The Dogs of Winter (16 page)

The craft, or what was left of it, sat where it had no doubt been planted by a powerful shorebreak, impaled upon a jagged outcropping of stone though the lacy fringes of spent waves still reached out to brush it, beckoning it back to a more watery grave.

The Indians had collected about these two objects, the truck and the Zodiac, thereby dividing themselves into halves. Of the group which had gathered around the Zodiac, most were women. Some wept openly. Others held to the hands of small children, blank-faced before a rising sun. There were several older children there as well, who had come on their own, unattended, or who had broken from their parents and scampered about the beach as if at play, for unlike the men at the truck, these were well beyond the range of the rocks. A pair of rust-colored mongrels ran alternately among the children and the adults, pausing now and then to sniff at the remains of the inflatable boat. The coats of the dogs were wet and had begun to give off steam with the coming of the sun.

Travis’s trail had brought him to the beach very near the truck, and when Goffer’s rifle fired again, Travis could see the weapon’s recoil. He could hear the men shouting, calling out conflicting coordinates in frustrated attempts to direct fire, as Goffer was operating with the sun in his face rather than behind him and who, in any event, was not known as a marksman, or even a passable dart player.

Travis looked once more at the figure in the sand. The man was clearly alive but also clearly injured, perhaps seriously. He would
have to be gotten to soon. Though how this might be accomplished in the face of the flying rocks was not immediately apparent. On the other hand, Travis did not imagine the man’s cover could last for long, at which time it would be the men at the truck who would have to be reckoned with, for clearly some great wrong had been done here and they meant to have recompense.

It was a tricky situation and Travis was some time behind the last of the brush. He was thinking about his next move and how best to play it in light of these difficulties when he caught sight of Drew Harmon.

The man was running up the beach from the sea. He was coming fast, with long, powerful strides and before Travis had done little more than register his arrival, he was already past the Zodiac and among the men. Travis felt himself freeze, as if in expectation of some further calamity. What he saw, however, were men parting to make way for this
wagay
in their midst. Upon closer inspection, he supposed that he could not blame them, for the man came on with great authority and in general, it was as it had always been among his people. They knew true craziness when they saw it and were apt to respect it, or at least to give it clearance.

He supposed the man had taken them by surprise as well, for Harmon had fallen upon their flank and leapt at once into the bed of the truck so as to be beyond their reach, though unless they had been able to act as one, Travis thought it unlikely any could have successfully opposed him on their own, or even in concert with another.

Goffer turned when the truck heaved beneath him but he was way too slow. Drew Harmon had the rifle. He pulled it toward him and then back in a rapid motion. Travis saw the stock hit Goffer in the face. The Indian would have done well to let go. He hung on, however, and when Harmon pulled again, in a kind of twisting motion, the Indian was flung completely out of the truck and planted face first in the sand. Harmon was left in the bed, the rifle in his hands, swinging it in a wide arc as the men around him dove for cover.

Travis moved quickly then, out onto the sand, waving his arms. He saw the rifle swing toward him but he remained upright, his
arms in the air. The men made way for him. He heard someone call his name, but he ignored them. Goffer Mayhew was pulling himself out of the sand. The rifle had broken his nose and split his mouth. Goffer was trying to put the nose back together with a thumb and forefinger, spitting blood and teeth into the beach.

“Goddamn little pissant in those trees,” Drew said. “We don’t get that fucker out of here, someone is going to get killed.”

“Someone already has,” one of the men said.

“It wasn’t them that did it,” Drew said. “Let ’em take their guy and go.”

Travis was somewhat amazed at Drew Harmon’s demeanor. He’d pulled his hood away from his head. There was a dark light in his eyes, with the veins and muscles standing out on his neck where it strained at the collar of his wet suit, but the man’s voice was calm and he was talking about pissants in the trees as if he and Travis had come to the beach to do no more than cast their bait into the surf.

“Who is it?” Travis asked.

Harmon ignored the question. A rock creased the roof of the cab. Drew ducked and cursed and shouted toward the island, though it seemed to Travis that his words must have been taken on the wind, which, like the sun, was in favor of the shooter in the trees. He was answered by a second rock.

Drew turned, squatting on his haunches, the cab at his back, the rifle across his knees. “Kid must be blind as well as stupid,” he said.

“Good aim for a blind man,” Travis offered.

Drew just looked at him. “I tried to get to them on the board,” he said. “Currents pulled me way the hell over to the other side of the river. I had to paddle all the way back around the bay to get in here.”

Travis looked toward the sea, lost for a moment in simple astonishment at this feat, though Drew himself had spoken of it as if he had done no more than dog paddle around some placid lake. It was the Indians who answered Travis’s question, crowding about him, speaking all at once. The
wagays,
it seems, had come to surf. David Little had been paid to take them out. They wanted photographs. It had gone badly. The boat was lost. David could not be found. While Drew stayed out to continue the search, three of the surfers had
come to the beach. There had been an argument, a fight. At least two of the invaders had fled to higher ground. The standoff had begun.

“We’ve got to get them off the land,” Drew said.

Travis nodded. The present situation was barely under control, and he suspected there were already other men going for guns. If someone was shot here, federal agents would come. People would be fucked with. And that was never good.

“Tide’s still high,” Drew said. “If you were to get your ass out there in a boat you might get ’em off the rock before it turns.”

The plan was not without merit. Travis knew these people. They would not leave the beach. It was their beach. He looked over the men grouped around him. They were not bad people, he thought, a few fishermen, a few loafers and drinkers, a few delinquents. He saw them in the misty light of the beach, in their jeans and khakis and flannel shirts worn too big and untucked over T-shirts. He saw the knit caps, worn at the eyebrows as if they had made a quick inspection of the outside world and chosen as their models the very ones most likely to ensure their own demise.

“How bad is he?” Travis asked. He was looking now at the young man who had fallen.

“Don’t know,” Drew said. “I’ll look. But he ought to see a doctor. I can tell you that right now.”

Travis was thinking this over when he caught sight of Bean Dip, together with Denice’s brother among the men. To his great horror, he saw that Bean Dip was indeed armed. The butt end of a small caliber revolver could be seen sticking out of the waistband of his jeans, and even as Travis watched, he saw Bean Dip pull the gun. His first thought was that Bean Dip would drawn down on Drew Harmon. Bullets would fly. Any number of people would be killed. Instead, however, Bean Dip stepped out onto the sand and began firing rounds at the island.

Travis got to him quickly, seizing him by the wrist. The youth’s arm felt no bigger around than a yardstick in his hand and when he twisted it, Bean Dip let go the gun.

“Are you crazy?” Travis asked him.

Bean Dip responded by trying to kick him in the balls. Travis gave
him the heel of his hand up alongside his temple and set him down in the sand. He felt a rock pass his ear. Close. He could hear it sing. He reached down and grabbed the kid, dragged him to his feet and stepped back, getting both of them behind the truck. Bean Dip shook loose, spitting and cursing, demanding his piece.

Travis flipped open the chamber and dumped the remaining shells on the sand. He stuffed the empty gun into the waistband of his own trousers and looked at the men grouped around him. “Okay,” he said. He tried to make himself heard, and he saw that most of them were looking at him. “We don’t want the feds out here. I’m gonna try and get those guys off the reservation. You see me out there, you back off.”

The faces which stared back at him were, for the most part, impassive. Still, he thought, they would do it, could the
wagays
be removed. He looked once more at Drew Harmon.

The man was still hunkered down in the bed of the truck, his hair in wet tendrils draped over his shoulders, an odd half smile playing about his face as if this last little scene with Bean Dip was something acted out for his entertainment.

“You got about two hours before the tide turns,” Drew told him.

Travis just looked at him. He wondered if the idea that any of this was his fault had ever entered the man’s head, but he did not suppose so. Guilt was for lesser men. A sign of weakness.

“I’ll tell you what,” Travis said. “I’ll make it just as fast as I can.”

Drew Harmon grinned at him. “You do that,” he said.

Travis stared at the grinning face, taken with a moment of profound contempt, for the man’s arrogance, for the ignorance which accompanied it. Had Mr. Harmon taken the time to learn a little more about the people he had come to live among he would not have hired a Hupa to bring a boat through Yurok waters, and at least some of the morning’s troubles would have been averted. Nor, Travis believed, would he have been so complacent just now, for in truth there was a good deal more to be worried about than the turning of the tide.

The men on the beach were Yurok. David Little had been Hupa. His people came from a particularly bad place deep in the interior of the reservation. In time, the word of this thing would spread. It
would reach even into those places without phones or electricity where a certain breed of men with guns and idle hands might leave untended their meth labs and fields of contraband long enough to come downriver, drawn by the promise of sport and a taste for mindless violence. Travis knew these men, as much, that is, as one could, for they were of a different sort from these on the beach and could not truly be known by anyone of this world, for theirs was the vestige of some other, and all he could say of them with certainty was that they would not be so easily reasoned with, or held at bay, even by the likes of Drew Harmon. There was, of course, little point in going into any of this with the surfer. One might as well tell it to the wind. And so it was that having said his good-byes to the men, Travis turned and made his way back through the manzanita with the beach grown silent behind him, save for the sound of the waves which continued to rage and moan as if they had not yet heaped sufficient calamity upon the land.

•  •  •

Travis kept a boat on the river, an aluminum-hulled skiff with a Johnson outboard. The boat was stored on the dock of an old friend, a Yurok barber by the name of Carl Sugarfoot. The dock was about a mile and a half north of the mouth. Travis reached it quickly in his truck and soon he was on the water, motoring toward the sea.

The island upon which the surfers had stranded themselves was known locally as the Witch’s Rock. Travis had visited it many times. He’d camped and picnicked there with each of his wives. As he approached it now, upon sun-spangled water, it was impossible not to think of those times, or to see it as a perfect day for such an outing—a thing to be undertaken with a bottle of wine, in the company of a young lady. Kendra Harmon came to mind. He was imagining what that might be like as the island drew near. He put in at a tiny cove on the southern side, then tied his boat off to a tree that jutted from the rocks at an angle perpendicular to the water below. It was an easy climb from this point, and soon he was looking down on the grassy bowl at the center of the little island which was shaped something like a squat volcano.

The surfers were just about where he had expected to find them but he was some time in watching, wary of getting nailed with a rock. Given the number he’d seen pelting the beach, he had supposed both men were in some way armed. He saw now this was not the case.

One of the men seemed to have injured himself. He was stretched out on his back in the grass, his hands laced behind his head, but he’d pulled off one of his booties, as if to examine his foot. The other man, however, was getting off enough shots for any two men. He was a lanky, well-muscled youth with a shaved head and a huge tattoo which covered most of his back. Travis was afforded a look at the tattoo, as the man had peeled his wet suit down around his waist. He saw too that he had been right about the wrist rocket. The kid would scrabble about on the rocks like a spider on speed, collecting ammunition, then rise to fire, occasionally getting off some kind of hoarse scream as well, though between the roar of the surf and the rush of wind, his words were, for the most part, incomprehensible.

Travis waited until the surfer was looking for rocks to make his entrance into the grassy bowl. He did so with his hands raised, palms out, in what he assumed to be some universal gesture of peace and goodwill.

The man on the ground saw him at once. Travis saw him sit up, then call something to the kid with the wrist rocket. The man on the ground was probably close to Travis’s age. He looked to be fairly tall himself, a bit lanky, like the kid, but a good deal softer around the edges. His hair was straight and brown and fell to the collar of his wet suit.

“I’m here to help,” Travis said.

“Help what?” the kid asked him.

Travis was a moment in staring at this bald-headed
wagay.
He could see where the boy might be a problem.

“Name’s Travis McCade. I work for the local Indian council. I’ve come to get you and your friend here off the reservation.”