The Dogs of Winter (38 page)

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Travis said. He was still trying to make sense out of what the kid had told him.

“What’s to follow?”

“About what he’s going to get.”

Robbie Jones just looked at him, clutching at the roll bar above his head as Balloon Dick’s Jeep came to life, lurching forward on the rutted road. Travis felt the pain run all the way up into the core of his being and fought back the urge to vomit.

“This wind,” Robbie Jones yelled over the engine. “It’s gonna be blown to shit. Strictly victory at sea. I could’ve gone with him, but I thought what the fuck.”

Travis saw that he was talking about the surf.

“You mean he was going surfing,” Travis asked.

“He had the boards, dude. What can I tell you? The fucker’s crazy.”

K
endra Harmon had brightened with Fletcher’s agreeing to accompany her to the cemetery. But as the day wore on and they approached the location the woman from the Orleans Grill had told them about, she grew silent and pensive once more.

They reached the trail head near midday, beneath a sky gone to the color of pearl, made luminous in two places. Fletcher took one of these for the sun. The other appeared as a kind of reflection he could not recall having seen before. The result of this illusion was such that there was not one sun but a matched pair set upon twin trajectories above a leaden sea. Fletcher called this phenomenon of the two suns to Kendra’s attention as they parked among the coastal scrub at the rocky end of the road. The girl stood upon a running board, raised to her full height, as if by so doing, she would be afforded a better view of things.

“It is the job of the sun,” the girl told him, “to sort out and refine
the light brought to it by the moon. For this is the light made up of the souls of the dead and it has been mixed with darkness.”

Fletcher had come round to her side of the truck. She was still on the running board and he was standing next to her, which made them roughly the same height. He was not exactly certain about how to respond and so said nothing.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Am I scaring you?”

“I think I’m just coming down,” he said.

“I think I’m just my father’s girl,” she told him.

He had no idea what she was talking about. He was looking at the trail before them. It was clearly unmaintained, a steep and rocky descent of indeterminate length, and he was beginning to wonder if either of them were really up for it. He felt compelled to point out that it was not too late to turn back.

“No, you don’t,” she said.

•  •  •

They went on after that, a long unremitting descent, through coastal scrub and manzanita, the trail nothing but gullies and loose rock that crumbled and slid beneath their feet. It was the false sun they followed here. Fletcher was certain of it and he doubted this sun capable of the kind of separating work the girl had spoken of, for he was only an imposture, a trick done with mirrors. He’s like me, Fletcher thought, for it had been his job to separate the light as well, to preserve a little something for eternity, but all he had managed was to drown a boy.

There were times in the course of this hike that Fletcher believed himself to be followed, though by what or by whom he would have been hard pressed to say. The only indication that this was something other than his own paranoia came when once he turned quickly enough to catch sight of a handful of pebbles skittering across rocky soil and which, he was convinced, gave evidence of some unseen figure dogging their tracks. His thoughts went to the Indians who had taken Kendra, for she had spoke of them as men, though in fact he had only seen one at the clearing. When he raised this issue with her, however, she would only dismiss it with a wave of the hand, convinced apparently that she had cut their lifelines as
she had said and that having been so crippled they posed no further threat to the living.

The trail went on, through the manzanita and thorns, passing beneath a surprise stand of redwood then coming at last into a stiff, yellowish grass. The grass was ankle high and wind bent, sprinkled with rock and bone and at its western edge one might see mists swirling up out of nothing as if they had come to the very edge of the planet. Though Fletcher supposed it was their destination they had come to, for it was clear they had arrived at land’s end and he watched with some satisfaction these mists thrown up by the sea, swirling as they passed, achieving in many cases forms and shapes that only poetry, or perhaps his girl at his side, might have named. But the shapes were transitory and lost to the very winds which had spawned them.

In time they came upon many broken stones set flat against the earth. They saw pieces of old iron fences and mounds of shells bleached white yet polished like mother of pearl and Fletcher was willing to take it for that sacred place the girl had spoken of. He hoped she would find her benediction here but of course he doubted it. As for what the place held for him, he could not imagine it.

T
ravis was occupying a bed in the Sweet Home Emergency Center. He was awaiting transfer to the hospital in Eureka and watching his leg drain by way of a plastic tube run from his foot into a large plastic container marked as hazardous waste when he heard the voice of Jerry Blacklage. Travis was alone in the room and he could hear Jerry in the hall. The chief was inquiring after his health. Travis listened as the nurse spoke in hushed tones about his leg.

There was a compound fracture. An infection. Clearly he would never have made it to Neah Heads had not Drew Harmon been willing and able to carry him. He could not exactly say that he cared for owing his life to a man he did not like. But there it was. Things were as they were. He righted himself somewhat on his pillows as Blacklage walked into the room. The chief was dressed in his summer tans, complete with cap and shades, as if expecting transfer to San Diego at any moment. A man, Travis thought, of infinite hope.

“Hear you got here in Balloon Dick’s Jeep,” Blacklage said.

Travis allowed that he had.

“Lucky he didn’t kill you.”

“I got news for you. He damn near did.”

Blacklage nodded without smiling. “So, what did you find out?” he asked.

“I found out there’s a hell of a current runs from that bay on a minus tide.”

“I figured I’d give you another day, then try and get a chopper in here to look for you.”

“Another day and I would’ve been dead.”

“So they tell me.” Blacklage removed his cap and ran a hand through his hair. “I always thought it was a bad idea.” He put his cap back on and looked at Travis. “What’s this I hear about Harmon going off with Jim Lemon?”

“Who told you that?”

“I talked to that kid, the bald-headed one.”

“Lemon was up at the Orleans Grill this morning. Jenny told him a couple of strange ones had come in, a man and a woman. Sounded like Kendra and that photographer. Drew wanted to go find out.”

“I thought the girl was kidnapped by crankster gangsters from upriver.”

Travis felt the blood in his face. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “She had to have gotten out there some way. All I know is, it looks like she’s with the photographer now. It looks like they’ve gone off to that old cemetery north of the Heads.”

“Christ. Why would they do that?”

Travis was aware of a sinking sensation in his chest.

Blacklage just looked at him. “What?” he said.

“Wrong answer, Cousin. You were supposed to say you already knew.”

“How would I know that?”

“You were supposed to say Lemon had called in.”

Blacklage seemed suddenly to get where Travis was going. His face darkened noticeably. “Shit,” he said. “I been trying to raise Lemon on the radio all afternoon.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Travis said. “That surfer you talked to
saw Drew just before we left the Heads. The kid didn’t ask him anything, naturally, but it sounded like Drew was by himself. And I sure didn’t see Lemon anywhere when we were driving out of there.”

“Damn,” Blacklage said. He walked to the window at the side of Travis’s bed. Travis craned his neck to watch. The chief seemed suddenly quite intent upon the long northern twilight. As Travis watched a coloring sky reflected in the man’s shades, he was stricken by the feeling that somehow things were even worse than he had imagined.

In time, Blacklage turned from the window. “Anybody ever tell you about the Doves hiring a private detective to look into the death of that girl?”

It was suddenly quite hot in the small room and Travis was aware of the sweat popping out along his brow, of the bed crawling beneath him. “I heard something,” he said at length. “I couldn’t believe there was anything to it.”

“You remember Jack Lindherst?”

“Racetrack Jack?”

Blacklage stepped away from the window and removed his glasses. “He’s been down in San Francisco. Put himself through some kind of detective school.”

“Christ. That guy would be lucky to make rent-a-cop. You’re not going to tell me that’s who the Doves hired.”

“Yeah, and I’ll tell you something else too. The guy’s managed to get the body exhumed. Apparently there was a sister somewhere. She signed some papers.”

The two men looked at one another. “They found a couple of things,” Blacklage said. “Seems there was some stuff in the girl’s hair. Sawdust, to be exact. The deal is, it isn’t just any kind of sawdust. It’s balsa and redwood.”

“Drew Harmon,” Travis said.

“He’s the only one I know works with the stuff. It just ain’t that common. There was something else too.”

He turned from the window to look down on Travis. “Girl was pregnant at the time she was killed.”

“They just now found that out?”

“No. The Sweet Home guys saw that when they did the autopsy.
It just never got out, was all. Apparently they didn’t think it was a big deal. The girl was known to be fast, and they had their man.”

“Had themselves a derelict Indian.”

“Yep.”

“You think they were wrong?”

“I don’t know what to think. They exhumed the body just last week. Racetrack’s trying to get the case reopened. Apparently this sister he turned up has married into some money. So, who knows.” Blacklage spread his hands. “Right now, all the Sweet Home cops want is to talk to Harmon. I mean, as far as they’re concerned, it’s still Marvus.”

“And Lemon knows about all of this.”

Blacklage was some time in answering. “Puts a new spin on things, doesn’t it?”

Travis turned his face to the ceiling. The chance to clear an Indian, to hang the crime on an unpopular
wagay.
The lure might prove difficult to resist for a zealot like young Lemon. In fact, Travis could envision a particular scenario quite easily. One in which Drew Harmon wanted to head for the cemetery, while Deputy Lemon entertained visions of delivering his man to the cops of Sweet Home. One could envision an unhappy ending as well. He watched Blacklage hovering above him, certain they were partaking of the same paranoia.

“What are you going to do?” Travis asked at length.

Blacklage seated himself in a chair. “I don’t know,” he said. Travis suspected he’d rather be hanging out on the interstate, nursing his speed trap and dreaming of sunlit beaches. For once, Travis could not say that he blamed him.

“You’re going out there, you’d better take someone with you,” Travis told him.

“Who’d you have in mind?”

“How about somebody from Sweet Home? They’re the one’s want to talk to Drew Harmon.”

“Shit, I’d rather go to the devil. They’d a done their job in the first place, maybe they wouldn’ta been so quick to hang it on Marvus.”

Travis lay on his bed for some time. “Gonna be dark by time you even get out to the trail head, you know that?”

Blacklage nodded. “Yeah, but I can at least look for Lemon’s car. I find it and he’s not in it, I’m callin’ out the feds. Let the fuckers come.”

“It’s possible Lemon and Harmon went down there together.”

Blacklage shook his head. “Lemon would’ve called in, he was going to be out of touch that long. Something’s fucked up.”

Travis closed his eyes, listening to the distant, muffled rattle of the forced-air heating system. “There’s something else you might want to keep in mind,” Travis said. “You remember those Indians I told you about, from upriver? Well, I saw one of them on the rocks above the beach. He was dead. If he and the others were tracking Harmon . . . the other two might still be out there.”

Blacklage stood for some time at the foot of Travis’s bed. “Well,” he said, finally, “I’ll tell you what. The only one I’m worried about right now is Lemon. I don’t find him, I’m going to the bureau.”

“You know what that will mean.”

“The hell with ’em,” Blacklage said. “The hell with all of them.”

•  •  •

When Blacklage was gone, Travis was left alone with his thoughts. He could not believe he had been so out of touch as to have missed hearing about the Doves hiring Racetrack Jack. He had gotten old here, he thought, old and flabby and out of touch. He had thought to stay on top of things and yet he had missed them from the beginning. And now here he was, flat on his back with a tube up his leg, while such furies as he’d hoped to contain were loosed upon the windswept bluffs somewhere north of the Devil’s Hoof.

He knew the cemetery they’d all gone off to, if only by dim recollection. The last story he could recall hearing about the place was one involving a family of urban Tolowans who had gone there to scatter the ashes of their grandmother. The grandmother, it seems, had died a very old woman, and she had spent her entire life on the reservation. Her children and grandchildren, who had long ago moved to the city, had nevertheless elected to do what they considered a Native American thing. They’d had the old woman cremated and they meant to scatter her ashes upon the ocean in a sacred place. They had accordingly hiked out past the graveyard to the
rocks overlooking the Pacific, but a wave had taken them, the entire family, and none were seen again. Several friends not of the immediate family had accompanied them and had witnessed this occurrence. The surf, they’d said, did not appear to be unusually large that day and the papers had referred to the culprit as a sleeper wave, that is a huge wave which might materialize suddenly out of an otherwise unremarkable sea. Travis knew the cemetery and the cliffs by dim recollection, for it had been years since he had seen it. Still, he knew the rocks in question to be a good thirty feet above the ocean.