T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

How did he feel? He felt about the way he had when he came out of the jungle in Costa Rica and Warner Ayala had prodded him with the barrel of his weapon. What they wanted was to provoke you, get you when you were staggered and confused and ready to explode for the viewing pleasure of everybody out there whose son wasn’t psychologically impaired and crouching in the woods like some kind of animal waiting for his brains to be scorched out of him. He knew that. And he knew he had to control himself if Adam was to have any chance at all, but it didn’t matter what he knew because there was no knowledge and no thought involved in what came next. It was just a kind of eruption, and he didn’t hurt the guy, the reporter, whoever he was, and he didn’t say a word to him either. All he did, once he’d got the parameters straight, was snatch the camera off his shoulder — a lightweight thing, half the size and heft of the ones they used in his day — and beat it methodically against the side of the house until there wasn’t much more left of it than you could hold in the palm of your hand.

He didn’t say a word about it to Carolee but by the time she got up all she had to do was look out the window to see for herself — a whole cordon of reporters lined the street with their cameras and microphones, cars and sound trucks were parked up and down the block like the grand opening of an auto show, and the helicopter that kept clattering overhead and buzzing back again had nothing to do with the police. That was a public street out there, he understood that, and he had no recourse unless they actually set foot on his property like the one who’d shoved the camera in his face before the sun had even cleared the horizon, but he’d called Rob Rankin nonetheless to tell him he’d better keep the vultures off or they’d be hunting him down too. Rob said he’d send a car by. And added, before he’d even asked, that there’d been no new developments, except for rumors and crank calls and the usual wave of sightings that turned out to be non-sightings. And he promised, as he’d promised yesterday, to do everything in his power to see that Adam came to no harm, but then — and here he’d paused so long Sten thought the connection had gone dead — that depended on Adam.

The day progressed, the first day, in a way that just didn’t make any sense. They were both half-mad to get out and do something, anything — put up posters featuring Adam’s face and a number to call as if he were a child gone missing, haunt the sheriff’s substation in Fort Bragg in the hope of hearing even the least scrap of news, hike out into the woods and shout their son’s name till he heard them and laid down his rifle and came back to them, but all they had to do was appear in the window and the cameras were trained on them as if the house was a cage and they were some rare form of wildlife never before seen in captivity. Step out the door and the shouts and cries came crackling across the lawn like verbal gunfire. It was frustrating, but above all it was humiliating, deeply humiliating — two men they both knew, knew and respected and liked, were dead, and they were complicit in it. Because their son, their crazy son, enacting whatever fantasy had invaded his head, had shot them dead, and who was responsible? Sten asked himself the question, over and over, through the long morning and into the interminable afternoon, but the answer never changed: they were. He was.

A week went by. There was no news. Or no, there was constant news, but none of it verifiable or relevant. Adam had been spotted wearing a hoodie at Kentucky Fried, he’d stolen a car in Gualala, climbed through a window on North Harold Street in Fort Bragg and raided the refrigerator, pried open the newspaper machine and taken all the copies of the Advocate-News with his mug shot on the front cover. People had heard gunfire down by Glass Beach. Somebody found a wadded-up sleeping bag and two shell casings behind the utility shed in his backyard. A goat disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It was ridiculous. Community hysteria. And it devastated Carolee, who wasn’t able to sleep more than an hour or two a night and if she ate anything at all it was dry toast and coffee. He wasn’t much better himself. They had the TV on constantly and the radio too, the electronic voices in contention, one squawking from the living room, the other the kitchen. And while he refused to plug the phone back in, after that first night he and Carolee had their cellphones pinned to their ears, calling anybody they could think of who might be even remotely connected to what was going on out there in the woods. The chatter only seemed to make things worse, but it wasn’t the chatter that was killing them. It was the waiting.

Then one evening, past dark, when the reporters had given up and packed it in for the day, Rob pulled into the driveway in an unmarked car and just sat there a minute, as if gathering himself, then eased out the door and started up the walk. Sten had the door open by the time he reached it. Rob ducked his head, as if he were afraid of hitting it on the doorframe, but there was no danger there — he was a short man, short compared to Sten, anyway. “Mind if I come in for a minute?” he asked, and he wasn’t bringing good news, you could see that from the set of his mouth, and yet it wasn’t the worst either. Which meant that their son was still alive, still whole, still breathing.

Carolee was right there, her hands dropping helplessly to her sides. Her face was heavy, her shoulders slumped. There was no light in her eyes, nothing, just a sheenless dull glaze. What came into his head was that she looked as if she was drowning, but that was a cliché—no, she looked as if she’d already gone down. “Is it Adam?”

“Is there someplace we could sit for a minute?”

There was, of course there was, and in the next moment they were all three of them heading down the hall to the kitchen, to the oak table there, Carolee offering up everything she could think of — Coffee, did he want coffee? A sandwich? Cookies? She had some of those biscotti they made down at the bakery, or a drink, maybe he wanted a drink? — because the very request, Is there someplace we could sit for a minute, came hurtling at them with a force neither of them could bear.

Sten motioned to a chair and Rob pulled it out from under the table and sat heavily, Sten sliding into the chair beside him. “You know, on second thought”—Rob leaned back in the chair to call over his shoulder to Carolee, where she stood poised at the counter—“maybe a cup of coffee. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“So what’s the news?”

“I just wanted to ask — did Adam ever have any military training?”

“Military training? Are you kidding? He was never in the service. I told you, he’s unstable. And he’s been getting worse. Why do you ask?”

“Something happened out there today and I just can’t explain it—”

And now Carolee, who couldn’t hold it in any longer: “What do you mean — he’s all right, isn’t he? He isn’t hurt—?”

Rob just shook his head, then turned to look in her direction. “It’s not that. It’s just that I’m starting to have a bad feeling about all this — not to mention these goddamned news conferences and all the rest of the happy horseshit, because everybody, from the governor down, is putting pressure on me like you can’t believe. But today? We had SWAT teams out there from Sacramento and Fresno both — and more coming. Plus my men and the Alameda County Special Response Unit too. With dogs and helicopters and infrared. And these are professionals, believe me, and they’d just got here, the Alameda team, just staging out on this logging road near where the second crime scene is?”