The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It was a tiny place, claustrophobic, smelling of hops and cold sweat. There was an L-shaped bar that seated ten maybe, kitchen beyond it, a narrow hallway, a cramped array of tables. People were packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, chattering away in a percussive animal hum. In the old days there would have been a dense haze of cigarette smoke and a whiff of marijuana too, but if you wanted to smoke now it had to be outside, on the street. Behind the bar was a chalkboard featuring the brews on tap, with brief descriptions, the most pertinent of which seemed to be alcohol content. One of the ales, Sten noticed, was listed at 11.9% alcohol by volume, which must have had a real kick to it, but then that was the point, wasn’t it?

  Carolee was standing at the bar behind a cluster of people, mostly young, who were hunched over their elbows and their pints of stout, pilsner and ale. Nobody was drinking wine. And Carolee, her shoulders tense with agitation and her hair tucked haphazardly up under the collar of her coat, made no move to flag down the bartender. Her hands were clasped before her as if she were patiently awaiting her turn, when in fact her eyes were fixed on a table in the back, the last one down the narrow hallway which gave onto the restrooms and the rear exit. She was trying to be discreet, trying to look like a thirsty, gracefully aging woman who was only waiting for her pint of 11.9% ABV ale, but she wasn’t doing much of a job of it—she just looked awkward, that was all. No matter. Adam’s back was to them. He was leaning into the table, apparently staring down into his beer, while Sara, her face animated, did the talking. And gesturing. She was really going at it, her face running through all its permutations, her hands dancing and fluttering as if she were directing traffic on top of it, and what was the subject? The problems horses had with their hooves? The DMV? Dogs? Or was she just talking, was she one of those people—women, for the most part—who just talk to round out the sonic spectrum? Which would have cast Adam in the role of listener, but then Adam never seemed to pay much attention to anyone, off in a trance half the time, as if it wasn’t words that had meaning but the sound itself, voices sawing away like instruments in an ever-expanding orchestra. Sten eased his way through the crowd and tapped Carolee on the shoulder. “Okay, you’ve seen her,” he hissed, “now let’s get out of here before she spots us—or Adam does.”

  Carolee wouldn’t look at him. She made a pretense of studying the chalkboard. “I want a beer,” she said.

  “A beer? I haven’t seen you touch a beer in ten years.”

  “All right, a wine. A pinot noir. Get me a glass of pinot noir.”

  There was music playing over the sound system, a thin drift of high harmonies rising above an insistent guitar, the volume turned just low enough so that you couldn’t actually hear it except at odd intervals, though you knew it was there. He shuffled his feet. Put his hands in his pockets. He felt bad. Felt conflicted. Carolee was going to get her wine, that was as certain as the law of diminishing returns, and he was thinking he could maybe maneuver her back toward the door, as far from Adam as possible, and hope for the best. But then what was he thinking? What was wrong here? Why couldn’t they just stop by their own son’s table and say hello as if they’d drifted in at random? (Yeah, they’d been to a movie and had a craving for pizza and what a surprise to see you here, but we won’t keep you, no, no, just go ahead and we’ll see you later, okay?) Because Adam wouldn’t believe them, that was why. Or maybe he would. You could never tell with him.

  If all this was about making a decision, it was taken out of his hands, because Sara looked up then, her eyes languidly scanning the room, till they settled on his and then Carolee’s. He watched her face change. First she looked puzzled, as if she couldn’t quite place them, but then she smiled and waved and ducked her head to say something to Adam, who seemed to stiffen in his seat. His head was down still, the muscles at the back of his neck bunched, but he didn’t move or respond. He might have been frozen in place, might have been a statue. There was a lull. The music emerged. Somebody shouted out something inane, the way people tend to do in bars. And then, very slowly, Adam turned in profile to glance over his shoulder. The look he gave them—his parents, his own parents—shaded from incomprehension to hate, to a look of such ferocious contempt you would have thought they’d come to tear the flesh from his bones. In the next moment he was up and out of the seat and hurtling down the hallway, past the kitchen, past the restrooms and right on out the back door. And Sara, the horse lady who was fifteen years older than he was and no paragon herself, gave them a fleeting apologetic smile before she snatched up her purse and hurried out after him.

  But now it was morning and Sten was in the supermarket, arching his back to take the crick out of it, Carolee’s list clenched in one hand and the steak seeping blood at the bottom of the cart, getting on with his life. Eggs. Hadn’t she mentioned something about eggs? He scanned the list, her handwriting a neat rounded script that flowed like music on the page, handwriting that was as familiar as his own, but he saw no eggs listed there. What the hell, he was thinking, reaching for the carton anyway, thinking better safe than sorry, when he became aware that someone was standing right there beside him, too close for casual contact, someone who started off as a pair of running shoes and shorts climbing out of the floor and turned out to be Carey Bachman, who used to teach social studies at the school till his wife’s cosmetics business took off and made earning a paycheck extraneous. He was in his mid-forties, with a narrow slice of a face dominated by his milky protuberant eyes (“Fish-Eyes,” the students had called him behind his back) and he was dressed in a T-shirt though it was fifty-eight degrees outside and colder in here, what with the refrigerated air of the meat and dairy displays, and he should have been smiling, but wasn’t.

  “Carey,” Sten heard himself say.

  Still no smile. Sotto voce: “Hi, Sten.” A glance over his shoulder, conspiratorial. “Listen,” he said, “you see what’s going on here?”

  See what? What was he talking about?

  Carey led with his chin, eyes up, then down again, and Sten looked across the aisle to see three—no, four—Mexicans pushing a pair of overloaded carts. They were dressed in work clothes—boots, jeans, long-sleeved shirts—and each wore a brand-new Oakland A’s cap pushed back on his head with the bill jutting out at an odd angle, as if it were a fashion trend. Other than the caps, which they might have got at a ballgame at the Coliseum the night before, there was nothing to distinguish them. Three were young—teenage or early twenties—the other middle-aged. They could have been anybody. “Yeah,” he said, “I see them. What’s the deal?”

  Carey gave him a look of disbelief. “What’s the deal? ‘Take Back Our Forests,’ that’s the deal. Remember, you came to the first meeting? Before you went off on vacation—on that cruise?”

  It came back to him now, though so much had happened in the interval he’d completely forgotten about it, and even if he hadn’t he still couldn’t fathom what Carey was talking about. It was seven-fifteen in the morning. He’d had too much to drink the night before. The overhead light cut into his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “So?”

  “This is just what we were talking about. This. Right here. Right now.” Carey was having trouble containing himself, but he dropped his voice as the Mexicans wheeled past and turned into the next aisle over.

  Sten saw that their carts were loaded with staples, four-pound bags of Calrose rice, dried pinto beans, cellophane-wrapped boxes of instant noodles and what looked to be half the ground meat in the store, but still he just stared at Carey, the moment unwinding in slow reveal. Take Back Our Forests had been Carey’s idea—his and Gordon Welch’s, who managed the local B. of A. branch—and it wasn’t a vigilante group, not at all, a designation they’d bent over backwards to deplore. No, it was a citizens’ group—an association of concerned citizens, property owners, businessmen, locals all—that had risen up spontaneously in response to what was going on in the forest. The drug cartels—La Familia, the Zetas, Sinaloa—had come north, had come here, to grow marijuana on stat
e and federal land, bypassing the need to smuggle product across the border, and in their wake they’d brought violence to the Noyo Valley, to Big River and the Mendocino National Forest. And worse: they poisoned everything, putting out baits for rabbit, skunk, deer and bear, even poisoning the streams. The calculus was simple: a dead rabbit wouldn’t be girding the base of the plants to get at the moisture there and a dead deer wasn’t going to browse the nascent buds—or a dead bear either or a marmot or a squirrel or anything else that ate, moved and breathed—and the best way to ensure that was just to poison the drinking supply. Hikers had been shot at. Fishermen. Hunters. People were afraid to go into the woods.

  “I was out for my morning run,” Carey said, and then he broke off to crane his neck and peer down the aisle. “Mules,” he said. “These are the mules. You see what they’re buying?”

  Sten shrugged. “Maybe it’s a church group. Maybe they’re going on a picnic.”

  “Bullshit.”

  They stood there a moment, blinking in the light. Sten wanted a cup of coffee, an English muffin, maybe a soft-boiled egg—and a nap, definitely a nap. He watched a heavyset woman who looked vaguely familiar—another early-morning shopper—stump by with a handbasket bristling with celery, seven or eight bunches of it, and wondered what that was all about—cream of celery soup? Carey put a hand on his wrist. “Listen, we’ve got to follow them, you know that, don’t you? To find out where the camp is—”

  “Why not just call the sheriff?”

  “Don’t be naïve. There’s no law against buying groceries. And even if they’re illegal, which you damn well know they are, the cops are prohibited from checking their status—they can’t even ask because it might abridge their precious rights, to which everybody is entitled the minute they set foot in this country, whether they’re drug dealers or not. The cops are useless, you ought to know that.” He was going to say more, all ready to go off on a rant, but he suddenly stopped himself, motioning with his eyes, and here came two of them with their cart that was heaped now with peppers of every description—jalapeños, serranos, green, red, yellow, orange—and a pyramid of tortillas in the family-sized packages, twenty, thirty or more. When they’d turned down the next aisle, heading for the checkout stand, Carey let go of his wrist and lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. “You got to help me out here.”

  Sten was noncommittal, but he was aroused: more dark little men, more criminals. And here, right here in the U.S. He was no racist—he’d seen the demographic shift in the school population over the years, the Swedes, Norwegians, Italians and Poles who’d worked the lumber mills when they were a going concern giving way ever so gradually to the Hispanics who cleaned their houses, repaired their cars, stocked the shelves in the supermarket and made up the beds for the tourists, and it had meant nothing to him, immigrants in a nation built on them—but when they destroyed the land, drove people out of their own parks and forests, it was another thing altogether. He’d seen their abandoned camps deep in the woods, the mounds of trash, the carcasses of the animals, oil and pesticides leaching into the ground, the abandoned propane tanks and crude listing shacks. It was a matter of ecology as much as anything else. Save the forests. Save the trout. The salmon. The deer.

  “We’re going to have to use your car. Because I told you, I jogged here”—Carey picked at the front of his T-shirt in testament—“and mine’s all the way back at home.”

  “Follow them? Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  “We stay back, way back. Just till we see what road they turn off on.”

  “Then we call the sheriff?”

  “Yeah, then we call the sheriff.”

  14.

  THEY WERE DRIVING A new Ford XLT pickup, white, with Nevada plates and dust-streaked sides, which only seemed to confirm Carey in his suspicions, as if every Mexican had to be driving a beater prickling with rakes, shovels and blowers, as if it were a condition of their lives on this planet, as if the stereotype was the only type. “Stolen,” he said. “Bet anything.”

  Sten just nodded. But it was odd, he had to admit it. He wanted to think they were traveling mariachis, the construction crew for some millionaire building a getaway in the hills, a church group, real and bona fide, but as he sat behind the wheel of the Prius in the parking lot, Carey at his side, and watched them load the groceries into the bed of the truck, he knew he was fooling himself. He’d tried to appear casual at the checkout stand as the girl there, a Latina with heavy purple eye shadow who might or might not have been a student at the high school, scanned his items. Hovering over the counter in his jeans and sweatshirt, he went quietly about the business of bagging his forty-two dollars and thirty-five cents’ worth of groceries, nothing amiss, the most ordinary thing in the world, but out of the corner of his eye he was watching the Mexicans in the next checkout lane while Carey kept a lookout at the door. They had a third cart he hadn’t noticed before, this one filled with plastic jugs of water, half a dozen twenty-four-packs of Tecate and a couple bottles of E&J brandy, real rotgut, not at all the sort of thing you’d take on a church picnic.

  The men huddled there in their askew caps and they didn’t say a word, not to their own checkout girl or to each other either. They looked at nothing, at the wall, at the floor. When the customer ahead of them—the woman with the celery—had concluded her transaction, they came to life, juggling things from the carts to set them neatly on the rolling black conveyor belt. Sten took his time so he could study them, the three young guys doing all the work while the older one stood there watching the display on the computer screen as if totting up every item in his head. The bill, which the older man paid—in cash—came to over seven hundred dollars.

  There was a row of cars separating Sten’s Prius from their pickup, and if they noticed him and Carey sitting there, they gave no indication. They were focused on what they were doing, and they were quick and efficient, the groceries transferred from the carts in minutes, and then the older man got behind the wheel while two of the younger ones slipped in beside him and the third sprang up into the bed in a single bound, nimble as a gymnast. Sten waited until the Mexicans had backed out of their spot, conscious of Carey, who’d gone quiet with the tension of the moment, and then put the car in drive and slowly followed them out of the lot. The street they were on—Franklin—paralleled the Coast Highway, which was the town’s main thoroughfare and lively with traffic this time of year, what with all the tourists either coming or going, even in the morning, especially in the morning, because tourists liked to get right up, gulp down their coffee, eggs over easy, three strips of bacon and hash browns and hit the road to invade the next charmingly decrepit coastal town before everybody else got there. He was surprised when the pickup turned left—no signal, just a lurch—and headed down the block to turn right on the Coast Highway, where they’d be more visible to any patrol car that might happen by. But then—and he had to remind himself lest he get carried away—they really hadn’t done anything, had they? Aside from pumping seven-hundred-odd dollars into the local economy, and what was wrong with that?

  “Watch it,” Carey said, “watch it!” and he saw that he’d come up too close on them, almost rear-ended them in fact, swerving now, at the last moment, as the pickup—no signal—swung into a gas station and he rolled on by, the blood pounding in his temples and his hands locked on the wheel, trying his best to look innocuous. And old. Old and befuddled. No problem there.

  Carey’s voice came at him again, insistent: “Pull over. Here. Behind that van.”

  He flicked on the signal, did as he was told. The gas station was a block behind them. Glancing in the rearview, he saw the white truck ease up to the pump there and one of the men—the one in back—jump out to flip open the gas tank and insert the nozzle before hurrying inside to pay, in cash, because what drug dealer, what grower, would use a credit card?

  “Jesus, Sten, what are you thinking? You almost hit them.”

  And now he began to feel the faintest tick of
irritation. He hadn’t had his breakfast, his groceries weren’t getting any fresher, he was tired and fed up and here he was chasing phantoms while Carey Bachman barked orders at him. “But I didn’t,” he said, and gave him a steady look. “Did I?”

  They waited there at the side of the road till the pickup was in motion again, its blunt hood and massive grill nosing up to the street as a clutch of motor homes lumbered by, and then, without warning, the pickup was cutting across both lanes and heading back in the direction they’d come from and Carey, his voice rising, jerked up so violently in his seat the whole car rocked on its springs. “Cut a U-ey, quick, quick!” he shouted. “They’re turning left. Hit it, come on!”

  The Prius was built for gas mileage, not the Indianapolis 500, but it had enough acceleration to get you through a tight spot if your reflexes served you and Sten’s did. He was able to pull out front of the first creeping motor home and slash a U-turn with a minimal squeal of the tires and a single admonitory blast of the startled driver’s horn, and he kept his foot on the accelerator until he was fifty feet from the tail of the pickup, which continued half a block south before making an abrupt left back up the street they’d just followed it down. All right. He slowed, hung back, watched the pickup continue straight on up the road, the sun just beginning to poke through in the distance to illuminate the world in a soft wash of color, and did his best to keep up without being too obvious about it.

  Carey had gone rigid but for the bounce of one agitated knee. “They’re heading straight up into the hills,” he cried, his voice thin with excitement. “Didn’t I tell you? Huh?”

  Sten wanted to say, What does that prove?, but he was feeling it now too, more certain by the minute that Carey was right, that they were onto something. A load of groceries like that? There wasn’t much up here, once you got out of town—a couple of ranches, deep woods, the Georgia Pacific property he or Carey or one of the others hiked twice a week to make sure nothing like this was going on, to report it, which was what they were going to do now, just as soon as they saw where the illegal operation was. He didn’t say anything, just focused on the white gleam of the pickup ahead of him, which wasn’t doing much more than forty-five or so. He eased up on the accelerator. Held tight to the wheel. A car appeared around the next corner, coming the opposite way, followed by a battered pickup, its bed stacked high with baled hay—horses out here, a smattering of cattle, chickens, turkeys (and weed too, that went without saying, but that was different because what people did on their own private property for their own consumption—citizens, American citizens—was nobody’s business but theirs). The Prius shook ever so slightly with the motion of their passing, and then the road was clear but for the white pickup with the shadowy figures inside and the man in back propped up against the cab and looking straight at them, his gold-and-green hat flashing in the light like a homing beacon.