The Harder They Come (14 page)

T
HE WHOLE IDEA OF
a vacation, of a travel vacation, was to clear out the cobwebs, put your troubles behind you and come home refreshed. Well, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, had it? As he reminded Carolee every chance he got. His stress level was so high the first week home he had to go to the doctor to check on his blood-pressure medication and see about a refill on his Xanax, which he never took anymore, not since he’d shut the door behind him at the high school for the last and final time. It wasn’t enough that they’d been attacked or that the ship had been delayed in Puerto Limón for a full twenty-four hours while the Costa Rican bureaucrats conferred with the cruise line bureaucrats and the State Department flunkies so that when the boat did finally get to Miami they’d missed their flight to San Francisco or that the flight they did manage to get on was delayed for three hours because of fog on the other end—no, it was the press, the press was the real and continuing plague because they kept the whole thing going when all he wanted was to turn the page and forget about it. They didn’t care what he wanted. They never even asked. They just came after him.

Within an hour of his walking out of that room in the bowels of the ship, even before he and Carolee had got through the first bottle of Perrier-Jouët sent compliments of the captain and delivered by Kristi Breerling herself, his cell began ringing. Exhausted—wiped—and half-drunk too, he wasn’t thinking and just put the phone to his ear and rasped, “Hello?”

A voice came back at him, an unfamiliar voice, distant but clear. A man’s voice. “Mr. Stensen? Sten Stensen?”

“Yeah?”

The voice gave a name and an affiliation and without pausing to draw breath began hammering him with questions, each more inane and intrusive than the last—“What was it like out there? How many of them were there? How do you feel, you feel any different? You
are
a senior citizen, right—seventy years old, is that right? A war veteran? Did the alleged attacker say anything to you? He had a gun? Or was it a knife?” He tried to answer the man’s questions as patiently as he could, though Carolee was hissing at him to hang up and all he could think of was the cruise line’s slogan—
Experience World-Class Indulgence
—and wonder how in Christ’s name this reporter had managed to get his cell number, but finally, after a question about his service record—
In Vietnam, was it?
—he broke the connection even as the call-waiting light flared and he shut the thing off and stuffed it deep in his pocket.

“Who was that?” Carolee demanded.

“I don’t know. Some reporter.”

It was dark out over the water. They’d pulled the sliding door of their private veranda shut to thwart the mosquitoes and whatever else was out there—vampire bats, he supposed. The champagne in his glass had gone warm. He took a sip and made a face—it tasted like club soda with a dash of bitters and no more potent.

Carolee was giving him her severe look, her mouth drawn down and her eyebrows pinched together, a crease there in the shape of a
V
she’d been working on for sixty-four years now. “You don’t have to talk to those people,” she said.

The glass went heavy in his hand. He could barely hold his head up. “Yeah,” he said, “and you don’t have to swat flies either.”

Of course, part of the problem that first week was that he couldn’t seem to say no. He was a celebrity, an instant celebrity, the story plumbing some deep atavistic recess of the American psyche, and forgive him, because he knew it was wrong in every way, but
after the third or fourth interview he began to feel he was only getting his due:
Ex-Marine, 70, Kills Tour Thug
;
Quick Thinking Saves the Day; Costa Rica Tour Hero
. If he stopped to think about it he would have been ashamed of himself—he was being manipulated, and worse, glorified not for any virtue, but for a single act of violence that haunted him every time he shut his eyes—but he didn’t stop to think. He’d never been interviewed on the radio before—or on TV either—and that shot up the stress level, of course it did, but he went through with every request until the requests began to trickle off in the wake of newer and riper stories, the mass shooting of the week, the daily bombing, the women imprisoned as sex slaves and all the rest of it.

There were calls from Hollywood too, producers making promises, naming sums, gabbling over the line like auctioneers—and that was what this was, an auction, make no mistake about it—but none of them ever followed through and he never received a letter from a single one of them let alone a contract or, god forbid, a check. But he didn’t want a check, didn’t want to be inflated any more than he already had been—who in his right mind would ever want to see a movie made out of his life, anyway?
The camera pans down the street to focus on a frame house in need of paint in the sleepy lumber town of Fort Bragg, California, and there he is, ten years old and emerging from the front door to do something dramatic like walk to school, and here’s his mother calling to him like June Lockhart in
Lassie,
then we shift to the high school years, the junker car, the prom, Vietnam, college and Carolee, the birth of their son, student teaching, the rise up the rocky slope to the great and shining plateau of school principal, and all of it circling round the cruise ship and the blighted dirty jungle and one climactic moment to justify it all, this American life
. Who would they get to play him—Sean Connery? Tommy Lee Jones? Travolta? Absurdity on top of absurdity.

As it turned out, he did agree to one TV appearance, gratis, with a station out of San Francisco, which sent one of their newswomen and two support people to the house and filmed him
sitting in the rocker on the front porch with the blue pennant of the ocean flapping in the distance. When it aired that night on the six o’clock news, he saw himself loom up on the screen like something out of one of the Japanese horror flicks he’d loved as a boy—
Rodan,
maybe, or
Godzilla
—his eyes blunted, his face scaled and gray and his big fists clenched on the arms of the chair as if he was afraid of falling out of it.
Were you scared?
the TV woman asked him and he said he was too angry to be scared, his voice like the leaky hiss of an air hose.
It all happened so quickly,
she prompted.
Yeah,
he rasped, looking into the camera with his face absolutely frozen,
something like that. And you just reacted? Yeah,
he said,
I just reacted
.

By the second week, things had died down to the point of extinction as far as the press was concerned, but he couldn’t go anywhere without somebody giving him a thumbs-up or calling out to him, people he didn’t even know. It was as if he belonged to them now, the whole community, as if he’d graduated from being a retiree and homeowner to another level altogether. And that might have given him some satisfaction—it did—but somehow all he could see was Adam’s face, twisted in a sneer.
Big hero
. Yeah. Sure. That about summed it up. What was he going to do, run for mayor?

And yet still, at odd moments and always while Carolee was out or occupied elsewhere, he couldn’t resist googling his name to see what would come up. Most of the articles repeated the same information (and misinformation, one adding ten years to his age and another spelling his name variously as Sternson and Stevenson), but every once in a while he would find something new, a detail revealed, a tidbit that put everything in a fresh light as if the incident were reconstructing itself for him like a jigsaw puzzle. He was at it one fog-obliterated afternoon, surfing away, the world reduced to the dimensions of the screen in front of him, when he came across an article he’d somehow managed to overlook (or maybe it had just been posted, who knew?—the
internet worked in mysterious ways). This was a fuller account of the AP story that had appeared just about everywhere, and as he scanned it, his eyes jumped to the one detail the other reports had left out as if it had no significance at all: the name of the dead man. To this point, he’d been anonymous—the thug, the mugger, the thief—and now he had a name:
Warner Ayala
. And more: here was his biography, compacted in two lines of print. He was twenty-four years old. A resident of Jamaica Town. He’d built up a long rap sheet of minor crimes from the age of twelve on and he was a suspect in a string of attacks on tourists and local residents alike. Or had been. Warner Ayala. And here was his movie, here was his life.

“Warner,” he repeated to himself, saying it aloud like an incantation, “Warner,” and all at once he was thinking of the parents, the siblings, cousins, grandparents, a father like himself who was mourning his dead son even now. It was as if someone had crept up and struck him a blow from behind, all of it rushing back in that instant, the sun, the mud lot, the fierce unrelenting intimacy of his body entangled with this other one, and he felt so filled with self-loathing and despair it was all he could do to lift his finger to the off button and make the whole thing disappear.

It was three-thirty in the afternoon. The fog sat in the windows. It was very quiet. The blank screen gave him back a ghost image of himself, of his ravaged face and unfocused eyes, the presence still there, still awake and alert and corrosive, even as he pushed himself up from the desk and the world came back to him in all its color and immediacy. Paneled walls. The den. The framed photo of Adam, eleven years old and holding a stringer of half-grown trout aloft with a smile uncomplicated by anything beyond the joy of the moment. Another picture there, of him and Carolee, squinting into the camera against a fierce tropical sun and no older than Adam was now. And another, of his mother, dead twenty years and more, a ghost herself. Next thing he knew he was in the kitchen, washing down a Xanax with a cold beer,
and then he went into the living room and started a fire, as much for the cheer as the warmth of it. He felt hopeless. Felt like shit. The pill wasn’t working or the beer or the fire either.

For a long while he just sat there, moving only to stir the coals, the clock on the mantel ticking louder and louder and the fire hissing and the four walls closing him in until some sort of curtain seemed to lift inside him, dark to light, and gradually he began to come out of it. Here he was, still ambulatory, with his mind intact, or mostly so, sitting before a fire in the shingled ocean-view cottage they’d traded up to get—and get at a steal, jumping on it when the recession hit and the values plunged. Even better: he’d finally managed to escape Fort Bragg, winding up here in the religiously quaint little tourist village of Mendocino, population 1,008, where you could get fresh-baked bread every morning and afternoon and the world’s best coffee anytime you wanted. Enough, already—he wasn’t one to feel sorry for himself. What was done was done. Move forward. Shake some pleasure out of life. He got to his feet, groggy from the beer and the pill, but inspired suddenly: he was going to call Carolee and tell her to come home, right away, because he was taking her out to dinner—at the Bistro, the place she liked best.

Her phone rang but she didn’t answer and it went to voicemail. “Call me!” he shouted into the receiver and then rang the number again. She was down in Calpurnia, helping out at the animal preserve there where she liked to volunteer two days a week, but it was getting late—past five now—and they would have fed the animals already, wouldn’t they? Or shoveled up the shit or whatever they did? Maybe she was in the car, maybe that was it. He was trying to picture that, his wife, driving, the fog strangling the headlights, her gray serious eyes fixed on the road, which was slick and wet and deserted, when she picked up.

“Hi, Sten,” her voice breathed in his ear, “what’s up?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m just getting in the car.”

“Good. Great. Because I’m taking you out to dinner at that place you like.”

“The Bistro?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“We’re going to celebrate.”

He heard the muffled thump of the car door slamming shut, then the revolving whine of the engine starting up. “Celebrate what?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel like celebrating. Life, I guess.”

There was silence on the other end.

“You there?”

The faint distant crunch of gravel, tires in motion, then her voice coming back to him: “Sounds fine to me.”

“Okay,” he said, “okay.” Everything was precious suddenly, his life, her life, the lives of the animals and of everybody else out there on the slick wet roads. He felt so overwhelmed he could barely get the words out. “You be careful out there, huh?”

The restaurant was in Fort Bragg, eight miles up the road from Mendocino. It occupied the second floor of a brick building the size of a department store that had once housed the operations of Union Lumber and it was floor-to-ceiling windows all around so that if you got a window table you could sit there and eat and feel as if you were floating over the whole town and the ocean too. Though it was the middle of August and the tourists were out in force, they got a window table without having to wait at the bar because the hostess was a former student at Fort Bragg High and recognized him, though he didn’t recognize her. “Who was that?” Carolee asked, once they were seated.

“Beats me,” he said, looking up at her, feeling good, if a bit shaky still. “At this point, they all look the same to me.”

There were menus, drinks, a basket of hot bread. He went through the bread without even realizing what he was doing, hungry suddenly, though he hadn’t got a lick of exercise all day.

“You
are
hungry,” she said. “Don’t tell me you didn’t eat any lunch?”

He ducked his head, grinned. “No, I had something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know—a sandwich. Or cereal, a bowl of cereal.” The fact was, he couldn’t really remember. He had a sudden vision of himself laid out flat in a nursing home, gasping for breath, all his vitals dwindled down to nothing. Old man. He was an old man. “But tell me, how was it down there,” he said, to cover himself, “—they get any new zebras in? Or what, giraffes? Or are they fresh out over there in Africa?”