Free The Harder They Come by T. C. Boyle Page B

the fries and ordered a diet drink instead of regular, though she did ask for crispy instead of grilled because grilled had no more taste than warmed-over cardboard with a spatter of ketchup on it. Kutya was in the backseat, generally behaving himself, but he came to attention when she pulled into the drive-thru lane. He must have recognized the place, if not by sight, then smell, though she hadn’t stopped here more than a handful of times. At any rate, he began whining and tap dancing around on the seat he’d rendered filthy despite the towel she’d spread over it, and she gave in and ordered him a burger (no bun, no condiments, no pickles), feeding it to him over her shoulder as she put the trusty blue Nissan Sentra in drive and sailed on out of the lot and down the long winding road to Fort Bragg and the coast.
    There was talk on the radio, but it was mainly left-wing Communist crap— NPR, and how was it their signal was stronger than anybody else’s?—and even that faded out once she started down the grade and hit the first few switchbacks, so she poppedin a CD instead. She favored country, but the old stuff, the classic stuff, Loretta and Merle and Hank, because all the new singers with their custom-made boots and blow-dried hair were just pale imitators, anyway. And if people criticized her for being a once-divorced forty-year-old woman with no romantic prospects on the horizon who really wasn’t in step with the times ( You mean not even Brad Paisley? ), so much the worse. She liked what she liked. And when she went out on a Saturday night with her best friend, Christabel Walsh, and had a few beers, she just let the music wash right over her like the vapid stares of all the losers lined up at the bar who were too small-minded and self-absorbed to ask a woman to dance.
    No matter. She dwelled within herself. She was content and self-sufficient. She had her own business, she had Kutya, a rented two-bedroom clapboard house that looked down on the crotch of the Noyo Valley and half the horses in the world available to her anytime she wanted to ride. If another relationship came along, fine. If not, too bad for him—or them, whoever they might be—because she wasn’t desperate, not in the least, not even close, and there was no way in the world she was going to pretend to like Brad Paisley or whoever because to her it was all just more of the same singsong bastardized crap, and she’d told Christabel that and she’d tell anybody else who might want to stick their nose in too.
    So there she was, driving in her own personal property with her dog by her side and a living to earn, winding down Route 20 so she could get to the Coast Highway and head forty-four-point-five miles south to the little flyspeck town of Calpurnia, where there were three horses—and, if the veterinarian showed up on time, at least one sable antelope with three-foot horns—that needed her ministrations. It was the middle of the summer. The sky was clear, the sun fixed like a compass point ahead of her. When she looped around a turn and saw the coast off in the distance, it was clear there too, the fog burned back and exiled in a linty gray band out at sea. Was she wearing her seatbelt? No,she wasn’t, and she was never going to wear it either. Seatbelt laws were just another contrivance of the U.S. Illegitimate Government of America the Corporate that had given up the gold standard back in 1933 and pledged its citizens as collateral so it could borrow and keep on borrowing. But she wasn’t a citizen of the U.S.I.G.A., she was a sovereign citizen, a U.S. national, born and raised, and she didn’t now and never would again acknowledge anybody’s illegitimate authority over her. So no, she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt. And she didn’t have legal plates, or the sort of plates the republic of California deemed legal, that is (the sticker that had come with the ones on the car was long since expired because she wasn’t about to play that