The Dogs of Winter (12 page)

Kendra only nodded. She had seen the swell of a lifetime many times, in Hawaii, in Bali, in Costa Rica. More often than not it was the swell of a lifetime when it was on the way. Afterward, it was only good. Tomorrow, it would be better. But tomorrow brought wind. An unfavorable tide.

“I met one of them,” she said.

“Which one was that?”

“Jack Fletcher.”

Drew nodded. “That figures.” He smiled. It was not a particularly pleasant smile. She had seen it more often of late. “If there was a woman around, Jack Fletcher would find her.” He looked away. “We were always a little alike in that way. What were you doing to meet him?”

“I was walking.”

“You were walking by the river?”

Kendra nodded.

“You keep doing that, you’re going to meet worse than Jack Fletcher.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“You should listen.”

“He’s the photographer? The one you knew in the islands?”

Drew watched the light breaking above the river. “Yes,” he said.

“I thought pictures were bullshit.”

“Depends on what you want them for.”

“What do you want them for?”

He did not answer directly. He seemed to be waiting on the dawn. “How would you like to get out of here?” he asked suddenly.

When she did not immediately respond he turned to look at her. There was something in his face then, a thing she could not recall having seen before. It took her some moments to put a name to it. When she did, she saw that he was afraid.

“I’ve been thinking about Chile,” he said. “Fourteen thousand miles of coast down there. You can go from the tropics to the South Pole. Talk about last frontiers.”

“I thought this was the last frontier.”

He snorted. “For California,” he said. “This is it. Of course it won’t be for long. Not when these guys get done with it,” he nodded toward the river. She assumed he was referring to the photographer, Jack Fletcher, and the pros who had come with him.

“Then why invite them?”

“I’m serious,” he said. “Chile. What do you think?”

She hardly knew what to say. “That would take money,” she said.

“I can get the money, I have a way.”

“How?”

“Leave that to me,” he said.

“Why? Why now?” she asked him.

He took a step toward her. She thought he might even come close enough to hold her. She could not imagine what that would be like. It had been a good place to be once, a shelter from the storm. But they had not slept together in months, not since the day he’d come home and found her wearing Amanda’s things.

“It’s all gone wrong here,” he said. “Christ, can’t you see that? You never sleep anymore. You’re out at all hours walking in the woods.”

“There are times,” she told, “when I feel like I can see what the trailer saw. It comes in flashes of light.”

He looked at her for a long time. “You keep this up, we’ll be doing Tamarindo again,” he said finally. “Is that what you want? You want to wind up in the hospital?”

Just before moving to California, they had attended a legends event in Tamarindo, in Costa Rica. She’d had a kind of episode there. The kind of thing she had suffered on several occasions as a child. There had been flashes of light, unwelcome voices. She’d wound up drugged on Thorazine in a little hospital in San José. Drew had dropped out of the event and broken her out. Doing so had cost him his last sponsor, in part because he would not provide them with the cause. When they’d asked him why, he’d only told them to fuck off. As if on cue, his mother had died and left them the land. It was mortgaged to the hilt. There was no money in it, but it was a place to go.

She told him that she did not want to do Tamarindo again.

This seemed to satisfy him in some way and he put out a hand as if to touch her face. As he did, she drew back. The movement was involuntary and abrupt. She hit the wine bottle with an elbow and tipped it over.

There was not much left in the bottle. What there was spilled in a small trickle as the bottle rolled across a matted shag carpet. For some reason she could not quite bring herself to pick it up. She had wrapped herself in her own arms. She could feel her fingernails digging into the flesh covering her triceps.

Drew’s face hardened once more. He bent to pick up the bottle,
then stood, holding it between two fingers. “You know, you should really watch it with this shit.”

“Why?”

He held the bottle to the light. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “This isn’t even grape juice, for Christ’s sake. It’s for wino Indians and coons. You’re sitting there telling me about little flashes of light. You keep drinking this, you’ll wind up in front of Marvin’s Foodmart drooling on yourself.”

He set the bottle down on the countertop with enough force to cause a dirty plate to slide into the sink. The plate broke upon impact. She heard the tinkling shards as whispered voices.

“You know it’s colder than a motherfucker in here,” he told her. “When are you going to get those damn tanks filled?”

“Actually, one is filled. It’s just not here.”

“That’s a good one,” Drew said. “I feel warmer already.”

She watched as he took a pair of water bottles from beneath the sink and went outside. He did not say good-bye and neither did she.

•  •  •

When he was gone, she rose and went to the window. She could see him at the landing, at the side of his rusted-out old van. He was so small there, she thought, so solitary, with his worn-out gear and his wooden boards. She felt herself stirred by a sudden pity, a desire to go to him. He was not an evil man. He was in need of grace, was all, an angel of light. What he had was her.

She thought once more about Tamarindo. He had been her knight there. But in costing him his last sponsor, she had cost him the islands. Not that it was anything she could help. It was an episode was all. She had thought herself done with them. It was what they had told her mother when she was young. They had hung a name on it she did not care to remember. It could manifest itself as a single episode, they had said, a response to stress. The episode in question had followed the death of her father. But then, of course, there could be recurrences. These might be florid or mild. There was always the chance they could become chronic. They shouldn’t have said those things in front of a child, she thought. Christ. You spend your life waiting.

She put her elbows on the drain board and rested her face in her palms. He had tried just now to talk to her, to build a bridge, and she had sent him away, as if his guilt were a thing she could be sure of. And yet how could she be, sure it was him and not her, sure of what was inside her head and what was out? She had been through a stressful period here. How was one to know this was not some recurrence? “In mild cases,” she had read somewhere. “The voices maybe under the control of conscious attention, as are thoughts.” She made her hands into fists and banged them upon her temples, as if to drive the thoughts away.

She went reeling through the trailer to the small bedroom and lay there on her back, bathed in sweat. “I hear them if I attend to them,” she said. And again. “I hear them if I attend to them,” as a kind of mantra, in accompaniment to her breathing exercises, as the moisture which dripped almost continually from the trees pinged against the metal roof of the trailer—an incessant rustle of whispering voices.

I
n Drew Harmon’s shaping shack, a pale light drifted among the racked planks of exotic woods. An electric motor whirred. Fletcher stirred, blinking into the odd light with some surprise. He had not expected to sleep and when he looked to see if the others were sleeping as well, he discovered that not only had he dozed, but that the others had risen without him, that he was alone on the floor. He rolled to one side, seeking the source of the mechanical whine.

What he found was Robbie Jones. The young man seemed to have achieved a complete recovery in the wake of his episode in the van. He was moving about before Drew Harmon’s work bench, dressed in oversized sweatpants and a Local Motion T-shirt. The bench itself was a litter of broken eggshells and empty banana peels, together with various bottled and canned supplements. As Fletcher watched, Robbie turned off the blender and set about pouring a string of brownish liquid the consistency of spent tobacco juice into a large plastic cup.

“Jesus,” Fletcher said. “You brought all this stuff with you?”

Robbie nodded.

“Didn’t know you were into health foods.”

“Body’s a temple of the Lord, bro.”

Fletcher rose painfully from his bag. He was hoping Drew had made coffee, but if he had Fletcher couldn’t find it. He set about dressing in the cold light. “Wonder what the Lord’s take on penis studs might be?” he asked.

“What I do,” Robbie told him, “I do to His glory.”

At which point, Sonny Martin stumbled through the front door. His face was red, his eyes bloodshot, but he was smiling. “I heard that,” he said. He had a Twinkie in one hand, another in his mouth, and when he spoke, it was around the Twinkie, a blob of which bobbed on the tip of his chin like some cancerous growth. “They told the fucker,” he said. He was pointing at Robbie Jones with the Twinkie. “Man wasn’t supposed to beat off for six months. Dude just wouldn’t listen.”

“Fuck you,” Robbie said.

Sonny Martin favored Fletcher with one of his glazed smiles. “Oh yeah,” he said, as if he had only now remembered why he had come. “Drew says to tell you, the boat is here.”

•  •  •

Drew Harmon was standing on the landing, the river at his back. He was bare-chested, dressed as if in defiance of the chill morning air in only sweatpants and sandals, and Fletcher saw the scars for the first time.

He did not believe he had ever seen any so large. It was, he thought, as if the man had been sewn up with yarn. The marks issued from beneath the waistband of his sweats, crossing his abdominals then wrapping around his side, following in general the outline of the hip. The flesh along these tracks was raised and mottled—a deep purple in the gray light, and for a moment the sight was enough to distract Fletcher from why he had come. In time, however, he saw the boy and remembered all too well.

For standing at Drew’s side and slightly behind him was a thin, dark-haired boy. The boy rose only to Drew’s chest. He was dressed
in tennis shoes and jeans. He wore a red-and-black flannel shirt and a red ball-cap with a black marlin stitched above the bill. The boy was looking up the muddy bank toward the trees, holding to a length of rope running to an eyehook at his feet, at the end of which an inflatable Zodiac bobbed in the muddy water. At the sight of the boy and the boat, Fletcher’s heart sank.

“Beginning to wonder if you were going to make it,” Harmon said. He was sporting a cheek full of tobacco and seemed in high spirits.

Fletcher would have liked at this point to ask about the boat, but Harmon had caught sight of Robbie and Martin at the back of the van and stalked off to see what they were riding.

Fletcher followed. In part, because he was curious. In part, because he wanted to distance himself from the boy and the Zodiac, as if by doing so he might alter what had already transpired.

Both of the boys were on Brewers. They were beautiful boards. Martin’s was clear. Robbie’s was clear with yellow rails. Both were bisected by spruce stringers an inch wide. They bore the Brewer logo—a flower—and beneath it the signature of Dick Brewer.

Harmon deposited a line of tobacco juice into the mud and inquired after the boards’ length.

“Nine six,” Robbie told him.

“You bring anything longer?”

“They told me the pocket’s a lot like Waimea. Nine six is what I ride there.”

“You might want something a little longer here. Check this.”

He led them to the side of the shack where a pair of guns stood upright, propped against the wall. One was the board they had seen in the shop. The other was very much like it. Balsa and redwood, and featuring a particularly intricate and beautiful design—half a dozen narrow redwood stringers joined at the tail block, fanning out toward the nose in an elongated sunburst.

“You’re really going to ride those things out there?” Sonny Martin asked.

“Why not?” Harmon said. He said it in such a way that Martin was momentarily at a loss, as if he had concluded that saying the wrong thing at this point might, in fact, prove detrimental to one’s
health. “Well, I mean . . . Jesus, man . . . What if you snap a leash? What if you put it on the rocks?”

“I don’t wear a leash,” Drew told him. “Ever.”

There followed a moment of silence. Fletcher almost smiled. The sight of the boy and the Zodiac were the only things that prevented it.

“Let me tell you something,” Drew said. “Last thing you want out there is a light board. This ain’t da tropics, brah. Water’s heavier, denser. Harder to push through, harder to bury a rail. I made these boards to ride this break with. You get out there. You’ll see.”

There was a moment in which the only sound was that of the river. “I’ll stick with the Brewers,” Robbie said, and so saying turned and walked back to the van.

Sonny watched him go. He looked at the boards. He looked at Drew Harmon. At last he shrugged. “Me too,” he said. He turned and followed Robbie Jones.

Drew Harmon watched them. “You do that,” he said.

•  •  •

With Jones and Martin gone, Fletcher returned with Drew to the landing. He could feel the surge of the river here, feel it in the vibrations of the old wood beneath his feet. Drew looked at the van.

“Dickweeds. They’ll come around. Wait and see.”

“So, Drew,” Fletcher heard himself saying. He was looking at the Zodiac. “Is this the boat?”

Harmon stared a moment longer in the direction of the van. At length, he turned to the Zodiac and then to Fletcher. He nodded his head yes and said, “No, that’s not a boat.”

Fletcher hesitated, not quite sure what to make of this response. Perhaps he had been misunderstood. But the man began nodding again before he could speak and said the same thing. “That’s not a boat,” he said. At which point it became clear to Fletcher that the guy was simply fucking with him.