The Dogs of Winter (4 page)

Eventually Travis had given up trying to turn the conversation toward matters pertaining to the neighbors with which Drew had surrounded himself. In the end he had gone home wasted on beer and Hawaiian buds, with a headful of Hawaiian magic and the distinct impression that the arrival of Drew and Kendra Harmon would not lead to happiness. Within a week, the girl had miscarried and Drew had been bitten by a shark.

The last he had heard of Kendra was that she had been seen walking deep in the woods at the side of the river in the dead of night. It was a matter of some talk on the reservation. The
kidongwe
roamed at night, his face painted black, armed with a weapon of human bone and sinew. Not something one would want to meet by the river in the hour of his strength—not, at any rate, if one believed in the old tales. But then the old tales were still taken seriously on the reservations. The black magic, in particular, was taken seriously, and it was a matter of some curiosity to Travis that this was so. For once, there had been a healing magic as well, and it puzzled him the black magic was what held sway in the minds of his people.

He watched now as the young woman continued to look into the glass. “I guess I should see what she wants,” he said. He stood as he said it.

“You want some free advice?” the old man asked, for he had been watching the girl, and watching his son as well.

Travis just looked at him.

“Stay single. You can’t afford another mistake.”

Travis thought of responding, then thought better of it. He left the old man seated upon the planter and crossed the mall to his office.

•  •  •

The woman had her back to him but turned abruptly at his approach. She was still pale, he thought, and exotic in some way he found difficult to pin down—the product of a climate other than what the coast of Northern California had to offer. What he had forgotten, or somehow failed to notice, was exactly how attractive she was. The
cap and glasses could not hide it. The whiteness of her skin was set in contrast to the black radiance of her hair. He watched as she raised a hand to touch the hollow of her throat with the tips of her fingers. The gesture recalled the impression left by their first meeting. It suggested a degree of excitability, an undercurrent of complications Travis found difficult to resist, though, in fact, he had followed such paths before and always to calamitous endings.

“You’re Travis,” she told him. “Kendra Harmon.”

“I remember.”

As if to further accentuate her coloring, she was dressed entirely in black—boots, jeans, and a blouse. Over these she wore a leather jacket several sizes too large. It was an outfit in which she might have passed for some long-legged teenager, though Travis supposed she was in her mid-twenties. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I was wondering,” she said, “if we might talk.”

In recent months, Travis had hired a secretary, a young Hupa woman by the name of Denice. She came in three days a week. Saturday was not one of them. In her absence the office was dark and empty and damp.

As Travis turned on lights, Kendra Harmon seated herself on an old couch beneath a bulletin board. The board was filled to overflowing with various fliers, handbills, and leaflets. The material spoke in elevated tones of everything from night classes in Native American Studies to stints in the armed services.

When he had brightened the place up as much as possible he seated himself on the edge of his desk. He discovered Mrs. Harmon examining the board at her back. She was turned in what Travis found to be a provocative pose—one which accentuated the aquiline profile, the long line of her neck, the faint movement of her pulse.

“Anyone from around here ever go to Kuwait?” she asked.

There was a poster on the board advertising jobs in the Middle East.

“Never.”

She turned to him. “Not one?”

“Not a single one.”

“But it’s such a nice poster.”

Travis nodded. “Yeah, and it cost me ten bucks.”

“That’s too bad,” she said.

He thought maybe she was joking with him, but if she was, he couldn’t see it.

“You probably wonder why I’m here.”

Travis shrugged. He noted for the first time that the cap she wore was embroidered above the bill with a silver skull and crossbones. The skull had tiny red dots for eyes and a toothy smile and it was something he had seen before. He had, if he was not mistaken, seen it worn by the previous owner of the trailer in which the Harmons now lived, a local girl recently murdered by an unemployed Hupa fisherman named Marvus Dove. The observation struck him as somewhat unsettling.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked.

Travis handed her an ashtray from his desk.

Mrs. Harmon placed the ashtray near her foot. She took a pack of cigarettes from her jacket then sat with it in her hand. “Amanda left things,” she said. “There were boxes in the workroom that came with the trailer.” The words issued in a kind of staccato burst, as if she had been harboring them for some time.

Travis nodded. Amanda Jaffey was the name of the girl killed by Marvus Dove, and Travis concluded that he had been right about the cap. He noticed for the first time a tattoo on one of Kendra’s fingers—her ring finger on her left hand. This puzzled him, for he thought the tattoo familiar and yet he could not recall having seen it there before.

“No one ever showed up to claim the things,” Kendra said. “I wound up going through them. There were some clothes there, stuff I could use.” She looked at the unopened pack of cigarettes. “I’d heard that Marvus Dove’s family had hired a private detective. I was wondering if this was something he ought to know about.”

“Marvus Dove is dead,” Travis said at length. “Why would his family hire a detective?”

“I thought you might know. I remembered you had this office. I can’t exactly ask around on my own. We’re not liked there.”

“Who told you they hired a private detective?” It was an absurd notion.

The girl shrugged. “Someone.”

“A
wagay.
Not an Indian.”

“
Wagays.
That’s what you call us?”

“Some do.”

“So why not an Indian?”

“Because an Indian wouldn’t hire a private cop for a dead Indian. They probably wouldn’t hire one for a live Indian.”

“What would they hire?”

“A
hee-dee,
maybe. If they hired anybody.”

“What’s a
hee-dee?
”

Travis smiled.
Hee-dee
was a word he’d heard his father use. He was not sure where it came from. “Someone adept at the black magic,” he told her. “If they thought Marvus had been innocent, they might hire a
hee-dee.
See if the medicine man could figure out who did it, put a curse on them.”

“I see,” she said.

He watched as she shifted her weight on the couch. The sunlight sliced across the floor and fell upon her boots. They were simple black cowboy boots and he wondered if they had belonged to the dead girl as well.

“So what about this
hee-dee?
You think he might want to look through her things?”

Travis placed his hands on his desk top, palms flat on either side of his legs. “I’m sure he would. But then I happen to know that Marvus’s boys need a new engine for their boat.” He paused, looking for some reaction, though with her eyes hidden behind the ridiculous glasses, he felt himself to be addressing the grinning skull on her cap. “I would hate,” he said finally, “to see them throw their money away on false hopes.”

“Does this mean that you know who they hired, but you won’t tell me?”

He could see that she was quick to anger. Unhappily it did not serve to make her any less attractive.

“Marvus is dead.”

“I know that.”

“They caught him in Neah Heads with blood on his caulk boots, and he hanged himself in the jail.”

The girl was silent.

“What good is it going to do his family to pay for a curse?”

“What if Marvus Dove didn’t do it?” the girl asked. “Maybe this person could look at these things. Maybe they would know . . . Maybe they would see things . . .”

The Hupa had a particular word.
Oo-ma-ha.
It was not easily translated. It meant something like “beware,” but carried with it a dimension of time. Beware now, here and now, of this place, of this thing. He had grown up with that word. It was considered applicable to the river which was shifting and treacherous, the claimant of many lives. It occurred to him quite suddenly that the presence of Kendra Harmon now called forth that word as well.

“The Doves are poor,” Travis said finally. “They should spend their money on the engine.”

“I see.” She returned the cigarettes to her pocket. The ashtray remained at her feet, unused. “You’re an unbeliever then.”

Travis laughed. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “I believe this. I believe that if I were you, I wouldn’t go walking by the river at night.” He was finding that he did not want to talk anymore about Marvus Dove. Nor, he decided, much to his chagrin, did he want her to leave. The office would go empty without her.

“Is there some reason why I shouldn’t?”

“Some would say it isn’t safe.”

“Someone says that about everything.”

“You might meet your
hee-dee.
”

“Why should that bother me, if they’re all frauds?”

“Let me put it this way,” Travis said. “The point is not so much that they are frauds or not frauds. I mean we’re talking about stuff that’s been around for hundreds of years. I think there are a few that are truly adept, practitioners of the old arts. Others . . .” He spread his hands as if to dismiss them. “The thing is this. The black art is not a healing art. To even be interested in it requires a certain kind of person.” He stopped once more, watching her. “Even if you could know for sure that the Doves had hired such a person. Even if you could find that person, which I doubt you could, you would not be welcomed as a friend.”

She exhaled then and it seemed to him as if some spark had gone out of her. “Of course you’re right,” she said. “It was crazy, wasn’t it, a crazy idea . . .”

He smiled. Her sudden vulnerability had taken him off guard. “I can tell you what to do if you ever meet a person like that,” he offered.

“A
hee-dee?
”

“They would probably not identify themselves to you in that way.”

“And what would I do?”

“You would have to show that your magic is stronger than his.”

She seemed to give this a moment’s thought.

“Tell me,” she asked. “Is it always a him?”

“If you believe the old stories. The
hee-dees
were usually men, although they could change their shapes into bears or wolves. Their opposites were the shamans. Among the Hupa, the shamans were often women.”

“Could they change their shapes as well?”

“I don’t know.”

“So tell me what you do know.”

Travis rose and went to a series of bookshelves which lined the wall behind his desk. They were simple shelves, pine slats set upon concrete blocks. It took him a moment to find what he was after—
Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest,
and Power’s
Tribes of California.
The latter was considered something of a classic.

“What I know’s in here,” he told her.

As she took the books, their fingers touched.

“Thank you,” she said. She seemed genuinely pleased. “I will read them and get them back to you.”

It was of course what he’d had in mind. “There’s no hurry,” he told her.

“Someone else might want them.”

“The ones that should never do.” In fact, he had been here nine years and she was his first borrower.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m a fast reader, anyway.” She looked at the books. “Have you ever met one?” she asked.

He was momentarily at a loss.

“You said there were a few who were truly adept. I just wondered, have you ever known one?”

“I’ve met some that thought they were.”

“I mean the real thing,” she said. “Someone you believed in.”

“My grandmother was supposed to have been a shaman,” Travis told her. “She died when I was very young, so I never really knew her. When I was a little older, I got to know a friend of hers, a
woman by the name of Rose Hudson. If you thought a
hee-dee
had put something on you, Rose Hudson was the kind of person you might go to. She could see if they had or not. If they had, she had the power to do something about it. At least that was what people thought . . . But I would say, if anyone was the real thing, she was. She had a way of looking at you. Used to spook me sometimes.”

“Is she still alive?”

“No. She died a couple of years ago.”

The girl looked disappointed.

“She lived up the coast. You know the Heads?”

“Fairly well, actually. Drew and I used to go up there when we first moved here. Drew was looking for a spot he’d heard of. I discovered that little river valley. Drew would surf. I would hike along the river. One day I came upon this burned-out trailer and got chased by two pit bulls. I never went back.”

Travis laughed at her. “Lucky you didn’t get eaten,” he said.

“It seems much funnier now.”

Travis nodded. “That might’ve been Rose’s place,” he said. “There’s only been two or three families ever lived up there. Most of ’em crankster gangsters.”

“Crankster gangsters?”

“You know. A little meth lab, a little pot field . . .”

“You have names for everybody, don’t you?” She gave him an odd little smile then, almost mischievous, the hint of a secret self. “So tell me,” she asked. “What do you call yourself?”

Travis was a moment in responding. Unhappily, he was a moment too long. He watched as she tucked the books beneath her arm and made for the mall. Framed by an aluminum door jamb she faced him once more. “Thank you for the books,” she said.

He saw her disappear into the fragile winter light. He did this with some regret. The little smile seemed to linger, a ghost of itself, like the cry of a bird one hears in the night.

•  •  •