The Dogs of Winter (22 page)

Fletcher rose and went outside. He went for some way along the riverbank. It was the direction taken by Kendra Harmon, and he saw that her little truck had not come home. He was left with the feeling that the girl had run away from him.

In time, he turned from the road and looked to the river, to the blackness of its northern bank, trying to imagine what lay beyond. For it seemed to him that he had glimpsed it, that first afternoon, in the gloom and drizzle. A gray and rocky wasteland, run to some last place of land’s eventual ending, and it occurred to him that, for the first time in his forty-four years, he had come to know regret.

B
y midnight, one could no longer see the stars from the landing that marked Drew Harmon’s property. A heavy fog had rolled in off the ocean. It seemed to pour from the mouth of the river as if the river itself were some herald of bad tidings. “You live and die by the weather up here,” Drew was fond of saying. By which he meant the surf conditions were fickle, dependent upon many variables. And though Kendra could still not read his weather maps with their meticulous notations, she had, over the course of time, mastered some of the basics. She knew, for instance, that on the night in question, the fog was all wrong. It told her the ridge of high pressure her husband had been predicting had, in fact, broken down.

Not that such setbacks ever really deterred him. And as she drove across the muddy lot which bordered the landing, she could see that such was the case now. A boy was dead, another injured. The clear skies were gone. But the old van was gone as well and Drew with it, and she did not doubt that he had gone surfing.

The photographer’s van was where she had last seen it earlier that afternoon, suggesting that when all was said and done, he had gone too. That would make three of them out there, she thought, hunting their wave in the fog. She supposed that Drew had taken them up by the Hoof, to a big place he had found there. It would take them at least three days to get in and out, longer, she supposed, if they found what they were after. She would be alone. The thought even occurred to her that she might be gone when Drew came back, but then remembered that her leaving would require money. Christmas, she thought, feeling once more the complex surge of emotion which now accompanied the word.

She parked in the mud, then walked through the fog to the landing, that she might stand at the water’s edge, breathing in such scent of the sea as was borne upon the river. The big horns that marked the harbor entrance had commenced to moan. The dirge they toiled seemed omnipresent in the fog. She thought once more of euphoria as the precursor to despair, wondering at why this should be so, and if it necessarily was.

She still held her keys in her hand. There was one on the ring which fit the door of the shaping shack and she used it now, turning away from the river and going inside. She was not sure why. She carried the sack with her clippings over one shoulder. A few embers still glowed in the wood stove and a dim red light spread about the room. She stoked the embers with an iron poker, then threw in a few sticks of kindling. They caught at once, suggesting the men had not been gone for very long. The light of her small fire was yellow and uncertain and set the shadows to dancing. She saw Drew’s mattress on the floor, his water bottle, his magazines. She moved among the stacks of old wood and came to stand in front of the roll-top desk that had once belonged to Drew’s grandmother and had come with her by way of the Horn, landing at Sweet Home when there was yet no harbor there to speak of and so was borne, like the old lady herself, upon strong arms and shoulders over the very waves her grandson would one day come to ride.

She was looking rather absently over the books and magazines, the charts and papers and videocassettes all neatly arranged in their wooden shelves when one in particular caught her eye.
It was entitled
The Dogs of Winter,
and it bore the name of the photographer, Jack Fletcher. She pulled it from among the others and slipped it into the VCR perched atop the small television, which was itself perched atop the desk.

She started as the room filled with light—the small screen exploding with color. She had been expecting waves. What she got were Day-Glo alligators scattered like so many fallen logs, red tongues lolling beneath black plastic eyes. And these she found surrounded by yellow submarines and giant toadstools like something from beyond the looking glass, a hallucinogenic forest of pinks and yellows and greens, from the midst of which a huge sheet of water began to spew from four metal sluice gates.

She watched, a hand to her mouth as this impromptu river shot down a blue concrete runway to collide with a curved concrete wall. She watched as the water rolled up the face of this wall, arcing to form a long, perfectly shaped wave of chlorinated turquoise water, a wave big enough to stand in, she thought, and then noticed that someone had. There was a person in the water, surfing atop a kind of foam man. It was a thick-chested white kid, a kid so white as to suggest that much of his life had been spent beneath a rock, or perhaps here, in the shelter of this mechanical blue barrel. At that point she heard a voice she now recognized as Jack Fletcher’s.

“Duane Cravens, New Braunfels, Texas,” Jack Fletcher said. The camera pulled back to reveal a suntanned and smiling Jack Fletcher. He wore a blue ball-cap with the words “Dr. Fun” stitched above the brim.

The doctor was positioned upon a metal catwalk, talking to the kid, Duane Cravens, now standing just below him, waist-deep in the brilliant turquoise water.

“So, Duane,” Jack asked. “You ever surf in the ocean?”

The boy managed a sly smile. “Neow way,” Duane said, his accent a muted Texas twang. “Fish piss in the ocean.”

“Not to mention sharks.”

“Damn straight,” Duane said. “This friend of mine went up to Northern California. He saw this guy get bitten. Fucker bit the guy right in half then started spitting things out.”

“Jesus.”

“No shit.”

“You happen to know if the guy lived?”

Duane was a moment in thought, as if this answer required some consideration. “He lived,” Duane said at length. “But the guy was totally hassled.”

Dr. Fun appeared perplexed. “Hassled?” he asked. “By whom?”

Duane looked a little perplexed himself. “Oh, man,” he said finally, shaking his head at the doctor’s having missed the obvious. “By the shark.”

•  •  •

Kendra was on her way out of the shack when she heard the sound of something approaching the landing. It came by way of the road leading down from the bridge and the highway. Instinctively she drew back, holding the door open a crack, so that it was by this aperture that she saw it come. And it was, she saw, the thing which had trailed her along the river. There was no mistaking it. She saw it now for what it was—an old station wagon with the rear cut away, allowing for a small house to be built where the back seat and trunk had been.

The object came rolling down from among the trees, its engine popping and hissing, springs creaking. It might, she thought, have been the runaway calliope of a traveling roadside attraction, and she watched with some combination of fear and amazement as it rolled to a stop a short way from the landing. She watched as two doors swung open, as three men stepped out into the mud. For a moment, they stood there, looking about, as if to take some stock of their surroundings.

Briefly, she entertained the notion that they were simply lost, that not finding what they had come for, they would climb back into the thing which had brought them and go away. But her heart told her no. And though she could not see them clearly in the darkness, her instinct was that they were from upriver, that they had come about the boy. One wore a pointed hat, and beneath it, shoulder-length hair. Another was a big man. He wore a kind of poncho and there was something strapped to his leg, for she saw him bend to adjust it in some way. A third man said something to the others, and she saw him wave toward the river.

It seemed to her, at this point, that there were two things she
might do. She might stay in the shack, hoping somehow to hide there, or she might make a run for it. There was a deer trail just west of the stairs that led to the trailer. The men would no doubt see her. But the angle was in her favor. She would have a good head-start. If she could beat them to the trailer, she would have access to a phone. There was a weapon there too, an old shotgun that had belonged to Drew’s grandmother and which Drew had once shown her how to use.

There was not much time to decide. The men had begun to move. She took a breath, shoved open the door, and ran. She heard one of the men shout but she believed she had caught them flat-footed. She paused beneath the cover of the trees, for an instant, long enough to hear the sound of pursuit—though still some ways down. She had her lead. She turned and went on, pushing through the blackberry and stinging nettles which pulled at her clothes and lashed at her skin. She felt the bag containing her clippings fall from her shoulder. She stumbled among the gnarled roots and patches of dew-wet grass, coming in time to the rickety wooden landing built to front the old house trailer where it hunkered among the tall trees, only to find there that she had been outfoxed after all.

•  •  •

It was the Hupa who met her. He had guessed her destination, and while his companions chased her along the path, he had come by way of the stairs to the landing at the trailer’s door, so that when she stumbled from the woods, he was there to meet her, though it may have been that she surprised him almost as much as he surprised her. For though it cannot be said what he expected to find, it can only be stated that the moon had, at just that moment, begun to show through the fog, and it was by this light that he saw her—all black and white, with lines of blood drawn across her skin where the nettles had scratched her, with her chest heaving and eyes wide and spiderwebs alight with dew in her hair, so that even a man like him, who had long ago abandoned belief in anything more mysterious than blood, was, upon first sight, at such an hour, in such a place, willing to take her as a visitation.

T
here was only one seat in Drew’s van, and that was an old lawn chair he had placed behind the steering wheel. He had neglected, however, to bolt the chair down. In consequence, the invention made for highly unstable seating, and every time he went around a corner—which he was wont to do in excess of posted speeds—the chair would tilt up on one or two legs, swinging this way and that, with Drew hanging on to the wheel, turning the old van, and balancing himself at the same time, and in so doing, making a circus act out of every bend in the road, while at the same time, using his free hand to punctuate whatever discourse he was at that moment in the middle of. For the fact of the matter was that Mr. Harmon had, in his advancing years, become something of a professor.

It was a new wrinkle in the man’s act, but Fletcher could see how it had happened. He could imagine the solitary hours of hiking and surfing, of felling trees and shaping boards, the hours spent seated
in cold deep water, holding to all but nonexistent line-ups through shifting fogs and raging offshore winds. He could imagine him out there by his lonesome, plotting storms by campfires, rising in the still dark of a new day to drive yet more hours in his rusted, heater-less van, its walls covered with weather charts and infrared satellite photographs of the coasts of California and Oregon, and other photographs of perfect empty waves—not a surfer among them—arriving finally at some remote outcropping of stone to be marked and charted until he had marked and charted every reef and point, every cove and cloud break, had studied how each broke on differing swells, at differing tides, watching from unhikable cliffs, squinting toward some always distant horizon, and all the time with only himself for company.

What the man had hatched out of all this solitude was a kind of crazy quilt of a world view, stitched together from disparate parts. Nor was he inclined to show much sympathy for listeners. His thoughts were not arranged or edited along any discernable line but spewed forth in an intense but haphazard fashion, with much of his terminology left undefined. Ideas sprang from any number of arcane sources. He had, for instance, managed a kind of union between Terrance MacKenna’s notion of history’s fractal mountain and that of Miklos Dora—a.k.a. Da Cat, the king of Malibu’s rogue wave. It being Professor Harmon’s contention that, in fact, the Rogue Wave was the transcendental object at the end of history, that wave height, water density, speed, and intervals existed in a kind of Pythagorean flux, creating as it were a surfer’s cabal, the mysteries of what might only be plumbed with strict attention to a kind of cultus involving the grains of ancient woods and their arrangement along the lines of the ancient boards unearthed from the Hawaiian caves and charged with the magic of the Hawaiian kings.

The man could go on about these ideas at great length, and no doubt had. Typically, Fletcher suspected, with only the metal walls of the old van with their weather charts and satellite photos and empty waves for company. On the evening in question, however, these self-same walls were providing him with a captive audience in the form of Jack Fletcher and Robbie Jones.

Fletcher’s principal line of defense was silence. Which was
all-right with Drew, as the man was not much of a listener. It was the tortured landscape of his own mind that he was most interested in transversing. Others were invited to follow, as best they could.

Robbie Jones, on the other hand, was a restless listener in his own right, with his own poorly formed ideas on a wide variety of subjects. Nor was he a man to hide his great light beneath a bushel. As a result, the two men butted heads often. The subject of board design was a particularly sensitive issue. “But I’ve been there, dickweed,” Drew Harmon would say. “Been where?” would come the nasal response, and Harmon would dictate once more the details of his last visit to the basement of the Bishop Museum on the island of Oahu, of how he had gone equipped with white cotton gloves, of how he had been allowed to prowl among the stacks.