A Friend of the Earth (12 page)

Her hand was in his. He felt a roughness there, callus, the horn of work and worry, but a frankness too – no bullshit here, her handshake said. Her lips were moving too. ‘Andrea,' she said, in answer to his question, and her voice surprised him, so high and piping, so pure, when he'd expected a rasp, a growl deep in the throat –
Let's get down on all fours and fight over the meat –
‘Andrea Cotton.'

Teo's car was cramped on the way back to Los Angeles, but not as cramped as it had been on the way up. Tierwater sat up front, next to Teo, because of the length of his legs, and Andrea stretched out across the back seat because of the length of hers. Sierra was represented by a pink over–the–shoulder bag with the grinning face of a Disney character impressed on the front flap, a relic of her childhood. It was tucked away on the floor behind Tierwater's seat, and it contained a pair of cut–off jeans, a spandex top, socks, underwear, cosmetics, seven home–made gloom–and–doom tapes in cracked plastic cases and a backup vampire novel the size of a pocket dictionary. Though they'd been on the road for two hours – in California now, Mount Shasta appearing and vanishing through first one window, then another, like a conjuror's illusion – Tierwater hadn't said a word. He stared straight ahead, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt.

Andrea and Teo talked around him, the truncated vowels of Teo's
glad–handing surfer's voice banging up against the country inflections of her Montana drawl, on and on, and the only subject was tactics. Not Sierra. Not how they were going to wrest her away from the judge – Judge Duermer, fat as a rutting sea lion and twice as belligerent – and the slab–faced puritans down at Child Protective Services. Because this was the fact: Sierra's lawyer, assigned by the state, had filed a dependency petition in the Name of the People against Tierwater as an unfit parent, a parent who endangers his child and contributes to her delinquency, and she was in Juvenile Hall with the hard cases and he was heading home to California. On fifty thousand dollars' bail and facing a plea bargain negotiated by Fred – ‘They'll drop all the charges if you plead to assault on a peace officer' – that could, that would, put him in jail for as much as three months. And then what would his daughter do?

‘I say we go for the jugular, man – like play up Ty as
Father Knows Best
and Siskiyou Lumber and the Josephine County Sheriff's Department like a cross between the KGB and the Ayatollah.'

The worn tires sang on the pavement, cars clustered round them, fell back, moved ahead, the radio coughed up static. Tierwater was paralyzed. He was a fragile thing in a soft container. He'd forgotten how to blink. How to swallow. Andrea's voice came to him from a thousand miles away: ‘Sure, sure, of course. This is worth fifty protests. If we can just figure a way to get it into the papers – and you're on to it, Teo, you're totally right, I mean, separating a father from his daughter, it's like dropping a nuclear bomb on a Girl Scout picnic – '

Teo, muscles working the wheel, jaws pounding gum to a private beat, left ankle wrapped in gauze: ‘Yeah, but all I've seen so far is that thing in their Mickey Mouse newspaper – you know, Ty going berserk on an officer of the law, escaping from the hospital and all that. All that
shit
, I mean. Because that's what it is. It's like the Chicago Seven or the Jonesboro Boys or something. People can see that. They're not stupid.'

Andrea came forward suddenly, her head floating over the seat like a satellite drifting into orbit. ‘Oh, yes, they are. Stupid as dirt. But we've got to give this to Shep and Suzie – they'll run with it, they'll spin it and spin it again. We need the
L.A. Times, Newsweek, Woman's Day, Time.'

‘CBS News – TV, that's the way to go.'

Tierwater took all this in – not consciously, not alertly, but in the way of a sponge absorbing a slow trickle of water. This was his wife speaking, the woman he loved, the woman who set him on fire, and the man who'd stepped in to win the role of his best friend in the abbreviated space
of a few short months. This was his life talking here, a life so radically altered he couldn't have imagined it a year ago. Get married, draw down the bank accounts, sell off the movables and put the house and the shopping center on the market and never mind whether you take a beating or not – just get out, all the way out, all the way to the San Fernando Valley in the Jeep Laredo, and then sell that too, find a school for Sierra and stare at the palm trees rising up out of the smog like the tapering, reticulated necks of Mesozoic beasts. Sure. And commit criminal acts in the night.

What about Sierra?
he wanted to say.
What about me?

He hadn't responded, even to a direct question, for hours, and he couldn't blame them if they went on as if he weren't there. Or yes, he could. And he did. They talked over him, around him, through him, as if he were laid out on a gurney in the trauma ward. Their voices rose and fell. They were pillars of outrage, righteous, scheming, Trotsky and Lenin plotting to bring down Kerensky, Woodward and Bernstein with their heads together in the back room. Tierwater stared straight ahead. The rattling Caprice sliced through the apparent world and for the longest time he saw nothing at all. But then –

Then things slowed down and the real world coalesced for him with the dull rolling thunder of epiphany. Up ahead, on the right, was a construction site. They – the anonymous, omnipresent and ever–industrious – were apparently constructing an overpass here, slabs of concrete studded with rebar, steel beams, survey stakes trailing their raggled banners of pink and orange plastic, dirt in a violent state of disarrangement. And a Cat. A big solid D7 Cat, sitting idle beneath the gray film of dusk, the sun drawn down the sink of the sky, dead brush, the crippled fingers of the scarified trees. Tierwater saw this picture, a murky still–life, and in the same instant saw himself at the center of it, and suddenly he was snatching at the steering wheel. ‘Pull over,' he said.

Teo, his jaws working beneath the blond stubble of his head, looked alarmed. But just for a moment. Tierwater watched the light come into his eyes, saw his hands relax on the wheel. ‘You need to take a leak, Ty?' A glance back to Andrea, the makings of a grin. ‘Is that it?'

Nothing. Tierwater just looked out the window, but he kept his hand locked on the wheel, and in the next moment they were slowing and the tires began to sing a new song on the raw corrugations of the exit ramp. ‘Over there,' Tierwater heard himself say, ‘on the crossroad, just behind the Cat there.'

‘Wait a minute, Ty,' Andrea said, her hands on his shoulders, sweet breath and her look of concern, ‘you're not thinking – ?'

But Tierwater was already out of the car, the heat rising in his face, lizards scuttling for cover, already fingering the matches he'd idly lifted from the ashtray in the Rest Ye May Motel. They had his daughter, that's what he was thinking – they had
him,
had him by the balls – and now they were going to start paying for it, right now, now and forever. ‘Ty!' she was calling, Andrea, out of the car already, a wind coming up out of nowhere to whip that perfect sheet of hair across her face while the gray cars hunted along the freeway behind the steady pulse of their headlights. Everything was gray now, washed out, rinsed of color and definition. Could they see him? Could they see what he was doing, what he was about to do?
(At that point, I have to tell you, I honestly didn't care – they'd hit me, hard, and I was going to hit them back, and damn the consequences.)

His head was down, looking for something, a scrap of paper to stuff into the fuel tank, the fuse that would give him ten seconds, because that was all he was going to need, and ‘Ty!' Andrea was calling, ‘Ty, don't be crazy!' There was trash everywhere. Of course there was – what else would you expect? He bent to it mechanically, paper, take–out coffee cups, cans, bottles, and found what he was looking for – a rust–colored rag stained with machine oil. It took him a minute to locate the fuel tank and wrench the cap off of it – she was back in the car now, in the rear seat, her face drawn down to nothing, a pale bulb preserved behind the dark glass and you'd better plant it now and hope for flowers in the spring – and then he touched a match to the rag and the thinnest, blackest little coil of smoke crawled up into the air.

He was running by then, thirty–nine years old and mortgaged to the eyeballs, his right knee tender, teeth aching, hair undergoing a daily transmigration from head to comb, and he never stopped running till he was in the car and the car was slamming down the road and the shining big new D7 Cat was breathing fire like a dragon, yellow, orange and red.

So we laugh. It feels good, feels good to be looped on cheap
sake
at quarter past ten in the morning too, even though my nose is dripping and my head seems to be waterlogged. (It's the weather, of course, everybody indoors all the time, the great biomass of humanity a juicy, snuffling, shuffling culture medium for the sly and patient viruses, and I just pray it's not the
mucosa
plague making a comeback. But that's the thrill of life on this blistered planet: you never know which sniffle is going to be your last.) And my arm – they injected it, dusted it, stitched and wrapped it, and there's no hint of pain from that quarter. Not yet, anyway. In fact, it doesn't even feel attached to me, and here I am resting my haunches on the kitchen table and draining one tiny glass after another of fermented rice wine, casual as an amputee, my guard down – definitely down – and the women laughing along with me. Things could be worse.

Plus, we got Petunia back, and that's cause for celebration. Chuy rigged up a plywood enclosure at the corner of her pen where the chicken wire had been torn loose in the storm, and he buried the bottom end of it three feet in the ground so she can't dig under it, or wouldn't want to. Not that she isn't hot to get loose – all the animals are – but she's got to be the laziest Patagonian fox in the world (of course, since the set of Patagonian foxes is tiny and dwindling, the subset of lazy ones must be infinitesimal). At any rate, she's there, hunkered over a bowl of dog meal and the freshly trapped corpses of a couple of rats Chuy tossed her as a welcome–home present, and I know all about it because I was out in the pens myself before the sun came up, scattering straw over the mud to make her comfortable. And Delbert Sakapathian is satisfied too, because I got Mac's secretary to hand–deliver him a check for a thousand bucks, to make up for the loss of his cat. Everything wraps up neatly, doesn't it?

Still, that's April Wind over there sunk into the couch, and I might be laughing now, but I know that sooner or later a perforated chuckle or
premoistened guffaw is going to stick in my throat like a catfish bone. ‘Remember the time,' Andrea's saying, and we're all remembering, grinning wide, a day in the Tehachapis, dry and hot and with a sky so blue it was like somebody's eye – all right, God's eye, if He wants to exist – and the shock of that creek, instant deep–freeze. We were eluding the Freddies, and somebody – Teo? me? – insisted on the creek, throw them off the scent, and how deep is it, somebody else asked, knee–deep, that's all, knee–deep. ‘ – And then Ty stepped off that rock and came up sputtering like a polar bear?' Oh, yes. Yes. Ha–ha.

‘So that was, like, when?' April Wind is wondering. ‘Before or after Sierra … Because I don't remember her there, correct me if I'm wrong – '

Boom!
goes the wind, choosing the perfect moment to rattle my shack
[Enter
Ghost;
Exeunt
Peace, Sanity and Determination.] They're both looking at me, Andrea with her reconstructed face and midnight hair, eyes so glassy and opaque you could lather up and shave in them, and April Wind, the amazing dwarf woo–woo woman with a stare like two screws boring into a four–by–four. ‘After,' I say, and listen to the hiss of the rain swelling to fill the silence.

But what am I seeing? Sierra Tierwater, twenty–four years old, staring down at me out of Jane's fleshed–in circle of a face (perfectly round, round as the Doughboy's), the long braid of her hair dangling like a bell pull and a fine rain of particles sifting down from the weathered platform high up in her tree. Her redwood tree. Her one–thousand–year–old, two–hundred–foot–tall redwood that weighed something like a hundred tons and contained an estimated twenty thousand board feet of lumber, four hundred thousand dollars stacked up in the middle of an old–growth forest and there for the taking. That tree. The one that made her famous. Artemis, she called it, the Lady of Wild Things.

Sure. That's what I'm seeing, Sierra, my daughter, perched up there halfway to the sky in a blizzard of mystical, earth–mothering, New Wave crap, woo–woo on parade, and every ravening nutball with a grudge and a chainsaw stalking round down below.

‘So you were pretty broken up by that,' April Wind inserts into the howling silence – literally howling, Force 8 at least, a whole universe of untethered objects hurtling in a dismal blur past the only window that hasn't been boarded up yet. ‘Is that when you really, like, started to, you know – '

‘Broken up?' I throw it back it at her on the heels of two quick burning
hits of
sake,
and forget the delicate little cups, it's my lips now and the wet viridian throat of the bottle. ‘Is that what you came to hear about? This is the interview, right? We're not laughing anymore, are we, anything for the cold naked page and let's take down the last ten trees in the world for the paper to print it on. But what's the angle, what's the deal – does anybody really give a shit anymore? Because I don't. I really don't.'

Oh, they look uncomfortable now, the shifting buttocks and nervous little flicks of the head, fingers twirling twists of hair, eyes left, eyes right, eyes crawling up the walls. And what a coincidence that Andrea should come back to me the day before the little reporter shows up. It's money, sure, some publisher's money – we always need the next hagiography – but there's more to it than that, and I can see it glittering in their eyes. Andrea and April Wind. Am I crazy to think they don't have an agenda?