The Harder They Come

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Another cop was there now, a bald-headed one, tailed by a deputy who looked all of twelve years old, and why did everybody have to shave their heads, was it some sort of cops and robbers sort of thing? He stood there a moment, just out of range of the one who’d pinned Kutya down with the muzzle-stick, staring at her. “Sara Hovarty Jennings?” he asked.

  She couldn’t do much more than just nod yes, her heart going like the StairMaster set on Alpine, but the words were on her lips—Threat, Duress and Coercion—and if he didn’t back off she was going to start screaming and they could just go ahead and shoot her, but she surprised herself by finding her voice long enough to frame her own question in as nasty a voice as she could muster, “You got a search warrant?”

  The cop ignored her. He swung his head in Christabel’s direction, Christabel who was sitting right there beside her, her hands in the air still. “And what’s your name?”

  Poor Christa. She was so scared she could barely talk Or she couldn’t, she couldn’t talk at all.

  “You can put your hands down,” he said, softening his voice, “both of you.” He was short, this cop, as nondescript as if he had his face on backwards, but he seemed to be in charge, and he had some sort of decoration or whatever it was sewed to the shoulder of his uniform. “Now, once again, you”—nodding at Christabel—“I asked your name.”

  “Christabel Walsh? I’m a teacher’s aide?” She started to say where she worked, as if the name of the school would carry any weight, but her voice got choked in her throat and she couldn’t go on.

  And now one of the other cops, the one who’d been in the bedroom, going through her personal things, clomped into the room and announced, “All clear back there. Nobody here but these two.”

  “You go out there and check that yard, every blade of grass, hear me? Fence lines, all the fields around here. Get the dogs on it.”

  “Yes, sir.” And that cop was gone, out the door and into the yard where lights were at war and voices stalked around the corners.

  It was then, just then, in the interval before the chief cop turned back to her, that she began to understand. “Is this about Adam?” she asked, and why she asked she didn’t know—it was just some snaky intuition that made her heart hammer even faster and the fish go sour on her stomach.

  At first the cop questioned them both together, but then, after he’d asked Christabel what sort of person Adam was and she’d said, “I don’t know, regular, I guess, maybe a little weird—he’s a nudist, I mean, sometimes, anyway,” the cop called one of his men over and said, “Why don’t you take her out in the kitchen and see what she knows. I’ll take care of Sara here myself.”

  What he did then, with the lights flashing outside and cops all over the place as if this was some kind of war zone, was plunk himself down in the chair Christabel had just vacated, then scoot it over so that he was right there in her face, their knees practically touching. “You know, Sara—is it all right if I call you Sara? You know, I don’t really think we have to get upset here or anything—or take this down to the station either. I just want to ask you a couple questions. About Adam.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Why don’t you just let me ask the questions, okay? This doesn’t have to be hard. It’s not going to be hard. As long as you cooperate, you understand me?”

  What she felt then, under threat, duress and coercion like nobody could believe, was just the faintest breath of release: they hadn’t come for her, they didn’t care about her or her dog either. All they wanted was Adam. But why? What had he done? Sitting there knee-to-knee with the cop and the fire snapping and Christabel shunted away to the kitchen with another cop, she tried to picture him, and what she saw was his body greased with sweat, his arms, his bare arms, and the knife at his side. And the gun. The gun.

  “You saw him last, when? Two nights ago, is that right? Wednesday?”

  She just nodded. She flashed on that day in the car, the day she’d met him, when he’d gone ballistic over the sight of a cop car going in the opposite direction. But what had he done? They wouldn’t bring a thousand cops around to swarm all over her if it wasn’t the worst, but what was the worst? What was the worst thing you could do? She felt her scalp prickle. She could barely breathe.

  “And he left Thursday morning, early, before you were up?”

  “Yes.”

  “He say where he was going?”

  “I don’t know, the woods. I think he was, like, living out there.”

  “What about his rifle, did he take his rifle, did he have it here? With him, I mean?”

  “He always had it.”

  The cop was silent a minute, as if mulling this over, Adam and his rifle. Then he leaned in nearer so that she could see his eyes up close, the little dance of his pupils. “You took him to the hospital, why was that?”

  “He asked me to. He had the—the runs. Giardia.” Kutya had been still, but now, in the far corner of the room, he began struggling again, though the cop there held him firmly down. “This isn’t right,” she said. “I don’t have to talk to you. And I’m not going to say one more word until you tell me what this is all about.”

  Another silence, longer this time. The way he was watching her creeped her out, as if he was some kind of god looking down on the littlest thing in his creation, a bug or bacterium, when in fact he was just another tool of the system. “You want to get cute, I can arrest you right this minute.”

  She didn’t want to push it, but she couldn’t help herself, because this was just sick, the whole slimy police-state Heil Hitler crap that had brought Jerry Kane down and was bringing her down too. “For what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Accessory to murder. How does that sound?”

  Everything seemed to stop right then, the stomping, the hollering, the banging of her heart and the whimpering of the dog, replaced by a long slither of white noise hissing in her ears. What the cop told her was that Adam had shot somebody while he was on his sojourn out there in the woods, shot him and left him for dead, and that everybody had thought the Mexicans had done it, but it wasn’t the Mexicans at all. It was Adam. Proof positive. Adam had shot somebody and then he’d got sick and come to her, to her bed, and she’d washed his clothes for him and let him make love to her and he never even so much as mentioned it. As if people were nothing, as if you could just go around shooting and then drink bourbon and cook beef stew over a campfire as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. She didn’t know what to say. She was in shock.

  “And don’t pretend you don’t know where he is—you had a relationship with him. For what, two, three months now?”

  “I told you,” she said, “he’s in the woods.”

  “You getting smart with me? Because if you want to get smart, we can continue this down at the station.”

  “No,” she said, “really. I don’t know where he is, I mean, other than that. I told you, he left here yesterday morning, and I haven’t seen him since. Or heard from him. Really.”

  “And yet you took him to the hospital for medication.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t—”

  “That makes you an accessory right there.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “You didn’t know he killed an unarmed man in cold blood?”

  She shook her head.

  “Or today. What about today? You know he killed another man today, right this afternoon? While you were what, knitting?”

  It was all too much. She didn’t have to listen to this—whoever said she had to listen to this? He was a liar. He was just trying to get to her because he was the criminal, not Adam. “I don’t knit,” she said. “And I have no contract with you—how many times do I have to tell you people?” Kutya squirmed. He let out a low growl and the lights flashed in the yard. She shot a furious glance round the room, the cops, the poor dog—Christabel, where was Christabel? “You know what you are?” she said.

  He just sat there, his lips zipped tig
ht, trying to burn his eyes right through her.

  “You’re just an actor, that’s all. Somebody in a costume. Like you’re dressed up for Halloween. And you know something else? I’m not into trick-or-treating.”

  34.

  IN THE END, THEY must have believed her—and Christabel too, Christabel who by that point was scared sober and wearing a face like something she’d picked up off the floor—because eventually they took their muddy boots and clanking belts and double-barreled shotguns and faded back into the night, but not without taking two plastic bags of what they called evidence with them and leaving a patrol car just down the street with its lights off and two cops inside to see if she was going to run out into the woods, find her way to Adam and somehow warn him off. Which she would have, if she could. Because it was all lies and if you had to pick sides here she knew which one she was on. Adam never hurt anybody. And even if he did, even if it was true, whoever it was probably had it coming.

  The cops left a vacuum behind them, whoosh, all the air sucked right out of the place. One minute the house was an armed camp and the next it was deserted. They’d also left a mess. Her clothes were scattered around the bedroom, drawers pulled out, closets yawning open. The kitchen floor was all tracked up and they’d left it that way because what did they care about freemen on the land and personal property or individual rights or anything else for that matter, but she didn’t have the heart to take a mop to it before she went to bed and when she woke up from a night’s worth of poisonous dreams, she didn’t have the energy. Ditto for Christabel, who at least didn’t have to go into work, thank god, because it was Saturday.

  When she got up and came into the kitchen at something like half past six, Christabel was already sitting there at the table drinking black coffee and staring out the window. She was wearing a T-shirt she’d managed to put on backwards under a cardigan that hung loose over her butt and bare thighs, last night’s makeup caking under her eyes and her hair looking as if she’d been fighting a windstorm all night long. Kutya lay curled up under the table, his dreadlocks filthy from the mud out in the yard—the mud on the floor, for that matter—and he never even lifted his head when she stepped into the room. Christabel didn’t turn to look at her. She didn’t say hi or good morning. All she said was, “Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever been through anything like that, not in my whole life. Not even that time I was in the accident.”

  “Me either.”

  “I was so scared.”

  All she could do was nod. She went to the counter and poured herself a cup of coffee, then lightened it with a splash of milk and stirred in two heaping teaspoons of sugar, real sugar and not that artificial crap. She’d worry about calories later. Calories were the least of her problems.

  “You know, you can’t say I didn’t warn you,” and here Christabel turned to look up at her out of bloodshot eyes, eyes that weren’t even that pretty, really, but just a dull fixed brown.

  She just shook her head, very slowly, the injustice of it all settling on her like a coat made out of lead, like one of those things they make you wear when they take X-rays of your chest. “Yeah, you warned me, all right, but since when do I have to listen?”

  “Oh, Christ! You’re not going to defend him, are you? He’s a nut case. He killed two people. He could have killed us!”

  “So the cops say. You believe the cops?”

  She saw now that Christabel was holding something in her left hand, a slice of color, the sharp concentrated gleam of the Cloud sucked down to earth: her cellphone. “I believe this,” she said.

  And there it was, Adam’s face staring out of the phone, Adam’s face everywhere, on every site, proof run wild. He’d shot and killed two men, and here were their faces, their names and biographies, and she realized with a jolt that she knew one of them from the high school, and how strange it was to think he was dead—slain—and would never walk those corridors again or stand before a class of kids who might have loved him or hated him but had the same festering hormones and the same issues the class before them had had and the class after them would have and all the classes before and since. He was dead. Art Tolleson. He was dead and Adam had killed him.

  She went into the living room and flicked on the TV and it was on every channel. The sheriff—and it was his face on the screen now, the poser with the grappling-hook eyes who’d sat right there in her own house and harassed her for the better part of an hour—was giving a press conference and telling everybody to stay calm even though he was cordoning off the entire forest range, from the middle fork of the Ten Mile in the north to Big River in the south, coast to mountains, and that no one was to be allowed in for any purpose whatever until the threat had been neutralized. And what about Route 20? Route 20 was a major artery, as was the Coast Highway, and they would remain open to traffic, but he cautioned people not to linger or get out of their cars—the suspect was armed and dangerous and if anyone encountered him or knew anything of his whereabouts they should call 911. Then up came the picture of Adam, full-screen—a picture, she realized, that must have been a mug shot from one of his past brushes with the system, but the thing was, he didn’t look anything like Adam, not the Adam she knew. He looked like a thug, with his shaved head and one eye half-closed as a result of whatever struggle he must have put up when they were trying to take him into custody—and they must have gang-piled him because he was a rock and he could have taken on any three of them all by himself . . .

  But then that was no way to think. The way to think was of how to cut him loose, all knowledge and memory of him, to forget him and move on. To Nevada. The sooner the better. “Okay,” she said, nodding at Christabel, who’d joined her in front of the TV, “you were right, I admit it, and I should never have even thought about dating him—”

  Christabel made a little noise of disapproval in her throat. “I’ve said it before”—she gave her a sharp glance out of those mud brown eyes with their dead eyeliner and faded mascara, Christabel the righteous, Christabel in the aftermath, picking through the wreckage—“I never could tell what you saw in him, anyway.”

  A week went by, then another. Her court date came up, and if she thought anything about it at all, it was just that she regretted the waste of ink it took to mark her calendar when she had no intention of going anywhere near the courthouse or the police station or anyplace else the pretenders pretended to conduct their so-called business. Still, though—and this nagged at her—she hadn’t even taken step one as to getting herself out of Dodge and you had to chalk that up to inertia. That, and grief. She was grieving over Adam, over how she’d fallen so hard for him when clearly he was trouble—worse than trouble, a psychopath, a murderer, a cannon so loose he’d rolled right off the deck. But that was the problem: she had fallen for him and nothing could change that.

  Adam. He was all anybody could talk about, on the news every night, national news now, at large for eighteen days and counting. People called her out of the blue, clients, friends she’d forgotten she had, reporters, and they all wanted to know what she knew, wanted details, gossip, dirt. What it all boiled down to, no surprise, was sex, though nobody came straight out and said it. How could she have had sex with a maniac, that was what they wanted to know. How could she have kissed him, invited him into her bed? And more, and juicier: What was it like? Was it good? Was it hot? Did he get rough? When she went out, she tried to keep a low profile, wearing bulky clothes and a hat, always a hat. But she did have to work, after all (no subbing, though, no way, not with all this notoriety), and when she went to her clients’ houses just to see to their poor dumb horses that wouldn’t have known or cared if she’d gone to bed with a hundred maniacs, with the Taliban or the whole U.S. Army, she couldn’t have a moment’s peace. Here were these people she’d known for years, women mostly, decent people, her clients, for Christ’s sake, and they just draped themselves right over her while she manipulated her hoof pick and clinch cutters, sniffing and probing and working at her like paleontologists loo
king for the bones revealed in the dirt.

  Then one day she went down to work at the Burnsides’ because the Burnsides were marked on her calendar and she had to earn a living, no matter what the rest of the world was doing or thinking or saying. There were cops everywhere, as if it was some sort of convention, but she tried to ignore them because they weren’t there for her, and when she came into Calpurnia, the fog, which had pretty well curtained everything in to this point, got denser suddenly, so dense she had to put her lights and wipers on. She almost went right on by the turnoff but caught herself at the last minute. There was nobody else on the road—even here, forty miles south, Adam had managed to cast a pall over things. Because they couldn’t catch him. He was too smart for them. Too hard. They’d sent all those SWAT teams out there, helicopters with their infrared tracking devices, dogs—the very dogs Roger had told her about, Good dog, Good dog—and he’d outmaneuvered them all.

  When she swung into Cindy’s driveway, the gravel giving way under her wheels, she saw there was another car parked there in front of the barn, not Cindy’s or Gentian’s, but one that looked familiar somehow. Whose was it? The answer would come to her the minute she pulled up beside it, shut down her engine and climbed out of the car with her tool kit: it was Adam’s mother’s car, Carolee’s. Because here came Carolee marching out of the mist with Cindy and Gentian flanking her, the two of them looking as if they were going to war while she looked like she’d just been punched in the gut. “Hi,” Sara said, though Adam’s mother was somebody she could definitely have done without seeing.

  Gentian, a big man, once powerful, but now gone to seed around a face that drooped in folds right on down into the collar of his shirt, stopped in his tracks and the women pulled up then too. The look he was giving her was fierce, outraged. He spat out the words. “He shot Corinna and Lulu.”