The Dogs of Winter (10 page)

“I read it in a book.”

Drew just looked at him. “Which book was that?”

Fletcher was a bit reluctant to name the book. He was aware of Jones and Martin looking at him. “
A Wave Hunter’s Guide to the Golden State,
” he said.

Drew was grinning at him. He grinned at Martin and Jones as well. A moment passed. No one spoke.

“How do you get out?” Sonny Martin wanted to know, and Fletcher guessed that Heart Attacks it would be, boulder field or no, and was a little embarrassed that he had thought to question it. He was, after all, in the presence of the book himself, the man who had ridden them all.

Drew Harmon now pointed back toward the mouth of the river. “It’s hard to see in this light, with this wind chop,” he said, “but there’s really a pretty good rip running out of the river. You just ride it out. You got to snake around some on the inside bars, but you got some current pushing you. Once you’re past the inside stuff, the current bends south. You paddle out of it, then angle back across the bay and start looking for your lineups. I use the big rock and a point north you can’t see from here. It’s really not that hard getting out. Holding position is something else. You don’t want to take off behind the peak.”

“No shit,” Sonny said. “Peters said something about a boat.”

“A boat?” Harmon acted genuinely surprised. When he saw the expression on Sonny’s face, he laughed out loud. “What, you afraid of a little paddling?”

“No, it was just that Peters said you said there would be a boat. I was just wondering . . .”

Harmon silenced him with a wave of the hand. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar,” he said. “I got the whole thing covered. Boat was here waiting for you this morning.”

“How does the boat get out?” R.J. asked him.

“Right out the river mouth,” Harmon said. He made a gesture with his hand, cutting the damp air.

“Must be some boat.”

Drew rolled his shoulders and rubbed his hands as if taken by a sudden chill. “Swell’s building. I’ve seen fifty-foot faces out there.”

As Drew spoke, the last of the sun slipped into the sea, and with
its passing, the wind kicked up fresh and cold and the rain with it, hitting them full in the face.

“You eunuchs can hang around if you want to,” Harmon told them. “But I wouldn’t recommend it. Locals can get downright nasty. Firewater, you know.” The man rubbed his hands together, chortling to himself. “Might get yourselves scalped.” At which point he exited the manzanita as might a bear moving through the wood and started back down the ravine.

Fletcher and the two surfers followed. When they reached the turnout, they found Harmon already starting down the trail from which he had appeared. He spoke to them as he went, not bothering to turn around to see if they were there or close enough to hear.

“Go back to the other road,” he called. “Follow it to the river.” He said something else but the wind took it.

Fletcher and the others were left in the mud, in the gathering darkness.

Martin said, “What?” He was looking at Fletcher when he said it, as if Fletcher was supposed to know.

“He said follow the road to the river.”

“Yeah. What did he say after that?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Christ.”

Robbie Jones spit into the mud. When he spoke, it was to the river. “This is the guy’s supposed to show us the ropes?”

“Man’s some host,” Sonny said. “Really knows how to make you feel at home.”

“Fuck him. I say we go into town and find something to eat.”

Fletcher shook his head and started toward the van. “We’d better do what he says, we’re gonna find his place before it gets any darker.”

Robbie Jones stopped, touching Fletcher on the arm. “Whoa,” he said. “Is that oil under your van?”

Fletcher felt a sinking sensation in his stomach. He walked quickly to the van, then knelt to look beneath it. He saw nothing but rainwater. When he looked up, Robbie and Sonny were laughing at him.

“Had you going,” Robbie said.

Fletcher brushed the mud from his knees and got behind the wheel. “Ha, ha,” he said.

Sonny and Robbie climbed in after him.

“This Harmon dude is something else,” Sonny said. “Makes you wonder why he bothered to invite us in the first place.”

“He doesn’t give a shit about us. He invited the doc, here. He wants the pictures. Peters was the one invited us. That right, Doc?”

Fletcher started the van. “I suppose so,” he said.

“So tell us, Doc.” It was Sonny who asked. “What does a guy like that want with pictures?”

Fletcher was a moment in replying. He stared into the darkness now covering the reservation but out of which a few faint lights had begun to flicker. “That’s what no one knows,” Fletcher said.

T
hey drove back the way they had come, finding the fork and the gravel road. It was a washboard road filled with ruts and potholes. It took them to the river and led them along its bank. In time, they came to a wooden landing and this was where the road ended.

Fletcher was not sure exactly what he had expected to find here. You had Drew Harmon. You had the Great Northwest. The man had taken a bride. A rich girl. It had been so postulated and agreed upon before the trip was even begun. At the very least, Fletcher had expected a house. Possibly the work of Drew’s own hand. He would learn that Drew had felled the trees himself and milled the lumber. The house would be placed upon a hillside with a view to the sea.

What lay before him in the gathering darkness was so far removed from such fantasies, Fletcher’s first impulse was to believe he and his companions had gotten themselves lost again. Had it not been for the rusted-out van bearing a pair of surfboards lashed to the roof, he would have looked for a place to turn around without
bothering to stop. The van and the surfboards, however, suggested that he had come to the right place. Still, he sat for a moment behind the wheel, surveying the scene before him.

“This is it?” Sonny Martin asked.

“Looks like.”

“Any of these Indians surf?”

“Look at the boards,” Fletcher said.

One could see enough, even in the poor light, the length and thickness, the line of the rail. The place, on the other hand, looked like what they had seen on the reservation. The old van sat before a wooden landing that extended into the river. The landing fronted a clapboard shack whose windows had been broken and patched with scrap lumber and whose sagging shingled roof had been mended in tin. From the front of the shack a pathway led to trees and a steep hillside where stairs might be seen climbing toward a rickety deck set before an ancient house trailer. At length, Fletcher killed his engine and got out of the van. Robbie and Sonny got out with him.

“Shit,” Robbie said. “I thought this guy was supposed to be somebody.”

“Look at it this way,” Fletcher told him. He felt compelled to defend the man, though, in fact, he supposed his disappointment even keener than that of his companions. “It hadn’t of been for guys like him, guys like you wouldn’t be making squat.”

Robbie Jones said nothing.

Fletcher continued to look at the trailer. Clearly there would be nothing here to place alongside Michael Peter’s Biarritz tale. No fur coats and no Mercedes.

“So what now?” Sonny asked.

The shack showed no signs of occupancy. Above the trees an outdoor light burned at the door of the old trailer.

“I guess we try that,” Fletcher said. He nodded toward the light.

“Jesus.”

They had stumbled along the darkened path and come to the base of the stairs when Drew Harmon called to them. Fletcher could not say where he had come from. When he looked, the man had simply appeared on the trail behind them. He held a flashlight in one hand and a grocery bag in the other.

“That ain’t the way,” Drew told them. “It’s down here.”

He turned and started back down the path from which they had come.

Fletcher, who had been in the lead, was now in the rear. He looked once more toward the flight of stairs. It was longer and steeper than he would have imagined. He was about to follow the others when it suddenly occurred to him there was someone standing on the deck.

He saw that it was a woman, or so it appeared in the gloom. She was near the door. He believed her arms were folded about her chest. She seemed to be looking toward the river. He was still staring when a voice came to him from among the trees.

“I said, that ain’t the way,” the voice said.

Fletcher turned. Drew Harmon was standing on the path with his flashlight and bag. Martin and Jones were somewhere behind him in the shadows.

“That your place?” Fletcher gestured toward the stairs with his head.

“That’s my place,” Drew said. “But we’re staying down here.” He waited until Fletcher showed signs of following him before turning to the path once more.

Fletcher stole a final look at the trailer. His angle had changed and he saw the woman was still there. He could see the yellow light upon her hair. But he did not look for long, as Drew Harmon was waiting, and soon she was lost among the trees.

•  •  •

The shack was one room, maybe twenty feet square. There was a wood-burning stove against one wall, an ancient circular thing made of cast iron with ornate iron doors. It rested, in violation of all building codes Fletcher was familiar with, on a rough wooden floor. The room was lit by a single bulb attached to a cord wrapped about a rafter.

“You want to piss,” Drew told them, “do it in the river. You want to do anything else there’s an outhouse in the trees. You can use one of these to find your way.” He pointed to a pair of flashlights by the door.

“That’s cool,” Sonny said, to no one in particular.

In the center of the room was a surf board Fletcher had not seen
the likes of in many a year, or perhaps not at all, for the materials were of another era, redwood and balsa, yet the lines were those of a modern gun. It rested on a pair of sawhorses, sleek and shining in the light of the naked bulb.

There were other boards in various stages of development propped against walls or placed standing, tail down, in racks which had been made of two-by-fours nailed hastily together. Other racks held planks of wood. Balsa. Redwood. Other woods Fletcher could not name.

“This was my grandmother’s place,” Drew said. “Built in 1894. I been using it to shape in. Someday I’m gonna build my own place up there above where the trailer is. I got the site all picked out. You can see the river mouth from there. Right now we’re living in the trailer.”

Fletcher nodded. They had grouped around the board on the sawhorses. Sonny Martin ran a finger along the rail.

“Where’d you get this?” Martin asked. “A museum?”

Drew Harmon just laughed. “Not hardly. Had to go all the way to Ecuador to get that balsa. You can’t get the shit in big enough sticks in the States. Took me another eight months to get the stuff up here. The redwood is strictly from old growth timber.”

He stepped to one of the racks and pulled out a plank. The piece was solid redwood, ten feet long. Fletcher reckoned it must have weighed at least two hundred pounds. Harmon handled it as if it weighed no more than a third of that. He spun it on one end and propped it against the others, still racked. “Check this,” he told them. “It will blow your mind.” He ran his hand along several scars laid crosswise to the grain. “You know what those are?”

When no one answered, he smiled. “That’s the scars from a springboard,” he said. “That’s where some old logger drove his springboard into the trunk. There was still ten feet of the tree left in the ground. Wasteful as hell. I know a guy with a salvage license. We go into the woods looking for stumps. We find one, he slices me a piece off the top. Thing was three hundred pounds of solid wood when I started on it. But I wanted to save those scars. I get done, they’re gonna be right there in the board, under the glass job.”

He stood back, holding the board at arm’s length, admiring the old wood that was indeed quite impressive.

“That’s where the magic comes from,” he told them. “It’s in
the wood.” He gestured toward the board on the sawhorses. “You paddle out on that . . . the spirits will smile on you.”

He slid the plank back into the rack and went to his workbench where he set about removing what he had brought in the bag—two cans of tamales, two cans of chili, two six-packs of beer, and some hot dog buns.

“We’ll crash here,” Drew told them. “We’ll hit it early. First light.”

“May as well break out the shit,” Robbie said. The two surfers went outside where it had begun to rain once more.

Drew Harmon watched them go. He was at the workbench, opening cans. His parka was pulled back now. His hair was wet and he had twisted it into a ponytail that rested on his broad back.

Fletcher remained by the board. He looked around the shack. There was a hot plate on the workbench. A chaise lounge pad had been laid upon the floor with a sleeping bag on top of it.

Drew nodded toward the departed surfers, his back still to Fletcher. “That kid R.J. He the kid won the Masters this year?”

“Two years in a row.”

“What’s the payoff on that little item now?”

“I’m not sure. I think he made thirty, forty grand.”

“Shit.” Drew Harmon dumped the tamales in with the chili and placed the mess over his hot plate in a battered aluminum pan. “You know what I got the year I won that thing?”

“A trophy.”

“A fish dinner at Ahi’s.”

Fletcher listened to the rain on the tin roof. There was a stack of old surfing magazines on the floor by the sleeping bag together with a bottle of drinking water.

“We get some waves, I’d like to get pictures of all three of us riding my boards. What do you think?”

Fletcher looked at Drew. The man had his back to him.

“Fine by me.”

“I think there could be a market. This is the new frontier up here. You know that, don’t you? Undiscovered country. You need the right equipment to go after it on.”

Fletcher considered the board on the sawhorses. It was a ten-foot gun of serious proportions. The number of people requiring one
like it would be minimal. He kept the observation to himself. He watched as Drew Harmon stirred his tamales and chili. “You know I got an expense account for this trip. There’s someplace in town you and your wife would like to eat . . .”