by T. C. Boyle
Her face was cold. ‘It isn’t funny, Ty. This is the best we can do, and we’re going to make the most of it. When we give ourselves up it’s going to make the news coast to coast.’
He said nothing. He didn’t know where this was leading, but he didn’t like it.
‘Get ready,’ she said, and now she was animated, all right, effervescent, lit up like a self–contained power source, the three–hundred–watt smile and radar eyes. ‘You remember my great–grandfather?’
‘Never met him.’
‘I mean, his story?’
He remembered. She was the great–granddaughter of Joseph Knowles, one of the archetypal eco–nuts. On a gray spring day in 1913, in the Maine woods, he did a striptease for a gaggle of reporters, emptying his pockets, setting aside his watch and wallet and penknife, neatly folding his jacket, vest, trousers and shirt, until finally he was down to his long underwear. Ultimately, he shed that too, to stand pale and naked before them. He then reiterated the credo that had drawn the journalists in the first place – that nature was to be preserved for its own sake as the nurturer of mankind – and plunged into the woods to live off the land. Two months later, hard and brown and considerably thinner, not to mention chewed, sucked and drained by every biting insect in the county, he emerged at the same spot to an even larger crowd and proclaimed that his God was the wilderness and his church the church of the forest. ‘No,’ Tierwater said. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. Tell me you’re kidding.’
There was the world, there were the trees, there was his wife. The light was perfect, held in that fragile moment between light and dark, the highest crowns of the trees on the ridge behind them on fire with it. She came to him again, and all he could see were her eyes and her lips, her glowing lips, her red, rich, persuasive lips. They kissed. He held her. The sun faded from the trees. ‘Think of it, Ty,’ she whispered, ‘think of the statement we’ll make.’
Tierwater had never been good with crowds. Crowds made him nervous; crowds made him think of the degradation of the planet; crowds showed him what humanity was, and he didn’t like what he saw. This crowd, the one he, Andrea and Teo were the current focus of, must have consisted of a hundred or more. There was a good contingent of E.F.lers out there, conspicuous in their red berets and the power–red T–shirts of the clan, thirty or forty of them, dispersed through the crowd like poppies in a field. You couldn’t miss them. They were there to provide moral support – and to mob Tierwater and Andrea if any law–enforcement types showed up, in uniform or otherwise. The general public was in attendance too, at Andrea’s express invitation – journalists, mostly, turned out in two–hundred–dollar hiking boots, pressed jeans and disc sunglasses in sixteen different earth–annihilating colors, as well as a scattering of the curious, the nearsighted and the bored. The day was golden. The mountains lay all around them, folded into one another like ripples in meringue. Teo had given his speech, and Andrea had given hers. There was nothing left now but to get to it.
Tierwater eased himself down on a section of wind–smoothed rock and began unlacing his boots; Andrea, bare–legged in an airy dress the color of salt–water taffy, shucked off a pair of beaded moccasins. There was no wind, and the sun stood directly overhead, hot on his shoulders and the back of his neck. He gazed out over the mountains, his heart pounding, embarrassed already – and how had he ever let her talk him into this one? – and then he glanced up at Andrea. She was staring placidly at the onlookers, making eye contact with one after another of them, milking the moment for all it was worth. Tierwater stood abruptly. The quicker they got this over with, the better, that was his thinking, and he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and stepped out of them, one leg at a time.
No one said a word, the whole crowd holding its breath. Tierwater was in good shape from all that hiking and his nighttime activities, six one, a hundred eighty pounds, too skinny in the legs, maybe – and he hated showing off his legs in public, and his feet too – but all in all, a fair match to play Adam to Andrea’s Eve. He folded up his pants and handed them to Teo (who, incidentally, was dressed all in white, in a muscle shirt, shorts and sandals, like some sort of priest of the Movement). Everyone was staring at him, and he did his best to stare back, but then Andrea reached behind her for the zipper to her dress, and a hundred pairs of eyes went to her. He watched her arms bow out as she worked the zipper down to the base of her spine, and then the big hands come up and pull the dress over her head with a quick shake of her perfect hair, which fell perfectly into place. She was wearing crimson underwear – the subject of intense discussion that morning at breakfast, Tierwater fiercely opposed to it, Teo all for it – and the cups of her brassiere, right over the nipples, were imprinted with the raised black fist of the Movement. A smile for the crowd, and then she handed the dress to Teo. Defeated, feeling more foolish and more enraged by the moment, Tierwater tore off his shirt, dropped his briefs – his plain white briefs, $3.99 a pair at J. C. Penney – and stood there naked for all the world to see.
All right. And they were quiet now, E.F.!ers, newspaper hacks, birdwatchers and Winnebago pilots alike. This was a spectacle. This was nudity. And Andrea – Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, the Earth Forever! firebrand and environmental fugitive – was next. Again the bowed arms, as she worked at the catch of the brassiere, again the hundred pairs of eyes deserting Tierwater to embrace his wife. (Come on, Ty, she’d said, it’s the human body, that’s all, nothing to be ashamed of. You’re beautiful. I’m beautiful. This is the way we were born.) Then her breasts fell free and she stepped out of her panties – and handed them, silken and still warm, to Teo, Teo who’d seen all this before, up close and personal. And the rest of them? They saw that she was a natural blonde, for what it was worth.
There was a spatter of applause, and then Tierwater had her by the arm – grabbed hold of her before she could take a bow, because he was sure it was coming, and Why not, she’d insist, why not? — and they turned their backs and hobbled awkwardly over a spew of distressed granite on feet that weren’t nearly hardened enough. He couldn’t see the picture this made, because he was at the center of it, but Tierwater was reminded of nothing so much as Raphael’s depiction of the expulsion from paradise. But that wasn’t right. It was paradise they were entering, wasn’t it?
For the next three hours, Tierwater focused his attention on his wife’s buttocks, though the glutei were only the most prominent of the muscles in operation here. He studied her thighs, calves and ankles too, and the dimple at the base of her spine. Her shoulders dipped and arms swung free with the easy rhythm of her stride, and her hair – newly washed, brushed and conditioned – lifted and fell with a golden shimmering life of its own. He admired the sweet triangulation of her scapulae, the exquisite grip and release of the muscles of her upper back, and her heels, he loved her heels. This was all new to him, a revelation, bone and muscle working beneath the silk of the skin in a way that was nothing less than a miracle. He’d seen plenty of women with bare shoulders in his time, women playing tennis and wearing evening gowns, women in swimsuits and tank tops, women in the raw, active women, ballerinas and gymnasts, porn queens on the receiving end of a zoom lens and Jane giving birth to his daughter in the flesh, but he’d never followed a naked woman through the woods before. It was something. It really was. And it moved him somehow, the grace and good sense of it, even more than it excited him – and it did excite him, so much so that he was hard–pressed to keep from planting her in the ferns at the side of the trail and expressing his wonder in the most immediate and natural way.
Of course, he couldn’t do that. Not with Chris Mattingly moving along lightly behind him. And ‘lightly’ was the word – the man kept a discreet distance, the only indication of his presence the occasional scrape of boot on rock or the rustle of cooking equipment packed loosely in the outer flaps of his backpack. This – Chris Mattingly, that is, and picture an Eagle Scout all grown up and rejected by the Marines, twenty–eight years old, regular hai
rcut clipped to fishbelly–white arcs around the ears – was another of Andrea’s inspirations. We’ve got to bring a journalist along, she insisted. Somebody impartial – or at least impartial enough to see that we don’t cheat. How else would anybody know we don’t have a cache of jerky or candy bars or even filet mignon out there in the woods – or a cabin with a satellite dish? Or how would they know we didn’t just slip away to Maui for a couple of weeks? We need to record this, Ty, if it’s going to do any good.
So Chris Mattingly was going to shadow them for a month (thirty days, yes, because there was no sense in challenging Great–grandfather Knowles’ record, and, besides which, by September first it could get pretty frigid in these mountains). He would be sleeping in a tent, on an inflatable mat, and feasting on freeze–dried lobster thermidor, scallop enchiladas and power bars, while they made do with bark and pine boughs for bedding, and scraped watercress out of the muck and toasted grasshoppers and freshwater mussels on a stick – if they could manage to start a fire, that is. Think of it as an adventure, Andrea said, and it was an adventure, Tierwater saw that immediately, the sort of thing that would make the two of them more notorious than all the Foxes and Phantoms combined. Of course, when Andrea first mentioned it, he bitched and moaned, argued, pleaded, employed all the specious reasoning of the Sophist and the third–year law student, but it was for form’s sake only – secretly, he was pleased. To go out into the wilderness with nothing, to hunt and gather and survive like the first hominids scouring the African plains, that was something, a fantasy that burned in the atavistic heart of every environmentalist worthy of the name. And he was one of them, as far now from the shopping center and the life of the living dead he’d been enduring all these years as it was possible to be. And though his feet hurt and he ached with lust for his wife and he was already feeling the first stirrings of hunger despite the staggering mounds of ham, bacon, flapjacks and eggs he’d forced down for breakfast, he was feeling at peace with himself, feeling fulfilled, feeling lucky even.
They hiked all that afternoon, following a trail that led them out of the national forest proper and into a remote wilderness area (entry by permit only, no hunting, no logging, no motorized vehicles, no traps, snares, seines or gigs, all fishing on a strict catch–and–release basis, beer cans, chain saws and boom boxes strenuously discouraged). This was old–growth forest, the redwoods gathered in groves along steep stream courses, the pines rising up out of the hills like bristles on a brush, the silence absolute but for the screech of a jay or the breeze that would announce itself with a long echoing sigh in the treetops. It was dry. And warm. Very warm. Tierwater had begun to feel the sting of the sun on the back of his upper thighs and his own lean buttocks, and he watched his wife’s shoulders and backside turn first pink and then a freshly spanked red as the day wore on (and this despite the fact that they’d put in at least an hour of nude sunbathing each day over the course of the past two weeks as a precautionary measure). But you couldn’t guard against the sun, not if you were going to live in nature, or any of the other vicissitudes of natural life either – insects, snakebite, the elements – and both of them were prepared to make the sacrifice. Still, what he wouldn’t give for a tube of sunscreen or even a palm–full of Hawaiian Dream tanning butter.
But they didn’t have sunscreen. They didn’t have toothpaste or dental floss, aspirin, Desenex, matches, knives, crockery or silverware, they didn’t have down pillows or blankets or cell phones or even so much as a ring or bracelet to decorate their bodies with. All those things he’d accumulated in his life, all that detritus from his parents and his house and office and even the little he could call his own at Ratchiss’ – it was gone now, irrelevant, and he was like one of the roving Bushmen of the Kalahari, blackened and bearded little men who accounted themselves prosperous if they had an empty ostrich shell to haul water in. Sure. And what else were he and Andrea going to have to do without? Coffee, English muffins, canned tuna, chocolate, vodka. Books, music, TV. Band–Aids. Mercurochrome. A snakebite kit.
And this last was important. Vitally important. Indispensable, even. Because their destination was a stretch of the upper Kern River, deep in the gorge it had carved out over the eons, and there were whole tribes of snakes there – or so Tierwater had been informed by three–quarters of the residents of Big Timber, none of whom had ever actually set foot in the place. And it wasn’t as if they had hiking boots and sweatsocks and stiff thick denim jeans to protect against the savage thrust of the naked fangs. Or scorpions – what about scorpions? Ticks? Mites? Cougars, bears, rabid skunks? What about them?
(Ultimately? The way I felt that day? I welcomed them, welcomed them all: Here’s my flesh, I murmured – said it aloud – here’s my flesh. Come and get it.)
They didn’t have a permit either.
We don’t want to look hypocritical, Andrea had argued, because what are people going to think if we go out there and violate the rules like the Freemen and the Phineas Priests and all the rest of the self–righteous back–to–the–earth yahoos? But Tierwater knew they would have to violate the rules systematically if they were going to get through this – let alone make a statement. What kind of statement would they make if they gave up? Or, worse, died? This was an experiment, and the wilderness was the laboratory. They would do what they had to do to survive – that was the point, wasn’t it? Catch and release. Did the Bushmen practice catch and release? And what about Great–grandfather Knowles – had he lived on air while wandering the Maine woods?
It was past six and getting cool in the gorge by the time they found a likely–looking place to make camp, a tongue of sand thrown up against a wall of rock on the far side of the river. They waded across, the river no more than thirty feet wide and two or three feet deep at this juncture, and the frigid racing water felt good on their battered feet and sunburned legs. They’d agreed that their main priority the first night would be constructing a shelter – food they’d worry about in the morning. And so, dutifully, Tierwater and his wife had begun gathering brush and leaves to construct a debris shelter according to the instructions in one of the wilderness–survival manuals they’d found on Ratchiss’ shelf. It was a pretty rudimentary affair: just prop a pole up on a stump or rock three feet off the ground, lay sticks against either side of it and cover the whole business with leaves and brush. Then line the interior with four or five armloads of spare leaves for bedding, and presto, you’ve got an insulated shelter for the night.
Dusk fell. A wall of cold air worked its way down the canyon foot by foot, settling into the low places, probing corners, retarding the metabolism of all those hidden snakes and scorpions and prickling the skin of Tierwater’s chest with goosebumps. He was bent over a fireboard – a fragment of sun–bleached driftwood, that is – vigorously spinning a long, thin, very nearly straight drill of the same material. Andrea knelt beside him, fragments of brush in her hair, her breasts nicked and blemished from cradling armfuls of river–run debris, her big hands working in her lap. ‘Harder, Ty,’ she urged, ‘it’s starting to smoke.’ And it was, it was, the spindle working in the groove as he furiously kneaded it between his palms, the faintest glimmer of a coal reddening the tip of the thing, friction, more friction, and Andrea blowing now, puffing for all she was worth. There it was – a coal! And the coal fired the kindling for the briefest, most desperate moment, before it died out in a faint little ribbon of smoke. By Tierwater’s count, this was the twenty–seventh time the same scenario had played itself out in the course of the past hour. He was exhausted. His palms were raw. He sat heavily and let the cold air settle over his shoulders like the mande of defeat.
It was then that the smell of a clean–burning campfire came to them, sharp and somehow delicious on the chill air. And the scent of food – some sort of sauce, tomato sauce, and the unmistakable aroma of fresh coffee. Tierwater drew his wife to him and held her in his arms, and it was the saddest moment of the whole adventure. They turned their heads in unison to gaze thr
ough the snarl of scrub willow in the riverbed to a point a hundred yards upstream. Through the screen of the bushes, they could just make out the figure of Chris Mattingly, crouched lovingly over his fire. And then, as faint as the first tentative murmur of the birds on a cold spring morning, a sound came to them, pitched low and melodic. He was singing. Cheered by the blaze and the wildness of the place and the intoxicating smell of the freeze–dried entrée he raised to his lips, bite by savory bite, Chris Mattingly was singing at the fall of day.
It got better, and then it got worse. In the morning, with a pain in his gut that twisted like the blunted stone head of a Bushman’s arrow, Tierwater managed to get a fire going. He squatted beside it, his testicles dangling in the cool sand, and nurtured the weak dancing flame till it danced higher, into the nest of twigs and bark he’d prepared, and there it was: fire. It was a hungry little fire, and it chewed contentedly at everything he fed it, till finally he was dragging branches the size of coat racks out of the piles of river–run debris scattered along the spit and slamming them hard against the standing trees till they yielded the fuel he wanted, in convenient three–foot sections. He didn’t know what time it was – only that it was light and that the chill had begun to lift – and he did a naked capering dance of triumph round the fire, kicking up his heels in the sand. They had fire. Fire!
While Andrea slept on, oblivious, her slack limbs encrusted with leaf mold and all the small but ferocious things that lived within it, Tierwater gathered firewood. He combed both sides of the river, keeping an eye out for fish or bird’s nests or even snakes – and, yes, he’d be pleased and honored to indulge in a little roast ratdesnake for breakfast – and by the time the sun had climbed up over the eastern ridge of the gorge, he had enough fuel for a hundred fires stacked up round the shelter. But he wasn’t done yet – no, this shelter would never do; it wasn’t much more imposing than a suburban mulch pile, and all night, as insects crawled over him and fragments of leaves worked their way into his private parts and maddened him with itching, he envisioned a larger, airier shelter, a model of cleanliness and efficiency. Something you could stand in, with pine boughs spread inside over the soft, clean sand. The thought of it made his spirits lift and soar, as if a fierce–eyed bird of prey had emerged from his body – climbed right up out of his throat – and shot into the sky. He’d never felt anything like it. Never. And then he was crouching in the hut, leaning over his wife to kiss her awake, the smell of her like some fermenting thing, like vinegar or curdled milk spilled on a patch of damp ground, bits of leaf mold stuck to her lips and forced up her nostrils, a scurry of insects frantically hopping and burrowing out of his calamitous way. ‘Wake up, baby,’ he said, pressing his lips to hers, the leaves rustling and fragmenting beneath them, and she woke to the smell of him, to the smell of smoke on him, and they made love in the twisted thrashing way of animals in the bush – for the third time since the hut had gone up the night before. ‘I made fire,’ he told her, over and over, and she clutched at him with her big hands and powerful arms, pulling him into her with a furious urgency the hut couldn’t withstand. It rattled, it swayed, it fell, and they hardly noticed.