The Harder They Come (25 page)

S
O
A
DAM WAS GONE
. Adam was crazy and Adam was gone. That hurt. It did. Hurt her more than she would ever admit, not even to Christabel, and Christabel was there for her, sitting over her strawberry margarita with a long face saying, “You want to talk about it?” They were at Casa Carlos in Ukiah, Friday night, a month after Adam knocked her down, trashed the house and kept on trashing it till she thought he was going to hammer his way right on through the walls. She was crying that night. She’d tried to stop him, tried to bring him back up the hill where they could settle in and be like they were before, but he wouldn’t listen to her and he wouldn’t stop either. She screamed his name, screamed it over and over, the shock and confusion wadded in her throat till she thought she was going to choke on it, and then she cursed him, stood out in the dark yard and cursed him to the tone-deaf clank and clatter of things breaking, shattering, falling to pieces. Crying still, she’d put Kutya in the car, started up the engine and swung round in the driveway. “You son of a bitch!” she shouted out the window. “You shit! I hope you die and rot in hell!” Then she put the car in gear and drove on up the hill, listening to Hank Williams, only Hank, and crying in harsh hot jags that took the breath right out of her body.

She didn’t tell Christabel any of that—that was personal. Personal even from her. What she did tell her was that they’d had a fight—Adam was upset because they had to move out and he started taking it out on her—and that it was over, or probably over, ninety-nine and a half percent sure if you wanted to figure the odds. And what did Christabel say? “I don’t see what you saw in him, anyway.” She’d paused to blow out smoke. “Except
his bod. But he was trouble with a capital
T
and don’t you try to deny it.”

Now, in one of the dark booths along the back wall where the black velvet tapestry of Selena hung beside one of a snorting bull in a shadowy arena clotted with even shadowier faces, with the candle guttering in its rippled glass urn and the corny Mexican music tweedle-deeing through the speakers in a sad travesty of normalcy and joy, she felt like crying all over again. That, and getting drunk. They were already on their second pitcher, the remains of her beef enchilada and Christabel’s macho burrito congealing in grease on the plates before them—she really did have to start eating healthier and she made a promise to herself in that moment, albeit a drunken promise, to start tomorrow—and things had begun to blur a bit.

“I mean, beyond the sex,” Christabel said, her fluffed-up hair and the candlelight giving her a weird Halloweeny look, “what did he ever do for you? Did he contribute? Pay for anything?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. But she did. And in the next breath she said, “He could be so funny.”

“Right. Like that night he sat down to dinner buck naked—”

And then they were both laughing and she picked up the pitcher and topped off their glasses, the frothy pink confection like something a child would lap up, cotton candy made liquid, but it packed a punch, no doubt about that. Plus, she was driving because Christabel’s pickup was in the shop with some mysterious ailment that was probably nothing but would cost five hundred, minimum, of that she could be sure. The way mechanics took advantage of women, especially single women, was another kind of disgrace, as if things weren’t bad enough already . . .

The bill came. They divided it up and left a two-dollar tip on a thirty-six dollar charge because when you really thought about it the service was lousy and the food worse and the decor right out of a Tijuana whorehouse, and so what if the waiter gave them a dirty look when they were going out the door, he could go fuck himself,
they could all go fuck themselves. Right. And then they were on the street, the air cool on her bare arms, September nearly gone already and October coming on, time dragging you through the year as if it had hooks on it, one holiday after another, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and then the big ones, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of it in service of what? Shopping. Spend, spend, spend. Make the corporations that much richer and the people that much poorer. Really, the only way to get off that wheel was to drop out and she’d told Christabel that till she was blue in the face, explained it over and over, patiently, in detail, and still she didn’t get it. Or wouldn’t.

Jerry Kane got it. And Jerry Kane died for it. He just got fed up to the point where quoting the UCC code and declaring his status to whatever Fascist disguised as a policeman just didn’t cut it anymore and so he took up arms because they gave him no choice. The final straw, or the next-to-final straw, was when they arrested him in Carrizo, New Mexico, at what he called on his radio show a “Nazi checkpoint, show me your papers, Heil Hitler,” a checkpoint set up for the sole purpose of harassing citizens, both natural-born and slave-state, and, of course, extracting money from them, moola, hard cash, as if they were anything more than just roadside bandits out of the old time, the lawless time when you protected yourself and your own and lived free. It wasn’t any different from what happened to her. They stopped him for no reason except that they had the guns and demanded his papers and when he refused to enter into a contract with them they hauled him off to jail under threat, duress and coercion and what he did was file a counterclaim alleging kidnapping and extortion against the arresting officers and the justice of the so-called peace of the so-called court. And then, two months later, he was on his way back from one of his seminars in Vegas to his home in Florida, and it happened all over again, and who could blame him if he just turned around and defended himself from fraud, malice and yes,
kidnapping
. Yet again.

He’d had enough. And when the two cops came up to the white van that was his own personal property on one of the highways and byways guaranteed for free and unencumbered access under the Uniform Commercial Code, he started shooting. West Memphis, Arkansas, Crittenden County. Two oppressors shot dead. But that wasn’t enough because the cops tracked Jerry Kane and his son to that Walmart parking lot and two more cops went down in a shitstorm of bullets and Jerry Kane and his sixteen-year-old son gave up their lives for it. For what? For seatbelts? For
papers
?

“Uh, Sara—Sara, earth to Sara?”

It was cold. She was rubbing her arms on the street that was all but deserted and the neon sign out front of Casa Carlos was like icing on a frozen cake and Christabel was standing there beside her trying to be funny. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay, okay.”

Then they were walking to her car, the sound of their heels like gunshots echoing out into the night and the traffic lights going red and green and red again and nobody there to know or care and Christabel was saying, “You going to be all right to drive?” and she was saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

So she drove back to Willits on the road she could have driven blind and dropped Christabel off, a few pairs of headlights coming at her, nothing really. She was minding her own business and thinking ahead to Kutya and how he would have been missing her and holding his pee because he was the best-trained dog in the world and totally considerate of her, and if things seemed a bit blurrier than usual, that was all right, that was because it was dark and getting darker and she was sticking to back roads only now, taking a circuitous route home in the event there were any clowns in cop uniforms out there on the main road looking to harass, detain and rob people traveling in their own personal property to their own personal residence. Route 20, that was what she wanted
to avoid, and she did, cutting a big rectangle or maybe a trapezoid around it, twice having to back up and pull U-turns because she somehow wound up on dead-end streets. But Route 20 was where she had to go at some point if she was going to get home, and finally, after having circumvented—or rectangavented—the intersection at South Main, she found herself out on the darkened highway at something like eleven o’clock at night. Minding. Her. Own. Business.

And then it all started over again, as if she were caught in a time warp. One whoop, then the lights flashing in the rearview. The shoulder of the road, the narrow view out the windshield. The sounds: bugs in the grass, the overzealous roar of the cruiser’s engine straining even in neutral, the declamatory tattoo of the officer’s boots first on the pavement and then on the tired dirt strip of the shoulder. The lady cop, the very one, bloodless, thin as a post, no lipstick, and something like joy in her eyes. The flashlight. The commands,
License and registration, Proof of insurance, Step out of the car,
and the same answers, or answer: “I have no contract with you.”

But they had the guns. They had the handcuffs. And they had their way with her.

T
HIS TIME SHE HAD
to spend the night—in the drunk tank—with two other women, both in their twenties and both as dumb as boards and so polluted they couldn’t have stood up straight let alone driven an automobile, while she—she herself—was hardly drunk at all, and no, she wasn’t going to get out of the car and no, she wasn’t going to breathe into the Breathalyzer or stand on one leg or touch her fingertips to her nose or anything else. And why? Because SHE DID NOT HAVE A CONTRACT WITH THE REPUBLIC OF CALIFORNIA. And never would have. They could hang her, she didn’t care. But Kutya, poor Kutya, he was the one that had to suffer, just like the last time. He wasn’t in the Animal Control, but he was locked in the house and his bladder must have been bursting and what a trial of his conscience and all his training to have to go into the kitchen and take a sad guilty dribbling pee on the linoleum there. Where it would puddle. And stink. And dry up in a stain that would eat through the wax and take some real elbow grease to get out.

The judge was unsympathetic, a dried-up old bitch who looked as if her hair had been glued on. The bail money was doubled this time because of her failure to appear on the previous charge, and since Christabel didn’t have the money she’d had to go to a bail bondsman at an interest rate that would have put countries like Greece and Spain right under. Then there was the same charade at the impound yard, more bucks out the window, and she had to dig into her super-secret savings fund, the money she’d got when she and Roger split up and he bought out her interest in the house, money she’d told herself she’d never touch because it was going to be a down payment someday on a house
all her own—once she’d saved up enough on top of that to meet the piratical amount they wanted because the banks hadn’t got done raping America yet.

She paid off Mary Ellis at the impound yard, Mary too embarrassed to even mention the fact that this was the second time around and too much of a slave of the system to do anything more than just take the cashier’s check with a face carved out of lead and stamp her receipt. As far as the bail bond was concerned, she couldn’t leave Christabel hanging with that, so she took out the full amount to give her, five thousand dollars, because she had no intention of showing up for her court date. They’d got Jerry Kane, but they weren’t going to get her, never again.

What she was thinking was that the Republic of California was a place in which she no longer wanted to reside. It was the ultimate nanny state, everything you did short of drawing breath regulated through the roof, a list of no’s half a mile long posted on every street corner and the entrance to every park in the state. You couldn’t smoke on the street. Couldn’t park overnight, couldn’t pay your toll in cash on the Golden Gate Bridge, couldn’t buy something on the internet without the sales tax Nazis coming after you. You couldn’t even start a fire in your own woodstove or natural stone fireplace on a cold and damp and nasty winter’s day down in Visalia, where she’d lived with Roger through her unenlightened years, lest you run afoul of the air-quality control board, and don’t think you can sneak around the regulations because you’ve got a whole squadron of snitches and tattletales living right next door and across the street to report you out of sour grapes because they’re too whipped and beaten down to start up their own pathetic little fires.

No, what she was thinking was Nevada. Maybe Stateline. Anything goes in Nevada and if she found a place in Stateline she’d be within striking distance of all those rich yuppies in Lake Tahoe, who all had horses that needed regular shoeing and TLC like horses anywhere. Or maybe Kingman, in Arizona. She’d
been there once, just passing through but also to visit the funky little trailer court on old Route 66 there as a kind of pilgrimage, because that was where Timothy McVeigh had lived before he met Terry Nichols. Now
there
was a soldier, there was somebody who wasn’t going to take it anymore. Though maybe that was a bit extreme. She wasn’t violent herself and didn’t really believe in it and whenever his name came up she had to admit that maybe he had gone too far—she couldn’t see taking lives, though you could hardly call them
innocent
. Live and let live, right? Unless they keep on kidnapping you, keep on regulating you, keep on sticking their hands deeper and deeper into your pockets until you’ve got no pockets left.

Anyway, she entered into a contract with the court (TDC), picked up her car and drove home, where the poor dog ran and hid under the bed because of what he’d had no choice but to do on the kitchen floor, and that just made her all the more crazy. The subsidiary effects. They never thought of that. Never thought of what innocent creatures—truly innocent—they were torturing with their seatbelt laws and their drunk-but-not-drunk-enough nighttime patrols when anybody who wasn’t already asleep wouldn’t have given two shits if the streets were flowing with Cuervo Gold. But enough. She must have spent half an hour just standing there in her own kitchen, looking down on that piss stain on the floor, before finally she got down on her hands and knees and wiped it up, and then, because she wasn’t herself—she was trembling, actually trembling, she was so upset—she got out the mop, the bucket and the plastic bottle of Mop & Glo and redid the whole kitchen, just to take her mind off things.

She was just finishing up when her cell rang. It was Christabel.

“Just checking in,” Christabel said. “You all right?”

“I’m not hungover, if that’s what you mean. I wasn’t even buzzed last night. Not when they pulled me over. I mean, we did eat, didn’t we?”

“I feel so bad.”

“Bad? Why should you feel bad? The one that ought to feel bad is me. And the System. The System ought to feel bad, so bad it just rots from the inside out.”

“What I mean is, I should have been driving. I should never have let you, I mean, with what happened with the police last time around—”

She could hear Christabel breathing on the other end of the line, a series of deep, wet, patient breaths that were like a sedative. She could feel herself calming down. Christabel. Her best friend. Where would she be without her? “Don’t worry about me,” she said.

“Well, I am worried.”

“They can’t touch me.”

“What are you talking about, Sara—they’ve locked you up twice in the last, what, two months now?”

“What I’m talking about is I’m not going to be around, I’m out of here—I’ve had it, Christa, I really have—”

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to be like this again. If you skip out on this—”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got the money, I’m not going to burn you.”

“If you skip out they’re going to put you in jail, don’t you realize that? Don’t you get it? And not just for an hour or overnight either.”

She began to realize that on top of everything else the conversation was making her extremely unhappy, this conversation, even if it was with her best friend, even if Christabel only wanted to make her feel better, but she wasn’t making her feel better and maybe that was why she couldn’t help snapping at her. “So what are you now, a legal expert?”

“Oh, come off it, Sara—it’s just common sense.”

“Sure, and what do you know? You’re just a slave like all the rest of them. If you’d just read your Fourteenth Amendment, just
read
it—”

“
Sara
—”

And then she was quoting, from memory, because she was rankled and riled and she had to do something, “‘No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ You want me to go on?”

Nothing.

“Because I will. Because that right there is the essence of it, when the states gave up their rights and made all freemen on the land into federal citizens and then along comes the Social Security Act, surprise, to establish accounts in debit on every one of us, not to mention Roosevelt taking us off the gold standard—”

“Sara! Sara, listen, will you?” And here was Christa shouting at her, actually shouting at her because she didn’t want to hear the truth and never had. “Sara, I haven’t got time for this. I’m sorry. I got to go.”

“Yeah,” she said, and if her voice was bitter right down to the dregs, so what? “I got to go too.”