A Friend of the Earth (11 page)

‘Get in there, shithead,' the sheriff said under his breath as he spread a big hand over the crown of Tierwater's head and forced him into the car, where Deputy Sheets sat awaiting him. For an instant, everything confused in his mind, Tierwater thought of kicking open the door and making a hobbled run for it, because things were out of hand here – a peaceful protest, and look what it had led to – and it tore his heart out to give them the satisfaction of beating him down like this. Better to die than submit. His jaw ached from gritting his teeth. He was sweating. His heart
was pounding, his eyes were crazy, there were twigs and bits of seed and chaff in his hair.
Kick the door!
screamed a voice in his head.
Kick the door!

He didn't kick the door. He didn't have to. Andrea was there – Andrea and an attorney with beard and briefcase – and Teo, shadowing them on a pair of crutches. ‘We've come to bail him out,' Andrea said, and through the window of the cruiser Tierwater could see the winged creases ascending her forehead.

Officious, already moving round the front of the car while the door slammed shut like the lid of a coffin, Sheriff Bob Hicks let out a short mocking bark of a laugh. ‘Bail? Bail hasn't been set yet – he hasn't even been arraigned.'

The lawyer, in high dudgeon, countered with something Tierwater couldn't hear. Andrea bent to peer in the window, and Tierwater the desperado pressed his fingers to the glass, and it was just like the movies, exactly – visiting hour at the penitentiary, time's up, boys, this way, ladies. She was saying something, her lips moving, the police dog barking for the sheer love of it, the crowd jeering, something about Sierra —

‘ – too sick to go to jail,' the sheriff was saying, pointing a finger in the lawyer's face, ‘and then he pulls this crap, this escape from custody, and what do you have to say to that, Fred, huh?'

Fred had plenty to say, most of which escaped Tierwater, but during the course of the ensuing debate, he was able to lean forward to where the Plexiglas divider gave onto the front seat and the convenient flap there for purposes of criminal/peace–officer communication. ‘Where's Sierra?' he shouted into his wife's hovering face.

‘Child Protective Services.'

‘What? What do you mean?'

This was where Deputy Sheets, seated beside him on the hard serviceable seat, got into the act. Deputy Sheets had been embarrassed professionally, and he wasn't amused. ‘Juvenile Hall,' he said, giving a jerk at the handcuffs to get Tierwater's attention. ‘She's in there with your runaways, your shoplifters, your junkies and murderers. And she's going to stay there till the judge makes his ruling.'

‘His ruling?' Tierwater's heart was pounding. ‘Ruling on what?'

‘What do you think? On whether you're a fit parent or not.'

He jerked back round to read Andrea's face, a black gulf of despair and regret opening up inside him, limitless, unbreachable. He knew it. He'd known it all along. Trouble is a given in a world ruled by accident, sure,
and lightning hits too, but only a fool – strike that: an inveterate idiot – goes looking for it.

Deputy Sheets cleared his throat. ‘Got two more charges for you,' he said, and his voice was so rich with triumph he sounded as if he were announcing the winners of the Fourth of July sack race. ‘Attempted escape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.'

Eight months earlier, Tierwater was busy leading his life of quiet desperation, aimless, asleep at the wheel, watching his father's empire fall away into dust like all the geriatric empires before it –
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
It was December, bleak and wind–knifed. Ice one day, slush the next, then refiozen slush the day after that. Pathetic cardboard Santas and cutout menorahs clung to the dirty windows of the stores in the shopping center – the ones that hadn't gone dark for lack of tenants – and half the bulbs were burned out in the relict strings of Christmas lights he'd looped over the bent and rusting nails his father had hammered into the stucco fascia twenty years earlier. Sierra was twelve, insufferably motherless, inappropriately dressed (Jodie Foster,
Taxi Driver),
addicted to TV, gloom and doom, vegetarianism. Her face was a falling ax, and it fell on him twice a day: in the morning, when he drove her to school in the Jeep Laredo, and in the evening, when he got home from work and she was there infesting the house with her evil friends.

For his part, Tierwater tried to do his best, puzzling over geography and the
Golden Book of Literary Treasures
with her, taking her out for a weekly bonding ritual at the Mongolian Barbecue in the shopping center, withholding judgment when she came home with a nose ring from the brand–new sixty–seven–shop enclosed mall that was killing him, tearing his heart out, flattening his feet and destroying his digestion. His love life was null and void. A month earlier he'd withdrawn as tactfully as possible from a six–month affair with a skinny ungenerous woman named Sherry who wore her weedy hair kinked out in a white–blond corona that grazed the lintel of every door she passed through (to his secretary: ‘Tell her it was a mountaineering accident and they never recovered my body'). He hadn't met anyone since. In fact, during all that time, no woman so much as gave him a glance – not even in Cappelli's, the bar in the shopping center that was the only place that seemed to be doing any business at all. Single mothers clustered around shrinking tables and hung off the shoulders of single fathers as if all they needed were crampons and
rope, cosmetologists wept over the thunderous hits of the sixties, aerobics instructors showed off their tightly clamped buttocks round the pool table, but none of them had time for Tierwater. He was depressed, and he wore his depression like a lampshade over his head.

But then fate intervened.
(‘We are turned round and round in this world, and Fate is the handspike.' I don't know exactly what a handspike is, but I like the quote – and Melville had it right, especially if a handspike is something you can drive into the back of somebody's head.)
Reflexively, without giving it much thought, Tierwater had sent a check to the Sierra Club, a year's membership. Before his parents died – they were stopped in traffic, 44th and Lexington, when a crane hoisting steel girders capitulated to the force of gravity – he'd been chasing down a B.S. in wildlife biology, after having dropped out twice in his drug–tranced days, and nature had always glimmered somewhere out there on the horizon of his consciousness. This little gesture, this check delivered in a good cause, was like a Band–Aid slapped over a big gaping crater in his psyche, and he knew that, but there it was. He was a member of the Sierra Club. And as a member, he got onto a mailing list that entitled him to receive whole cordilleras of junk mail – talk about conserving paper – including, but not limited to, invitations to attend meetings, swim with the dolphins, save whales and remember the Himalayas. He felt guilty, but he never accepted any of these high–minded invitations, and worse, he never recycled a scrap of them.

Then, one day, a postcard slipped out of the pile of bills, letters, invitations, solicitations, violations, entreaties and threats his secretary mounded on his desk each morning. It featured a logo he'd never seen before – a crimson circle with a raised fist in the center of it (his first thought was the Black Panthers – but weren't they all dead, in jail or running Nike outlets?). It wasn't the Black Panthers. It was E.F.! – Earth Forever! – inviting him to attend a powwow/chili cookoff/apocalyptic lecture/slide show at the home of Linda D'Piqua–Hoover in Croton. He turned the postcard over in his hand.
Dear Mr. or Ms. Tierwater,
it read,
Are you concerned about the environment? Do you care about the rape of our forests, the pollution of our streams and rivers, the acid rain killing off the pristine lakes of the Adirondacks? Are you tired of promises? Fed up? Ready for Direct Action? Then come to our,
etc.

He went. Why? Boredom, curiosity, the desire to duck the Sherrys of the world and meet some environmentally minded women who might just want to share a freeze–dried entrée and a sleeping bag on the shore of
an acidic lake somewhere. And more – and he wouldn't want to make light of this – because he believed. He did. He genuinely did. He needed an awakening, a cause, a call to arms – and here it was.

It was raining the night of the powwow, a cold soulless wintry rain that wrung out the sky like an old cloth and found its way into the seams of his boots and down the collar of his jacket. He stepped out of the office and into a world from which every trace of light had been relentlessly squeezed, the moon imploded, the stars erased – there was no illumination without electricity, and electricity lit his path from the office to the car. The car itself was another kind of environment, a sort of rolling sarcophagus. It spat its fumes into the air, coughed and shook, gave off its stink of incinerated metal. Beyond the rain–scrawled windows lay the shopping center – the Copper Beech Shopping Center – curled into the killing night like the architecture of his nightmares. He sat there breathing the carbon monoxide coming through the floorboards till his classic 1966 Mustang could be coaxed into moving without stalling, and then he was off, rocketing over the potholes like a master of nature and machine alike.

He made an uncanny series of wrong turns, U–turns and gravel–churning retreats, all the while consulting the map reproduced on the back of the card, until finally the D'Piqua–Hoover house loomed up out of a dark lane, lit like a supernova. Import cars clustered around it, sleek and menacing in their steel skins. The black lawn glittered in the light of a hundred windows. His feet found the flagstone path, and then a tall woman in post–hippie Birkenstocks was greeting him at the door, so good of him to come and did he know Mrs. Somebody, chair of the Something Committee? He took Mrs. Somebody's limp hand in his own – she must have been seventy – and then made his way toward the bar, the scents of woodsmoke, body heat, perfume and warring chilies rising up to envelop him as he inserted himself into the crowd. A man in cummerbund and bow tie handed him a glass of wine. He wanted scotch. But he accepted the wine, sipped it and took a moment to get his bearings.

That was when he first noticed Andrea. She was in the corner, hunkered over a bowl of yogurt dip with a handful of carrot sticks and broccoli florets, gathering faces round her like a puppet master. Her free hand (ringless, chapped, the nails bitten down to translucent slivers) was in constant motion, underscoring each point she made, and she made a lot of them. She was talking with animation and confidence, lecturing, though he couldn't hear what she was saying from where he stood with
his nose in a long–stemmed glass. He must have watched her for a full five minutes, picture only, the sound muted, before he found himself moving toward her – and he wasn't moving consciously, not at all; it was more in the way of a moth following a pheromone trail. He fluttered his wings and sailed across the room.

(I need to describe her as she was then – and none of this black hair dye and she looks pretty good for a sixty–seven–year–old and all the rest of an old man's twice–burned revisionism – because you have to experience this for yourself. Be there. Step into the room, feel the heat of the big hardwood fire carbonizing the air, smell the simmering pots of chili and the burned–dust odor of the slide projector, inhale the aroma of coffee – decaf and espresso – and the perfume of forty women who want to give the impression that they're wearing nothing at all but the scent they were bom with. ‘Natural' is the word here. Earnest. Committed. And quick now, what's an environmentalist? Somebody who already has their mountain cabin.)

She gave him a look – the quickest snatch of her eyes – and admitted him to her circle. She was talking about logging in the West, some forest in Oregon he'd never heard of, old growth going down, weep for the animals, weep for the earth. He wasn't listening. Or not particularly. He was too busy studying her, enjoying her lips and the intensity of her eyes, trying to break her code and assimilate it. She might have been a steelworker or glass blower, her face shining with a light that seemed to radiate from a place just under her chin, the light of hammered ingots, molten silica, fire, and her hands were big and mannish, hands that had done things, accomplished things –
An activist's hands,
he told himself, as he clutched the glass of wine and moved in still closer, already sick with the romance of it –
Save the world, sure, and get laid too.

Her hair was blond in those days – then, and for all the time he knew her, but for those special occasions when they went out in the night to strike back at the machine and she dyed it dirt brown or fish–belly gray – and it was cut and parted in a way that allowed it to fall across her face whenever she tilted her head. The hair would fall – good hair, healthy hair,
California
hair – and then she would push it back, and you saw her hands, or she'd give her chin a flick so that her hair would grab the light and drop unerringly into place, and you saw her eyes. Tierwater saw them. He saw her. And even before he understood she was the main attraction of the evening – along with Teo, that is – he pushed his way through the scrim of faces hanging at her shoulder and introduced himself. ‘Hi,' he said, showing his teeth in his best imitation of a grin, ‘I'm Ty Tierwater, and you're – '

What was he wearing? He wouldn't remember. Certainly nothing that could be described as environmentally chic – no Gore–Tex or Bion II or anything like that. He looked like a bum, most likely. And why not? He wasn't going anywhere. Give him a three–day growth of prematurely graying beard (graying to the chin only, and no higher), blue jeans spattered with paint and spackle and other accoutrements of the building–management trade, a bomber jacket so crosshatched with age it looked as if it had been varnished over by one of the Italian masters. Style he didn't have. He would have been the first to admit it. But he wasn't bad–looking, depending on your taste. Thin. Skinny, actually – but at least he hadn't gone to fat like every other thirty–nine–year–old in America. He had most of his hair and a good proportion of his teeth and he could lift anything, throw it over his shoulder and walk to hell and back with it if the right woman were to ask him. And he was a patient, tireless and tender lover, a combination of adjectives and a resonant noun he should have had printed up on a T–shirt. It couldn't have hurt his chances.