A Friend of the Earth (9 page)

‘What have you got?'

‘Lapsang souchong.' A glance for me. ‘I brought it with me.'

Somehow, the women find this funny, as if I'm some sort of barbarian who couldn't be trusted to have a teabag in the house, and all the tension I'd been trying to inject into the moment evaporates. This is the laughter of relief, of camaraderie and nostalgia, but of something else too, something conspiratorial. I recognize this – I'm the target with the bull's–eye painted on it here, and let's not forget it – but Andrea's back, I tell myself,
Andrea,
and you may as well ride with it wherever it's going to go. So I laugh too. And it's a genuine laugh, it is, the unstoppered whinny that always used to get me in trouble in redneck bars, because I'm caught up in it too. I was there at the Headwaters and Mono Lake and a dozen other places, just like them. I can laugh. I can still laugh. Why not? You never forget how to ride a bicycle, do you? Ha–ha, ha–ha.

‘Screw the tea,' I hear myself saying, my miserable cramped two–room shack with the splootching buckets and the stink of terminal mold and animal feces suddenly alive and musical with the laughter of women. ‘Let's just break out a bottle of
sake.'

The one he has the clearest recollection of is the one named Boehringer. There were three of them, their names stenciled in black above the right breast pockets of their camouflage fatigues: Boehringer, Butts and Jerpbak. They climbed out of the jeep with faces that said,
This is no joke,
the sledgehammers slung over their shoulders like rifles, Sheriff Bob Hicks of Josephine County nodding his approval even as he fished the dark slim tube of a twenty–ounce Pepsi out of a cooler in the police cruiser and pressed it to his lips. ‘Pot commandos,' Teo said under his breath.

So these are pot commandos, Tierwater was thinking, but the thought didn't go much further than that. He watched them dispassionately, tired to the bone, tired of the sun, the trees, the hard dirt road he'd been sitting on for what seemed half his life. At this point, he was thinking nothing, dwelling deep inside himself, his lips raw beneath the tape, each breath tugged through his nostrils like an overinflated balloon, no thought but to get this over with and take his daughter and his wife and go back home and bury his head in the sand. Or maybe he wasn't quite so whipped as he appeared. Maybe he was thinking of Thoreau, his hero of the moment (along with Messrs. Muir, Leopold and Abbey):
The authority of government can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it
. Yes. Sure. Sure, he was. But of course he was right at the very beginning of a fool's progress that was to be like no other.

Collectively, Boehringer, Butts and Jerpbak had never heard of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold or Abbey – or Jefferson, for that matter. And even if they had, it wouldn't have mattered much more than a flea on an elephant. They were part of an elite force of five hundred paramilitary gun–loving whipcrack Marine Corps rejects who'd been organized to interdict clandestine marijuana operations on Forest Service lands. That was their stated purpose, but in fact – since all but the most oblivious and terminally stoned potheads had long since taken their plants
indoors to escape detection – they were actually being used to intimidate people like Tyrone Tierwater and his wife and daughter: that is, anybody who dared to get in the way of the profits to be made in the plunder of the national forests. Not that he'd want to preach.

(They used sledgehammers to break us loose – did I mention that? – and they didn't much concern themselves with the delicacy of the operation. If a blow went astray and an iron fist struck an ankle or a shinbone, so much the worse. The reasoning went like this, rhetorical flourishes and all: What else did you expect? If you didn't want your ankle broke, then why didn't you stay down there in California with the rest of the faggots and environmentalists? People work for a living around here, and that might just come as a surprise to you, huh? You could put all the owls in the world in a meat grinder for all I care, and I still say they aren't worth one American job.)

They looked at nothing, these men, and nothing fazed them – it was all the same to them whether they were torching marijuana plants or hauling activists off to jail. What they hadn't counted on, though, was Andrea. As soon as they filed out of the jeep, her face hardened. And this was no ordinary face – it was a movie screen in miniature, able to leap at you in startling close–up and quick–cut from the soft focus of the love scene in the candlelit restaurant to the raging harsh light of confrontation. She was especially good at confrontation, as Tierwater could testify. Her eyes swelled up pneumatically, and a ridge of three ascending V's formed between her eyebrows, hovering there like birds of prey. Her chin became Mount Rushmore. And her mouth – the mouth that kissed, nibbled, licked, leaked words of tenderness and erotic encouragement – turned parsimonious suddenly, shriveled up like a strip of jerky.

Needless to say, she didn't intimidate easily. And when the blows started to fall and Sierra shielded her eyes against the sudden sharp spray of concrete fragments, she opened up on them in a voice that was like an airraid siren. ‘I can't believe you people. You call yourselves men? Or do you think it's a big–dick manly thing to brutalize women and children? Huh, you sons of bitches? I don't hear you. And don't give me that look, you – yes, I'm talking to you, you with the air between your legs and that mongoloid smirk on your lips – Ow! – because if you have a wife, which I doubt because what woman would go for a sack of shit like – OW! – or a sister, you must have a sister, everybody's got at least one – because this is wrong, what you're doing here, all of you, and you know it. If you don't stop this now, right here and now, the whole fucking – Ow!, and will you get the fuck off me? – the whole fucking biosphere is going to
collapse like a balloon with a pin stuck in it, and then where're you going to be with your let's–dress–up–and–play–soldier suits? Huh? Where are you going to go? What are you going to eat? Ever think about that? When they – Ow! – close down the grocery stores? Huh? What then?'

It hurt. It hurt more than Tierwater could ever have imagined when he sank his sneakered feet into that yielding plastic medium, now hard as stone – stone, in fact – but he gritted his teeth and thought of the Mohawk. The hammers dropped again and again, the dull reverberative thump sucked up in the baffle of the trees. A crack would appear, and they'd go after it, beating a wedge loose here, levering up a section there. He tried to remain calm through all of this, tried to choke down the rage rising in his throat – passive resistance, that was the ticket, the strategy that brought the British Empire to its knees, stopped the war in Vietnam, humbled George Wallace and Bull Connor – but when his daughter let out a gasp, the smallest exhalation of pained surprise, the faintest whisper built round the thump of the hammer at her ankle, it went right to him.

Before he could think, he rose up off the concrete like a leashed animal and hit the nearest man to him – Boehringer, as it turned out, he of the vacant eyes and narrow, pinched–up shoulders – with everything he had. Which admittedly wasn't much, since his hands were cuffed behind his back, his feet locked in place and his mouth sealed with duct tape beyond even the possibility of bringing his teeth into play. Still, the man who'd made his daughter gasp – Boehringer – heaved into the next man, Butts, who was just then raising his hammer, and the two of them embraced briefly and tentatively, just learning the steps, before they went down in a heap of khaki and camouflage.

They didn't stay down long, though. And when they untangled their limbs and pushed themselves up from the dirt of the road, their faces had changed. No more the tight mask of duty and restraint, the averted eyes and diligently clamped jaws, but something looser, more brutal and habitual. One braced the other while Teo cried out to distract them in the high anxious voice of a man selling peanuts at the ballpark, ‘Hey, officers! Officers, would you please find the people that did this to us and arrest them? We'll even press charges – I mean, we were just standing here minding our business when these, these gang members come out of the woods and pour all this concrete on our feet – ‘

They ignored him. Nor did they take up the sledgehammers again, not right away. It was Butts who grabbed hold of Tierwater's rigid arms and jammed them high up into the wings of his shoulders while Boehringer,
the offended party, drove his right fist into the exposed gut – once, twice, then the left, then the right again – till Tierwater the pacifist was back down on the road that wasn't a road sucking at the air through two wholly inadequate nostrils. He couldn't breathe. They'd knocked the wind out of him, which was bad enough – and frightening too; he thought his lungs would never reinflate – but all the worse because his mouth was taped shut. Flat out on his back, arms twisted beneath him, the concrete jerking at his ankles, he thrashed like a freshly caught trout (or a sucker – wouldn't that be more appropriate?), asphyxiating in the clean sweet untainted air of the Oregon woods.

The third man – this was Jerpbak – paused to watch for the briefest moment before bringing his sledge down on Teo's left ankle, while the sheriff drank Pepsi and the Freddies looked the other way. Andrea was screaming, nothing wrong with her lungs, a sound that rang rapturously through the ravine, feeding on itself until there was no other sound in the world. And his daughter – he couldn't focus on her, but he can remember her shrinking into herself, dwindling, growing smaller and ever smaller, a puddle of black, a spot, an insignificant vanishing little speck caught between the mighty legs of the trees and the crushing stupendous lid of the sky.

He woke in a bed, in a room with a TV suspended from the ceiling and stiff white sanitary curtains on the windows. No bars. No toilet clamped to the floor, no must of fermenting bodies, no muttering, no retching, no shadows rising to greet him from a concrete bench bolted to the wall. He wasn't in jail, that much was clear, but he wasn't in the Rest Ye May Motel either. The ceiling tiles were perforated, like ceiling tiles everywhere, and the walls were painted in a clean no–nonsense shade of pale institutional green. But what was this? An IV. Inserted in his left arm and taped in place. So that was it. He was in a hospital. The thought of that froze him a moment: Was it a heart attack? At thirty–nine? He thought of his Uncle Sol, the world–beater who'd worked with Frank Buck in Singapore and been mauled and bitten by half the species on earth at one time or another, with a heart so strong it could have pumped blood for ten men, a heart that would have been pumping still, but for the fact that a coronary thrombosis cut him down while he was bending over the bulbul cages one fine sunny morning, and then he thought of his daughter: if he was here, in the hospital, then where was she? For that matter, where was Andrea? Teo?

All these mysteries were resolved for him in the next moment, when Deputy Sheets, of the Josephine County Sheriff's Department, stuck his head in the door, looked round him twice, as if checking the water before taking the plunge, and stepped into the room. Tierwater saw a man as tall and attenuated as a gusher, the uniform shrinking away from his wrists and ankles, his glasses shedding light. ‘Well,' the deputy said, ‘awake at last.'

‘I think so,' Tierwater murmured, going through a mental checklist of his body parts, just to be sure everything was still there. Since childhood, he'd had a fear of waking up in a hospital bed (not this one – a grainy, grayish, black–and–white–movie bed) with a doctor standing over him saying, I'm afraid the other leg's going to have to go too. ‘I mean, I don't remember – ‘

‘You're in the Ida P. Klipspringer Memorial Hospital. You passed out. Heat exhaustion is what the doctor called it.' The deputy's eyes were the same color as the walls. He screwed them up and gave Tierwater a look that had no hint of sympathy in it.

‘Heat exhaustion? Your friends or colleagues or whoever punched me in the goddamned stomach – and with my hands tied behind my back and, and duct tape over my mouth, for Christ's sake – punched me till I was out cold. You listen here' – and he was up on his elbows now, stoked with the recollection – ‘we're talking police brutality, we're talking a methodical, premeditated … and your sheriff was right there drinking a Pepsi and he never said a word.'

‘That's right,' the deputy said, nodding his head on the long stalk of his neck till it was like a hand at the end of a wrist, waving goodbye. ‘And that's a violation of the penal code – two of 'em, actually. Resisting arrest, and assault and battery on a peace officer. That's in addition to the charge of disturbing the peace – and trespassing.'

‘Trespassing? Are you out of your mind? The Siskiyou National Forest is public property and you know it as well as I do – ‘

‘Listen, mister –
sir —
and I tell you it really rankles me to have to be professional with people like you, but what I know or don't know isn't the issue here – it's what the judge knows. And you'll be seeing him soon enough.'

At this juncture of his life, Tyrone Tierwater was prone to volatility, and he would have been the first to admit it. The term ‘slow burn' meant nothing to him. He was a pile of mesquite branches on a windy day, a rag soaked in paint thinner. What did he know? He thought things mattered,
believed in the power of individuals to influence events, illuminate issues, effect change, resuscitate the earth. None of this did his digestion any good. Or his bank account either. Now, in the face of intransigence and stupidity, in the face of Deputy Sheets, he sat up, all the way up, and tore the IV from his arm as if he were swatting a mosquito. ‘Where's my wife and daughter?' he demanded. Or no: he roared, his voice erupting from the deepest cavity of his chest to boom off the walls and evoke a responsive tinkle from the instruments on the metal shelf in the corner.