The Dogs of Winter (14 page)

It was his general plan to keep them in his sights, to hold south and west, then move in with the next set. He would set up on the south side of the peak, fifty yards from the impact zone. He would shoot with the sun at his back, lighting the wave at its highest and most dramatic point, then ride up and over a still unbroken shoulder as the wave passed by. The boy would have to gun it to get them over the shoulder, but it was nothing he had not already done on the bars and Fletcher did not anticipate a problem. Afterward it would only remain to negotiate the mouth of the river at the session’s end.

“This is good,” Fletcher told the boy. He lowered his hand. “We’ll wait right here.”

The boy nodded, cut back on his throttle and raised the engine, allowing them to drift. Fletcher could find no suitable line up to the north, but to the south, there was a large island at the mouth of the river, and it seemed to him that if they held to its westernmost tip, they would be about right.

Turning toward the bay, he found them at the south end of a long strip of sand, and he picked that point where the sand ended in rock as his second line-up. He said as much to the boy. “Here and
here,” he said, and he showed the boy the tip of the island and the end of the sand. “We stay between these two points. Next set, we’ll move in a little closer. You just head right toward them.” He waved at the surfers. “I’ll be taking the pictures.” He held up the camera for the boy to see, as if this would make him understand. “But as soon as I say go, you give it the gas, turn us out to sea, and get us over the shoulder.” He paused a moment. “Just like you did on the inside. That was good, how you got us over those bars.”

The boy smiled at him when he said that and Fletcher thought maybe this would work after all. The boy remained silent and Fletcher went back to fiddling with his stuff. He worked now with the lens, sighting through it, adjusting his focus. Through the lens, he could see the surfers very clearly, seated on their boards, a few yards apart. He could see Robbie Jones and Sonny Martin talking to one another. He could see Drew Harmon slightly apart, arms folded on his chest, eyes on the horizon.

He checked his watch and his line-ups. They had moved too far north along the sand and he said as much to the boy. The boy tilted his engine so that it was back in the water and made a little circle, bringing them back on line. Fletcher nodded. He looked at his watch once more, checked his light meter, and sighted through his lens.

It was always odd, he thought, these little moments of calm on a big day. He felt the sun warming the shoulders of his wet suit. He put down the camera and reached over the side of the boat. He splashed his face and hands, allowing the water to roll down his back, as he had begun to sweat in the thick suit. He looked at the boy. The boy was checking the line-ups, holding to them. He gets it, Fletcher thought. He’s going to do all-right. At which point, Fletcher saw him look out to sea, and he saw his expression change.

Fletcher followed the boy’s gaze. He was just in time to see Drew Harmon flatten himself on the deck of his board and begin to windmill toward the horizon. Jones and Martin followed suit and Fletcher felt his heart jump. It did not seem to him that they should have to paddle with such intent less they had been too far inside, and he looked toward the horizon himself and saw that, in fact, things had taken a turn.

A wave had begun to build and its peak had indeed shifted and it
was further outside than he had anticipated. He looked at the boy, telling him to go, but the boy had tilted the engine out of the water and was now having difficulty in getting it back in. Fletcher moved to the stern to see if he could help and when the boy looked at him, he could see that the boy was scared.

The engine was hung up on something and when they got it into the water, it stalled. Fletcher watched as the boy tugged at the starter line. It was a short line and a one-man job and it was the boy’s engine. Fletcher sat back on the rubber seat, striving to master his fear. They were still, he reasoned, far enough south to be well off the peak. Even with a stalled engine, they might ride out a wave or two. Surely it would start in the end. It was the thought with which he sought to console himself as the first gust of an offshore wind kicked down upon them from the mouth of the river.

Fletcher looked at the boy tugging furiously on the line. The wind was cold and dry, laced with the scent of pine. It suggested high pressure and clear skies. It was all he could have asked for. It was also pushing the rubber boat in a northerly direction and he knew that if this continued, if they did not get under power soon, they would be in deep shit, the blessing become the malediction. He looked toward the beach, as if he might have some say in the matter, and it was while he was looking that he heard someone yell. It was a kind of war whoop echoing across the water. Fletcher knew it to be the voice of one of the surfers, and he knew only too well what it meant and he turned to the sea. What he saw there was a wave as large as any he had yet been forced to deal with in thirty years on the water.

The thing seemed to stretch from beyond the point to the mouth of the river—one endless dark wall which, when it hit the reef, would no doubt blot out the sky. Already it was beginning to draw from the depths, adding exponentially to itself even as Fletcher watched it, and it was here that he heard the second war whoop and that he saw the surfers. There were two of them and he believed it to be Jones and Harmon.

Harmon was scratching for the lip, trying to make it over the top. Robbie Jones was behind him, but even as Fletcher watched, he saw the kid swing the board around and begin to stroke toward the river mouth, paddling for all he was worth in an effort to overcome the
water flowing back up the face to meet him. To Fletcher’s astonishment, the kid was going for it. He was trying to catch the wave.

It was an impossible moment. Fletcher had no doubt the kid was undergunned, that he was already too late into the wave. There was a good ten feet of water above his head, another twenty below him, with the wave just about to jack as he got to his feet. Instinctively, Fletcher went for his camera.

The wave face was dark with the amount of water it contained but with the sunlight splitting the last thin bands of cloud, lighting up the yellow rails of the Brewer gun and the red stripes of the wet suit in such a way that, as Fletcher brought the scene into focus, he could actually see the colors reflected on the face of the wave, and suddenly he was drawing a bead on Robbie Jones. Even as the boy jerked on the starter line. Even as the wave bore down upon them, because in some dark corner of his head, Fletcher knew very clearly what he was looking at. The only shot ever taken from the water at Heart Attacks. In epic conditions. A rider up. The thing he had come for. He saw his shot and he pulled the trigger.

It was really quite perfectly done. Robbie Jones was on his feet, crouched slightly with the board bucking beneath him but driving cleanly down the face of the wave. Fletcher held him in frame, leading him slightly, firing away, aware now too of yet one more sound—something apart from the thunder of the wave, the clicking of the camera. He was aware of the absurd sputtering of the Zodiac’s outboard as it kicked to life and yet even as he put out his hand in anticipation of its acceleration, the foolish thing leaped beneath him.

Fletcher’s hand, extended backwards, caught at the craft’s rail. The rail in question, however, was wide and fat, made of synthetic rubber, slick with spray, and it afforded no purchase. Nor was there time for a second grab. Just like that and Fletcher was going over, still clutching the old orange housing he’d once risked his life to save, ass first into the icy Pacific.

F
letcher’s first impulse, upon sinking beneath the surface, was to believe this was not happening. He had been thirty years a waterman. Only a kook of the first order would get caught looking, would fall out of the boat half a mile from shore, his camera still in his hands. The thought, however comforting, was a fleeting one and quickly erased by the sub-fifty-degree water which filled his head and he knew that he had indeed taken the fall, that he’d done it in the path of one of the biggest waves he had ever had to deal with, in shark-infested waters, hundreds of yards from a beach upon which no palms swayed in tropic light.

The second thought that came to him was that he would survive. He was no stranger to the open ocean. He had rolled waves for thirty years and he would roll this one. At which point, he rose to the surface and looked once more into the teeth of the dark monster already beginning to feather before a luminous sky and he was not so sure. The urge to panic rose in his chest. He felt it as a
physical presence, a dull pain which sapped the strength from his arms. Still, he knew what to do, and he knew that knowing it was the key. Or rather, he wanted to believe that knowing it would prove the key. While one voice outlined a course of action, another cursed him for his ineptitude, calling loudly for panic and surrender, as if, by drowning, he could simply call the whole thing off. Fletcher gathered himself before the approaching wall of water. He took two or three deep breaths, held the last one, bent himself in the middle and kicked out with his legs, swimming for the bottom.

He held the old orange housing before him, kicking hard, hoping to get deep enough so that the wave would not suck him back to the surface. The water grew colder with each kick, and darker. He could see no more than a few inches in front of his face when he felt it come. It came first as a movement in the ocean around him. And then the explosion, prenaturally low. A thing felt more than heard. A function of blood. A promise of what was to come. And yet when the turbulence hit, it did so out of all proportion even to what he had expected. The camera was jerked from his grasp. His wet suit filled as the frigid water flushed down his back. His first thought was that the damn thing had burst a seam, that it would carry him down, as surely as if he had been encased in concrete.

There was no swimming against it now. The shock waves buffeted him as though he were some badly outclassed fighter pinned to the ropes, his sense of direction lost to the sea. Again, he sought to cling to a single thought, that it was a question of time—twenty seconds, max, and that though these twenty seconds might seem an eternity, he had been here before. This too would pass. At which point he began to flail, clutching at handfuls of water, clawing in what he could only hope was the proper direction, forgetting everything save the desire to breath.

And in time it came. The release. The blackness gone to gray, the sudden explosion of sunlight and sound as his head broke through the layers of foamy water, ringing as if from a blow. His first thought, however, was for the next wave, and instinctively he turned toward the reef where indeed the second wave of the set had already begun to build and he saw the boy for the last time.

The Zodiac had managed somehow to ride over the top of the
first wave, for Fletcher saw it quite clearly, not fifty yards ahead of him. He could see the boy sitting in what appeared to be some attitude of calm at the stern of his craft in his blue pants and red flannel shirt, his red ball-cap. The Zodiac, however, showed no indication of having regained power. It was simply sitting on the face of the wave, about midway up, with the crest already beginning to feather above it.

One could see what was to come. The thing was inevitable and Fletcher turned from it. Once again he dove. And once again he felt it come, the distant thunder, the pressure in the ears. This time, however, he got under it. Maybe it was the thrashing he had taken on the first wave, making for an inspired effort. Maybe the second wave was simply smaller. He allowed himself a momentary respite and for a moment he simply drifted, allowing his air to take him up. But he was deep and once more the need for oxygen pushed him, kicking and clawing for the surface, dreading what he would find there, for he did not believe he could roll a third wave. Nor did he know if the turbulence was pushing him toward the shore or only holding him in place. When he surfaced, however, the sea was awash once more in light, and there was nothing on it save the movement of the swell itself, which might be seen as an undulation of the horizon, as if some procession of unnamed beasts roamed there, skulking in the blue light.

He felt the cold now, as he had not felt it before. It was a gnawing thing. It worked upon the bone. He fought once more the almost overwhelming urge to panic, to simply thrash wildly, but set out instead with a measured stroke, offering himself instructions on hand position and follow-through, keeping his head down, breathing, at least for the present, on every other stroke, in some attempt to escape the impact zone before the next set could find him there. He had gone some distance when he became aware of a voice booming at him from across the water. What he saw was Drew Harmon. The man was stroking toward him on the deck of his big wooden board, a bright blue O’Neil hot lid in place over his outsized head, his nose and beard dripping water, his eyes full of demented light.

The man stroked up to him, pulled himself up to straddle the board, reached around behind his back, and, like the magician in a
magic show, produced a single Churchill swim fin which he proceeded to pass to Fletcher. Fletcher received it with fingers from which any feeling had long ago departed.

“Swim for the point on the north side of the river mouth,” Harmon shouted at him. He waved at some rocks Fletcher was able to see only when the ground swell had raised him to sufficient height.

“Don’t let yourself get pulled past those rocks,” Drew said. “You get caught in the rips at the mouth, you’re going back out to sea.”

And so saying, the man was gone. He flattened back out on his board and paddled off toward a distant line-up. Fletcher, for his part, had not said a word. The thought occurred to him that he was perhaps, at this particular point, incapable of it. Eventually he tried. He managed a kind of grotesque call. He found his voice was hoarse with the cold and weak, and he did not believe that the man had heard him and did not himself have any clear idea of what he was trying to say. Perhaps he was trying to tell him to look for the boy. Perhaps it was for himself that he called. But the man was gone, and Fletcher was alone once more with his blue hands and his ice-cream headache and his Churchill swim fin, which, eventually, he managed to work on over his bootie and with it in place he began to swim. He swam for the rocks and the beach he could not exactly see.