T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

Whatever. But then she was barking at him and he thought she was going to run him down with the car she was in such a panic, which wasn’t cool-headed at all and he was ashamed for her and wanted to say something about that, about tactics and coolness under fire, but the words wouldn’t come. He was flying, the sound and feel of that rifle pumping him full of helium gas like a balloon lifting off into the sky, and for the first few minutes he just sat there seeing the headlights streaming out into the night and knowing how wrong that was. Kill the lights, he told her, knowing they’d be coming, and it was no different from the deeds they’d done in high school, slowing down to hang out the window and obliterate somebody’s mailbox with a baseball bat or egging the gym teacher’s house because he was a Nazi, and always with the lights off so you could slip in under the radar. I can’t, she said, and he was about to reach over and flip the switch himself when the siren started in and he knew just what to do and where to go because the pigs were flat-out stupid and so what if there was only one road going down? Here, he said. Stop here. Turn .

And then they were in the dark and the lights were off and he guided her the first part of the way with the goggles, at least until they’d put a couple of curves between them and the main road so there was no chance of any U-turning pig seeing their running lights or anything else and then he let her switch the headlights back on and everything was cool. She calmed down finally and when she calmed down she started chattering away about anything that came into her head as they went bumping over washboard ripples and slamming through potholes, everything a uniform drifting dirt-brown and the leaves more gray than green and the tree trunks like pillars supporting a whole other road above them, a black road and starless. He wasn’t listening. The wheel was spinning but spinning slower now and she was there beside him, Sara, a human being, a word mill, a talking dictionary, big tits jouncing with the up and down of the car springs, her voice coming too fast at first but gradually slowing as she got used to the fact that they’d one-upped them yet again and there was no chance of being caught by anybody, not now or later.

Some time passed, or must have passed, but he didn’t notice. She was still talking. “So what did you think of Christabel?” was one thing she said but he didn’t answer so she said it again and this time he was right there with her.

“Is she Chinese?”

“ Chinese? Christabel? What are you talking about? Christabel Walsh? That’s Irish. And her mother was a McCoy.”

“She looks Chinese.”

“Christabel? Come on, Adam, what planet are you on? She’s no more Chinese than I am. Or you, for that matter.” Her big tits bounced. The trees caught the light. “What is this obsession with the Chinese, anyway?”

He didn’t want to tell her about the incident in San Francisco, whenever that was, years ago, he guessed, and he didn’t want to tell her that the Orientals were conduits to the other worlds and the Chinese star proved it. It was too complicated. And he didn’t really feel like getting into all that now, so he unscrewed the cap on his canteen and had a hit of 151 and just repeated what he’d already told her because she was trying to understand and he had to give her credit for that. “They’re the new hostiles,” he said. “I told you.”

More ruts, more bouncing. The car spoke its own language, low and steady, a kind of robot growl that never gave up and he could look right through the dashboard and into the engine and see the pistons there, the valves and connecting rods, pumping and pumping like sex, robot sex, car sex, steel on steel. “What do you mean,” she said, “like economically?”

“Are you crazy? Who’s talking about economics ? Economics is shit.” He stopped there, looking for the words that right then started marching across his line of vision, left to right, as if he was reading from a script and that was nothing new because everything in this world was scripted like some lame reality show and everything had been said before a billion trillion times, How are you today, Fine, How are you, Fine, Have a nice day, You too . His head hurt where he’d banged it on the windshield, but there was no blood. She drove. The car growled. “Let me ask you something”—she was pissing him off she was so stupid and he wanted her to know it—“because sometimes I wonder about the college you went to and if you were paying attention at all.”

“So ask.”

“Where did the Indians come from?”

It took her a minute. “Asia? The land bridge, you mean?”

“What we ought to do?” he said. “If I was president?”

“What?” A little bleat, and that was funny, because her voice got jerked on a string by the next pothole.

“Nuke ’em. Nuke ’em before they nuke us,” and he was picturing it now, everything melted, everything ash. “Or hack all our computers and send us back to the Stone Age. No money, no food, no electricity, no nothing.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? It’d give the animals and the environment a chance to come back. We’d need more Colters then, wouldn’t we? People that could live off the land?” Her face was turned toward him, light on one side, dark on the other, quarter moon. She was right. Back to the Stone Age. More Colters. Live off the land. And get ready for the hostiles, because they were coming and they would just take what they wanted and nobody to stop them.

She was quiet a moment. The car thumped. The night squeezed in. She didn’t know it yet but they were going to have to stay out here all night long, at the campground, where they’d blend in with the others. It would be cramped in the car and she might not like it but that was how it was. There was a blanket in back. He had a couple PowerBars and she always carried a bottle of water in the car. They’d sit there in the dark. They’d get high. And not just on rum and marijuana, but what he had in his shirt pocket, a surprise, first fruit of his poppies, the sap he’d worked into little dried-out balls you could smoke just like that in a pipe you made out of foil and could use once and toss away and nobody the wiser. Then they’d have sex. She’d open up to him — she always opened up to him, hot and greasy and with that smell of her like some animal with its scent glands on display, like a beaver, and it came to him then that that was why it was called beaver. Beaver shot, he said in his head. And then he said it aloud: “Beaver shot.”

“What?”

He didn’t say it again, only thought it: Beaver shot . And money shot, that was when you pulled it out and squirted their beaver or their tits or belly. Spermatized them.

“I said, if the whole corrupt society broke down, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“No,” he said softly, “no, it wouldn’t.”

Days flipped by, he wasn’t sure how many. She was there in the house, cooking, cleaning, picking lint out of the Rasta dog’s fur and spreading for him every night, and he was out working his plants, slitting the seed pods with a razor and letting the milky stuff drip out till he scraped it off and rolled it into a ball. When he had enough of it, when he was satisfied with the product, he was going to sell it — Cody, Cody was going to help him out on that end because he really couldn’t feature tramping up and down the street looking for heads and freaks and tourists who might or might not be interested — and he was going to take the money and put it in a jar and hide that jar in a secret place so he could be independent of everybody and everything forever . He’d build another bunker, deeper, farther, and he wasn’t ever going to come back.