A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘What are you going to cut when all the trees are gone? You think your bosses care about that? You think the junk–bond kings and the rest of the suits in New York give the slightest damn about you or your children or the mills or the trees or anything else?’

  ‘Or retirement,’ Teo puts in. ‘What about retirement? Huh? I can’t hear you. Talk to me. Talk to me, man, come on: talk to me.’

  He isn’t one for debate, this man, or consorting with environmentalists either. For a long moment he just stands there staring at them – at Tierwater, at Sierra, Andrea, Teo, at their linked hands and the alien strip of concrete holding them fast at the ankles. ‘Piss on you,’ he says finally, and in a concerted move he and his companions roll back into the pickup and the engine fires up with a roar. A screech of tires and fanbelt, and then he’s reversing gears, jerking round and charging back down the road in the direction he came from. They’re left with dust. With the mosquitoes. And the sun, which has just begun to slash through the trees and make its first radiant impression on their faces and hands and the flat black cotton and polyester that clothe them.

  ‘I’m hungry. I’m tired. I want to go home.’

  His daughter is propped up on her bucket, limp as an invertebrate, and she’s trying to be brave, trying to be an adult, trying to prove she’s as capable of manning the barricades as anybody, but it isn’t working. The sun is already hot, though it’s just past ten by Tierwater’s watch, and they’ve long since shed their sweatshirts. They’ve kept the caps on, for protection against the sun, and they’ve referred to their water bags and consumed the sandwiches Andrea so providentially brought along, and what they’re doing now is waiting. Waiting for the confrontation, the climax, the reporters and TV cameras, the sheriff and his deputies. Tierwater can picture the jail cell, cool shadows playing off the walls, the sound of a flushing toilet, a cot to stretch out on. They’ll have just long enough to close their eyes, no fears, no problems, events leaping on ahead of them – bailed out before the afternoon is over, the E.F.! lawyers on alert, everything in place. Everything but the sheriff, that is. What could be keeping him?

  ‘How much longer, Andrea? Really. Because I want to know, and don’t try to patronize me either.’

  He wants to say, It’s all right, baby, it’ll be over soon, but he’s not much good at comforting people, even his own daughter – Bear up, that’s his philosophy. Tough it out. Think of the Mohawk, whose captives had to laugh in the face of the knife, applaud their own systematic dismemberment, cry out in mirth as their skin came away in bloody tapering strips. He leaves it to Andrea, who coos encouragement in a voice that’s like a salve. Numbed, he watches her reach out to exchange Sierra’s vampire novel (which, under the circumstances, hasn’t proved lurid enough) for a book of crossword puzzles.

  Teo, at the opposite end of the line, is a model of stoicism. Hunched over the upended bucket like a man perched on the throne in the privacy of his own bathroom, his eyes roaming the trees for a glimpse of wildlife instead of scanning headlines in the paper, he’s utterly at home, unperturbed, perfectly willing to accept the role of martyr, if that’s what comes to him. Tierwater isn’t in his league, and he’d be the first to admit it. His feet itch, for one thing – a compelling, imperative itch that brings tears to his eyes – and the concrete, still imperceptibly hardening, has begun to chew at his ankles beneath the armor of his double socks and stiffened jeans. He has a full–blown headache too, the kind that starts behind the eyes and works its way through the cortex to the occipital lobe and back again in pulses as rhythmic and regular as waves beating against the shore. He has to urinate. Even worse, he can feel a bowel movement coming on.

  Another hour oozes by. He’s been trying to read – Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature — but his eyes are burning and the relentless march of dispirited rhetoric makes him suicidal. Or maybe homicidal. It’s hot. Very hot. Unseasonably hot. And though they’re all backpackers, all four of them, exposed regularly to the sun, this is something else altogether, this is like some kind of torture – like the sweat box in The Bridge on the River Kwai — and when he lifts the bota bag to his lips for the hundredth time, Andrea reminds him to conserve water. ‘The way it’s looking,’ she says, and here is the voice of experience, delivered with a certain grim satisfaction, ‘we could be here a long time yet.’

  And then, far off in the distance, a sound so attenuated they can’t be sure they’ve heard it. It’s the sound of an internal–combustion engine, a diesel, blat–blatting in the interstices between dips in the road. The noise grows louder, they can see the poisoned billows of black exhaust, and all at once a bulldozer heaves into view, scuffed yellow paint, treads like millwheels, a bulbous face of determination and outrage at the controls. The driver lumbers straight for them, as if he’s blind, the shovel lowered to reap the standing crop of them, to shear them off at the ankles like a row of dried–out cornstalks. Tierwater is on his feet suddenly, on his feet again, reaching out instinctively for his daughter’s hand, and ‘Dad,’ she’s saying, ‘does he know? Does he know we can’t move?’

  It’s the pickup truck all over again, only worse: the four of them shouting till the veins stand out in their necks, Andrea and Teo waving their arms over their heads, the sweat of fear and mortal tension prickling at their scalps and private places, and that’s exactly what the man on the Cat wants. He knows perfectly well what’s going on here – they all do by now, from the supervisors down to the surveying crews – and his object is intimidation, pure and simple. All those gleaming, pumping tons of steel in motion, the big tractor treads burning up the road and the noise of the thing, still coming at them at full–speed, and Tierwater can’t see the eyes of the lunatic at the controls – shades, he’s wearing mirror shades that give him an evil insectoid look, no mercy, no appeal— and suddenly he’s outraged, ready to kill: this is one sick game. At the last conceivable moment, a raw–knuckled hand jerks back a lever and the thing rears like a horse and swivels away from them with a kind of mechanized grace he wouldn’t have believed possible.

  But that’s only the first pass, and it carries the bulldozer into the wall of rock beside them with a concussive blast, sparks spewing from the blade, the shriek of one unyielding surface meeting another, and Tierwater can feel the crush of it in his feet, even as the shards of stone and dirt rain down on him. He’s no stranger to violence. His father purveyed it, his mother suffered it, his first wife died of it – the most casual violence in the world, in a place as wild as this. He’s new at pacifism or masochism or whatever you’d want to call what they’re suffering here, and if he could free his legs for just half a minute, he’d drag that tight–jawed executioner down off his perch and instruct him in the laws of the flesh, he would. But he can’t do a thing. He’s caught. Stuck fast in the glue of passive resistance, Saint Mahatma and Rosa Parks and James Meredith flashing through his mind in quick review. And he’s swearing to himself, Never again, never, even as the man with the stick and eight tons of screaming iron and steel swings round for the second pass, and then the third and the fourth.

  But that’s enough. That’s enough right there. Tyrone Tierwater wouldn’t want to remember what that did to his daughter or the look on her face or the sad sick feeling of his own impotence. The sheriff came, with two deputies, and he took his own sweet time about it. And what did he do when he finally did get there? Did he arrest the man on the Cat? Close down the whole operation and let the courts decide if it’s legal to bulldoze a dead zone through a federally designated roadless area? No. He handcuffed the four of them – even Sierra – and his deputies had a good laugh ripping the watchcaps off their heads, wadding them up and flinging them into the creek, and they caught a glimpse of the curtains parting on redneck heaven when they cut the straps of the bota bags and flung them after the hats. And then, for good measure, smirking all the while, these same deputies got a nice little frisson out of kicking the buckets out from under Tierwater and his wife and daughter and good fr
iend, one at a time, and then settling in to watch them wait three interminable hours in the sun for the men with the sledgehammers.

  Andrea cursed the deputies, and they cursed her back. Teo glared from the cave of his muscles. Tierwater was beside himself. He raged and bellowed and threatened them with everything from aggravated assault to monetary damages and prosecution for police brutality – at least until the sheriff, Sheriff Bob Hicks of Josephine County, produced a roll of duct tape and shut his mouth for him. And his daughter, his tough, right–thinking, long–haired, tree–hugging, animal–loving, vegetarian daughter – she folded herself up like an umbrella over the prison of her feet and cried. Thirteen years old, tired, scared, and she just let herself go. (They shuffled their workboots and looked shamefaced then, those standard–issue badge–polishers and the Forest Service officials who drove up in a green jeep to join them – they probably had daughters themselves, and sons and dogs and rabbits in a hutch – but there was nothing any of them could do about my little girl’s grief. Least of all me.)

  Grateful for a day’s reprieve, the Pacific salamanders curled up under the cover of their rocks, the martens retreated into the leaves and the spotted owls winked open an eye at the sound of that thin disconsolate wail of human distress. Tierwater’s hands were bound, his mouth taped. Every snuffle, every choked–back sob, was a spike driven into the back of his head.

  Yes. And here’s the irony, the kicker, the sad, deflating and piss–poor denouement. For all they went through that morning, for all the pain and boredom and humiliation, there wasn’t a single reporter on hand to bear witness, because Sheriff Bob Hicks had blocked the road at the highway and wouldn’t let anyone in – and so it was a joke, a big joke, the whole thing. He can remember sitting there frying like somebody’s meal with a face, no ozone layer left to protect them from the sun, no water, no hat and no shade and all the trees of the world under the ax, while he worked out the conundrum in his head: if a protest falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  Santa Ynez, November 2025

  It’s still raining when we wake up – or when I wake up, anyway. I’m awake before her, long before her, and why wouldn’t I be? I’m feeling historical here. Eggs and bacon, that’s how I’m feeling, but you don’t see much of those commodities any more (eggs maybe, but you can forget bacon) and there’s her purse on the table, big as the head of an elephant and stuffed with used Kleenex, debit slips, gum wrappers, keychains full of keys to doors in houses that no longer exist. I’m an archaeologist, that’s what I am, prising one potsherd after another out of the dung heap of my life. Andrea sleeps late. I knew that. I’ve lived with that. But for twenty–odd years until now, it didn’t operate, not in my sphere. We’ve had, let’s say, an interesting night, highly stimulating, drenched in nostalgia and heartbreak, a night that was finally, if briefly, sexual, and I’ve got no complaints on that score. I think I’m actually whistling as I dodge round the splootching cans and buckets in the living room/kitchen, preparatory to fixing something nice for her to eat when she gets around to it.

  How am I feeling? Moist. Moist in the tear ducts and gonads, swelled up like a lungfish that’s been buried in the sand through a long desiccated summer till the day the sky breaks apart and the world goes wet again. The smell of coffee is taking me back – I don’t drink it myself anymore, too expensive and it raises hell with my stomach – and I feel myself slipping so far into the past I’m in danger of disappearing without making a ripple. She’s snoring. I can hear it – no delicate insuck and outhale, but a real venting of the airways, a noise as true in its way as anything Lily could work up. The rain slaps its broad hand on the roof, something that wasn’t tied down by somebody somewhere hits the wall just above the window, the world shudders, Andrea sleeps. It’s a moment.

  Unfortunately, our idyll doesn’t last much longer than that moment, because, before I can think whether to serve her the tuna salad I’ve been storing in the food compressor the past three years for a special occasion or just to go ahead and open up that last can of crab because life doesn’t last forever, especially if you’re a crab, Chuy is at the door. He’s agitated. Dancing on his feet, working his jaws and lips and tongue and generally trying, without success, to communicate something to me. He’s hatless and slickerless, the hair glued to his scalp, his eyes so naked you can almost see through them to his Dursban–dusted brain. How old is he? He doesn’t know – doesn’t even remember what town he was born in, though the country, he’s pretty sure – almost ‘a hunerd and ten percent, or maybe a hunerd and twenty’ – was Guatemala. I’m not as good at judging people’s ages as I once was, because everybody looks young to me except the old–old, but I’d figure him for forty, forty–five. Anyway, he’s on my doorstep, and this is what he says, more or less: ‘Some people … some people, Mr. Ty – ‘

  ‘What people?’ I’m standing there at the open door, the sky like an inverted fishbowl, big propellers of wind chasing sticks, papers, leaves across the swamp of the yard, the immemorial coffee smell behind me, the heater, the bed, Andrea. Chuy might as well be standing under Niagara Falls. My slippers are wet. The fringe of my bathrobe. Everything is wet, always – molding and wet – books falling apart on the shelves, slugs climbing out of the teapot, the very chairs turning green under our hind ends and sprouting again. Exasperated, I take Chuy by the collar and drag him into the room. I’m not a patient man.

  ‘The, the people – ‘ A gesture, mostly spastic, in the direction of the condos.

  ‘The people at Lupine Hill?’

  ‘Ellos, sí, the ones sobre the hill, they, they – they encuentran Petunia. In the laundry.’

  Petunia is the Patagonian fox. She stands two and a half feet tall at the shoulder, thin red ribbons for legs, a black shag of bristling hair laid over her back like a rug. The laundry rooms, as I understand these things, are communal to every ten units at Lupine Hill. As for the Spanish, this is the language Chuy reverts to when the pesticide clogs up the pathways scored in his brain by the contortions of English.

  ‘She have, what do you call, some catch in her mouth. Maybe un gato. And maybe they shut the door. So we, we – ’

  ‘We need to get over there ASAP.’

  Streaming, grinning, flicking the hair out of his eyes: ‘Yes, Ess–A–Pee.’

  That’s the moment Andrea chooses to emerge from the back room, hair in her face, eyes vacant, legs bare to the follicles – and good legs, because legs are the last thing to go in a beautiful woman, hardly any cellulite and no varicosities to speak of. She’s wearing one of my shirts, I notice (black silk, fanciest thing I own, a gift from Mac, of course, because Tyrone Tierwater the animal man is strictly no frills), and there’s nothing underneath that but what she was born with. Or evolved into. I follow Chuy’s eyes to the black shirt and the place in front, down low, where she hasn’t bothered with the bottom two buttons. I can see her private hair, and it’s white, white as a winter ptarmigan (now extinct), and then we’re both staring at the glossy dyed black marvel of her head. I have to admit it: I’m embarrassed. And before I can think, I’m crossing the room and moving into her, fastening the buttons like a doting husband. Or maybe a lovesick dog – one with bad breath and the mange and a habit of getting whipped and liking it. ‘Andrea,’ I say, ‘Chuy. Chuy, Andrea.’

  Chuy is giving her a watery stare of amazement, as if she’s materialized out of one of the animal pens, and he’s looking hard at me too, reevaluating everything we’ve said and done together over the past decade in an entirely new light – the revivifying beers, meat cooked out in the open, animals dying on us in a welter of shit and blood, the bites, bruises and festering claw–wounds and the breakneck trips to the emergency room, Lori and her melting smile and love of high–end sake, the rare ‘95 Qupé Chardonnay out of Mac’s cellars the three of us would share on special occasions, Mac – Mac himself – all of it. And Andrea – she just gives him a bright–eyed look and says, ‘You staying
for breakfast?’

  I can see Chuy wrestling with the response to that one, and I’m right on the verge of answering for him, my George to his Lennie, when there comes a fearsome thumping at the door. Who is it? Delbert Sakapathian, of #1002B, Avenida Lupine Hill, Santa Ynez, California. He’s a big man with a cueball head, younger than the young–old, sixty maybe, and with the kind of gut you used to see a lot more of around the turn of the century, when junk food was a staple. Now people crave meat and fish and broccoli, sweet potatoes, chard, wheat germ, the things they can’t get the way they used to, and forget the Ho–Ho’s and Pop Tarts and Doritos Extra–Spicy Meat–Flavored Tortilla Chips – that crap they can’t give away. ‘You him?’ Delbert Sakapathian says, poking a finger the size of a souvenir bat in my face.

  I don’t have time for this sort of thing, I really don’t, but if it’ll get me Petunia back, I guess I’ll see if my secretarial staff can cancel one of my morning appointments and work Mr. Sakapathian in. I nod. ‘I’m him,’ I say.

  The doorframe isn’t big enough to contain him, besides which the rain isn’t doing much for my carpet, not to mention the reddish muck melting off his gum boots and the steady divestiture of water from his slicker (and there’s another business to invest in – Slickers, Inc., or maybe Slickers ‘R’ Us). ‘Well, goddamnit,’ he spits. ‘Goddamnit to hell.’

  And then a voice zeroes in over my shoulder, as accurate as a smart bomb. ‘Lighten up,’ Andrea says, and I know that tone, though it hasn’t been directed at me, not this time around, not yet anyway. ‘And shut the door, clod – you’re ruining the carpet.’

  The big streaming cueball ducks, chin to chest, and then Delbert Sakapathian is in the room, the door thundering shut behind him. He’s chastened, but not for long. ‘You got to get that thing, whatever it is, out of there, because it’s got my, my’ – and here a wave of emotion peaks in his eyes and I think he’s going to break down – ‘Pitty–Sing, my cat, and I think, I mean, by Christ you better, because, if anything happens to her, I’ll, I’ll – ’