The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “A week isn’t forever.”

  “What then—you going to stay the full thirty days till the dog’s out of quarantine? You think that’s going to satisfy them? You can’t just—why don’t you at least take him to the vet and have the vet give him a shot or some kind of certificate or something?”

  It was as if somebody had laid a cold hand on her back—or no, an ice pack. All her fear and hate gusted through her like an Arctic wind and froze her right there in place, her boots stuck fast in the dirt, her frame as rigid as the cinder-block wall and the trees that stood motionless all around her. Christabel was right: she couldn’t stay here forever, plus Sten was closing on the place and there’d be a new owner soon. And where did that leave her? She couldn’t go back to her own house because they’d be looking for her there, at least till the quarantine was up, and Christabel’s apartment was the size of your average cell at the House of Detention and she wouldn’t have her anyway because she couldn’t risk harboring a fugitive. And that was just how she’d put it, Christabel, the coward, the wuss: harboring a fugitive. Bow down and kiss their asses, why don’t you? I could lose my job, she’d said.

  The fact was, Sara had already taken the dog to the vet and already mailed the proof of rabies/parvo vaccination to the court, knowing it most likely wouldn’t fly since Kutya had bitten the cop before he was vaccinated. But it was better than nothing. At least she was trying, though they had no right in any of this except the right of might, the right of their fraudulent and blatantly unconstitutional laws and their storm troopers in the shiny taxpayer-bought cars. And the judges and the courts and the DMV and all the rest of the parasitic bureaucracy they’d imposed on the American public. It was a house of cards just waiting for somebody to blow it all away. The leeches. The bloodsuckers.

  “I already did,” she said. “But I’m not going to stand around and wait for some dickhead in a patrol car to pull into the driveway with a warrant, I’m not that stupid. And I’ll tell you another thing: I blew off the court appearance too.”

  “Great. That’s just fucking brilliant. What do you want to do, go to jail?”

  No, she didn’t want to go to jail, but there was no way she was going to bow down to them because that would just make her a slave like everybody else. In three weeks she’d go back to the vet and have him certify that the dog didn’t have rabies, not then or ever, and if they still wanted to come after her for a bogus misdemeanor charge of obstructing police operations (!!!), well she’d take that risk. And bet anything—bet anybody—they’d forget all about it. Really, even in their puffed-up sick little world they must have had better things to do than harass somebody over a dog and a seatbelt. Like catch a couple serial killers or rapists maybe, wouldn’t that be a start?

  “Whatever,” she said. The sun was warm on her shoulders, already defrosting her. Birds sang in the trees. It was a beautiful day, a glorious day, and here came Kutya around the corner of the house to rub up against her leg and sit at her feet in a cascade of hair. Chicken cordon bleu, that was what she was thinking, the classiest thing she knew how to make, because this was an occasion, or it was going to be, and she wasn’t cowed or bowed or stranded like some refugee floating on a raft, and Christabel was going to see that and appreciate it and they were going to party on down as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Christabel? You there?”

  Another long exhalation, pfffhhhh. “Uh-huh.”

  “Listen,” she said, “let me tell you how to get here . . .”

  Then she was in the kitchen, cleaning up after breakfast. She’d made eggs over easy and Canadian bacon with fried tomatoes on sourdough toast, enough for two (cooking for two already a habit, after all these years of cooking for one, one only), even though Adam wasn’t there to share the meal. She’d wakened at first light to the gentle release of the bedsprings and there he was, naked and slipping into his camouflage pants, in too much of a hurry to bother with underwear. Or too manly. Or juvenile or whatever. He didn’t look at her, didn’t even glance in her direction. Thirty seconds was all it took to lace up his boots, throw on a shirt and disappear into the bathroom, where she heard the buzz of his electric razor. She’d watched him shaving two mornings ago just for the thrill of it—her man, hard as rock, shaving his chin, his cheeks, circling the taut slash of his mouth, then running the razor up over his skull and down the back of his neck, thirty seconds more, and he never once looked at himself in the mirror. And why was that? Mirrors spooked him, or so he’d told her over their third glass of wine at dinner that night. “Why?” she’d asked. He’d just turned away and in that soft breath of a voice said, “I don’t like what I see in there.”

  This morning she’d got out of bed while he was in the bathroom, throwing on a terrycloth robe his grandmother had left behind, and followed him into the living room. “You going out in the woods?” she asked, though she already knew the answer—and knew too not to pry. He had something out there, a bunker, a fortress—it could have been a treehouse, for all he let on—and it occupied him all day every day. Or maybe he was hiking. Maybe that was it. Whatever it was, it sure kept him in shape.

  He didn’t answer. Didn’t even bother to nod. It was morning and in the morning he didn’t have much to say. They were close at night, in the dark, very close, but what they were doing together didn’t need words. When he’d been drinking, which was a pretty regular thing—daily, that is, and she joined him because why not?—he’d open up to her as much as he was capable of. He wasn’t a talker. That was all right with her. She could talk for two.

  “You want me to make you a sandwich?”

  Still nothing. He just slipped on his backpack, took up his rifle and slung it over one shoulder. She noticed he was wearing the knife he’d got at Big 5, the sheath looped over his belt at hip level. And he had his canteen, of course, dangling from the pack, and whether it contained 151 or water she couldn’t say. His boots shone—he polished them every night, the sound of the rag snapping back and forth the last thing she heard before he came to bed. Everything about him seemed to gleam in the light, from the boots right on up to the barrel of the rifle. For her part, she didn’t know one rifle from another—guns didn’t interest her—but this one was some sort of military thing with a clip on it. “What’s with the gun?” she asked. “You going hunting?” And then she tried to make a joke of it: “Bring me back a couple of squirrels. I make a mean squirrel stew.”

  He’d glanced up at her then, as if seeing her for the first time. His eyes were clear, a bright transparent blue that went so deep she could have been looking into the ocean and seeing no bottom to it at all. “For protection,” he said.

  “From what?” And she couldn’t help herself: “Cougars?”

  If he heard her, if he recognized she was making a joke, he never let on. “People,” he said, “motherfuckers, creeps, assholes. Cougars eat deer, people eat everything.”

  “And they’re not going to eat you?”

  He gave her a smile then—his version of a smile, anyway, the corners of his mouth lifting ever so subtly in acknowledgment—and started out the door, ducking his left shoulder automatically so as not to strike the lintel with the muzzle of his rifle. She wanted to call out to ask him if she should expect him for dinner, but checked herself—she wasn’t his mother. She wasn’t a nag either. And what he did, for as long as he was going to do it, didn’t matter to her. This was temporary. It was a week. Maybe it would go three weeks more. Or maybe . . . but she didn’t want to think beyond that.

  She went to the door and watched him stride to the cement-block wall and go up and over it as if it were nothing. Like Jackie Chan. Or the new James Bond, whatever his name was. And what was that martial arts thing called, where you just run right up a wall? Parkour. Adam was a master of that. Of course, he could have just strolled through the doorway his father had made, but he refused to—he wouldn’t acknowledge it, didn’t even seem to see it. If it was up to him he’d seal it up again, she knew that, but then
it would be pretty inconvenient for her when she wanted to haul in a load of groceries or take the dog out for a walk, and what was she going to do, use the stepladder? Plus, how could you sell a house with no way in? And Sten intended to sell it, no matter how his son felt about it, and he’d taken her aside and told her as much. The house was in escrow and he didn’t want anything screwing up the deal—the buyer was a friend of his and Carolee’s who was taking the place as is, grandmother’s furniture and all, and he’d agreed to let Adam stay on till the end of the month. Her guess was that they needed the money to pay down the mortgage on the new place in Mendocino, which had ocean views, and ocean views were anything but cheap.

  Crossing the yard herself now, Kutya trotting along behind to pause and pee and sniff at her ankles, she came through the doorway just in time to see Adam heading down the slope to the river. The sun glinted off his shaved head and sparked at the muzzle of the rifle, and then he was in the shadow of the trees and she lost him a moment before he reappeared on a bend in the path, moving fast, double time, always double time, as if somebody—or something—was after him.

  She’d just got done with the dishes when her phone rang. Without thinking, she hit “talk” and put it to her ear. “Sara here,” she said, figuring it was one of her clients—or maybe somebody new. She was in the Yellow Pages, both in the phonebook and online, and she could never have too much work. The money was good and she worked hard for it, which was why she was never going to give another nickel to the feds, or what—the Franchise Tax Board, and what a joke that was.

  “Sara?” The voice was a man’s, deep, a froggy baritone.

  “Yes?”

  “Sara Hovarty Jennings?”

  It was right about then that she began to regret having answered, because what client—or potential client—would ask for her by her full name? “Yeah,” she said, and all the brass had gone out of her voice. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Sergeant Brawley of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department.” A pause to let that sink in. “And I’m calling to urge you to come in voluntarily to the Ukiah station and surrender your dog”—the rattle of a keyboard—“Kutya. Is that right? Kutya, isn’t it?”

  Stupidly, she said, “Yes.”

  “Let me apprise you that there is a warrant out for your arrest—for failure to appear—and that we have video evidence showing that you entered Animal Control with an accomplice at 2:35 p.m. on Saturday, August 10, and illegally removed your dog from quarantine. What do you have to say to that?”

  “I’m quarantining him myself,” she said, feeling up against it now, more angry than scared.

  Another pause. More rattling. “And where might that be?”

  “I mailed a certificate of rabies vaccination to the court—what more do you want from me, blood?”

  The voice, which had been deep, calm and blandly officious to this point, rose in pitch—and color, color too, as if any of this mattered to him, as if it was anything more than some idiotic imposture: “We want, or no, we require you to surrender your person and your animal immediately on penalty of—”

  That was all she heard, because in the next moment she had the phone down on the kitchen floor and was grinding it underfoot—they could track you, track you anywhere, the phone like a homing device, like your own little flag of surrender. For a moment she was too angry to think, and if she just kept grinding the phone under her heel and if the plastic frame of it was gouging the linoleum floor Adam’s grandmother had kept up through all her failing years, well, she would worry about that later. At the moment, she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, she was so upset. She kept telling herself to calm down even as the dog, with his dog’s radar, sensed that something was amiss and began to whine, his nails tapping out an elaborate distress signal on the slick linoleum.

  As soon as she’d had a chance to catch her breath she began to rethink things. Already she regretted smashing the phone. Yes, the number had been compromised, no doubt about that—obviously the police had hacked the phone records to get her cell number, but without a phone how would her clients reach her? How would she schedule appointments? How would she live? Even now people could be calling her—or the home phone, where they’d just get a message. Which she couldn’t receive and couldn’t answer. And if she didn’t call back, they’d just go to somebody else, and there went her business. She looked down at her hands and saw they were shaking.

  She needed to go to the market for groceries—and to stop in at Radio Shack for a new phone, one of those cheap disposable things that came with a prepaid card. But she was in no condition to drive, not now. So she did the only thing she could think to do: clean. Cleaning always calmed her, the Zen of it, the mindlessness, take up a sponge and some Ajax and go deep. For the next two hours she did nothing but sweep, scrub and polish, rechanneling her energy into something productive. She wasn’t going to let them get to her, she was determined about that. Christabel was coming over for a nice dinner and they were going to celebrate, the United States Illegitimate Government of America be damned. She took out the trash and carried the recycling to the car. Retrieved the mop and cleaned and waxed the linoleum in the kitchen, though she’d just done it the day before, then soaked a sponge in bleach and ran it over the grout around the sink by way of eradicating the ugly black tendrils of mold there, working an old toothbrush over the problem spots till they disappeared. Next, she proceeded to the living room, where she took up the oriental rug and carried it outside to air it, flinging it high to drape over the wall, then went back in to sweep and wax the oak floor before turning to the bedrooms.

  The house had two: the late grandmother’s, which was fussy and cluttered with keepsakes and bric-a-brac, the walls hung with corny pictures of anthropomorphized chicks and puppies and kittens, and Adam’s, which was where they’d been sleeping. His room was Spartan, nothing but the essentials, though she did find his bong, a couple of rolled-up Bob Marley and the Wailers posters and a handful of tie-dyed T-shirts tucked away in the back of his closet, along with a cardboard box of old video games and action movies. Typical stuff. Boys’ stuff. It made her smile. And that smile broke the spell. They couldn’t trace her—she could have answered that phone anywhere, could have been on a job, cruising along in her car, roaming the aisles of the food store, how would they know? Sergeant What’s-His-Face probably had a list of sixty people to call—and harass—and it was nothing to her. They’d never find her. The tools. The corporate tools of the U.S.I.G.A. who couldn’t begin to comprehend anything other than what their bosses dictated to them, and wasn’t that the way the Fascists took hold and the Communists too? Through ignorance and propaganda? Just keep the people in the dark and whatever you do don’t let them read the Constitution.

  She swept the bedroom, taking her time, then she vacuumed for good measure and made up the bed with fresh sheets, and then—once she felt calm again, as calm and unruffled as if she were at the tiller of a sloop cutting across a spanking sun-drenched bay—she put the dog in the car and drove on into Fort Bragg, to the cheap market there, the one the tourists didn’t know about, to pick up the boneless chicken breast and the ham and Gruyère and seasoned bread crumbs for the cordon bleu, as well as asparagus, new potatoes and two bottles of wine for her and Christabel and a six-pack of Old Stock Ale, 11.9% ABV, for Adam, after which she stopped in at Radio Shack to get herself a new phone.

  She had everything ready by four, the table set, the cordon bleu and potatoes ready to slip into the oven, the asparagus rinsed, drizzled in oil and laid out on a separate pan and the first bottle of wine (a mid-range California red, on special, but a step up from Two-Buck Chuck and certainly drinkable, especially after it sat out for a while) opened and decanted to give it some air. Adam wasn’t back yet, but he generally turned up around cocktail hour, looking to get a buzz on. She’d got into the habit of putting out potato chips or crackers and cheese or mixed nuts or something, he was that hungry, as if he hadn’t eaten all day—and maybe he hadn’
t, unless he was eating the freeze-dried meals he’d got such a deal on at the Big 5. She fed Kutya so he wouldn’t be begging at the table and she’d just sat down with the three-by-five card she kept in her wallet to put some of her clients’ numbers into the new phone when she heard the sound of a car coming up the road. Expecting Christabel, she rose with a smile, tucked the phone away in the front pocket of her jeans and went out the door, across the yard and through the gap in the wall, Kutya at her heels.

  But this wasn’t Christabel’s pickup rolling to a stop out front, but a Prius, a silver Prius, and for a moment she drew a blank. Then she recognized Sten’s face there behind the windshield and understood. He’d come to hang the metal door that had been sitting there all week, that was what she was thinking, but then she saw that his wife was with him—Carolee, whom she’d never met, or not formally—and began wondering if she’d have enough for two more people, and beyond that how all this was going to go down with Adam. And Christabel. Because Christabel was expecting a party, just the three of them, that was the whole point. But the doors flung open, slammed, and there they were, Kutya circling round them and barking as if they were intruders, which, in a way, they were. “No, Kutya,” she called. “No bark. Get down now.”

  Carolee wore a puzzled expression—or inquisitive, maybe that was a better word—and she didn’t even seem to notice the dog, just fastened her eyes on Sara’s and tried to simulate a smile to cover herself. It was a motherly smile because she was a mother, in her sixties—Adam’s mother—though she looked younger, what with her blond hair, worn long and parted so it fell across her face. She was wearing dressy sandals, white shorts and a pink blouse with plenty of room in it. Compared with her husband she was almost a dwarf, three or four inches shorter than Sara herself, and here she came, still ignoring the dog, right on up to her to extend her hand, squint into her face and say, “You must be Sara.”