The Harder They Come

33

“YOU MIND IF WE just eat in front of the woodstove tonight?” She was in the kitchen, cooking, calling over her shoulder to where Christabel sat in the rocker in the living room, the latest Cosmo spread open in her lap and a glass of the chardonnay she’d brought along dangling from one hand. “It’s so much cozier in there, what with this rain and all, don’t you think?”

Christabel was giving her a faraway look, half-looped already. She didn’t answer.

“We don’t have to stand on formality, do we?”

“No, no way,” Christabel said, rousing herself. This would be one of the nights when Christa slept over, she could see that already. “Right here’s fine with me. Better than fine: now I won’t even have to move.”

“You expect me to serve you?”

“Damn straight I do. I am the guest, after all, aren’t I? I mean, I serve you at my house—”

They were teasing back and forth, bantering, and it was perfect, just what she needed, the fire going in the stove, rain at the windows, Kutya curled up asleep on the rug and dinner three shakes from being done. “Right,” she called, pausing to take a sip of her own wine and then douse the fish with the rest of it, “and when was the last time that happened?”

She was cooking up the two dozen smelt one of her clients had given her — he was rich, in his sixties, and when he wasn’t riding he was out on his boat, catching fish — and they were the simplest thing in the world: gut them, wash them, roll them in flour and sauté them whole with a little salt and pepper. High-protein, low-cal. She was serving a garden salad on the side and those Pillsbury dinner rolls that took fifteen minutes in the oven. After dinner they’d watch one of the DVDs she’d checked out of the library on her way back with the fish. Or maybe both of them, one a so-called comedy and the other horror, though she didn’t feel much like horror tonight. Maybe they’d just turn in early. And if Adam had snuck out of the house yesterday morning before she even got up and took the bourbon with him too, she wasn’t missing him, not with Christabel here and everything so slow and calm and easy. Or that was what she told herself, anyway. He’d show up when he was ready — and this was the kind of weather that made camping a pure misery, so most likely it wouldn’t be long. But let him take his time — she wasn’t tied to him. She had a whole life of her own. When he showed, he showed, why worry about it?

She tipped the fish onto a serving plate and set the plate on the table next to the salad, then pulled the rolls from the oven, letting the sweet warm wafting scent of them fill the kitchen even as the rain whispered on the roof and feathered the windows. “You want water?” she called.

“What would the French say?” This was one of their jokes, having once been suckered into watching a French movie on Netflix that had gotten good reviews but turned out to be all but incomprehensible despite the subtitles, because the French, they concluded, had different values.

“The French would say, ‘Non.’ They’d say, ‘Pour me some more wine.’”

“Oui, oui,” Christabel said, rising from the chair now, “more wine.”

They pulled two chairs up to the stove, the door of which she’d left open so they could watch the fire crackling inside, and settled in, plates in laps. Kutya was interested suddenly and though she told herself she wouldn’t have him begging she couldn’t help feeding him a sliver or two of fish in between bites. He took it daintily, with the softest jaws in the world, bolted it down and looked up expectantly for the next morsel to come his way.

“This is good,” Christabel said, as if she doubted herself. “Really good. I don’t think I’ve ever. . I mean the whole fish—”

“You don’t think about it, though, do you? After the first one.”

Christabel, chewing, staring into the stove, just nodded.

This was the kind of meal Sara loved, no chemicals, no BHT or food coloring or (the worst) corn syrup, just natural food, come by naturally. Except for the rolls, but she just didn’t have the time or energy to make them from scratch, having worked outside in the rain half the day, but the fish were fresh-caught right down there on the coast and the butter lettuce, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and radishes had come from her own garden. And the fish were free, which made it even better, free for the taking. Like mussels. She loved nothing better than to just pull over and make her way down a path to the sea at low tide, cut a bunch of mussels from the rocks (but not in summer, when they were quarantined because of the possibility of paralytic shellfish poisoning, which was fatal, thank you), and then steam them up and serve half as a starter with butter and garlic and homemade bread and then toss the rest into a pot of marinara at the last minute so you didn’t have to worry about them getting overcooked and rubbery. And berries. Nothing better than gathering berries in late summer for pies and tarts, but then you had the calorie factor to worry about. Berries with a little half-and-half then. And the smallest sprinkle of sugar.

When they were done, Christabel insisted on washing the dishes but she told her no, just let them sit, because why spoil the evening with something so — what was the word? — boring. Or no, tedious. “Too tedious,” she said, and she liked the sound of it and added, “Don’t be tedious. Let’s be the opposite — what is the opposite of tedious, anyway?”

Christabel let out a laugh. “I don’t know, untedious?”

They talked about having an after-dinner drink — Bailey’s, she had some Bailey’s in the cabinet, but that stuff packed on the pounds like steroids. “They ought to give that to the cattle at the feedlots,” she said. “That’d fatten them up. Pronto.”

“Yeah,” Christabel said, giving her a sloppy grin, “but what would the French say?”

“They’d say ‘Make mine rare.’”

“Right. And then they’d say, ‘Let’s stick to wine.’”

So they stuck to wine, how many glasses neither of them could say, but the quantity turned out to be exactly the precise amount to make the so-called comedy funny — or, that is, to prime them to the point where they could get sarcastic and laugh at it, which, as it turned out, made it genuinely funny.

They were both laughing when they heard the sirens, and before they could even get up out of their chairs or pause the video or shut the stove so they wouldn’t have to worry about sparks, the front door, which had been locked — she was pretty sure it had been locked — burst open as if it was made of cardboard and there were cops everywhere, shouting, “Your hands! Let me see your hands!”

She’d been a fool, that was her first thought, worse than a fool, because she of all people should have known they’d never let it go because once they got their claws into you, you had no more status than they did, and not packing up and moving to Nevada when she had the chance was just about the stupidest thing she’d ever done. What was wrong with her? What had she been thinking — that they’d forget about it? That if she stuck around, Adam would give up on the woods and come back to her? That it would be too hard, too much of an effort, to pull up her stakes here? She’d been lazy, that was what it was, living in fantasyland, and she was getting just what she deserved, because here they were with their boots and guns and bulletproof vests and there was no way out now.

She had her hands in the air. Christabel, who looked as if she’d been flash-frozen, had dropped the wine glass on the rug in the shock of the moment and she had her hands in the air too. And Kutya, Kutya was going bonkers. “Lady,” one of the cops yelled at her, “will you control that animal?”

At first she couldn’t understand what he was saying because they’d come to take Kutya away from her, hadn’t they? Wasn’t that what this was all about? That and maybe her no-show on the seatbelt thing. And the court date on the trumped-up DUI charge, to which she’d pleaded innocent, but that wasn’t for two weeks yet, not that she had any intention of showing for it. . or hadn’t had. Until now. But wait — and here her blood froze — what about that little incident the other night with the police cruiser and the sugar water meant for innocent hummingbirds? They’d caught her on videotape, she was sure of it, because everything in the U.S.I.G.A. was on tape now, every breath you took, and what about the Fourth Amendment, what about that? Search and Seizure? Hello?

“Kutya,” she called, “Kutya! Stop it now!” But when she tried to get up out of the chair and take him by the collar, the cop shoved her back down. “Hands!” he roared, and he had his gun trained right on her.

She was scared, had never been so scared in her life, but she couldn’t help throwing it back at him nonetheless, “How am I supposed to control him if I can’t even—”

“Shut the fuck up,” that was what he said, or snarled, and then another cop had one of those muzzle things on a stick and seized hold of the dog’s snout and the barking abruptly stopped.

It was right around then that she began to reconsider. There were cops everywhere, stalking through the kitchen, the bedrooms, their guns held out rigidly before them and laser lights poking red holes in everything — but why? Why would there be such a show of force over a woman who wasn’t wearing her seatbelt? Even if she hadn’t shown for her court date? Even if they knew she’d destroyed a police car, which, it became obvious to her in that moment, they didn’t. .

Another cop was there now, a bald-headed one, tailed by a deputy who looked all of twelve years old, and why did everybody have to shave their heads, was it some sort of cops and robbers sort of thing? He stood there a moment, just out of range of the one who’d pinned Kutya down with the muzzle-stick, staring at her. “Sara Hovarty Jennings?” he asked.

She couldn’t do much more than just nod yes, her heart going like the StairMaster set on Alpine, but the words were on her lips—Threat, Duress and Coercion—and if he didn’t back off she was going to start screaming and they could just go ahead and shoot her, but she surprised herself by finding her voice long enough to frame her own question in as nasty a voice as she could muster, “You got a search warrant?”

The cop ignored her. He swung his head in Christabel’s direction, Christabel who was sitting right there beside her, her hands in the air still. “And what’s your name?”

Poor Christa. She was so scared she could barely talk Or she couldn’t, she couldn’t talk at all.

“You can put your hands down,” he said, softening his voice, “both of you.” He was short, this cop, as nondescript as if he had his face on backwards, but he seemed to be in charge, and he had some sort of decoration or whatever it was sewed to the shoulder of his uniform. “Now, once again, you”—nodding at Christabel—“I asked your name.”

“Christabel Walsh? I’m a teacher’s aide?” She started to say where she worked, as if the name of the school would carry any weight, but her voice got choked in her throat and she couldn’t go on.

And now one of the other cops, the one who’d been in the bedroom, going through her personal things, clomped into the room and announced, “All clear back there. Nobody here but these two.”

“You go out there and check that yard, every blade of grass, hear me? Fence lines, all the fields around here. Get the dogs on it.”

“Yes, sir.” And that cop was gone, out the door and into the yard where lights were at war and voices stalked around the corners.

It was then, just then, in the interval before the chief cop turned back to her, that she began to understand. “Is this about Adam?” she asked, and why she asked she didn’t know — it was just some snaky intuition that made her heart hammer even faster and the fish go sour on her stomach.

At first the cop questioned them both together, but then, after he’d asked Christabel what sort of person Adam was and she’d said, “I don’t know, regular, I guess, maybe a little weird — he’s a nudist, I mean, sometimes, anyway,” the cop called one of his men over and said, “Why don’t you take her out in the kitchen and see what she knows. I’ll take care of Sara here myself.”

What he did then, with the lights flashing outside and cops all over the place as if this was some kind of war zone, was plunk himself down in the chair Christabel had just vacated, then scoot it over so that he was right there in her face, their knees practically touching. “You know, Sara — is it all right if I call you Sara? You know, I don’t really think we have to get upset here or anything — or take this down to the station either. I just want to ask you a couple questions. About Adam.”

“What did he do?”

“Why don’t you just let me ask the questions, okay? This doesn’t have to be hard. It’s not going to be hard. As long as you cooperate, you understand me?”

What she felt then, under threat, duress and coercion like nobody could believe, was just the faintest breath of release: they hadn’t come for her, they didn’t care about her or her dog either. All they wanted was Adam. But why? What had he done? Sitting there knee-to-knee with the cop and the fire snapping and Christabel shunted away to the kitchen with another cop, she tried to picture him, and what she saw was his body greased with sweat, his arms, his bare arms, and the knife at his side. And the gun. The gun.

“You saw him last, when? Two nights ago, is that right? Wednesday?”

She just nodded. She flashed on that day in the car, the day she’d met him, when he’d gone ballistic over the sight of a cop car going in the opposite direction. But what had he done? They wouldn’t bring a thousand cops around to swarm all over her if it wasn’t the worst, but what was the worst? What was the worst thing you could do? She felt her scalp prickle. She could barely breathe.

“And he left Thursday morning, early, before you were up?”

“Yes.”

“He say where he was going?”

“I don’t know, the woods. I think he was, like, living out there.”

“What about his rifle, did he take his rifle, did he have it here? With him, I mean?”

“He always had it.”

The cop was silent a minute, as if mulling this over, Adam and his rifle. Then he leaned in nearer so that she could see his eyes up close, the little dance of his pupils. “You took him to the hospital, why was that?”

“He asked me to. He had the — the runs. Giardia.” Kutya had been still, but now, in the far corner of the room, he began struggling again, though the cop there held him firmly down. “This isn’t right,” she said. “I don’t have to talk to you. And I’m not going to say one more word until you tell me what this is all about.”

Another silence, longer this time. The way he was watching her creeped her out, as if he was some kind of god looking down on the littlest thing in his creation, a bug or bacterium, when in fact he was just another tool of the system. “You want to get cute, I can arrest you right this minute.”

She didn’t want to push it, but she couldn’t help herself, because this was just sick, the whole slimy police-state Heil Hitler crap that had brought Jerry Kane down and was bringing her down too. “For what?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Accessory to murder. How does that sound?”

Everything seemed to stop right then, the stomping, the hollering, the banging of her heart and the whimpering of the dog, replaced by a long slither of white noise hissing in her ears. What the cop told her was that Adam had shot somebody while he was on his sojourn out there in the woods, shot him and left him for dead, and that everybody had thought the Mexicans had done it, but it wasn’t the Mexicans at all. It was Adam. Proof positive. Adam had shot somebody and then he’d got sick and come to her, to her bed, and she’d washed his clothes for him and let him make love to her and he never even so much as mentioned it. As if people were nothing, as if you could just go around shooting and then drink bourbon and cook beef stew over a campfire as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. She didn’t know what to say. She was in shock.

“And don’t pretend you don’t know where he is — you had a relationship with him. For what, two, three months now?”

“I told you,” she said, “he’s in the woods.”

“You getting smart with me? Because if you want to get smart, we can continue this down at the station.”

“No,” she said, “really. I don’t know where he is, I mean, other than that. I told you, he left here yesterday morning, and I haven’t seen him since. Or heard from him. Really.”

“And yet you took him to the hospital for medication.”

“Yes, but I didn’t—”

“That makes you an accessory right there.”

“I didn’t know—”

“You didn’t know he killed an unarmed man in cold blood?”

She shook her head.

“Or today. What about today? You know he killed another man today, right this afternoon? While you were what, knitting?”

It was all too much. She didn’t have to listen to this — whoever said she had to listen to this? He was a liar. He was just trying to get to her because he was the criminal, not Adam. “I don’t knit,” she said. “And I have no contract with you — how many times do I have to tell you people?” Kutya squirmed. He let out a low growl and the lights flashed in the yard. She shot a furious glance round the room, the cops, the poor dog — Christabel, where was Christabel? “You know what you are?” she said.

He just sat there, his lips zipped tight, trying to burn his eyes right through her.

“You’re just an actor, that’s all. Somebody in a costume. Like you’re dressed up for Halloween. And you know something else? I’m not into trick-or-treating.”

34

IN THE END, THEY must have believed her — and Christabel too, Christabel who by that point was scared sober and wearing a face like something she’d picked up off the floor — because eventually they took their muddy boots and clanking belts and double-barreled shotguns and faded back into the night, but not without taking two plastic bags of what they called evidence with them and leaving a patrol car just down the street with its lights off and two cops inside to see if she was going to run out into the woods, find her way to Adam and somehow warn him off. Which she would have, if she could. Because it was all lies and if you had to pick sides here she knew which one she was on. Adam never hurt anybody. And even if he did, even if it was true, whoever it was probably had it coming.

The cops left a vacuum behind them, whoosh, all the air sucked right out of the place. One minute the house was an armed camp and the next it was deserted. They’d also left a mess. Her clothes were scattered around the bedroom, drawers pulled out, closets yawning open. The kitchen floor was all tracked up and they’d left it that way because what did they care about freemen on the land and personal property or individual rights or anything else for that matter, but she didn’t have the heart to take a mop to it before she went to bed and when she woke up from a night’s worth of poisonous dreams, she didn’t have the energy. Ditto for Christabel, who at least didn’t have to go into work, thank god, because it was Saturday.

When she got up and came into the kitchen at something like half past six, Christabel was already sitting there at the table drinking black coffee and staring out the window. She was wearing a T-shirt she’d managed to put on backwards under a cardigan that hung loose over her butt and bare thighs, last night’s makeup caking under her eyes and her hair looking as if she’d been fighting a windstorm all night long. Kutya lay curled up under the table, his dreadlocks filthy from the mud out in the yard — the mud on the floor, for that matter — and he never even lifted his head when she stepped into the room. Christabel didn’t turn to look at her. She didn’t say hi or good morning. All she said was, “Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever been through anything like that, not in my whole life. Not even that time I was in the accident.”

“Me either.”

“I was so scared.”

All she could do was nod. She went to the counter and poured herself a cup of coffee, then lightened it with a splash of milk and stirred in two heaping teaspoons of sugar, real sugar and not that artificial crap. She’d worry about calories later. Calories were the least of her problems.

“You know, you can’t say I didn’t warn you,” and here Christabel turned to look up at her out of bloodshot eyes, eyes that weren’t even that pretty, really, but just a dull fixed brown.

She just shook her head, very slowly, the injustice of it all settling on her like a coat made out of lead, like one of those things they make you wear when they take X-rays of your chest. “Yeah, you warned me, all right, but since when do I have to listen?”

“Oh, Christ! You’re not going to defend him, are you? He’s a nut case. He killed two people. He could have killed us!”

“So the cops say. You believe the cops?”

She saw now that Christabel was holding something in her left hand, a slice of color, the sharp concentrated gleam of the Cloud sucked down to earth: her cellphone. “I believe this,” she said.

And there it was, Adam’s face staring out of the phone, Adam’s face everywhere, on every site, proof run wild. He’d shot and killed two men, and here were their faces, their names and biographies, and she realized with a jolt that she knew one of them from the high school, and how strange it was to think he was dead—slain—and would never walk those corridors again or stand before a class of kids who might have loved him or hated him but had the same festering hormones and the same issues the class before them had had and the class after them would have and all the classes before and since. He was dead. Art Tolleson. He was dead and Adam had killed him.

She went into the living room and flicked on the TV and it was on every channel. The sheriff — and it was his face on the screen now, the poser with the grappling-hook eyes who’d sat right there in her own house and harassed her for the better part of an hour — was giving a press conference and telling everybody to stay calm even though he was cordoning off the entire forest range, from the middle fork of the Ten Mile in the north to Big River in the south, coast to mountains, and that no one was to be allowed in for any purpose whatever until the threat had been neutralized. And what about Route 20? Route 20 was a major artery, as was the Coast Highway, and they would remain open to traffic, but he cautioned people not to linger or get out of their cars — the suspect was armed and dangerous and if anyone encountered him or knew anything of his whereabouts they should call 911. Then up came the picture of Adam, full-screen — a picture, she realized, that must have been a mug shot from one of his past brushes with the system, but the thing was, he didn’t look anything like Adam, not the Adam she knew. He looked like a thug, with his shaved head and one eye half-closed as a result of whatever struggle he must have put up when they were trying to take him into custody — and they must have gang-piled him because he was a rock and he could have taken on any three of them all by himself. .

But then that was no way to think. The way to think was of how to cut him loose, all knowledge and memory of him, to forget him and move on. To Nevada. The sooner the better. “Okay,” she said, nodding at Christabel, who’d joined her in front of the TV, “you were right, I admit it, and I should never have even thought about dating him—”

Christabel made a little noise of disapproval in her throat. “I’ve said it before”—she gave her a sharp glance out of those mud brown eyes with their dead eyeliner and faded mascara, Christabel the righteous, Christabel in the aftermath, picking through the wreckage—“I never could tell what you saw in him, anyway.”

A week went by, then another. Her court date came up, and if she thought anything about it at all, it was just that she regretted the waste of ink it took to mark her calendar when she had no intention of going anywhere near the courthouse or the police station or anyplace else the pretenders pretended to conduct their so-called business. Still, though — and this nagged at her — she hadn’t even taken step one as to getting herself out of Dodge and you had to chalk that up to inertia. That, and grief. She was grieving over Adam, over how she’d fallen so hard for him when clearly he was trouble — worse than trouble, a psychopath, a murderer, a cannon so loose he’d rolled right off the deck. But that was the problem: she had fallen for him and nothing could change that.

Adam. He was all anybody could talk about, on the news every night, national news now, at large for eighteen days and counting. People called her out of the blue, clients, friends she’d forgotten she had, reporters, and they all wanted to know what she knew, wanted details, gossip, dirt. What it all boiled down to, no surprise, was sex, though nobody came straight out and said it. How could she have had sex with a maniac, that was what they wanted to know. How could she have kissed him, invited him into her bed? And more, and juicier: What was it like? Was it good? Was it hot? Did he get rough? When she went out, she tried to keep a low profile, wearing bulky clothes and a hat, always a hat. But she did have to work, after all (no subbing, though, no way, not with all this notoriety), and when she went to her clients’ houses just to see to their poor dumb horses that wouldn’t have known or cared if she’d gone to bed with a hundred maniacs, with the Taliban or the whole U.S. Army, she couldn’t have a moment’s peace. Here were these people she’d known for years, women mostly, decent people, her clients, for Christ’s sake, and they just draped themselves right over her while she manipulated her hoof pick and clinch cutters, sniffing and probing and working at her like paleontologists looking for the bones revealed in the dirt.

Then one day she went down to work at the Burnsides’ because the Burnsides were marked on her calendar and she had to earn a living, no matter what the rest of the world was doing or thinking or saying. There were cops everywhere, as if it was some sort of convention, but she tried to ignore them because they weren’t there for her, and when she came into Calpurnia, the fog, which had pretty well curtained everything in to this point, got denser suddenly, so dense she had to put her lights and wipers on. She almost went right on by the turnoff but caught herself at the last minute. There was nobody else on the road — even here, forty miles south, Adam had managed to cast a pall over things. Because they couldn’t catch him. He was too smart for them. Too hard. They’d sent all those SWAT teams out there, helicopters with their infrared tracking devices, dogs — the very dogs Roger had told her about, Good dog, Good dog—and he’d outmaneuvered them all.

When she swung into Cindy’s driveway, the gravel giving way under her wheels, she saw there was another car parked there in front of the barn, not Cindy’s or Gentian’s, but one that looked familiar somehow. Whose was it? The answer would come to her the minute she pulled up beside it, shut down her engine and climbed out of the car with her tool kit: it was Adam’s mother’s car, Carolee’s. Because here came Carolee marching out of the mist with Cindy and Gentian flanking her, the two of them looking as if they were going to war while she looked like she’d just been punched in the gut. “Hi,” Sara said, though Adam’s mother was somebody she could definitely have done without seeing.

Gentian, a big man, once powerful, but now gone to seed around a face that drooped in folds right on down into the collar of his shirt, stopped in his tracks and the women pulled up then too. The look he was giving her was fierce, outraged. He spat out the words. “He shot Corinna and Lulu.”

“Who? What are you talking about?”

Cindy answered for him: “Adam.”

They all looked to Carolee, the mother, but Carolee had nothing to say, either in affirmation or denial. She was having enough trouble keeping her face composed. What she’d done — Sara could see this in a flash — was come down here to help out, to do something, anything, to get away from the terrible tension at home that must have been even worse for her than it was for herself. She’d given birth to him. Breast-fed him. Potty-trained him. Held his hand when he went to kindergarten and agonized over every inappropriate display and skewed adjustment through what must have been a chaotic childhood to a squirrelly adolescence and now this — they were hunting her son and he was their quarry, no different from the deer the sportsmen bungee-strapped to the hoods of their cars, and who hadn’t seen the blood there striping the windshield and tarnishing the bright resistant strips of chrome? In that moment, Sara went outside herself and saw what this woman — her enemy, who’d rejected her right from the start — was going through. She said, “It wasn’t Adam.”

“How the hell would you know?” Gentian still hadn’t moved, but she could see how furious he was, his fists clenched, the old splayed muscles tightening on their cords, something working beneath the skin at the corner of one eye. “Did you see him? Did you ask him?”

“It wasn’t Adam.”

Cindy said, “He’s on foot, Gent. It’s forty miles.”

The picture of Corinna came into her head then, not the big-ribbed corpse she’d see bloodied in the field in due course, but Corinna after she’d had her first calf, proud and watchful and erect on her stiffened legs, her ears up and her nostrils to the wind. A dog had appeared at the periphery of the meadow one afternoon, a thousand yards away, a dog on a leash being walked along the street on the far side of the fence, no threat at all, not if she understood the situation. But Corinna didn’t understand the situation. Corinna had perceived the danger in the way the light scissored between those four trotting legs and she charged halfway across the field, flinging up turf with her savage cutting hooves that could have decapitated that dog in a heartbeat and maybe his owner too. That was instinct. That was all she knew.

“Forty miles, shit,” Gentian spat, turning bitterly on his wife. “You tell me who else is crazy enough to shoot defenseless animals like this? Who else is out there killing things with a rifle? Huh? Tell me that?”

No one answered him. The fog lifted and fell in beaded threads and tugged at the light in waves that seemed to pulsate across the yard. The gravel shone with wet. Gentian was red-faced. Cindy looked ashamed. And Carolee? Carolee looked as if she never expected her feelings to be spared again, looked like a pariah, mother of the murderer. And what did that say about her then? She was the girlfriend, no denying it, and that made her guilty too. As guilty, in their eyes, as if she’d pulled the trigger herself.

35

IT 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.”