A Friend of the Earth (27 page)

Three times I went by the road I wanted and three times had to cut U–turns in a soup of mud, rock and streaming water, until finally I found the turnout where we'd parked that afternoon. It had been compacted dirt then, dusty even, but now it was like an automotive tar pit, a glowing headlighted arena in which to race the engine and spin the tires till they stuck fast. I didn't care. Sierra was up there on top of the ridge before me, up there in the thrashing wind, scared and lonely and for all I knew dangling from some limb a hundred and eighty feet in the air and fighting for her life. I had five beers in me. I was her father. I was going to save her.

What was I wearing? Jeans, a sweater, an old pair of hiking boots, some kind of rain gear – I don't remember. What I do remember is the sound of the wind in the trees, a screech of rending wood, the long crashing fall of shattered branches, the deep–throated roar of the rain as it combed the ridge and made the whole natural world bow down before it. I was
ankle–deep in mud, fumbling with the switch of an uncooperative flashlight, inhaling rain and coughing it back up again, thinking of John Muir, the holy fool who was the proximate cause of all this. One foot followed the other and I climbed, not even sure if this was the right turnout or the right ridge – path? what path? – and I remembered Muir riding out a storm one night in the Sierras, thrashing to and fro in the highest branches of a tossing pine, just to see what it was like. He wasn't trying to save anything or anybody – he just wanted to seize the moment, to experience what no one had experienced, to shout his hosannas to the god of the wind and the rain and the mad whirling rush of the spinning earth. He had joy, he had connection, he had vision and mystical reach. What he didn't have was Black Cat malt liquor.

I spat to clear my throat, hunched my shoulders and hovered over the last can. I was halfway up the ridge at that point, sure that at any moment a dislodged branch would come crashing out of the sky and pin me to the ground like a toad, and when I threw back my head to drink, the rain beat at my clenched eyelids with a steady unceasing pressure. Three long swallows and my last comfort was gone. I crushed the can and stuffed it into the pocket of the rain slicker and went on, feeling my way, the feeble beam of the flashlight all but useless in the hovering black immensity of the night. I must have been out there for hours, reading the bark like Braille, and the sad thing is I never did find Sierra's tree. Or not that I know of. Three times that night I found myself at the foot of a redwood that might have been hers, the bark red–orange and friable in the glow of the flashlight, a slash of charred cambium that looked vaguely familiar, the base of the thing alone as wide around as the municipal wading pool in Peterskill where Sierra used to frolic with all the other four–year–olds while I sat in a row of benches with a squad of vigilant mothers and tried to read the paper with one eye. This was her tree, I told myself. It had to be.

‘Sierra!' I shouted, and the rain gave it back to me. ‘Sierra! Are you up there?'

I don't really remember what the past few Christmases were like. One year – it might have been last year or five years ago, for all I know – Chuy and I went up to Swenson's and had the catfish boat with gravy and stuffing on the side, and another time we sat in my living room and watched the buckets splootch while sharing one of the last twelve–ounce
cans of solid white albacore on earth. We ignored the expiration date and ate it with capers and pita bread and a bowl of fresh salsa Chuy whipped up, and I remember we washed it down with
sake
heated in a pan over the stove. And what was on the radio?
Ranchera
music and a trip–hop version of ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.' This year is different. This year it's Andrea and April Wind and Yuletide cheer chez Pulchris.

Christmas morning I'm awake and waiting for the dawn as usual, Andrea snoring lightly beside me, the concept of a good night's sleep as foreign to me now as jogging or biting into an apple sans forethought or even bending to tie my shoelaces without a whole string section of pain playing up and down my spine in a mad pizzicato. Sleep at my age comes like a blow to the back of the head, any time of day or night, and you'd better have a couch or an easy chair handy when you go down for the count (and don't even ask about the old–old – they're nothing more than zombies, staggering around on bird's bones with twenty or thirty years' accumulation of sleep deprivation bleeding out of their eye sockets). Anyway, the first thing I notice is that the rain has stopped. No rattling, no whooshing, no white noise like a lint screen inside your head, nothing but a profound early–Christmas silence, not a creature stirring, not even a Patagonian fox.

Up out of bed and into the clamminess, a pair of powder–blue boxer shorts climbing up my glabrous old man's legs and cradling the brindled spectacle of my old man's sexual equipment. Then the jeans, the plaid shirt and the rinsed–out jeans jacket, Grunge all the way, yes indeed. I'm thinking of Andrea's present – and I know she's expecting one, though every other breath out of her body for the past week has been a pro–forma denial (‘Oh, no, no, Ty, you don't have to bother, really') – wondering what totemic object to dig out of the water–logged mound of my possessions or to beg or borrow from Mac that would express what I'm feeling for her. Because what I'm feeling is gratitude, what I'm feeling is an affection so deep for this big–shouldered oblivious old lady in the bed at my feet that it's verging dangerously close to love, and beyond love, to forgiveness and even – dare I say it? – bliss. I'm in love all over again. I am. Standing there in the dark, the silence so profound it's beating in my veins with an unconquerable force, the force of life undenied and lived right on down to the last tooth in the last head, I'm almost sure of it. On the other hand, it could just be indigestion.

There's no newspaper, of course, what with the flooding, and since magazines are scarce because of the lack of stock – paper, that is – I retreat
to the lavatory with a mold–splotched copy of Muir's
The Mountains of California
. This is a big room, by the way, a room the size of the average condo, with a six–person Jacuzzi and a tiled shower stall with dual heads, recessed lighting and a built–in bench for comfort, and it smells of Andrea, of her perfume and powders and skin rejuvenator. The walls are painted to resemble the aluminum garage doors of old, in honor of garage bands everywhere, the detail true right on down to three–dimensional handles and glittering rust spots (the portrait of Eddie Vedder, all eyes and teeth, I've long since turned to the wall, so as to be able to conduct my business in peace). In any case, I stoop to the faucet for a drink, just to rinse the night–taste out of my mouth, and then settle in for a long pre–Christmas–dinner bout with my comatose digestive tract. Relaxing, or trying to, I flip back the page and read of fantastical forests:
The trees of the species stand more or less apart in groves, or in small, irregular groups, enabling one to find a way nearly everywhere, along sunny colonnades and through openings that have a smooth, park–like surface, strewn with brown needles and burs. Now you cross a wild garden, now a ferny, willowy stream …

I don't know how long I'm lost in those memorial forests – the better part of an hour, at least – moving on from the unconquered trees to the adventures of the water ouzel and the Douglas squirrel, not even the faintest stirring of a movement down below, when Andrea raps at the door. ‘Ty?' she calls. ‘You in there? I have to pee.'

‘Just a minute.' I lurch up off the seat with a jolt of pain in both hips and my left knee, hoist my pants, flush, and close the book on my index finger to mark the place.

‘Ty?'

‘Yeah?'

‘Merry Christmas.'

The phrase takes me by surprise, the novelty of it, and beyond that, the novelty of the situation. We didn't wish one another a merry Christmas in prison, and, as I say, Chuy and I have been on our own the last few years. Nobody has wished me anything in a long time, not even hate, despair or a lingering death. I'm moved. Moved almost to tears, as I'd been with the tinfoil angel in the hall. I'm halfway to the door, but then I remember to go back and wash up at the nearest of the four sinks, so I have to raise my voice to be heard through the solid plank of the door. ‘You too,' I call, my voice echoing in the tomblike vastness of the place. ‘Merry Christmas.'

Tierwater was feeling his age. He'd turned forty at the beginning of the month, an occasion memorialized by a discreet party out on the redwood deck. It was a small gathering, as it would necessarily have to be if FBI agents were to be excluded, consisting of his wife and daughter, Teo, Ratchiss and Mag (or Mug). Everyone, even Andrea, seemed to be in good spirits. They drank a California Viognier without worrying about the oak trees and other native species the vineyards had displaced, and as the evening turned chill, they disported themselves in the redwood hot tub without a murmur about the ancient giants felled for their momentary pleasure. Sierra – Sarah Drinkwater, that is, the cynosure of the junior high in Springville – went in to write an essay on ancient Mesopotamia after the birthday cake had been set ablaze, wished over, sliced up and divided, while the rest of the party lingered in the hot tub, global warming be damned, at least for the duration of the night. Mag, in a high energetic voice, volunteered the story of how he'd lost his face, with Ratchiss filling in the supporting details
(He creep on me, because I am profound inebriate with the strong savor of palm wine on my lips, and I am dreaming of the long rains and millet when he come and snap him jaw)
, Teo and Andrea hatched plans for her covert participation in a coordinated series of protests along the northern–California coast and Tierwater got so drunk he'd had to go off in the woods and commune with nature a while – it was either that or vomit in the recirculating waters of the hot tub.

Tonight, though, he was only mildly drunk – just drunk enough to take the sting off. He'd twisted his bad knee and nearly fractured an ankle stumbling into a hole while trying to outrun the beam of a watchman's flashlight up in Del Norte County two nights ago, and he was sitting in front of the fireplace, his leg propped up, judiciously anaesthetizing himself. The house was quiet. It had been quiet since the fire last summer, which had sent a ripple – no, a tidal wave – through all the West Coast
chapters of Earth Forever! Thirty–five thousand acres had burned, and spokespersons up and down the coast fell all over themselves denying any involvement – E.F.!ers might have marched in the street and shouted slogans like ‘Back to the Pleistocene!' but they strictly eschewed any illegal activity; it was only the disaffected fringe that sometimes, out of frustration and an overriding love of the earth, spiked a grove of ancient redwoods or blocked a culvert, but certainly the organization was there to protect the forests, not burn them down. And where did that leave Tierwater? Right where he wanted to be, on the unraveling edge of the disaffected fringe.

Teo, back safe in Tarzana, was especially vocal, deploring everybody and everything, even while the Tulare County Sheriffs Department expanded its investigation and Coast Lumber hired a pair of shuffling retirees from the local community to stand watch over the gleaming new Cats, wood–chippers, loaders and log trucks the insurance money had provided. (In their generosity, the insurers also provided a private investigator by the name of Declan Quinn, a shoulderless relic who sat permanently hunched over a pack of Camels at the Big Timber Bar and Mountain Top Lodge, chain–drinking Dewar's and water and asking endlessly in a cancerous rasp if anyone had seen ‘anything suspicious.') At the first whiff of smoke, Ratchiss had lit out for Malibu, and Andrea, though she stayed put and went through the motions of mothering and housewifery, devoted her every waking minute to roasting Tierwater for his lack of judgment, juvenility and criminal stupidity. Even Sierra weighed in. ‘It was really like mega–dumb, Dad,' she said one night over home–made manicotti and the steamed vegetables she kept pushing from one corner of the plate to another. ‘What if they catch you? What if you go to jail? What am I supposed to do then – change my name to Sarah
Dork
water or something?' The idyll was over. Definitely over.

And then it was his birthday, and both Teo and Ratchiss showed up. It was dusk, and they were out on the back deck, charring meat, when Teo ambled out of the woods in a pair of shorts and hiking boots. Ratchiss had arrived an hour earlier, the silver Land Cruiser packed to the ceiling with gifts and goodies, and he looked up from the grill and raised his gin and bitters in salute. ‘All hail,' he said. And then: ‘Methinks yond Teo has a lean and thirsty look. How about a drink, my friend?'

Teo dropped his backpack on the planks and accepted a glass of iced gin with a splash of vermouth. He was shirtless, though the evening had begun to take on a chill (there was still snow out there in the woods,
especially on the north–facing slopes), but then that was his pose: the insensible, the indefatigable, the iron man of the Movement. ‘It's been a while,' he said, ducking his head and taking Tierwater's hand, ‘but hey, happy birthday, man.' He nodded democratically at Mag, who stood behind the grill in a torpedoed freighter of smoke, basting the meat with his secret sauce, and then he was embracing Sierra and digging into his pack for the plain–wrapped gift he'd brought her. There were the usual exclamations – ‘You're as tall as me now' and ‘Let's get this girl a basketball scholarship!' – and then Andrea, who'd gone into the house for a sweater, stepped out onto the deck.

It was just a moment in a history of moments, but it bore watching. She was buttoning the sweater up the front, her hair swept forward, barefoot in a pair of jeans. ‘Teo,' she exclaimed, and Tierwater saw the anticipatory smile, the quickened stride, watched them embrace, the tall woman and the short man, and he knew the answer to his question as surely as he knew it would be dark in half an hour and the sky would spill over with stars: of course she'd had sex with him. Fucked him, that is. Of course she had. Any fool could see that from the way they moved around each other, the familiarity of one organism with the other, all those dark and secret places, the commingled breath and shared fluids and supercharged emotions. But so what? So what? That was before he'd even met her – so what if she'd fucked whole armies? Tierwater was no puritan. And he wasn't jealous. Not a bit.