The Dogs of Winter (29 page)

Standing now at the side of his pickup, beneath a morning sky the color of a dead television screen, he considered the decision once again. It was a question of weight. The kayak was, after all, a recent acquisition, his experience in it thus far limited to a few local coves in small surf. On the morning in question, he would already be carrying more weight than ever before, and he considered yet
again the particular configuration of land and sea he would this day hope to traverse.

He’d always felt that the Devil’s Hoof was shaped more like a boot than a hoof, the toe of which extended into a great natural bay. It was Travis’s intention to have his father take him as far as the bay. For as long as they kept with the lee of the Hoof, he reasoned the old man would be able to put him out and come about with minimum exposure to the big swell pushing down from the north. Travis would then kayak to the beaches, upon which he fully expected to find Drew Harmon and the others.

The plan had more or less made sense to him upon conception. Now, standing in the dark and cold, adding the weight of the gun to the gear already lashed to the deck above the small storage compartment, he was less certain. It all seemed a little crazier by the cold light of day, the simple truth of the thing more apparent—that without the involvement of Kendra Harmon, he would no doubt be willing to follow the sheriff’s lead, to curse the surfers for their persistence and wait on their return. It was the girl who had him up at dawn. If she was in danger, he wanted to know it. If she was with the surfers on the beaches, there was the prospect of a day in her company, on the trails leading back to the Heads. And so he put the gun into a Gore-Tex stuff bag and set about tying it to the deck of his craft, which was itself tied to the bed of his truck, and, all the while, in some interior chamber, grinning at himself like some jackass at the window, content in the secret pleasure that he was not like his wives, grown plump and complacent in their ordered lives. In the end, he was still a gambler, a believer in mad romance.

•  •  •

He found his father seated on a stool at the Marlin, a coffee shop favored by local fishermen. It was a place in which they might pass the time with one another for company, waiting out storms and fog banks and red tides. The room was all fishnets and turquoise Naugahyde, with large picture windows fronting the harbor which, on the morning in question, lay unseen beyond the greasy plate-glass and smoky air.

“I don’t know,” his father said. He blew on his coffee as Travis
seated himself at his side. “Fog’s a bastard and there’s a storm coming. Outside buoys are showing at twenty feet.”

Travis looked at his reflection in the plate glass. He ordered a cup of coffee.

“Think maybe you’d better shit-can it for the day,” his father told him.

“Bay’s generally pretty sheltered. Fog might even be better there.”

His old man looked at him over his cup.

“Damn. You must want out there pretty bad.”

Travis shrugged.

“How you gonna get back?”

“Walk.”

“To town?”

“Campground at the Heads. I know a few people there. I’ll bum a ride.”

His father nodded. “Let’s watch the fog,” he said. “I expect it will lift.”

•  •  •

By noon, the fog had burned off in the direction of town but still lay heavy on a rolling ocean. Travis felt called upon to point out that the old man knew the waters, that he was equipped with instruments and not likely to lose his way between the harbor and the bay.

The old man looked at the harbor.

“We wait too long, we may get a storm.”

At last, the old man sighed. He put out the last of his cigarette and led Travis down to the docks, where his trawler rocked in the gentle swell of the harbor. They carried the kayak between them. The old man had said nothing but had watched Travis unleash it from his truck with a dubious eye. A large gray-and-white gull studied them from atop a concrete piling. The bird gave them twenty feet of dock before departing at their approach.

Travis’s father went on board and started checking over instruments and firing up his engine while Travis pulled in the buoys and coiled the deck lines—chores learned as a boy, when his father still entertained notions of his son following in his footsteps, this when a
man might still make a good living from the sea. But that time was gone and both men knew it, so that it was just as well Travis had grown tired of the stink of fish and gone off to school instead and come home to counsel desultory Indians because there were still those in abundance, with grievances aplenty, some of which were aimed at men like Travis’s father and some of which were not unlike those harbored by the old man himself. And both men knew this too, in a way that made talk of it superfluous.

They had little company as they made for the channel. A few fisherman waved to them from the docks. An old man who lived on a tugboat he’d turned into a kind of houseboat and had since Travis was a boy, stood out on his deck with his old black dog and shouted at them and wanted to know what McCade thought he was going to catch in a storm and laughed at them.

Travis’s father waved back, and Travis looked at the old man and his old dog on their old green boat that had been the same color since he was a boy and, in fact, did not look as if it had seen a new coat of paint since he was a boy, and he said as much to his father.

“Isn’t that old man ever going to die?” he asked.

His father studied the channel, squinting now and then toward the swell lines running like hills across the horizon.

“He’ll die,” his father said. “It’s just that he’ll come to both our funerals first.”

Travis nodded, wondering if this would prove the case.

They had by now reached the harbor entrance where the great buoys, covered in rust and the droppings of gulls, lurched about like drunken Salvation Army supplicants ringing their bells, beckoning them entrance to some refuge of the deranged.

•  •  •

The seas were indeed high, and even without rounding the point at Devil’s Hoof, the old trawler took on a corkscrewing motion as it plunged steadily north, climbing the faces of the ground swells, then sliding down their back sides to meet the hump that followed and which, at times, was apt to bury the bowsprit altogether, washing the decks with water, eliciting a hoot from the old man. Travis found in these things an unexpected exhilaration as well, for it had
been some time since he had been on the open sea, and for a while his spirits ran high, the trepidation he had felt in his driveway all but gone.

They ran with the fog bank well off the starboard bow, with the coast visible to port. Coming within sight of the big bay, however, they cursed, and Travis felt his high spirits wilt upon the vine for they saw that, in fact, the bay was filled with cloud. It rolled before them in great billowing sheets, as if this were the place from which the entire bank had sprung and they had come to some chimney stack leading back down to the molten core of the planet.

Travis watched his father shake his head, consulting instruments as they plunged into the fog. He set the running lights and a small foghorn to signal any other boats of his presence, though it seemed highly doubtful there would be any to hear. He cut back on his engines as the water smoothed beneath them, giving evidence that they had indeed entered the bay.

“No way,” his father said at last. “You can’t go off into that.”

“Maybe we could circle in and out a couple of times. Maybe we’ll get a break.”

His old man shook his head. “Got your mind made up, don’t you?”

Travis stared into the fog. He felt a sudden gust of wind upon his cheek. He turned to the old man.

“We’ll make one circle.”

In perhaps twenty minutes, at a more westerly point than Travis would’ve picked, they came to a hole in the fog. A yellow-faced sun burned through the mists, striking the ocean and one narrow band of coast where a pair of sandy coves presented themselves among the rocks, and Travis elected to go.

“I guess you’re old enough to call your own shots,” the old man observed, though it was clear he didn’t like the looks of things.

“I guess so,” Travis told him, and set about pulling on his wet suit and strapping his gear into his kayak, then hitching himself to it by way of a cord and Velcro ankle strap and attaching the paddles to his wrist in the same fashion, so as not to be separated from either in case of a spill, because one was no good without the other.

He shoved the plastic boat over the side and went in after it,
hitting the cold water on the rise of a swell alongside his craft, then pulling himself quickly on board. The kayak was the kind you straddled rather that sat down in, and with one final look at his old man he began to paddle hard for the coast, lest the fog rush in and swallow what he aimed at.

For his part, Travis’s father was not long in watching his son. There was a storm coming and he was eager to be gone, and so the two men moved off in opposite directions with no more than a look, though each carried with him the image of the other. What Travis saw was an old man, a solitary figure on the deck of a working man’s boat, and he thought of the years his father had spent in just that fashion, alone upon the sea with a wife and daughter buried and a desultory half-breed for a son. As for the old man, he went with the image of his only son, headed toward some distant cove, dwarfed by an immense groundswell, yet pulling with a skilled and powerful stroke—a feat, he supposed, in which a father might take some pride—and he wondered what it was his son thought so important that he was willing to risk himself in such seas but had long ago given up asking such questions, as he had yet to have one answered.

•  •  •

And so it was that if one were to view this entire section of coastline from the air, from Scorpion Bay at the south to Neah Heads at the north, one would see a huge chunk of ground some fifty miles in length bulging into the Pacific, punctuated at its center by that arm of land known as the Devil’s Hoof.

The land that formed this western outpost was a barren, windswept thing. The trees would not have it. There was only grass and rock and a little coastal scrub ending in harsh cliffs that tumbled toward rocky beaches—a rookery for migratory birds made white by their droppings, home to sea lions and seals, a breeding ground for the great white sharks which, on a clear day, might be seen circling from the rocks high above the sea. The Indians had called it Humaliwu, and they had buried their dead above its grassy plains. The whites had called it the Devil’s Hoof. They’d left it to the Indians and built their town on the little harbor to the south.

And if, on the morning in question, one were to have viewed this
stretch of coastline from the air, or with the eye of a god, one might have seen three separate groups of pilgrims, two by land, one by sea, traversing slowly this dented landscape, following their varied paths, yet meant, one would see, to converge, as if in dance. Though what pattern these steps might weave, or to what end the dance might come, it would not be so easy to say, lest one be some Demiurge as well, and thus able to order these patterns as might the caller in a barn dance, and so dictate both set and step in accordance with the intentions of the Darkness.

B
y midday, the surfers had at last traversed the long field of rock and come finally to a great stretch of flat sandy beach. To the north, a point of land might be seen as a vague outline in the fog. The land appeared to stretch for some distance into the ocean, forming, as it went, the northern end of a great natural bay.

Fletcher was relatively certain that they had arrived at the place, though it was hard to see much in the fog. Nor had the great booming sounds they had heard earlier come to them again, neither on the hike across the last of the rock field or here now, on this stretch of sand. Still, if the arm of land they could see reaching westward was not the Devil’s Hoof, it was hard to imagine what else it might be. The elements were accounted for, and Fletcher called these things to Drew’s attention.

The big man only nodded. “We’ll get waves off that point,” he said. “Probably what we heard earlier. The place is fickle as hell. I’ll tell you this, you wouldn’t want to try and paddle out there just now.
There’s a rip runs out of this bay on an outgoing tide you wouldn’t believe. I’ve never been able to figure it out. There’s that estuary we crossed back there, but it’s not that deep. I mean, you get caught in this mother you’ll think you’re at the mouth of San Francisco Bay or some damn place. But then this whole area is a little weird.”

“What do you mean, weird?” Robbie asked him.

“Got a charge on it,” Drew said. “You spend enough time out here, you’ll feel it. I mean, look at the place. No one’s ever used it for anything. Not even the Indians.”

The three surfers stood for some time in silence, surveying the desolate landscape into which they had come. When Fletcher had seen enough he dumped his gear on the sand and lay down. His back was killing him and he wanted to stretch it out. He began by pulling one knee to his chest and then the other.

“What’s with the Doc?” Robbie Jones asked.

Drew Harmon squinted down on him. “Back,” he said. “What’s with yours, Doc?”

“They don’t know,” Fletcher said.

Drew Harmon nodded. “Sounds about right. But that don’t keep ’em from askin’ for their money, does it?”

“Bill’s always right on time. It’s like death and taxes.”

“Where’d you hurt it?”

“Mexico.”

Drew nodded. “Fractured three vertebrae in the islands a few years back. Some fucker’s board came over the falls on me.”

“I hoped you kicked his ass,” Robbie Jones said.

“Actually, I wasn’t in condition to kick his ass at the time. Ain’t seen him since.”

“Shit. Some fucker does that to me, he’d better fucking kill me. He doesn’t, he’s dead meat.”

Drew Harmon lifted his shirt to reveal the patterns of stitch marks running around his side and back. “This guy fucked me up even better. I didn’t kill him either.”

Robbie Jones observed the scars standing out like train tracks in the desert. “That’s another story,” he said.