A Friend of the Earth (41 page)

Sierra had the right idea. She refused to drive. Refused even to get her learner's permit. The bus is good enough for me, she said. And boys. Boys'll always take me where I want to go. They're lined up out there, Dad, twenty deep. Boys. Yeah, he said, sure, and he winked, because he wouldn't rise to the bait. But you tell them your heart belongs to Daddy.

That was when – yesterday? A week ago? He was thinking about that, his rage dissipating, the Jeep rolling forward – the whole line moving now, the car at the head of the train lurching into motion, and then the next in line, and the next, motion communicated through hands and feet and gas pedals in an unbroken chain – until he was staring bewildered into the brake lights of the car ahead of him and hitting his own brakes, hard. At the very instant everyone had lurched forward, a boxy little foreign car shot into the gap that opened between the first and second vehicles, and suddenly, all along the line, twenty drivers – the old, the suspect, the drunk, the suffering – were slamming on their brakes in succession. Before he could think – before he could even squeeze his eyes shut or clench his teeth – Tierwater was jerked forward in his seat and wrung back again, as the car behind him rode up his bumper, crumpled the rear end of the Jeep and drove him helplessly into the next car up the line.

He'd never understood what whiplash was until that moment, muscle fibers fraying, the back of his neck and shoulders stinging as if he'd been slammed with a board, blindsided, knocked down for the count, but it didn't prevent him from leaping out of the car to confront the jackass who'd hit him. What was wrong with these people? How could they live like this? Didn't they realize there was a natural world out there?

The smog was like mustard gas, burning in his lungs. There was trash everywhere, scattered up and down the off–ramp like the leavings of a bombed–out civilization, cans, bottles, fast–food wrappers, yellowing diapers and rusting shopping carts, oil filters, Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts. The grass was dead, the oleanders were buried in dust. A lone eucalyptus, twelve thousand miles removed from the continent where it had evolved, presided over the scene like an advertisement for blight. There were shouts in the distance, curses, the screaming, uncontainable blast of one car's horn after another, and sirens, the ubiquitous sirens, playing a thin dirge over it all.

Tierwater wrenched open the door of the car behind him, no need for rationality here, some threshold crossed and crossed again, Andrea, Teo,
the shithole that was the human world, and he was capable of anything. Here, here in this ratcheting, stinking, crumpled hulk of steel, was the face of his enemy, an enemy as specific and unequivocal as Johnny Taradash, and he had his left hand on the door handle and his right balled into a fist, all the horns in the world shrieking … and then he saw that face and stopped.

She was an Asian girl, seventeen, eighteen, no older than Sierra, with eyes like the bottom of a well and three bright tributaries sectioning her face into a delta of blood, and though he hated everybody and everything, though he had an acetylene torch and a tank of oxygen and a sack of silicon carbide in the back of the Jeep, he reached into the wrecked car, pulled her out and held her in his arms till the ambulance came.

What did that mean to him? Nothing, nothing at all. Sure, there were individuals out there, human beings worthy of compassion, sacrifice, love, but that didn't absolve them of collective guilt. There were too many people in the world, six billion already and more coming, endless people, people like locusts, and nothing would survive their onslaught. It took Tierwater less than a week – the rear end of the Jeep hammered roughly back into shape, his neck immobilized in an antiseptic white brace that would have glowed like a light bulb if he hadn't blackened it with shoe polish – and he was back in action. First, though, he'd had to sit through a dinner with Teo, Andrea and three other E.F.! honchos, at which they discussed things like the electorate, Congress, letter–writing campaigns and ways to attract more green–friendly donors. Teo was wearing a four–hundred–dollar suit.
Teo. Liverhead.
Sitting there like he'd already been nominated for state senator. Plates of Phat Thai, ginger shrimp and glass noodles circulated round the table. Nobody said a word about the earth.

Tierwater excused himself before the dessert came – ‘My neck's killing me,' he said, giving Andrea a pathetic look, ‘Teo'll drop you off, won't you, Teo?' – and before the hour was out he was parking in a quiet cul–de–sac in a development less than a mile from where General Electric (or the DWP or whoever, it was all the same to him) was rearranging the earth in the name of progress. That was when he got out the shoe–blacking and his watchcap and all the rest. In hindsight, he shouldn't have acted alone. Always work in pairs, that was the monkeywrencher's first rule, because a lookout was absolutely essential, especially if you were wearing welder's goggles and you couldn't move your neck more than half an inch in either direction, let alone look over your shoulder. But he
was done with the law now – he'd paid his dues and then some – and he was eager to get back into the game, to act, to do something meaningful. And he was fed up too, terminally fed up, with Andrea and Teo and the rest of the do–nothings. So he took a chance. Who could blame him?

It was just after eleven when he left the car, a few lights on in the houses still, but nobody out and nothing moving, not even the odd dog or cat. He slipped noiselessly down the street, ready to duck into the bushes if a car should happen by – it would be difficult to explain the way he was dressed and just what his mission was, and even if he
was
able to explain himself he could expect little sympathy from the concerned homeowner, who no doubt applauded General Electric and its mission to bring more electricity to the Valley in order to create yet more homes and, by extension, concerned homeowners. He saw himself sitting at a kitchen table trying to explain island biogeography, extinction and ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere to a yuppie homeowner with a never–used .38 Special pointed at his neck brace. No, anybody who caught even the most cursory glimpse of him would mistake him for a burglar, and the passing cop, if cops came out this far, would take one look at him and start shooting.

He skirted a house with its porch light burning, then made his way through the one lot left vacant in the whole creeping five–hundred–home development and on into the chaparral behind it. Here he could breathe. Here were the smells of sage and sun–baked dirt strewn with the chaff and seeds of the plants that sprang from it, desert fives and desert deaths. He sat on a slab of sandstone to draw the heavy black socks on over his boots and saw the San Fernando Valley spread out below him like a dark pit into which all the stars in the universe had been poured. Each fight out there, each of those infinite dots of light, marked a house or business, and what would his father think? What would Sy Tierwater, the developer, the builder of tract homes and shopping centers, think about all this spread out beneath him? This was the fruit of ten thousand Tierwaters, a hundred thousand, the city built out beyond any reason or limit. Would he say enough is enough – or would he applaud all those intrepid builders, say a prayer of thanksgiving for all those roofs erected over all those aspiring heads? An owl hooted emphatically, as if in answer, and then Tierwater detected the sound of its wings and lifted his head painfully to watch the dark form beat across a moonless sky.

The answer was self–evident: Sy Tierwater would have loved all this, and hated what his son was about to do.

The night was shrunk down to nothing, the stars glowing feebly through a shroud of smog, the yellow bowl of light pollution halving the sky at his back. He came down off the ridge behind the development and into the moonscape of the construction site on muffled feet, every step sure, not so much as a kicked stone or snapped branch to give him away. He wasn't reckless. He knew what jail was and he wasn't going back, that was for sure, and he knew what Andrea's wrath meant, and her love and attachment too. There could be no slip–ups tonight. The very fact of his being here would outrage her, if she knew about it – and by now, he supposed, she did. He was risking everything, he knew that. But then, what was one marriage, one daughter, one suburban life compared with the fate of the earth?

Sometimes, hiking the trails, dreaming, the breeze in his face and the chaparral burnished with the sun, he wished some avenger would come down and wipe them all out, all those seething masses out there with their Hondas and their kitchen sets and throw rugs and doilies and VCRs. A comet would hit. The plague, mutated beyond all recognition, would come back to scour the land. Fire and ice. The final solution. And in all these scenarios, Ty Tierwater would miraculously survive – and his wife and daughter and a few others who respected the earth – and they would build the new uncivilized civilization on the ashes of the old. No more progress. No more products. Just life.

He turned first to the heavy equipment – the earth movers, a crane, a pair of dump trucks. It was nothing, the routine he'd gone through a dozen times and more: locate the crankcase, fill it to the neck with grit and move on to the next diesel–stinking hulk. He'd waited for the dark of the moon so he could work without fear of detection, and though the shapes were indistinct, he was blessed with excellent night vision, and yes, he took his multiple vitamins every morning and a beta–carotene supplement too. The usual night sounds blossomed around him, the distant hum of the freeways, crickets and peepers, a pair of coyotes announcing some furtive triumph. He felt relaxed. He felt good.

This was the point at which he should have called it a job well done and gone home to bed. But he didn't. He wanted to do something big, make a grand statement that would pique interest out there in the dens and kitchens of the Valley, generate news clippings and wow the hardcore Earth Forever! cadre, the ones who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty. In his backpack was the acetylene torch and an oxygen bottle made of aluminum. This was a heavy–duty torch, the sort of thing that could
cut through steel like a magic wand, just wave it at the blade arms of a bulldozer or a section of railroad track and it would do the trick in less than a minute. Tierwater had been instructed in the use of the thing by an Oregon E.F.!er by the name of Teddy Scruggs, a twenty–five–year–old welder with a lazy eye, bad skin and long trailing hair that generated enough grease to lubricate machinery – no more idiocy like the dance around the cement bags in the Siskiyou, not for Tierwater. He was a professional now, a veteran, and he prided himself on that.

The power company had sheared off the top of a hill here and run a dead zone back into the mountains as far as you could see. And they'd erected a chain of steel towers, bound together by high–tension wires, marching one after another on up the hill into the blue yonder – and soon to reach down on the near side into the Valley itself. He'd given some thought to waiting till the project was complete and the power up and running, but bringing down those towers when they were carrying God knew how many megavolts of electricity was just too risky. Not that he meant to cut all the way through the supports – no, he would merely weaken them, slice neatly through the steel right at the base, where it plunged into the concrete footings. Then he'd go home and wait for the wind to blow – as it would tomorrow, according to the newspaper, Santa Anas gusting up to fifty miles per hour in the mountains and passes. Just about the time they'd be wondering what was wrong with the trucks, the towers would come thundering down, each yoked to the other, bang–bang–bang, like a chain of dominoes.

And what was that going to accomplish? He could hear Andrea already, and Teo – though Teo would have to give him his grudging admiration. Oh, yes, and the rest of the armchair radicals too. Because the answer was: plenty. Because all it took was public awareness – if they only knew what that electricity ultimately cost them, if they only knew they were tightening the noose round their own throats, day by day, kilowatt hour by kilowatt hour, then they'd rise up as one and put an end to it. And to make sure that they did know, to make sure they understood just what the environmental movement was all about, Tierwater had drafted a ten–page letter to the
Los Angeles Times
, on a used typewriter he'd bought for cash at a junk shop in Bakersfield and discarded in a Dumpster in Santa Monica, and that letter was his testament, his manifesto, a call to arms for every wondering and disaffected soul out there. He'd signed it, after much deliberation,
The California Phantom.

It was a good plan. But the problem with the torch, aside from the
obvious disadvantage of its awkwardness and the weight of the tanks, was visibility. On a dismal black smog–shrouded night like this, you'd be hard–pressed to find anything much brighter than an oxy–fuel torch, except maybe one of those flares they used to shoot off over the trip wire in Vietnam so they could count how many teeth each of the Viet Cong had before blowing them away in a hail of M-16 fire. Tierwater considered that – he even thought about waiting till dawn, when the big light in the sky would efface the glare of the torch – but he went ahead with it anyway. There was nobody out here, and if he waited till dawn he ran the risk of running into an overeager GE employee or some suburban dog–walker with a photographic memory for license–plate numbers. He bent for the pack, hefted it and ambled up the grade to where the first of the towers stood skeletal against the night.

The stanchions were thicker than he'd supposed. No problem, though – he was ready for anything; hell, he could have taken the George Washington Bridge down if he'd had enough time and enough fuel and oxygen. He did feel a twinge in the back of his neck as he bent to attach his hoses and the oxygen regulator – the brace shoved at his chin and held his head up awkwardly, as if he were about to lay it out flat on the chopping block or into the slit of the guillotine. But the torch took away his pain. He flipped down his goggles, turned up the flame and began to slice through high–grade Korean steel as if he were omnipotent.