T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

The Boy Scouts, that was what he was thinking about. They were another kind of pathetic, crybabies and dudes and the sons of dudes, and they hadn’t really needed the sleeping bag he spread out by the side of the spring so he could lie back and watch the tops of the trees stir and settle and stir again before he got down to digging. And cutting. Maybe he closed his eyes. Maybe he drifted off. It didn’t really matter because he was dreaming when he was asleep and dreaming when he was awake and if the two dreams intertwined that was the way it was meant to be. What it was that woke him out of the one dream and sent him rushing into the other was a noise, the dull airtight thump of a car door slamming shut, but how could that be? How could there be a car out here? Unless —and the qualifier shot out claws to grab him down deep in his gut where he was already cramping — unless he hadn’t done a proper recon because he wasn’t a soldier at all or a mountain man either but just another unhard unprepared unfit version of the fat kids with their bags of Doritos he used to play World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto with before he pulled the plug on all that. Mountain men didn’t need video games. Mountain men didn’t need to waste hostiles by proxy. Who wanted to be connected? Who needed Doritos? Who needed fat kids? And nerds. Half of them were probably in China, Chinese nerds. No, he was dis connected and proud of it and had been since he was what, fourteen, fifteen?

But what about that noise? What about that slamming door? How could you have a secure backup position within earshot of a logging road? Cursing himself, knowing he’d fucked up, he came fully alert in that instant. Silently, he took up the rifle and rose to his knees, listening, trying to determine what direction the threat was coming from. The rifle had a pistol grip, which he’d wrapped in black electrical tape for the feel of it, the tactile sensation of knowing it was in his hand, wedded to it like skin, so he could feel his finger on the trigger with no interference and squeeze off rounds at will, thirty rounds to a clip and two more clips in the backpack and another 208 rounds of dull-silver Wolf 7.62mm bullets in there too. He could hold off an army. He would. Just bring them on.

Everything was silent. Some kind of peeping started up — a bird, or no, one of those chickaree squirrels, the kind that don’t know a thing beyond eating and shitting and fucking but cling to the high branches and bitch all day long, anyway — and that peeping was an unfortunate thing because it covered the sound of footsteps coming up the slope along the streambed. That and the noise of the stream itself. And that was crazy. How could you develop a defensive position and anticipate the enemy with all this racket? An electric bolt shot through him. He wanted to shout out to the squirrel to shut the fuck up. He wanted to blow him away, eradicate him with one blast, and then what? Then stomp his rodent head till it was just mush. .

The voice came out of nowhere. “Hey, you,” the voice said, the voice demanded, “what do you think you’re doing in there?”

He was startled, he admitted it, and he hated himself for that, taken by surprise because he hadn’t done a proper recon and even after he’d been alerted to the presence of hostiles he had to go off dreaming about squirrels. He was still on his knees. He could feel his fatigues getting wet because there was moss here beside the sleeping bag and moss was like a sponge and now he felt the pressure on his bowels too until he was like Potts about to shit himself in that canoe. The source of the voice, where was it? It seemed to be everywhere. And he was a fool, a fool. He slipped off the safety, hating himself.

“There’s no camping here,” the voice went on, and here was the source, a hostile with fish eyes and a flat fish head and shorts and hiking boots, coming toward him through the draw where the stream started down out of the spring and carved its own way, silver music, “and no trespassing either. This is Georgia Pacific property. Can’t you read?”

His defenses were down and so he said that, said, “My defenses are down.”

The hostile was fifty feet from him, red-faced, barking, everybody barking twenty-four/seven and he was tired of that, give it a break, give my ears a fucking break, and the hostile was saying, “You pack up your crap and get out of here,” and that was when he pulled the trigger, twice, pop-pop, and it wasn’t like I didn’t even know my finger was on the trigger because he did know and he took aim the way he had a thousand times in target practice and the two shots went home and dropped that hostile like he was a suit of clothes with nobody in it.

Long time. Long, long time. He just sat there, right where he was, and smoked another blunt, the chickaree still at it, the spring pumping out water like it was never going to quit. A few mosquitoes came to visit and after a while there were meat bees and a couple bluebottle flies dancing over the dead man who might have needed to be buried and might not have. Colter never buried anybody, not hostiles, anyway, and Fish-Eyes was definitely a hostile, even if he did look like that teacher from school. What he did do though, finally, was push himself up to go and stand over the corpse the way Colter would have done and he briefly entertained the notion of collecting a scalp here, his first scalp, but rejected that. The man was on his back. He’d been shot through the gut and then, in recoiling from that shot, he must have turned slightly so that the second shot went through his right arm and on into the side of his ribcage. A hole there, but not as big as the one in his gut. His shirt — a T-shirt with some stupid logo of some stupid organization on it — was very wet and very red with the color of the cinnamon bicycle that was propped up against the wall back at the house that used to be his. The eyes weren’t looking at anything. And the mouth — the mouth definitely wasn’t giving any commands or issuing any threats, not anymore. But the whole thing didn’t look right to him and he was seeing a bright shearing radiance of colors and things breaking down into their constituent parts and then reassembling again, only not in the same way, not the same way at all, and what he was feeling was pain, sharp and demanding, pain in his own gut, and he didn’t think twice about it, just pulled down his pants and squatted there and took a rank and violent shit.

He needed something, that was what he was thinking, Imodium or maybe if it was giardia, some kind of prescription. He couldn’t just go around sick in his stomach and shitting all the time, could he? No. That wasn’t going to work. He’d have to go into town, to the drugstore there. But if he needed a prescription, where was he going to get that? For the moment though the problem was the shit he could smell in his own nostrils and so he hiked his pants halfway and crabwalked over to sit in the spring and clean himself off, then he dried himself with leaves — not poison oak, just leaves — pulled his pants back up, collected his things and went off into the woods, heading upslope. He knew a place up there, remembered it, could picture it even now, where there was another spring. Maybe, he was thinking, just maybe, if he gave it a real good recon, it would turn out to be a primo spot, exactly what he was looking for.

And then let them come. Just let them.

STEN WAS AT THE gas station, pumping gas and working the squeegee over the broad glass plane of the Prius’ back window, seven-thirty in the morning, sun shining, on his way down to the harbor with a spinning rod to fling a lure across the mouth of the channel there and see if anything cruising in from the sea would like to take it in its scaly jaws. All the years he’d been working he told himself he loved fishing the way he had as a boy, nailing steelhead and salmon in the Noyo, Big River, the Ten Mile and out on the ocean too, told himself that as soon as he had time he was going to fish till he dropped. But he didn’t. Or hadn’t. In fact, this was the first time he’d touched the rod in longer than he could remember, and he wasn’t fooling himself — he knew he’d put his gear in the car and come out here this morning just to do something, just to get out of the house and shake the rust off. If he caught anything, so much the better — that would be a bonus — but the real deal was to kill a couple of hours before he went back home to see if the bushes he’d trimmed yesterday had grown back or the caulk he’d replaced in the kitchen a week ago needed replacing again.