The Dogs of Winter (9 page)

They passed more trailers like the one the girl belonged to, together with a variety of modular and self-made shacks of all shapes and sizes yet all in the relatively same sorry state of disrepair, and, given the rain and the mud and the dripping trees, all looking very much alike—gray and drab, with the hulks of cars and small fishing boats and various appliances rusting or rotting around them in concentric circles until each had become a small junkyard unto itself and above whose patched and sagging roofs, the occasional trail of gray smoke could be seen spiraling into a gray sky before gray woods, so that the entire scene appeared as a badly done watercolor in which the various pigmentations had been lost to too wet a surface. With the disappearance of the girl, however, the men seemed to have been left quite alone, and they drove the rest of the way to the sea and the light, unchallenged. The road bent upward, ending in a muddy turnout where they parked and went on foot to the cliff’s edge, for their first look at that part of the coast they had come to explore.

The mouth of the river lay beneath them. It was wide and muddied with crescents of rocky beach on either side bending back toward impossible shorelines which, in many places, were strewn with mighty logs heaped one upon the other like broken telephone poles. Most of the logs lay parallel with the coastline, though here and there others pointed toward the sea, which at this precise moment was of a uniform gray color, though the sky above it was filled with a pale golden mist out of which a declining sun appeared opposite the three surfers, showing itself for a brief interval in that
space between the water and the clouds like some tarnished medallion but losing shape even as they watched it, as if the sea itself bore some responsibility for its dismemberment.

At the edges of the beaches, there were thin fingers of wet sand made purple in the fading light and above the sand and rocks and scattered logs, forest-clad bluffs crumbled into the sea, their broken parts forming any number of small jagged islands dark with living greenery, and from which individual trees could in places be seen jutting upward, or outward, at angles which suggested the skeletal remains of sailing ships broken upon the shore.

As for the break itself, the swell lines were windblown and confused, crisscrossing at treacherous angles around the muddy mouth of the river where patterns of white water gone to the color of old brass in the failing light gave evidence of strong currents.

Fletcher could see Robbie Jones roll his shoulders beneath his nylon parka. Beads of water rolled from his tanned head and disappeared beneath his collar. “Gnarly,” he said.

“So where’s the spot?” Sonny asked. “Can we see it from here?”

“Beats me,” Robbie said. “What about it, Doc?”

Fletcher was uncertain. His book had talked about the long walk in, but he assumed that the authors had gone in from the public lands to the north, avoiding the reservations. “That’s why we need Harmon,” he told them.

“Supposed to be by the river,” Sonny said.

“You bothered to look at a map yet?” R.J. asked him. “There’s about six rivers empty’n out all over the place up here.”

The three men continued to study the sea beneath them.

“Well, I don’t see shit out there,” Sonny said.

“You ain’t seen shit because you cain’t see shit,” a voice told them. The voice was distinctly male. The words, cast in exaggerated hillbilly twang, seemed to issue from somewhere to their left and slightly below them.

“An’ you cain’t see shit if you don’t know shit. An’ you don’t know shit.”

The three men turned in the direction of the voice.

“What the fuck?” Sonny said.

A shaggy apparition had appeared at the cliff’s edge, moving to
meet them out of the gloom, although nearly inseparable from it as it was draped head to toe in military green canvas. They watched as this phantom scrabbled along a steep and narrow trail leading up from the river.

In time the man reached the bluff upon which they stood, swinging a shadowy, bearded face in their direction. “Reminds me of Saint Philip and the eunuch,” the man said, dropping the hick accent, shaking rainwater from a huge poncho. “And the eunuch saieth unto Philip, ‘How can I understand without someone to guide me?’ ”

The man studied them for a moment as if in expectation of some answer. When none was forthcoming he came toward them once more and there was, Fletcher thought, something about the way he moved. He moved slowly and with some stiffness. He moved in the manner Fletcher had seen certain professional athletes move when their playing days were done, as a man sharing an acquaintance with pain, and when he had gotten close enough, Fletcher saw that it was Drew Harmon.

“So I’m sittin’ on my dock all nice and dry and I see these three eunuchs standin’ in the rain tryin’ to read the water, and this little voice says, look here, hoss, this must be these same three assholes you’ve been expecting. Gotten themselves lost, of course. Missed the morning glass. Now you better get your ass up there and tell ’em what they’re looking at and what to do and where to stand before they fall off the fucking cliff and squirrel the whole deal.” He paused for a moment, resting his hands on his hips.

“So I guess I’m supposed to ask, what you eunuchs are looking for out there, anything in particular?”

Jones and Martin exchanged looks. Fletcher made eye contact with Drew and offered a hand. “Been a while,” he said. In fact, he was still trying to reach some accommodation with himself with respect to the man planted before him, for he would not have picked him out of a crowd. He was still big, of course, tall and broad-shouldered, but what Fletcher remembered was a man possessed of movie-star good looks, tall and lithe. He could still picture him blasting down the Kam Highway on a BSA Lightning Rocket, the wind in his hair.

Drew Harmon squinted down on him from beneath the brim of some kind of outrageous rubber seaman’s cap. The object was the same military green as the poncho. It sported earflaps and a chin strip that Harmon had knotted in a bow and over which his shaggy beard extended in a dripping point. The man looked like a cross between some West Virginia hillman and something from a children’s illustrated
Captain’s Courageous.
The eyes that studied Fletcher were small and bright, and, it occurred to Fletcher, as the man’s hand enveloped his own, slightly deranged. He saw as well that the man did not recognize him.

“Jack Fletcher,” Fletcher said.

“I knew that,” Harmon said, although his expression did not change. “Dr. Fun. And you’ve got company.”

Fletcher nodded at the men standing slightly behind him. “Robbie Jones, Sonny Martin.”

Sonny Martin shook hands with Drew Harmon. Robbie just nodded, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his parka.

“So,” Harmon asked. “You eunuchs looking for anything in particular, or are you just enjoying the weather?”

“Take a guess,” Robbie said.

Harmon just looked at him. The look was not particularly friendly. Two alpha males in the same crew, Fletcher thought. Always bad news.

“Just wondered what we could see from up here,” Fletcher said. “We knew we must’ve taken the wrong turn back there when we found ourselves on the reservation, but we wanted a look at the coast before the sun went down.”

“Can you see it from here or not?” Sonny asked.

“See what?”

“Shit,” Robbie Jones said.

“What? Shit? You want to know if you can see shit from here? You’re standin’ in shit, chrome dome.”

Robbie Jones looked at his feet.

“Heart Attacks,” Sonny Martin said.

“Ah, Heart Attacks. That place.” Drew Harmon laughed out loud. “You mean to tell me you believe everything you read in those stupid magazines?”

Sonny Martin looked at Robbie Jones. Jones was staring at Harmon, his hands still pushed into the parka. Harmon looked at him. “What about you, Mr. Jones? You looking for Heart Attacks too, gonna snag yourself a big one, maybe?”

“Depends on whether you’re gonna show us where it is or stand around and bullshit all day.”

Harmon tried to look chastened. The light in his eyes prevented it. “Oh hey, I forgot. This is serious shit. I mean we got photogs. We got pros. For Christ’s sake, man . . . I mean, Jesus, we don’t get this kind of treatment up here. I musta forgot my manners.” At which point and without further conversation, Harmon pushed past them toward a stand of trees at the north end of the turnout.

The three surfers exchanged looks. They watched as Drew Harmon disappeared among the trees without looking back. Sonny looked at Robbie and shrugged. “May as well,” he said.

Robbie Jones spit into mud and said, “Fuck.” At which point the two headed for the trees, hurrying to catch up. Fletcher followed.

•  •  •

The trees were tall and thin with pale bark and dripping limbs and once beneath their cover, Fletcher found that the ground began to turn upward once more. Drew Harmon picked his way among the trees, leading them quickly along a twisting path that ended abruptly at a narrow ravine creasing an otherwise impenetrable wall of earth and stone.

The ravine was shallow and muddy, laced with the gnarled roots of trees and chunks of rocks. A miniature river trickled in a series of tiny switchbacks along its bottom. Their guide did not hesitate but started immediately up the ravine, using the rocks and roots for hand- and footholds as if they had been placed there for that purpose alone.

Fletcher kept up the chase, though he found the ravine tough going. He wore an old pair of running shoes whose tread had long ago worn smooth. He slipped numerous times on the slick roots and muddied rocks and was thankful that there was no one behind him to witness this spectacle or to hear the sound of his breathing, which had become quite labored. In fact, there was a point in his
ascent at which Fletcher fell so far behind, the others were lost to sight and he was left quite alone in the darkening ravine, alone with the dripping trees, the thunder of distant surf, the sound of blood in his ears. There was even a moment in which he imagined that he might, in this fashion, lose his way and in consequence was seized by a momentary panic he took as quite absurd but was seized by it nonetheless.

He pushed on, of course, eventually emerging from the ravine to find himself on a grassy bluff overlooking the sea. It was here he found the others, waist deep in a thicket of manzanita, intent upon the ocean below. It was an odd little tableau. The two younger surfers were looking toward the water. Drew was looking too, but with his arm pointing in the direction of the sea. Fletcher could hear the big man talking as he approached.

“Sets’ve been comin’ in maybe twenty minutes apart. Intervals should decrease by morning. Should clean up too,” Drew said. “We’re getting the rain off this little pissant low coming up out of the south. The swell’s out of a monster system to the north. Isobars packed just right.” The man’s face broke in a ragged grin. “Prettiest thing I’ve seen all season.”

Fletcher made a place for himself in the manzanita. It was indeed a fresh vantage point, and from it he was able to see a large crescent-shaped beach dipping inland just north of the river, forming there a kind of bay which had till now been hidden by the shoulder of land they had just climbed. He saw as well what held the attention of the men around him, for the swell lines were clearly delineated, moving as Drew had predicted, out of the north, approaching the bay in such a way as to eventually wrap around its northernmost end then sweep across it toward the headlands at the mouth of the river. He saw too a series of large, jagged rocks rising from the water maybe half a mile from land, in the northern quarter of the bay, and even as he saw the rocks he heard Drew Harmon say, “Okay,” and he knew it was the rocks to which the man had been pointing at all along, for he could see quite clearly that something had begun there. He could make it out, even from this distance, in the failing light. The water had begun to boil at the base of the rocks, drawn seaward by some great force. And he saw that a
wave of considerable size had begun to build at the mouth of the bay, another quarter mile beyond the rocks, yet drawing deeply enough off the bottom to so alter their appearance.

The peak of the wave was enormous, its pocket perhaps fifty yards across, its crest a boil of whitecaps whipped by the wind—a tremendous amount of water rolling toward the coast. The question was, would it break? For it had a lumbering, sluggish way about it, as if it might roll toward the coast indefinitely, alternately building and flattening, finally dumping its load in some useless shore break of wasted power. Quite suddenly, however, even as he and his companions looked and wondered, they saw it find the reef, and they saw it jack.

Someone sucked in their breath. Fletcher believed it was Martin. Drew Harmon laughed. The wave went top to bottom with what had to be a thirty-foot face. It was hard to judge with nothing out there to give it scale. The wave continued to suck out around the peak even as they watched it—huge and hollow as the shoulders suddenly began to line up, feathering north and south but with the ride clearly a right-hander, peeling away from the rocks toward the mouth of the river, and when the first of the lip came crashing down to meet the turbulent Pacific, Fletcher could feel it in his feet, moving up into his bones from the ground beneath him. He was aware of Drew Harmon at his side, checking his watch. He would, Fletcher knew, be watching for intervals.

There were three waves in the set, with twenty-second intervals between the waves. No one spoke. They watched as the last wave thundered toward the rocks, at which point Fletcher was aware of Drew Harmon chuckling once more. “Welcome to the North Country, boys. Hope you brought the Rhino Chasers.”

“That’s it?” Sonny asked. “That’s Heart Attacks?”

“You get caught inside, you’ll call it Heart Attacks,” Drew told him.

“That beach,” Fletcher said, pointing toward the bay. “That’s what they call Big Sandy?”

“It’s big and it’s sandy,” Drew said.

“I thought there was some big boulder field you had to cross to get there.”

“Who told you that?”