The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  He never made it. He ran into another expedition at the mouth of the Platte River—a conglomerate of fur traders under Manuel Lisa who were ambitious to set up a trading post–slash-fort—and he agreed to go on ahead, to go back, that is, and scout for them. His job this time was to contact the Crows in their scattered villages and spread the news about the trading post and how they could exchange furs for steel knives, mirrors, blankets, beads and baubles, which he did. In the process he became the first white man to discover what would become Yellowstone Park and managed to get himself shot in the right leg while fighting with the Crows against a party of Blackfeet. The Crows weren’t especially sympathetic or grateful either. They moved on and left him to his fate. But what kind of fate was that? Dying out there with a suppurating wound while the buzzards settled in for the feast? No, no way. Totally unacceptable. He wasn’t ready to leave this planet because he was too tough for that, too determined and resilient—and yes, independent—so he favored his good leg and walked three hundred miles back to the fort on the Platte.

  This was what he knew, what the history books revealed, and if he closed his eyes while she sat beside him in the driver’s seat humming one of her lame country songs and the dog hung his head over the seat and breathed its meat-reeking breath in his face as the car yawed down Route 20 on the way to his place, he could picture how it must have been, Colter fighting down the pain till it went from something that filled him like an air pump inflating his skin to a hot white pinpoint of light that cooled with every step he took. Three hundred miles. Who could walk three hundred miles today, even on two good legs? Not to mention that Colter had no PowerBars or beef jerky or anything else, not even an apple, which people today took totally for granted as if apples were like air, and he had to forage all the way, subsisting on roots, frogs, snakes, the things he shot and feasted on only to leave what he couldn’t carry to rot when he moved on. That was legendary, that was a feat, but it was nothing compared to what came next—Colter’s Run, when he was naked and barefoot and a whole army of Blackfeet braves was chasing him down, all of them pissed-off and screaming and taking aim at his naked shoulders with their spears held high. He ran, and they chased him. And if he was faster than they were, even on their own ground and with their feet protected by moccasins, it was because he was John Colter and they weren’t.

  He knew something was wrong the minute they turned into the dirt road and heard the distant discontinuous clanging as if the world were made of steel and coming apart at the seams. The windows were down. He’d been staring into the side mirror, staring into his own jolting eye and seeing the door panels fixed there like blistered skin and the dog slavering out the back and smearing the fender with a shiny outwardly radiating web of spit and mucus that immediately turned brown with flung-up dust when they went from pavement to dirt, and he wouldn’t look up. He wasn’t ready yet. He was listening to the tires, a clean spinning whine of perfect harmony on the blacktop that gave way to an angry thump and pop as they rocked over the washboard corrugations worked into the road to his grandmother’s house—to his house—because it was better than listening to her, to Sara, who kept trying to radicalize him against the government when he was already a thousand times more radical than she was. Nobody governed him. They were all just criminals anyway, every politician bought and sold by the special interests and the cops nothing more than their private army—he knew that and she didn’t have to tell him. But she did. On and on till her voice seemed to be coming from someplace other than her mouth and lips and larynx, as if it was riding radio waves on its own special channel.

  But that clanging. Somehow he knew what it was and who was making it, though he’d never heard that exact sound before and couldn’t have said how he knew unless it was some sixth sense like the sense that told Colter when there were hostiles about. She was saying, “They might come to my house but I’ll just play dumb and say, ‘I thought you had him’ and then get angry and say, ‘What are you telling me—that he got away? Or what, you didn’t . . .’”—she turned to him, grinning, pretending to be someplace else talking to somebody else and not him at all—“‘send him out for adoption?’ And then I’ll pause and let my face go dark. ‘Or no, don’t tell me you put him down? Because if you did—’”

  The house was there under the trees and the river was down below it. Ever since the cops had taken his car away he’d had to hitch into town for groceries, though his mother would come pick him up, was happy to come pick him up—and she’d done it a couple of times—but that wasn’t independent, and after a while when she pulled up to the house that used to have a phone before he uprooted it and tossed it in the river where it could go deep and talk to the minnows and steelhead in every human language, he would duck out the back door, slip over the wall and into the woods, and then he went to the locksmith and changed the locks so she couldn’t get in.

  Sara said, “Is this it?,” and he nodded and she put on her blinker to turn into the gravel drive even as he saw the bishop pines screaming with sunlight and the three brown plastic overflowing trash cans no one ever seemed to come and pick up and the big object, the real thing, the thing that slammed at him like a missile shot out of nowhere—his father’s car, parked in the shadow of the wall like it belonged there.

  “Shit,” he said. “Shit.”

  The car lurched to a stop. She put it in park, cut the engine and turned to him. “What’s wrong?”

  He just pointed at the car in front of them, a new Toyota hybrid his father had bought as a retirement present to himself, a statement on four wheels that might as well have had a loudspeaker attached to it trumpeting its miles per gallon and crying out against the spoliation of the earth and the four hundred parts per million of CO2 in the air. That was a good thing, he wouldn’t argue with that—it made sense to cut down on gas-guzzling, of course it did—but if you really wanted to get serious you’d just send the car back to Japan and use your own two legs to get around. His father didn’t need a car. Nobody needed a car. That was what feet were for. Tell it to Colter: he didn’t even have a horse.

  The clanging faltered, intermittent now, and then it died altogether so that the little noises—of insects, the river, birds in the trees—came back to establish themselves in a soundloop that was as steady as the beating of his heart. Out of the car went the dreadlock dog the minute Sara cracked her door and then they were out in the yard and the dog was lifting his leg against something that hadn’t been there before, rubble, a pile of rubble that looked like busted-up cinder block. And then the clanging started up again and he thought of his father and how his father had got in his face when he saw the wall for the first time, shouting “Where’s your brain? You build an eight-foot wall without a doorway, what are you thinking? Or are you thinking, are you thinking at all?”

  His father had shouted for a good fifteen minutes and then gone home and come back with a stepladder and he’d watched him—an old man with a scorched-earth face—climb up to perch crotch-wise on the lip of the wall and hoist the stepladder up behind him so he could ease it down the inside, and then his father was there, in the compound, and he was shouting all over again.

  “It’s to keep people out,” he’d said in his own defense. “I can climb it. And I don’t need any ladder either.”

  But now, now there was a doorway-sized hole in the wall and a pile of busted-up cinder block in the yard and even before the dreadlock dog had got done with his yellow arc of piss here came another fractured block, flung through the doorway to clack against the pile and send the dog off yipping as if he’d been hit, which he hadn’t. Sara snapped a look at him like he was the one who’d thrown the thing and called comfort to the dog while those little brown birds with the forked white tail feathers shot like bullets across the yard and the sun flared and flared again. That was the moment his father appeared in the jagged new doorway, dressed in his hiking boots and jeans, his T-shirt sweated through and a pair of stained work gloves on his hands. His father’s face t
ook up a wondering look and then discarded it. “Adam,” his father said, and his tone was neutral because he was surprised to see Sara there beside him, as if she’d crawled out of some secret passage deep under the earth like a gopher or a mole, a thing that went around on all fours, and Let’s do it doggie-style, she’d said the second time, do you like it doggie-style?

  “Hi, Sten,” she said, and he watched his father’s eyes fall into their twin sinkholes for just an instant as he tried to place her and then his father said “Hi” back and added her name, to prove he knew her. And more: his father was calculating, the two of them in the same picture, her with her big tits and the dreadlock dog that was sniffing at his leg now, putting two and two together, fucking in his mind, fucking, fucking.

  “Nice to see you again,” Sara said, and his father dredged up a smile for her. “How’s retirement treating you? You did retire, right—isn’t that what I heard?”

  His father put both his palms on his forehead and swept his hair back, gray hair going to white, the kind of thing a Blackfoot brave would have prized on a dripping scalp, then unfastened the rubber band pinching his ponytail, patted the loose hairs in place and refastened it, all in three seconds flat. This was his characteristic gesture. Or one of them, anyway. Hair. He had hair. “That’s right,” his father said. “Just got back from a cruise, in fact. Down south. Maybe you read about it? Or saw it on TV?”

  She was wearing her jeans and shit-kicking boots, nothing to see there, so far as fucking was concerned, but her big tits were sticking out of a little turquoise blouse the size of a rag and you could see her navel too. And her belly. Her belly that was like a wave at sea and just as soft once it washed over you. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “yeah. Of course.” She raised her right hand to smack her head in a duh! kind of way. “That must have been terrifying.”

  His father shrugged.

  “I heard it was three of them. Mexicans, right? In Mexico?”

  “Costa Rica.”

  “Costa Rica? Jesus, I thought that was supposed to be safe—”

  “Yeah, well, nothing’s safe,” his father said, and why did he look at him as if he’d had anything to do with it? He wasn’t there. He didn’t kill anybody. “It could happen anywhere. We were just lucky, that was all.”

  “Three of them,” she repeated, “and they were armed and you had nothing but your bare hands? I’d say that’s more than luck.”

  Another shrug, his father the hero, the killer. “You let two of them get away,” he heard himself say. He could feel his father’s stare boring into him, but he wasn’t going to look up and acknowledge it—he was watching the way Sara’s reptile boots shifted in the dirt, the two little silver gleams there at the toes of them, shit-kickers. “So did the guy’s eyes pop out or what? Like a frog when you step on it?”

  “Adam,” his father said, and he heard the tone of it and knew it, the tone that cut him down to size, diminished him, made him nothing more than a boy, a child, an infant, as if what he said was always stupid and irrelevant and nobody wanted to hear it.

  “What,” he said, throwing it back at him. “You killed him, didn’t you? You ought to know.”

  “Adam. Come on, now. That’s not the point, you know that. Sometimes—”

  And here she cut in, as if she was on his father’s side now, as if she and his father were some sort of tag team and everything he’d done with her, from one-upping the Animal Control idiots to drinking Two-Buck Chuck to fucking in the dark didn’t count for a thing. “It was self-defense.”

  He’d been clear, or a little clear anyway, but he wasn’t clear anymore, a sudden buzz of noise in his ears and then the dreadlock dog started barking and the trees took it up, all the Sitka spruce and Doug firs and bishop pines and new-growth redwoods running up into the hills and barking in chorus. He needed a hit of something, pot, hash, opium, acid, and where was the canteen, what had he done with the canteen?

  “Adam, it’s all right,” his father said in his hollowed-out reptile’s rasp of a voice, the voice that was meant to be comforting and copacetic but was really nothing more than a hiss, and his father took a step toward him, the gloves swelling his hands till they were King Kong hands, black and rubbery and made to crush things. “We’re okay here, there’s no rush, and we’re going to find you a new place to live, believe me, we will—”

  “My name’s not Adam,” he heard himself say, and there was somebody else speaking for him now, Colter, Colter speaking, “because Adam was the original man and I’m not the original anything.”

  Sara was right there, right there between them, leading with her midriff—that was the term, her midriff, her bare midriff—and she said, “Adam’s been helping me. He’s great. He’s been a great help. What we need is a place to keep the dog—Kutya?—for a couple of days. Because my landlord? She’s being a bitch about having a pet. And I was wondering if, well, Adam said he’d help me out—if it’s okay with his grandma, that is. And you, you of course.”

  So his father was taking this in and the trees were barking and his father knew it was all a lie and his son had been fucking her, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself, and the three of them were standing there outside the wall just jawing away as if they were in one of the plays they’d put on in the auditorium in high school.

  “Well, good, good,” his father was saying. “I’m glad he could help, and as far as his grandmother’s concerned, well, she passed on six months ago now, so that won’t be a problem. Right, Adam?” A look for him now, drilled full of holes and every hole a question mark punctured with little barbs. “Happy to accommodate you—I mean, if it’s okay with Adam it’s okay with me.”

  Everything was so nice, everything so perfect, his father on his best behavior because of her, going out of his way to be reasonable and understanding, just like he always was in his office at school with his big arms laid on the desk in the short-sleeved button-down shirt he wore without fail, winter and summer. As reasonable as the guidance counselor and the parade of shrinks marching through his life as long as he could remember. And what was it the last one said, Dr. Rob Robertson, Robert’s son, just call me Rob, the head-thumping diagnosis that was supposed to end it all and stop the wheel and make everybody happy? A problem of adjustment to adulthood. Yeah, sure. In spades. And then he was an adult, eighteen and out of school, and that was the end of the shrinks. He had acid instead, he had alcohol, pot. And here he was, adjusting to adulthood, right here, right now.

  “Big hero,” he heard himself say in the most sarcastic voice he could dredge up, and he was looking at the ground, at the dreadlock dog, at the pile of busted-up cinder block. “John Colter would have killed them all—I would have killed them all.”

  They just looked at each other, the two of them, as if he’d been speaking Chinese.

  The urge he had, right then, was to take them by surprise, dash through the new doorway, circle round back of the house and go right up over the wall and out into the woods, just to get a little peace for a minute, and was that too much to ask? And he was going to, he was going to do that, just as soon as he wrapped up this conversation or dialogue or trialogue or whatever it was, and so he squared himself up so he was his father’s height—Straighten up, straighten your shoulders and stand up straight, be a man, that was what his father was always telling him, had been telling him, harping on it as long as he could remember, from elementary school to junior high to senior year and the half semester at Humboldt, which was about all he could stand—and he was fed up with it and he did something he never did, looked him dead in the eye and said, “And one more thing, in case you’re wondering—I fucked her. Isn’t that right, Sara? Isn’t that right? Didn’t I fuck you?”

  11.

  HE DIDN’T WAIT AROUND to see the look on his father’s face because that was then and this was now and now he was already up and over the back wall and across the Noyo because the rains had stopped for the season and there were places you could wade, no problem, his boots we
t and squishing and his pants soaked to his knees, moving fast, army double time, up beyond the cabin where the dog-faced man lived with his fat grub of a wife and ugly squalling kids who didn’t deserve to live, not on this planet, anyway, and a good mile and a half beyond that to where he’d made his own clearing on timber company property with the chainsaw he’d lifted from one of the cabins down around Alpine and then trimmed the branches off the logs and stacked up the logs to make his bunker. What he needed was sunshine. Sunshine was essential to plant growth. Any fool knew that. And you didn’t get sunshine in a pine forest unless you took down the trees as quietly as you could considering the noise of the chainsaw that beat at your ears and went right inside of you whether you used ear protection or not, but there were ways around that. For one thing, who was there to hear, anyway, aside from the dog-faced man whose name was Chip Moody and who’d hated him on sight and the feeling was mutual? Or the old white-hairs like his father the timber company paid to hike around the woods and make sure the Mexican gangs weren’t out there carving up marijuana plantations and poisoning everything that moved? For another thing, he was smart enough to do most of his cutting in the middle of the day when people were at work or when the Skunk Train was taking a load of tourists up and down the tracks to Northspur and back and all the hard metallic noises of the world ran confused.

  He wasn’t thinking because his father had set him off, his father always set him off and his mother did too, but not as instantly and not as thoroughly, and when he emerged in the clearing he realized he’d forgotten to bring his pack with the new knife and the cook-kit and the freeze-dried entrées that were better when they took on a little smoke from the fire than anything you’d cook yourself. And his canteen. His canteen was still half-full of 151 and he had his baggie of buds and his blunt and matches in the side flap of the pack, which was in the backseat of her car and he wanted all that now. His stomach rumbled. He could see the pack there on the dirty seat with its filthy rumpled towel and the white clumps of dog hair scattered around like weeds growing out of it, but the dirty seat was in the back of the blue car that was parked behind his father’s car and he had to fight down a cresting wave of paranoia and regret that slammed at him so hard he had to sit down on a stump in the middle of the field just to swim through it and catch his breath because what if she’d forgotten the pack was there and gone back up the hill to her house and left nothing behind but the dreadlock dog? Or worse, what if she’d stolen it, stolen everything? And worse, worse, worse, what if she’d broken a window in the house and crawled in and got at his stuff there, what if she took his rifle, his porn, the six hundred dollars he kept against emergencies in the Safeway sweet pickle relish jar behind the couch?