The Dogs of Winter (30 page)

Drew Harmon looked down at Fletcher. “ ‘Another story,’ he says. You know what they called the 1916 Harley-Davidson? The
silent gray fellow.” Harmon nodded toward the sea. “That’s what I call these bastards. The silent gray fellows. You see one, you kick his ass for me.” He was looking at Robbie Jones.

Robbie Jones looked at the ocean. “So. This it?”

“Is this what?”

“Don’t give me that shit.”

Harmon rested his hands on his hips. “We’ll see,” he said.

Robbie Jones was somewhat incredulous. “We’ll see,” he repeated. “We’ve been hiking for two days.”

“What? You got some place to be?”

It occurred to Fletcher that Robbie Jones looked just a little bit worried for the first time.

Drew turned to Fletcher once more. “He doesn’t know what I’m talkin’ about, does he?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Robbie asked.

“Means you’re too young. You still think you’re gonna live forever. Ask the Doc. He knows. Those silent gray fellows. They’re out there. Lying in wait. Under reefs. Hidden in shadow. In the end, they get you. Don’t they, Doc?”

Fletcher looked up at the two men standing above him, one hawk-faced and reddened, a viking too long among the waves, the other tanned and shaved bald beneath a gray hood, a tiny golden cross dangling from one ear as if he were the acolyte of some apocryphal order.

“They do indeed,” Fletcher said.

•  •  •

When Fletcher had gotten off his back, he found that Drew Harmon had wandered down toward the wet sand where he had embarked on an elaborate series of stretching exercises of his own. Robbie Jones had climbed atop some rocks, the better to observe the break. Fletcher could see his parka and sweats, blue against the gray stone, as if a painter had touched the morning with his brush, then gone away grieving. In time, Fletcher joined him.

Robbie Jones noted his approach but said nothing. Fletcher squatted beside him and looked toward the sea. The fog was still quite heavy, and the waves appeared as gray humps moving against
a gray sky, a species of sea life no one had heretofore thought to name. As the tide had begun to rise once more, the waves did not break upon the reef but rolled silently through the fog, only to lose themselves in the deep still waters of the bay.

On the beach below, Drew Harmon could be observed in the performance of a peculiar kind of side stretch. He stood with one hand arced above his head, the other braced upon his hip. As they watched, he moved slowly from side to side, appearing as might some mutant crane about to take flight.

“Guy’s nuts. You know that, don’t you?”

It was the first time Robbie Jones had spoken directly to Fletcher in some time. Fletcher continued to watch the man below, leaning this way and that, balanced upon one leg.

“For Christ’s sake,” Robbie Jones said. He was looking at Drew. “This is about the most fucked-up trip I’ve ever been on. Except for maybe that time we went looking for this island off Mexico. We found a guy with a sea plane said he could get us there. He takes us out and drops us off. He’s supposed to pick us up in two days and there’s not a wave in sight, just rocks and about a million seagulls all the time shitting on everything. We spent two days holding our boards over our heads to keep the shit off. Son of a bitch never did come back. We finally wound up hitching a ride with some fisherman. That was pretty fucked-up too.”

“I can see where it would be,” Fletcher told him.

“What does this guy mean, ‘we’ll see’? Does he know where this place is or doesn’t he?”

Fletcher shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Could be he’s still looking for it.”

Robbie Jones appeared to give this some thought. “We’re a long fucking way from nowhere, you’ve noticed that?”

“I have.”

“There could be half a dozen Heart Attacks out here.”

“Or none at all.”

“So what’s his trip? Why are we even here?”

“Drew Harmon and Heart Attacks. What was Peters gonna do, say no thanks?”

“Yea, but if this jerk-off doesn’t know where the place is . . .”

“He seems to know where everything else is.”

“Well . . .” Robbie started to say something else but the words appeared to fail him.

Fletcher just shook his head. “He’s up to something,” he said. “It has to do with these wooden boards, the logs he’s kept. You didn’t know the guy in the old days. I did. He was always a scam artist, and this is beginning to smell like a scam to me. But I can’t figure the angle. I mean, it might have something to do with selling these wooden guns.”

“Shit, man. How many people do you think are going to want one of those?”

“About six.”

“I’ll tell you what I think. I think the guy’s lost it. Maybe it was the fucking shark or something. I mean, we got those waves at the river mouth, I thought maybe we were really onto something, but this . . .” He waved toward the colorless beaches where Drew Harmon continued to stretch.

“Well, according to the book, this has got to be the Devil’s Hoof. We don’t get something wrapping around that point out there, I don’t see any reason to go on.”

“What if he doesn’t see it that way?”

Fletcher gave this some thought. It spoke directly to his own paranoia. “Maybe we go home without him,” he said.

“You’re shittin’ me. You think you could get back out the way we came? That guy knows every trail. Every tide.”

“There might be another way. If this is where I think it is.”

Robbie Jones just laughed at him. “Dream on dude. You think you can find some trail ’cause you read about it in that stupid book?”

“They got the boulder field right. Harmon himself admitted there were trails.”

“The trouble with the trails is, you got to find them.”

“Harmon said it was about halfway.”

Robbie Jones spit over the edge of the rock he was perched on. “Yea, well, I just hiked it, and I didn’t see shit.”

“It was foggy and we weren’t looking.”

Robbie Jones shook his head. “You want to bail on your own, be
my guest. You ask me, you’ll find those trails same way you got that kid out of the Zodiac.”

Fletcher got to his feet. “Have it your way,” he said. He started back down the trail that led to the beach. He could hear Robbie Jones say something behind him but the boy’s words were lost on the wind.

•  •  •

By late that afternoon, the tide had turned and the waves had begun to break in the bay. As there was no shore break here, no inside bars as there had been at the mouth of the river, there was only the sound of big waves breaking upon deep water and Fletcher and Robbie had soon dubbed the place “Thunder Bay” in honor of this sound, though Drew scoffed at the name and led them in a long paddle across the icy water.

Fletcher brought up the rear, his camera beneath his chin, resting upon the deck of the wooden gun which planed easily across the water, slicing through the small surface chop as if it were the bow of some sleek craft, which in fact it was.

He set up south of the peak as he had done in the Zodiac with the boy. This time, however, he was in calmer waters, still within the lee of this great arm of land which itself provided him with the only line-up he truly required, and soon he was running through film, shooting without difficulty as the surfers began to catch the waves.

The set waves here were big. Fletcher reckoned it at double overhead, but nothing like what he had seen at the mouth of the great river. Though maybe, as the tide fell, the wave would jack more handily across the reef. Or maybe, the swell generated by the storm was not as great as Drew had predicted. Or was not striking at the anticipated angle.

Nor were conditions optimal for shooting, as all was still cast in a murky gray light, but Fletcher was determined to get what he could and so continued to fire away, his fingers blue from paddling, but finding his shots and thinking none were yet equal to what he had seen at the mouth of the river.

He was resting for a moment, as there were no riders up, looking back in the direction of the beach, when something on the cliff
ledge caught his eye. First a shard of reflected light. And then a small, bent figure moving among the coastal scrub. He lifted the camera and pointed it toward the cliff. What he saw there was a man with a gun. The man was dressed in denim and plaid, waist deep in a thicket of grass and scrub. He was sighting through what appeared to be a scope of some power and he appeared focused on the sea below, leading something with his rifle.

Instinctively Fletcher snapped the picture, then looked back into the line-up in an effort to see what the man was pointing at. He was in time to see Robbie Jones drop cleanly down the face of a polished gray wall. He watched as the wave steepened and began to pitch. He saw Robbie pull up into a barrel, then watched as the wave collapsed on him. When he looked back at the cliff, he found the man had turned. The gun was still raised, but now pointed directly at Fletcher.

Fletcher could feel a sudden rush of blood, a quickening of the heart. He supposed the thing to do was to dive, get under the board. Inexplicably he remained upright, his eye to the camera, so that for a moment the two men simply watched each other through the two lenses. At which point, the man on the cliff lowered the rifle and disappeared into the brush. He did this quickly, in one fluid motion, so that one second he was there and the next he was gone and Fletcher was very much alone, rocking gently upon a frigid ground swell, his eye glued to an empty cliff in the gray light.

He continued to sit there. He found Drew Harmon on a wave and took another series of shots in the shitty light. Robbie rode another wave as well. Between waves, Fletcher scanned the cliffs. The man did not return. As soon as he was able to catch Harmon looking in his direction, however, he waved his arm, then pointed to the beach, a signal he was ready to go in.

Harmon raised his own hands, palms up, as if to ask why. Fletcher began to paddle. He assumed the others would follow. He started with a measured stroke, but once under way, a kind of delayed panic set in and he pulled as hard as he was able for the distant line of beach, certain now that he was about to be shot. He still could not understand the way he had sat there on his board, staring into the barrel of a gun. One could not call it bravery. It was more a paralysis born of surprise,
he supposed, for it occurred to him, scratching for the shoreline, that no one had ever pointed a gun at him before. Nor, he decided, was it an experience he cared to repeat.

Once on the beach, he collected their gear, then dragged it closer to the foot of the cliffs, so as to be hidden from the view of anyone skirting the ledges. When he had done that, he pulled on his sweats and set about gathering wood. He had a small fire started by the time he saw the others walking along the beach from the north.

Drew began talking as soon as Fletcher was within earshot, shouting to him across the beach. “What’s the story, Doc? You get bumped out there, or what?”

Fletcher waited until the surfers had gotten closer, for he had no desire to shout. When they had reached the fire, he told them about what he had seen on the cliff.

Robbie Jones looked there now, as if he fully expected to see something. “You’re telling me this fucker was leading me with a gun?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

Drew Harmon put his board on the sand and shook his head in disgust. “Some asshole from the Heads. Probably hunting birds.”

“The guy was an Indian.”

“So he was an Indian asshole hunting birds.”

“How about an Indian from upriver? Some kin to the boy who drowned?”

“How would they know where to look?”

“You left your wife there. She knew, I take it.”

“I sent her into town.”

“I don’t know,” Robbie said. “I don’t much like the idea of some jerk-off pointing a gun at me. I don’t care what the motherfucker is hunting.”

“There’s worse things in the water. Christ, I thought that was what the Doc here was pissing himself over. Turns out it was a drunken red man with a bird gun.”

“This wasn’t a bird gun,” Fletcher told him.

“You know anything about guns?”

“No. But this thing had a big scope on it, I know that much, and I know the guy was pointing it at us.”

“So why didn’t he shoot?”

“I don’t know.”

Harmon laughed at him. He had peeled his wet suit down around his waist. Now he picked up a few sticks of firewood and tossed them into the flames, then held his hands out to warm them. Robbie Jones picked up a few sticks as well. The fire grew.

“Forget it,” Drew told them. “It’s nothing. Anyway, I’d say we’re hitting it just about right. Wait till you see what’s waiting around the point.”

Fletcher was a moment in assimilating this information. He looked at Robbie Jones. The young man was staring at Harmon in a way that was not altogether friendly.

“Really,” Fletcher said finally. “Around the point. I thought you said, we got to the sand at the end of the rock field, we were there.”

“Shit,” Drew said. “Any asshole can hike down from the Heads and this is where they’re going to wind up.”

Fletcher looked at the empty beaches, the steep cliffs. It was difficult to imagine a crowd.

“This is the obvious spot,” Harmon went on. “But you’ve got to get around the point. There’s really a series of reefs up here. This is the first reef, where we were today. There are two others, spaced out to the north. Heart Attacks is the last reef.”

“How far?” Robbie asked him.

“Well, shit,” Harmon told him. “You can be in Oregon from here in a day. How’s that for a joke? California’s big mysto spot. Only it’s not in California. It’s in Oregon.”

“Is that what you’re telling us now, it’s in Oregon?”

“I’m telling you there are three reefs. Heart Attacks is the last one. We get one more minus tide in the morning, we can start out. It’s a bitch getting there. It’s not that far, but it’s a bitch. There’s no beach to speak of. You have to go in off the rocks.”

Fletcher looked toward the great arm of the Devil’s Hoof. At its westernmost tip, where the rocks met the sea, the sky had already begun to darken. In his mind’s eye he held once more the map of the coast, the long unbroken run toward the Oregon border which lay to the north, the direction Drew intended to take. He could not believe there was anything there. The configuration of land spoke
against it. “Maybe it’s time we went back,” he said. “Maybe what’s around the bend is for another trip.”