The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The bill came. They divided it up and left a two-dollar tip on a thirty-six dollar charge because when you really thought about it the service was lousy and the food worse and the decor right out of a Tijuana whorehouse, and so what if the waiter gave them a dirty look when they were going out the door, he could go fuck himself, they could all go fuck themselves. Right. And then they were on the street, the air cool on her bare arms, September nearly gone already and October coming on, time dragging you through the year as if it had hooks on it, one holiday after another, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and then the big ones, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of it in service of what? Shopping. Spend, spend, spend. Make the corporations that much richer and the people that much poorer. Really, the only way to get off that wheel was to drop out and she’d told Christabel that till she was blue in the face, explained it over and over, patiently, in detail, and still she didn’t get it. Or wouldn’t.

  Jerry Kane got it. And Jerry Kane died for it. He just got fed up to the point where quoting the UCC code and declaring his status to whatever Fascist disguised as a policeman just didn’t cut it anymore and so he took up arms because they gave him no choice. The final straw, or the next-to-final straw, was when they arrested him in Carrizo, New Mexico, at what he called on his radio show a “Nazi checkpoint, show me your papers, Heil Hitler,” a checkpoint set up for the sole purpose of harassing citizens, both natural-born and slave-state, and, of course, extracting money from them, moola, hard cash, as if they were anything more than just roadside bandits out of the old time, the lawless time when you protected yourself and your own and lived free. It wasn’t any different from what happened to her. They stopped him for no reason except that they had the guns and demanded his papers and when he refused to enter into a contract with them they hauled him off to jail under threat, duress and coercion and what he did was file a counterclaim alleging kidnapping and extortion against the arresting officers and the justice of the so-called peace of the so-called court. And then, two months later, he was on his way back from one of his seminars in Vegas to his home in Florida, and it happened all over again, and who could blame him if he just turned around and defended himself from fraud, malice and yes, kidnapping. Yet again.

  He’d had enough. And when the two cops came up to the white van that was his own personal property on one of the highways and byways guaranteed for free and unencumbered access under the Uniform Commercial Code, he started shooting. West Memphis, Arkansas, Crittenden County. Two oppressors shot dead. But that wasn’t enough because the cops tracked Jerry Kane and his son to that Walmart parking lot and two more cops went down in a shitstorm of bullets and Jerry Kane and his sixteen-year-old son gave up their lives for it. For what? For seatbelts? For papers?

  “Uh, Sara—Sara, earth to Sara?”

  It was cold. She was rubbing her arms on the street that was all but deserted and the neon sign out front of Casa Carlos was like icing on a frozen cake and Christabel was standing there beside her trying to be funny. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay, okay.”

  Then they were walking to her car, the sound of their heels like gunshots echoing out into the night and the traffic lights going red and green and red again and nobody there to know or care and Christabel was saying, “You going to be all right to drive?” and she was saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

  So she drove back to Willits on the road she could have driven blind and dropped Christabel off, a few pairs of headlights coming at her, nothing really. She was minding her own business and thinking ahead to Kutya and how he would have been missing her and holding his pee because he was the best-trained dog in the world and totally considerate of her, and if things seemed a bit blurrier than usual, that was all right, that was because it was dark and getting darker and she was sticking to back roads only now, taking a circuitous route home in the event there were any clowns in cop uniforms out there on the main road looking to harass, detain and rob people traveling in their own personal property to their own personal residence. Route 20, that was what she wanted to avoid, and she did, cutting a big rectangle or maybe a trapezoid around it, twice having to back up and pull U-turns because she somehow wound up on dead-end streets. But Route 20 was where she had to go at some point if she was going to get home, and finally, after having circumvented—or rectangavented—the intersection at South Main, she found herself out on the darkened highway at something like eleven o’clock at night. Minding. Her. Own. Business.

  And then it all started over again, as if she were caught in a time warp. One whoop, then the lights flashing in the rearview. The shoulder of the road, the narrow view out the windshield. The sounds: bugs in the grass, the overzealous roar of the cruiser’s engine straining even in neutral, the declamatory tattoo of the officer’s boots first on the pavement and then on the tired dirt strip of the shoulder. The lady cop, the very one, bloodless, thin as a post, no lipstick, and something like joy in her eyes. The flashlight. The commands, License and registration, Proof of insurance, Step out of the car, and the same answers, or answer: “I have no contract with you.”

  But they had the guns. They had the handcuffs. And they had their way with her.

  25.

  THIS TIME SHE HAD to spend the night—in the drunk tank—with two other women, both in their twenties and both as dumb as boards and so polluted they couldn’t have stood up straight let alone driven an automobile, while she—she herself—was hardly drunk at all, and no, she wasn’t going to get out of the car and no, she wasn’t going to breathe into the Breathalyzer or stand on one leg or touch her fingertips to her nose or anything else. And why? Because SHE DID NOT HAVE A CONTRACT WITH THE REPUBLIC OF CALIFORNIA. And never would have. They could hang her, she didn’t care. But Kutya, poor Kutya, he was the one that had to suffer, just like the last time. He wasn’t in the Animal Control, but he was locked in the house and his bladder must have been bursting and what a trial of his conscience and all his training to have to go into the kitchen and take a sad guilty dribbling pee on the linoleum there. Where it would puddle. And stink. And dry up in a stain that would eat through the wax and take some real elbow grease to get out.

  The judge was unsympathetic, a dried-up old bitch who looked as if her hair had been glued on. The bail money was doubled this time because of her failure to appear on the previous charge, and since Christabel didn’t have the money she’d had to go to a bail bondsman at an interest rate that would have put countries like Greece and Spain right under. Then there was the same charade at the impound yard, more bucks out the window, and she had to dig into her super-secret savings fund, the money she’d got when she and Roger split up and he bought out her interest in the house, money she’d told herself she’d never touch because it was going to be a down payment someday on a house all her own—once she’d saved up enough on top of that to meet the piratical amount they wanted because the banks hadn’t got done raping America yet.

  She paid off Mary Ellis at the impound yard, Mary too embarrassed to even mention the fact that this was the second time around and too much of a slave of the system to do anything more than just take the cashier’s check with a face carved out of lead and stamp her receipt. As far as the bail bond was concerned, she couldn’t leave Christabel hanging with that, so she took out the full amount to give her, five thousand dollars, because she had no intention of showing up for her court date. They’d got Jerry Kane, but they weren’t going to get her, never again.

  What she was thinking was that the Republic of California was a place in which she no longer wanted to reside. It was the ultimate nanny state, everything you did short of drawing breath regulated through the roof, a list of no’s half a mile long posted on every street corner and the entrance to every park in the state. You couldn’t smoke on the street. Couldn’t park overnight, couldn’t pay your toll in cash on the Golden Gate Bridge, couldn’t buy something on the internet without the sales tax Nazis coming after you. You couldn’t eve
n start a fire in your own woodstove or natural stone fireplace on a cold and damp and nasty winter’s day down in Visalia, where she’d lived with Roger through her unenlightened years, lest you run afoul of the air-quality control board, and don’t think you can sneak around the regulations because you’ve got a whole squadron of snitches and tattletales living right next door and across the street to report you out of sour grapes because they’re too whipped and beaten down to start up their own pathetic little fires.

  No, what she was thinking was Nevada. Maybe Stateline. Anything goes in Nevada and if she found a place in Stateline she’d be within striking distance of all those rich yuppies in Lake Tahoe, who all had horses that needed regular shoeing and TLC like horses anywhere. Or maybe Kingman, in Arizona. She’d been there once, just passing through but also to visit the funky little trailer court on old Route 66 there as a kind of pilgrimage, because that was where Timothy McVeigh had lived before he met Terry Nichols. Now there was a soldier, there was somebody who wasn’t going to take it anymore. Though maybe that was a bit extreme. She wasn’t violent herself and didn’t really believe in it and whenever his name came up she had to admit that maybe he had gone too far—she couldn’t see taking lives, though you could hardly call them innocent. Live and let live, right? Unless they keep on kidnapping you, keep on regulating you, keep on sticking their hands deeper and deeper into your pockets until you’ve got no pockets left.

  Anyway, she entered into a contract with the court (TDC), picked up her car and drove home, where the poor dog ran and hid under the bed because of what he’d had no choice but to do on the kitchen floor, and that just made her all the more crazy. The subsidiary effects. They never thought of that. Never thought of what innocent creatures—truly innocent—they were torturing with their seatbelt laws and their drunk-but-not-drunk-enough nighttime patrols when anybody who wasn’t already asleep wouldn’t have given two shits if the streets were flowing with Cuervo Gold. But enough. She must have spent half an hour just standing there in her own kitchen, looking down on that piss stain on the floor, before finally she got down on her hands and knees and wiped it up, and then, because she wasn’t herself—she was trembling, actually trembling, she was so upset—she got out the mop, the bucket and the plastic bottle of Mop & Glo and redid the whole kitchen, just to take her mind off things.

  She was just finishing up when her cell rang. It was Christabel.

  “Just checking in,” Christabel said. “You all right?”

  “I’m not hungover, if that’s what you mean. I wasn’t even buzzed last night. Not when they pulled me over. I mean, we did eat, didn’t we?”

  “I feel so bad.”

  “Bad? Why should you feel bad? The one that ought to feel bad is me. And the System. The System ought to feel bad, so bad it just rots from the inside out.”

  “What I mean is, I should have been driving. I should never have let you, I mean, with what happened with the police last time around—”

  She could hear Christabel breathing on the other end of the line, a series of deep, wet, patient breaths that were like a sedative. She could feel herself calming down. Christabel. Her best friend. Where would she be without her? “Don’t worry about me,” she said.

  “Well, I am worried.”

  “They can’t touch me.”

  “What are you talking about, Sara—they’ve locked you up twice in the last, what, two months now?”

  “What I’m talking about is I’m not going to be around, I’m out of here—I’ve had it, Christa, I really have—”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re going to be like this again. If you skip out on this—”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got the money, I’m not going to burn you.”

  “If you skip out they’re going to put you in jail, don’t you realize that? Don’t you get it? And not just for an hour or overnight either.”

  She began to realize that on top of everything else the conversation was making her extremely unhappy, this conversation, even if it was with her best friend, even if Christabel only wanted to make her feel better, but she wasn’t making her feel better and maybe that was why she couldn’t help snapping at her. “So what are you now, a legal expert?”

  “Oh, come off it, Sara—it’s just common sense.”

  “Sure, and what do you know? You’re just a slave like all the rest of them. If you’d just read your Fourteenth Amendment, just read it—”

  “Sara—”

  And then she was quoting, from memory, because she was rankled and riled and she had to do something, “‘No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ You want me to go on?”

  Nothing.

  “Because I will. Because that right there is the essence of it, when the states gave up their rights and made all freemen on the land into federal citizens and then along comes the Social Security Act, surprise, to establish accounts in debit on every one of us, not to mention Roosevelt taking us off the gold standard—”

  “Sara! Sara, listen, will you?” And here was Christa shouting at her, actually shouting at her because she didn’t want to hear the truth and never had. “Sara, I haven’t got time for this. I’m sorry. I got to go.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and if her voice was bitter right down to the dregs, so what? “I got to go too.”

  26.

  SHE WAS AT THE stove two days later, making a pot of low-cal chicken vegetable soup (tenders sautéed in safflower oil with garlic and onions, chicken stock, zucchini, tomatoes and snow peas from her garden), late afternoon, a glass of zinfandel on the counter beside her, everything as still as still can be. Kutya was asleep on the floor, in the cool place by the sink. A faint breeze, just the breath of one, came in through the screen windows. Quartering the tomatoes and dicing the zucchini, occasionally taking a sip of wine and gazing idly out the window to where the hummingbirds were buzzing each other off the feeder, she felt herself easing into a kind of waking dream, and wasn’t this the way life was supposed to be? No worries. Just living in the moment. Normally she would have been listening to the radio, but she’d spun through the dial twice and there was nothing but crap on—classical, with the stick-up-the-ass announcers who sounded as if they’d had all their blood drained out of them the minute they turned the microphone on; Mexican talk; Mexican music; Mexican car ads; classic rock with the same playlist they’d been rehashing for the last half century and, if you didn’t like that, the alt rock that was such crap even the musicians’ mothers couldn’t take it—and so she was listening to the house breathing around her, to the jay outside the window and the neat controlled tap and release of the blade on the cutting board.

  She hadn’t heard from Christabel since the night before last, since their fight, if you could call it that, but what best friends didn’t fight once in a while? You weren’t really close with somebody unless you could let it all hang out—that was what intimacy was all about, going deep, getting under each other’s skin, taking the good with the bad. That was what she was thinking, elevating the edge of the cutting board now to guide the zucchini and tomatoes into the pot and wondering if she had any mushrooms left in the refrigerator because mushrooms would give the soup a little more density and add a nice subtle flavor—the creminis, the chewy ones—when the strangest feeling came over her, almost as if a ghost had materialized in the room behind her, and that was even stranger, because she didn’t believe in ghosts. She believed in graves, six feet down, and the spirit trapped in the body. That rotted.

  Still, she couldn’t help turning her head to look over her shoulder as the steam from the pot rose around her and the garlic sent up its aroma to sweeten the room, but there was nothing there. The strangest thing—she’d have to tell Christabel about it. To the refrigerator—yes, there were the
creminis—and then to the sink to rinse them and again to the cutting board. Then the feeling came back, stronger now, and she turned around again and there he was, Adam, standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, trying to smile. “Adam,” she said, naming him, just that, but she was soaring inside.

  He was in his fatigues, the knife strapped at his side, his boots scuffed, his face and scalp tanned as deeply as any lifeguard’s. Behind him, in the hallway that led to the living room, she could see the dark mound of his discarded pack and the thin shadow of the rifle leaning up against the wall. The dog, too lazy and spoiled to do his job properly, lifted his head suddenly, gave a soft woof and trotted over to him. Adam hadn’t moved or said a word, but now he reached behind him, ignoring Kutya, who was wagging his tail in recognition and sniffing at his pantleg, and produced a plastic Ziploc bag that seemed to contain a dark smear of something that might have been chocolate but wasn’t. “I got the shits,” he announced.

  She was going to ask if he was hungry, if he wanted a glass of wine, if he’d been out there camping in the woods all this time (the answer to that was obvious, just from a glance at him), but instead she said, “You need Pepto-Bismol? I’ve got those little pink tabs, I think, and maybe a bottle too.” She looked at him dubiously. His pants were stained. He’d lost weight. She could smell him from all the way across the room.

  He didn’t answer, just repeated himself: “I got the shits.”

  “Or maybe something stronger? Imodium? I think I might have some in the medicine cabinet . . .” And she started for the bathroom but he just reached out and grabbed hold of her in his arms that were like steel cables and pressed her to him, hard, so hard it was as if he never wanted to let go, and then he was kissing her, the plastic bag flapping behind her so that she could feel the inflexible zippered edge of it digging into her where her pants pulled away from her blouse, and she held on to him just as tightly and kissed him back with everything she had.