The Dogs of Winter (35 page)

“I cut their lifelines,” Kendra Harmon told him. “What can I tell you?”

Fletcher nodded. It was clear the girl would require attention. It was possible that he would be requiring some himself. At which point, he noticed the buzzards, an entire congregation perched among the trees. They sat with their great black wings held rigidly away from their bodies as if posing for his benefit, bat-winged shadows before a failing sky.

•  •  •

Fletcher supposed he should do something about all of the bodies. Someone, of course, would have to be told. Some appropriate thing would have to be done. And then there was the girl. In fact, she presented a rather alarming spectacle. He could see that some harm had befallen her, but had no clear idea of how to proceed.

He began by offering her a pill. But she would only shake her head, stroking the chicken’s neck while looking into the trees. Fletcher took the pill himself. After which, he set about a hurried inspection of the property. Apart from the trailer, there were two structures. A pair of shacks in which he found gardening tools, firewood and burlap bags. An old truck was parked behind one of the shacks. There was a second entrance to the property there as well. A dirt pathway barely wide enough to accommodate the truck could be seen winding off into the shadows in an easterly direction.

The dead men had obviously been living in the trailer, for though the thing had been scorched by fire, the interior was intact. Neither man, however, had been much of a housekeeper. The place was a litter of filth, of paper bags filled to overflowing with discarded tin cans, soiled dishes and half-eaten bowls of dog food.

When he had satisfied himself that there were no phones or much else to interest him, he went back out to the girl. She was still at the tree but the chicken was now walking around in front of her, scratching at the ground. Fletcher knelt at her side. “There’s an old truck back there,” he said. “You know how to get anywhere from here?”

The girl rested her head against the tree and closed her eyes. “The shamans in these parts were women, and they were meant for
receiving pain. When this happened, they would go to a sacred place. They would dance there, until the spirit brought a second pain. For it was only when the two pains had been paired that a healing might be effected.”

Fletcher nodded. Obviously, the girl was not thinking clearly. But then she had been through an ordeal, the likes of which he could only imagine.

“I know of such a place,” she said. Her face appeared slightly flushed. A light burned in her dark eyes. Fletcher suspected she was with fever. “It’s an old Indian cemetery,” she continued. “It’s on the coast, north of the Heads. I want to go there. I want to dance.”

Fletcher gazed into the failing light. The buzzards had grown in number. When new birds arrived, the air was filled with the rustle of their wings. He supposed that, at the very least, the bodies ought to be protected in some way. “Can I ask you something?” he said. He was thinking about the Indian on the bridge. He had begun to formulate a theory about what the girl was doing here and he thought it important to find out if he was right or not. “Drew said he sent you into town. How did you wind up here?”

“Some men came to the trailer. I tried to run. They caught me.”

“Kin to the boy who drowned?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They found Drew’s note telling me he’d gone to the Hoof. That’s how they knew where to come.”

Fletcher looked at the carnage once more. “I saw one of them,” he said. “It was that guy back by the bridge. He was on a cliff, pointing a gun at me.”

“I know,” she said.

“But how . . .” he began, then stopped as she raised her fingers to his lips. “Don’t,” she said.

She took her hand away. Her fingers smelled like the woods, and it seemed to him as if they had left a residue he could still taste.

“Okay,” he said. “But I think we should get back. The wrong people show up here, we could be in deep shit.”

The girl shrugged. “They’ve got nothing on me. I cut their lifelines.”

Fletcher fingered the vial of pills in the vest pocket of his parka. “Yeah, well, I’m sure they had it coming.”

“You’re sure I’m full of shit.”

“I’m sure you should see a doctor.”

She shook her head, then looked away.

“I don’t mean a shrink. I mean someone to look you over. You’ve been through a lot.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she told him.

They sat for a moment in silence. With the passing of the sunlight, the temperature had begun to drop. The wind smelled of rain. “If we left now,” Fletcher said, “we might beat the storm.”

“Beat it where?”

“You think you could find your way to town?”

“I told you,” she said, “I have no interest in town. I told you where I wanted to go.”

It was clear the girl had her mind made up. Short of fighting her, Fletcher was unclear about what to do. “Could we get to this place in the truck?” he asked.

“We?”

“I can’t exactly leave you here.”

She looked at him for a moment. “There might be a way,” she said. “But I don’t know how. The only way I know would be by the trails.”

Fletcher seated himself on the dirt. He supposed they might weather the night in one of the shacks. The trailer would be warmer, but the thing was too foul for his liking. There was also the prospect of someone else showing up. The thing to do, he decided, was to leave a propane lantern on in the trailer, then he and the girl could hide out in one of the shacks. Perhaps they could sleep in shifts. If anyone showed up, they would see it, they could slip out the back and hide in the woods. Perhaps, he thought, the girl would see things his way in the morning.

“Okay,” he told her at length. “We can spend the night here. We’ll try to figure something out in the morning.”

The girl nodded in the direction of the trailer. “Look’t Lucky,” she said.

Together they looked toward the water where the man in long- johns lay covered in dirt and blood. The surviving chicken had climbed atop the man’s chest. As Fletcher and Kendra watched it, the bird pecked out an eye.

“Dinner time,” Kendra told him.

•  •  •

With much effort, Fletcher managed to get two of the bodies into one of the shacks where he covered them with burlap bags. The Indian on the bridge was too big to move very far. In the end, Fletcher rolled him down the bank and buried him in a shallow grave in the soft ground near the water. As for the dogs, he dragged them far enough into the woods where he would not have to witness the feast and left them to the local scavengers.

As he worked, he became increasingly puzzled over what the guy in the long-johns had been doing with a garden hose. The thing had by now run out of water. Following it to its source, Fletcher found a holding tank and a well but nothing else. As near as he could tell, the guy had been doing little more than adding to the stream. But the light was failing him, and, in time, he abandoned this mystery and set about finding them something to eat.

There were a few canned goods left in the trailer—Pork and beans, Vienna sausages and stale soda crackers. Fletcher brought these outside where he and Kendra ate from the cans in the shack they had elected to sleep in. When Kendra had eaten, she went outside and wretched. Fletcher lay on one of the flimsy mattresses he’d dragged from the trailer, waiting for her to come back, wondering at what was to become of them.

In time, a steady rain began. Kendra was still outside. He was about to go looking when he heard her come in. She pulled a mattress as close to one of the walls as she could get it and lay down, her knees drawn up, her face to the tin siding. Fletcher watched her. She had wrapped herself rather ineffectually in one of the sleeping bags he’d found with the mattresses. He waited a moment, then moved to kneel behind her, arranging the bag so that she was completely covered with it. She allowed him to do this, and when he was done and gone back to his own mattress, he heard her thank him.

He had left a lantern burning in the trailer as planned, but it did not, he concluded, make much sense to talk to the girl about sleeping in shifts. He had retrieved the automatic rifle and the .45 from the two men in the clearing—the rifle because it looked to be the most lethal of the weapons, the handgun because it was the only one he was certain he knew how to use without some amount of experimentation. But not once during the night did he bother to look outside.

The cold was murderous—much colder than what he had grown used to on the beaches. Near morning, the girl came to him. “I wonder,” she said, “if you could put your hand here.” She seemed to be pointing to her stomach. Fletcher opened the bag, allowing her to crawl in with him. It was the first she had spoken since they had eaten and she had gotten sick. He could hardly refuse the request. She placed his hand upon her stomach, but low, below her navel. He could feel something writhing there. A serpent in the garden.

He held her that way for a long while. Anyone would have. They exchanged a few words. She asked him, for the first time, what he was doing here and why he wasn’t out taking pictures.

He told her.

“You got scared,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Of the Indian you’d seen on the cliff.”

“That was part of it.”

She was quiet for some time. “You were scared of Drew,” she said.

He didn’t answer right away. He could feel her breathing against his chest. “That was part of it too,” he said finally.

He thought maybe she would say more but she didn’t. In time, his shoulder began to ache, for the mattresses were pitifully thin and she had brought him to an awkward position. Still, he held her. He would hold her till daylight, he decided, if that was what she wanted, and at some point, he was able to feel the snakes beneath his hand stop their incessant writhing. He knew, however, that she was not asleep.

“Are you okay?” he asked. They had not spoken in quite some time.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m not.”

T
he surfers made Neah Heads in darkness, in a driving rain. Under optimal conditions, the trip might have taken them six to eight hours. As it was, they did it in closer to twelve, managing the last couple of miles in total darkness, stumbling blindly among the redwoods. For Travis, the hour had little meaning. He had been, at various times throughout the day, dragged, carried, pushed, and pulled. He had ridden on backs and on boards. The time had passed as a kaleidoscope of dreams and half-dreams, punctuated by moments of stark clarity, with pain as his only constant, the star by which to place himself, and it had burned with a brilliance that far outshown that pale and watery impersonator which had raced them across a darkening sky.

The initial climb was the worst, his arms wrapped around Drew Harmon’s neck as Drew picked his way among the rocks, climbing toward the bluffs with two hundred pounds of dead weight clinging to his back. The kid followed them. Travis was afforded glimpses of
him now and then. With his shaved head and his peaked hood and the huge board bags dangling from his shoulders, he appeared upon the fogbound rocks as might some slightly demented vassal in pursuit of his king. The fact of the matter, however, was that the kid was carrying quite a load, and Travis was well aware that had he been discovered by two any less capable specimens, he would no doubt have been left on the rocks until more help could be found.

Once upon the grassy bluffs, they proceeded in all manner of configurations. At one point, they even tried dragging him in one of the board bags with a wet suit under his tailbone to save it from the rocks. In the end, however, it was Drew who took him once more, draping him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, then trudging for a mile and a half in the rain and darkness, a steady uphill run among the redwoods to the ramshackle cabins and finally to the tribal center set upon the balding crest of a hill where, by the light of day, it commanded a view of both the redwoods below and the restless sea beyond.

They arrived to find that lines, downed by recent storms, had left the reservation with neither phones nor power. The small building that passed as the tribal center was attended by Art the maintenance man, a burly 250-pounder who, some forty years previously, had gone off to Los Angeles to a brief, undistinguished career as a professional fighter, then come back to the reservation where, for the last thirty years or so, he had worked as a handyman for the campground and tribal center at Neah Heads. It seemed to Travis that someone had once told him Art had fought under the name Art the Red Man Hancock.

On the evening in question, Art the Red Man Hancock had already settled in for the night. He was dressed in his pajamas and romeo slippers. He had a fire going in the big wood-burning stove and a little generator set up to run his television. They were used to power outages in Neah Heads. The Red Man was drinking Old Crow and watching reruns of
The Rockford Files
when the surfers and Travis came banging on his door. When he saw that it was Ruth McCade’s boy, he pointed and laughed and ushered them in, where they stood shedding water as if they were themselves storm clouds set upon legs.

Travis attempted some introductions, but Drew brushed them
aside, demanding some link to the outside. The Red Man reiterated that there were no lines.

“You must have some kind of two-way radio up here,” Drew told him.

Art said this was not the case.

“Bullshit,” Drew said. He pushed past the old man, looking around the room for himself, leaving great puddles of water wherever he went. “You’ve got something. I know you have.”

“What do you think this is?” Art asked him. “A fucking Coast Guard station?”

Drew whirled to face him. “What do you do if you have an emergency? What about that?”

The two men were eye to eye.

“We wait,” Art told him. “We’re Indians. We’re good at it. If you want to wait with us, you can shed those clothes and take a seat. If you don’t, then get the fuck out of here, ’cause this is where I live and you’re makin’ a mess out of it.”

Drew left without another word. He shouldered past them and walked back out into the rain. Travis had no idea where he was going, nor was he in a position to ask. He was braced against the door jamb and it was all he could do to keep from falling, but he watched the old Indian. Drew had left the door standing open to the storm, and as Art the Red Man Hancock moved to close it, he stopped for a moment and stood looking into the night with an odd expression on his face, much, Travis imagined, as if he were watching some young
wagay
version of himself striding off to make war with the world.