The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It was a hateful thought and it made him miserable right through to the bone, and he sat there on the stump looking across the field of stumps that was as long as a football field but narrower, much narrower, so as not to attract attention from the air, where the sheriff’s department was always doing flyovers looking for growing operations, sat there staring at where his bunker was disguised on the hill with the brush he’d cut and the camo cover over it and at the marshaled lines of black pots glinting under the sun, but getting no satisfaction from any of it. He was hungry because he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast at her house and the lack of food, the loss of it, gnawed hard at him, because here he was out in the woods without his stuff like some weakling, like some tenderfoot who’d run away without giving it the least smallest little niggardly thought. “Niggardly,” he said to himself, said it aloud, and then he was chanting it as he pushed himself up and started back across the field, niggardlies dropping like spit, ten of them, a hundred, niggardly, niggardly, niggardly.

  He saw smoke rising from the woodstove chimney at Chip Moody’s dog-faced house and the car pulled up there under the sun, so he circled around through the trees without showing himself because why should it be Chip Moody’s dog-faced business what he did or where he went? The woods were quiet, no birds, no bugs, nothing moving. Light fingered through the bare trunks of the trees. The dirt smell was strong, humus, pine needles, rot. He heard somebody beeping a car horn off in the distance and thought of his house again, of Sara and her car and his father and the clanging mallet, and hurried down the hill to the river where he just glided across the water like those lizards in the nature shows that go so fast they never break the surface. Then he was there, back at the house, and he wasn’t calm, wasn’t calm at all.

  The first thing he saw was the dog, its fur in violent motion, and it was barking at him, once, twice, till the trees took it up and then suddenly stopped because the dog came up to him and stuck out its wet snout so he could take it in one palm and feel the electricity go out of it, tail wagging now, the dreadlock dog here to stay whether he had anything to say about it or not. Then he saw her car and then he saw the vacant space where his father’s car had been and everything sucked back down from hyperspace and slowed to a crawl, all the visuals good and fine and everything as it was except for the door-shaped hole in the wall and the frame his father had cemented in there and the flat metal door propped up in the shade, ready to hang. Hang a door. He said that to himself, then said it again. All right. There would be a door into the compound. But it was metal and metal was better than wood and he’d have a key to it and he’d lock it and keep everybody out for as long as that was going to happen.

  His next surprise, beyond the dog and the fact of her car being there while his father’s wasn’t, was the smell of food, a loud red shout of a smell he’d known since he was little—spaghetti sauce, that was what it was, floating atop the scent of the garlic powder in the clear plastic container you had to thump against the counter before you could get anything out of it. He stepped through the gap in the wall and saw that the door to the house stood open behind the dark mesh of the screen door, and that stopped him a moment. How had that happened, unless she had broken a window or his father somehow managed to get a key or change the locks back or somebody forgot to lock up when he went hitching up to Ukiah yesterday afternoon? No matter. He stepped into his own house as if he were a stranger and there she was, her back to him, rattling around in the kitchen like somebody’s mother. Or wife. There was music on the radio—that came to him next—and everything that was familiar about the place, which he kept neat, shipshape, he did, looked different now because she was in the middle of it like some force field that bent and distorted things, and if he thought of his grandmother, it was only the briefest stabbing spike of a thought because she turned then and saw him and smiled.

  “Hey,” she said, “where’ve you been?”

  There was sun, late sun now, evening sun, spilling through the kitchen window, and it took hold of her and held her there. He didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. Nobody knew about the camp in the woods and nobody was ever going to know.

  A pot hissed on the burner behind her. There came the tap-tap-tap of the dog’s nails on the hardwood floor and the dog brushed by him like a shrub on legs and entered the picture, right there, beside her.

  “Your father went home,” she said. “He had to pick the lock to let me in—and I hope that’s all right.” She stopped to swipe a strand of loose hair back behind her ear with the pinky finger of her left hand, her characteristic gesture. Or one of them. She had hair too. Squirrel-colored hair. “I just thought we might have something to eat because, you know, with Kutya here and I don’t have to work tomorrow, I just thought I might as well, you know, stay.” She was grinning. She had something in her hand—a stirring spoon, his grandmother’s stirring spoon with the rust flecks in the shiny metal and the hard yellow plastic handle. “What do you say about that?”

  What did he say? He said nothing, not yet. This was a concept and it was going to take a minute for it to seep in because he hadn’t thought it would go like this, not when he was out at the camp and knew that he’d left his pack behind in the backseat of her car, where it still was, the 151 and all, but right now, in this moment with her there and the dreadlock dog and the light spilling through the windows till his grandmother’s stirring spoon glowed like a wand, a magic wand, he felt so close to calm it was like a spell had come over him. And yet, and yet—there was something there still to keep the wheel spinning, and it was his father, the thought of his father, who’d gone home now, for now, but would be back anytime he pleased and with a new doorway to walk through too.

  “You talk to my father?”

  “Yeah. I knew him, you know, from school.”

  “You talk about me?”

  She shrugged. “A little.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  The dog pulled his front end low to the floor and stretched, the banner of his tail waving as she bent to him to scratch his back, right there in his sweet spot, but what she was doing, whether she knew he knew it or not, was stalling so she could think of what to say next. She straightened up. He was ten feet from her, in the living room still, watching the light. “He said you were going through a rough patch.”

  A rough patch. That hit him like a slap in the face and he had to laugh, but it wasn’t like the laughter in the car after they’d stolen the dog back, but more of a noise that caught in his throat as if he’d swallowed something and couldn’t get it out. “Rough patch,” he repeated and laughed again. “Did he tell you about the playground? About my car? About the Chinese? Did he tell you I don’t have a job?”

  “No,” she said, and she crossed the floor to him and squeezed his arm at the bicep, leaning in to touch her soft lips to the side of his face. “All he said was you’d hit a rough patch, but I don’t care about that. I like you, you know that?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “And since I’m here anyway I looked in the refrigerator—which is impressive the way you keep it, neat, neater than mine, by far—and found the hamburger there and the chicken sausage, and since you had all these spices and cans of stewed tomatoes and whatnot, I just figured I’m hungry and I’ll bet you are too. Okay? So let’s have some wine and maybe sit out back for a while and let the sauce cook down. You’re going to like the way I make spaghetti. Everybody says it’s the best.”

  She was holding on to his arm still and the light was flowing over the dog where it lay in the rug of its fur on the kitchen floor and the smell of the simmering sauce was tugging at his glands, the salivary glands that looked like trussed-up sacks of tapioca pudding in the illustration in his biology text from school, and another phrase came to him that had nothing niggardly in it at all: Go with the flow. He said it aloud, “Go with the flow,” and she gave his muscle another squeeze.

  PART IV

  Mendocino

  12.

  THE
WHOLE IDEA OF a vacation, of a travel vacation, was to clear out the cobwebs, put your troubles behind you and come home refreshed. Well, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, had it? As he reminded Carolee every chance he got. His stress level was so high the first week home he had to go to the doctor to check on his blood-pressure medication and see about a refill on his Xanax, which he never took anymore, not since he’d shut the door behind him at the high school for the last and final time. It wasn’t enough that they’d been attacked or that the ship had been delayed in Puerto Limón for a full twenty-four hours while the Costa Rican bureaucrats conferred with the cruise line bureaucrats and the State Department flunkies so that when the boat did finally get to Miami they’d missed their flight to San Francisco or that the flight they did manage to get on was delayed for three hours because of fog on the other end—no, it was the press, the press was the real and continuing plague because they kept the whole thing going when all he wanted was to turn the page and forget about it. They didn’t care what he wanted. They never even asked. They just came after him.

  Within an hour of his walking out of that room in the bowels of the ship, even before he and Carolee had got through the first bottle of Perrier-Jouët sent compliments of the captain and delivered by Kristi Breerling herself, his cell began ringing. Exhausted—wiped—and half-drunk too, he wasn’t thinking and just put the phone to his ear and rasped, “Hello?”

  A voice came back at him, an unfamiliar voice, distant but clear. A man’s voice. “Mr. Stensen? Sten Stensen?”

  “Yeah?”

  The voice gave a name and an affiliation and without pausing to draw breath began hammering him with questions, each more inane and intrusive than the last—“What was it like out there? How many of them were there? How do you feel, you feel any different? You are a senior citizen, right—seventy years old, is that right? A war veteran? Did the alleged attacker say anything to you? He had a gun? Or was it a knife?” He tried to answer the man’s questions as patiently as he could, though Carolee was hissing at him to hang up and all he could think of was the cruise line’s slogan—Experience World-Class Indulgence—and wonder how in Christ’s name this reporter had managed to get his cell number, but finally, after a question about his service record—In Vietnam, was it?—he broke the connection even as the call-waiting light flared and he shut the thing off and stuffed it deep in his pocket.

  “Who was that?” Carolee demanded.

  “I don’t know. Some reporter.”

  It was dark out over the water. They’d pulled the sliding door of their private veranda shut to thwart the mosquitoes and whatever else was out there—vampire bats, he supposed. The champagne in his glass had gone warm. He took a sip and made a face—it tasted like club soda with a dash of bitters and no more potent.

  Carolee was giving him her severe look, her mouth drawn down and her eyebrows pinched together, a crease there in the shape of a V she’d been working on for sixty-four years now. “You don’t have to talk to those people,” she said.

  The glass went heavy in his hand. He could barely hold his head up. “Yeah,” he said, “and you don’t have to swat flies either.”

  Of course, part of the problem that first week was that he couldn’t seem to say no. He was a celebrity, an instant celebrity, the story plumbing some deep atavistic recess of the American psyche, and forgive him, because he knew it was wrong in every way, but after the third or fourth interview he began to feel he was only getting his due: Ex-Marine, 70, Kills Tour Thug; Quick Thinking Saves the Day; Costa Rica Tour Hero. If he stopped to think about it he would have been ashamed of himself—he was being manipulated, and worse, glorified not for any virtue, but for a single act of violence that haunted him every time he shut his eyes—but he didn’t stop to think. He’d never been interviewed on the radio before—or on TV either—and that shot up the stress level, of course it did, but he went through with every request until the requests began to trickle off in the wake of newer and riper stories, the mass shooting of the week, the daily bombing, the women imprisoned as sex slaves and all the rest of it.

  There were calls from Hollywood too, producers making promises, naming sums, gabbling over the line like auctioneers—and that was what this was, an auction, make no mistake about it—but none of them ever followed through and he never received a letter from a single one of them let alone a contract or, god forbid, a check. But he didn’t want a check, didn’t want to be inflated any more than he already had been—who in his right mind would ever want to see a movie made out of his life, anyway? The camera pans down the street to focus on a frame house in need of paint in the sleepy lumber town of Fort Bragg, California, and there he is, ten years old and emerging from the front door to do something dramatic like walk to school, and here’s his mother calling to him like June Lockhart in Lassie, then we shift to the high school years, the junker car, the prom, Vietnam, college and Carolee, the birth of their son, student teaching, the rise up the rocky slope to the great and shining plateau of school principal, and all of it circling round the cruise ship and the blighted dirty jungle and one climactic moment to justify it all, this American life. Who would they get to play him—Sean Connery? Tommy Lee Jones? Travolta? Absurdity on top of absurdity.

  As it turned out, he did agree to one TV appearance, gratis, with a station out of San Francisco, which sent one of their newswomen and two support people to the house and filmed him sitting in the rocker on the front porch with the blue pennant of the ocean flapping in the distance. When it aired that night on the six o’clock news, he saw himself loom up on the screen like something out of one of the Japanese horror flicks he’d loved as a boy—Rodan, maybe, or Godzilla—his eyes blunted, his face scaled and gray and his big fists clenched on the arms of the chair as if he was afraid of falling out of it. Were you scared? the TV woman asked him and he said he was too angry to be scared, his voice like the leaky hiss of an air hose. It all happened so quickly, she prompted. Yeah, he rasped, looking into the camera with his face absolutely frozen, something like that. And you just reacted? Yeah, he said, I just reacted.

  By the second week, things had died down to the point of extinction as far as the press was concerned, but he couldn’t go anywhere without somebody giving him a thumbs-up or calling out to him, people he didn’t even know. It was as if he belonged to them now, the whole community, as if he’d graduated from being a retiree and homeowner to another level altogether. And that might have given him some satisfaction—it did—but somehow all he could see was Adam’s face, twisted in a sneer. Big hero. Yeah. Sure. That about summed it up. What was he going to do, run for mayor?

  And yet still, at odd moments and always while Carolee was out or occupied elsewhere, he couldn’t resist googling his name to see what would come up. Most of the articles repeated the same information (and misinformation, one adding ten years to his age and another spelling his name variously as Sternson and Stevenson), but every once in a while he would find something new, a detail revealed, a tidbit that put everything in a fresh light as if the incident were reconstructing itself for him like a jigsaw puzzle. He was at it one fog-obliterated afternoon, surfing away, the world reduced to the dimensions of the screen in front of him, when he came across an article he’d somehow managed to overlook (or maybe it had just been posted, who knew?—the internet worked in mysterious ways). This was a fuller account of the AP story that had appeared just about everywhere, and as he scanned it, his eyes jumped to the one detail the other reports had left out as if it had no significance at all: the name of the dead man. To this point, he’d been anonymous—the thug, the mugger, the thief—and now he had a name: Warner Ayala. And more: here was his biography, compacted in two lines of print. He was twenty-four years old. A resident of Jamaica Town. He’d built up a long rap sheet of minor crimes from the age of twelve on and he was a suspect in a string of attacks on tourists and local residents alike. Or had been. Warner Ayala. And here was his movie, here was his life.

  “Wa
rner,” he repeated to himself, saying it aloud like an incantation, “Warner,” and all at once he was thinking of the parents, the siblings, cousins, grandparents, a father like himself who was mourning his dead son even now. It was as if someone had crept up and struck him a blow from behind, all of it rushing back in that instant, the sun, the mud lot, the fierce unrelenting intimacy of his body entangled with this other one, and he felt so filled with self-loathing and despair it was all he could do to lift his finger to the off button and make the whole thing disappear.

  It was three-thirty in the afternoon. The fog sat in the windows. It was very quiet. The blank screen gave him back a ghost image of himself, of his ravaged face and unfocused eyes, the presence still there, still awake and alert and corrosive, even as he pushed himself up from the desk and the world came back to him in all its color and immediacy. Paneled walls. The den. The framed photo of Adam, eleven years old and holding a stringer of half-grown trout aloft with a smile uncomplicated by anything beyond the joy of the moment. Another picture there, of him and Carolee, squinting into the camera against a fierce tropical sun and no older than Adam was now. And another, of his mother, dead twenty years and more, a ghost herself. Next thing he knew he was in the kitchen, washing down a Xanax with a cold beer, and then he went into the living room and started a fire, as much for the cheer as the warmth of it. He felt hopeless. Felt like shit. The pill wasn’t working or the beer or the fire either.