T. Boyle: The Harder They Come

This was something new, something the guidebook hadn’t advertised, a curiosity under the sun that beat down steadily on the ochre mud of the lot, and everybody just stood there taking it in, minutes slipping away, the heat exacting its price in sweat, the fat woman emerging from her stall and the bus driver stepping tentatively down from the bus as if the ground were rolling under him like a treadmill. The main attraction, the man on his back on the ground, never stirred. Oh, there was movement, but it was only the resistance of the inanimate to a moving force, the paramedic thanklessly riding the compression of his two stacked palms, then breaking off to pinch the nostrils and force his own breath past the dry lips, the ruptured trachea and down into the deflated lungs. This was a man, this paramedic, who didn’t give up easily. His mustache glistened with saliva and the crown of his head humped up and down as if at the climax of some insistent sexual act. He kept at it, kept at it, kept at it.

Carolee’s voice was very soft and at first he didn’t know if she was speaking to him or the paramedic. What she said was, “Is he going to make it?”

He didn’t know about that — he didn’t even know what he’d done. The only man he’d ever killed in his life, or might have killed, nothing confirmed, was a dink two hundred yards away on a moonless night when the flares strobed out over the world and he was in something very much like a panic, his rifle on full automatic.

“We should get him to a hospital,” Bill said, still holding on to the gun — a revolver, Sten saw that now, 357 Magnum, six shots — as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “I mean, is there a hospital here? In Limón, I mean?”

“There must be,” somebody said.

“But where is it?” Bill wondered. “And if we — I mean, should we move him? Maybe there’s damage there, a neck injury”—and here he raised his eyes to Sten’s—“like in football, you know? Where they bring out the stretcher?”

Up and down the paramedic went, up and down, and now the fat woman was there, peering over Sheila’s shoulder as if to make some sort of positive identification of the body on the ground — and it was a body, a corpse, not a living thing, not anymore, Sten was sure of it — and here was the driver too, his eyes masked behind the sunglasses, the lower portion of his face locked up like a strongbox.

“Driver,” Bill said, and he seemed to be panting, like a dog that had run a long way up a steep hill, “we need to take this man to the hospital. Where— dónde —is the hospital?”

The paramedic, without breaking his rhythm, looked up and said something in Spanish to the driver, something that had the cognate os-pee-tal in it, but the driver just shook his head and turned away to spit in the dirt. “You don’t want,” he said finally, shaking his head very slowly. “You want el córoner .”

“ Os-pee-tal, ” the paramedic insisted, and Bill joined him, aping his pronunciation: “ Os-pee-tal .”

The fat woman emitted a pinched labial noise as if she were unstoppering a bottle, then turned — fat ankles, splayed feet in a pair of huaraches that sank into the ochre mud as if it were dough — and started back across the lot. Sten could still feel the blood thudding in his ears, though he was calming now, what was done was done, already thinking of the repercussions. Certainly he’d acted in self-defense, and here were the witnesses to prove it, but who knew what the laws were like in this country, what kind of flaming hoops they’d make him jump through — and lawyers, would he need a lawyer? He scanned the group — they were still milling there, clueless — but no one would look him in the eye. He wasn’t one of them, not anymore — he was something else now.

Sheila came up to him then, to where he was standing with his arm around Carolee still, and pressed his hand. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re a hero, a real hero.” Then she bent to the tangle of things scattered on the blanket to reclaim her purse and passport — her precious passport — and as if a spell had been broken, they all came forward now, one after another, to sift through the pile and take back what belonged to them.

THE RED CROSS CLINIC ( La Clínica de la Cruz Roja ) was where they wound up, the whole tour group, as if this were part of the package. The driver had retraced their route at the same breakneck speed he’d employed on the way out — or no, he’d seen this as an excuse to go even faster, pedal to the metal all the way, as if the bus had been scaled down and transformed into an ambulance, though as far as Sten could see there was no need for hurry, not on the gunman’s account. He hoped he was wrong. Hoped the guy was only unconscious, in a coma maybe, deep sleep, dreaming. They’d give him oxygen at the hospital, defibrillation, adrenaline, something to kick-start his heart and wake him up. . but what if he didn’t wake up? Was that manslaughter? A term came to him then: justifiable homicide . That was what this was. He’d acted instinctively, in self-defense, in defense of his wife and all the others too — he’d neutralized a threat, that was all, and who could blame him? But what if the man was paralyzed, alive still, but dead from the neck down, what then? Who’d pay for the nurse to spoon-feed him and change his diapers? There was no health care down here, no insurance, no nothing. Would there be a lawsuit? They had lawsuits everywhere. And jails. They had jails everywhere too.

He tried not to think about it, tried to wipe his mind clean. The whole way back he’d held tight to Carolee’s hand, his eyes locked straight ahead, the bus rattling till every nut and bolt down the length of it began to sing. Time compressed. The jungle slashed by on either side and the potholes exploded under the wheels. He felt sick. There was a kind of buzzing in his skull, as if a swarm of insects had got trapped inside. His knees were cramped. He felt thirsty all over again. Three rows up, laid out in the middle of the aisle, was the foreshortened form of the gunman, the paramedic hovering over him, but all he could make out were the soles of the man’s feet, jutting up like parentheses enclosing a phrase he didn’t want to decipher.

At first, there’d been some question about where to put the man. No one wanted him inside the bus, but what were they going to do, strap him to the roof? Leave him there in the mud for the police? The buzzards? The dogs? He was a human being, no matter what he’d done, or tried to do, and there wasn’t much debate about it — he was going with them. That was the consensus, at any rate, people wringing their hands, their voices shaky still. Bill’s wife — processed hair, low-cut blouse — held out, her teeth clamped as if she’d bitten into something gone bad. “I don’t want him near me,” she insisted. “I don’t want—” and she’d broken off, fighting back a sob.

It turned out they couldn’t fit the man lengthwise across any of the seats, so Bill and the paramedic, who’d hauled him up the steps by his shoulders and feet, laid him out in the aisle, the back of his head bisected by the scuffed white line on the floor, the one you were advised to stay behind. Most people were already on the bus at that point, their faces blanched and reduced, eyes staring straight ahead, but the final few, Sten and Carolee amongst them, had to step over him to make their way down the aisle. Sten took his wife by the arm and tried not to look down at the glazed eyes and the teeth glinting in the open mouth, and if he missed his step and one foot wound up coming down on the man’s sprawled wrist, so much the worse. The guy was feeling no pain, and besides, he’d asked for it, hadn’t he?