The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  For a long while he just sat there, moving only to stir the coals, the clock on the mantel ticking louder and louder and the fire hissing and the four walls closing him in until some sort of curtain seemed to lift inside him, dark to light, and gradually he began to come out of it. Here he was, still ambulatory, with his mind intact, or mostly so, sitting before a fire in the shingled ocean-view cottage they’d traded up to get—and get at a steal, jumping on it when the recession hit and the values plunged. Even better: he’d finally managed to escape Fort Bragg, winding up here in the religiously quaint little tourist village of Mendocino, population 1,008, where you could get fresh-baked bread every morning and afternoon and the world’s best coffee anytime you wanted. Enough, already—he wasn’t one to feel sorry for himself. What was done was done. Move forward. Shake some pleasure out of life. He got to his feet, groggy from the beer and the pill, but inspired suddenly: he was going to call Carolee and tell her to come home, right away, because he was taking her out to dinner—at the Bistro, the place she liked best.

  Her phone rang but she didn’t answer and it went to voicemail. “Call me!” he shouted into the receiver and then rang the number again. She was down in Calpurnia, helping out at the animal preserve there where she liked to volunteer two days a week, but it was getting late—past five now—and they would have fed the animals already, wouldn’t they? Or shoveled up the shit or whatever they did? Maybe she was in the car, maybe that was it. He was trying to picture that, his wife, driving, the fog strangling the headlights, her gray serious eyes fixed on the road, which was slick and wet and deserted, when she picked up.

  “Hi, Sten,” her voice breathed in his ear, “what’s up?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m just getting in the car.”

  “Good. Great. Because I’m taking you out to dinner at that place you like.”

  “The Bistro?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “We’re going to celebrate.”

  He heard the muffled thump of the car door slamming shut, then the revolving whine of the engine starting up. “Celebrate what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel like celebrating. Life, I guess.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “You there?”

  The faint distant crunch of gravel, tires in motion, then her voice coming back to him: “Sounds fine to me.”

  “Okay,” he said, “okay.” Everything was precious suddenly, his life, her life, the lives of the animals and of everybody else out there on the slick wet roads. He felt so overwhelmed he could barely get the words out. “You be careful out there, huh?”

  The restaurant was in Fort Bragg, eight miles up the road from Mendocino. It occupied the second floor of a brick building the size of a department store that had once housed the operations of Union Lumber and it was floor-to-ceiling windows all around so that if you got a window table you could sit there and eat and feel as if you were floating over the whole town and the ocean too. Though it was the middle of August and the tourists were out in force, they got a window table without having to wait at the bar because the hostess was a former student at Fort Bragg High and recognized him, though he didn’t recognize her. “Who was that?” Carolee asked, once they were seated.

  “Beats me,” he said, looking up at her, feeling good, if a bit shaky still. “At this point, they all look the same to me.”

  There were menus, drinks, a basket of hot bread. He went through the bread without even realizing what he was doing, hungry suddenly, though he hadn’t got a lick of exercise all day.

  “You are hungry,” she said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t eat any lunch?”

  He ducked his head, grinned. “No, I had something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know—a sandwich. Or cereal, a bowl of cereal.” The fact was, he couldn’t really remember. He had a sudden vision of himself laid out flat in a nursing home, gasping for breath, all his vitals dwindled down to nothing. Old man. He was an old man. “But tell me, how was it down there,” he said, to cover himself, “—they get any new zebras in? Or what, giraffes? Or are they fresh out over there in Africa?”

  “Same old,” she said. “But really, I don’t know why you have to make fun of them. If it wasn’t for the Burnsides and a handful of people like them, people who care, those zebras and antelope would be gone from the face of the earth.”

  “Then why don’t they send them back? Because that’s where they belong, isn’t it? I mean, zebras in Mendocino County—give me a break. What does he think, he’s Noah or something?”

  She was having a martini, three olives on the side. That was her trick: olives on the side so you get more gin, a matter of displacement—or lack of it, that is. She took a long slow sip, watching him. “That’s the idea,” she said. “Eventually. When things are, I don’t know, more stable over there.”

  “Right,” he said, and he felt his spirits crank back up and it had nothing to do with the Xanax, or did it? “Because they’d just eat them now, right? Probably the minute they got off the boat.” The mountain zebra was almost gone in its native range, he knew that much, and the Grevy’s too. The kudu weren’t doing all that much better.

  “Stable,” she repeated bitterly, sweeping her hair back. “It’s a joke over there. Places like Sudan or Somalia, even Kenya. Everything’s guns. Tribes. Guerrillas.” She paused to back up and give it an exaggerated Spanish pronunciation: “Gare-ee-yas, I mean. Not gorillas—gorillas we could use more of. A whole lot more. But that’s the mentality over there—shoot everything that moves.”

  “Over here too,” he said.

  She was silent a moment. Then she said, “What are you thinking of having?”

  “Me? Fish. What about you?”

  That was when he glanced out the window to the street below and saw Adam climbing out of an unfamiliar car that had just pulled up to the curb—a Japanese thing, pale blue, that suddenly became familiar, because here was that woman, what was her name, emerging from the driver’s side to join him on the sidewalk. From this angle—he was right above them—he saw only the crowns of their heads and the flat plateaus of their shoulders, Adam’s head shaved to the bone and glowing in the light trapped beneath the fog. The woman—her name came to him then, Sara—wore her hair parted down the middle, a crisp white line there as if her skull had been divided in two. They seemed to confer a moment and then started across the street to the pizza place and the bar there, Adam in the camo outfit he seemed to wear perennially now and Sara in jeans, boots and a low-cut top that displayed the deep crease between her breasts, bird’s-eye view.

  “Isn’t that Adam?” Carolee said.

  “Yeah, he just got out of the car there.”

  “Who’s that with him?”

  “Sara. The woman I told you about—from the other day?”

  A silence. The restaurant buzzed around them. They watched the two of them cross the street, mount the curb and disappear into the pizza place—the pub that sold pizza, that is—Adam hunching in ahead of her, no thought of standing aside or holding the door, but that was only typical, that was only to be expected, that was Adam.

  “She’s old for him, isn’t she? She’s got to be forty.”

  “That’s his business.”

  “I mean, what’s she even doing with him?” She was leaning to her left, at the very edge of the table, squinting to peer out the window, though there was nothing to see but the closed door and above it the neon sign doing battle with the fog. “She’s a piece of work herself, is what I hear.”

  He just shrugged, took a sip of his martini. He’d given up worrying about Adam a long time ago—or at least he’d tried to. Adam had problems. He’d always had problems. There’d been shrinks, a whole succession of them, but once he turned eighteen they had no control over that, and even after the last time he’d been arrested and evaluated by a state-appointed psychiatrist they still couldn’t
get access to the records. Privacy laws. He was an adult. Living in his own world. And while that world had its intersections with theirs and they did what they could—helped him with money, gave him a place to live where he could have some privacy and do his thing, whatever that might be, putting up walls, obsessing over the Chinese, calling himself Colter—he kept pushing them away till there was no point in it anymore.

  “Cindy Burnside says she’s got some pretty strange theories; I mean, really out there—as in right wing? As in conspiracies? Anti-everything? You know she got arrested for refusing to show a cop her license and registration?”

  “She’s fine,” he said. “He’s fine too.”

  “Fine? Where’s he going to live when we close on my mother’s house? With her?”

  He didn’t have a chance to answer because the waiter suddenly appeared with two fresh drinks, two more martinis, which would put them both over their self-imposed limit, if they were going to drink wine with dinner, that is—and they were. But there was the tray, there the perspiring glasses, there the waiter, smiling. “We didn’t order those,” Sten said.

  The waiter—fiftyish, in white shirt and tie, his hair slicked tight to his skull—gestured to the couple sitting two tables over. They smiled, waved. Did he know them? “Compliments of the gentleman and lady,” the waiter said.

  “I don’t want another martini,” Sten said. “I’m not even half-finished with this one—”

  “They want to buy you a round,” the waiter said.

  He wanted to say For what? Why? I don’t even know them, but they were already raising their glasses to him and here was the man giving him the thumbs-up and then the peace sign—or maybe it was the V-for-victory sign—and he said, “Yeah, sure, okay,” and in the next moment he was raising his glass in return.

  “That was nice,” Carolee said.

  “Real nice,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

  She must not have caught it because the next thing she said was, “The sturgeon sounds good,” and then, in non sequitur, “I thought Adam wasn’t supposed to go in there? Piero’s, I mean.”

  “That was a long time ago,” he said.

  “They don’t eighty-six you for life?”

  He stared into the fresh martini—and he wasn’t going to rush even if it was getting warm before his eyes because he wouldn’t have strangers dictating his life to him—before he looked up and said, “If every time somebody got a little rowdy they eighty-sixed you for life all the bars in the world would be out of business.”

  “A little rowdy?” And here was that look again, the one that bunched her eyebrows. “I’d say he was more than a little rowdy—and what did that wind up costing us?”

  He felt the irritation come up in him, despite the Xanax, despite the gin and the whiff of vermouth riding atop it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

  13.

  THE NEXT MORNING, EARLY, he found himself back in Fort Bragg, at the grocery there—the cheap one, the one the tourists didn’t know about—pushing a cart and working his way through the itemized list Carolee had pressed on him as he went out the door. The place was over-lit, antiseptic, as artificial as the flight deck of a spaceship, and at this hour there were more shelf-stockers than shoppers. That was all right. He liked the early hours, when things were less complicated. He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate, and he supposed he could thank his mother for that. And his father. The work ethic—once you had it, once it had been implanted in you, how could you shake it? Why would you want to? Relax, he kept telling himself. Keep busy. Relax. Keep busy. The last thing he wanted was to wind up sitting in a recliner all day staring at the TV like some zombie or pulling on a sun visor to chase a golf ball around the fairways with a bunch of loudmouthed jocks. Or bridge. He hated bridge, hated games of any kind. But how did you relax? That was the problem he was trying to resolve—and certainly world-class indulgence wasn’t the answer.

  He seemed to have a package of meat in his hand, T-bone steak, slick and wet and red, and when he set it in the cart, there was a fine glaze of blood on his hand, and no place to wipe it off. Some stores provided paper towels to ease the unpleasantness of this little reminder of precisely where that steak or chop or chicken breast originated, but not this one. He stood there a moment, rubbing the pink glaze over his fingertips before surreptitiously wiping it off on the soft plastic wrapper of one of the packages of hamburger buns stacked on the display case behind him.

  When he turned back to the cart, reaching down to reassemble the things there and check them against Carolee’s list—1% milk in the plastic jug, pickles, cookies, more meat, pasta, beans, rice—he felt the twinge in his lower back again, the muscle there balky still. It seemed to bother him more in the mornings, stiffening up overnight despite the form-fitting neoprene pad Carolee had stretched over the mattress, but then he hadn’t slept on that pad or in that bed—their bed—the previous night. He’d wound up on the narrow single bed in the guest room because Carolee was in one of her moods. And it wasn’t all her—he’d been in a mood too, absolutely. And why? Because after they’d finished their celebratory dinner, she’d insisted they go across the street and into the pizza place where Adam was, where Adam had been for the better part of an hour. “For an after-dinner drink,” she said, taking hold of his arm as they came down the stairs at the restaurant.

  “They don’t have after-dinner drinks there. Only beer and wine, remember?”

  “An after-dinner wine then.”

  They were passing by the bar on the lower level—the door swung open on muted lighting and inflamed faces—and he said, “Why not have one here? A real drink, a cognac or that Benedictine you like. I’m wined out, if you want to know the truth.” They were in the hallway now, moving toward the front door. “Or actually, I’ve had enough. More than enough. Let’s just go home, huh?”

  She was chopping along in her short swift strides, tugging at his arm as if leading him on a leash. “I want to go to Piero’s,” she said.

  And he stopped, right there, right at the door, to tug back at her. “Let it go,” he told her. “Drop it. He’s a big boy now. He’s an adult. You can’t just go around spying on him—”

  “I’m not spying on him. I just want a drink at Piero’s, all right? Is that a crime?”

  “No,” he said, “but stalking is.”

  She’d jerked angrily away from him. “I can’t believe you,” she said, pushing through the door and out onto the street while he followed in her wake, the folds of her dress in violent motion, her perfume an assault on the damp night air, perfume he didn’t like, had never liked, perfume she wore just to make his eyes water. He made a note to himself to find the little bottle amidst the clutter in the bathroom and dump it in the trash when she wasn’t looking, but then of course she’d just go and buy another bottle and he’d dump that and she’d buy another one, a losing proposition all the way round. He hadn’t gone two steps before she swung round on him, combative, her legs braced, hands on hips. “He’s my son. Our son.” She took in a deep moist breath and blew it out again. “I just want to get a look at her.”

  The fog softened the lights of the buildings up and down the street. There was no traffic. No noise, no sound of any kind. Even the ocean, no more than five hundred yards away, was silent, as if the waves had been sucked back down the beach before they had a chance to break. “Right,” he said into the stillness, “like we just happened to be passing by and got a sudden craving for pizza, at what—nine-fifteen at night? When we’re normally sitting in front of the TV and thinking about bed? He’s not stupid, you know.”

  Her face was contorted, angry, the lines at the corners of her eyes etched in the faint tricolored glow of the neon across the street. “I’m going in there,” she said. “Whether you’re comi
ng or not.”

  What he did then was take hold of her arm—or no, he snatched it with a sudden jolt of violence that seemed to explode inside him. “You’re going nowhere,” he rasped, his voice locked tight in his throat.

  She tried to pull away but he held on to her, his hand clamped just above her elbow, feeling the bone there, the humerus, and how weightless and weak and fragile it was. She was angry enough to curse him, except that she never cursed—in her quaint moral universe, women didn’t use offensive language, only men did. “Let me go,” she demanded, “you’re hurting me.”

  He didn’t know what had come over him but it was all too much—Adam, Warner Ayala, the martinis sent over by two total strangers as if they could buy his approval, as if he’d asked for it or wanted it in any way, shape or form—and he just tightened his grip till all he could hear was the furious chuffing intake of her breath and the kick and scrape of her heels on the pavement. This was a dance, a kind of dance, more jig than polka, and it might have gone on till one or the other of them gave in, but then a car came up the street, headlights sifting through the fog to pin them there as if they were onstage, and he let her go. At which point she lurched back a step and then, without so much as a glance, stalked across the street and into the bar, leaving him with no choice but to follow.