The Harder They Come

24

SO ADAM WAS GONE. Adam was crazy and Adam was gone. That hurt. It did. Hurt her more than she would ever admit, not even to Christabel, and Christabel was there for her, sitting over her strawberry margarita with a long face saying, “You want to talk about it?” They were at Casa Carlos in Ukiah, Friday night, a month after Adam knocked her down, trashed the house and kept on trashing it till she thought he was going to hammer his way right on through the walls. She was crying that night. She’d tried to stop him, tried to bring him back up the hill where they could settle in and be like they were before, but he wouldn’t listen to her and he wouldn’t stop either. She screamed his name, screamed it over and over, the shock and confusion wadded in her throat till she thought she was going to choke on it, and then she cursed him, stood out in the dark yard and cursed him to the tone-deaf clank and clatter of things breaking, shattering, falling to pieces. Crying still, she’d put Kutya in the car, started up the engine and swung round in the driveway. “You son of a bitch!” she shouted out the window. “You shit! I hope you die and rot in hell!” Then she put the car in gear and drove on up the hill, listening to Hank Williams, only Hank, and crying in harsh hot jags that took the breath right out of her body.

She didn’t tell Christabel any of that — that was personal. Personal even from her. What she did tell her was that they’d had a fight — Adam was upset because they had to move out and he started taking it out on her — and that it was over, or probably over, ninety-nine and a half percent sure if you wanted to figure the odds. And what did Christabel say? “I don’t see what you saw in him, anyway.” She’d paused to blow out smoke. “Except his bod. But he was trouble with a capital T and don’t you try to deny it.”

Now, in one of the dark booths along the back wall where the black velvet tapestry of Selena hung beside one of a snorting bull in a shadowy arena clotted with even shadowier faces, with the candle guttering in its rippled glass urn and the corny Mexican music tweedle-deeing through the speakers in a sad travesty of normalcy and joy, she felt like crying all over again. That, and getting drunk. They were already on their second pitcher, the remains of her beef enchilada and Christabel’s macho burrito congealing in grease on the plates before them — she really did have to start eating healthier and she made a promise to herself in that moment, albeit a drunken promise, to start tomorrow — and things had begun to blur a bit.

“I mean, beyond the sex,” Christabel said, her fluffed-up hair and the candlelight giving her a weird Halloweeny look, “what did he ever do for you? Did he contribute? Pay for anything?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. But she did. And in the next breath she said, “He could be so funny.”

“Right. Like that night he sat down to dinner buck naked—”

And then they were both laughing and she picked up the pitcher and topped off their glasses, the frothy pink confection like something a child would lap up, cotton candy made liquid, but it packed a punch, no doubt about that. Plus, she was driving because Christabel’s pickup was in the shop with some mysterious ailment that was probably nothing but would cost five hundred, minimum, of that she could be sure. The way mechanics took advantage of women, especially single women, was another kind of disgrace, as if things weren’t bad enough already. .

The bill came. They divided it up and left a two-dollar tip on a thirty-six dollar charge because when you really thought about it the service was lousy and the food worse and the decor right out of a Tijuana whorehouse, and so what if the waiter gave them a dirty look when they were going out the door, he could go fuck himself, they could all go fuck themselves. Right. And then they were on the street, the air cool on her bare arms, September nearly gone already and October coming on, time dragging you through the year as if it had hooks on it, one holiday after another, Memorial Day, Flag Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, and then the big ones, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all of it in service of what? Shopping. Spend, spend, spend. Make the corporations that much richer and the people that much poorer. Really, the only way to get off that wheel was to drop out and she’d told Christabel that till she was blue in the face, explained it over and over, patiently, in detail, and still she didn’t get it. Or wouldn’t.

Jerry Kane got it. And Jerry Kane died for it. He just got fed up to the point where quoting the UCC code and declaring his status to whatever Fascist disguised as a policeman just didn’t cut it anymore and so he took up arms because they gave him no choice. The final straw, or the next-to-final straw, was when they arrested him in Carrizo, New Mexico, at what he called on his radio show a “Nazi checkpoint, show me your papers, Heil Hitler,” a checkpoint set up for the sole purpose of harassing citizens, both natural-born and slave-state, and, of course, extracting money from them, moola, hard cash, as if they were anything more than just roadside bandits out of the old time, the lawless time when you protected yourself and your own and lived free. It wasn’t any different from what happened to her. They stopped him for no reason except that they had the guns and demanded his papers and when he refused to enter into a contract with them they hauled him off to jail under threat, duress and coercion and what he did was file a counterclaim alleging kidnapping and extortion against the arresting officers and the justice of the so-called peace of the so-called court. And then, two months later, he was on his way back from one of his seminars in Vegas to his home in Florida, and it happened all over again, and who could blame him if he just turned around and defended himself from fraud, malice and yes, kidnapping. Yet again.

He’d had enough. And when the two cops came up to the white van that was his own personal property on one of the highways and byways guaranteed for free and unencumbered access under the Uniform Commercial Code, he started shooting. West Memphis, Arkansas, Crittenden County. Two oppressors shot dead. But that wasn’t enough because the cops tracked Jerry Kane and his son to that Walmart parking lot and two more cops went down in a shitstorm of bullets and Jerry Kane and his sixteen-year-old son gave up their lives for it. For what? For seatbelts? For papers?

“Uh, Sara — Sara, earth to Sara?”

It was cold. She was rubbing her arms on the street that was all but deserted and the neon sign out front of Casa Carlos was like icing on a frozen cake and Christabel was standing there beside her trying to be funny. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay, okay.”

Then they were walking to her car, the sound of their heels like gunshots echoing out into the night and the traffic lights going red and green and red again and nobody there to know or care and Christabel was saying, “You going to be all right to drive?” and she was saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

So she drove back to Willits on the road she could have driven blind and dropped Christabel off, a few pairs of headlights coming at her, nothing really. She was minding her own business and thinking ahead to Kutya and how he would have been missing her and holding his pee because he was the best-trained dog in the world and totally considerate of her, and if things seemed a bit blurrier than usual, that was all right, that was because it was dark and getting darker and she was sticking to back roads only now, taking a circuitous route home in the event there were any clowns in cop uniforms out there on the main road looking to harass, detain and rob people traveling in their own personal property to their own personal residence. Route 20, that was what she wanted to avoid, and she did, cutting a big rectangle or maybe a trapezoid around it, twice having to back up and pull U-turns because she somehow wound up on dead-end streets. But Route 20 was where she had to go at some point if she was going to get home, and finally, after having circumvented — or rectangavented — the intersection at South Main, she found herself out on the darkened highway at something like eleven o’clock at night. Minding. Her. Own. Business.

And then it all started over again, as if she were caught in a time warp. One whoop, then the lights flashing in the rearview. The shoulder of the road, the narrow view out the windshield. The sounds: bugs in the grass, the overzealous roar of the cruiser’s engine straining even in neutral, the declamatory tattoo of the officer’s boots first on the pavement and then on the tired dirt strip of the shoulder. The lady cop, the very one, bloodless, thin as a post, no lipstick, and something like joy in her eyes. The flashlight. The commands, License and registration, Proof of insurance, Step out of the car, and the same answers, or answer: “I have no contract with you.”

But they had the guns. They had the handcuffs. And they had their way with her.

25

THIS TIME SHE HAD to spend the night — in the drunk tank — with two other women, both in their twenties and both as dumb as boards and so polluted they couldn’t have stood up straight let alone driven an automobile, while she — she herself — was hardly drunk at all, and no, she wasn’t going to get out of the car and no, she wasn’t going to breathe into the Breathalyzer or stand on one leg or touch her fingertips to her nose or anything else. And why? Because SHE DID NOT HAVE A CONTRACT WITH THE REPUBLIC OF CALIFORNIA. And never would have. They could hang her, she didn’t care. But Kutya, poor Kutya, he was the one that had to suffer, just like the last time. He wasn’t in the Animal Control, but he was locked in the house and his bladder must have been bursting and what a trial of his conscience and all his training to have to go into the kitchen and take a sad guilty dribbling pee on the linoleum there. Where it would puddle. And stink. And dry up in a stain that would eat through the wax and take some real elbow grease to get out.

The judge was unsympathetic, a dried-up old bitch who looked as if her hair had been glued on. The bail money was doubled this time because of her failure to appear on the previous charge, and since Christabel didn’t have the money she’d had to go to a bail bondsman at an interest rate that would have put countries like Greece and Spain right under. Then there was the same charade at the impound yard, more bucks out the window, and she had to dig into her super-secret savings fund, the money she’d got when she and Roger split up and he bought out her interest in the house, money she’d told herself she’d never touch because it was going to be a down payment someday on a house all her own — once she’d saved up enough on top of that to meet the piratical amount they wanted because the banks hadn’t got done raping America yet.

She paid off Mary Ellis at the impound yard, Mary too embarrassed to even mention the fact that this was the second time around and too much of a slave of the system to do anything more than just take the cashier’s check with a face carved out of lead and stamp her receipt. As far as the bail bond was concerned, she couldn’t leave Christabel hanging with that, so she took out the full amount to give her, five thousand dollars, because she had no intention of showing up for her court date. They’d got Jerry Kane, but they weren’t going to get her, never again.

What she was thinking was that the Republic of California was a place in which she no longer wanted to reside. It was the ultimate nanny state, everything you did short of drawing breath regulated through the roof, a list of no’s half a mile long posted on every street corner and the entrance to every park in the state. You couldn’t smoke on the street. Couldn’t park overnight, couldn’t pay your toll in cash on the Golden Gate Bridge, couldn’t buy something on the internet without the sales tax Nazis coming after you. You couldn’t even start a fire in your own woodstove or natural stone fireplace on a cold and damp and nasty winter’s day down in Visalia, where she’d lived with Roger through her unenlightened years, lest you run afoul of the air-quality control board, and don’t think you can sneak around the regulations because you’ve got a whole squadron of snitches and tattletales living right next door and across the street to report you out of sour grapes because they’re too whipped and beaten down to start up their own pathetic little fires.

No, what she was thinking was Nevada. Maybe Stateline. Anything goes in Nevada and if she found a place in Stateline she’d be within striking distance of all those rich yuppies in Lake Tahoe, who all had horses that needed regular shoeing and TLC like horses anywhere. Or maybe Kingman, in Arizona. She’d been there once, just passing through but also to visit the funky little trailer court on old Route 66 there as a kind of pilgrimage, because that was where Timothy McVeigh had lived before he met Terry Nichols. Now there was a soldier, there was somebody who wasn’t going to take it anymore. Though maybe that was a bit extreme. She wasn’t violent herself and didn’t really believe in it and whenever his name came up she had to admit that maybe he had gone too far — she couldn’t see taking lives, though you could hardly call them innocent. Live and let live, right? Unless they keep on kidnapping you, keep on regulating you, keep on sticking their hands deeper and deeper into your pockets until you’ve got no pockets left.

Anyway, she entered into a contract with the court (TDC), picked up her car and drove home, where the poor dog ran and hid under the bed because of what he’d had no choice but to do on the kitchen floor, and that just made her all the more crazy. The subsidiary effects. They never thought of that. Never thought of what innocent creatures — truly innocent — they were torturing with their seatbelt laws and their drunk-but-not-drunk-enough nighttime patrols when anybody who wasn’t already asleep wouldn’t have given two shits if the streets were flowing with Cuervo Gold. But enough. She must have spent half an hour just standing there in her own kitchen, looking down on that piss stain on the floor, before finally she got down on her hands and knees and wiped it up, and then, because she wasn’t herself — she was trembling, actually trembling, she was so upset — she got out the mop, the bucket and the plastic bottle of Mop & Glo and redid the whole kitchen, just to take her mind off things.

She was just finishing up when her cell rang. It was Christabel.

“Just checking in,” Christabel said. “You all right?”

“I’m not hungover, if that’s what you mean. I wasn’t even buzzed last night. Not when they pulled me over. I mean, we did eat, didn’t we?”

“I feel so bad.”

“Bad? Why should you feel bad? The one that ought to feel bad is me. And the System. The System ought to feel bad, so bad it just rots from the inside out.”

“What I mean is, I should have been driving. I should never have let you, I mean, with what happened with the police last time around—”

She could hear Christabel breathing on the other end of the line, a series of deep, wet, patient breaths that were like a sedative. She could feel herself calming down. Christabel. Her best friend. Where would she be without her? “Don’t worry about me,” she said.

“Well, I am worried.”

“They can’t touch me.”

“What are you talking about, Sara — they’ve locked you up twice in the last, what, two months now?”

“What I’m talking about is I’m not going to be around, I’m out of here — I’ve had it, Christa, I really have—”

“Please don’t tell me you’re going to be like this again. If you skip out on this—”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got the money, I’m not going to burn you.”

“If you skip out they’re going to put you in jail, don’t you realize that? Don’t you get it? And not just for an hour or overnight either.”

She began to realize that on top of everything else the conversation was making her extremely unhappy, this conversation, even if it was with her best friend, even if Christabel only wanted to make her feel better, but she wasn’t making her feel better and maybe that was why she couldn’t help snapping at her. “So what are you now, a legal expert?”

“Oh, come off it, Sara — it’s just common sense.”

“Sure, and what do you know? You’re just a slave like all the rest of them. If you’d just read your Fourteenth Amendment, just read it—”

“Sara—”

And then she was quoting, from memory, because she was rankled and riled and she had to do something, “‘No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ You want me to go on?”

Nothing.

“Because I will. Because that right there is the essence of it, when the states gave up their rights and made all freemen on the land into federal citizens and then along comes the Social Security Act, surprise, to establish accounts in debit on every one of us, not to mention Roosevelt taking us off the gold standard—”

“Sara! Sara, listen, will you?” And here was Christa shouting at her, actually shouting at her because she didn’t want to hear the truth and never had. “Sara, I haven’t got time for this. I’m sorry. I got to go.”

“Yeah,” she said, and if her voice was bitter right down to the dregs, so what? “I got to go too.”

26

SHE WAS AT THE stove two days later, making a pot of low-cal chicken vegetable soup (tenders sautéed in safflower oil with garlic and onions, chicken stock, zucchini, tomatoes and snow peas from her garden), late afternoon, a glass of zinfandel on the counter beside her, everything as still as still can be. Kutya was asleep on the floor, in the cool place by the sink. A faint breeze, just the breath of one, came in through the screen windows. Quartering the tomatoes and dicing the zucchini, occasionally taking a sip of wine and gazing idly out the window to where the hummingbirds were buzzing each other off the feeder, she felt herself easing into a kind of waking dream, and wasn’t this the way life was supposed to be? No worries. Just living in the moment. Normally she would have been listening to the radio, but she’d spun through the dial twice and there was nothing but crap on — classical, with the stick-up-the-ass announcers who sounded as if they’d had all their blood drained out of them the minute they turned the microphone on; Mexican talk; Mexican music; Mexican car ads; classic rock with the same playlist they’d been rehashing for the last half century and, if you didn’t like that, the alt rock that was such crap even the musicians’ mothers couldn’t take it — and so she was listening to the house breathing around her, to the jay outside the window and the neat controlled tap and release of the blade on the cutting board.

She hadn’t heard from Christabel since the night before last, since their fight, if you could call it that, but what best friends didn’t fight once in a while? You weren’t really close with somebody unless you could let it all hang out — that was what intimacy was all about, going deep, getting under each other’s skin, taking the good with the bad. That was what she was thinking, elevating the edge of the cutting board now to guide the zucchini and tomatoes into the pot and wondering if she had any mushrooms left in the refrigerator because mushrooms would give the soup a little more density and add a nice subtle flavor — the creminis, the chewy ones — when the strangest feeling came over her, almost as if a ghost had materialized in the room behind her, and that was even stranger, because she didn’t believe in ghosts. She believed in graves, six feet down, and the spirit trapped in the body. That rotted.

Still, she couldn’t help turning her head to look over her shoulder as the steam from the pot rose around her and the garlic sent up its aroma to sweeten the room, but there was nothing there. The strangest thing — she’d have to tell Christabel about it. To the refrigerator — yes, there were the creminis — and then to the sink to rinse them and again to the cutting board. Then the feeling came back, stronger now, and she turned around again and there he was, Adam, standing in the doorway, arms akimbo, trying to smile. “Adam,” she said, naming him, just that, but she was soaring inside.

He was in his fatigues, the knife strapped at his side, his boots scuffed, his face and scalp tanned as deeply as any lifeguard’s. Behind him, in the hallway that led to the living room, she could see the dark mound of his discarded pack and the thin shadow of the rifle leaning up against the wall. The dog, too lazy and spoiled to do his job properly, lifted his head suddenly, gave a soft woof and trotted over to him. Adam hadn’t moved or said a word, but now he reached behind him, ignoring Kutya, who was wagging his tail in recognition and sniffing at his pantleg, and produced a plastic Ziploc bag that seemed to contain a dark smear of something that might have been chocolate but wasn’t. “I got the shits,” he announced.

She was going to ask if he was hungry, if he wanted a glass of wine, if he’d been out there camping in the woods all this time (the answer to that was obvious, just from a glance at him), but instead she said, “You need Pepto-Bismol? I’ve got those little pink tabs, I think, and maybe a bottle too.” She looked at him dubiously. His pants were stained. He’d lost weight. She could smell him from all the way across the room.

He didn’t answer, just repeated himself: “I got the shits.”

“Or maybe something stronger? Imodium? I think I might have some in the medicine cabinet. .” And she started for the bathroom but he just reached out and grabbed hold of her in his arms that were like steel cables and pressed her to him, hard, so hard it was as if he never wanted to let go, and then he was kissing her, the plastic bag flapping behind her so that she could feel the inflexible zippered edge of it digging into her where her pants pulled away from her blouse, and she held on to him just as tightly and kissed him back with everything she had.

Later, after she’d put his clothes in the wash — and whatever else he had in his backpack, another set of fatigues, crusted socks, undershorts that looked as if they’d been used to swab out a latrine — and left him alone in the shower with a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo, she went to the pantry to dig out the egg noodles and sprinkle them over the pot where it was simmering on the stove so he could get something more substantial than diet veggie soup in him. As for the shampoo, he’d looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was — somehow, even out there in the woods, even while suffering diarrhea (giardia, that was what he insisted it was), he’d managed to keep his head shaved, and his face too. She’d even teased him about it as he stepped out of his clothes and handed them to her, saying, “I thought mountain men were allowed to grow beards,” but he didn’t respond because there was a whole lot else going on inside his head right then with his body full of parasites and the thinness of him and just the simple basic need of a good hot shower, but he did give her his partway grin and he was hard, hard right there before her, and he let her reach out a hand to his cock and give it a friendly tug before he shut the door and stepped into the shower.

Once he’d had his shower, he strolled into the kitchen and sat down at the table as if he’d been doing it every day of his life, grinning his strained grin and saying he was hungry enough to eat a hog or maybe a dog and they both looked at Kutya and burst out laughing. He was wearing her terrycloth robe and nothing else and it rode halfway up his arms and bunched in the shoulders. It was blue and it brought out the blue of his eyes, which was a nice contrast (she’d almost said pretty, or thought it) with his suntanned skin. The first thing he did, right off, was drink two beers, hardly pausing for breath, and then he had a glass of water and washed down a palmful of Imodium tabs. “Cool,” he said. “Niiiice,” drawing it out till the final c was like air hissing out of a balloon. He gave her a long penetrating look, his lips glistening with the water, half of which he’d spilled down the front of the robe. From the look he was giving her she’d expected him to say something suggestive, but he didn’t. “You got anything hard?” is what he said then. Or asked.

She was at the stove, stirring the soup, which was just about ready, and she set down the spoon, crossed the room to him and took hold of his arm, just above the rolled-up sleeve, and said, “Yeah, I’ve got you.”

But he stared right through her as if he hadn’t processed that at all, and she supposed he hadn’t, because he was Adam, no different from how he was a month ago, right there with you one minute and gone off the next. What he said was, “ ’Cause I’m all out of one fifty-one.”

So she poured him a glass of bourbon and he threw that down like a cowboy in one of the flickering westerns the old movie channel showed every other night. “More?” she asked, but the bottle was back on the counter behind her and she thought maybe he’d had enough, especially considering the purpose she had in mind once they’d finished supper and retired to the bedroom.

He held out the glass.

“Sure you don’t want to eat first? Put something on your stomach?”

Well, he didn’t. Or not yet, anyway. There was the glass framed in his hand, the nails dirty still despite the shower, half-moons of dirt worked in under them and up under the cuticles too, and she wondered if he’d sit still for a manicure at some point. She swung away to retrieve the bottle and poured for him, the neck kissing the glass, and when she tried to tip it back he just held her hand till the glass was full. “If you’re going to party,” she murmured, leaning into him so he could feel the weight of her against him, feel her heat and how much she wanted him and how glad she was that he was back, communication of the flesh and communion too, “then I’m going to pour myself another glass of wine.”

He’d always had a good appetite, burning up calories by the thousands out there in the woods keeping himself like a rock, but he outdid himself this time. He ate as if he was half-starved, and considering the problem he was having, she supposed he was, most of whatever he’d been eating probably going right through him. She made him a sandwich — smoked turkey and cheddar on brown bread, with mustard, mayo, fresh-sliced tomato and lettuce from the garden — and that was gone by the time he started on his second bowl of soup so she made him another one. If she didn’t eat a whole lot herself that night it was because she was watching him, this miracle of dynamic energy and concentrated movement that had blown back into her life, and because she was being careful about her weight and had to pick around the egg noodles. She did have three glasses of wine, though, and that made her feel as if she were floating free right along with him.

What did they talk about? Nothing much (thanks, Christa, for asking) — the woods, which for all she could get out of him, seemed to be full of trees; her latest victimization by the System; Stateline, Nevada, and Tahoe, did he like Tahoe? And giardia, of course. Giardia and shit. There was a cherry pie she’d bought in a moment of weakness yesterday and she set that out in front of him, and he seemed interested, but then the stomach pains got to him and he disappeared into the bathroom. After a moment she pushed the pie away from her so as to resist temptation but then slid it back and had just the tiniest sliver, licking the sweet congealed cherry filling off her fingers before getting up to put on a CD and start cleaning up.

He was in there forever, doing what she couldn’t imagine, though it came to her that he was maybe just slumped over the toilet, in real pain, and she was remembering that time in Mexico with Roger when she’d got the turista and felt as though somebody was alternately running a screwdriver through her and pumping her gut full of swamp gas. When he did emerge, finally, he was naked and dripping with water from the shower, his second shower, and he had the Ziploc bag in one hand. Which he held up in front of his face and shook once or twice to make sure she was focused on it. “You got to take me to the doctor,” he said in his soft, soft voice, and he wouldn’t look at her, as if he was embarrassed by his own weakness.

“The doctor? I don’t know any doctor. And they wouldn’t be open now, anyway.”

“The emergency room. They have to like take anybody, right?”

Of course there was the whole rigamarole of insurance and who’s your primary-care doctor and fill out this form and this one too, but the surprise was that Adam actually had insurance through his father and they had his name and information in the computer from a previous visit or visits he’d made, one time apparently after he’d gotten bloodied in a scuffle at Piero’s and another after he’d driven his car through the fence at the playground, something he didn’t want to talk about but kept mentioning all the time, as if he’d padlocked it away and couldn’t remember the combination. The waiting room was packed to the walls with people who didn’t have health care, illegals, white trash, working stiffs who couldn’t afford rent let alone seeing a doctor because their two-year-old was vomiting blood. It stank worse than any stable she’d ever been in and she had to thank her lucky stars she’d never been sick or she didn’t know what she would do. If things were the way they should be, the way they once were, with freemen on the land associating with each other on a by-need basis, then she could have just bartered with some doctor who kept horses and eliminated the middleman, the tax squeezer and the accountant and the whole shitty bureaucracy that had brought her here tonight. With Adam. Because he had giardia and they really didn’t have any other alternative.

They sat there for three and a half hours, him running to the bathroom every ten minutes and her paging through the magazines that were two years out of date and so encrusted with filth she’d be lucky if she didn’t get tetanus or something just from touching them, until, finally, they called his name and he went into the back room with the nurse and she watched the clock and got angrier by the minute. Or not angry, exactly. It was more like disappointment. She didn’t want to be here with the screaming babies and the old men with the bloody bandages wrapped around their bleached-out skulls and the illegals so sick with whatever it was they were like walking bags of infection. No, she wanted to be home. In her own house. With Kutya. And Adam.

Forty-five minutes more — they had to run his stool sample under the microscope to confirm the diagnosis he’d already made, and yes, it was giardia, very common in these parts, and that was the danger of drinking unchlorinated water, even from the purest-looking mountain stream — and then he was walking right by her in the waiting room as if he didn’t recognize her, locked in one of his trances, and she scurried across the room to catch up with him and take him by the arm and lead him out the door and into the parking lot. And that was where things got interesting.

Because there, right in front of them, pulled up neatly to the curb and with its gumball machine idly spinning, was a police cruiser, just sitting there, the engine running and the gasoline the wage slaves had paid for — she’d paid for — cycling through it and spewing out the tailpipe as carbon monoxide to pollute the atmosphere even more than they’d already polluted it. There was no one in the cruiser. No one in sight. And what she was thinking, despite Adam and her hurry to get home, was that a chance had presented itself to her out of nowhere, a chance to get back at them, if not to get even, because she’d never get even. Adam walked right by it, the prescription they’d given him clutched in one hand, the bag of shit in the other, and why he didn’t just dump it she didn’t know.

“Adam,” she called. “Adam!”

He stopped, turned, gave her that maddening look as if he’d never seen her before in his life.

“Why don’t you get rid of that bag — there, in the trash receptacle.” She’d come up even with him now, the pavement like a dark lake spreading open before them. “Come on,” she said, “snap out of it,” and he let the bag drop from his fingers, where it would lie undisturbed till the gardeners came in the morning with their rakes and blowers.

“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “Okay, yeah.”

“Listen,” and she pulled in close to him, lowering her voice, “there’s something we got to do. It’ll take like sixty seconds, that’s all. Can you drive?”

He shrugged, an elaborate gesture under the yellow glaze of the streetlamps along the walk. Then he grinned, or tried to. “What you got in mind?”

What she had in mind was very simple, nothing as complex or radical maybe as what a Jerry Kane would have come up with, but a plan nonetheless: she was going to fuck up that cruiser, whether it was the one the lady cop had used to cage her up in or not, and she was going to do it by putting something in the gas tank and destroying the engine so that when the cop came out of the hospital he — or she—would be going nowhere. But what? Dirt? Sand? Or no, and now the solution came to her fully formed: sugar water. It just happened that in the backseat of the car was a present she’d got at the hardware store for Christabel, a kiss-and-make-up present. A hummingbird feeder. Christabel had been commenting on the hummingbirds last time she was over, the two of them sitting out on the porch and watching them hover and feed and shear off again, as greedy as vultures, and when she saw the feeder on sale at the hardware store she bought it and then went home and made up the sugar water, one cup sugar to four cups water, and left the thing in the back of the car so she wouldn’t forget it when they got together again.

All right. She didn’t know the mechanics of it, but she’d heard this was a good way to really fuck up an engine or maybe even blow it up if that was possible, and why not? They’d screwed her over enough, that was for shit sure. She and Adam had reached her car now and she steadied herself a minute before unlocking the door and handing him the keys. Giving the parking lot a quick scan to be sure no one was watching, she pulled open the back door and reached in back to unscrew the cylinder from the feeder. “Listen,” she said, straightening up and looking him in the eye to be sure he was with her, “just start up the car and wait here — just wait, and no craziness now — till I get done with that cop car over there, and then I stroll away and you pull up and we drive out of here, easy as you please.”

He got into the car, inserted the key, turned over the engine.

“Then,” she said, “we go back home.” She paused, leaning in the window to reach out and touch him on the shoulder — she was always touching him, she loved to touch him, to put her imprint on him, her skin to his.

“Cool,” he said.

And then she was striding briskly back up the walk, pressing the glass cylinder close to her body on the side away from the hospital with its lights and windows and the patients in their beds there who might or might not be looking out on the parking lot. Anyone seeing her would assume she was going to her car or heading back into the emergency room because she’d just gone out for a breath of air — or a smoke, a verboten smoke — and here was the cruiser, still running, the light atop it still revolving, and she was right there, her fingers working at the metal flap of the gas tank, thinking it must be locked, they’d have to keep it locked or everybody’d be doing this all day long, the shits, the pathetic wasteful cruel inhuman shits, only to find that it was true — it was locked and it wouldn’t give. A quick look around: nothing, nobody. The gumball machine chopped up the light. Her heart was pounding. In the next moment she slipped around to the driver’s side — gliding, flowing as if she were made of silk — cracked the door and reached in to run her hand over the dash, and where was it, where was the release? On the floor. Yes, on the floor. Then she had it and it gave and she was back around the car again — thirty seconds, that was all it took. And every gurgling ounce of the sugar water, every drop, went home, right into the greedy gullet of that cage on wheels, that tool of the oppressors that was a tool no more.

Let them suck on that. See how they liked it.

Adam was all right behind the wheel — no Dale Earnhardt, but fine just the same. He kept the car between the lines and he didn’t go over the speed limit though he couldn’t seem to stop laughing. “Just wait,” he kept saying, snorting with laughter, “just wait till they, what, go to nail somebody, and the engine seizes up on them. That was great. That was genius.”

It was. It was great. She’d gotten her little bit back and she’d got Adam back too. They went home and went to bed and he couldn’t get enough of her, hard and hot and sweating in the dark, her man, her beautiful man. He’d missed her. And he didn’t have to tell her, not in words, because she could feel it, oh, blessed lord, yes, feel it all night long.

But then — and she wasn’t surprised or at least that’s what she told herself — she woke to daylight poking through the blinds and the bed was empty and the house too. She didn’t have to go out into the hallway and look to see if his pack was there or run barefoot out the back door to watch for him in the field across the way. He was gone and she knew it, vanished like smoke, human smoke, as if he wasn’t made of flesh at all. But he was, oh yes — flesh and bone and hard unyielding muscle — and she knew that better than anybody. He should have stayed — she’d wanted him to and would have told him as much if she’d had the chance — but he had his own agenda, doing whatever it was he did out there in the woods.

It wasn’t ideal, far from it. She’d rather have him there, rather be making coffee for two instead of one — and eggs and toast and whatever else he wanted. The house felt empty without him, though he’d been in it no more than what, twelve, thirteen hours? It saddened her. Standing at the counter in the kitchen that still vibrated with the aura of him, she poured herself a cup of coffee and gazed out the window to where a hummingbird no bigger than her thumb was sucking sugar water from the feeder through the miniature syringe of its bill, a creature innocent of cops, internal combustion engines, wages, taxes, slavery. A free bird, a free bird on the land. She blew on her coffee to cool it and told herself to be patient — one way or the other he’d get tired of it out there and then he’d be back, she was sure of it.

Just give him time.