The Dogs of Winter (39 page)

He was still thinking about these things when his telephone began to ring. He picked it up. It was his father calling to tell him he was a fool. Travis did not dispute it.

“Guess you ain’t gonna be doing much dancing this year after all,” the old man told him.

“What?” Travis said. For his mind was still on the cemetery.

“The Jump Dance,” his father said. “Looks like Frank was wrong after all.”

His father hung up after that. It was a habit he had, of hanging up without saying good-bye. Travis replaced the receiver. In doing so, he was afforded a look at the sky beyond his window. It was quite dark now and he found in it a sudden reminder of his whereabouts on the night before, of his place on Art the Red Man’s floor as Nurse Becky peered into the storm, asking if the big man who had brought him would be coming in out of the rain, and Travis had said no, and it occurred to him now, as the first full drops of rain flattened themselves upon the glass, that such indeed was the case. Drew Harmon would not be coming in again. The question, it seemed to Travis, lay only in how many others, bound perhaps by the sheer force of such a man’s will, would suffer the storm in his company.

T
he girl danced. Fletcher sat on a rock and watched her. She danced before a gathering of clouds. Twirling this way and that, the khakis and flannel shirt trailing her arms and legs like flags before a tarnished sky. There were moments in which she appeared as quite exotic. A creature from another age. There were times when she appeared as simply deranged. It depended, Fletcher decided, on the light.

Eventually, she elected to stop, but it was too late to go on. Nor did Fletcher have any clear idea what was to come next. There was a kind of shelter built there, a place dug into the ground. A mound of earth had been built up around it. There were some boards on top. Grass grew on the mound. A small, circular opening permitted access.

Kendra said it had been once used as a sweat lodge. There was a circle of rocks inside and the walls, made of cedar and covered with slabs of bark, were blackened with soot.

The afternoon brought rain. Kendra and Fletcher hunkered in the darkness of the earthen room. There was no food and in time he held her as he had before, his hand flat against her stomach. He thought of asking her if the dancing had changed anything, if she had found the blessing she required, but her silence prevented him. She had gotten tired. That was all.

•  •  •

At some point late in the day the rain backed off though the sky remained dark over the ocean. Kendra went once more to the edge of the land where it curled off in a grassy point like a question mark placed above the sea.

Fletcher could see her there, arms outstretched. He saw her spin before the darkening sky. He saw the spray thrown up from the sea below. There were rainbows caught in these plumes of spray and the grass about her feet was green and bathed in the last light where it slipped from among the clouds and fell upon the land.

He was seated on his haunches at the door of the hole and wondering if he ought to go down by the cliff lest the girl stray too close to the edge when he saw the figure moving toward him out of the mist. Again he thought of the men who had stalked them above the cliff and he started. Quickly, however, he saw that this was not the case. For the man had moved closer and he saw that it was Drew Harmon. Fletcher’s relief was short lived. Given Kendra’s story, one might take the arrival of either as bad news.

One might, of course, doubt her story. Fletcher’s inclination was to believe that she had called it. In either case, there was little to do save sit there and he watched as Harmon came on. He looked for Robbie Jones but it appeared as if the big man had come alone. He moved much as Fletcher had seen him on that first day, coming to meet them on the bluffs overlooking the river mouth, with a certain stiffness to his gait, in a dripping parka. He had a pair of board bags slung over one shoulder and a large nylon stuff bag over the other and this was his only gear. When he saw Fletcher hunkered before the sweat lodge he stopped. For a moment the two men simply stared at one another across the wind bent grass. Eventually Harmon altered his course and started up the slope.

“What’s the matter,” Harmon called. “You get lost?”

The big man was still some yards away. Fletcher did not answer. He got to his feet, then pointed in the direction of the sea.

Harmon hesitated, then turned to look. When he saw what Fletcher was pointing at he dropped his gear and ran. Fletcher watched. He saw Kendra catch sight of her husband. He saw her turn and run back for a ways along the edge of the cliff. He saw Drew follow, then stop, silouetted before the sky. The man seemed to beckon. The woman to hold back. For a time, it seemed to Fletcher that they moved this way, as if in dance.

•  •  •

In the end, Drew caught her up in his arms and carried her as one might a child to where Fletcher waited by the hole. He carried her inside and laid her down. After that he came back to the front of the shelter where Fletcher sat. He opened a board bag, removed one of the long wooden guns and set about filling the bag with handfuls of grass. Fletcher went to help. They worked in silence. When they were done, Drew took the bag inside, presumably for Kendra to lie on.

The brief period of sunlight and rainbows was gone. The darkness had come and, with it, the rain. As Fletcher waited, he noticed the stuff bag Drew had carried still sitting some ways down the slope, and he went to retrieve it. The bag was only partially zipped, and as Fletcher lifted it, he could see there was a gun inside. He believed it to be a .357 Magnum, silver with a black grip. It was sheathed in a black holster attached to a black belt, and the whole rig had a very official look about it. Fletcher was quite sure it was some kind of police issue. He was equally certain that Drew had not carried it on the long hike up the coast. He supposed that some story was contained in the appearance of this object just now, but if this was so, he could not say that he was in any great hurry to hear it. He would wait, he decided, for the light of day, though it occurred to him that if things went badly, he might not hear it at all.

It also occurred to him that he might take the gun for himself, though this might prove a tricky business, as he and Drew were now within sight of one another, the big man having set himself to
starting a fire near the mouth of the lodge. Nor could he quite see himself drawing down on Drew Harmon. In the end, Fletcher elected to help with the fire. He placed the bag before the doorway then went about delivering his own sorry offering of damp sticks and driftwood, out of which, through some woodsman’s skill Fletcher could do little more than admire, a garden of yellow flame had soon blossomed beneath Harmon’s hand to contend with the darkness.

When the fire was lit to his satisfaction, Drew Harmon seized the stuff bag containing the gun and pulled it into the sweat lodge, then retired to the rear. Fletcher remained outside. No one had asked him to. Nor had he been asked to leave. He might have run, hoping to gain the trail head and the battered Dodge. Honor, he believed, dictated some form of vigil, though to what point he maintained it, or to what end it might come, it was not so easy to say. There was the distinct possibility that all three of them would die here. Kendra first, then Fletcher. In the end, he supposed Drew would turn the gun on himself. It was what you heard on the evening news. The way it went.

And so he waited, his parka drawn about him, the rain tattooing his shoulders and skull, though, from time to time, he would turn to the room for a glimpse of some dim movement therein. He could see no more than that, as the lodge was low and long, with much of the rear left in darkness. Nor could he tell with any certainty if two people were moving about back there or only one. The rain and wind were such that any sounds which might have originated in those shadows were lost to him, the movement rendered all the more mysterious in their absence.

He might, he thought, have been swept back in time, made witness to whatever rites this structure had been built to house in the first place, and he would have known no more of those hieratic gestures than he did of these, yet they would have seemed no less mysterious, no less rife with concealed meaning.

In time, however, the movement stopped, and after more time, Drew Harmon came out of the hole and stood before Fletcher, but with his eyes averted, his face to the storm. Fletcher rose himself, for he had been seated before the door.

“She wants something,” Drew said.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Drew told him. His voice was quite grave. “She wants you.”

Fletcher went into the room. It was not high enough to stand in. He went on all fours, crawling to the back. The girl was there, lying on the bag. He had no idea of what to expect. She seemed at rest, though her face was bathed in sweat, and when she opened her eyes to look at him, he saw, even in the shadowy light, that they were ringed with dark circles yet lit with some pale inner fire.

“I think I might try one of those pills now,” she said.

Fletcher was not immediately sure about what to say. He supposed he had been expecting something more dramatic. Perhaps he had hoped to be made privy to that which had thus far transpired. But apparently such was not to be.

He fumbled in the pocket of his parka, producing the plastic vial, removing the cap.

Kendra held out a hand. He could feel her fingers brush his wrist. He tapped a pill into her palm.

“Maybe I should have one of each,” she said.

Fletcher smiled. Apparently she was more observant than he had imagined.

She had brought herself to one elbow and was watching him.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “You think the shamans took pills?”

“I think the shamans were chumps,” she told him.

Fletcher gave her the second pill. She washed them down with water they’d purchased at the Orleans Grill, then lay back down and closed her eyes. Fletcher felt that he should say more but he didn’t. Nothing suitable would present itself nor would she look at him again, and, in the end, he went back to the door and out into the rain.

Drew Harmon was hunkered there, the water dripping from his T-shirt, for the parka had been cast aside. He held something in his hands, and as Fletcher knelt beside him, he saw that it was an eight-inch diver’s knife. First a gun, now the knife, though in fact Fletcher had seen this article before, as Drew had used it from time to time along the beaches to whittle kindling or to scrape something of interest from a stone. He seemed now to be testing the edge with his thumb. “What was all that about?” he asked.

“She wanted a pill.”

“You give her one?”

“I gave her two. They should make her sleep.”

Drew Harmon looked at him for some time. “She’s been through shit,” he said.

“Yes, she has.”

“That was foolish of me to leave that note. She says she cut their lifelines.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. The only one I saw was killed in a shoot-out with some other guys up one of the rivers we passed. I had the feeling she had gotten him to walk into something.”

“A trap?”

“That’s what it looked like. They were all dead when I got there. Everybody but her.”

“Must’ve been that valley, where she got chased by the dogs.” He turned to his knife. “That was a hell of a thing to do,” he said.

“Yes, it was.”

Harmon was silent, examining the knife as if it was an object of great mystery. The image recalled Kendra’s story—the local girl found on the floor of her trailer, a death by cutting. Kendra had said she could see how it might have happened, and, in fact, Fletcher could see this too. He had, after all, been in the room that night in Waikiki. He had seen the bouncer thrown from the roof.

The act had always struck him as more careless than malicious—the reckless behavior of a golden child, with the bouncer’s water landing just one more indicator of Harmon’s luck. But that was all changed now, with the ticket come due up some dark alley in a nothing little town. It would not have surprised Fletcher to learn that the girl had died of a broken neck, of a careless slap thrown too hard, caught at a bad angle, that the cutting had come later—a misguided afterthought in those seconds following the realization that something irrevocable had gone down. And yet even then it must have seemed to Harmon as if his luck would hold. An Indian was busted, then found dead. There must have been a moment in which Drew thought it behind him, an aberration. At which point his wife had found the board and begun to wear the dead girl’s clothes and Drew had gone to the well one more time, looking to
trade on the past, to sell the boards and disappear into Chile, the myth intact. But now that scheme had failed him as well, leaving Fletcher to wonder at what could possibly come next and to what extent the luck had run out for them all.

“Tell me,” Drew said. “You think before you die, there’ll be a shining light?”

“I don’t know,” Fletcher said.

“But you’ve thought about it?”

“Of late, yes.”

Drew laughed at him. “I ever tell you I was born in Sweet Home?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, I was. My mom got herself knocked up by some logger. When she saw the guy wasn’t going to marry her, she headed for L.A. I think she thought she was going to make it in pictures.” He laughed at that. “She made it in the bars instead. I never went to school. She didn’t give a shit. I drifted down to the South Bay, discovered the ocean. Pretty soon there were people paying me to ride their boards.”

“I remember that part,” Fletcher said. “The rest is history.”

Harmon just looked at him. “Yeah,” he said finally. “And now I’ve come home.” At which point, he stood up.

Fletcher rose with him. The moment seemed to demand it. For a moment, Drew looked at him, as if his presence there was suddenly quite unexpected. “Dr. Fun,” Drew said. And then he was past. It seemed to Fletcher that the big man brushed his shoulder with his own. Fletcher turned. He saw Drew Harmon duck and go into the sweat lodge once more.