A Friend of the Earth (36 page)

It was past four in the afternoon when he woke. He thought of Andrea briefly, and of Sierra. They'd be worried, and in Andrea's case angry – he could hear her voice already,
You idiot, you jackass, what are you thinking? Enough, Ty. Enough already. Let it go
. The voice was in his head, the argument as familiar as any litany, but he was unmoved. He drifted off
into the woods, chewing the cold stub of a bean burrito and swilling from a plastic bottle of water. When he was finished with breakfast, he made his ablutions in a stream, relieved himself (properly, with every thought and care to contamination and the stream's drainage), and spent the rest of the daylight hours in a bed of pine boughs, watching the sky.

For long stretches, he thought nothing, but then he was thinking of Chris Mattingly, and the article he'd written about the Tierwaters' venture into aboriginal life. It had made the cover of
Outside
magazine, and it put them on the map, that was for sure. After that, practically every publication in the country, from
People
to the
New York Times
to the
Enquirer
, wanted to know what he and Andrea thought about the rain forest, the holes in the ozone layer, the decline of frogs worldwide, what it felt like to live naked and make love in a hut. The article had run to twelve pages, with photos, and each line added another layer to the myth till the canonization was complete: they were the saints of the Movement, and forget the Fox, forget Abbey and Leopold and Brower and all the rest. Tierwater must have read it twenty times, lingering over the photos as he lay in his bunk in prison, remembering the texture of the rock, the smell of the night air and the taste of water fed on alpine snow. And the cover photo – he could see it now – of him and Andrea from the waist up, their faces reddened and smudged, the sun–bleached ends of her hair blowing across her face, both of them healthy still and sleek, looking like naked rock stars on the cover of
Rolling Stone
. It was a charge. But what, he wondered, would Chris Mattingly think of this, of what was going to come down tonight? Would that be a saintly thing? Would that be worthy of the cover?

He drifted off, and then darkness came, attached to a fine drizzle, and he sat in the car to get out of the wet, listening to the radio and letting his mind go numb. It was too early yet to get down to business – he'd wait till twelve at least, maybe later. He tried to sleep – it was going to be a long night, and a longer day, because he was driving straight through the minute he was done, and he would be sitting right there in the living room in front of the TV when Jimmy Chavez, his parole officer, came round to ask him if he'd heard anything about what had gone down in Oregon last night.

At quarter past twelve, he put the car in gear and followed a snaking series of back roads to Grants Pass. It was nothing to find addresses for Judge Harold P. Duermer and Sheriff Robert R. Hicks – they were both listed in the phone book – and he already knew where the police station
was. He drove by the judge's house twice, then parked round the corner, on a street so dark it was like the inside of a cave. The drizzle had turned to a persistent shower by this time, and when he came up the judge's long macadam drive, it shone like a dark river in the light of the gas lamp over the garage door. There was no sound at all, but for the hum of a transformer on the telephone pole overhead: no crickets, no frogs, not the hoot of an owl or the soft
shoosh
of a passing car. Tierwater stuck to the shadows and reconnoitered.

The judge lived well, in a big colonial–style place that stood on the crest of a hill, surrounded by lawns and flowerbeds, and with a swimming pool and clay tennis court out back, and Tierwater didn't begrudge him that. The man was a tool of the machine – why wouldn't he live well? All he had to do was toss a bunch of protestors in the slammer, break up families and terrorize little girls, and somehow, with the good grace of the timber company, convert all that ponderous legal activity into something tangible, the yacht in the harbor, the white Mercedes 500SL, the condo in Aspen and a good month here and there in Cancún or Saint–Moritz, maybe a shopping spree in the Big Apple for Mrs. Justice Duermer herself.

No lights on in the house, no dogs, sleeping or otherwise. Tierwater tried the door at the back of the garage, barely a creak of the hinges, and then he was inside. The pinkish glow of the flashlight revealed three cars, and what was this – a Lexus? Two Lexuses – Lexi – one silver, one black, his and hers. And some sort of sportscar, an old Jaguar, it looked like, big wire wheels, running boards – lovingly, as they say, restored. Imagine that – imagine Judge Duermer, robeless, a porkpie cap pulled down over his fat brow, wedged into the puny leather seat of the roadster, Sunday afternoon,
roaaaaarrrrrr
, hi, judge, and a safe sweet taste of the bohemian life to you too. But Tierwater wasn't there to imagine things, and it took him less than five minutes to locate the cars' crankcases, lovingly tap a few ounces of silicon carbide into each and close the hoods with a click as soft as the beat of a moth's wing.

There were lights on at the police station, some poor drone – Sheets, maybe it was Sheets – putting in his time by the telephone, waiting for the call from the old woman who'd lost her glasses or maybe the one with the raccoon in her kitchen. The town stood still. The rain fell. Tierwater could see his breath steaming in front of his face. He couldn't get at the hoods of the two cruisers parked out front of the place, but they hadn't thought to put locking caps on the gas tanks. It hurt him to have to settle
for slashing the tires, jamming the locks with slivers of wood and pouring diatomaceous earth into the gas tanks, but there wasn't much more he could do, short of firebombing the station itself, and he didn't want to alert anybody to what was going down here, especially not Sheriff Bob Hicks. Because Sheriff Bob Hicks (wife, Estelle), of 17 Spruce Lane, was next on the list.

This was where things got tricky. Sheriff Bob Hicks lived outside of town, on a country road fringed with blackly glistening weeds and long–legged shrubs, no other house in sight, rainwater gurgling in the ditches and no place to pull over – at least no place where the car wouldn't be seen if anyone passed by. It was getting late too – quarter past four by Tierwater's watch – and who knew what hour people around here got up to let the cat out, pour a cup of coffee and stare dreaming into the smoke of their first cigarette? Tierwater found the mailbox set out on the road, number 17, the house dark beyond it, and drove on by, looking for a turnout so he could double back, do what he had to do and head back to the bosom of his family. But the road wasn't cooperating. It seemed to get progressively narrower. And darker. And the rain was coming down harder now, raking the headlights in sheets so dense he could barely see the surface of the road.

For a minute he thought about giving it up – just getting out of there and back to the interstate before he got the car stuck in a ditch or wound up getting shot at or thrown in jail. What he was doing wasn't honorable, he knew that, and it wasn't stopping the logging or helping the cause in even the most marginal way – Andrea was right: he should let it go. But he couldn't. What they'd done to him – the sheriff, the judge, Boehringer and Butts (and he'd like to pay them a visit too, but life was short and you couldn't settle every score) – was no different from what Johnny Taradash had done. Or tried to do. Just thinking about it made the blood come up in him: a year in jail, a year listening to Bill Driscoll moan in his sleep, a year torn out of his life like a chapter from a book. And for what? For
what?
When he saw a driveway emerge from the vegetation up on his left, he jerked the wheel and spun the car around, and so what if he took some stupid hick's mailbox with him?

The rain was blinding, absolutely, and where was the damn house anyway? Was that it up there? No. Just another bank of trees. He swiped at the moisture on the inside of the window with an impatient hand, fumbled with the defroster. And then he came around a bend in the road and saw a sight that shrank him right down to nothing: there was Sheriff
Bob Hicks' mailbox, all right, illuminated in the thin stream of the headlights, but a long, flat, lucent object had been coughed up out of the night beside it. It might have been a low–slung billboard, a cutout, the fixed reflective side of a shed or trailer, but it wasn't: it was a police cruiser. Sheriff Bob Hicks' police cruiser. And Sheriff Bob Hicks, a long–jawed, white–faced apparition in a floppy hat, was frozen there at the wheel, as if in an overexposed photo.

Tierwater's first impulse was to slam on the brakes, but he resisted it: to stop was to invite disaster. Windshield wipers clapping, defroster roaring, tires spewing cascades of their own, the rental car crept innocuously past the driveway, Tierwater shrinking from the headlights that lit up the front seat like a stage – and would the sheriff be able to see the slashes of greasepaint beneath his eyes, the watchcap clinging to his scalp? Would he recognize him? Was he looking? Did he wear glasses? Were they fogged up? And what was the man doing up at this hour, anyway? Had he gotten a call from the station,
Better get on down here, Chief, some asshole's gone and slashed the tires on two of the squad cars
, was that it?

Sheriff Bob Hicks could have turned either way on that road – he could have backed up the driveway and gone back to bed, for that matter – but he turned right, the headlights of the patrol car shooting off into the night and then swinging round to appear in Tierwater's rearview mirror. Heart in mouth, Tierwater snatched off the watchcap, cranked the window enough to wet it and used the rough acrylic weave to scrub the greasepaint from his face. He was doing, what, thirty, thirty–five miles an hour? Was that too fast? Too slow? Weren't you supposed to drive according to the conditions? The rain crashed down; the headlights closed on him.

For an instant, he thought of running – of flooring it and losing the bastard – but he dismissed the idea as soon as it came into his head. He didn't even know what kind of car he was driving – the cheapest compact, some Japanese piece of crap that wouldn't have outrun an old lady on a bicycle – and besides, nothing had happened yet. There was no reason to think he'd be pulled over. He just had to stay calm, that was all. But here were the headlights looming up in his mirror and then settling in behind him, moving along at the same excruciatingly slow pace that he was. His hands gripped the wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet. He tried to project innocence through the set of his shoulders, the back of his head, his ears. He sped up ever so slightly.

The worst thing was Andrea. Or no, Sierra. How was he going to
explain this to her? Out of jail a week and a half, and back behind bars already? He hadn't even attended a parent/teacher conference yet. And Chris Mattingly and all the rest of them – what were they going to think? He could see the headlines already, ECO–HERO TARNISHED; E.F.! TIRE–SLASHER; TIERWATER A PETTY VANDAL. Then he had a vision of Lompoc, Judge Duermer, Fred: this time it wouldn't be prison camp. Oh, no: this time it would be a cell on a cellblock, gangs, rape, intimidation, level two at least, maybe worse. Violation of parole, in possession of burglary tools, breaking and entering, destruction of private and public property, use of an alias in the commission of a crime –

But then a miracle happened. Slowly, with all the prudence and slow, safe, peace–officerly care in the world, Sheriff Bob Hicks swung the cruiser out to the left and for the smallest fraction of a moment pulled up even with Tierwater before easing in ahead of him. Through two rain–scrawled side windows and the intermediary space of the rain–thick night, Tierwater caught a glimpse of the man himself, the incurious eyes and pale bloated face that was like something unearthed from the ground, the quickest exchange of hazy early–morning looks, and then the sheriff was a pair of taillights receding in the gloom.

The first one to show up, aside from the county sheriff and the coroner, is a lawyer, and if that isn't emblematic of what we've become, then I don't know what is. He's about the size you think of when you think of regular, with a pillbox of kinky hair set up high against a receding hairline, teeth that look as if they've been filed and a pair of five–hundred–dollar fake–grain vinyl shoes so encrusted with mud he's had to remove them and stand there on the doorstep in his muddy socks. His suit is soaked through. His tie is twisted up under his collar like a hangman's noose. And his briefcase – his briefcase is just a crude clay sculpture, with a long trailing fringe of pondweed. In the confusion of that house, in the shock, horror and trauma following in the wake of Mac's death, there's nobody to answer the door, and while the sheriff and his men are prowling around upstairs and the coroner's people zipping up the body bags, I'm the one who responds to the ‘Chariots of Love' theme and swings open the door on the eighteenth repetition of that unforgettable melody. ‘Good afternoon,' he says, as if we're standing in the hallway at the county courthouse, ‘I'm Randy Bowgler, of Bowgler and Asburger? I represent Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Pulchris. May I come in?'

Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose: that'd be Mac's third wife, the real–estate heiress, the one with eyes like two cold planets glittering in the night.

I'm looking out over the hill in front of the house, the ambulance and police cruiser stuck up to their frames in the muck of the receding river and the media vans beginning to gather on the horizon like the vanished herds of old. It must be a hundred and fifteen degrees out there. ‘I don't think so,' I say.

‘I'm here to protect my client's interests, Mr., ah – I didn't catch your name?'

‘I already gave at the office,' I tell him.