could not really say what he thought ought to be done. There was no way of knowing where Drew had gone or when he would be back, or if his wife was indeed with him. There was no point in asking the Moke, and certainly no point in saying anything to the officers from Sweet Home. The reservation was not their jurisdiction. If there looked to be trouble Jerry Blacklage could not handle, they would call in the feds. Travis had seen the feds. They would come with guns and dogs. Before they were finished looking for whatever
it was they had been called in to look for, they would find half a dozen excuses to send half a dozen more Indians off to places like Scorpion Bay, and the black stake of recrimination and reprisal would be driven ever deeper in the heart of the very thing Travis would have hoped to heal. And so it was that he stood in the misty light, looking up the hill at the charred remains of the old trailer while Blacklage mumbled something about getting into town to do something about the van, for it had been towed out upon his order.

Travis just looked at him a moment, uncomprehending in his weariness. “Why’d you do that?” he asked at length.

“ ’Cause there was still stuff on it,” Blacklage told him.

“What kind of stuff?”

“Everything, pretty much. Engine. Parts . . .”

“You mean it was vandalized but not stripped?”

Blacklage nodded. “I figured I’d get it out of here before it was.”

“That doesn’t strike you as odd?”

“What, that it wasn’t stripped?”

“Been kids, they would’ve taken everything. You know that.”

Blacklage shrugged. “If there was time, if something hadn’t scared them off. Like I said, I don’t see as how there’s much we can do but wait. Harmons’ll be back.”

“You hope they’ll be back.”

Jerry Blacklage just looked at him. “They’ll be back,” he said.

The men got into Travis’s truck.

“You say anything to the cops from Sweet Home?” Travis asked. “About the salmon, or the van not being stripped?”

The police chief smiled. “You shittin’ me?” he asked. Travis nodded. He started the truck and drove away.

•  •  •

Travis went twice that day to the trailer by the river. The first time with the chief of police, the second time by himself. It was after he had gone home and showered and tried to sleep. But the sleep would not come, and something had begun to eat at him. He had the feeling that they had missed something. He could not have told you what. A detail. A sign to be read.

He drove back along the rutted dirt road, coming within sight of
the landing and Kendra Harmon’s truck. It was difficult for him to imagine that she had gone with the surfers, though she had accompanied Drew at times past, for she had told him so, told him of Drew’s interest in remote spots with difficult access, and yet the sight of that little truck appeared to him as some omen of evil luck.

He parked near it and got out. He found the doors unlocked. There was a bottle on the seat. White port. Half full. Surely this was not how she steeled herself for those moonlit hikes in the forest. And yet why would someone else have put it there, not yet empty? He began to move around the truck, circling it in ever-widening loops until, at length, he had come to the deer path and found there an unusual number of tracks. Someone had been up this trail quite recently, he thought, for the tracks were fresh and deep, suggesting, he concluded, that someone had come this way in a hurry. Moving on, he found further signs of some hasty ascent, broken stems, crushed leaves. In one place, he came upon a piece of a black, silky fabric impaled upon a thorny branch. He took it between a thumb and forefinger, moving the fabric beneath his skin. It was hers, he thought. How could it be otherwise? He went on once more, halfway to the trailer, where, as the last piece of some demented puzzle, he came upon the things she had collected, the horsetail and mushrooms. The yellow yarrow. He found them dropped and spilled from their bag as if they were nothing less than the brightly colored entrails of some small thing taken in the night.

W
ith the coming of the morning, Kendra saw the men clearly for the first time. There were three of them and she saw that they were Indians. One was no older than a boy, dressed like a cholo. She believed she had seen him before, in town, or around the reservation. The others were strange to her. One was skinny with a narrow, pointed face and long white hair. The other was big. Not tall, but thick-chested and thick in the arms and thighs and neck. His hair was long and braided. He wore a long drooping mustache and a patch of hair beneath his chin, and she knew he was the one who had surprised her at the trailer.

When she had seen him on the landing, she had run. She had not gotten far. She had been taken quickly and with great force. The other way she was taken did not happen then and there, but later, on a filthy mattress in the back of the homegrown camper. Which was where she was just now, the vantage point from which she viewed the men.

They were hunkered about a small fire from which gray smoke spooled away into a wet gray morning. There was coffee that they laced with alcohol, and someone had apparently made a run into town because there were Egg McMuffins and Tater Tots and biscuits and sausages that she could smell wafting through the cracks in the bare plywood walls and through the sliding glass windows which had been left open to the chill morning air. She could smell the trees on the air as well as the food, and this came as a kind of perverse reminder that indeed another world continued to exist beyond these warped and splintered walls, thought it seemed to her now, in light of what had transpired, that her entrance to that world must surely have been revoked and would remain so from here on out.

No one thought to offer her any food, although she did not believe she could have eaten anyway, as her mouth was still sour with rancid jissim and her throat sore and her body bruised and bleeding. Eventually she was given to understand that what they were talking about was her. They were trying to decide what to do with her, now that they had her.

The boy apparently favored pushing her off a cliff.

“Everybody knows she walks in the woods at night.”

“You pumped enough paste into her. They’ll see what happened before she got pushed.”

“You pumped some into her yourself.”

The skinny one favored taking her deeper into the woods where no one would find her.

“That’s deep.”

“Deep like I was up her ass with it.”

“Yeah, all three inches.”

At length, however, the big man, who till now had been squatting on his haunches and poking at the fire with a stick, said what he wanted and she saw right away that that was how it would be.

“We take her,” he said.

The skinny one seemed to like the idea. She was watching them from the mattress that covered the floor of the plywood room and that, in fact, was its only article of furnishing. She saw the man take hold of his crotch, moving himself about in an obscene fashion.

“What then?”

The big man looked up, annoyed. “What do you think, what then? We fuck her in front of her old man. After that, we have some fun.”

The boy chewed on a doughnut. The skinny man looked toward the car and caught her looking. He favored her with a toothless and demented smile. He grabbed his crotch once more, this time pointing to it for her benefit with the thumb of his free hand.

“Humaliwu,” the man said. “The place where legends die.” The name seemed to amuse him but Kendra recoiled when she heard it, for she knew now that she had been right in her assessment of Drew’s plans. Most likely, he had left one of his notes for her, taped to the trailer door. The Hupa had found it. It was how they knew, and she could see now that these men meant to go there as well. And, as if in some perverse counterpoint to this revelation, she saw for the first time that the men were armed.

They had moved around some and she could see rifles propped against a fallen log not far from their fire. One of the guns was exposed to the air, the other was encased in a soiled buckskin sheath with fringe on it as if it were a relic of some Wild West show.

She supposed this should not come as any big surprise to her. Still the sight of the weapons sickened her in a way the mere knowledge of their existence might not have. For in seeing the guns, she could see as well where this would lead. She could see its end in its beginning.

“So what about her?” the boy asked.

Kendra drew back into the interior of her box. She pushed at the rear door with her foot but found it locked. Outside the men continued to talk. In time she heard them coming to the car. She thought that maybe they would come for her but they didn’t. She lay on her back on the soiled mattress as the car started and drove away.

It was a rough ride, leading her to assume they were holding to the logging roads and as the light drained from the windows she concluded that they had come within the shadows of tall trees. She did not raise herself to look. She had no desire to call attention to herself, for she felt that she was being watched, that something was on her, the darkness, perhaps. The thing she had seen moving in the trailer, collecting and dispersing, laying in wait for her across the years. It had all come down at last. She would be undone here. She and Drew and the surfers with them.

F
letcher woke to the sound of Drew Harmon’s voice. He woke to utter blackness and was some time in placing himself. Had not some hand been there, in the dark, to shake him awake, he might well have thought he had never slept at all, for he had continued to hike even in his dreams, slipping and sliding, through the surreal dark and drip of the forest, following a distant, dancing light, and come finally to a beach so shrouded in fog that even Drew Harmon’s lantern had shown them little of it but where they had heard the crashing of unseen waves and tasted the sea and gone about making a shelter of sorts among the driftwood to shield themselves from the night.

Upon reflection, he supposed that this was where he was just now. He was no longer scouring the beach like some blind worm. He was on his back, in the thing they had made. Having settled this for himself he closed his eyes and rolled onto his shoulder.

“For Christ’s sake, Doc. You dead, or what?”

Fletcher looked into the blackness. He watched as a piece of the roof was lifted and tossed away, revealing a pre-dawn sky across which some tepid gray light had begun to bleed. A dark shape hovered above him. He set up slowly, the sleeping bag falling from his shoulders. A Pop-Tart was thrust into his hand.