A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  When he woke again, he checked his watch, and his watch told him it was morning. There was no confusion about where he was, none of the dislocation he’d experienced a hundred times in pup tents and motel rooms or on the unforgiving couch at a friend’s house – he woke to full consciousness and saw everything in the room as if it were an oil painting he’d spent the whole night composing. Central to the composition was Deputy Sheets, seated, thin cloth pressed to narrow shanks, skull thrown back against the wall behind him, mouth agape. Long shadows. Early light. Deputy Sheets was asleep. Stationed by the door, it’s true, but lost in the wilderness of dreams.

  Stealthily, Tierwater slipped the IV from his arm. His thoughts, at this juncture, were uncomplicated. He was getting out of here, that’s all he knew, vacating this place, sidestepping the emaciated arm of the law and making his way to his daughter, his wife, the outraged and militant cadre of E.F! lawyers who would make everything right. And the reporters too – don’t forget them. They had to hear about this, about the desecration of the forest, the complicity of the sheriff and the brutality of Boehringer and Butts, and he did want to preach, yes, he did – preach, proclaim and testify. His feet were on the floor, the papery hospital gown rustling at his shoulders. And where were his clothes – his wallet, his keys, his belt? They took those things away from you in jail, that much he knew, but were they as scrupulous at the hospital?

  Across the room to the closet. Nothing there. The bathroom. Easing the door shut, one eye on Deputy Sheets, the whir of the fan cyclonic, and he was sure the noise of it would rouse his jailer – Just taking a leak, officer, and I suppose you’re going to tell me that’s against the law too — but no, Sheets slept on. In his gown, on silent feet, Tierwater vacated the bathroom, slipped past the innocuous lump of creased and pleated matter that was the deputy and out into the corridor. He was dimly aware of adding yet another offense to the list Sheets had recited for him, but the great hardwood forests of the East and Midwest had been decimated by men like Sheriff Bob Hicks and Boehringer and their ilk, and the redwoods and Doug firs were going fast – this was no time for indecision.

  The corridor was deserted. Cadaverous light, eternally fluorescent – nobody could look healthy here. His powers of observation told him he was on the second floor, judging from the view to the middle reaches of the trees just beyond the windows at the far end of the hall, and he understood – from the movies, primarily, or maybe exclusively – that the elevator would be a mistake. Nurses, orderlies, gurneys transporting the near–dead and partially alive, anxious relatives and loved ones, interns, candy stripers – they’d all be packed into that elevator, and all wondering aloud about his bare feet and bare legs and the disposable paper gown that left his rear exposed. And that was another thing – what had become of the diapers? The thought shrank him. He pictured the blocky nurse cutting the things off of him, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and then he changed channels and headed down the corridor, looking for the stairwell.

  Twice he had to duck into occupied rooms – a subterranean light, tubes, hoses, the electric winking eyes of the machines that took note of every fluctuation and discharge – to avoid detection by prowling nurses. No one seemed to notice. They were busy with their tubes and monitors, busy trying to breathe, a collection of tired old beaks and chins grimly relaxing into death – or so he imagined, secreted behind the door as the nurses soft–stepped up the hallway. Then, a cold draft playing off his genitals, he flung open the door marked stairwell and plunged through it.

  In the process, he startled a morose–looking woman sneaking a smoke, but she dropped her eyes and never said a word, and the stairs vibrated under his feet. He cracked the door on the ground floor – early yet, very early, but there was more traffic here – and waited for the golden moment when everybody seemed to disappear simultaneously through separate doorways. Freedom glowed in the glass panels of the door at the main entrance, just past the gift shop and reception desk. What was it – fifty feet, seventy–five? Now or never. He pinched the gown closed behind him and made for the door, deaf to the startled cries of the two women at the desk (young nursey types, with hamburger faces and plasticized hair, and Sir! they cried; Sir! Can I help you, sir?), the sweet, fresh, as–yet–uncorrupted Oregon air in his face and an endless field of scrub and weed heaving into view just beyond the dead expanse of the parking lot.

  If this were a movie, he was thinking – and his every move to this point had been dictated by what he’d witnessed repeatedly on the big screen – he would slip into a late–model sports sedan, punch the ignition with a screwdriver, hotwire the thing and be gone in a glorious roil of smoke and gravel. Or the heroine, looking a lot like Andrea, with a scoop neckline and killer brassiere, would at that moment wheel up to the curb and he’d say, Let’s move it. Or Let’s rock and roll. Isn’t that what they said in every definable moment of heroic duress? But this was no movie, and he had no script. In the end, he had to settle for making his way on all fours through the briars and poison oak, awaiting the inevitable clash of sirens and uproar of excited voices.

  (How long was I out there – at large, that is? Let me tell you, I don’t know, but it was the longest better part of a morning I ever spent in my life. And then it was the dogs – or dog – and the humiliation of that on top of the concrete and the diapers and the tight shit–eating smirks of the Freddies and their sledgehammering minions. I gave myself up. Of course I did. How far was I going to get in a hospital gown?)

  Tierwater had plenty of time to nurse his grievances and contemplate the inadvisability – the sheer unreconstructed foolishness, the howling idiocy – of what he’d done that morning in extricating himself from the personal jurisdiction of Deputy Sheets and, by extension, the Josephine County Sheriff’s Department. He sat there in the heavy brush, not five hundred yards from the hospital entrance, scraped and begrimed, his feet bleeding in half a dozen places, the paper gown bunched up around his hips, thinking of what they would do to him now, on top of everything else. If he’d been tentative two nights ago in the fastness of the Siskiyou and purely outraged when they went after his daughter, now he was almost contrite. Almost. But not quite. They’d humiliated him and terrorized his wife and daughter – there was no coming back from that.

  He listened to the wail of the sirens in the distance, and, more immediately, to the songbirds in the trees and the insects in the grass. His breathing slowed. After a while, the sun burned through the early–morning haze and warmed him. He laid his head back in the cradle of his hands and became an observer, for lack of anything better to do. The tracery of the plants – saxifrage, corn lily, goldenrod – stood illuminated against the sky, every leaf and stem trembling with animate life. Grasshoppers, moths, ants, beetles, spiders, they were the gazelles here and the lions, prowling a miniature veldt that was plenty big enough for them – at least until the hospital needed a new wing or a developer threw up a strip mall. He tried not to think about mites, chiggers, ticks, though he itched in every part and scratched till his flesh was raw and his fingernails bloody. He had no plan. He was here, couched in the bushes, instead of sitting up in bed and addressing a plate of eggs or waffles while CNN droned on about Polish Solidarity or the turmoil in Iran, but why? Because he had to do something, anything – he couldn’t just roll over and become their whipping boy. Could he?

  For a long while – hours, it seemed – there were the distant sights and sounds of confusion emanating from the front of the hospital. The clash of sirens, raised voices, a flurry of activity centering on two police cruisers. It wasn’t until the K–9 Corps arrived, and the first eager lusty deep–chested woofs of the police dog began to ring out over the scrub, that Tierwater developed a plan. He wasn’t about to let the dog come careening through the bushes to take hold of his ankle and drag him thrashing out into the open, where the local reporter would snap action shots of his flailing legs and unclothed buttocks for the edification of the local timber families. No way. It simply wasn’t a via
ble scenario. Beyond that, he was hungry, thirsty, sunburned, fed up. He’d made his point. Enough was enough. He stood up and waved his arms. ‘Over here!’ he shouted.

  And this was where things got interesting. The dog, dragging a cop who might have been Sheets’ brother (thin as a wading bird, a stick of an arm at the end of the leash), made a show of it, barking ferociously, hysterically even, and right behind cop and dog was the inevitable reporter, camera flashing away. She was a female, this reporter, a little blonde with bangs, short skirt and running shoes, and Tierwater couldn’t help trying to smooth his hair down and maybe even work up a smile for her. Say ‘cheese.’ Behind her was Sheets, looking hangdog, and the stomping, massive, outraged figure of Sheriff Bob Hicks himself.

  The dog was encouraged to come in close and to nip at the ankles without drawing any evidentiary blood, the cops dutifully produced service revolvers and handcuffs and Tierwater was led out of the bush and across the lot, wincing on bare feet. A crowd was gathered to watch the sheriff consummate his duty by shoving the cuffed and subdued desperado into the back of the patrol car – Publicity, that’s what we came here for, Tierwater kept telling himself, trying to transmute defeat into victory, humiliation into triumph, but he was half naked, his hair was a mess and he felt less like a crusader than a figure out of the Opéra Bouffe.

  ‘Get in there, shithead,’ the sheriff said under his breath as he spread a big hand over the crown of Tierwater’s head and forced him into the car, where Deputy Sheets sat awaiting him. For an instant, everything confused in his mind, Tierwater thought of kicking open the door and making a hobbled run for it, because things were out of hand here – a peaceful protest, and look what it had led to – and it tore his heart out to give them the satisfaction of beating him down like this. Better to die than submit. His jaw ached from gritting his teeth. He was sweating. His heart was pounding, his eyes were crazy, there were twigs and bits of seed and chaff in his hair. Kick the door! screamed a voice in his head. Kick the door!

  He didn’t kick the door. He didn’t have to. Andrea was there – Andrea and an attorney with beard and briefcase – and Teo, shadowing them on a pair of crutches. ‘We’ve come to bail him out,’ Andrea said, and through the window of the cruiser Tierwater could see the winged creases ascending her forehead.

  Officious, already moving round the front of the car while the door slammed shut like the lid of a coffin, Sheriff Bob Hicks let out a short mocking bark of a laugh. ‘Bail? Bail hasn’t been set yet – he hasn’t even been arraigned.’

  The lawyer, in high dudgeon, countered with something Tierwater couldn’t hear. Andrea bent to peer in the window, and Tierwater the desperado pressed his fingers to the glass, and it was just like the movies, exactly – visiting hour at the penitentiary, time’s up, boys, this way, ladies. She was saying something, her lips moving, the police dog barking for the sheer love of it, the crowd jeering, something about Sierra —

  ‘ – too sick to go to jail,’ the sheriff was saying, pointing a finger in the lawyer’s face, ‘and then he pulls this crap, this escape from custody, and what do you have to say to that, Fred, huh?’

  Fred had plenty to say, most of which escaped Tierwater, but during the course of the ensuing debate, he was able to lean forward to where the Plexiglas divider gave onto the front seat and the convenient flap there for purposes of criminal/peace–officer communication. ‘Where’s Sierra?’ he shouted into his wife’s hovering face.

  ‘Child Protective Services.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  This was where Deputy Sheets, seated beside him on the hard serviceable seat, got into the act. Deputy Sheets had been embarrassed professionally, and he wasn’t amused. ‘Juvenile Hall,’ he said, giving a jerk at the handcuffs to get Tierwater’s attention. ‘She’s in there with your runaways, your shoplifters, your junkies and murderers. And she’s going to stay there till the judge makes his ruling.’

  ‘His ruling?’ Tierwater’s heart was pounding. ‘Ruling on what?’

  ‘What do you think? On whether you’re a fit parent or not.’

  He jerked back round to read Andrea’s face, a black gulf of despair and regret opening up inside him, limitless, unbreachable. He knew it. He’d known it all along. Trouble is a given in a world ruled by accident, sure, and lightning hits too, but only a fool – strike that: an inveterate idiot – goes looking for it.

  Deputy Sheets cleared his throat. ‘Got two more charges for you,’ he said, and his voice was so rich with triumph he sounded as if he were announcing the winners of the Fourth of July sack race. ‘Attempted escape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.’

  Eight months earlier, Tierwater was busy leading his life of quiet desperation, aimless, asleep at the wheel, watching his father’s empire fall away into dust like all the geriatric empires before it – Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! It was December, bleak and wind–knifed. Ice one day, slush the next, then refiozen slush the day after that. Pathetic cardboard Santas and cutout menorahs clung to the dirty windows of the stores in the shopping center – the ones that hadn’t gone dark for lack of tenants – and half the bulbs were burned out in the relict strings of Christmas lights he’d looped over the bent and rusting nails his father had hammered into the stucco fascia twenty years earlier. Sierra was twelve, insufferably motherless, inappropriately dressed (Jodie Foster, Taxi Driver), addicted to TV, gloom and doom, vegetarianism. Her face was a falling ax, and it fell on him twice a day: in the morning, when he drove her to school in the Jeep Laredo, and in the evening, when he got home from work and she was there infesting the house with her evil friends.

  For his part, Tierwater tried to do his best, puzzling over geography and the Golden Book of Literary Treasures with her, taking her out for a weekly bonding ritual at the Mongolian Barbecue in the shopping center, withholding judgment when she came home with a nose ring from the brand–new sixty–seven–shop enclosed mall that was killing him, tearing his heart out, flattening his feet and destroying his digestion. His love life was null and void. A month earlier he’d withdrawn as tactfully as possible from a six–month affair with a skinny ungenerous woman named Sherry who wore her weedy hair kinked out in a white–blond corona that grazed the lintel of every door she passed through (to his secretary: ‘Tell her it was a mountaineering accident and they never recovered my body’). He hadn’t met anyone since. In fact, during all that time, no woman so much as gave him a glance – not even in Cappelli’s, the bar in the shopping center that was the only place that seemed to be doing any business at all. Single mothers clustered around shrinking tables and hung off the shoulders of single fathers as if all they needed were crampons and rope, cosmetologists wept over the thunderous hits of the sixties, aerobics instructors showed off their tightly clamped buttocks round the pool table, but none of them had time for Tierwater. He was depressed, and he wore his depression like a lampshade over his head.

  But then fate intervened. (‘We are turned round and round in this world, and Fate is the handspike.’ I don’t know exactly what a handspike is, but I like the quote – and Melville had it right, especially if a handspike is something you can drive into the back of somebody’s head.) Reflexively, without giving it much thought, Tierwater had sent a check to the Sierra Club, a year’s membership. Before his parents died – they were stopped in traffic, 44th and Lexington, when a crane hoisting steel girders capitulated to the force of gravity – he’d been chasing down a B.S. in wildlife biology, after having dropped out twice in his drug–tranced days, and nature had always glimmered somewhere out there on the horizon of his consciousness. This little gesture, this check delivered in a good cause, was like a Band–Aid slapped over a big gaping crater in his psyche, and he knew that, but there it was. He was a member of the Sierra Club. And as a member, he got onto a mailing list that entitled him to receive whole cordilleras of junk mail – talk about conserving paper – including, but not limited to, invitations to attend meetings, swim w
ith the dolphins, save whales and remember the Himalayas. He felt guilty, but he never accepted any of these high–minded invitations, and worse, he never recycled a scrap of them.

  Then, one day, a postcard slipped out of the pile of bills, letters, invitations, solicitations, violations, entreaties and threats his secretary mounded on his desk each morning. It featured a logo he’d never seen before – a crimson circle with a raised fist in the center of it (his first thought was the Black Panthers – but weren’t they all dead, in jail or running Nike outlets?). It wasn’t the Black Panthers. It was E.F.! – Earth Forever! – inviting him to attend a powwow/chili cookoff/apocalyptic lecture/slide show at the home of Linda D’Piqua–Hoover in Croton. He turned the postcard over in his hand. Dear Mr. or Ms. Tierwater, it read, Are you concerned about the environment? Do you care about the rape of our forests, the pollution of our streams and rivers, the acid rain killing off the pristine lakes of the Adirondacks? Are you tired of promises? Fed up? Ready for Direct Action? Then come to our, etc.

  He went. Why? Boredom, curiosity, the desire to duck the Sherrys of the world and meet some environmentally minded women who might just want to share a freeze–dried entrée and a sleeping bag on the shore of an acidic lake somewhere. And more – and he wouldn’t want to make light of this – because he believed. He did. He genuinely did. He needed an awakening, a cause, a call to arms – and here it was.

  It was raining the night of the powwow, a cold soulless wintry rain that wrung out the sky like an old cloth and found its way into the seams of his boots and down the collar of his jacket. He stepped out of the office and into a world from which every trace of light had been relentlessly squeezed, the moon imploded, the stars erased – there was no illumination without electricity, and electricity lit his path from the office to the car. The car itself was another kind of environment, a sort of rolling sarcophagus. It spat its fumes into the air, coughed and shook, gave off its stink of incinerated metal. Beyond the rain–scrawled windows lay the shopping center – the Copper Beech Shopping Center – curled into the killing night like the architecture of his nightmares. He sat there breathing the carbon monoxide coming through the floorboards till his classic 1966 Mustang could be coaxed into moving without stalling, and then he was off, rocketing over the potholes like a master of nature and machine alike.