The Dogs of Winter (3 page)

Fletcher had added the book to his gear and gone back to looking for his hood when the phone rang once more.

It was Michael Peters.

“They’re off,” Peters told him. “I put them on the plane myself.”

“That goes without saying,” Fletcher said. “You wanted them on the right plane.”

“Lighten up,” Peters told him. “Make believe you’re still Dr. Fun.”

“You know what Robbie Jones was doing the last time I saw him? He was head-butting some guy’s car.”

“I remember that. The Op Pro. The guy was checking out R.J.’s girlfriend, man. What do you want? He’s an excitable boy.”

“He’s a moron. The only guy on the tour any dumber is Sonny Martin.”

“You’re just sore, ’cause he was needling you about blowing the finals last year. Anyway, I should point out to you that Mr. Jones has gotten religion. He’s a new man.”

“No.”

“Born again.”

“Christ, Martin too?”

“Are you kidding?”

“You’re doing this to me,” Fletcher said. “It’s punishment for getting the gig.”

“Forget it,” Peters told him. “These guys are going. Besides, that’s not why I called.”

There was a moment of silence on the line. It occurred to Fletcher that Peters was probably on his car phone, alone upon that great red plateau of pineapples in the first light of a tropic sunrise.

“You know what they say about this place,” Peters said. “It’s not just the drop. They say it’s got that old magic, the way the Bay had it, in the old days, before they turned it into a theme park.”

“Maybe it’s all that Indian land,” Fletcher suggested. It suddenly felt to him as if some offering of peace was about to descend.

“Maybe so,” Peters said. “Harmon’s married now. You know that?”

“I hadn’t heard. Who’s the lucky girl?”

“Don’t know. No one does, as near as I can tell. Last I heard the guy was living in Costa Rica. He calls from Northern California. Tells me he’s married, that he’s gotten himself a chunk of land . . .”

“That was probably how he got the land,” Fletcher said. “He found himself an heiress.”

“Half his age no doubt.”

“With a large trust fund.”

The men allowed themselves a moment of laughter.

“I ever tell you about that time in Biarritz? We’re camping on the beach for two days, waiting on a swell. Finally we get it. I get up at dawn, look out. There it is, corduroy to the horizon. The sun is out. The wind is offshore. I hear something and I look up. A Mercedes wagon pulls up and stops. Door swings open. Out steps Drew Harmon. Man’s wearing shades and an ankle-length fur coat. I can see this blonde sitting in the seat behind him. He’s got at least four boards racked to the roof. He pulls one out. Pulls on a wet suit. Walks down. And rips. For about three hours. Never says a word. Just rips. He leaves and the wind turns around, starts blowing on shore. Half an hour later and the place is shit.”

In fact, Fletcher had heard the Biarritz tale before. But then surfers did love their stories. Big waves and outlaws. Anybody who could grow old and stay in the life. Drew Harmon was all of those things.

“You remember when I took over the magazine?” Peters asked. “You remember what it looked like then? We changed all of that, Doc. You changed it. All that shit you shot from the water. That was heavy stuff. You set the standard, man. You upped the stakes . . .” The man paused, moved perhaps by his own rhetoric.

“What I’m trying to tell you,” Peters said finally, “is that I’m
pulling for you on this one. Sonny Martin’s nothing new. But R.J. is. He’s the real thing. You get Jones and Harmon, passing the torch in mysto California surf . . .” The man paused once more. “You can tell the newlyweds to go fuck themselves.”

Fletcher had been off the phone for a full five minutes before it occurred to him that Michael Peters had just made reference to the weddings. He paused at that point in his packing. He looked with some wonder upon the first light. You lost your money. You fucked up your back. In the end, it was hard even to maintain one’s front. In the end, they knew. In the end, they had you. He glanced at his watch. He stuffed the last of his gear into his bags and went with it into the alley where he had parked the old Dodge. As he did so, he was just in time to see a pair of egrets as they swept up from the remains of the Bolsa Chica wetlands where once his great-grandfather had come on horseback from Los Angeles to hunt with his friends. The birds passed almost directly above him, wing to wing, sleek prehistoric shadows before a tarnished silver sky.

T
ravis woke early to the sound of distant thunder. Checking his clock, he found it to be 4:00
A.M.
He lay awake for some time, his hands clasped behind his head, listening to the waves. He began to think about the meeting of the tribal councils he’d promised to attend upon the coming evening. With the approaching season, tensions were running high on the river.

The federal government had recently divided the fishing rights on the Klamath. The Yuroks had the first twenty miles of the river, which included its mouth. The Hupas had the rest and believed themselves to have been short-changed. Between the commercial fishermen who fished the ocean, the Yuroks at the river’s mouth, and the licensed sports fishermen loosed to fish anywhere they pleased, the Hupas’ take was drastically reduced. As a consequence, some had been coming downriver anyway, fishing Yurok water. There had been incidents of violence. The government had empowered certain Indians to enforce the boundaries. It made for
an ugly situation. Hence the meeting. The bad blood, however, ran deep and went way back and included transgressions, imagined and real, from a time before Travis was even born and thinking about it was enough to keep him awake, in the dark room, with the sound of the waves which might otherwise have put him to sleep.

At length, he got out of bed. He fixed a cup of coffee, dressed and went outside. He found the streets empty and wet with a frail light beginning to gnaw at the edges of the sky.

He crossed the street and walked along a narrow strip of land which skirted the bluff. The ocean thundered beneath him. A chunk of pale moon wandered off above the town of Sweet Home. Beyond the distant pier, he could see the masts of boats marking the harbor and in some interior place could hear their rigging like the mail of ghosts and heard as well the cries of circling gulls, though in point of fact, he could hear neither where he walked along the cliff for the sea was too loud here and even the birds had been driven away by its agitation.

He walked the wet strip of grass, coming in time to a half circle of stone and concrete where a single wind-bent tree held forth against the elements and found that he was not alone with the morning.

There was an old man there, bearded, bundled in a sailor’s peacoat, sporting yellow slickers and a Greek fishing cap, and when Travis caught sight of him, he smiled and went up beside the tree and the corrugated railing upon which the old man leaned.

“What’s up, Pop?” Travis asked.

His father regarded him with a sideways glance.

“Waves get you out of bed?” the old man wanted to know.

Travis allowed that they had.

He leaned against the rail and for a moment neither man spoke. They watched the light collecting above the sea. The two sometimes met here. They lived only blocks apart but by some mutually agreed upon arrangement, neither ever dropped in on the other. They spoke on the phone, or met along the trail that skirted the cliff.

“Damn swells will muddy the water,” the old man said.

Travis nodded.

His father had come to the town in the forties, at the end of the war. He had logged and fished and worked in the mills. He had
married a Hupa woman. She had given him a son and two daughters and died of cancer at a premature age. One of Travis’s sisters had died young as well, in a traffic accident. The other lived in San Francisco and neither man had much to do with her. Travis had come back to Sweet Home after college, alive with a sense of purpose. He’d come back married to an Irish Catholic girl he’d met at Berkeley. When that ended, he had married a Hupa woman—which union had gone only the better part of a year. Now he was alone, with two children by different mothers, in a shabby apartment with alimony and child support eating up two-thirds of what he made. To his father, married eighteen years to the same woman and faithful even to her memory, these follies did little to elevate Travis’s stature. It wasn’t that the old man rode his case. It was a look was all, a word here or there. Each man pretty well knew what the other thought. In point of fact, Travis was rather fond of the old man. As for his part, the old man would have to make do with the cold comfort of feeling superior to his only son. Travis would have had it otherwise, but things were what they were, and he imagined they would live with it.

“Give the fish something to eat,” Travis said. He made reference to the debris stirred up by the storm.

“You say,” his father said. The effects of weather upon the industry was a matter of debate between them.

The old man was some time in studying the horizon.

“Frank tells me he asked you to dance with them this year.”

“He did,” Travis said. In fact, he was somewhat nonplussed at having been asked and was unsure what to do about it.

“They want you to bring the beads.”

“They do.”

The beads had belonged to Travis’s grandmother. She had been a shaman of some repute.

“You going to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

It was a ten-day affair. The Jump Dance. A ritual to make war on evil.

“Why not?”

Travis shrugged. To go would require fasting. A certain purity of thought. “I don’t know if I’m up for it or not,” he said.

The old man laughed at him.

“Frank seems to think you should do it.”

“Frank’s a preacher. He’s looking for converts.”

“Timing might not be so bad. You get them to invite the Yuroks, you go dance with them, you might get them to agree on something.”

“I don’t think it works that way.”

“How does it work?”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

The old man spit to the windward. “Lots of stiff-necked bastards, you ask me.”

“Who’s asking?”

The old man just looked at him.

“Walk up the street,” Travis said. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

•  •  •

Travis and his father drank their coffee, sitting opposite one another on the brick planters which marked the entrance to the town’s single strip-mall. For all the talking they did, they might have been a pair of founding fathers effigiated in stone and set before this mall which was itself a kind of monument, erected upon that wave of enthusiasm which had accompanied the coming of the state correctional facility to Scorpion Bay. The mall was home to a dozen businesses, one of them the office of the Northern California Indian Development Council and Travis’s place of employment.

Travis watched as a pair of brothers, Bill and Tom Jenkins, parked in front of Ned’s doughnut shop and got out of their truck. They were men Travis had gone to school with and on this morning they were up early, dressed for the river in hip boots and coveralls. Travis raised a hand. The brothers nodded in his direction. He watched them with some degree of melancholy. There was a time when they might have invited him along. A time when he might have accepted. Those days had passed. There was new money in Sweet Home. There were new tensions. There were also old wounds. It was the old wounds in which Travis had come to traffic and his life had grown more solitary in consequence.

He watched as the men left the shop and drove away. They had not gone more than a block before he heard honking. He believed
he heard a man’s voice as well, a catcall set before the morning. He turned to the sounds.

What he saw there was a woman. She was tall and willowy, and even from the distance at which he first saw her, he knew her to be Kendra Harmon. She was walking toward them along a gray sidewalk still damp from the night’s rain, and with the passing of the truck, the crack of her boot heels was all that could be heard. She passed without a word and if she had recognized Travis, which well she might, Travis could not see it, as her eyes were covered by a pair of tiny, wire-rimmed dark glasses. She wore a ball cap as well, a black one, with her hair pulled out the hole in back and the bill pulled low over her face, as if there was someone from whom she was trying to hide.

Travis watched as she entered the mall. He saw her look about for a moment and then go up to the door of his office and peer inside.

“Friend of yours?” the old man asked.

Travis watched with some surprise. He could not imagine what she was doing there. “She’s married to that surfer,” he said. “The one that rides the big waves up by the Hoof.”

“One that got bit.”

Travis nodded. He had, on the occasion of Drew’s taking possession of his inheritance, dined with them in their shack on the river.

It had been an odd evening, with Drew very much the mountain man in possession of his child bride. Travis had taken another man with him, a Yurok who owned land near the Harmons’ and whom, Travis had concluded, it would be good for Drew to meet. What he remembered most about the evening now was Drew’s complete disinterest in affairs relating to the reservation, together with what Travis had taken as a profound unhappiness on the part of his wife.

Kendra had been pregnant at the time. She had fixed a dinner of fish and vegetables. Travis had thought her pale and exotic and maybe just a little neurotic. Or, perhaps, he had decided, she was simply lonely in a new place without sunshine. She seemed pleased to have visitors, but soon after supper, Travis and the Yurok had been whisked by Drew to his workroom for a detailed rundown of his interests and inventions. The foremost of these were surfboards and old woods and he had spoken at great length of the Hawaiian Islands where he had been allowed to prowl among the archives of
the Bishop Museum, making template drawings of ancient boards found in the caves of Hawaiian kings and which he seemed to believe were possessed of a kind of magic.