T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

“Slayer? What are they, rock?”

He shrugged. She didn’t even know Slayer ? It came to him that she lived in a different world, but then everybody lived in a different world, boxed off, dead to life, the seas turned to acid and the Chinese taking over because they were the new hostiles and if you had ten million Colters you couldn’t beat them back. “Pantera,” he said. “You got any Pantera?”

She let out a laugh and he didn’t like that laugh, or not particularly, and she held out her hands, palms-up, as if he’d stumped her. “Why don’t I just put something on and you relax — you’ve had a hard day shopping and dog-liberating, right?” And here came the giggle again. “Chill,” she said, “just chill. I won’t be a minute.”

The dog was on the rug in front of the couch, inches from his boots. Dreadlocks. Dreadlock dog. That was cool. He thought of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, thought of his camp in the woods that nobody knew about, thought of ganja and opium and the poppy plants he was growing from seed in two hundred and twenty-seven black plastic pots so the gophers couldn’t get at them. He smelled onions. Garlic. Heard the sizzle of the pan and realized there was music playing, old-timey music, corny as corny can be, and felt his boner straining at his zipper the way it did when he was looking at porn when his grandma was out in the garden or at the supermarket or when she was dead, dead the way she was now, dead six months and he in that house still and still talking to her, at least when the wheel was spinning. When it wasn’t, when he was clear, he was out in the woods, tending his plants and building his bunker because it was all coming down, all the shit of the world and the pollution and the death of everything and he was going to be prepared for it, a mountain man himself and no two ways about it.

They ate right there in the living room with its white walls that were so bright they were like gunshots bursting in his ears till she turned the overhead light off and the yellow-glass lamp in the corner took over. She poured more wine and settled in beside him on the couch, her legs jackknifed under her and the soles of her bare feet showing dirt on the balls of her big toes and on her heels, the skin yellowed there and the other toes clenched like miniature fists clutching at the rim of a cliff that wasn’t a cliff but only a flat broad short-of-white couch pillow that connected with the couch pillow he was sitting on so that every time she bent forward to the coffee table which was really just a wooden chest with brass handles on either end he could feel the buoyancy of her as if they were both out in the ocean and treading water. And those black slashing things circling around them, those fins cutting the surface? They weren’t sharks, they were dolphins, grinning dolphins, happy dolphins, tail-walking dolphins showing off their tricks to such a degree that he felt nothing but gratitude for them and if she was touching him now, touching his jeans, his thighs, his crotch, that was all according to plan. He stopped treading water and her face was right there, closing in on his, and she kissed him, her lips soft as the inside of things and tasting of garlic and butter and what was that herb, that herb his mother put on everything till it tasted like soap? Cilantro. He hated cilantro. But not now, not on her lips, not while she was unzipping him and loosening his belt and putting her tongue in his mouth.

In the morning she wanted him to stay, fussing around in the kitchen with a coffeemaker and a hot griddle and talking at such a clip she barely drew breath, telling him about the seminars she’d taken in Redemption Theory and how they’d really opened her eyes. “Do you know that everybody born in this country has a straw man behind them worth six hundred and thirty thousand dollars, which is what allows the government, or what passes for government, to take out loans on the backs of us all?” she asked, or no, demanded of him as if he were arguing with her when he wasn’t, when he was clear and just sitting there at the kitchen table with a mug in one hand and a fork in the other. “Unless you call their bluff. Unless you stand up to them and write checks against your straw man and start to draw that money down and keep them off your back permanently—”

In the night, in her bedroom that was as black dark as alien space — darker, because out there at least there were stars — he’d held tight to her and her big tits and soft lips and done it twice without seeing anything or being seen and that was anonymous and it calmed him till he blacked out and slept and woke up clear and with the wheel quiet inside him. Now he was eating and she wanted him to stay, and the dog was crunching kibble over a blue plastic bowl set in the corner, the sun shining and something that wasn’t much more than static playing on the radio on the counter by the sink, and he cut her off in the middle of her straw man speech to say, “I have to go. You know why?”

She was pushing things around on the stove. She shifted her head to look at him over one shoulder. “Why?”

“Because they’re going to be coming for you.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

“How do they know it was me? Nobody saw us. For all they know I could sue them for letting somebody steal my dog out of the pound—”

He had to laugh, but it was a noiseless laugh and his lips never moved. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said.

She gave him a puzzled look.

“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes. It’s your dog. Who else would steal it?”

Her hair was a mess where he’d run his fingers through it in the dark and the pillow had flattened it on one side and for an instant it seemed to catch fire in the sun coming in through the window, every wild wisp of it burning like a halo of jumping flames. He could see the smallest things, the fine leather creases at the corners of her eyes, a single translucent hair stabbing out beneath her left ear, and finer still, till he could see the microscopic mites living and fucking and shitting in her eyebrows, in everybody’s eyebrows, every minute of every day. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought of that, but there’s nobody to take him for me, to hold him, I mean, till the thirty days are up — he doesn’t have rabies, I swear it. .”

He said nothing. Just sat there watching her mites wave their segmented legs even as he felt his own mites stirring in the valleys between his eyes, and then the mites were gone and he was clear again. Mornings. In the mornings he was clear, or mostly so, and he knew what was happening to him and knew that dope and alcohol made it worse — or better, definitely better — and that all his plans, the plans he talked up in his own head and out loud too, with his own lips and tongue and mouth, were going to come to nothing, that the poppies would die and the hostiles would come for him and he’d lead them on a merry chase, but that in the end everything in this life was just shit and more shit.

“Could you take him? Hide him, I mean — just for a few days?”

“I can’t have a dog.”

“You’ve got your own place, didn’t you tell me? Near Northspur? On the river there? That’s only like fifteen miles or something and there’s nobody around out there, right? Like even if Kutya barks, nobody’s going to hear. Or complain. Or even know.” She was looking at him as if she could see right through him, two naked eyes hooked up to her brain and taking in information like the feed on a video camera. “I could drive you there now and you could just — he’s no trouble. Really.”

“My grandma wouldn’t like it.”

“Talk to her, will you? Or we both could. I’m sure if she understood the circumstances — it’s just temporary, that’s all — she’d want to help out.”