The Harder They Come
One of the braves waved them into shore and they had no choice but to comply. Both canoes hit the sandbank at the same time and Colter sprang out to stand up straight and face them down to show he had no fear, but Potts wouldn’t get out. They’re going to kill us, he said in a choked voice, but they’re going to torture us first, and he tried to back the canoe away but one of the braves took hold of the paddle and then, when Potts went for his rifle, the brave grabbed that. At this point, Colter, who was stronger than any two of them combined, waded in, snatched the rifle away and handed it back to Potts. (Why, Adam always wondered, when they should have just waited them out? What was he thinking? Or maybe he wasn’t thinking, maybe he was just reacting.) That, unfortunately, started a chain of events no one could stop. Potts pushed back in his canoe and it shot out to midstream, at which point one of the Indians let fly with an arrow—shush—and there it was, embedded in Potts’ left hip, blooming there, the feathers trembling like rose petals in a breeze. And what did Potts do next? Snatched up his rifle and shot the closest Indian to him, which was the one who’d tried to take it away from him, now hip-deep in the water and looking hate at him. An instant and it was done. And in the next instant every brave there was using Potts for target practice.
So Potts was dead, dead in a matter of seconds, and Colter was standing there on the shore amidst all the hostiles howling like scorched demons and the women sending up their weird ululations of grief over the dead brave and half a dozen Indians in the creek now and wading to the canoe to drag it back to shore. Where they went at Potts’ corpse like a butchers’ convention, the women especially, hacking at him till he was unrecognizable, just meat, slick and wet and red. And Colter? Still there, still standing, still staring out unflinchingly, in another place altogether, ignoring them.
What was that like, seeing your companion gutted and dismembered out of the corner of your eye and not thirty feet away? How could anybody have just stood there instead of panicking and trying to make a run for it? Colter did. Five minutes, that was all it took for them to finish hacking at Potts till there was no more left of him than a skinned rabbit, and then they turned to Colter. Everybody was jabbering at once, crowding in to threaten him with hatchets, spears, the points of arrows and knives, their faces contorted and their mouths flung open so that every word, every shriek was delivered in a thunderstorm of spit. And they stank. They really stank. Stank worse than corpses come back to life. As if it mattered. As if anything mattered to Colter other than somehow saving his own skin. In the next moment he was stripped naked, his clothes sliced off him by the squaws’ knives, and here was what was left of Potts’ organs flung at him to spatter his chest with blood. One woman—the widow who’d been a married woman ten minutes before—was brandishing something in his face, flailing him with it, and what was it? White, flaccid, a twist of pubic hair and the sorrowful deracinated sack of what had been Potts’ testicles and the other thing attached to it, limp and bright with blood, and it could have been a turkey neck, stripped of skin and feathers, but it wasn’t.
So what was he shooting at? Was she serious? Movement, that was what. Who knew who was out there, whether it was the officers of the law or the Chinese smuggled up from Mexico on the panga boats they abandoned on the beaches till there were more pangas than seals and bundles of kelp combined or just some dog-walking shithead who was already dialing 911? And if he strapped on the night-vision goggles and whoever it was was gone in the space of those twenty seconds, what did that prove? That they were elusive. That they were smart. That they were watching him harder than he was watching them and that they were watching her too. He’d seen movement and so he fired, just to keep them off, just to let them know what his Chinese Norinco SKS Sporter semi-automatic assault rifle could do in the hands of somebody who really knew how to use it no matter what his father said or tried to say when his Aunt Marion gave it to him for his twenty-third birthday because her husband was dead and you didn’t have any use for a rifle when you were dead unless maybe you were a zombie and his Uncle Dave might have been a zombie in real life but definitely wasn’t going to be coming out of his grave anytime soon.
Whatever. But then she was barking at him and he thought she was going to run him down with the car she was in such a panic, which wasn’t cool-headed at all and he was ashamed for her and wanted to say something about that, about tactics and coolness under fire, but the words wouldn’t come. He was flying, the sound and feel of that rifle pumping him full of helium gas like a balloon lifting off into the sky, and for the first few minutes he just sat there seeing the headlights streaming out into the night and knowing how wrong that was. Kill the lights, he told her, knowing they’d be coming, and it was no different from the deeds they’d done in high school, slowing down to hang out the window and obliterate somebody’s mailbox with a baseball bat or egging the gym teacher’s house because he was a Nazi, and always with the lights off so you could slip in under the radar. I can’t, she said, and he was about to reach over and flip the switch himself when the siren started in and he knew just what to do and where to go because the pigs were flat-out stupid and so what if there was only one road going down? Here, he said. Stop here. Turn.
And then they were in the dark and the lights were off and he guided her the first part of the way with the goggles, at least until they’d put a couple of curves between them and the main road so there was no chance of any U-turning pig seeing their running lights or anything else and then he let her switch the headlights back on and everything was cool. She calmed down finally and when she calmed down she started chattering away about anything that came into her head as they went bumping over washboard ripples and slamming through potholes, everything a uniform drifting dirt-brown and the leaves more gray than green and the tree trunks like pillars supporting a whole other road above them, a black road and starless. He wasn’t listening. The wheel was spinning but spinning slower now and she was there beside him, Sara, a human being, a word mill, a talking dictionary, big tits jouncing with the up and down of the car springs, her voice coming too fast at first but gradually slowing as she got used to the fact that they’d one-upped them yet again and there was no chance of being caught by anybody, not now or later.
Some time passed, or must have passed, but he didn’t notice. She was still talking. “So what did you think of Christabel?” was one thing she said but he didn’t answer so she said it again and this time he was right there with her.
“Is she Chinese?”
“Chinese? Christabel? What are you talking about? Christabel Walsh? That’s Irish. And her mother was a McCoy.”
“She looks Chinese.”
“Christabel? Come on, Adam, what planet are you on? She’s no more Chinese than I am. Or you, for that matter.” Her big tits bounced. The trees caught the light. “What is this obsession with the Chinese, anyway?”
He didn’t want to tell her about the incident in San Francisco, whenever that was, years ago, he guessed, and he didn’t want to tell her that the Orientals were conduits to the other worlds and the Chinese star proved it. It was too complicated. And he didn’t really feel like getting into all that now, so he unscrewed the cap on his canteen and had a hit of 151 and just repeated what he’d already told her because she was trying to understand and he had to give her credit for that. “They’re the new hostiles,” he said. “I told you.”
More ruts, more bouncing. The car spoke its own language, low and steady, a kind of robot growl that never gave up and he could look right through the dashboard and into the engine and see the pistons there, the valves and connecting rods, pumping and pumping like sex, robot sex, car sex, steel on steel. “What do you mean,” she said, “like economically?”
“Are you crazy? Who’s talking about economics? Economics is shit.” He stopped there, looking for the words that right then started marching across his line of vision, left to right, as if he was reading from a script and that was nothing new because everything in this world was scripted lik
e some lame reality show and everything had been said before a billion trillion times, How are you today, Fine, How are you, Fine, Have a nice day, You too. His head hurt where he’d banged it on the windshield, but there was no blood. She drove. The car growled. “Let me ask you something”—she was pissing him off she was so stupid and he wanted her to know it—“because sometimes I wonder about the college you went to and if you were paying attention at all.”
“So ask.”
“Where did the Indians come from?”
It took her a minute. “Asia? The land bridge, you mean?”
“What we ought to do?” he said. “If I was president?”
“What?” A little bleat, and that was funny, because her voice got jerked on a string by the next pothole.
“Nuke ’em. Nuke ’em before they nuke us,” and he was picturing it now, everything melted, everything ash. “Or hack all our computers and send us back to the Stone Age. No money, no food, no electricity, no nothing.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? It’d give the animals and the environment a chance to come back. We’d need more Colters then, wouldn’t we? People that could live off the land?” Her face was turned toward him, light on one side, dark on the other, quarter moon. She was right. Back to the Stone Age. More Colters. Live off the land. And get ready for the hostiles, because they were coming and they would just take what they wanted and nobody to stop them.
She was quiet a moment. The car thumped. The night squeezed in. She didn’t know it yet but they were going to have to stay out here all night long, at the campground, where they’d blend in with the others. It would be cramped in the car and she might not like it but that was how it was. There was a blanket in back. He had a couple PowerBars and she always carried a bottle of water in the car. They’d sit there in the dark. They’d get high. And not just on rum and marijuana, but what he had in his shirt pocket, a surprise, first fruit of his poppies, the sap he’d worked into little dried-out balls you could smoke just like that in a pipe you made out of foil and could use once and toss away and nobody the wiser. Then they’d have sex. She’d open up to him—she always opened up to him, hot and greasy and with that smell of her like some animal with its scent glands on display, like a beaver, and it came to him then that that was why it was called beaver. Beaver shot, he said in his head. And then he said it aloud: “Beaver shot.”
“What?”
He didn’t say it again, only thought it: Beaver shot. And money shot, that was when you pulled it out and squirted their beaver or their tits or belly. Spermatized them.
“I said, if the whole corrupt society broke down, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“No,” he said softly, “no, it wouldn’t.”
Days flipped by, he wasn’t sure how many. She was there in the house, cooking, cleaning, picking lint out of the Rasta dog’s fur and spreading for him every night, and he was out working his plants, slitting the seed pods with a razor and letting the milky stuff drip out till he scraped it off and rolled it into a ball. When he had enough of it, when he was satisfied with the product, he was going to sell it—Cody, Cody was going to help him out on that end because he really couldn’t feature tramping up and down the street looking for heads and freaks and tourists who might or might not be interested—and he was going to take the money and put it in a jar and hide that jar in a secret place so he could be independent of everybody and everything forever. He’d build another bunker, deeper, farther, and he wasn’t ever going to come back.
Problem was, he had a wicked case of poison oak. It was in between his fingers, blisters so big there it hurt to make a fist. And he’d somehow managed to get it on his cock, pissing, most likely, but then you had to piss and to get it out you had to touch yourself and that’s where the poison oak got in. He’d heard that if you ate some of the leaves you’d be immune and he’d tried that when he was twelve or thirteen and all that had happened was he had blisters on his lips and in his mouth and halfway down his throat so he couldn’t even eat for a week, so that, to put it mildly, was bullshit. Anyway, he needed calamine lotion and she’d gone to the store and gotten it for him and now, right now, with the sun straight up overhead, he was skirting the dog-face’s property and heading back to the house to dose himself with it, especially down there where every step chafed him and the itch was a thing you couldn’t scratch because that would only make it worse but he was scratching it anyway and it was bringing tears to his eyes.
Down one slope, across the river that was less a river every day, up the other slope and through the trees to the house, the wall there, and then up and over the wall and into the yard. Two whispers: his feet touching down. The dirt. Yellow weeds. Sun. A hole the Rasta dog had dug, no bigger than a birdbath. One tree, puny, leaves drooping. And what was this? A bicycle up against the wall, cinnamon red, with dirty white tape wrapped around the handlebars, and that was strange because Colter didn’t have a bicycle, bicycles hadn’t even been invented yet, and where had that come from? He’d already shrugged out of the backpack and propped the rifle against the wall, but now he straightened up, alert suddenly, his sixth sense kicking in. That was when he heard the voices. That was when he made himself small and slipped round the corner of the house to peer in the window and see his mother there and now his father too, shapes shifting in the sun raking through the glass to cut their heads off and replace them with haloes like in the church with Jesus and Mary but his father wasn’t Jesus and his mother was no saint either.
Slip away, a voice was telling him, whispering to him, slip away over the wall and go deep before they know you’re here, and he realized he could see through the house because the curtains were gone, see all the way across the rugless bare boards, out through the windows on the other side and beyond that to the door his father had cut in the wall. Which stood open. Propped open. And why, if every time his father showed he was going to prop the door open, had he bothered to put that door there in the first place? For security? To keep everybody out? Or in? But there was something there, a vehicle, the broad white flank of it suddenly blasting up at warp speed to spread itself atop the wall, black lettering there, or the tops of letters, letters wearing hats, and for the tiniest hemidemisemiquaver of a second it was a puzzle but a puzzle anybody could have solved: U-Haul. That’s what it said. They had a U-Haul here. And what did that mean? That meant they were taking things. That meant the alien was moving in, into his house, into his grandma’s house, and he could see it now, the alien in the cemetery with his shovel and digging, digging, digging till he had her dead body dripping beetles and grubs and he threw it over his shoulder and came right back and laid her out on the bed to be his bride like in The Evil Dead or one of those movies, he couldn’t remember because they were all the same.
He wanted something. It wasn’t 151, it wasn’t pot or opium or acid or a two-foot-long submarine sandwich heaped with prosciutto, provolone and pickled Tuscan peppers. No. It wasn’t any of that. It was Sara. Sara was what he wanted. And he rose now, confused, because where was she, and that was when the Rasta dog must have seen his shadow because the Rasta dog was barking and they saw him there in the yard and his father was waving him in, waving like the braves on the shore before they peppered Potts. Peppered Potts—he was saying it, saying it aloud—and here they were, his father, his mother and Sara, all of them out the back door and into the yard and the Rasta dog too, barking and inciting the trees till the trees were barking along with him.
“Adam,” and it was like a chorus, “you’re here.”
There was no denying it though he wished he didn’t have poison oak and wished he’d just stayed out there in the woods so he wouldn’t have to crawl through this big dripping heaped-up pile of bullshit and worse bullshit yet to come, so he didn’t deny it. “Yeah,” he said, and he tried to put a smile on his face but it wouldn’t come. He stared down at the ground.
And now his father: “Art Tolleson’s moving in tomorrow. So that’s it. All she wrote. If
you want anything, personal things, you better take it now.”
And his mother: “We fixed up a room for you? At the new house? It’s just temporary, I know, and we’ll help you find something, I don’t know, more suitable—”
His father: “When the time comes.”
Sara said nothing. She was just standing there. He was staring at the ground—or no, at her shit-kickers. “What about Sara?” he heard himself say. “What are you going to do, bury her too?”
His father: “What in Christ’s name are you talking about? Stop with this crap. Enough. I’ve had it up to here.” A glare. “You can turn it on and off just like that, can’t you? Isn’t that right?” Nothing. Nobody. The sun, the dirt, the weeds, the shit-kickers. “Well, turn it off. Or take your meds or whatever it is you need because the fact is—the reality—the house is no longer ours.”
His mother: “Sten. Don’t be like that.” Softer now: “Adam, come on, it’s all right. She can, she can maybe, for a few days, I mean, at our house—”
And Sara, finally: “He can come with me. Stay at my place. For as long as he wants.” And then, shifting her face or at least the voice coming out of it as if her head was a loudspeaker but he couldn’t say, not really, because he wasn’t going to look up because if he looked up he’d be part of their reality and he didn’t want any part of being a part of that: “It’s okay, the thirty days are up, no problem. We’ll just help your parents clean up a bit and then tonight”—a pause for his father’s benefit, and she was the saint now and where was her halo?—“we’ll go up the hill. Sound good?”