T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

When he came in around six he was wired on something, he wouldn’t say what, still pissed over what had happened that morning. “You’re out of line,” he told her, glaring at her, standing there poised over the sink in the kitchen that was sunlit and warm and peaking with the aroma of the homemade lasagna she’d sweated over half the afternoon. “Way out of line. Because for your information I’m not growing nothing.”

“Anything,” she said automatically.

Still the glare. “Nothing,” he said carefully. “I’m not growing nothing.”

It wasn’t really in her to be repentant — that just wasn’t her, sorry — but she tried her best to placate him, keeping her mouth firmly shut and handing him a margarita when he came up for air after dipping his head to the faucet and letting the water run over his face and scalp, saying everything she had to say with gestures, as if she were a deaf-mute. There was no mud on him, not a trace, though his boots were thick with trail dust, and he took the margarita without comment and went out to sit on the porch with it. She gave it a minute, then brought the pitcher out to him and her own glass too and they sat there in silence, pouring till the pitcher was empty. He wouldn’t look at her the whole time and she took the hint and made as if she were wrapped up in her own thoughts, the two of them sitting there in silence, getting a buzz on, but she couldn’t help sneaking glances at him — and not just to gauge his mood but because she loved watching him, the way he moved, the delicacy of his smallest gestures, how he circled the rim of the glass with his thumb and forefinger and brought it to his lips, his eyes narrowing in on something she couldn’t see, beautiful eyes set off with a girl’s lashes, eyes like flowers, like flowers in a field.

Then she served him the lasagna and poured him a beer — and poured herself one too, though the carbs went straight to fat on her — and when he started in on Colter and the Chinese she listened to as much of it as she could take before cutting him off. “Adam,” she said. “Listen, I’m sorry about this morning but the thing is I need some things up at my place — I mean, this is great here and all, but I feel like I’m camping out, you know what I’m saying?”

He shrugged as if it was nothing to him.

“My address book, for one thing. I need to get hold of everybody and make sure I’m not screwing up my appointments — and clothes, I need to pick up some clothes. Like a dress. Would you like that — me in a dress?”

Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But he wasn’t going to show her anything.

She dropped her voice till it was a purr in her throat: “What do you say to going up there tonight? Just you and me. Late, like maybe midnight or one maybe, when nobody’ll be around?” Her own lasagna was getting cold. She tapped the fork on the edge of the plate, tap-tap, anybody home? “A raid,” she said. “Let’s call it a raid.”

She was watching him closely, like that first day in the car, and she could see she was having an effect. He’d gone still, the beer clutched in one hand, fork in the other. After a moment, he set down his beer and swiveled his neck to bring his eyes to hers, and he wasn’t staring through her now — now he was seeing her.

“Well,” she said, “what do you say?”

“Cool,” he said. “I’ll bring the rifle.”

“What? What are you talking about?” His eyes were on her still and he was holding on to that half-formed grin of his that seemed to stick in the corner of his mouth as if his lips just couldn’t lift it all the way up. “No,” she said, “no way. That’s just crazy.”

She hated guns and she put her foot down, or tried to, because this really was overkill, not to mention a recipe for disaster, but five hours later there they were following the track of her headlights up the hill on a moonless night, his gun propped between them — not in the trunk, not laid out flat on the floor in the backseat — and a pair of night-vision goggles dangling from his neck. He’d drawn two slashes of oil or greasepaint or whatever it was under his eyes like the players you’d see on Monday Night Football if you were unlucky enough to be bar-hopping in the middle of it and he was so amped up he kept talking about the plan, what the plan was and how they were going to execute it — his word: execute .

“Look,” she told him, leaning into one of the wicked switchbacks that seemed to chase the car all over the road (and she wasn’t drunk, not even close — just a little buzzed), “it’s all in good fun, but that thing isn’t loaded, is it? It’s not going to go off and blow a hole in the roof or anything—?”

He didn’t answer. She’d already extracted a promise from him that he wasn’t going to do anything more than just sit there in the car — which she was going to park down the street from the house, out of sight — and wait for her. Ten minutes, that was all she was going to need and he could just sit tight, okay? Was he cool with that?

They hadn’t seen a single car since they’d turned onto the highway and that had helped with her blood pressure, which must have been spiking despite the alcohol in her system because she was regretting ever having mentioned this whole fiasco to him — she should have just waited till he was asleep and snuck on up the road by herself and he’d never have been the wiser. But she’d wanted some moral support (that was a laugh: it was more like amoral support where he was concerned) and things had sort of ratcheted out of control. He was a boy, playing war games. She could understand that. But this was no toy rifle and if he saw a cop, any cop, anywhere, who could tell what he might do? And what would that make her — accessory to murder? It was bad enough that the next time a cop stopped her she’d be going straight to the county jail, and while she wasn’t ready to accept that or genuflect to the system either, she was still smart enough to stay out of its way as much as possible. You couldn’t fight them. Look what had happened to Jerry Kane. She’d tried to tell him about that, how the pigs had shot dead one of the gurus of the movement, the foremost, the very man whose seminars she’d attended and who’d opened her eyes and revolutionized her life, gunned him down in a Walmart parking lot in Arkansas and his sixteen-year-old son along with him, but it just seemed to go in one ear and out the other.

“I said, that thing isn’t loaded, right? Because if it is, I’m just going to turn around right here and now. You hear me?”

His voice, soft as fur, came at her out of the darkness: “Jesus, you sound like my mother. But you’re not my mother, right?”

And that got her, that reminded her of what was real, what counted, what she was doing here on this dark road. With him. “No, baby,” she said, softening, and she reached out her hand to him. “I’m not your mother, I’m your lover. And when we get home, watch out.”

So that was that. Whether the gun was loaded or not or whether she was going to enter into a contract with the sheriff’s department under threat, duress and coercion and go to jail for the better part of her natural life or wind up shot herself or just assert her right to travel in her own personal property to her own house and reclaim the personal property she kept there was anybody’s guess. But it was late and Willits wasn’t exactly Times Square and they’d be turning off well before they got into town proper and there really wasn’t anything that could go wrong. She was just being a slave and a coward even to think it. The cops were asleep. And so was everybody else.

WHEN THEY WERE COMING up on her turnoff she couldn’t decide whether to use her signal or not, but then she figured not, because if anybody was watching why broadcast her intentions? “This is it up here,” he said suddenly, fully alert and ready for anything, and she was impressed that he could pick out the road in the dark even though he’d only been to the house once. He was smart — and he’d been born with an internal compass too, no ravine or trail or gulley or back road too remote for him, the kind of person who would always land on his feet no matter where you tossed him. And if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was a coward. Or a slave. He might have been in outer space half the time, but if ever there was anybody born who would take them on, no holds barred, he was the one. And maybe that was suicidal, maybe it was mental — it was, it definitely was — but as she turned into the dark lane between the two vestigial fenceposts that picked the thread of it out of the night for her, she was glad he was there. If anything happened, which it wouldn’t, she’d at least go out in a blaze of glory.