The Harder They Come

Sten shrugged and rose to his feet, the megaphone clutched in one hand. He was planning to go out there on the observation car no matter what anybody said, and if his son wanted to shoot him—Adam, if Adam wanted to shoot his own father—well let him go ahead. Anything would be better than this.

 

Until he stepped out on the deck, he hadn’t realized how stifling it had been in the car. The air was in motion here, blowing cool on his face and drying the nervous sweat under his arms. He smelled bay, alder, pine, smelled mud and standing water, the dark funk of rot that underlay everything. The train swung round a curve, heading east now, heading uphill, and he caught a glimpse of a hidden glen thick with moss and fern, the light sifting through the trees in a luminous haze that made him forget for a moment just exactly what the purpose of all this was. He braced his hips instinctively against the sway of the platform and let the world open up around him, thinking how ungenerous he’d been to dismiss the tourists—who could blame them for wanting to come up here where it was silent and green and the trees had stood motionless since the time before Christ, at least the ones the loggers hadn’t got to? The air rushed at him. The tracks sang. He found he’d gone outside himself for a minute there and it took the weight of the hard plastic butt of the bullhorn to bring him back, but then he raised the thing to his lips, feeling foolish and afraid and maybe a little fatalistic too because they were just wasting their time here, weren’t they?

 

He called Adam’s name, but nothing happened because he’d somehow neglected to switch the thing on. Behind him, a small army sat balanced over their weapons, watching him. He found the switch. Flicked it. And called his son’s name, bellowed it, chanted it, threw it up against the changeless trunks of the trees till it came back to him riding on its own echo, and he kept on calling it all the way up the line and back down again, as the shadows deepened and his voice dried up to a hoarse reverberant rattle in the very deepest hollow of his throat.

 

 

 

 

 

PART XI

 

 

Route 20

 

 

 

 

 

33.

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

“You expect me to serve you?”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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