The Dogs of Winter (25 page)

“Eat this,” a voice told him.

Fletcher decided that he was not altogether well. With the Pop-Tart in one hand he crawled out onto the wet sand, finally settling upon a wet rock while Drew Harmon rolled his bag for him and assembled his pack. Fletcher could see him there, a dim shape in the fog.

“I ain’t gonna do this for you every fucking morning,” Drew told him. “Tide’s coming up fast. We need to get around a point up yonder before it peaks. We’ve got a minus seven at three this afternoon. I’m hoping to hit the rock field by two. We can do that, we can make Big Sandy by the end of the day.”

Fletcher took a bite of the tart. He was attempting to process this information. At length he began to fumble in the pocket of his parka for a pill. The articles could be heard rattling in their plastic container.

“What the fuck’s that?” Harmon asked him. He had finished with the packing and was standing in front of Fletcher, holding his gear.

“Vitamins,” Fletcher told him.

“Take ’em later.”

“These are the kind you gotta take right now,” Fletcher said. He managed to free one from the bottle and swallow it with a mouthful of cherry-flavored pastry.

“You haven’t gotten old on me, have you, Doc?”

“It seems to me a man should try everything at least once,” Fletcher told him. He slid off his rock as Drew stepped around behind him, helping to get the pack onto his back. “If only,” Fletcher continued, “to get a complete picture of the resources of the planet.” He was suddenly feeling a bit giddy with false bravado, inclined to quotations.

Harmon tugged at the straps of his pack, then hung a board bag over his shoulder. Fletcher put a hand upon the rock to steady himself against the weight. The prospect of dragging this shit for an
entire day, over miles of beach, was suddenly unimaginable. A wave of panic swept over him, erasing the bravado of only moments before. “Looks like we lost that high-pressure system,” he said. He felt it necessary to say something, if only to break the feeling which gripped him. Perhaps the big man would agree. They would call the whole thing off. It was only sensible.

He was aware of Harmon looking him over, then turning to stare off into the gloom. The man had wrapped his head in a large bandanna and might, Fletcher thought, have passed for a figure of another time, the ghost of Blue Beard perhaps, come back to scour the beaches for something he had lost.

“It’s mother nature fucking with you,” Drew told him. He gave one of Fletcher’s straps a final pull, then turned his attention to Robbie Jones. The boy had hoisted his own gear and was now standing some way off, a shadow in the fog, eager to be off. “Okay,” Drew told them. “Let’s do it.” It was how they began.

The beach they were on ended after a short walk and they began to climb. For Fletcher it was a hellish ordeal. He was always in the rear. Climbing with the pack would have been bad enough. The board bag rendered it close to impossible. On several occasions he banged the thing into the rocks, or hooked it in such a way as to be thrown off balance. At such times he would lose his footing, jamming his shoe into a crevice, or immersing it in a swirling pool of frigid water. Had there been some ledge from which to topple, he would no doubt have fallen to his death. As it was, the way was never very ledgy, but seemed to proceed along corridors cut from stone. At times these corridors would lead them up and over things, and at other times they appeared to be right at sea level, splashing over rocks made slick with sea grass and sharp with crustaceans, and sometimes even through vast tide pools with bottoms of sand though the sea itself seemed always to be some distance away, for rarely could Fletcher sense its surge or feel the spray of breaking waves. Though with such limited visibility, there was really no way to make much sense of anything. There was no end in sight, nor, for that matter, was there a beginning or a middle. There was only the going on, the next place to put a foot, the next crevice set among walls of stone.

The thing that was most certain was that without Drew Harmon to lead them, they would have been unable to proceed at all. That the man had come this way often enough to negotiate such paths in such conditions was a kind of tribute to something. Though whether these skills spoke of dedication or insanity, Fletcher would, at that moment, have been hard-pressed to say. It was all he could do to hold up the rear and he was aware that often, upon rounding some corner, he would find the others, awaiting his arrival. There were other times when he would meet Drew Harmon coming back to find him, lest he wander off down some wrong turn and the sea take him, and at such times he knew that he was slowing them down, though no word was spoken of it, neither by Drew Harmon, nor by himself. There would just be this dark shape looming up among the dark rocks, in the dark light, beckoning him on, and Fletcher would hoist his gear and shuffle ahead and the journey would continue. And in time, he even managed an image with which to sustain himself. It was the image of the boy in the Zodiac. For in the aftermath of what had befallen him at the river mouth, Fletcher could find no suitable place in which to position himself, neither here, nor in the days to come. As a consequence of this dilemma, there arrived a point in which this painful groping among the shadows came to seem quite right and proper. He took it for an act of penance, the first, no doubt, of many.

•  •  •

By midday they had climbed over more rocky points and traversed more coves than Fletcher cared to think about, but the pills had done their work and he had shaken off the cold. The sun had burned a hole in the sky and the wind had been kind to them. Still, he was aware that he was slowing them down. The beaches were often pitched at steep angles that he found hard on both his back and his ankle. At first, Drew had tried to hurry them along. In time, however, he seemed to resign himself to Fletcher’s pace, though ofttimes Fletcher would see him looking at his watch, and then toward the sea, as if studying the progress of the tide or the capricious antics of the fog which, though it had burned from the immediate coast, could still be seen laying in a thick bank not more than half a
mile off shore and from which point it would roll toward them now and again before thinning and retreating, as if to mimic the motion of the sea which heaved beneath it.

At times, they hugged the beach. At other times, they went higher and deeper into the woods where they would pick up some piece of trail which, in the end, would generally lead them back down to yet one more cove bordered by more outcroppings of rock.

Now that they could be seen, many of these coves were quite beautiful, with white, unmarked sand, and where the water was shallow, it went often to the color of some fine gem, and starfish could be seen clinging to the rocks like lilies in the field. It was finally to one such cove that Drew brought them and announced it as their next camp.

“It’s still early,” Robbie Jones said.

Harmon just shook his head. “We were too slow,” he told them. “We get around this next point and we’re into the rock field.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s where you don’t want to get stuck on a rising tide.”

“It’s where those guys in the book got stuck,” Fletcher said.

“They almost got stuck there,” Harmon corrected him. “They got lucky is what they got. They got a flat ocean. They’d had a swell, they would’ve done two things. They probably would’ve seen Heart Attacks. And they would’ve drowned.”

Fletcher dumped his backpack and board bag and seated himself on a rock, wiping the sweat from his face. He looked around at the little cove. They had first seen it some ways back, from the edge of a cliff. In time, they had made a steep and treacherous descent, following the path of a small waterfall as it tumbled a hundred feet to a narrow creek that opened into a sandy beach. At one end of this beach, there was a huge rock from whose center the elements had cut a twisting arch and toward which Drew now pointed.

“We’ll do better on the other side,” he told them.

Fletcher shouldered his gear one more time. “What about those trails?” he asked. “The ones those guys in the book used? We couldn’t camp there?” He supposed he was hoping to make some show of having gotten with the program. Though in point of fact, he was spent, and the words had a hollow ring, even as he spoke them.

Drew Harmon just looked at him. He was still wearing the bandanna and beneath it his face was reddened and streaked with sweat. The blue eyes, however, still burned with their savage light, and for a moment Fletcher thought the big man might call his bluff, or reprimand him in some way for their failure to cover the ground he had intended. In the end, he simply shrugged and looked at the water. “We could,” he said. “Trouble is, we wouldn’t gain that much. We’d still have to wait out the tide and it’s a crappy place to camp. Much nicer here. Besides that, there’s surf.”

The argument so settled, Fletcher followed his two companions toward the portal cut from stone and through which an expanse of pure white sand shimmered in the light.

“Beach is deeper here,” Drew called as he led them into the rock. “We’ll stay drier.”

Fletcher followed. He passed through the wind-sculpted stone and into the light, where he saw at once that they had indeed come to a fine stretch of beach, deep and wide, remarkable for its lack of driftwood or dying kelp, although beds of the stuff could be seen glistening in the sunlight a scant fifty yards from the shore. When he looked back in the direction from which they had come, he could see Harmon had been right, that to go further would be risky, that indeed the tide had already begun to turn. For he saw the first lacy fingers of white water as they reached out to touch the wind-sculpted rocks, and he could see that in another hour or two, the sea would indeed seal the portal behind them.

When he turned back to the beach, he found Drew Harmon watching him. The man was standing some ways up the sand, the board bag and backpack still dangling from his shoulders. He waited as Fletcher slogged on up into the dry sand, then nodded toward the rising tide. He looked at Fletcher and he smiled. “No one gets out of here alive,” he said.

B
y three o’clock of the day on which he had gone with Jerry Blacklage to the trailer, Travis was on his way to see the chief of police once more. He had not yet reached a conclusion about what ought to be done but he was beginning to have some ideas. He carried with him a partial map he had fished from the floor of Drew Harmon’s shaping shack, and he figured it was time to talk. He would liked to have talked to someone other than Jerry Blacklage. Under the circumstances, however, Chief Blacklage was all he had, and he would have to do.

Travis drove off the highway and down among the trailers and modular homes of the Lower Elwa, all hunkered amid their piles of cast-off debris, their rusted refrigerators and cars sunk to the axles in mud and weed, and came finally to the big steel-roofed building of the tribal center.

It was going on Halloween, and as Travis got out of his truck, he found himself walking in the midst of costumed children, of midget
Wolfmans and Barney Rubbles and Casper the Ghosts. They scampered about his legs in cheesy store-bought costumes, depicting the full range of Saturday-morning television heroes. He nearly tripped over a three-foot Incredible Hulk in an effort to gain the stairs through the press of the children, and he found in the sight of them cause for a profound depression. “G.I. Joe will see you dead,” he told them, but they were making noise, and, in the end, he supposed, it was for himself that he spoke.

He crossed the main floor of the tribal center and proceeded down a narrow carpeted hallway where he came to the door marked Tribal Police. There was a paper pumpkin covering the window and, beneath that, a small skeleton dangled against the door. Travis opened it and went inside.

Jerry Blacklage was alone in the office, seated behind his desk. He was downing a pair of Eskimo Pies and a can of diet cola when Travis came in. He tossed the Eskimo Pie wrappers into the trash can, patted his paunch, and shrugged. At which point he held up the can of diet soda.

“Only two calories per can,” he said.

Travis seated himself opposite the chief. He looked around the room.

“Lemon out on point?”

“I got him on the highway. Least that’s where he’s supposed to be.”

By this, Travis assumed, the boy was watching the speed trap.

“You know, for someone who grew up around here, you’d think that kid would show a little more savvy. I mean, there’s some things you fix and some best left alone.”

Travis nodded. “Yeah, well, I hate to say it, but I think we’ve got one on our hands that’s going to need fixing.”

A shadow crossed the chief’s face, but he listened as Travis told him of what he had seen. He told him about the trip back to the trailer, about the tracks, and about the clippings from the forest he’d found scattered across the deer trail.

Blacklage shifted his weight but made no move to speak.

“I didn’t go back out to Moke’s,” Travis said. “I didn’t want to take the time. But I’ll tell you this. I will lay you odds it was those guys in the house car from upriver who trashed the Harmon place.”

Jerry Blacklage pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling. “What you’re trying to tell me,” Blacklage said, “is that you think these crankster gangsters from upriver took the girl.”

It was the first time Travis had heard it said out loud, and he found that he didn’t like it much. But it was what he thought. He took the map from his pocket and spread it across Blacklage’s desk. The map was stained and torn but it was readable. Travis pointed to a boot of land sticking into the Pacific. The spot had been marked and there were notations in red ink written upon the ocean.

“I think Drew’s gone up here,” Travis said. “I think he’s taken those surfers from the magazine and they’ve gone to the Devil’s Hoof.”

“That’s reservation land all the way. You think he’d try that, after what happened?”

“I think he wouldn’t give a shit about anything except the waves.”

Blacklage looked at the map and shook his head. “That’s a long way from nowhere.” He drummed the desktop with his fingertips. “Damn. You know it’s not a hell of a lot to go on. I take that story to the Bureau, you know what’s going to happen.”