T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

Then there was the second mile, the third, and he was halfway there by his calculation and still alive and in one piece, though his feet were bloody and pierced with cholla spines and his lungs were on fire. But at least he still had lungs and that was better than the alternative, better than Potts, whose own innards were just food for dogs at this point. After a while, and he was running now for the sake of it, for nothing else but that, just running as if he’d never done anything else in his life, he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw to his amazement that there were only three braves anywhere near him. So what did he do? He poured it on, running faster than anybody before or since, and by the time he reached what he guessed was the fifth mile and could see the distant declivity where the river cut its banks, there was only one brave behind him, the fittest one in the whole camp, young, streamlined, his spear stabbing out before him as he pumped his arms with each stride.

No matter. Colter was outrunning him. Or could have or would have but for the fact that he felt something hot and viscid running down the front of him, his own blood, some essential thing ruptured inside of him from the sheer pounding stress and high anxiety he was putting his body through. He was bleeding out both nostrils, that was what it was, his chest and even his thighs smeared with blood as if he’d been plunged in a vat in one of the slaughterhouses back in St. Louis, and he knew that things had come to a head, to the point of crisis, flip a coin, live or die. So what he did, even as the brave gained on him and was about to take aim and hurl his spear at any second, was stop in his tracks and whirl around to face him. It was a good move. Because the brave, fittest and fleetest of the whole tribe, had been focused all this time on the shifting target of Colter’s soap white shoulders and now suddenly here was Colter’s face and chest bright with blood and Colter running no more. “Spare me,” he called out, but the brave had no such intention. He cocked the spear over his right shoulder, leaning into his throw in midstride, but unfortunately for him he caught his foot at that moment and pitched face-forward into the dirt, the spear slamming down in front of him to quiver in the ground.

Colter was on him in that instant, jerking the shaft out of the earth and bringing the business end of the spear down on the writhing Indian with such force that it went right through his ribcage and pinned him to the turf like an insect. That was a moment. And Colter felt it not so much in his brain or his heart, but in his legs. He was bloody. His feet were raw. One of his pursuers lay dead on the ground, but here came the rest of them letting out a collective howl of rage and disbelief when they saw their fallen comrade, and there went Colter, running, running.

IT WAS A LONG hike from her place, down through the wooded canyon that was like her two spread legs with the river the wet part in the middle of it, but it was nothing to him and he could have walked it five times a day if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. He’d got his prescription and that was going to stop the shits — it already had — and he’d got the sex he really didn’t need but wanted, anyway, another weakness. Poison oak. The shits. Sex. If he stopped to think about it, it scared him. A voice — and it wasn’t in his head, but out there in front of him somewhere, hidden in the leaves — started ragging on him. Boy Scout, it called him. Girl Scout. Brownie. Weakling. Dude. Fag. Wannabe . After the first hour he stopped listening because that voice was the voice of defeat and if you had discipline you could take your weakness and transform it into strength, the same as you could take a fat kid with a bag of Doritos and make him lift weights and run a treadmill instead of playing video games and firm him up in a month. Basic training. Run the hills, climb the ropes, get hard and stay hard. His father had been a Marine and he’d been hard once but now he was old. And soft. Still — and this came to him at odd moments, like now — he had gone over there and waxed gooks and then as an old man went down to waste some Costa Rican alien with his bare hands and you had to give him credit for that. Even if he was clueless. Even if he didn’t have even the faintest hint of the threat the hostiles posed, but then why would he, living in his clean and perfect upscale ocean-view house in Yuppiesville, California?

The day was cool and he hardly sweated at all, plus his clothes were clean, courtesy of Sara’s washer and dryer, and if he regretted not having stayed on at least for one day more, at least till he could have gotten to the grocery store and maybe Big 5, he had to dismiss it. He was on a mission, never forget that. Maybe that alien had interrupted him, had showed him how weak and mindless and just plain stupid his first attempt at establishing a backup position was, and maybe that was for the best because he hadn’t been prepared, had he, but now he was or he was going to be. He’d already cached some things at the second camp, which was an hour’s hike from the one he’d had to abandon, the one he’d had to say mission aborted to, and on a different watercourse entirely, high ground, absolutely, and no road within miles. He was on his way there now, hurrying, hurrying, and there were planes overhead, always planes, glinting, and it was just a matter of time before it was drones, which were just another kind of robot, and his wind was good and his legs were strong even if his pack was overloaded and pulling ever so slightly to the right and he really didn’t feel like stopping to shift things around. What he had in there were the items he’d acquired from Sara that she wouldn’t be needing, anyway, like what was left of the bottle of bourbon and some cans of beef stew (extra weight, but totally tasty, especially over a campfire, and easy too because all you needed was a can opener and you could set the can down in the coals and then eat right out of it when it was ready), plus a hatchet and an adjustable wrench he’d found in some alien’s cabin on the way up and then stashed for the return trip.

But wait: was he lost? He seemed to wake up suddenly, the sun a jolt to his system the way coffee was, but she hadn’t made coffee and he hadn’t wanted it because she was asleep in bed and snoring with her mouth thrown open when he slipped out the door, and he realized he was disoriented, to the south of where he wanted to be, and how he came to realize it — and come awake — was because here was somebody’s cabin hidden in the trees and a dirt road curling up in front of it like a cat taking a nap. All right, he was thinking, why not? And he circled the place three times, doing his recon, until he determined with ninety-nine percent accuracy that there was nobody home. Up on the porch now, locked door, casement windows, drawn curtains. Hello, anybody there?

A tap of the stone he dug out of the dirt and the near window had a fist-sized hole in it that allowed him to put his hand in, rotate the latch and pull the windows open so that anybody could have just stepped right over the sill and into the place that was only two rooms, woodstove, rag rug on the floor, a rusty dusty musty smell, and what was this? A.22 rifle hanging from two hooks over the stove and wouldn’t that make a nice close-up kind of weapon if somebody sawed off the barrel and filed it clean?

He lost himself there for a while and that wasn’t cool, that wasn’t military, and he would have been the first to admit it. But so what. He liked the feel of the place, liked the old armchair with the dog hair on it and the stuffed deer head sticking out of the knotty-pine wall across from it — and he liked the liquor too, a handle of vodka, two-thirds full, papa bear, mama bear, baby bear. He found a hacksaw in the toolshed and a vise and file there too. Food in the refrigerator, ham and cheese, yellow mustard, soft white sourdough bread that toasted up just perfect. And what was that tapping on the roof? It was rain, that was what it was, first rain of the season, and if it swelled the streams he wasn’t worried. All that hurry, and for what? In fact, he just took a time-out and built a fire in the woodstove and sat there through the back end of the morning and into the afternoon, drinking somebody else’s vodka and modifying somebody else’s.22 rifle, and didn’t think anything at all.