A Friend of the Earth (15 page)

The sad fact was that since the day he made bail he'd been back just once – up and down the coast in the space of forty–eight hours – with Andrea and Fred, for a dependency hearing before the judge.

Judge Duermer (triple–chinned, rolling in his robes, the great bulging watery sea lion's eyes): Can you show cause why this juvenile – Sierra Sarah Tierwater – should be returned to the custody of her father and stepmother, both of whom are facing criminal charges in this county?

Fred (short and bald, a blazing wick of vital energy, appalled for all the world to see): But, Your Honor, with all due respect, this is a matter of peaceable civil protest, an exercise of my clients' rights to free speech and assembly –

Judge Duermer (reading from a sheet in front of him, Sierra nowhere to be seen): Assault on a peace officer, resisting arrest, escape from custody, child endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor? Come on, counsel, these are serious charges, and until such time as they have been adjudicated, I can't see fit to release this child to the parents.

Sierra's Lawyer (Cotton Mather in a three–piece suit, no nose or chin to speak of): Your honor, on behalf of Child Protective Services, I move to have Sierra Sarah Tierwater placed with a foster family until such time as the parents can show that they have taken appropriate measures – parenting classes, for instance, and refraining from further criminal conduct – to assure the court that they are indeed fit to raise this child.

The upshot? Tierwater, still facing up to a year in jail on the criminal charge, was ordered to take approved parenting classes and to keep his own very prominent nose clean for a period of twelve months, after
which the court would make its decision. Back again to Los Angeles, doom and gloom and seething hate. He stared out the window of the car and into the trees, and even the shell of the burned–out Cat glimpsed somewhere between Cottonwood and Red Bluff gave him no pleasure. Criminal conduct. The sons of puritanical high–and–mighty bitches – they haven't seen anything yet. That's what Tierwater was thinking, but it came and went. Revenge fantasies got you nowhere. Despair did, though. Despair got you to submit to the gravitational force and become one with the cracked leather couch in front of the eternally blipping TV in a rented house on a palm–lined street in suburbia.
(Give me my daughter back and I wil pluck the owls and drop them in the frying pan myself, no questions asked, that's how I felt, because I was all about giving up then, a victim, a schmuck, ground under the iron heel of Judge Duermer and Sheriff Bob Hicks.)

‘Come on, Ty,' Andrea said, trying for a smile but looking grim underneath it, ‘snap out of it. We're fighting this, okay? It'll be all right. It will.'

It was a morning of common heat, a hundred and three by eleven o'clock, the San Fernando Valley baking like cheap pottery. The dry wind they called Santa Ana was rattling the leaves of the grapefruit trees in the desiccated backyard – nothing there, not a spike of grass, not even a gopher mound – and knocking the dead fronds out of the palms out front with a sound like sabers rattling. This was in a place called Tarzana, named for the Lord of the Jungle, whose steady earning power had allowed his creator to buy it all up at one time and make it his ranch, his spread, his dusty, spottily irrigated, citrus–tree–studded estate and manor in the New World – and there was a transformation for you. Now it was part of the stinking, creeping, blistered megalopolis – Teo's hometown, incidentally – and E.F! had chosen it as the location for their Los Angeles chapter. Why? Because Teo knew it, and because it was quiet and dull, a place where people had jobs and foreign cars and repainted their classic 1950s ranch houses every other year in the same two basic colors. Ecotage? Never heard of it.

Teo and Andrea didn't have jobs. Neither, any longer, did Tierwater. Teo and Andrea were supported by E.F.! contributions, the money they made stumping in places like Croton, and, ultimately, by Tierwater. And Tierwater was supported by his dead father. This is called the food chain. ‘Yeah, I know,' he said, his voice buried in a swamp of misery and depression, ‘but it's killing me. It's like going to a shrink when you're a kid – did you ever go to a shrink?'

She was sitting beside him on the couch. Phones were ringing, people moving incessantly from room to room, sweating and conspiratorial. She just lifted her eyebrows, noncommittal.

‘Just because you know what the problem is, just because you can express it in so many words, that doesn't mean you can do anything about it. I feel impotent. Castrated. Fucked. I think I'm having a nervous breakdown here. I mean, I've dealt with grief before –
grieving
– but this is different. Nobody died.' The effort of talking was giving him a headache. He was in a hyperbaric chamber, that's what it was, and they'd screwed down the pressure so he could feel it in every pore. ‘Except maybe me.'

She slipped down beside him, the curves and hollows of her body seeking his, holding him, mothering him, but it was no good. For one thing, it must have been ten degrees hotter inside than out. For another, the phones were ringing, a natural irritant, and the voices whispering. And then there was this, the issue he really hadn't dealt with yet: resentment. How could he let himself be soothed by her when she was the one who'd dragged him into this, when she was the one to blame? ‘Listen,' and she was whispering now, her breath sour, the smell of her underarms and the sweat sliding down her temples, one more weight crushing him, ‘Fred says – '

And here was where the violence spurted out like bad blood, where push came to shove, Andrea on the floor suddenly, Tierwater up off the couch in a single snaking motion. He was shouting. Standing over her and shouting. ‘Fuck Fred!' he shouted. ‘Fuck him! And fuck you too!'

And then the letter came. It was in a stained envelope, invitation–size, and it wasn't from his ex–secretary, his realtor in New York or any of the legal or social–service departments of Josephine County, Oregon. The handwriting – a random conjunction of block letters and an undisciplined, wobbling cursive – brought him out of his slumber. With trembling fingers, he tore open the flap – tore the letter inside into two curling strips, in fact – and saw Sierra's hasty scrawl there on the back of a fast–food napkin.
Dad
, he read,
they've got me at this farmers house in this town called i think Titansville or something come get me I'm going to die here Sierra
.

‘I'm not going to do anything rash,' he told Andrea in a kitchen full of volunteers, the wind flailing branches against the windows, flyers running hot off the Canon copier on the table, Teo on the phone in the corner,
rubbing the unfashionable stubble of his athlete's head as if the harder he rubbed, the more money he could conjure up out of the wires. It was two in the afternoon. He wouldn't let her take the letter from him – the napkin, that is, already damp with his sweat – but he spread it across his palm for her to read.

He watched her eyes.

‘I mean,' and he dropped his voice, ‘I'm not going to kidnap her or anything. I just want to see her, that's all – just for a minute. Give her some money. Reassure her – '

‘No, Ty. Uh–uh. No way in the world.'

‘She's scared, don't you understand that? Can you even imagine it? She doesn't know what's going on here. Maybe she thinks we abandoned her, maybe that's what she thinks. I want my daughter. I miss her. I can't even sleep, for Christ's sake.'

‘Forget it, Ty. No.'

‘You know something, Andrea' – and they were all listening now, the three Pierce College students in their Pierce College sweatshirts, the housewife with the spiked hair and bruised mascara, the unemployed stockboy of forty with the beard, ponytail and multiple earrings – 'nobody tells me no, because I don't like to hear that word, not from you, not from Fred, not from anybody. I'm going up there.'

‘You're out of your mind, Ty. Flat–out crazy.' She gestured to Teo, an urgent swipe of the hand, and he whispered something into the phone and hung up. ‘This is no joke – they're trying to make an example of us up there – of you, and you're the one who had to go and try to escape, and from a hospital, no less – '

‘What's the problem?' Teo wanted to know. His face was suddenly interposed between Tierwater's and his wife's, the face of Overhead, severe and uncompromising. Both of them had to look down at him.

Andrea, her eyes cold as crystal. ‘Ty wants to go up and rescue Sierra. Show him the letter, Ty.'

Tierwater brought his hand out from behind his back, where it had gone instinctively, and held out the limp napkin. Teo scanned the message while Andrea made her case: ‘I don't think Ty understands just how serious this is – I mean, we could lose her for good, permanently, till she's of legal age anyway. They'll put her in a foster home, they will. In a heartbeat.'

Tierwater couldn't appreciate the logic of this. ‘She's in a foster home now. With some farmer. Imagine that? Some farmer. Who the hell is he?
Maybe he's a pedophile or something – sure, why wouldn't he be? Aren't they all?'

Teo: ‘What, farmers?'

‘These people that take in kids. Why else would they do it?'

‘Come on, Ty – what planet are you living on? For money, for one thing. Because they like kids. Because they have a social conscience.' Andrea was turning over one of the flyers in her hand – in a week they'd be staging a protest in the Arizona desert against yet another power plant. ‘Listen, Ty, I know you're upset – I miss her too, and I regret this whole thing, it's tearing me up, it is – but you've got to stay above ground with this one. Fred'll have her back in a week, trust me, he will.'

The Santa Anas tapped at the windowpane and Tierwater looked up to see a tumbleweed (Russian thistle,
Salsola kali
, another invasive species) hurtle across the yard. The college students, three boys so alike they might have been triplets, shared a laugh over something, their breathless snorts of amusement a counterpoint to the rasp of the wind outside. ‘A week? You heard what the judge said.'

‘Fred's working on it.'

‘Bullshit he is. I'm out the door, I'm telling you – and if you want to come, that's fine with me, but I'm going whether you like it or not.' Tierwater's voice got away from him for a minute, and the students' laughter died in their throats. He looked round the room. Nobody said a word. Even the telephones stopped ringing. ‘This is my
daughter
we're talking about here.'

Tierwater didn't like traffic. He didn't like freeways. He hated the constant nosing for position at seventy, seventy–five, eighty, the big eighteen–wheelers thundering along on either side of you like moving walls, the exhaust, the noise, the heat. He'd come to Los Angeles with his new bride, with Andrea, because that was what she wanted – and it was what Sierra wanted too, or seemed to want. (‘This place? You mean, like Peterskill? You've got to be joking, Dad – you really think there's a kid in America that wouldn't choose L.A. over
Peterskill?')
He wouldn't kid himself – he wanted out too – and though Andrea moved in with him in the house he shared with his daughter, it was understood that she was a California girl, and once he got his affairs in order (read: sold everything at rock–bottom prices) and Sierra's school let out, they were heading west, as an environmentally correct, newly nuclear family. It might have been
different if they'd got there in February, when the sun was pale as milk and the days were long cool tunnels full of light and bloom, but they arrived on the first of June – after truncating Sierra's seventh–grade experience by three and a half weeks – and it was hot. And smoggy. And the freeways were burning up.

And now he was out on the freeway again, in an unfamiliar car, looking to feed into the 405 North from the 101 East – and why couldn't they call the freeways by their proper names, the San Diego and Ventura? – a very pale and bristling Andrea at his side. Trucks swerved, cars shot randomly across lanes, engines coughed and roared and spat out fumes, oleander flashing red and white along the dividers, the palms gone shabby, garbage everywhere. ‘Jesus Christ,' Tierwater swore, crushing the accelerator, ‘there's too many people in the world, that's what it is, and they're all going the same place we are – all the time. That's what gets to me – you can't even take a crap without six hundred people in line ahead of you.'

‘And I suppose Peterskill's better?'

‘At least you could see the road. At least you felt like you were in control.'

He swerved and lurched, hit the horn, hit the brakes, randomly punching buttons on the radio, swearing all the while. He was letting the little things get to him, because the big thing – Sierra – was something he didn't want to think about, not yet, not until the 405 became the 5 and he followed it all the long way up the spine of California to Oregon, where he wasn't welcome, definitely wasn't welcome. He had no plan. None whatever. He didn't even know what town she was in, though ‘Titansville' seemed a pretty good match for Titusville, ten or fifteen miles south of Grants Pass, and that was good enough for him.

They spent the night at a public campground near Yreka, Tierwater dropping off into a dense dreamless sleep the minute he'd unfurled his groundcloth and sleeping bag. It was 3:00 a.m. The sky was open to the stars, not a light showing anywhere, out of the car, low whispers, and that was all till he opened his eyes on ten o'clock in the morning and Andrea sitting cross–legged beside him. Her face was a deep drenched blue, the color imparted to it by the light sifting through the walls of the tent, and she was studying a map. ‘You slept like a zombie,' she said. ‘Or no, not a zombie – zombies don't sleep at all, do they?'