The Harder They Come (34 page)

I
T WAS MIDWAY THROUGH
the fifth week, Adam was still at large and the police were beyond crazy. They were stopping everybody on Route 20 just to look in their cars because in their feeble minds they imagined Adam squeezed under somebody’s seat or packed into their trunk and they’d stopped her three times now but it was nothing more than a petty annoyance. They didn’t ask for her papers and she didn’t have to state her status. They didn’t care if she was wearing a seatbelt or not and they didn’t run her license plate or turn up the warrant out for her arrest on the grounds that she’d refused to play their idiot games or shuffle one more time through the charade of authority with the old hag of a judge in her courthouse presided over by the flag of the U.S.I.G.A. No. All they were interested in was Adam. It was all-out war now. They’d been made to look like the fools they were, big macho men with their big manly guns and all the resources of ten sheriff’s departments and they still couldn’t catch one twenty-five-year-old mountain man who was driving a stake through the heart of the local economy and scaring the bejesus out of the taxpayers so they couldn’t even sleep at night.

She was at home, in the kitchen, listening to music and pushing two bone-in pork chops around a pan and sprinkling them with rosemary from her garden. She was tired of salad so she’d bought some fresh spinach at the farmers’ market, rinsed it, tossed it with a little garlic salt and pepper, then splashed it with olive oil and balsamic and microwaved it for three minutes, easiest thing in the world. It had fallen dark now, the nights growing shorter—and colder—and Halloween just two days away. How would that play out? she wondered. What would parents tell their children? They’d
have private parties, she supposed, because no one—absolutely no one—would be going house to house. Not with Adam out there. Would he consciously hurt a kid? Not the Adam she knew. But then he had driven his car onto the playground, hadn’t he? And maybe he wasn’t really the Adam she knew, not if he could shoot down Art Tolleson and the other one and just leave them there to rot.

Kutya stirred in the corner where he’d been lying asleep, laziest dog she’d ever seen and not getting any younger, and now he came clicking across the floor to her and the smell of the meat searing in the pan. “No,” she told him, bending from the waist to look into his eyes, “you’re just going to have to wait.” Then she turned back to the pan and flipped the chops, everything in its place and everything quiet, but here she was in her warm kitchen with the smell of the meat rising around her and she couldn’t help wondering what Adam was eating. He had a prodigious appetite and no matter how many freeze-dried entrées or cans of beef stew he’d squirreled away out there, how could it have lasted him all this time? He’d been breaking into cabins, they’d reported that, and he’d held that one old lady hostage back there at the beginning, but still. And that was another thing: no hot food. Even when it was raining, even when it was cold, and it had been getting down into the forties at night. Maybe he had a camp stove, the kind of thing you could risk cooking on in a deep secluded place, a cave or something, but even so he must have been pretty miserable. She tried to picture that a minute, him in a cave, with that rank wet smell caves always had and what, bats hanging overhead? He wouldn’t dare travel in the daytime, not if he had any sense and he did, obviously, so he must have been roaming the woods in the dark—and if he was, he couldn’t use a light. And if he couldn’t use a light, how could he find his way? Plus, how could he keep from dying of boredom out there, even if he was putting everything he had into baiting the jerkoff cops and their killer dogs and no doubt enjoying it too? Adam. And why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?

Maybe because nobody else could either. Anything went wrong within a hundred miles, even a flat tire, and Adam was to blame. Like with that whole debacle down at the Burnsides’. How quick they were to pin that on him, even with his mother—their friend, a woman who was just volunteering her time, for god’s sake—standing right there beside them.
He shot the sable,
that was what Gentian had said, not someone shot the sable, but
he
shot them. The way it turned out, though, Adam had nothing to do with it.

Of course, the cops were there within five minutes of Gentian’s putting in the call, swarming all over everything, their faces haggard and desperate because the system wasn’t supporting them, the system was breaking down right in front of their eyes and there was nothing they could do about it. They searched the edge of the field and came up with some shell casings and they had one of their butchers slice open these beautiful four-hundred-pound animals and dig the slugs out of them and they tramped hell out of the place but didn’t turn up Adam or anybody else. What they did discover, finally, and they took their sweet time about disclosing it too, was that two junior high kids had been fooling around with a deer rifle one of them found in his father’s gun safe, which had been left unlocked. They found something in the liquor cabinet too. And thought it would be a great idea—or rad, wasn’t that what they would say, a rad idea?—to go out and put holes in these beautiful animals that were fast disappearing from the earth.

She sat at the table to eat, idly paging through one of the magazines Christabel had left behind for her. Christa was a real hound for the gossip sheets—
Us Weekly
,
In Touch
,
People, The Star
—but basically they left her cold because it was just more of the same blindered attitude and slave mentality, as if whoever was dating whoever or buying what fabulous mansion had anything to do with the fact that the system was rotted all the way down to the stump. After dinner she went to her computer and read the latest about Adam, which was basically nothing piled on top
of nothing, limiting herself to half an hour, and then she tried to read by the woodstove for a while, Kutya curled up at her feet, and finally turned on the idiot box to see if maybe there was an old movie on, one of the ones where people—Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, take your pick—made all these stirring declarations about democracy and standing up for the little man while the heroine flashed across the screen in all these killer outfits. It was crap, but high-minded crap, crap in layers she could peel away till she found something there that took her back to a simpler time, a time before the corporations had taken over and made a mockery of everything everybody said on the screen. A movie. It was just a movie. A way to pass the time in an empty house on a night when there was nothing going on and the world had been reduced to these four walls and this gently ticking woodstove and the dog, in his dreadlocks, on the rug at her feet.

The funny thing—or odd,
odd
was a better word—was that it was just like the last time, nothing moving, nothing shaking, but there was a feeling coming over her that she wasn’t alone. She looked over her shoulder. There was no one there. The doors were locked, she was sure of it, and if anyone should try to get in, Kutya, old as he was, would be up and barking his head off. She turned back to the movie, someone sitting by a deathbed on a ship, flimsy walls that were just a stage set and another movie playing through the porthole to give the illusion that the ship was moving and this was all real, and then the feeling stole over her again and she turned around and there he was.

He didn’t say hello or help me or I love you, but just stood there, like Adam, exactly like, only different because of what he’d done and where he’d been and how he’d been putting it to the cops for all these weeks now. Kutya didn’t stir until he spoke and even then he didn’t bark because he must have remembered him, without prejudice, because he was only a dog. Adam said, “Turn out the lights.”

She said his name, but she didn’t get up from the chair, though the dog had crossed the room to him, sniffing.

“Do it,” he said.

She got up then, but she didn’t go to him, instead working her way from lamp to lamp till the room was lit only by the TV. He looked older somehow, thinner, a lot thinner, and his clothes were ragged. She could smell the woods on him, the rot, as if he
had
been living in a cave. With the bats. And the lice. And the giardia parasites.

“Kill the TV too.”

“We’d be totally in the dark,” she said. “No, no way.” And then, standing poised there in front of the lamp over the desk even as the glow of it faded away, she said, “What are you doing here, anyway? Are you crazy? The cops are watching this place, don’t you realize that?”

He shrugged, dark in his dark clothes. There was a slash across his face, a welt there, fresh and livid, and the first thing she thought was that he’d been grazed by a bullet, but she saw that it wasn’t that at all, more likely a mishap in the dark as he was creeping up on the place. He just stood there, his hands hanging at his sides. And where was his gun, his rifle? There, propped against the wall in the hallway that led to the back room. He looked exhausted, looked beat—beaten, beaten down.

She began to fear for herself then—not out of fear of him because she didn’t care what he’d done, he would never hurt her, she was sure of it, but of the cops. If they found him here, if they found even the minutest scrap of evidence that he’d been here, then she
was
an accomplice and all the shit they’d brought down on her already was nothing compared to what was coming. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“I’m hungry.”

“I can’t give you food, I can’t give you anything—they’ll put me in jail.”

“Who?” he said, his voice thick with contempt. “The hostiles? The aliens?”
And then he laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “Not while I’m here they won’t.”

“You’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “They’ll kill you.”

He laughed again.

“I’m not kidding, Adam—they’ve been here. They tore the whole place apart. You’ve got to go. Right now.
Now,
hear me?”

“You won’t give me food?”

“No.”

“Colter would have got food,” he said. “Colter would have—”

She cut him off. “Enough with Colter. Colter has nothing to do with this. Colter’s dead. He’s been dead for like two hundred years and the world isn’t like that anymore, you know it, you of all people—”

“I want to sleep with you.”

They were ten feet apart and he didn’t come to her and she didn’t go to him. They were like statues, talking statues. That moment? That was the moment that tested her more than any other. And if she saw herself packing in a frenzy and sneaking him and Kutya into the car and making a run for Stateline or wherever—Canada—it was because her heart was breaking. She was his mother too. His mother and his lover. And they were going to kill him. “No,” she said. “You have to get out. Get out and never come back.”

The light of the TV flickered across his face, black and white, somebody dying on a ship and everything as false and artificial and make-believe as it could be.

“Get out,” she said, fighting to control her voice. “If you don’t get out I’m going to call the police.”

“Really?” he said, and still he hadn’t moved. “You’d really do that? Even to Colter?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Even to Colter.”

T
HE COTTONWOOD TREES ALONG
the river waved like flags, their leaves struck yellow and flapping in the breeze that came down out of the north, not much to look at really, but to Colter, running, it was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. He was bloodied, his feet were like pincushions and his legs were growing heavier, and yet with each stride he was closer to making it out of this alive. He was within sight of the river now and the Indians were somewhere behind him. Hooting. Cursing. Running as fast as their legs could carry them, reinvigorated by hate and the thirst for revenge. If before this was all a kind of game to them, now it had gotten personal.

Colter never broke stride, the dried-out scrub giving way to the denser vegetation of the riverbank, to dogwood, sumac, wild grape and the shining coppery leaves of poison ivy, then to the weeds and sedges taking root in the sandbars, then to damp earth, then to mud, and in the next moment he was launching himself into the water in a knifing fluid dive. It was a shock. The water, snowmelt from the big blunt mountains above, was like liquid ice, but Colter was generating his own kind of heat, beating across the river to an island that had been pushed up out of the current in a time of flood. There was a huge raft of uprooted trees there, hundreds of them, the whole interlarded with smaller debris, and that was what he was making for. And what was he thinking, his brain fueled by the adrenaline of the chase that was like cocaine running through his veins? He was thinking that if he could get to that heap of debris before the Indians appeared on the bank, he could find a place somewhere in the water beneath it to hide himself. Of course, that was a big if, because he could hear them
shrieking now, pounding closer, sure they would find him floundering in some backwater where he’d be as easy to spear as a buffalo fish.

He was almost there, the thatch of logs taking on color and dimension, the bark slick and black, branches splintered and trailing in the water and the water dark and swift where it fought to pull the whole mess back out into the river. Snatching a breath, he plunged under, gliding like a beaver, but this was no beaver lodge and he couldn’t find a place to surface and breathe. Desperate, his lungs burning, he had no choice but to back out and thrust his head up again even as his eyes raked the shore: if they saw him, he was doomed. No one there yet. But here they came, hooting, hooting. He took the deepest breath he could hold and went back down again, feeling along the bottom of the pile for a gap, a hole, a crevice, and still nothing. Were his lungs bursting? Yes, yes, they were, but he kept on, his hands frantically digging at the debris, ready to drown rather than give himself up, but he was Colter and he was legendary and to be legendary you had to be lucky too. And he was. At the last possible moment, when he was about to give up and fill his lungs with another medium altogether, the medium only fish could make use of, not humans, he found an air pocket and surfaced.

He was too worked up to feel the terrible life-sucking chill of that water yet and because he was Colter and because he’d escaped, at least for the moment, he couldn’t help smiling to himself there in that dark hole where the water-run thatch filtered the light and held him in tenuous suspension. Their voices came to him then, the war whoops giving way to a querulous snarl of disbelief as they came to the deserted bank and saw that their quarry had eluded them, and though he couldn’t fully understand what they were saying, there was a lot of blame being thrown around, a lot of contention. Some of the braves, judging from the direction of their voices, had already started down the bank, poking through the reeds, searching the shallows, straining their
eyes to see the glistening ball of his head bobbing with the current so they could draw a bead on it and put an arrow through one ear and out the other. Let them go. That was fine with him. He smiled wider.

But then he froze. There was a noise above him, a heavy footfall, voices. Two, three, four of them had apparently swum across to the island and they were probing the raft, tearing at branches now, thrusting their spears into the gaps and all the while jabbering and arguing with each other, probably along the lines of
You shithead
and
I told you so
. That was a hard moment. Colter never made a sound, even when a spear thrust came within a foot of him. He barely even breathed. What he was thinking was that one of them would get in the water and start searching the underside of the pile, same as he had, and his mind started playing tricks with him, the water itself, the very branches, feeling like the skin of an enemy come to discover him. But no enemy discovered him and a good thing too because that brave, though he might have sent up the alarm, would have been throttled and drowned in a heartbeat.

All right. But Colter was shivering now and they didn’t seem to be moving on. They kept jabbering and arguing and tugging at one log or another, and that was when a new thought entered his head: What if they set fire to the raft? Wasn’t that the way to flush out a rat? He’d die of smoke inhalation before the flames even got to him because he wasn’t going to move no matter what—he’d rather go that way, rather burn if it came to it, than give them the satisfaction of flushing him out so they could spear him like a muskrat. That water was cold. Cold enough to induce hyperventilation. Cold enough to kill. And they weren’t going away. On the positive side, though, they didn’t seem inclined to come into the water and get underneath the thing—and they didn’t seem to want to bother setting fire to the whole business. Or maybe they just didn’t think of it, maybe that was it.

Three hours. That was how long Colter stayed under that raft.
Eventually the braves treading overhead moved on to search the rest of the island and probe both banks going upstream and down, looking for the place where he would have left the water. They didn’t find that place, of course, because he hadn’t left the water and now night was coming on. How did Colter survive? Once they’d moved on and he calculated it was safe, he began to widen the crevice he’d found so that eventually he was able to raise his torso out of the water, though it took a feat of strength and determination to hold himself there till his muscles must have locked on him. Plus, he was still naked and still shivering and he had no sustenance of any kind or any way to get it.

When it was fully dark and he hadn’t heard a voice for as long as he could remember, Colter slipped out from beneath the debris—and what fortitude it must have taken to get
back
in that water, what toughness, what balls—and started downstream, careful to keep his hands beneath the surface so as to make as little noise as possible, to make no noise, to let the river carry him through a long looping mile till finally he could make his way out of the water and up the bank and hide himself in the bushes. Could he rest? Could he pluck the cactus spines out of his feet and wrap his feet in bark? Eat? Sleep? No, of course not. He had to run and keep running because they would be on his trail at first light.