by T. C. Boyle
He looked into the bull–necked kid’s swollen face and saw release. That was all. Nothing he’d planned or even thought about, but when he brought his fist in over his daughter’s shoulder and planted it in the center of that looming fat–constricted face, he felt himself sail right off the ground, as if gravity no longer operated on him. The kid fell magically away, all two hundred linebacking pounds of him, even as Tierwater turned to the building inspector. The man was still clawing at him, a look of anguish and prayerful appeal on his face, but the elbow Tierwater slashed to his windpipe was like a wing, fluttering and flapping and holding him aloft and out of harm’s way.
He was thinking nothing, his posture defensive, but his daughter was behind him now and Andrea somehow in the driver’s seat of the turd–brown car, shouting, ‘Ty! Ty!’ He looked at Sierra. Her face was bloodless and raw. She glanced over her shoulder at Andrea, and then looked back at the girls on the lawn and the turquoise house and the building inspector writhing on the blacktop with both hands wrapped around his throat, and she broke for the car with a tight little smile of triumph on her face. As for Tierwater, high as he was, he had no choice but to sidestep the kid when the kid came back at him in the spastic sort of lunge he might have made at a tackling dummy, and for good measure he gave the dog a deft kick that sent it skittering into the ditch with a yelp of surprise. And so what if he could see the lips of both the skinny girls working as they repeated the license–plate number to fix it in their memories? So what?
He had his daughter back now, and nobody was going to take her away again.
For the first ten miles, no one said a word. Gas fled down the throat of the carburetor, the tires screeched, Andrea hammered the accelerator and fought the wheel with spasmodic jerks of her big hands, and everything – farmhouses, sagging pickups, shirts, faces, clothes on a line, bark, branches, leaves – clapped by the windows like images in a rifled deck. She was going too fast, her eyes jumping at the rearview mirror, the borrowed car rocketing down one country lane after another, and there was nothing to say. Because this was no passive resistance, no peaceful protest, this was no mere violation of a court order or even the willful destruction of private property along the shoulder of Interstate 5 – this was the serious business now. Tierwater knew it, Andrea knew it, and even Sierra, clinging to him in the back seat and struggling to breathe through the muffled hoarse rasp of her sobs, must have known it. There was no coming back from this.
They drove on. A meadow appeared and vanished, two horses, a culvert, a narrow bridge. Andrea swerved through a series of S–turns, the car like a big oarless boat shooting down the rapids of some wild river, and finally Tierwater found himself breaking the silence with a pointed question: ‘Where’re we going?’
She gave him a wild glance, her eyes extruded and hard. ‘Out of here, what do you think? You’re the one – if you hadn’t pushed it, if you didn’t – you had to see her, didn’t you? You couldn’t leave well enough alone. I told you Fred was going to take care of it, didn’t I?’
‘Fred,’ he spat, all but obliterating the name under the weight of his disgust. His face had come up out of its huddle. The countryside rushed by. He was scared, of course he was, but he was exhilarated too – he’d done something, finally done something – and his heart was racing faster than the Nova’s straining engine. He was worked up, shot full of adrenaline, wild and angry and not to be denied. ‘All right, sure, let’s argue about it. Let’s talk about whose idea it was to go into the fucking Siskiyou in the first place, all right? Because that’s going to do us a lot of good right now.’ A car loomed up on the left and shot by with a soft whoosh. Somewhere behind them the phone lines were busy, very busy. ‘But where are we going? You know where you are?’
He watched her shoulders, furious shoulders, as she dug into the glove compartment. It took her a minute, and then she flung a map over the seat. ‘You figure it out. You’re the lunatic. You’re the one they’re after.’
That was when Sierra lifted her face from the cavity of his left arm. She’d buried it there when he leapt into the car and held his arms out to her, and through every jolt and dip of the road he’d felt the heat of her breath on his skin, the gende swaying orbit of her body as the centrifugal forces threatened to pull her away from him. The car hit a bump and he watched her head wobble on the uncertain fulcrum of her neck. She was wearing mascara, and the tears had smeared it across her face in a dark wet paste. ‘They took my nose ring,’ she sobbed. ‘They, they said it wasn’t Christian.’
He intoned the automatic words – ‘It’s all right, honey’ – and Andrea intoned them too, all the rage gone out of her voice. The car decelerated a moment in sympathy, but then she floored it again.
‘I mean, they were horrible people – you wouldn’t believe it. They made you sit straight up in your chair like some sort of marine or something, and, and’ – she broke down again, and Tierwater felt his stomach sink – ‘and they made you pray before you could eat!’
That was something, he was thinking – prayer, no less – but before he could absorb this information, before he could chew it over and let his eyes narrow over the implications and ramifications of this particular brand of child abuse (‘They didn’t touch you, did they, honey? I mean, nobody laid a hand on you in any way, did they?’), Andrea let out a low exclamation of surprise. ‘Oh, shit!’ she said, and gave the wheel a sudden savage spin. In the next moment he was thrown into his daughter, both of them rocked across the seat in a helpless surge of dead weight and flailing limbs. He snatched at the window crank for support, but it came off in his hand, one more useless scrap of metal.
When he regained his equilibrium he saw that they were on a dirt road now, the car fishtailing from one side to the other, tires spewing gravel, a contrail of dust spinning out behind them – and what else? What was that sound? It came to him with a jolt of recognition: it was a siren – a siren! – screaming in the distance. Andrea fought the wheel and the car skidded to a stop in a clump of weed just off the road, and they all three turned to stare out the back window at the intersection behind them. Tierwater saw a pall of sunstruck dust, a tunnel of pine, the natural world reaching out to them. His heart was pounding. The siren screamed, and screamed again. And then he saw it, a red streak flashing past the mouth of the dirt road, hook and ladder, men in T–shirts and hardhats – one glimpse and it was gone. ‘It’s a firetruck,’ he said, and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. ‘It’s only a firetruck.’
The sky had begun to close up, a low dirty rug of cloud stretched out on a line and beaten till the bright corners went dark. Tierwater lay on his back in a nest of grass, the wadded–up plaid shirt supporting his head, the 49ers cap perched on his chest like a sleeping pet, and watched the clouds unravel. He smelled chlorophyll, mold, the vague tangy scent of wild–flowers he didn’t know the names of. In half an hour, it would be raining.
Twenty feet away, Sierra and Andrea were busy scooping mud out of a culvert alongside the road and flinging it at the car. They were aiming for a Jackson Pollock effect, an intricate web of abstraction that would somehow transmute the car into something harmless and inconspicuous, something a local might drive, with plates so muddied you couldn’t tell at a glance whether they’d been issued in California or Oregon – or Saskatchewan, for that matter. Tierwater could have told them they were wasting their time – the rain would wash the car clean, no doubt about it – but he didn’t want to dampen their enthusiasm. Besides, it gave them something to do, good healthy activity to while away the hours till dark, when they would make a run for the California border and get lost in the traffic that swept down out of the north in dense hurtling clots of steel and glass.
Andrea was making a game of it, and Sierra, with her mother’s moon face and churning awkward legs, was laughing, actually laughing, as the mud flew and Robin Goldman’s Chevy Nova became a work of art. This was good – she’d been scared, no doubt about it, scared and confused, the slab–faces whisper
ing in one ear, the cops and her lawyer in the other – and if the past month had been hell for Tierwater, he could only imagine what it must have been like for her. But Andrea was the charm. Andrea took her in her arms and they sat down and talked it out, sharing a stale sandwich and a can of tepid root beer, and Tierwater was right there, his arms around both of them, so moved he could barely speak.
‘I know there’s no way we can ever make it up to you, honey,’ Andrea said, ‘and it’s my fault, my fault entirely, you have to understand that. Your father didn’t want to take you – he was right, and I should have listened, because you know we would never do anything to consciously hurt you or even if we thought there was the slightest risk… but I never dreamed … These are real sons of bitches we’re dealing with here, major–league, and they’ll do anything to bring us down. You’ll be stronger for this, you will.’
(It was a dubious proposition, and it made no mention of the future, of the safe house, the underground, the assumed names and paranoia and the shuttling from one school to another— but my daughter was only thirteen years old and so glad to be rescued, to be out of the iron hands of the do–gooders, she never questioned it. And how do you give birth to a radical? I could write the manual.)
Sierra ducked her head, the half–eaten sandwich in one hand, her eyes like wolves’ eyes, darker than the sky, wild already. ‘I know,’ she whispered.
But now Tierwater was lying in the grass and the solemnity was over. His wife and daughter were splashing the car with mud, giggling, crying out, feinting at one another with dripping palms, their bare feet black and glistening. He lay back and watched the clouds, smelled the rain, and it shouldn’t have surprised him in the least that it was Jane he was thinking of, because she was the one he couldn’t rescue, didn’t rescue, the one who slipped away from him for good.
How do you want your pancakes — that’s what she’d asked him on the morning of the day she died, and he could hear her voice like a half–remembered melody floating through his head – burned black or semi–black? He saw her in a pall of smoke – smoke that rose around her and ascended into the trees in thin white coils. She was wearing shorts, hiking boots, a New York Rangers sweatshirt – she was an upstate girl, from Watertown, hockey her passion. He hated hockey – a bunch of pumped–up yahoos slamming each other into the boards and grunting out violent epithets in Québecois French while the ice held its breath – but he loved her. That was the fact, though he hardly knew it himself and never expressed it aloud except in moments of erotic confusion. They didn’t talk about abstractions, they talked about the baby, his job, her job, they talked about marmots and grizzly bears and what they were going to have for breakfast.
Give her dirty legs – scraped, scabbed, mosquito–bitten – and hands that could have been cleaner. And smoother. A smudge under her left eye that glistened like a scar. Limp hair. Clothes that smelled of smoke and food and her own rich musk. Give her all that, because they were camping, Glacier Park, special permit, and you could wash all you wanted, but you couldn’t escape the dirt, not under those conditions.
He wanted his pancakes semi–black, and he communicated that much from the folds of his sleeping bag, which was laid out next to hers on a neoprene pad in the tent that looked like a big amanita mushroom sprung up out of the earth. It was raining, a soft misting rain that stained the trunks and silvered the needles of the trees. The night before, in the brooding black ringing silence of 11:30 p.m., they’d violated the chastity oath they’d taken on entering the park a week earlier: no sex in grizzly territory. No sex. That was common sense, and they’d discussed it dispassionately on the plane into Kalispell, and with real feeling in the motel room the night before they hiked into the back country – she was all skin and heat and hot ratcheting breath and they must have done it ten times against the deprivation to come. But two girls had been killed here – maimed and killed and one of them partially eaten – and they were taking no chances.
This was the wild, or as wild as it got on the planet earth in 1979. Tierwater’s heart beat just a little bit faster to know that there were creatures out there that could and would attack a human being and maybe even eat him, big eight– and nine–hundred–pound bears that could outrun a racehorse and outsmell a pack of bloodhounds, real serial killers, the top of the food chain. It thrilled Jane too. This wasn’t Westchester County, where the most dangerous thing you’d run into was a black widow in the shower or maybe the quick–moving shadow of a copperhead sucking itself into a crevice in a fieldstone wall. This was raw. This was nature, untamed and unsanitized. ‘You know what the scientific name for the grizzly is?’ he’d asked her as the plane dipped its wings and the landing gear thumped into place. ‘Ursus arctos horribilis. Horribilis? Isn’t that a gas?’
It was, it was. And he could see it in the sheen of her eyes and the way her face opened up to him. ‘And those girls? Is it true they were menstruating?’
‘You have to realize these things make their living by smell – they have to sniff out spring beauties, whitebark–pine nuts, carrion that’s hardly even dead yet. Because they can never have too much to eat, and their whole life is a trip to the salad bar with a nice piece of meat on the side. So yes. The girls were menstruating, and maybe wearing perfume too. A grizzly could smell it – the blood – from miles away. It’s like ringing a dinner bell – ’
‘Come on.’
‘It is. And that’s why there’s no sex. They can smell the secretions.’
‘Come on.’
‘No, I mean it. Just last summer, right here in Glacier, a couple was killed in their tent. At night. They were – at least this is what the investigators say – they were doing it.’
So the pancakes. The pan was black, inside and out, soot like paint running right up the handle. Tierwater slapped mosquitoes and choked down the Jane–fried flapjacks that tasted like incinerated wood pulp and watched his wife eat her portion. There was no syrup. Syrup was too potent an attractant for bears. The beverage of choice? Pond water, fresh from the tin cup.
Of course, what was a potent attractant and what was not really hadn’t come into play the night before. They’d been out there a week now – one week down, one to go – collecting the scat of the yellow–bellied marmot in Glad sandwich bags. Jane was working toward her Ph.D. in wildlife management, and one of her professors was studying the dietary predilections of the marmot in Glacier National Park for some reason fathomable only to herself. But, for two weeks, Dr. Rosenthal had to be at a Sciuridae/Rodentia/Mustela conference in Toronto, and Tierwater and Jane jumped at the opportunity to spell her, though it meant leaving Sierra with her grandmother in Watertown. That hurt. And yet there was never any real debate about it – this was a chance for Jane to do fieldwork and to score some bonus points with her friend and mentor, Dr. Sandee Rosenthal, the foremost marmot–person in the world, and it was a chance for Tierwater and his wife to be alone together, romantically alone, in a romantic setting. A second honeymoon, nothing less.
No sex, though – that would have been crazy.
Still, when Jane lit up a joint and slid bare–legged into his sleeping bag, he couldn’t seem to keep his hands from making a mute appeal to her – and she seemed to be having the same problem he was. She pulled him to her. They kissed, long and hard, and then, panting and hot, they forced themselves apart. They lay there under the canopy of the tent, fighting for self–control – ‘We can fool around, can’t we? Maybe just a little?’ – listening to the condensation drip from the trees as the fire outside settled into its embers, and what with the stillness and the pot and the electricity of their bodies, things got out of hand. They hadn’t seen a grizzly, hadn’t heard one, hadn’t seen tracks or scat or stumps gutted for ants. They took a chance. They couldn’t help themselves. And it was all the more intense for the danger of it – for the fractured resolve, for the tease – and when it was over they made themselves get up out of the sleeping bag and follow the beam of the flashlight down to the po
nd, where they slipped into the icy envelope of the water to scrub themselves with scendess soap till their teeth chattered and their lips turned blue.
Tierwater chewed the cud of his pancakes, the atomized rain collecting in his hair, and stared up into the canopy of the trees, opening up to everything there was. He was feeling rich, feeling blessed, and – he was only twenty–nine then, so you’ll have to forgive him – feeling all but invulnerable. When Jane cried out he almost laughed, it was so comical. ‘Oh!’ she said, and that was all – just ‘Oh’ – as if she’d been surprised in the dark or fallen out of bed. It wasn’t ‘Oh, shit!’ or ‘Oh, fuck!’ – just ‘Oh.’ Jane didn’t curse, couldn’t bring herself to it, and though they’d played at being street–smart and tough when that was the thing to do and smoked countless bowls with countless stoners and shouted their lungs out in dark overheated clubs and reeling outdoor arenas, Jane clung to her core of small–town propriety. Tierwater always thought that if it weren’t for him she would have grown up to be the kind of woman who sat on the PTA board and went to church in a veiled hat and white gloves. And he loved that, he loved that about her. The world was full of obscenity, full of hard cases, antichrists and nutballs – he didn’t need that. Not at home. Not in a wife.