The Harder They Come (15 page)

“Same old,” she said. “But really, I don’t know why you have to make fun of them. If it wasn’t for the Burnsides and a handful of people like them, people who care, those zebras and antelope would be gone from the face of the earth.”

“Then why don’t they send them back? Because that’s where they belong, isn’t it? I mean, zebras in Mendocino County—give me a break. What does he think, he’s Noah or something?”

She was having a martini, three olives on the side. That was her trick: olives on the side so you get more gin, a matter of displacement—or lack of it, that is. She took a long slow sip, watching him. “That’s the idea,” she said. “Eventually. When things are, I don’t know, more stable over there.”

“Right,” he said, and he felt his spirits crank back up and it had nothing to do with the Xanax, or did it? “Because they’d just eat them now, right? Probably the minute they got off the boat.” The mountain zebra was almost gone in its native range, he knew that much, and the Grevy’s too. The kudu weren’t doing all that much better.

“
Stable,
” she repeated bitterly, sweeping her hair back. “It’s a joke over there. Places like Sudan or Somalia, even Kenya. Everything’s
guns. Tribes. Guerrillas.” She paused to back up and give it an exaggerated Spanish pronunciation: “
Gare-ee-yas,
I mean. Not gorillas—gorillas we could use more of. A whole lot more. But that’s the mentality over there—shoot everything that moves.”

“Over here too,” he said.

She was silent a moment. Then she said, “What are you thinking of having?”

“Me? Fish. What about you?”

That was when he glanced out the window to the street below and saw Adam climbing out of an unfamiliar car that had just pulled up to the curb—a Japanese thing, pale blue, that suddenly became familiar, because here was that woman, what was her name, emerging from the driver’s side to join him on the sidewalk. From this angle—he was right above them—he saw only the crowns of their heads and the flat plateaus of their shoulders, Adam’s head shaved to the bone and glowing in the light trapped beneath the fog. The woman—her name came to him then, Sara—wore her hair parted down the middle, a crisp white line there as if her skull had been divided in two. They seemed to confer a moment and then started across the street to the pizza place and the bar there, Adam in the camo outfit he seemed to wear perennially now and Sara in jeans, boots and a low-cut top that displayed the deep crease between her breasts, bird’s-eye view.

“Isn’t that Adam?” Carolee said.

“Yeah, he just got out of the car there.”

“Who’s that with him?”

“Sara. The woman I told you about—from the other day?”

A silence. The restaurant buzzed around them. They watched the two of them cross the street, mount the curb and disappear into the pizza place—the pub that sold pizza, that is—Adam hunching in ahead of her, no thought of standing aside or holding the door, but that was only typical, that was only to be expected, that was Adam.

“She’s old for him, isn’t she? She’s got to be forty.”

“That’s his business.”

“I mean, what’s she even doing with him?” She was leaning to her left, at the very edge of the table, squinting to peer out the window, though there was nothing to see but the closed door and above it the neon sign doing battle with the fog. “She’s a piece of work herself, is what I hear.”

He just shrugged, took a sip of his martini. He’d given up worrying about Adam a long time ago—or at least he’d tried to. Adam had problems. He’d always had problems. There’d been shrinks, a whole succession of them, but once he turned eighteen they had no control over that, and even after the last time he’d been arrested and evaluated by a state-appointed psychiatrist they still couldn’t get access to the records. Privacy laws. He was an adult. Living in his own world. And while that world had its intersections with theirs and they did what they could—helped him with money, gave him a place to live where he could have some privacy and do his thing, whatever that might be, putting up walls, obsessing over the Chinese, calling himself Colter—he kept pushing them away till there was no point in it anymore.

“Cindy Burnside says she’s got some pretty strange theories; I mean, really out there—as in right wing? As in conspiracies? Anti-everything? You know she got arrested for refusing to show a cop her license and registration?”

“She’s fine,” he said. “He’s fine too.”

“Fine? Where’s he going to live when we close on my mother’s house? With her?”

He didn’t have a chance to answer because the waiter suddenly appeared with two fresh drinks, two more martinis, which would put them both over their self-imposed limit, if they were going to drink wine with dinner, that is—and they were. But there was the tray, there the perspiring glasses, there the waiter, smiling. “We didn’t order those,” Sten said.

The waiter—fiftyish, in white shirt and tie, his hair slicked
tight to his skull—gestured to the couple sitting two tables over. They smiled, waved. Did he know them? “Compliments of the gentleman and lady,” the waiter said.

“I don’t want another martini,” Sten said. “I’m not even half-finished with this one—”

“They want to buy you a round,” the waiter said.

He wanted to say
For what? Why? I don’t even know them,
but they were already raising their glasses to him and here was the man giving him the thumbs-up and then the peace sign—or maybe it was the
V
-for-victory sign—and he said, “Yeah, sure, okay,” and in the next moment he was raising his glass in return.

“That was nice,” Carolee said.

“Real nice,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

She must not have caught it because the next thing she said was, “The sturgeon sounds good,” and then, in non sequitur, “I thought Adam wasn’t supposed to go in there? Piero’s, I mean.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

“They don’t eighty-six you for life?”

He stared into the fresh martini—and he wasn’t going to rush even if it was getting warm before his eyes because he wouldn’t have strangers dictating his life to him—before he looked up and said, “If every time somebody got a little rowdy they eighty-sixed you for life all the bars in the world would be out of business.”

“A
little
rowdy?” And here was that look again, the one that bunched her eyebrows. “I’d say he was more than a little rowdy—and what did that wind up costing us?”

He felt the irritation come up in him, despite the Xanax, despite the gin and the whiff of vermouth riding atop it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

T
HE NEXT MORNING, EARLY
, he found himself back in Fort Bragg, at the grocery there—the cheap one, the one the tourists didn’t know about—pushing a cart and working his way through the itemized list Carolee had pressed on him as he went out the door. The place was over-lit, antiseptic, as artificial as the flight deck of a spaceship, and at this hour there were more shelf-stockers than shoppers. That was all right. He liked the early hours, when things were less complicated. He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate, and he supposed he could thank his mother for that. And his father. The work ethic—once you had it, once it had been implanted in you, how could you shake it? Why would you want to? Relax, he kept telling himself. Keep busy. Relax. Keep busy. The last thing he wanted was to wind up sitting in a recliner all day staring at the TV like some zombie or pulling on a sun visor to chase a golf ball around the fairways with a bunch of loudmouthed jocks. Or bridge. He hated bridge, hated games of any kind. But how
did
you relax? That was the problem he was trying to resolve—and certainly world-class indulgence wasn’t the answer.

He seemed to have a package of meat in his hand, T-bone steak, slick and wet and red, and when he set it in the cart, there was a fine glaze of blood on his hand, and no place to wipe it off. Some stores provided paper towels to ease the unpleasantness of this little reminder of precisely where that steak or chop or chicken breast originated, but not this one. He stood there a moment, rubbing the pink glaze over his fingertips before
surreptitiously wiping it off on the soft plastic wrapper of one of the packages of hamburger buns stacked on the display case behind him.

When he turned back to the cart, reaching down to reassemble the things there and check them against Carolee’s list—1% milk in the plastic jug, pickles, cookies, more meat, pasta, beans, rice—he felt the twinge in his lower back again, the muscle there balky still. It seemed to bother him more in the mornings, stiffening up overnight despite the form-fitting neoprene pad Carolee had stretched over the mattress, but then he hadn’t slept on that pad or in that bed—their bed—the previous night. He’d wound up on the narrow single bed in the guest room because Carolee was in one of her moods. And it wasn’t all her—he’d been in a mood too, absolutely. And why? Because after they’d finished their celebratory dinner, she’d insisted they go across the street and into the pizza place where Adam was, where Adam had been for the better part of an hour. “For an after-dinner drink,” she said, taking hold of his arm as they came down the stairs at the restaurant.

“They don’t have after-dinner drinks there. Only beer and wine, remember?”

“An after-dinner wine then.”

They were passing by the bar on the lower level—the door swung open on muted lighting and inflamed faces—and he said, “Why not have one here? A real drink, a cognac or that Benedictine you like. I’m wined out, if you want to know the truth.” They were in the hallway now, moving toward the front door. “Or actually, I’ve had enough. More than enough. Let’s just go home, huh?”

She was chopping along in her short swift strides, tugging at his arm as if leading him on a leash. “I want to go to Piero’s,” she said.

And he stopped, right there, right at the door, to tug back at her. “Let it go,” he told her. “Drop it. He’s a big boy now. He’s an adult. You can’t just go around spying on him—”

“I’m not spying on him. I just want a drink at Piero’s, all right? Is that a crime?”

“No,” he said, “but stalking is.”

She’d jerked angrily away from him. “I can’t believe you,” she said, pushing through the door and out onto the street while he followed in her wake, the folds of her dress in violent motion, her perfume an assault on the damp night air, perfume he didn’t like, had never liked, perfume she wore just to make his eyes water. He made a note to himself to find the little bottle amidst the clutter in the bathroom and dump it in the trash when she wasn’t looking, but then of course she’d just go and buy another bottle and he’d dump that and she’d buy another one, a losing proposition all the way round. He hadn’t gone two steps before she swung round on him, combative, her legs braced, hands on hips. “He’s my son.
Our
son.” She took in a deep moist breath and blew it out again. “I just want to get a look at her.”

The fog softened the lights of the buildings up and down the street. There was no traffic. No noise, no sound of any kind. Even the ocean, no more than five hundred yards away, was silent, as if the waves had been sucked back down the beach before they had a chance to break. “Right,” he said into the stillness, “like we just happened to be passing by and got a sudden craving for pizza, at what—nine-fifteen at night? When we’re normally sitting in front of the TV and thinking about bed? He’s not stupid, you know.”

Her face was contorted, angry, the lines at the corners of her eyes etched in the faint tricolored glow of the neon across the street. “I’m going in there,” she said. “Whether you’re coming or not.”

What he did then was take hold of her arm—or no, he snatched it with a sudden jolt of violence that seemed to explode inside him. “You’re going nowhere,” he rasped, his voice locked tight in his throat.

She tried to pull away but he held on to her, his hand clamped
just above her elbow, feeling the bone there, the humerus, and how weightless and weak and fragile it was. She was angry enough to curse him, except that she never cursed—in her quaint moral universe, women didn’t use offensive language, only men did. “Let me go,” she demanded, “you’re hurting me.”

He didn’t know what had come over him but it was all too much—Adam, Warner Ayala, the martinis sent over by two total strangers as if they could buy his approval, as if he’d asked for it or wanted it in any way, shape or form—and he just tightened his grip till all he could hear was the furious chuffing intake of her breath and the kick and scrape of her heels on the pavement. This was a dance, a kind of dance, more jig than polka, and it might have gone on till one or the other of them gave in, but then a car came up the street, headlights sifting through the fog to pin them there as if they were onstage, and he let her go. At which point she lurched back a step and then, without so much as a glance, stalked across the street and into the bar, leaving him with no choice but to follow.

It was a tiny place, claustrophobic, smelling of hops and cold sweat. There was an L-shaped bar that seated ten maybe, kitchen beyond it, a narrow hallway, a cramped array of tables. People were packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, chattering away in a percussive animal hum. In the old days there would have been a dense haze of cigarette smoke and a whiff of marijuana too, but if you wanted to smoke now it had to be outside, on the street. Behind the bar was a chalkboard featuring the brews on tap, with brief descriptions, the most pertinent of which seemed to be alcohol content. One of the ales, Sten noticed, was listed at 11.9% alcohol by volume, which must have had a real kick to it, but then that was the point, wasn’t it?

Carolee was standing at the bar behind a cluster of people, mostly young, who were hunched over their elbows and their pints of stout, pilsner and ale. Nobody was drinking wine. And Carolee, her shoulders tense with agitation and her hair tucked
haphazardly up under the collar of her coat, made no move to flag down the bartender. Her hands were clasped before her as if she were patiently awaiting her turn, when in fact her eyes were fixed on a table in the back, the last one down the narrow hallway which gave onto the restrooms and the rear exit. She was trying to be discreet, trying to look like a thirsty, gracefully aging woman who was only waiting for her pint of 11.9% ABV ale, but she wasn’t doing much of a job of it—she just looked awkward, that was all. No matter. Adam’s back was to them. He was leaning into the table, apparently staring down into his beer, while Sara, her face animated, did the talking. And gesturing. She was really going at it, her face running through all its permutations, her hands dancing and fluttering as if she were directing traffic on top of it, and what was the subject? The problems horses had with their hooves? The DMV? Dogs? Or was she just talking, was she one of those people—women, for the most part—who just talk to round out the sonic spectrum? Which would have cast Adam in the role of listener, but then Adam never seemed to pay much attention to anyone, off in a trance half the time, as if it wasn’t words that had meaning but the sound itself, voices sawing away like instruments in an ever-expanding orchestra. Sten eased his way through the crowd and tapped Carolee on the shoulder. “Okay, you’ve seen her,” he hissed, “now let’s get out of here before she spots us—or Adam does.”

Carolee wouldn’t look at him. She made a pretense of studying the chalkboard. “I want a beer,” she said.

“A beer? I haven’t seen you touch a beer in ten years.”

“All right, a wine. A pinot noir. Get me a glass of pinot noir.”

There was music playing over the sound system, a thin drift of high harmonies rising above an insistent guitar, the volume turned just low enough so that you couldn’t actually hear it except at odd intervals, though you knew it was there. He shuffled his feet. Put his hands in his pockets. He felt bad. Felt conflicted. Carolee was going to get her wine, that was as certain as the
law of diminishing returns, and he was thinking he could maybe maneuver her back toward the door, as far from Adam as possible, and hope for the best. But then what was he thinking? What was wrong here? Why couldn’t they just stop by their own son’s table and say hello as if they’d drifted in at random? (
Yeah, they’d been to a movie and had a craving for pizza and what a surprise to see you here, but we won’t keep you, no, no, just go ahead and we’ll see you later, okay?
) Because Adam wouldn’t believe them, that was why. Or maybe he would. You could never tell with him.

If all this was about making a decision, it was taken out of his hands, because Sara looked up then, her eyes languidly scanning the room, till they settled on his and then Carolee’s. He watched her face change. First she looked puzzled, as if she couldn’t quite place them, but then she smiled and waved and ducked her head to say something to Adam, who seemed to stiffen in his seat. His head was down still, the muscles at the back of his neck bunched, but he didn’t move or respond. He might have been frozen in place, might have been a statue. There was a lull. The music emerged. Somebody shouted out something inane, the way people tend to do in bars. And then, very slowly, Adam turned in profile to glance over his shoulder. The look he gave them—his parents, his own parents—shaded from incomprehension to hate, to a look of such ferocious contempt you would have thought they’d come to tear the flesh from his bones. In the next moment he was up and out of the seat and hurtling down the hallway, past the kitchen, past the restrooms and right on out the back door. And Sara, the horse lady who was fifteen years older than he was and no paragon herself, gave them a fleeting apologetic smile before she snatched up her purse and hurried out after him.

But now it was morning and Sten was in the supermarket, arching his back to take the crick out of it, Carolee’s list clenched in one hand and the steak seeping blood at the bottom of the cart, getting on with his life. Eggs. Hadn’t she mentioned something about eggs? He scanned the list, her handwriting a neat rounded
script that flowed like music on the page, handwriting that was as familiar as his own, but he saw no eggs listed there. What the hell, he was thinking, reaching for the carton anyway, thinking better safe than sorry, when he became aware that someone was standing right there beside him, too close for casual contact, someone who started off as a pair of running shoes and shorts climbing out of the floor and turned out to be Carey Bachman, who used to teach social studies at the school till his wife’s cosmetics business took off and made earning a paycheck extraneous. He was in his mid-forties, with a narrow slice of a face dominated by his milky protuberant eyes (“Fish-Eyes,” the students had called him behind his back) and he was dressed in a T-shirt though it was fifty-eight degrees outside and colder in here, what with the refrigerated air of the meat and dairy displays, and he should have been smiling, but wasn’t.

“Carey,” Sten heard himself say.

Still no smile. Sotto voce: “Hi, Sten.” A glance over his shoulder, conspiratorial. “Listen,” he said, “you see what’s going on here?”

See what? What was he talking about?

Carey led with his chin, eyes up, then down again, and Sten looked across the aisle to see three—no, four—Mexicans pushing a pair of overloaded carts. They were dressed in work clothes—boots, jeans, long-sleeved shirts—and each wore a brand-new Oakland A’s cap pushed back on his head with the bill jutting out at an odd angle, as if it were a fashion trend. Other than the caps, which they might have got at a ballgame at the Coliseum the night before, there was nothing to distinguish them. Three were young—teenage or early twenties—the other middle-aged. They could have been anybody. “Yeah,” he said, “I see them. What’s the deal?”

Carey gave him a look of disbelief. “What’s the deal? ‘Take Back Our Forests,’ that’s the deal. Remember, you came to the first meeting? Before you went off on vacation—on that cruise?”

It came back to him now, though so much had happened in the interval he’d completely forgotten about it, and even if he hadn’t he still couldn’t fathom what Carey was talking about. It was seven-fifteen in the morning. He’d had too much to drink the night before. The overhead light cut into his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “So?”

“This is just what we were talking about. This. Right here. Right now.” Carey was having trouble containing himself, but he dropped his voice as the Mexicans wheeled past and turned into the next aisle over.

Sten saw that their carts were loaded with staples, four-pound bags of Calrose rice, dried pinto beans, cellophane-wrapped boxes of instant noodles and what looked to be half the ground meat in the store, but still he just stared at Carey, the moment unwinding in slow reveal. Take Back Our Forests had been Carey’s idea—his and Gordon Welch’s, who managed the local B. of A. branch—and it wasn’t a vigilante group, not at all, a designation they’d bent over backwards to deplore. No, it was a citizens’ group—an association of concerned citizens, property owners, businessmen, locals all—that had risen up spontaneously in response to what was going on in the forest. The drug cartels—La Familia, the Zetas, Sinaloa—had come north, had come here, to grow marijuana on state and federal land, bypassing the need to smuggle product across the border, and in their wake they’d brought violence to the Noyo Valley, to Big River and the Mendocino National Forest. And worse: they poisoned everything, putting out baits for rabbit, skunk, deer and bear, even poisoning the streams. The calculus was simple: a dead rabbit wouldn’t be girding the base of the plants to get at the moisture there and a dead deer wasn’t going to browse the nascent buds—or a dead bear either or a marmot or a squirrel or anything else that ate, moved and breathed—and the best way to ensure that was just to poison the drinking supply. Hikers had been shot at. Fishermen. Hunters. People were afraid to go into the woods.