The Dogs of Winter (8 page)

“What if you’re living with him?”

Kendra could feel the baseline of the music in her blood. “Yes,” she said. She believed it was the first time she had said it aloud and her inclination was to stop here, to consider what doing so had done.

“Look. If you think that . . . if you think anything like that, then that trailer is the last place you should be.” Pam paused for a drink. “Personally, I think Drew is an asshole. I doubt he had anything to do with this girl. Why would he buy the trailer, for Christ’s sake?”

“It would be his.”

“What?”

“I mean . . . in this weird way . . . it would be his. He would want it.” But she was only half thinking about these answers. Her mind was still upon what she had said before. Yes, she had said, yes.

Pam blew smoke through her nostrils. “That’s one weird answer,” she said. She gave it a moment’s thought. “Something is happening here,” she announced. “I think you should see Deborah, maybe.”

Deborah was a Caucasian woman who lived in town. The women in Pam’s circle seemed to believe she was adept at reading auras. Kendra had her doubts. Nor was she altogether certain she wanted someone looking at her aura. She found the prospect faintly distasteful, the kind of thing her father might have indulged in.

“I’m serious, Kendra. There’s something here you ought to get to the bottom of. And it doesn’t have anything to do with Drew. Or Amanda, or that fucking trailer you spend too much time alone in. It’s something with you. Deborah might help. The coven might help. The rituals might help . . .”

“Pam. Please. Give me a break.”

“I’m trying to.”

“Deborah watches
Melrose Place
on television, for Christ’s sake. I’ve seen her.”

“What is it, really?” Pam asked her. “Afraid it won’t work, or afraid it will?”

Kendra found herself smiling.

“Now what?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Come on. What?”

Kendra drank her wine. “Maybe it isn’t all gardens and faery queens,” she said. She was set upon by the sudden desire to be gone. She took the check from the table, creased it down the middle, and slipped it into her purse. “He’ll never find it here,” she said.

“He?”

“The mad professor.”

Pam looked confused.

“You know, Felix the Cat. The cartoon.”

“I remember the cat. That’s about it.”

“Well, there was this mad professor. He was always stealing Felix’s bag of magic tricks. And then Felix would have to steal it back. And he would fold it into a triangle and stick it into his side. And he would say, ‘They’ll never find it here.’ ”

Pam shook her head.

“It was a joke,” Kendra told her. “I saw the check, I flashed on the cartoon . . .”

Pam turned to the men at the bar. She looked at Kendra. “Stay here,” Pam told her.

Kendra watched as Pam went once more to the cooler, at which point she made her exit. She was really rather reckless about it, no doubt rude as well. She was halfway down the stairs before she realized she had not paid Pam for her share of the wine. But she did not want to go back up and she decided it would have to wait.

She was in the parking lot, getting into her truck, when she saw the logger again. It was the man from the landing. She heard someone call to her and when she turned she saw the man leaning against the side of a truck. She was not sure what the man had said. She saw another man move around from the back of the truck. The rain had picked up. The afternoon was growing dark and there were two men.

Kendra slid quickly behind the wheel, then drove without looking into the path of an oncoming logging truck. She heard the horn at about the same time she saw the immense vehicle bearing down upon her. Her mind seemed to snap a picture of it, something she would carry to look at later—the driver, in some attitude of panic, hunched over the wheel, wrenching it toward the bar, the cut logs swaying as if made of rubber. She believed she shut her eyes, expecting impact. The driver missed her, however, and when she saw him again, he was on the running board of his jackknifed rig, middle finger extended, as the afternoon broke about him into shimmering liquid sheets.

•  •  •

Kendra drove on. She crossed the river and entered the woods and not till she came to the gravel road that would carry her back to her husband’s land did she realize she had forgotten the butane tank. Clearly, she would not go back for it. In its absence the death coach would be quite cold. By morning she would be able to see her breath and there would be no hot water for the shower.

She sat for a moment at just this point in the road. To the left the road curved uphill and into the big trees. To the right it fell away, among the spruce and poplar, and even with the windows up and the engine running, she could hear the rain-swollen river sweeping past her, wide and rapacious and unclean.

She turned off the engine that she might be alone with the sound of the water. She sat with her hands atop the wheel, behind windows streaked with rain. Gazing upon the floor of her truck, she saw that her purse had toppled from the seat, that the little wooden board had slid from it and lay now amid the clutter. If only he had not reacted as he had when she confronted him with it, when she had worn Amanda’s clothes. If only he had dismissed it and carried on as before. But things were set against them here. She had known it from the start. Their coming had awakened a sickness. And then one night a girl had died. Just somebody. A girl in an alley arguing with a man. She rested her forehead upon the wheel. Perhaps it was her, she thought. Perhaps it was only her mind fucking with her. It wouldn’t be the first time. A little electronic stimulation applied to
the posterior of the right temporal lobe, you might get voices, music from unseen harps. Stimulate the middle gyrus, you might get Yahweh and burning bushes. A little indigestion, you might get Marley’s ghost.

And yet when Pam had asked her, she had said yes, as if his guilt were a thing one could be sure of. And her of all people. She looked once more at the board. The sight made her vaguely nauseous. She opened her door and stepped into the rain. There was a spell in one of the books—it was one of the cleansing spells, a spell for self-acceptance, for the absolution of regret. She tried now to remember how it went. The rain poured down upon her hair, plastering it to her head. She wheeled about in the mud at the edge of the embankment that dropped down toward the water, casting her circle in the air. In the mud she drew a pentagram and stood facing the north, for the north was the most powerful direction, the direction of mystery, of the unseen. She drew a dark stone from the mud and pressed it to her forehead. “I am the mother of all things,” she said, which was all she could remember, and at which point it occurred to her that she was drunk on her ass. She pressed the stone to her head a moment longer, hard enough to hurt, then threw it toward the water on its way to the sea.

T
he van needed a water pump. The station was able to replace it but the surfers lost three hours. By the time they passed the junction with 580 and the turn to San Francisco, the sky had begun to color. It was dark when they hit Redding. They stopped here for food, then picked up the road to the coast. It was a long and winding road, and about an hour and a half into it, Fletcher’s van blew a tire. Unhappily, he was without a spare.

At this point, they were about three miles outside a town called Dutch Gulch. They walked the three miles only to find the town closed for the night. They walked the three miles back and slept in the van. Actually, Fletcher slept in the van. The others slept outside, beneath a stand of trees some ways off the road. Fletcher woke early to find Robbie Jones defacing a state mileage sign with his wrist rocket. It was noon by the time they had dealt with the tire and gotten something to eat.

Fletcher could feel his future unraveling along with his vehicle.
There were directions to Drew Harmon’s house, but no phone number. Apparently the man had harbored some objection to giving it out and there was no way to tell him they were running late. He could, however, call Michael Peters. This he did. Peters was still in Hawaii and Fletcher called collect.

“What is it?” Peters asked. “What’s wrong?”

“We’ve been having a little trouble with the van,” Fletcher said. He was standing in a cramped booth at the back of a ratty little station, staring into the groves of pine that surrounded the town of Dutch Gulch. The day was cold and gray, and the tops of the trees were lost in cloud.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Peters said.

There was a kid in bib overalls standing out in back of the station, hitting a rusted piece of farming equipment with a hammer.

“Is it serious?”

“First a water pump. Now a tire. We’ll get there.”

“What’s that?” Peters said.

“What’s what?”

“That banging. I can barely hear you.”

“It’s some kid,” Fletcher told him. The kid looked to be about sixteen. He was still hitting the piece of equipment, grinning foolishly at Fletcher.

“Can’t you tell him to shut the fuck up?”

“I believe he’s retarded,” Fletcher said.

Peters fumed for several moments in silence.

“Listen,” Fletcher said. “I just wanted to let you know, in case Harmon calls you, wondering where we are. Tell him we’ll be there sometime this afternoon.” He fairly shouted, to make himself heard above the kid.

“You should be in the fucking water right now, Doc. The damn ocean’s on fire. You should see it over here.”

“If he calls,” Fletcher said, “just tell him.”

Peters started to say something else but Fletcher hung up. It was the first thing he had done that day which pleased him. He went past the kid with the hammer and around to the front of the station, where they were prepared to hit the road once more.

“Wha’d he say?” Sonny asked.

“He says it’s going off like crazy over there.”

“Shit, man,” Robbie said. “This sucks.”

•  •  •

The sky darkened as they approached the coast. They drove among magnificent scenery punctuated by sorry little towns hunkering among the trees as if they were no more than the detritus of some grander and larger thing which had passed unseen in the night. They took turns at the wheel and finally it was Robbie who did most of the driving, because, he said, just sitting there made him bored. Fletcher, on the other hand, discovered that he was quite content among the bags and board cases. The beer and muscle relaxants helped. In fact, he was sleeping soundly when, late on the second day of their trip, they rolled into the tiny town of Sweet Home.

He woke to the steady drumming of rain on the metal roof of the van. He was quite alone. When he crawled to the passenger side window and looked outside, he found himself parked before a two-story building sporting a large wooden sign which named it as Bodine’s Tavern.

Half a dozen men stood beneath an overhang which ran the length of the bar. The lot before them was streaked with puddles in which a gray sky found reflection. The men were of a kind. They wore plaid shirts, heavy dark jeans, and dark suspenders. Most were bearded. None were what you could call small. They seemed to regard the van with some curiosity.

Fletcher was slightly disoriented. He could not immediately say how long he had slept. He was about to get out to look for his charges when he saw them exit a door and pass among the men.

The boys had a six-pack apiece and Fletcher watched as they came down the steps and splashed through the puddles toward the van. He saw the men watching them as well, all six of them, lined up as if they were no more than mock Paul Bunyans cut from wood and cleverly painted.

“We’re here,” Sonny said.

The two surfers entered the van with great fanfare, shaking rain from their clothes, reeking of beer and tobacco.

“Not quite,” Fletcher told them. For he was awake now and he could see that the road had led them inland. It remained to find the coast and Drew Harmon’s house.

Peters had provided a map. Fletcher took it from one of his packs and unfolded it in the back of the van. The map indicated a bridge on the outskirts of town and just past it, a narrow road leading to the coast.

•  •  •

They found the bridge, crossing it slowly as the rain-swollen river thundered beneath them. Fletcher squatted between the two front seats. The map suggested the road to the coast was very near the bridge, and, in fact, such a road soon presented itself—a narrow strip of asphalt that ran off among the trees, then forked in two directions almost at once.

They sat at this intersection, peering into the thickening gloom while the rain hammered the van and Fletcher fumbled with his map. Predictably, the thing said nothing about choices. In one direction, the road was hard-packed white rock and appeared to curve back toward the river which lay now to the south. The other road turned north, was straighter and still of asphalt. It seemed the obvious path and they took it.

Fletcher had to tell Robbie twice to slow it down. Martin grinned and hung on. The rain came hard, then backed off quite suddenly as the road corkscrewed toward a flat place where a number of wrecked cars sat in a field of grass and a dirt road ran up toward a trailer with a ramshackle room-addition dangling from one side above a muddy sinkhole. The addition appeared as a mutilated appendage someone had mistakenly thought to save rather than amputate.

Robbie stopped the van. In the road before them, a pair of stricken-looking ducks waddled out of the bush in the company of two equally sorry-looking chickens and made for the opposite shoulder. Martin suggested to Jones that he see how many of the fowl he could run over. Before R.J. could act on this suggestion, however, a young girl came from somewhere out of the grass in pursuit of the birds. She wore a flowered dress, which was wet, and
high-topped white workout shoes. Her black hair was wet as well and hung in shining strands around her face, and Fletcher was given to understand that she was an Indian, that, in fact, they had driven onto the reservation and would not find Drew Harmon’s place on this road.

He said as much to R.J., but it was the last light of the day and there was a break in the rain. They could see an end to the trees as well, and a kind of light in the sky that spoke of the ocean, and both Robbie and Martin wanted a look. The fact of the matter was, Fletcher wanted a look too, and when the girl and the birds had pushed off into the bush, they continued along the road.