The Dogs of Winter (7 page)

When she had finished with the tea, she pulled a leather jacket over the clothes she had slept in and went outside to see about the tanks. There were two of them. They were short and fat and had been painted to look like giant ladybugs. It was the work of the trailer’s former tenant, the one murdered by Marvus Dove. The two had apparently quarreled behind a bar. Marvus was believed to have followed her home, cut her throat ear to ear with a rigging knife, and left her to bleed to death on the kitchen floor. Found two days later at Neah Heads with blood on his boots, Marvus had asserted his innocence then hanged himself at his earliest convenience. Amanda’s landlord had driven down from Brookings, scoured out the trailer, and put it up for sale. It had been sitting empty for two weeks when Drew bought it and put it on his land.

Kendra took the tank from the front of the trailer and started with it down the long flight of stairs. The fog clung to her face and filled her lungs. Rheumatism and consumption. The Shaker missionaries had found them the principle ailments among the indigenous inhabitants.

The indigenous inhabitants had blamed these ailments upon evil spirits, Skwai-il chief among them. “You must not do wrong,” the Tolowans were reputed to have told their children. “Skwai-il will see you, and take you as his dwelling place.” She supposed the children had been frightened. She would have been frightened.

It was all in the books Travis had lent her. Skwai-il, Kitdongwes, sorcerers and shamans. As Travis had suggested, the latter were generally women. Spirits would come to them while they were in
trances and put a pain into them. In order to heal, however, the pain need be paired with another, and it was this they were to go in search of, alone, to remote and sacred places. Some of these were high in the mountains, some upon dangerous cliffs above the sea, and here they would stay, and dance, awaiting the arrival of the spirit and the second pain. When it came, the intensity was such that the shaman would temporarily lose her senses. She would retire to a sweat lodge where the pains would become a slimy substance that in time might be expelled from her body.

Kendra found herself moved by this image of the woman, dancing alone in some sacred place, awaiting a pain. She went so far as to imagine that this might have something to do with why she walked in the woods, in a dead girl’s clothes. The books, of course, had nothing to say about that. They didn’t tell her what she wanted to know.

Perhaps, she thought, upon reaching the mud at the foot of the stairs, if she had not miscarried. If Drew had not been bitten. If she had not been left alone for days at a time. She could, in fact, envision another life here—some gleaming, untraveled road. As it was, she found herself thrown back upon unpleasant memories. She felt privy to what the trailer had seen and what the steam cleaning had failed to wash away. She had taken to sluggish days and wakeful nights, to the sound of rain on the tin roof while she pitched the cork for the cat that had been the dead girl’s and that had been taught to fetch. And now there were to be visitors. It was an absurd proposition. Drew had promised big waves, a secret spot. If they took the pictures, where was the secret? Unless it was like the Indians had said. They took your picture, you lost your soul. That might be something, the picture the thing itself. Like seeing an aura. They could bring that off, she thought, they might get more than they had bargained for.

•  •  •

By the time she reached Sweet Home, the fog had turned to a light drizzle and she decided that a glass of wine was in order—a little something to ward off the chill as she waited for the gas. She dropped the tank at Mike’s Travel Land for filling and proceeded to Bodine’s Tavern.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon and there were only four cars in the lot. Kendra parked beside Pam’s brown Honda Civic and went inside, out of the rain. She could hear them at the dartboard as she climbed the stairs. An Iris Dement tape played softly in the background—a song about sweet forgiveness. Kendra stopped when she reached the landing. She listened to the sound of a dart striking the board. The sound was followed by a chorus of laughter that momentarily drowned out the music.

From somewhere in the dark interior of the bar came the sound of an ice machine spitting cubes into a tray. The song ended. Pam’s voice rose out of the void, some derogatory remark aimed at the weekend’s competition. Darts was considered a large time in Sweet Home. Bodine’s had a team, as did most of the other bars. There were leagues, tournaments, trophies, good times. Kendra had been invited to try out. She had declined, of course. She was that way. Tournaments would be won and lost. Trophies would change hands. It would all happen without her.

A toilet flushed in one of the johns behind her. A man she did not recognize stepped onto the landing, buttoning his jeans. The man was dressed like a logger, the heavy black pants, plaid shirt, suspenders, caulk boots. The man had unruly blond hair and a beard. He was not unattractive. He stared at Kendra for a moment, looking her over, then smiled. Kendra turned and went into the bar.

She caught Pam in mid-throw, left leg straight, right leg back and bent at the knee and ankle, toes touching the ground. Pam was a big-boned woman, and the pose—Kendra had seen it many times—always struck her as slightly ridiculous.

Kendra waited at one end of the bar, so as not to disturb Pam’s concentration. The throw was apparently on the money. Pam was in the act of waving her fist in the air when she caught sight of Kendra in the dim glow of the cigarette machine and stopped short, staring with such intensity Kendra was compelled to look over her shoulder. When she turned back to the room, she found Pam approaching her.

The larger woman took her by the arm and guided her to an empty table with such dispatch she was barely able to nod a greeting to the two men with whom Pam had been playing, although when
she did, she had the feeling that they were looking at her in an odd way as well.

“What is this?” Pam asked her. They were seated against the wall, in a black Naugahyde booth. From the street below Kendra was able to make out the sound of traffic, tires on wet asphalt, the distant patter of rain on metal roofs.

“What?” Kendra asked. She was aware of the two men glancing in her direction, then looking away.

“Christ on a bike,” Pam said. “Don’t you know who you looked like, standing there?”

Kendra said nothing. The woman shook her head.

“You looked like Amanda,” she said. “I mean you looked just like her. The clothes were bad enough, you had to go for the haircut too?”

“I guess.” Kendra fingered a strand of hair, tucking it behind her ear. Until just yesterday, her hair had been long and black. In Eureka she’d had it cut short and added a reddish tint. There had been a few pictures of Amanda in the trailer, and Kendra had taken one with her to the salon.

“What did Drew say?”

“Nothing. It was just like with the clothes. The tattoo. He doesn’t say anything. He just leaves. That’s part of it.”

Pam looked at her for a moment. “You should get away,” she said. “I’m serious. You should get out of Sweet Home, get away from Mr. Macho Man, and get out of that stupid trailer.”

“Perhaps,” Kendra said. “We could have a little wine.”

Pam went to the bar and came back with a bottle and two glasses.

“I’m serious,” Pam said.

Kendra sipped her wine. She watched as Pam’s brother pinned a dart to the board.

“You need a break. Go to Seattle for the winter, or San Francisco. Get a job.”

Kendra had had a job once, in Raleigh Hills. She had worked as a receptionist in a dental office. It seemed like another life to her now, and the prospect of doing anything remotely like it again was, at the moment, inconceivable. She placed her purse on the table and took something from inside it, a manilla envelope containing a
check for fifty dollars. She pushed the check across the table for Pam to see.

Pam looked at it, raising her eyebrows.

“I sent one of my arrangements to a floral shop in San Francisco. They sent me that. There was a note asking for more.”

“No way.”

Kendra nodded. For months now, since her miscarriage, she had been collecting things from the woods. Papery hornets’ nests, bundles of dried yellow yarrow and dried kelp, driftwood and lichens and dried bear grass, horsetail reeds and river roots. She found that these might be fashioned into arrangements. It was her belief that people might pay her for them. Still, the check had taken her by surprise. She watched now as Pam held it to the light, finally placing it on the table between them.

“I don’t know,” Pam told her. “I mean, it’s cool, but somehow I don’t think time alone in the forest is what you need.”

Behind them three men had entered the bar. “I shot the son of a bitch right through the spine,” one of the men said. He was an older man, with white hair, a red-and-black flannel shirt. “The motherfucker just kept running, up the fucking hill. Just charging.” The men bellied up to the bar. Pam went to draw their beers.

When she returned, she took one of Kendra’s hands with her own, turning it to look at the month-old tattoo.

“So what’s next? The nose ring?”

“Don’t laugh,” Kendra told her. “I’m considering it.”

“Considering it, my ass. I see you with one of those, I’ll drag you to the loony bin with it.” She let go of Kendra’s hand.

Kendra raised her glass—a mock toast. The other woman remained impassive.

“I hope you’re not going to tell me you’re still looking around for that detective.”

Kendra sighed, lowering her glass. “A lost cause,” she said. “Anyway, Travis says they wouldn’t hire a detective. They would hire a
hee-dee.
”

“A what?”

“A sorcerer. I thought maybe you would know the word.”

“Jesus. They should save their money.”

“That’s what Travis said.”

“Travis McCade?”

“I was trying to get him to tell me who it was. I didn’t feel that I could ask the Doves. I figured Travis would know. He has that office.”

Pam rolled her own cigarettes and she set about rolling one now. “Did you tell him about what you found?” she asked.

“Not yet.” Kendra took some more wine. With alcohol, she could always feel it right away, the smallest amount. “He loaned me some books,” she said. “I thought, maybe, when I give them back . . .” She allowed her voice to trail away.

What she had found was a little surfboard. She’d found it among Amanda’s things, in a small box filled with costume jewelry. It was only a few inches long, made of redwood with a flat deck and a V-bottom, and she knew it to be a model of a particular kind of board once ridden in the Hawaiian Islands. She knew this because it was what Drew did. She had not known him to make miniatures but he did not deny it was something he had done. When she asked him about how it came to be with Amanda’s things, he had been less forthcoming. He would only say that it must have gotten put there somehow when they were moving, and she had begun to have a bad feeling about it. She had also, for reasons that were still not altogether clear to her, begun to wear the dead girl’s clothes, and Drew had begun to spend a great deal of his time in the shack by the river, with his template drawings and his weather charts and his old wood.

Pam placed her cigarette on the table. “Let me tell you something about Travis McCade. The guy’s got two kids by two wives. I’ve known him since high school. The man thinks with his dick. You start hanging around him, he’ll get you into trouble.”

“Like I’m not in trouble already,” Kendra said. She took a sip of wine, aware of her pulse in her temples.

Pam studied her in the dim light of the bar. “Have you been doing those exercises?” Pam asked. “The ones I showed you.”

“You mean the spells?”

“I mean the meditative exercises.”

Pam had given her a number of books.
Drawing Down the Moon. The Spiral Dance. Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense.

“I tried the one with saltwater.”

“The saltwater purification ritual. That’s good. Water washes. Salt preserves. You should do that on a regular basis. How did it make you feel?”

“Sick. You wind up drinking the water.”

Pam rolled her eyes. At the bar the men were calling for another round. On the tape deck Iris Dement had been replaced by Charlie Daniels.

“You don’t drink it. You sip it. One sip . . .” Pam rose to serve the men.

In fact, the ritual had not made Kendra sick, because she had not gotten so far as the drinking part. She had, however, filled her ritual chalice with water. With her athame she had added the three mounds of salt and stirred it, counterclockwise, holding the chalice in her lap. She had set about letting her fears, worries, doubts, hatreds, and disappointments surface in her mind—a feat that, in her case, required some commitment of time. She had done her best to see them as a muddy stream flowing from her body as her breath rose and fell, tried to see them dissolved in the ritual chalice—which, in this case, was a mug from the Chart House restaurant in Haleiwa. She had held the cup before her, trying to feel her body drawing power from the earth, letting the power flow into the salt . . . which, according to the book, was to be done until the water began to glow with light. Which was where she got stuck. Her chalice refused to glow and the water was only cloudy like dishwater, and rather than feeling deeply cleansed, she had only felt deeply foolish. She had ended by pouring the water down the sink and drinking one of Drew’s beers instead.

“You got to get off this kick,” Pam told her. She had returned from the bar. “They found the man with blood on his boots, for Christ’s sake . . .”

“And then he hanged himself.”

“You think he was innocent, he would hang himself?”

“The guy was no doubt some loser. You’re a loser long enough, you start thinking like a loser. He probably figured he was an Indian . . .”

She broke off as Pam was only shaking her head. “Don’t give me that,” Pam told her.

A moment passed between them. Pam picked up her cigarette. She placed it between her lips and lit it.

“What if he didn’t do it?” Kendra said. “The papers said he and Amanda knew each other. So what if he came by afterward? What if he found her, but he was afraid? Because he was an Indian. Because he knew what people would say. What if the guy that did it is still out there . . .”