The Harder They Come (37 page)

T
HE WINTER RAINS CAME
and buried everything. They swelled the streams, scoured the ravines, drove deep to refresh the roots of the big sentinel trees that stood watch over the forest and climbed steadily up into the greening hills. Botanists put on their slickers and went out to take core samples and hoist themselves three hundred feet up into the canopy to measure the new season’s growth and biologists set up bait stations to collect hair samples of fox and marten for DNA analysis. Fishermen fished. Drinkers drank. It wasn’t the tourist season, but a few people ventured up the coast from the Bay Area, mainly on weekends and mainly to stroll arm-in-arm up and down the six streets of Mendocino village, and the Skunk Train started hauling tourists up the Noyo Valley again, though on the usual limited winter schedule.

After the funeral back in the fall, Carolee went to stay with her sister in Newbury Park for a few days, and when she returned, looking haggard, looking unrested and every bit as tragic as when she’d left, she kept harping on the theme of traveling, of getting out and seeing the world. Just a trip. Anywhere. If only to get out of town for a while because she couldn’t take the way people looked at her wherever she went, whether it was the library or the post office or just picking up the dry cleaning, and Sten felt as burdened as she did and gave in without much of a fight. They wound up driving down to Death Valley for the wildflower bloom at the end of February and then continued on to Las Vegas to throw money away and watch some overpriced idiotic revue he could have done without, once and forever. What he said to her was, “This is just like the cruise ship, except it’s floating on dirt instead of water.”

And she said, “Without the world-class indulgence,” smiling when she said it, because she was beginning to climb up out of the pit Adam had dug, the steps and handholds shaky at first but firming up as the days passed. They came home to an empty house, but then the house had been empty of Adam for years now, and if Carolee had ever harbored any dreams of grandchildren, whether produced by Sara Hovarty Jennings or some other woman unstable enough to hook up with their son, those dreams were buried now too. It was for the better, it really was, and he told her that, though he meant it to be comforting and not just purely cold-blooded. The truth was, he couldn’t imagine going through this all over again and couldn’t even begin to guess at what a child of that union, of Sara and Adam, would have had to cope with. Or no, he could. And that was why, all things considered, Adam’s death had been a kind of blessing, the true blessing, and not his odds-defying birth or the sweetness of his early childhood or the sense of completeness this kicking perfect blue-eyed baby lying there in his cradle had given them. He was their son, evidence in the flesh of the interlocking of the genes they’d separately inherited, genes their parents and parents’ parents had held on to through all the generations there ever were. More biology.
Reproductio ad absurdum
. Adam, the product of an older mother. An old mother.

He could adapt. Carolee could adapt too. But the thing that lingered longer than the sorrow, the thing he just couldn’t shake, was the shame. It was like a dream you can’t wake from, the vision of himself up there on the stage in the high school auditorium, urging everyone to remain calm and not rush off on some sort of witch hunt. Or chasing down those Mexicans with Carey, dead Carey, posturing beside him. Sitting there at the picnic table and trying to deny the evidence Rob Rankin presented in his little plastic bags. Living with the guilt. He wasn’t used to hanging his head or ducking away from anybody, all his life one of the big men in town, from his years on the football field in high
school to his return as a decorated veteran and then a college grad working his way up from history teacher to assistant principal and finally principal and master of all he surveyed. He tried to be bigger than the shame, tried to get on with his life, but he found he couldn’t really face people anymore, couldn’t look anybody in the eye, even strangers, without wondering if they knew and how much they knew—it got to the point where he began to think there was no other solution but to pack up and move. Sun City, in Arizona, wasn’t that where old people went? Or Florida. What was wrong with Florida?

He came in from a walk one afternoon, his mind churning over the possibilities, and sat Carolee down and told her there was no other way, they were just going to have to move.

“Move?” she’d said. “Where? I mean, we practically just moved in here, didn’t we?”

“What about Florida?”

“Florida? Are you crazy? The tropics? You really want to go to the tropics?”

He shrugged, let her see his open palms. He was just thinking out loud, that was all, exploring the possibilities. “I don’t know. Up the coast, maybe. Eureka. What’s wrong with Eureka?”

“Another broken-down mill town? We don’t know anybody there, not a soul.”

“Right,” he said. “That’s what I mean.”

Well, they’d put that on hold, because in a time of crisis, a time like this, it was ill-advised to make rash decisions, everybody said that. So they did the little things that make up a life, anybody’s life, cooking, eating, running the dishwasher, sitting by the window with a book, knocking the mud from the soles of your boots, building a fire at night and staring into it with a cocktail clenched in your fist. Going to bed. Getting up. Watching the rain. Watching the sun. Watching the flies crawl up the windowpane.

She couldn’t go back to volunteering at the preserve, not after the way the Burnsides had turned on her, and he couldn’t very
well go out patrolling timber company property anymore, for obvious reasons. He wouldn’t have wanted to, in any case. In fact, he looked up into those mountains from the back window and saw nothing there that was even remotely attractive to him, not anymore. If he hiked, he hiked the beach. And if he wanted exercise—and he did, because he wasn’t dead yet—he went out on the golf course. The golf course. He never thought he’d sink so low, but he did, like every other old duffer across the land. And what was golf but a way to fight off the desperation?

On this particular day, a day in the first week of April when the sun broke through early along the coast and Carolee was sleeping late, which was a mercy in itself, he tossed his clubs in the trunk and drove the two miles south to Little River and the course there, which was only nine holes, but nine holes were plenty as far as he was concerned. Until the past month, he hadn’t touched a club since he was a teenager and back then he’d never got much past the thrill of whacking the hell out of the ball, whether it was on the first tee or at a driving range. He remembered that, the driving range, how he and his buddies—R.J. Call, Rick Wiley, Mark Stowhouse—would down a couple of beers and compete to see who could send that little white sphere the farthest, over the nets even and into the field beyond. Hit it hard, that was all that mattered to them, and as far as the subtleties of strategy and making par, the irons, putting—playing the game to win—they could perfect all that later. When they were old.

Well, now he was old. Now he was an old white man with sunburned kneecaps lifting a golf bag out of the trunk of his car and trudging across the parking lot to the first tee, and if he didn’t have a partner it was because he didn’t want one. He didn’t need chatter, he didn’t need companionship, or not yet, anyway. What he needed was to get out of the house and that was what he was doing on this bright early morning when there was no one stirring but him and maybe the odd squirrel. The course looked out to sea, where the mouth of Little River opened up on the waves,
and there were always seabirds here, pelicans gliding overhead as if they were being drawn on a string, gulls fixed to the roof of the Little River Inn like replicas or perched atop the flag at one hole or another and messing the green with the long trailing white stripes of their guano.

For a long while he sat on the bench behind the first hole, sipping the coffee he’d brought along in a thermos, crossing and uncrossing his legs, reaching back to adjust his hair in the grip of the rubber band he used to bind it up in back. The clubs, a cheap set they’d bought for Adam one Christmas when he was eleven or twelve, thinking to interest him in something beyond video games, sat propped against the bench. It was chilly, with a light breeze coming in off the water, something he’d have to account for when he was driving the ball. When he got to it. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stared out across the fairways and the greens that were so bright they seemed lit from within, all the way out to sea, where a pair of fishing boats stood like signposts at the place where sea and sky came together.

He was thinking about a day not too much different from this one, a week or so ago (he couldn’t really say because there wasn’t much to distinguish one day from another, light in the morning, dark at night, and whatever went on in between). Carolee had wanted to do some shopping up in Willits—or not shopping, really, but just cruising the various junk shops in the hope of finding treasure there, whether it be in the form of somebody’s dead grandmother’s crocheted doilies or salt and pepper shakers molded in the shape of Scottie dogs—and he’d agreed to come along just to do something and maybe take her out to lunch someplace.

He dropped her off and drove around a while, seeing things he’d never had time to see before, mostly signs of decay, empty storefronts, ruptured sidewalks, graffiti scrawled on the cornerstones of the buildings along the main drag, the big hopeful welcome-to-the-world banner that loomed over the road in promise and challenge both:
Willits, Gateway to the Redwoods
. He
went to the hardware store, though he really didn’t need anything, and poked around there for a while, then he sat on a chair outside one of the antique shops and tried to read a paperback book he’d brought along to ease the tedium because he was determined to give Carolee as much time as she wanted to sift through whatever the tourists and the newly dead had left behind. Finally, he just wandered up and down the street, peering in store windows, watching the traffic gather at the lights, thinking, as old people do, of lunch.

Carolee wasn’t answering her cellphone. An hour of his life had marched on into oblivion. His stomach began to act up on him—acid stomach, exacerbated by the coffee and booze that seemed to round out his life, morning and evening, like prayers—and he told himself he was hungry, that was all. It was one o’clock. He’d planned on taking Carolee to the Mexican restaurant, the nice one, but he found himself getting back in the car and running over to the fast-food place at the top of Route 20, just to get something to hold him, a burger, chicken sandwich, anything. Whopper. Maybe he’d get a Whopper.

The place was crowded, a fact that normally would have driven him up a wall. He’d spent his whole life being impatient, expecting everybody to clear out of his way, the slow drivers to pull over and the crowds, wherever they were—the movies, the ballpark, the airport—to gather some other time, some other day and hour when he wasn’t there to share the planet with them. He was always cursing under his breath, always wound up, but not now, not today. Today he had all the time in the world. Of course, the dropouts behind the counter moved as if their feet had been nailed to the floor, but finally the line in front of him dwindled down to just him and he put in his order and went over to the fountain to pour himself a small drink, eyeing a table by the window where somebody had left a newspaper. He was just making his way toward it when he glanced down the row and saw Sara there, sitting at a table by herself, a half-eaten sandwich at her
elbow. She was dressed in her work clothes—jeans, boots and a long-sleeved shirt, and her apron, her leather apron—and she had her head down, absorbed in some sort of pamphlet. She seemed to have gained weight. Or maybe not. He couldn’t really remember.

It was an awkward moment. He didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want anything to do with her, but there he was, going down the very aisle of disarranged plastic tables where she was sitting, and he thought about swinging around and just walking right out of the place, getting in the car and forgetting about the whole thing—Whopper, did he really need a Whopper?—but he didn’t. He just continued on down the aisle, trying to slip past her, but at the last moment she lifted her face to him. “Sara?” he heard himself say.

Her eyes were adrift, soft and unfocused, and he watched them narrow to take him in. “Oh, hi,” she said, her voice so throaty and soft it was barely present.

“You all right?”

She shrugged. “Not really. You?”

“Day to day. Carolee’s still not over it, if she’s ever going to be. Which I doubt. But life goes on, right?”

She didn’t answer. Just dipped her head to take a bite of her sandwich as if she’d suddenly remembered what she was doing there. The door opened and closed. People drifted in, drifted out. “You want to know the truth, I’ve had it,” she said, glancing up at him again. “Soon as I can manage it I’m out of here.”

He was standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, nothing more to say, really, but something he couldn’t name held him there. He shifted his weight. Watched her chew.

“I’m thinking Nevada or maybe Wyoming? Someplace where you can live free without all this Big Brother crap. I’ve had it. Really, I’ve just had it.”

He didn’t know what to say to this and if he nodded his head it wasn’t in agreement or sympathy but only just to work the muscles at the back of his neck. Things came toppling down on
you, whole mountainsides, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. If you were lucky—very, very lucky—you got to step out of the way. “Yeah,” he said finally, his breath released in a drawn-out sigh, and he opened his palm and closed it again, bye-bye. “You have a nice day now.”

“You too,” she said, and he was already moving down the aisle.

It was nothing, just a moment cookie-cuttered out of his day, but it was enough to see the look of hurt and incomprehension on her face and to brush it off too. How long had she known Adam? A couple of months. What was a couple of months? Nothing. A memory, a whisper, pages flapping in the breeze. He settled in at the table in back and picked up the discarded paper. When he looked up again, she was gone.