T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

What brought it all up though was the old lady who looked more and more like his dead grandma as the afternoon fell off into evening and the rain kept up and he tipped back the bottle and just talked his heart out to her because that was what the peacefulness of her cabin and her presence too brought out in him. She was pissed, no doubt about that, and when he told her to just sit down and stop fussing she did it, but she didn’t like it. He was talking and she kept interrupting him, kept complaining, kept bitching, till he had to tell her, twice, to shut the fuck up. At some hour — it was still gray out and that was good because he had to find his way back — he thanked her one more time, gathered up his things and went on out to the door to flip the hood on her car and rip out the distributor cap before hunching his shoulders under the straps of his pack and humping into the woods, already wet through to the skin.

He woke shivering in his sleeping bag, which had somehow got wet too, despite the fact that he’d spread a camo tarp over the bunker and dug a runoff trench with the stainless-steel folding shovel he’d borrowed from the Boy Scouts. Permanently. The thing was, though, he was clear and knew right where he was, which was Camp 2, the one high above everybody and everything. He opened his eyes on the tarp, bellied now with accumulated water so that it looked like the bottom end of a brontosaur — or a dragon, Smaug the Impenetrable, scalier than shit — and heard the soft spatter of the dying rain in the trees, along with the crash and roar of the swollen creek coming out of the spring, and right away felt sick in his stomach. It wasn’t the shits. Or maybe it was, but only partially. He was hungover, that was what it was, drunk-sick, because he’d taken the old lady’s handle of vodka with him and never got around to building a fire for the beef stew or anything else and had just lain there under the tarp, listening to the rain and smelling the deep ferment of the woods while sucking on the bottle like some half-witted mewling little baby that didn’t know any better till his mind went blank and he passed out to wake up now, here, with the rain spattering and the spring roaring. Feeling like crap. Or no, warmed-over crap, crap that wasn’t even fresh but just heated up in a pan and served to all the shit-eaters of the world in some alien soup kitchen.

First thing he did was climb up over the lip of the bunker, which was three feet high, just exactly right for cover and defense both, and get down on all fours to puke, and then he dug out one of the little yellow giardia pills and washed it down with spring water because no one was going to tell him this spring was contaminated because if it was then the whole planet was just a big cesspool and the aliens could have it and welcome to it. For a long while he sat there wet and shivering on the near wall of the bunker, which was constructed of bark-on logs he’d dragged from a long ways out so as to cover his tracks if anyone should come upon the stumps. And no, it wasn’t anything like the forts he and Cody and Billy Julian built when they were like ten years old, just hammering anything together they could find, but the real deal, straight out of the U.S. Army Field Manual, Chapter 20: “Survival Movement in Hostile Areas,” most of which he could have quoted verbatim if somebody asked him, but really all you had to know was the acronym BLISS:

B — Blends in with the surroundings

L–Low in silhouette

I–Irregular in shape

S — Small in size

S — Secluded

Secluded, that was for sure, and you had to be secluded or they’d find you with their car doors slamming and their barking worked-up irate old man’s voices crowing, What do you think you’re doing in there? He never did get a chance to answer that day, whenever it was, a long time ago or maybe not, but if he’d had the chance he would have said, “I think I’m getting away from assholes like you.” That’s what he should have said and he was saying it now to the dripping trees and thinking about starting a little campfire to heat up a can of beef stew or just boil some water for freeze-dried chicken cashew curry, hungry now, hungry all over again since he’d just puked up a whole wad of nothing, not even chunks, just mucus, and he went around doing that, gathering up twigs that weren’t too sodden and some scraps of newspaper and then laying some of the bigger stuff he kept under his tarp across the top of it. He didn’t like showing smoke in hostile territory — a thing Colter would never have done — but he wanted something hot. And besides, the war really hadn’t started yet.

It was when he was dishing up the beef stew (blowing on it, actually; it was still too hot to eat) that an ugly thought occurred to him. It was the kind of thought a groundhog might have had studying his own burrow from outside in the hard light of day, a gnawing, paranoid kind of feeling that poisoned the smell of the beef stew and killed his mood dead. He shifted uneasily. His crotch was wet and it was going to start itching with the crotch fungus that made it feel as if your balls were on fire if he didn’t change into something dry pretty soon — and what was he going to do, go to the drugstore every day? But here came that thought roaring into his head and he cursed himself again. Fucker. Idiot. Moron. Shit for brains . Here he’d been sitting around in hospital waiting rooms and fucking Sara in the dark and jawing away with a random old lady like some — it hurt to have to say it — like some mental case, and not a thought to the plantation, which he hadn’t laid eyes on for two full days now.

He had to get a grip. There’d been a storm, rain falling in sheets and beating like a whole ship full of aliens on that old lady’s split-shake roof, and what if it had damaged the plants? What if it had broken the stems supporting the pods that were only viable now, right now, because the growing cycle was something like ninety days and he’d been late receiving his seeds in the mail and then getting them in the dirt of his two hundred twenty-seven gopher-proof pots? Worse, what if the whole thing had washed away, the pots and plants and the brown balls of opium in the screw-top jar hidden in the secret recess behind the back wall of the bunker? What then?

The stew was hot, too hot to eat, but he ate it anyway, the wheel cranking round now as if it had no stop on it, as if it was going to break loose and tear right out of his head like a freak accident on the roller coaster. He didn’t bother to scrape the can, just threw it down in the mud. The spoon too. And then he had his pack on, the rifle shouldered and the knife strapped to his thigh, and he was heading downhill, double time becoming triple time and then quadruple time till he was running full-out, running like Colter.

SO MAYBE HE SLIPPED and fell a couple of times, the mud slick underfoot, the tread of his boots clogged with it till he might as well have had no tread at all, everything rushing downward and the rain starting in again. His pants were filthy, basted with mud and long filarial streaks of some green shit he didn’t know what it was, and he’d managed to tear the sleeve of his shirt slamming into a tree to keep from pitching headlong into a ravine like some clumsy-ass motherfucker, but it was nothing more than what you would expect out here this time of year when the rain started in and just kept on coming, the kind of thing the average person didn’t even know about or even suspect because the average person was sitting in front of a TV in a dry house with a remote in one hand and a bag of wasabi peas in the other. Plus he was on a mission here and whether he broke a leg or both legs or not really didn’t enter into it — if he couldn’t keep on his feet and hurtle every obstacle then he didn’t deserve to have a plantation or live free or even think of calling himself a mountain man. So what he did was let his instincts take over and just go for it.