A Friend of the Earth (23 page)

Ratchiss answered it. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Oh, hi. Just talking about you. Uh–huh, uh–huh.' He cupped a hand over the mouthpiece. ‘It's Teo, calling from a phone booth. Change of plans – he'll be up tomorrow. He wants to know if you want anything – '

Tierwater just shook his head, but Sierra rose out of her seat and threw down the magazine. ‘Tell him I want magazines, books, video games, anything,' she said, advancing on Ratchiss as if to snatch the phone away from him. ‘Tell him I want friends. Tell him I'm bored, bored, bored – ‘

‘Yeah,' Ratchiss whispered into the phone. ‘Uh–huh, yeah.' Then he put his hand over the receiver again and gently replaced it in its cradle.

Sierra was left standing in the middle of the room, her hands spread in extenuation. She was grimacing, and Tierwater could see the light glint off her braces – and that was another thing, an orthodontist, and how was he going to explain the fact that somebody had twisted those wires over her teeth and kept meticulous records of it but that that somebody's name and records were unavailable? ‘I mean it,' she said, and he thought she was going to start stamping her foot the way she did when she was three. ‘I don't want to be trapped up here with a bunch of old people and hicks, and I don't want to be Sarah Drinkwater either – I want to be me, Sierra, and I want' – her voice cracked – ‘I want to go home.'

‘You see this?' Teo was standing at the edge of a dirt road deep in the woods, hands on his hips. He gestured with a jerk of his chin. ‘This is a culvert, twelve–inch pipe, nice and neat, keeps the creek from flooding out the road at snowmelt. If they don't have a culvert they don't have a road, and if they don't have a road they can't get the logs out.'

It was a day of high cloud and benevolent sun, a Saturday, and the trees stood silent around them. They weren't real trees, though – not to Tierwater's mind, anyway. They weren't the yellow pines, the Jeffreys, ponderosas, cedars and sequoias that should have been here, but artificial trees, hybrids engineered for rapid and unbending growth and a moderate branching pattern. Neat rows of them fanned out along both sides of the road, as rectilinear as rows of corn in the Midwest, interrupted only by the naked rotting stumps of the giants that had been sacrificed for them. Tree farming, that's what it was, tree farming in the national forest, monoculture,
and to hell with diversity. Tierwater didn't see the long green needles catching the sun, didn't smell the pine sap or think of carbon–dioxide conversion or the Steller's jay squawking in the distance – he just gazed with disgust on the heaps of frayed yellow underbranches the timber company had pruned to make the job of harvesting all the easier. There was even a sign down the road – a sign in the middle of the forest, no less – that read
Penny Pines Plantation
. It was no better than graffiti.

One night, against his better judgment, he'd gotten into a debate with a logger at the local bar, an old man so wizened and bent over you wouldn't have thought he'd be able to lift a saw, let alone handle it, but as it turned out, he was a trimmer, part of the crew that shears the branches off the trees once they've been felled. Tierwater had said something about clear–cutting, and the old man, who was sitting at the bar with two cronies in plaid shirts and workboots, took exception to it. ‘Let me ask you this,' he said, leaning into the bar and fixing Tierwater with a stone–cold crazy look, ‘you live in a house or a cave? Uh–huh. And what's it made out of? That's right. You use paper too, don't you, you got some kind of job where you don't get your hands dirty, am I right? Well, I'm the one that give you the paper in your nice clean office, and I'm the one that cut the boards for your house – and if I didn't you'd be living in a teepee someplace and wiping your ass with redwood bark and aspen leaves, now, wouldn't you?'

Tierwater had felt something rise up in him, something born of impatience, truculence, violence, but he suppressed it – he was trying to keep a low profile here, after all. There weren't more than fifty cabins out there in the woods, with a couple of blacktop roads connecting them to the combination lodge, gift shop, bar and restaurant he was now sitting in, and everybody knew everybody in Big Timber. So he just turned his back, picked up his beer and went off to sit at a table in the corner. He'd felt bad about that, about letting the running dogs of progress have the last say, but now, out here under the sky, in the midst of their plantation, he saw a way to answer them all.

And this' – Teo was grinning, squatting over his big calves to rummage through his backpack and produce a scuffed rag of leather that looked like a deflated volleyball – ‘is a deflated volleyball. All you have to do is stuff it in the pipe, inflate the piss out of it and toss some debris up against it for camouflage. Soon as the water starts to flow – goodbye, road.'

‘Perfect for ten- or twelve–inch pipe,' Andrea added. She was in a pair
of khaki shorts and a T–shirt, her legs and arms tanned the color of iced tea, plastic wraparounds for sunglasses, Angels cap askew, halo and all. This was her hiker's disguise – that and the map in her hand – and she stood at the edge of the road shuffling her feet and grinning as Teo produced a bicycle pump and bent to his work. ‘Of course,' she continued, ‘for bigger pipe we use a drill and those little eye screws? You know what I mean, Ty – the kind of thing you use for hanging plants? You just screw four of them in, or maybe six, depending, and then stretch some chicken wire across the gap.'

‘Right, and for really big pipe, pipe you can walk through' – Teo was off the road now, down in the gully, wedging the ball deep into the culvert – ‘you use a pickax, just punch holes in the bottom of the thing, I mean really tear it up, because eventually the water'll seep in underneath and undermine the whole business.'

‘It's really pretty easy,' Andrea said. She was enjoying this, a little field trip, she the professor and Tierwater the student. Call it Ecodefense 101, or Monkeywrenching for the Beginner.

Teo's face, peering up from the culvert, a grin to match hers, the sun glancing off the shaven dome of his head: ‘Not to mention fun. You're having fun, aren't you, Ty?'

‘I don't know – am I? What if somebody comes, what then?'

‘We're hikers, Ty, that's all,' Andrea said. ‘Here, look at my map. Besides which, there's nobody within ten miles of us, and all the loggers are hunkered around watching the game – ‘

‘What game?' Tierwater said. ‘Is there a game on today?'

‘There's always a game, football, basketball, hockey, championship bowling, whatever – and they're all watching it and getting liquored up so they can go out on the town and get into a brawl someplace. We don't even exist. And nobody'll know about this till spring runoff.'

Fine. But would it save the forest? And beyond that, would it save the world? Or would it only serve to provoke the timber company all the more, like the Oregon fiasco? Where had that gotten them? What had that saved? Even the press was bad, portraying Tierwater as a subspecies of violent lunatic (two of the flattopped kid's teeth had been knocked loose, and the building inspector claimed he'd suffered a bruised windpipe), and Earth Forever! as a collection of unhinged radicals dedicated to killing jobs and destroying the economy. Still, as he shouldered his pack and moved on up the road, Tierwater understood that he didn't care, not
about the press or the organization or the trees or anything else: all he cared about now was destruction.

‘You see, Ty, what I wanted to tell you is you're in a unique position.' Teo shifted his own pack with a twist of his shoulders and took two quick steps to catch up. ‘My hands are tied – I mean, they're watching me day and night, phones tapped, the works – but you're Tom Drinkwater now, you're nobody, and you can have all the fun you want. Right here, for instance, where the road narrows by that bend up there? See it? Perfect place for a spikeboard.'

‘What's a spikeboard?'

‘Maybe a four–foot length of two–by–four, studded with sawed–off pieces of rebar, set at a forty–five degree angle. You anchor the thing in the road with two L–shaped strips of the same rebar – invaluable stuff, really, you'd be surprised – maybe a foot and a half, two feet long, so the board doesn't shift when they run over it. Then you just kick some dirt on top of it and it's practically invisible.'

Andrea, loping along, all stride and motion, hands swinging, eyes electric with excitement: ‘That slows them down all right.' She let out a barely contained whinny of a laugh that rode up into the trees and startled the whole world into silence. And then Teo laughed along with her – a soft nasal snicker that sounded as if someone were drowning a cat – and Tierwater joined in too.

An hour later they arrived at their destination, a bald spot carved out of the mountain at the end of the road. On one side was the unbroken line of shadow that was the forest; on the other there was nothing but a dome of rock and debris that fell away into the valley below. There were machines everywhere, naked steel and scuffed paint glinting in the sun. It was dry underfoot, the duff scattered and pulverized, crushed twigs poking out of the soil like bones, dust like a second skin. In the center of the bald spot, a thin coil of smoke twisted up into the air where a heap of charred branches, crushed pine cones and other debris had been swept up by the Cats and left to smolder over the weekend.

They scouted the place as thoroughly as they could from the cover of the trees, then stepped out into the open. ‘Don't worry, Ty, we're only hikers, remember?' Andrea said. ‘And it's not like we're trespassing. This is still the Sequoia National Forest, and whether the Freddies would admit it or not, we have as much right to be here as the – what does that say on the loader over there? Can you read that?'

‘Cross Creek Timber Co.,' Teo read.

‘Right – as the Cross Creek Timber Company.'

They walked right up to the machines, Teo and Andrea alternately lecturing about the most effective way to disable them, pointing out the salient features of a Clark scraper, a shovel loader and a pair of Kenmore log trucks parked nose to tail at the mouth of the road. Tierwater didn't like being out in the open in broad daylight, even if there was no one around. He kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to catch the quick glint of the sun flashing off a pair of binoculars from the cover of a blind, or worse – a couple of forest rangers, with sidearms, ambling across the burned–over field. Or cops. Or FBI agents. And this was yet another movie, and he the reluctant star of it. What did FBI agents look like? Robert Stack? Tommy Lee Jones?

‘See, they burn it over to put something back in the soil,' Teo was saying, squatting to sift the blackened dirt through his fingers. ‘Gets rid of the debris too. Then they come in and plant in their neat rows and twenty more acres of old growth become a plantation.'

They were in the shadow of the shovel loader, a big cranelike thing that heaved the logs up onto the trucks once the Cats had knocked them down and the trimmers had removed the branches. Andrea slipped on a pair of cheap cotton gloves and unscrewed the filler cap on the crankcase. ‘Right here, Ty – this is where you pour the sand, tonight, when it's dark. Medium–grit silicon carbide is even better, but obviously we're not going to haul anything extra all the way out here. And don't forget your boots.'

All three of them, at Teo's insistence, had slipped sweatsocks over their hiking boots before they emerged from the woods – to cover up the waffle pattern on the soles. It was daylight, and they were hikers – only hikers, nothing but hikers – but they were taking no chances. ‘I won't,' Tierwater promised. ‘But I tell you, I don't know if I can wait till dark. I'm here, the machines are here, the fucking artificial pines are down the road – I wouldn't mind torching the whole business, plantation, Cats, the whole fucking thing.'

‘I know, Ty,' Andrea said, and her hand was on his arm, a gentle hand, a persuasive hand, a wifely hand that spoke volumes with a squeeze, ‘but you won't.'

When the lesson was over for the day, the three of them retired to a creek bed half a mile away and Andrea spread out a picnic lunch – smoked–duck sausage, Asiago cheese, artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes and baguettes, replete with a stream–chilled bottle of Orvieto. They drank a toast to Tierwater's first covert action – coming action, that is – and then
Andrea and Teo shouldered their packs and headed up the streambed to the trail that would, in three hours' time, take them back to Ratchiss' cabin. And Tierwater? He settled in to feel the sun on his face, read a book, watch the sky and wait till the day closed down and the moon rose up over the bald spot on the mountain.

It was past nine when he woke. Something had crossed the stream not fifty feet from where he lay, something big, and it startled him out of a dreamless sleep. The first thing he thought of, even before he fully recalled where he was or why, was Sierra. He checked his watch, listened again for the splashing – it was a deer, had to be; either that or an FBI agent – and pictured her dangling her big feet over the arm of the
mopane
easy chair, reading
The Catcher in the Rye
under the dull, staring gaze of the kongoni head in Ratchiss' living room. She wasn't here tonight, and she wasn't going to be present – ever again – for any nighttime activities of any kind. He was determined that she was going to have a normal life – or as normal a life as you can have living under an assumed name in a museum of African memorabilia in an A–frame in the hind end of nowhere. She was going to go to school, learn about the Visigoths and prime numbers, go to dances, acquire a new squadron of evil friends, experiment with pot and booze, become passionate about affectless bands, debate meat–eaters, rebel and recant, have her nose ring reinserted and drive a convertible at a hundred and ten. In five years – four and a half, actually – she could even have her identity back.