The Dogs of Winter (11 page)

“I don’t go into town,” Drew told him. He turned to look at Fletcher. His hair was pulled back flat against his skull, streaked with gray about the temples, and Fletcher could see the crow’s feet webbing the skin around the big man’s eyes, much, he imagined, as it webbed the skin around his own. Too many years of sunlight on the water, too many hours spent searching for those outside sets on seas made molten before harsh and declining suns.

“Nothing there but a bunch of redneck bars,” Harmon continued. “Kind of places I can’t go.”

When not booming at someone, or clowning with his exaggerated hick accent, Harmon’s voice was, in fact, quite soft and well modulated, belying somehow the power of its owner. It was in this soft voice that Harmon now spoke, enumerating in all seriousness a considerable list of things he could not do. He didn’t go out at night. He didn’t drive much. He did not seek out the company of others. Surfing, of course, provided the exception to these rules. One might drive in pursuit of waves. One might go out at night, if only to arrive at a given spot in time for the dawn patrol. The rest of it was bullshit.

Fletcher’s first impulse was to think of the woman he had seen at the top of the stairs. He had taken her for Drew Harmon’s wife and he wondered what she thought of these rules, for it seemed to him as if they did not allow for much of a social life. “Why not?” he asked.

Drew Harmon looked directly at him. “Can’t,” he said. “There’s people out there . . .” He looked toward the door where, at just this moment, Sonny Martin had appeared. The boy held a duffle bag in each hand. At his back, the sheets of rain, illuminated by a light above the door, shown about the outline of his shaggy head as might some dime-store halo.

“There’s people I can’t be around,” Drew continued. “People that will get me into trouble.”

“Jesus Christ,” Sonny said. “It ever quit raining around here?”

“Move the fuck out of the way,” Robbie called out from behind him. “You’re lettin’ it all in.”

The boys came on, dragging gear, the door slamming behind them.

“He’s just pissed,” Sonny Martin said. “Found his ex dancin’ at the Staide. Picking up quarters for Jap tourists with her cunt.”

Robbie Jones set his bags down, spun around with a lightning-fast wheel kick, and planted his heel in Sonny Martin’s solar plexus. The stricken youth made a great show of staggering about the room as if looking for someplace to toss his cookies.

Drew Harmon was still at his stove, a pot in one hand, a spoon in the other. He turned to Sonny Martin and Robbie Jones, as if seeing them for the first time. “Jesus,” he said. “This is what they got out there now?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“It’s what the boss sent,” Fletcher told him.

Robbie Jones ignored them. On the wall opposite the workbench and hot plate were shelves filled with books and videocassettes. A small television set mounted by a VCR was perched there as well, among a clutter of books and magazines. Robbie read a couple of the titles out loud.

“
The Art of Wave Riding. Hawaiian Surfboards.
”

“Just about everything ever written on the subject,” Harmon told them. “That’s the goal, get it all. You look, you’ll even see Lord’s study on hydrohulls for the U.S. Navy.”

Robbie Jones just looked at him.

“That’s the book Simmons got his hands on back in ‘46. What made the modern board possible, you think?”

Harmon winked at Fletcher, for it was clear Robbie Jones had no idea who he was talking about. Robbie Jones returned to the case. “You got videos too,” he said.

“Them’s that’s worthy.”

Robbie pulled one from the shelf. He passed it to Sonny Martin. “Check this,” he said. “He’s got the Doc’s movie.”

“Let’s watch it,” Sonny said.

“Fuck it,” Drew Harmon told him. “Let’s eat.”

•  •  •

When they had polished off the tamales and chili and eaten the buns and drank the beers, they turned in early so as to be ready for
what the morning might bring. They crashed in sleeping bags on the floor of the shack. Fletcher drifted easily into a drug-induced sleep but woke sometime before dawn.

He awoke soaked in sweat to a moment of pain and confusion. Eventually his surroundings became clear to him and he was aware of the rush of the river beyond the clapboard walls, the far-off moan of what he took to be a foghorn sounding in the night. The next thing which became clear to him was that he had lost the feeling in his right hand. As he worked it open and closed little flashes of pain moved up his arm and into his neck. He sat up slowly on the thin mat, squeezing his right hand with his left. What was called for, he decided, were pills. He had placed his backpack and water next to him for just such an occasion, but as he began to dig through the pack it occurred to him that he had left the drugs in the van with his film. Cursing softly, he pushed the sleeping bag from his legs and got to his feet. He pulled on jeans and shoes, took one of the flashlights Drew had left by the door, and went outside.

The night was cold and damp, filled with the scent of pine and the sweet rot of the forest. He crossed the landing and went down into the mud. The river thundered at his side. He used the flashlight to show him his footing, but, in fact, he could have managed quite well without it. The rain was gone and the moon had come to ride squarely above the river, bathing the night in a silvery light.

He stood for a moment at the back of the van, drinking in the sight. The moon was nearly full and the river wound toward it as if it were a thing one might walk on and the moon itself a place that might be so reached. He opened the door of the van by rote, his mind still on the river, and was halfway in when someone groaned at him.

Fletcher was taken completely by surprise. He jumped backwards, banging his head on the roof of the van.

He heard someone say “Shit,” and when he looked once more into the van he was greeted by the sight of Robbie Jones. The boy was quite alone in the darkness, seated on an overturned plastic bucket, his male member cradled in a white handtowel stained with blood.

“Shit,” Robbie said again. He was hunched forward, one hand raised to ward off the light.

“Jesus,” Fletcher said. For, in fact, the whole thing made for a rather disturbing spectacle. “Are you all-right?”

“Thing hurts like a motherfucker,” Robbie told him. “I think there might be something wrong with it.” He lifted an edge of the towel to reveal his organ, which did in fact appear in worse shape than the last time Fletcher had seen it.

“Is there anything I can get for you?” Fletcher asked.

Robbie Jones just looked at him. “Yeah. You can get me a new dick.”

“You want some of that stuff they gave you, that solution?”

“That’s what started the fucker bleeding, when I washed it out.”

Fletcher stood at the door, in his T-shirt and jeans, in the damp night air.

“I’ll be all-right,” Robbie said. “Just leave me alone for a while. It sort of hurts when I talk.”

Fletcher nodded. He grabbed the bag with the pills in it then looked once more at Robbie Jones. “You want the light?” he asked.

Robbie just shook his head. He appeared to be undergoing some kind of spasm.

Fletcher swung the light toward the trees. “They said it could do this,” Robbie told him.

•  •  •

Fletcher was nearly back to the landing when he saw the girl. She would have been easy to miss, a dark place in the night. He saw her at the edge of the path he had earlier followed himself, the one leading toward the stairs and the trailer. She had been watching him. He was quite certain of it, and when she saw that she had been found out she started into the trees. Fletcher prevented it. He took her for the woman he had seen on the landing and he meant to have a look. “Hello,” he said.

The woman stopped. Fletcher had turned off his flashlight but the moon was on her face so that even in the darkness he could see that she was quite striking in appearance. She was wrapped in a dark coat that fell to her ankles. Her hair was black and cropped short.

“You must be Drew’s wife. I’m Jack Fletcher.”

“The photographer.”

“How did you guess?”

He saw the woman shrug. It was hard to know her age in the darkness. She was young, he thought. Not yet thirty.

“You’re a friend of Drew’s. The others would be too young.”

“Not a friend, exactly. We knew each other in the islands.”

“The glory days.”

“I guess,” he said to her. “They have become so.”

“So that’s what this is? You get to go back?”

“Go back?”

“Relive your youth.”

Her tone seemed vaguely disapproving.

“Drew wanted pictures. We came.”

“So you did.”

“You always up at this time of night?” It had occurred to him that she was alone in the forest at an unlikely hour.

She looked at the river. “Pretty much.”

“A creature of the night.”

She looked at him a long moment then. The river roared at his back. He saw bats cross the face of the moon, tree to tree. They might have been drawn there as in some animated feature. When he looked again, she had given him her profile.

“Well,” she told him. “It’s late. Or is it early?”

“I don’t know,” Fletcher said. “I’ve lost track.”

It appeared to him that she smiled a little when he said that.

“Maybe it’s those pills.”

“Vitamins,” Fletcher said.

“The shadow knows,” she told him.

Fletcher laughed. “I’m supposed to take your picture,” he told her. The idea had just occurred to him.

She stopped once more and looked at him. “Who said that?”

“The editor. At the magazine. He’s a friend of Drew’s too. I think he would like a picture for the article.”

“That’s idiotic.”

“I think it’s a good idea. I think we should do it.”

“You can’t.”

“Really?”

“It’s a ploy,” she said. “You let somebody take your picture, they wind up with your bag of tricks.”

Fletcher watched as she disappeared beneath the trees. He remained there for some time. She was certainly not what he had expected. Not a party girl from the islands and he found himself wondering at just where Drew Harmon could possibly have found her, and why.

Eventually he went back to the shed and took his place on the floor. The pills dulled the pain but sleep eluded him. Robbie Jones returned. Fletcher listened as he climbed into his bag. In a short while the young man was snoring softly. Time passed. Perhaps an hour. Fletcher was still awake when Drew Harmon rose from his mat and went out into what was left of the night. Fletcher did not see him return. He remained sleepless, on his back in the sawdust of the shed, awaiting the dawn, thinking of the girl he had seen by the river, thinking of Drew Harmon climbing the long flight of steps to the trailer, perched there among the trees, at the edge of the town they called Sweet Home—though it seemed to him as if Drew Harmon had not found it so, for he was struck by the feeling that something had gone awry in the land of the tall pine. He lay with his thoughts as the fog horn tolled the hour, its mournful call a reminder of what the morning would bring. For they had come to a place without palms or a tropic light. In their stead, Fletcher imagined once more the rocky coastline he had glimpsed from the high trail near the river mouth. He imagined a ghostly cloud break a mile from shore where they would await the dogs of winter, and which beasts, unlike the ones in Fletcher’s movie, would be the real thing.

D
rew came to the trailer before dawn. Kendra was still awake. She had finished with Travis’s books and had taken up
The Origin of Consciousness
in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Janes. That and pitching the cork for the cat. She was seated on the floor, a nearly empty wine bottle on one side, an empty glass on the other.

She heard Drew on the stairs. She could tell it was him. He limped a bit after the shark. She watched as he used his key to come in. He started when he saw her.

“Jesus, Kendra. You still up?”

“No,” she said. “I’m asleep.”

He reached down to touch the book she was holding, tilting it back with one finger that he might read the title.

“This the guy who thinks everyone was schizophrenic?”

“Once.”

“He say anything about those of us still are?”

Kendra gave him a thin smile. “He says something like twenty percent of the population will at one time or another experience some kind of auditory hallucination.”

Drew nodded. “Great. I guess I still got a few things to look forward to.” He went past her and into the kitchen where he began washing his hands in the sink.

Kendra remained on the floor, seated on her cushion. At Drew’s arrival, the cat had withdrawn. It was very skittish. Kendra could only imagine what the animal had seen. It seemed to be more afraid of men than of women. It seemed particularly frightened of her husband.

She watched him. His hair was loose and fell about his face. A golden mane in the artificial light. She was reminded of the way he had looked at Hatteras, showing up on his Harley to rent a boat from her stepfather. In a T-shirt and denim, blond hair flying in the wind. Arms cut with muscle. He was exactly the kind of man her stepfather was always warning her about, so that when he offered her a ride she had taken him up on it at once.

He had come to surf in a contest at Cape Hatteras, in waves driven by a distant storm and she had sat in the sand and watched him, as if the mystery of the sea were a thing he had mastered. And on that day, he had surfed better than anyone on the beach, young or old, because the waves had been big and powerful and that was his stock-in-trade and watching, she had sensed that he might touch something in her that had not been touched before. And so he had.

She watched as he bent to wash his face, drawing his hands back through his hair, plastering it against his skull. His face took on the aspect of a bird of prey in the false light.

“I’m gonna take these guys from the magazine out today,” he told her. “We should be gone all day.” He turned to look at her. “It’s a good swell,” he said. “The swell of a lifetime.”