The Harder They Come (31 page)

Sten heard himself say, “What if I went out there?”

“You can’t do that. Too risky.”

“What if I, I don’t know, went up the train tracks with a bullhorn or something, and called him to give himself up? Or the train. What if I took the train up there and just kept calling all the way up and back again—it’s better than nothing. I’ll tell you, sitting here is killing me. And Carolee too.”

Carolee had an arm round his shoulder, bracing herself, and he felt her grip tighten now. “I could go too,” she said. “He’d listen to me, I mean, more than—”

“Me? You mean more than me?” He could feel the anger coming up in him, anger at her, anger at Rob, but most of all at Adam, Adam with his thrusts and parries and the way he hid behind his debility, pulled it down like a screen to excuse anything, and so what if he was the principal’s son? Was it really all that much of a burden? They’d tried to send him to another school, any school he wanted, but he wouldn’t go, wouldn’t behave or act normal or even try, wouldn’t do anything anybody wanted except to please
himself. “Because I’m shit for a father, right, is that what you mean? Because he hates me?”

“You’d have to wear body armor,” Rob said, giving him a long cool look. “I wouldn’t let you go out there without it.”

Carolee pushed the hair away from her face and leaned in over the table, looking from him to Rob, her eyes fierce. “I’m going too.”

“I can’t allow that,” Rob said.

“Can’t allow it?”

“Too dangerous.”

But she wouldn’t have it. She stood there glaring at the sheriff, the cords of her throat drawn tight. “I can’t believe you,” she said, her voice rising till it broke. “You think my son would ever dream of hurting me? His own mother?”

O
N THE MORNING THE
sheriff finally called to give his permission, Sten was still in bed. A long stripe of bleached-out sunlight painted the wall over the night table, where the clock radio showed half past ten. Carolee was nowhere to be seen, gone, he remembered, down to Calpurnia to work at the game reserve,
Just to get out of the house because I swear I’m going to start screaming any minute now
. He’d taken a sleeping pill in the middle of the night after something had awakened him—a random noise, a scurrying in the dark—and he’d lain there for what seemed like hours till he got up, made his way to the bathroom and swallowed an Ambien, dry, and then staggered back to bed. When his cellphone weaned him into consciousness, he didn’t at first know where he was, his head fogged with the residue of his dreams, dreams that bucked and shifted and left his muscles kinked with anxiety till he felt as if he’d been crawling through a series of decreasingly narrow tubes all night long.

He was going to ignore the phone—he was trying to ignore it, two weeks more having dragged by since Rob had stopped by the house to quiz him on the subject of Adam’s military background, the police presence in the hills inflated till there was a virtual army out there and still no news, no hope, no reason to do anything but lie flat out on your back like one of the living dead—but those two sharp bleats, followed by a pause and another pair of bleats and then another, were too much for him. He pushed the talk button and heard the sheriff’s voice coming at him, a morning voice, caffeinated and urgent.

“Sten?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, I just—you know how it is.” And now all his fears came to squat on his chest like a flock of carrion birds with their long naked claws. “What’s the news? Tell me quick.”

“No news. Nothing. Zip. No contact. But what I’m calling about is I think it’s a good idea you going out there and see what you can do. We’ve arranged it with the railroad people.”

The railroad people. Sure. Of course they’d be involved. Why not? They wanted this thing over with as much as anybody because they’d been shut down now since Adam started in—and that meant no income, no tourists being hauled up the hill by the hundreds and paying forty-nine bucks apiece for the privilege, which in turn meant that everybody who owned a motel or a restaurant or even a gas station was hurting too. The irony of it. But it was beyond irony—it was like some black-hearted joke the universe was playing on him. If before he couldn’t step in the door of a restaurant or coffee shop for fear of some total stranger sending over martinis or picking up his tab, now he didn’t dare show his face because of Adam, because of what Adam had done to Carey Bachman and Art Tolleson and what he was doing, single-handedly, to the local economy. The forests were closed, off-limits. And if the forests were closed, what was the attraction for the tourists—or anybody else, for that matter? Take Back Our Forests. Right. Take them back from Adam.

“Can you be ready today? For the afternoon run? That’s at three-thirty?”

He said, “Yeah, I guess,” but it came out as an airless rasp and he had to repeat himself.

“We’re going to hook you up with a bullhorn, just like you wanted, because frankly we’re all getting kind of desperate here. But you’ll wear protection, I insist on that. And we’re going to have a select group of agents on the train, a few females too, so it looks like the tourists are out again because we don’t want to make the suspect—Adam, I mean—suspicious.”

What could he say? The words were wadded in his throat. He needed water, needed breakfast, needed an aspirin. “So if he comes to me, you’ll take him? Is that it? Is that the plan?”

“Listen, I don’t want to risk any lives out there, and yes, that would be the ideal solution.”

“If I can get him to come.”

“Yeah,
if
.”

“And get him to put his gun down.”

“It’s a big if. But I tell you, at this point I’m willing to try anything.”

There was a silence.

“And if he won’t put it down, assuming he even comes to the sound of my voice?”

A sigh. The squawk of a radio in the background. “I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

The railroad was strictly a tourist thing now, though originally it had been used for bringing logs down to the mill at Fort Bragg, now defunct, like everything else, and he hadn’t been on it more than three or four times in his life. The Skunk Train. With its cartoon skunk logo that made everything seem so innocuous and appealing, though the nickname had come about because the train had originally burned crude oil for heat in the passenger car and that left a sour odor hanging over the tracks. Half-day trips took you to Northspur from the coast or down from Willits up above. And you could see and document the redwoods without having to exert any more effort than it took to set down your wine glass and lift a camera off the seat. For his part, when he wanted to see redwoods, he used his legs. And what he smelled out there wasn’t crude oil or diesel or even woodsmoke from the old steam engine they sometimes ran but just what nature offered up. Not that he was critical. Or complaining. Every town needed an industry, and now that the mills were gone, this was the next best thing.
Let the tourists go gaga over the big trees, let them grow fat and fatter. It was fine with him.

The first thing he did after he got off the phone with Rob was walk the three blocks into town for a big twenty-ounce caffe latte with a double shot of espresso, the air dense, the sea swallowed up in fog. There were tourists everywhere, though the season was petering out. Or should have been. But then the Boomers were enjoying their retirement and didn’t have a season anymore—they just kept coming. He would have gone to the bakery or the breakfast place to put something on his stomach, if only for ballast, but he didn’t really want to see anybody or have to make explanations or pretend to be grateful for the expressions of sympathy people kept laying on him, whether false or sincere or somewhere in between. Instead he went to the deli and had them fix him a couple of sandwiches, one for now, one for the train, then he went home to make his hundred daily phone calls in the frustrated hope of gleaning some bit of information that would provide the key here, the key he could turn in a lock that would open the door and make all this go away.

Just yesterday he’d heard from a source at the Fort Bragg police station (Freddy Aulin, who’d graduated from the high school in 1982) that a witness had positively identified Adam the night before. The witness—a man in his twenties, one of those free spirits who didn’t worry much about grooming and slept rough and had a drug and/or drinking problem—was making his own camp off the railroad tracks up near the South Fork milepost, and while he wasn’t oblivious to the sheriff’s order he just didn’t think it applied to him. It was unclear whether he knew Adam or not, but he was heading back from town along the tracks with a bottle of fortified wine and saw a figure coming toward him, moving fast, and recognized Adam. The thing was, Adam didn’t seem jumpy or paranoid at all. In fact, he’d stopped and chatted with the man awhile, even going so far as to share a joint with him in a thicket not fifty feet off the tracks where transients were known
to gather. Was the man afraid for his life? Well, no, he wasn’t. For one thing, he was drunk, and for another he expressed nothing but admiration for what Adam was doing,
sticking it to them,
and they were brothers, that was how he saw it. Adam must have seen it that way too.

“You know,” the man told him, “they’re out here looking for you. Like a million cops.”

Adam just shrugged. “Let them look,” he said.

And how had this man come to let the police in on the encounter? Had he strolled in voluntarily to offer up information, maybe in the hope of scoring some reward money? No. He was arrested for urinating in public when he went back into town later that night for a second bottle, and as the arresting officer was handcuffing him, he happened to let it drop, whether out of civic duty or by way of extenuation wasn’t clear. “I don’t know if it means anything to you,” he said, the words thick in his mouth, “but I just saw that dude you’re after, Adam? Like two hours ago?”

So yes, Sten was making phone calls, and whether they led to anything other than frustration, more frustration, at least he was doing something. He spent the next two hours on the phone, learning nothing, then thought to call Carolee before he left for the train, just to let her know what was going on. She picked up on the first ring and right away he could tell something was wrong, just from the way she murmured hello as if it had to be pried from her lips.

“What is it?” he said. “You hear anything?”

It took her a minute. She was gathering herself, her breathing harsh and sodden, as if she were holding a washcloth over the receiver. “They shot the antelope.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

“Two of the sable. Corinna and Lulu. They’re saying Adam did it.”

“Adam? That’s ridiculous. It’s forty miles to get down there.”

She didn’t say anything to this, just breathed through the line.

“It’s probably nothing. Some kid with a gun.”

A pause. Her voice so reduced it was barely there. “Adam’s a kid with a gun.”

“Some other kid. Some apprentice yahoo. It’s nothing, I’m sure of it.”

“Uh-huh. Tell that to Cindy. And Gentian. They’ve got two dead animals on their hands, animals that might as well have been over in Africa, taking their chances there.”

He didn’t know what to say to this. Adam could easily have humped those forty miles in the last two days, but Sten was sure he hadn’t. And even if he had, why would he shoot antelope? But then—and Sten’s thoughts were racing ahead of him—why would he shoot Carey or Art or open fire on a SWAT team? The answer came rising to the surface like something buoyed on its own gases: because he was suicidal, that was why. Because he wanted to die. He wasn’t going to come to the train, to the sound of his own name, to his father. That was fantasy. That was futility. That was the way to pain and more pain.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I am. Really. That’s a terrible thing. But I’m sure it’s not Adam, I’m sure there’s some other explanation . . . but look, the reason I called is I heard from Rob and he wants me to go up the train line.”

“When?”

“Today. This afternoon.”

“I’m coming.”

“You heard Rob, didn’t you? Bullets are flying out there. And whether these cops are highly trained or not, you never can tell what’s going to happen, so that’s just not an option.”

“And you really think he’s going to listen to you, he’s going to come to you? Because I’m the one. I’m the one he’ll come to.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I know that,” and here was the accusation again, the old thrust, why can’t you be a better father, why can’t you be home nights, why can’t you get strict with him, lay down the law, make him stop this nonsense, why didn’t
you show up for the T-ball game, the sing-along, the cake sale, because what meeting is more important than your own son? “And if I didn’t know it I’m sure you’d be there to tell me the next ten thousand times.”

The train moved along at a walking pace, easing across the intersection on Main with its whistle blowing for everybody to hear and take note of, whether they were stalled at the crossing in their cars and campers or hunkered in some ravine halfway up the mountainside ready to take on the world. Sten was dressed like a tourist, in shorts, running shoes and a woolen shirt that concealed the soft body armor Rob had insisted on, though it wasn’t quite clear why since it wouldn’t stop a round from an assault rifle. Slow it down, maybe, depending on how far it had to travel. Or a ricochet, it might stop a ricochet, which, of course, might not necessarily cooperate and strike you where you were protected. It could go anywhere, through your skull, the roof of your mouth, your groin. But he didn’t want to think about that—or the last time he’d laid eyes on Adam, the fight they’d had, how Adam had shoved back with all the sick fury uncoiling inside him, and what had the Norse called their fiercest warriors? Berserkers. They didn’t know fear. They were unhinged. And on the battlefield they went berserk. Adam Stensen. Sten’s son. Son of Sten who was the son of Sten.

There was no one on the deck of the observation car—that would have been suicidal in Rob’s estimation, Rob who’d declined to go on this little expedition because he had a command to oversee—and Sten wondered about that, about the imposture they were trying to pull off here. Various deputies were scattered throughout the two enclosed cars, men and women both, dressed casually, the men in loud shirts and reversed baseball caps, the women in big straw hats and pastels, but if they were really tourists, actual tourists, half of them would have been lounging
around the open car, beer bottles pressed to their lips and cameras flashing. Would Adam notice? Would he care? Would he even be anywhere near the rail line in broad daylight? And here, despite himself, he felt a flush of pride: Adam
was
smart. He was elusive. And he knew his terrain. He would have made a LURP in Vietnam, the ghost in the night who materialized amongst the enemy to cut the throats of the unwary and scare the shit out of the rest.

The train rattled on, picking up speed but still going at half the normal pace because it was a target and make no mistake about it. A lure. A bait. But then why would Adam want to shoot up a train or go anywhere near it? Sten had no answer to that, except that Adam had a rage inside him and that rage had to come up against something, just to rub it, feel it, let the world know what it was to have a thing like that clawing to get out. He’d felt it himself when he was in his teens and after too and he’d seen it channeled through two generations of cynical slouching bullheaded kids at the high school, of which Deputy Jason Ringwald, seated two rows behind him and staring hard out the window, was a prime example. Most of them suppressed it and went out into the world to become cops and corporate raiders, army lifers, mill hands, but some never could get loose of it and they wound up in jail, crippled in motorcycle accidents or scattered across the blacktop in pieces. Or shot. Shot dead.