A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  The answer was self–evident: Sy Tierwater would have loved all this, and hated what his son was about to do.

  The night was shrunk down to nothing, the stars glowing feebly through a shroud of smog, the yellow bowl of light pollution halving the sky at his back. He came down off the ridge behind the development and into the moonscape of the construction site on muffled feet, every step sure, not so much as a kicked stone or snapped branch to give him away. He wasn’t reckless. He knew what jail was and he wasn’t going back, that was for sure, and he knew what Andrea’s wrath meant, and her love and attachment too. There could be no slip–ups tonight. The very fact of his being here would outrage her, if she knew about it – and by now, he supposed, she did. He was risking everything, he knew that. But then, what was one marriage, one daughter, one suburban life compared with the fate of the earth?

  Sometimes, hiking the trails, dreaming, the breeze in his face and the chaparral burnished with the sun, he wished some avenger would come down and wipe them all out, all those seething masses out there with their Hondas and their kitchen sets and throw rugs and doilies and VCRs. A comet would hit. The plague, mutated beyond all recognition, would come back to scour the land. Fire and ice. The final solution. And in all these scenarios, Ty Tierwater would miraculously survive – and his wife and daughter and a few others who respected the earth – and they would build the new uncivilized civilization on the ashes of the old. No more progress. No more products. Just life.

  He turned first to the heavy equipment – the earth movers, a crane, a pair of dump trucks. It was nothing, the routine he’d gone through a dozen times and more: locate the crankcase, fill it to the neck with grit and move on to the next diesel–stinking hulk. He’d waited for the dark of the moon so he could work without fear of detection, and though the shapes were indistinct, he was blessed with excellent night vision, and yes, he took his multiple vitamins every morning and a beta–carotene supplement too. The usual night sounds blossomed around him, the distant hum of the freeways, crickets and peepers, a pair of coyotes announcing some furtive triumph. He felt relaxed. He felt good.

  This was the point at which he should have called it a job well done and gone home to bed. But he didn’t. He wanted to do something big, make a grand statement that would pique interest out there in the dens and kitchens of the Valley, generate news clippings and wow the hardcore Earth Forever! cadre, the ones who weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. In his backpack was the acetylene torch and an oxygen bottle made of aluminum. This was a heavy–duty torch, the sort of thing that could cut through steel like a magic wand, just wave it at the blade arms of a bulldozer or a section of railroad track and it would do the trick in less than a minute. Tierwater had been instructed in the use of the thing by an Oregon E.F.!er by the name of Teddy Scruggs, a twenty–five–year–old welder with a lazy eye, bad skin and long trailing hair that generated enough grease to lubricate machinery – no more idiocy like the dance around the cement bags in the Siskiyou, not for Tierwater. He was a professional now, a veteran, and he prided himself on that.

  The power company had sheared off the top of a hill here and run a dead zone back into the mountains as far as you could see. And they’d erected a chain of steel towers, bound together by high–tension wires, marching one after another on up the hill into the blue yonder – and soon to reach down on the near side into the Valley itself. He’d given some thought to waiting till the project was complete and the power up and running, but bringing down those towers when they were carrying God knew how many megavolts of electricity was just too risky. Not that he meant to cut all the way through the supports – no, he would merely weaken them, slice neatly through the steel right at the base, where it plunged into the concrete footings. Then he’d go home and wait for the wind to blow – as it would tomorrow, according to the newspaper, Santa Anas gusting up to fifty miles per hour in the mountains and passes. Just about the time they’d be wondering what was wrong with the trucks, the towers would come thundering down, each yoked to the other, bang–bang–bang, like a chain of dominoes.

  And what was that going to accomplish? He could hear Andrea already, and Teo – though Teo would have to give him his grudging admiration. Oh, yes, and the rest of the armchair radicals too. Because the answer was: plenty. Because all it took was public awareness – if they only knew what that electricity ultimately cost them, if they only knew they were tightening the noose round their own throats, day by day, kilowatt hour by kilowatt hour, then they’d rise up as one and put an end to it. And to make sure that they did know, to make sure they understood just what the environmental movement was all about, Tierwater had drafted a ten–page letter to the Los Angeles Times, on a used typewriter he’d bought for cash at a junk shop in Bakersfield and discarded in a Dumpster in Santa Monica, and that letter was his testament, his manifesto, a call to arms for every wondering and disaffected soul out there. He’d signed it, after much deliberation, The California Phantom.

  It was a good plan. But the problem with the torch, aside from the obvious disadvantage of its awkwardness and the weight of the tanks, was visibility. On a dismal black smog–shrouded night like this, you’d be hard–pressed to find anything much brighter than an oxy–fuel torch, except maybe one of those flares they used to shoot off over the trip wire in Vietnam so they could count how many teeth each of the Viet Cong had before blowing them away in a hail of M-16 fire. Tierwater considered that – he even thought about waiting till dawn, when the big light in the sky would efface the glare of the torch – but he went ahead with it anyway. There was nobody out here, and if he waited till dawn he ran the risk of running into an overeager GE employee or some suburban dog–walker with a photographic memory for license–plate numbers. He bent for the pack, hefted it and ambled up the grade to where the first of the towers stood skeletal against the night.

  The stanchions were thicker than he’d supposed. No problem, though – he was ready for anything; hell, he could have taken the George Washington Bridge down if he’d had enough time and enough fuel and oxygen. He did feel a twinge in the back of his neck as he bent to attach his hoses and the oxygen regulator – the brace shoved at his chin and held his head up awkwardly, as if he were about to lay it out flat on the chopping block or into the slit of the guillotine. But the torch took away his pain. He flipped down his goggles, turned up the flame and began to slice through high–grade Korean steel as if he were omnipotent.

  Tierwater had always been a careful worker, precise where another might be approximate, a model of concentration who never allowed himself to be distracted, even when he was a boy putting models together on a noisy playground or sitting at his father’s drafting table creating his own blueprints of imaginary cities. His mother praised him for what was really an extraordinary ability in one so young, and his teachers praised him too. There was one in particular, an art teacher in the fifth or sixth grade – what was her name? – he could see her as clearly as if she were standing before him now, a tiny smiling woman not much older than Morty Reich’s big sister – who really thought he had a talent, and not just because he’d mastered perspective drawing in a week and could sketch an unerring line, like the one he was drawing now, but –

  He never got to finish the thought. Because just then, though the neck brace prevented him from turning round to acknowledge it, he felt a firm, unmistakable tap at his shoulder.

  * * *

  They came down hard on him this time. The State of California arraigned him on four counts of felony vandalism, and then the feds stepped in to charge him with violating parole, and that was the unkindest cut of all, because at the time of his arrest he had less than three weeks left till he was in the clear. Fred – and the defense attorney Tierwater had to hire to replace him when Fred begged off the minute he made bail – could do nothing. The press jumped gleefully on the case – this was Tierwater, Tyrone O’Shaughnessy Tierwater, the nudist radical who’d spent a naked month in the Sierras with his naked a
nd busty wife, Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, the high–flying E.F.! director and spokesperson, and here were the photos of that infamous stunt dredged up out of the files and reprinted with remarkable clarity on page one of the Metro section, nipples and genitalia airbrushed out so as not to offend puerile sensibilities, of course. The DA wouldn’t bend, not with all that light shining on him. He made Tierwater plead to the face – plead on all counts, that is – and he was sentenced to two years on count one, the other three eight–month counts to be served consecutively, after which he’d be going back to Lompoc for six months under federal supervision. Tierwater was no mathematician, but no matter how he juggled the figures, they added up to fifty–four months – four and a half stupefying years.

  But it got worse. He was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of eight hundred and seventy–five thousand dollars for damage to the vehicles and earth–moving equipment, not to mention the compromised stanchion, which required full replacement of the tower in question. The press wasn’t calling him a hyena yet – that would come later – but there wasn’t a friendly reporter out there, not even Chris Mattingly, who went on the record condemning any sort of monkeywrenching as anarchy, pure and simple. Newsweek ran a feature on ecotage, replete with the usual diagrams, a titillating breakdown of the various techniques employed, from tree–spiking to fire–bombing corporate offices, and a photo of a watchcapped and greasepainted Tierwater in a little box on the front cover. And the good honest law–abiding image–conscious hypocrites at Earth Forever! fell all over themselves denying any involvement. Which was why Fred had to bow out – ‘It just wouldn’t look right,’ he said. ‘I hope you understand.’

  All right, so Fred was a coward, like the rest of them. But he was there the first day to bail Tierwater out and, along with Andrea, to creatively restructure the Tierwater holdings, both in real property and in the mutual–fund investments into which the shopping–center profits had gone. It was like this: Fred had foreseen the judgment and already had the instrument in hand that would shift all Tierwater’s assets to the Earth Forever! Preservation Trust, under his wife’s name and control. ‘Before the court gets it,’ Fred reasoned, pacing back and forth across the living–room carpet of the rented house in Tarzana, the frogs croaking and birds singing obliviously in the trees Tierwater wouldn’t be seeing again for some time to come. ‘Or GE. You don’t want to see GE get everything you have, do you?’

  Tierwater was in a state of shock. He held himself rigid against the smudged neck–brace and bent awkwardly to sign the papers. And Andrea, as prearranged, filed for divorce. ‘Yes, I’m pissed off,’ she said, ‘of course I am, and disappointed and hurt too – I can’t begin to tell you the harm you’ve done, Ty, and not just to me and Sierra, but to the whole organization. You’re so goddamned mindless and stupid it just astonishes me’ – a shadow swept by the window on swift wings, Sierra sat white–faced on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin, Fred stood by – ‘but I’m not deserting you, though no one would blame me if I did. This is just a maneuver, don’t you see? We’re hiding your assets and hoping the other side won’t find out you have anything more than a closet full of old camping equipment, a beat–up Jeep and a rental house. If you don’t have anything, what can they take?’

  (Speeches. I heard one after the other, everybody so practical, so reasonable, but what it amounted to was the fleecing of Ty Tierwater, once and forever, my father’s last hard–earned dollars poured down the funnel and into the money–hungry gullet of Earth Forever!, the incorporated earth–savers, Rallies R Us, rah–rah–rah. Andrea and I never did remarry, although she was therefor me, nominally at least, when I got out. Do I sound bitter? I am. Or I was. But none of it matters anymore, not really.)

  So Tierwater, officially penniless, shackled at the ankles and handcuffed at the wrists, took a bus ride to the state prison at Calpatria, a big stark factory of a place in the blasted scrubby hills of the Mohave Desert. What can he say about that place? It was no camp, that was for sure. Forget the tennis courts, the strolls round the yard, the dormitory. It was cellblock time. A lockup for the discerning criminal, no amateurs here. Your cell consisted of a metal–frame bunk, a lidless steel toilet, two metal counters with attached swing–out stools, a sink, a single overhead lightbulb and a sheet of polished metal bolted into the wall for a mirror. The guards didn’t like to be called guards – they were ‘correctional officers’ – and they called everybody else ‘shitbird,’ regardless of race or crime or attitude. What else? The cuisine was shit. The work was shit. Your fellow inmates were shit. You got drunk on a kind of rancid thin liquid made from bread, oranges, water and sugar fermented for four days in a plastic bag hidden in the back of your locker. Drugs came in in the vaginas of girlfriends and wives, tucked into condoms that made it from the female mouth to the male during that first long lingering kiss of greeting. Tierwater didn’t do drugs. And he didn’t have a girlfriend. His wife – or ex–wife – visited him once a month if he was lucky. And his daughter – to her eyes, and hers alone, he was still a hero – tried to come when she could, but she was in college now, and she had papers to write, exams to take, rallies to attend, protests to organize, animals to liberate. She wrote him every week, long discursive letters on the Gaia hypothesis, rock and roll, fossil love and her roommate’s hygienic habits. Once in a while she’d take the bus down to Calpatria and surprise him.

  (Sample conversation, Tierwater and his daughter, the table between them, the shriek and gibber of two dozen voices, Fat Frank, the puffed–up guard, looming over them like an avalanche about to happen.

  Sierra: Yeah, well, chickens have rights too. They do. It’s just species chauvinism is what it is.

  Tierwater: What what is?

  Sierra: Saying they’re just dumb animals as a rationale for penning them up in a space the size of a shoebox for their whole lives, with a what–do–you–call–it – a conveyor belt – underneath it to carry off their waste. Well, they used to say the same thing a hundred and fifty years ago about African Americans.

  Tierwater: I’m not following you – you want to liberate the chickens and deep–fry African Americans, is that it?

  Sierra: Dad.)

  Then there was Sandman. Sandman – Geoffrey R. Sandman, the ‘R.’ signifying nothing, but giving the extra bit of heft to a name that had to look good at the bottom of a bad check – was Tierwater’s cellmate during the better part of the thirty–eight months of the state sentence he wound up serving. It was Sandman who kept him sane (if ‘sane’ was an accurate description, and there were plenty who would debate that), and kept him safe too. Sandman was in for armed robbery – he’d taken down a Brinks guard coming out of the neighborhood Safeway with the day’s receipts, then shot the man at the wheel in both feet when he stepped out to come to his partner’s aid, and on top of that he wound up stealing the armored car for a glorious two–hour chase on the 605 Freeway – and he was a force to be reckoned with. He was tall, six three or four, and he put in his time in the weight room. Tierwater’s reputation had preceded him – the Johnny Taradash incident, a few other minor but indicative things at Lompoc and the sheer craziness of the nude stunt and trying to take out General Electric – and that gave him at least some initial respect on the cellblock. Together, they formed a gang of two.

  They were sitting in the cell one night, half an hour before lockdown, playing take–no–prisoners chess for five–dollar chits (Tierwater already owed his cellmate something like three hundred and twenty dollars at that point) and sharing the last of a pack of Camels (a nasty habit, sure, but what else were you going to do in prison?). There were the usual sounds, the jabbering, the cursing, the rucking up of clots of phlegm, the persistent tuh–tuh of sunflower seeds spat into a fist or a cup. The usual smells too, the body reek of caged animals, of vomit, urine and disinfectant, cut by the sweet cherry perfume of pipe tobacco or the scent of beer nuts or a freshly cracked bag of salt–and–vinegar potato chips. From the radio that hu
ng from the bars in the exact spot where the reception was best came the low thump of bass and the high breathy wheeze of Maclovio Pulchris rendering the ineluctable lyrics of his latest hit: I want you, I want you, I want you, / Ooo, baby, ooo, baby, ooo!

  ‘Christ, I hate that shit,’ Sandman said, maneuvering his bishop in for the kill – he still had better than half his pieces on the board; Tierwater was down to his king, an embattled queen and two pawns. ‘Every time he opens his mouth he sounds like he’s pissing down his leg.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tierwater said, ‘I kind of like it.’

  Sandman gave him a look of incredulity – what he liked to call his ‘tomcat–sniffing–a–new–asshole look’ – but he let it drop right there. He had the most malleable face Tierwater had ever seen, and he used it to his advantage, acting, always acting, but ready to underscore any performance with a ready brutal violence that was no act at all. When Tierwater first met him, Sandman was thirty–two, his face tanned from the yard, with a pair of casual blue eyes and a beard so carefully clipped it was like a shadow tracing the line of his jaw and underscoring the thrust of his chin. He was handsome, as handsome as the kind of actor who specializes in the role of the wisecracking world–beater and gets paid for it, and he used his looks to his advantage. People instinctively liked him. And he used their prejudices – no bad guy could look like that, they thought, certainly no con – and turned them upside down. ‘I spent years looking into the mirror,’ he’d told Tierwater, ‘till I got every look down, from “don’t fuck with me” to “holy reverend taking the collection” to “would you please put the money in the paper sack before I remove your fucking face.”’