The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Someone at the bar behind them let out a laugh and the lines hardened in Salas’ face, lines that traced his jaw muscles and pulled tight round his mouth. He wasn’t much older than his own son, Sten realized, thirty maybe, thirty tops, but his job—poking at the underbelly of things, interviewing gringos, sweeping the dirt under the carpet—bore down on him, you could see that at a glance. Sten had an impulse to reach out to him, to thank him, but he couldn’t relax, not yet, not till the boat weighed anchor and they saw the last of this place.

  “The man you”—a pause—“encountered, was a criminal, well known to us. Let me tell you, his death is no loss to the world.” His lips parted and here came the smile again. “In fact, from a certain perspective, you could almost say that you’ve done us a favor.”

  The other cop nodded in assent. “One less problem. Or headache, is that how you say it? One less headache?”

  “Yes,” Salas agreed, “that’s exactly it. Now,” swinging round to face Carolee, “we will require a statement from you, señora—and my colleague here, Sergeant Araya, will assist you in that.” He squared his shoulders, as if coming to attention, though he was still seated and his iced tea stood untouched before him and the cigarette burned unnoticed in his hand. “And you, sir, Mr. Stensen, I would ask you please to accompany me and the Senior Second Officer”—a nod for Potamiamos—“to another portion of this ship, a cabin we have secured for this purpose, in order for you to make identification of a man we have reason to believe was an accomplice in this business.” He made a motion toward the door, sweeping an arm in invitation.

  Sten remained seated. He looked to Carolee, who’d sat there wordlessly to this point. “It’s okay,” he said, “no worries. I’ll be right back.”

  Potamiamos rose. He and the lieutenant exchanged a glance. The party seemed to be breaking up.

  “All right,” Sten said, “I’ll take a look at him. But I’m not leaving this ship.”

  “Oh, no, no.” Potamiamos very nearly clucked his tongue. “No, there’s no question of that.”

  They walked down the corridor to the elevator, Potamiamos to his left, Salas to his right, and everybody, every reveler aboard, stared at him as if he were being led off to a detention cell somewhere, and he supposed there must have been a secure room down there in the depths of the ship to accommodate the occasional passenger or crewmember who drank too much or went floridly berserk. They had a sick bay, didn’t they? And a pharmacy. And just about anything else you could imagine. They were a small city afloat and all contingencies had to be anticipated and prepared for.

  He was a head taller than either of his—what would you call them?—escorts, but still he couldn’t help feeling a sense of unease, no matter how many times he told himself he was in control, because he wasn’t, he wasn’t at all, and he half expected some sort of trick, a roomful of cops, handcuffs, the cloth bag jerked over his head and a quick hustle down the gangplank and into some festering hole like the one in Midnight Express. The tendon clicked in his knee again, once, twice, and then they were standing before the elevator and the doors were opening on a scrum of passengers in tennis togs, terrycloth robes, shorts and T-shirts, dinner jackets and cocktail dresses. The Senior Second Officer greeted them with a blooming smile and a cheery “Good evening, folks, enjoying yourselves?” while Salas held the door and shepherded Sten in amongst them. Most of the others were going up and Sten and his escorts made way for them as the elevator stopped at various decks, even as a fresh crew of tennis players, high rollers and shuffleboarders crowded in, and then they were going down, stopping at each floor, until they were belowdecks, in the crew’s quarters, where passengers were not allowed.

  Sten had been arrested only once in his life, for a DUI after a wedding for which he’d stood as best man. John Jarvis’ wedding. J.J. They’d been in the Corps together, had seen some hairy and not-so-hairy shit, buddies over there and back here, and when they got home—the very week—J.J. had married his high school heartthrob in some wedding palace down in Carmel. Drinking preceded the ceremony, floated through it on fumes and quick nips from one flask or another, rose in a delirious clamor while the cake was cut and distributed and went on unabated long after the newlyweds had ducked away to do what they were going to do as man and wife in their room at the big hotel in the middle of town. He’d felt a bit hazy as he’d climbed into his VW Bug and started back up the coast, alone and missing Carolee, who was away in London for her semester abroad, but he had the radio—“Radar Love,” cranked high, he remembered that, and “Magic Carpet Ride” too—and he had the window rolled down though he was freezing, making it all the way up 101 and Nineteenth Avenue through the city and Golden Gate Park and back onto the freeway and across the bridge, feeling clearer and soberer by the mile.

  That was when the flashing lights appeared in his rearview, a cop rushing up on him so fast he thought at first the problem must have been up ahead of him somewhere, the cop after somebody else in that streaming river of taillights that made the night so cozy and inviting. He was wrong. The cruiser rode up on his tail, but he told himself that didn’t mean anything, not necessarily, because maybe the cop was going to get off at the exit coming up on the right, an emergency there somewhere, an accident, a dog loose on the highway, a motorcyclist down, debris in the passing lane . . . but then the cruiser swung out alongside him and it began to dawn on him that he was in trouble.

  What he remembered of that night, aside from the wheezing and muttering of his fellow drunks and the reek of vomit that was so pervasive it seemed to arise from the walls themselves, was the helplessness he’d felt behind bars, locked up, incarcerated, in the can, no place to turn or even sit, except the floor—not in control, definitely not in control. He’d told the arresting officer he’d been to a wedding, the wedding of one of his service buddies—“You know,” he said, “the Marine Corps? Like I served my country. Like I saw some bad shit and I know I had a couple drinks, just this once, because it was a wedding, okay?”—but it didn’t do any good. He had a flashlight, the cop, and it was right there like a supernova bursting in Sten’s face, in his eyes, hot and probing. Cars hissed by. It was the strangest thing, but for a moment, just that moment, he didn’t seem to know where he was or where the light had come from or why it was punishing him like this. “You know you’re in no condition to drive, don’t you?” the cop said.

  Sten just blinked at him. And then, very slowly, he began to nod his head in agreement.

  But now he was in a corridor, deep in the underbelly of the ship, one man on his left, the other on his right. They walked along amiably enough, down to the end of the corridor, and then they swung into another corridor and another after that till he had no idea where he was or how to find his way back. He followed their lead, moving along blindly till Salas put a hand on his arm to guide him and they entered a room that smelled of food—of hamburgers, a mountain of hamburgers, fries, onion rings, beer—and he saw the light there, bright as the cop’s flashlight, and the man it illuminated till it seemed as if he were the only three-dimensional thing in the room. Everything else was flattened as if on a screen, tables, chairs, the counter where they must have served up meals to the crew. But the man—a Tico in an oversized T-shirt sitting at one of the Formica tables, his hands cuffed behind his back and his eyes cast down—seemed to leap out at him. He wore a goatee. He was skinny, puny, barely there. He might once have held a knife in his hand.

  “Is this the man that attacked you?” Salas indicated the prisoner with a jerk of his head, his voice in official mode now, ripe with accusation and contempt. “Or one of the men?”

  Sten saw now that there was another policeman in the room, a guard with a holstered gun leaning against the back wall in the shadow—or relative shadow—of the lamp. He saw too that the lamp, one of those shop lights with a clamp at the base of it, was fixed to the table directly across from the prisoner and arranged so that there was no way for him to escape the glare of it, and if he went outside o
f himself again to think of the movies, this scene he’d witnessed a hundred times on screens big and small, it was because the movies were his only reference point for what was happening to him. It was as if he’d entered some dream, some fantasyland where there was no sun, no sky, no mud lot or bus or ship, only this. Finally—and he was on his guard now, on his guard all over again—he noticed the square of white cloth smoothed out at the far end of the table. It was a linen napkin, one of the service items on pristine display at each of the ship’s restaurants and lounges, one of countless thousands that must have been washed, dried, folded and set out afresh each day. But this one was different. This one held—presented—three exhibits: a .357 Magnum revolver and two knives, switchblades with mother-of-pearl handles.

  “Well?” Salas said. “What do you say?”

  Sten looked to Potamiamos but Potamiamos averted his eyes, as uneasy with the proceedings as he was himself. He could feel Salas pushing his will on him, eager to get this over with, wrap it up, take the prisoner back where he belonged, to the cell in some crumbling compound with the rusting steel bars and wet concrete floor—and what else? Roaches, there’d have to be roaches. Scorpions, maybe. Who knew? Biting flies. Leeches. Toss him in the pit and leave him there. Sten wanted out too. He thought of Carolee and the other cop and how she was bearing up, and then he was focusing on the prisoner as if seeing him for the first time. The man’s left eye was partially closed and a raised red welt traced the cheekbone beneath it. His scalp was close-shaved, each follicle of hair bristling like a clump of rice set down in a smooth paddy of skull-tight flesh. There was a problem with his ear, the lobe torn, dried blood coiled in the hollow there, grainy and dark, and his posture was all wrong, his body language. He looked ashamed of himself, looked guilty. Was this the man? Sten couldn’t say. It could be. Certainly it could be.

  “Well?”

  Sten shrugged.

  Salas exchanged a glance with the Senior Second Officer. “We will need a positive identification, because unfortunately”—he gestured to the weapons on the white cloth—“whatever person extracted these knives from the mud compromised any fingerprints we might have found there. Do these look like the knives the perpetrators used—in your recollection?”

  Another shrug. “I don’t know,” he said. “But that’s the gun.”

  “Yes, we have corroborated that.”

  It was then that the prisoner entered the equation, suddenly jerking to life as if he’d been hot-wired. His head snapped forward and he rucked something up—a rapid ratcheting of his throat, the pursing of his lips—and there it was on the front of Sten’s shirt, dangling in a long glistening thread. “Voy a matarle,” he snarled, even as Salas stepped forward and cuffed the side of his face. “¡Silencio!” Salas roared, and then he turned to Sten and said, “Do you see? Do you see what happens when you try to treat these animals like human beings?” He drew himself up. The prisoner shrank back into the nest of his bones. The light flickered and the bloated hull of the ship seemed to rise and dip on a nonexistent tide.

  “What did he say?” Sten wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” Salas said. He seemed abrupt, almost offended by the question. In the same moment, he removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and very carefully, tenderly even, he wiped the spittle from the front of Sten’s shirt. “Now, I ask you again: is this the man?”

  If his heart was pounding, it wasn’t out of fear or excitement or remorse, but out of rage, only that. He’d never seen this man before in his life—in that instant, he was sure of it. Another Tico. Another shaved head. Another goatee. He looked first to Potamiamos, then to Salas, and finally, to the prisoner. “Yeah,” he said, and he was already shifting his hips to work the long muscles of his legs and climb on up out of this hole, “that’s him. That’s the one.”

  PART II

  Willits

  5.

  SHE DIDN’T LIKE FAST food, or not particularly—the grease they used hardened your arteries and they doused everything with corn syrup and sugar, which jacked up the calories and made you put on weight, an issue with her, she knew it—but she stopped at the place on Route 20 in Willits and got a crispy chicken sandwich, if only to put something on her stomach. It wasn’t like her to oversleep, but that’s what happened, and she’d had to skip breakfast and run out the door with nothing but a cup of yesterday’s coffee microwaved to an angry boil—and she still wound up being half an hour late for her morning appointment. As a concession to the little voice nagging in her head, she skipped the fries and ordered a diet drink instead of regular, though she did ask for crispy instead of grilled because grilled had no more taste than warmed-over cardboard with a spatter of ketchup on it. Kutya was in the backseat, generally behaving himself, but he came to attention when she pulled into the drive-thru lane. He must have recognized the place, if not by sight, then smell, though she hadn’t stopped here more than a handful of times. At any rate, he began whining and tap dancing around on the seat he’d rendered filthy despite the towel she’d spread over it, and she gave in and ordered him a burger (no bun, no condiments, no pickles), feeding it to him over her shoulder as she put the trusty blue Nissan Sentra in drive and sailed on out of the lot and down the long winding road to Fort Bragg and the coast.

  There was talk on the radio, but it was mainly left-wing Communist crap—NPR, and how was it their signal was stronger than anybody else’s?—and even that faded out once she started down the grade and hit the first few switchbacks, so she popped in a CD instead. She favored country, but the old stuff, the classic stuff, Loretta and Merle and Hank, because all the new singers with their custom-made boots and blow-dried hair were just pale imitators, anyway. And if people criticized her for being a once-divorced forty-year-old woman with no romantic prospects on the horizon who really wasn’t in step with the times (You mean not even Brad Paisley?), so much the worse. She liked what she liked. And when she went out on a Saturday night with her best friend, Christabel Walsh, and had a few beers, she just let the music wash right over her like the vapid stares of all the losers lined up at the bar who were too small-minded and self-absorbed to ask a woman to dance.

  No matter. She dwelled within herself. She was content and self-sufficient. She had her own business, she had Kutya, a rented two-bedroom clapboard house that looked down on the crotch of the Noyo Valley and half the horses in the world available to her anytime she wanted to ride. If another relationship came along, fine. If not, too bad for him—or them, whoever they might be—because she wasn’t desperate, not in the least, not even close, and there was no way in the world she was going to pretend to like Brad Paisley or whoever because to her it was all just more of the same singsong bastardized crap, and she’d told Christabel that and she’d tell anybody else who might want to stick their nose in too.

  So there she was, driving in her own personal property with her dog by her side and a living to earn, winding down Route 20 so she could get to the Coast Highway and head forty-four-point-five miles south to the little flyspeck town of Calpurnia, where there were three horses—and, if the veterinarian showed up on time, at least one sable antelope with three-foot horns—that needed her ministrations. It was the middle of the summer. The sky was clear, the sun fixed like a compass point ahead of her. When she looped around a turn and saw the coast off in the distance, it was clear there too, the fog burned back and exiled in a linty gray band out at sea. Was she wearing her seatbelt? No, she wasn’t, and she was never going to wear it either. Seatbelt laws were just another contrivance of the U.S. Illegitimate Government of America the Corporate that had given up the gold standard back in 1933 and pledged its citizens as collateral so it could borrow and keep on borrowing. But she wasn’t a citizen of the U.S.I.G.A., she was a sovereign citizen, a U.S. national, born and raised, and she didn’t now and never would again acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her. So no, she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. And she didn’t have legal plates, or the sort of plates the republic
of California deemed legal, that is (the sticker that had come with the ones on the car was long since expired because she wasn’t about to play that game), and if she was traveling on the public roads in her own personal property, it was her business and nobody else’s.

  When the cop pulled her over, he claimed it was because she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but of course he would have had to have raptor’s eyes to see that from three hundred feet away where he was fooling nobody behind a roadside clump of madrone except maybe the drifting black vultures overhead. She’d watched him swing out behind her, pulling a U-turn and settling in on her tail with his gumball machine spinning and his siren whoop-whoop-whooping. She might have gone half a mile or more before she finally pulled over—in a spot at the mouth of a dirt drive that seemed sufficiently safe, the whole road to this point bristling with jagged pines and dried-up weeds that snatched at the side of the car every time she drifted toward the shoulder. Looking back on it, she supposed she could have stopped sooner, and she supposed too that that might have had something to do with this particular cop’s agitation, but you did what you did and you couldn’t have regrets, not in this life that just marched you on toward the grave day by day.

  He was lean, young, fresh-faced. He had to tap at the window three times before she rolled it down. Kutya lurched forward to give him a low warning growl and then he was barking and she didn’t do a thing about it. Let him bark, that was what she felt. It was his right.

  “Do you know why I stopped you, ma’am?” the cop said.

  Of course she did: he was the oppressor and she was the oppressed. She said nothing.