The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “License and registration,” the cop said, raising his voice to be heard over the clamor of the dog. “And proof of insurance.”

  What she told him in response, in a voice as steady as she could hold it, even as Kutya settled into a ragged gasping continuous low-throated bark and people slowed to gape at her as if she were some circus attraction, was that she was not engaged in a contract with the republic of California. “I’m a sovereign citizen,” she said, speaking as clearly as she could, given the noise of the dog and the clank and hiss of the traffic as all the white-haired Baby Boomer tourists applied their brakes and then stepped back on the gas once they’d got a good look. “You have no authority over me.”

  The cop just stared at her. After a moment he flipped up his sunglasses so she could see the fine red fissures of irritation fracturing his frog-belly eyes. “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” he said, “but I asked for your license and registration.”

  She said nothing. Just fixed her gaze straight ahead to where the road ran on into the sunshine past a field of stiff yellow grass and a shadowy fringe of trees, the road that ran true to her destination, to the place where she had business when she had no business here at all.

  “Ma’am?”

  She turned her head back to him, locked her eyes on his, and her heart was going, all right, because she could tell where this was leading and it scared her and made the anger come up in her too, and why couldn’t they just leave well enough alone? “I told you,” she said, “I have no contract with you.”

  “Does that mean you refuse?”

  “Let me repeat,” she said. “I—have—no—contract—with—you.”

  He shifted his boots in the gravel along the roadside, a dull grating intolerable sound that got Kutya back up into the high register. The cop put his hands on his hips, as if to show her where the gun was and the nightstick and handcuffs too. He said, “I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the car.”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t.”

  “Suit yourself.” He straightened up then and stalked back to his car, where she could see him in her rearview as he leaned in, pulled out the cord of the radio mike and started moving his lips.

  Ten long minutes crept by. Each one of them, each second, dripped acid through her veins, and she thought of just putting the car in gear and driving off, but resisted because that would only make things worse. Kutya—he was a puli, a white puli—settled into the discolored basket of his dreadlocks and fell off to sleep, thinking the threat had passed. Foolishly. But then he was a dog, and dogs had other concerns.

  Finally another cruiser appeared, lights flashing, siren screaming, swooping on up the road behind her like a black steel shroud and nosing in at an angle so close to her front bumper she thought it was going to hit her. In the next instant she was staring across the passenger’s seat of this new car and into the face—the hard demanding unforgiving put-upon face—of a female officer, who picked something up off the seat, squared herself and swung out of the car. Next thing she knew, both cops were there, one on either side of her, and Kutya was back on his feet, back at it again, barking in a renewed frenzy that just made everything that much harder.

  “Good afternoon,” the female cop said, her eyes roaming over the interior as if she was thinking of making an offer on the car. “I understand that you refuse to comply with Officer Switzer’s request for identification, is that right?”

  She said nothing.

  The female officer—she was tall, thin, no shape to her at all, and she wore no makeup, not a trace, not even lipstick—asked her to get out of the car. Or no, commanded her.

  She said nothing.

  “Just to be sure you understand me,” the male cop cut in now—he was stationed by the passenger’s-side window, leaning in so he could watch her, and if that didn’t make her feel paranoid she couldn’t imagine what would because this was like being squeezed between two pincers and it was wrong, intolerable, a violation of every natural right there was—“I have to inform you that state law requires you to show a valid driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance at the reasonable request of a peace officer.”

  She threw it right back at him. “Reasonable? You call this reasonable? You have no authority here—you’re nothing more to me than a man dressed up in a Halloween costume.”

  “If you refuse,” he said, the muscles tightening around his mouth, “we will have no recourse but to remove you forcibly from your vehicle—”

  “Which will be impounded,” the female added, as if they’d switched speakers on a stereo, his voice assaulting her on the right, hers on the left. “And your dog will be taken to the shelter.” She paused. A top-heavy camper swished delicately past them, ten miles under the limit. A pickup going the opposite way swung with elaborate courtesy off onto the shoulder to give it room and then continued on in a slow-motion crawl. “And you yourself, if you don’t comply this minute, will be arrested, I promise you that—and I personally will escort you to the county jail.”

  It was hopeless, she could see that. The day was ruined. The week, the whole month. This was the mega-state in all its glory. She’d stated her status in plain English and they still didn’t seem to understand. Well, they could go to hell, all of them. She started screaming then, calling them every name in the book, shouting “TDC! TDC! Threat, Duress and Coercion!” over and over again, even as the female forced open the door and took hold of her by her left arm and Kutya, good dog, faithful dog, went right at her.

  They took her to the county jail in Ukiah, retracing her route back up Route 20, though now she was in restraints and in the backseat of a police cruiser, separated by a heavy wire grid and Plexiglas shield from the female cop, whose right hand, resting at one o’clock on the wheel, sported two bright shining flesh-colored bandaids where the dog’s teeth had broken the skin, though it wasn’t much more than a scratch. Her own car was back alongside the road, awaiting the tow truck, and Kutya—poor Kutya—after having been poked, prodded and muzzled by two numbnuts from Animal Control, had been forced into a boxy white van, which must have been somewhere behind her now, on its way up this same road to the animal shelter, also in Ukiah. She’d missed her appointment, of course—and for what, for nothing, for a seatbelt?—and she’d had no way of letting the Burnsides know she wasn’t coming, that she’d been unavoidably and illegally detained and wasn’t just blowing off her responsibility, and who could blame them if they went online and found another farrier to shoe their horses and trim the hooves of their sable antelope? She had a reputation to maintain, a business to run, and she was doing no harm to anybody, doing nothing more than using the public byways as was her inalienable right, and now look at the mess she was in.

  Still, as the cruiser looped through the turns and climbed back up out of the Noyo Valley, she began to rethink her position, until degree by degree she felt the indignation cooling in her. This was going to cost her. Fines, towing and Christ knew what else. They’d make her renew that sticker, and there’d be paperwork, a layout of cash she really didn’t have and every sort of hassle the authorities (authorities, what a joke) could devise. By the time they arrived at the police station and they’d photographed and fingerprinted her, given her her one phone call—to Christabel, who else?—and escorted her to an empty cell and locked her in, she was contrite. Or no: chastened was a better word. And enlightened. Enlightened too. These people didn’t recognize her status, didn’t know a damned thing about the Uniform Commercial Code or her rights under it, and they didn’t care either. They had all the power, all the muscle, and she was nothing, reduced to this, to groveling and ass-kissing and giving lip service to the System, as if she was grateful they’d assaulted her and taken away her rights and her property. All right. If that was how they wanted it, fine. She sat in that cell and kept her mouth firmly shut and fed her hate and resentment till Christabel showed up an hour later with the bail money and she was out.

  “I told you,” Christabel said, once
they’d slammed into her pickup in the lot out back of the station. “You may have your theories or beliefs or whatever, but these people? They don’t care. They’re on another planet—this planet, planet earth.” She gave her a look, all eye shadow and glistening black mascara. “And you—you’re in outer space. I mean it, Sara. I really do.”

  Christabel was two years older than she was, also divorced, also childless. She’d kept her figure and had men sniffing after her seven days a week, but she was done with men, or that’s what she said, anyway—at least till the next one came along. She was Sara’s best friend and here she was proving it all over again, taking time out from her work as a teacher’s aide at the elementary school to be there for her, but she was wrong on this, dead wrong.

  “It’s not theory,” she said. “It’s law. Natural law.”

  “There you go—I mean, don’t you ever learn?” They were heading out of the parking lot now, the police lot, and the idiot dinger started in because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. “And buckle your belt, will you?”

  Contrite? Who was contrite? Not her. “No,” she said. “No way.”

  That was when Christabel hit the brake so hard she nearly went through the window. “I swear I’m not going another inch until you buckle up—and not just because of what happened here and not for safety’s sake either, but because I can’t stand that fucking noise one more second!”

  “You don’t have to shout,” she said. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with my hearing.” Still she didn’t touch the belt. It was as if her hands were paralyzed.

  The noise kept up, ding-ding-ding, a beat, then ding-ding-ding and ding-ding-ding.

  “Sara, I’m warning you, I mean it, I do—”

  She let her gaze roll on out over the scene. She was calm now, utterly calm. Traffic flicked by on the street. Ding-ding-ding. Ding-ding-ding. A girl who honestly couldn’t have been more than sixteen went by pushing one of those double baby strollers as if there was nothing wrong with that, as if that was the way people were supposed to live. She looked over her shoulder and saw that there was a car in the lot behind them, a face trapped in the blaze of the windshield, some other soul trying to get out of this purgatory and back to real life, but nobody was going anywhere unless something changed right here and now. Christabel was glaring at her, actually glaring.

  In the next moment, and she hardly knew what she was doing, she flipped the handle and pushed the door open wide, and then she was out on the sidewalk, her feet moving and the door gaping behind her, hurrying down the street as fast as her boots would take her, thinking, The bank, the bank before it closes. And Christabel? Christabel was just an afterthought because she wasn’t going to sit there arguing. She had to get to the bank because she knew she was going to have to suck everything out of her savings and put it into a cashier’s check if she was going to get the car out of hock. That was the first priority, the car, because without it she was stuck. Once she had it back, the minute they handed her the keys, she’d head straight to the animal shelter, because when she thought about how scared and hurt and confused that dog must have been, it just made her heart seize. He’d never been separated from her since she’d got him as a pup, never, not for a single day, and what had he done? Just defend her, that was all. And now he was locked up in a concrete pen with a bunch of strays and pit bulls and god knew what else. She didn’t care what anybody said, and they could go ahead and crucify her, but that was as wrong as wrong got.

  6.

  BUT THEN THEY WOULDN’T let her car go until she went down to the DMV and had it properly registered (their words, not hers), yet in order to do that she had to show title to the car, which was at home in the lower drawer of her filing cabinet, which in turn meant calling Christabel and eating crow (I’m sorry, I was upset, I don’t know what came over me) so she could get a ride back up to Willits and then down again to the DMV, which was closed when she got there, of course, as was the animal shelter, and that was hard, the hardest thing about this whole sorry affair. She could see through the glass of the door into the deserted lobby and hear the dogs barking in back, could hear Kutya, and there was nothing she could do about it. She must have banged on that door for ten minutes but nobody came, and the noise she made, the noise of her frustration and anger, meted out with the underside of her coiled fist, just made the dogs bark all the louder.

  Behind her, in the lot, Christabel sat in the truck with the engine running. “They’re closed!” she shouted, hanging half out the window. “Can’t you see that? They’re closed!”

  She almost broke down then, so frustrated her eyes clouded over till she could barely see, but she didn’t break down and she didn’t give up either. Instead she worked her way around back, looking for a way in, a gate with a padlock somebody had forgotten to secure, a chainlink fence she could scale, and all the while the dogs barked and howled and whimpered from deep inside. She circled the place twice—there was a rear door, locked, and from the feel of it, bolted too—then made her way back across the lot to Christabel.

  “Well?” Christabel demanded. “Did I tell you? They’re closed. Shut down.” She held up her phone. “Hours, ten to five, Tuesday through Saturday.”

  “You don’t have a crowbar, do you, anything like a crowbar? A jack handle?”

  “Are you crazy? They probably have cameras—everybody does. You’re probably on film right now. You can’t just—”

  “The bastards,” she said, spitting the words out, so saturated with grief and hate it was coming out her pores. “Jesus. I was just going to work. Isn’t that what they want in this rip-off society, people working? So they can stick their hands in your pockets?”

  The pickup rumbled in a soft smooth way that was like its own kind of melody. A steady float of exhaust ghosted across the lot. Christabel pulled down her sunglasses to squint against the light that flattened her features and picked out the vertical trenches between her eyes. “You’re not talking about the IRS again, are you?”

  She didn’t answer. Just stared at the building and listened to the barking of the dogs as it wound down now to a confused gabble and then stopped altogether.

  “Because I’ve heard it all already. And you don’t pay taxes, anyway, do you? Or fines either.” She paused. The exhaust tumbled on a breeze that came up out of nowhere, rich with chemical intoxicants. “Get in the car,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  “So am I.”

  “Well, get in.”

  This was why people firebombed buildings. And how she’d like to bomb the police station and the DMV and this shithole too . . . but then Kutya was in there and she couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t even think of it. Most people—and Christabel was one of them—didn’t understand that government by the corporation was no government at all. Didn’t understand that it was the Fourteenth Amendment that converted sovereign citizens into federal citizens by making them agree to a contract to accept federal benefits—and taxes and all the illegal and confounding maze of laws that come with them. Taxes on your taxes. Do this, do that. You don’t like it, go to jail. But that amendment was unconstitutional and if you subscribed to it you were just a slave of the system and had no rights at all except what they doled out to you with one hand while helping themselves to your paycheck with the other. How had it ever come to this? How could people be so blind, so stupid?

  It all came down on her in that moment in a funk of hopelessness, because what was the use? She’d fight them, she’d continue to fight them and do everything in her power to live free and beholden to no man or woman, fight till there was nothing left of her but bleached white bones spread out in the dirt, but not tonight, not now. There was nothing she could do. She was beaten. She ducked her head so that her hair fell in her eyes till the wind lifted it again, then climbed into the pickup and slammed the door.

  “Where to?” Christabel asked, softening her look.

  Christabel was a good friend, a true friend, the best she’d ever had, the one person who was there for
her, wading through the shitstorm no matter what came down. And she was right, of course—they couldn’t sit here all night. Sara just shrugged.

  “How about a drink? After all you’ve been through don’t you deserve it?” A little laugh. “Not to mention me.”

  The truck rumbled. A plastic bag chased the breeze across the blacktop. She fixed one last look on the ugly buff building with its cheap knee-high vertical windows anybody could step right through and let out a sigh. “I don’t care,” she heard herself say.

  They wound up going to a brew pub on State and she tried a pint of something called Mendo Blonde, but it tasted of hops and metal and just gave her gas, so they went over to Casa Carlos and had margaritas and chicken tacos and she ate too much and had at least two too many drinks. She didn’t even know she was eating, she was so upset. The food just seemed to disappear, tacos, beans, rice, basket after basket of the chips she dipped mechanically in the little cruets of salsa that began to clutter the table till there was no room to rest your elbow or even a forearm. And the margaritas too—as soon as she set down her empty glass there was a new one there to replace it. By the time they made it back home to Willits (twenty minutes on a darkened highway that seemed like hours), she was too exhausted to do anything more than collapse in bed after Christabel dropped her off. She didn’t even bother to turn on a light or pour herself a glass of water, just undressed in the dark, flinging her clothes in the direction of the chair in the corner, the house woeful and empty without Kutya there so that every creeping sound of the night was magnified, and if she was the kind who cried herself to sleep, she would have done it. She woke at intervals throughout the night, feeling as if she was being strangled in her sleep, a heavy shroud of sorrow and regret pulled up over her like a comforter made of dross.

  She was up at dawn, her every mortal fiber aching, and her first thought was for Kutya. Christabel had agreed to drop her at the DMV before she went in to work, but that was two long hours away, and so she made herself a pot of coffee and some wheat toast and went out on the front porch to watch the sun ease its way down into the valley and illuminate the tops of the pines and firs and redwoods that had been the support of generations of loggers since the first settlers made their way up from the coast. She kept checking her watch, the minutes dragging as if they had anchors attached to them, and then the newspaper arrived to reiterate its falsehoods and outright lies, but she was too worked up to concentrate on it and she found herself pacing round the yard, back and forth, as if she were in the cell still—under lock and key, restrained, constrained, helpless—until Christabel’s pickup turned off the main road and came up the drive.