The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Weed. The great lure of the North Coast, the Gold Coast, Pot Alley. They grew grapes in the Anderson Valley, but they grew pot in the hills. It had been going on as long as he could remember.

  “They’re signaling,” Carey said, and his voice seemed to come out of nowhere, startling him. He saw that the pickup had its right blinker on and that it was slowing now to pull over on the shoulder in a tornado of dust and it took him by surprise. His first instinct was to hit the brakes, not knowing what else to do. “No, no, no, don’t stop,” Carey hissed, “whatever you do, don’t stop,” and here they were, right on top of them, giving him little choice but to continue on past, staring straight ahead as if the pickup on the shoulder was no more significant than the trees, the rocks and the litter along the roadside. He was going slowly, too slowly, and he could feel their eyes on him, arrogant eyes, angry, suspicious. “Goose it,” Carey said, and he was staring straight ahead too.

  They drove on up the road, Sten snatching a look in the rearview while Carey slouched low in the seat so he could study the side mirror. The white pickup just sat there, the dust dissipating, and then they were around the next turn and it was gone. “What now?” Sten asked, and he wasn’t really asking, just thinking aloud.

  Carey was agitated, hyper, frazzled with the adrenaline running through him, the way it was in battle, when your glands pumped chemicals into your bloodstream and action was the only off-valve to bring you back down again. “Just keep on,” he said, his eyes swollen in their sockets. “Or no, pull over. Pull over and wait till they go past again.”

  Sten flicked on the blinker, looking for a spot up ahead, and there it was, a patch of bleached-out dirt on the edge of a dropoff, and in the next moment he was swinging onto the shoulder, generating his own tornado of dust. Unfortunately, he was barely off the road, the turnout so narrow the driver’s-side wheels were still on the blacktop, and he had a fleeting vision of a logging truck roaring round the turn to peel off the left side of the car—and how would he explain that to Carolee? Not to mention the insurance company?

  The engine shut itself off, dutifully. There was no traffic. He lifted his eyes to look into the mirror. “What if they don’t come by? What if they already went past their turnoff just to fox us and they’re doubling back?”

  Carey turned a stricken face to him and jerked his head round to stare out the back window, where the road lay silent and the sun swelled to brighten the surface till it might have been freshly oiled. “Just wait,” Carey said.

  “Wait for what? They’re gone, I tell you.” Another glance in the rearview. The bushes gilded in light. The soaring trees. Everything as still and innocent as the beginning of time. “I’m for turning around.”

  And then suddenly the pickup was there, rounding the bend, looming huge in the rearview. It gave him a jolt. He could feel his heart going. He snatched a quick breath and kept his hands firmly on the wheel, as if it were in danger of breaking loose and disintegrating before his eyes. The truck was moving at a good clip, but it slowed abruptly as it came up even with them and both he and Carey turned their heads to stare into the faces of the four men, no pretense now, the truck twice the size of the Prius, big tires, big cab, and it came to a halt right there beside them. It was a staring contest, that was what it was, and he was thinking they would be armed and why wouldn’t they be because this was no church group and these were no ranch hands, thinking What have I got myself into?

  The man behind the wheel, the older one, had a face that sucked up the light, his eyes red-rimmed and sleepy, but the look he gave Sten was unmistakable. Sten had seen it all his life, on the football field, in the service, from the punks at the high school who thought they were men when they didn’t have the faintest notion of what a man was, the look that said, Don’t fuck with me. Five seconds, that was all there was to it. Nobody said a word, though the windows were down and the one in the passenger’s seat was close enough to spit on, and then the tires jumped and the pickup shot up the road to vanish round the next turn.

  “Call the sheriff,” Sten said, and in that instant he had the car in gear and he was lurching out onto the roadway, pedal to the floor, something gone awry in him now, the switch thrown, and he could no more have turned around and gone back home than cut off his own hand. This was America, this was his turf, where he’d been born and raised, not some shithole in the jungle somewhere. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  And Carey? Carey was clutching at the passenger’s strap with one hand and trying to work his phone with the other. “Slow down!” he shouted. “It’s not worth it. Jesus, Sten, you’re going to kill us.”

  The trees careened past, tight turns here, the coast far below them now, dips and rises, timberland, better than fifty inches of rain up here on the slopes each winter and thirty-nine below, rain that swelled the streams and percolated into the soil and pushed the biggest trees in the world—living fossils—up into the sky. The tires shrieked. Air beat in the window to slap at his face. “I can’t get any reception,” Carey said, as if it mattered, and then the white flash of the truck’s tailgate shone through the treetrunks up ahead and he eased off on the gas, in control now, because they might have had the advantage on the open highway, but here the smaller vehicle was more than a match for them.

  He settled in behind them, giving them space—fifty feet, as if the Prius was equipped with an invisible tape measure, as if it was one of those super cars out of a James Bond movie. The one in back, his face a sharp blade of light beneath the upthrust bill of his cap, stared right through them as if it was all nothing to him, as if he wasn’t a criminal, as if he wasn’t going to go out there and open up cans of tuna and sardines laced with carbofuran to poison the bears and raccoons and fishers and anything else that dared get in his way. Well, all right. He was past caring about niceties now. He was going to follow them till the wheels fell off—or they ran out of gas. Yes. Right. And that was another advantage of the Prius.

  Carey said nothing. He kept fiddling with his phone, though it was futile, any fool could see that. There was no reception here—they were in the middle of nowhere, what did he expect? Ten minutes drifted by, fifteen. Sten focused on the shifting white tailgate so fiercely it began to blur, swelling and receding, a ghostly thing, almost illusory, a thing that floated out ahead of him, snaking through the turns, vanishing in the dips and emerging again, no rhythm, no logic, just movement. He kept hoping for some traffic, for another car, for anyone to signal to or flag down, but there were no other cars on the road, not this far up, not today. The road narrowed, became a channel through a sea of redwood and fir, and still the pickup rolled on and still Sten sat fifty feet behind it.

  And then, abruptly, the Mexicans pulled off on the shoulder and Sten hit the brakes, put on his blinker—pointlessly, but it was an old habit—and followed suit. There was a logging road off to the left and a hundred feet on and he wondered if that was their destination, if they had their camp somewhere in there and didn’t want to give it away. They were stuck, that was what he was thinking. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t retreat. Check and mate.

  After a while, the driver of the pickup shut down the engine. The sun climbed higher by degrees. Shadows shortened. A jay called from the woods. “What are they doing?” Carey asked. “Why are they stopping here?”

  “See that road up ahead?” He indicated it with a thrust of his chin.

  “You think that’s where they’re headed?”

  Sten shrugged. His stomach rumbled. “They’re in a spot now. They hadn’t counted on us being here, that’s for shit sure.”

  Another fifteen minutes ticked by on the dashboard clock. And then finally, inevitably, the driver’s door of the pickup flashed open and the older Mexican stepped out and started back down the road toward them, his steps slow and measured, the cap still at the same jaunty angle. His face was flat, boneless, almost as if it had been scooped hollow, and his nose was flat too so that Sten wondered if he’d once been a boxer. Or a rodeo clown.


  The man came up to the window and leaned down to look in at him. “You need help?” he asked, his accent slow and stopped-up so that “help” came out as “hell.”

  “No,” Sten said, shaking his head for emphasis. “No, we’re fine.”

  The man seemed to consider this a moment, his look unwavering, a hint of menace seeping like a tincture into his squinting brown eyes.

  “How about you?” Sten said. “You need help?”

  Sighing, the man drew himself up and said, “No, we doan need no hell,” and then he looked off in the distance as if to find the words there for whatever was to come next.

  Carbofuran. It was one of the deadliest pesticides known to man. A couple drops of it would kill you. And what happened to the bears? They died clawing at themselves, their guts on fire.

  “You sure?” Sten said.

  Another sigh. The man bent to look in the window again, his eyes hardening. It was then that he let the flap of his shirt fall open so that Sten could see the polished wooden handle of the revolver tucked in his waistband, but that was a mistake and it was going to cost him because he didn’t know who he was dealing with here.

  Sten shoved open the door so suddenly the man had to step back, and then he was out on the naked strip of pavement, unfurling himself to his full height so that now he was the one looking down. “You know what this is?” he demanded and he could feel it coming up in him all over again and there was no stopping it, though the man shot a look to his compatriots, who flung open the doors of the pickup even as the acrobat in back sprang out and began coming down the road toward them and Carey hissed, Sten, come on, it’s not worth it, let’s go. “This is America, you son of a bitch. The United States of America. You get that?”

  The man rocked back on his heels, his eyes locked on Sten’s, and for a moment Sten thought he was going to spit at him the way the prisoner had in Costa Rica, but that didn’t happen and a good thing too because he was a beat away from losing it. Here was guilt. Here was the shit of the world come home to roost right here in the redwoods. The man scuffed his boots on the pavement, then swung round without a word and started back for the truck, his arms outstretched to usher the other three along with him. Sten watched them climb back in. The doors slammed. Sun glinted off chrome. And the truck sat there—and so did Sten—till the minutes became hours and Carey, in over his head, talked himself hoarse on the theme of giving it up, of getting out of there before somebody got hurt, because they weren’t vigilantes, were they?

  Finally, and by now it was past noon, the pickup’s engine roared to life and the driver cut the wheels hard even as the man in back—the acrobat—leapt down and started up the road on foot. He was lithe, tall, rabbity, and by the time the driver had turned the truck around and started back down the hill, he was jogging up the road, the bill of his cap pulled down tight now, fashion sacrificed to exigency. “Where’s he going?” Carey wondered aloud.

  Sten didn’t answer. He just put the car in gear, swung a U-turn and followed the pickup back down the road, all the way down, past the supermarket and back out onto the Coast Highway, where it turned north and kept on going. At speed. And here was where the big engine had the advantage, though Sten tried gamely to keep up. By Cleone, they’d lost them, but Carey got the 911 dispatcher on the phone as soon as they were in range. “What do I tell them?” he asked, his face blanched and the armpits of his T-shirt soaked through with nervous sweat.

  Sten went silently through the list of crimes—Being Mexican; Driving a New Ford XLT; Buying Too Many Groceries; Acting Suspicious—but he was already signaling, already looking up the road for the next left so he could turn round and head home. It was one-twenty in the afternoon. The meat was rotted, the milk gone sour. And the eggs. Nothing worse than the smell of rotten eggs. He turned to Carey, Carey with his bouncing knee and too much white in his eyes, Carey in his jogging togs, Carey the vigilante. “Just tell them they were brandishing a weapon,” he said. “That ought to do it.”

  PART V

  The Noyo

  15.

  “DOESN’T HE SCARE YOU?”

  She was in the kitchen of the house on the banks of the Noyo, a weak sun sifting through the trees, and Christabel, who didn’t even know him and who was probably jealous—definitely jealous—had called to see how she was getting along in exile.

  “No,” she said, “not at all.” And that was the truth. Adam could be as strange as strange got, no doubt about that, but what Christabel didn’t understand was that underneath there was an essential sweetness to him, a boyishness, an innocence you didn’t find in the types that took up space in the bars and stomped up and down the aisles of the hardware store with the oh-so-pleased-with-themselves smirks on their faces, which, sadly, seemed to be the only types available to women like her and Christabel. Plus, he was young. And handsome. A whole lot handsomer than her ex, Roger, who’d let himself go till he wasn’t much more than a belly with pants on it—or anybody she’d dated since. And built. She told Christabel that, as if she needed any justification, because who she dated was nobody’s business but hers, not even her best friend’s.

  “He’s like a rock. I don’t know what he does—I don’t see him lifting weights or anything—but he’s hard all over.”

  “Don’t get dirty on me now.”

  She laughed. “I’m not. Really, I’m not. Just stating the facts.”

  There was a long exhalation on the other end of the line, Christabel blowing out the smoke of her cigarette, and she could picture it, the way she threw her head back and pursed her lips as if she were channeling the smoke through an imaginary portal in the sky and sending it right on up to heaven, to God Himself, who, after all, was the one who invented nicotine. “You’re just a cougar, that’s all.”

  She didn’t deny it. In fact, it brought a smile to her lips. “Who me?” she said, and they both laughed. Then she said, “I thought you gave up smoking?”

  “I did.”

  “So what’s that puffing I hear?”

  “Just having a little taste to see what I’m missing. Isn’t that what you’re doing—with Adam? Because don’t tell me you’re serious—”

  It had been a week since she’d moved in and if he hadn’t been around much, that was all right. He was mysterious, always out in the woods, and when he wasn’t he was lying supine on the couch in a clutter of books and notepads or just staring into the gray void of the TV, which looked as if it hadn’t worked in years. If he had anything to say at all it was about Colter—Colter this and Colter that, the same story, over and over. And the cops, the cops really lit him up. Ditto the Chinese. Colter, the cops and the Chinese, those were his themes. When he was talking, that is, which wasn’t much. He disappeared early each morning, before she was up, but he was always there for dinner and always glad to see the food dished out on the plate, whether it was meat loaf or mac and cheese or bean burritos. Glad for the sex too. She’d never known anybody like him—it was as if he’d been locked up in a cage his whole life. He wanted it. He needed it. He was hungry for it. And so was she. She’d been abstinent so long she’d forgotten what it was like to have your blood quicken just thinking about somebody, to feast on the smell of him, to find yourself getting wet even before he had his clothes off, even before he touched you.

  “You want to meet him? See for yourself?” A pause. “He’s sweet. He really is.”

  Christabel said something back, but it was garbled, hampered by the connection, the signal weak out here in the woods, and there was no landline—Adam had ripped it out. And why? He claimed the phone had been listening to him, spying on him, and if she doubted that—CIA, FBI, his mother, the Chinese—she couldn’t fault his paranoia. Or was it even paranoia—or just wariness, just being hip to reality? They were listening in on everybody and tracking their e-mails too, and that was a fact.

  “You’re breaking up,” she said. “It’s me. Wait a minute”—and she stepped out the back door—“is this better?”

/>   “I said, after what you’ve been telling me, he sounds pretty strange. Even if he is a stud.”

  “What’s strange? Everybody’s strange. You’re strange. I’m strange.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “No, seriously, you want to come for dinner?”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, tonight?” It was a Saturday, the day they usually got together for dinner someplace and then the whole hopeless charade of bar-hopping, singles night out, as if there’d be any male in any of those places who would be of interest to either of them, every last one too old, too young, too stupid or too married.

  “Come early. We’ll have cocktails. Four-thirty? Four, even?”

  A silence, as if Christabel were weighing all the stacked-up options of her glittering social life, and then she said, “I don’t even know how to get there, like what road, it’s not even marked, right? And that’s another thing—it’s just crazy what you’re doing. You can’t hide out forever—”