The Dogs of Winter (36 page)

When Drew showed no signs of rejoining them, Art shut the door and took their clothes and gave them towels and blankets so that they might warm themselves by the fire. He had to help Travis with his clothes and, in so doing, got his first look at Travis’s leg.

“This is bad,” he said. “Only thing I know to do before morning is to get Becky. She’s the nurse from the school. She might have something.”

Travis nodded. He watched as the old Indian set about pulling on his jeans and rain gear. After some deliberation with himself, he told Art about the Tolowan he had seen on the rocks.

Art stopped and looked at him. “Long white hair? No front teeth?”

“That’s the one.”

“That’s Whitey Longtree,” Art said. “He was up here night before last. Showed up around sundown. Wanted a cabin.”

“You see who he was with?”

“No. Shit. This time of year, who cares? I gave him a key to number twenty-five. That’s where he wanted. I made a run by there this afternoon. There’d been a fire, but the place was clean. No sign of Whitey. Must of been somebody with him though. I don’t think Whitey’d ever clean anything on his own.”

“You knew him?”

Art shrugged. “Knew him when he was a kid. He doesn’t come around here much anymore. Stays upriver, the way I hear it. When he’s not in jail.” Art paused to shake his head. “Old Whitey,” he said. “Probably been whiffin’ fumes. Think there’s anything we ought to do?”

“Tell Blacklage, I guess. When we see him.”

The Red Man laughed. “Gotta get a traffic ticket to do that. I’ll go for the nurse.”

•  •  •

Nurse Becky was quite young, or so it seemed to Travis. She had a little black bag with her and walked in shaking rain from her hair like a country doctor called out on a bad night. When she saw Travis’s ankle, she made a face which did not make him feel any better, then turned to her bag. “That must hurt like a bastard,” she told him.

She shot him full of antibiotics and painkillers. She also bathed and dressed his wound as best she could, though it was beyond her skill to set the leg and she told him so. She told him that, in the morning, he would have to be transported by some means to the medical clinic in Sweet Home.

There was not much to do after that, except wait. The nurse made coffee and Art got back into his pajamas.
The Rockford Files
went off the air and was replaced by
Star Trek.

“This is a good one,” Art said.

“Hey, yeah, no shit,” Robbie Jones said. “I remember this one.”

“It’s the one where they take out Spock’s brain,” Art said.

“Fuckin’ A,” Robbie said.

Travis was, by now, prone upon the floor, his leg raised upon a rolled sleeping bag, covered by a blanket. He had another sleeping bag underneath him and a couch pillow for his head. It was how the nurse had fixed him. He was a little ways off from the others, where it was darker, and where Becky thought he might be able to get some sleep.

When she was ready to go home, Becky came over to Travis one more time.

“I hoped you would be asleep,” she said.

“I’m close.”

“I hope so. You need the rest. It’s only a few hours now. We don’t have any phone service by morning, we’ll have to find somebody here that can drive you. I’m sorry, it’s the best we can do.”

Travis nodded.

She stood then. She had a big navy blue coat and as she was buttoning it, she looked outside. There was lightning at just that moment and Travis was afforded a look at her face.

“What’s with your friend?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Your friend. Out there. The big one.”

“You can see him?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I can see him. He’s outside.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all.”

She shrugged. “He’s squatting down. He’s got his arms wrapped around his knees, it looks like, and he’s staring toward the ocean. What’s his story?”

“I don’t know,” Travis said. He had turned his head to a different angle and was treated to the unlikely sight of Art the Red Man and Robbie Jones. The two were seated side by side on Art’s couch. The kid was wrapped up in one of Art’s oversized bathrobes. They had their feet up on Art’s table and were eating from boxes of Cracker Jacks, their faces lit by the flickering light of the wood stove, their eyes fixed on the screen above them.

“You think I should try and get him?” the nurse asked.

“I think he’ll come in if he wants to,” Travis said. His words were punctuated by a rolling clap of thunder.

“You think he’ll want to?”

“No,” Travis told her. “Probably not. Not tonight.”

F
letcher found the girl much restored by morning. It was quite surprising, really. He woke to find her already up, dressed in a flannel shirt and khaki pants several sizes too large. He supposed she had been in the trailer. She’d tied the pants up with a piece of sheet and clad her feet in oversized woolen socks and leather sandals. So dressed, she made for quite a sight—the last of the homeless waifs. She’d picked some berries as well and was quite enthused about the idea of eating them with vanilla ice cream.

She’d also found a hundred dollars cash in an old can, together with a stash of buds. Fletcher was quite happy with the find. It would give him a little something to go with the pills. So armed, they had taken the truck and the chicken, electing to follow the back road away from the clearing. She was still intent on finding the cemetery. The good news was, he had been able to talk her into the truck.

Happily, the truck was an old Dodge Power Wagon. It carried them without complaint through bush and bramble. Branches
lashed at the windshield. Mud spattered the hood. At the end of a particularly long and rocky climb, they arrived upon a more reasonable excuse for a road. Fletcher was willing to take it for the fire road he’d hiked on the previous day but at a much higher elevation.

This road led them to the top of a ridgeline from which they were afforded a view of the sea, or at least of the clouds in which that body was so draped. They turned north here and, in another half hour or so of fairly tortuous driving, came to a long, ramshackle building so covered in ivy as to be almost inseparable from the vegetation that surrounded it.

There was a ‘69 Coupe de Ville sitting out front with its windows missing and great iron-colored rust spots on its hood and trunk. Its tires were missing as well, with the wheels gone to rust and the axles set on blocks. There was, however, a more roadworthy vehicle—a four-wheel-drive Toyota parked to one side of the place and a thin trail of smoke issuing from a stack at the back half of the building, which was arranged, more or less, in the shape of an L. An ancient dog lay near the Toyota, in a puddle of sunlight. At the arrival of the Power Wagon, he raised a graying muzzle and sniffed at the air. The dog was flanked by a pair of chickens scratching at the dirt. “Lucky’s cousins,” Kendra said.

A sign perched atop the roof gave them to understand they had arrived at the Orleans Grill. Fletcher parked and got out. The place was so covered in ivy, it took them some time to locate the door. The old dog had by now made his way over. Fletcher scratched him behind the ear, and when they found the door and went inside, the dog followed them.

If the outside of the Orleans Grill was unique in appearance, the inside was more so, an eatery and roadside attraction rolled into one. For what they saw upon entering was a long, dimly lit corridor whose walls were punctuated by a series of recklessly constructed dioramas. One featured two female mannequins whose flowered cotton dresses had grown thin as paper with time, and these were bent in attitudes of mute concentration over an ancient Victrola and attended to by a taxidermied two-headed calf whose heads were cocked as if in attention to some master’s voice none but themselves could hear. In other booths were other mannequins and
taxidermied birds, but most were simply full of junk—mainly consisting of old mining and lumbering tools such as long, two-handled saws with rusted blades and handles rotted with time and bugs.

Fletcher found the place reminded him of the roadside attractions he’d visited in the Mojave Desert as a boy and half expected to find a missing link or alien being but such was not the case. The walls between the dioramas were covered in old sheet music, and at the end of this long hall, one came finally to the Orleans Grill itself—a one-room affair attended to by a fat white woman. A tall, thin male of clearly Native American descent might be seen some ways back, in the murky confines of a windowless kitchen.

The walls of this room were covered with cast-iron skillets upon whose flat, black bottoms the names of various couples had been inscribed in white paint. “Rusty and Sue.” “Bill and Bobby.” At which point, the fat woman took it upon herself to tell them that they too might purchase a skillet and get their names on it and which skillet, so adorned, would then hang upon these walls for all to see until death might do them part.

“Nice,” Fletcher told her, and drifted off once more into the hallway to peer with no small amount of wonder at the dioramas, wondering about how these things had come to be here and what stories they might have to tell, could their poor, dumb mannequin voices be lifted in other than dusty silence, while Kendra Harmon went about her transaction, which included trading Lucky for ice cream and obtaining directions to the old Tolowan cemetery north of the Heads. The fat woman was evidently familiar with the place as Fletcher was able to pick up bits and pieces of the conversation. He could hear the woman talking about road conditions and unmaintained trails, not to mention the uncertainty of the weather, all of which led him to conclude the woman was trying to dissuade Mrs. Harmon, but he’d already tried that one himself and was, by this point, quite confident the girl would get what she came for, which, in the end, is exactly what happened.

•  •  •

The late morning found them outside, seated upon a log placed before the Orleans Grill, and meant, Fletcher supposed, to serve as
a kind of curbstone, though he found it hard to believe many tires were stopped by it. On the other hand, there was the testimony of the skillets, so that, for all he knew, they had arrived at some local hot spot and come the weekend, people he could only dimly imagine would show up here to drink and party and pass along the dusty entrance and the attentive mannequins and the dusty two-headed calf which, the fat woman had assured him, was quite real and born to a local farmer and had lived to the size at which he now saw it, as if this was supposed to tell him something about its age—a thing he had scant interest in, for the mere sight of it had been enough to brighten his day.

“So what do you say?” Fletcher asked her. “You think we should get our names on a skillet?”

The girl smiled, eating the ice cream and berries.

Fletcher had rolled a joint and now set about smoking it.

The girl declined his offer to share. Her brain, she said, had never been the most dependable of organs, and she didn’t like to fuck with it any more than she had to.

Fletcher nodded. “The course of prudent behavior,” he told her. He was suddenly feeling quite content. There was no reason for it. In fact, everything argued against it.

Clouds were passing quickly and in great number overhead, a parade of distended airships set before a blue blaze of sky. Shafts of sunlight fell among the trees. It pooled at their feet and warmed their shoulders, though the wind was from the ocean and spoke of the coming rain the fat woman had predicted.

Fletcher seated himself in the dirt that he might lean back with his elbows upon the log, high on pot and pills, at peace with the world. Kendra stayed where she was. In time, however, she placed the ice cream at her feet and started taking things from her pockets.

“I collected these this morning,” she said. “While you were sleeping.”

She laid the articles first upon the log. There were flowers she named as yellow yarrow, together with several strands of dried kelp, horsetail reed, and river roots.

As Fletcher watched, Kendra took these in her hands, braiding and wrapping, until she had fashioned a small wreath that one
might hold in the palm of one’s hand. She gave this to Fletcher. He sat with it in the light, examining the intricate weave of color punctuated by the bright yellow blossoms.

“You need a wire to do it right,” she told him. “But that’s the idea. The trippy part is, people will pay you money for those and it’s all right here, just waiting for someone to pick it up.”

Fletcher nodded, examining the small wreath. “It’s nice,” he said.

“I first thought of that, it seemed like the perfect thing. Drew could make his boards. I could make these. We would live off the forest and the beaches.”

“I don’t see why not. I don’t see why you couldn’t.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Because Drew’s done something,” she told him.

“Done what?”

The girl looked at him for some time. “It’s so hard to be sure,” she said. “But I am.”

Fletcher sat with the small wreath in his hands.

“I think I can see how it happened. It was hard for him here,” Kendra said. “The old lady had taken out loans on the property. He wanted so much to make a family, to have a home. I miscarried. He got bitten. There were medical bills on top of the other payments. He’d gone through whatever he’d saved. He was working two jobs. He was scrapping hulls at the harbor during the day. At night, he was driving to Eureka to unload trucks. He wasn’t surfing. Eventually he got everything paid off. He had the idea about the old boards. He saved money for the woods. He began to shape. But somewhere something happened between him and this girl. I think it was while he was at his lowest point, working all the jobs. Maybe she made him feel like he used to feel. A distraction. I don’t think it was more than that. Maybe she wanted it to go on. Or end. I don’t know. She was last seen arguing with a man in an alley behind a bar in Sweet Home. They found her the next day with her throat cut.”

Some time passed. Neither spoke.

“I think Drew was that man,” Kendra said at length.