The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  It didn’t sound good. Nothing sounded good. He wanted his parents out of there—hit “enter” and just beam them up, haloes and all—and he wanted it to be night so he could go in and fuck Sara in the dark. “Personal things,” he said, spitting out the words. “Peppered Potts. Dog-face Moody. And Art Tolleson, I don’t know if you noticed”—raising his eyes now as if they were the high beams on the car—“is an alien.”

  His father took two strides forward, his father the giant with his hands like catcher’s mitts, and he was livid. “That’s rum on your breath. You’re drunk. And Jesus knows what else.”

  He just shrugged, but it was afternoon and afternoons were never good and here went the wheel, spinning, spinning.

  “Now you get your ass in there and pack up your crap”—stinking breath, hostile breath—“and you can come to our house tonight, both of you, or you can go to her house, I don’t really care—”

  “Yeah,” he was saying in that other voice, the one that was like vinegar up your nose, “and you can go fuck yourself too. Big hero. Why don’t you just kill me too—wouldn’t that be easier? Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t it?”

  Then his father shoved him, hard, didn’t hit him but shoved him, and he was a rock because he hardly felt it and didn’t even take a step back but when his own arms jerked out and he was doing the shoving they were like two pistons pulled right up out of the engine block and his father reeled, his father stepped back, but then his father came at him again and it was ugly, he was ugly, as ugly as Potts, and maybe his mother got into it too, trying to separate them, her voice gone up into the high register till it was like an air-raid siren, and that really was all she wrote, finally and absolutely, because his father was in the dirt now and his mother too and he was gone, rifle, backpack, knife in its sheath, up over the wall and into the high weeds and gone, pure gone.

  20.

  LATE, BLACK DARK, THE frogs doing their thing along the creek and the crickets in the high grass, no other sound but the whisper of his boots. He circled the place twice to make sure there was nobody around and it wasn’t till the second recon that he noticed her car there because he wasn’t expecting it and the shadows were like loam and the loam was piled up till it was buried, absolutely. What did he feel about that? He felt a quickening, not the wheel now, though it was humming along, all right, but in his blood, in his cock. Her car. Her car was there though it should have been gone by now and her with it. He was in cover, crouching, and if he itched, he was going to take care of that because he was going to go into that house whether his father liked it or not—or Art Tolleson the alien or whoever—and he was going to get the calamine lotion he’d come for earlier and, more importantly, he was going to go down behind the couch Art Tolleson was inheriting as part and parcel of the deal and extract the sweet pickle relish jar with the six hundred dollars in it and then they’d see just how independent he was. He lifted the night-vision goggles to his face and took a good long look at the car and there she was, her head lolling back and no doubt the Rasta dog there too on the floor someplace or the seat beside her and what was she thinking, what was she doing? It made his skin prickle to think of the answer, made his cock hard: she was waiting for him.

  The Rasta dog let out with a whole boiling cauldron of yips, snarls, barks and high-throated yowls the minute he touched his hand to the car door and here was her face, dumb with sleep and pale as the underside of her feet, fixed in the gap where the scrolling-down window slipped into the doorframe. She called him by name, his old name, the one he’d rejected, but he didn’t care, not now, and he didn’t bother to correct her. Then she asked if he’d had anything to eat, but he didn’t answer. He said, “I want to get in the house. He didn’t change the locks again, did he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice sticky, like taffy. “I don’t think so.”

  “Because I’ll smash every fucking window in the place . . .”

  Stickier still: “What do you need, baby?”

  “Calamine.”

  “I’ve got it here with me in the car. Come on, get in. We’ll go up to my place—just for tonight. Or longer. However long you want. It’s okay. It is.”

  He held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

  It took her about six weeks, fumbling around with her purse and her suitcase and all the bags of groceries and crap, the dog whining and stinking and breathing out his meat-eating breath and her turning on the dome light, which was so wrong and so untactical and so just plain idiotic he couldn’t have even begun to explain it to her, but there it was, the plastic bottle cool and round in the palm of his hand and their skin touching like two flames as she handed it over.

  She tried again. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go. I’m tired.”

  He ignored her. Yes, his cock was hard, but so was Colter’s through a thousand black nights and freezing dawns, and it was something you just had to deal with. Discipline, that was what it was called. What soldier, what mountain man, worried about sex? You got it when you could and if you didn’t have it you just learned to do without. It wasn’t like food. Or plews. Or balls and powder for your rifle. Of course he could have gone through the front gate, which was unlocked—he tried it—but that would be giving in to his father and his father’s scheme, so he went over the wall, and when he got to the front door he tried his key and his key worked but that didn’t mean anything because it was just more of the same. No, what he was going to do was what he’d envisioned all the way back: he was going to break in, break things, let people—let his father—know just how he felt.

  There were rocks in the yard that fit his fist as if they’d been shaped and eroded and pressed deep in the earth over all the eons just for this purpose, just for smashing windows, and no one to hear or care. Except Sara. She was there shouting at him after the picture window in front gave up the ghost—the ghost, and that was funny, this one’s for you, Grandma—and then she actually tried to stop him, to grab at his arm as he went for the next window and the next one after that, methodical now, with all the time and purpose in the world.

  Sometimes it was a good thing to put the brakes on the wheel and slow everything down and the 151 and the opium did that but then you were vulnerable because you weren’t alert and ready for action and when you shouldered your rifle and went up the trail to your bunker you felt like you were wading through water, as if the air wasn’t air anymore but something thicker, denser, something dragging you down like the too-thick atmosphere and too-heavy gravity of the aliens’ planet. The Chinese planet. The planet where they lived and bred and sent out their scouts to come after you. So he stopped the opium—Colter didn’t need it and neither did he—and traded off a couple marble-sized balls of it to Cody at the pizza place in exchange for six hits of acid and a chintzy little baggie of what Cody said was coke but was really meth. No matter. Stay awake, get awake, and march, march all day long till your legs didn’t know they were attached to your body.

  Weeks went by. Or he thought it was weeks. Maybe it was days, maybe it was months, but the important thing was he was in training and he could go like Colter when Colter walked those three hundred miles and he knew every trail in all these woods and forests and he didn’t even need trails because there was nobody in that whole poisoned corrupt police state of Mendo who knew the country better than him and never had been, not since the mountain men themselves. He was doing it, he was finally doing it, living free, and no, he’d said no to Sara that night, the night of the broken glass, because he didn’t want to be dependent, didn’t want to go soft on her baked lasagna and her big soft lips and big soft tits and all the rest of it. No, he’d said, no, get off me! And she did. She got off him. She gave up. He smashed glass and a whole lot more and she got back in her car with the Rasta dog and the taillights cut a stencil out of the night, red stencil, red stencil receding, Have a nice day, You too.

  But now, today, whatever day today was, he had a problem—and it wasn’t poison oak because that was dried
up now and it wasn’t the shits, though come to think of it he did have the shits and that was from drinking out of whatever stream whether it was in the state forest or running through the lumber company property like silver music playing all on its own or maybe the Noyo, never the same river twice, everything in flux, including his fucked-up bowels—and that problem was backup. He’d begun to realize—or no, the realization slammed into him like the hundred arrows that transfixed Potts—that he was vulnerable on his own turf where anybody could see his plants and maybe the bunker too if they looked hard enough and hadn’t he spotted a helicopter going over just the day before? And all those jets, high up, like silver needles threading the sky, every one of them equipped with super-secret spy cameras? Too much, way too much, and he’d really let his guard down this time, hadn’t he?

  A new bunker, that was what he needed, a backup plan, a place to retreat to if it came to it, anybody could see that and you didn’t have to be a tactical genius to appreciate the value of it. So he had a shovel and a bow saw he’d taken from the Boy Scout camp on the Noyo which was abandoned now for the season because the Boy Scouts were all back in school and he was heading overland—no sense in showing himself on the roads—to a place he knew of six miles north, very secure, high ground surrounding the pool a spring made when it pushed out of the mountain. Pure water, that was what he was thinking. A spring. None of this bacteria and giardia and human waste the aliens fed into all these other streams. He went through the trees, down a ravine, up the other side, double time, and the air was cool and the bugs asleep, and when he got there he unwrapped a handful of Hershey’s Kisses for the sugar rush and then used the little soft foil wrappers to make himself a blunt and smoke out while he contemplated the arrangements.

  The Boy Scouts, that was what he was thinking about. They were another kind of pathetic, crybabies and dudes and the sons of dudes, and they hadn’t really needed the sleeping bag he spread out by the side of the spring so he could lie back and watch the tops of the trees stir and settle and stir again before he got down to digging. And cutting. Maybe he closed his eyes. Maybe he drifted off. It didn’t really matter because he was dreaming when he was asleep and dreaming when he was awake and if the two dreams intertwined that was the way it was meant to be. What it was that woke him out of the one dream and sent him rushing into the other was a noise, the dull airtight thump of a car door slamming shut, but how could that be? How could there be a car out here? Unless—and the qualifier shot out claws to grab him down deep in his gut where he was already cramping—unless he hadn’t done a proper recon because he wasn’t a soldier at all or a mountain man either but just another unhard unprepared unfit version of the fat kids with their bags of Doritos he used to play World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto with before he pulled the plug on all that. Mountain men didn’t need video games. Mountain men didn’t need to waste hostiles by proxy. Who wanted to be connected? Who needed Doritos? Who needed fat kids? And nerds. Half of them were probably in China, Chinese nerds. No, he was disconnected and proud of it and had been since he was what, fourteen, fifteen?

  But what about that noise? What about that slamming door? How could you have a secure backup position within earshot of a logging road? Cursing himself, knowing he’d fucked up, he came fully alert in that instant. Silently, he took up the rifle and rose to his knees, listening, trying to determine what direction the threat was coming from. The rifle had a pistol grip, which he’d wrapped in black electrical tape for the feel of it, the tactile sensation of knowing it was in his hand, wedded to it like skin, so he could feel his finger on the trigger with no interference and squeeze off rounds at will, thirty rounds to a clip and two more clips in the backpack and another 208 rounds of dull-silver Wolf 7.62mm bullets in there too. He could hold off an army. He would. Just bring them on.

  Everything was silent. Some kind of peeping started up—a bird, or no, one of those chickaree squirrels, the kind that don’t know a thing beyond eating and shitting and fucking but cling to the high branches and bitch all day long, anyway—and that peeping was an unfortunate thing because it covered the sound of footsteps coming up the slope along the streambed. That and the noise of the stream itself. And that was crazy. How could you develop a defensive position and anticipate the enemy with all this racket? An electric bolt shot through him. He wanted to shout out to the squirrel to shut the fuck up. He wanted to blow him away, eradicate him with one blast, and then what? Then stomp his rodent head till it was just mush . . .

  The voice came out of nowhere. “Hey, you,” the voice said, the voice demanded, “what do you think you’re doing in there?”

  He was startled, he admitted it, and he hated himself for that, taken by surprise because he hadn’t done a proper recon and even after he’d been alerted to the presence of hostiles he had to go off dreaming about squirrels. He was still on his knees. He could feel his fatigues getting wet because there was moss here beside the sleeping bag and moss was like a sponge and now he felt the pressure on his bowels too until he was like Potts about to shit himself in that canoe. The source of the voice, where was it? It seemed to be everywhere. And he was a fool, a fool. He slipped off the safety, hating himself.

  “There’s no camping here,” the voice went on, and here was the source, a hostile with fish eyes and a flat fish head and shorts and hiking boots, coming toward him through the draw where the stream started down out of the spring and carved its own way, silver music, “and no trespassing either. This is Georgia Pacific property. Can’t you read?”

  His defenses were down and so he said that, said, “My defenses are down.”

  The hostile was fifty feet from him, red-faced, barking, everybody barking twenty-four/seven and he was tired of that, give it a break, give my ears a fucking break, and the hostile was saying, “You pack up your crap and get out of here,” and that was when he pulled the trigger, twice, pop-pop, and it wasn’t like I didn’t even know my finger was on the trigger because he did know and he took aim the way he had a thousand times in target practice and the two shots went home and dropped that hostile like he was a suit of clothes with nobody in it.

  Long time. Long, long time. He just sat there, right where he was, and smoked another blunt, the chickaree still at it, the spring pumping out water like it was never going to quit. A few mosquitoes came to visit and after a while there were meat bees and a couple bluebottle flies dancing over the dead man who might have needed to be buried and might not have. Colter never buried anybody, not hostiles, anyway, and Fish-Eyes was definitely a hostile, even if he did look like that teacher from school. What he did do though, finally, was push himself up to go and stand over the corpse the way Colter would have done and he briefly entertained the notion of collecting a scalp here, his first scalp, but rejected that. The man was on his back. He’d been shot through the gut and then, in recoiling from that shot, he must have turned slightly so that the second shot went through his right arm and on into the side of his ribcage. A hole there, but not as big as the one in his gut. His shirt—a T-shirt with some stupid logo of some stupid organization on it—was very wet and very red with the color of the cinnamon bicycle that was propped up against the wall back at the house that used to be his. The eyes weren’t looking at anything. And the mouth—the mouth definitely wasn’t giving any commands or issuing any threats, not anymore. But the whole thing didn’t look right to him and he was seeing a bright shearing radiance of colors and things breaking down into their constituent parts and then reassembling again, only not in the same way, not the same way at all, and what he was feeling was pain, sharp and demanding, pain in his own gut, and he didn’t think twice about it, just pulled down his pants and squatted there and took a rank and violent shit.

  He needed something, that was what he was thinking, Imodium or maybe if it was giardia, some kind of prescription. He couldn’t just go around sick in his stomach and shitting all the time, could he? No. That wasn’t going to work. He’d have to go into town, to the drugstore t
here. But if he needed a prescription, where was he going to get that? For the moment though the problem was the shit he could smell in his own nostrils and so he hiked his pants halfway and crabwalked over to sit in the spring and clean himself off, then he dried himself with leaves—not poison oak, just leaves—pulled his pants back up, collected his things and went off into the woods, heading upslope. He knew a place up there, remembered it, could picture it even now, where there was another spring. Maybe, he was thinking, just maybe, if he gave it a real good recon, it would turn out to be a primo spot, exactly what he was looking for.

  And then let them come. Just let them.

  PART VII

  Fort Bragg

  21.

  STEN WAS AT THE gas station, pumping gas and working the squeegee over the broad glass plane of the Prius’ back window, seven-thirty in the morning, sun shining, on his way down to the harbor with a spinning rod to fling a lure across the mouth of the channel there and see if anything cruising in from the sea would like to take it in its scaly jaws. All the years he’d been working he told himself he loved fishing the way he had as a boy, nailing steelhead and salmon in the Noyo, Big River, the Ten Mile and out on the ocean too, told himself that as soon as he had time he was going to fish till he dropped. But he didn’t. Or hadn’t. In fact, this was the first time he’d touched the rod in longer than he could remember, and he wasn’t fooling himself—he knew he’d put his gear in the car and come out here this morning just to do something, just to get out of the house and shake the rust off. If he caught anything, so much the better—that would be a bonus—but the real deal was to kill a couple of hours before he went back home to see if the bushes he’d trimmed yesterday had grown back or the caulk he’d replaced in the kitchen a week ago needed replacing again.