The Harder They Come

“He was here.”

  “They both were, your mother too, and I’ll tell you, she treated me like dirt. And Christabel too.”

  “If he touched anything, I’ll kill him,” he said, and now he was coming toward her and the light caught him so that she could see he was mud all over, pants and shirt and his hands too where they dangled from the soiled sleeves.

  She put her hands on her hips. “He just hung the door, is all,” she said. “Your mother took a couple boxes of things from your grandma’s room—”

  His face changed suddenly, hardened up as if it had been set in concrete. “Shit,” he spat. “Shit on her. And shit on you too.”

  “Me? What have I got to do with it?”

  “You let her.”

  “I didn’t let anybody do anything. This is their house, not mine, remember?” She felt a little woozy suddenly and she wanted to go over and give him a kiss, mud or no, but instead she just cocked her head back and said, “If you want to get any tonight you better behave yourself. So go in and get washed up—and take your boots off first, you’re tracking the place all up—and then you come out and meet Christabel and make nice.” She lifted her wrist to squint at her watch, the hands of which she could just barely make out because her reading glasses were on the kitchen table next to the recipe book. “Dinner is served—or will be—in five minutes flat. Hear me?”

  When he did show up at the table—with another beer, which must have been his second or third, and the canteen too—the mud was gone and his fingernails were clean, but he wasn’t wearing any clothes at all, only the towel cinched round his waist. Which he made a show of dropping when he pulled out the chair and sat down. Christabel, nonchalant, or at least pretending to be, said hello, but Adam ignored her. It wasn’t much past six but they were in the shadows here, the sun having sunk away into the canopy of the trees, and while it wasn’t cold yet it was getting there. You could see that Adam’s chest and arms were stippled with gooseflesh and his nipples were hard, though he wasn’t shivering. Let him play his games, Sara was thinking, but after she’d filled his wine glass and topped off Christabel’s and her own, she couldn’t take it any longer and finally had to ask, “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Toughens you,” he said, though he wouldn’t look into her eyes.

  “I was just going to get up and put on a jacket—what about you, Christa? You cold?”

  But then Adam was talking, a miracle, as if a stone had cracked open and become fluent. “Colter wasn’t cold. Colter was butt-ass naked when they chased him—and that river he jumped into? That river was like ice.”

  Christabel was just staring, running her eyes all over him, and she had that little smirk on her face. “Uh-uh,” she said, “I’m not cold,” and then, to Adam: “So you’re a nudist, huh? Sara never told me or I wouldn’t have bothered with all these clothes myself. Here,” she said, and she actually reached down, arched her back and worked the spandex top up and over her shoulders, pausing there a moment before pulling it over her head and balling it up on the table in front of her. She was wearing a black lace brassiere underneath and she was all gooseflesh too.

  “Oh, come on, grow up, the two of you.” Sara was sitting there clinging to her wine glass, not upset, not yet, but maybe something less than amused. A whole lot less.

  “You said you wanted to show me off,” Adam said in an even voice, and then he was rising from the chair so you could see all of him, cock, balls, pubic hair, everything. “Isn’t that right, Sara?”

  All she could think to say was “Not at the table” and she was going to add that his mother must not have taught him any manners at all, making a joke of it, but checked herself—she didn’t want to provoke him because you never could tell what he was going to do next.

  It wouldn’t have mattered because in the next moment Adam was gone—present, but gone, veering off into one of his reveries or spells or whatever you wanted to call it—his gaze focused on a point over Christabel’s head, on nothing, and his voice took on a weird metallic timbre as if there were a microphone stuck in his throat: “Party on down,” he said, echoing her, mocking her. “How about a threesome? You ladies up for a threesome?”

  That seized her up, all right. She was no prude, but this was just him pushing her buttons to see how far he could go. He was still posed there, staring off into space, but now he was getting hard by degrees, click, click, click, and she couldn’t have that, not in front of Christabel, so she did the first thing that came to mind—she took up one of the grandmother’s antique-gold linen napkins and snapped it at him, right there, right where it hurt most, and what did Christabel do? She just burst out with a laugh.

  Okay. Fine. But Adam got the message, both hands shooting to his groin, and then he sat down, wrapped the towel back around him, and without another word put his head down and began to eat. Christabel watched him a minute—fork to mouth, his jaws grinding—then let out a hoot and said, “What fun!”, shook out her top and pulled it back over her head, though it didn’t do her sprayed-up hair any good. And herself? She laughed too, couldn’t help it, and in the next moment, as the sky pulled down and the bats shot out of the trees to explode overhead, they were all three of them laughing to beat the band, and when they were done with dinner they went on into the house and built a fire and sat around it, watching the flames leap up the chimney and holding tight to their wine glasses until at some point, Adam, still wrapped in the towel, got up and slipped out the door and into the night.

  17.

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the second week when she began to wake up to reality, at least that portion of it that had to do with money and earning a living. She’d had two jobs the week before, one all the way up in Redwood Valley, which would have been no problem if she’d been at home because that was practically in the neighborhood, and the other down in Navarro, at the winery there, where she saw to the owners’ horses on a regular basis, but that meant burning up gas and since she didn’t want to use her credit card—they could trace it—she had to use cash and her cash was running low. Most of her income, the lion’s share (or horse’s share, actually), came from her trade and the connections she’d made over the years, but she relied on subbing to supplement it and school was still out for the summer. And even if it wasn’t, how could they call her if she wasn’t home?

  To complicate things, she didn’t have her calendar—or most of her clients’ numbers either, aside from the few she’d kept on the card double-folded in her wallet—and she was sure she must be missing appointments. For the past three mornings now she’d awakened with a jolt from dreams of fucking up, of being late, lost, unable to get where she was going in the hazy geography of dreamland that was clogged with wrong turns and the butts of horses galloping steadily away from her. That made her nervous. Irritable. She’d even snapped at Adam over breakfast when he started going on about Colter. “Colter,” she’d spat, slapping the flat of her hand down on the counter, “fucking Colter! I’ve only heard it like ten thousand times.”

  He was sitting at the table, forking up French toast, and he shot her a look that should have warned her off, three parts hurt and one part pure slingshot rage.

  “Can’t you ever talk about anything else? Like what you’re doing out there in the woods all day long? Huh? Like what you’re growing?”

  What happened to the plate he was eating from, his grandmother’s china plate with the rose-cluster design on it? Up against the wall, syrup and all, and then down on the floor, in pieces. And Adam? He looked hate at her, then bulled right by her, and if she lost her balance and slammed against the kitchen cabinet it was nothing to him because he was snatching up his pack and jerking the rifle over his shoulder and then he was over the wall and gone without a word.

  So she was sitting there in the kitchen in the aftermath of all this, brooding over things, Kutya licking the scraps off the floor and the sun trapped in the morning fog, which had managed to reach this far up just to depress her further, when it came to her that what she need
ed was to get into her house, whether they were watching it or not. She needed her calendar, where she’d always been careful to write out her appointments under the date, along with phone numbers, and in the case of word-of-mouth referrals, addresses. And she could use some clothes, having packed hastily to say the least. She was bored with what she was wearing—boots, jeans and the same two tops, in rotation—and figured Adam must be too. She hardly ever wore a dress, but she had half a closetful, including a cute yellow sundress with a scoop neck that still fit her in all the right places. Maybe Adam would like to see her in that, just for a change, to spice things up. And here she went off into an erotic daydream, him sitting there on the couch with the towel wrapped around him, already hard, and her coming across the room to climb atop him and lift the skirt up so he could see she wasn’t wearing anything underneath . . .

  It didn’t take her long to convince herself that they wouldn’t be watching her house. She was too small-time. She hadn’t killed anybody, had she? And she told them she was quarantining the dog, though it was just plain stupid because anybody could see he didn’t have rabies and what was a little scratch on some scrawny lady trooper’s hand? A quick raid on her own house, that was what she was thinking. But not in daylight—it might be totally paranoid to think they were watching the place twenty-four/seven, but it was very much in the realm of possibility that they’d send a patrol car by once in a while just to see if there was a vehicle in the driveway. No, she’d go at night. Tonight. Late. Adam would love the idea because here was another chance to stick it to them, and all at once she was replaying the scene at the animal shelter, how her blood had raced, beating like a drum circle, and how the two of them had laughed in the car as they rolled down the highway free and clear, laughed till they were gasping for air and she put a hand on his thigh and asked him if he wanted to party and he did. Oh yes, he did. With gusto. And the party was still going on.

  When he came in around six he was wired on something, he wouldn’t say what, still pissed over what had happened that morning. “You’re out of line,” he told her, glaring at her, standing there poised over the sink in the kitchen that was sunlit and warm and peaking with the aroma of the homemade lasagna she’d sweated over half the afternoon. “Way out of line. Because for your information I’m not growing nothing.”

  “Anything,” she said automatically.

  Still the glare. “Nothing,” he said carefully. “I’m not growing nothing.”

  It wasn’t really in her to be repentant—that just wasn’t her, sorry—but she tried her best to placate him, keeping her mouth firmly shut and handing him a margarita when he came up for air after dipping his head to the faucet and letting the water run over his face and scalp, saying everything she had to say with gestures, as if she were a deaf-mute. There was no mud on him, not a trace, though his boots were thick with trail dust, and he took the margarita without comment and went out to sit on the porch with it. She gave it a minute, then brought the pitcher out to him and her own glass too and they sat there in silence, pouring till the pitcher was empty. He wouldn’t look at her the whole time and she took the hint and made as if she were wrapped up in her own thoughts, the two of them sitting there in silence, getting a buzz on, but she couldn’t help sneaking glances at him—and not just to gauge his mood but because she loved watching him, the way he moved, the delicacy of his smallest gestures, how he circled the rim of the glass with his thumb and forefinger and brought it to his lips, his eyes narrowing in on something she couldn’t see, beautiful eyes set off with a girl’s lashes, eyes like flowers, like flowers in a field.

  Then she served him the lasagna and poured him a beer—and poured herself one too, though the carbs went straight to fat on her—and when he started in on Colter and the Chinese she listened to as much of it as she could take before cutting him off. “Adam,” she said. “Listen, I’m sorry about this morning but the thing is I need some things up at my place—I mean, this is great here and all, but I feel like I’m camping out, you know what I’m saying?”

  He shrugged as if it was nothing to him.

  “My address book, for one thing. I need to get hold of everybody and make sure I’m not screwing up my appointments—and clothes, I need to pick up some clothes. Like a dress. Would you like that—me in a dress?”

  Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. But he wasn’t going to show her anything.

  She dropped her voice till it was a purr in her throat: “What do you say to going up there tonight? Just you and me. Late, like maybe midnight or one maybe, when nobody’ll be around?” Her own lasagna was getting cold. She tapped the fork on the edge of the plate, tap-tap, anybody home? “A raid,” she said. “Let’s call it a raid.”

  She was watching him closely, like that first day in the car, and she could see she was having an effect. He’d gone still, the beer clutched in one hand, fork in the other. After a moment, he set down his beer and swiveled his neck to bring his eyes to hers, and he wasn’t staring through her now—now he was seeing her.

  “Well,” she said, “what do you say?”

  “Cool,” he said. “I’ll bring the rifle.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” His eyes were on her still and he was holding on to that half-formed grin of his that seemed to stick in the corner of his mouth as if his lips just couldn’t lift it all the way up. “No,” she said, “no way. That’s just crazy.”

  She hated guns and she put her foot down, or tried to, because this really was overkill, not to mention a recipe for disaster, but five hours later there they were following the track of her headlights up the hill on a moonless night, his gun propped between them—not in the trunk, not laid out flat on the floor in the backseat—and a pair of night-vision goggles dangling from his neck. He’d drawn two slashes of oil or greasepaint or whatever it was under his eyes like the players you’d see on Monday Night Football if you were unlucky enough to be bar-hopping in the middle of it and he was so amped up he kept talking about the plan, what the plan was and how they were going to execute it—his word: execute.

  “Look,” she told him, leaning into one of the wicked switchbacks that seemed to chase the car all over the road (and she wasn’t drunk, not even close—just a little buzzed), “it’s all in good fun, but that thing isn’t loaded, is it? It’s not going to go off and blow a hole in the roof or anything—?”

  He didn’t answer. She’d already extracted a promise from him that he wasn’t going to do anything more than just sit there in the car—which she was going to park down the street from the house, out of sight—and wait for her. Ten minutes, that was all she was going to need and he could just sit tight, okay? Was he cool with that?

  They hadn’t seen a single car since they’d turned onto the highway and that had helped with her blood pressure, which must have been spiking despite the alcohol in her system because she was regretting ever having mentioned this whole fiasco to him—she should have just waited till he was asleep and snuck on up the road by herself and he’d never have been the wiser. But she’d wanted some moral support (that was a laugh: it was more like amoral support where he was concerned) and things had sort of ratcheted out of control. He was a boy, playing war games. She could understand that. But this was no toy rifle and if he saw a cop, any cop, anywhere, who could tell what he might do? And what would that make her—accessory to murder? It was bad enough that the next time a cop stopped her she’d be going straight to the county jail, and while she wasn’t ready to accept that or genuflect to the system either, she was still smart enough to stay out of its way as much as possible. You couldn’t fight them. Look what had happened to Jerry Kane. She’d tried to tell him about that, how the pigs had shot dead one of the gurus of the movement, the foremost, the very man whose seminars she’d attended and who’d opened her eyes and revolutionized her life, gunned him down in a Walmart parking lot in Arkansas and his sixteen-year-old son along with him, but it just seemed to go in one ear and out the other.

  “
I said, that thing isn’t loaded, right? Because if it is, I’m just going to turn around right here and now. You hear me?”

  His voice, soft as fur, came at her out of the darkness: “Jesus, you sound like my mother. But you’re not my mother, right?”

  And that got her, that reminded her of what was real, what counted, what she was doing here on this dark road. With him. “No, baby,” she said, softening, and she reached out her hand to him. “I’m not your mother, I’m your lover. And when we get home, watch out.”

  So that was that. Whether the gun was loaded or not or whether she was going to enter into a contract with the sheriff’s department under threat, duress and coercion and go to jail for the better part of her natural life or wind up shot herself or just assert her right to travel in her own personal property to her own house and reclaim the personal property she kept there was anybody’s guess. But it was late and Willits wasn’t exactly Times Square and they’d be turning off well before they got into town proper and there really wasn’t anything that could go wrong. She was just being a slave and a coward even to think it. The cops were asleep. And so was everybody else.

  18.

  WHEN THEY WERE COMING up on her turnoff she couldn’t decide whether to use her signal or not, but then she figured not, because if anybody was watching why broadcast her intentions? “This is it up here,” he said suddenly, fully alert and ready for anything, and she was impressed that he could pick out the road in the dark even though he’d only been to the house once. He was smart—and he’d been born with an internal compass too, no ravine or trail or gulley or back road too remote for him, the kind of person who would always land on his feet no matter where you tossed him. And if there was one thing he wasn’t, it was a coward. Or a slave. He might have been in outer space half the time, but if ever there was anybody born who would take them on, no holds barred, he was the one. And maybe that was suicidal, maybe it was mental—it was, it definitely was—but as she turned into the dark lane between the two vestigial fenceposts that picked the thread of it out of the night for her, she was glad he was there. If anything happened, which it wouldn’t, she’d at least go out in a blaze of glory.