T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

The front end let out a little shriek and then the tires were hissing along the blacktop and she flicked off the headlights, just in case. “Blaze of glory,” she said aloud, tailing it with a nervous cackle, and she was as crazy as he was, Jesus .

She pulled just off the road a hundred yards from her house, then thought better of it and swung a U-turn so the car was facing the other way in case they needed to make a quick exit. With no moon, her house was in darkness, nothing showing there but what the stars gave up. Ditto the L-shaped ranch house of her closest neighbors, the Rackstraws, an older couple with grown children out of the house and a dog so ancient and decrepit it had forgotten how to bark. “Okay,” she said, her fingers wrapped around the door handle, “you know the drill. I’m just going in the house, my own house, that’s all, for like ten minutes. And you’re just going to sit here, right? Don’t even get out of the car. Okay?”

She watched him a moment, the profile of him, too dark to see his features — all she could tell was that he was staring straight ahead, out the windshield and down the road the way they’d come. And that he was wound up, strung tight as wire. “Okay?” she repeated and leaned in to peck a kiss to his cheek before she slipped out of the car and started up the road.

As soon as the door eased shut and she was out there in the night, her tension began to fade. This was her home, her turf, the place where she’d lived for the past eight and a half years since she’d given up on Roger, the place where she walked Kutya and exercised her clients’ horses in the fields and sat out on the deck in the evenings to watch the sun slip down over the distant gray band of the ocean. What was she afraid of? It was her right to be here — it was anybody’s right. This was a free country. Or so they claimed.

Everything was quiet but for the soft percussion of her heels on the pavement and the intermittent grinding of a solitary cricket in the dark dried-up field to her left. Her night vision came back to her incrementally as her eyes adjusted, though she could have found her way blindfolded. Her strides lengthened. She breathed in the night air, fragrant with a lingering sweetness the afternoon sun had pulled out of the weeds and wildflowers, and she felt freer than she had in a long time — at least since that idiot cop had come after her and turned her whole life inside out.

Before she knew it she was heading up the gravel drive, the pea stone — pale in contrast with the darker void of the yard — looking almost as if it were illuminated. It crunched underfoot though, so she stepped off into the dirt: no reason to make noise if she didn’t have to. She fished the keys from her purse, a faint tinkle of metal, and she was actually heading for the front door before catching herself. She stopped, listened, telling herself she was just being crazy, then slipped round back anyway. Another tinkle as the key turned in the lock and she was in.

For a long moment she stood just inside the kitchen door, in the darkness, debating whether to turn the lights on. She could smell the garbage from all the way across the room, whatever was in there when she’d left gone rancid and probably attracting ants too — they were a problem in this place, always had been, black rivers of them flowing in under the door and darkening the counters, the walls, even the ceiling sometimes. No matter. She’d deal with all that later. Now she just needed to get her address book and her calendar and some clean clothes — and that dress, or maybe a couple of dresses, like the yellow and white polka dot, which was real summery and looked great with her strappy sandals — and then lock up and forget about the place for a while. Let the ants have it.

Ultimately, she did turn the lights on, first in the kitchen, then in the hall where her desk was, and finally in her bedroom. She didn’t bother folding things, just stuffed a couple blouses, some underwear, another pair of jeans and her dresses and sandals into a kitchen-tall garbage bag and rolled up the calendar and tucked it in her purse. She was getting ready to leave, giving things a final look-over, trying to think what she was forgetting — she had her address book, her checkbook, her moisturizer and nail polish remover, the special shampoo she used for dandruff, stamps, envelopes, a beach towel and her bathing suit, just in case he wanted to go swimming some afternoon — when the first rattling burst of gunfire split the night in two and she just about jumped out of her skin.

Talk about panic, talk about going from the launching pad straight up into orbit in the space of a single heartbeat, well here it was. She didn’t have time to think, just run. Later she would find that she’d bruised herself above her left knee, but she couldn’t for the life of her recall how or when, just that it must have happened in those first few panicky seconds when she was racing through the house to shut off the lights and slam through the back door and out into the blinding dark, where the sharp crackling rattle of gunfire split the night open all over again. But what was it? Where was it? She stumbled across the yard, clutching her purse and the garbage bag to her chest, the night unfolding in layers till she could see again, her breath coming hard and her feet pounding across the gravel — there was the pale outline of the drive, there the dark erasure of the road and the still darker hump of her car planted rigid and unmoving at the side of it and she was running even as the light flashed on in the Rackstraws’ front window and the dog that hadn’t made a sound in the last five years started howling as if it had been set on fire.

And where was Adam, where was he, no shape or shadow of him in the passenger’s seat as she jerked open the driver’s door and flung her things in, calling “Adam! Adam!” in a hot fierce whisper that sounded in her own ears like a scream. Her fingers trembled as she rifled through the purse for her keys and then she had them in the ignition and the engine jumped to life and the headlights flew out like heat-seeking missiles and there he was, Adam, right there in front of the car, the rifle tucked under one arm and the twin pinpoints of his eyes throwing the light back at her.

“Jesus!” she shouted, her head out the window now. “What are you doing? Get in the car, get in!” Something changed behind her, something qualitatively different now — another light, the Rackstraws’ porch light, floodlight, whatever it was — and somebody’s voice, a man’s voice, Jack Rackstraw’s, thundering, “What’s going on down there?”

“Adam,” she said, “Adam,” and it was like a plea, a prayer, an invocation to get them out of there, and she couldn’t leave him, she couldn’t, but her heart was going into overdrive and she actually had her hand on the gearshift to shove the thing into reverse and back away from him when the door pulled open and he slid into the seat and slammed the door shut again and she hit the accelerator with a foot that really didn’t know what it was doing beyond finding that place where the tires would grab and the car would hurtle off into the tunnel the high beams carved out of the night.

“Kill the lights,” he said, and it was the first thing either of them had said since he’d got in the car. They were out on Route 20 now, heading back down the hill, and there was nobody behind them as far as she could see, but then that didn’t mean anything, did it? They had helicopters, whole fleets of cruisers, guns and more guns. She was going too fast, she knew it. The tires screeched. She jerked at the wheel. She was in a state, close to breaking down and screaming her head off, susceptible, fully susceptible — but this didn’t make any sense to her. Shut off the lights? Now? On the highway? In the dark?