The Harder They Come

5

SHE DIDN’T LIKE FAST food, or not particularly — the grease they used hardened your arteries and they doused everything with corn syrup and sugar, which jacked up the calories and made you put on weight, an issue with her, she knew it — but she stopped at the place on Route 20 in Willits and got a crispy chicken sandwich, if only to put something on her stomach. It wasn’t like her to oversleep, but that’s what happened, and she’d had to skip breakfast and run out the door with nothing but a cup of yesterday’s coffee microwaved to an angry boil — and she still wound up being half an hour late for her morning appointment. As a concession to the little voice nagging in her head, she skipped the fries and ordered a diet drink instead of regular, though she did ask for crispy instead of grilled because grilled had no more taste than warmed-over cardboard with a spatter of ketchup on it. Kutya was in the backseat, generally behaving himself, but he came to attention when she pulled into the drive-thru lane. He must have recognized the place, if not by sight, then smell, though she hadn’t stopped here more than a handful of times. At any rate, he began whining and tap dancing around on the seat he’d rendered filthy despite the towel she’d spread over it, and she gave in and ordered him a burger (no bun, no condiments, no pickles), feeding it to him over her shoulder as she put the trusty blue Nissan Sentra in drive and sailed on out of the lot and down the long winding road to Fort Bragg and the coast.

There was talk on the radio, but it was mainly left-wing Communist crap—NPR, and how was it their signal was stronger than anybody else’s? — and even that faded out once she started down the grade and hit the first few switchbacks, so she popped in a CD instead. She favored country, but the old stuff, the classic stuff, Loretta and Merle and Hank, because all the new singers with their custom-made boots and blow-dried hair were just pale imitators, anyway. And if people criticized her for being a once-divorced forty-year-old woman with no romantic prospects on the horizon who really wasn’t in step with the times (You mean not even Brad Paisley?), so much the worse. She liked what she liked. And when she went out on a Saturday night with her best friend, Christabel Walsh, and had a few beers, she just let the music wash right over her like the vapid stares of all the losers lined up at the bar who were too small-minded and self-absorbed to ask a woman to dance.

No matter. She dwelled within herself. She was content and self-sufficient. She had her own business, she had Kutya, a rented two-bedroom clapboard house that looked down on the crotch of the Noyo Valley and half the horses in the world available to her anytime she wanted to ride. If another relationship came along, fine. If not, too bad for him — or them, whoever they might be — because she wasn’t desperate, not in the least, not even close, and there was no way in the world she was going to pretend to like Brad Paisley or whoever because to her it was all just more of the same singsong bastardized crap, and she’d told Christabel that and she’d tell anybody else who might want to stick their nose in too.

So there she was, driving in her own personal property with her dog by her side and a living to earn, winding down Route 20 so she could get to the Coast Highway and head forty-four-point-five miles south to the little flyspeck town of Calpurnia, where there were three horses — and, if the veterinarian showed up on time, at least one sable antelope with three-foot horns — that needed her ministrations. It was the middle of the summer. The sky was clear, the sun fixed like a compass point ahead of her. When she looped around a turn and saw the coast off in the distance, it was clear there too, the fog burned back and exiled in a linty gray band out at sea. Was she wearing her seatbelt? No, she wasn’t, and she was never going to wear it either. Seatbelt laws were just another contrivance of the U.S. Illegitimate Government of America the Corporate that had given up the gold standard back in 1933 and pledged its citizens as collateral so it could borrow and keep on borrowing. But she wasn’t a citizen of the U.S.I.G.A., she was a sovereign citizen, a U.S. national, born and raised, and she didn’t now and never would again acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her. So no, she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. And she didn’t have legal plates, or the sort of plates the republic of California deemed legal, that is (the sticker that had come with the ones on the car was long since expired because she wasn’t about to play that game), and if she was traveling on the public roads in her own personal property, it was her business and nobody else’s.

When the cop pulled her over, he claimed it was because she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but of course he would have had to have raptor’s eyes to see that from three hundred feet away where he was fooling nobody behind a roadside clump of madrone except maybe the drifting black vultures overhead. She’d watched him swing out behind her, pulling a U-turn and settling in on her tail with his gumball machine spinning and his siren whoop-whoop-whooping. She might have gone half a mile or more before she finally pulled over — in a spot at the mouth of a dirt drive that seemed sufficiently safe, the whole road to this point bristling with jagged pines and dried-up weeds that snatched at the side of the car every time she drifted toward the shoulder. Looking back on it, she supposed she could have stopped sooner, and she supposed too that that might have had something to do with this particular cop’s agitation, but you did what you did and you couldn’t have regrets, not in this life that just marched you on toward the grave day by day.

He was lean, young, fresh-faced. He had to tap at the window three times before she rolled it down. Kutya lurched forward to give him a low warning growl and then he was barking and she didn’t do a thing about it. Let him bark, that was what she felt. It was his right.

“Do you know why I stopped you, ma’am?” the cop said.

Of course she did: he was the oppressor and she was the oppressed. She said nothing.

“License and registration,” the cop said, raising his voice to be heard over the clamor of the dog. “And proof of insurance.”

What she told him in response, in a voice as steady as she could hold it, even as Kutya settled into a ragged gasping continuous low-throated bark and people slowed to gape at her as if she were some circus attraction, was that she was not engaged in a contract with the republic of California. “I’m a sovereign citizen,” she said, speaking as clearly as she could, given the noise of the dog and the clank and hiss of the traffic as all the white-haired Baby Boomer tourists applied their brakes and then stepped back on the gas once they’d got a good look. “You have no authority over me.”

The cop just stared at her. After a moment he flipped up his sunglasses so she could see the fine red fissures of irritation fracturing his frog-belly eyes. “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” he said, “but I asked for your license and registration.”

She said nothing. Just fixed her gaze straight ahead to where the road ran on into the sunshine past a field of stiff yellow grass and a shadowy fringe of trees, the road that ran true to her destination, to the place where she had business when she had no business here at all.

“Ma’am?”

She turned her head back to him, locked her eyes on his, and her heart was going, all right, because she could tell where this was leading and it scared her and made the anger come up in her too, and why couldn’t they just leave well enough alone? “I told you,” she said, “I have no contract with you.”

“Does that mean you refuse?”

“Let me repeat,” she said. “I — have — no — contract — with — you.”

He shifted his boots in the gravel along the roadside, a dull grating intolerable sound that got Kutya back up into the high register. The cop put his hands on his hips, as if to show her where the gun was and the nightstick and handcuffs too. He said, “I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the car.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t.”

“Suit yourself.” He straightened up then and stalked back to his car, where she could see him in her rearview as he leaned in, pulled out the cord of the radio mike and started moving his lips.

Ten long minutes crept by. Each one of them, each second, dripped acid through her veins, and she thought of just putting the car in gear and driving off, but resisted because that would only make things worse. Kutya — he was a puli, a white puli — settled into the discolored basket of his dreadlocks and fell off to sleep, thinking the threat had passed. Foolishly. But then he was a dog, and dogs had other concerns.

Finally another cruiser appeared, lights flashing, siren screaming, swooping on up the road behind her like a black steel shroud and nosing in at an angle so close to her front bumper she thought it was going to hit her. In the next instant she was staring across the passenger’s seat of this new car and into the face — the hard demanding unforgiving put-upon face — of a female officer, who picked something up off the seat, squared herself and swung out of the car. Next thing she knew, both cops were there, one on either side of her, and Kutya was back on his feet, back at it again, barking in a renewed frenzy that just made everything that much harder.

“Good afternoon,” the female cop said, her eyes roaming over the interior as if she was thinking of making an offer on the car. “I understand that you refuse to comply with Officer Switzer’s request for identification, is that right?”

She said nothing.

The female officer — she was tall, thin, no shape to her at all, and she wore no makeup, not a trace, not even lipstick — asked her to get out of the car. Or no, commanded her.

She said nothing.

“Just to be sure you understand me,” the male cop cut in now — he was stationed by the passenger’s-side window, leaning in so he could watch her, and if that didn’t make her feel paranoid she couldn’t imagine what would because this was like being squeezed between two pincers and it was wrong, intolerable, a violation of every natural right there was—“I have to inform you that state law requires you to show a valid driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance at the reasonable request of a peace officer.”

She threw it right back at him. “Reasonable? You call this reasonable? You have no authority here — you’re nothing more to me than a man dressed up in a Halloween costume.”

“If you refuse,” he said, the muscles tightening around his mouth, “we will have no recourse but to remove you forcibly from your vehicle—”

“Which will be impounded,” the female added, as if they’d switched speakers on a stereo, his voice assaulting her on the right, hers on the left. “And your dog will be taken to the shelter.” She paused. A top-heavy camper swished delicately past them, ten miles under the limit. A pickup going the opposite way swung with elaborate courtesy off onto the shoulder to give it room and then continued on in a slow-motion crawl. “And you yourself, if you don’t comply this minute, will be arrested, I promise you that — and I personally will escort you to the county jail.”

It was hopeless, she could see that. The day was ruined. The week, the whole month. This was the mega-state in all its glory. She’d stated her status in plain English and they still didn’t seem to understand. Well, they could go to hell, all of them. She started screaming then, calling them every name in the book, shouting “TDC! TDC! Threat, Duress and Coercion!” over and over again, even as the female forced open the door and took hold of her by her left arm and Kutya, good dog, faithful dog, went right at her.

They took her to the county jail in Ukiah, retracing her route back up Route 20, though now she was in restraints and in the backseat of a police cruiser, separated by a heavy wire grid and Plexiglas shield from the female cop, whose right hand, resting at one o’clock on the wheel, sported two bright shining flesh-colored bandaids where the dog’s teeth had broken the skin, though it wasn’t much more than a scratch. Her own car was back alongside the road, awaiting the tow truck, and Kutya — poor Kutya — after having been poked, prodded and muzzled by two numbnuts from Animal Control, had been forced into a boxy white van, which must have been somewhere behind her now, on its way up this same road to the animal shelter, also in Ukiah. She’d missed her appointment, of course — and for what, for nothing, for a seatbelt? — and she’d had no way of letting the Burnsides know she wasn’t coming, that she’d been unavoidably and illegally detained and wasn’t just blowing off her responsibility, and who could blame them if they went online and found another farrier to shoe their horses and trim the hooves of their sable antelope? She had a reputation to maintain, a business to run, and she was doing no harm to anybody, doing nothing more than using the public byways as was her inalienable right, and now look at the mess she was in.

Still, as the cruiser looped through the turns and climbed back up out of the Noyo Valley, she began to rethink her position, until degree by degree she felt the indignation cooling in her. This was going to cost her. Fines, towing and Christ knew what else. They’d make her renew that sticker, and there’d be paperwork, a layout of cash she really didn’t have and every sort of hassle the authorities (authorities, what a joke) could devise. By the time they arrived at the police station and they’d photographed and fingerprinted her, given her her one phone call — to Christabel, who else? — and escorted her to an empty cell and locked her in, she was contrite. Or no: chastened was a better word. And enlightened. Enlightened too. These people didn’t recognize her status, didn’t know a damned thing about the Uniform Commercial Code or her rights under it, and they didn’t care either. They had all the power, all the muscle, and she was nothing, reduced to this, to groveling and ass-kissing and giving lip service to the System, as if she was grateful they’d assaulted her and taken away her rights and her property. All right. If that was how they wanted it, fine. She sat in that cell and kept her mouth firmly shut and fed her hate and resentment till Christabel showed up an hour later with the bail money and she was out.

“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.

6

BUT 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.”

7

TWO LONG DREARY PLAYED-OUT days dragged by, every ticking minute a new kind of torture. She couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. The TV was just noise and every book and magazine she picked up might as well have been written in code for all the sense it made. She paced back and forth across the kitchen floor till she practically wore a groove in it and shunned the ringing phone, though caller ID told her it was Christabel or one of her clients or — endlessly — her mother calling from her condo in San Diego to magnify her complaints and whisper the details of her confidential crises in a voice so thin and reduced you might have thought it was coming from beyond the grave. Either that or the phone was tapped. Who knew? Maybe it was.

She’d tried to reason with the girl at Animal Control but all she got was “Sorry” and “Those are the regulations” and “There’s nothing I can do,” and then she tried to educate her so she could comprehend what a free-born citizen was and how her arbitrary rules didn’t apply, but that wasn’t working, not a chance, and finally she’d lost it, actually snatching something up off the counter — a ledger of some sort — and slamming it to the floor with a sharp reverberant boom that startled them both. The girl pulled her cellphone out then and informed her she was going to have to leave or she’d call the police. “And I mean it too,” the girl said, her mouth bunched in a pout, and she was a child — a willful, stupid child. And how could you argue with a child?

On the morning of the fourth day, which was a Saturday and the last day the shelter would be open till the following week, she knew she had to do something — she could feel Kutya’s spirit crying out to her just as intensely as if he were right there in the room with her — but she couldn’t imagine what it might be. It was seven o’clock. She made herself some coffee and a packet of oatmeal. Suddenly the phone rang — her landline — and this time she picked it up.

A familiar voice came at her, but at first she couldn’t quite place it. “Sara?”

“Yeah?”

“Cindy Burnside.”

“Oh, yeah. Hi.”

“We were expecting you on Tuesday, or did you forget?”

“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t forget — I ran into some trouble and I should have called you, I know, but, well, it was the police. They impounded my car.” Her voice went thick. She was on the verge of tears. “And Kutya. They’ve got Kutya down at Animal Control.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“He bit the cop that pulled me over. Nipped her, really. Barely broke the skin if you want to know.”

There was a silence.

“But it’s okay now,” she said, “I got the car back. I can come this morning, if you still want me—”

And so there she was again, driving in her own personal property down the brake-eating road to the coast, listening to Hank Williams feeling sorry for himself, her seatbelt unfastened and the windows open wide. She tried not to think, weaving in and out of the dense bastions of shadow the big trees threw up across the road, but she kept coming back to Kutya and the girl at Animal Control and the vertical windows and the locked back door as if it were a chess problem that only needed sufficient brain power to solve. There was practically no one on the road, which was fine with her because there was nothing worse than following some overcompensating idiot’s brake lights around every real or imagined turn, but by the time she was halfway to Fort Bragg the fog had climbed up the hill to meet her, locking everything in its gloom. She rolled up the windows, and then it got progressively darker and wetter till she had to flick on her lights and the wipers too.

She saw no cops, hidden or otherwise, and she made it to Calpurnia in good time, considering the fog. When she pulled into the long dirt drive at the Gentian Burnside Preserve it wasn’t ten yet and that was a good thing because she still had unfinished business in Ukiah. As she rolled up to the barn, Cindy emerged from the house dressed in jeans and a sweater, her hair loose around her shoulders. It was cold. Everything was beaded with moisture, the fog even thicker here. “You poor thing,” Cindy said, coming across the yard to her. “Did you get your dog back yet?”

She could only shake her head, the question so fraught and painful she had to bite her lip to keep from venting right then and there. She tried to keep her personal life separate from her business and didn’t like to make excuses — it wasn’t professional — or lay any of her political views on her clients unless they were receptive, and the Burnsides definitely weren’t receptive, or not the way she read them anyway.

“Cup of tea?” Cindy offered. “And I’ve got a loaf of three-grain bread I baked yesterday if you want a bite of something—”

Cindy was in her fifties, an heiress to some corporate fortune — Sara never could remember which — who bankrolled her husband’s obsession with preserving African ungulates that were on their way to extinction in the wild. She didn’t put on any airs. If you didn’t know, you’d never guess she was worth a hundred million or two or three or whatever it was. She seemed content to live out here on their hundred and twenty acres, riding her horses and helping her husband manage the herd of sable, roan and kudu antelope and the Hartmann’s and Grevy’s zebras roaming around the place as if they’d stepped out of a nature film. She didn’t have a dog because of the animals — there were breeding females amongst them, that was the whole point, and they saw any canine as a threat, no different from jackals or the piebald wild dogs that tore their calves to pieces out on the savanna — and when Sara was there she was always careful to keep Kutya in the car. But then Kutya wasn’t in the car. He was in a cage. In Ukiah.

“No, that’s nice of you, Cindy, but I’ve got a day ahead of me — lots of complications — so I better get right to it. The vet coming?”

“He was out on Tuesday so we went ahead without you. It was Corinna? She was favoring her left hind leg and so he darted her and did a thorough exam — there was some inflammation there and he didn’t know exactly what was causing it, so he’s got her on prednisone. And since she was down, he did the hoof trimming himself.” They both looked off to where the corral narrowed and the fences started and you could see some of the animals in the distance. “So it’s just the horses today,” Cindy said, turning back to her. “No big deal. Nothing to worry about. These things happen, right?”

“Yeah,” Sara said. “Yeah. But why do they have to happen to me?”

She worked quickly, trimming the horses’ hooves, cutting out the excess hoof walls and dead sole and then reshoeing them, letting her mind go free. All three horses — two mares and a gelding — knew her, so there was no problem there, just the routine she’d gone through a thousand times. The work settled her, the simple movements, the tools in her hands, the living breathing presence of the animals. She was in the car and heading back up the driveway by noon, feeling the sense of accomplishment she always felt on a job well done (and a payment received), but as soon as she got out on the main road it all came rushing back at her. The quarantine period was for thirty days. Thirty days. There was no way she was going to accept that.

She might have been pressing a bit, going faster than she should have considering the fog — at one point she came up on the pale ghost of a Winnebago moving so slowly it might as well have been parked, and she had to swing blindly out into the opposite lane to avoid hitting it, something she’d never do normally. There was no one coming, thank god, but she told herself she had to get a grip even as her speed crept back up again. The radio gave her classic rock, tunes she’d heard ad nauseam, but she was bored with her CDs and just let it play. She was tapping idly at the wheel, drumming along with the beat, jittery still from her morning coffee and the prospect of what lay ahead of her, when the sun broke through not half a mile after she’d turned back onto Route 20, and if it wasn’t exactly an omen, at least it was nice. Off went the wipers, down came the windows. The breeze was cool and fresh and it carried the deep dry scent of the conifers that climbed up the grade as far as you could see in both directions. She’d just swung into the first of the wide sweeping turns after the long straightaway up from town when she saw the figure there on the side of the road — a man, a young man, backpedaling along the shoulder with his thumb out.

She wasn’t naïve and she didn’t have the highest opinion of human nature — or intelligence — but she made a point of stopping for hitchhikers, on these roads, anyway, whereas she would never even consider it down in the Bay Area where you had all sorts of nutballs and weirdos and stone-cold killers running around. Anybody hitching here was a local, most likely, and everybody couldn’t afford a car, she understood that. There was still something of the hippie spirit up here, long hair, bandanas, brothers and sisters all, and half the population of the county growing marijuana as a going proposition. She pulled over and here he was, hustling up the shoulder to her.

He didn’t have long hair. Didn’t have any hair at all. He was wearing some sort of fatigues or camouflage — it wasn’t deer season yet, was it? — and he was shouldering a backpack with a canteen looped over it. She saw a perfectly proportioned skull shaved to the bone, pale arching eyebrows that were barely there and a pair of naked eyes squinting against the sun. He was tall, six-one or — two, and he had to duck way down to toss his pack in on the backseat and then fold up his legs to squeeze into the seat beside her.

“Hi,” she said, smiling reflexively, and it came to her that she knew him somehow, maybe from one of her clients or the bar scene or maybe she’d picked him up before. He looked young, but he was old enough to drink, mid-twenties, maybe — and who was he?

He gave her a blue-eyed stare, his eyes drifting away from her face as if he were stoned or just wakened from a dream.

“Where to?” she said, putting the car in gear and throwing a quick glance over her shoulder before rumbling back onto the roadway in a storm of dust.

He didn’t answer, as if he hadn’t heard her, and he wasn’t looking at her now but sitting there rigidly as if he were at the dentist’s, staring straight ahead.

She tried again. “You going far?”

“Ukiah,” he said without turning his head, his voice soft and subdued, fluttering up from somewhere deep inside him.

The trees flashed by. She leaned into the next turn. “You’re in luck,” she said.

She wound up doing most of the talking, general subjects mainly — the tourists, the weather, how dry the forest was this time of year and how the fog down on the coast seemed thicker than usual — and when she got specific with regard to the absolute worthlessness of the song that was on the radio he didn’t offer an opinion one way or the other. Whether he was an Elton John aficionado or wanted to poison his well or was utterly indifferent, she couldn’t say, but she’d thrown it out because she certainly wasn’t shy about her opinions and laying them out there was the best way to open people up. It didn’t open him up. He just stared out the window, his shoulders stiff as a coat hanger. In fact, the only thing that seemed to get a rise out of him was when she told him about Kutya, how they’d impounded her car and taken him away from her. He gave her a sidelong look then, his head and neck still locked in position, straight forward, and murmured, “Yeah, they took my car too.”

“Really? Why? What happened?”

He just shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said after a moment.

“Yeah,” she said, stealing a look at him, “tell me about it.”

The day glanced off the windshield. She gave the car some gas to get up the grade and there was nobody ahead of her, which was nice, but there was a whole phalanx of motor homes twisting down the hill in the opposite direction, big groaning fortresses of metal that seemed ready to fly out of control on every turn, and what kind of person would drive something like that? Somebody clueless. Somebody who was a slave to the corporation and the oil companies and didn’t even know it. She goosed the accelerator and the engine faltered till she goosed it again and another gear kicked in. A lone car flashed by, heading down, then there was a log truck, empty, rattling and clanking till you couldn’t even hear the radio, and then, emerging suddenly from its shadow, a cop car, the windows opaque with sun. That was when her passenger came to life, whipping round in the seat as the cruiser blew past, shouting “Fuckers!” out the window and stabbing both middle fingers in the air. He was right there, leaning into her, and she could smell the sharp ammoniac taint of his breath. “Fuckers!” he shouted. “Fuckers!”

It was over in a heartbeat, the cop car gone and vanished round the bend behind them along with the motor homes and the log truck, but she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. All she needed was another confrontation with the police. What was he thinking? Who was this guy? Was he on drugs, was that it? “Jesus,” she exploded, “don’t do that, are you crazy?”

She gave him a hard stare, but he was looking right through her now, his jaw set so that the muscles stood out in a ridge that ran up into the hard unyielding shell of his skull. He never even blinked, just turned his head, rigid and erect and unmoving all over again. She repeated herself—“Are you crazy?”—but he didn’t answer. She was on the verge of pulling over and telling him to get out because this was too much, she just couldn’t risk it, not now, not today, when it came to her: she knew him, of course she did. “I know you,” she said.

She shot a glance at him, then her eyes went back to the road. “From Fort Bragg High? I used to sub there.” Another glance. “You’re Sten Stensen’s son, aren’t you — Aaron? Or no, Adam — Adam, right?”

He didn’t turn. Barely moved his lips. “My name’s Colter.”

Colter. He wasn’t fooling her. Sten had been principal until he retired, and this was his son, Adam, the one who’d caused so much trouble for everybody concerned. She’d had him in class a couple of times — he’d had hair then, long hair, puffed out and braided into dreadlocks, an inveterate doper who wore Burning Spear T-shirts and affected a Rasta accent. Adam. Adam Stensen.

“Colter,” she said musingly, lingering over the r. “Is that a nickname? Or an online moniker or what?”

He wouldn’t answer and they were silent for a while. There was just the buzz and thump of the radio, the whoosh of the breeze and the sibilance of the tires catching and releasing the road. She wanted to instruct him, wanted to tell him she felt the same way he did about the corporate police in their jackboots and shiny patrol cars and let him know about the Uniform Commercial Code and the Sovereign Citizens’ Movement and the straw man and all the rest, but she kept her peace — at least for now — because a plan was already forming in her head. By the time they hit Willits and turned south on 101 for Ukiah, it was as firm as it was going to get. “You know,” she said, and they were the first words she’d uttered in the past fifteen minutes, “when we get to Ukiah? I mean, before I drop you off at, where was it, the sporting goods place?”

He didn’t turn his head, but he was listening, she could see that.

“It won’t take five minutes,” she said, watching him now, even as her eyes darted back and forth to the road ahead of her. “One quick stop, that’s all.”

8

HE WAS GOING TO cooperate — he liked the idea, she could see that — but he insisted she had her priorities backwards. “You take me over to Big 5,” he said, “and then we go to the animal place.” It was the longest speech he’d given since he got in the car. “Because I don’t want to get hung up here, you understand?” He was looking at her now, actually looking at her, as if he’d come out of a trance.

“They close at five,” she said, “and I’m not going to leave my dog in there one more day, no way, José—”

“Look,” he said, pointing to the clock on the dashboard. It showed one-forty-five. “There’s a ton of time.”

“But my dog’s in there, don’t you get it? Every minute he’s locked up is like driving nails into my flesh. No, I’m sorry, but Kutya’s first—”

He shook his head. “You want my help, it’s Big 5 first. You don’t, you can let me off anywhere. Here. You can stop here.”

They were on the outskirts of Ukiah now, traffic thickening, the sun glaze brushed over everything like a coat of varnish. Big 5 was on East Perkins, more or less in the middle of town, and Animal Control was on the far side, heading south. She was recalculating — she needed help if she was going to get Kutya back, and nobody else, least of all Christabel, would be willing to go through with it because she was afraid, they were all afraid, everybody she knew — when he reached into the back for his canteen, unscrewed the cap, took a long swallow and offered it to her.

She tried to brush it away. “No thanks,” she said. “I’m not thirsty.”

“You know what you need?” he said, pressing it on her. “You need to relax. Go ahead, take a hit.”

What she was trying to do was stay focused and humor him at the same time, because those were the cards she’d been dealt, so she took the canteen and lifted it to her lips. She’d expected water or maybe a sports drink, but that wasn’t what she got — it was alcohol, booze, a quick sharp burn of it in her throat. “Jesus,” she said, and the surprise of it made her laugh, “what is that — jet fuel?”

“One fifty-one.”

“What? Rum, you mean?”

And now he was smiling for the first time. “Gets you where you’re going. But here, turn here, that’s East Perkins—”

They went into the store together, as if they were on a date or something, and if that felt a little strange, she didn’t mind. She needed to keep an eye on him. If she was attracted to him on some level she told herself it was only because he was malleable — or potentially so — and she was willing to ride with that. No harm, no foul. Once they were done here they’d see to her problem and once that was over she could foresee offering him a lift back as far as Willits, and if he wanted to come in and see where she lived, maybe drink some wine and sit out on the porch, that was okay too. Omelets. She could make omelets. She had eggs and cheese, red pepper, tomatoes. And she could always whip up a salad. That was what she was thinking as the automatic door swung open for them and they stepped into the artificially illuminated cavern of a place that smelled of pigskin, gun oil and saddle soap. And plastic, plastic in all its thousands of guises.

“Wait here,” he whispered as they came through the door, and he had his head down, as if he was afraid of being seen or called out. Then he was gone, slipping down the aisle toward the fishing and hunting section where the fiberglass rods poked up like antennas and the rifles glinted in their display cases. There was hardly anybody else in the store, aside from the checkout guy — young, short, dark hair, his earlobes distended by a pair of shining black plugs — and two teenage girls trying on running shoes. The thought came to her that he was going to rob the place — or at least shoplift — but she put it out of her head. He was Sten Stensen’s son. And yes, he was trouble. But he wasn’t going to do anything crazy — and if he did she’d cut him loose in an eyeblink, just slip out the door as if she’d never seen him before. She wandered over to a display of biking gloves and matched her hand size to the hard plastic package that read Women’s Medium.

It didn’t take him ten minutes. She’d moved on from the gloves to a display of detachable water bottles, reflectors and helmets for all your biking needs, though she didn’t own a bike, and when she looked up he was at the cash register, pretending he didn’t know the guy with the earplugs. He set two handbaskets on the counter, the one filled with expensive freeze-dried meals, the other with what looked to be an outdoor cook kit and a hunting knife in a fancy strap-on sheath that probably ran ninety or a hundred dollars. Not one word passed between him and the checkout guy. He paid with a crumpled twenty and the guy rang something up, popped the cash register, and gave him back a ten and a five. Adam ducked his head, shot him a grin—“You have a nice day,” he said — and then the guy wished him a nice day too and Adam was out the door, his back to her, striding briskly for the car. She gave it a minute, taking up one of the water bottles and then replacing it on the display stand before making her way to the door, trying not to look at the guy with the earplugs, but she wavered just as the door pulled back for her and saw that he was studying her, with interest.

Adam was already in the car when she got there, stuffing the silver-foil packets of food into his backpack. She slid in beside him and shut the door. “Got a good deal, huh?” she offered, turning the key in the ignition and ignoring her seatbelt, which she could do with impunity because she’d long since disabled the dinger or nanny buzzer or whatever you wanted to call it.

“Let’s just say I have a connection.” He gave her a smirk, tearing at the packaging that housed the cook kit (more hard plastic) and casually dropping it out the window. By the time they were rolling out of the lot, he’d slipped the shining aluminum kit into the pack, along with the knife, which he didn’t even glance at, and he was lifting the canteen to his lips again and again offering it to her.

“No,” she said, “not now. Not till we get Kutya.” She smiled. “Then we can celebrate.”

“Party,” he said, and his voice had gone mechanical, as if he were thinking about something else altogether, as if he weren’t even there. “Party on.”

Was he drunk, was that it?

“I’m a party animal,” he said in the same detached voice. “A real, a super, party animal.”

“Yeah,” she said, swinging out onto the highway, “yeah, me too. But you’re going to be all right for this, aren’t you? What we discussed?”

Nothing.

“Listen, Adam—”

“Colter.”

“Colter. I need five minutes, that’s all. And then, if you want, we can go back to my place — in Willits, at the top of the canyon? — and party all we want. I’ve got wine. I can make us omelets. You like omelets?”

No response. He was rigid again, staring through the windshield as if it was the transparent lid of a coffin.

“Okay,” she said, “okay, fine. Five minutes. That’s all I ask.”

She got lucky, because when they came through the door at Animal Control, it wasn’t the girl behind the counter but a middle-aged man with dyed hair and a severe comb-over, and he was busy explaining adoption procedures to a couple his own age who sported identical his-and-hers paunches. Adam was grinning, for what reason she couldn’t fathom, except that he was drunk, he must have been drunk, but he’d roused himself when they pulled into the lot and now he edged right in, saying, “Sir? Sir, could I ask you a question?”

The couple turned to stare at him. The man behind the counter, who’d been in the midst of enumerating the virtues of a dog named Dolly, lifted his head to give him an annoyed look. “Just a minute,” he said.

“But”—and here Adam, soft-voiced to the point where you could barely hear him, calibrated his tone till it was a kind of rising whine—“I have a question, just a simple question.”

The man just blinked at him.

And her? She was making like she didn’t know him, as if they’d come in separately, two strangers interested in dogs. And cats. She went over to the brochures and made a show of selecting one of each, a pet lover who only wanted to be informed about the rules and regulations, about safety and health and the special needs of kittens and puppies.

“About spaying?” Adam said. “You do spaying here, don’t you?”

“Yes,” the man behind the counter said, “yes, of course. But if you could just wait a second until I’m done with these people, who were here before you—”

The woman gave Adam an indignant look, then turned back to the conversation. “Dolly’s housetrained, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” the man lied, because how would he know? “They all are.”

And then Adam, inserting himself between husband and wife at the counter so that each had to take a step back, let his voice go a notch higher. “How old do they have to be before you spay them?”

The Animal Control man blinked again, but he was there to inform people and the response was all but automatic. “Six months or so.”

“You use a scalpel, right? Betadine, make it nice and clean. Do you do it yourself — I mean, personally?”

That was when she drifted down along the far side of the counter and away from the little group gathered there behind her, her neck bent as if studying the brochures in her hand, and nobody even glanced at her as she ducked into the hallway, turned the handle of the door and slipped inside. She found herself in a corridor with an office of some sort on her right and an open door at the far end. She moved cautiously, a step at a time. If there was somebody back there she’d play dumb — she was looking to adopt, that was all, and was this the way to the cages? But what if it was the girl from the other day? She could be back here, she would be, dispensing kibble, filling water bowls, hosing down the floors. What then — another stare-down? Or something more, something harder, something worse? There was one thing she knew: she wasn’t leaving here without her dog. A sharp smell of urine hit her. She could hear the animals moving and rustling beyond the door, a clack of nails on concrete, a furtive yip, whining. She steeled herself and went on.

As soon as she came through the door and started down the row of cages, the dogs — there must have been forty or more — sprang up off the concrete floor, scrabbling at the wire mesh and crying out for release, but where was Kutya, where was he? They were barking now, every last one of them, raising a clamor that was sure to bring the attendants running — the girl, wherever she was, and the man from the front desk and who knew who else? “Kutya!” she called, “where are you? Come on, boy! Kutya!”

He was in the last cage down, looking cowed, as if he’d done something wrong, as if it was his fault he’d been locked away in here, and she felt sick with the thought of what he’d been put through. It was a crime, that was what it was, and she was beyond caring now — just let them try to stop her. In the next moment she had the cage door open and she was clicking the leash to his collar and bulling her way out the rear door, the one that gave onto the fenced-in courtyard and the parking lot beyond.

The dog seemed to sense her urgency and he didn’t hang back to fawn on her or lick her hand or jump up. He had his head down, his paws moving in a brisk businesslike trot, following the leash and the quick clatter of her boots around the corner of the building, across the pavement and up into the backseat of the Sentra, which was parked just out of sight of the front windows. She fell into her seat, slammed the door, her heart pounding. “Stay,” she growled at the dog. “Stay. Get down!” And then the engine fired up and she put the car in gear, telling herself to be calm, that everything was all right, just fine, no one had seen a thing, but her hand trembled on the wheel as she swerved across the lot and pulled up parallel to the front door.

He was in there still — she could see him through the near window, his scalp shining in the light. What was wrong with him? Why wasn’t he coming? She couldn’t help herself and she knew she shouldn’t do it, but she tapped at the horn, twice, two sharp little bleats, and still he stood there at the desk, apparently jawing on with the Animal Control officer when he hadn’t said twenty words to her all the way up the hill. She leaned forward. Kutya began to whine. And now she hit the horn again, more insistently this time, and saw him glance up, a confused look on his face. They were all four of them staring now and she didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to hit the horn again, but she did, grinding her palm into it.

And now there was movement, a shuffling of position as if he were swapping shirts with the couple at the counter — or dancing with them — and he was still talking, his jaw still going. What was wrong with him? She beeped again. She saw him detach himself from the little group and then he went out of her line of vision until he appeared again at the glass door, which snatched at the light as he pushed it open and came down the walk to her. But — and this was strange too, strange and maddening — he just stood there staring at the car as if he’d never seen it before. She rolled down the window. “Get in!” she said.

He just stared, gone off again.

She barked out his name—“Adam!”—even as Kutya came tumbling over the backseat and into the front where he was plainly visible and the shapes inside the building seemed to coalesce, three faces wedded in one and staring out the window at her. “Goddamn you, get in!

“Adam!” she warned, and she was half a beat from just leaving him there, dumping his pack out into the lot and turning her back on him, when his face changed and he came round the front of the car to pull open the passenger’s-side door, scoot the dog off the seat and slide in. She was already in gear, already tugging at the wheel and hitting the gas, when he turned to her, full-face, and said, “I told you, my name’s Colter.”