T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

“Uh, Sara — Sara, earth to Sara?”

It was cold. She was rubbing her arms on the street that was all but deserted and the neon sign out front of Casa Carlos was like icing on a frozen cake and Christabel was standing there beside her trying to be funny. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay, okay.”

Then they were walking to her car, the sound of their heels like gunshots echoing out into the night and the traffic lights going red and green and red again and nobody there to know or care and Christabel was saying, “You going to be all right to drive?” and she was saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

So she drove back to Willits on the road she could have driven blind and dropped Christabel off, a few pairs of headlights coming at her, nothing really. She was minding her own business and thinking ahead to Kutya and how he would have been missing her and holding his pee because he was the best-trained dog in the world and totally considerate of her, and if things seemed a bit blurrier than usual, that was all right, that was because it was dark and getting darker and she was sticking to back roads only now, taking a circuitous route home in the event there were any clowns in cop uniforms out there on the main road looking to harass, detain and rob people traveling in their own personal property to their own personal residence. Route 20, that was what she wanted to avoid, and she did, cutting a big rectangle or maybe a trapezoid around it, twice having to back up and pull U-turns because she somehow wound up on dead-end streets. But Route 20 was where she had to go at some point if she was going to get home, and finally, after having circumvented — or rectangavented — the intersection at South Main, she found herself out on the darkened highway at something like eleven o’clock at night. Minding. Her. Own. Business.

And then it all started over again, as if she were caught in a time warp. One whoop, then the lights flashing in the rearview. The shoulder of the road, the narrow view out the windshield. The sounds: bugs in the grass, the overzealous roar of the cruiser’s engine straining even in neutral, the declamatory tattoo of the officer’s boots first on the pavement and then on the tired dirt strip of the shoulder. The lady cop, the very one, bloodless, thin as a post, no lipstick, and something like joy in her eyes. The flashlight. The commands, License and registration, Proof of insurance, Step out of the car, and the same answers, or answer: “I have no contract with you.”

But they had the guns. They had the handcuffs. And they had their way with her.

THIS TIME SHE HAD to spend the night — in the drunk tank — with two other women, both in their twenties and both as dumb as boards and so polluted they couldn’t have stood up straight let alone driven an automobile, while she — she herself — was hardly drunk at all, and no, she wasn’t going to get out of the car and no, she wasn’t going to breathe into the Breathalyzer or stand on one leg or touch her fingertips to her nose or anything else. And why? Because SHE DID NOT HAVE A CONTRACT WITH THE REPUBLIC OF CALIFORNIA. And never would have. They could hang her, she didn’t care. But Kutya, poor Kutya, he was the one that had to suffer, just like the last time. He wasn’t in the Animal Control, but he was locked in the house and his bladder must have been bursting and what a trial of his conscience and all his training to have to go into the kitchen and take a sad guilty dribbling pee on the linoleum there. Where it would puddle. And stink. And dry up in a stain that would eat through the wax and take some real elbow grease to get out.

The judge was unsympathetic, a dried-up old bitch who looked as if her hair had been glued on. The bail money was doubled this time because of her failure to appear on the previous charge, and since Christabel didn’t have the money she’d had to go to a bail bondsman at an interest rate that would have put countries like Greece and Spain right under. Then there was the same charade at the impound yard, more bucks out the window, and she had to dig into her super-secret savings fund, the money she’d got when she and Roger split up and he bought out her interest in the house, money she’d told herself she’d never touch because it was going to be a down payment someday on a house all her own — once she’d saved up enough on top of that to meet the piratical amount they wanted because the banks hadn’t got done raping America yet.

She paid off Mary Ellis at the impound yard, Mary too embarrassed to even mention the fact that this was the second time around and too much of a slave of the system to do anything more than just take the cashier’s check with a face carved out of lead and stamp her receipt. As far as the bail bond was concerned, she couldn’t leave Christabel hanging with that, so she took out the full amount to give her, five thousand dollars, because she had no intention of showing up for her court date. They’d got Jerry Kane, but they weren’t going to get her, never again.

What she was thinking was that the Republic of California was a place in which she no longer wanted to reside. It was the ultimate nanny state, everything you did short of drawing breath regulated through the roof, a list of no’s half a mile long posted on every street corner and the entrance to every park in the state. You couldn’t smoke on the street. Couldn’t park overnight, couldn’t pay your toll in cash on the Golden Gate Bridge, couldn’t buy something on the internet without the sales tax Nazis coming after you. You couldn’t even start a fire in your own woodstove or natural stone fireplace on a cold and damp and nasty winter’s day down in Visalia, where she’d lived with Roger through her unenlightened years, lest you run afoul of the air-quality control board, and don’t think you can sneak around the regulations because you’ve got a whole squadron of snitches and tattletales living right next door and across the street to report you out of sour grapes because they’re too whipped and beaten down to start up their own pathetic little fires.

No, what she was thinking was Nevada. Maybe Stateline. Anything goes in Nevada and if she found a place in Stateline she’d be within striking distance of all those rich yuppies in Lake Tahoe, who all had horses that needed regular shoeing and TLC like horses anywhere. Or maybe Kingman, in Arizona. She’d been there once, just passing through but also to visit the funky little trailer court on old Route 66 there as a kind of pilgrimage, because that was where Timothy McVeigh had lived before he met Terry Nichols. Now there was a soldier, there was somebody who wasn’t going to take it anymore. Though maybe that was a bit extreme. She wasn’t violent herself and didn’t really believe in it and whenever his name came up she had to admit that maybe he had gone too far — she couldn’t see taking lives, though you could hardly call them innocent . Live and let live, right? Unless they keep on kidnapping you, keep on regulating you, keep on sticking their hands deeper and deeper into your pockets until you’ve got no pockets left.

Anyway, she entered into a contract with the court (TDC), picked up her car and drove home, where the poor dog ran and hid under the bed because of what he’d had no choice but to do on the kitchen floor, and that just made her all the more crazy. The subsidiary effects. They never thought of that. Never thought of what innocent creatures — truly innocent — they were torturing with their seatbelt laws and their drunk-but-not-drunk-enough nighttime patrols when anybody who wasn’t already asleep wouldn’t have given two shits if the streets were flowing with Cuervo Gold. But enough. She must have spent half an hour just standing there in her own kitchen, looking down on that piss stain on the floor, before finally she got down on her hands and knees and wiped it up, and then, because she wasn’t herself — she was trembling, actually trembling, she was so upset — she got out the mop, the bucket and the plastic bottle of Mop & Glo and redid the whole kitchen, just to take her mind off things.