The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The people at the DMV barely glanced at her, lost in their wilderness of forms and regulations and computer printouts. She was the first one in the door when they opened. There was the usual crap, the flag, the linoleum, the chairs and desks and eye charts, all paid for by the wage slaves of the U.S. of A., one little sinkhole of bureaucracy amongst a million of them. The man behind the front desk could have been anybody, and if he realized he was a minion and servant of the corporate state, he gave no indication and she wasn’t about to inform him either. All she wanted was the signed, sealed and approved scrap of DMV paper to tape to the inside of her windshield. Which she got in due course. Money changed hands, naturally, but she wasn’t going to worry about that now because now she needed her car back so she could drive to the animal shelter and retrieve her dog before he whined himself to death—and what must he have been thinking? That she’d abandoned him? Given up on him? Told them to lock him away with all those strays they euthanized as if they had no more animate soul than a bug?

  She got a surprise at the impound yard, which she’d walked to, ten long blocks, but it was a pleasant surprise, if you can call having your property stolen from you and paying to get it back pleasant in any way, shape or form. But there was Mary Ellis, one of her longtime clients, standing behind the bulletproof glass in the office, and she was sympathetic to the point of rallying to the cause—oh, she knew the arresting officer, all right, Joanie Jerpbak, and she was a queen bitch, daughter of a retired CHP officer who was the original son of a bitch—but more money, a lot more money, changed hands despite the sympathy, and then it was on to Animal Control.

  Barking was what she heard when she pulled into the lot, barking that seemed to rise to a frenzy as she stepped out of the car, and what were they doing to them in there, goading them with cattle prods? She remembered her husband—ex-husband—telling her a story about how they trained the police dogs down in Sacramento. He was in college then and the apartment he was renting was on the second story of a building that looked down on the backyard of the K-9 academy, where they kept and trained the dogs. One afternoon he heard the dogs going crazy and looked out to see a figure dressed like the Michelin Man with a pair of Belgian shepherds tearing at him. He had a stick in his hand—he was the aggressor, the bad guy—and he didn’t shout, “Bad dog!” No, what he was shouting was “Good dog!” over and over again. That was how they trained them. That was the kind of people they were.

  Her throat was dry and her heart was pounding when she stepped through the door, the barking from the pens in back rising in volume and yet another functionary standing there gazing at her from behind another desk. They murdered dogs here, that was what she was thinking, euthanized them, and from the sound of it, provoked them just for the pleasure of it. She didn’t say hello or state her business, but just gave the functionary—a woman in her twenties dressed in khaki shirt and shorts—a shocked look. “What are you doing to them back there?” she demanded.

  The woman—girl—smiled. “They’re all excited,” she said, and the smile widened. “It’s feeding time.”

  Feeding time. Did she feel foolish? Maybe. A little. She shifted her gaze to the bulletin board on the side wall, which was plastered with head-shots of dogs and cats up for adoption, and then to the cats themselves, ten of them or so, each in a separate cage tricked out with a mini hammock, as if they were on vacation with all the time in the world at their disposal, as if they were happy to be here, when the truth was they were only waiting for their appointment with the furnace in back. There was an antiseptic smell about the place, a scent of formalin and Simple Green, and something else she couldn’t quite place, something caustic. The counter before her offered brochures on pet care, vaccinations and neutering and a hallway led to another door, the one that gave onto the inner sanctum. “I came for my dog,” she said, bringing her focus back to the girl. “I would’ve been here last night, but you were closed.”

  “Name?”

  “Kutya.”

  “Kutya what?”

  “Just Kutya, that’s all. I mean, does a dog have to have a last name?”

  The girl let out a laugh. “Sorry,” she said. “Your name, I mean.”

  “Sara Hovarty Jennings. That’s H-o-v-a-r-t-y, Jennings. They took my dog away from me yesterday afternoon, the cops, when they impounded my car. And they brought him here.”

  Still smiling—they’d broken the routine, shared a joke—the girl focused on the screen of her computer and tapped away at the keyboard. Sara stood there at the counter studying the girl’s face while the dogs barked distantly and a pale finger of sun poked in through one of the windows she’d briefly considered smashing the night before. She watched the smile fade and then die. “I’m sorry,” the girl said, looking up at her now, “but we can’t release the dog at this time.”

  “What do you mean? I’m the owner. Do you need proof, is that it?”

  The girl looked embarrassed, the way people do when they’re about to drop a bomb on you. “No,” she said softly, and Sara could see that it wasn’t her fault, that she was sympathetic, somebody’s daughter just doing her job. “It’s that—well, the report says here that the dog bit someone, is that right? And that you don’t have a certificate of rabies vaccination?”

  Sara went numb. She just shook her head. The dogs barked and barked, but it was joyous barking—they were barking for their kibble and the cold comfort of their cages.

  “She’ll have to be quarantined for thirty days—”

  “He.”

  “He will, I mean. It’s right here, see?” She swung the monitor round so that Sara could see the regimented blocks of words suspended there, as if they meant anything, as if the official who’d typed out the order had any authority over the dog she’d raised from a puppy so tiny he couldn’t even climb the two steps to the back porch.

  “My dog doesn’t have rabies,” she said.

  But the girl was ahead of her here, the girl, who despite her youth, sympathy and good humor, had been in this very position before, a girl in uniform just doing her job. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We can’t take that chance. It’s the rules.”

  7.

  TWO LONG DREARY PLAYED-OUT days dragged by, every ticking minute a new kind of torture. She couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. The TV was just noise and every book and magazine she picked up might as well have been written in code for all the sense it made. She paced back and forth across the kitchen floor till she practically wore a groove in it and shunned the ringing phone, though caller ID told her it was Christabel or one of her clients or—endlessly—her mother calling from her condo in San Diego to magnify her complaints and whisper the details of her confidential crises in a voice so thin and reduced you might have thought it was coming from beyond the grave. Either that or the phone was tapped. Who knew? Maybe it was.

  She’d tried to reason with the girl at Animal Control but all she got was “Sorry” and “Those are the regulations” and “There’s nothing I can do,” and then she tried to educate her so she could comprehend what a free-born citizen was and how her arbitrary rules didn’t apply, but that wasn’t working, not a chance, and finally she’d lost it, actually snatching something up off the counter—a ledger of some sort—and slamming it to the floor with a sharp reverberant boom that startled them both. The girl pulled her cellphone out then and informed her she was going to have to leave or she’d call the police. “And I mean it too,” the girl said, her mouth bunched in a pout, and she was a child—a willful, stupid child. And how could you argue with a child?

  On the morning of the fourth day, which was a Saturday and the last day the shelter would be open till the following week, she knew she had to do something—she could feel Kutya’s spirit crying out to her just as intensely as if he were right there in the room with her—but she couldn’t imagine what it might be. It was seven o’clock. She made herself some coffee and a packet of oatmeal. Suddenly the phone rang—her landline—and this time she picked it up.
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br />   A familiar voice came at her, but at first she couldn’t quite place it. “Sara?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Cindy Burnside.”

  “Oh, yeah. Hi.”

  “We were expecting you on Tuesday, or did you forget?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t forget—I ran into some trouble and I should have called you, I know, but, well, it was the police. They impounded my car.” Her voice went thick. She was on the verge of tears. “And Kutya. They’ve got Kutya down at Animal Control.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “He bit the cop that pulled me over. Nipped her, really. Barely broke the skin if you want to know.”

  There was a silence.

  “But it’s okay now,” she said, “I got the car back. I can come this morning, if you still want me—”

  And so there she was again, driving in her own personal property down the brake-eating road to the coast, listening to Hank Williams feeling sorry for himself, her seatbelt unfastened and the windows open wide. She tried not to think, weaving in and out of the dense bastions of shadow the big trees threw up across the road, but she kept coming back to Kutya and the girl at Animal Control and the vertical windows and the locked back door as if it were a chess problem that only needed sufficient brain power to solve. There was practically no one on the road, which was fine with her because there was nothing worse than following some overcompensating idiot’s brake lights around every real or imagined turn, but by the time she was halfway to Fort Bragg the fog had climbed up the hill to meet her, locking everything in its gloom. She rolled up the windows, and then it got progressively darker and wetter till she had to flick on her lights and the wipers too.

  She saw no cops, hidden or otherwise, and she made it to Calpurnia in good time, considering the fog. When she pulled into the long dirt drive at the Gentian Burnside Preserve it wasn’t ten yet and that was a good thing because she still had unfinished business in Ukiah. As she rolled up to the barn, Cindy emerged from the house dressed in jeans and a sweater, her hair loose around her shoulders. It was cold. Everything was beaded with moisture, the fog even thicker here. “You poor thing,” Cindy said, coming across the yard to her. “Did you get your dog back yet?”

  She could only shake her head, the question so fraught and painful she had to bite her lip to keep from venting right then and there. She tried to keep her personal life separate from her business and didn’t like to make excuses—it wasn’t professional—or lay any of her political views on her clients unless they were receptive, and the Burnsides definitely weren’t receptive, or not the way she read them anyway.

  “Cup of tea?” Cindy offered. “And I’ve got a loaf of three-grain bread I baked yesterday if you want a bite of something—”

  Cindy was in her fifties, an heiress to some corporate fortune—Sara never could remember which—who bankrolled her husband’s obsession with preserving African ungulates that were on their way to extinction in the wild. She didn’t put on any airs. If you didn’t know, you’d never guess she was worth a hundred million or two or three or whatever it was. She seemed content to live out here on their hundred and twenty acres, riding her horses and helping her husband manage the herd of sable, roan and kudu antelope and the Hartmann’s and Grevy’s zebras roaming around the place as if they’d stepped out of a nature film. She didn’t have a dog because of the animals—there were breeding females amongst them, that was the whole point, and they saw any canine as a threat, no different from jackals or the piebald wild dogs that tore their calves to pieces out on the savanna—and when Sara was there she was always careful to keep Kutya in the car. But then Kutya wasn’t in the car. He was in a cage. In Ukiah.

  “No, that’s nice of you, Cindy, but I’ve got a day ahead of me—lots of complications—so I better get right to it. The vet coming?”

  “He was out on Tuesday so we went ahead without you. It was Corinna? She was favoring her left hind leg and so he darted her and did a thorough exam—there was some inflammation there and he didn’t know exactly what was causing it, so he’s got her on prednisone. And since she was down, he did the hoof trimming himself.” They both looked off to where the corral narrowed and the fences started and you could see some of the animals in the distance. “So it’s just the horses today,” Cindy said, turning back to her. “No big deal. Nothing to worry about. These things happen, right?”

  “Yeah,” Sara said. “Yeah. But why do they have to happen to me?”

  She worked quickly, trimming the horses’ hooves, cutting out the excess hoof walls and dead sole and then reshoeing them, letting her mind go free. All three horses—two mares and a gelding—knew her, so there was no problem there, just the routine she’d gone through a thousand times. The work settled her, the simple movements, the tools in her hands, the living breathing presence of the animals. She was in the car and heading back up the driveway by noon, feeling the sense of accomplishment she always felt on a job well done (and a payment received), but as soon as she got out on the main road it all came rushing back at her. The quarantine period was for thirty days. Thirty days. There was no way she was going to accept that.

  She might have been pressing a bit, going faster than she should have considering the fog—at one point she came up on the pale ghost of a Winnebago moving so slowly it might as well have been parked, and she had to swing blindly out into the opposite lane to avoid hitting it, something she’d never do normally. There was no one coming, thank god, but she told herself she had to get a grip even as her speed crept back up again. The radio gave her classic rock, tunes she’d heard ad nauseam, but she was bored with her CDs and just let it play. She was tapping idly at the wheel, drumming along with the beat, jittery still from her morning coffee and the prospect of what lay ahead of her, when the sun broke through not half a mile after she’d turned back onto Route 20, and if it wasn’t exactly an omen, at least it was nice. Off went the wipers, down came the windows. The breeze was cool and fresh and it carried the deep dry scent of the conifers that climbed up the grade as far as you could see in both directions. She’d just swung into the first of the wide sweeping turns after the long straightaway up from town when she saw the figure there on the side of the road—a man, a young man, backpedaling along the shoulder with his thumb out.

  She wasn’t naïve and she didn’t have the highest opinion of human nature—or intelligence—but she made a point of stopping for hitchhikers, on these roads, anyway, whereas she would never even consider it down in the Bay Area where you had all sorts of nutballs and weirdos and stone-cold killers running around. Anybody hitching here was a local, most likely, and everybody couldn’t afford a car, she understood that. There was still something of the hippie spirit up here, long hair, bandanas, brothers and sisters all, and half the population of the county growing marijuana as a going proposition. She pulled over and here he was, hustling up the shoulder to her.

  He didn’t have long hair. Didn’t have any hair at all. He was wearing some sort of fatigues or camouflage—it wasn’t deer season yet, was it?—and he was shouldering a backpack with a canteen looped over it. She saw a perfectly proportioned skull shaved to the bone, pale arching eyebrows that were barely there and a pair of naked eyes squinting against the sun. He was tall, six-one or -two, and he had to duck way down to toss his pack in on the backseat and then fold up his legs to squeeze into the seat beside her.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling reflexively, and it came to her that she knew him somehow, maybe from one of her clients or the bar scene or maybe she’d picked him up before. He looked young, but he was old enough to drink, mid-twenties, maybe—and who was he?

  He gave her a blue-eyed stare, his eyes drifting away from her face as if he were stoned or just wakened from a dream.

  “Where to?” she said, putting the car in gear and throwing a quick glance over her shoulder before rumbling back onto the roadway in a storm of dust.

  He didn’t answer, as if he hadn’t heard her, and he wasn
’t looking at her now but sitting there rigidly as if he were at the dentist’s, staring straight ahead.

  She tried again. “You going far?”

  “Ukiah,” he said without turning his head, his voice soft and subdued, fluttering up from somewhere deep inside him.

  The trees flashed by. She leaned into the next turn. “You’re in luck,” she said.

  She wound up doing most of the talking, general subjects mainly—the tourists, the weather, how dry the forest was this time of year and how the fog down on the coast seemed thicker than usual—and when she got specific with regard to the absolute worthlessness of the song that was on the radio he didn’t offer an opinion one way or the other. Whether he was an Elton John aficionado or wanted to poison his well or was utterly indifferent, she couldn’t say, but she’d thrown it out because she certainly wasn’t shy about her opinions and laying them out there was the best way to open people up. It didn’t open him up. He just stared out the window, his shoulders stiff as a coat hanger. In fact, the only thing that seemed to get a rise out of him was when she told him about Kutya, how they’d impounded her car and taken him away from her. He gave her a sidelong look then, his head and neck still locked in position, straight forward, and murmured, “Yeah, they took my car too.”