A Friend of the Earth (4 page)

She's a big woman, Andrea, big still – in her shoulders, the legs tucked up under her skirt, those hands – but she reduces herself somehow. She's a waif. She's put–upon. She's no threat to anybody and this isn't her idea but April Wind's, the woman who talks to trees. ‘I think it's a good idea,' she says. ‘For posterity.'

‘What posterity?' My arm swings wide. ‘This is your posterity.'

‘Come on, Ty – do it for Sierra. Let the woman interview you, tell your story – what'll it hurt?'

Everything compresses to rush into the vacuum inside me, the winds dying as if on the downstroke of a baton, the rain taking a time–out, the mop finally prevailing at the door. Andrea is standing now too, and we're a matching pair of the young–old, as rejuvenant as any couple you'd see in New York or Paris or in those TV ads for transplants, poised over the table as if we're about to sweep off across the floor in some elaborate dance routine. ‘What's it in for you? A finder's fee?'

No response.

‘And how
did
you track me down, anyway?'

There's no malice in her smile – a hint of smugness, maybe, but no malice. She holds up her fingers, all ten of them. ‘The Internet. Search for Maclovio Pulchris and you'd be amazed at what turns up – and as far as what's in it for me, that's easy: you. You're what I want.'

I'm stirred, and there's no denying it. But I'm not taking her home with me, never, no matter what. I'm grinning, though – a grin so glutinous you could hang wallpaper on it. ‘You want to go to a motel?'

‘You don't have to do that.'

Still grinning, all my dental enhancements on display, my naked gums anaesthetized with
sake
fumes and my eyes on fire behind the twin discs of my glasses: ‘I want to.'

The wind comes back for an encore. Snatches of music drift in from the bar. Everything is roaring, the whole world, noise and more noise. ‘I won't stay long,' she says. ‘And I'll help with the animals. You know how I love animals – '

This is the way it begins, on a summer night so crammed with stars the Milky Way looks like a white plastic sack strung out across the roof of the sky. No moon, though – that wouldn't do at all. And no sound, but for the discontinuous trickle of water, the muted patter of cheap tennis sneakers on the ghostly surface of the road and the sustained applause of the crickets. It's a dirt road, a logging road, in fact, but Tyrone Tierwater wouldn't want to call it a road. He'd call it a scar, a gash, an open wound in the body corporal of the forest. But for the sake of convenience, let's identify it as a road. In daylight, trucks pound over it, big D7 Cats, loaders, wood–chippers. It's a road. And he's on it.

He's moving along purposively, all but invisible in the abyss of shadow beneath the big Douglas firs. If your eyes were adjusted to the dark and you looked closely enough, you might detect his three companions, the night disarranging itself ever so casually as they pass: now you see them, now you don't. All four are dressed identically, in cheap tennis sneakers blackened with shoe polish, two pairs of socks, black tees and sweatshirts and, of course, the black watchcaps. Where would they be without them?

Tierwater had wanted to go further, the whole nine yards, stripes of greasepaint down the bridge of the nose, slick rays of it fanning out across their cheekbones – or, better yet, blackface – but Andrea talked him out of it. She can talk him out of anything, because she's more rational than he, more aggressive, because she has a better command of the language and eyes that bark after weakness like hounds – but then she doesn't have half his capacity for paranoia, neurotic display, pessimism or despair. Things can go wrong. They do. They will. He tried to tell her that, but she wouldn't listen.

They were back in the motel room at the time, on the unfledged strip of the comatose town of Grants Pass, Oregon, where they were registered under the name of Mr. and Mrs. James Watt. He was nervous – butterflies in the stomach, termites in the head – nervous and angry. Angry at the
loggers, Oregon, the motel room, her. Outside, three steps from the door, Teo's Chevy Caprice (anonymous gray, with the artfully smudged plates) sat listing in its appointed slot. He came out of the bathroom with a crayon in one hand, a glittering, shrink–wrapped package of Halloween face paint in the other. There were doughnuts on the bed in a staved–in carton, paper coffee cups subsiding into the low fiberboard table. ‘Forget it, Ty,' she said. I keep telling you, this is nothing, the first jab in a whole long bout. You think I'd take Sierra along if I wasn't a hundred percent sure it was safe? It's going to be a stroll in the park, it is.'

A moment evaporated. He looked at his daughter, but she had nothing to say, her head cocked in a way that indicated she was listening, but only reflexively. The TV said, ‘ – and these magnificent creatures, their range shrinking, can no longer find the mast to sustain them, let alone the carrion.' He tried to smile, but the appropriate muscles didn't seem to be working. He had misgivings about the whole business, especially when it came to Sierra – but as he stood there listening to the insects sizzle against the bug zapper outside the window, he understood that ‘misgivings' wasn't exactly the word he wanted. Misgivings? How about crashing fears, terrors, night sweats? The inability to swallow? A heart ground up like glass?

There were people out there who weren't going to like what the four of them were planning to do to that road he didn't want to call a road. Bosses, underbosses, heavy–machine operators, CEOs, power–lunchers, police, accountants. Not to mention all those good, decent, hardworking and terminally misguided timber families, the men in baseball caps and red suspenders, the women like tented houses, people who spent their spare time affixing loops of yellow ribbon to every shrub, tree, doorknob, mailbox and car antenna in every town up and down the coast. They had mortgages, trailers, bass boats, plans for the future, and the dirt–blasted bumpers of their pickups sported stickers that read
Save a Skunk, Roadkill an Activist
and
Do You Work for a Living or Are You an Environmentalist?
They were angry – born angry – and they didn't much care about physical restraint, one way or the other. Talk about misgivings – his daughter is only thirteen years old, for all her Gothic drag and nose ring and the cape of hair that drapes her shoulders like an advertisement, and she's never participated in an act of civil disobedience in her life, not even a daylit rally with minicams whirring and a supporting cast of thousands. ‘Come on,' he pleaded, ‘just under the eyes, then. To mask the glow.'

Andrea just shook her head. She looked good in black, he had to admit
it, and the watchcap, riding low over her eyebrows, was a very sexy thing. They'd been married three months now, and everything about her was a novelty and a revelation, right down to the way she stepped into her jeans in the morning or pouted over a saucepan of ratatouille, a thin strip of green pepper disappearing between her lips while the steam rose witchily in her hair. ‘What if the police pull us over?' she said. ‘Ever think of that? What're you going to say – “The game really ran late tonight, officer”? Or “Gee, it was a great old–timey minstrel show – you should have been there.”' She was the one with the experience here – she was the organizer, the protestor, the activist – and she wasn't giving an inch. ‘The trouble with you,' she said, running a finger under the lip of her cap, ‘is you've been watching too many movies.'

Maybe so. But you couldn't really call the proposition relevant, not now, not here. This is the wilderness, or what's left of it. The night is deep, the road intangible, the stars the feeblest mementos of the birth of the universe. There are nine galaxies out there for each person alive today, and each of those galaxies features a hundred billion suns, give or take the odd billion, and yet he can barely see where he's going, groping like a sleepwalker, one foot stabbing after the other. This is crazy, he's thinking, this is trouble, like stumbling around in a cave waiting for the bottom to fall out. He's wondering if the others are having as hard a time as he is, thinking vaguely about beta–carotene supplements and night–vision goggles, when an owl chimes in somewhere ahead of them, a single wavering cry that says it has something strangled in its claws.

His daughter, detectable only through the rhythmic snap of her gum, asks in a theatrical whisper if that could be a spotted owl, I mean hopefully, by any chance?'

He can't see her face, the night a loose–fitting jacket, his mind ten miles up the road, and he answers before he can think: ‘Don't I wish.'

Right beside him, from the void on his left, another voice weighs in, the voice of Andrea, his second wife, the wife who is not Sierra's biological mother and so free to take on the role of her advocate in all disputes, tiffs, misunderstandings, misrepresentations and adventures gone wrong: ‘Give the kid a break, Ty.' And then, in a whisper so soft it's like a feather floating down out of the night, ‘Sure it is, honey, that's a spotted owl if ever I heard one.'

Tierwater keeps walking, the damp working odor of the nighttime woods in his nostrils, the taste of it on his tongue – mold transposed to another element, mold ascendant – but he's furious suddenly. He doesn't
like this. He doesn't like it at all. He knows it's necessary, knows that the woods are being raped and the world stripped right on down to the last twig and that somebody's got to save it, but still he doesn't like it. His voice, cracking with the strain, leaps out ahead of him: ‘Keep it down, will you? We're supposed to be stealthy here – this is illegal, what we're doing, remember? Christ, you'd think we were on a nature walk or something –
And here's where the woodpecker lives, and here the giant forest fern:'

A chastened silence, into which the crickets pour all their Orthopteran angst, but it can't hold. One more voice enters the mix, an itch of the larynx emanating from the vacancy to his right. This is Teo, Teo Van Sparks, aka Liverhead. Eight years ago he was standing out on Rodeo Drive, in front of Sterling's Fur Emporium, with a slab of calf's liver sutured to his shaved head. He'd let the liver get ripe – three or four days or so, flies like a crown of thorns, maggots beginning to trail down his nose – and then he'd tear it off his head and lay it at the feet of a silvery old crone in chinchilla or a starlet parading through the door in white fox. Next day he'd be back again, with a fresh slab of meat. Now he's a voice on the E.F.! circuit
(Eco–Agitator,
that's what his card says), thirty–one years old, a weightlifter with the biceps, triceps, lats and abs to prove it, and there isn't anything about the natural world he doesn't know. At least not that he'll admit. ‘Sorry, kids,' he says, ‘but by most estimates they're down to less than five hundred breeding pairs in the whole range, from B.C. down to the southern Sierra, so I doubt – '

‘Fewer,' Andrea corrects, in her pedantic mode. She's in charge here tonight, and she's going to rein them all in, right on down to the finer points of English grammar and usage. If it was just a question of giving out instructions in a methodical, dispassionate voice, that would be one thing – but she's so supercilious, so self–satisfied, cocky, bossy. He's not sure he can take it. Not tonight.

‘Fewer, right. So what I'm saying is, more likely it's your screech or flammulated or even your great gray. Of course, we'd have to hear its call to be sure. The spotted's a high–pitched hoot, usually in groups of fours or threes, very fast, crescendoing.'

‘Call, why don't you,' Sierra whispers, and the silence of the night is no silence at all but the screaming backdrop to some imminent and catastrophic surprise. ‘So you can make it call back. Then we'll know, right?'

Is it his imagination, or can he feel the earth slipping out from under
him? He's blind, totally blind, his shoulders hunched in anticipation of the first furtive blow, his breath coming hard, his heart hammering at the walls of its cage. And the others? They're moving down the road in a horizontal line like tourists on a pier, noisy and ambling, heedless. ‘And while we're at it,' he says, and he's surprised by his own voice, the vehemence of it, I just want to know one thing from you, Andrea – did you remember the diapers? Or is this going to be another in a long line of, of – '

‘At
what?'

‘It. The subject of stealth and preparedness.'

He's talking to nothing, to the void in front of him, moving down the invisible road and releasing strings of words like a street gibberer. The owl sounds off again, and then something else, a rattling harsh buzz in the night.

‘Of course I remembered the diapers.' The reassuring thump of his wife's big mannish hand patting the cross–stitched nylon of her daypack. ‘And the sandwiches and granola bars and sunblock too. You think I don't know what I'm doing here? Is that what you're implying?'

He's implying nothing, but he's half a beat from getting excruciatingly specific. The honeymoon is over. He's out here risking arrest, humiliation, physical abuse and worse – and for her, all for her, or because of her, anyway – and her tone irritates him. He wants to come back at her, draw some blood, get a good old–fashioned domestic dispute going, but instead he lets the silence speak for him.

‘What kind of sandwiches?' Sierra wants to know, a hushed and tremulous little missive inserted in the envelope of her parents' bickering. He can just make out the moving shape of her, black against black, the sloped shoulders, the too–big feet, the burgeoning miracle of tofu–fed flesh, and this is where the panic closes in on him again. What if things turn nasty? What then?