The Harder They Come Read online

  He was staring gloomily out the window, getting more irritated by the minute, when they came to a shallow stream that seemed to be incorporated into the road along with the blistered rocks and scum-filled potholes, except that it was flowing, fanning out in front of them in a broad rippling pan. The tires eased into the water with a soft shush, spray leapt up and fell back again, and all at once he was thinking of the fish that must have lived there in the deep pools, tropical fish, the characins and Jack Dempseys and brick-red platys he’d introduced to his aquarium as a boy. Suddenly he was lost in reverie, picturing the glowing wall of tanks in the pet shop he’d haunted after school each day, remembering the pleasure of selecting the fish and paying for them with his own money, of setting up his first aquarium, arranging the rocks, digging in the gravel to plant the—what was it?—elodea. Yes, elodea. And the Amazon sword plant that looked like a miniature avocado tree. And what else? The little dwarf catfish, the albino ones, and what were they called?

  He hadn’t thought about that in years. Or his mother—the way she recoiled in mock horror from the tubifex worms he kept in a Dixie cup in the refrigerator to preserve them. Fish food. The thread-like worms, the smell of them, the smell of the aquarium itself when you lifted the top and the world you’d created breathed back in your face. He began to feel his mood lift. Carolee was right. This was an adventure, something to break the routine, get him outside his comfort zone. The brochure had promised all four types of monkey, as well as agoutis, sloths, peccaries, maybe even an ocelot or jaguar, and here he was getting worked up over taking a leak. He almost felt ashamed of himself, but then he lifted his eyes to where the driver sat block-like at the wheel and felt all the outrage rush back into him. The guy was a clod. An idiot. No more sensible than a stone. He was about to get up again, about to lean over the man and hiss You did say five minutes, right?, when the bus emerged on a muddy clearing scored with tire ruts and the driver pulled over to one side and applied the brakes. Everybody looked up.

  “Now we have arrived,” the driver said in his textbook English, swiveling in his seat to project his voice down the aisle. “Now you must debark.” The buds were back in his ears. The dark glasses caught the light. Outside was the jungle. “Two hours,” he said, and the door wheezed open.

  They were all rising now, fumbling with cameras, purses, daypacks. One of the women—Sheila, sixtyish, traveling alone with what must have been a gallon of perfume and the pink sneakers and turquoise capris she’d worn every day on the cruise, breakfast, lunch, high tea, cocktails and dinner—raised her voice to ask, “Do you meet us back here or what?”

  “I am here,” the driver said, bringing two fingers to the wisps of hair at his chin. He stretched, cracked his knuckles. “Two hours,” he repeated.

  Sten peered out the window. There was, of course, no restroom, no Porta-Potty, nothing, just half a dozen mud-spattered vehicles nosed in around the trailhead, where a sign read Nature Preserve, in Spanish and English. Across the lot, in the shade of the trees, there was a palapa and in the palapa a single titanic woman in a red head scarf. She would have something to drink—a soda, that was all he needed—and behind the palapa, in the undergrowth, he would find a tree trunk to decorate and all would be well.

  They disembarked in a storm of chatter, Phil leading the way—or no, Bill, his name was definitely Bill, because Sten recalled distinctly that there had been two Bills at their table for lunch, and this was the bald-headed one. Not that it mattered. Once the ship docked in Miami he’d never see the guy again—and what he had seen of him so far didn’t go much deeper than How about those Giants? and Pass the salt.

  There was a momentary holdup, because Sheila, who was next in line, couldn’t resist leaning in to ask the driver where their best chance to see scarlet macaws was and they all had to wait as the driver removed the buds from his ears and asked her to repeat herself. They watched the man frown over the question, his eyebrows rising like twin smudges above the rim of the sunglasses. “No sé,” he said finally, waving at the lot, the jungle, the trail. “I have never—” and he broke off, searching for the word.

  Sheila looked at him in astonishment. “You mean you just drop people off and you’ve never even been up there? In your own country? Aren’t you curious?”

  The driver shrugged. He was doing a job, that was all. Why muddy his shoes? Why feed the mosquitoes? He’d leave that to the gringos with their cameras and purses and black cloth bags, their fanny packs and preposterous turquoise pants and the dummy wallets with the expired credit cards to throw off the pickpockets while everybody knew their real wallets were tucked down the front of their pants.

  “Come on,” Sten heard himself say. “You’re holding up the line.”

  Outside, in the lot, the sun hammered down on him all over again. He waited a moment, gathering himself while Carolee tried simultaneously to tighten the cord of her floppy straw hat and loop the strap of the black bag over her head, and then he was striding across the lot toward the palapa and the woman there. “I’m getting a soda,” he called over his shoulder. “You want anything?”

  She didn’t. She had her water. And no matter the taste, it had come from the ship.

  When the woman in the palapa saw him coming, she pushed herself laboriously up from the stool she was sitting on and rested her arms on the makeshift counter. She must have weighed two-fifty, maybe more. Her skin shone black with sweat. Like the waiter at the café, she was West Indian, one of the Jamaicans who’d settled in Limón—there was a whole section called Jamaica Town, or so the guidebook had it. Very colorful. Plenty of rum. Plenty of reggae. Trinkets galore. “Good afternoon,” she said, treating him to a broad full-lipped smile. “And how may I be helping you?”

  There was a plastic cooler set on the ground behind the counter in a spill of green coconuts. Above it, nailed to the crossbeam, was a board displaying various packages of nuts, potato chips and candy. A paperback book—El Amor Furioso—lay facedown on the counter.

  “You got any sodas back there?” Sten asked, and he’d almost asked for a cerveza, but thought better of it—he was already dehydrated. And he had to piss. Badly.

  “Cola, Cola Lite, agua mineral, pipas, carambola, naranja, limón,” she recited, holding her smile.

  “Cola Lite,” he said, reaching for his wallet, and then he had the can, lukewarm, in his hand, and he was wading through the trash-studded undergrowth in back of the stall, his fly already open.

  At first his water wouldn’t come, another trick of old age—your bladder feels like a hot-air balloon and then you stand over the toilet for ten minutes before the first burning dribble releases itself—but he employed the countermeasure of clearing his mind, of thinking of anything but the matter at hand, of the boat and his berth and the way Carolee had looked in the new negligee she’d bought expressly for the trip and what he’d been able to do about it, and then, finally, the relief came. He took his time, christening a tree that was alive with ants, tropical ants, ants of a kind he’d never seen before and would likely never see again. If he was lucky.

  A long suspended moment drifted by, the ants piling up and colliding over the cascade of this rank new element in their midst, insects throbbing, birds calling, everything alive all around him. The sun barely penetrated here, and where it did the leaves gave off a dull underwater sheen, the air so dense he half expected to see sharks cruising through the trees. There was a smell of rot, of fragile earth. Something hooted and then another something took it up and hooted back. He might have stood there forever if it weren’t for the mosquitoes—here they came, rising up out of nowhere to remind him of where he was. He shook and zipped up, and only then did he rediscover the can of soda in his left hand, an amazing thing really, an artifact, an object of manufactured beauty transported all the way out here to quench his thirst and pump aspartame into his bloodstream.

  He cracked the tab and wet his lips. Cola Lite. It tasted awful, like the amalgam the dentist put in his teeth. No matter. It
was wet. He took a swallow and started back around the fat woman’s stall, the shade of the trees giving way to a blast of naked sun so that the headache came up on him all over again and he couldn’t help wishing, for at least the tenth time since they’d left the boat, that he’d remembered his baseball cap.

  That was when things changed, changed radically. He was standing there blinking in the light and feeling in his shirt pocket for his sunglasses when a noise—the slamming of a car door—made him look up. There was another car in the lot now, an old American car—what was it, a Chevy?—and it was pulled up right beside the bus. The car was a faded yellow, the finish worn through to rusted metal in so many places it might have been spotted, like one of the big cats that were purportedly roaming the jungle behind them. He saw three men, Ticos, their heads shaved like the driver’s, two with goatees, one without, and they seemed to be dancing, flailing their arms and jumping from one foot to the other as if the ground had caught fire.

  “Todo!” one was shouting, the one without the goatee. “Empty sus bolsillos, wallet, cellphone, todo!” There was a flash of light, two flashes: the goatees had knives. And the one without, the one doing all the shouting, he had a handgun.

  The one with the gun saw him then and pointed it at him, though he was a hundred feet away. “You,” the man shouted, his voice so shrill with the rush of adrenaline it was almost a shriek, almost girlish. “You come over here!”

  Sten could feel his heart going, accelerating like a flight of ducks beating up off the surface of a pond, flap, flap, flap. It was an old feeling, a feeling that took him back to another time and place, a seething green overgrown rot-stinking place like this one all the way across the ocean on the far side of the world. There were tropical fish there too. Monkeys. Men with guns. He dropped the can and raised his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot.”

  The man with the gun was careless—man, he was a boy, all three of them were boys, nineteen, twenty years old, their limbs like broomsticks poking out of their baggy shorts and oversized T-shirts and their faces ablaze with excitement and maybe something else, maybe drugs. The weapon was just an object to him, Sten could see that in an instant, like a plate of food he was carrying from one table to another. A shoe. A book. A used CD he’d found in a bin at the record shop. He didn’t respect it. He didn’t know it. He didn’t even know how to take a stance and aim. “You,” the man repeated. “Right here, ahora!”

  Sten shuffled forward, his feet gone heavy suddenly, so heavy he could barely lift them. He saw Carolee there with the others, her face rinsed with fear, the brim of her hat askew. Everybody was tightly bunched, purses, cameras and backpacks dropping at their feet while the goatees prodded them with their knives. There was a blanket there, he saw that now, spread out in the sun-blasted mud to receive the loot. It was one of those Indian blankets they sold in the tourist shops up and down the coast, the colors garish in the harsh hot light.

  When he was there, when he’d reached the one with the gun and allowed himself to be shepherded into the group with a quick hot punch of the barrel in his ribs, he was startled by the faces around him. These were the faces of dead people, drained of animation, their eyes fixed on the ground as they gave up what they had, dropping change, wallets, bracelets and wristwatches into the pile as if they were tossing coins in a fountain. Sheila was murmuring “Oh god, oh god,” over and over. Another woman was crying. The man with the gun prodded him again and said, “Empty it, todo lo que tiene—ahora mismo!”

  He exchanged a look with Carolee, then pulled his pockets inside out and dropped the contents on the pile, card key, dummy wallet, a pack of matches, his cell. He was thinking there was no sense in getting shot over nothing, no sense in getting excited, but then the one with the gun nudged him again and he went cold all over. They were amateurs, children playing at cops and robbers, infants, punks, too stupid even to be scared. Why would they be? This was easy pickings, old people, seniors so frightened and hopeless they could barely twist the watches off their wrists, let alone defend themselves. “Todo!” the man repeated.

  Everything came into focus suddenly, the two goatees with their hands in people’s pockets and down the front of their shorts, Sheila whimpering Please, no, not my passport, the driver shut inside the bus and the fat woman vanished altogether—in on it, both of them, he was sure of it—and the carelessness, the unforgiveable carelessness of the one with the gun who barely came up to his shoulder for Christ’s sake, who’d turned away from him, turned his back on him as if he were nothing, less than nothing, just old and weak and useless. What he’d learned as a nineteen-year-old himself, a recruit, green as an apple, wasn’t about self-defense, it was about killing, and does anybody ever forget that? Mount a bicycle, lace up a pair of skates, shoot the rapids: here it was. In the next instant he hit the man so hard from behind he felt the shock of it surge through his own body even as he locked his right forearm across the man’s throat and brought his left hand up to tighten the vise, simplest maneuver in the book, first thing they teach you, Choke off the air and don’t let up no matter what.

  The gun dropped away at the moment of impact and it wasn’t as if he was merely applying pressure to the man flailing in his arms—he wasn’t doing that, no, he was immobilizing him, because that was what he’d been trained to do and he had no choice in the matter. It was beyond reason now, autonomous, dial it up, semper fi. Everyone froze. The two with the knives looked as if they’d been transported to another planet, helpless, stupefied, scared. And then Bill, his bald crown raking at the light, bent to pick up the gun as if it were some pedestrian thing somebody had dropped in the street, an umbrella, a checkbook, a pair of glasses, his face gratified and composed, almost as if he meant to hand it back to the man kicking in Sten’s arms. Somebody screamed. The man kicked. Sten held tight, tighter, even as he watched the other two drop their knives in the mud and scramble for the car.

  The engine sucked fuel, the wheels spun in the mud and then the car was fishtailing across the lot, spewing exhaust and fighting for purchase. Sten watched it go—they all watched—as it threw up clods of earth and sheared through the puddles till it plunged into the tunnel of the road where the deep holes gathered and the stream sank into its pools and the brick-red platys darted and hovered. Then it was quiet. The man in his arms had gone limp, like an exhausted dance partner, and the only thing Sten could think to do was move back a step and lower him to the ground.

  Sheila started up again, invoking God, and then Carolee was in his arms and they were all gathered round, staring down at the man in the mud. He was on his back, where Sten had dropped him, eyes open and staring at nothing. He looked shrunken, shorter even than the five-eight or -nine he must have been, no girth to him at all, his oversized shorts and new spotless white T-shirt hanging off him like flour sacks. And his ankles—you could have wrapped two fingers around his ankles.

  “Is he—?” somebody said, and now somebody else, a boxy officious-looking man with a pencil mustache Sten could have sworn he’d never seen before in his life, was bending over the body checking for vital signs, ear to chest, finger to wrist. This man—certainly he’d been on the bus—looked up and announced, “I’m a paramedic,” and began alternately kneading the supine man’s chest and blowing into his mouth.

  This was something new, something the guidebook hadn’t advertised, a curiosity under the sun that beat down steadily on the ochre mud of the lot, and everybody just stood there taking it in, minutes slipping away, the heat exacting its price in sweat, the fat woman emerging from her stall and the bus driver stepping tentatively down from the bus as if the ground were rolling under him like a treadmill. The main attraction, the man on his back on the ground, never stirred. Oh, there was movement, but it was only the resistance of the inanimate to a moving force, the paramedic thanklessly riding the compression of his two stacked palms, then breaking off to pinch the nostrils and force his own breath past the dry lips, the ruptured trachea and down into the deflated lungs.
This was a man, this paramedic, who didn’t give up easily. His mustache glistened with saliva and the crown of his head humped up and down as if at the climax of some insistent sexual act. He kept at it, kept at it, kept at it.

  Carolee’s voice was very soft and at first he didn’t know if she was speaking to him or the paramedic. What she said was, “Is he going to make it?”

  He didn’t know about that—he didn’t even know what he’d done. The only man he’d ever killed in his life, or might have killed, nothing confirmed, was a dink two hundred yards away on a moonless night when the flares strobed out over the world and he was in something very much like a panic, his rifle on full automatic.

  “We should get him to a hospital,” Bill said, still holding on to the gun—a revolver, Sten saw that now, .357 Magnum, six shots—as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “I mean, is there a hospital here? In Limón, I mean?”

  “There must be,” somebody said.

  “But where is it?” Bill wondered. “And if we—I mean, should we move him? Maybe there’s damage there, a neck injury”—and here he raised his eyes to Sten’s—“like in football, you know? Where they bring out the stretcher?”

  Up and down the paramedic went, up and down, and now the fat woman was there, peering over Sheila’s shoulder as if to make some sort of positive identification of the body on the ground—and it was a body, a corpse, not a living thing, not anymore, Sten was sure of it—and here was the driver too, his eyes masked behind the sunglasses, the lower portion of his face locked up like a strongbox.

  “Driver,” Bill said, and he seemed to be panting, like a dog that had run a long way up a steep hill, “we need to take this man to the hospital. Where—dónde—is the hospital?”