T. Boyle - The Harder They Come

He dropped her off and drove around a while, seeing things he’d never had time to see before, mostly signs of decay, empty storefronts, ruptured sidewalks, graffiti scrawled on the cornerstones of the buildings along the main drag, the big hopeful welcome-to-the-world banner that loomed over the road in promise and challenge both: Willits, Gateway to the Redwoods . He went to the hardware store, though he really didn’t need anything, and poked around there for a while, then he sat on a chair outside one of the antique shops and tried to read a paperback book he’d brought along to ease the tedium because he was determined to give Carolee as much time as she wanted to sift through whatever the tourists and the newly dead had left behind. Finally, he just wandered up and down the street, peering in store windows, watching the traffic gather at the lights, thinking, as old people do, of lunch.

Carolee wasn’t answering her cellphone. An hour of his life had marched on into oblivion. His stomach began to act up on him — acid stomach, exacerbated by the coffee and booze that seemed to round out his life, morning and evening, like prayers — and he told himself he was hungry, that was all. It was one o’clock. He’d planned on taking Carolee to the Mexican restaurant, the nice one, but he found himself getting back in the car and running over to the fast-food place at the top of Route 20, just to get something to hold him, a burger, chicken sandwich, anything. Whopper. Maybe he’d get a Whopper.

The place was crowded, a fact that normally would have driven him up a wall. He’d spent his whole life being impatient, expecting everybody to clear out of his way, the slow drivers to pull over and the crowds, wherever they were — the movies, the ballpark, the airport — to gather some other time, some other day and hour when he wasn’t there to share the planet with them. He was always cursing under his breath, always wound up, but not now, not today. Today he had all the time in the world. Of course, the dropouts behind the counter moved as if their feet had been nailed to the floor, but finally the line in front of him dwindled down to just him and he put in his order and went over to the fountain to pour himself a small drink, eyeing a table by the window where somebody had left a newspaper. He was just making his way toward it when he glanced down the row and saw Sara there, sitting at a table by herself, a half-eaten sandwich at her elbow. She was dressed in her work clothes — jeans, boots and a long-sleeved shirt, and her apron, her leather apron — and she had her head down, absorbed in some sort of pamphlet. She seemed to have gained weight. Or maybe not. He couldn’t really remember.

It was an awkward moment. He didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want anything to do with her, but there he was, going down the very aisle of disarranged plastic tables where she was sitting, and he thought about swinging around and just walking right out of the place, getting in the car and forgetting about the whole thing — Whopper, did he really need a Whopper? — but he didn’t. He just continued on down the aisle, trying to slip past her, but at the last moment she lifted her face to him. “Sara?” he heard himself say.

Her eyes were adrift, soft and unfocused, and he watched them narrow to take him in. “Oh, hi,” she said, her voice so throaty and soft it was barely present.

“You all right?”

She shrugged. “Not really. You?”

“Day to day. Carolee’s still not over it, if she’s ever going to be. Which I doubt. But life goes on, right?”

She didn’t answer. Just dipped her head to take a bite of her sandwich as if she’d suddenly remembered what she was doing there. The door opened and closed. People drifted in, drifted out. “You want to know the truth, I’ve had it,” she said, glancing up at him again. “Soon as I can manage it I’m out of here.”

He was standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, nothing more to say, really, but something he couldn’t name held him there. He shifted his weight. Watched her chew.

“I’m thinking Nevada or maybe Wyoming? Someplace where you can live free without all this Big Brother crap. I’ve had it. Really, I’ve just had it.”

He didn’t know what to say to this and if he nodded his head it wasn’t in agreement or sympathy but only just to work the muscles at the back of his neck. Things came toppling down on you, whole mountainsides, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. If you were lucky — very, very lucky — you got to step out of the way. “Yeah,” he said finally, his breath released in a drawn-out sigh, and he opened his palm and closed it again, bye-bye. “You have a nice day now.”

“You too,” she said, and he was already moving down the aisle.

It was nothing, just a moment cookie-cuttered out of his day, but it was enough to see the look of hurt and incomprehension on her face and to brush it off too. How long had she known Adam? A couple of months. What was a couple of months? Nothing. A memory, a whisper, pages flapping in the breeze. He settled in at the table in back and picked up the discarded paper. When he looked up again, she was gone.

He was the one who’d had to identify Adam’s body, never any question that it was up to him and him alone because he wasn’t going to expose Carolee to that. It was there in a drawer at the morgue— he was there, Adam — looking as if he was asleep. There wasn’t a mark on his face but for a thin welt that might have been a rope burn, and what Sten was feeling in that moment was hard to contain. He’d seen corpses before, laid out on the ground, their lifeless faces turned to the sky, awaiting body bags and a chopper and then a flight back to the States, but they hadn’t prepared him for this. He didn’t break down, but it was close. Standing there alone in that room with its unnatural cold and the smell of chlorine bleach so harsh and pervasive it was like a public urinal, he fought to contain himself, because there was another odor beneath it and it wasn’t of the flesh or of its fluids, but of fear. Fear and regret. And what did that smell like? Like the body’s essence.

What he was remembering was Adam’s first day at the high school, freshman year, the teachers just back from summer vacation, everybody trying to settle in, the students decked out in their new skirts and jeans and oversized T-shirts, electric with excitement. First day. The whole year to look forward to, the ritual starting over again in a stew of hormones, timeless and immemorial. Math, history, the ballgame, senior prom, elections, lunch, gym class. There were never any fights the first day, never any discipline problems — everything was too new and everybody on their best behavior. Except for Adam. Within the first hour he was in the office, hauled in by Joe Buteo, the assistant principal, the enforcer. Adam had been in a fight. The other kid — a stranger to him as far as anybody knew — hadn’t done anything to provoke him. They were in the hallway between classes and Adam had seen something he didn’t like, something he couldn’t tolerate, some vision, some hallucination, and it was the other kid’s misfortune to have been part of it. It had taken two teachers to restrain Adam. The other kid — his victim, a junior twice his size who’d never caused anybody any trouble — had lost a tooth in front and his shirt was like a bloody flag.

Sten didn’t say anything, not then — this was the assistant principal’s job and he certainly didn’t want to give any impression of favoritism when it came to his own son — but when he got home you can be sure he laid into him. First thing. He came through the front door and stalked down the hall to his son’s room and he didn’t pause to knock either.