The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The paramedic, without breaking his rhythm, looked up and said something in Spanish to the driver, something that had the cognate os-pee-tal in it, but the driver just shook his head and turned away to spit in the dirt. “You don’t want,” he said finally, shaking his head very slowly. “You want el córoner.”

  “Os-pee-tal,” the paramedic insisted, and Bill joined him, aping his pronunciation: “Os-pee-tal.”

  The fat woman emitted a pinched labial noise as if she were unstoppering a bottle, then turned—fat ankles, splayed feet in a pair of huaraches that sank into the ochre mud as if it were dough—and started back across the lot. Sten could still feel the blood thudding in his ears, though he was calming now, what was done was done, already thinking of the repercussions. Certainly he’d acted in self-defense, and here were the witnesses to prove it, but who knew what the laws were like in this country, what kind of flaming hoops they’d make him jump through—and lawyers, would he need a lawyer? He scanned the group—they were still milling there, clueless—but no one would look him in the eye. He wasn’t one of them, not anymore—he was something else now.

  Sheila came up to him then, to where he was standing with his arm around Carolee still, and pressed his hand. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re a hero, a real hero.” Then she bent to the tangle of things scattered on the blanket to reclaim her purse and passport—her precious passport—and as if a spell had been broken, they all came forward now, one after another, to sift through the pile and take back what belonged to them.

  2.

  THE RED CROSS CLINIC (La Clínica de la Cruz Roja) was where they wound up, the whole tour group, as if this were part of the package. The driver had retraced their route at the same breakneck speed he’d employed on the way out—or no, he’d seen this as an excuse to go even faster, pedal to the metal all the way, as if the bus had been scaled down and transformed into an ambulance, though as far as Sten could see there was no need for hurry, not on the gunman’s account. He hoped he was wrong. Hoped the guy was only unconscious, in a coma maybe, deep sleep, dreaming. They’d give him oxygen at the hospital, defibrillation, adrenaline, something to kick-start his heart and wake him up . . . but what if he didn’t wake up? Was that manslaughter? A term came to him then: justifiable homicide. That was what this was. He’d acted instinctively, in self-defense, in defense of his wife and all the others too—he’d neutralized a threat, that was all, and who could blame him? But what if the man was paralyzed, alive still, but dead from the neck down, what then? Who’d pay for the nurse to spoon-feed him and change his diapers? There was no health care down here, no insurance, no nothing. Would there be a lawsuit? They had lawsuits everywhere. And jails. They had jails everywhere too.

  He tried not to think about it, tried to wipe his mind clean. The whole way back he’d held tight to Carolee’s hand, his eyes locked straight ahead, the bus rattling till every nut and bolt down the length of it began to sing. Time compressed. The jungle slashed by on either side and the potholes exploded under the wheels. He felt sick. There was a kind of buzzing in his skull, as if a swarm of insects had got trapped inside. His knees were cramped. He felt thirsty all over again. Three rows up, laid out in the middle of the aisle, was the foreshortened form of the gunman, the paramedic hovering over him, but all he could make out were the soles of the man’s feet, jutting up like parentheses enclosing a phrase he didn’t want to decipher.

  At first, there’d been some question about where to put the man. No one wanted him inside the bus, but what were they going to do, strap him to the roof? Leave him there in the mud for the police? The buzzards? The dogs? He was a human being, no matter what he’d done, or tried to do, and there wasn’t much debate about it—he was going with them. That was the consensus, at any rate, people wringing their hands, their voices shaky still. Bill’s wife—processed hair, low-cut blouse—held out, her teeth clamped as if she’d bitten into something gone bad. “I don’t want him near me,” she insisted. “I don’t want—” and she’d broken off, fighting back a sob.

  It turned out they couldn’t fit the man lengthwise across any of the seats, so Bill and the paramedic, who’d hauled him up the steps by his shoulders and feet, laid him out in the aisle, the back of his head bisected by the scuffed white line on the floor, the one you were advised to stay behind. Most people were already on the bus at that point, their faces blanched and reduced, eyes staring straight ahead, but the final few, Sten and Carolee amongst them, had to step over him to make their way down the aisle. Sten took his wife by the arm and tried not to look down at the glazed eyes and the teeth glinting in the open mouth, and if he missed his step and one foot wound up coming down on the man’s sprawled wrist, so much the worse. The guy was feeling no pain, and besides, he’d asked for it, hadn’t he?

  Last to board was the driver, who removed his dark glasses to squint down the length of the bus, counting heads, and then, bending awkwardly to dig under the seat—he had a belly, Sten saw now, the belly of a man who sat for a living—he produced a neon-orange rain slicker, unfurling it with a flourish to make sure everybody was watching. Was he going to drape it over the man’s face? Was that it then, was it all over, forget the charade? But no, he folded the slicker into a makeshift pillow, plumped it two or three times, then bent again, all the way down now, and slipped it under the man’s head. No one said a word. Flies buzzed. Sten’s throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow, and yet he didn’t reach for Carolee’s water bottle because he didn’t want to call attention to himself—or any more attention, that is.

  For a moment—too long, because this was an emergency, wasn’t it?—the driver simply stood there looking down on his handiwork, shaking his head slowly. Did he know the man? Had they been in collusion? It was hard to judge from his expression, but when he sank into his seat and pulled the door closed, he shot a withering look down the aisle and repeated his mantra—“You sit”—though everybody was already seated. Incredibly, he was glaring, actually glaring at them, no mistaking the severity of that look, the reprobation, the censure, as if they’d all gone so far beyond the bounds of propriety it wasn’t worth mentioning, as if they were in fact children and had behaved badly, as if they hadn’t been attacked and he hadn’t been in on it or at least complicit. Sten was sure he was. Lure the tourists out here in the middle of nowhere, call the gang, split the proceeds, what could be simpler? The man—the driver, the hypocrite—held that look a beat, then he fished out his sunglasses, and as if performing a delicate operation, fitted them carefully over his ears, adding superfluously, “We go now.”

  When they reached the outskirts of the city and the harbor came into view, the bus swung off the main road and hurtled down a series of surface streets, one careening turn after another, until suddenly, without warning, right in the middle of a nondescript block of tiendas, market stalls and apartments, the driver hit the brakes hard, and they lurched to a stop in front of a low concrete-block building that might have been a warehouse or machine shop but for the Red Cross emblem over the door. Caught off guard, Sten was violently pitched forward, and if he hadn’t been holding on to Carolee—protecting her—he might have slammed face-first into the seatback in front of him. As it was, he just managed to tuck his shoulder and soften the blow as the chassis recoiled and a rain of purses, cameras and water bottles spilled from the overhead racks and skittered across the floor, seeking equilibrium. The paramedic wasn’t as fortunate. All this time he’d been on the edge of his seat, leaning over the gunman and bracing him against the bumps and dips and wild looping turns, but he lost his grip at the final moment and the body rucked forward, sliding partially down the stairwell and shedding the rain slicker in the process.

  People looked to Sten, as if it was his responsibility, but he was having none of it. It was the paramedic’s problem now—he’d taken it upon himself, hadn’t he? He was the professional. Let him deal with it. For one stunned instant, people just stared, and then, cursing, the paramedic—short, square-shoulder
ed, too heavy in the butt and with a face as round as the moon—sprang up out of his seat to wedge himself in the stairwell and prop up the man’s head, but he was clearly having trouble, the body having come to rest on one shoulder, canting the neck at a spastic angle. “Give me a hand here, will you, somebody?” he gasped, but nobody moved, or at least not expeditiously enough—they were old, all of them, old people—so he slid his hands in under the man’s arms, cradling his head as best he could, and began easing him down the steps.

  At this point, Bill—the other Bill, the one with hair—pushed himself up to help, ducking into the stairwell in a shuffling stoop to catch hold of the patient’s feet at the door, but at the last second they slipped from his grasp, flopping down on the hot pavement like fish on a stringer. The sound of it was nothing, barely audible, the small dull thump of dissociated flesh striking an unyielding surface, but it reverberated through the bus like a thunderclap. Sten could feel Carolee tense beside him. Nobody breathed.

  The paramedic—he’d seen worse—just seemed to shrug it off, dragging his patient up over the curb even as Bill, fumbling forward, managed to take hold of the abraded heels and lift them from the pavement. “Set him down,” they heard the paramedic say. “No, not in the dirt—right here, right on the walk.” Awkwardly, in a stoop that had him bent over double, Bill swung the man’s legs into alignment as the paramedic eased him down—waist, shoulders, one hand to protect the head, easy does it, and there was their collective burden, harmless enough now, laid out on his back like a sunbather on a glittering gum-spotted beach. Satisfied, the paramedic straightened up and threw a quick glance at the bus before hurrying up the walk and disappearing into the building, leaving Bill there to stand watch.

  That was the scene: the man called Bill, skinny, sunburned, his shoulders slumped and his waxen hair flattened to his head as if it had been dripped in place one hot strand at a time, standing there over the man who wasn’t breathing and whose throat was discolored under the point of his up-thrust chin—dark there, too dark, as if he’d decided to grow a goatee after all. Bill shifted in place, put his hands on his hips, dropped them. There was a smell of the sea, tepid and redolent of small deaths. Someone was revving a motorbike in the alley next to the clinic. A car rolled slowly up the street, its windshield molten under the sun.

  And then the paramedic (his name was Oscar, Sten would later learn, Oscar Ruiz, of Oakland, California, sixty-two years old and in his first month of retirement) emerged from the building, an attendant in pale green scrubs hustling along beside him, pushing a gurney. Everyone leaned forward to watch as the attendant bent to the motionless form, checking for vital signs—futilely, as far as Sten could see, though one woman kept insisting there was no reason to give up hope because the electroshock machine, the defibrillator, was a real miracle and it had saved her husband, twice. “The guy’s gone, can’t you see that?” the man behind her put in, and a whole sotto voce debate started up. Sten ignored it. He sat there with the rest of them, sweating, thirsty, wanting only to be back on the ship. The police would be coming now, he knew that. At the very least he’d be required to give a statement, they all would. But what then? Would they charge him? Would he and Carolee have to stay here in this reeking excuse for a city for days on end—weeks, even—while all the others climbed back aboard the ship and cruised away into the sunset?

  His eyes shot to the driver. The man had swung his legs out into the aisle to get comfortable. He had a cellphone to his ear now, speaking his whipcrack Spanish into the receiver, and who was he contacting if not the authorities? Sten looked to Carolee and she breathed his name, twice, in a kind of moan: “Oh, Sten, Sten.” She fidgeted in the seat, and whether consciously or not, she pulled her hand away from his and rubbed her palm, the moisture there, on her shorts. She spoke in a whisper: “You think they’ll let us go back now?”

  He shrugged. He wasn’t exactly in a talkative mood. All he felt was tired. Sleep, that was what he wanted, another realm, a way out of this. He watched dispassionately as the paramedic helped the attendant load the limp body onto the gurney and wheel it up the walk and into the yawning double doors of the clinic. Everybody saw it, the retreating feet, the wheels of the gurney, the doors snapping shut like a set of jaws, and as if at a signal, people began stirring. Here came Bill, the good Samaritan, to lead it off, mounting the steps of the bus and sliding into the front seat beside his wife. A man Sten couldn’t place stood and started sorting through the daypack he’d stowed overhead. There was a rustle of bags and papers, as if a stiff internal wind had started up to whip through the bus. Bottles of water appeared. Power bars. Cellphones. The unpleasantness was over now and it was as if nothing had happened: they were tourists deprived of a nature walk and thinking only to get back to the boat, to their cabins and staterooms, to privacy, air-conditioning, cocktails, dinner at the captain’s table. They’d had an experience, all right, something to text home about, but it was over now.

  “Driver?” It was Bill, the first Bill, the bald-headed one, who seemed to have become their spokesman. He was seated two rows up from Sten and Carolee, his shirt soaked through with sweat and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His wife was there beside him, her brittle hair set aflame by a shaft of sun slanting through the window.

  The driver was in no hurry to respond. He pursed his mouth. Tapped the cellphone at his ear. “Driver?” Bill repeated, and finally the man swiveled round in his seat and lifted his eyebrows as if to say What now?

  “We just wanted to know what the holdup is.”

  The driver said something into the phone, then pulled it away from his ear and held it up like an exhibit in a courtroom. “I am talking,” he said, “to la Fuerza Pública, the police. You will need to make a testimony for the facts of this”—he couldn’t find the word—“today. A la reserva. The crime. You must make a testimony of the crime.”

  “Yes, all right, fine,” Bill said, waving a hand in dismissal. “But can’t we do that back aboard ship? We’ve been through a lot here, I’m talking trauma, real trauma, and it’s not doing anybody any good to sit here sweltering for no reason . . .”

  “Take us back,” a voice boomed from the rear of the bus.

  “Yeah, let’s get this thing moving,” somebody else put in.

  As if awaiting her cue, Sheila cried out suddenly, her voice stretched to the breaking point: “We need a restroom. We haven’t—I mean, I haven’t—” She was two seats up, on the left, sitting beside the woman whose husband had been revived twice (but not, apparently, a third time). Sheila’s makeup had gone gummy in the heat and from this angle, Sten’s angle, it looked as if the skin were peeling away from her face. “We’re hot. Thirsty. I don’t know about anybody else, but I for one could use a cold shower.”

  The driver slowly shook his head. “This is not possible,” he said, before returning the cell to his ear. “Not at the moment.”

  “What is this,” Sten heard himself say, “a debating society?” He’d had enough. Who was this supercilious jerk to hold them here? He had no authority over them, he was nothing, less than nothing. “Hell,” he said, pulling himself up from the seat, “we can walk from here. Or get a taxi. There’s got to be taxis.”

  Everyone was in motion now, people clambering to their feet, pulling down bags, looping packs over their shoulders, white hair, trembling hands, a shuffle of sneakered and sandaled feet. In the same moment the driver came up out of his seat, as if to block their way, and what Sten was thinking was Just let him try. It might have been a standoff, might have gotten out of hand—people were scared, angry, impatient—but then the doors to the clinic swung open and the paramedic, one of their own, was hurrying up the walk to them, bringing the news.

  Sten watched the man duck into the shadow of the bus, then reappear in the stairwell, his face neutral. He was saying something in Spanish to the driver, something detailed, but nobody could fathom what it was. Sten felt his stomach clench. But then the first Bill, who was standing in the
aisle now with the others, called out, “So, Oscar, what’s the deal, is the guy going to be okay or what? And when are we going to get out of here?”

  The paramedic turned and blinked up at the faces ranged above him as if he couldn’t quite place them.

  “Well?” Bill demanded.

  “They’re going to need a statement.”

  Sheila let out a groan. “What sort of statement, what do they want? We didn’t do anything.”

  The paramedic—Oscar—held up a hand for silence. “But they say they can do that on the ship.” On the ship: those were the incantatory words, the words they’d all been waiting to hear, the spell broken, relief at hand. Everyone exhaled simultaneously. “For the witnesses, that is, and I guess that includes all of us.” His eyes settled on Sten. “Except you—they’re saying you’re going to have to wait here till the police arrive.”

  He didn’t know whether to grin or grimace. His face felt hot. His back ached, low down, where he must have tweaked something out there in the mud lot, one of the tight lateral muscles that didn’t get enough use, one of his killing muscles.

  “But don’t worry,” Oscar went on, “I’ll stay with you, in case you need an interpreter.”

  “Yes, okay,” Sten said, barely conscious of what he was assenting to, and then he was moving forward—dehydrated, lightheaded, unsteady on his feet—and Carolee, the bag looped over her chest and clutching her hat as if it were a lifeline thrown over the side of a sinking ship, was following along behind.

  There was a waiting room in the clinic and it wasn’t much different from what you’d find in the States: fluorescent lights, gleaming linoleum, a smell of bleach and floor wax to drive down the faint lingering odor of body fluids. Nurses glided through one door and out another, a trio of hard-faced women sat staring into computer screens at the front desk and a forlorn cadre of the sick, hopeless and unlucky slouched on folding chairs in an array of bloody bandages and mewling infants. There was air-conditioning, and that was a blessing. And a restroom. The first thing he did, as soon as Oscar directed them to seats in the far corner of the room, was lock himself in the men’s, turn the tap on full and let the cold water (tepid, actually) run over his face. He wet his hands and worked them through his hair, which he wore long, in the fashion he’d adopted as soon as he’d got out of the service and gone off to college, no hard-liner and no fool either, because what woman in San Francisco in that day and age would look twice at a man in a crewcut? Baby killer, that’s what they’d shouted at him when he boarded the bus at the airport, but the accusation only puzzled him. He didn’t want to hear about babies, alive or dead, or Vietnamese self-determination or the jungle that was a kind of death in itself. He only wanted to get laid. Just that.