T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

“What,” he said, throwing it back at him. “You killed him, didn’t you? You ought to know.”

“Adam. Come on, now. That’s not the point, you know that. Sometimes—”

And here she cut in, as if she was on his father’s side now, as if she and his father were some sort of tag team and everything he’d done with her, from one-upping the Animal Control idiots to drinking Two-Buck Chuck to fucking in the dark didn’t count for a thing. “It was self-defense.”

He’d been clear, or a little clear anyway, but he wasn’t clear anymore, a sudden buzz of noise in his ears and then the dreadlock dog started barking and the trees took it up, all the Sitka spruce and Doug firs and bishop pines and new-growth redwoods running up into the hills and barking in chorus. He needed a hit of something, pot, hash, opium, acid, and where was the canteen, what had he done with the canteen?

“Adam, it’s all right,” his father said in his hollowed-out reptile’s rasp of a voice, the voice that was meant to be comforting and copacetic but was really nothing more than a hiss, and his father took a step toward him, the gloves swelling his hands till they were King Kong hands, black and rubbery and made to crush things. “We’re okay here, there’s no rush, and we’re going to find you a new place to live, believe me, we will—”

“My name’s not Adam,” he heard himself say, and there was somebody else speaking for him now, Colter, Colter speaking, “because Adam was the original man and I’m not the original anything.”

Sara was right there, right there between them, leading with her midriff — that was the term, her midriff, her bare midriff — and she said, “Adam’s been helping me. He’s great. He’s been a great help. What we need is a place to keep the dog — Kutya? — for a couple of days. Because my landlord? She’s being a bitch about having a pet. And I was wondering if, well, Adam said he’d help me out — if it’s okay with his grandma, that is. And you, you of course.”

So his father was taking this in and the trees were barking and his father knew it was all a lie and his son had been fucking her, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself, and the three of them were standing there outside the wall just jawing away as if they were in one of the plays they’d put on in the auditorium in high school.

“Well, good, good,” his father was saying. “I’m glad he could help, and as far as his grandmother’s concerned, well, she passed on six months ago now, so that won’t be a problem. Right, Adam?” A look for him now, drilled full of holes and every hole a question mark punctured with little barbs. “Happy to accommodate you — I mean, if it’s okay with Adam it’s okay with me.”

Everything was so nice, everything so perfect, his father on his best behavior because of her, going out of his way to be reasonable and understanding, just like he always was in his office at school with his big arms laid on the desk in the short-sleeved button-down shirt he wore without fail, winter and summer. As reasonable as the guidance counselor and the parade of shrinks marching through his life as long as he could remember. And what was it the last one said, Dr. Rob Robertson, Robert’s son, just call me Rob, the head-thumping diagnosis that was supposed to end it all and stop the wheel and make everybody happy? A problem of adjustment to adulthood . Yeah, sure. In spades. And then he was an adult, eighteen and out of school, and that was the end of the shrinks. He had acid instead, he had alcohol, pot. And here he was, adjusting to adulthood, right here, right now.

“Big hero,” he heard himself say in the most sarcastic voice he could dredge up, and he was looking at the ground, at the dreadlock dog, at the pile of busted-up cinder block. “John Colter would have killed them all— I would have killed them all.”

They just looked at each other, the two of them, as if he’d been speaking Chinese.

The urge he had, right then, was to take them by surprise, dash through the new doorway, circle round back of the house and go right up over the wall and out into the woods, just to get a little peace for a minute, and was that too much to ask? And he was going to, he was going to do that, just as soon as he wrapped up this conversation or dialogue or trialogue or whatever it was, and so he squared himself up so he was his father’s height— Straighten up, straighten your shoulders and stand up straight, be a man, that was what his father was always telling him, had been telling him, harping on it as long as he could remember, from elementary school to junior high to senior year and the half semester at Humboldt, which was about all he could stand — and he was fed up with it and he did something he never did, looked him dead in the eye and said, “And one more thing, in case you’re wondering — I fucked her. Isn’t that right, Sara? Isn’t that right? Didn’t I fuck you?”

HE DIDN’T WAIT AROUND to see the look on his father’s face because that was then and this was now and now he was already up and over the back wall and across the Noyo because the rains had stopped for the season and there were places you could wade, no problem, his boots wet and squishing and his pants soaked to his knees, moving fast, army double time, up beyond the cabin where the dog-faced man lived with his fat grub of a wife and ugly squalling kids who didn’t deserve to live, not on this planet, anyway, and a good mile and a half beyond that to where he’d made his own clearing on timber company property with the chainsaw he’d lifted from one of the cabins down around Alpine and then trimmed the branches off the logs and stacked up the logs to make his bunker. What he needed was sunshine. Sunshine was essential to plant growth. Any fool knew that. And you didn’t get sunshine in a pine forest unless you took down the trees as quietly as you could considering the noise of the chainsaw that beat at your ears and went right inside of you whether you used ear protection or not, but there were ways around that. For one thing, who was there to hear, anyway, aside from the dog-faced man whose name was Chip Moody and who’d hated him on sight and the feeling was mutual? Or the old white-hairs like his father the timber company paid to hike around the woods and make sure the Mexican gangs weren’t out there carving up marijuana plantations and poisoning everything that moved? For another thing, he was smart enough to do most of his cutting in the middle of the day when people were at work or when the Skunk Train was taking a load of tourists up and down the tracks to Northspur and back and all the hard metallic noises of the world ran confused.

He wasn’t thinking because his father had set him off, his father always set him off and his mother did too, but not as instantly and not as thoroughly, and when he emerged in the clearing he realized he’d forgotten to bring his pack with the new knife and the cook-kit and the freeze-dried entrées that were better when they took on a little smoke from the fire than anything you’d cook yourself. And his canteen. His canteen was still half-full of 151 and he had his baggie of buds and his blunt and matches in the side flap of the pack, which was in the backseat of her car and he wanted all that now. His stomach rumbled. He could see the pack there on the dirty seat with its filthy rumpled towel and the white clumps of dog hair scattered around like weeds growing out of it, but the dirty seat was in the back of the blue car that was parked behind his father’s car and he had to fight down a cresting wave of paranoia and regret that slammed at him so hard he had to sit down on a stump in the middle of the field just to swim through it and catch his breath because what if she’d forgotten the pack was there and gone back up the hill to her house and left nothing behind but the dreadlock dog? Or worse, what if she’d stolen it, stolen everything? And worse, worse, worse, what if she’d broken a window in the house and crawled in and got at his stuff there, what if she took his rifle, his porn, the six hundred dollars he kept against emergencies in the Safeway sweet pickle relish jar behind the couch?