The Harder They Come by T. Coraghessan Boyle
He was thinking of another gas station, one that was long gone now, where he’d worked the summer before his senior year in high school. Three young Italians—or maybe one of them wasn’t Italian—had pooled their resources to open the place. They were in their early thirties, he guessed, but back then they seemed old to him, and they were enthusiasts, full of jokes and high spirits, their own bosses now and sure to rake in a fortune. One of them, the one who might not have been Italian—Gene, his name was Gene—did bodywork and the other two, Tony and Rico, were mechanics. What they needed him for was to pump gas, check tires and oil and coolant, and to dole out Green Stamps against their eventual redemption. Different times then. He’d worked seven a.m. to seven p.m. and every day at noon Rico would go to the sandwich shop and bring back subs for all of them—and beer, a can of which they would let him have instead of soda though he was underage. They made him feel good. Made him feel like a man.
Where were they now? he wondered. Dead, he supposed. Dead and buried and rotted away to nothing, the casket collapsed on itself, their bones bare and gray and losing heft by the day. People asked him what his philosophy was, as if by being principal—having been principal—he was schooled in the thoughts of the great thinkers, and what’s more, was a great thinker himself. Well, he had no philosophy. He just lived and drew breath like any other creature, more acted upon than acting. There were Jesus, Santa Claus and God when he was little, but they’d gone the way of slingshots and training wheels, the apprehension of death—the first intimation of it—canceling out everything else. What was his philosophy? Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. Or no, that was too harsh. Just be, that was all. What was coming was coming and there was no sense or comfort in worrying about it. Other people went to church, other people played golf, served on committees, ran charities. He went on a luxury cruise. He went fishing. And if Carolee should die before him, he faced a world of woe so deep and catastrophic he didn’t think he’d be able to see himself through. Definitely not. No way in the world. He kept a gun in the house, a Glock 9mm he’d always prayed Adam would never find when he was a squirrelly kid and into everything, and that gun would have its use sometime down the line. Retirement plan? Sure, the good and giving Glock Firearms Company would see to that.
So he was morbid, so he was bored, so he was pumping his own gas and letting his mind tick through the past and present like one of the mutating tapes of the home movies he’d made when Adam was a kid before he saw the utter futility of it because who was ever going to watch them and how could you hope to stop time? There was a breeze. It lifted the hair around his ears and laid it back down on his shoulders, the lightest part of himself, but heavy all the same. Then a GMC Yukon, fire-engine red, slid up on the other side of the pump, and Art Tolleson’s face was there, suspended behind the sheen of the window like an old towel hung up to dry.
Art didn’t say hello and he didn’t smile. He looked like somebody carrying an armful of raw eggs as he eased out of the car and climbed up onto the island separating the pumps. “Did you hear?” he asked.
“Hear what?”
“They shot Carey Bachman.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think—the Mexicans.”
Art stood there blinking at him, the tentative expression gone now, subsumed in something harder. He looked pained, looked angry, as if he’d been shot himself, Art Tolleson, friend, neighbor, former colleague, a lifelong bachelor in his early fifties who taught English at the high school, and whether his sexual orientation had been a matter of conjecture in the faculty lounge or not never factored into the school board’s perception of him because he drew students like a magnet, male and female alike, and never a complaint or even the hint of one. He had a high nasal English teacher’s voice and a slack body, but as if in compensation—and to still rumors—he dressed as if he’d been born and raised in a logging camp, workboots, jeans, plaid shirts, and made a point of attending the full range of sporting events at the school. He hunted in the fall. Fished in the spring. And he’d done Sten a huge favor by taking the house off his hands, though the day he took possession was a disaster, every window in the place smashed out, glass everywhere, the coffee table staved in and the toilet in the guest room—Adam’s room—shattered in porcelain fragments that lay scattered across the floor like unearthed bones, the water three inches deep and flowing out under the door. Sten had cleaned up the place himself, paid for everything, and he and Carolee had put Art up in the guest room at their place till the glazier got done because it was the least they could do. As for Adam, he hadn’t laid eyes on him since—or heard from him—and that was a month ago. “He needs help,” was what he said to Carolee, but what he was thinking, exhausted now, fed up, terminal, was Goodbye and good riddance; there’s no paternal or even human sympathy left because the well has run dry. It’s dried-up and blown away.
“What are you talking about? What Mexicans?”
Art should have been wearing glasses but he wasn’t—contacts, had he gotten contacts? Or what, laser surgery? Art gave him a strained look, ever so slightly myopic. “They found him last night, up on the north logging road—you know, the one where there were all those downed trees last spring?”
He didn’t have anything to say to this. He was picturing the Mexican with the pistol tucked in his waistband, the Don’t-Fuck-With-Me clown with the scooped-out face. That picture went gray and broadened out till it was like a shovel whacking him in the back of the head. His blood pressure rocketed. Here it was, right in your face. The only surprise was that it hadn’t come sooner.
Art, myopic Art, was studying him out of his dull brown eyes, expecting some sort of response, but Sten was thinking about Carey, trying to picture him, and drawing a blank. All he could see was the Mexican, duplicated over and over again.
“They shot him twice is what I hear and left him there to die. That was night before last so there’s no telling how long he suffered. And then”—he hesitated, his eyes jumping in their sockets—“the animals got to him. After he was dead, I mean. Or I think. I hope.”
There was nothing to say but he had to say something so he said, “All right,” and what that meant—I’ve heard enough or I feel your outrage or The tank’s full—he couldn’t have said himself.
Art said, “We’ve got to do something.”
“Yeah,” Sten said, or heard himself say because he wasn’t all there yet, “definitely. Definitely we have to do something.”
“You have a gun?” Art’s tone was nasal but elevated with emotion, and he might have been reading out a line from David Mamet or Arthur Miller to his drama class. You have a gun?
Sten didn’t answer him, or not directly, because he didn’t want to go down that road because that road led to people getting shot in the woods, led to poor Carey with his hot head and thumping knee getting it not once but twice until he was dead, dead, dead. Take Back Our Forests. Fine. Sure. But not that way. “They ought to call out the National Guard,” he said. “Sweep the whole fucking forest.”
“That’s an idea. Really. That’s what they ought to do.” A pause, a look, direct, eyeball to eyeball. “But Carey’s dead. And they’re still out there. Right now. Laughing, probably laughing about it.”
Sten got his receipt out of the metal slot, tucked it in his wallet, swung open the door and settled into the seat. “We’ll talk,” he said before slamming the door, starting up the engine and edging out onto the highway. A quick glance for Art in the rearview, and there he was, looking small and lost, the big red truck looming over him. Somebody waved from a passing car, somebody who looked familiar, though he couldn’t place him, and he actually started toward the harbor, driving along like anybody else on the way to a morning’s fishing on a day of precious sunshine under a sky lit bright and without a cloud to cast a shadow, before he put on his blinker, swung round and headed back home. The fish would be relieved, at least there was that.
Carolee was in her nightgown still, sitting at the kitchen tabl
The answer—annelid—sprang into his head, cribbed from a mimeographed sheet of multiple-choice questions in Bio 101 a thousand years ago, but he didn’t give it to her, didn’t say anything in fact. He just stood there, shaken more than he cared to admit—and now he was seeing Carey’s face, the excitable face, the anxious one, the face he’d worn on the day they’d chased the Mexicans halfway across the county. He tried to picture him dead, but he drew a blank. Hard to picture anyone dead because there was a spirit there, a soul, the animating principle, whether you believed in God the Father and all the ministering angels or not, and that spirit was more specific even than the body that contained it. Carey was dead. There’d be a funeral. The community would come unglued. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Maybe so. But not this time.
“Sten?” Looking up now, the glasses at half-mast on the flange of her nose. “Did you hear me?”
What he said was, “They got Carey.”
She gave him a numb look, her pale wondering eyes riding up above the frames.
“Carey Bachman. The Mexicans. They shot him.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying he’s dead, what do you think? He’s dead. Carey’s dead.”
She wasn’t indifferent, or not exactly—he could see the alarm germinating in her eyes and unfolding its petals across her face, color there, blossoming—but she didn’t jump up from the table and tear out her hair or set up a wail of grief or even, and he couldn’t help noticing this smallest detail, let go of the pencil gripped neatly between her thumb and first two fingers. The requisite questions dropped from her lips—How? When? Where? How had he found out? Had they caught the killers? Was there no place safe anymore?—and yet there was no shock in her tone, no outrage, no engagement. And why was that? He knew why. Adam. Adam was why.
She’d spent the previous afternoon at the Burnsides’, helping Cindy and Gentian with the animals and the tours they gave daily. But it wasn’t only Cindy and Gentian: Sara had been there. She came down on a regular basis, every six weeks or so, to shoe Cindy’s horses and file their teeth, and there she was, in her boots, jeans and a no-nonsense T-shirt, her hair tied back in a ponytail and her hands roughened by the work. Carolee had said hi, uneasy, maybe a little embarrassed because of the scene out front of the house the last time they’d seen each other, Adam attacking his own father and his own father down there on the ground, but she was aching for news of Adam and here was her chance to get it.
Cindy, always the gracious hostess, had set out a platter of tuna- and egg-salad sandwiches for them, late lunch, with a scoop of homemade potato salad and carrot sticks and a drink of her own concoction, two parts cranberry, one part each of sparkling water and diet 7Up. Nice. A nice lunch. Cindy was always going out of her way like that. They were sitting there, she and Cindy, talking about the antelope and Cindy’s hope for a mating pair of giraffes one of the zoos was offering them, when Sara came out of the bathroom where she’d been cleaning up. She looked good. She’d combed out her hair and put on some makeup and if she was forty she didn’t look it. More like thirty.
There was some business talk—the horses, the antelope, the fact that the vet was doing the hooves on the zebras, sable and kudu now and Cindy hoped Sara didn’t mind but it was just easier that way since he had to be there to dart the animals in any case—and then Cindy excused herself to go to the kitchen and put on the water for tea and Carolee and Sara had a moment to themselves. “How are you?” Carolee asked. “Everything okay?”
The other woman tugged at her fingers for a minute as if to loosen the joints—she worked hard and had the calluses to prove it—then gave a smile so fleeting it was dead on arrival. “I’m not getting laid, if that’s what you mean.” She picked up her glass, rattled the ice cubes, drained what was left in the bottom. “So things could be better, yeah. A whole lot better.”
Carolee was puzzled. And maybe a bit offended too—she’d never been a fan of that kind of talk—but she forged on because she had no choice and if this woman with the flaring eyes and low habits and mad theories was going to wind up with Adam she needed to be understanding, needed to give her the benefit of the doubt, needed, above all else, to pump her for information. “But what about Adam? How’s he doing? Is he helping out, is he okay?”
“Adam? I haven’t seen Adam since that night, that time, I mean—at the house?”
This information came down on Carolee like a rockslide, just buried her, the way she told it. They’d both assumed he was with her, and the news came down hard on him too—if he thought he’d washed his hands of his son he was fooling himself. Adam was there, always there, as persistent as a drumbeat in the back of your mind, the rhythm you can’t shake, the tune you can’t stop humming—he was his father, still and forever, and he’d tried to be as good a father as he could through all these years no matter how hard he rubbed up against Adam’s will and his delusions and his pranks, if you could call them that. He was Adam’s father. He loved him. And here he’d been entertaining his own delusion of Adam living in a kind of half-cracked (which meant half-sane) parity with this woman, Sara, who at least dwelled on Mother Earth and had a job and could cook for him and feed him and be his mother and lover rolled in one. I fucked her. Isn’t that right, Sara? Didn’t I fuck you? It was like throwing coins in a wishing well. He’d made his silent wish, the wish he couldn’t say aloud because then it wouldn’t come true. And what was it? That Adam was somebody else’s problem now.
Carolee had been stunned silent, sitting there with her mouth open. “You mean,” she said, “he isn’t with you?”
Sara, piggy Sara, Sara with her flaccid cheeks and fat thighs, too-old Sara, slutty Sara—no suitable lover for her son, not even close—had shaken her head emphatically and her eyes had moistened. “And I want to apologize—for that night, I mean. I stayed there till like ten or eleven, waiting for him? And when he came back I tried to stop him smashing things up, but he wouldn’t listen.” A catch in her voice, and in that moment, just for an instant, Carolee softened again. “And he wouldn’t come. Believe me, I tried”—and here was Cindy with the teapot nestled in its cozy—“I tried so hard I had bruises up and down my arm for a week after. But he wouldn’t listen. And he wouldn’t come.”
Now, in the kitchen, with the birds at the feeder and the newspaper folded down flat on the table, Sten felt nothing but anger. Carey was dead, the gangs had taken over, there’d be beheadings next, corpses hanging from the bridges like in Tijuana, the forests lost and all hope of peace and tranquility flown out the window, and all she did was tack up a checklist of questions, as if she cared, and then went back to her crossword. “Annelid,” he said, snapping out the syllables as if each one had a flail attached to it. “Seven letters for earthworm.”
“Oh, Sten,” she said, shaking her head side to side. “I know, I know. I’m just worried, that’s all. Where is he, that’s what I want to know—”
“He’s at the funeral home. Or the morgue.”
“Maybe we should call Cody’s parents—maybe he’s with Cody.”
“I’m talking about Carey. Carey Bachman. He’s at the morgue. Can’t you get that through your head?”
It was a pointless conversation and it ended, as if at the bell between rounds in a prize
22.
THE MEETING—THERE HAD to be a meeting—was scheduled for seven the next night in the high school auditorium, Gordon Welch presiding. Over two hundred people showed up. The initial meeting, the one that got Take Back Our Forests off the ground, had been held in Gordon’s den (his man cave, as he liked to call it, with a kind of rote obnoxiousness he seemed not even dimly aware of), and there were exactly eight people in attendance, all male but for Susan Burton, who owned the coffee shop on Main Street and who supported any and all causes that had to do with salvation, whether of stray cats, Romanian orphans or the land we trod, the water we drank and the air we breathed. As Sten remembered it, they talked a whole lot of nothing for two solid hours, Carey giving speeches and Gordon taking over when he ran out of breath, the stuffed heads of big-game animals from three continents staring incongruously down on them from their vantages on the paneled walls. Sten wasn’t exactly sure what a kudu was, but he had a feeling that the one with the twisted black horns must have been a kudu—or was that a sable?—and couldn’t help wondering how the Burnsides would feel about its presence there amongst them. But the Burnsides weren’t there. And neither was Carolee.
What was resolved? The color of the T-shirts they were going to give out at the coffee shop by way of drumming up support and the configuration of the Take Back Our Forests logo that would grace the breast pocket and the back too (a clever melding of the letters T, B, O and F to represent a tree-spiked hillside Carey had devised with the aid of Photoshop). And a vague promise of future meetings, a letter-writing campaign and the involvement of law enforcement. There was no urgency. They were operating on rumors. On the sightings of Mexicans at the supermarket and the hardware store. On statistics. The only real evidence was the dead zones the growers had left behind, to which Sten was an eyewitness and said as much.