A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  Still, for all that, the days seemed to go on forever. Andrea was at work, knocking down eighty–five thousand dollars a year as a member of E.F.!’s board of directors, and Sierra was at school, maneuvering her way out of the Goth crowd and into the inchoate grip of the makeupless neo–hippie vegan earth–saving contingent. So what did Tierwater do, apart from becoming an inveterate house husband, deviser of three–course meals and underassistant coach of Sierra’s rec–league soccer team? He gardened. Or landscaped, actually.

  The place was a rental, yes, but they had an option to buy, and Tierwater would have gone ahead with his planting, mulching, digging and trenching in any case – it was a compulsion, or it became one. The house was a classic sprawling ranch dating from the late forties and sitting on a full acre in a decidedly upscale neighborhood. The problem was that all the plantings – pittosporum, wisteria, crepe myrtle, cycad, banks of impatiens, ivy geranium and vinca – were artificial, normative, wasteful of water and destructive of the environment. He tore them out. Tore out everything, reducing stem, branch and bole to fragments in a roaring wood–chipper, and began replanting with natives. In the back of the house he planted sycamore, walnut and valley oak, and on the west–facing slope beyond that he put in ceanothus, redshanks, Catalina cherry and big stabbing swaths of yucca. He was equally decisive with the pool. He couldn’t live with it – it was as simple as that. There it was, artificially shimmering in the sun, devouring electricity, chemicals, water piped all the way down from the Sacramento and Colorado Rivers. It was obscene, that’s what it was. And before the first two months of his tenure were out, and despite Andrea’s objections, he’d fired the pool man, drained off the top three feet of water and tossed rocks and dirt and debris into the basin until he’d created a marsh where waterfowl could frolic side by side with the red–legged frog and the common toad.

  The next–door neighbor – Roger something or other; Tierwater never did catch the man’s surname – questioned the wisdom of this. Roger was an investment broker, and he wore long–sleeved pinstriped shirts even while pruning his roses or overwatering his lawn with a snaking green garden hose. ‘It’ll breed mosquitoes,’ he opined one afternoon, thrusting the stalk of his neck over the redwood fence that separated their yards.

  Tierwater had already stocked the pond with mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis holbrooki), but he didn’t tell Roger that. ‘Better than suburban drones,’ he said.

  The front lawn came up in strips, and where unquenchable grass had been, he created a xeroscape of native plants, and, like any good and true denizen of suburbia, told the cavilers among his neighbors to go fuck themselves. He felt good. Self–righteous. He was doing his part to restore at least a small swath of the ecosystem, even if nobody else was doing theirs. And if they all converted, if they all pitched in, all his Mercedes–driving, bargain–obsessed neighbors, then everything would be fine – if they had the further good sense to go out back to their mulch piles, bury their designer–clad torsos in leaves and grass clippings and shoot themselves in the back of the head, that is.

  All right, maybe he was something of a crank – he’d be the first to admit it. But at least he stayed out of trouble, which pleased Andrea and his parole officer, and, he liked to think, Sierra too. But one day, all the trees had been planted – and the bushes and the succulents and cacti – and the frogs cried lustily from the reconverted swimming pool, and Tierwater found himself craving more, craving action. It was an addiction, exactly that: once you’d identified the enemy, once you’d struck in the night and felt the magnetic effect of it, you were hooked. The passive business was fine, restoring an ecosystem, digging up a lawn, handing out flyers and attending rallies, but there was nothing like action, covert, direct, devastating: block enough culverts, destroy enough Cats, squeeze enough blood out of the corporate sons of bitches, and they’d back off. That was Tierwater’s thinking, anyway. He’d just about served out his parole, and his daughter was growing up fast, seventeen years old, a senior in high school and already talking about UC Santa Cruz, the cheerful sylvan campus of which he and Andrea had dutifully visited with her during spring break. Two years was a long time to play Father Knows Best. And he was sick to death of it.

  Of course, there was Andrea to consider. She might have been happy to show him the tricks of the ecoteur’s trade at one time, but things were different now. She had a position to maintain – and so did he. And it did nobody any good if he was in jail. He remembered an evening somewhere toward the end of his two–year stint as house husband and suburban drone, when for the first time in a long while he broached the subject of nightwork. It was after dinner and they were lingering over a glass of wine. Sierra was in her room, on the phone, nouveau folkies harmonizing through her speakers like a gentle fall of rain on a still lake. Outside, beyond the window screens, the red–legged frogs were working up a good communal croak to celebrate the setting of the sun. ‘No,’ Andrea said, ‘it’s too risky.’

  She was responding to a comment Tierwater had just made about the local electric company and its plans – ‘plans already in the implementation stage, for Christ’s sake, bulldozers, backhoes, habitat loss, you name it’ – to bring a new power grid in over the Santa Susana Mountains at the opposite end of the Valley. ‘It’s nothing,’ Tierwater countered, running a finger round the rim of his wineglass. ‘I’ve been up there hiking every afternoon for the past week – did you know that? – and it’s nothing. Like what you said about the Siskiyou thing – a piece of cake. But truly. In fact. No guards, no night watchmen, no nothing. They’re just whacking away at everything, just another job, guys in hardhats who never heard from ecology and think a monkey wrench is something you tighten bolts with.’

  ‘Uh–uh, Ty,’ she said, and there were those ridges of annoyance climbing her forehead right on up into her hairline. She swept her hair back and cocked her head to stare him in the face. ‘No more guerrilla tactics. We can’t afford it. Every time some eco–nut blows something up or spikes a grove of trees, we lose points with the public, not to mention the legislature. Seventy–three percent of California voters say they’re for the environment. All we need to do is to get them to vote – and we are. We’re succeeding. We don’t need violence anymore – I don’t know if we ever did.’

  Tierwater said nothing. Eco–nut. Is that what he was now? A loose cannon, an embarrassment to the cause? Well, he was the one who’d done the time here, while she and Teo and all the rest of them held hands and skipped through the fields – and made money, don’t forget that. Sure. And what was environmentalism but just another career? He lifted the glass to his lips and let the wine play on his palate. It smelled like mineral springs and fruit fat with the sun, but he took no pleasure in it because the smell was artificial and the grapes that gave up their juice for it had been dusted with sulfur and Christ knew what other sorts of chemicals. Oak trees had fallen to make that wine. Habitat had been gobbled up. Nothing lived in a vineyard, not even nematodes.

  ‘I’m not saying we don’t need direct action – especially against people like the Axxam Corporation and the mining companies and all the rest. But it’s got to be peaceable – and legal.’ The light of the setting sun glowed pinkly off the plaster walls, kitchen fixtures and hanging plants, and it fixed Andrea in her chair as if in a scene of domestic tranquillity – Seated Woman with Wineglass – which was what this was. So far. ‘We did a great thing up there in the Sierras, Ty, and everybody’s tuned in now, you know that. Tuned in to us, to you and me. I’ll say it again – we can’t afford to slip up.’

  ‘I’m not going to slip up.’

  She came right back at him: ‘I know you’re not.’

  He didn’t like her tone, heavy with the freight of implication: he wasn’t going to slip up because he wasn’t going to do anything much more than flap his mouth and wave his hands, that’s what she was saying. And further, if he did dare to fish out the watchcap and the greasepaint and bolt–cutters, there would be no more domestic
tranquillity, not in this house, and not with this wife. ‘Listen to yourself,’ he said. ‘You sound like some sort of corporate whore. Is that what this is all about – rising to the top of the food chain? Politics? A fat paycheck? Is that what it is?’

  She tipped back her head and drained her glass. When she set it down, the base of the glass hitting the tabletop with a force just this side of shattering, he saw how angry she was. ‘I was out there on the front lines when I was twenty–three years old – where were you?’

  ‘How many species you think were lost when we were running around bare–assed in the mountains? Tell me that,’ he said, ignoring the question. ‘How many did we save in those thirty days? And how many roads were built, how many trees came down? Worldwide. Not just in California and Oregon, but worldwide.’ Tierwater’s hand went for the bottle. The wine might have been poison for the environment, but it sang in his head. ‘And while we’re on the subject of numbers, how many guys did you fuck while I was in Lompoc?’

  It all stopped right there, dead in its tracks.

  ‘Huh?’ he demanded, and he felt low, felt like a toad, a criminal, a homewrecker. ‘I don’t hear you? How many? Or was it just Teo?’

  She was on her feet now, and so was he. The look she gave him had no reserve of love in it, not the smallest portion. She was beyond exasperation, beyond contempt even. If she’d been a dog – or a hyena or a Patagonian fox – she’d have snarled. As it was, she just jerked her head to take the hair out of her face, turned her back and stalked out of the picture.

  And Tierwater? He hit the wall so hard with the bottle he could feel the jolt of it all the way down to the base of his spine. He stood there a minute, the neck of the bottle sprouting from his hand like a bouquet of hard green flowers, and then he went out to the garage to look for the watchcap.

  He didn’t get far. Not that night. There was a problem on the freeway, shoulder work, a police chase, chemical spill, furniture in lane two, some maniac blocking an on–ramp with his pickup truck and threatening suicide – take your pick. When wasn’t there a problem on the freeway? Tierwater sat there, stalled in traffic, fuming. There were cars as far as he could see in either direction, cars hemmed in by apartments and condos, restaurants, parking lots and auto malls, each of them pumping its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere each year, every year, forever. The radio played talk and scandal. A baseball game. Oldies. He listened to the oldies and felt nothing but old. The traffic crept forward like an army converging on some distant objective and he crept with it, cursing his fellow drivers, squeezing the Jeep over one foot at a time until he reached the nearest off–ramp, which just happened to be blocked, along with the surface streets it fed.

  Sierra had the right idea. She refused to drive. Refused even to get her learner’s permit. The bus is good enough for me, she said. And boys. Boys’ll always take me where I want to go. They’re lined up out there, Dad, twenty deep. Boys. Yeah, he said, sure, and he winked, because he wouldn’t rise to the bait. But you tell them your heart belongs to Daddy.

  That was when – yesterday? A week ago? He was thinking about that, his rage dissipating, the Jeep rolling forward – the whole line moving now, the car at the head of the train lurching into motion, and then the next in line, and the next, motion communicated through hands and feet and gas pedals in an unbroken chain – until he was staring bewildered into the brake lights of the car ahead of him and hitting his own brakes, hard. At the very instant everyone had lurched forward, a boxy little foreign car shot into the gap that opened between the first and second vehicles, and suddenly, all along the line, twenty drivers – the old, the suspect, the drunk, the suffering – were slamming on their brakes in succession. Before he could think – before he could even squeeze his eyes shut or clench his teeth – Tierwater was jerked forward in his seat and wrung back again, as the car behind him rode up his bumper, crumpled the rear end of the Jeep and drove him helplessly into the next car up the line.

  He’d never understood what whiplash was until that moment, muscle fibers fraying, the back of his neck and shoulders stinging as if he’d been slammed with a board, blindsided, knocked down for the count, but it didn’t prevent him from leaping out of the car to confront the jackass who’d hit him. What was wrong with these people? How could they live like this? Didn’t they realize there was a natural world out there?

  The smog was like mustard gas, burning in his lungs. There was trash everywhere, scattered up and down the off–ramp like the leavings of a bombed–out civilization, cans, bottles, fast–food wrappers, yellowing diapers and rusting shopping carts, oil filters, Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts. The grass was dead, the oleanders were buried in dust. A lone eucalyptus, twelve thousand miles removed from the continent where it had evolved, presided over the scene like an advertisement for blight. There were shouts in the distance, curses, the screaming, uncontainable blast of one car’s horn after another, and sirens, the ubiquitous sirens, playing a thin dirge over it all.

  Tierwater wrenched open the door of the car behind him, no need for rationality here, some threshold crossed and crossed again, Andrea, Teo, the shithole that was the human world, and he was capable of anything. Here, here in this ratcheting, stinking, crumpled hulk of steel, was the face of his enemy, an enemy as specific and unequivocal as Johnny Taradash, and he had his left hand on the door handle and his right balled into a fist, all the horns in the world shrieking … and then he saw that face and stopped.

  She was an Asian girl, seventeen, eighteen, no older than Sierra, with eyes like the bottom of a well and three bright tributaries sectioning her face into a delta of blood, and though he hated everybody and everything, though he had an acetylene torch and a tank of oxygen and a sack of silicon carbide in the back of the Jeep, he reached into the wrecked car, pulled her out and held her in his arms till the ambulance came.

  What did that mean to him? Nothing, nothing at all. Sure, there were individuals out there, human beings worthy of compassion, sacrifice, love, but that didn’t absolve them of collective guilt. There were too many people in the world, six billion already and more coming, endless people, people like locusts, and nothing would survive their onslaught. It took Tierwater less than a week – the rear end of the Jeep hammered roughly back into shape, his neck immobilized in an antiseptic white brace that would have glowed like a light bulb if he hadn’t blackened it with shoe polish – and he was back in action. First, though, he’d had to sit through a dinner with Teo, Andrea and three other E.F.! honchos, at which they discussed things like the electorate, Congress, letter–writing campaigns and ways to attract more green–friendly donors. Teo was wearing a four–hundred–dollar suit. Teo. Liverhead. Sitting there like he’d already been nominated for state senator. Plates of Phat Thai, ginger shrimp and glass noodles circulated round the table. Nobody said a word about the earth.

  Tierwater excused himself before the dessert came – ‘My neck’s killing me,’ he said, giving Andrea a pathetic look, ‘Teo’ll drop you off, won’t you, Teo?’ – and before the hour was out he was parking in a quiet cul–de–sac in a development less than a mile from where General Electric (or the DWP or whoever, it was all the same to him) was rearranging the earth in the name of progress. That was when he got out the shoe–blacking and his watchcap and all the rest. In hindsight, he shouldn’t have acted alone. Always work in pairs, that was the monkeywrencher’s first rule, because a lookout was absolutely essential, especially if you were wearing welder’s goggles and you couldn’t move your neck more than half an inch in either direction, let alone look over your shoulder. But he was done with the law now – he’d paid his dues and then some – and he was eager to get back into the game, to act, to do something meaningful. And he was fed up too, terminally fed up, with Andrea and Teo and the rest of the do–nothings. So he took a chance. Who could blame him?

  It was just after eleven when he left the car, a few lights on in the houses still, but nobody out and nothing moving, not even the odd
dog or cat. He slipped noiselessly down the street, ready to duck into the bushes if a car should happen by – it would be difficult to explain the way he was dressed and just what his mission was, and even if he was able to explain himself he could expect little sympathy from the concerned homeowner, who no doubt applauded General Electric and its mission to bring more electricity to the Valley in order to create yet more homes and, by extension, concerned homeowners. He saw himself sitting at a kitchen table trying to explain island biogeography, extinction and ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere to a yuppie homeowner with a never–used .38 Special pointed at his neck brace. No, anybody who caught even the most cursory glimpse of him would mistake him for a burglar, and the passing cop, if cops came out this far, would take one look at him and start shooting.

  He skirted a house with its porch light burning, then made his way through the one lot left vacant in the whole creeping five–hundred–home development and on into the chaparral behind it. Here he could breathe. Here were the smells of sage and sun–baked dirt strewn with the chaff and seeds of the plants that sprang from it, desert fives and desert deaths. He sat on a slab of sandstone to draw the heavy black socks on over his boots and saw the San Fernando Valley spread out below him like a dark pit into which all the stars in the universe had been poured. Each fight out there, each of those infinite dots of light, marked a house or business, and what would his father think? What would Sy Tierwater, the developer, the builder of tract homes and shopping centers, think about all this spread out beneath him? This was the fruit of ten thousand Tierwaters, a hundred thousand, the city built out beyond any reason or limit. Would he say enough is enough – or would he applaud all those intrepid builders, say a prayer of thanksgiving for all those roofs erected over all those aspiring heads? An owl hooted emphatically, as if in answer, and then Tierwater detected the sound of its wings and lifted his head painfully to watch the dark form beat across a moonless sky.