The Dogs of Winter (15 page)

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Fletcher made shore some fifteen feet from the rocks that marked the mouth of the river. Whether he would have made shore at all without the fin was a matter of some debate. In all probability, the current would have carried him past the rocks and into the rip which, in turn, would have carried him back to sea. And that, he was quite certain, would have been the end of him. He did not doubt that the fin had saved his life.

His legs, it seemed, had checked out already, for when he tried to stand they went out from under him at once. He went to all fours on a steep section of beach where rags of foam lay glistening like snow drifts in the sun, and the icy water, reluctant to let go such a tasty morsel, tugged at his arms and legs, threatening to pull him back once more. At last, however, the water withdrew, sweeping back down the steep bank of sand, raking at the myriad of tiny
shards so that they rattled one against the other as might the instruments of some mariachi band sent in mockery of his arrival.

Fletcher made for higher ground on all fours, his camera gone, the Churchill fallen from his foot, his nose dripping water. He made some progress but eventually was caught from behind by yet one more onslaught of white water and foam. For though the swells on the outside reefs came in sets separated by lulls, the wave action on the inside bars was incessant and Fletcher was knocked flat, then dragged on his stomach back into the trough from which he had come, then pitched forward once more and rolled for several seconds up and down this treacherous incline like a piece of driftwood before regaining his position on hands and knees. He crawled more wildly this time, without regard for the spectacle he would no doubt have presented, had there been any to witness it.

He crawled among splintered timbers and piles of kelp from which clouds of black flies rose at his approach. Soon there was dry sand clinging to his wet suit. Yet even here he continued to crawl, not trusting himself to stand or to look back from where he had come, and in fact might have crawled for some distance had not the unlikely sound of an engine brought him to a halt. He looked back along the beach toward the northern end of the bay and saw there an aging primer gray pickup bouncing across the rocks and saw at the same time two dark figures running before it.

In a moment, he was able to make out the colors of their wet suits and saw that it was Sonny Martin and Robbie Jones. They were without boards, pumping with their arms to aid them though the sand, or using them for balance among the rocks so that one might, from a distance, have taken then for some outlandish form of seabird seeking flight with black, featherless wings.

Fletcher rose unsteadily to his feet. He could see the truck more clearly now, could see there were people in the bed, could see their flannel shirts, their dark, flowing hair. As he watched, one of the figures leaned suddenly from the bed and threw something. Fletcher could not say what it was but he saw Sonny Martin stumble and go down.

Robbie Jones came on, offering a single piece of advice as he passed. “Run,” he said. And Fletcher did.

They splashed into a shallow channel of fast-moving water at the mouth of the river where Fletcher went into a hole and did something to his ankle. He stumbled and began to swim. Fortunately, it was not necessary to swim far, as the water, though not deep, was cold and fast-moving. Soon, however, he had come to the pile of rock he had earlier that day named as an island and used as one of his line-ups.

Robbie reached the summit before him. Fletcher could see him as he began to climb, scrounging amid the sea grass and razor-sharp crustaceans for handholds among the rocks. He saw that Robbie had managed to salvage a day pack and, from that, his wrist rocket, that even now he was in the act of launching stones in the direction of the beach. In time, Fletcher joined him. They had come to a level place among the stand of trees which capped the island.

“What the hell is this?” Fletcher asked. “What’s going on down there?”

“Fuck you,” Robbie said. He was a moment in looking for more rocks with which to arm himself. “I shouldn’t have even told you to run, man. I should’ve let them have you.”

Fletcher just stared at him. He could see that the boy’s face was scraped on one side and that his eyes were gone quite mad.

“You lost the fucking kid,” Robbie said. “You get out there with that fucking kid and you can’t keep him out of the impact zone. I thought you knew your shit, man. This kid’s gone, dude. And these fuckers think it’s our fault.” He fired off another rock in the direction of the truck. “They got Martin,” he said.

Fletcher was momentarily awash in a dawning comprehension, of what had transpired, of how his part in it would be perceived. “What do you mean, they got him?” he asked.

“I mean some fucker cold-cocked him with a piece of wood.”

Fletcher nodded, for he had seen as much but worried that Robbie was referring to some new atrocity just witnessed.

“He’s still down there,” Robbie said.

Fletcher looked toward the beach. He found it blurred by sea spray and refracted light.

“The kid lost his engine,” Fletcher heard himself say. “He lost power.”

“Bullshit, man. I saw you fall out of the fucking boat.”

Fletcher stood in his wet rubber suit, on his bad ankle. He would not, he decided, be required to defend himself before the likes of Robbie Jones.

“You weren’t there,” Fletcher said. “I was.”

“No shit.”

At that moment, a volley of what could only be gunshots rang out from the beach. Robbie and Fletcher dove for cover behind the rocks as a number of bullets slammed into the trees high above their heads. They watched as a huge owl broke from its perch and flew screaming into the sun.

“Jesus Christ,” Fletcher said.

“Cop to it,” Robbie told him. They were seated now on the stiff winter grass which grew among the rocks, their backs to the stone. “The kid’s gone. You blew it. And we’re fucked.”

T
ravis was up with the dawn. The council of tribes was scheduled to meet that night and he had intended to tidy up his notes from the last meeting, as he had offered to act as unofficial secretary. But he was finding it difficult to concentrate. In fact, his mind kept slipping back to his meeting with Kendra Harmon. This annoyed him. Surely there were more productive things to concentrate upon. The problem, he concluded, was that his life had become one of routine. The women he saw from time to time tended now to be of a type, middle-aged divorcées, perverse mirror images of himself, with children and mortgage payments and health complaints. Everyone drank. And though the girls still got prettier at closing time, he had learned through experience it was best to be alone in the first light.

At length he stood up, for he had been seated at the kitchen table, and went to the old stove that had belonged to his grandmother and was equipped with a narrow compartment in which
one might keep a small wood fire burning. He added a few sticks of kindling then went to the sink to draw water for coffee. The seas were high again today. He could hear the thunder of the waves from his kitchen.

He leaned back against the counter, surveying the cluttered room. It was not much different, he decided, from many of the reservation houses. Artifacts, which had once been his grandmother’s, competed for space with the trash of the present. A television capped by a battered set of rabbit-ear antennas occupied one corner. Various magazines and newspapers lay strewn about the floor and furniture, which tended to be of the thrift-store variety. On one wall, there were a pair of old hand-carved pipes and a photograph of his grandmother in a plain cotton dress, wearing the beads he’d been asked to bring to the Jump Dance. On an opposing wall he’d hung a painting of an Indian maiden. She had been painted on black velvet, framed in gold, and Travis had picked her out at a Hupa crafts fair, the proceeds from which had gone to build a gymnasium for the Hupa school. All of which served in some way to elevate her, at least in Travis’s mind, from the trashy to the sublime. She was seated on a rock, her buckskin skirt parted to reveal a great expanse of shapely thigh. Her profile was to the viewer, her head tilted slightly upward, her sleek black hair thrown back. Her eyes were fixed upon some high and distant place. She was barefoot, a rawhide band around one ankle, suggesting captivity narratives and maidens in distress. As he looked at the painting now, he found that she reminded him of Kendra Harmon. Something was amiss down there on the river, and, at some point during the night, he’d decided that he should do something about it. She had, after all, come to his door, a bird with a broken wing. In fact, he had thought of little else during the past forty-eight hours, so that when his phone began to ring just now, his first impulse was to believe Kendra Harmon was calling for him.

At such an hour, this was highly unlikely, and yet he managed to hold the possibility in his mind as one might hold the flame of a candle, cupped in the palm of one’s hand to shelter it from the wind. The gesture gave him reason for hope. He found in it some small victory of the heart over the forces of entropy and quiet desperation.

Unhappily, it was not Kendra Harmon on the phone. It was Denice, the girl he had hired for the office. She was calling from the reservation and the moment he heard her voice, he knew that something was wrong. There was trouble on the river, she told him. David Little from Johnstons had been seen there in a rubber boat with Drew Harmon and several white men. A number of Yuroks had gone to investigate, her brother among them. Denice had seen them driving away in Bean Dip’s white Toyota, and she had seen that they were armed.

Travis left quickly. It was the kind of thing which might well come to nothing. Drew Harmon was not a fisherman. David Little, however, was Hupa, and Travis could not imagine why he would be with Drew Harmon on the river at dawn. Harmon sometimes surfed near there, at a big break north of the mouth, but he had not been known to require the aid of Indians or rubber boats. And then there was the specter presented by Bean Dip and whatever crew he was carting around in his truck. Travis knew most of them, by sight if not by name, the ones who’d dropped out early to take up careers as petty thieves and small-time drug dealers. He knew Bean Dip by name because he was one of the few Travis had been able to catch in the act of vandalizing his office. The boy was no more than sixteen years old and the thought of him at first light in the throws of some speed-induced dementia and packing a piece was not reassuring. It was Travis’s hope that by putting himself on the scene he might stop something before it started, and it was only when he had come within sight of the river and heard the sound of guns that he understood he had been too late.

He parked in a muddy turnout that marked the end of the lower road. He jumped from his truck and began to run. He ran toward the coast, his boots tearing holes in the loose soil. The trail ran downhill, through coffeeberry and poison oak. It passed among a stand of coastal alder still holding to the last of their leaves and came finally to an immense pile of logs it was necessary to traverse before reaching the beach but from whose summit the beach was plainly visible. And it was here, atop this stack of seaworn timber, that he was afforded his first glimpse of what the morning had wrought.

A number of Indians were grouped around a Chevrolet pickup Travis recognized as belonging to Goffer Mayhew, a local Yurok empowered by the BIA to enforce the fishing boundaries. A vehicle could indeed be gotten to the beach via a fire road some miles to the north, but the beach was tricky business and Travis could see that Goffer had managed to run himself aground on an outcropping of stone where the truck now sat with one rear tire spinning slowly in midair. There were other Indians on the beach as well, but these were strung out along the sand where it fell away in a long shallow decline and hence more difficult to see clearly. Most appeared grouped around a dark shape that hunkered in the mist at the water’s edge, and though he could not see this shape well enough to name it, he could see enough to know that he did not like the looks of it. It looked like death, he thought, even before he had given it a name or seen the figure on the rocks.

It was an Indian from the truck who drew his attention to the man on the rocks. A boy in khakis and a flannel shirt came suddenly from behind the old Chevy, darted across a rocky stretch of sand, and kicked at a prostrate figure—a blond-haired man in a gaily colored wet suit. Travis saw the body jerk with the kick, then fold in upon itself.

The boy delivered a second kick, then ran toward the truck in a crouched position as if he too were afraid of something. Travis was trying to guess what the something might be when one of the truck’s headlights suddenly disappeared in what, for Travis, was a soundless explosion of glass. This, in turn, was followed by the hollow crack of a rifle, and he saw that the truck’s owner, Goffer Mayhew, had himself climbed into the bed where he now stood sporting a red bandanna and sighting over the cab with a Winchester 30/30. He appeared, Travis thought, to be aiming toward a stand of trees on a small island situated at the mouth of the river not a hundred yards from where the Indians had gathered on its northern shore. On a minus tide, the island might be walked to. At the moment, it was separated from the mainland by a fifty-yard trough of fast-moving water.

Travis left his spot on the woodpile and went once more into the brush, following now the path of a small stream which ran to the
beach, arriving finally at that place where there was nothing more to separate him from the morning’s devastation.

•  •  •

The Indians, as Travis had noted, held the beach. An enemy he had yet to see had taken the island where, by some means, a wrist rocket perhaps, they were able to launch stones with sufficient speed and accuracy to provide cover for the prostrate figure now occupying that no-man’s land between the truck and the island. Further to the west, where the beach angled down toward the sea, the dark shape Travis had glimpsed from the timbers still hunkered in the mist, and he saw it now for what it was—the tattered remains of David Little’s Zodiac.