The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Move?” she’d said. “Where? I mean, we practically just moved in here, didn’t we?”

  “What about Florida?”

  “Florida? Are you crazy? The tropics? You really want to go to the tropics?”

  He shrugged, let her see his open palms. He was just thinking out loud, that was all, exploring the possibilities. “I don’t know. Up the coast, maybe. Eureka. What’s wrong with Eureka?”

  “Another broken-down mill town? We don’t know anybody there, not a soul.”

  “Right,” he said. “That’s what I mean.”

  Well, they’d put that on hold, because in a time of crisis, a time like this, it was ill-advised to make rash decisions, everybody said that. So they did the little things that make up a life, anybody’s life, cooking, eating, running the dishwasher, sitting by the window with a book, knocking the mud from the soles of your boots, building a fire at night and staring into it with a cocktail clenched in your fist. Going to bed. Getting up. Watching the rain. Watching the sun. Watching the flies crawl up the windowpane.

  She couldn’t go back to volunteering at the preserve, not after the way the Burnsides had turned on her, and he couldn’t very well go out patrolling timber company property anymore, for obvious reasons. He wouldn’t have wanted to, in any case. In fact, he looked up into those mountains from the back window and saw nothing there that was even remotely attractive to him, not anymore. If he hiked, he hiked the beach. And if he wanted exercise—and he did, because he wasn’t dead yet—he went out on the golf course. The golf course. He never thought he’d sink so low, but he did, like every other old duffer across the land. And what was golf but a way to fight off the desperation?

  On this particular day, a day in the first week of April when the sun broke through early along the coast and Carolee was sleeping late, which was a mercy in itself, he tossed his clubs in the trunk and drove the two miles south to Little River and the course there, which was only nine holes, but nine holes were plenty as far as he was concerned. Until the past month, he hadn’t touched a club since he was a teenager and back then he’d never got much past the thrill of whacking the hell out of the ball, whether it was on the first tee or at a driving range. He remembered that, the driving range, how he and his buddies—R.J. Call, Rick Wiley, Mark Stowhouse—would down a couple of beers and compete to see who could send that little white sphere the farthest, over the nets even and into the field beyond. Hit it hard, that was all that mattered to them, and as far as the subtleties of strategy and making par, the irons, putting—playing the game to win—they could perfect all that later. When they were old.

  Well, now he was old. Now he was an old white man with sunburned kneecaps lifting a golf bag out of the trunk of his car and trudging across the parking lot to the first tee, and if he didn’t have a partner it was because he didn’t want one. He didn’t need chatter, he didn’t need companionship, or not yet, anyway. What he needed was to get out of the house and that was what he was doing on this bright early morning when there was no one stirring but him and maybe the odd squirrel. The course looked out to sea, where the mouth of Little River opened up on the waves, and there were always seabirds here, pelicans gliding overhead as if they were being drawn on a string, gulls fixed to the roof of the Little River Inn like replicas or perched atop the flag at one hole or another and messing the green with the long trailing white stripes of their guano.

  For a long while he sat on the bench behind the first hole, sipping the coffee he’d brought along in a thermos, crossing and uncrossing his legs, reaching back to adjust his hair in the grip of the rubber band he used to bind it up in back. The clubs, a cheap set they’d bought for Adam one Christmas when he was eleven or twelve, thinking to interest him in something beyond video games, sat propped against the bench. It was chilly, with a light breeze coming in off the water, something he’d have to account for when he was driving the ball. When he got to it. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stared out across the fairways and the greens that were so bright they seemed lit from within, all the way out to sea, where a pair of fishing boats stood like signposts at the place where sea and sky came together.

  He was thinking about a day not too much different from this one, a week or so ago (he couldn’t really say because there wasn’t much to distinguish one day from another, light in the morning, dark at night, and whatever went on in between). Carolee had wanted to do some shopping up in Willits—or not shopping, really, but just cruising the various junk shops in the hope of finding treasure there, whether it be in the form of somebody’s dead grandmother’s crocheted doilies or salt and pepper shakers molded in the shape of Scottie dogs—and he’d agreed to come along just to do something and maybe take her out to lunch someplace.

  He dropped her off and drove around a while, seeing things he’d never had time to see before, mostly signs of decay, empty storefronts, ruptured sidewalks, graffiti scrawled on the cornerstones of the buildings along the main drag, the big hopeful welcome-to-the-world banner that loomed over the road in promise and challenge both: Willits, Gateway to the Redwoods. He went to the hardware store, though he really didn’t need anything, and poked around there for a while, then he sat on a chair outside one of the antique shops and tried to read a paperback book he’d brought along to ease the tedium because he was determined to give Carolee as much time as she wanted to sift through whatever the tourists and the newly dead had left behind. Finally, he just wandered up and down the street, peering in store windows, watching the traffic gather at the lights, thinking, as old people do, of lunch.

  Carolee wasn’t answering her cellphone. An hour of his life had marched on into oblivion. His stomach began to act up on him—acid stomach, exacerbated by the coffee and booze that seemed to round out his life, morning and evening, like prayers—and he told himself he was hungry, that was all. It was one o’clock. He’d planned on taking Carolee to the Mexican restaurant, the nice one, but he found himself getting back in the car and running over to the fast-food place at the top of Route 20, just to get something to hold him, a burger, chicken sandwich, anything. Whopper. Maybe he’d get a Whopper.

  The place was crowded, a fact that normally would have driven him up a wall. He’d spent his whole life being impatient, expecting everybody to clear out of his way, the slow drivers to pull over and the crowds, wherever they were—the movies, the ballpark, the airport—to gather some other time, some other day and hour when he wasn’t there to share the planet with them. He was always cursing under his breath, always wound up, but not now, not today. Today he had all the time in the world. Of course, the dropouts behind the counter moved as if their feet had been nailed to the floor, but finally the line in front of him dwindled down to just him and he put in his order and went over to the fountain to pour himself a small drink, eyeing a table by the window where somebody had left a newspaper. He was just making his way toward it when he glanced down the row and saw Sara there, sitting at a table by herself, a half-eaten sandwich at her elbow. She was dressed in her work clothes—jeans, boots and a long-sleeved shirt, and her apron, her leather apron—and she had her head down, absorbed in some sort of pamphlet. She seemed to have gained weight. Or maybe not. He couldn’t really remember.

  It was an awkward moment. He didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want anything to do with her, but there he was, going down the very aisle of disarranged plastic tables where she was sitting, and he thought about swinging around and just walking right out of the place, getting in the car and forgetting about the whole thing—Whopper, did he really need a Whopper?—but he didn’t. He just continued on down the aisle, trying to slip past her, but at the last moment she lifted her face to him. “Sara?” he heard himself say.

  Her eyes were adrift, soft and unfocused, and he watched them narrow to take him in. “Oh, hi,” she said, her voice so throaty and soft it was barely present.

  “You all right?”

  She shrugged. “Not really. You?�
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  “Day to day. Carolee’s still not over it, if she’s ever going to be. Which I doubt. But life goes on, right?”

  She didn’t answer. Just dipped her head to take a bite of her sandwich as if she’d suddenly remembered what she was doing there. The door opened and closed. People drifted in, drifted out. “You want to know the truth, I’ve had it,” she said, glancing up at him again. “Soon as I can manage it I’m out of here.”

  He was standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, nothing more to say, really, but something he couldn’t name held him there. He shifted his weight. Watched her chew.

  “I’m thinking Nevada or maybe Wyoming? Someplace where you can live free without all this Big Brother crap. I’ve had it. Really, I’ve just had it.”

  He didn’t know what to say to this and if he nodded his head it wasn’t in agreement or sympathy but only just to work the muscles at the back of his neck. Things came toppling down on you, whole mountainsides, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. If you were lucky—very, very lucky—you got to step out of the way. “Yeah,” he said finally, his breath released in a drawn-out sigh, and he opened his palm and closed it again, bye-bye. “You have a nice day now.”

  “You too,” she said, and he was already moving down the aisle.

  It was nothing, just a moment cookie-cuttered out of his day, but it was enough to see the look of hurt and incomprehension on her face and to brush it off too. How long had she known Adam? A couple of months. What was a couple of months? Nothing. A memory, a whisper, pages flapping in the breeze. He settled in at the table in back and picked up the discarded paper. When he looked up again, she was gone.

  He was the one who’d had to identify Adam’s body, never any question that it was up to him and him alone because he wasn’t going to expose Carolee to that. It was there in a drawer at the morgue—he was there, Adam—looking as if he was asleep. There wasn’t a mark on his face but for a thin welt that might have been a rope burn, and what Sten was feeling in that moment was hard to contain. He’d seen corpses before, laid out on the ground, their lifeless faces turned to the sky, awaiting body bags and a chopper and then a flight back to the States, but they hadn’t prepared him for this. He didn’t break down, but it was close. Standing there alone in that room with its unnatural cold and the smell of chlorine bleach so harsh and pervasive it was like a public urinal, he fought to contain himself, because there was another odor beneath it and it wasn’t of the flesh or of its fluids, but of fear. Fear and regret. And what did that smell like? Like the body’s essence.

  What he was remembering was Adam’s first day at the high school, freshman year, the teachers just back from summer vacation, everybody trying to settle in, the students decked out in their new skirts and jeans and oversized T-shirts, electric with excitement. First day. The whole year to look forward to, the ritual starting over again in a stew of hormones, timeless and immemorial. Math, history, the ballgame, senior prom, elections, lunch, gym class. There were never any fights the first day, never any discipline problems—everything was too new and everybody on their best behavior. Except for Adam. Within the first hour he was in the office, hauled in by Joe Buteo, the assistant principal, the enforcer. Adam had been in a fight. The other kid—a stranger to him as far as anybody knew—hadn’t done anything to provoke him. They were in the hallway between classes and Adam had seen something he didn’t like, something he couldn’t tolerate, some vision, some hallucination, and it was the other kid’s misfortune to have been part of it. It had taken two teachers to restrain Adam. The other kid—his victim, a junior twice his size who’d never caused anybody any trouble—had lost a tooth in front and his shirt was like a bloody flag.

  Sten didn’t say anything, not then—this was the assistant principal’s job and he certainly didn’t want to give any impression of favoritism when it came to his own son—but when he got home you can be sure he laid into him. First thing. He came through the front door and stalked down the hall to his son’s room and he didn’t pause to knock either.

  Adam was wearing a look that was to become habitual with him, his eyes hooded, his mouth drawn tight. He was in his dreadlock phase then, his hair matted and looped and hanging like brush in his face. He had a magazine in his lap. He didn’t even bother to look up.

  Sten had never been violent with his son—violence didn’t work because it just provoked resentment and resentment led to more violence, a whole downward spiral of it—but he was on the verge of it that night. The principal’s son. First day of school. “What were you thinking?” he demanded. “You don’t just go and attack people—what did he do, anyway? I’d like to hear that. I really would.”

  “That kid?” Adam said, and he hadn’t moved. “He’s an alien.”

  Nobody shouted out to him from that tree. Nobody said, “Throw down your weapon,” or read him his rights. Shoot to kill, that was the order Rob gave because Rob was left with no other choice. Adam was armed and dangerous. He had his finger on the trigger. He’d come after them, stalked and fired on them—and worst of all, the unforgivable sin, he’d made them look bad. They’d fired twelve rounds, the two officers in the tree and their team member stretched out flat in the dirt with his rifle trained on the trail that wound down along the streambed there. Seven rounds went home, all in the torso, crack shots, these SWAT team studs, with hundreds of hours on the shooting range and a squeeze as gentle as held breath: Adam must have been dead before he hit the ground. He hadn’t suffered. Hadn’t even known what was coming. At least there was that.

  But Sara was gone, pulling out of the lot now in her battered blue car, the fuzzy dog sticking its snout out the window, and they called his number and he went to the counter to pick up his order, everything too loud and too bright, people everywhere. His first thought was to go back to the table, but then the cell started buzzing in his pocket—Carolee—and he decided to detour out the door and go get her and take her to the nice place. He didn’t want the burger anymore. He wasn’t even hungry, not really.

  “Hello?” he said, pinning the phone to his ear so he could hear over the noise as he pushed through the door and out into the lot.

  His wife’s voice, small and satisfied: “I’m ready.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On Main? That place with the redwood carvings out front?”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “Wait till you see what I found—just what I’ve been looking for.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. Two of those yellow Bakelite bracelets to go with that amber pin you bought me?”

  “That I bought you?” He loved to joke that he was always buying her things but never actually realized he’d done it till he saw them around her neck or dangling from her wrist.

  “And these Art Deco linens with a tatted edge—in perfect condition—from like the thirties—”

  He was going to say something like Isn’t that a little old for you—I mean, you didn’t come along till the next decade, did you?, but the glare of the lot hit him in the face and he lost the thread of it.

  “Sten? Sten, are you there?”

  “I’ll be there in five,” he said. “You be out front, okay?”

  He was just strolling across the lot minding his own business, tangled up maybe over seeing Sara there and all that entailed, memories, tricks of memory, and when the pickup lurched back out of the space in front of him, it took him by surprise. He stepped awkwardly out of the way, his feet colliding and the bag, the Whopper, dropping to the pavement—he very nearly went down himself. It was just a moment, a random moment, but the truck’s engine roared in neutral, stick shift, and here was the face of the driver, a punk with a shaved head and the tattoos every kid had to have now climbing up the back of his neck, and a stud, a silver stud, punched through one nostril. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going,” the kid snarled. And then, gratuitously, as if that wasn’t enough, he added, “Grandpa.”

  And here it came a
gain—boom!—gasoline on the coals. He was five feet from him, from this kid who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, the apprentice tough guy, the clown in the truck with the big-dick tires. He should have just let it go but he couldn’t. “Fuck you,” he rasped, his voice clenched in his throat.

  And now the kid, throwing it back at him—“Fuck you too!”—and what else could he say, pro forma, call and response, the same text, the old text, oldest there was?

  He couldn’t say “fuck you” one more time, couldn’t stand here under this sun, in this lot, at his age, and play this game, so he just turned his back and listened to the hot squeal of the tires as the victor shot triumphantly across the lot and lost himself in the traffic heading down the hill to the coast.

  Something awakened the gulls on the roof of the inn and they rose in a sudden flap of wings to sail out across the parking lot and the road beyond, fracturing the light. He pushed himself up, hoisted the clubs and ambled over to the first tee, glad there was no one around to observe him in his ineptitude. He was going to whack a little white ball and then he was going to follow it around for an hour or two and then he was going to go home and do something else. He’d watched a couple of golf videos and he was trying to improve his swing along the lines they laid out—head still, feet apart, focus on the ball and not where it’s going—but he hadn’t really made any gains and maybe didn’t expect to. It was enough just to be here, in the morning light, thumbing the tee into the turf and balancing the ball atop it like an egg in a miniature cup.

  He swiveled his hips. Arched his back. Took a practice swing to loosen up. And then he tightened his grip, raised the club over his shoulder and came down with everything he had. There was the flat head of the club, there the ball, and he saw it so clearly it was as if it had been caught in stop-time. He hit it. Hit it squarely, hit it hard, and it wasn’t a great shot or even a good one, but there it was, looping up into the great vast ocean of the sky, and it kept on going and kept on going.