The Harder They Come (12 page)

“Could you take him? Hide him, I mean—just for a few days?”

“I can’t have a dog.”

“You’ve got your own place, didn’t you tell me? Near Northspur? On the river there? That’s only like fifteen miles or something and there’s nobody around out there, right? Like even if Kutya barks, nobody’s going to hear. Or complain. Or even know.” She was looking at him as if she could see right through him, two naked eyes hooked up to her brain and taking in information like the feed on a video camera. “I could drive you there now and you could just—he’s no trouble. Really.”

“My grandma wouldn’t like it.”

“Talk to her, will you? Or we both could. I’m sure if she understood the circumstances—it’s just temporary, that’s all—she’d want to help out.”

He couldn’t picture that. Couldn’t picture the dreadlock dog in the house that was his private universe behind the eight-foot cement-block wall he’d built around it to keep them out, all of them, because the fact he kept trying to bury was that his father was selling the place to some alien and had already told him he had so many days from that day whatever day that was
to clean up your crap and get out and I’m not going to tell you twice,
which was why he’d set up the camp in the woods in the first place.

“No,” he said, “no,” and he was shaking his head. “She wouldn’t like it.”

J
OHN
C
OLTER WAS TWENTY-NINE
, four years older than he was now, when he signed on with Lewis and Clark for the expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase and open up the west. He’d been raised on the frontier in Kentucky, a wild place back then, more comfortable sleeping rough than in his own bed in the cabin he shared with his parents and his brothers and sisters and one uncle and his uncle’s wife, and if the other farmers’ sons were content to walk behind a plow, he wasn’t. He was a free agent from the earliest age, earning his keep by way of hunting, fishing and trapping, and in no need of a trail to carry him out or bring him home again either. As a child, he took to disappearing for days at a time, and then, as he got older and ran through his teens, for weeks, and no matter how far he roamed or in what territory, he was never lost, born with an uncanny ability to orient himself no matter where he was. He was like an animal in that regard, like a fox—or better yet, a wolf, an outlier with his nose to the wind.

Lewis and Clark took him on as scout and hunter, and while he left St. Louis with the expedition and stayed with it for more than two years, exploring the course of the Missouri River and going overland to the Columbia and ultimately the Pacific Ocean, he never made it back to civilization with the rest of them. It happened that on the return trip, while they were retracing their route through the Dakota country, a pair of trappers, heading west, stopped to camp with the expedition and tried to persuade Colter to come with them—he knew the country and they didn’t. He’d be their guide and their partner, three-way split. Plews were fetching ten dollars a head back in St. Louis, so it would be like
stealing candy from a baby, easiest thing in the world, trap beaver and get rich—not that Colter cared about money much more than as a means to keep him in powder and balls, but the idea of staying in the country appealed to him. He went to Captain Clark for permission to muster out and he gave it to him, though there wasn’t a man in that company who didn’t think he was out of his mind, more than two years on the trail and civilization within reach—women, drink, clean sheets, news of the world and the celebrity that would come down to them all—and yet all that meant nothing to him. That was for other men, weaker men. He wanted to go out into the wilderness and take what was his and if anybody stood in his way, Cheyenne, Crow or Blackfoot, he’d take them too.

What became of the trappers, nobody knows, but at some point—a month in, two—Colter had got fed up with them, and who could blame him? Even with Lewis and Clark he was mostly on his own, out ahead of the expedition, breaking trail, hunting meat, camping solitary against the fastness of the night. The trappers—Joseph Dixon and Forrest Hancock—bickered, gave out with opinions, expected him to do things their way, two votes to one, as if setting traps and roasting beaver tail over a cottonwood fire was a democratic process. By spring of the following year—this would have been 1807—he was heading back down the Missouri in a canoe, his plews gone and stolen after a party of Blackfeet had surprised him. He had nothing to his name but his knife and rifle and a leather pouch with his powder, balls, flint and steel inside, and he had no destination either, though he had a vague notion of going back down to St. Louis just to see what would turn up.

He never made it. He ran into another expedition at the mouth of the Platte River—a conglomerate of fur traders under Manuel Lisa who were ambitious to set up a trading post–slash-fort—and he agreed to go on ahead, to go back, that is, and scout for them. His job this time was to contact the Crows in
their scattered villages and spread the news about the trading post and how they could exchange furs for steel knives, mirrors, blankets, beads and baubles, which he did. In the process he became the first white man to discover what would become Yellowstone Park and managed to get himself shot in the right leg while fighting with the Crows against a party of Blackfeet. The Crows weren’t especially sympathetic or grateful either. They moved on and left him to his fate. But what kind of fate was that? Dying out there with a suppurating wound while the buzzards settled in for the feast? No, no way. Totally unacceptable. He wasn’t ready to leave this planet because he was too tough for that, too determined and resilient—and yes, independent—so he favored his good leg and walked three hundred miles back to the fort on the Platte.

This was what he knew, what the history books revealed, and if he closed his eyes while she sat beside him in the driver’s seat humming one of her lame country songs and the dog hung his head over the seat and breathed its meat-reeking breath in his face as the car yawed down Route 20 on the way to his place, he could picture how it must have been, Colter fighting down the pain till it went from something that filled him like an air pump inflating his skin to a hot white pinpoint of light that cooled with every step he took. Three hundred miles. Who could walk three hundred miles today, even on two good legs? Not to mention that Colter had no PowerBars or beef jerky or anything else, not even an apple, which people today took totally for granted as if apples were like air, and he had to forage all the way, subsisting on roots, frogs, snakes, the things he shot and feasted on only to leave what he couldn’t carry to rot when he moved on. That was legendary, that was a feat, but it was nothing compared to what came next—Colter’s Run, when he was naked and barefoot and a whole army of Blackfeet braves was chasing him down, all of them pissed-off and screaming and taking aim at his naked shoulders with their spears held high. He ran, and they chased him. And if he was
faster than they were, even on their own ground and with their feet protected by moccasins, it was because he was John Colter and they weren’t.

He knew something was wrong the minute they turned into the dirt road and heard the distant discontinuous clanging as if the world were made of steel and coming apart at the seams. The windows were down. He’d been staring into the side mirror, staring into his own jolting eye and seeing the door panels fixed there like blistered skin and the dog slavering out the back and smearing the fender with a shiny outwardly radiating web of spit and mucus that immediately turned brown with flung-up dust when they went from pavement to dirt, and he wouldn’t look up. He wasn’t ready yet. He was listening to the tires, a clean spinning whine of perfect harmony on the blacktop that gave way to an angry thump and pop as they rocked over the washboard corrugations worked into the road to his grandmother’s house—to
his
house—because it was better than listening to her, to Sara, who kept trying to radicalize him against the government when he was already a thousand times more radical than she was. Nobody governed him. They were all just criminals anyway, every politician bought and sold by the special interests and the cops nothing more than their private army—he knew that and she didn’t have to tell him. But she did. On and on till her voice seemed to be coming from someplace other than her mouth and lips and larynx, as if it was riding radio waves on its own special channel.

But that clanging. Somehow he knew what it was and who was making it, though he’d never heard that exact sound before and couldn’t have said how he knew unless it was some sixth sense like the sense that told Colter when there were hostiles about. She was saying, “They might come to my house but I’ll just play dumb and say, ‘I thought you had him’ and then get
angry and say, ‘What are you telling me—that he got away? Or what, you didn’t . . .’”—she turned to him, grinning, pretending to be someplace else talking to somebody else and not him at all—“‘send him out for adoption?’ And then I’ll pause and let my face go dark. ‘Or no, don’t tell me you
put him down
? Because if you did—’”

The house was there under the trees and the river was down below it. Ever since the cops had taken his car away he’d had to hitch into town for groceries, though his mother would come pick him up, was happy to come pick him up—and she’d done it a couple of times—but that wasn’t independent, and after a while when she pulled up to the house that used to have a phone before he uprooted it and tossed it in the river where it could go deep and talk to the minnows and steelhead in every human language, he would duck out the back door, slip over the wall and into the woods, and then he went to the locksmith and changed the locks so she couldn’t get in.

Sara said, “Is this it?,” and he nodded and she put on her blinker to turn into the gravel drive even as he saw the bishop pines screaming with sunlight and the three brown plastic overflowing trash cans no one ever seemed to come and pick up and the big object, the real thing, the thing that slammed at him like a missile shot out of nowhere—his father’s car, parked in the shadow of the wall like it belonged there.

“Shit,” he said. “
Shit
.”

The car lurched to a stop. She put it in park, cut the engine and turned to him. “What’s wrong?”

He just pointed at the car in front of them, a new Toyota hybrid his father had bought as a retirement present to himself, a statement on four wheels that might as well have had a loudspeaker attached to it trumpeting its miles per gallon and crying out against the spoliation of the earth and the four hundred parts per million of CO
²
in the air. That was a good thing, he wouldn’t argue with that—it made sense to cut down on gas-guzzling,
of course it did—but if you really wanted to get serious you’d just send the car back to Japan and use your own two legs to get around. His father didn’t need a car. Nobody needed a car. That was what feet were for. Tell it to Colter: he didn’t even have a horse.

The clanging faltered, intermittent now, and then it died altogether so that the little noises—of insects, the river, birds in the trees—came back to establish themselves in a soundloop that was as steady as the beating of his heart. Out of the car went the dreadlock dog the minute Sara cracked her door and then they were out in the yard and the dog was lifting his leg against something that hadn’t been there before, rubble, a pile of rubble that looked like busted-up cinder block. And then the clanging started up again and he thought of his father and how his father had got in his face when he saw the wall for the first time, shouting “Where’s your brain? You build an eight-foot wall without a doorway, what are you thinking? Or are you thinking, are you thinking at all?”

His father had shouted for a good fifteen minutes and then gone home and come back with a stepladder and he’d watched him—an old man with a scorched-earth face—climb up to perch crotch-wise on the lip of the wall and hoist the stepladder up behind him so he could ease it down the inside, and then his father was there, in the compound, and he was shouting all over again.

“It’s to keep people out,” he’d said in his own defense. “I can climb it. And I don’t need any ladder either.”

But now, now there was a doorway-sized hole in the wall and a pile of busted-up cinder block in the yard and even before the dreadlock dog had got done with his yellow arc of piss here came another fractured block, flung through the doorway to clack against the pile and send the dog off yipping as if he’d been hit, which he hadn’t. Sara snapped a look at him like he was the one who’d thrown the thing and called comfort to the dog while those little brown birds with the forked white tail feathers shot like bullets across the yard and the sun flared and flared
again. That was the moment his father appeared in the jagged new doorway, dressed in his hiking boots and jeans, his T-shirt sweated through and a pair of stained work gloves on his hands. His father’s face took up a wondering look and then discarded it. “Adam,” his father said, and his tone was neutral because he was surprised to see Sara there beside him, as if she’d crawled out of some secret passage deep under the earth like a gopher or a mole, a thing that went around on all fours, and
Let’s do it doggie-style,
she’d said the second time,
do you like it doggie-style?

“Hi, Sten,” she said, and he watched his father’s eyes fall into their twin sinkholes for just an instant as he tried to place her and then his father said “Hi” back and added her name, to prove he knew her. And more: his father was calculating, the two of them in the same picture, her with her big tits and the dreadlock dog that was sniffing at his leg now, putting two and two together, fucking in his mind, fucking, fucking.

“Nice to see you again,” Sara said, and his father dredged up a smile for her. “How’s retirement treating you? You did retire, right—isn’t that what I heard?”

His father put both his palms on his forehead and swept his hair back, gray hair going to white, the kind of thing a Blackfoot brave would have prized on a dripping scalp, then unfastened the rubber band pinching his ponytail, patted the loose hairs in place and refastened it, all in three seconds flat. This was his characteristic gesture. Or one of them, anyway. Hair. He had hair. “That’s right,” his father said. “Just got back from a cruise, in fact. Down south. Maybe you read about it? Or saw it on TV?”

She was wearing her jeans and shit-kicking boots, nothing to see there, so far as fucking was concerned, but her big tits were sticking out of a little turquoise blouse the size of a rag and you could see her navel too. And her belly. Her belly that was like a wave at sea and just as soft once it washed over you. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “yeah. Of course.” She raised her right hand to smack her head in a
duh!
kind of way. “That must have been terrifying.”

His father shrugged.

“I heard it was three of them. Mexicans, right? In Mexico?”

“Costa Rica.”

“Costa Rica? Jesus, I thought that was supposed to be safe—”

“Yeah, well, nothing’s safe,” his father said, and why did he look at
him
as if he’d had anything to do with it? He wasn’t there. He didn’t kill anybody. “It could happen anywhere. We were just lucky, that was all.”

“Three of them,” she repeated, “and they were armed and you had nothing but your bare hands? I’d say that’s more than luck.”

Another shrug, his father the hero, the killer. “You let two of them get away,” he heard himself say. He could feel his father’s stare boring into him, but he wasn’t going to look up and acknowledge it—he was watching the way Sara’s reptile boots shifted in the dirt, the two little silver gleams there at the toes of them,
shit-kickers
. “So did the guy’s eyes pop out or what? Like a frog when you step on it?”