T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

“And you really think he’s going to listen to you, he’s going to come to you? Because I’m the one. I’m the one he’ll come to.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I know that,” and here was the accusation again, the old thrust, why can’t you be a better father, why can’t you be home nights, why can’t you get strict with him, lay down the law, make him stop this nonsense, why didn’t you show up for the T-ball game, the sing-along, the cake sale, because what meeting is more important than your own son? “And if I didn’t know it I’m sure you’d be there to tell me the next ten thousand times.”

The train moved along at a walking pace, easing across the intersection on Main with its whistle blowing for everybody to hear and take note of, whether they were stalled at the crossing in their cars and campers or hunkered in some ravine halfway up the mountainside ready to take on the world. Sten was dressed like a tourist, in shorts, running shoes and a woolen shirt that concealed the soft body armor Rob had insisted on, though it wasn’t quite clear why since it wouldn’t stop a round from an assault rifle. Slow it down, maybe, depending on how far it had to travel. Or a ricochet, it might stop a ricochet, which, of course, might not necessarily cooperate and strike you where you were protected. It could go anywhere, through your skull, the roof of your mouth, your groin. But he didn’t want to think about that — or the last time he’d laid eyes on Adam, the fight they’d had, how Adam had shoved back with all the sick fury uncoiling inside him, and what had the Norse called their fiercest warriors? Berserkers. They didn’t know fear. They were unhinged. And on the battlefield they went berserk. Adam Stensen. Sten’s son. Son of Sten who was the son of Sten.

There was no one on the deck of the observation car — that would have been suicidal in Rob’s estimation, Rob who’d declined to go on this little expedition because he had a command to oversee — and Sten wondered about that, about the imposture they were trying to pull off here. Various deputies were scattered throughout the two enclosed cars, men and women both, dressed casually, the men in loud shirts and reversed baseball caps, the women in big straw hats and pastels, but if they were really tourists, actual tourists, half of them would have been lounging around the open car, beer bottles pressed to their lips and cameras flashing. Would Adam notice? Would he care? Would he even be anywhere near the rail line in broad daylight? And here, despite himself, he felt a flush of pride: Adam was smart. He was elusive. And he knew his terrain. He would have made a LURP in Vietnam, the ghost in the night who materialized amongst the enemy to cut the throats of the unwary and scare the shit out of the rest.

The train rattled on, picking up speed but still going at half the normal pace because it was a target and make no mistake about it. A lure. A bait. But then why would Adam want to shoot up a train or go anywhere near it? Sten had no answer to that, except that Adam had a rage inside him and that rage had to come up against something, just to rub it, feel it, let the world know what it was to have a thing like that clawing to get out. He’d felt it himself when he was in his teens and after too and he’d seen it channeled through two generations of cynical slouching bullheaded kids at the high school, of which Deputy Jason Ringwald, seated two rows behind him and staring hard out the window, was a prime example. Most of them suppressed it and went out into the world to become cops and corporate raiders, army lifers, mill hands, but some never could get loose of it and they wound up in jail, crippled in motorcycle accidents or scattered across the blacktop in pieces. Or shot. Shot dead.

“Any time now,” a voice was saying and he looked up to see one of the SWAT team honchos, a lieutenant, all eyebrows and a mouth pursed round a set of small even teeth, hovering over the seat.

They were passing along Pudding Creek, which was tidal here, and had been used to float logs during rainy seasons of the past but was now a swampy stretch of nothing you could barely turn a canoe around in. There were houses up on the hills. Roads. The gleam of a parked automobile. “Here?” he said. “We’re barely out of town.”

The man — he was in his late thirties, forties maybe, with flecks of gray stubble along his jawline where he’d shaved hurriedly — just gave him a look. This man didn’t trust him. Didn’t like him. None of them did. He was the father of the shooter and that made him damaged goods, and if he wasn’t a suspect, in their eyes he should have been. “Might as well. You never know where he could be. Didn’t they spot him along here night before last?”

“That’s what I hear.”

The cop held the look. “It’s costing time and money. For the engineer up there, the two of them. And us. All of us.” He gave it a beat. “We got families too, you know.”

Sten shrugged and rose to his feet, the megaphone clutched in one hand. He was planning to go out there on the observation car no matter what anybody said, and if his son wanted to shoot him — Adam, if Adam wanted to shoot his own father — well let him go ahead. Anything would be better than this.

Until he stepped out on the deck, he hadn’t realized how stifling it had been in the car. The air was in motion here, blowing cool on his face and drying the nervous sweat under his arms. He smelled bay, alder, pine, smelled mud and standing water, the dark funk of rot that underlay everything. The train swung round a curve, heading east now, heading uphill, and he caught a glimpse of a hidden glen thick with moss and fern, the light sifting through the trees in a luminous haze that made him forget for a moment just exactly what the purpose of all this was. He braced his hips instinctively against the sway of the platform and let the world open up around him, thinking how ungenerous he’d been to dismiss the tourists — who could blame them for wanting to come up here where it was silent and green and the trees had stood motionless since the time before Christ, at least the ones the loggers hadn’t got to? The air rushed at him. The tracks sang. He found he’d gone outside himself for a minute there and it took the weight of the hard plastic butt of the bullhorn to bring him back, but then he raised the thing to his lips, feeling foolish and afraid and maybe a little fatalistic too because they were just wasting their time here, weren’t they?

He called Adam’s name, but nothing happened because he’d somehow neglected to switch the thing on. Behind him, a small army sat balanced over their weapons, watching him. He found the switch. Flicked it. And called his son’s name, bellowed it, chanted it, threw it up against the changeless trunks of the trees till it came back to him riding on its own echo, and he kept on calling it all the way up the line and back down again, as the shadows deepened and his voice dried up to a hoarse reverberant rattle in the very deepest hollow of his throat.

“YOU MIND IF WE just eat in front of the woodstove tonight?” She was in the kitchen, cooking, calling over her shoulder to where Christabel sat in the rocker in the living room, the latest Cosmo spread open in her lap and a glass of the chardonnay she’d brought along dangling from one hand. “It’s so much cozier in there, what with this rain and all, don’t you think?”

Christabel was giving her a faraway look, half-looped already. She didn’t answer.

“We don’t have to stand on formality, do we?”

“No, no way,” Christabel said, rousing herself. This would be one of the nights when Christa slept over, she could see that already. “Right here’s fine with me. Better than fine: now I won’t even have to move.”