The Dogs of Winter (13 page)

“I was hoping,” Fletcher said, “for more of a boat.”

Harmon nodded. “I know just what you mean,” he said. “I guess we’re all hopin’ for a little more of something.” He bent to a canvas bag on the landing and tugged at its zipper. A wet suit and
neoprene booties spilled onto the deck. Harmon nodded toward the suit. “You got one of these, you might want to put it on.”

There seemed little point in discussing it further. Fletcher looked at the boy one more time. He was standing as before, holding to the line, his eye on the trees. After that, he went up the bank and around to the back of the van. His hands felt stiff and cold in the damp air, and it occurred to him that he was scared.

He found Sonny Martin already dressed in the latest of cold-water fashion, a red-and-black O’Neil Heat Seeker complete with booties and gloves and a black neoprene cap with a red stripe down the center which he held in one hand. The stuff appeared supple and warm and Fletcher found himself lamenting once more the loss of his hood. He’d pulled one of his stuff bags to the edge of the van and set about undressing, when he noticed Robbie Jones several yards away, his wet suit covering his legs but turned down at the waist to reveal his back, which was long and narrow but corded with muscle and decorated with an elaborate tattoo. A crucified Jesus hung from his thoracic spine to his lumbar, the Christ’s bleeding palms extending as far as his shoulder blades, and beneath the Christ’s hands were letters, blocked out in a style Fletcher associated with the Chicano gangs of East L.A. The letters sat one above the other, stacked along both sides of the boy’s rib cage. It took Fletcher a moment to make out what the letters spelled. Eventually he saw there were two words—
TRUE LOVE
.

Mr. Jones was, at this particular moment, down on both knees at the edge of the forest, his shaved head bowed. Fletcher’s first thought was that the guy was sick, and he looked around to find Sonny Martin pulling on his cap. “He all-right?” Fletcher asked.

Sonny glanced over his shoulder. “He’s cool. He’s sayin’ his prayers.”

“Nice tattoo,” Fletcher said.

“Yeah. First he just had the Jesus on there, then he got those words. He told his girlfriend it was for her.”

“The one now dancing at the Staide?”

Sonny Martin smiled. “The one picking up quarters for Jap tourists with her cunt. What a bitch.”

Sonny jerked his chin strap tight then stopped and looked
toward the landing. “How about those scars?” he asked. “Fucker was damn near bit in half.” He paused, observing the river where it ran to the sea. “Right out there, I’ll bet ya.”

“Maybe we all ought to say some prayers,” Fletcher said.

Sonny Martin just looked at him. “Fuck that,” he said. He made a slight adjustment to his cap, then sauntered off in the direction of the dock.

•  •  •

Fletcher was some time at the van, assembling his equipment, and when he came with it down the muddy bank he found the others already in the boat. The Indian boy was in the middle of the stern end, seated before the engine. The others had positioned themselves at the boat’s three corners with the fourth open for Fletcher.

He came aboard with his gear dangling from both shoulders. He felt at once the cold water rippling beneath him. He felt the boat shift with his weight. There was an awkward moment as he fought to remain upright with the weight of his gear pulling him in one direction while the boat moved in the other. He might have gone down, but Drew put out an arm and Fletcher used it to steady himself.

Harmon laughed as Fletcher regained his balance, then took his seat. “I remember that,” he said. He was nodding toward Fletcher’s orange housing. “I remember that housing from the islands.” He turned to Martin and Jones seated in the stern on either side of the boy. “He lost that thing once,” Harmon told them, “on the reef at the Pipe.”

“We’ve heard the story,” Robbie said, and from there they traveled in silence along the river for perhaps a mile before coming within sight of its mouth.

Here the boy made for a narrow strip of exposed shoreline on the northern bank. The water grew slower as they approached, due in part to an arm of rock which extended some yards into the river to form there a kind of miniature breakwater. The bottom appeared shallow and sandy, and the boy was able to bring the Zodiac to within a few feet of the beach, at which point Drew Harmon clambered over the side. He called for Jones and Martin to
follow, and Fletcher was given to understand that it would be him and the boy from here on out.

“We’ll never get this thing over the bars with all of us in it,” Drew said. He was looking at Fletcher when he spoke. “We’ll hike to that point on the north side of the bay. It’s the shortest way out. We’ll have the current with us from there. The way I figure it, you two can set up on the south side of the peak.” Harmon smiled. “You should be staring right into the pocket. But watch the lines. The peaks can shift. You don’t want to get caught inside.”

The Zodiac bobbed and heaved as Jones and Martin followed Harmon into the water and soon all three men were wading toward the shore, the big boards beneath their arms.

Fletcher had only nodded when Drew spoke and he watched now as the three surfers moved away. He couldn’t help noticing that neither of his two traveling companions had complained about getting out of the Zodiac, nor had either of them spoken to him or looked in his direction before going over the side. He watched as they splashed through the shallows and disappeared quickly among the trees, quite content, no doubt, to take their chances paddling rather than risk the river mouth in such a craft and when they were gone, it was just Fletcher and the boy, alone on the river in the rubber boat.

•  •  •

The boat was bisected by a pair of braces to be used as seats. The boy was already in the center of the one in the stern. With his companions gone, Fletcher now moved to the middle of the one in the bow. He was aware of the boy watching him with a steady liquid stare, and it occurred to him for the first time that Drew Harmon had not introduced them. When he had situated himself and found the boy still staring at him, it occurred to him as well that the boy was waiting for some command, that, in fact, he was in charge. He found the revelation dispiriting.

Fletcher could not quite bring himself to speak. He nodded to see what that would do, then took some comfort in the smoothness with which the boy swung them around, pointing once more toward the mouth of the river. He could not, however, take much comfort in what he saw there.

The tide was down and the bars appeared quite shallow. In fact, from his position at the bow of the little boat, he could see nothing but row upon row of white water, and beyond that row upon row of waves that seemed to line up quickly out of nowhere. The waves turned slick, muddy faces toward a rising sun, then sucked out to pound the bars with the sharp cracking of light artillery. The sound could be heard as something quite distinct from the rush of the river or the distant thunder of the big outside sets which, from their current vantage point, could not even be seen but only imagined.

Farther up river, Fletcher had noted one or two canoes, manned by fishermen, drifting in the early light. This far down, however, he and the boy were quite alone. Overhead, the sky was beginning to blue, but at the river’s edge patches of fog still clung to the banks, and as they approached the mouth, a fine, steady mist thrown off by the sea settled to cake the eyelashes and lips, but in spite of which Fletcher found his own mouth quite dry, with his tongue thick and swollen against it.

•  •  •

The boy, as it turned out, was quite good with the Zodiac. He kept them in constant motion, turning first to the left, then to the right, snaking his way through the conflicting waves, making always for the shoulders, gunning up the faces of at least two inside grinders Fletcher guessed to be well overhead and which, if timed incorrectly, would certainly have dumped them on the bars, making for a cold and tricky swim.

In spite of the boy’s skill, however, Fletcher was also aware of the rather sickening way the inflatable boat had of bending back upon itself as the boy pushed it up the face and of the way it bent back the other way as it bridged the peak and of the ripples of cold water which he could feel even through the neoprene booties, and he was quite certain that Drew had been right. The small craft would not have born the weight of four men and a boy through the white water, but would have foundered on the bars.

•  •  •

Once outside the boy swung the boat north, taking them past the headland Fletcher had climbed the day before, allowing a first look
at the bay and the distant point. The sea was deeper here and the Zodiac rode easily on the ground swell, smooth green water rushing beneath the bow as overhead the sky continued to clear with the sunlight pooling upon the water.

Chunks of driftwood bobbed in the light, together with beds of kelp, some bearing various crustaceans—bright spots of pink or orange which had been loosed from their moorings by the power of the swell, and on at least two occasions, sea lions raised sleek dark heads to look at them as they passed, and Fletcher was reminded of what he had seen on the landing—the scars wrapping Harmon’s body like the seams of a baseball. He had not heard about the man being bitten, but clearly this is what had occurred. And this was as good a place as any—the very heart of what surfers called the Red Triangle. The fish came to the mouths of the rivers to spawn. The sea lions came to eat the fish. The great white came to eat the sea lions, and being of poor sight, were wont to get the occasional surfer as well, though generally these were spit back out when the mistake had been so noted and thereby leaving some, like Drew Harmon, to tell the tale.

Such lines of thought were, of course, counter-productive, and Fletcher set about preparing his equipment the better to drive them from his mind. He fooled with his light meter and gauged the angle of the sun. There were bumps on the horizon but as yet no sets. He heard the boy say something behind him and turned to see that he was pointing toward the shore. Fletcher followed the boy’s finger with his eye. What he saw were three dark figures on boards angling toward them from the point, and as he followed their line of attack, he saw the first set beginning to build on the reef.

He had no doubt he and the boy were still well off the shoulder, but there was no way he was going to quell the beating of his heart as the set began to build, no way to escape that adrenaline rush you got from seeing a truly big wave from ground zero. It never looked quite real to him. And his first reaction was always the same and had been for twenty years; he could never quite believe he was putting himself in its way.

Fletcher had been around long enough to know the drill. The surfers would hang back a little on the inside, wait out the set, then
sprint for the outside. Once outside, the trick was in knowing where to wait. The advantage enjoyed on this particular morning by Jones and Martin was that they were surfing with someone who had already charted the break and could show them their line-ups. It would be up to Fletcher and the boy to find their own.

It was to this end that Fletcher now set himself, and he watched as the first wave of the set passed over the reef and began to break. At close quarters, it was an unnerving spectacle, and yet a thing to behold, full of terror and fluid beauty. The amount of water involved was such that it was like watching a piece of the earth become liquid, as if in some cataclysm, or at the hour of creation. The wave rose first with great mass, like a hill, but this hill was made of liquid, in constant flux, and even as you watched it, it would change its form, turning itself to a long dark wall as the face went vertical and then beyond vertical as the crest began to feather and finally to pitch forward, to strike the water far out in front of the face—thus creating the vaunted green room of surfing myth—the place to be if you were to be there at all, on a board, at the eye storm, encompassed by the sound and the fury, bone dry in a place no one had ever been, or would be again, because when the wave was gone the place was gone too and would exist only in memory, or perhaps, if the right person was there, in the right place, with the right equipment, it would exist on film—a little piece of eternity to hang on the wall.

There were five waves in the set. Fletcher reckoned their size at twenty-five feet. A pair broke perfectly and could have been ridden. Three others broke in sections that were too long to make—sections of two, maybe three hundred yards—and when a section like that would go off, Fletcher was aware of the little beads of water that had gathered along the sides of the Zodiac jumping with the impact—suggesting no doubt some principal of physics he had, in his present position, no desire to contemplate at length.

When the set had passed, he and the boy looked at each other. For a moment, Fletcher felt at a loss, as if in need of a translator, at which point, it occurred to him that this, of course, was ridiculous.

“We’re going to have to get closer,” Fletcher said. He made an effort to sound casual about it, as if this was business as usual.

The boy nodded. He turned in a more northerly direction, running almost parallel to the coast. He did not, however, give the boat much throttle, suggesting, Fletcher decided, that he understood what was needed but was in no great hurry to get there. In fact, Fletcher might have said the same for himself and he made no move to speed things up. But he had seen his shot and it had given him something with which to cut his fear. The hunt had begun. It was something he had not experienced in a long time and it was good, he thought, to have it back. It was good to be here.

The sea was smooth in the wake of the set, and Fletcher was aware of the three surfers angling toward the line up from the north even as he and the boy angled in from the south. He watched as the three men stroked to some invisible point of Drew’s choosing then stopped and swung themselves up to straddle their boards. He held up a hand for the boy to cut back on his throttle and the boy did so. He and the boy were now even with the surfers, separated from them by a hundred yards of ocean.