The Harder They Come

9

HE COULDN’T STOP LAUGHING, giggling like he was in junior high and Mr. Wilder was throwing his voice to be Huckleberry Finn one minute and Nigger Jim the next, because this was the way it was supposed to be, sticking it to them at the Big 5 and at the animal place too, one-upping them, one-upping the world, and she was giggling too so that every time he found himself winding down she’d start him up all over again, best thing ever, huge, just laughing and laughing, and what he was thinking was that she was all right, cool, or close to it, even though she was too old and didn’t have any qualms about displaying her uptight side for all to see, leaning on the car horn and barking at him in the parking lot to the point where he’d almost told her to go fuck herself and forget about the ride because he could just stick out his thumb and not have to listen to her shit or absorb it either. But he was racing now, the little wheel inside his brain spinning at top speed, everything on the highway shooting by as if they’d gone into hyperspace though there was no one chasing them and when he snatched a look at the speedometer he saw she was doing fifty-five, exactly fifty-five, as if the engine had a governor on it. Or a robot arm. He tried to picture that and all he could see was a bolted-together metal head where her head had been just a second ago and a mechanical arm reaching down under the steering wheel and through the instrument panel and into the superhot engine until she began to say something through the giggles and her real head popped back on her shoulders with all its lines and grooves and stingy retreating bones and the eyes that kept snapping at him like rubber bands. He needed a hit of 151. Or maybe he didn’t. Cars exploded all around them. He lifted the canteen to his lips and drank.

What she was saying was, “So you think you might want to come back to the house? To celebrate?” Another rush of giggles. Her hair was in her face. A silver bracelet sparked on her wrist, Morse code, a signal, a definite signal, long, short, long, long, short. He passed her the canteen and watched her press it to her lips. The dog — the dog had dreadlocks and that rocked him — poked its head between the seats and breathed a gas fog of stinking breath between them. “You up for it?”

The wheel began to slow. He came back to things the way they were or had to be and saw her all over again. She was old and he didn’t like her squirrel-colored hair and he hated the way she’d said I know you and called him Adam, but she had big tits and her boots were made out of snakeskin and they had pointed toes with silver strips worked in, shit-kicking boots, and she was a shit-kicker and so was he. “You don’t know me,” he said.

She grinned at him, big lips, soft lips. The cars had stopped exploding and the highway ran true now so that he knew it and knew where he was and the dog breathed its stinking breath and she said, “Maybe, maybe not.”

“I could rape you,” he said.

“Go ahead and try.”

There was no independence in the world, just dependence, and the animals were dying and the sky was like a sore and everything had a price tag on it. It wasn’t like that when the mountain men came out of the east and went up into the Plains and the Rocky Mountains when the country stopped at the Mississippi and the hostiles ruled all the territory beyond. That was when John Colter went up amongst the Blackfeet on the Missouri River and did his deeds. This much he knew from the history books — and the internet too but the internet had about one fiftieth of the information the books gave you — and when he could concentrate, when the wheel slowed and everything came back into focus, he could sit in one place for hours and read the same passages over and over, Give Your Heart to the Hawks and The Mountain Men and John Colter: His Years in the Rockies, with its picture of Colter on skis in the snow and facing down a whole village of braves and their mad snarling dogs. His favorite place, the place where he kept his Army Survival Guide and his books on trapping and fishing and living off the land, was his grandmother’s house when she was alive and the rain was coming at the windows like the ocean turned upside down and the Noyo swelled up and gouged at the banks and took the big logs and boulders down with it so you could hear them grinding like teeth. Everything was safe then, the room warm with the woodstove, something cooking in the kitchen, the bed made for him in the spare room so he didn’t have to go home and see his father there in the chair in the living room with the what-did-you-do-for-me-lately look scored into his face like a mask out of some sci-fi flick the aliens wore to make them look like upright lizards. The mountain men lived free and they never had to say Yessir, Cap’n, to no man. Beaver, that was what they were after, beaver hides — plews — to make the felt for the high hats everybody wore across the sea in London and in New York and Boston too, and the beaver were theirs for the taking and there was nobody in that day and age tougher and savvier and more independent than Colter.

“You want a glass of wine?” she was saying to him. “Two-Buck Chuck, but if you blow on it and let it sit a minute it’s not half bad.”

Somehow he was in her house, though he couldn’t remember how he’d got there, the chain of events, that is, the movement of the car, the opening and slamming of the doors, boots on the porch, key in the latch, none of it. Her house was white, everything painted white, though there were dark smudges of human dirt on the cabinets and doors and the frame of the doorway without a door that led from the living room, where he was, to the kitchen, where she was, throwing her voice like a ventriloquist with a dummy in her lap and who was the dummy here, who was the receiver, what was the message?

“I drink it,” she said, and let out a laugh. “If it’s good enough for me I guess it’s good enough for anybody except maybe the president and his wife and the CEOs of the major corporations, so what do you say? Join me?”

He watched her. She had big tits. They were right there, underneath a T-shirt screaming with the letters TDC in a glossy lipsticky red that was the color of the blood John Colter spilled when he had to, when they wouldn’t leave him alone, the white men and redskins alike. Her big tits swayed like water balloons as she came into the room now with the bottle in one hand and a glass in the other and he watched the way the neck of the bottle kissed the rim of the glass and the vacant space inside it filled red, but a darker red, wine-red, and then he had the glass in his hand and he was draining it in a gulp.

“Whoa,” she said out of her soft lips, “I guess you are a party animal, Colter. But I’m making us omelets, so just hold on,” and here she was filling his glass again. “You want music? I can put some music on. What do you like?”

All right. He was sufficiently slowed down now to appreciate what was going on here. This was called interaction, words spilled and words sucked up, the phase of things you needed to get through if you were going to get laid and he was going to get laid — everybody talked about getting laid, Cody and everybody else he’d ever known — and he’d been laid before so he knew all about it, twice, on two separate nights, and here she was, whatever her name was, padding back into the kitchen on her feet that were bare now to go through with the ritual of food preparation when all he was seeing was Dara Spinelli from high school with her eyes like lasers she never closed the whole time. She had big tits too. She sat atop him in the backseat of his car before they took it away from him and rubbed herself into him and shucked off her shirt and there they were, her tits, and he took hold of them and put his mouth to them and then he got laid. “You got any Slayer?” he heard himself say.

“Slayer? What are they, rock?”

He shrugged. She didn’t even know Slayer? It came to him that she lived in a different world, but then everybody lived in a different world, boxed off, dead to life, the seas turned to acid and the Chinese taking over because they were the new hostiles and if you had ten million Colters you couldn’t beat them back. “Pantera,” he said. “You got any Pantera?”

She let out a laugh and he didn’t like that laugh, or not particularly, and she held out her hands, palms-up, as if he’d stumped her. “Why don’t I just put something on and you relax — you’ve had a hard day shopping and dog-liberating, right?” And here came the giggle again. “Chill,” she said, “just chill. I won’t be a minute.”

The dog was on the rug in front of the couch, inches from his boots. Dreadlocks. Dreadlock dog. That was cool. He thought of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, thought of his camp in the woods that nobody knew about, thought of ganja and opium and the poppy plants he was growing from seed in two hundred and twenty-seven black plastic pots so the gophers couldn’t get at them. He smelled onions. Garlic. Heard the sizzle of the pan and realized there was music playing, old-timey music, corny as corny can be, and felt his boner straining at his zipper the way it did when he was looking at porn when his grandma was out in the garden or at the supermarket or when she was dead, dead the way she was now, dead six months and he in that house still and still talking to her, at least when the wheel was spinning. When it wasn’t, when he was clear, he was out in the woods, tending his plants and building his bunker because it was all coming down, all the shit of the world and the pollution and the death of everything and he was going to be prepared for it, a mountain man himself and no two ways about it.

They ate right there in the living room with its white walls that were so bright they were like gunshots bursting in his ears till she turned the overhead light off and the yellow-glass lamp in the corner took over. She poured more wine and settled in beside him on the couch, her legs jackknifed under her and the soles of her bare feet showing dirt on the balls of her big toes and on her heels, the skin yellowed there and the other toes clenched like miniature fists clutching at the rim of a cliff that wasn’t a cliff but only a flat broad short-of-white couch pillow that connected with the couch pillow he was sitting on so that every time she bent forward to the coffee table which was really just a wooden chest with brass handles on either end he could feel the buoyancy of her as if they were both out in the ocean and treading water. And those black slashing things circling around them, those fins cutting the surface? They weren’t sharks, they were dolphins, grinning dolphins, happy dolphins, tail-walking dolphins showing off their tricks to such a degree that he felt nothing but gratitude for them and if she was touching him now, touching his jeans, his thighs, his crotch, that was all according to plan. He stopped treading water and her face was right there, closing in on his, and she kissed him, her lips soft as the inside of things and tasting of garlic and butter and what was that herb, that herb his mother put on everything till it tasted like soap? Cilantro. He hated cilantro. But not now, not on her lips, not while she was unzipping him and loosening his belt and putting her tongue in his mouth.

In the morning she wanted him to stay, fussing around in the kitchen with a coffeemaker and a hot griddle and talking at such a clip she barely drew breath, telling him about the seminars she’d taken in Redemption Theory and how they’d really opened her eyes. “Do you know that everybody born in this country has a straw man behind them worth six hundred and thirty thousand dollars, which is what allows the government, or what passes for government, to take out loans on the backs of us all?” she asked, or no, demanded of him as if he were arguing with her when he wasn’t, when he was clear and just sitting there at the kitchen table with a mug in one hand and a fork in the other. “Unless you call their bluff. Unless you stand up to them and write checks against your straw man and start to draw that money down and keep them off your back permanently—”

In the night, in her bedroom that was as black dark as alien space — darker, because out there at least there were stars — he’d held tight to her and her big tits and soft lips and done it twice without seeing anything or being seen and that was anonymous and it calmed him till he blacked out and slept and woke up clear and with the wheel quiet inside him. Now he was eating and she wanted him to stay, and the dog was crunching kibble over a blue plastic bowl set in the corner, the sun shining and something that wasn’t much more than static playing on the radio on the counter by the sink, and he cut her off in the middle of her straw man speech to say, “I have to go. You know why?”

She was pushing things around on the stove. She shifted her head to look at him over one shoulder. “Why?”

“Because they’re going to be coming for you.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

“How do they know it was me? Nobody saw us. For all they know I could sue them for letting somebody steal my dog out of the pound—”

He had to laugh, but it was a noiseless laugh and his lips never moved. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said.

She gave him a puzzled look.

“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes. It’s your dog. Who else would steal it?”

Her hair was a mess where he’d run his fingers through it in the dark and the pillow had flattened it on one side and for an instant it seemed to catch fire in the sun coming in through the window, every wild wisp of it burning like a halo of jumping flames. He could see the smallest things, the fine leather creases at the corners of her eyes, a single translucent hair stabbing out beneath her left ear, and finer still, till he could see the microscopic mites living and fucking and shitting in her eyebrows, in everybody’s eyebrows, every minute of every day. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought of that, but there’s nobody to take him for me, to hold him, I mean, till the thirty days are up — he doesn’t have rabies, I swear it. .”

He said nothing. Just sat there watching her mites wave their segmented legs even as he felt his own mites stirring in the valleys between his eyes, and then the mites were gone and he was clear again. Mornings. In the mornings he was clear, or mostly so, and he knew what was happening to him and knew that dope and alcohol made it worse — or better, definitely better — and that all his plans, the plans he talked up in his own head and out loud too, with his own lips and tongue and mouth, were going to come to nothing, that the poppies would die and the hostiles would come for him and he’d lead them on a merry chase, but that in the end everything in this life was just shit and more shit.

“Could you take him? Hide him, I mean — just for a few days?”

“I can’t have a dog.”

“You’ve got your own place, didn’t you tell me? Near Northspur? On the river there? That’s only like fifteen miles or something and there’s nobody around out there, right? Like even if Kutya barks, nobody’s going to hear. Or complain. Or even know.” She was looking at him as if she could see right through him, two naked eyes hooked up to her brain and taking in information like the feed on a video camera. “I could drive you there now and you could just — he’s no trouble. Really.”

“My grandma wouldn’t like it.”

“Talk to her, will you? Or we both could. I’m sure if she understood the circumstances — it’s just temporary, that’s all — she’d want to help out.”

He couldn’t picture that. Couldn’t picture the dreadlock dog in the house that was his private universe behind the eight-foot cement-block wall he’d built around it to keep them out, all of them, because the fact he kept trying to bury was that his father was selling the place to some alien and had already told him he had so many days from that day whatever day that was to clean up your crap and get out and I’m not going to tell you twice, which was why he’d set up the camp in the woods in the first place.

“No,” he said, “no,” and he was shaking his head. “She wouldn’t like it.”

10

JOHN COLTER WAS TWENTY-NINE, four years older than he was now, when he signed on with Lewis and Clark for the expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase and open up the west. He’d been raised on the frontier in Kentucky, a wild place back then, more comfortable sleeping rough than in his own bed in the cabin he shared with his parents and his brothers and sisters and one uncle and his uncle’s wife, and if the other farmers’ sons were content to walk behind a plow, he wasn’t. He was a free agent from the earliest age, earning his keep by way of hunting, fishing and trapping, and in no need of a trail to carry him out or bring him home again either. As a child, he took to disappearing for days at a time, and then, as he got older and ran through his teens, for weeks, and no matter how far he roamed or in what territory, he was never lost, born with an uncanny ability to orient himself no matter where he was. He was like an animal in that regard, like a fox — or better yet, a wolf, an outlier with his nose to the wind.

Lewis and Clark took him on as scout and hunter, and while he left St. Louis with the expedition and stayed with it for more than two years, exploring the course of the Missouri River and going overland to the Columbia and ultimately the Pacific Ocean, he never made it back to civilization with the rest of them. It happened that on the return trip, while they were retracing their route through the Dakota country, a pair of trappers, heading west, stopped to camp with the expedition and tried to persuade Colter to come with them — he knew the country and they didn’t. He’d be their guide and their partner, three-way split. Plews were fetching ten dollars a head back in St. Louis, so it would be like stealing candy from a baby, easiest thing in the world, trap beaver and get rich — not that Colter cared about money much more than as a means to keep him in powder and balls, but the idea of staying in the country appealed to him. He went to Captain Clark for permission to muster out and he gave it to him, though there wasn’t a man in that company who didn’t think he was out of his mind, more than two years on the trail and civilization within reach — women, drink, clean sheets, news of the world and the celebrity that would come down to them all — and yet all that meant nothing to him. That was for other men, weaker men. He wanted to go out into the wilderness and take what was his and if anybody stood in his way, Cheyenne, Crow or Blackfoot, he’d take them too.

What became of the trappers, nobody knows, but at some point — a month in, two — Colter had got fed up with them, and who could blame him? Even with Lewis and Clark he was mostly on his own, out ahead of the expedition, breaking trail, hunting meat, camping solitary against the fastness of the night. The trappers — Joseph Dixon and Forrest Hancock — bickered, gave out with opinions, expected him to do things their way, two votes to one, as if setting traps and roasting beaver tail over a cottonwood fire was a democratic process. By spring of the following year — this would have been 1807—he was heading back down the Missouri in a canoe, his plews gone and stolen after a party of Blackfeet had surprised him. He had nothing to his name but his knife and rifle and a leather pouch with his powder, balls, flint and steel inside, and he had no destination either, though he had a vague notion of going back down to St. Louis just to see what would turn up.

He never made it. He ran into another expedition at the mouth of the Platte River — a conglomerate of fur traders under Manuel Lisa who were ambitious to set up a trading post — slash-fort — and he agreed to go on ahead, to go back, that is, and scout for them. His job this time was to contact the Crows in their scattered villages and spread the news about the trading post and how they could exchange furs for steel knives, mirrors, blankets, beads and baubles, which he did. In the process he became the first white man to discover what would become Yellowstone Park and managed to get himself shot in the right leg while fighting with the Crows against a party of Blackfeet. The Crows weren’t especially sympathetic or grateful either. They moved on and left him to his fate. But what kind of fate was that? Dying out there with a suppurating wound while the buzzards settled in for the feast? No, no way. Totally unacceptable. He wasn’t ready to leave this planet because he was too tough for that, too determined and resilient — and yes, independent — so he favored his good leg and walked three hundred miles back to the fort on the Platte.

This was what he knew, what the history books revealed, and if he closed his eyes while she sat beside him in the driver’s seat humming one of her lame country songs and the dog hung his head over the seat and breathed its meat-reeking breath in his face as the car yawed down Route 20 on the way to his place, he could picture how it must have been, Colter fighting down the pain till it went from something that filled him like an air pump inflating his skin to a hot white pinpoint of light that cooled with every step he took. Three hundred miles. Who could walk three hundred miles today, even on two good legs? Not to mention that Colter had no PowerBars or beef jerky or anything else, not even an apple, which people today took totally for granted as if apples were like air, and he had to forage all the way, subsisting on roots, frogs, snakes, the things he shot and feasted on only to leave what he couldn’t carry to rot when he moved on. That was legendary, that was a feat, but it was nothing compared to what came next — Colter’s Run, when he was naked and barefoot and a whole army of Blackfeet braves was chasing him down, all of them pissed-off and screaming and taking aim at his naked shoulders with their spears held high. He ran, and they chased him. And if he was faster than they were, even on their own ground and with their feet protected by moccasins, it was because he was John Colter and they weren’t.

He knew something was wrong the minute they turned into the dirt road and heard the distant discontinuous clanging as if the world were made of steel and coming apart at the seams. The windows were down. He’d been staring into the side mirror, staring into his own jolting eye and seeing the door panels fixed there like blistered skin and the dog slavering out the back and smearing the fender with a shiny outwardly radiating web of spit and mucus that immediately turned brown with flung-up dust when they went from pavement to dirt, and he wouldn’t look up. He wasn’t ready yet. He was listening to the tires, a clean spinning whine of perfect harmony on the blacktop that gave way to an angry thump and pop as they rocked over the washboard corrugations worked into the road to his grandmother’s house — to his house — because it was better than listening to her, to Sara, who kept trying to radicalize him against the government when he was already a thousand times more radical than she was. Nobody governed him. They were all just criminals anyway, every politician bought and sold by the special interests and the cops nothing more than their private army — he knew that and she didn’t have to tell him. But she did. On and on till her voice seemed to be coming from someplace other than her mouth and lips and larynx, as if it was riding radio waves on its own special channel.

But that clanging. Somehow he knew what it was and who was making it, though he’d never heard that exact sound before and couldn’t have said how he knew unless it was some sixth sense like the sense that told Colter when there were hostiles about. She was saying, “They might come to my house but I’ll just play dumb and say, ‘I thought you had him’ and then get angry and say, ‘What are you telling me — that he got away? Or what, you didn’t. .’”—she turned to him, grinning, pretending to be someplace else talking to somebody else and not him at all—“‘send him out for adoption?’ And then I’ll pause and let my face go dark. ‘Or no, don’t tell me you put him down? Because if you did—’”

The house was there under the trees and the river was down below it. Ever since the cops had taken his car away he’d had to hitch into town for groceries, though his mother would come pick him up, was happy to come pick him up — and she’d done it a couple of times — but that wasn’t independent, and after a while when she pulled up to the house that used to have a phone before he uprooted it and tossed it in the river where it could go deep and talk to the minnows and steelhead in every human language, he would duck out the back door, slip over the wall and into the woods, and then he went to the locksmith and changed the locks so she couldn’t get in.

Sara said, “Is this it?” and he nodded and she put on her blinker to turn into the gravel drive even as he saw the bishop pines screaming with sunlight and the three brown plastic overflowing trash cans no one ever seemed to come and pick up and the big object, the real thing, the thing that slammed at him like a missile shot out of nowhere — his father’s car, parked in the shadow of the wall like it belonged there.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit.”

The car lurched to a stop. She put it in park, cut the engine and turned to him. “What’s wrong?”

He just pointed at the car in front of them, a new Toyota hybrid his father had bought as a retirement present to himself, a statement on four wheels that might as well have had a loudspeaker attached to it trumpeting its miles per gallon and crying out against the spoliation of the earth and the four hundred parts per million of CO² in the air. That was a good thing, he wouldn’t argue with that — it made sense to cut down on gas-guzzling, of course it did — but if you really wanted to get serious you’d just send the car back to Japan and use your own two legs to get around. His father didn’t need a car. Nobody needed a car. That was what feet were for. Tell it to Colter: he didn’t even have a horse.

The clanging faltered, intermittent now, and then it died altogether so that the little noises — of insects, the river, birds in the trees — came back to establish themselves in a soundloop that was as steady as the beating of his heart. Out of the car went the dreadlock dog the minute Sara cracked her door and then they were out in the yard and the dog was lifting his leg against something that hadn’t been there before, rubble, a pile of rubble that looked like busted-up cinder block. And then the clanging started up again and he thought of his father and how his father had got in his face when he saw the wall for the first time, shouting “Where’s your brain? You build an eight-foot wall without a doorway, what are you thinking? Or are you thinking, are you thinking at all?”

His father had shouted for a good fifteen minutes and then gone home and come back with a stepladder and he’d watched him — an old man with a scorched-earth face — climb up to perch crotch-wise on the lip of the wall and hoist the stepladder up behind him so he could ease it down the inside, and then his father was there, in the compound, and he was shouting all over again.

“It’s to keep people out,” he’d said in his own defense. “I can climb it. And I don’t need any ladder either.”

But now, now there was a doorway-sized hole in the wall and a pile of busted-up cinder block in the yard and even before the dreadlock dog had got done with his yellow arc of piss here came another fractured block, flung through the doorway to clack against the pile and send the dog off yipping as if he’d been hit, which he hadn’t. Sara snapped a look at him like he was the one who’d thrown the thing and called comfort to the dog while those little brown birds with the forked white tail feathers shot like bullets across the yard and the sun flared and flared again. That was the moment his father appeared in the jagged new doorway, dressed in his hiking boots and jeans, his T-shirt sweated through and a pair of stained work gloves on his hands. His father’s face took up a wondering look and then discarded it. “Adam,” his father said, and his tone was neutral because he was surprised to see Sara there beside him, as if she’d crawled out of some secret passage deep under the earth like a gopher or a mole, a thing that went around on all fours, and Let’s do it doggie-style, she’d said the second time, do you like it doggie-style?

“Hi, Sten,” she said, and he watched his father’s eyes fall into their twin sinkholes for just an instant as he tried to place her and then his father said “Hi” back and added her name, to prove he knew her. And more: his father was calculating, the two of them in the same picture, her with her big tits and the dreadlock dog that was sniffing at his leg now, putting two and two together, fucking in his mind, fucking, fucking.

“Nice to see you again,” Sara said, and his father dredged up a smile for her. “How’s retirement treating you? You did retire, right — isn’t that what I heard?”

His father put both his palms on his forehead and swept his hair back, gray hair going to white, the kind of thing a Blackfoot brave would have prized on a dripping scalp, then unfastened the rubber band pinching his ponytail, patted the loose hairs in place and refastened it, all in three seconds flat. This was his characteristic gesture. Or one of them, anyway. Hair. He had hair. “That’s right,” his father said. “Just got back from a cruise, in fact. Down south. Maybe you read about it? Or saw it on TV?”

She was wearing her jeans and shit-kicking boots, nothing to see there, so far as fucking was concerned, but her big tits were sticking out of a little turquoise blouse the size of a rag and you could see her navel too. And her belly. Her belly that was like a wave at sea and just as soft once it washed over you. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “yeah. Of course.” She raised her right hand to smack her head in a duh! kind of way. “That must have been terrifying.”

His father shrugged.

“I heard it was three of them. Mexicans, right? In Mexico?”

“Costa Rica.”

“Costa Rica? Jesus, I thought that was supposed to be safe—”

“Yeah, well, nothing’s safe,” his father said, and why did he look at him as if he’d had anything to do with it? He wasn’t there. He didn’t kill anybody. “It could happen anywhere. We were just lucky, that was all.”

“Three of them,” she repeated, “and they were armed and you had nothing but your bare hands? I’d say that’s more than luck.”

Another shrug, his father the hero, the killer. “You let two of them get away,” he heard himself say. He could feel his father’s stare boring into him, but he wasn’t going to look up and acknowledge it — he was watching the way Sara’s reptile boots shifted in the dirt, the two little silver gleams there at the toes of them, shit-kickers. “So did the guy’s eyes pop out or what? Like a frog when you step on it?”

“Adam,” his father said, and he heard the tone of it and knew it, the tone that cut him down to size, diminished him, made him nothing more than a boy, a child, an infant, as if what he said was always stupid and irrelevant and nobody wanted to hear it.

“What,” he said, throwing it back at him. “You killed him, didn’t you? You ought to know.”

“Adam. Come on, now. That’s not the point, you know that. Sometimes—”

And here she cut in, as if she was on his father’s side now, as if she and his father were some sort of tag team and everything he’d done with her, from one-upping the Animal Control idiots to drinking Two-Buck Chuck to fucking in the dark didn’t count for a thing. “It was self-defense.”

He’d been clear, or a little clear anyway, but he wasn’t clear anymore, a sudden buzz of noise in his ears and then the dreadlock dog started barking and the trees took it up, all the Sitka spruce and Doug firs and bishop pines and new-growth redwoods running up into the hills and barking in chorus. He needed a hit of something, pot, hash, opium, acid, and where was the canteen, what had he done with the canteen?

“Adam, it’s all right,” his father said in his hollowed-out reptile’s rasp of a voice, the voice that was meant to be comforting and copacetic but was really nothing more than a hiss, and his father took a step toward him, the gloves swelling his hands till they were King Kong hands, black and rubbery and made to crush things. “We’re okay here, there’s no rush, and we’re going to find you a new place to live, believe me, we will—”

“My name’s not Adam,” he heard himself say, and there was somebody else speaking for him now, Colter, Colter speaking, “because Adam was the original man and I’m not the original anything.”

Sara was right there, right there between them, leading with her midriff — that was the term, her midriff, her bare midriff — and she said, “Adam’s been helping me. He’s great. He’s been a great help. What we need is a place to keep the dog — Kutya? — for a couple of days. Because my landlord? She’s being a bitch about having a pet. And I was wondering if, well, Adam said he’d help me out — if it’s okay with his grandma, that is. And you, you of course.”

So his father was taking this in and the trees were barking and his father knew it was all a lie and his son had been fucking her, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself, and the three of them were standing there outside the wall just jawing away as if they were in one of the plays they’d put on in the auditorium in high school.

“Well, good, good,” his father was saying. “I’m glad he could help, and as far as his grandmother’s concerned, well, she passed on six months ago now, so that won’t be a problem. Right, Adam?” A look for him now, drilled full of holes and every hole a question mark punctured with little barbs. “Happy to accommodate you — I mean, if it’s okay with Adam it’s okay with me.”

Everything was so nice, everything so perfect, his father on his best behavior because of her, going out of his way to be reasonable and understanding, just like he always was in his office at school with his big arms laid on the desk in the short-sleeved button-down shirt he wore without fail, winter and summer. As reasonable as the guidance counselor and the parade of shrinks marching through his life as long as he could remember. And what was it the last one said, Dr. Rob Robertson, Robert’s son, just call me Rob, the head-thumping diagnosis that was supposed to end it all and stop the wheel and make everybody happy? A problem of adjustment to adulthood. Yeah, sure. In spades. And then he was an adult, eighteen and out of school, and that was the end of the shrinks. He had acid instead, he had alcohol, pot. And here he was, adjusting to adulthood, right here, right now.

“Big hero,” he heard himself say in the most sarcastic voice he could dredge up, and he was looking at the ground, at the dreadlock dog, at the pile of busted-up cinder block. “John Colter would have killed them all—I would have killed them all.”

They just looked at each other, the two of them, as if he’d been speaking Chinese.

The urge he had, right then, was to take them by surprise, dash through the new doorway, circle round back of the house and go right up over the wall and out into the woods, just to get a little peace for a minute, and was that too much to ask? And he was going to, he was going to do that, just as soon as he wrapped up this conversation or dialogue or trialogue or whatever it was, and so he squared himself up so he was his father’s height—Straighten up, straighten your shoulders and stand up straight, be a man, that was what his father was always telling him, had been telling him, harping on it as long as he could remember, from elementary school to junior high to senior year and the half semester at Humboldt, which was about all he could stand — and he was fed up with it and he did something he never did, looked him dead in the eye and said, “And one more thing, in case you’re wondering — I fucked her. Isn’t that right, Sara? Isn’t that right? Didn’t I fuck you?”

11

HE DIDN’T WAIT AROUND to see the look on his father’s face because that was then and this was now and now he was already up and over the back wall and across the Noyo because the rains had stopped for the season and there were places you could wade, no problem, his boots wet and squishing and his pants soaked to his knees, moving fast, army double time, up beyond the cabin where the dog-faced man lived with his fat grub of a wife and ugly squalling kids who didn’t deserve to live, not on this planet, anyway, and a good mile and a half beyond that to where he’d made his own clearing on timber company property with the chainsaw he’d lifted from one of the cabins down around Alpine and then trimmed the branches off the logs and stacked up the logs to make his bunker. What he needed was sunshine. Sunshine was essential to plant growth. Any fool knew that. And you didn’t get sunshine in a pine forest unless you took down the trees as quietly as you could considering the noise of the chainsaw that beat at your ears and went right inside of you whether you used ear protection or not, but there were ways around that. For one thing, who was there to hear, anyway, aside from the dog-faced man whose name was Chip Moody and who’d hated him on sight and the feeling was mutual? Or the old white-hairs like his father the timber company paid to hike around the woods and make sure the Mexican gangs weren’t out there carving up marijuana plantations and poisoning everything that moved? For another thing, he was smart enough to do most of his cutting in the middle of the day when people were at work or when the Skunk Train was taking a load of tourists up and down the tracks to Northspur and back and all the hard metallic noises of the world ran confused.

He wasn’t thinking because his father had set him off, his father always set him off and his mother did too, but not as instantly and not as thoroughly, and when he emerged in the clearing he realized he’d forgotten to bring his pack with the new knife and the cook-kit and the freeze-dried entrées that were better when they took on a little smoke from the fire than anything you’d cook yourself. And his canteen. His canteen was still half-full of 151 and he had his baggie of buds and his blunt and matches in the side flap of the pack, which was in the backseat of her car and he wanted all that now. His stomach rumbled. He could see the pack there on the dirty seat with its filthy rumpled towel and the white clumps of dog hair scattered around like weeds growing out of it, but the dirty seat was in the back of the blue car that was parked behind his father’s car and he had to fight down a cresting wave of paranoia and regret that slammed at him so hard he had to sit down on a stump in the middle of the field just to swim through it and catch his breath because what if she’d forgotten the pack was there and gone back up the hill to her house and left nothing behind but the dreadlock dog? Or worse, what if she’d stolen it, stolen everything? And worse, worse, worse, what if she’d broken a window in the house and crawled in and got at his stuff there, what if she took his rifle, his porn, the six hundred dollars he kept against emergencies in the Safeway sweet pickle relish jar behind the couch?

It was a hateful thought and it made him miserable right through to the bone, and he sat there on the stump looking across the field of stumps that was as long as a football field but narrower, much narrower, so as not to attract attention from the air, where the sheriff’s department was always doing flyovers looking for growing operations, sat there staring at where his bunker was disguised on the hill with the brush he’d cut and the camo cover over it and at the marshaled lines of black pots glinting under the sun, but getting no satisfaction from any of it. He was hungry because he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast at her house and the lack of food, the loss of it, gnawed hard at him, because here he was out in the woods without his stuff like some weakling, like some tenderfoot who’d run away without giving it the least smallest little niggardly thought. “Niggardly,” he said to himself, said it aloud, and then he was chanting it as he pushed himself up and started back across the field, niggardlies dropping like spit, ten of them, a hundred, niggardly, niggardly, niggardly.

He saw smoke rising from the woodstove chimney at Chip Moody’s dog-faced house and the car pulled up there under the sun, so he circled around through the trees without showing himself because why should it be Chip Moody’s dog-faced business what he did or where he went? The woods were quiet, no birds, no bugs, nothing moving. Light fingered through the bare trunks of the trees. The dirt smell was strong, humus, pine needles, rot. He heard somebody beeping a car horn off in the distance and thought of his house again, of Sara and her car and his father and the clanging mallet, and hurried down the hill to the river where he just glided across the water like those lizards in the nature shows that go so fast they never break the surface. Then he was there, back at the house, and he wasn’t calm, wasn’t calm at all.

The first thing he saw was the dog, its fur in violent motion, and it was barking at him, once, twice, till the trees took it up and then suddenly stopped because the dog came up to him and stuck out its wet snout so he could take it in one palm and feel the electricity go out of it, tail wagging now, the dreadlock dog here to stay whether he had anything to say about it or not. Then he saw her car and then he saw the vacant space where his father’s car had been and everything sucked back down from hyperspace and slowed to a crawl, all the visuals good and fine and everything as it was except for the door-shaped hole in the wall and the frame his father had cemented in there and the flat metal door propped up in the shade, ready to hang. Hang a door. He said that to himself, then said it again. All right. There would be a door into the compound. But it was metal and metal was better than wood and he’d have a key to it and he’d lock it and keep everybody out for as long as that was going to happen.

His next surprise, beyond the dog and the fact of her car being there while his father’s wasn’t, was the smell of food, a loud red shout of a smell he’d known since he was little — spaghetti sauce, that was what it was, floating atop the scent of the garlic powder in the clear plastic container you had to thump against the counter before you could get anything out of it. He stepped through the gap in the wall and saw that the door to the house stood open behind the dark mesh of the screen door, and that stopped him a moment. How had that happened, unless she had broken a window or his father somehow managed to get a key or change the locks back or somebody forgot to lock up when he went hitching up to Ukiah yesterday afternoon? No matter. He stepped into his own house as if he were a stranger and there she was, her back to him, rattling around in the kitchen like somebody’s mother. Or wife. There was music on the radio — that came to him next — and everything that was familiar about the place, which he kept neat, shipshape, he did, looked different now because she was in the middle of it like some force field that bent and distorted things, and if he thought of his grandmother, it was only the briefest stabbing spike of a thought because she turned then and saw him and smiled.

“Hey,” she said, “where’ve you been?”

There was sun, late sun now, evening sun, spilling through the kitchen window, and it took hold of her and held her there. He didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. Nobody knew about the camp in the woods and nobody was ever going to know.

A pot hissed on the burner behind her. There came the tap-tap-tap of the dog’s nails on the hardwood floor and the dog brushed by him like a shrub on legs and entered the picture, right there, beside her.

“Your father went home,” she said. “He had to pick the lock to let me in — and I hope that’s all right.” She stopped to swipe a strand of loose hair back behind her ear with the pinky finger of her left hand, her characteristic gesture. Or one of them. She had hair too. Squirrel-colored hair. “I just thought we might have something to eat because, you know, with Kutya here and I don’t have to work tomorrow, I just thought I might as well, you know, stay.” She was grinning. She had something in her hand — a stirring spoon, his grandmother’s stirring spoon with the rust flecks in the shiny metal and the hard yellow plastic handle. “What do you say about that?”

What did he say? He said nothing, not yet. This was a concept and it was going to take a minute for it to seep in because he hadn’t thought it would go like this, not when he was out at the camp and knew that he’d left his pack behind in the backseat of her car, where it still was, the 151 and all, but right now, in this moment with her there and the dreadlock dog and the light spilling through the windows till his grandmother’s stirring spoon glowed like a wand, a magic wand, he felt so close to calm it was like a spell had come over him. And yet, and yet — there was something there still to keep the wheel spinning, and it was his father, the thought of his father, who’d gone home now, for now, but would be back anytime he pleased and with a new doorway to walk through too.

“You talk to my father?”

“Yeah. I knew him, you know, from school.”

“You talk about me?”

She shrugged. “A little.”

“What did he tell you?”

The dog pulled his front end low to the floor and stretched, the banner of his tail waving as she bent to him to scratch his back, right there in his sweet spot, but what she was doing, whether she knew he knew it or not, was stalling so she could think of what to say next. She straightened up. He was ten feet from her, in the living room still, watching the light. “He said you were going through a rough patch.”

A rough patch. That hit him like a slap in the face and he had to laugh, but it wasn’t like the laughter in the car after they’d stolen the dog back, but more of a noise that caught in his throat as if he’d swallowed something and couldn’t get it out. “Rough patch,” he repeated and laughed again. “Did he tell you about the playground? About my car? About the Chinese? Did he tell you I don’t have a job?”

“No,” she said, and she crossed the floor to him and squeezed his arm at the bicep, leaning in to touch her soft lips to the side of his face. “All he said was you’d hit a rough patch, but I don’t care about that. I like you, you know that?”

He didn’t answer.

“And since I’m here anyway I looked in the refrigerator — which is impressive the way you keep it, neat, neater than mine, by far — and found the hamburger there and the chicken sausage, and since you had all these spices and cans of stewed tomatoes and whatnot, I just figured I’m hungry and I’ll bet you are too. Okay? So let’s have some wine and maybe sit out back for a while and let the sauce cook down. You’re going to like the way I make spaghetti. Everybody says it’s the best.”

She was holding on to his arm still and the light was flowing over the dog where it lay in the rug of its fur on the kitchen floor and the smell of the simmering sauce was tugging at his glands, the salivary glands that looked like trussed-up sacks of tapioca pudding in the illustration in his biology text from school, and another phrase came to him that had nothing niggardly in it at all: Go with the flow. He said it aloud, “Go with the flow,” and she gave his muscle another squeeze.