A Friend of the Earth (24 page)

As for Teo, there was never any question of his participating in anything like this, not for real, not anymore – he was Earth Forever!'s poster boy now, the big fund–raiser, and he couldn't afford to get caught in a covert action. He could chain himself to nuclear reactors and tree–sit and preach and publish all he wanted to, but his tire–slashing days were over. ‘Really, Ty,' he said, working the corkscrew with the sun flattening his face and the butt of the wine bottle clenched between his thighs, ‘you understand why I can't risk any extracurricular activities anymore, don't you?' The cork slid from the bottle with a wet oozing pop of release. ‘But I envy you, I do.'

And Andrea. She'd paid her fine, like Teo, and gotten off with probation for the Siskiyou incident – she hadn't assaulted anybody. And who knew it was her in that turd–brown car? Or at least that's what Teo was thinking. Maybe they'd let her back in, maybe Fred could
do something … ‘About the kidnapping. Or abduction, or whatever. The Sierra thing.'

Tierwater watched her. She'd tugged the brim of the baseball cap down to keep the sun out of her face and it immobilized her hair as she sliced cheese and portioned out the wine. She didn't say anything, but Tierwater could read the look on her face. Second thoughts. She was having second thoughts.

‘Look,' he said, ‘there's no reason I can't do this myself. How hard can it be? In fact, I insist. I know the drill. I know the trail out of here better than either of you.' Andrea looked up. The brim of the cap threw a shadow over her face. ‘Right, hon?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I don't feel right about it.' That was what she said, and she might even have meant it, or thought she meant it, but she was already looking for a way out of the whole mess, whether she realized it or not. ‘You sure you want to do this by yourself, Ty?'

She'd asked him twice. Once over the wine and duck sausage, and then when she bent to kiss him just before she and Teo packed up and left.

‘It's all right,' he told her. ‘Hey, the Fox always worked by himself, didn't he?'

But now it was dark, and he was alone, and something was splashing in the creek. When he'd fallen asleep, it was on a scoured pan of granite just above the high–water mark, in a place where the spring floods had scooped out a hollow in the rock, and he lay there as if in the palm of a sculpted hand, the water continuously butting up against it and rushing by with the white noise of infinity. A minute passed, and then another. Whatever it was that had wakened him was gone now. He listened for a minute more to be sure, then pushed himself up and flung the pack over his shoulder. Before he knew it, he was weaving through the debris of the clear–cut, his footsteps muffled by the sweatsocks stretched over his boots, a gibbous moon showing him the way with a light as pale and cold as the ambient light of a dream.

(And what was I carrying in that pack? The tools of my new trade. Pipe wrench, socket wrenches, gloves, wire cutters, hacksaw, flashlight, plastic tubing and plastic funnel, a couple of granola bars, bota bag, sheath knife, matches. I was equipped to wreak havoc, no excuses, no regrets. The least of those machines was worth fifty thousand dollars, and I was prepared to destroy every working part I could locate – but subtly, subtly, so they'd see nothing amiss and run their stinking diesel engines till they choked and seized. I only wished I could be there to see it happen, see the
looks on their faces, see the trees I'd saved standing tall while the big yellow machines spat and belched and ground to an ignominious and oh–so–expensive halt.)

Tierwater scouted the place twice – no one and nothing moved; the silence was absolute – and then he slipped on the black cotton gloves and began servicing the machinery. He hit the shovel loader first, unscrewing the filler cap on the manifold as Andrea had showed him, neatly inserting the plastic tubing and then pouring cup after cup of sand (or decomposed granite, actually) into the funnel. It sifted down and into the innards of the engine with a soft gratifying swish, and it was that sound, the sound of sand in a plastic tube, that he would forever identify with nightwork – and revenge.

He went to each of the vehicles in succession, working not only on the engines but on all the lubrication fittings he could find, and when he was done with the heavy machinery, he turned his hand to the two trucks. Tinkering, tapping, murmuring directions to himself under his breath, he lost all sense of time. When finally he thought to check his watch, he was amazed to see it was past three in the morning. He had to get going, had to get out of there and head down the moonlit trail that would take him back home to the safety and anonymity of his bed, and already he could see ahead to the next day, a late–afternoon drink at the bar, his ears attuned to the buzz of drunken conversation ebbing and flowing around him. Sabotage? What do you mean, sabotage? Where? When? You're kidding. Now, who would do a thing like that?

The night breathed in, breathed out. He stood there looking up into the nullity of the sky, and for a long moment he didn't move at all. What was he feeling? Satisfaction, yes, the special charge that comes of knowing you've done your best, the true sweet exhaustion of a job well done, but something more – anger. He was angry still. This was nothing, the smallest pinprick in the web of progress, the death of a few machines – maybe, if he was lucky, of a logging company. But what about the trees? What about all those artificial pulpwood trees in the Penny Pines Plantation an hour down the road? They were there still, weren't they, and until they were gone, eliminated, erased from the face of the mountain, there was no forest here. No forest at all.

He found himself walking. Not down the path, not toward the cabin and Andrea and his bed, but toward the place where the planted pines ran on as far as the eye could see. The air was cool – temperature in the low sixties, or fifties even – but he was sweating as he walked, and even as he
sweated he stepped up the pace. Fifty minutes later he was in the middle of the plantation, down on his knees in the dry, yielding, friable dirt, and in his hands, the matches. There was the sudden sizzle of the struck match, the bloom of light as he touched it to one of the random heaps of shorn branches, and then the quick fingers of flame racing through the desiccated needles. He watched it take, watched the first tree explode in violent color against the black of the night, and even as he ran, even as he fought down the pain in his knee and the screaming of his lungs, the world at his back was transfigured, lit so spontaneously and so brightly it was as if the sun had come up early.

Andrea murmured something, a snippet of dream dialogue, and rolled over. The windows were infused with the green light of seven–thirty in the morning, and when Tierwater lifted the covers and slid in beside her, the tranquil hot familiar odor of the nesting animal rose to envelop him, the smell of his wife's body, her beautiful naked slumbering body, rich in all its properties and functions. He nuzzled at her ear and worked an arm underneath her so he could cup her breasts in both hands. He was excited. Burning up with it. She murmured again, moved her buttocks against him in a sleepy, precoital wriggle. ‘You're back,' she said. ‘I am,' he whispered, and felt her nipples harden. He was thinking of Jane and Sherry and half a dozen other girls and women he'd known, and then she turned to face him, to kiss him, and he was thinking of her, nobody but her.

Afterward, they lay side by side and stared up into the rafters as the house began to stir beneath them. There was the sound of a flushing toilet, then the wheeze of the refrigerator door and the low hum of Sierra's tape deck as the muted throb of gloom and doom filtered up through the floorboards. Voices. Sierra's, Teo's. The swat of the screen door, and then Ratchiss' ‘What ho!' and Teo's whispered response.

‘You smell like smoke,' Andrea said.

‘Me?' Tierwater knew he'd gone too far, knew they'd suspect arson once the machines went down, and he'd heard the first of the planes rumbling in to attack the fire even as he legged it on up the trail home. The lookout at Saddle Peak or the Needles must have been up early, because the helicopters were in the sky before he'd had a chance to catch his breath, and within the hour the drone of the bombers saturated the air and he looked up to see three of them scraping overhead with their wings aglow and their bellies full of fire retardant.

She was up on one elbow now, watching him. ‘You didn't start a campfire out there last night, did you? Because that would be stupid, really stupid – ‘

‘Are you kidding? It went great, every minute of it. I was like the Phantom and the Fox rolled into one, so efficient it was scary. It was a rush, it was.'

He could feel her eyes on the side of his face, the eyes that brooked no bullshit and reduced every complexity to the basics. She was sniffing – first the air, and now him – hovering over him, her breasts soft on his chest, ruffling his hair, sniffing. ‘I don't know,' she said, ‘but you smell like you spent the night in the chimney.'

‘Maybe that's it,' he lied – ‘I started a fire when I came in, just to take the chill off the morning.'

That seemed to satisfy her, at least for the moment – until she heard the bombers for herself, that is, and walked down to the mailbox and smelled the smoke on the air and saw the Forest Service buses rolling down the highway crammed to the windows with the impassive dark–faced immigrants they hired at minimum wage to beat back the flames bush by bush and yard by yard. Then she'd know. And Teo would know, and Ratchiss. He could hear them already –
Are you crazy? Right in our own backyard? You think these people are stupid? You want to jeopardize everybody and everything – the whole organization, for Christ's sake – just because you're out of control? Huh? What's your problem?

Suddenly he was exhausted. He'd been up all night, hiked nine miles each way, destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of heavy equipment. His knee ached, and his upper back, which he must have strained somehow – probably fighting one fitting or another. He was no mechanic.

‘You want to get some rest?' Andrea said, and already she was in motion, the bed pitching like a rubber raft in deep water, a lingering glimpse of her nude body, and then she was shrugging into T–shirt, panties and shorts.

‘Yeah, that would be nice,' he said, ‘but you never answered my question.'

‘What question?'

‘About you and Teo. All those nights on the road, Connecticut, New Jersey, wherever. You slept with him, didn't you?'

‘What does it matter? It was before I even met you.'

‘You did, didn't you?'

Somewhere, far overhead, there was the thin drone of an airplane. The wind must have shifted, at least temporarily, because he could smell the smoke now too, as if the air had been perfumed with it. ‘I'm not going to lie to you, Ty – we're both grownups, aren't we? You want to know the answer? Did I sleep with him?'

He closed his eyes. He'd never been so tired in his life. ‘No,' he said. ‘No, forget it.'

Mac has always made a big deal of the holidays – glitter, he just loves it, cookies in the oven, blinking lights, fa–la–la–la–la, that sort of thing – and this year is no exception. So what if conditions are a little extreme? So what if we live on what amounts to an island and can't get out to the supermarket, hospital, sushi bar or feedlot? So what if the basement is full of shitting, snarling, pissed–off and dislocated animals? Let's decorate, that's his thinking. Two years ago he brought in a crew of fifty to string lights in parallel strips up and down the walls of the house so the whole place looked like a gift box on a hill (or, more accurately, a huge electric toaster as seen from the inside out), something like twenty thousand bulbs burning up electricity nobody has and nobody can afford, and he wasn't even here. Last year a crew nearly as big showed up on the first of December, but the winds were so intense the workers kept getting blown off their ladders and out of their cherry pickers, while the lights they did manage to string just slapped against the side of the house till there was nothing left but a long chain of empty sockets chattering in the breeze. Mac wasn't here then either. He's here now, though, here with a vengeance, and if we can't have Christmas outside because of the unremitting meteorological cataclysm that seems to be lashing away day and night at everything that isn't buried ten feet underground, then we're going to have it inside.

Which to my mind is purely asinine. What's to celebrate, that's what I want to know? That we had a forty–eight–hour respite from the rain last week? That April Wind has started her Sierra–the–martyr book with me as the chief and captive source? That Lily seems to have adjusted to her new surroundings as if she'd been born between paneled walls and that the rock–hard pendulous corpses of cattle, pigs and turkeys look to tide us over right on through the next millennium? Piss poor, that's what I say. The end is nigh. What fools these mortals be.

We're wearing masks still, all of us, though we might as well be on a
coral atoll for all the contact we've had with the outside world, and when I'm not disinterring the past with April Wind or watching Andrea cozy up to Mac, I try to stay busy with the animals. Chuy and I are doing a creditable job of feeding them, I think, but feeding isn't the problem. Captive breeding, and that's been our biggest goal here, right from the start, is nothing less than impossible under conditions like these. We have no real access to the animals – it's just too risky to try to tiptoe up to a reinforced wooden door and surprise any creature that isn't deaf, blind and comatose. And forget the cleaning, it's just too dangerous, particularly with Lily, Petunia and the lions – and you'd be surprised how cantankerous and subversive even a warthog can be. Open the door of the bowling alley, and you hear nothing, not so much as a snort or whimper; half a heartbeat later you've got two angry pairs of tusks swiping at your gonads. Someday, in the dry season, if it ever comes, Mac will have to rip up the carpets, tear out the pissed–over paneling and burn it, that's all. And then we can start again, with new pens and new animals – or some new breeding stock, at least.