The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Later, after she’d put his clothes in the wash—and whatever else he had in his backpack, another set of fatigues, crusted socks, undershorts that looked as if they’d been used to swab out a latrine—and left him alone in the shower with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo, she went to the pantry to dig out the egg noodles and sprinkle them over the pot where it was simmering on the stove so he could get something more substantial than diet veggie soup in him. As for the shampoo, he’d looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was—somehow, even out there in the woods, even while suffering diarrhea (giardia, that was what he insisted it was), he’d managed to keep his head shaved, and his face too. She’d even teased him about it as he stepped out of his clothes and handed them to her, saying, “I thought mountain men were allowed to grow beards,” but he didn’t respond because there was a whole lot else going on inside his head right then with his body full of parasites and the thinness of him and just the simple basic need of a good hot shower, but he did give her his partway grin and he was hard, hard right there before her, and he let her reach out a hand to his cock and give it a friendly tug before he shut the door and stepped into the shower.

  Once he’d had his shower, he strolled into the kitchen and sat down at the table as if he’d been doing it every day of his life, grinning his strained grin and saying he was hungry enough to eat a hog or maybe a dog and they both looked at Kutya and burst out laughing. He was wearing her terrycloth robe and nothing else and it rode halfway up his arms and bunched in the shoulders. It was blue and it brought out the blue of his eyes, which was a nice contrast (she’d almost said pretty, or thought it) with his suntanned skin. The first thing he did, right off, was drink two beers, hardly pausing for breath, and then he had a glass of water and washed down a palmful of Imodium tabs. “Cool,” he said. “Niiiice,” drawing it out till the final c was like air hissing out of a balloon. He gave her a long penetrating look, his lips glistening with the water, half of which he’d spilled down the front of the robe. From the look he was giving her she’d expected him to say something suggestive, but he didn’t. “You got anything hard?” is what he said then. Or asked.

  She was at the stove, stirring the soup, which was just about ready, and she set down the spoon, crossed the room to him and took hold of his arm, just above the rolled-up sleeve, and said, “Yeah, I’ve got you.”

  But he stared right through her as if he hadn’t processed that at all, and she supposed he hadn’t, because he was Adam, no different from how he was a month ago, right there with you one minute and gone off the next. What he said was, “ ’Cause I’m all out of one fifty-one.”

  So she poured him a glass of bourbon and he threw that down like a cowboy in one of the flickering westerns the old movie channel showed every other night. “More?” she asked, but the bottle was back on the counter behind her and she thought maybe he’d had enough, especially considering the purpose she had in mind once they’d finished supper and retired to the bedroom.

  He held out the glass.

  “Sure you don’t want to eat first? Put something on your stomach?”

  Well, he didn’t. Or not yet, anyway. There was the glass framed in his hand, the nails dirty still despite the shower, half-moons of dirt worked in under them and up under the cuticles too, and she wondered if he’d sit still for a manicure at some point. She swung away to retrieve the bottle and poured for him, the neck kissing the glass, and when she tried to tip it back he just held her hand till the glass was full. “If you’re going to party,” she murmured, leaning into him so he could feel the weight of her against him, feel her heat and how much she wanted him and how glad she was that he was back, communication of the flesh and communion too, “then I’m going to pour myself another glass of wine.”

  He’d always had a good appetite, burning up calories by the thousands out there in the woods keeping himself like a rock, but he outdid himself this time. He ate as if he was half-starved, and considering the problem he was having, she supposed he was, most of whatever he’d been eating probably going right through him. She made him a sandwich—smoked turkey and cheddar on brown bread, with mustard, mayo, fresh-sliced tomato and lettuce from the garden—and that was gone by the time he started on his second bowl of soup so she made him another one. If she didn’t eat a whole lot herself that night it was because she was watching him, this miracle of dynamic energy and concentrated movement that had blown back into her life, and because she was being careful about her weight and had to pick around the egg noodles. She did have three glasses of wine, though, and that made her feel as if she were floating free right along with him.

  What did they talk about? Nothing much (thanks, Christa, for asking)—the woods, which for all she could get out of him, seemed to be full of trees; her latest victimization by the System; Stateline, Nevada, and Tahoe, did he like Tahoe? And giardia, of course. Giardia and shit. There was a cherry pie she’d bought in a moment of weakness yesterday and she set that out in front of him, and he seemed interested, but then the stomach pains got to him and he disappeared into the bathroom. After a moment she pushed the pie away from her so as to resist temptation but then slid it back and had just the tiniest sliver, licking the sweet congealed cherry filling off her fingers before getting up to put on a CD and start cleaning up.

  He was in there forever, doing what she couldn’t imagine, though it came to her that he was maybe just slumped over the toilet, in real pain, and she was remembering that time in Mexico with Roger when she’d got the turista and felt as though somebody was alternately running a screwdriver through her and pumping her gut full of swamp gas. When he did emerge, finally, he was naked and dripping with water from the shower, his second shower, and he had the Ziploc bag in one hand. Which he held up in front of his face and shook once or twice to make sure she was focused on it. “You got to take me to the doctor,” he said in his soft, soft voice, and he wouldn’t look at her, as if he was embarrassed by his own weakness.

  “The doctor? I don’t know any doctor. And they wouldn’t be open now, anyway.”

  “The emergency room. They have to like take anybody, right?”

  Of course there was the whole rigamarole of insurance and who’s your primary-care doctor and fill out this form and this one too, but the surprise was that Adam actually had insurance through his father and they had his name and information in the computer from a previous visit or visits he’d made, one time apparently after he’d gotten bloodied in a scuffle at Piero’s and another after he’d driven his car through the fence at the playground, something he didn’t want to talk about but kept mentioning all the time, as if he’d padlocked it away and couldn’t remember the combination. The waiting room was packed to the walls with people who didn’t have health care, illegals, white trash, working stiffs who couldn’t afford rent let alone seeing a doctor because their two-year-old was vomiting blood. It stank worse than any stable she’d ever been in and she had to thank her lucky stars she’d never been sick or she didn’t know what she would do. If things were the way they should be, the way they once were, with freemen on the land associating with each other on a by-need basis, then she could have just bartered with some doctor who kept horses and eliminated the middleman, the tax squeezer and the accountant and the whole shitty bureaucracy that had brought her here tonight. With Adam. Because he had giardia and they really didn’t have any other alternative.

  They sat there for three and a half hours, him running to the bathroom every ten minutes and her paging through the magazines that were two years out of date and so encrusted with filth she’d be lucky if she didn’t get tetanus or something just from touching them, until, finally, they called his name and he went into the back room with the nurse and she watched the clock and got angrier by the minute. Or not angry, exactly. It was more like disappointment. She didn’t want to be here with the screaming babies and the old men with the bloody bandages wrapped around their bleached-out skulls and the illegals so sick with whatever it was they
were like walking bags of infection. No, she wanted to be home. In her own house. With Kutya. And Adam.

  Forty-five minutes more—they had to run his stool sample under the microscope to confirm the diagnosis he’d already made, and yes, it was giardia, very common in these parts, and that was the danger of drinking unchlorinated water, even from the purest-looking mountain stream—and then he was walking right by her in the waiting room as if he didn’t recognize her, locked in one of his trances, and she scurried across the room to catch up with him and take him by the arm and lead him out the door and into the parking lot. And that was where things got interesting.

  Because there, right in front of them, pulled up neatly to the curb and with its gumball machine idly spinning, was a police cruiser, just sitting there, the engine running and the gasoline the wage slaves had paid for—she’d paid for—cycling through it and spewing out the tailpipe as carbon monoxide to pollute the atmosphere even more than they’d already polluted it. There was no one in the cruiser. No one in sight. And what she was thinking, despite Adam and her hurry to get home, was that a chance had presented itself to her out of nowhere, a chance to get back at them, if not to get even, because she’d never get even. Adam walked right by it, the prescription they’d given him clutched in one hand, the bag of shit in the other, and why he didn’t just dump it she didn’t know.

  “Adam,” she called. “Adam!”

  He stopped, turned, gave her that maddening look as if he’d never seen her before in his life.

  “Why don’t you get rid of that bag—there, in the trash receptacle.” She’d come up even with him now, the pavement like a dark lake spreading open before them. “Come on,” she said, “snap out of it,” and he let the bag drop from his fingers, where it would lie undisturbed till the gardeners came in the morning with their rakes and blowers.

  “Yeah,” he said vaguely. “Okay, yeah.”

  “Listen,” and she pulled in close to him, lowering her voice, “there’s something we got to do. It’ll take like sixty seconds, that’s all. Can you drive?”

  He shrugged, an elaborate gesture under the yellow glaze of the streetlamps along the walk. Then he grinned, or tried to. “What you got in mind?”

  What she had in mind was very simple, nothing as complex or radical maybe as what a Jerry Kane would have come up with, but a plan nonetheless: she was going to fuck up that cruiser, whether it was the one the lady cop had used to cage her up in or not, and she was going to do it by putting something in the gas tank and destroying the engine so that when the cop came out of the hospital he—or she—would be going nowhere. But what? Dirt? Sand? Or no, and now the solution came to her fully formed: sugar water. It just happened that in the backseat of the car was a present she’d got at the hardware store for Christabel, a kiss-and-make-up present. A hummingbird feeder. Christabel had been commenting on the hummingbirds last time she was over, the two of them sitting out on the porch and watching them hover and feed and shear off again, as greedy as vultures, and when she saw the feeder on sale at the hardware store she bought it and then went home and made up the sugar water, one cup sugar to four cups water, and left the thing in the back of the car so she wouldn’t forget it when they got together again.

  All right. She didn’t know the mechanics of it, but she’d heard this was a good way to really fuck up an engine or maybe even blow it up if that was possible, and why not? They’d screwed her over enough, that was for shit sure. She and Adam had reached her car now and she steadied herself a minute before unlocking the door and handing him the keys. Giving the parking lot a quick scan to be sure no one was watching, she pulled open the back door and reached in back to unscrew the cylinder from the feeder. “Listen,” she said, straightening up and looking him in the eye to be sure he was with her, “just start up the car and wait here—just wait, and no craziness now—till I get done with that cop car over there, and then I stroll away and you pull up and we drive out of here, easy as you please.”

  He got into the car, inserted the key, turned over the engine.

  “Then,” she said, “we go back home.” She paused, leaning in the window to reach out and touch him on the shoulder—she was always touching him, she loved to touch him, to put her imprint on him, her skin to his.

  “Cool,” he said.

  And then she was striding briskly back up the walk, pressing the glass cylinder close to her body on the side away from the hospital with its lights and windows and the patients in their beds there who might or might not be looking out on the parking lot. Anyone seeing her would assume she was going to her car or heading back into the emergency room because she’d just gone out for a breath of air—or a smoke, a verboten smoke—and here was the cruiser, still running, the light atop it still revolving, and she was right there, her fingers working at the metal flap of the gas tank, thinking it must be locked, they’d have to keep it locked or everybody’d be doing this all day long, the shits, the pathetic wasteful cruel inhuman shits, only to find that it was true—it was locked and it wouldn’t give. A quick look around: nothing, nobody. The gumball machine chopped up the light. Her heart was pounding. In the next moment she slipped around to the driver’s side—gliding, flowing as if she were made of silk—cracked the door and reached in to run her hand over the dash, and where was it, where was the release? On the floor. Yes, on the floor. Then she had it and it gave and she was back around the car again—thirty seconds, that was all it took. And every gurgling ounce of the sugar water, every drop, went home, right into the greedy gullet of that cage on wheels, that tool of the oppressors that was a tool no more.

  Let them suck on that. See how they liked it.

  Adam was all right behind the wheel—no Dale Earnhardt, but fine just the same. He kept the car between the lines and he didn’t go over the speed limit though he couldn’t seem to stop laughing. “Just wait,” he kept saying, snorting with laughter, “just wait till they, what, go to nail somebody, and the engine seizes up on them. That was great. That was genius.”

  It was. It was great. She’d gotten her little bit back and she’d got Adam back too. They went home and went to bed and he couldn’t get enough of her, hard and hot and sweating in the dark, her man, her beautiful man. He’d missed her. And he didn’t have to tell her, not in words, because she could feel it, oh, blessed lord, yes, feel it all night long.

  But then—and she wasn’t surprised or at least that’s what she told herself—she woke to daylight poking through the blinds and the bed was empty and the house too. She didn’t have to go out into the hallway and look to see if his pack was there or run barefoot out the back door to watch for him in the field across the way. He was gone and she knew it, vanished like smoke, human smoke, as if he wasn’t made of flesh at all. But he was, oh yes—flesh and bone and hard unyielding muscle—and she knew that better than anybody. He should have stayed—she’d wanted him to and would have told him as much if she’d had the chance—but he had his own agenda, doing whatever it was he did out there in the woods.

  It wasn’t ideal, far from it. She’d rather have him there, rather be making coffee for two instead of one—and eggs and toast and whatever else he wanted. The house felt empty without him, though he’d been in it no more than what, twelve, thirteen hours? It saddened her. Standing at the counter in the kitchen that still vibrated with the aura of him, she poured herself a cup of coffee and gazed out the window to where a hummingbird no bigger than her thumb was sucking sugar water from the feeder through the miniature syringe of its bill, a creature innocent of cops, internal combustion engines, wages, taxes, slavery. A free bird, a free bird on the land. She blew on her coffee to cool it and told herself to be patient—one way or the other he’d get tired of it out there and then he’d be back, she was sure of it.

  Just give him time.

  PART IX

  The Plantation

  27.

  COLTER DIDN’T HAVE THE shits. They probably didn’t even have giardia back then, let alone the littl
e yellow 400 mg metronidazole tablets they gave you to cure it. What they did have was hostiles, thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands, though the white race had done their best to bring those numbers down, what with smallpox and gonorrhea and rum, whiskey, vodka and gin. But here they were, the Blackfeet, terminally furious and flinging Potts’ bloody genitalia at him, and the only issue was not if but how they were going to put him to death. Braves kept lurching up to him, right in his face, tomahawks drawn, then jerking back again, as if to rattle him, but he kept calm because he saw that some of the higher-ranking ones, the chiefs, had withdrawn a ways to sit around in a circle and think things through. Why be hasty? They had all day, all night, and if he lasted that long, the day after that. He felt his heart sink, though he wouldn’t let his face show it. After a while the ululations dropped off and the young braves, the hotheads, held back in deference to their elders, but you could see they were aching for the moment they’d be set free—and gloating too over the prospect of what mold of sport the elders were devising for them.

  Naked, with Potts’ blood drying on his chest and shoulders, Colter stood rigid, trying to focus his mind. He could make out something of what the elders were saying—some were for the death of a thousand slits, others for making a target out of him so they could improve their aim the way they had with Potts, maybe even take wagers as to which of them could drill him the closest without killing him outright. He had enough of their language to get a sense of all this, but not enough to plead his case—if he was doing anything at that moment it was trying to form the Blackfoot words in his head, when only the language of their enemies, the Crows, or Kee-kat-sa, as they called themselves, would rise up out of the depths of his brain, which was, understandably, under a whole lot of stress at the moment.