The Dogs of Winter (23 page)

“It was all there, man. Alias, Olos, Hot Curls, Balsas. I felt like Howard Carter when he opened up Tut’s Tomb. You know what the bastard said when they asked him what he saw?”

Drew paused, waiting for a response that did not come. For his part, Fletcher had no idea what the bastard had said. Harmon smiled. “He said, ‘I see wonderful things.’ ”

Drew laughed.

“I been to the Bishop Museum,” Robbie Jones said. “That’s one big whale they’ve got there.”

Drew craned his neck, staring into the back of the van. “Whale? You hear me talking about a whale? I’m not talking about a goddamn whale. I’m talking about surfboards.” He shook his head and looked back into the night.

“There I am, man, right in the middle of all this . . .” He pawed at the night with one of his big weatherbeaten hands. “This, stuff. And one of the coolest things there is this 1930s redwood. I mean, this one really breathed.”

As Harmon talked, he described the various design features not only in words but with his hands as well, chopping and slicing the air, at times letting go of the wheel altogether, bringing the old van back on line only when two wheels were already off the road, but doing so with a certain effortlessness, one which bespoke a set of reflexes Fletcher imagined had served him well through some thirty-odd years of riding the world’s biggest waves, and which, in
the end, put Fletcher’s mind to rest. The man would not drive off the road and kill them in some ditch. Such was not his fate.

“The bottom design was really very similar to today’s boards,” Harmon said. “Complex as shit, considering it was shaped with an ax. It started me thinking. This board was carved from a tree. It was alive once. You could see it in the grain of the wood.” Harmon paused. “And when I picked it up, something happened. That’s all I can say. There was like this sound coming up through the timber. I swear it sang to me.”

“Wha’d it sing?” Robbie Jones wanted to know.

Drew Harmon shook his head. “Jesus. I don’t know, man. Pure energy.”

“Sounds to me like you were on something, dude. Why don’t you pull over, I gotta flash.”

Harmon looked unhappily toward the road. “Shit. Flash out the window, Junior. We got a storm to catch.”

Robbie Jones just stared at him. “You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not shitting you. You gotta piss, do it out the window. What do you think? You think I’m your momma drivin’ you to the beach? You think there’s anybody out there to see you?”

Robbie Jones cursed and got to his feet as best he could in the confines of the van and pushed open one of the rear windows, where, after more fumbling, he managed to get his dick out of his pants and into the night so that, in time, Fletcher was treated to the sound of Robbie Jones’s urine pinging against the side of the van. At which point, Drew made a hard right and Robbie Jones toppled away from the window, landing first on his ass and then his back, urine spraying in all directions as Drew hooted and rolled down his window to usher out the stench, and Robbie rolled and swore and clutched at himself, having apparently hooked his penis stud on something as he fell, jerking the mutilated appendage hard enough to draw blood.

Drew looked over at the kid rolling around on his floor, noticing the blood and the penis stud for the first time. “What kind of faggoty bullshit do you call that?” he asked.

But Robbie Jones was too busy pissing and moaning to answer. Fletcher looked away. He clung to the stack of wet suits he was using
as a seat and banged the back of his head on the metal wall of the van as Drew rounded one more curve, as what the next few days had to promise presented themselves to him in all of their terrible glory.

•  •  •

Drew Harmon drove on, for a time, down roads that still had names to them but coming finally to roads no one had thought over long enough to name. Roads torn violently from hillsides and ridges, the earth taken right down to the bone so that the rusted-out old van rattled and shimmied, following its own corkscrewing headlights into places where only people long dead and loggers had gone before.

It was a patchwork landscape they passed through here, a motley collection of clear cuts and burns, of recent Forestry Service plantings wherein spindly young trees of remarkably uniform dimensions were laid out in neat, Christmas tree–farm rows, their fuzzy limbs laced with dew. Here and there, they would see some older stand of timber rising up black before the black night, and to which Drew was inclined to point, calling out the trees by name. Douglas Fir. Cedar. The ubiquitous hemlock. And all the while negotiating intersections known only to himself, driving them deeper into the heart of the wilderness.

By the time Harmon at last parked in a rutted turnout on the side of a logging road, they had been gone from the river for close to two hours. Fletcher climbed stiff-legged from the back of the reeking van. On one side of the road was a great clear cut, the timber having been harvested for as far as the eye could see, nor had anything yet been planted in its place, and the moon rolled high and white above a black and barren landscape punctuated only by intermittent mounds of dirt and ash and blackened tree stumps left moldering like the tombstones of some ancient and forgotten race. In stark contrast to this bleak scene, and yet separated from it by not more than eight feet of rocky ground, there rose up, on the opposite side of the road, a wall of virgin forest, a tiered web of foliage impregnable to light, as well as to men, and along whose uppermost edge even the stars surrendered their light.

“Enough to make you believe in Bigfoot, the beast, ain’t it?” Drew Harmon asked.

He was watching Fletcher watch the dark woods. Robbie Jones stood a few feet away, still cursing beneath his breath, apparently tending his unit.

“We walk from here,” Drew said.

“Walk where?” Robbie Jones asked him.

Drew pointed toward the wall of blackness. “There,” he said. And he went to the back of the van and opened the doors and began to remove their gear. Fletcher went with him.

Each man carried a pack with food and water, together with a sleeping bag, a wet suit, and a board. Fletcher carried a camera as well and Drew asked how his ankle was, for he had gotten a look at it before leaving and had wrapped it in an Ace bandage.

Fletcher said it felt okay, and, in fact, it did feel better than he would have imagined. How it would hold up was another matter, but he guessed he would find out soon enough.

“It ain’t that bad,” Drew told him, shouldering a pack. “Just keep it moving.”

Robbie, having finished with his business, stood looking at the boards shimmering in the moonlight. They were Drew’s boards now. Robbie’s had been lost to the locals, and if he wanted to ride Heart Attacks, he was going to have to do it on one of Drew’s big guns. He bent to pick up a board, testing it for weight. “I owe you one,” he said.

“Oh, hey, don’t mention it, brah. They put your picture in the magazine, you tell them how good the board worked.”

“I’m not talkin’ about boards.”

Drew ignored him. He was turned now toward the moonlight and Fletcher got a good look at his face for the first time since climbing into the van, and it seemed to him as if the man had aged considerably during the course of the drive. There was a weariness about him Fletcher had not seen in the shaping room by the river, and as he stared toward the moonlit clear cuts, his face appeared lined and drawn. At last, however, he turned toward the dark stands of timber and when his voice came to them, there was an edge to it, that of a weary parent scolding a slow-moving child.

“Come on,” he told him. “I want to hit the beach early enough to get some rest. We got some miles to cover in the morning, we’re
gonna make Big Sandy by tomorrow night.” And so saying, he snatched up a lantern from the back of the van and started with it into the trees.

•  •  •

What followed was, for Fletcher, a kind of hallucinogenic experience, lit by the strobe of Drew Harmon’s lantern, complete with dripping sword ferns, and mushrooms the size of serving platters, and moss-covered cedar which, in places, showed trunk diameters of more than twenty feet. There was little time to admire these wonders, however, as Drew set the pace, driving them through the woods in one long, forced march. It was all Fletcher could do to keep up. His ankle was soon throbbing away and he slipped often, as the ground was cast in darkness and veined with tree roots made slick as icicles by the incessant drip of the forest. There was of course no question of stopping. He slogged on, without complaint, a steady downhill trek, following at times the beds of tiny gullies where his feet splashed in running water, trying always to keep up, to follow the dancing light, lest the darkness swallow him whole and one nightmare take the place of another.

And so the time wore on, and the night with it. Nor was there any movement of moon or stars to mark its passing, as all that was hidden from them here. By that canopy of living growth which concealed the sky. And concealed as well the pale red glow which, at this very moment, had they been perched atop some clear-cut ridge rather than sunk in the heart of the wood, they might have observed staining the sky above the old trailer that had belonged to the murdered girl, then purchased at a reduced price and moved to the banks of the Klamath.

T
ravis awoke stiff and hungover, having slept on a couch on the back porch of the Moke’s. He woke to gray skies and the sound of the river. He shed the dirty wool blanket with which he had covered himself and walked to the front of the property where he saw at once that the house car had not returned.

He cursed his lassitude in the cold gray light and picked his way among the empty beer cans and the bones of animals to where his own truck sat parked near the oxidized Duster. Looking back toward Moke’s he could see a thin line of smoke just beginning to curl from a rusted vent, but the house itself, like the morning, was silent and gray and showed no obvious sign of life. He saw that several Indians had spent the night near the blackened remains of the fire but had yet to regain consciousness. He saw too the remains of the skinned Roosevelt elk already drawing flies where it hung beneath the cedar at the entrance to the smokehouse, and he thought that if they were smart, they would put it in with the
salmon, but then being smart was not their way. Although he guessed they had been smart enough to fool him, and when he had seen enough he got into his truck and drove away.

•  •  •

He drove back along the road which skirted the river. The water looked high and cold, the waves formed by its speed bearing silver crowns in the early light. He saw a pair of men in fishing vests floating on the water in an aluminum drift boat, though aside from their vests, they showed nothing else in the way of gear, nor did they row, but were content to drift with the current, and might, for all the life they showed, have been no more than chunks of wood carved into the shapes of men. As Travis went on, however, he was aware of their heads turning together to mark his passing, though no hand was raised in greeting, neither his nor theirs.

When he reached the interstate and the bridge which spanned the river, he was set upon by a not-unexpected sense of dread, for what he saw there was a small caravan exiting the gravel road that skirted the lower Klamath. Out in front, there was a car belonging to the Sweet Home Police Department. Behind that there came a flatbed tow truck bearing a bronze Dodge van Travis believed he had seen before, parked at Drew’s landing, and even at the distance from which he first saw the cars, he could see the van had been gutted, windows broken, tires slashed. It hunkered atop the flatbed as might the husk of some gigantic and ruined insect. Behind the truck came the entire tribal police department of the lower Klamath—Jerry Blacklage and his deputy, Jim Lemon. The Indians rode in Blacklage’s green-and-white Bronco with a gold sheriff’s star on the door.

Travis pulled to the shoulder of the road, watching as the little procession climbed up from the river and turned toward town. When they had passed, he fell in behind, flashing his headlights. When the police chief saw him, he pulled over, allowing the caravan to proceed without him, disappearing finally into the fog that had thinned but not yet burned from above the town.

Blacklage was a tall, fleshy Indian from Portland. He wore his summer tans and aviator shades in spite of the fog. He had been
trying to work his way south for the past decade and still applied for postings on the reservations around San Diego, but the jobs in that part of the state were hard to come by, and Sweet Home was as far south as he had managed to get. His principal accomplishment to date was the posting of a thirty-five-mile zone on a short strip of interstate where it crossed the reservation. It was where he spent most of his time, sipping Diet Cokes, dreaming of sunlit beaches, and handing out traffic citations to unobservant citizens. He had been known to absent himself in times of trouble.

His deputy, Officer Lemon, was an enthusiastic young Hupa recently graduated from the state university in Humboldt County. He had been less than six months on the force, and, for the most part, Blacklage kept him chained to a desk at the tribal center, plowing through the backlog of paperwork which had been collecting since the chief’s arrival from Portland. Travis suspected that if there was anyone pulling for Blacklage’s transfer any harder than Blacklage himself, it was Jim Lemon. The three men met between their respective trucks.

“What?” Travis asked.

Blacklage removed his aviator shades. He looked, Travis thought, even more unhappy than usual. “Vandals,” Blacklage said.

“The Harmons?”

Blacklage nodded.

“Anyone hurt?”

“Don’t know. Doesn’t look like it. There’s no one there.”

“Kendra’s not there?”

Blacklage shook his head.

“Know anything about who did it?”

Blacklage nodded in the direction of the departed caravan. “The cheese dicks think it was kids. The Posse maybe. Maybe the Stoners. Harmon’s had trouble with them before.”

“Burned one of his storage sheds.”