T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

LATE, BLACK DARK, THE frogs doing their thing along the creek and the crickets in the high grass, no other sound but the whisper of his boots. He circled the place twice to make sure there was nobody around and it wasn’t till the second recon that he noticed her car there because he wasn’t expecting it and the shadows were like loam and the loam was piled up till it was buried, absolutely. What did he feel about that? He felt a quickening, not the wheel now, though it was humming along, all right, but in his blood, in his cock. Her car. Her car was there though it should have been gone by now and her with it. He was in cover, crouching, and if he itched, he was going to take care of that because he was going to go into that house whether his father liked it or not — or Art Tolleson the alien or whoever — and he was going to get the calamine lotion he’d come for earlier and, more importantly, he was going to go down behind the couch Art Tolleson was inheriting as part and parcel of the deal and extract the sweet pickle relish jar with the six hundred dollars in it and then they’d see just how independent he was. He lifted the night-vision goggles to his face and took a good long look at the car and there she was, her head lolling back and no doubt the Rasta dog there too on the floor someplace or the seat beside her and what was she thinking, what was she doing? It made his skin prickle to think of the answer, made his cock hard: she was waiting for him.

The Rasta dog let out with a whole boiling cauldron of yips, snarls, barks and high-throated yowls the minute he touched his hand to the car door and here was her face, dumb with sleep and pale as the underside of her feet, fixed in the gap where the scrolling-down window slipped into the doorframe. She called him by name, his old name, the one he’d rejected, but he didn’t care, not now, and he didn’t bother to correct her. Then she asked if he’d had anything to eat, but he didn’t answer. He said, “I want to get in the house. He didn’t change the locks again, did he?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice sticky, like taffy. “I don’t think so.”

“Because I’ll smash every fucking window in the place. .”

Stickier still: “What do you need, baby?”

“Calamine.”

“I’ve got it here with me in the car. Come on, get in. We’ll go up to my place — just for tonight. Or longer. However long you want. It’s okay. It is.”

He held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

It took her about six weeks, fumbling around with her purse and her suitcase and all the bags of groceries and crap, the dog whining and stinking and breathing out his meat-eating breath and her turning on the dome light, which was so wrong and so untactical and so just plain idiotic he couldn’t have even begun to explain it to her, but there it was, the plastic bottle cool and round in the palm of his hand and their skin touching like two flames as she handed it over.

She tried again. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go. I’m tired.”

He ignored her. Yes, his cock was hard, but so was Colter’s through a thousand black nights and freezing dawns, and it was something you just had to deal with. Discipline, that was what it was called. What soldier, what mountain man, worried about sex? You got it when you could and if you didn’t have it you just learned to do without. It wasn’t like food. Or plews. Or balls and powder for your rifle. Of course he could have gone through the front gate, which was unlocked — he tried it — but that would be giving in to his father and his father’s scheme, so he went over the wall, and when he got to the front door he tried his key and his key worked but that didn’t mean anything because it was just more of the same. No, what he was going to do was what he’d envisioned all the way back: he was going to break in, break things, let people — let his father — know just how he felt.

There were rocks in the yard that fit his fist as if they’d been shaped and eroded and pressed deep in the earth over all the eons just for this purpose, just for smashing windows, and no one to hear or care. Except Sara. She was there shouting at him after the picture window in front gave up the ghost — the ghost, and that was funny, this one’s for you, Grandma — and then she actually tried to stop him, to grab at his arm as he went for the next window and the next one after that, methodical now, with all the time and purpose in the world.

Sometimes it was a good thing to put the brakes on the wheel and slow everything down and the 151 and the opium did that but then you were vulnerable because you weren’t alert and ready for action and when you shouldered your rifle and went up the trail to your bunker you felt like you were wading through water, as if the air wasn’t air anymore but something thicker, denser, something dragging you down like the too-thick atmosphere and too-heavy gravity of the aliens’ planet. The Chinese planet. The planet where they lived and bred and sent out their scouts to come after you. So he stopped the opium — Colter didn’t need it and neither did he — and traded off a couple marble-sized balls of it to Cody at the pizza place in exchange for six hits of acid and a chintzy little baggie of what Cody said was coke but was really meth. No matter. Stay awake, get awake, and march, march all day long till your legs didn’t know they were attached to your body.

Weeks went by. Or he thought it was weeks. Maybe it was days, maybe it was months, but the important thing was he was in training and he could go like Colter when Colter walked those three hundred miles and he knew every trail in all these woods and forests and he didn’t even need trails because there was nobody in that whole poisoned corrupt police state of Mendo who knew the country better than him and never had been, not since the mountain men themselves. He was doing it, he was finally doing it, living free, and no, he’d said no to Sara that night, the night of the broken glass, because he didn’t want to be dependent, didn’t want to go soft on her baked lasagna and her big soft lips and big soft tits and all the rest of it. No, he’d said, no, get off me! And she did. She got off him. She gave up. He smashed glass and a whole lot more and she got back in her car with the Rasta dog and the taillights cut a stencil out of the night, red stencil, red stencil receding, Have a nice day, You too .

But now, today, whatever day today was, he had a problem — and it wasn’t poison oak because that was dried up now and it wasn’t the shits, though come to think of it he did have the shits and that was from drinking out of whatever stream whether it was in the state forest or running through the lumber company property like silver music playing all on its own or maybe the Noyo, never the same river twice, everything in flux, including his fucked-up bowels — and that problem was backup. He’d begun to realize — or no, the realization slammed into him like the hundred arrows that transfixed Potts — that he was vulnerable on his own turf where anybody could see his plants and maybe the bunker too if they looked hard enough and hadn’t he spotted a helicopter going over just the day before? And all those jets, high up, like silver needles threading the sky, every one of them equipped with super-secret spy cameras? Too much, way too much, and he’d really let his guard down this time, hadn’t he?

A new bunker, that was what he needed, a backup plan, a place to retreat to if it came to it, anybody could see that and you didn’t have to be a tactical genius to appreciate the value of it. So he had a shovel and a bow saw he’d taken from the Boy Scout camp on the Noyo which was abandoned now for the season because the Boy Scouts were all back in school and he was heading overland — no sense in showing himself on the roads — to a place he knew of six miles north, very secure, high ground surrounding the pool a spring made when it pushed out of the mountain. Pure water, that was what he was thinking. A spring. None of this bacteria and giardia and human waste the aliens fed into all these other streams. He went through the trees, down a ravine, up the other side, double time, and the air was cool and the bugs asleep, and when he got there he unwrapped a handful of Hershey’s Kisses for the sugar rush and then used the little soft foil wrappers to make himself a blunt and smoke out while he contemplated the arrangements.