The Dogs of Winter (44 page)

The man with the Range Rover took them to their truck. From there, they drove to the nearest town where they showered and doused themselves with calamine lotion. Travis allowed his son to go first. He went next, and when he came out of the bathroom to dress, he found his son had turned on the television set. The boy was seated on the edge of the bed in his underwear, engrossed in a rerun of
The Munsters.

The sight depressed him further. He had hoped to start something here. He had hoped to show something of the old ways and of the values which accompanied them to his son. But, in fact, he had known little about the dance himself and now here they were, holed up in a cheap motel room while Herman Munster cavorted on a miniature screen and cars whizzed past along the interstate.

Travis turned off the television, and, after dressing, they drove to town. They ordered burgers and fries and chocolate shakes. Travis watched as his son poured catsup on his french fries. They ate in near silence, surrounded by photographs of loggers and miners and other industrious sorts who had participated in the destruction of the very thing his people had come to celebrate, and still were, somewhere up the big river.

He was feeling quite low as they left the restaurant and walked out into the parking lot and the last light, and it was here he saw something which stopped him in his tracks.

What he saw was the photographer, Jack Fletcher. The man was dressed in jeans and hiking boots and a flannel shirt. His hair had grown long enough to wear in a ponytail. He was still driving the old Dodge van. Travis could see the tires were new, but the windows were still broken out of the back. When Travis called to him, he turned, then walked to meet him.

“What’s the matter?” Travis asked him. “You lost?”

Fletcher smiled. He looked relatively well, Travis thought, although he was limping a bit, as if perhaps his back had stiffened up on him.

“I live here now,” Fletcher told him.

“No way.”

Fletcher nodded. “Not here exactly. Just north of the border. I’m on a river there.”

A moment passed between them. In fact, Travis supposed, there was not really much to say.

“Funny I should see you here,” Fletcher said. “I was in your office the other day. But the girl said you were out.”

“Yeah,” Travis said. “I was here.” At which time, he thought to introduce his son. Fletcher shook the boy’s hand, then looked at Travis once more.

“You remember that conversation we had once? You told me about the custom of making recompense . . .”

Travis remembered.

“I was wondering,” Fletcher said, “if you knew much about David Little’s family.”

“That’s why you were in the office?”

Fletcher nodded.

“What about them?”

“I guess I was wondering if you might know if there was something they needed. Something specific. A new boat. A car. Maybe there are other kids. Maybe they need something for school.”

“I don’t know. It’s been a while since I’ve talked to them.”

“But you could find out?”

Travis shrugged. “What is it? Your magazine come through with some money after all?”

“I don’t have a magazine,” Fletcher told him. “This would be strictly between me and them. But I would need a go-between. I can’t just head out there and start asking around.”

Travis looked at him a long moment. “A car?” he said. “A boat? Might run you into some money.”

“I think we can work something out.”

Travis nodded. He looked to the mountains. They were blue in the afternoon light. “You ever hear anything from Kendra Harmon?” he asked.

The other man was a moment in replying. “No,” he said at length. “Have you?”

Travis shook his head.

“What I don’t get is how she ever got away from those men. The Hupa was a bad one.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Fletcher said. “I found her sitting on a little bridge on the floor of this valley.”

“I know the place,” Travis told him. “There was an old woman used to live there. She was suppose to be a healer. She could see things as well. If someone thought a
hee-dee
had put a curse on them, she was the kind of person they would go to. She could see if someone had put something on you.”

“What’s a
hee-dee?
” Fletcher asked him.

“A sorcerer. Something like that. My old man always called them
hee-dees.
”

Fletcher nodded.

“The old lady died, maybe a year back. Last I heard, some cousin of hers was down there. Everybody figured he was growing weed. Blacklage was in there a week or two after you were. Said the old place had burned to the ground. There was no sign of anybody around. Only thing he could find to suggest someone had even been there after Rose Hudson was a new well pump. Guess you didn’t see anything.”

“Just Kendra.”

Travis nodded. “Well pump would suggest the stories about the cousin may have been right. I mean you’re gonna grow the shit, you got to water it.”

“I suppose so,” Fletcher said.

Travis looked hard at the man before him. The man looked back, an even gaze. A light wind was kicking down upon them now, out of the canyon and, at his side, he sensed his son, eager to be gone.

“So, how do you want me to get hold of you, I talk to the family?”

“I’ll be in touch,” Fletcher told him.

Travis nodded. The two men looked at one another again. At length, Travis held out his hand. Jack Fletcher took it, and Travis could feel the blisters on the other man’s hand, not yet gone to calluses.

Travis got into his truck with his son. He watched as Jack Fletcher went up the steps and into the restaurant whose entrance was marked by a carved eight-foot statue of Big Foot, the beast.

“Who was that?” Jason asked him.

Travis continued to watch the restaurant. “Some guy,” he said. And he looked at his son. “But I think he’s okay.”

His son nodded.

Travis felt himself smile. It seemed to him that he had not done so in some time. He started the truck and turned from the lot.

“You going to come back up here next year?” his son asked.

Travis was surprised by the question, but then his children were like that, he had found. He could not always tell what they were thinking and they often saw more than he thought they had. “You think we should?” he asked.

The boy looked thoughtfully out the window. “What did it mean,” he asked, “when the fire builders held those baskets above their heads?”

“The basket is supposed to be the family. When the fire builder holds it above his head, that means he places the needs of the family above his own.” Travis looked at his boy. “And then did you see what he did with it?”

The boy shook his head.

“He brought it down,” Travis said. He made a motion with his own hand in the cab of the truck. He held it in front of his groin. “That was to show he placed the good of the family before his male drive.”

“I don’t get it,” his son said.

“You will.”

Travis felt somewhat pleased with himself, though, in fact, that was about all he knew of what they had seen. The rest of it was still a mystery to him.

“Will you dance?” his son asked him. “If we come back? If your leg is better?”

Travis looked across the hood toward the line of blue mountains. “I don’t know,” he said. “I might. I can buy enough bug spray.”

The boy laughed. Travis laughed as well, for the fact of the matter was, he had been set upon by the sudden notion that indeed he would be back. He would persevere. He could not say with certainty where any of this would lead. Nor would he venture a guess as to whether or not the Jump Dance of the Hupa might have some function in the economy of the universe, as his cousin would no doubt assert. All he knew was that he would be back. He would take his place among the dancers.

K
endra Harmon spent some time with the women of Casa de Madre. For the Tolowan woman had brought her to a center for battered women in the town of Redding, some two hundred miles from the coast. It was not a bad call. And indeed, they were nice to her there, though she felt under no obligation to talk, as if she had taken some vow of silence unbeknownst even to herself.

She was seen by a doctor. The woman prescribed pills, which was to her liking, as the pills provided her with a place to hide. There were times when she thought of the Hupa, reliving what had transpired in the valley. The mystery was that the man who had taken her had saved her as well. He had killed the dogs, in rapid succession. A shot apiece, or so it had seemed. At which point, he had turned his attention to the men. The last thing she saw, before going into a full-on duck-and-cover routine, was the man in the T-shirt and boxer shorts. He was already going
down—a huge red stain blossoming across his shorts—but firing madly with the automatic weapon. She had felt the bullets in the air. When next she looked, however, everything was dead. Everything except her and the chicken, and she would never know about the Hupa, if he had really thought to save her, or simply reckoned his chances better at making a stand than at making a run, or how a man might act who believed his lifeline to have been cut. But then, she supposed, the actions of all men were beyond her. This went for Drew as well. In the end, she had offered him a life. Her offer had not been without its terms. She had offered herself, in Sweet Home, and all that that implied. He had turned her down. Sometimes, when she saw him now, it was on the beach at Hatteras, on the day of the contest. He was something else that day, fit and powerful. But when she had congratulated him on winning, he had only laughed and said it was a legends event. And when she had asked him what that meant, he had told her it was a contest for guys who used to be somebody.

•  •  •

Days passed. She could not have told you how many. On a particular afternoon, however, she felt moved to speak. She had been lying in bed. It was a position from which she was afforded a view of the small courtyard around which the rooms had been arranged. There were flowers there, a couple of dwarf orange trees come to blossom. She heard two women talking somewhere behind her.

One of the women was newly arrived. She had been badly beaten. She was speaking with another woman and they were talking about the men who had abused them.

Kendra listened for some time. At last, she rose from her bed and walked over to where they sat, on an old couch near a coffee table with magazines on it. The women looked up at her approach.

“I can tell you what to do,” Kendra said.

The women looked at her. She might have been a ghost to their eyes, so pale and wan did she appear, a mere wisp of a thing in the winter light.

“You have to show them something,” Kendra said. “You have to show them your magic is stronger than theirs.”

At which point, she made a motion in the air, as if she were collecting something that she then folded and placed beneath her breast, her hands held now in the shape of a triangle, as if they were themselves that thing she had so collected. “They’ll never find it here,” she told them. And she smiled.

I
n the months that followed, Jack Fletcher’s photograph appeared on the cover of Michael Peters’s magazine. It appeared in several newspapers and in one New York publication as well, often in such places linked to the drowning of Drew Harmon, a big-wave legend who lost his life to a shark in huge surf at a remote spot in the Pacific Northwest, achieving with his passing a notoriety he had not enjoyed since his emergence as a young lion on the North Shore of Oahu.

O’Neil Wet Suits purchased rights, as Robbie Jones was one of their team riders, and the photograph was reprinted throughout the world. In time, you could find it on posters from California to Japan. Kids Jack Fletcher would never know hung it on their walls, and they knew the name of the spot and the name of the rider. Some even knew the name of the man who had taken the picture as well. But the name of Jack Fletcher appeared on no more mastheads and his photographs were not seen in the surfing magazines,
or any other, ever again. Nor did he, as Michael Peters had predicted he would, ever admit to having, or express an interest in selling any photographs of Drew Harmon on his last go out at a remote spot many a rumor held to have been the real Heart Attacks.

With the passing of time, Jack Fletcher himself became a more difficult man to find. Members of the surfing community would sometimes wonder what had become of him, and, in time, his name was often mentioned in connection with the likes of Drew Harmon. Because surfers loved their stories. Big waves and outlaws. Eccentrics who had managed somehow to beat the system, to stay in the life when others moved inland and paid taxes.

It was rumored that Jack Fletcher had stayed up north. It was said he bought land there, a choice piece with difficult access and a view to the sea. No one was quite sure where the money had come from. They figured the photograph probably made him some, but not that much.

As for Travis McCade, he never asked where the money came from, but then again, he never had to, though it did puzzle him as to how that particular crop had been grown up there in the little river valley, as neither he nor Blacklage could ever find any evidence that the land around the old sight had been in any way tilled or disturbed. It took some BIA agents and a bust upriver to show him the light.

“Damndest thing,” Blacklage told Travis, for he was still in Sweet Home and he’d dropped by to talk about it. “The guy had filled these big burlap bags with sod and weed and hoisted ’em up into the branches of a bunch of scrub oak. Practically invisible.”

Travis had given this some thought. “Kind of like that grove of oak up there by Rose Hudson’s old place,” he had said. And the two men had looked at each other, and laughed. And that was the end of it. And nothing was ever said about it again, either by Travis or by the Chief of the Tribal Police. For the important part was that Jack Fletcher was proving to be a man of his word—the Little family having, by that date, received in recompense for the accidental death of their son, a new Boston Whaler. In addition to which their daughter attended a beauty college in Eureka, eventually opening a salon on the lower Elwa, which, in fact, did quite well. The monies for these
things had arrived in monthly installments. They were paid in cash, dropped on the first Monday of each month in an unmarked envelope at the Office for Indian Affairs in Sweet Home and passed on to the Little family by the office’s director, Travis McCade.