T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

But no, that didn’t make any sense. They wouldn’t have shot him — that would only bring attention to themselves, bring the heat. They might have cursed, might have made a crude gesture or two and spat out a garble of Spanish and English — Spanglish — to proclaim their innocence, We are hikers, señor, only hikers, and then gone on their way. To avoid the confrontation the way they had the day he and Carey had followed them to a standstill. They didn’t want to kill anybody, not unless someone got too close to the growing operation, either by design or accident, and even then the better part of them — the mules — would just melt away into the undergrowth when the DEA or the sheriff’s department pulled a raid. Who wanted to be a hero? Who wanted the attention?

No, that wasn’t the answer, that wasn’t the answer at all. He was standing there on the very rock, the smooth clean water-burnished slab of granite where they’d found the body — the chalk marks there still — and if he was studying the grain of the rock for bloodstains it wasn’t out of idle curiosity or morbidity or even a desire to mourn a friend. There was a mystery here, a puzzle he had to solve for himself before Rob Rankin and his forensics team did, and it was tied up with that fear, the nameless fear that was mutating now into a named fear, named and punishing and inadmissible.

Suddenly, and he didn’t quite know why, he was calling out his son’s name. “Adam?” he shouted, obliterating the silence. “Adam, are you out there?”

SO ADAM WAS GONE. Adam was crazy and Adam was gone. That hurt. It did. Hurt her more than she would ever admit, not even to Christabel, and Christabel was there for her, sitting over her strawberry margarita with a long face saying, “You want to talk about it?” They were at Casa Carlos in Ukiah, Friday night, a month after Adam knocked her down, trashed the house and kept on trashing it till she thought he was going to hammer his way right on through the walls. She was crying that night. She’d tried to stop him, tried to bring him back up the hill where they could settle in and be like they were before, but he wouldn’t listen to her and he wouldn’t stop either. She screamed his name, screamed it over and over, the shock and confusion wadded in her throat till she thought she was going to choke on it, and then she cursed him, stood out in the dark yard and cursed him to the tone-deaf clank and clatter of things breaking, shattering, falling to pieces. Crying still, she’d put Kutya in the car, started up the engine and swung round in the driveway. “You son of a bitch!” she shouted out the window. “You shit! I hope you die and rot in hell!” Then she put the car in gear and drove on up the hill, listening to Hank Williams, only Hank, and crying in harsh hot jags that took the breath right out of her body.

She didn’t tell Christabel any of that — that was personal. Personal even from her. What she did tell her was that they’d had a fight — Adam was upset because they had to move out and he started taking it out on her — and that it was over, or probably over, ninety-nine and a half percent sure if you wanted to figure the odds. And what did Christabel say? “I don’t see what you saw in him, anyway.” She’d paused to blow out smoke. “Except his bod. But he was trouble with a capital T and don’t you try to deny it.”

Now, in one of the dark booths along the back wall where the black velvet tapestry of Selena hung beside one of a snorting bull in a shadowy arena clotted with even shadowier faces, with the candle guttering in its rippled glass urn and the corny Mexican music tweedle-deeing through the speakers in a sad travesty of normalcy and joy, she felt like crying all over again. That, and getting drunk. They were already on their second pitcher, the remains of her beef enchilada and Christabel’s macho burrito congealing in grease on the plates before them — she really did have to start eating healthier and she made a promise to herself in that moment, albeit a drunken promise, to start tomorrow — and things had begun to blur a bit.

“I mean, beyond the sex,” Christabel said, her fluffed-up hair and the candlelight giving her a weird Halloweeny look, “what did he ever do for you? Did he contribute? Pay for anything?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. But she did. And in the next breath she said, “He could be so funny.”

“Right. Like that night he sat down to dinner buck naked—”

And then they were both laughing and she picked up the pitcher and topped off their glasses, the frothy pink confection like something a child would lap up, cotton candy made liquid, but it packed a punch, no doubt about that. Plus, she was driving because Christabel’s pickup was in the shop with some mysterious ailment that was probably nothing but would cost five hundred, minimum, of that she could be sure. The way mechanics took advantage of women, especially single women, was another kind of disgrace, as if things weren’t bad enough already. .

The bill came. They divided it up and left a two-dollar tip on a thirty-six dollar charge because when you really thought about it the service was lousy and the food worse and the decor right out of a Tijuana whorehouse, and so what if the waiter gave them a dirty look when they were going out the door, he could go fuck himself, they could all go fuck themselves. Right. And then they were on the street, the air cool on her bare arms, September nearly gone already and October coming on, time dragging you through the year as if it had hooks on it, one holiday after another, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and then the big ones, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of it in service of what? Shopping. Spend, spend, spend. Make the corporations that much richer and the people that much poorer. Really, the only way to get off that wheel was to drop out and she’d told Christabel that till she was blue in the face, explained it over and over, patiently, in detail, and still she didn’t get it. Or wouldn’t.

Jerry Kane got it. And Jerry Kane died for it. He just got fed up to the point where quoting the UCC code and declaring his status to whatever Fascist disguised as a policeman just didn’t cut it anymore and so he took up arms because they gave him no choice. The final straw, or the next-to-final straw, was when they arrested him in Carrizo, New Mexico, at what he called on his radio show a “Nazi checkpoint, show me your papers, Heil Hitler,” a checkpoint set up for the sole purpose of harassing citizens, both natural-born and slave-state, and, of course, extracting money from them, moola, hard cash, as if they were anything more than just roadside bandits out of the old time, the lawless time when you protected yourself and your own and lived free. It wasn’t any different from what happened to her. They stopped him for no reason except that they had the guns and demanded his papers and when he refused to enter into a contract with them they hauled him off to jail under threat, duress and coercion and what he did was file a counterclaim alleging kidnapping and extortion against the arresting officers and the justice of the so-called peace of the so-called court. And then, two months later, he was on his way back from one of his seminars in Vegas to his home in Florida, and it happened all over again, and who could blame him if he just turned around and defended himself from fraud, malice and yes, kidnapping . Yet again.

He’d had enough. And when the two cops came up to the white van that was his own personal property on one of the highways and byways guaranteed for free and unencumbered access under the Uniform Commercial Code, he started shooting. West Memphis, Arkansas, Crittenden County. Two oppressors shot dead. But that wasn’t enough because the cops tracked Jerry Kane and his son to that Walmart parking lot and two more cops went down in a shitstorm of bullets and Jerry Kane and his sixteen-year-old son gave up their lives for it. For what? For seatbelts? For papers ?