by T. C. Boyle
It’s ten miles in, and they’ve given themselves three and a half hours at a good brisk clip, no stops for rest or scholarly dissertations on dendrology or Strigidae calls, their caps pulled down tight, individual water rations riding their backs in bota bags as fat and supple as overfed babies. They’re carrying plastic buckets, one apiece, the indestructible kind that come with five gallons of paint at Dunn–Edwards or Colortone. The buckets are empty, light as nothing, but tedious all the same, rubbing against their shins and slapping at the outside of his bad knee just over the indentation where the arthroscrope went in, scuffing and squeaking in a fabricated, not–made–for–this–earth kind of way. But there’s no talking, not anymore, not once they reach the eight–mile mark, conveniently indicated by a tiny Day–Glo E.F.! sticker affixed to the black wall of a doomed Douglas fir – a tree that took root here five hundred years before Columbus brought the technological monster to a sunny little island in the Caribbean.
But Tierwater wouldn’t want to preach. He’d just want to explain what happened that night, how it stuck in him like a barbed hook, like a bullet lodged too close to the bone to remove, and how it was the beginning, the real beginning, of everything to come.
All right.
It’s still dark when they arrive, four–fifteen by his watch, and the concrete – all thirty bags of it – is there waiting for them, not ten feet off the road. Andrea is the one who locates it, with the aid of the softly glowing red cap of her flashlight – watchman or no, it would be crazy to go shining lights out here, and the red, she explains, doesn’t kill your night vision like the full glare of the white. Silently, they haul the concrete up the road – all of them, even Sierra, though sixty pounds of dead weight is a real load for her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad,’ she says when he asks if she’s okay – or whispers, actually, whispers didactically – ’because if Burmese peasants or coolies or whatever that hardly weigh more than I do can carry hundred–and–twenty–pound sacks of rice from dawn to dusk for something like thirty–two cents a day, then I can lift this.’
He wants to say something to relieve the tension no one but him seems to be feeling, something about the Burmese, but they’re as alien to him as the headhunters of the Rajang Valley – don’t some of them make thirty–six cents a day, the lucky ones? – and the best he can do is mutter ‘Be my guest’ into the sleeve of his black sweatshirt. Then he’s bending for the next bag, snatching it to his chest and rising out of his crouch like a weightlifter. The odd grunt comes to him out of the dark, and the thin whine of the first appreciative mosquitoes.
In addition to the concrete, there are two shovels and a pickax secreted in the bushes. Without a word, he takes up the pick, and once he gets his hands wrapped round that length of tempered oak, once he begins raising it above his head and slamming it down into the yielding flesh of the road, he feels better. The fact that the concrete and the tools were here in the first place is something to cheer about – they have allies in this, confederates, grunts and foot soldiers – and he lets the knowledge of that soothe him, his shoulders working, breath coming in ragged gasps. The night compresses. The pick lifts and drops. He could be anywhere, digging a petunia bed, a root cellar, a grave, and he’s beginning to think he’s having an out–of–body experience when Andrea takes hold of his rising arm. ‘That’s enough, Ty,’ she whispers.
Then it’s the shovels. He and Teo take turns clearing the loose dirt from the trench and heaving it into the bushes, and before long they have an excavation eighteen inches deep, two feet wide and twelve feet across, a neat black line spanning the narrowest stretch of the road in the roseate glow of Andrea’s flashlight. It may not be much of a road by most standards, but still it’s been surveyed, dozed, cleared and tamped flat, and it brings the machines to the trees. There’s no question about it – the trucks have to be stopped, the line has to be drawn. Here. Right here. Our local friends have chosen well, he thinks, leaning on the shovel and gazing up into the night, where two dark fortresses of rock, discernible now only as the absence of stars, crowd in over the road: block it here and there’s no way around.
They’re tired, all of them. Beat, exhausted, zombified. Though they dozed away the afternoon at the Rest Ye May Motel and fueled themselves with sugar–dipped doughnuts and reheated diner coffee, the hike, the unaccustomed labor and the lateness of the hour are beginning to take their toll. Andrea and Teo are off in the bushes, bickering over something in short, sharp explosions of breath that hit the air like body blows. Sierra, who has an opinion on everything, is uncharacteristically silent, a shadow perched on a rock at the side of the road – she may want to save the world, but not at this hour. He can hardly blame her. He’s sapped too, feeling it in his hamstrings, his shoulders, his tender knee, and when he tries to focus on anything other than the stars, random spots and blotches float across his field of vision like paramecia frolicking under the lens of a microscope. But they’re not done yet. Now it’s the water. And again, their comrades–in–arms have chosen well. Shut your eyes and listen. That’s right. That sound he’s been hearing isn’t the white noise of traffic on a freeway or the hiss of a stylus clogged with lint – it’s water, the muted gargle of a stream passing into a conduit not fifty feet up the road. This is what the buckets are for – to carry the water to the trench and moisten the concrete. They’re almost home.
But not quite. There seems to be some confusion about the concrete, the proportion of water to mix in, and have any of them – even he, son of a builder and thirty–nine years on this earth – ever actually worked with concrete? Have any of them built a wall, smoothed out a walk, set bricks? Teo once watched a pair of Mexican laborers construct a deck round the family pool, but he was a kid then and it was a long time ago. He thinks they just dumped the bags into a hand–cranked mixer and added water from the hose. Did they need a mixer, was that the problem? Andrea thinks she can recall setting fenceposts with her father on their ranch in Montana, and Tierwater has a vague recollection of watching his own father set charges of dynamite on one of his job sites, stones flung up in the air and bang and bang again, but as far as concrete is concerned, he’s drawing a blank. I think we just dump the bags in the trench, level it out and add water to the desired consistency,’ he concludes with all the authority of a man who flunked chemistry twice.
Andrea is dubious. ‘Sounds like a recipe for cake batter.’
Teo: ‘What consistency, though? This is quick–set stuff, sure, but if we get it too runny it’s never going to set up in two hours, and that’s all we’ve got.’
A sigh of exasperation from Sierra. I can’t believe you guys – I mean, three adults, and we come all the way out here, with all this planning and all, and nobody knows what they’re doing? No wonder my generation is going to wind up inheriting a desert.’ He can hear the plaintive, plangent sound of her bony hands executing mosquitoes. ‘Plus, I’m tired. Really like monster–tired. I want to go home to bed.’
He’s giving it some thought. How hard could it be? The people who do this for a living – laying concrete, that is – could hardly be confused with geniuses. ‘What does it say on the package? Are there any directions?’
‘Close one eye,’ Andrea warns, ‘because that way you don’t lose all your night vision, just in case, I mean, if anybody –’ and then she flicks on the flashlight. The world suddenly explodes in light, and it’s a new world, dun–colored and circumscribed, sacks of concrete like overstuffed brown pillows, the pipestems of their legs, the blackened sneakers. He’s inadvertently closed his good eye, the one that sees up close, and he has to go binocular – and risk a perilous moment of night–blindness – to read what it says on the bag.
King Kon–Crete, it reads, over the picture of a cartoon ape in sunglasses strutting around a wheelbarrow, Premium Concrete. Mix Entire Bag with Water to Desired Consistency. Keep Away from Children.
‘Back to consistency again,’ Teo says, shuffling his feet round the bag, and that’s all that can
be seen of him, his feet – his diminutive feet, feet no bigger than Sierra’s – in the cone of light descending from Andrea’s hand. Tierwater can picture him, though, squat and muscular, his upper body honed from pumping iron and driving his longboard through the surf, his face delicate, his wrists and ankles tapered like a girl’s. He’s so small and pumped he could be a special breed, a kind of human terrier, fearless, indefatigable, tenacious, and with a bark like – But enough. They need him here. They need him to say, ‘Shit, let’s just dump the stuff and get it over with.’
And so they do. They slit the bags and let the dependable force of gravity empty them. They haul the water in a thickening miasma of mosquitoes, swatting, cursing, unceremoniously upending the buckets atop the dry concrete. And then they mix and slice and chivy till the trench is uniformly filled with something like cold lava, and the hour is finally at hand. ‘Ready, everybody?’ Tierwater whispers. ‘Teo on the outside, Andrea next to Teo – and, Sierra, you get in between me and Andrea, okay?’
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ This is Andrea, exhausted, but reclaiming the initiative.
He looks round him in the dark, a wasted gesture. ‘No, what?’
A slight lilt to the tone, an edge of satisfaction. She’s done her homework, she’s seen the movie, memorized the poem, got in touch with her inner self. She has the information, and he doesn’t. ‘The essential final step, the issue you’ve been avoiding all week except when you accused me of forgetting it – them, I mean?’
Then it hits him. ‘The diapers?’
Eighteen per package, at $16.99. They’ve had to invest in three different sizes – small, medium and large, for Sierra, Andrea and Teo, and himself, respectively – though Andrea assures him they’ll use them up during the next direct action, whenever and wherever that may be. Either that, or give them away to volunteers. They’re called, comfortingly enough, Depends, and on her advice they’ve chosen the Fitted Briefs for Extra Absorbency. He can’t help thinking about that for just the smallest slice of a moment – Extra Absorbency — and about what it is the diapers are meant to absorb.
There’s a moment of silence there in the dark, the naked woods crepitating round them, the alertest of the birds already calling out for dawn, when they’re all communally involved in a very private act. The sound of zippers, the hopping on one foot, arms jerked out for balance, and then they’re diapered and the jeans rise back up their legs to grab at their bellies and buttocks. He hasn’t worn diapers – or pads, as the professionals euphemistically call them so as not to offend the Alzheimer’s patients and other walking disasters who have to be swathed in them day and night – since he was an infant, and he doesn’t remember much of that. He remembers Sierra, though, mewling and gurgling, kicking her shit–besmeared legs in the air, as he bent to the task on those rare occasions when Jane, the perfect mother, was either absent or unconscious. They feel – not so bad, not yet anyway. Like underwear, like briefs, only thicker.
And now, finally, the time has come to compete the ritual and settle down to slap mosquitoes, slumber fitfully and await the first astonished Freddies (Forest Service types) and heavy–machine operators. They join hands for balance, sink their cheap tennis sneakers into the wet concrete as deep as they’ll go and then ease themselves down on the tapered bottoms of their upended buckets. He will be miserable. His head will droop, his back will scream. He will bait mosquitoes and crap in his pants. But it’s nothing. The smallest thing, the sacrifice of one night in bed with a book or narcotized in front of the tube – that, and a few hours of physical discomfort. And as he settles in, the concrete gripping his ankles like a dark set of jaws, the stars receding into the skullcap of the silvering sky and every bird alive in every tree, he tells himself, Somebody’s got to do it.
He must have dozed. He did doze – or sleep, would be more accurate. He slumped over his knees, put his head to rest and drifted into unconsciousness, because there was no sense in doing anything else, no matter his dreads and fears – nothing was going to happen till seven–thirty or eight at the earliest, and he put all that out of his mind and orchestrated his dreams to revolve around a man in bed, a man like him, thin as grass but big across the shoulders, with no gut or rear end to speak of and the first tentative fingers of hair loss massaging his skull, a man in an air–conditioned room in blissful deep non–REM sleep with something like Respighi’s ‘The Birds’ playing softly in the background.
And what does he wake to? Is it the coughing wheeze of a poorly tuned pickup beating along the road, the single mocking laugh of a raven, the low–threshold tocsin of his daughter’s voice, soft and supple and caught deep in her throat, saying, ‘Uh … Dad. Dad, wake up?’ Whatever it is, it jerks him up off the narrow stool of the bucket in one explosive motion, like a diver surging up out of the deepest pool, and he tries to lift his feet, to leap, to run, to escape the hammering in his chest. But his feet are locked in place. And his body, his upper body, is suddenly floundering forward without support, even as the image of the burnt–orange pickup with its grinning bumper and the swept–back mask of the glassed–in cab comes hurtling down the road toward him, toward them … but the knee joint isn’t designed to give in that direction, and even in the moment of crisis —Jesus Christ, the shithead’s going to hit us! — he lurches back and sits heavily and ignominiously on the bucket that even now is squirting out from under him. ‘Stop,’ he roars, ‘stop!,’ against a background of shrieks and protests, and somehow he’s on his feet again and reaching out to his left, for his daughter, to pull her to him and cradle her against the moment of impact … which, mercifully, never comes.
He wouldn’t want to talk about the diapers, not in this context. He’d want to address the issue of the three intensely bearded, red–suspendered timber people wedged into the cab of that pickup, that scorching–orange Toyota 4x4 that comes to rest in a demon–driven cloud of dust no more than ten feet from them. And the looks on their faces – their seven–thirty–in–the–a.m. faces, Egg McMuffins still warm in their bellies, searing coffee sloshed in their laps, the bills of their caps askew and their eyes crawling across their faces like slugs. This is the look of pure, otherworldly astonishment. (Don’t blame these men – or not yet, anyway. They didn’t expect us to be there – they didn’t expect anything, other than maybe a tardy coyote or a suicidal ground squirrel – and suddenly there we were, like some manifestation of the divine, like the lame made to walk and the blind to see.)
‘Oh, God,’ Andrea murmurs, and it’s as if the air has been squeezed out of her lungs, and they’re all standing now, erect and trembling and holding hands for lack of anything better to do. Tierwater cuts a swift glance from the stalled pickup to the face of his daughter. It’s a tiny little dollop of a face, shrunken and drawn in on itself, the face of the little girl awake with the terror of the night and the scratchy voice and the need for reason and comprehension and the whispered assurance that the world into which she’s awakened is the ancient one, the imperturbable one, the one that will go on twisting round its axis whether we’re here to spin it or not. That face paralyzes him. What are they thinking? What are they doing?
‘Christ Jesus, what is goin’ on here?’ comes the voice of the pickup, the unanimous voice, concentrated in the form of the pony–tailed and ginger–bearded head poking through the open window of the wide–swinging driver’s–side door. ‘You people lost or what?’ A moment later, the rest of the speaker emerges, workboots, rolled–up jeans, a flannel shirt in some bleached–out shade of tartan plaid. His face is like an electric skillet. Like a fuse in the moment of burning out. ‘What in Christ’s name is wrong with you? I almost – you know, I could of – ‘ He’s trembling too, his hands so shaky he has to bury them in his pockets.
Tierwater has to remind himself that this man – thirty–five, flat dead alcoholic eyes, the annealed imprint of a scar like a brand stamped into the flange of his nose – is not the enemy. He’s just earning his paycheck, felling and loadin
g and producing so many board feet a year so middle–class Americans can exercise their God–given right to panel their family rooms and cobble together redwood picnic tables from incomprehensible sets of plans. He’s never heard of Arne Naess or Deep Ecology or the mycorrhizal fungi that cling to the roots of old growth trees and make the forest possible. Rush Limbaugh wrote his bible, and the exegesis of it too. He has a T–shirt in a drawer at home that depicts a spotted owl in a frying pan. He knows incontrovertibly and with a kind of unconquerable serenity that all members of the Sierra Club are ‘Green Niggers’ and that Earth Forever! is a front for Bolshevik terrorists with homosexual tendencies. But he’s not the enemy. His bosses are.
‘We’re not letting you through,’ Teo announces, and there he is, a plug of muscle hammered into the ground, anchoring the far end of the human chain. All he needs is a slab of liver.
The other two have squeezed out of the truck by now, work–hardened men, incongruously bellied, looks of utter stupefaction on their faces. They just stare.
‘What are you,’ the first man wants to know, the driver, the one in faded tartan, ‘environmentalists or something?’ He’s seen housewives, ministers, schoolchildren, drug addicts, drunks, ex–cons, jockeys, ballplayers, maybe even sexual deviates, but you can tell by the faltering interrogatory lift of the question that he’s never in his life been face to face with the devil before.
‘That’s right,’ Tierwater says, radicalized already, gone from suburban drudge to outside agitator in eight months’ time, ‘and you ought to be one too, if you want to keep your job beyond next year or even next month.’ He glances up at the palisade of the trees, needles stitched together like a quilt, the sun stalking through crowns and snags in its slow progress across the sky, and then he’s confronting those blunted eyes again. And this is the strange part: he’s not in bed dreaming, but actually standing in the middle of a concrete trench in a road in the middle of nowhere, wearing diapers and giving a speech – at seven–thirty in the morning, no less.