The Dogs of Winter (43 page)

She wondered at what these things might mean, and at where they were going, but she was too tired to discuss it. They were going somewhere and that was good enough. She rested in the belief that, in time, everything would be revealed.

•  •  •

When next Kendra opened her eyes, she saw that they had arrived in some town. The sky was blue and streaked with cloud. The air was hot and dry and she knew they were a long way from the coast. She could hear cars but she did not immediately sit up to look out the window. She was quite content to stay where she was, wrapped in the blanket. It was as if she belonged here, among these painted pots and stuffed birds. Everyone must have some niche in the world and it occurred to her that she had come, at last, to hers.

In time, however, the woman stopped the car. She turned in the seat and looked back at Kendra Harmon. “We’re here,” she said. “You made it.”

Kendra righted herself on the narrow bed. “Where’s here?” she asked.

“It’s okay,” the woman told her. “I know. I came here myself once.”

“You’re Tolowan,” Kendra said.

The woman nodded.

“From the coast.”

“You’ll be okay.”

The woman came and got her now. It was only when she tried to stand that she discovered how weak she was.

“That’s a girl,” the woman said.

Kendra leaned on her arm. They stepped outside and into the light.

There was a building before them. Concrete steps led toward a glass door upon which had been stenciled a name: Casa de Madre.

“This is a good place,” the woman said. And they went up the steps and into the building.

A
memorial service was held for Drew Harmon at the end of that month. It was sparsely attended. Michael Peters drove up. He had Robbie Jones with him. To Fletcher’s lasting amazement, he was pleased to see them. It meant that Drew would be laid to rest in accordance with the tradition of his tribe.

There were no ceremonies on land. They rode in Michael Peters’s Grand Cherokee along the old logging road that ended at the trail head above the cemetery. From there, they hiked out to the cove where Drew had died. As no body had ever been recovered, they took leis flown in from the islands and paddled with them out onto the water of the bay.

There were four of them present that day. Jack Fletcher, Michael Peters, Robbie Jones, and a local kid Drew had on occasion surfed with at the cove near town. The men donned wet suits on the beach, then paddled out to the spot where Drew was last seen. The Devil’s Hoof was to the south of them here, a barren outcropping of
stone extended into the sea—the westernmost tip of the westernmost point of land the coast of California had to offer. Above them were the cliffs and the lonely grasslands where the Tolowans had come to bury their dead. Fletcher reckoned them at close to a half a mile out.

There was no swell to speak of that day though a wind chop moved the surface of the water and small whitecapped waves buffeted them as they joined hands in a small circle. Words were spoken. Hands were raised overhead, arms outstretched. They might have been the tribesmen of some lost people in performance of a ritual none could now name. The hands were parted, the leis cast upon the water. They watched as the flowers drifted upon the current, bobbing among the whitecaps until finally they were lost from sight. When it was done, they paddled in. They hiked with the aid of flashlights back along the trail to the road and, from there, they returned to town.

•  •  •

Fletcher showed them the slides that night. He and Michael Peters and Robbie Jones, seated in a booth at the local Denny’s restaurant, for the two men intended to drive back without further delay.

Peters sat for some time in the Naugahyde booth, the loupe held to an overhead light. “Goddamn,” he said. “I can’t quit looking at it.” Eventually, however, his arms got tired and he passed it to Robbie Jones. “That a cover shot or isn’t it?”

Robbie raised the loupe, squinting at it for a long time, turning it to different angles. “Rad,” he said after a good while. He passed it back to Peters, then looked at Jack Fletcher. “It’s a rad shot,” he said. “I didn’t think you got it. But you did.”

“O’Neil’s gonna want this too,” Peters said. “You know that. You may make some money on this one, Doc.”

Fletcher shrugged.

Peters was silent for some time. “I don’t suppose,” he said at length, “you got anything of Drew Harmon, on that last day.”

“There was nothing to get,” Fletcher told them. “Nothing past the point. These were the biggest waves we found, right here.”

“Heart Attacks?”

Fletcher looked at the slides. “Why not?” he said. He looked at Robbie Jones. The young man’s hair had grown into a shaggy butch.

“Why not?” Robbie Jones said.

Peters looked at the two of them. He nodded and sighed, then picked up the loupe one more time, holding it to the light. “I gotta tell ya, Doc. I’ve been looking at surf shots a long time. And this is one of the best. They’re going to be talking about this one for a long time.” He lowered the slide then turned to Fletcher. “Why don’t you ride back with us?” he asked.

“You go on,” Fletcher told him.

The man just looked at him.

“I got something to do,” Fletcher said.

“In Sweet Home?”

“Why not?”

Michael Peters looked around him. “You got to talk to O’Neil,” he said.

“You talk to him.”

Peters just shook his head. There were trucks and cars lining up in the parking lot and the restaurant was filling up with customers. Fletcher took them for the night crew from Scorpion Bay, for they seemed a drab and colorless lot, eager to wash away one more shift among the cold gray walls of stone, happy to sit now in the blood-red booths, some of them even old enough to trot out a story or two of how it had been in the old days, when there were still trees to fell and lumber to mill and fish to catch.

Peters was silent, considering his surroundings once more. At last he turned to Fletcher. “You’re a strange one, Doc. You know that?”

“T’was always so.”

Peters just laughed at him, then he grew serious. “Let me ask you something, Doc. There’s this local kid they busted out there on the Heads. Did this guy shoot Harmon or didn’t he? I can’t get shit from that fat-assed police chief. What’s it gonna be, Doc?”

“For the record?”

“We gotta print something.”

Fletcher was some time in replying. He was aware of Robbie Jones watching him from across the booth. A truck rumbled past up
on the interstate and it seemed to Fletcher as if the cold wind of its passing might be felt among the shadowed booths. There was a sudden chill upon his spine, a whisper that might have been the wind, or perhaps the voice of a hanged Indian, gone to his grave not knowing, or maybe that of a young, dark-eyed girl he would never know more of than a name. Or maybe, he thought, it was the two of them together, asking only that truth be told, and he was set upon by a momentary urge to oblige, followed by the rather hollow realization that he would not. In the end, it was for an old friend that he spoke, playing what he took to be his part in such things to the end. “A shark took him,” he said at length. “In big surf, at a mysto secret spot in the heart of the red triangle. That’s your story.”

“Yours too?” Peters asked him.

Fletcher sat a moment longer in the booth, but already the chill had begun to fade, the voices to slink away, until there was only the hum of passing cars, the wind heard through an opening door.

Fletcher shrugged. “Mine too.”

“Well,” Peters said, “it’s a good story.”

When they had paid their bill, they walked outside. The night had cooled considerably and a wind could be felt blowing up from the ocean beyond the town.

“Let me set something straight right now,” Peters said. They had come to the side of his Jeep. “I know you, Doc. I don’t believe you didn’t get pictures of that last session. And I think one of these days, you’re going to want to sell ’em. When that day comes, I want you to remember who bankrolled this trip.”

Fletcher smiled at him. “You know what the Indians called the big point out there where we said good-bye to Drew? Humaliwu. It means the place where legends die. How do you like that?”

Peters gave it a moment’s thought. “That’s too much,” he said. Then he thought about it some more. “Besides, Drew didn’t really die there. We were a ways north of that.”

Fletcher shrugged.

Peters was still thinking. Fletcher could see the gears at work beneath that balding crown. “Sounds good, though, doesn’t it?”

“You’ve got your picture,” Fletcher said. “You’ve got your story. A good title is always nice.”

Peters smiled. “Yes, it is,” he said. “And you won’t forget what I said about those pictures.”

“The ones I didn’t get.”

“Yeah, those.”

“I won’t forget,” Fletcher told him. The two men shook hands. After that, Fletcher shook hands with Robbie Jones. The kid looked like he was of a mind to say more, but seemed to be having a hard time getting it to come. But then words had never been the boy’s strong suit.

“I’m glad you came,” Fletcher told him. “I think Drew would have been glad too.”

The kid looked at him. “You think so?” The idea seemed to please him.

“I do,” Fletcher said.

Robbie nodded and got into the Jeep.

“You want a ride, at least?” Peters asked him. “Back to wherever it is you’re staying?”

Fletcher declined. He saw them off. He saw them onto the interstate where their taillights joined the graveyard shift to Scorpion Bay, then turned and went on foot back into the town of Sweet Home.

T
ravis attended the funeral of Drew Harmon on crutches. The man, after all, had saved his life. He did not join in with the surfers or even ride out to the Heads in their Jeep, but went alone, by way of another logging road to a point further north of the trail used by the surfers, and came there to a high place which afforded him a partial view of both the cemetery and the bay at the foot of the cliffs. He was in no condition for hiking and he’d brought with him a powerful pair of binoculars with which he might watch at least part of what transpired below.

His father had been right. The holy man had been wrong. He would not participate in the Jump Dance. His leg prevented it. He had nearly lost the thing. The nurse, it seems, had done a poor job of cleaning it. No one had bothered to check it further at Sweet Home. He’d reached Eureka with a temperature of 104, been promptly packed in ice and rushed to surgery where a doctor
scraped then pinned his bones. He had always fancied himself light on his feet and did not like to think about how things would have gone had the leg been lost.

He thought about it nonetheless. He thought about it as he stood in the wind and watched the gray ocean beyond the cliffs. In time, the surfers paddled into his view. He could not see them clearly enough to name them, but he knew Jack Fletcher to be among them. Travis found that he was jealous of the man. He’d had time with Kendra Harmon and she had not been heard from since. She had vanished was all, gone from the forests of Sweet Home.

He watched as the surfers joined hands, forming a small ragged circle in the cold gray water. He saw them cast what he knew to be flowers upon the water, though from the distance at which he watched he could not have identified them as such had not someone told him beforehand. After that, he saw them join hands and raise their arms over their heads. It was a primitive little scene, like something his ancestors might have done, had they boards to carry them past the surf line. And yet, the ritual only served to fuel his sense of futility and displacement.

The feelings had been quite strong of late. That he had been fooled by the Indians at Moke’s still rankled, and with the capture of Bean Dip, he had learned of what had gone down with Kendra and he had cursed his ineptitude. He should have seen the Hupa from upriver for what he was. He should have taken steps. He’d gotten stoned instead and danced like a fool around a dead elk. When he had gone to warn the surfers, he had managed only to break his leg and strand himself on the rocks. If it had not been for Drew Harmon, he would have died there, which did not strike him as altogether inappropriate.

Travis watched as the surfers finished with their ceremony and paddled once more from his sight. He lowered his binoculars then, allowing them to hang from his neck. But he remained on the promontory at which his drive had ended. For the wind had held the fog at bay and the evening was clear, the darkening sky strewn with stars, and he stood beneath this immensity, propped upon his crutches as if he were no more than a sad scarecrow erected as an afterthought to some crop that had failed even before he was made.
A man should have something, he thought, some thread to the earth, lest he lose even the ground beneath his feet.

It was with this in mind that, in three weeks’ time, Travis made the long trek upriver to the crossroads known as Soam’s Bar, where a winding forest road took him deep into the woods and finally to a second road marked only by a cardboard sign nailed to a tree. The words “Jump Dance” had been written on the sign with a felt marker, and beneath these, an arrow pointed down the road which was steep and unpaved. Travis did not want to attempt it without four-wheel drive. He’d brought his son with him, and together, they loaded their packs and waited at the side of the road until an old Indian couple in an ancient Toyota Land Cruiser offered them a ride and so came in time to the camp of the Hupa.

The camps were divided according to family. Each clan leader, or fire builder, had his own camp. Travis’s cousin, Frank, was one of the fire builders, and Travis and his son made camp there. The ritual was to last ten days. It was an arduous affair. The fire builders danced only after the sun went down. They danced barefoot around a fire in the woods some ways from the camps, and as the land was sacred, the people went barefoot as well, climbing a steep trail in the dead of night to watch the dancers.

After two days of sleeping on the ground and going barefoot in the woods, Travis was beginning to feel like one of the blood runners in Frank’s story. He was covered with bites and rashes. His leg was killing him. He might have persevered but his son was worse off than he and begging to be gone, and so it was that on the fourth day, he threw in the towel and hitched a ride out of the encampment with a Hupa from Seattle who had gotten to the fires by way of a four-wheel-drive Range Rover with a wooden console and leather seats. Travis saw the whole thing as an admission of defeat.