The Dogs of Winter (37 page)

Fletcher was not sure what to say.

“You think that’s a terrible thing to say, don’t you?”

“Only if it isn’t true. Did anyone investigate this? Did anyone ever talk to Drew?”

The girl shook her head. “They got someone. Right away. They found this Indian by the name of Marvus Dove in Neah Heads. He had the girl’s blood on his boots. When they busted him, he hung himself.”

Fletcher looked once more at the small wreath, the weave of color.

“Now you think it’s a terrible thing to say.” She put her fingers to her temples. “I did. I thought it was a terrible thing to say, to think. The trouble was, I began to see things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Little things. I began to see things at night. Like what the walls had seen. Drew bought the trailer she was killed in. It’s where we live.”

Fletcher had nothing to say about that. It was hard to argue with visions. “Does Drew know,” he asked, “how you feel?”

“He knows.”

Fletcher sat with this in the tepid light. Clouds shifted above them. The light vanished. He recalled the sight of Drew’s shaping shack, the mattress on the floor, amid the sawdust and shavings. He thought of what Drew had told him, that there were places he couldn’t go, people he couldn’t be around. On the long hike up the coast, he had spoken of unforgivable sin.

“The girl’s name was Amanda Jaffey,” Kendra said. “She was pretty, part Indian, I think. Kind of a street girl. Except that she had this crappy trailer. When she died, no one came. No one ever took her things. They were still there when Drew bought it. I was looking through them one night and I found this little surfboard carved out of redwood. It was a certain kind, without a fin.”

“A hot curl board.”

“That’s the name.”

“It was what the Hawaiians rode, before the Californians showed up with fins.”

“I think it was why Drew bought the trailer. He knew about the board. Maybe he knew about other things too. If the trailer was his, no one would ever discover anything else in it.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

“Did you ever tell him?”

Kendra nodded.

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing. I wore her clothes and he still didn’t say anything. But he began to sleep in the shaping shack by the river. He began to talk about moving to Chile.”

Fletcher watched the clouds. When he turned back to the girl, he saw that she was watching him with an intensity he found unsettling. “Why did he call that magazine?” she asked. “He used to say pictures were bullshit.”

Fletcher shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

“The morning you left, to go out with the boy, I told him Chile would take money. We’re broke, but he said he had it covered. So I wondered about these pictures . . .”

Fletcher shook his head once more. “There’s no money in the pictures. I mean, he might have some deal with Peters. But it wouldn’t be much. Maybe he thinks he can pick up a sponsor . . .” At which point, he thought of something else and stopped short.

“What?” she asked him.

“The boards,” Fletcher said. He rose and walked some way into the dirt road. Christ. The boards of Heart Attacks. He turned to face her. “When did all this happen?” he asked. “When did the girl die?”

“Amanda was killed at the beginning of August.”

Fletcher shook his head. “He was going to sell those boards,” he said. “The article was just free advertising.”

The girl looked puzzled. “But how much could he expect to get for them?”

Fletcher laughed. He couldn’t quite help himself. He and Robbie had joked about it, for Christ’s sake. But he could see now that they had been wrong. When Robbie had asked him how many people would want one, he was thinking about how many people would buy them to ride. “They’re collectibles,” he said. It seemed so obvious to him now—the elaborate work with the stringers, the sunbursts and tail blocks. Old Greg Noll Da Cat models were going for
ten grand a pop the last he had heard and it was a growing market. So how much for a Drew Harmon signature model, a balsa wood gun with redwood stringers? “He could probably get two to three grand a board,” he said. “At least.” He was talking almost as much to himself as to the girl. “You invite
Victory at Sea
up for a spread . . . You get the editor to drop a line about how one of the boards might be had . . . That’s a hundred thousand free ad bills. And all you need for a quick score is to sell a dozen that are already shaped.”

“That’s thirty or forty thousand.”

“It is, indeed.”

“You see,” the girl said. She had begun to rock. She had clasped her arms about her shoulders and sat there rocking on the log, the ice cream melting at her feet. “You see.”

Fletcher sat down at her side. He found that her rocking disturbed him, and, after some consideration, he circled her with his arm to make her stop.

She leaned into him. Her head came to rest upon his shoulder. He could feel the beating of his own heart, the rush of blood in hidden chambers and he knew that Drew had felt it too, with this girl in his arms. And he could not prevent himself from imagining what must it have been like to lose her. To look in her eyes and see it gone.

“I was going to tell him I wouldn’t go,” she said. “But then I guess he won’t go either, now. Not if he was counting on the pictures.”

Fletcher took a roll of film from his pocket and held it out for the girl to see.

“That’s him?”

“Drew Harmon and Robbie Jones, on his boards.”

“But there’s nothing left to sell.”

Fletcher craned his neck, the better to see her face. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean the rest of the boards, the wood to make them. Those men who took me—they burned it all down.”

“Everything?” Fletcher asked. “Everything that was in that shed?”

“It’s gone,” she said.

Fletcher looked to the road, to the tall trees, above whose tips the clouds continued to swirl. In fact, the news affected him in a way he would not have imagined, for the first thing which struck him was the
enormity of what had been lost—the books, the tapes, the charts, the boards, the wood—a life’s storehouse, up in smoke. The second thing which struck him was the image of Drew Harmon. The picture which came most readily to mind was that of the man as he had last seen him, crouched before the flames, with the story of his nameless tribe and of the end they had chosen, and he knew now, with a clarity not afforded him before, that he had been right to leave. Indeed, he had been right to be afraid. “We should go back,” he said. “Right now. You should see a doctor.” They should probably talk to someone too, he thought, about this thing that had happened, about the dead girl and the little board found among her things. It occurred to him they might start with the man who had rescued him from the island. They could go to Travis, he thought.

He stood, ready to return to the truck, but the girl had him by the wrist. He looked down on her. Her face was turned toward his, the ice cream melting between her feet. “There’s a place I have to go first,” she said. “I require its blessing.”

She was, of course, completely serious.

“I think I require a shower more than a blessing,” Fletcher said. “I should think you would want one too.”

He was hoping to lighten her mood but she wasn’t having any. “No way,” she said. “You require this place too. For losing the boy.”

He looked down the road. His eyes were clouded with mist. “I should see his family,” he said. It was one more reason to go back. “I should tell them . . .” His voice trailed away.

The girl squeezed his wrist. “They will be there,” she said.

“They will?”

“Where we’re going, are you kidding?”

Fletcher was aware of an unpleasant weight upon his chest. Every rational impulse called for him to go back into the Orleans Grill, to ask for a phone, for more sensible directions. “And after this place,” he asked. “After we go there. You’ll come back with me then? We’ll go back together.”

“Of course,” she said.

T
ravis slept fitfully. At length, he opened his eyes to find the floor streaked with sunlight. Turning, he saw, through rippled glass, a blue sky lined with clouds. For a short time, he was alone in the room. Soon, however, Robbie Jones came in, accompanied by Becky the nurse. To Travis’s dismay, he learned that Drew Harmon was no longer around, but had gone off with Blacklage’s deputy, Jim Lemon.

It seems that Jim had arrived in Neah Heads some time earlier. On his way, he’d stopped at the Orleans Grill, where the owner had told him of an odd occurrence. It seems that around eight or nine that morning, a man and woman fitting the descriptions of Jack Fletcher and Kendra Harmon had shown up there. The woman had wanted to trade a chicken for a quart of vanilla ice cream, then inquired about directions to the old Tolowan cemetery at the north end of Neah Heads. Drew had been insistent that Lemon investigate this further and the two of them had gone off together.

Becky was furious that no one had told the deputy about Travis, but Art had been out and it was not the kind of thing that would have occurred to Robbie Jones, who, in fact, had seen the men go off together. Becky couldn’t quite believe it. “You saw them leave?” she said.

Robbie nodded.

“Well, what about him?” she said. She was pointing at Travis. “That deputy should be driving him into Sweet Home, right now.”

“They’ll be back,” Robbie said.

At which point, Becky had thrown up her hands and gone off in search of another driver.

Robbie and Travis were left alone in the center. There was little for Travis to do but wait. And this he did, in the company of Robbie Jones, while the wind railed at the walls of Art the Red Man’s living quarters, upon which a badly done portrait of Christ thumped against knotty pine. The picture was hung above the television now showing reruns of
Family Feud.
Alongside the picture there were hung old hand-carved eel hooks and beaded headdresses and old wooden masks, and these shared equal space with photographs of the Neah Heads football team, together with several dusty pedestals upon which small golden men who did not look at all like Native Americans ran above nonexistent gridirons, footballs tucked beneath one arm, the other outstretched to ward off invisible tacklers. The men ran among dust-covered bowls of Halloween candies and two dead rats dressed in hula skirts and mounted upon burls of polished redwood.

As the time wore on, Travis became increasingly worried about Drew Harmon and Jim Lemon. He rested his head on the floor as the game show continued to spill from the television. It was impossible not to hear. White people vied with one another for some kind of ultimate humiliation. “He masturbate with chicken parts,” a fat woman said. The audience howled with delight. Her husband looked hurt. “Disgust you to see it,” the woman added, playing now to the crowd. The show’s host, an edible blonde in a tight skirt, convulsed with laughter, appearing to swallow her tongue. Travis believed himself to be hallucinating. He closed his eyes but he could still see it. The Indian on the rocks. Holes where his brains had been. Behind this
abhorrence, an audience of mutants clamored for blood. At which point, he became aware of the face of Robbie Jones peering down on him out of the gloom, capped by its shaved dome upon which the first signs of stubble had begun to appear.

“Hey,” Robbie said. “You’re the dude I hit, right?”

Travis said that he was. He tried to imagine the particular mindset which would allow for such a delayed recognition, and found that he could not.

“I’m sorry, man,” the kid told him. “I was kind of excited out there. I’d seen ’em pack my bro.”

Travis told him to forget it.

“I’m tryin’ to do better,” Robbie said. “You shoulda seen me before I accepted Jesus as my lord and savior.” He offered Travis a hand.

Travis took it. It seemed silly not to. They shook as the wind rattled the walls.

•  •  •

In the end, it was decided that a Tolowan by the name of Balloon Dick Bob would drive Travis to the hospital in his Jeep. The man was a notorious drunk. The road out of the Heads was all but nonexistent, steep and rutted, choked with weeds. A place where drunken Indians killed themselves on a regular basis. Balloon Dick and Art the Red Man carried him outside on a canvas stretcher as the rain began to fall, and he felt the first drops on his face. They struck him as might sparks driven on a wind.

The stretcher wouldn’t fit into the ratted-out Jeep, making it necessary for Travis to sit upright in the front seat. Balloon Dick set about tying him in with canvas straps, as the vehicle was short on belts. Art Hancock stood alongside, apparently to make sure things were done correctly.

It had just occurred to Travis that Robbie Jones was missing when he looked up to see the young man running from the hillside behind the tribal center. The Jeep rocked as the young man heaved himself inside. Travis could see just enough through the haze of Nurse Becky’s pain pills to notice that the kid was without gear save for one small backpack. “What happened to the rest of your stuff?” Travis asked him.

“It’s gone,” Robbie said.

“You mean somebody ripped it off?”

“Yeah. Drew Harmon.”

Travis twisted in his seat. Pain prevented him from turning as completely as he would have liked.

“You mean he was here, just now?” he asked. He wanted to be sure he had heard correctly, that he was not hallucinating.

“We stashed our stuff in that little storage shed out back.” Robbie told him. “I went out there to get it, he was just leaving . . .”

“Now? You talked to him just now?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, what did he say? Did they find anybody? Was the deputy with him?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him any of that shit.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Yeah. He said it was coming up, right on time.”

Travis was some time in trying to figure out what this meant. Balloon Dick was experiencing difficulty in starting his Jeep. The engine growled but refused to kick over.

“I don’t know what he thinks he’s gonna get,” Robbie said.