The Harder They Come (11 page)

H
E COULDN
’
T STOP LAUGHING
, giggling like he was in junior high and Mr. Wilder was throwing his voice to be Huckleberry Finn one minute and Nigger Jim the next, because this was the way it was supposed to be, sticking it to them at the Big 5 and at the animal place too, one-upping them, one-upping the world, and she was giggling too so that every time he found himself winding down she’d start him up all over again, best thing ever, huge, just laughing and laughing, and what he was thinking was that she was all right, cool, or close to it, even though she was too old and didn’t have any qualms about displaying her uptight side for all to see, leaning on the car horn and barking at him in the parking lot to the point where he’d almost told her to go fuck herself and forget about the ride because he could just stick out his thumb and not have to listen to her shit or absorb it either. But he was racing now, the little wheel inside his brain spinning at top speed, everything on the highway shooting by as if they’d gone into hyperspace though there was no one chasing them and when he snatched a look at the speedometer he saw she was doing fifty-five, exactly fifty-five, as if the engine had a governor on it. Or a robot arm. He tried to picture that and all he could see was a bolted-together metal head where her head had been just a second ago and a mechanical arm reaching down under the steering wheel and through the instrument panel and into the superhot engine until she began to say something through the giggles and her real head popped back on her shoulders with all its lines and grooves and stingy retreating bones and the eyes that kept snapping at him like rubber bands. He needed a hit of 151. Or maybe he didn’t. Cars exploded all around them. He lifted the canteen to his lips and drank.

What she was saying was, “So you think you might want to come back to the house? To celebrate?” Another rush of giggles. Her hair was in her face. A silver bracelet sparked on her wrist, Morse code, a signal, a definite signal,
long, short, long, long, short
. He passed her the canteen and watched her press it to her lips. The dog—the dog had dreadlocks and that rocked him—poked its head between the seats and breathed a gas fog of stinking breath between them. “You up for it?”

The wheel began to slow. He came back to things the way they were or had to be and saw her all over again. She was old and he didn’t like her squirrel-colored hair and he hated the way she’d said I know you and called him Adam, but she had big tits and her boots were made out of snakeskin and they had pointed toes with silver strips worked in, shit-kicking boots, and she was a shit-kicker and so was he. “You don’t know me,” he said.

She grinned at him, big lips, soft lips. The cars had stopped exploding and the highway ran true now so that he knew it and knew where he was and the dog breathed its stinking breath and she said, “Maybe, maybe not.”

“I could rape you,” he said.

“Go ahead and try.”

There was no independence in the world, just dependence, and the animals were dying and the sky was like a sore and everything had a price tag on it. It wasn’t like that when the mountain men came out of the east and went up into the Plains and the Rocky Mountains when the country stopped at the Mississippi and the hostiles ruled all the territory beyond. That was when John Colter went up amongst the Blackfeet on the Missouri River and did his deeds. This much he knew from the history books—and the internet too but the internet had about one fiftieth of the information the books gave you—and when he could concentrate, when the wheel slowed and everything came back into focus, he
could sit in one place for hours and read the same passages over and over,
Give Your Heart to the Hawks
and
The Mountain Men
and
John Colter: His Years in the Rockies,
with its picture of Colter on skis in the snow and facing down a whole village of braves and their mad snarling dogs. His favorite place, the place where he kept his Army Survival Guide and his books on trapping and fishing and living off the land, was his grandmother’s house when she was alive and the rain was coming at the windows like the ocean turned upside down and the Noyo swelled up and gouged at the banks and took the big logs and boulders down with it so you could hear them grinding like teeth. Everything was safe then, the room warm with the woodstove, something cooking in the kitchen, the bed made for him in the spare room so he didn’t have to go home and see his father there in the chair in the living room with the what-did-you-do-for-me-lately look scored into his face like a mask out of some sci-fi flick the aliens wore to make them look like upright lizards. The mountain men lived free and they never had to say
Yessir, Cap’n, to no man
. Beaver, that was what they were after, beaver hides—plews—to make the felt for the high hats everybody wore across the sea in London and in New York and Boston too, and the beaver were theirs for the taking and there was nobody in that day and age tougher and savvier and more independent than Colter.

“You want a glass of wine?” she was saying to him. “Two-Buck Chuck, but if you blow on it and let it sit a minute it’s not half bad.”

Somehow he was in her house, though he couldn’t remember how he’d got there, the chain of events, that is, the movement of the car, the opening and slamming of the doors, boots on the porch, key in the latch, none of it. Her house was white, everything painted white, though there were dark smudges of human dirt on the cabinets and doors and the frame of the doorway without a door that led from the living room, where he was, to the kitchen, where she was, throwing her voice like a ventriloquist
with a dummy in her lap and who was the dummy here, who was the receiver, what was the message?

“I drink it,” she said, and let out a laugh. “If it’s good enough for me I guess it’s good enough for anybody except maybe the president and his wife and the CEOs of the major corporations, so what do you say? Join me?”

He watched her. She had big tits. They were right there, underneath a T-shirt screaming with the letters TDC in a glossy lipsticky red that was the color of the blood John Colter spilled when he had to, when they wouldn’t leave him alone, the white men and redskins alike. Her big tits swayed like water balloons as she came into the room now with the bottle in one hand and a glass in the other and he watched the way the neck of the bottle kissed the rim of the glass and the vacant space inside it filled red, but a darker red, wine-red, and then he had the glass in his hand and he was draining it in a gulp.

“Whoa,” she said out of her soft lips, “I guess you are a party animal,
Colter
. But I’m making us omelets, so just hold on,” and here she was filling his glass again. “You want music? I can put some music on. What do you like?”

All right. He was sufficiently slowed down now to appreciate what was going on here. This was called interaction, words spilled and words sucked up, the phase of things you needed to get through if you were going to get laid and he was going to get laid—everybody talked about getting laid, Cody and everybody else he’d ever known—and he’d been laid before so he knew all about it, twice, on two separate nights, and here she was, whatever her name was, padding back into the kitchen on her feet that were bare now to go through with the ritual of food preparation when all he was seeing was Dara Spinelli from high school with her eyes like lasers she never closed the whole time. She had big tits too. She sat atop him in the backseat of his car before they took it away from him and rubbed herself into him and shucked off her shirt and there they were, her tits, and he took hold of
them and put his mouth to them and then he got laid. “You got any Slayer?” he heard himself say.

“Slayer? What are they, rock?”

He shrugged. She didn’t even know
Slayer
? It came to him that she lived in a different world, but then everybody lived in a different world, boxed off, dead to life, the seas turned to acid and the Chinese taking over because they were the new hostiles and if you had ten million Colters you couldn’t beat them back. “Pantera,” he said. “You got any Pantera?”

She let out a laugh and he didn’t like that laugh, or not particularly, and she held out her hands, palms-up, as if he’d stumped her. “Why don’t I just put something on and you relax—you’ve had a hard day shopping and dog-liberating, right?” And here came the giggle again. “Chill,” she said, “just chill. I won’t be a minute.”

The dog was on the rug in front of the couch, inches from his boots. Dreadlocks. Dreadlock dog. That was cool. He thought of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, thought of his camp in the woods that nobody knew about, thought of ganja and opium and the poppy plants he was growing from seed in two hundred and twenty-seven black plastic pots so the gophers couldn’t get at them. He smelled onions. Garlic. Heard the sizzle of the pan and realized there was music playing, old-timey music, corny as corny can be, and felt his boner straining at his zipper the way it did when he was looking at porn when his grandma was out in the garden or at the supermarket or when she was dead, dead the way she was now, dead six months and he in that house still and still talking to her, at least when the wheel was spinning. When it wasn’t, when he was clear, he was out in the woods, tending his plants and building his bunker because it was all coming down, all the shit of the world and the pollution and the death of everything and he was going to be prepared for it, a mountain man himself and no two ways about it.

They ate right there in the living room with its white walls that were so bright they were like gunshots bursting in his ears till she turned the overhead light off and the yellow-glass lamp in the corner took over. She poured more wine and settled in beside him on the couch, her legs jackknifed under her and the soles of her bare feet showing dirt on the balls of her big toes and on her heels, the skin yellowed there and the other toes clenched like miniature fists clutching at the rim of a cliff that wasn’t a cliff but only a flat broad short-of-white couch pillow that connected with the couch pillow he was sitting on so that every time she bent forward to the coffee table which was really just a wooden chest with brass handles on either end he could feel the buoyancy of her as if they were both out in the ocean and treading water. And those black slashing things circling around them, those fins cutting the surface? They weren’t sharks, they were dolphins, grinning dolphins, happy dolphins, tail-walking dolphins showing off their tricks to such a degree that he felt nothing but gratitude for them and if she was touching him now, touching his jeans, his thighs, his crotch, that was all according to plan. He stopped treading water and her face was right there, closing in on his, and she kissed him, her lips soft as the inside of things and tasting of garlic and butter and what was that herb, that herb his mother put on everything till it tasted like soap? Cilantro. He hated cilantro. But not now, not on her lips, not while she was unzipping him and loosening his belt and putting her tongue in his mouth.

In the morning she wanted him to stay, fussing around in the kitchen with a coffeemaker and a hot griddle and talking at such a clip she barely drew breath, telling him about the seminars she’d taken in Redemption Theory and how they’d really opened her eyes. “Do you know that everybody born in this country has a straw man behind them worth six hundred and thirty thousand dollars, which is what allows the government, or what passes for
government, to take out loans on the backs of us all?” she asked, or no, demanded of him as if he were arguing with her when he wasn’t, when he was clear and just sitting there at the kitchen table with a mug in one hand and a fork in the other. “Unless you call their bluff. Unless you stand up to them and write checks against your straw man and start to draw that money down and keep them off your back permanently—”

In the night, in her bedroom that was as black dark as alien space—darker, because out there at least there were stars—he’d held tight to her and her big tits and soft lips and done it twice without seeing anything or being seen and that was anonymous and it calmed him till he blacked out and slept and woke up clear and with the wheel quiet inside him. Now he was eating and she wanted him to stay, and the dog was crunching kibble over a blue plastic bowl set in the corner, the sun shining and something that wasn’t much more than static playing on the radio on the counter by the sink, and he cut her off in the middle of her straw man speech to say, “I have to go. You know why?”

She was pushing things around on the stove. She shifted her head to look at him over one shoulder. “Why?”

“Because they’re going to be coming for you.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

“How do they know it was me? Nobody saw us. For all they know I could sue them for letting somebody steal my dog out of the pound—”

He had to laugh, but it was a noiseless laugh and his lips never moved. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said.

She gave him a puzzled look.

“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes. It’s your dog. Who else would steal it?”

Her hair was a mess where he’d run his fingers through it in the dark and the pillow had flattened it on one side and for an instant it seemed to catch fire in the sun coming in through the
window, every wild wisp of it burning like a halo of jumping flames. He could see the smallest things, the fine leather creases at the corners of her eyes, a single translucent hair stabbing out beneath her left ear, and finer still, till he could see the microscopic mites living and fucking and shitting in her eyebrows, in everybody’s eyebrows, every minute of every day. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought of that, but there’s nobody to take him for me, to hold him, I mean, till the thirty days are up—he doesn’t have rabies, I swear it . . .”

He said nothing. Just sat there watching her mites wave their segmented legs even as he felt his own mites stirring in the valleys between his eyes, and then the mites were gone and he was clear again. Mornings. In the mornings he was clear, or mostly so, and he knew what was happening to him and knew that dope and alcohol made it worse—or better, definitely better—and that all his plans, the plans he talked up in his own head and out loud too, with his own lips and tongue and mouth, were going to come to nothing, that the poppies would die and the hostiles would come for him and he’d lead them on a merry chase, but that in the end everything in this life was just shit and more shit.