The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Really? Why? What happened?”

  He just shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said after a moment.

  “Yeah,” she said, stealing a look at him, “tell me about it.”

  The day glanced off the windshield. She gave the car some gas to get up the grade and there was nobody ahead of her, which was nice, but there was a whole phalanx of motor homes twisting down the hill in the opposite direction, big groaning fortresses of metal that seemed ready to fly out of control on every turn, and what kind of person would drive something like that? Somebody clueless. Somebody who was a slave to the corporation and the oil companies and didn’t even know it. She goosed the accelerator and the engine faltered till she goosed it again and another gear kicked in. A lone car flashed by, heading down, then there was a log truck, empty, rattling and clanking till you couldn’t even hear the radio, and then, emerging suddenly from its shadow, a cop car, the windows opaque with sun. That was when her passenger came to life, whipping round in the seat as the cruiser blew past, shouting “Fuckers!” out the window and stabbing both middle fingers in the air. He was right there, leaning into her, and she could smell the sharp ammoniac taint of his breath. “Fuckers!” he shouted. “Fuckers!”

  It was over in a heartbeat, the cop car gone and vanished round the bend behind them along with the motor homes and the log truck, but she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. All she needed was another confrontation with the police. What was he thinking? Who was this guy? Was he on drugs, was that it? “Jesus,” she exploded, “don’t do that, are you crazy?”

  She gave him a hard stare, but he was looking right through her now, his jaw set so that the muscles stood out in a ridge that ran up into the hard unyielding shell of his skull. He never even blinked, just turned his head, rigid and erect and unmoving all over again. She repeated herself—“Are you crazy?”—but he didn’t answer. She was on the verge of pulling over and telling him to get out because this was too much, she just couldn’t risk it, not now, not today, when it came to her: she knew him, of course she did. “I know you,” she said.

  She shot a glance at him, then her eyes went back to the road. “From Fort Bragg High? I used to sub there.” Another glance. “You’re Sten Stensen’s son, aren’t you—Aaron? Or no, Adam—Adam, right?”

  He didn’t turn. Barely moved his lips. “My name’s Colter.”

  Colter. He wasn’t fooling her. Sten had been principal until he retired, and this was his son, Adam, the one who’d caused so much trouble for everybody concerned. She’d had him in class a couple of times—he’d had hair then, long hair, puffed out and braided into dreadlocks, an inveterate doper who wore Burning Spear T-shirts and affected a Rasta accent. Adam. Adam Stensen.

  “Colter,” she said musingly, lingering over the r. “Is that a nickname? Or an online moniker or what?”

  He wouldn’t answer and they were silent for a while. There was just the buzz and thump of the radio, the whoosh of the breeze and the sibilance of the tires catching and releasing the road. She wanted to instruct him, wanted to tell him she felt the same way he did about the corporate police in their jackboots and shiny patrol cars and let him know about the Uniform Commercial Code and the Sovereign Citizens’ Movement and the straw man and all the rest, but she kept her peace—at least for now—because a plan was already forming in her head. By the time they hit Willits and turned south on 101 for Ukiah, it was as firm as it was going to get. “You know,” she said, and they were the first words she’d uttered in the past fifteen minutes, “when we get to Ukiah? I mean, before I drop you off at, where was it, the sporting goods place?”

  He didn’t turn his head, but he was listening, she could see that.

  “It won’t take five minutes,” she said, watching him now, even as her eyes darted back and forth to the road ahead of her. “One quick stop, that’s all.”

  8.

  HE WAS GOING TO cooperate—he liked the idea, she could see that—but he insisted she had her priorities backwards. “You take me over to Big 5,” he said, “and then we go to the animal place.” It was the longest speech he’d given since he got in the car. “Because I don’t want to get hung up here, you understand?” He was looking at her now, actually looking at her, as if he’d come out of a trance.

  “They close at five,” she said, “and I’m not going to leave my dog in there one more day, no way, José—”

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the clock on the dashboard. It showed one-forty-five. “There’s a ton of time.”

  “But my dog’s in there, don’t you get it? Every minute he’s locked up is like driving nails into my flesh. No, I’m sorry, but Kutya’s first—”

  He shook his head. “You want my help, it’s Big 5 first. You don’t, you can let me off anywhere. Here. You can stop here.”

  They were on the outskirts of Ukiah now, traffic thickening, the sun glaze brushed over everything like a coat of varnish. Big 5 was on East Perkins, more or less in the middle of town, and Animal Control was on the far side, heading south. She was recalculating—she needed help if she was going to get Kutya back, and nobody else, least of all Christabel, would be willing to go through with it because she was afraid, they were all afraid, everybody she knew—when he reached into the back for his canteen, unscrewed the cap, took a long swallow and offered it to her.

  She tried to brush it away. “No thanks,” she said. “I’m not thirsty.”

  “You know what you need?” he said, pressing it on her. “You need to relax. Go ahead, take a hit.”

  What she was trying to do was stay focused and humor him at the same time, because those were the cards she’d been dealt, so she took the canteen and lifted it to her lips. She’d expected water or maybe a sports drink, but that wasn’t what she got—it was alcohol, booze, a quick sharp burn of it in her throat. “Jesus,” she said, and the surprise of it made her laugh, “what is that—jet fuel?”

  “One fifty-one.”

  “What? Rum, you mean?”

  And now he was smiling for the first time. “Gets you where you’re going. But here, turn here, that’s East Perkins—”

  They went into the store together, as if they were on a date or something, and if that felt a little strange, she didn’t mind. She needed to keep an eye on him. If she was attracted to him on some level she told herself it was only because he was malleable—or potentially so—and she was willing to ride with that. No harm, no foul. Once they were done here they’d see to her problem and once that was over she could foresee offering him a lift back as far as Willits, and if he wanted to come in and see where she lived, maybe drink some wine and sit out on the porch, that was okay too. Omelets. She could make omelets. She had eggs and cheese, red pepper, tomatoes. And she could always whip up a salad. That was what she was thinking as the automatic door swung open for them and they stepped into the artificially illuminated cavern of a place that smelled of pigskin, gun oil and saddle soap. And plastic, plastic in all its thousands of guises.

  “Wait here,” he whispered as they came through the door, and he had his head down, as if he was afraid of being seen or called out. Then he was gone, slipping down the aisle toward the fishing and hunting section where the fiberglass rods poked up like antennas and the rifles glinted in their display cases. There was hardly anybody else in the store, aside from the checkout guy—young, short, dark hair, his earlobes distended by a pair of shining black plugs—and two teenage girls trying on running shoes. The thought came to her that he was going to rob the place—or at least shoplift—but she put it out of her head. He was Sten Stensen’s son. And yes, he was trouble. But he wasn’t going to do anything crazy—and if he did she’d cut him loose in an eyeblink, just slip out the door as if she’d never seen him before. She wandered over to a display of biking gloves and matched her hand size to the hard plastic package that read Women’s Medium.

  It didn’t take him ten minutes. She’d moved on from the gloves to a display of detachable water bottles, reflectors a
nd helmets for all your biking needs, though she didn’t own a bike, and when she looked up he was at the cash register, pretending he didn’t know the guy with the earplugs. He set two handbaskets on the counter, the one filled with expensive freeze-dried meals, the other with what looked to be an outdoor cook kit and a hunting knife in a fancy strap-on sheath that probably ran ninety or a hundred dollars. Not one word passed between him and the checkout guy. He paid with a crumpled twenty and the guy rang something up, popped the cash register, and gave him back a ten and a five. Adam ducked his head, shot him a grin—“You have a nice day,” he said—and then the guy wished him a nice day too and Adam was out the door, his back to her, striding briskly for the car. She gave it a minute, taking up one of the water bottles and then replacing it on the display stand before making her way to the door, trying not to look at the guy with the earplugs, but she wavered just as the door pulled back for her and saw that he was studying her, with interest.

  Adam was already in the car when she got there, stuffing the silver-foil packets of food into his backpack. She slid in beside him and shut the door. “Got a good deal, huh?” she offered, turning the key in the ignition and ignoring her seatbelt, which she could do with impunity because she’d long since disabled the dinger or nanny buzzer or whatever you wanted to call it.

  “Let’s just say I have a connection.” He gave her a smirk, tearing at the packaging that housed the cook kit (more hard plastic) and casually dropping it out the window. By the time they were rolling out of the lot, he’d slipped the shining aluminum kit into the pack, along with the knife, which he didn’t even glance at, and he was lifting the canteen to his lips again and again offering it to her.

  “No,” she said, “not now. Not till we get Kutya.” She smiled. “Then we can celebrate.”

  “Party,” he said, and his voice had gone mechanical, as if he were thinking about something else altogether, as if he weren’t even there. “Party on.”

  Was he drunk, was that it?

  “I’m a party animal,” he said in the same detached voice. “A real, a super, party animal.”

  “Yeah,” she said, swinging out onto the highway, “yeah, me too. But you’re going to be all right for this, aren’t you? What we discussed?”

  Nothing.

  “Listen, Adam—”

  “Colter.”

  “Colter. I need five minutes, that’s all. And then, if you want, we can go back to my place—in Willits, at the top of the canyon?—and party all we want. I’ve got wine. I can make us omelets. You like omelets?”

  No response. He was rigid again, staring through the windshield as if it was the transparent lid of a coffin.

  “Okay,” she said, “okay, fine. Five minutes. That’s all I ask.”

  She got lucky, because when they came through the door at Animal Control, it wasn’t the girl behind the counter but a middle-aged man with dyed hair and a severe comb-over, and he was busy explaining adoption procedures to a couple his own age who sported identical his-and-hers paunches. Adam was grinning, for what reason she couldn’t fathom, except that he was drunk, he must have been drunk, but he’d roused himself when they pulled into the lot and now he edged right in, saying, “Sir? Sir, could I ask you a question?”

  The couple turned to stare at him. The man behind the counter, who’d been in the midst of enumerating the virtues of a dog named Dolly, lifted his head to give him an annoyed look. “Just a minute,” he said.

  “But”—and here Adam, soft-voiced to the point where you could barely hear him, calibrated his tone till it was a kind of rising whine—“I have a question, just a simple question.”

  The man just blinked at him.

  And her? She was making like she didn’t know him, as if they’d come in separately, two strangers interested in dogs. And cats. She went over to the brochures and made a show of selecting one of each, a pet lover who only wanted to be informed about the rules and regulations, about safety and health and the special needs of kittens and puppies.

  “About spaying?” Adam said. “You do spaying here, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” the man behind the counter said, “yes, of course. But if you could just wait a second until I’m done with these people, who were here before you—”

  The woman gave Adam an indignant look, then turned back to the conversation. “Dolly’s housetrained, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” the man lied, because how would he know? “They all are.”

  And then Adam, inserting himself between husband and wife at the counter so that each had to take a step back, let his voice go a notch higher. “How old do they have to be before you spay them?”

  The Animal Control man blinked again, but he was there to inform people and the response was all but automatic. “Six months or so.”

  “You use a scalpel, right? Betadine, make it nice and clean. Do you do it yourself—I mean, personally?”

  That was when she drifted down along the far side of the counter and away from the little group gathered there behind her, her neck bent as if studying the brochures in her hand, and nobody even glanced at her as she ducked into the hallway, turned the handle of the door and slipped inside. She found herself in a corridor with an office of some sort on her right and an open door at the far end. She moved cautiously, a step at a time. If there was somebody back there she’d play dumb—she was looking to adopt, that was all, and was this the way to the cages? But what if it was the girl from the other day? She could be back here, she would be, dispensing kibble, filling water bowls, hosing down the floors. What then—another stare-down? Or something more, something harder, something worse? There was one thing she knew: she wasn’t leaving here without her dog. A sharp smell of urine hit her. She could hear the animals moving and rustling beyond the door, a clack of nails on concrete, a furtive yip, whining. She steeled herself and went on.

  As soon as she came through the door and started down the row of cages, the dogs—there must have been forty or more—sprang up off the concrete floor, scrabbling at the wire mesh and crying out for release, but where was Kutya, where was he? They were barking now, every last one of them, raising a clamor that was sure to bring the attendants running—the girl, wherever she was, and the man from the front desk and who knew who else? “Kutya!” she called, “where are you? Come on, boy! Kutya!”

  He was in the last cage down, looking cowed, as if he’d done something wrong, as if it was his fault he’d been locked away in here, and she felt sick with the thought of what he’d been put through. It was a crime, that was what it was, and she was beyond caring now—just let them try to stop her. In the next moment she had the cage door open and she was clicking the leash to his collar and bulling her way out the rear door, the one that gave onto the fenced-in courtyard and the parking lot beyond.

  The dog seemed to sense her urgency and he didn’t hang back to fawn on her or lick her hand or jump up. He had his head down, his paws moving in a brisk businesslike trot, following the leash and the quick clatter of her boots around the corner of the building, across the pavement and up into the backseat of the Sentra, which was parked just out of sight of the front windows. She fell into her seat, slammed the door, her heart pounding. “Stay,” she growled at the dog. “Stay. Get down!” And then the engine fired up and she put the car in gear, telling herself to be calm, that everything was all right, just fine, no one had seen a thing, but her hand trembled on the wheel as she swerved across the lot and pulled up parallel to the front door.

  He was in there still—she could see him through the near window, his scalp shining in the light. What was wrong with him? Why wasn’t he coming? She couldn’t help herself and she knew she shouldn’t do it, but she tapped at the horn, twice, two sharp little bleats, and still he stood there at the desk, apparently jawing on with the Animal Control officer when he hadn’t said twenty words to her all the way up the hill. She leaned forward. Kutya began to whine. And now she hit the horn again, more insistently this time, and saw him glanc
e up, a confused look on his face. They were all four of them staring now and she didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to hit the horn again, but she did, grinding her palm into it.

  And now there was movement, a shuffling of position as if he were swapping shirts with the couple at the counter—or dancing with them—and he was still talking, his jaw still going. What was wrong with him? She beeped again. She saw him detach himself from the little group and then he went out of her line of vision until he appeared again at the glass door, which snatched at the light as he pushed it open and came down the walk to her. But—and this was strange too, strange and maddening—he just stood there staring at the car as if he’d never seen it before. She rolled down the window. “Get in!” she said.

  He just stared, gone off again.

  She barked out his name—“Adam!”—even as Kutya came tumbling over the backseat and into the front where he was plainly visible and the shapes inside the building seemed to coalesce, three faces wedded in one and staring out the window at her. “Goddamn you, get in!

  “Adam!” she warned, and she was half a beat from just leaving him there, dumping his pack out into the lot and turning her back on him, when his face changed and he came round the front of the car to pull open the passenger’s-side door, scoot the dog off the seat and slide in. She was already in gear, already tugging at the wheel and hitting the gas, when he turned to her, full-face, and said, “I told you, my name’s Colter.”

  PART III

  Northspur

  9.

  HE COULDN’T STOP LAUGHING, giggling like he was in junior high and Mr. Wilder was throwing his voice to be Huckleberry Finn one minute and Nigger Jim the next, because this was the way it was supposed to be, sticking it to them at the Big 5 and at the animal place too, one-upping them, one-upping the world, and she was giggling too so that every time he found himself winding down she’d start him up all over again, best thing ever, huge, just laughing and laughing, and what he was thinking was that she was all right, cool, or close to it, even though she was too old and didn’t have any qualms about displaying her uptight side for all to see, leaning on the car horn and barking at him in the parking lot to the point where he’d almost told her to go fuck herself and forget about the ride because he could just stick out his thumb and not have to listen to her shit or absorb it either. But he was racing now, the little wheel inside his brain spinning at top speed, everything on the highway shooting by as if they’d gone into hyperspace though there was no one chasing them and when he snatched a look at the speedometer he saw she was doing fifty-five, exactly fifty-five, as if the engine had a governor on it. Or a robot arm. He tried to picture that and all he could see was a bolted-together metal head where her head had been just a second ago and a mechanical arm reaching down under the steering wheel and through the instrument panel and into the superhot engine until she began to say something through the giggles and her real head popped back on her shoulders with all its lines and grooves and stingy retreating bones and the eyes that kept snapping at him like rubber bands. He needed a hit of 151. Or maybe he didn’t. Cars exploded all around them. He lifted the canteen to his lips and drank.