The Harder They Come (8 page)

“I told you,” Christabel said, once they’d slammed into her pickup in the lot out back of the station. “You may have your theories or beliefs or whatever, but these people? They don’t care. They’re on another planet—this planet, planet earth.” She gave her a look, all eye shadow and glistening black mascara. “And you—you’re in outer space. I mean it, Sara. I really do.”

Christabel was two years older than she was, also divorced, also childless. She’d kept her figure and had men sniffing after her seven days a week, but she was done with men, or that’s what she said, anyway—at least till the next one came along. She was Sara’s best friend and here she was proving it all over again, taking time out from her work as a teacher’s aide at the elementary school to be there for her, but she was wrong on this, dead wrong.

“It’s not theory,” she said. “It’s law. Natural law.”

“There you go—I mean, don’t you ever learn?” They were heading out of the parking lot now, the police lot, and the idiot dinger started in because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. “And buckle your belt, will you?”

Contrite? Who was contrite? Not her. “No,” she said. “No way.”

That was when Christabel hit the brake so hard she nearly went through the window. “I swear I’m not going another inch
until you buckle up—and not just because of what happened here and not for safety’s sake either, but because I can’t stand that fucking noise one more second!”

“You don’t have to shout,” she said. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with my hearing.” Still she didn’t touch the belt. It was as if her hands were paralyzed.

The noise kept up,
ding-ding-ding,
a beat, then
ding-ding-ding
and
ding-ding-ding
.

“Sara, I’m warning you, I mean it, I do—”

She let her gaze roll on out over the scene. She was calm now, utterly calm. Traffic flicked by on the street.
Ding-ding-ding
.
Ding-ding-ding
. A girl who honestly couldn’t have been more than sixteen went by pushing one of those double baby strollers as if there was nothing wrong with that, as if that was the way people were supposed to live. She looked over her shoulder and saw that there was a car in the lot behind them, a face trapped in the blaze of the windshield, some other soul trying to get out of this purgatory and back to real life, but nobody was going anywhere unless something changed right here and now. Christabel was glaring at her, actually glaring.

In the next moment, and she hardly knew what she was doing, she flipped the handle and pushed the door open wide, and then she was out on the sidewalk, her feet moving and the door gaping behind her, hurrying down the street as fast as her boots would take her, thinking,
The bank, the bank before it closes
. And Christabel? Christabel was just an afterthought because she wasn’t going to sit there arguing. She had to get to the bank because she knew she was going to have to suck everything out of her savings and put it into a cashier’s check if she was going to get the car out of hock. That was the first priority, the car, because without it she was stuck. Once she had it back, the minute they handed her the keys, she’d head straight to the animal shelter, because when she thought about how scared and hurt and confused that dog must have been, it just made her heart seize. He’d never been separated
from her since she’d got him as a pup, never, not for a single day, and what had he done? Just defend her, that was all. And now he was locked up in a concrete pen with a bunch of strays and pit bulls and god knew what else. She didn’t care what anybody said, and they could go ahead and crucify her, but that was as wrong as wrong got.

B
UT THEN THEY WOULDN
’
T
let her car go until she went down to the DMV and had it properly registered (their words, not hers), yet in order to do that she had to show title to the car, which was at home in the lower drawer of her filing cabinet, which in turn meant calling Christabel and eating crow (
I’m sorry, I was upset, I don’t know what came over me
) so she could get a ride back up to Willits and then down again to the DMV, which was closed when she got there, of course, as was the animal shelter, and that was hard, the hardest thing about this whole sorry affair. She could see through the glass of the door into the deserted lobby and hear the dogs barking in back, could hear Kutya, and there was nothing she could do about it. She must have banged on that door for ten minutes but nobody came, and the noise she made, the noise of her frustration and anger, meted out with the underside of her coiled fist, just made the dogs bark all the louder.

Behind her, in the lot, Christabel sat in the truck with the engine running. “They’re closed!” she shouted, hanging half out the window. “Can’t you see that? They’re closed!”

She almost broke down then, so frustrated her eyes clouded over till she could barely see, but she didn’t break down and she didn’t give up either. Instead she worked her way around back, looking for a way in, a gate with a padlock somebody had forgotten to secure, a chainlink fence she could scale, and all the while the dogs barked and howled and whimpered from deep inside. She circled the place twice—there was a rear door, locked, and from the feel of it, bolted too—then made her way back across the lot to Christabel.

“Well?” Christabel demanded. “Did I tell you? They’re closed.
Shut down.” She held up her phone. “Hours, ten to five, Tuesday through Saturday.”

“You don’t have a crowbar, do you, anything like a crowbar? A jack handle?”

“Are you crazy? They probably have cameras—everybody does. You’re probably on film right now. You can’t just—”

“The bastards,” she said, spitting the words out, so saturated with grief and hate it was coming out her pores. “Jesus. I was just going to work. Isn’t that what they want in this rip-off society, people working? So they can stick their hands in your pockets?”

The pickup rumbled in a soft smooth way that was like its own kind of melody. A steady float of exhaust ghosted across the lot. Christabel pulled down her sunglasses to squint against the light that flattened her features and picked out the vertical trenches between her eyes. “You’re not talking about the IRS again, are you?”

She didn’t answer. Just stared at the building and listened to the barking of the dogs as it wound down now to a confused gabble and then stopped altogether.

“Because I’ve heard it all already. And you don’t pay taxes, anyway, do you? Or fines either.” She paused. The exhaust tumbled on a breeze that came up out of nowhere, rich with chemical intoxicants. “Get in the car,” she said. “I’m tired.”

“So am I.”

“Well, get in.”

This was why people firebombed buildings. And how she’d like to bomb the police station and the DMV and this shithole too . . . but then Kutya was in there and she couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t even think of it. Most people—and Christabel was one of them—didn’t understand that government by the corporation was no government at all. Didn’t understand that it was the Fourteenth Amendment that converted sovereign citizens into federal citizens by making them agree to a contract to accept federal benefits—and taxes and all the illegal and confounding maze of
laws that come with them. Taxes on your taxes. Do this, do that. You don’t like it, go to jail. But that amendment was unconstitutional and if you subscribed to it you were just a slave of the system and had no rights at all except what they doled out to you with one hand while helping themselves to your paycheck with the other. How had it ever come to this? How could people be so blind, so stupid?

It all came down on her in that moment in a funk of hopelessness, because what was the use? She’d fight them, she’d continue to fight them and do everything in her power to live free and beholden to no man or woman, fight till there was nothing left of her but bleached white bones spread out in the dirt, but not tonight, not now. There was nothing she could do. She was beaten. She ducked her head so that her hair fell in her eyes till the wind lifted it again, then climbed into the pickup and slammed the door.

“Where to?” Christabel asked, softening her look.

Christabel was a good friend, a true friend, the best she’d ever had, the one person who was there for her, wading through the shitstorm no matter what came down. And she was right, of course—they couldn’t sit here all night. Sara just shrugged.

“How about a drink? After all you’ve been through don’t you deserve it?” A little laugh. “Not to mention me.”

The truck rumbled. A plastic bag chased the breeze across the blacktop. She fixed one last look on the ugly buff building with its cheap knee-high vertical windows anybody could step right through and let out a sigh. “I don’t care,” she heard herself say.

They wound up going to a brew pub on State and she tried a pint of something called Mendo Blonde, but it tasted of hops and metal and just gave her gas, so they went over to Casa Carlos and had margaritas and chicken tacos and she ate too much and had at least two too many drinks. She didn’t even know she was eating,
she was so upset. The food just seemed to disappear, tacos, beans, rice, basket after basket of the chips she dipped mechanically in the little cruets of salsa that began to clutter the table till there was no room to rest your elbow or even a forearm. And the margaritas too—as soon as she set down her empty glass there was a new one there to replace it. By the time they made it back home to Willits (twenty minutes on a darkened highway that seemed like hours), she was too exhausted to do anything more than collapse in bed after Christabel dropped her off. She didn’t even bother to turn on a light or pour herself a glass of water, just undressed in the dark, flinging her clothes in the direction of the chair in the corner, the house woeful and empty without Kutya there so that every creeping sound of the night was magnified, and if she was the kind who cried herself to sleep, she would have done it. She woke at intervals throughout the night, feeling as if she was being strangled in her sleep, a heavy shroud of sorrow and regret pulled up over her like a comforter made of dross.

She was up at dawn, her every mortal fiber aching, and her first thought was for Kutya. Christabel had agreed to drop her at the DMV before she went in to work, but that was two long hours away, and so she made herself a pot of coffee and some wheat toast and went out on the front porch to watch the sun ease its way down into the valley and illuminate the tops of the pines and firs and redwoods that had been the support of generations of loggers since the first settlers made their way up from the coast. She kept checking her watch, the minutes dragging as if they had anchors attached to them, and then the newspaper arrived to reiterate its falsehoods and outright lies, but she was too worked up to concentrate on it and she found herself pacing round the yard, back and forth, as if she were in the cell still—under lock and key, restrained, constrained, helpless—until Christabel’s pickup turned off the main road and came up the drive.

The people at the DMV barely glanced at her, lost in their wilderness of forms and regulations and computer printouts. She
was the first one in the door when they opened. There was the usual crap, the flag, the linoleum, the chairs and desks and eye charts, all paid for by the wage slaves of the U.S. of A., one little sinkhole of bureaucracy amongst a million of them. The man behind the front desk could have been anybody, and if he realized he was a minion and servant of the corporate state, he gave no indication and she wasn’t about to inform him either. All she wanted was the signed, sealed and approved scrap of DMV paper to tape to the inside of her windshield. Which she got in due course. Money changed hands, naturally, but she wasn’t going to worry about that now because now she needed her car back so she could drive to the animal shelter and retrieve her dog before he whined himself to death—and what must
he
have been thinking? That she’d abandoned him? Given up on him? Told them to lock him away with all those strays they euthanized as if they had no more animate soul than a bug?

She got a surprise at the impound yard, which she’d walked to, ten long blocks, but it was a pleasant surprise, if you can call having your property stolen from you and paying to get it back pleasant in any way, shape or form. But there was Mary Ellis, one of her longtime clients, standing behind the bulletproof glass in the office, and she was sympathetic to the point of rallying to the cause—oh, she knew the arresting officer, all right, Joanie Jerpbak, and she was a queen bitch, daughter of a retired CHP officer who was the original son of a bitch—but more money, a lot more money, changed hands despite the sympathy, and then it was on to Animal Control.

Barking was what she heard when she pulled into the lot, barking that seemed to rise to a frenzy as she stepped out of the car, and what were they doing to them in there, goading them with cattle prods? She remembered her husband—ex-husband—telling her a story about how they trained the police dogs down in Sacramento. He was in college then and the apartment he was renting was on the second story of a building that looked down on
the backyard of the K-9 academy, where they kept and trained the dogs. One afternoon he heard the dogs going crazy and looked out to see a figure dressed like the Michelin Man with a pair of Belgian shepherds tearing at him. He had a stick in his hand—he was the aggressor, the bad guy—and he didn’t shout, “Bad dog!” No, what he was shouting was “Good dog!” over and over again. That was how they trained them. That was the kind of people they were.

Her throat was dry and her heart was pounding when she stepped through the door, the barking from the pens in back rising in volume and yet another functionary standing there gazing at her from behind another desk. They murdered dogs here, that was what she was thinking,
euthanized
them, and from the sound of it, provoked them just for the pleasure of it. She didn’t say hello or state her business, but just gave the functionary—a woman in her twenties dressed in khaki shirt and shorts—a shocked look. “What are you doing to them back there?” she demanded.

The woman—girl—smiled. “They’re all excited,” she said, and the smile widened. “It’s feeding time.”

Feeding time. Did she feel foolish? Maybe. A little. She shifted her gaze to the bulletin board on the side wall, which was plastered with head-shots of dogs and cats up for adoption, and then to the cats themselves, ten of them or so, each in a separate cage tricked out with a mini hammock, as if they were on vacation with all the time in the world at their disposal, as if they were happy to be here, when the truth was they were only waiting for their appointment with the furnace in back. There was an antiseptic smell about the place, a scent of formalin and Simple Green, and something else she couldn’t quite place, something caustic. The counter before her offered brochures on pet care, vaccinations and neutering and a hallway led to another door, the one that gave onto the inner sanctum. “I came for my dog,” she said, bringing her focus back to the girl. “I would’ve been here last night, but you were closed.”

“Name?”

“Kutya.”

“Kutya what?”

“Just Kutya, that’s all. I mean, does a dog have to have a last name?”

The girl let out a laugh. “Sorry,” she said. “Your name, I mean.”

“Sara Hovarty Jennings. That’s H-o-v-a-r-t-y, Jennings. They took my dog away from me yesterday afternoon, the cops, when they impounded my car. And they brought him here.”

Still smiling—they’d broken the routine, shared a joke—the girl focused on the screen of her computer and tapped away at the keyboard. Sara stood there at the counter studying the girl’s face while the dogs barked distantly and a pale finger of sun poked in through one of the windows she’d briefly considered smashing the night before. She watched the smile fade and then die. “I’m sorry,” the girl said, looking up at her now, “but we can’t release the dog at this time.”

“What do you mean? I’m the owner. Do you need proof, is that it?”

The girl looked embarrassed, the way people do when they’re about to drop a bomb on you. “No,” she said softly, and Sara could see that it wasn’t her fault, that she was sympathetic, somebody’s daughter just doing her job. “It’s that—well, the report says here that the dog bit someone, is that right? And that you don’t have a certificate of rabies vaccination?”

Sara went numb. She just shook her head. The dogs barked and barked, but it was joyous barking—they were barking for their kibble and the cold comfort of their cages.

“She’ll have to be quarantined for thirty days—”

“He.”

“He will, I mean. It’s right here, see?” She swung the monitor round so that Sara could see the regimented blocks of words suspended there, as if they meant anything, as if the official who’d
typed out the order had any authority over the dog she’d raised from a puppy so tiny he couldn’t even climb the two steps to the back porch.

“My dog doesn’t have rabies,” she said.

But the girl was ahead of her here, the girl, who despite her youth, sympathy and good humor, had been in this very position before, a girl in uniform
just doing her job
. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We can’t take that chance. It’s the rules.”