A Friend of the Earth (6 page)

And what does he wake to? Is it the coughing wheeze of a poorly tuned pickup beating along the road, the single mocking laugh of a raven, the low–threshold tocsin of his daughter's voice, soft and supple and caught deep in her throat, saying, ‘Uh … Dad. Dad, wake up?' Whatever it is, it jerks him up off the narrow stool of the bucket in one explosive motion, like a diver surging up out of the deepest pool, and he tries to lift his feet, to leap, to run, to escape the hammering in his chest. But his feet are locked in place. And his body, his upper body, is suddenly floundering forward without support, even as the image of the burnt–orange pickup with its grinning bumper and the swept–back mask of the glassed–in cab comes hurtling down the road toward him, toward
them …
but the knee joint isn't designed to give in that direction, and even in the moment of crisis
—Jesus Christ, the shithead's going to hit us! —
he lurches back and sits heavily and ignominiously on the bucket that even now is squirting out from under him. ‘Stop,' he roars, ‘stop!,' against a background of shrieks and protests, and somehow he's on his feet again and reaching out to his left, for his daughter, to pull her to him and cradle her against the moment of impact … which, mercifully, never comes.

He wouldn't want to talk about the diapers, not in this context. He'd want to address the issue of the three intensely bearded, red–suspendered timber people wedged into the cab of that pickup, that scorching–orange Toyota 4x4 that comes to rest in a demon–driven cloud of dust no more than ten feet from them. And the looks on their faces – their seven–thirty–in–the–a.m. faces, Egg McMuffins still warm in their bellies, searing coffee
sloshed in their laps, the bills of their caps askew and their eyes crawling across their faces like slugs. This is the look of pure, otherworldly astonishment.
(Don't blame these men – or not yet, anyway. They didn't expect us to be there – they didn't expect anything, other than maybe a tardy coyote or a suicidal ground squirrel – and suddenly there we were, like some manifestation of the divine, like the lame made to walk and the blind to see.)

‘Oh, God,' Andrea murmurs, and it's as if the air has been squeezed out of her lungs, and they're all standing now, erect and trembling and holding hands for lack of anything better to do. Tierwater cuts a swift glance from the stalled pickup to the face of his daughter. It's a tiny little dollop of a face, shrunken and drawn in on itself, the face of the little girl awake with the terror of the night and the scratchy voice and the need for reason and comprehension and the whispered assurance that the world into which she's awakened is the ancient one, the imperturbable one, the one that will go on twisting round its axis whether we're here to spin it or not. That face paralyzes him. What are they thinking? What are they doing?

‘Christ Jesus, what is goin' on here?' comes the voice of the pickup, the unanimous voice, concentrated in the form of the pony–tailed and ginger–bearded head poking through the open window of the wide–swinging driver's–side door. ‘You people lost or what?' A moment later, the rest of the speaker emerges, workboots, rolled–up jeans, a flannel shirt in some bleached–out shade of tartan plaid. His face is like an electric skillet. Like a fuse in the moment of burning out. ‘What in Christ's name is wrong with you? I almost – you know, I could of – ‘ He's trembling too, his hands so shaky he has to bury them in his pockets.

Tierwater has to remind himself that this man – thirty–five, flat dead alcoholic eyes, the annealed imprint of a scar like a brand stamped into the flange of his nose – is not the enemy. He's just earning his paycheck, felling and loading and producing so many board feet a year so middle–class Americans can exercise their God–given right to panel their family rooms and cobble together redwood picnic tables from incomprehensible sets of plans. He's never heard of Arne Naess or Deep Ecology or the mycorrhizal fungi that cling to the roots of old growth trees and make the forest possible. Rush Limbaugh wrote his bible, and the exegesis of it too. He has a T–shirt in a drawer at home that depicts a spotted owl in a frying pan. He knows incontrovertibly and with a kind of unconquerable serenity that all members of the Sierra Club are ‘Green Niggers' and
that Earth Forever! is a front for Bolshevik terrorists with homosexual tendencies. But he's not the enemy. His bosses are.

‘We're not letting you through,' Teo announces, and there he is, a plug of muscle hammered into the ground, anchoring the far end of the human chain. All he needs is a slab of liver.

The other two have squeezed out of the truck by now, work–hardened men, incongruously bellied, looks of utter stupefaction on their faces. They just stare.

‘What are you,' the first man wants to know, the driver, the one in faded tartan, ‘environmentalists or something?' He's seen housewives, ministers, schoolchildren, drug addicts, drunks, ex–cons, jockeys, ballplayers, maybe even sexual deviates, but you can tell by the faltering interrogatory lift of the question that he's never in his life been face to face with the devil before.

‘That's right,' Tierwater says, radicalized already, gone from suburban drudge to outside agitator in eight months' time, ‘and you ought to be one too, if you want to keep your job beyond next year or even next month.' He glances up at the palisade of the trees, needles stitched together like a quilt, the sun stalking through crowns and snags in its slow progress across the sky, and then he's confronting those blunted eyes again. And this is the strange part: he's not in bed dreaming, but actually standing in the middle of a concrete trench in a road in the middle of nowhere, wearing diapers and giving a speech – at seven–thirty in the morning, no less.

‘What are you going to cut when all the trees are gone? You think your bosses care about that? You think the junk–bond kings and the rest of the suits in New York give the slightest damn about you or your children or the mills or the trees or anything else?'

‘Or retirement,' Teo puts in. ‘What about retirement? Huh? I can't hear you. Talk to me. Talk to me, man, come on:
talk to me.'

He isn't one for debate, this man, or consorting with environmentalists either. For a long moment he just stands there staring at them – at Tierwater, at Sierra, Andrea, Teo, at their linked hands and the alien strip of concrete holding them fast at the ankles. ‘Piss on you,' he says finally, and in a concerted move he and his companions roll back into the pickup and the engine fires up with a roar. A screech of tires and fanbelt, and then he's reversing gears, jerking round and charging back down the road in the direction he came from. They're left with dust. With the mosquitoes. And the sun, which has just begun to slash through the trees and make its
first radiant impression on their faces and hands and the flat black cotton and polyester that clothe them.

‘I'm hungry. I'm tired. I want to go home.'

His daughter is propped up on her bucket, limp as an invertebrate, and she's trying to be brave, trying to be an adult, trying to prove she's as capable of manning the barricades as anybody, but it isn't working. The sun is already hot, though it's just past ten by Tierwater's watch, and they've long since shed their sweatshirts. They've kept the caps on, for protection against the sun, and they've referred to their water bags and consumed the sandwiches Andrea so providentially brought along, and what they're doing now is waiting. Waiting for the confrontation, the climax, the reporters and TV cameras, the sheriff and his deputies. Tierwater can picture the jail cell, cool shadows playing off the walls, the sound of a flushing toilet, a cot to stretch out on. They'll have just long enough to close their eyes, no fears, no problems, events leaping on ahead of them – bailed out before the afternoon is over, the E.F.! lawyers on alert, everything in place. Everything but the sheriff, that is. What could be keeping him?

‘How much longer, Andrea? Really. Because I want to know, and don't try to patronize me either.'

He wants to say,
It's all right, baby, it'll be over soon,
but he's not much good at comforting people, even his own daughter – Bear up, that's his philosophy. Tough it out. Think of the Mohawk, whose captives had to laugh in the face of the knife, applaud their own systematic dismemberment, cry out in mirth as their skin came away in bloody tapering strips. He leaves it to Andrea, who coos encouragement in a voice that's like a salve. Numbed, he watches her reach out to exchange Sierra's vampire novel (which, under the circumstances, hasn't proved lurid enough) for a book of crossword puzzles.

Teo, at the opposite end of the line, is a model of stoicism. Hunched over the upended bucket like a man perched on the throne in the privacy of his own bathroom, his eyes roaming the trees for a glimpse of wildlife instead of scanning headlines in the paper, he's utterly at home, unperturbed, perfectly willing to accept the role of martyr, if that's what comes to him. Tierwater isn't in his league, and he'd be the first to admit it. His feet itch, for one thing – a compelling, imperative itch that brings tears to his eyes – and the concrete, still imperceptibly hardening, has begun to chew at his ankles beneath the armor of his double socks and
stiffened jeans. He has a full–blown headache too, the kind that starts behind the eyes and works its way through the cortex to the occipital lobe and back again in pulses as rhythmic and regular as waves beating against the shore. He has to urinate. Even worse, he can feel a bowel movement coming on.

Another hour oozes by. He's been trying to read – Bill McKibben's
The End of Nature —
but his eyes are burning and the relentless march of dispirited rhetoric makes him suicidal. Or maybe homicidal. It's hot. Very hot. Unseasonably hot. And though they're all backpackers, all four of them, exposed regularly to the sun, this is something else altogether, this is like some kind of torture – like the sweat box in
The Bridge on the River Kwai —
and when he lifts the bota bag to his lips for the hundredth time, Andrea reminds him to conserve water. ‘The way it's looking,' she says, and here is the voice of experience, delivered with a certain grim satisfaction, ‘we could be here a long time yet.'

And then, far off in the distance, a sound so attenuated they can't be sure they've heard it. It's the sound of an internal–combustion engine, a diesel, blat–blatting in the interstices between dips in the road. The noise grows louder, they can see the poisoned billows of black exhaust, and all at once a bulldozer heaves into view, scuffed yellow paint, treads like millwheels, a bulbous face of determination and outrage at the controls. The driver lumbers straight for them, as if he's blind, the shovel lowered to reap the standing crop of them, to shear them off at the ankles like a row of dried–out cornstalks. Tierwater is on his feet suddenly, on his feet again, reaching out instinctively for his daughter's hand, and ‘Dad,' she's saying, ‘does he know? Does he know we can't move?'

It's the pickup truck all over again, only worse: the four of them shouting till the veins stand out in their necks, Andrea and Teo waving their arms over their heads, the sweat of fear and mortal tension prickling at their scalps and private places, and that's exactly what the man on the Cat wants. He knows perfectly well what's going on here – they all do by now, from the supervisors down to the surveying crews – and his object is intimidation, pure and simple. All those gleaming, pumping tons of steel in motion, the big tractor treads burning up the road and the noise of the thing, still coming at them at full–speed, and Tierwater can't see the eyes of the lunatic at the controls –
shades, he's wearing mirror shades that give him an evil insectoid look, no mercy, no appeal—
and suddenly he's outraged, ready to kill: this is one sick game. At the last conceivable moment, a raw–knuckled hand jerks back a lever and the thing rears like a horse and
swivels away from them with a kind of mechanized grace he wouldn't have believed possible.

But that's only the first pass, and it carries the bulldozer into the wall of rock beside them with a concussive blast, sparks spewing from the blade, the shriek of one unyielding surface meeting another, and Tierwater can feel the crush of it in his feet, even as the shards of stone and dirt rain down on him. He's no stranger to violence. His father purveyed it, his mother suffered it, his first wife died of it – the most casual violence in the world, in a place as wild as this. He's new at pacifism or masochism or whatever you'd want to call what they're suffering here, and if he could free his legs for just half a minute, he'd drag that tight–jawed executioner down off his perch and instruct him in the laws of the flesh, he would. But he can't do a thing. He's caught. Stuck fast in the glue of passive resistance, Saint Mahatma and Rosa Parks and James Meredith flashing through his mind in quick review. And he's swearing to himself,
Never again, never,
even as the man with the stick and eight tons of screaming iron and steel swings round for the second pass, and then the third and the fourth.

But that's enough. That's enough right there. Tyrone Tierwater wouldn't want to remember what that did to his daughter or the look on her face or the sad sick feeling of his own impotence. The sheriff came, with two deputies, and he took his own sweet time about it. And what did he do when he finally did get there? Did he arrest the man on the Cat? Close down the whole operation and let the courts decide if it's legal to bulldoze a dead zone through a federally designated roadless area? No. He handcuffed the four of them – even Sierra – and his deputies had a good laugh ripping the watchcaps off their heads, wadding them up and flinging them into the creek, and they caught a glimpse of the curtains parting on redneck heaven when they cut the straps of the bota bags and flung them after the hats. And then, for good measure, smirking all the while, these same deputies got a nice little frisson out of kicking the buckets out from under Tierwater and his wife and daughter and good friend, one at a time, and then settling in to watch them wait three interminable hours in the sun for the men with the sledgehammers.