The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  But this was different. Now Carey was dead, shot down and murdered, and people were out for blood. If it felt strange walking down the corridor and stepping into the auditorium, Carolee on his arm, Sten tried not to show it. He’d been back a few times since he retired, easing the transition for the new man, John Reilly, clearing out his things, saying his goodbyes after a lifetime, but here he was in the very auditorium where he’d called so many meetings and assemblies himself, where he’d been in charge and was in charge no longer. That was all right with him. He was fine with that. He was here to bear witness and lend his stature to the moment and the cause and whatever was to come. They were not vigilantes, that was the thing to remember, and that was what he was going to emphasize when it was his turn to speak because he knew where violence took you, knew better than most, and if he thought of Carey he thought of that day in the car and the rage that had come over him. Whether the man with the gun had been guilty or not, he’d been ready to take him on, ready to snap, a heartbeat away—it was the Mexican who had the sense, who was cool enough to suss out the situation and back down. For the moment. But then he was out there still, wasn’t he?

  John Reilly brought the meeting to order and said a few words about Carey, about how much he was loved and how much he would be missed—clichés, but necessary clichés, the very same ones that had been on his own lips through all the afternoons and early evenings he’d had to preside over public chest-barings like this, the accumulated grief, juniors and seniors struck down in auto accidents, a girl with a sweet teardrop face who played the violin dead of leukemia, colleagues gone in an eyeblink. This was for the students, who were sober-faced and attentive for a change, the first three rows congested with them, shining with them, their heads glossy with reflected light. Their parents and the rest of the townspeople filled the rows behind them, their faces anything but sober. They looked angry, vengeful, looked like vigilantes. He saw that Carey’s widow, Sandra, wasn’t there, her grief too raw and unconstrained to make a public show of it, and that was a small mercy. This wasn’t a memorial. That would come at the funeral home later in the week, as soon as forensics did what they had to do and released the body. Carolee would send a card and they’d be there, both of them. He’d be expected to say words and he would, the same words John Reilly was saying now.

  Next was Gordon. He wore a suit and tie, his dyed hair left gray at the temples by way of lending him gravitas—he was a banker after all, and Sten didn’t grudge him the artificial touches, though he was something of an attitudinizing ass and tended to think a little too much of himself. What he talked about, and he was shrewd enough to keep it brief this time, was the ecology. The resources the north country had been blessed with—timber, water, fish and game—and how they belonged equally to all citizens, rich and poor. They were our legacy and they had to be preserved, for the generation sitting here tonight and the generations to come. Right before he sat down, he delivered the kicker: “And we’re not going to let anybody take them away from us—not the criminals or their gangs or anybody else.” The applause was thunderous.

  Sten was up next and he was to be followed by the real draw of the night, Rob Rankin, the county sheriff, who was going to have to do a whole lot of explaining and lay down a soft smooth wrinkleless carpet of reassurances. And then take questions. Which, judging from the mood of the crowd, could be an occasion for some real bloodletting. At any rate, Sten took the podium to a groundswell of applause and after eulogizing Carey in a way he hoped went beyond the usual—Carey truly cared, not just about the environment but about democracy and the legacy we were leaving our children, and he’d actually gone out and done something about it, patrolling the woods to make us all safer—and then reminded everybody present that nothing had been established yet aside from the fact that whoever had committed this crime was armed and dangerous and not to be trifled with. The sheriff was doing his best to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice. In the meanwhile, it was imperative—he’d actually dredged up and dusted off the word, his officialese come back to him like a second language—that everybody just stay calm.

  He’d paused at that point and gazed out on the crowd. “We are not vigilantes,” he said, “and we are not going to fly off the handle and take matters into our own hands because that’ll do nobody any good, least of all Carey Bachman. Respect him. Respect his memory.” Another pause. Nobody believed him, he could see that. Senior Citizen Kills Tour Thug. All right. He’d done his best. He wasn’t principal, he wasn’t mayor, he wasn’t the sheriff. What he was was an American citizen, a senior citizen, and he felt immeasurably tired all of a sudden. The auditorium seemed to swell and recede. His back ached. He felt a headache coming on. The thing was, everything just seemed so hopeless, so utterly, blackly, irremediably hopeless.

  “And now,” he said, his voice echoing in that acoustic desert till it came back to him as the last desperate gasp of a man withering under the sun that wasn’t the sun at all but the 1,500-watt theatrical spotlight installed by Rainier Holcomb, the deaf electrician, now dead, under Sten’s own mandate, “I’ll hand the mike over to Sheriff Rankin.” He nodded at the radiant bald head and glittering badge of the loose-limbed man in uniform sitting amongst the twelfth graders in the front row. “Who’ll say a few words and then take your questions.” Then, gathering himself up, he went on back to find his seat beside Carolee.

  The rest turned into a kind of drowsy meditation, the auditorium overheated, the sheriff droning on in a sleepwalker’s voice, the questioners by turns timid and outraged but performing their roles just exactly as expected, Should we keep our doors locked? Is it safe to be out at night? Why don’t you arrest them at the supermarket, tell me that? You want perpetrators, I’ll show you perpetrators! Twice he felt the sharp reminder of Carolee’s index finger probing his ribs and realized he’d drifted off, an embarrassment at any time but doubly so now, here in the high school auditorium with Carey dead and people looking to him to provide guidance and support. Problem was, he didn’t want to provide guidance and support. He just wanted to go home. To bed.

  Finally, as things were winding down—the sheriff had been asked the same question for the sixth or seventh time and gave the same tired answer, to wit, “We’ll know more when the facts are in,” and somebody said, “So you don’t advise going out in the woods right now, for any purpose?” and the sheriff said, “No, not really, not until we clear this thing up”—Sten felt himself come awake in a way he’d never been awake before, as if he was an animal seized in the jaws of a bigger animal and shaken helplessly. The woods. Out in the woods. He’d actually placed a call to Cody Waters’ parents—yesterday, with Carolee fretting and all the shit raining down around them—and got Cody’s cellphone number and gone outside where she wouldn’t hear and punched it in. A voice answered—“Digame”—and he thought he had the wrong number but persisted anyway. “Cody?” he’d said. “Is that you?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Sten. Adam’s father?”

  A silence. Then, “Yeah?”

  “Was that Spanish you were talking?

  “I guess.”

  Another silence.

  “Listen, I was calling because I wanted to ask if you’ve seen Adam lately. You know he moved out of the house by the river, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “We just, well we haven’t heard from him and we were wondering if maybe he was up there with you—”

  “No, no, he’s not here. I haven’t seen him in like a month maybe.”

  There was static on the line, a faint sizzling in the background. “Did he say what his plans were? Where he’s living?”

  He could picture the boy on the other end of the line, the sharp slash of his nose, the sloped shoulders and Don’t-Even-Ask look, the dreadlocks he and Adam used to wear before they gave up reggae for rap and then death metal and shaved their heads, before they went military and developed attitudes and started pushing the buttons of the police and
everybody else too. When they were kids. Just kids.

  A sigh. The sizzle of static. “I don’t know,” Cody said finally. “In the woods, I guess.”

  23.

  THERE ARE THE NAMELESS fears and there are the named ones too. When he was a child his nightmares weren’t of ghouls or monsters or people chasing him with knives and axes and decapitated heads, but amorphous things, neither human nor animal, the fear that sat in your stomach, inside you, and you couldn’t define it or shake it either. That was what this was like. He didn’t say a word to Carolee, but the morning after the meeting he was up early, earlier than usual—first light—and he didn’t bother with breakfast because if he started fussing around in the kitchen she’d wake up and ask him where he was going and he’d just have to lie to her. His daypack—water in a bota bag, granola bars, binoculars, Swiss Army knife, matches stuffed in a plastic pill container to keep them dry, foil space blanket and GPS beacon for emergencies—was hanging on the coat tree where he always put it when he came in from one of his surveillance hikes. He pulled on a baseball cap—Oakland A’s, how about that?—patted down his pockets to make sure he had his wallet, keys and cellphone, and then headed out the door.

  He drove up the north road, slowly, rolling over pinecones, fist-sized rocks, sticks and twigs and scraps of vegetation that had been pulverized by the tires of the emergency vehicles, looking for the spot where it had happened. Art had told him it was by the spring up there, no more than a thousand yards off the road, just follow the creek on up and you can’t miss it. Well, he couldn’t have missed it anyway because the tracks of the ambulance and the sheriff’s four-wheel drive came together there, crosshatching the road where they’d had to make their three-point turns to return with the body and whatever evidence they’d discovered. Which thus far was being kept secret. He’d tried to get Rob Rankin to tell him but Rob just shook his head. “Can’t disclose that. Sorry, Sten. Ongoing investigation.”

  There would have been shell casings. And the bullets themselves, the ones they dug out of Carey’s dead flesh. That would have been something, at least. But what he wondered—and here he was, following a wide beaten path uphill through the bracken at the feet of the trees, the morning still, nothing moving and nothing sounding off, not even birds—was just what caliber those casings and bullets had turned out to be. Were they from a handgun? A revolver? An old wood-grip .38 or .45 some scoop-faced son of a bitch kept tucked in his waistband like a Hollywood cliché? Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges. Or something else. Something else altogether.

  The only sound was the trickle of the stream, no wind in the trees and that eerie absence of birdcall, as if the place had been poisoned, as if the Zetas were just over the next rise with their human mules and their booby traps and their carbofuran. He never had found out what happened that day when they’d lost sight of the white truck and Carey phoned 911—there was nothing in the paper and he could only assume the Mexicans had gone off on a side road somewhere and waited an hour or two before doubling back. It was nothing to the cops. They had a whole lot on their hands and if every 911 call about people brandishing weapons didn’t have a scripted ending, so much the worse. But it was quiet. Too quiet. Quieter than any forest he could remember. He pricked up his senses. The air was damp with a funk of rot, of moss and mold and things breaking down, and underneath it the smell of water bubbling up out of some dark place. He forced himself to move slowly, step by step, studying the shadows where they deepened in clots of vegetation, listening hard, as if the perpetrators would be anywhere within ten miles of here—what did he think, they were going to kill somebody and then come back and lick the blood off the rocks? After a moment he went down on one knee to peer into the stream and see if he could detect any life there, nymphs, water boatmen, minnows as dull and gray and natural in these waters as the brick-red platys were in theirs. The water was pellucid. He saw nothing, not even a water strider.

  He continued on up, the trees standing silent, the bushes increasingly beaten down and the ground raked over as he came closer to the dun scallop of rock where the spring emerged from the side of the mountain. There was a tree down just in front of the pool the spring made, cover for anyone lying in ambush, but then why would there be an ambush in this place? There was no plantation here, that was obvious. The trees were dense, closed in, the sunshine minimal. It was a water source, of course—they needed water, and they were known to divert whole streams as well as run drip lines hundreds of yards out into their makeshift clearings where they’d sacrificed the trees for the greater good of profit and criminality. What if—and he was speculating now—Carey had come upon a couple of them checking out the location or even laying out plastic tubing to take the water down to the road, to a catchment there or a tank in the back of a brand-new white Ford XLT pickup with all-terrain tires?

  But no, that didn’t make any sense. They wouldn’t have shot him—that would only bring attention to themselves, bring the heat. They might have cursed, might have made a crude gesture or two and spat out a garble of Spanish and English—Spanglish—to proclaim their innocence, We are hikers, señor, only hikers, and then gone on their way. To avoid the confrontation the way they had the day he and Carey had followed them to a standstill. They didn’t want to kill anybody, not unless someone got too close to the growing operation, either by design or accident, and even then the better part of them—the mules—would just melt away into the undergrowth when the DEA or the sheriff’s department pulled a raid. Who wanted to be a hero? Who wanted the attention?

  No, that wasn’t the answer, that wasn’t the answer at all. He was standing there on the very rock, the smooth clean water-burnished slab of granite where they’d found the body—the chalk marks there still—and if he was studying the grain of the rock for bloodstains it wasn’t out of idle curiosity or morbidity or even a desire to mourn a friend. There was a mystery here, a puzzle he had to solve for himself before Rob Rankin and his forensics team did, and it was tied up with that fear, the nameless fear that was mutating now into a named fear, named and punishing and inadmissible.

  Suddenly, and he didn’t quite know why, he was calling out his son’s name. “Adam?” he shouted, obliterating the silence. “Adam, are you out there?”

  PART VIII

  Ukiah

  24.

  SO ADAM WAS GONE. Adam was crazy and Adam was gone. That hurt. It did. Hurt her more than she would ever admit, not even to Christabel, and Christabel was there for her, sitting over her strawberry margarita with a long face saying, “You want to talk about it?” They were at Casa Carlos in Ukiah, Friday night, a month after Adam knocked her down, trashed the house and kept on trashing it till she thought he was going to hammer his way right on through the walls. She was crying that night. She’d tried to stop him, tried to bring him back up the hill where they could settle in and be like they were before, but he wouldn’t listen to her and he wouldn’t stop either. She screamed his name, screamed it over and over, the shock and confusion wadded in her throat till she thought she was going to choke on it, and then she cursed him, stood out in the dark yard and cursed him to the tone-deaf clank and clatter of things breaking, shattering, falling to pieces. Crying still, she’d put Kutya in the car, started up the engine and swung round in the driveway. “You son of a bitch!” she shouted out the window. “You shit! I hope you die and rot in hell!” Then she put the car in gear and drove on up the hill, listening to Hank Williams, only Hank, and crying in harsh hot jags that took the breath right out of her body.

  She didn’t tell Christabel any of that—that was personal. Personal even from her. What she did tell her was that they’d had a fight—Adam was upset because they had to move out and he started taking it out on her—and that it was over, or probably over, ninety-nine and a half percent sure if you wanted to figure the odds. And what did Christabel say? “I don’t see what you saw in him, anyway.” She’d paused to blow out smoke. “Except his bod. But he was trouble with a capital T and don�
��t you try to deny it.”

  Now, in one of the dark booths along the back wall where the black velvet tapestry of Selena hung beside one of a snorting bull in a shadowy arena clotted with even shadowier faces, with the candle guttering in its rippled glass urn and the corny Mexican music tweedle-deeing through the speakers in a sad travesty of normalcy and joy, she felt like crying all over again. That, and getting drunk. They were already on their second pitcher, the remains of her beef enchilada and Christabel’s macho burrito congealing in grease on the plates before them—she really did have to start eating healthier and she made a promise to herself in that moment, albeit a drunken promise, to start tomorrow—and things had begun to blur a bit.

  “I mean, beyond the sex,” Christabel said, her fluffed-up hair and the candlelight giving her a weird Halloweeny look, “what did he ever do for you? Did he contribute? Pay for anything?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. But she did. And in the next breath she said, “He could be so funny.”

  “Right. Like that night he sat down to dinner buck naked—”

  And then they were both laughing and she picked up the pitcher and topped off their glasses, the frothy pink confection like something a child would lap up, cotton candy made liquid, but it packed a punch, no doubt about that. Plus, she was driving because Christabel’s pickup was in the shop with some mysterious ailment that was probably nothing but would cost five hundred, minimum, of that she could be sure. The way mechanics took advantage of women, especially single women, was another kind of disgrace, as if things weren’t bad enough already . . .