The Harder They Come (38 page)

Authors: T. C. Boyle

Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Family Life, #Literary

BOOK: The Harder They Come

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He was the one who’d had to identify Adam’s body, never any question that it was up to him and him alone because he wasn’t going to expose Carolee to that. It was there in a drawer at the morgue—
he
was there, Adam—looking as if he was asleep. There wasn’t a mark on his face but for a thin welt that might have been a rope burn, and what Sten was feeling in that moment was hard to contain. He’d seen corpses before, laid out on the ground, their lifeless faces turned to the sky, awaiting body bags and a chopper and then a flight back to the States, but they hadn’t prepared him for this. He didn’t break down, but it was close. Standing there alone in that room with its unnatural cold and the smell of chlorine bleach so harsh and pervasive it was like a public urinal, he fought to contain himself, because there was another odor beneath it and it wasn’t of the flesh or of its fluids, but of fear. Fear and regret. And what did that smell like? Like the body’s essence.

What he was remembering was Adam’s first day at the high school, freshman year, the teachers just back from summer vacation, everybody trying to settle in, the students decked out in their new skirts and jeans and oversized T-shirts, electric with excitement. First day. The whole year to look forward to, the
ritual starting over again in a stew of hormones, timeless and immemorial. Math, history, the ballgame, senior prom, elections, lunch, gym class. There were never any fights the first day, never any discipline problems—everything was too new and everybody on their best behavior. Except for Adam. Within the first hour he was in the office, hauled in by Joe Buteo, the assistant principal, the enforcer. Adam had been in a fight. The other kid—a stranger to him as far as anybody knew—hadn’t done anything to provoke him. They were in the hallway between classes and Adam had seen something he didn’t like, something he couldn’t tolerate, some vision, some hallucination, and it was the other kid’s misfortune to have been part of it. It had taken two teachers to restrain Adam. The other kid—his victim, a junior twice his size who’d never caused anybody any trouble—had lost a tooth in front and his shirt was like a bloody flag.

Sten didn’t say anything, not then—this was the assistant principal’s job and he certainly didn’t want to give any impression of favoritism when it came to his own son—but when he got home you can be sure he laid into him. First thing. He came through the front door and stalked down the hall to his son’s room and he didn’t pause to knock either.

Adam was wearing a look that was to become habitual with him, his eyes hooded, his mouth drawn tight. He was in his dreadlock phase then, his hair matted and looped and hanging like brush in his face. He had a magazine in his lap. He didn’t even bother to look up.

Sten had never been violent with his son—violence didn’t work because it just provoked resentment and resentment led to more violence, a whole downward spiral of it—but he was on the verge of it that night. The principal’s son. First day of school. “What were you thinking?” he demanded. “You don’t just go and attack people—what did he do, anyway? I’d like to hear that. I really would.”

“That kid?” Adam said, and he hadn’t moved. “He’s an alien.”

Nobody shouted out to him from that tree. Nobody said, “Throw down your weapon,” or read him his rights. Shoot to kill, that was the order Rob gave because Rob was left with no other choice. Adam was armed and dangerous. He had his finger on the trigger. He’d come after them, stalked and fired on them—and worst of all, the unforgivable sin, he’d made them look bad. They’d fired twelve rounds, the two officers in the tree and their team member stretched out flat in the dirt with his rifle trained on the trail that wound down along the streambed there. Seven rounds went home, all in the torso, crack shots, these SWAT team studs, with hundreds of hours on the shooting range and a squeeze as gentle as held breath: Adam must have been dead before he hit the ground. He hadn’t suffered. Hadn’t even known what was coming. At least there was that.

But Sara was gone, pulling out of the lot now in her battered blue car, the fuzzy dog sticking its snout out the window, and they called his number and he went to the counter to pick up his order, everything too loud and too bright, people everywhere. His first thought was to go back to the table, but then the cell started buzzing in his pocket—Carolee—and he decided to detour out the door and go get her and take her to the nice place. He didn’t want the burger anymore. He wasn’t even hungry, not really.

“Hello?” he said, pinning the phone to his ear so he could hear over the noise as he pushed through the door and out into the lot.

His wife’s voice, small and satisfied: “I’m ready.”

“Where are you?”

“On Main? That place with the redwood carvings out front?”

“I’ll be right there.”

“Wait till you see what I found—just what I’ve been looking for.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Two of those yellow Bakelite bracelets to go with that amber pin you bought me?”

“That I bought you?” He loved to joke that he was always buying her things but never actually realized he’d done it till he saw them around her neck or dangling from her wrist.

“And these Art Deco linens with a tatted edge—in perfect condition—from like the thirties—”

He was going to say something like
Isn’t that a little old for you—I mean, you didn’t come along till the next decade, did you?,
but the glare of the lot hit him in the face and he lost the thread of it.

“Sten? Sten, are you there?”

“I’ll be there in five,” he said. “You be out front, okay?”

He was just strolling across the lot minding his own business, tangled up maybe over seeing Sara there and all that entailed, memories, tricks of memory, and when the pickup lurched back out of the space in front of him, it took him by surprise. He stepped awkwardly out of the way, his feet colliding and the bag, the Whopper, dropping to the pavement—he very nearly went down himself. It was just a moment, a random moment, but the truck’s engine roared in neutral, stick shift, and here was the face of the driver, a punk with a shaved head and the tattoos every kid had to have now climbing up the back of his neck, and a stud, a silver stud, punched through one nostril. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going,” the kid snarled. And then, gratuitously, as if that wasn’t enough, he added, “Grandpa.”

And here it came again—
boom!
—gasoline on the coals. He was five feet from him, from this kid who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, the apprentice tough guy, the clown in the truck with the big-dick tires. He should have just let it go but he couldn’t. “Fuck you,” he rasped, his voice clenched in his throat.

And now the kid, throwing it back at him—“Fuck you too!”—and what else could he say, pro forma, call and response, the same text, the old text, oldest there was?

He couldn’t say “fuck you” one more time, couldn’t stand
here under this sun, in this lot, at his age, and play this game, so he just turned his back and listened to the hot squeal of the tires as the victor shot triumphantly across the lot and lost himself in the traffic heading down the hill to the coast.

Something awakened the gulls on the roof of the inn and they rose in a sudden flap of wings to sail out across the parking lot and the road beyond, fracturing the light. He pushed himself up, hoisted the clubs and ambled over to the first tee, glad there was no one around to observe him in his ineptitude. He was going to whack a little white ball and then he was going to follow it around for an hour or two and then he was going to go home and do something else. He’d watched a couple of golf videos and he was trying to improve his swing along the lines they laid out—head still, feet apart, focus on the ball and not where it’s going—but he hadn’t really made any gains and maybe didn’t expect to. It was enough just to be here, in the morning light, thumbing the tee into the turf and balancing the ball atop it like an egg in a miniature cup.

He swiveled his hips. Arched his back. Took a practice swing to loosen up. And then he tightened his grip, raised the club over his shoulder and came down with everything he had. There was the flat head of the club, there the ball, and he saw it so clearly it was as if it had been caught in stop-time. He hit it. Hit it squarely, hit it hard, and it wasn’t a great shot or even a good one, but there it was, looping up into the great vast ocean of the sky, and it kept on going and kept on going.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

T.C. BOYLE
is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the late 1970s, he has published fourteen novels and ten collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his novel
World’s End
, and the Prix Médicis étranger for
The Tortilla Curtain
in 1995, as well as the 2014 Henry David Thoreau award for excellence in nature writing. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.

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A
LSO BY
T. C
ORAGHESSAN
B
OYLE

NOVELS

Water Music
(1982)

Budding Prospects
(1984)

World’s End
(1987)

East Is East
(1990)

The Road to Wellville
(1993)

The Tortilla Curtain
(1995)

Riven Rock
(1998)

A Friend of the Earth
(2000)

Drop City
(2003)

The Inner Circle
(2004)

Talk Talk
(2006)

The Women
(2009)

When the Killing’s Done
(2011)

San Miguel
(2012)

SHORT STORIES

Descent of Man
(1979)

Greasy Lake & Other Stories
(1985)

If the River Was Whiskey
(1989)

Without a Hero
(1994)

T.C. Boyle Stories
(1998)

After the Plague
(2001)

Tooth and Claw
(2005)

The Human Fly
(2005)

Wild Child & Other Stories
(2010)

T.C. Boyle Stories II
(2013)

ANTHOLOGIES

DoubleTakes
(2004) co-edited with K. Kvashay-Boyle

C
REDITS

Cover art and design by Jim Tierney

C
OPYRIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE HARDER THEY COME
. Copyright © 2015 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition March 2015 ISBN 9780062349392

ISBN 978-0-06-234937-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-239071-4 (international edition)

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A
BOUT THE
P
UBLISHER

Australia

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Canada

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