The Harder They Come

  The front end let out a little shriek and then the tires were hissing along the blacktop and she flicked off the headlights, just in case. “Blaze of glory,” she said aloud, tailing it with a nervous cackle, and she was as crazy as he was, Jesus.

  She pulled just off the road a hundred yards from her house, then thought better of it and swung a U-turn so the car was facing the other way in case they needed to make a quick exit. With no moon, her house was in darkness, nothing showing there but what the stars gave up. Ditto the L-shaped ranch house of her closest neighbors, the Rackstraws, an older couple with grown children out of the house and a dog so ancient and decrepit it had forgotten how to bark. “Okay,” she said, her fingers wrapped around the door handle, “you know the drill. I’m just going in the house, my own house, that’s all, for like ten minutes. And you’re just going to sit here, right? Don’t even get out of the car. Okay?”

  She watched him a moment, the profile of him, too dark to see his features—all she could tell was that he was staring straight ahead, out the windshield and down the road the way they’d come. And that he was wound up, strung tight as wire. “Okay?” she repeated and leaned in to peck a kiss to his cheek before she slipped out of the car and started up the road.

  As soon as the door eased shut and she was out there in the night, her tension began to fade. This was her home, her turf, the place where she’d lived for the past eight and a half years since she’d given up on Roger, the place where she walked Kutya and exercised her clients’ horses in the fields and sat out on the deck in the evenings to watch the sun slip down over the distant gray band of the ocean. What was she afraid of? It was her right to be here—it was anybody’s right. This was a free country. Or so they claimed.

  Everything was quiet but for the soft percussion of her heels on the pavement and the intermittent grinding of a solitary cricket in the dark dried-up field to her left. Her night vision came back to her incrementally as her eyes adjusted, though she could have found her way blindfolded. Her strides lengthened. She breathed in the night air, fragrant with a lingering sweetness the afternoon sun had pulled out of the weeds and wildflowers, and she felt freer than she had in a long time—at least since that idiot cop had come after her and turned her whole life inside out.

  Before she knew it she was heading up the gravel drive, the pea stone—pale in contrast with the darker void of the yard—looking almost as if it were illuminated. It crunched underfoot though, so she stepped off into the dirt: no reason to make noise if she didn’t have to. She fished the keys from her purse, a faint tinkle of metal, and she was actually heading for the front door before catching herself. She stopped, listened, telling herself she was just being crazy, then slipped round back anyway. Another tinkle as the key turned in the lock and she was in.

  For a long moment she stood just inside the kitchen door, in the darkness, debating whether to turn the lights on. She could smell the garbage from all the way across the room, whatever was in there when she’d left gone rancid and probably attracting ants too—they were a problem in this place, always had been, black rivers of them flowing in under the door and darkening the counters, the walls, even the ceiling sometimes. No matter. She’d deal with all that later. Now she just needed to get her address book and her calendar and some clean clothes—and that dress, or maybe a couple of dresses, like the yellow and white polka dot, which was real summery and looked great with her strappy sandals—and then lock up and forget about the place for a while. Let the ants have it.

  Ultimately, she did turn the lights on, first in the kitchen, then in the hall where her desk was, and finally in her bedroom. She didn’t bother folding things, just stuffed a couple blouses, some underwear, another pair of jeans and her dresses and sandals into a kitchen-tall garbage bag and rolled up the calendar and tucked it in her purse. She was getting ready to leave, giving things a final look-over, trying to think what she was forgetting—she had her address book, her checkbook, her moisturizer and nail polish remover, the special shampoo she used for dandruff, stamps, envelopes, a beach towel and her bathing suit, just in case he wanted to go swimming some afternoon—when the first rattling burst of gunfire split the night in two and she just about jumped out of her skin.

  Talk about panic, talk about going from the launching pad straight up into orbit in the space of a single heartbeat, well here it was. She didn’t have time to think, just run. Later she would find that she’d bruised herself above her left knee, but she couldn’t for the life of her recall how or when, just that it must have happened in those first few panicky seconds when she was racing through the house to shut off the lights and slam through the back door and out into the blinding dark, where the sharp crackling rattle of gunfire split the night open all over again. But what was it? Where was it? She stumbled across the yard, clutching her purse and the garbage bag to her chest, the night unfolding in layers till she could see again, her breath coming hard and her feet pounding across the gravel—there was the pale outline of the drive, there the dark erasure of the road and the still darker hump of her car planted rigid and unmoving at the side of it and she was running even as the light flashed on in the Rackstraws’ front window and the dog that hadn’t made a sound in the last five years started howling as if it had been set on fire.

  And where was Adam, where was he, no shape or shadow of him in the passenger’s seat as she jerked open the driver’s door and flung her things in, calling “Adam! Adam!” in a hot fierce whisper that sounded in her own ears like a scream. Her fingers trembled as she rifled through the purse for her keys and then she had them in the ignition and the engine jumped to life and the headlights flew out like heat-seeking missiles and there he was, Adam, right there in front of the car, the rifle tucked under one arm and the twin pinpoints of his eyes throwing the light back at her.

  “Jesus!” she shouted, her head out the window now. “What are you doing? Get in the car, get in!” Something changed behind her, something qualitatively different now—another light, the Rackstraws’ porch light, floodlight, whatever it was—and somebody’s voice, a man’s voice, Jack Rackstraw’s, thundering, “What’s going on down there?”

  “Adam,” she said, “Adam,” and it was like a plea, a prayer, an invocation to get them out of there, and she couldn’t leave him, she couldn’t, but her heart was going into overdrive and she actually had her hand on the gearshift to shove the thing into reverse and back away from him when the door pulled open and he slid into the seat and slammed the door shut again and she hit the accelerator with a foot that really didn’t know what it was doing beyond finding that place where the tires would grab and the car would hurtle off into the tunnel the high beams carved out of the night.

  “Kill the lights,” he said, and it was the first thing either of them had said since he’d got in the car. They were out on Route 20 now, heading back down the hill, and there was nobody behind them as far as she could see, but then that didn’t mean anything, did it? They had helicopters, whole fleets of cruisers, guns and more guns. She was going too fast, she knew it. The tires screeched. She jerked at the wheel. She was in a state, close to breaking down and screaming her head off, susceptible, fully susceptible—but this didn’t make any sense to her. Shut off the lights? Now? On the highway? In the dark?

  He repeated himself, his voice honed and hard: “I said, kill the lights.”

  She swung wildly through a turn and then looped back the other way, through the next one, her palms sweating and her eyes jumping at the road ahead. “I can’t,” she said, “we’ll go off the road. I can hardly see as it is—”

  “Here,” he said, and he was thrusting something at her—what was it? Heavy plastic, slick glass: the night-vision goggles.

  “I can’t—what are you doing?”

  “Slow down,” he said. “Watch the road.”

  And then they both froze, the sound of the siren riding up on them out of nowhere. A whoop, a scream. It jabbed right into her, shoved itself up under her
flesh like a hypodermic scoured with acid. This was it, she knew it, she was done, doomed, everything she’d built in her life gone out the window—she wasn’t going to have to worry about being a slave to the system anymore because she was going to be a prisoner of it. In a jail cell. With what—a tray of mush and insta-food shoved through a slit in the door three times a day? She wanted to pull over, wait for the inevitable, but she didn’t. She just kept on driving, kept on going down, one turn, then the next, but where was the siren coming from—behind them or out in front?

  There was a whoop, another whoop, then it faded, then whooped again. “Are they—?” she asked, but never got to finish the question because here came the sheriff’s dead-black cruiser hurtling up the hill in the opposite lane, lights flashing, one suspended moment as the thing rocked past them, Adam motioning with the gun and she furious and spitting “No, no!” at him, and then it was gone and vanished round the next bend.

  “The pigs,” he snarled. “The fucking pigs.”

  She didn’t feel as if she was driving anymore but sailing, and not across some calm picture-postcard bay, but into a dark maelstrom dragging her down to some darker place still. She stabbed at the brakes, hard, and the force of it threw them both forward—seatbelts, who needed seatbelts?—and he hit the windshield with a sudden heavy wet resonance she could feel like a blow to her own body, the car careening toward the trees, everything held in the balance before it caught on the hard compacted dirt of the shoulder and straightened itself out, and still she was driving and still they were going downhill.

  When she could talk, when the words came back to her, stingy, squeezed, caught in her throat, she asked him if he’d hurt himself, was he okay, was he bleeding?

  He didn’t answer. But she could feel him there at her side, glowering, outraged, all his jets on high. A minute passed. Two. The trunks of the trees flipped past like cards in a fanned deck.

  “Here,” he said suddenly. “Stop here. Turn.”

  She saw a dirt road rushing up on the right, a wide mouth of nothing cut between a ragged avenue of trees, and for once she did as she was told.

  Later, after they’d rocked and swayed for what seemed like hours over a series of pits and craters and washboard corrugations, a campground appeared under the canopy of the trees, her headlights catching the glint of metal, cars there, half a dozen of them, parked in darkness, and he told her to pull over and shut down the engine. “Here?” she said. “Yeah, here.” She switched off the ignition and killed the lights and everything vanished. The darkness was absolute—they might as well have plunged down a mine shaft somewhere, no trace here even of the stars. And if there were campers out there, they weren’t sitting around campfires roasting marshmallows, not at this hour. They must have had tents, but in the instant before the lights went out she hadn’t seen any. Aren’t you afraid of him? Christabel had asked.

  Well, here was the test of it. And the answer? Yes and no. Yes, she was afraid he was going to do something crazy, like shoot off his goddamned gun, which he’d already proved fully capable of doing, but no, she wasn’t afraid to be there with him in the blackest depths of the blackest night she’d ever dreamed or imagined. He was right there beside her, breathing steadily. She could smell him, the sweat of him, the neat’s-foot oil he used on his boots, a faint chemical drift of the rum on his breath. He’d brought her here because that cruiser was going to turn around, he was sure of it, because their car was the only one on the only roadway through these hills, one way in, one way out, and now they were safe because no cop would ever think of looking for them here—no cop even knew it existed, she’d bet anything. She breathed out, breathed in. Closed her eyes and opened them again and it made no difference. All right. So they’d had an adventure and here they were, together, in the dark.

  All the adrenaline had gone out of her or been reabsorbed or whatever was supposed to happen to it and she felt a deep peace steal over her. “What now?” she asked, though she already knew.

  His voice came at her out of the void. “We sleep.”

  “Just sleep?”

  He didn’t answer but she could picture him wearing his little smirk, which was answer enough for her.

  “You want to get comfortable?” she asked. “Like in the backseat?”

  There was the sound of liquid sloshing around its container, liquid in motion. “You up for a hit of rum?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She was hot for him, hotter than ever, excitement running through her like a burn, but she had to ask him one more thing before she pulled her blouse up over her head and dropped her bra and let him nuzzle there like the child he was. “Adam?”

  “Colter. Call me Colter.”

  “What were you shooting at? There was nobody there. You weren’t even supposed to get out of the car.”

  He was silent a long while. Finally, he said, “You accusing me?”

  “No. I’m just, I just want to know what you were shooting at—”

  “Hostiles,” he said, his voice as disembodied as if she were talking to him on the phone, long-distance, the words dropped down and filtered out of the buzz of the universe and nobody listening in but her and her alone. “I told you,” he said, “they’re everywhere.”

  PART VI

  The Jefferson

  19.

  THEY WERE UP ON the forks of the Missouri, where the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers come together in what’s now Montana, trapping beaver and stacking up plew after plew because this was virgin territory, under control of the Blackfeet, and the Blackfeet had their own ways of dealing with trespassers, none of them pretty. Depending on their mood, they might cut off your fingers, one by one, then your toes, your ears, your lips. Or jam splinters of pine up under your flesh and set them afire or strip the skin from your limbs and hold the bleeding ropes of it up in front of your eyes so you could focus on what they were doing to you. And through it all you had to laugh in their faces to show how impervious you were to pain in the thin hope they’d put a swifter end to it. Cry out, whimper, whine, plead, and they’d take their time with you. And get creative too.

  Colter had a single companion with him this time, a black-bearded trapper named John Potts who talked too much and ate too much but was tough enough and had his own traps, which cost ten dollars each—as much as you’d get for a hide—and were like stacked-up gold out there in the wilderness where there was no way to manufacture or repair them. They were heavy cumbersome things of iron and they had to be set out and held in place in the swift cold water by means of a stake driven into the bottom. The trappers would save the castor glands of beaver they’d killed and work them into a redolent paste that reproduced the scent the animals marked their territory with. They used this to cap a second, thinner stick that stuck up out of the water just high enough so that the beaver would have to step on the pan of the trap to boost himself up and get a sniff of it. Once the jaws closed on him, he’d dive and eventually drown.

  Nobody knows how many traps Colter had but Adam liked to think of him as having ten, ten at least—more than Potts, anyway, because Potts was his inferior in everything, whether it was paddling upriver against the current all day or jerking meat or catching beaver to make the money to get him back out into the wilderness to catch more. What time of year was it? Fall. Fall, when the beaver pelts begin to thicken out again with winter coming on. Colter’s leg had healed by this point, though the scar was still puckered and red and he must have been thinking he’d just as soon have grown a new leg as be confined back at Fort Lisa with all those people around him and nothing to look at but bark-peeled logs and a big dull muddy river that had been all beavered out. He didn’t like people. Or not much, anyway. Not as much as being out there under the spreading sky and depending on no one but himself and why he’d taken Potts along no one could figure. Maybe Potts bribed him. Maybe that was it.

  But there was a morning, first light, when they were checking the traps they’d set out the previous morning on a fair-sized
creek that fed into the Jefferson—dusk and dawn, that was all they could risk, lie low through the day and don’t even think about starting a cookfire, making do with jerky and hardtack and whatever came to hand that didn’t need a flame under it—when Colter’s sixth sense kicked in. They were in their canoes, sticking close to the alder and willow that overhung the banks, silently going about their work. Fog steamed like breath out of the water and hung there, though it would soon burn off and leave them exposed. Colter was for packing it in, but Potts, greedy Potts, wanted to keep on till all the traps had been checked and re-baited. This was the part that always got to him, how Colter, who knew better, had hooked up with this clown and then gone against his own better judgment. But there it was. And still—still—even after they heard the clatter of hooves on the shore above them, Potts insisted that it was just a herd of buffalo coming down for a morning drink. Insisted, and spoke out loud too, though, of course, it was in a whisper. He must have said something like Don’t be a pussy or whatever the equivalent was back in the day.

  That was when the Blackfeet appeared, a horde of them, painted, mounted on their ponies. There must have been two or three hundred of them or more. It wasn’t a war party, Colter could see that at a glance—there were women and children with them, crowding in now to peer over the bank at the two interlopers in the canoes. Maybe they’d only be robbed, that was what he was thinking—hopeful, always hopeful—and he made a peace sign and called out a greeting in their own language. He had maybe a dozen phrases in the Blackfoot language and could understand more than he could speak. Crow was the language he knew best. He could speak that fluently, but then the Crows, along with the Flatheads, were the enemies of the Blackfeet, which brought up a further complication—what if one of them recognized him as the sole white man who’d fought on the side of the Crows six months earlier? As for Potts, Potts didn’t speak anything. He just sat there in the canoe, looking as if he was going to shit himself.