The Harder They Come (28 page)

I
T WAS A LONG
hike from her place, down through the wooded canyon that was like her two spread legs with the river the wet part in the middle of it, but it was nothing to him and he could have walked it five times a day if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. He’d got his prescription and that was going to stop the shits—it already had—and he’d got the sex he really didn’t need but wanted, anyway, another weakness. Poison oak. The shits. Sex. If he stopped to think about it, it scared him. A voice—and it wasn’t in his head, but out there in front of him somewhere, hidden in the leaves—started ragging on him.
Boy Scout,
it called him.
Girl Scout. Brownie. Weakling. Dude. Fag. Wannabe
. After the first hour he stopped listening because that voice was the voice of defeat and if you had discipline you could take your weakness and transform it into strength, the same as you could take a fat kid with a bag of Doritos and make him lift weights and run a treadmill instead of playing video games and firm him up in a month. Basic training. Run the hills, climb the ropes, get hard and stay hard. His father had been a Marine and he’d been hard once but now he was old. And soft. Still—and this came to him at odd moments, like now—he
had
gone over there and waxed gooks and then as an old man went down to waste some Costa Rican alien with his bare hands and you had to give him credit for that. Even if he was clueless. Even if he didn’t have even the faintest hint of the threat the hostiles posed, but then why would he, living in his clean and perfect upscale ocean-view house in Yuppiesville, California?

The day was cool and he hardly sweated at all, plus his clothes were clean, courtesy of Sara’s washer and dryer, and if he regretted
not having stayed on at least for one day more, at least till he could have gotten to the grocery store and maybe Big 5, he had to dismiss it. He was on a mission, never forget that. Maybe that alien had interrupted him, had showed him how weak and mindless and just plain stupid his first attempt at establishing a backup position was, and maybe that was for the best because he hadn’t been prepared, had he, but now he was or he was going to be. He’d already cached some things at the second camp, which was an hour’s hike from the one he’d had to abandon, the one he’d had to say
mission aborted
to, and on a different watercourse entirely, high ground, absolutely, and no road within miles. He was on his way there now, hurrying, hurrying, and there were planes overhead, always planes, glinting, and it was just a matter of time before it was drones, which were just another kind of robot, and his wind was good and his legs were strong even if his pack was overloaded and pulling ever so slightly to the right and he really didn’t feel like stopping to shift things around. What he had in there were the items he’d acquired from Sara that she wouldn’t be needing, anyway, like what was left of the bottle of bourbon and some cans of beef stew (extra weight, but totally tasty, especially over a campfire, and easy too because all you needed was a can opener and you could set the can down in the coals and then eat right out of it when it was ready), plus a hatchet and an adjustable wrench he’d found in some alien’s cabin on the way up and then stashed for the return trip.

But wait: was he lost? He seemed to wake up suddenly, the sun a jolt to his system the way coffee was, but she hadn’t made coffee and he hadn’t wanted it because she was asleep in bed and snoring with her mouth thrown open when he slipped out the door, and he realized he was disoriented, to the south of where he wanted to be, and how he came to realize it—and come awake—was because here was somebody’s cabin hidden in the trees and a dirt road curling up in front of it like a cat taking a nap. All right, he was thinking, why not? And he circled the place three times,
doing his recon, until he determined with ninety-nine percent accuracy that there was nobody home. Up on the porch now, locked door, casement windows, drawn curtains. Hello, anybody there?

A tap of the stone he dug out of the dirt and the near window had a fist-sized hole in it that allowed him to put his hand in, rotate the latch and pull the windows open so that anybody could have just stepped right over the sill and into the place that was only two rooms, woodstove, rag rug on the floor, a rusty dusty musty smell, and what was this? A .22 rifle hanging from two hooks over the stove and wouldn’t that make a nice close-up kind of weapon if somebody sawed off the barrel and filed it clean?

He lost himself there for a while and that wasn’t cool, that wasn’t military, and he would have been the first to admit it. But so what. He liked the feel of the place, liked the old armchair with the dog hair on it and the stuffed deer head sticking out of the knotty-pine wall across from it—and he liked the liquor too, a handle of vodka, two-thirds full, papa bear, mama bear, baby bear. He found a hacksaw in the toolshed and a vise and file there too. Food in the refrigerator, ham and cheese, yellow mustard, soft white sourdough bread that toasted up just perfect. And what was that tapping on the roof? It was rain, that was what it was, first rain of the season, and if it swelled the streams he wasn’t worried. All that hurry, and for what? In fact, he just took a time-out and built a fire in the woodstove and sat there through the back end of the morning and into the afternoon, drinking somebody else’s vodka and modifying somebody else’s .22 rifle, and didn’t think anything at all.

What woke him was his sixth sense. He heard the rain, heavy now, sizzling like the deep fryer at McDonald’s, and something else, an automotive noise, but the wheel inside him was barely turning at all and the vodka seemed to just press down on him till
he felt like a deep-sea diver in one of those old-fashioned deep-sea suits with the riveted helmet and the long trailing air hose that seemed to rise up into infinity. It wasn’t weakness and it wasn’t the vodka, or not exactly, and it wasn’t the warmth of the woodstove or the fact that he could have lived in this cabin himself, all by himself, and built a wall around it too . . . it was just that he was feeling cool, equal to anything, and he was just waiting to see who or what was coming through that door because he had a sawed-off .22 in his hand that was just like a pistol, that he could use as a pistol in any tight place, and a box of shells for it too that was just lying there in the drawer of the coffee table next to a deck of cards that had been thumbed through so many times the lamination was practically worn right off each and every one of them. And he’d looked. He had. And saw that the deck was missing the ace of diamonds—not the ace of spades, the ace of diamonds—and what that meant or didn’t mean he couldn’t say. He wasn’t superstitious. Or maybe he was.

Footsteps on the porch. Key in the lock. And there she was, an old lady with white hair and a what’s-up face who could have been his grandmother if his grandmother wasn’t dead already and buried and probably being dug up at that very minute by Art Tolleson, whoever he was or turned out to be when you peeled his mask off. It took her a minute, hanging there in the doorway as if she couldn’t decide whether to stay or go, the rain hanging like a gray sheet behind her and smelling of release and new life for the plants, the animals, the gullies and creeks and rivers. “Who are
you
?” she asked and before he could answer asked what he was doing there. Or what he thought he was doing there.

The door stood open. The old lady had three plastic bags of groceries dangling from her purple-veined hands. Her hair was wet on top and two long strands of it, one on either side of her puzzled face, were plastered wet to the skin there. “Who am I?” he said. “I’m Colter. What was the second question again?”

The rain sizzled behind her. It was really coming down, a real
worm-washer. She didn’t seem to have heard him. She just stood there, the bags dangling. “What are you doing in my house?” That was what she wanted to know, and if there was an edge to her voice now, that was because she’d begun to take in the scene, the open window, the vodka, the fire, the metal shavings on the floor and the vise he’d clamped to the edge of the coffee table to steady the blade. And the guns: his rifle, propped up against the armchair with the dog hair on it, and the modified .22 he held in his hand. Which used to be a rifle. And used to be hers.

She deserved an answer and he felt so lazy and peaceful and calm he decided to give her one—and to be as pleasant about it as he could too. “Enjoying your hospitality,” was what he said, even as another sound entered the mix, the rattle of a dog’s toenails on the boards of the porch, and here came the dog himself, a miniature poodle sort of thing, old and arthritic and with the dark stains of his drooling eye fluids darkening the white fluff of fur on either side of his snout. He didn’t even bother to bark. Just stood there next to the old lady, dripping.

“You get out of here,” the old lady said then, and it wasn’t the dog she was talking to.

He held up a hand. Everything was okay, couldn’t she see that? There were no aliens here. And she wasn’t Chinese, not even close. So what he did was push himself up from the chair and go over to the window and pull it shut. “Sorry about the glass,” he said, and then, forgive him, he couldn’t help himself, he was laughing. “But you forgot to leave me a key.”

She did have a telephone, but he didn’t care about that. It was the same ugly sort of thing his grandmother’d had, no cellphone, cellphones didn’t work out here, but just a big black box of a thing that was so heavy you could have beaten an elephant to death with it. He didn’t want to alarm her so he didn’t jerk the wires out of the socket but just bent down and gently removed them, then straightened up and dodged past her with the phone and its trailing wires in one hand and the .22 in the other, and tossed the
whole business out into the rain. (The phone, that is. Not the .22. The .22 he was going to need.) Then he pushed the door shut behind her—she still hadn’t moved, though the dog was really tapping up a storm now on the bare boards of the floor, all worked up about something.

“Listen,” he said, and the look on her face was breaking his heart because it was exactly the look his grandmother used to give him when she was pissed at him, “I really want to thank you for your hospitality. And I’m going to have to go soon. I’ve got, well, a lot”—and he waved one arm to show just how much he did have to do—“but with this rain and all, I think we might as well get comfortable, at least for a while. Don’t you?”

The time he drove the car through the fence at the playground he’d gone outside of himself for a moment there and knew what he’d done the minute the kids started scattering like rabbits across the dead grass and the scooped-out sandpit under the monkey bars, which were what stopped the car finally. The monkey bars were made of hollowed-out steel and they were cemented in place like a big metal beehive, and that was what set him off in the first place. To this day he couldn’t go past it without picturing the thing as some alien Chinese spacecraft just touched down and disgorging all these shrieking little half-sized hostiles who turned out to be kids, just kids. It was hard to explain, and he’d tried to explain it, tried hard, first to the pigs on the scene, then to the court-appointed lawyer and then to the judge and the shrink they assigned him. “Hey,” he said, “give me a break, it was an accident. And yeah, okay, I was on ’shrooms, all right? Is that a crime?” But it was. And he shouldn’t have said that or admitted it or whatever and he knew he’d fucked up the minute it was out of his mouth.

They sent him away for evaluation but he didn’t have a record and he was mostly clear while he was in the
facility
as they liked to call it
euphemistically
and they gave him meds, more meds, and
released him to the custody of his parents and he went back to school and got bored and hung out with Cody and got high and higher and finally moved in with his grandmother and turned eighteen and began to get serious about the outdoors because he saw his destiny then as the first true mountain man of modern times. He read all the books. He worshipped Hugh Glass, who in some ways was as tough as Colter, a former pirate turned mountain man who had a run-in with a grizzly that left him mauled and broken and all but dead so that his so-called friends abandoned him and he had to crawl a hundred fifty miles and live on roots and lizards till he got his strength back and hunted them down and put the fear of God in them. He was going to call himself Glass at first, just Glass, but then Colter came into his life, and the name was so much cooler, and so was the man too.

The rest was history. And maybe someday they’d be writing him up in books. The scene at Piero’s was the one they’d have to embroider a bit because the fact was he’d seen some things there he didn’t like and got into it with some of the resident aliens and if truth be told got the living shit beat out of him to the tune of two fractured ribs, a chipped tooth and a seriously disarranged nose. He knew better now. Now he had his Norinco and his .22 and his Jungle King fourteen-inch hunting knife with the serrated edge on top, which was enough to discourage twenty hostiles. As for the thing at the Chinese consulate in S.F., that wasn’t even worth mentioning.

What brought it all up though was the old lady who looked more and more like his dead grandma as the afternoon fell off into evening and the rain kept up and he tipped back the bottle and just talked his heart out to her because that was what the peacefulness of her cabin and her presence too brought out in him. She was pissed, no doubt about that, and when he told her to just sit down and stop fussing she did it, but she didn’t like it. He was talking and she kept interrupting him, kept complaining, kept
bitching,
till he had to tell her, twice, to shut the fuck up. At some
hour—it was still gray out and that was good because he had to find his way back—he thanked her one more time, gathered up his things and went on out to the door to flip the hood on her car and rip out the distributor cap before hunching his shoulders under the straps of his pack and humping into the woods, already wet through to the skin.

He woke shivering in his sleeping bag, which had somehow got wet too, despite the fact that he’d spread a camo tarp over the bunker and dug a runoff trench with the stainless-steel folding shovel he’d borrowed from the Boy Scouts. Permanently. The thing was, though, he was clear and knew right where he was, which was Camp 2, the one high above everybody and everything. He opened his eyes on the tarp, bellied now with accumulated water so that it looked like the bottom end of a brontosaur—or a dragon, Smaug the Impenetrable, scalier than shit—and heard the soft spatter of the dying rain in the trees, along with the crash and roar of the swollen creek coming out of the spring, and right away felt sick in his stomach. It wasn’t the shits. Or maybe it was, but only partially. He was hungover, that was what it was, drunk-sick, because he’d taken the old lady’s handle of vodka with him and never got around to building a fire for the beef stew or anything else and had just lain there under the tarp, listening to the rain and smelling the deep ferment of the woods while sucking on the bottle like some half-witted mewling little baby that didn’t know any better till his mind went blank and he passed out to wake up now, here, with the rain spattering and the spring roaring. Feeling like crap. Or no, warmed-over crap, crap that wasn’t even fresh but just heated up in a pan and served to all the shit-eaters of the world in some alien soup kitchen.