T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

She was at home, in the kitchen, listening to music and pushing two bone-in pork chops around a pan and sprinkling them with rosemary from her garden. She was tired of salad so she’d bought some fresh spinach at the farmers’ market, rinsed it, tossed it with a little garlic salt and pepper, then splashed it with olive oil and balsamic and microwaved it for three minutes, easiest thing in the world. It had fallen dark now, the nights growing shorter — and colder — and Halloween just two days away. How would that play out? she wondered. What would parents tell their children? They’d have private parties, she supposed, because no one — absolutely no one — would be going house to house. Not with Adam out there. Would he consciously hurt a kid? Not the Adam she knew. But then he had driven his car onto the playground, hadn’t he? And maybe he wasn’t really the Adam she knew, not if he could shoot down Art Tolleson and the other one and just leave them there to rot.

Kutya stirred in the corner where he’d been lying asleep, laziest dog she’d ever seen and not getting any younger, and now he came clicking across the floor to her and the smell of the meat searing in the pan. “No,” she told him, bending from the waist to look into his eyes, “you’re just going to have to wait.” Then she turned back to the pan and flipped the chops, everything in its place and everything quiet, but here she was in her warm kitchen with the smell of the meat rising around her and she couldn’t help wondering what Adam was eating. He had a prodigious appetite and no matter how many freeze-dried entrées or cans of beef stew he’d squirreled away out there, how could it have lasted him all this time? He’d been breaking into cabins, they’d reported that, and he’d held that one old lady hostage back there at the beginning, but still. And that was another thing: no hot food. Even when it was raining, even when it was cold, and it had been getting down into the forties at night. Maybe he had a camp stove, the kind of thing you could risk cooking on in a deep secluded place, a cave or something, but even so he must have been pretty miserable. She tried to picture that a minute, him in a cave, with that rank wet smell caves always had and what, bats hanging overhead? He wouldn’t dare travel in the daytime, not if he had any sense and he did, obviously, so he must have been roaming the woods in the dark — and if he was, he couldn’t use a light. And if he couldn’t use a light, how could he find his way? Plus, how could he keep from dying of boredom out there, even if he was putting everything he had into baiting the jerkoff cops and their killer dogs and no doubt enjoying it too? Adam. And why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?

Maybe because nobody else could either. Anything went wrong within a hundred miles, even a flat tire, and Adam was to blame. Like with that whole debacle down at the Burnsides’. How quick they were to pin that on him, even with his mother — their friend, a woman who was just volunteering her time, for god’s sake — standing right there beside them. He shot the sable, that was what Gentian had said, not someone shot the sable, but he shot them. The way it turned out, though, Adam had nothing to do with it.

Of course, the cops were there within five minutes of Gentian’s putting in the call, swarming all over everything, their faces haggard and desperate because the system wasn’t supporting them, the system was breaking down right in front of their eyes and there was nothing they could do about it. They searched the edge of the field and came up with some shell casings and they had one of their butchers slice open these beautiful four-hundred-pound animals and dig the slugs out of them and they tramped hell out of the place but didn’t turn up Adam or anybody else. What they did discover, finally, and they took their sweet time about disclosing it too, was that two junior high kids had been fooling around with a deer rifle one of them found in his father’s gun safe, which had been left unlocked. They found something in the liquor cabinet too. And thought it would be a great idea — or rad, wasn’t that what they would say, a rad idea? — to go out and put holes in these beautiful animals that were fast disappearing from the earth.

She sat at the table to eat, idly paging through one of the magazines Christabel had left behind for her. Christa was a real hound for the gossip sheets— Us Weekly, In Touch, People, The Star —but basically they left her cold because it was just more of the same blindered attitude and slave mentality, as if whoever was dating whoever or buying what fabulous mansion had anything to do with the fact that the system was rotted all the way down to the stump. After dinner she went to her computer and read the latest about Adam, which was basically nothing piled on top of nothing, limiting herself to half an hour, and then she tried to read by the woodstove for a while, Kutya curled up at her feet, and finally turned on the idiot box to see if maybe there was an old movie on, one of the ones where people — Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, take your pick — made all these stirring declarations about democracy and standing up for the little man while the heroine flashed across the screen in all these killer outfits. It was crap, but high-minded crap, crap in layers she could peel away till she found something there that took her back to a simpler time, a time before the corporations had taken over and made a mockery of everything everybody said on the screen. A movie. It was just a movie. A way to pass the time in an empty house on a night when there was nothing going on and the world had been reduced to these four walls and this gently ticking woodstove and the dog, in his dreadlocks, on the rug at her feet.

The funny thing — or odd, odd was a better word — was that it was just like the last time, nothing moving, nothing shaking, but there was a feeling coming over her that she wasn’t alone. She looked over her shoulder. There was no one there. The doors were locked, she was sure of it, and if anyone should try to get in, Kutya, old as he was, would be up and barking his head off. She turned back to the movie, someone sitting by a deathbed on a ship, flimsy walls that were just a stage set and another movie playing through the porthole to give the illusion that the ship was moving and this was all real, and then the feeling stole over her again and she turned around and there he was.

He didn’t say hello or help me or I love you, but just stood there, like Adam, exactly like, only different because of what he’d done and where he’d been and how he’d been putting it to the cops for all these weeks now. Kutya didn’t stir until he spoke and even then he didn’t bark because he must have remembered him, without prejudice, because he was only a dog. Adam said, “Turn out the lights.”

She said his name, but she didn’t get up from the chair, though the dog had crossed the room to him, sniffing.

“Do it,” he said.

She got up then, but she didn’t go to him, instead working her way from lamp to lamp till the room was lit only by the TV. He looked older somehow, thinner, a lot thinner, and his clothes were ragged. She could smell the woods on him, the rot, as if he had been living in a cave. With the bats. And the lice. And the giardia parasites.

“Kill the TV too.”

“We’d be totally in the dark,” she said. “No, no way.” And then, standing poised there in front of the lamp over the desk even as the glow of it faded away, she said, “What are you doing here, anyway? Are you crazy? The cops are watching this place, don’t you realize that?”

He shrugged, dark in his dark clothes. There was a slash across his face, a welt there, fresh and livid, and the first thing she thought was that he’d been grazed by a bullet, but she saw that it wasn’t that at all, more likely a mishap in the dark as he was creeping up on the place. He just stood there, his hands hanging at his sides. And where was his gun, his rifle? There, propped against the wall in the hallway that led to the back room. He looked exhausted, looked beat — beaten, beaten down.