The Dogs of Winter (42 page)

He had a decision to make then. He did not think he would see Drew Harmon again. But he could not be sure. He could not be sure the man was not out there, rolling the sets, looking for help. He could not be sure the shark was not out there either. Nor could he be sure whoever had fired on them was not still on the cliffs. He might be shot. Or he might be bitten. For that matter he might lose his board and drown. The trouble was, if he didn’t look, he would always wonder. The boy on his conscience was enough, and, in the end, it was that image that drove him, the dark-haired boy in his red flannel shirt, alone on the face of the wave. He made one trip to the beach, to deposit the extra wet suit and camera, and having done this, he picked up the big balsa gun with the redwood stringers cut from the hearts of the ancient trees and paddled with it for all he was worth, pushing it through the shore break, then angling toward the waves and the distant reef and whatever else he might find.

He circled there for an hour, in the cold, rolling waves, pushing through the outside sets, then paddling back in. He called Drew’s name but was never answered. There was no shark. And no more shots. The morning was still, and he was alone with the waves.

•  •  •

He was met on the bluffs by a portly Indian. The man sported military tans and aviator shades. He carried, Fletcher noticed, the
gun and belt Drew had left in the sweat lodge. “There was nothing I could do,” the man said. “The girl told me about the shark.”

They went in silence across the grass. The cop did not mention the gun and neither did Fletcher. When they had come within sight of the sweat lodge, Fletcher broke into a run, but he found the room empty and the girl gone. He saw that she had been into his pills. The plastic vial lay empty on top of his parka. There was something else on the parka as well. Drew’s black notebook. Clearly the girl had placed it there for him to find. For the moment, he left it where it lay and went outside.

He spent a long time there, walking, circling the land as he’d circled on the water below, a long time among those dead, with the waves pounding the rocks and the air filled with their spray, and he threw his voice upon the wind until he had no voice left to throw. The cop watched him from a distance, as if he were some curiosity, or something better left alone. Fletcher himself was reminded of the scripture Drew had cited. The madman among the tombs. He was that man, he thought, or would become so. And when his last calls had gone unanswered, on land as on sea, he went back into the sweat lodge and peeled off the wet suit. He dried and dressed, picked up the black book and left. The cop was waiting. “You ready?” he asked.

Fletcher nodded. He picked up the balsa-wood gun he had carried for so far along the beaches and the two men went in silence once more, coming in a short while to the stand of redwood where, much to Fletcher’s amazement, a beat-up Jeep Wrangler with huge tires and full roll-cage sat just north of the trees.

“Couldn’t get it through these things,” the cop told him. At which point, Fletcher saw the boy handcuffed to the Jeep by way of the roll cage. He was a short, skinny Indian, with a stocking cap and two black eyes. No more than 120 pounds soaking wet. Fletcher asked if this was the man who had shot Drew Harmon, and the sheriff told him it was.

•  •  •

The plump cop who identified himself as Jerry Blacklage, Chief of the Tribal Police on the lower Klamath, drove Fletcher and the
boy who had shot Drew Harmon and was apparently known as Bean Dip back along the trail Fletcher had hiked the previous day with Kendra Harmon. Fletcher would not have thought this even possible, but the cop managed it with a skill one would not have imagined from his appearance.

Upon reaching the northern trail head, Fletcher saw that the old Dodge was gone. He had never thought to look for the keys, and when he did so now, he found his pockets empty. He said nothing about it and the cop drove on, though once upon the logging road, the man made the observation that the girl must have taken the truck.

“I guess so,” Fletcher said.

“I don’t suppose you would know where?”

Fletcher said that he did not and they rode in silence after that, though from time to time, some sound could be heard coming from the boy in the back. It seemed to Fletcher the boy was crying but he did not care to look.

•  •  •

They reached Sweet Home late that afternoon. Blacklage drove directly to the tribal center. He pulled in next to Fletcher’s van, which was parked at the rear of the building.

“You can sleep in it where it is, if you want to,” Blacklage told him. “I got to do some paperwork on this one, then run him into town.”

Fletcher nodded and got out. He set about untying the big balsa gun from the roll cage where they had carried it. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll see about getting some tires in the morning.”

“Other than that and the windows, the thing’s okay. You’re lucky,” Blacklage told him.

Fletcher was not feeling particularly lucky, but he thanked him again. He put the board under his arm and carried it to his van. He was still there a short time later, sweeping the glass from the interior, when Chief Blacklage called to him. Fletcher looked up to see the man standing slightly above him, on the wooden deck which ringed the big A-framed building.

“I imagine this belongs to you,” Blacklage said.

The chief was holding something out in front of him, and as he came down the steps, Fletcher could see it was the old Nikon in the orange housing. He did not immediately reach to take it, but stood for some time, staring at it with no small degree of wonder. “How . . .” he began, but the cop cut him short.

“I don’t know,” Blacklage said. “We went down to see the Zodiac. I found some kid running around on the beach with it. It must have washed up.”

“I don’t see how that could be.”

The chief shrugged, as if he had little interest in how such a thing could be. It had and that was all there was. It only remained for Fletcher to claim what was his.

Fletcher took the housing. Some of the duct tape was frayed where he imagined it had tumbled over the rocks. When he looked inside, however, he saw that the camera and film was still in place.

“I wonder,” he said, “if there is a phone I might use?”

Blacklage nodded. He led him into the tribal center, where, after only two calls, he was able to locate a lab in Eureka able to process his film. He thanked the chief, signed for his camera and vehicle and left. He passed the kid in the Jeep for the last time. He did so without looking, content in the belief he would never see the boy again and this, in fact, was the case.

•  •  •

He read Drew’s final entry that night. It was the same entry Kendra had read earlier that day, as she’d searched for Fletcher’s pills. He sat with the book on his lap for some time when he had finished, as the light failed, as the cold crept through the broken windows of the old van. At last, he wrapped himself in a sleeping bag and lay down, exhausted, ready to sleep, but he continued to think. He thought of the diver’s knife Drew had worn strapped to his leg on the final morning. In light of the entry, its purpose seemed clear. The boy Bean Dip had only done what Drew himself would have done in time. He had called the shark. And Drew Harmon had gone out, still a legend, taken by a shark at a mysto spot of great secrecy, and no one would ever know about the girl with the crappy trailer, in a little California town with the unlikely name of Sweet
Home. And maybe, with luck, and with time, the girl he had married and brought to Sweet Home would remember him as he was and not for the thing he had become. In time, he would learn that Deputy Lemon had been found, somewhat the worse for wear, by one Art the Red Man Hancock, handcuffed to a tree near the campgrounds at Neah Heads, and this, Fletcher concluded, lent a certain credence to his theory. It was a fantasy bolstered as well by the simple tableau he’d witnessed in the old sweat lodge above the bluffs. Though, in the end, he supposed, it was really a matter of hope.

•  •  •

Fletcher spent the following night in the parking lot of the photo lab in Eureka where they had promised him the slides in twenty-four hours. He viewed them the next day, in the waiting room, holding them up to the overhead light to look through the loupe he carried in his gear. In time, his arms began to tire, his neck to cramp, but he could not quite bring himself to put them down.

The centerpiece was really something quite special, one of his best. A cover shot if ever he had seen one. It featured Robbie Jones in a doomed yet clearly heroic position, too high and too late on what had to be a thirty-foot face. The wave was bright and well-lit with the sky dark and ominous behind it, a truly rare shot, but powerful—as if lit in a studio. One could see the yellow rails of the Brewer gun and the red stripes of the surfer’s wet suit reflected on the water. The wave itself looked immense in the dramatic lighting, already beginning to pitch, the face to go hollow, as if what lurked in the pit was nothing less than a hole in time. You stared at it long enough, you could feel the drop in the center of your chest, and Fletcher saw it for just what it was. Most likely, the largest cold-water wave ever ridden. The only verifiable shot of Heart Attacks, the premier mysto surf spot of the Pacific Northwest, in epic conditions, a rider up. The thing he had come for.

W
hen the cop left Kendra at the cemetery, he had told her to wait, but Kendra had no intention of doing so. She had read Drew’s entry. She had seen him taken. She supposed it would have been to his liking. She guessed the photographer was still down there. She supposed he would want to see her. She, on the other hand, felt herself done, at least for the present, with the company of men. As she went up through the grass, she passed the boy one more time. The cop had cuffed him, ankle to wrist. He was on his side in the grass, his back to her, and it had occurred to her that she could cut his lifeline big-time if she wanted to. In the end, she thought better of it. He would live or he would die. He was nothing to her.

On her way to the upper trail head, she passed a Jeep she took for the fat cop’s. The sight spurred her on. For it was her intention to reach the truck before anyone else could get to her, which is what she did. She rested for a short time here, dizzy from her labors, seeking to catch her breath. When she had managed this, she jumped into the
truck and drove away. She did so without looking back. She held to the ragged washboard road and came in time to a fork. One way bent southeast and she believed it to be the way she had come with Jack Fletcher. The other turned toward the north and this was the way she chose. She followed its torturous uphill path for perhaps an hour before the truck ran out of gas. When this happened, she got out and walked. She had no idea where she was going or why. She walked for some time before noticing she’d left the big sandals in the car, that her feet were becoming cut and dirty. When she looked back, however, the truck was already gone, lost around some curve. She elected to go on. She was more than half-looped on the photographer’s pills. They were quite something. But then she had been the better part of two days without food. It was, she imagined, some combination thereof which accounted for her state of mind, for the fact that the road was insistent upon playing tricks beneath her feet, for the fickle nature of the sun.

In time, she heard something coming. She was still stumbling onward, barely, at this point, able to see. She supposed there was something one should do, some measure that ought to be taken. What was the photographer’s line? The course of prudent behavior. On the other hand, she had come to think of this particular road as hers. There was the next step, and the one after, and that was all, and so she continued in this fashion until at the apex of some unnamed hill she came face-to-face with the thing itself.

It seemed to stand shimmering before her as might some distant object glimpsed in a desert landscape, the illusory progeny of heat and light. As she blinked the sweat from her eyes, it became clear to her that the thing was a house car of absurd proportions, tall and thin—a cereal box stood on one side and set to wheels—and that she and this object were alone, facing each other on a dirt logging road, waiting, it appeared, to see who might be the first to grant right of way.

Once more, she supposed, one ought to be afraid, but she had gotten beyond that. She stood her ground, wrapped in the pale winter light that filtered down among the trees. She seemed to have become engaged in a stand-off with the first Winnebago, reduced by time to little more than oxidation and rust.

Eventually, she became aware of a face peering down on her from behind a mud-streaked window, and she started when she saw it, for the face was long and thin, framed by graying hair. Her first impulse was to believe that she had proven too weak to cast a spell, that it had all come back on her in the person of William Longtree, risen from the rocks. At which time, the driver leaned from a side window and she saw that, in fact, the car was driven by a woman, and, for a moment, these two women regarded one another in the autumnal light, the one leaning from the window, the other positioned in the muddy road as if she were the wife of Lot, effigated in salt at the edge of the city.

“You don’t look so good,” the driver said at length.

Kendra put the back of her wrist to her head.

“Come on,” the woman told her. “You can get in. It’s okay.”

Kendra moved for the first time after that. She went to a door on the side of the car and pulled it open. She did so without hesitation. She was done, she thought. The woman would aid her or feed her to the fish. Her fate had been cast.

The woman showed her to a narrow bed at the rear of the car. She covered her with a blanket. “You’ll be okay,” the woman told her. “I know what to do.”

Kendra nodded. She watched as the woman returned to the wheel of the car. The woman was dressed like a man, in jeans and suspenders, a red bandanna about her neck. Kendra looked around her. She found herself surrounded by plaster hens and gaily painted teapots. These set side by side with taxidermied birds and quilted blankets of great intricacy. In one corner, there hung a coat made of monkey hair, and this was set upon a kind of wicker mannequin above whose featureless face there perched an elaborate red felt hat decorated with a huge emerald pin and about whose straw neck had been balanced a plastic samurai sword in a glittering plastic sheath.