The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Finally, one of the chiefs—tall, bleak-faced, with reddened mucousy eyes and skin jerked by the wind and sun—pushed himself up and ambled over to stand face-to-face with him, practically nose-to-nose. Colter could smell him, the tobacco he sucked through his pipe, the sweat of his horse, the dried buffalo meat and pounded meal he’d had for breakfast. They stood like that for a long moment, Colter naked and vulnerable and wanting only to sprout wings and fly on out of there, the hardest thing to keep your back straight and not give in to the impulse to protect your gut—a reflex, really—and guard against a sneak blow that would double you up and leave you gasping in the dirt. “Are you a fast runner?” the chief asked, but Colter didn’t understand him, so after a long moment, the chief repeated himself and he got the gist of it. This was hope. A particle of it, anyway. He’d heard of similar situations, in which a tribe would let their captive run for his life so they could have the sport of the chase, like fox and hounds, except that the ground was festooned with prickly pear and the fox had no moccasins to protect his feet and even if he did there was nowhere to escape to or even hide in all that flat deserted plain.

  And what did Colter say, in his accent that must have been a kind of insult in itself? “Not really.”

  The chief bored into him with his rheumy eyes, wondering if he could believe him—or should—or if it even mattered. Even if Colter was the fastest man alive, how could he hope to outrun a hundred or more hopped-up spear-flinging braves, each of them vying to be the one to avenge the death of their tribesman, their friend, their relative, their father or son or brother? After a minute or two of this—enough to make Colter feel the extra weight of paranoia, wondering if the chief had been there for the fight with the Crows and was just now beginning to place him—the chief turned his back on him and returned to the circle of elders. Things got quiet. Children stared at him out of wide unblinking eyes. A dog came up to sniff him and raise its hackles before slinking away. The elders were talking in low voices now, as if they’d reached consensus, and he strained to hear what they were saying but couldn’t catch a word of it.

  Another eternity went by, every minute of it precious, however fraught, because he was alive still and thinking and breathing and pumping blood on planet earth. He just stood there, staring straight ahead, as if he didn’t care one way or the other what they did with him. It was cool still, the temperature just above freezing despite the sun that had come up over the horizon now, but he didn’t feel it—if anything, he felt overheated, as if he were wrapped in furs and lying in front of a bonfire. Maybe he had an itch on the back of his neck or under his arm—people had itches all the time—but he didn’t dare scratch it or even move a fraction of an inch. Finally, the first chief, joined now by a younger, angrier-looking one, strolled across the beaten dirt to him, taking his sweet time. He was nodding, nodding assent, and when he was right there in front of Colter again, nose-to-nose, he said, “You go out there on the plain and then”—he gestured to the young braves, who’d begun to remove their leggings and line up for the chase—“we see how fast you run.”

  So Colter, taking his sweet time too, ambled out across the plain, expecting at any moment to hear the shout go up behind him but forcing himself to walk so as to get as much distance between himself and his pursuers as he could before he broke into a run and set them off. Most people wouldn’t have had the presence of mind Colter had—they would have taken off sprinting and the Indians would have been on them quicker than flies on shit—but it served him well. He must have gotten a hundred yards out before the shout went up, but it wasn’t so much a shout as a mad blood-crazed shriek of three hundred voices, the women ululating all over again and the braves howling like beasts. Colter didn’t let it distract him and he didn’t look back. He knew right where he was—it was six miles straight across the plain to the forks of the Missouri, the big river, and if he could somehow reach that and maybe get in the water ahead of them and flail his way downstream he had a chance, the smallest, tiniest, infinitesimal chance, of surviving.

  Colter ran. He kept his head down, watching his feet, trying to avoid the spines of the cholla and prickly pear and whatever else was out there. His legs felt strong, though he’d spent the better part of the past month sitting in a canoe, and he never slowed his pace, sprinting the first mile as if this wasn’t about endurance but speed, only that. The braves—and what had they been doing all their lives except letting their ponies do the running for them?—began to drop out, one by one. Those closest to him flung their spears at the pale retreating wedge of his back but they weren’t near enough to be accurate and he could hear the spears clatter on the stones behind him. Encouraged, he kept running, and if anything, increased his speed.

  Then there was the second mile, the third, and he was halfway there by his calculation and still alive and in one piece, though his feet were bloody and pierced with cholla spines and his lungs were on fire. But at least he still had lungs and that was better than the alternative, better than Potts, whose own innards were just food for dogs at this point. After a while, and he was running now for the sake of it, for nothing else but that, just running as if he’d never done anything else in his life, he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw to his amazement that there were only three braves anywhere near him. So what did he do? He poured it on, running faster than anybody before or since, and by the time he reached what he guessed was the fifth mile and could see the distant declivity where the river cut its banks, there was only one brave behind him, the fittest one in the whole camp, young, streamlined, his spear stabbing out before him as he pumped his arms with each stride.

  No matter. Colter was outrunning him. Or could have or would have but for the fact that he felt something hot and viscid running down the front of him, his own blood, some essential thing ruptured inside of him from the sheer pounding stress and high anxiety he was putting his body through. He was bleeding out both nostrils, that was what it was, his chest and even his thighs smeared with blood as if he’d been plunged in a vat in one of the slaughterhouses back in St. Louis, and he knew that things had come to a head, to the point of crisis, flip a coin, live or die. So what he did, even as the brave gained on him and was about to take aim and hurl his spear at any second, was stop in his tracks and whirl around to face him. It was a good move. Because the brave, fittest and fleetest of the whole tribe, had been focused all this time on the shifting target of Colter’s soap white shoulders and now suddenly here was Colter’s face and chest bright with blood and Colter running no more. “Spare me,” he called out, but the brave had no such intention. He cocked the spear over his right shoulder, leaning into his throw in midstride, but unfortunately for him he caught his foot at that moment and pitched face-forward into the dirt, the spear slamming down in front of him to quiver in the ground.

  Colter was on him in that instant, jerking the shaft out of the earth and bringing the business end of the spear down on the writhing Indian with such force that it went right through his ribcage and pinned him to the turf like an insect. That was a moment. And Colter felt it not so much in his brain or his heart, but in his legs. He was bloody. His feet were raw. One of his pursuers lay dead on the ground, but here came the rest of them letting out a collective howl of rage and disbelief when they saw their fallen comrade, and there went Colter, running, running.

  28.

  IT WAS A LONG hike from her place, down through the wooded canyon that was like her two spread legs with the river the wet part in the middle of it, but it was nothing to him and he could have walked it five times a day if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. He’d got his prescription and that was going to stop the shits—it already had—and he’d got the sex he really didn’t need but wanted, anyway, another weakness. Poison oak. The shits. Sex. If he stopped to think about it, it scared him. A voice—and it wasn’t in his head, but out there in front of him somewhere, hidden in the leaves—started ragging on him. Boy Scout, it called him. Girl Scout. Brownie. Weakling. Dude.
Fag. Wannabe. After the first hour he stopped listening because that voice was the voice of defeat and if you had discipline you could take your weakness and transform it into strength, the same as you could take a fat kid with a bag of Doritos and make him lift weights and run a treadmill instead of playing video games and firm him up in a month. Basic training. Run the hills, climb the ropes, get hard and stay hard. His father had been a Marine and he’d been hard once but now he was old. And soft. Still—and this came to him at odd moments, like now—he had gone over there and waxed gooks and then as an old man went down to waste some Costa Rican alien with his bare hands and you had to give him credit for that. Even if he was clueless. Even if he didn’t have even the faintest hint of the threat the hostiles posed, but then why would he, living in his clean and perfect upscale ocean-view house in Yuppiesville, California?

  The day was cool and he hardly sweated at all, plus his clothes were clean, courtesy of Sara’s washer and dryer, and if he regretted not having stayed on at least for one day more, at least till he could have gotten to the grocery store and maybe Big 5, he had to dismiss it. He was on a mission, never forget that. Maybe that alien had interrupted him, had showed him how weak and mindless and just plain stupid his first attempt at establishing a backup position was, and maybe that was for the best because he hadn’t been prepared, had he, but now he was or he was going to be. He’d already cached some things at the second camp, which was an hour’s hike from the one he’d had to abandon, the one he’d had to say mission aborted to, and on a different watercourse entirely, high ground, absolutely, and no road within miles. He was on his way there now, hurrying, hurrying, and there were planes overhead, always planes, glinting, and it was just a matter of time before it was drones, which were just another kind of robot, and his wind was good and his legs were strong even if his pack was overloaded and pulling ever so slightly to the right and he really didn’t feel like stopping to shift things around. What he had in there were the items he’d acquired from Sara that she wouldn’t be needing, anyway, like what was left of the bottle of bourbon and some cans of beef stew (extra weight, but totally tasty, especially over a campfire, and easy too because all you needed was a can opener and you could set the can down in the coals and then eat right out of it when it was ready), plus a hatchet and an adjustable wrench he’d found in some alien’s cabin on the way up and then stashed for the return trip.

  But wait: was he lost? He seemed to wake up suddenly, the sun a jolt to his system the way coffee was, but she hadn’t made coffee and he hadn’t wanted it because she was asleep in bed and snoring with her mouth thrown open when he slipped out the door, and he realized he was disoriented, to the south of where he wanted to be, and how he came to realize it—and come awake—was because here was somebody’s cabin hidden in the trees and a dirt road curling up in front of it like a cat taking a nap. All right, he was thinking, why not? And he circled the place three times, doing his recon, until he determined with ninety-nine percent accuracy that there was nobody home. Up on the porch now, locked door, casement windows, drawn curtains. Hello, anybody there?

  A tap of the stone he dug out of the dirt and the near window had a fist-sized hole in it that allowed him to put his hand in, rotate the latch and pull the windows open so that anybody could have just stepped right over the sill and into the place that was only two rooms, woodstove, rag rug on the floor, a rusty dusty musty smell, and what was this? A .22 rifle hanging from two hooks over the stove and wouldn’t that make a nice close-up kind of weapon if somebody sawed off the barrel and filed it clean?

  He lost himself there for a while and that wasn’t cool, that wasn’t military, and he would have been the first to admit it. But so what. He liked the feel of the place, liked the old armchair with the dog hair on it and the stuffed deer head sticking out of the knotty-pine wall across from it—and he liked the liquor too, a handle of vodka, two-thirds full, papa bear, mama bear, baby bear. He found a hacksaw in the toolshed and a vise and file there too. Food in the refrigerator, ham and cheese, yellow mustard, soft white sourdough bread that toasted up just perfect. And what was that tapping on the roof? It was rain, that was what it was, first rain of the season, and if it swelled the streams he wasn’t worried. All that hurry, and for what? In fact, he just took a time-out and built a fire in the woodstove and sat there through the back end of the morning and into the afternoon, drinking somebody else’s vodka and modifying somebody else’s .22 rifle, and didn’t think anything at all.

  What woke him was his sixth sense. He heard the rain, heavy now, sizzling like the deep fryer at McDonald’s, and something else, an automotive noise, but the wheel inside him was barely turning at all and the vodka seemed to just press down on him till he felt like a deep-sea diver in one of those old-fashioned deep-sea suits with the riveted helmet and the long trailing air hose that seemed to rise up into infinity. It wasn’t weakness and it wasn’t the vodka, or not exactly, and it wasn’t the warmth of the woodstove or the fact that he could have lived in this cabin himself, all by himself, and built a wall around it too . . . it was just that he was feeling cool, equal to anything, and he was just waiting to see who or what was coming through that door because he had a sawed-off .22 in his hand that was just like a pistol, that he could use as a pistol in any tight place, and a box of shells for it too that was just lying there in the drawer of the coffee table next to a deck of cards that had been thumbed through so many times the lamination was practically worn right off each and every one of them. And he’d looked. He had. And saw that the deck was missing the ace of diamonds—not the ace of spades, the ace of diamonds—and what that meant or didn’t mean he couldn’t say. He wasn’t superstitious. Or maybe he was.

  Footsteps on the porch. Key in the lock. And there she was, an old lady with white hair and a what’s-up face who could have been his grandmother if his grandmother wasn’t dead already and buried and probably being dug up at that very minute by Art Tolleson, whoever he was or turned out to be when you peeled his mask off. It took her a minute, hanging there in the doorway as if she couldn’t decide whether to stay or go, the rain hanging like a gray sheet behind her and smelling of release and new life for the plants, the animals, the gullies and creeks and rivers. “Who are you?” she asked and before he could answer asked what he was doing there. Or what he thought he was doing there.

  The door stood open. The old lady had three plastic bags of groceries dangling from her purple-veined hands. Her hair was wet on top and two long strands of it, one on either side of her puzzled face, were plastered wet to the skin there. “Who am I?” he said. “I’m Colter. What was the second question again?”

  The rain sizzled behind her. It was really coming down, a real worm-washer. She didn’t seem to have heard him. She just stood there, the bags dangling. “What are you doing in my house?” That was what she wanted to know, and if there was an edge to her voice now, that was because she’d begun to take in the scene, the open window, the vodka, the fire, the metal shavings on the floor and the vise he’d clamped to the edge of the coffee table to steady the blade. And the guns: his rifle, propped up against the armchair with the dog hair on it, and the modified .22 he held in his hand. Which used to be a rifle. And used to be hers.

  She deserved an answer and he felt so lazy and peaceful and calm he decided to give her one—and to be as pleasant about it as he could too. “Enjoying your hospitality,” was what he said, even as another sound entered the mix, the rattle of a dog’s toenails on the boards of the porch, and here came the dog himself, a miniature poodle sort of thing, old and arthritic and with the dark stains of his drooling eye fluids darkening the white fluff of fur on either side of his snout. He didn’t even bother to bark. Just stood there next to the old lady, dripping.

  “You get out of here,” the old lady said then, and it wasn’t the dog she was talking to.

  He held up a hand. Everything was okay, couldn’t she see that? There were no aliens here. And she wasn’t Chinese, not ev
en close. So what he did was push himself up from the chair and go over to the window and pull it shut. “Sorry about the glass,” he said, and then, forgive him, he couldn’t help himself, he was laughing. “But you forgot to leave me a key.”

  She did have a telephone, but he didn’t care about that. It was the same ugly sort of thing his grandmother’d had, no cellphone, cellphones didn’t work out here, but just a big black box of a thing that was so heavy you could have beaten an elephant to death with it. He didn’t want to alarm her so he didn’t jerk the wires out of the socket but just bent down and gently removed them, then straightened up and dodged past her with the phone and its trailing wires in one hand and the .22 in the other, and tossed the whole business out into the rain. (The phone, that is. Not the .22. The .22 he was going to need.) Then he pushed the door shut behind her—she still hadn’t moved, though the dog was really tapping up a storm now on the bare boards of the floor, all worked up about something.

  “Listen,” he said, and the look on her face was breaking his heart because it was exactly the look his grandmother used to give him when she was pissed at him, “I really want to thank you for your hospitality. And I’m going to have to go soon. I’ve got, well, a lot”—and he waved one arm to show just how much he did have to do—“but with this rain and all, I think we might as well get comfortable, at least for a while. Don’t you?”

  The time he drove the car through the fence at the playground he’d gone outside of himself for a moment there and knew what he’d done the minute the kids started scattering like rabbits across the dead grass and the scooped-out sandpit under the monkey bars, which were what stopped the car finally. The monkey bars were made of hollowed-out steel and they were cemented in place like a big metal beehive, and that was what set him off in the first place. To this day he couldn’t go past it without picturing the thing as some alien Chinese spacecraft just touched down and disgorging all these shrieking little half-sized hostiles who turned out to be kids, just kids. It was hard to explain, and he’d tried to explain it, tried hard, first to the pigs on the scene, then to the court-appointed lawyer and then to the judge and the shrink they assigned him. “Hey,” he said, “give me a break, it was an accident. And yeah, okay, I was on ’shrooms, all right? Is that a crime?” But it was. And he shouldn’t have said that or admitted it or whatever and he knew he’d fucked up the minute it was out of his mouth.