The Harder They Come (23 page)

He needed something, that was what he was thinking, Imodium or maybe if it was giardia, some kind of prescription. He couldn’t just go around sick in his stomach and shitting all the time, could he? No. That wasn’t going to work. He’d have to go into town, to the drugstore there. But if he needed a prescription, where was he going to get that? For the moment though the problem was the shit he could smell in his own nostrils and so he hiked his pants halfway and crabwalked over to sit in the spring and clean himself off, then he dried himself with leaves—not poison oak, just leaves—pulled his pants back up, collected his things and went off into the woods, heading upslope. He knew a place up there, remembered it, could picture it even now, where there was another spring. Maybe, he was thinking, just maybe, if he gave it a real good recon, it would turn out to be a primo spot, exactly what he was looking for.

And then let them come. Just let them.

S
TEN WAS AT THE
gas station, pumping gas and working the squeegee over the broad glass plane of the Prius’ back window, seven-thirty in the morning, sun shining, on his way down to the harbor with a spinning rod to fling a lure across the mouth of the channel there and see if anything cruising in from the sea would like to take it in its scaly jaws. All the years he’d been working he told himself he loved fishing the way he had as a boy, nailing steelhead and salmon in the Noyo, Big River, the Ten Mile and out on the ocean too, told himself that as soon as he had time he was going to fish till he dropped. But he didn’t. Or hadn’t. In fact, this was the first time he’d touched the rod in longer than he could remember, and he wasn’t fooling himself—he knew he’d put his gear in the car and come out here this morning just to do something, just to get out of the house and shake the rust off. If he caught anything, so much the better—that would be a bonus—but the real deal was to kill a couple of hours before he went back home to see if the bushes he’d trimmed yesterday had grown back or the caulk he’d replaced in the kitchen a week ago needed replacing again.

He was thinking of another gas station, one that was long gone now, where he’d worked the summer before his senior year in high school. Three young Italians—or maybe one of them wasn’t Italian—had pooled their resources to open the place. They were in their early thirties, he guessed, but back then they seemed old to him, and they were enthusiasts, full of jokes and high spirits, their own bosses now and sure to rake in a fortune. One of them, the one who might not have been Italian—Gene, his name was Gene—did bodywork and the other two, Tony and Rico, were mechanics.
What they needed him for was to pump gas, check tires and oil and coolant, and to dole out Green Stamps against their eventual redemption. Different times then. He’d worked seven a.m. to seven p.m. and every day at noon Rico would go to the sandwich shop and bring back subs for all of them—and beer, a can of which they would let him have instead of soda though he was underage. They made him feel good. Made him feel like a man.

Where were they now? he wondered. Dead, he supposed. Dead and buried and rotted away to nothing, the casket collapsed on itself, their bones bare and gray and losing heft by the day. People asked him what his philosophy was, as if by being principal—having been principal—he was schooled in the thoughts of the great thinkers, and what’s more, was a great thinker himself. Well, he had no philosophy. He just lived and drew breath like any other creature, more acted upon than acting. There were Jesus, Santa Claus and God when he was little, but they’d gone the way of slingshots and training wheels, the apprehension of death—the first intimation of it—canceling out everything else. What was his philosophy? Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. Or no, that was too harsh. Just be, that was all. What was coming was coming and there was no sense or comfort in worrying about it. Other people went to church, other people played golf, served on committees, ran charities. He went on a luxury cruise. He went fishing. And if Carolee should die before him, he faced a world of woe so deep and catastrophic he didn’t think he’d be able to see himself through. Definitely not. No way in the world. He kept a gun in the house, a Glock 9mm he’d always prayed Adam would never find when he was a squirrelly kid and into everything, and that gun would have its use sometime down the line. Retirement plan? Sure, the good and giving Glock Firearms Company would see to that.

So he was morbid, so he was bored, so he was pumping his own gas and letting his mind tick through the past and present like one of the mutating tapes of the home movies he’d made
when Adam was a kid before he saw the utter futility of it because who was ever going to watch them and how could you hope to stop time? There was a breeze. It lifted the hair around his ears and laid it back down on his shoulders, the lightest part of himself, but heavy all the same. Then a GMC Yukon, fire-engine red, slid up on the other side of the pump, and Art Tolleson’s face was there, suspended behind the sheen of the window like an old towel hung up to dry.

Art didn’t say hello and he didn’t smile. He looked like somebody carrying an armful of raw eggs as he eased out of the car and climbed up onto the island separating the pumps. “Did you hear?” he asked.

“Hear what?”

“They shot Carey Bachman.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think—the Mexicans.”

Art stood there blinking at him, the tentative expression gone now, subsumed in something harder. He looked pained, looked angry, as if he’d been shot himself, Art Tolleson, friend, neighbor, former colleague, a lifelong bachelor in his early fifties who taught English at the high school, and whether his sexual orientation had been a matter of conjecture in the faculty lounge or not never factored into the school board’s perception of him because he drew students like a magnet, male and female alike, and never a complaint or even the hint of one. He had a high nasal English teacher’s voice and a slack body, but as if in compensation—and to still rumors—he dressed as if he’d been born and raised in a logging camp, workboots, jeans, plaid shirts, and made a point of attending the full range of sporting events at the school. He hunted in the fall. Fished in the spring. And he’d done Sten a huge favor by taking the house off his hands, though the day he took possession was a disaster, every window in the place smashed out, glass everywhere, the coffee table staved in and the toilet in the guest room—Adam’s room—shattered in porcelain fragments
that lay scattered across the floor like unearthed bones, the water three inches deep and flowing out under the door. Sten had cleaned up the place himself, paid for everything, and he and Carolee had put Art up in the guest room at their place till the glazier got done because it was the least they could do. As for Adam, he hadn’t laid eyes on him since—or heard from him—and that was a month ago. “He needs help,” was what he said to Carolee, but what he was thinking, exhausted now, fed up, terminal, was
Goodbye and good riddance; there’s no paternal or even human sympathy left because the well has run dry. It’s dried-up and blown away.

“What are you talking about? What Mexicans?”

Art should have been wearing glasses but he wasn’t—contacts, had he gotten contacts? Or what, laser surgery? Art gave him a strained look, ever so slightly myopic. “They found him last night, up on the north logging road—you know, the one where there were all those downed trees last spring?”

He didn’t have anything to say to this. He was picturing the Mexican with the pistol tucked in his waistband, the Don’t-Fuck-With-Me clown with the scooped-out face. That picture went gray and broadened out till it was like a shovel whacking him in the back of the head. His blood pressure rocketed. Here it was, right in your face. The only surprise was that it hadn’t come sooner.

Art, myopic Art, was studying him out of his dull brown eyes, expecting some sort of response, but Sten was thinking about Carey, trying to picture
him,
and drawing a blank. All he could see was the Mexican, duplicated over and over again.

“They shot him twice is what I hear and left him there to die. That was night before last so there’s no telling how long he suffered. And then”—he hesitated, his eyes jumping in their sockets—“the animals got to him. After he was dead, I mean. Or I think. I hope.”

There was nothing to say but he had to say something so he said, “All right,” and what that meant—
I’ve heard enough
or
I feel your outrage
or
The tank’s full
—he couldn’t have said himself.

Art said, “We’ve got to do something.”

“Yeah,” Sten said, or heard himself say because he wasn’t all there yet, “definitely. Definitely we have to do something.”

“You have a gun?” Art’s tone was nasal but elevated with emotion, and he might have been reading out a line from David Mamet or Arthur Miller to his drama class.
You have a gun?

Sten didn’t answer him, or not directly, because he didn’t want to go down that road because that road led to people getting shot in the woods, led to poor Carey with his hot head and thumping knee getting it not once but twice until he was dead, dead, dead. Take Back Our Forests. Fine. Sure. But not that way. “They ought to call out the National Guard,” he said. “Sweep the whole fucking forest.”

“That’s an idea. Really. That’s what they ought to do.” A pause, a look, direct, eyeball to eyeball. “But Carey’s dead. And they’re still out there. Right now. Laughing, probably laughing about it.”

Sten got his receipt out of the metal slot, tucked it in his wallet, swung open the door and settled into the seat. “We’ll talk,” he said before slamming the door, starting up the engine and edging out onto the highway. A quick glance for Art in the rearview, and there he was, looking small and lost, the big red truck looming over him. Somebody waved from a passing car, somebody who looked familiar, though he couldn’t place him, and he actually started toward the harbor, driving along like anybody else on the way to a morning’s fishing on a day of precious sunshine under a sky lit bright and without a cloud to cast a shadow, before he put on his blinker, swung round and headed back home. The fish would be relieved, at least there was that.

Carolee was in her nightgown still, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the crossword puzzle out of the
Chronicle,
and she barely glanced up when he came in. “Back so soon?” she murmured. She was wearing her glasses and staring intently at
the page before her, trying to break the code, and this was her way of staving off the boredom and filling the hours when she wasn’t enjoying world-class indulgence aboard a cruise ship in the sunny crystalline waters of the Caribbean. Her hair shone in the light through the picture window, outside of which, in the intermediate view, birds flapped and clustered at the feeder, while in the longer view the sea sparked distantly under the sun. She was barefoot. The flesh bunched at her chin as she compressed the muscles there in concentration. “What’s a seven-letter word for earthworm?”

The answer—
annelid
—sprang into his head, cribbed from a mimeographed sheet of multiple-choice questions in Bio 101 a thousand years ago, but he didn’t give it to her, didn’t say anything in fact. He just stood there, shaken more than he cared to admit—and now he
was
seeing Carey’s face, the excitable face, the anxious one, the face he’d worn on the day they’d chased the Mexicans halfway across the county. He tried to picture him dead, but he drew a blank. Hard to picture anyone dead because there was a spirit there, a soul, the animating principle, whether you believed in God the Father and all the ministering angels or not, and that spirit was more specific even than the body that contained it. Carey was dead. There’d be a funeral. The community would come unglued. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Maybe so. But not this time.

“Sten?” Looking up now, the glasses at half-mast on the flange of her nose. “Did you hear me?”

What he said was, “They got Carey.”

She gave him a numb look, her pale wondering eyes riding up above the frames.

“Carey Bachman. The Mexicans. They shot him.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying he’s dead, what do you think? He’s dead. Carey’s dead.”

She wasn’t indifferent, or not exactly—he could see the alarm
germinating in her eyes and unfolding its petals across her face, color there, blossoming—but she didn’t jump up from the table and tear out her hair or set up a wail of grief or even, and he couldn’t help noticing this smallest detail, let go of the pencil gripped neatly between her thumb and first two fingers. The requisite questions dropped from her lips—
How? When? Where? How had he found out? Had they caught the killers? Was there no place safe anymore
?—and yet there was no shock in her tone, no outrage, no engagement. And why was that? He knew why. Adam. Adam was why.

She’d spent the previous afternoon at the Burnsides’, helping Cindy and Gentian with the animals and the tours they gave daily. But it wasn’t only Cindy and Gentian: Sara had been there. She came down on a regular basis, every six weeks or so, to shoe Cindy’s horses and file their teeth, and there she was, in her boots, jeans and a no-nonsense T-shirt, her hair tied back in a ponytail and her hands roughened by the work. Carolee had said hi, uneasy, maybe a little embarrassed because of the scene out front of the house the last time they’d seen each other, Adam attacking his own father and his own father down there on the ground, but she was aching for news of Adam and here was her chance to get it.

Cindy, always the gracious hostess, had set out a platter of tuna- and egg-salad sandwiches for them, late lunch, with a scoop of homemade potato salad and carrot sticks and a drink of her own concoction, two parts cranberry, one part each of sparkling water and diet 7Up. Nice. A nice lunch. Cindy was always going out of her way like that. They were sitting there, she and Cindy, talking about the antelope and Cindy’s hope for a mating pair of giraffes one of the zoos was offering them, when Sara came out of the bathroom where she’d been cleaning up. She looked good. She’d combed out her hair and put on some makeup and if she was forty she didn’t look it. More like thirty.

There was some business talk—the horses, the antelope, the fact that the vet was doing the hooves on the zebras, sable and
kudu now and Cindy hoped Sara didn’t mind but it was just easier that way since he had to be there to dart the animals in any case—and then Cindy excused herself to go to the kitchen and put on the water for tea and Carolee and Sara had a moment to themselves. “How are you?” Carolee asked. “Everything okay?”

The other woman tugged at her fingers for a minute as if to loosen the joints—she worked hard and had the calluses to prove it—then gave a smile so fleeting it was dead on arrival. “I’m not getting laid, if that’s what you mean.” She picked up her glass, rattled the ice cubes, drained what was left in the bottom. “So things could be better, yeah. A whole lot better.”

Carolee was puzzled. And maybe a bit offended too—she’d never been a fan of that kind of talk—but she forged on because she had no choice and if this woman with the flaring eyes and low habits and mad theories was going to wind up with Adam she needed to be understanding, needed to give her the benefit of the doubt, needed, above all else, to pump her for information. “But what about Adam? How’s he doing? Is he helping out, is he okay?”