I'm With the Bears (2 page)

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, under-bosses, heavy machine operators, CEOs, power-lunchers, police, accountants. Not to mention all those good, decent, hard-working 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 100 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 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, a.k.a. 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 EF! 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 BC 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?

“Something special for you, honey. A surprise, okay?”

“Tomato, avocado and sprouts on honey wheat-berry, don't spare the mayo?”

A low whistle from Andrea. “I'm not saying.”

“Hummus—hummus and tabouleh on pita. Whole wheat pita.”

“Not saying.”

“Peanut butter-marshmallow? Nusspli?”

A stroll in the park, isn't that what she said? Sure, sure it is. And we're making so much racket we might as well be shooting off fireworks and beating a big bass drum into the bargain. What fun, huh? The family that monkeywrenches together stays together? But what if they
are
listening? What if they got word ahead of time, somebody finked, ratted, spilled the beans, crapped us out?
“Look, really,” he hears himself saying, trying to sound casual, but getting nowhere with that, “you've got to be quiet. I'm begging you—Andrea, come on. Sierra. Teo. Just for my peace of mind, if nothing else—”

Andrea's response is clear and resonant, a definitive non-whisper. “They don't have a watchman, I keep telling you that—so get a grip, Ty.” A caesura. The crickets, the muffled tramp of sneakered feet, the faintest soughing of a night breeze in the doomed expanse of branch and bough. “Tomorrow night they will, though—you can bet on it.”

It's ten miles in, and they've given themselves three and a half hours at a good brisk clip, no stops for rest or scholarly dissertations on dendrology or Strigidae calls, their caps pulled down tight, individual water rations riding their backs in bota bags as fat and supple as overfed babies. They're carrying plastic buckets, one apiece, the indestructible kind that come with five gallons of paint at Dunn & Edwards or Colortone. The buckets are empty, light as nothing, but tedious all the same, rubbing against their shins and slapping at the outside of his bad knee just over the indentation where the arthroscope went in, scuffing and squeaking in a fabricated, not-made-for-this-earth kind of way. But there's no talking, not any more, not once they reach the eight-mile mark, conveniently indicated by a tiny day-glo EF! sticker affixed to the black wall of a doomed Douglas fir—a tree that took root here five hundred years before Columbus brought the technological monster to a sunny little island in the Caribbean.

But Tierwater wouldn't want to preach. He'd just want to explain what happened that night, how it stuck in him like a barbed hook, like a bullet lodged too close to the bone to remove, and how it was the beginning, the real beginning, of everything to come.

All right.

It's still dark when they arrive, four-fifteen by his watch, and the concrete—all thirty bags of it—is there waiting for them, not ten feet off the road. Andrea is the one who locates it, with the aid of the softly glowing red cap of her flashlight—watchman or no, it would be crazy to go shining lights out here—and the red, she explains, doesn't kill your night vision like the full glare of the white. Silently, they haul the concrete up the road—all of them, even Sierra, though sixty pounds of dead weight is a real load for her. “Don't be ridiculous, Dad,” she says when he asks if she's okay—or whispers, actually, whispers didactically—“because if Burmese peasants or coolies or whatever that hardly weigh more than I do can carry hundred and twenty pound sacks of rice from dawn to dusk for something like thirty-two cents a day, then I can lift this.”

He wants to say something to relieve the tension no one but him seems to be feeling, something about the Burmese, but they're as alien to him as the headhunters of the Rajang Valley—don't some of them make thirty-six cents a day, the lucky ones?—and the best he can do is mutter “Be my guest” into the sleeve of his black sweatshirt. Then he's bending for the next bag, snatching it to his chest and rising out of his crouch like a weightlifter. The odd grunt comes to him out of the dark, and the thin whine of the first appreciative mosquitoes.

In addition to the concrete, there are two shovels and a pickaxe secreted in the bushes. Without a word, he takes up the pick, and once he gets his hands wrapped round that length of tempered oak, once he begins raising it above his head and slamming it down into the yielding flesh of the road, he feels better. The fact that the concrete and the tools were here in the first place is something to cheer about—they have allies in this, confederates, grunts and foot soldiers—and he lets the knowledge of that soothe him, his shoulders working, breath coming in ragged gasps. The night compresses. The pick lifts and drops. He could be anywhere, digging a petunia bed, a root cellar, a grave, and he's beginning to think he's having an out-of-body experience when Andrea takes hold of his rising arm. “That's enough, Ty,” she whispers.