A Friend of the Earth (10 page)

Deputy Sheets never flinched. He gave Tierwater a tight, encapsulated smile. He was wearing his firearm, and he let his right hand go to it, as much to reassure himself as to let Tierwater know exactly what the parameters were here. His lips barely moved as he spoke. ‘In custody,' he said.

‘What do you mean, “in custody”? Where?'

He didn't answer, not right away. Just squared his shoulders and turned his head to the side, as if to spit, but then he caught himself, all the linoleum tiles agleam from his boots to the foot of the bed. ‘No worries on that score. Soon as the doctor says so, friend,' he breathed, letting his eyes go cold, ‘you'll be joining 'em.'

This hospital room wasn't the first Tierwater had inhabited. He'd had his tonsils out at the Peterskill Municipal Hospital when he was six, and he was back again a few years later with a fractured arm – after an ill–fated decision to intervene in one of his parents' more physical discussions. Oh, his father was destroyed – never has there been such sorrow, not since Abraham offered up Isaac – and his mother was a fragrant sink of pity and consolation and he pushed his face of greed into gallon after gallon of the butter–brickle ice cream proffered as compensatory damages. Sure. But violence breeds violence, and though neither parent ever laid a finger on him again, there it was, a rotten seed, festering. He was in the hospital again for the birth of his daughter, though the venue was a theater of pain and confusion, women crying out from behind the thin trembling walls of curtains on sliding hooks –
Oh, God! Oh, my God!
shrieked one anonymous soprano voice for forty–five solid minutes – and he made it as far as the emergency room in Whitefish, Montana, with Jane, but she wasn't breathing by then, and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't – what? They couldn't do shit.

There was nothing wrong with him, but the doctor – a pale, towering
bald–headed man with a pelt of laminated black hair climbing out of the V–neck of his scrubs – wanted to run some tests. Just to be sure. Deputy Sheets stood at the door, a look of disgust pressed into his skeletal features, scrutinizing the doctor's every move. ‘I'm all right, really,' Tierwater insisted while the doctor studied his chart and paced back and forth, a broad–beamed scurrying nurse at his elbow. ‘I feel fine, I do. I just want to get out of here, okay?'

All three of them – Tierwater, the doctor and his nurse – turned to look at Deputy Sheets. ‘I don't like your blood pressure,' the doctor said, swinging back round again. His arms were unnaturally long, ape's arms, the knuckles all but grazing his knees, and even in his extremity, Tierwater couldn't help puzzling over a species so recently come down from the trees and yet so intent on destroying them. ‘It's dangerously elevated. And I'm going to have to ask you not to interfere with the intravenous drip. You've been dehydrated. We need to replenish your fluids.'

That put a scare into him –
dangerously elevated
, Uncle Sol, where are you? – but he fought it down. ‘What do you expect? I've been gagged and beaten and left out in the sun all day by your, your – '

Sheets' voice, from the door: ‘Nobody laid a finger on him. He's one of those activists is what he is. From California.'

The doctor gave Tierwater a cold look. Josephine County was a timber county, replete with timber families, and timber families paid the bills. ‘Yes, well,' the doctor said, and he was practically scraping the ceiling with the big shining globe of his head, ‘you're not going anywhere' – peering at the chart – ‘Mr. Tierwater. Not to jail and not to California either – not till we stabilize you.'

‘But what about my daughter?' he demanded, and his blood pressure was going up, through the roof, sure, and what did they expect, the sons of bitches? He hadn't been away from Sierra for a single night since her mother died – and if he hadn't been away from her then, if he and Jane had just stayed put, stayed home where they belonged, then Jane would be alive today. ‘Don't I get a phone call at least? I mean, what is this, the gulag?'

No one bothered to answer, least of all the doctor, whose looming hairy frame was already passing through the door, on his way out, but the nurse lingered long enough to reinsert the IV with the abraded tips of her cold, rough fingers. The stab of it was no more than a bee sting, the merest prick, but he couldn't help thinking they were taking something
from him – draining him, drop by drop – instead of putting something back in.

When he woke again, he checked his watch, and his watch told him it was morning. There was no confusion about where he was, none of the dislocation he'd experienced a hundred times in pup tents and motel rooms or on the unforgiving couch at a friend's house – he woke to full consciousness and saw everything in the room as if it were an oil painting he'd spent the whole night composing. Central to the composition was Deputy Sheets, seated, thin cloth pressed to narrow shanks, skull thrown back against the wall behind him, mouth agape. Long shadows. Early light. Deputy Sheets was asleep. Stationed by the door, it's true, but lost in the wilderness of dreams.

Stealthily, Tierwater slipped the IV from his arm. His thoughts, at this juncture, were uncomplicated. He was getting out of here, that's all he knew, vacating this place, sidestepping the emaciated arm of the law and making his way to his daughter, his wife, the outraged and militant cadre of E.F! lawyers who would make everything right. And the reporters too – don't forget them. They had to hear about this, about the desecration of the forest, the complicity of the sheriff and the brutality of Boehringer and Butts, and he did want to preach, yes, he did – preach, proclaim and testify. His feet were on the floor, the papery hospital gown rustling at his shoulders. And where were his clothes – his wallet, his keys, his belt? They took those things away from you in jail, that much he knew, but were they as scrupulous at the hospital?

Across the room to the closet. Nothing there. The bathroom. Easing the door shut, one eye on Deputy Sheets, the whir of the fan cyclonic, and he was sure the noise of it would rouse his jailer –
Just taking a leak, officer, and I suppose you're going to tell me that's against the law too —
but no, Sheets slept on. In his gown, on silent feet, Tierwater vacated the bathroom, slipped past the innocuous lump of creased and pleated matter that was the deputy and out into the corridor. He was dimly aware of adding yet another offense to the list Sheets had recited for him, but the great hardwood forests of the East and Midwest had been decimated by men like Sheriff Bob Hicks and Boehringer and their ilk, and the redwoods and Doug firs were going fast – this was no time for indecision.

The corridor was deserted. Cadaverous light, eternally fluorescent – nobody could look healthy here. His powers of observation told him he was on the second floor, judging from the view to the middle reaches of
the trees just beyond the windows at the far end of the hall, and he understood – from the movies, primarily, or maybe exclusively – that the elevator would be a mistake. Nurses, orderlies, gurneys transporting the near–dead and partially alive, anxious relatives and loved ones, interns, candy stripers – they'd all be packed into that elevator, and all wondering aloud about his bare feet and bare legs and the disposable paper gown that left his rear exposed. And that was another thing – what had become of the diapers? The thought shrank him. He pictured the blocky nurse cutting the things off of him, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and then he changed channels and headed down the corridor, looking for the stairwell.

Twice he had to duck into occupied rooms – a subterranean light, tubes, hoses, the electric winking eyes of the machines that took note of every fluctuation and discharge – to avoid detection by prowling nurses. No one seemed to notice. They were busy with their tubes and monitors, busy trying to breathe, a collection of tired old beaks and chins grimly relaxing into death – or so he imagined, secreted behind the door as the nurses soft–stepped up the hallway. Then, a cold draft playing off his genitals, he flung open the door marked
stairwell
and plunged through it.

In the process, he startled a morose–looking woman sneaking a smoke, but she dropped her eyes and never said a word, and the stairs vibrated under his feet. He cracked the door on the ground floor – early yet, very early, but there was more traffic here – and waited for the golden moment when everybody seemed to disappear simultaneously through separate doorways. Freedom glowed in the glass panels of the door at the main entrance, just past the gift shop and reception desk. What was it – fifty feet, seventy–five? Now or never. He pinched the gown closed behind him and made for the door, deaf to the startled cries of the two women at the desk (young nursey types, with hamburger faces and plasticized hair, and
Sir!
they cried;
Sir! Can I help you, sir?),
the sweet, fresh, as–yet–uncorrupted Oregon air in his face and an endless field of scrub and weed heaving into view just beyond the dead expanse of the parking lot.

If this were a movie, he was thinking – and his every move to this point had been dictated by what he'd witnessed repeatedly on the big screen – he would slip into a late–model sports sedan, punch the ignition with a screwdriver, hotwire the thing and be gone in a glorious roil of smoke and gravel. Or the heroine, looking a lot like Andrea, with a scoop neckline and killer brassiere, would at that moment wheel up to the curb
and he'd say,
Let's move it
. Or
Let's rock and roll
. Isn't that what they said in every definable moment of heroic duress? But this was no movie, and he had no script. In the end, he had to settle for making his way on all fours through the briars and poison oak, awaiting the inevitable clash of sirens and uproar of excited voices.

(How long was I out there – at large, that is? Let me tell you, I don't know, but it was the longest better part of a morning I ever spent in my life. And then it was the dogs – or dog – and the humiliation of that on top of the concrete and the diapers and the tight shit–eating smirks of the Freddies and their sledgehammering minions. I gave myself up. Of course I did. How far was I going to get in a hospital gown?)

Tierwater had plenty of time to nurse his grievances and contemplate the inadvisability – the sheer unreconstructed foolishness, the howling idiocy – of what he'd done that morning in extricating himself from the personal jurisdiction of Deputy Sheets and, by extension, the Josephine County Sheriff's Department. He sat there in the heavy brush, not five hundred yards from the hospital entrance, scraped and begrimed, his feet bleeding in half a dozen places, the paper gown bunched up around his hips, thinking of what they would do to him now, on top of everything else. If he'd been tentative two nights ago in the fastness of the Siskiyou and purely outraged when they went after his daughter, now he was almost contrite. Almost. But not quite. They'd humiliated him and terrorized his wife and daughter – there was no coming back from that.

He listened to the wail of the sirens in the distance, and, more immediately, to the songbirds in the trees and the insects in the grass. His breathing slowed. After a while, the sun burned through the early–morning haze and warmed him. He laid his head back in the cradle of his hands and became an observer, for lack of anything better to do. The tracery of the plants – saxifrage, corn lily, goldenrod – stood illuminated against the sky, every leaf and stem trembling with animate life. Grasshoppers, moths, ants, beetles, spiders, they were the gazelles here and the lions, prowling a miniature veldt that was plenty big enough for them – at least until the hospital needed a new wing or a developer threw up a strip mall. He tried not to think about mites, chiggers, ticks, though he itched in every part and scratched till his flesh was raw and his fingernails bloody. He had no plan. He was here, couched in the bushes, instead of sitting up in bed and addressing a plate of eggs or waffles while CNN droned on about Polish Solidarity or the turmoil in Iran, but why? Because he had to do something, anything – he couldn't just roll over and become their whipping boy. Could he?

For a long while – hours, it seemed – there were the distant sights and sounds of confusion emanating from the front of the hospital. The clash of sirens, raised voices, a flurry of activity centering on two police cruisers. It wasn't until the K–9 Corps arrived, and the first eager lusty deep–chested woofs of the police dog began to ring out over the scrub, that Tierwater developed a plan. He wasn't about to let the dog come careening through the bushes to take hold of his ankle and drag him thrashing out into the open, where the local reporter would snap action shots of his flailing legs and unclothed buttocks for the edification of the local timber families. No way. It simply wasn't a viable scenario. Beyond that, he was hungry, thirsty, sunburned, fed up. He'd made his point. Enough was enough. He stood up and waved his arms. ‘Over here!' he shouted.

And this was where things got interesting. The dog, dragging a cop who might have been Sheets' brother (thin as a wading bird, a stick of an arm at the end of the leash), made a show of it, barking ferociously, hysterically even, and right behind cop and dog was the inevitable reporter, camera flashing away. She was a female, this reporter, a little blonde with bangs, short skirt and running shoes, and Tierwater couldn't help trying to smooth his hair down and maybe even work up a smile for her. Say ‘cheese.' Behind her was Sheets, looking hangdog, and the stomping, massive, outraged figure of Sheriff Bob Hicks himself.

The dog was encouraged to come in close and to nip at the ankles without drawing any evidentiary blood, the cops dutifully produced service revolvers and handcuffs and Tierwater was led out of the bush and across the lot, wincing on bare feet. A crowd was gathered to watch the sheriff consummate his duty by shoving the cuffed and subdued desperado into the back of the patrol car –
Publicity, that's what we came here for
, Tierwater kept telling himself, trying to transmute defeat into victory, humiliation into triumph, but he was half naked, his hair was a mess and he felt less like a crusader than a figure out of the Opéra Bouffe.