A Friend of the Earth (40 page)

The peccaries are easy. They'd once been native to the Southwest in any case, and all I have to do is open three doors – the one in the bowling alley, two in the lower hall – and watch them snort off into the fading light until they're no more strange or unexpected than the dust and rocks and mesquite itself. And the Egyptian vultures – they're purely a pleasure. These are the birds, by the way, that used to be featured in the old nature
films, cream white with ratty black trailing feathers and hooked yellow beaks, the ones that would drop rocks on ostrich eggs in order to get through the tough outer tegument – when there were ostriches, that is. I hood them individually and make use of a leather gauntlet one of Mac's Saudi Arabian friends left behind years ago. Then we're out on the lawn – or where the lawn will be when the irrepressible landscape architect gets himself back in business.

The heat has died down into the eighties. Everything smells of life. The birds grip my arm and sit still as statues, and then, one by one, off come the hoods, and they lift into the air with a furious beating of their shabby wings. For a long while, we watch them climb into the sky, the night settling in behind them while a deep stippled cracked egg of a sunset glows luminously over the hills and the hint of a breeze finds its way in off the sea.

That leaves Petunia.

‘I can't do it,' I say. ‘I just can't.'

Andrea considers this as we stand there in the drive, the lights of the house glowing softly behind us. There is no sound, nothing, not the roar of an engine or the wail of a distant siren, and all at once a solitary cricket, incurable optimist, starts up with a creaking, teetering song all his own. She touches me then, her fingers gently stroking the sagging, tired flesh of my forearm and the raised reminder there of my thirty–two stitches and all the wounds I never knew I'd sustained.

She understands. Andrea, my wife of a thousand years ago, and my wife now. Her voice is soft. She says, ‘Why don't we take her with us?'

Tierwater came home shaken from his Oregon adventure, and for a good long while thereafter – nearly two years – he lived the life of a model citizen, exemplary father and devoted husband. Or at least he tried to. Tried hard. He didn't work, not at anything so ordinary or tedious as a job – the only thing he was qualified for was running antiquated shopping centers into the ground, and there wasn't much call for that in southern California, where all the maxi- and mini–malls seemed to have been built in the last ten minutes – and his father's money, the money Andrea and Teo had squeezed out of the stone that had been hanging round his neck all these years, was plenty enough to last for a good long time to come. So what he did was throw himself headlong into suburban life, though suburban life was the enemy of everything he hoped to achieve as an environmentalist, but never mind that: it was safe. And it provided a cocoon for Sierra. She was what mattered now, and what she needed was a regular father, a suntanned grinning uncomplicated burger–flipping dad greeting her at the door and puzzling over her geometry problems after dinner, not some incarcerated hero.

Still, for all that, the days seemed to go on forever. Andrea was at work, knocking down eighty–five thousand dollars a year as a member of E.F.!'s board of directors, and Sierra was at school, maneuvering her way out of the Goth crowd and into the inchoate grip of the makeupless neo–hippie vegan earth–saving contingent. So what did Tierwater do, apart from becoming an inveterate house husband, deviser of three–course meals and underassistant coach of Sierra's rec–league soccer team? He gardened. Or landscaped, actually.

The place was a rental, yes, but they had an option to buy, and Tierwater would have gone ahead with his planting, mulching, digging and trenching in any case – it was a compulsion, or it became one. The
house was a classic sprawling ranch dating from the late forties and sitting on a full acre in a decidedly upscale neighborhood. The problem was that all the plantings – pittosporum, wisteria, crepe myrtle, cycad, banks of impatiens, ivy geranium and vinca – were artificial, normative, wasteful of water and destructive of the environment. He tore them out. Tore out everything, reducing stem, branch and bole to fragments in a roaring wood–chipper, and began replanting with natives. In the back of the house he planted sycamore, walnut and valley oak, and on the west–facing slope beyond that he put in ceanothus, redshanks, Catalina cherry and big stabbing swaths of yucca. He was equally decisive with the pool. He couldn't live with it – it was as simple as that. There it was, artificially shimmering in the sun, devouring electricity, chemicals, water piped all the way down from the Sacramento and Colorado Rivers. It was obscene, that's what it was. And before the first two months of his tenure were out, and despite Andrea's objections, he'd fired the pool man, drained off the top three feet of water and tossed rocks and dirt and debris into the basin until he'd created a marsh where waterfowl could frolic side by side with the red–legged frog and the common toad.

The next–door neighbor – Roger something or other; Tierwater never did catch the man's surname – questioned the wisdom of this. Roger was an investment broker, and he wore long–sleeved pinstriped shirts even while pruning his roses or overwatering his lawn with a snaking green garden hose. ‘It'll breed mosquitoes,' he opined one afternoon, thrusting the stalk of his neck over the redwood fence that separated their yards.

Tierwater had already stocked the pond with mosquito fish
(Gambusia affinis holbrooki)
, but he didn't tell Roger that. ‘Better than suburban drones,' he said.

The front lawn came up in strips, and where unquenchable grass had been, he created a xeroscape of native plants, and, like any good and true denizen of suburbia, told the cavilers among his neighbors to go fuck themselves. He felt good. Self–righteous. He was doing his part to restore at least a small swath of the ecosystem, even if nobody else was doing theirs. And if they all converted, if they all pitched in, all his Mercedes–driving, bargain–obsessed neighbors, then everything would be fine – if they had the further good sense to go out back to their mulch piles, bury their designer–clad torsos in leaves and grass clippings and shoot themselves in the back of the head, that is.

All right, maybe he was something of a crank – he'd be the first to admit it. But at least he stayed out of trouble, which pleased Andrea and
his parole officer, and, he liked to think, Sierra too. But one day, all the trees had been planted – and the bushes and the succulents and cacti – and the frogs cried lustily from the reconverted swimming pool, and Tierwater found himself craving more, craving action. It was an addiction, exactly that: once you'd identified the enemy, once you'd struck in the night and felt the magnetic effect of it, you were hooked. The passive business was fine, restoring an ecosystem, digging up a lawn, handing out flyers and attending rallies, but there was nothing like action, covert, direct, devastating: block enough culverts, destroy enough Cats, squeeze enough blood out of the corporate sons of bitches, and they'd back off. That was Tierwater's thinking, anyway. He'd just about served out his parole, and his daughter was growing up fast, seventeen years old, a senior in high school and already talking about UC Santa Cruz, the cheerful sylvan campus of which he and Andrea had dutifully visited with her during spring break. Two years was a long time to play
Father Knows Best.
And he was sick to death of it.

Of course, there was Andrea to consider. She might have been happy to show him the tricks of the ecoteur's trade at one time, but things were different now. She had a position to maintain – and so did he. And it did nobody any good if he was in jail. He remembered an evening somewhere toward the end of his two–year stint as house husband and suburban drone, when for the first time in a long while he broached the subject of nightwork. It was after dinner and they were lingering over a glass of wine. Sierra was in her room, on the phone, nouveau folkies harmonizing through her speakers like a gentle fall of rain on a still lake. Outside, beyond the window screens, the red–legged frogs were working up a good communal croak to celebrate the setting of the sun. ‘No,' Andrea said, ‘it's too risky.'

She was responding to a comment Tierwater had just made about the local electric company and its plans – ‘plans already in the implementation stage, for Christ's sake, bulldozers, backhoes, habitat loss, you name it' – to bring a new power grid in over the Santa Susana Mountains at the opposite end of the Valley. ‘It's nothing,' Tierwater countered, running a finger round the rim of his wineglass. ‘I've been up there hiking every afternoon for the past week – did you know that? – and it's nothing. Like what you said about the Siskiyou thing – a piece of cake. But truly. In fact. No guards, no night watchmen, no nothing. They're just whacking away at everything, just another job, guys in hardhats who never heard from ecology and think a monkey wrench is something you tighten bolts with.'

‘Uh–uh, Ty,' she said, and there were those ridges of annoyance climbing her forehead right on up into her hairline. She swept her hair back and cocked her head to stare him in the face. ‘No more guerrilla tactics. We can't afford it. Every time some eco–nut blows something up or spikes a grove of trees, we lose points with the public, not to mention the legislature. Seventy–three percent of California voters say they're for the environment. All we need to do is to get them to vote – and we are. We're succeeding. We don't need violence anymore – I don't know if we ever did.'

Tierwater said nothing. Eco–nut. Is that what he was now? A loose cannon, an embarrassment to the cause? Well, he was the one who'd done the time here, while she and Teo and all the rest of them held hands and skipped through the fields – and made money, don't forget that. Sure. And what was environmentalism but just another career? He lifted the glass to his lips and let the wine play on his palate. It smelled like mineral springs and fruit fat with the sun, but he took no pleasure in it because the smell was artificial and the grapes that gave up their juice for it had been dusted with sulfur and Christ knew what other sorts of chemicals. Oak trees had fallen to make that wine. Habitat had been gobbled up. Nothing lived in a vineyard, not even nematodes.

‘I'm not saying we don't need direct action – especially against people like the Axxam Corporation and the mining companies and all the rest. But it's got to be peaceable – and legal.' The light of the setting sun glowed pinkly off the plaster walls, kitchen fixtures and hanging plants, and it fixed Andrea in her chair as if in a scene of domestic tranquillity –
Seated Woman with Wineglass
– which was what this was. So far. ‘We did a great thing up there in the Sierras, Ty, and everybody's tuned in now, you know that. Tuned in to us, to you and me. I'll say it again – we can't afford to slip up.'

‘I'm not going to slip up.'

She came right back at him: ‘I know you're not.'

He didn't like her tone, heavy with the freight of implication: he wasn't going to slip up because he wasn't going to do anything much more than flap his mouth and wave his hands, that's what she was saying. And further, if he did dare to fish out the watchcap and the greasepaint and bolt–cutters, there would be no more domestic tranquillity, not in this house, and not with this wife. ‘Listen to yourself,' he said. ‘You sound like some sort of corporate whore. Is that what this is all about – rising to the top of the food chain? Politics? A fat paycheck? Is that what it is?'

She tipped back her head and drained her glass. When she set it down, the base of the glass hitting the tabletop with a force just this side of shattering, he saw how angry she was. ‘I was out there on the front lines when I was twenty–three years old – where were you?'

‘How many species you think were lost when we were running around bare–assed in the mountains? Tell me that,' he said, ignoring the question. ‘How many did we save in those thirty days? And how many roads were built, how many trees came down? Worldwide. Not just in California and Oregon, but worldwide.' Tierwater's hand went for the bottle. The wine might have been poison for the environment, but it sang in his head. ‘And while we're on the subject of numbers, how many guys did you fuck while I was in Lompoc?'

It all stopped right there, dead in its tracks.

‘Huh?' he demanded, and he felt low, felt like a toad, a criminal, a homewrecker. ‘I don't hear you? How many? Or was it just Teo?'

She was on her feet now, and so was he. The look she gave him had no reserve of love in it, not the smallest portion. She was beyond exasperation, beyond contempt even. If she'd been a dog – or a hyena or a Patagonian fox – she'd have snarled. As it was, she just jerked her head to take the hair out of her face, turned her back and stalked out of the picture.

And Tierwater? He hit the wall so hard with the bottle he could feel the jolt of it all the way down to the base of his spine. He stood there a minute, the neck of the bottle sprouting from his hand like a bouquet of hard green flowers, and then he went out to the garage to look for the watchcap.

He didn't get far. Not that night. There was a problem on the freeway, shoulder work, a police chase, chemical spill, furniture in lane two, some maniac blocking an on–ramp with his pickup truck and threatening suicide – take your pick. When wasn't there a problem on the freeway? Tierwater sat there, stalled in traffic, fuming. There were cars as far as he could see in either direction, cars hemmed in by apartments and condos, restaurants, parking lots and auto malls, each of them pumping its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere each year, every year, forever. The radio played talk and scandal. A baseball game. Oldies. He listened to the oldies and felt nothing but old. The traffic crept forward like an army converging on some distant objective and he crept with it, cursing his fellow drivers, squeezing the Jeep over one foot at a time until he reached
the nearest off–ramp, which just happened to be blocked, along with the surface streets it fed.