The Dogs of Winter (26 page)

Travis knew. Bad Indians from up the river. A kidnapping. Enough to bring out the guns and the dogs.

“It would be bad if we called them and you were wrong,” Blacklage said. “If the girl was with the surfers.”

This was true. Travis stood and went to the wall at the side of Jerry’s desk. There was a map of the reservation there. It was a good deal more readable than what he had taken from Harmon’s floor and showed clearly the land extending into the Pacific, the great bay which lay to the south.

“There might be a way of finding out,” Travis said.

“What? If you’re right about the girl?”

“I could find out if she was with the surfers or not.” The idea was taking shape even as he spoke.

“How’s that?”

“Go out and look.”

“Shit. You couldn’t leave now. It’s too late. You leave tomorrow, you’ll spend the whole day just getting there.”

“Not with a boat. You can motor up there from the harbor in a
couple of hours. I was thinking, I might prevail upon the old man to run me up there first thing tomorrow. He could drop me off in the bay. I could kayak to the beach.”

Blacklage was up now too, looking at the map with Travis.

“You ever kayak out there?”

“No.”

The two men were a moment in studying the map.

“I don’t know,” Blacklage said. “I wouldn’t want to try it.”

Travis listened with growing impatience, with Blacklage, with himself. It seemed to him that he’d mishandled just about everything so far, and he shook his head. “We need to find out,” he said. “Those guys shouldn’t be out there anyway, not after what happened. And if Kendra isn’t with them, then fuck it. Bring on the feds. The sooner the better. Meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to start looking for that house car.”

Blacklage snorted at him. “Needle in a haystack,” he said.

This was true. There was a network among the reservations, a brotherhood of miscreants. Men such as these might move like ghosts among the old logging roads and backwoods camps. The fact that the car had not been licensed in more than a decade spoke of the paths taken by its owners. Still, it was something to do. He said as much to Blacklage.

The man had gone to a little refrigerator he kept at the side of the desk, removing from it a fresh diet cola. He opened the can with a loud pop. “Damn,” Blacklage said. “Of all the people that photographer had to drown.”

T
he men had still not offered Kendra food. She had been in the wooden box since the advent of her capture. Hours now. She could not say how many. Nor had the men offered her any opportunity to relieve herself. Apparently they did not think of her in those terms.

They continued along the rough roads, though at one point the ride had gotten smooth and the tires had begun to hum. She had raised herself a bit then, to look from a window. There was little to see save trees. She judged they were headed north, although this was only to be expected if what they said was true, that they were taking her to the Devil’s Hoof. It was a poisonous thought. In time, however, even that pain seemed to recede before the need to empty her bladder, and she began to cast about beneath the wooden shell for something she might use to this end.

She undertook this investigation surreptitiously, as she had no desire to draw the attention of the men who sat only a few feet away,
all three riding in the front seat and separated from her by means of a plastic shower curtain which had been shortened and hung upon a rod and which, at this moment, was only half covering the rectangular window that had been cut between the camper and the car.

She managed her search from the fetal position, from beneath the coarse blanket, at intervals snaking out a hand or foot to lift some piece of canvas or push at a box. For though the mattress upon which she lay took up most of the camper’s floor space, there was a fair amount of junk piled around it.

Eventually, she came upon an old five-gallon can that she thought might work. It smelled of chemical residue but it was empty and the top had been cut away. It was only when she had rolled the thing toward her, and squatted above it, hunkered as tightly into one corner as she could get, the old blanket still covering her shoulders, that she discovered the top had been removed with tin snips, leaving behind a number of jagged edges, and it was on one of these that she cut her thigh, allowing her blood to run into the can along with her urine, which burned badly enough to suggest an infection.

The smell was bad too and soon filled the interior of the plywood box and the men caught her at it. She saw a hand on the shower curtain, and she heard one of them say something. The others laughed. She tried to move, then lost her balance, for the logging roads were rough, filled with ruts and curves, and when she fell, she cut her leg once more and the can rolled away from her, dumping her urine across the already soiled mattress upon which she had been plundered.

When next she looked toward the front seat, she found the skinny Indian watching her. The man was peering at her from between the shower curtains, his toothless grin framed by yellow daisies and guernsey cows, as if she were the object in some carnival peep show in which the usual roles had been reversed and it was the citizenry placed in dioramas arranged for their various humiliations, with the freaks come to gawk in demented wonder.

•  •  •

They came late that afternoon to the Tolowan reservation at Neah Heads. She knew the place, for she had visited it with Drew.
The tribe ran a campground there. It was located in the coastal range and looked out over the beaches which lay north of the long point. From the camp, it was a day’s hike back to the Hoof’s south-facing slopes where a series of trails led down to the beach the surfers called Big Sandy.

There were clapboard cabins here that the Tolowans rented in the summer, to tourists and hikers and even a few surfers come to explore the rocks and beaches to the south. In summer it could be a busy place. She and Drew had come for the last time on the Fourth of July when the Tolowans were selling firecrackers as well as their beaches. It was the occasion on which her hike up the little river valley had been cut short by the pit bulls she’d told Travis about. Still, around the camp, the air had been scented with gun powder and a festive mood had prevailed. She and Drew had watched sunsets and fireworks from a high place above their cabin, at rest in the grass, a bottle of wine between them. But the summer was past now and the cabins sat empty in the wind above a distant, steel gray sea. It appeared, however, that at least one of the men was known here by someone, as they were given one of the more remote cabins for the night. It was a flimsy clapboard affair, damp and uninsulated.

Kendra watched as the men built a fire. It was a poor excuse for heat. The cabin remained cold and unless you were sitting on top of it, the stove was little match for the north wind whistling through the cracks in the rough, slatted walls. She hated it that they had come here, to a place she’d shared with Drew. Must you take every memory? she asked of no one. Will nothing remain unspoiled? There was no response to these questions, hallucinatory or otherwise. The men, in fact, had very little to say to her. Much of their time was spent oiling and cleaning the two rifles she had seen that morning. One belonged to the big man, the other to the boy. The big man’s looked the more efficient of the two, with a long barrel and a big telescopic scope mounted above the stock. The boy’s seemed small by comparison but each took great care in the maintenance of his piece, and, in time, the talk turned to shooting and how upon arrival at the cliffs they would be looking down on the beaches and the men below.

They talked of strategy as well, and she was given to understand it was their intention to kill anyone they could but Drew outright, and she saw that it was their intention to save him for last that they might make sport with his wife before he died.

In Neah Heads she was given something to eat for the first time, cold jerky, canned beans, and beer, which was what they ate themselves and she tried but was unable to keep it down.

“Bitch is worse than a dog,” the big man said.

When they had stopped laughing at her, they stuck her back in the plywood box while they finished with their food and their guns in the meager heat provided by the stove, and she was left to the cold and the coming dark, alone with the certain knowledge they would come for her again when they were ready.

She wrapped herself once more in the old blanket for she had begun to shake uncontrollably. She sat with her back to the wall, pressing herself against it, trying to force her mind to do something. It had never been a very dependable organ, even under the best of circumstances. She thought, at the very least, it could oblige her by providing some abyss into which she might fall. But there was nothing and she remained where she was, aware of each torment. She drew up her knees. She placed her forearms across them and pressed her brow to the backs of her hands. She closed her eyes. The wind was in the trees. Something thumped against the truck. She thought at first it was them, but when she looked, there were only the shadows deepening beneath the trees, an advancing darkness before which she was quite powerless. She could not hide in drink or reach for a light. She felt the panic as heat and constriction. She closed her eyes once more, then opened them quickly, for it seemed to her as if she had glimpsed something after all—a shape in the darkness, a thing she had never seen before, yet surely, she thought, he had been there all along. Maybe she had never looked. Maybe it was the fever. But she saw him now, with a sudden clarity, as if he were the supplicant, she the hieratic witness to his entreaties. It was so simple, really. One need only embrace him to make it so.

•  •  •

In time they came. It was the skinny man with white hair, the Tolowan with the toothless grin, that she saw first. For being the most eager, he had gotten there ahead of the others and jerked open the door and that was how she saw him—framed as a scarecrow in the last purple light. She watched as he sought her out, then saw him stop short, stammering to himself as the others joined him, so that in a moment all three of them were there, gaping, in various stages of drunkenness and undress, in the weird half light which was neither day nor night, for she had put a little something over on them and what they saw was not exactly what they had come for, or had expected to find.

She was quite naked and bruised, with blood still on her thighs from the things they had done, but she was seated on the horsehair blanket with her head bowed and when she turned toward them, they saw that she had drawn on her forehead a pentagram with her own blood. Her arms she held crossed in the attitude of skull and crossbones, and her eyes were fixed on some place they could not see.

“What the fuck . . .” the skinny man said.

“I have eaten from the drum,” she told them. “I have drunk from the holy basket. I have passed within the bridal chamber. You come in, you can meet my friend.”

T
he surfers lolled about their little beach for the rest of the afternoon. They ate dried fruit and soybeans. The surf, Drew predicted, would come with the rising tide. Upon arrival, he had indicated rocks at the north end of the cove, proclaiming that by late afternoon, they would be under water, and that, in their place, a clean right-hander would begin to rifle off the point.

Fletcher had little interest in such things. He had come for Heart Attacks, and finding it was all that mattered. For the moment he was content to break out the soma and Percodan.

Harmon saw him with the pills and wondered what they were.

Fletcher told him.

“Stuff will make you old before your time.”

“Already happened.”

“You ain’t givin’ up, are you, Doc?”

“I was givin’ up, I wouldn’t be here.”

“You think you shoot Heart Attacks, they’re gonna let you back in?”

“Let me put it this way,” Fletcher said. “I got a kid, an ex-wife, and a whole shitload of bills.”

Drew Harmon nodded. He studied the ocean before them, the play of light upon the waves. “Let that be a lesson to you,” he said.

When Harmon had left him, he lay on his back. The sand was warm here. The drug put him in a dreamy state. He began to study, from this position, the unnatural collision of earth and sky. For the cliffs were set here upon an incline, pitching forward above the sand, cutting patterns from the sky and so appearing, in that angle from which Fletcher viewed them, as the edges of continents, replete with inlets and peninsulas and jagged bays. The sky became the sea, upon whose surface thin rages of cloud swirled as might distant storms, allowing Fletcher to find in all of this an inverted reality. A fun-house mirror upon whose surface the land bowed and the sea undulated, but from which he and his companions, being of little consequence, had been omitted altogether.

The view interested him, and, in time, he decided to shoot it. He did so lying on his back, framing what he found to be the most interesting angles. Drew Harmon came over to watch. He had a large black bound notebook with him and Fletcher could hear him as he shot, the scratching of pen upon paper. Neither man spoke and for some time, each went about his own business.

Eventually, the sun came to the edge of the rock and burned the color from the sky. Fletcher stopped shooting.

“You find something to interest you?” Harmon asked him.

“It’s the angle of these cliffs,” Fletcher said. “The rocks against the sky.”

“Think they’ll put it in the magazine?”

“Who gives a shit?” Fletcher said.

Drew Harmon nodded. “It will be so noted,” he said, and Fletcher could hear him once more, scratching in his book.

•  •  •

In time, what Drew had predicted came to pass, and with the rising of the tide, a clean right-hander did indeed materialize where the surfer had said it would, and with the sky just beginning to color
in the West, Drew and Robbie broke out their gear and stood naked on the beach, pulling on wet suits.