T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

Carolee was in her nightgown still, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the crossword puzzle out of the Chronicle, and she barely glanced up when he came in. “Back so soon?” she murmured. She was wearing her glasses and staring intently at the page before her, trying to break the code, and this was her way of staving off the boredom and filling the hours when she wasn’t enjoying world-class indulgence aboard a cruise ship in the sunny crystalline waters of the Caribbean. Her hair shone in the light through the picture window, outside of which, in the intermediate view, birds flapped and clustered at the feeder, while in the longer view the sea sparked distantly under the sun. She was barefoot. The flesh bunched at her chin as she compressed the muscles there in concentration. “What’s a seven-letter word for earthworm?”

The answer— annelid —sprang into his head, cribbed from a mimeographed sheet of multiple-choice questions in Bio 101 a thousand years ago, but he didn’t give it to her, didn’t say anything in fact. He just stood there, shaken more than he cared to admit — and now he was seeing Carey’s face, the excitable face, the anxious one, the face he’d worn on the day they’d chased the Mexicans halfway across the county. He tried to picture him dead, but he drew a blank. Hard to picture anyone dead because there was a spirit there, a soul, the animating principle, whether you believed in God the Father and all the ministering angels or not, and that spirit was more specific even than the body that contained it. Carey was dead. There’d be a funeral. The community would come unglued. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Maybe so. But not this time.

“Sten?” Looking up now, the glasses at half-mast on the flange of her nose. “Did you hear me?”

What he said was, “They got Carey.”

She gave him a numb look, her pale wondering eyes riding up above the frames.

“Carey Bachman. The Mexicans. They shot him.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying he’s dead, what do you think? He’s dead. Carey’s dead.”

She wasn’t indifferent, or not exactly — he could see the alarm germinating in her eyes and unfolding its petals across her face, color there, blossoming — but she didn’t jump up from the table and tear out her hair or set up a wail of grief or even, and he couldn’t help noticing this smallest detail, let go of the pencil gripped neatly between her thumb and first two fingers. The requisite questions dropped from her lips— How? When? Where? How had he found out? Had they caught the killers? Was there no place safe anymore ? — and yet there was no shock in her tone, no outrage, no engagement. And why was that? He knew why. Adam. Adam was why.

She’d spent the previous afternoon at the Burnsides’, helping Cindy and Gentian with the animals and the tours they gave daily. But it wasn’t only Cindy and Gentian: Sara had been there. She came down on a regular basis, every six weeks or so, to shoe Cindy’s horses and file their teeth, and there she was, in her boots, jeans and a no-nonsense T-shirt, her hair tied back in a ponytail and her hands roughened by the work. Carolee had said hi, uneasy, maybe a little embarrassed because of the scene out front of the house the last time they’d seen each other, Adam attacking his own father and his own father down there on the ground, but she was aching for news of Adam and here was her chance to get it.

Cindy, always the gracious hostess, had set out a platter of tuna- and egg-salad sandwiches for them, late lunch, with a scoop of homemade potato salad and carrot sticks and a drink of her own concoction, two parts cranberry, one part each of sparkling water and diet 7Up. Nice. A nice lunch. Cindy was always going out of her way like that. They were sitting there, she and Cindy, talking about the antelope and Cindy’s hope for a mating pair of giraffes one of the zoos was offering them, when Sara came out of the bathroom where she’d been cleaning up. She looked good. She’d combed out her hair and put on some makeup and if she was forty she didn’t look it. More like thirty.

There was some business talk — the horses, the antelope, the fact that the vet was doing the hooves on the zebras, sable and kudu now and Cindy hoped Sara didn’t mind but it was just easier that way since he had to be there to dart the animals in any case — and then Cindy excused herself to go to the kitchen and put on the water for tea and Carolee and Sara had a moment to themselves. “How are you?” Carolee asked. “Everything okay?”

The other woman tugged at her fingers for a minute as if to loosen the joints — she worked hard and had the calluses to prove it — then gave a smile so fleeting it was dead on arrival. “I’m not getting laid, if that’s what you mean.” She picked up her glass, rattled the ice cubes, drained what was left in the bottom. “So things could be better, yeah. A whole lot better.”

Carolee was puzzled. And maybe a bit offended too — she’d never been a fan of that kind of talk — but she forged on because she had no choice and if this woman with the flaring eyes and low habits and mad theories was going to wind up with Adam she needed to be understanding, needed to give her the benefit of the doubt, needed, above all else, to pump her for information. “But what about Adam? How’s he doing? Is he helping out, is he okay?”

“Adam? I haven’t seen Adam since that night, that time, I mean — at the house?”

This information came down on Carolee like a rockslide, just buried her, the way she told it. They’d both assumed he was with her, and the news came down hard on him too — if he thought he’d washed his hands of his son he was fooling himself. Adam was there, always there, as persistent as a drumbeat in the back of your mind, the rhythm you can’t shake, the tune you can’t stop humming — he was his father, still and forever, and he’d tried to be as good a father as he could through all these years no matter how hard he rubbed up against Adam’s will and his delusions and his pranks, if you could call them that. He was Adam’s father. He loved him. And here he’d been entertaining his own delusion of Adam living in a kind of half-cracked (which meant half-sane) parity with this woman, Sara, who at least dwelled on Mother Earth and had a job and could cook for him and feed him and be his mother and lover rolled in one. I fucked her. Isn’t that right, Sara? Didn’t I fuck you? It was like throwing coins in a wishing well. He’d made his silent wish, the wish he couldn’t say aloud because then it wouldn’t come true. And what was it? That Adam was somebody else’s problem now.

Carolee had been stunned silent, sitting there with her mouth open. “You mean,” she said, “he isn’t with you?”

Sara, piggy Sara, Sara with her flaccid cheeks and fat thighs, too-old Sara, slutty Sara — no suitable lover for her son, not even close — had shaken her head emphatically and her eyes had moistened. “And I want to apologize — for that night, I mean. I stayed there till like ten or eleven, waiting for him? And when he came back I tried to stop him smashing things up, but he wouldn’t listen.” A catch in her voice, and in that moment, just for an instant, Carolee softened again. “And he wouldn’t come. Believe me, I tried”—and here was Cindy with the teapot nestled in its cozy—“I tried so hard I had bruises up and down my arm for a week after. But he wouldn’t listen. And he wouldn’t come.”

Now, in the kitchen, with the birds at the feeder and the newspaper folded down flat on the table, Sten felt nothing but anger. Carey was dead, the gangs had taken over, there’d be beheadings next, corpses hanging from the bridges like in Tijuana, the forests lost and all hope of peace and tranquility flown out the window, and all she did was tack up a checklist of questions, as if she cared, and then went back to her crossword. “Annelid,” he said, snapping out the syllables as if each one had a flail attached to it. “Seven letters for earthworm.”