The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “What is it?” he said. “You hear anything?”

  It took her a minute. She was gathering herself, her breathing harsh and sodden, as if she were holding a washcloth over the receiver. “They shot the antelope.”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “Two of the sable. Corinna and Lulu. They’re saying Adam did it.”

  “Adam? That’s ridiculous. It’s forty miles to get down there.”

  She didn’t say anything to this, just breathed through the line.

  “It’s probably nothing. Some kid with a gun.”

  A pause. Her voice so reduced it was barely there. “Adam’s a kid with a gun.”

  “Some other kid. Some apprentice yahoo. It’s nothing, I’m sure of it.”

  “Uh-huh. Tell that to Cindy. And Gentian. They’ve got two dead animals on their hands, animals that might as well have been over in Africa, taking their chances there.”

  He didn’t know what to say to this. Adam could easily have humped those forty miles in the last two days, but Sten was sure he hadn’t. And even if he had, why would he shoot antelope? But then—and Sten’s thoughts were racing ahead of him—why would he shoot Carey or Art or open fire on a SWAT team? The answer came rising to the surface like something buoyed on its own gases: because he was suicidal, that was why. Because he wanted to die. He wasn’t going to come to the train, to the sound of his own name, to his father. That was fantasy. That was futility. That was the way to pain and more pain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I am. Really. That’s a terrible thing. But I’m sure it’s not Adam, I’m sure there’s some other explanation . . . but look, the reason I called is I heard from Rob and he wants me to go up the train line.”

  “When?”

  “Today. This afternoon.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “You heard Rob, didn’t you? Bullets are flying out there. And whether these cops are highly trained or not, you never can tell what’s going to happen, so that’s just not an option.”

  “And you really think he’s going to listen to you, he’s going to come to you? Because I’m the one. I’m the one he’ll come to.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know that,” and here was the accusation again, the old thrust, why can’t you be a better father, why can’t you be home nights, why can’t you get strict with him, lay down the law, make him stop this nonsense, why didn’t you show up for the T-ball game, the sing-along, the cake sale, because what meeting is more important than your own son? “And if I didn’t know it I’m sure you’d be there to tell me the next ten thousand times.”

  The train moved along at a walking pace, easing across the intersection on Main with its whistle blowing for everybody to hear and take note of, whether they were stalled at the crossing in their cars and campers or hunkered in some ravine halfway up the mountainside ready to take on the world. Sten was dressed like a tourist, in shorts, running shoes and a woolen shirt that concealed the soft body armor Rob had insisted on, though it wasn’t quite clear why since it wouldn’t stop a round from an assault rifle. Slow it down, maybe, depending on how far it had to travel. Or a ricochet, it might stop a ricochet, which, of course, might not necessarily cooperate and strike you where you were protected. It could go anywhere, through your skull, the roof of your mouth, your groin. But he didn’t want to think about that—or the last time he’d laid eyes on Adam, the fight they’d had, how Adam had shoved back with all the sick fury uncoiling inside him, and what had the Norse called their fiercest warriors? Berserkers. They didn’t know fear. They were unhinged. And on the battlefield they went berserk. Adam Stensen. Sten’s son. Son of Sten who was the son of Sten.

  There was no one on the deck of the observation car—that would have been suicidal in Rob’s estimation, Rob who’d declined to go on this little expedition because he had a command to oversee—and Sten wondered about that, about the imposture they were trying to pull off here. Various deputies were scattered throughout the two enclosed cars, men and women both, dressed casually, the men in loud shirts and reversed baseball caps, the women in big straw hats and pastels, but if they were really tourists, actual tourists, half of them would have been lounging around the open car, beer bottles pressed to their lips and cameras flashing. Would Adam notice? Would he care? Would he even be anywhere near the rail line in broad daylight? And here, despite himself, he felt a flush of pride: Adam was smart. He was elusive. And he knew his terrain. He would have made a LURP in Vietnam, the ghost in the night who materialized amongst the enemy to cut the throats of the unwary and scare the shit out of the rest.

  The train rattled on, picking up speed but still going at half the normal pace because it was a target and make no mistake about it. A lure. A bait. But then why would Adam want to shoot up a train or go anywhere near it? Sten had no answer to that, except that Adam had a rage inside him and that rage had to come up against something, just to rub it, feel it, let the world know what it was to have a thing like that clawing to get out. He’d felt it himself when he was in his teens and after too and he’d seen it channeled through two generations of cynical slouching bullheaded kids at the high school, of which Deputy Jason Ringwald, seated two rows behind him and staring hard out the window, was a prime example. Most of them suppressed it and went out into the world to become cops and corporate raiders, army lifers, mill hands, but some never could get loose of it and they wound up in jail, crippled in motorcycle accidents or scattered across the blacktop in pieces. Or shot. Shot dead.

  “Any time now,” a voice was saying and he looked up to see one of the SWAT team honchos, a lieutenant, all eyebrows and a mouth pursed round a set of small even teeth, hovering over the seat.

  They were passing along Pudding Creek, which was tidal here, and had been used to float logs during rainy seasons of the past but was now a swampy stretch of nothing you could barely turn a canoe around in. There were houses up on the hills. Roads. The gleam of a parked automobile. “Here?” he said. “We’re barely out of town.”

  The man—he was in his late thirties, forties maybe, with flecks of gray stubble along his jawline where he’d shaved hurriedly—just gave him a look. This man didn’t trust him. Didn’t like him. None of them did. He was the father of the shooter and that made him damaged goods, and if he wasn’t a suspect, in their eyes he should have been. “Might as well. You never know where he could be. Didn’t they spot him along here night before last?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  The cop held the look. “It’s costing time and money. For the engineer up there, the two of them. And us. All of us.” He gave it a beat. “We got families too, you know.”

  Sten shrugged and rose to his feet, the megaphone clutched in one hand. He was planning to go out there on the observation car no matter what anybody said, and if his son wanted to shoot him—Adam, if Adam wanted to shoot his own father—well let him go ahead. Anything would be better than this.

  Until he stepped out on the deck, he hadn’t realized how stifling it had been in the car. The air was in motion here, blowing cool on his face and drying the nervous sweat under his arms. He smelled bay, alder, pine, smelled mud and standing water, the dark funk of rot that underlay everything. The train swung round a curve, heading east now, heading uphill, and he caught a glimpse of a hidden glen thick with moss and fern, the light sifting through the trees in a luminous haze that made him forget for a moment just exactly what the purpose of all this was. He braced his hips instinctively against the sway of the platform and let the world open up around him, thinking how ungenerous he’d been to dismiss the tourists—who could blame them for wanting to come up here where it was silent and green and the trees had stood motionless since the time before Christ, at least the ones the loggers hadn’t got to? The air rushed at him. The tracks sang. He found he’d gone outside himself for a minute there and it took the weight of the hard plastic butt of the bullhorn to bring him back, but then he raised the thing to his lips, feeling foolish and afr
aid and maybe a little fatalistic too because they were just wasting their time here, weren’t they?

  He called Adam’s name, but nothing happened because he’d somehow neglected to switch the thing on. Behind him, a small army sat balanced over their weapons, watching him. He found the switch. Flicked it. And called his son’s name, bellowed it, chanted it, threw it up against the changeless trunks of the trees till it came back to him riding on its own echo, and he kept on calling it all the way up the line and back down again, as the shadows deepened and his voice dried up to a hoarse reverberant rattle in the very deepest hollow of his throat.

  PART XI

  Route 20

  33.

  “YOU MIND IF WE just eat in front of the woodstove tonight?” She was in the kitchen, cooking, calling over her shoulder to where Christabel sat in the rocker in the living room, the latest Cosmo spread open in her lap and a glass of the chardonnay she’d brought along dangling from one hand. “It’s so much cozier in there, what with this rain and all, don’t you think?”

  Christabel was giving her a faraway look, half-looped already. She didn’t answer.

  “We don’t have to stand on formality, do we?”

  “No, no way,” Christabel said, rousing herself. This would be one of the nights when Christa slept over, she could see that already. “Right here’s fine with me. Better than fine: now I won’t even have to move.”

  “You expect me to serve you?”

  “Damn straight I do. I am the guest, after all, aren’t I? I mean, I serve you at my house—”

  They were teasing back and forth, bantering, and it was perfect, just what she needed, the fire going in the stove, rain at the windows, Kutya curled up asleep on the rug and dinner three shakes from being done. “Right,” she called, pausing to take a sip of her own wine and then douse the fish with the rest of it, “and when was the last time that happened?”

  She was cooking up the two dozen smelt one of her clients had given her—he was rich, in his sixties, and when he wasn’t riding he was out on his boat, catching fish—and they were the simplest thing in the world: gut them, wash them, roll them in flour and sauté them whole with a little salt and pepper. High-protein, low-cal. She was serving a garden salad on the side and those Pillsbury dinner rolls that took fifteen minutes in the oven. After dinner they’d watch one of the DVDs she’d checked out of the library on her way back with the fish. Or maybe both of them, one a so-called comedy and the other horror, though she didn’t feel much like horror tonight. Maybe they’d just turn in early. And if Adam had snuck out of the house yesterday morning before she even got up and took the bourbon with him too, she wasn’t missing him, not with Christabel here and everything so slow and calm and easy. Or that was what she told herself, anyway. He’d show up when he was ready—and this was the kind of weather that made camping a pure misery, so most likely it wouldn’t be long. But let him take his time—she wasn’t tied to him. She had a whole life of her own. When he showed, he showed, why worry about it?

  She tipped the fish onto a serving plate and set the plate on the table next to the salad, then pulled the rolls from the oven, letting the sweet warm wafting scent of them fill the kitchen even as the rain whispered on the roof and feathered the windows. “You want water?” she called.

  “What would the French say?” This was one of their jokes, having once been suckered into watching a French movie on Netflix that had gotten good reviews but turned out to be all but incomprehensible despite the subtitles, because the French, they concluded, had different values.

  “The French would say, ‘Non.’ They’d say, ‘Pour me some more wine.’”

  “Oui, oui,” Christabel said, rising from the chair now, “more wine.”

  They pulled two chairs up to the stove, the door of which she’d left open so they could watch the fire crackling inside, and settled in, plates in laps. Kutya was interested suddenly and though she told herself she wouldn’t have him begging she couldn’t help feeding him a sliver or two of fish in between bites. He took it daintily, with the softest jaws in the world, bolted it down and looked up expectantly for the next morsel to come his way.

  “This is good,” Christabel said, as if she doubted herself. “Really good. I don’t think I’ve ever . . . I mean the whole fish—”

  “You don’t think about it, though, do you? After the first one.”

  Christabel, chewing, staring into the stove, just nodded.

  This was the kind of meal Sara loved, no chemicals, no BHT or food coloring or (the worst) corn syrup, just natural food, come by naturally. Except for the rolls, but she just didn’t have the time or energy to make them from scratch, having worked outside in the rain half the day, but the fish were fresh-caught right down there on the coast and the butter lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and radishes had come from her own garden. And the fish were free, which made it even better, free for the taking. Like mussels. She loved nothing better than to just pull over and make her way down a path to the sea at low tide, cut a bunch of mussels from the rocks (but not in summer, when they were quarantined because of the possibility of paralytic shellfish poisoning, which was fatal, thank you), and then steam them up and serve half as a starter with butter and garlic and homemade bread and then toss the rest into a pot of marinara at the last minute so you didn’t have to worry about them getting overcooked and rubbery. And berries. Nothing better than gathering berries in late summer for pies and tarts, but then you had the calorie factor to worry about. Berries with a little half-and-half then. And the smallest sprinkle of sugar.

  When they were done, Christabel insisted on washing the dishes but she told her no, just let them sit, because why spoil the evening with something so—what was the word?—boring. Or no, tedious. “Too tedious,” she said, and she liked the sound of it and added, “Don’t be tedious. Let’s be the opposite—what is the opposite of tedious, anyway?”

  Christabel let out a laugh. “I don’t know, untedious?”

  They talked about having an after-dinner drink—Bailey’s, she had some Bailey’s in the cabinet, but that stuff packed on the pounds like steroids. “They ought to give that to the cattle at the feedlots,” she said. “That’d fatten them up. Pronto.”

  “Yeah,” Christabel said, giving her a sloppy grin, “but what would the French say?”

  “They’d say ‘Make mine rare.’”

  “Right. And then they’d say, ‘Let’s stick to wine.’”

  So they stuck to wine, how many glasses neither of them could say, but the quantity turned out to be exactly the precise amount to make the so-called comedy funny—or, that is, to prime them to the point where they could get sarcastic and laugh at it, which, as it turned out, made it genuinely funny.

  They were both laughing when they heard the sirens, and before they could even get up out of their chairs or pause the video or shut the stove so they wouldn’t have to worry about sparks, the front door, which had been locked—she was pretty sure it had been locked—burst open as if it was made of cardboard and there were cops everywhere, shouting, “Your hands! Let me see your hands!”

  She’d been a fool, that was her first thought, worse than a fool, because she of all people should have known they’d never let it go because once they got their claws into you, you had no more status than they did, and not packing up and moving to Nevada when she had the chance was just about the stupidest thing she’d ever done. What was wrong with her? What had she been thinking—that they’d forget about it? That if she stuck around, Adam would give up on the woods and come back to her? That it would be too hard, too much of an effort, to pull up her stakes here? She’d been lazy, that was what it was, living in fantasyland, and she was getting just what she deserved, because here they were with their boots and guns and bulletproof vests and there was no way out now.

  She had her hands in the air. Christabel, who looked as if she’d been flash-frozen, had dropped the wine glass on the rug in the shock of the moment and she had her hands
in the air too. And Kutya, Kutya was going bonkers. “Lady,” one of the cops yelled at her, “will you control that animal?”

  At first she couldn’t understand what he was saying because they’d come to take Kutya away from her, hadn’t they? Wasn’t that what this was all about? That and maybe her no-show on the seatbelt thing. And the court date on the trumped-up DUI charge, to which she’d pleaded innocent, but that wasn’t for two weeks yet, not that she had any intention of showing for it . . . or hadn’t had. Until now. But wait—and here her blood froze—what about that little incident the other night with the police cruiser and the sugar water meant for innocent hummingbirds? They’d caught her on videotape, she was sure of it, because everything in the U.S.I.G.A. was on tape now, every breath you took, and what about the Fourth Amendment, what about that? Search and Seizure? Hello?

  “Kutya,” she called, “Kutya! Stop it now!” But when she tried to get up out of the chair and take him by the collar, the cop shoved her back down. “Hands!” he roared, and he had his gun trained right on her.

  She was scared, had never been so scared in her life, but she couldn’t help throwing it back at him nonetheless, “How am I supposed to control him if I can’t even—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” that was what he said, or snarled, and then another cop had one of those muzzle things on a stick and seized hold of the dog’s snout and the barking abruptly stopped.

  It was right around then that she began to reconsider. There were cops everywhere, stalking through the kitchen, the bedrooms, their guns held out rigidly before them and laser lights poking red holes in everything—but why? Why would there be such a show of force over a woman who wasn’t wearing her seatbelt? Even if she hadn’t shown for her court date? Even if they knew she’d destroyed a police car, which, it became obvious to her in that moment, they didn’t . . .