T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

“You want to meet him? See for yourself?” A pause. “He’s sweet. He really is.”

Christabel said something back, but it was garbled, hampered by the connection, the signal weak out here in the woods, and there was no landline — Adam had ripped it out. And why? He claimed the phone had been listening to him, spying on him, and if she doubted that — CIA, FBI, his mother, the Chinese — she couldn’t fault his paranoia. Or was it even paranoia — or just wariness, just being hip to reality? They were listening in on everybody and tracking their e-mails too, and that was a fact.

“You’re breaking up,” she said. “It’s me. Wait a minute”—and she stepped out the back door—“is this better?”

“I said, after what you’ve been telling me, he sounds pretty strange. Even if he is a stud.”

“What’s strange? Everybody’s strange. You’re strange. I’m strange.”

“You can say that again.”

“No, seriously, you want to come for dinner?”

“When?”

“I don’t know, tonight?” It was a Saturday, the day they usually got together for dinner someplace and then the whole hopeless charade of bar-hopping, singles night out, as if there’d be any male in any of those places who would be of interest to either of them, every last one too old, too young, too stupid or too married.

“Come early. We’ll have cocktails. Four-thirty? Four, even?”

A silence, as if Christabel were weighing all the stacked-up options of her glittering social life, and then she said, “I don’t even know how to get there, like what road, it’s not even marked, right? And that’s another thing — it’s just crazy what you’re doing. You can’t hide out forever—”

“A week isn’t forever.”

“What then — you going to stay the full thirty days till the dog’s out of quarantine? You think that’s going to satisfy them? You can’t just — why don’t you at least take him to the vet and have the vet give him a shot or some kind of certificate or something?”

It was as if somebody had laid a cold hand on her back — or no, an ice pack. All her fear and hate gusted through her like an Arctic wind and froze her right there in place, her boots stuck fast in the dirt, her frame as rigid as the cinder-block wall and the trees that stood motionless all around her. Christabel was right: she couldn’t stay here forever, plus Sten was closing on the place and there’d be a new owner soon. And where did that leave her? She couldn’t go back to her own house because they’d be looking for her there, at least till the quarantine was up, and Christabel’s apartment was the size of your average cell at the House of Detention and she wouldn’t have her anyway because she couldn’t risk harboring a fugitive. And that was just how she’d put it, Christabel, the coward, the wuss: harboring a fugitive . Bow down and kiss their asses, why don’t you? I could lose my job, she’d said.

The fact was, Sara had already taken the dog to the vet and already mailed the proof of rabies/parvo vaccination to the court, knowing it most likely wouldn’t fly since Kutya had bitten the cop before he was vaccinated. But it was better than nothing. At least she was trying, though they had no right in any of this except the right of might, the right of their fraudulent and blatantly unconstitutional laws and their storm troopers in the shiny taxpayer-bought cars. And the judges and the courts and the DMV and all the rest of the parasitic bureaucracy they’d imposed on the American public. It was a house of cards just waiting for somebody to blow it all away. The leeches. The bloodsuckers.

“I already did,” she said. “But I’m not going to stand around and wait for some dickhead in a patrol car to pull into the driveway with a warrant, I’m not that stupid. And I’ll tell you another thing: I blew off the court appearance too.”

“Great. That’s just fucking brilliant. What do you want to do, go to jail?”

No, she didn’t want to go to jail, but there was no way she was going to bow down to them because that would just make her a slave like everybody else. In three weeks she’d go back to the vet and have him certify that the dog didn’t have rabies, not then or ever, and if they still wanted to come after her for a bogus misdemeanor charge of obstructing police operations (!!!), well she’d take that risk. And bet anything — bet anybody — they’d forget all about it. Really, even in their puffed-up sick little world they must have had better things to do than harass somebody over a dog and a seatbelt. Like catch a couple serial killers or rapists maybe, wouldn’t that be a start?

“Whatever,” she said. The sun was warm on her shoulders, already defrosting her. Birds sang in the trees. It was a beautiful day, a glorious day, and here came Kutya around the corner of the house to rub up against her leg and sit at her feet in a cascade of hair. Chicken cordon bleu, that was what she was thinking, the classiest thing she knew how to make, because this was an occasion, or it was going to be, and she wasn’t cowed or bowed or stranded like some refugee floating on a raft, and Christabel was going to see that and appreciate it and they were going to party on down as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Christabel? You there?”

Another long exhalation, pfffhhhh . “Uh-huh.”

“Listen,” she said, “let me tell you how to get here. .”

Then she was in the kitchen, cleaning up after breakfast. She’d made eggs over easy and Canadian bacon with fried tomatoes on sourdough toast, enough for two (cooking for two already a habit, after all these years of cooking for one, one only), even though Adam wasn’t there to share the meal. She’d wakened at first light to the gentle release of the bedsprings and there he was, naked and slipping into his camouflage pants, in too much of a hurry to bother with underwear. Or too manly. Or juvenile or whatever. He didn’t look at her, didn’t even glance in her direction. Thirty seconds was all it took to lace up his boots, throw on a shirt and disappear into the bathroom, where she heard the buzz of his electric razor. She’d watched him shaving two mornings ago just for the thrill of it — her man, hard as rock, shaving his chin, his cheeks, circling the taut slash of his mouth, then running the razor up over his skull and down the back of his neck, thirty seconds more, and he never once looked at himself in the mirror. And why was that? Mirrors spooked him, or so he’d told her over their third glass of wine at dinner that night. “Why?” she’d asked. He’d just turned away and in that soft breath of a voice said, “I don’t like what I see in there.”

This morning she’d got out of bed while he was in the bathroom, throwing on a terrycloth robe his grandmother had left behind, and followed him into the living room. “You going out in the woods?” she asked, though she already knew the answer — and knew too not to pry. He had something out there, a bunker, a fortress — it could have been a treehouse, for all he let on — and it occupied him all day every day. Or maybe he was hiking. Maybe that was it. Whatever it was, it sure kept him in shape.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even bother to nod. It was morning and in the morning he didn’t have much to say. They were close at night, in the dark, very close, but what they were doing together didn’t need words. When he’d been drinking, which was a pretty regular thing — daily, that is, and she joined him because why not? — he’d open up to her as much as he was capable of. He wasn’t a talker. That was all right with her. She could talk for two.

“You want me to make you a sandwich?”

Still nothing. He just slipped on his backpack, took up his rifle and slung it over one shoulder. She noticed he was wearing the knife he’d got at Big 5, the sheath looped over his belt at hip level. And he had his canteen, of course, dangling from the pack, and whether it contained 151 or water she couldn’t say. His boots shone — he polished them every night, the sound of the rag snapping back and forth the last thing she heard before he came to bed. Everything about him seemed to gleam in the light, from the boots right on up to the barrel of the rifle. For her part, she didn’t know one rifle from another — guns didn’t interest her — but this one was some sort of military thing with a clip on it. “What’s with the gun?” she asked. “You going hunting?” And then she tried to make a joke of it: “Bring me back a couple of squirrels. I make a mean squirrel stew.”