A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘The lyrics might be a little weak,’ Tierwater admitted, ‘but with Pulchris it’s the beat, that’s what it’s all about.’

  Sandman waved a hand in extenuation, then swooped in on the board to replace Tierwater’s queen with a black rook that seemed to come out of nowhere. ‘Hah, got her, the bitch!’

  ‘Shit. I didn’t even see it.’

  ‘Ready to concede? And by the way, speaking of bitches, how’s your ex doing?’ He leaned forward to collect the pieces. ‘I mean, I saw you all tangled up with her there this afternoon, and you didn’t look too happy – ’

  ‘What about your own bitch of an ex–wife?’ Tierwater just sat there, trading grins with him. Andrea was a subject he didn’t want to talk about. Or think about. It was like thinking about water when you’re out on the desert, or pizza when you’re in South Dakota.

  ‘I ever tell you I’ve been married five times?’ Sandman was leaning forward, grinning, the heavy muscles of his upper arms bunched under the thin fabric of his T–shirt. ‘Five times, and I’m only still a child yet. But the first one, Candy, Candy Martinez, she was my high–school sweetheart? – she was the worst. Soon as I went up the first time, she turned around and fucked everybody I ever knew, as if it was an assignment or something – I mean, my brother, my best bud, the guy across the street, even the shop teacher, for shit’s sake, and he must’ve been forty, at least, with like those gorilla hands with the black hairs all over them – ‘

  Tierwater pushed himself up off the bunk, took two paces right, two paces left – the cell was fifty–one square feet, total, so it was no parade ground. He just needed to shake out his legs, that was all. ‘Thanks, Sandman,’ he said, working up his best mock–sincere voice, ‘thanks for sharing that with me. I feel a lot better now.’

  Prison. Tierwater endured it, and there’s not much more to be said about it. Every day he regretted going out there with that torch, but the regret made him harder, and he would have done it again without thinking twice about it – only, of course, as in all fantasies and theoretical models, he wouldn’t get caught this time. He wound up serving the better part of his sentence, a block of good days (good–behavior days, that is, two days’ credit for every day served in state) subtracted from his record because of an unfortunate incident with two child–sized members of a Vietnamese gang in the prison mess hall, and then he went back to Lompoc, minimum security again, because he wasn’t going anywhere with six months left to serve.

  And who visited him there? Sierra, sometimes, though it was a real haul for her on the Greyhound bus, and Andrea too, of course, though every time he pressed his lips to hers and felt her tongue in his mouth he knew it was wrong, knew it was over, knew she’d already written him off and was just playing out the game like a good sport. That hurt him. That put the knife in him and twisted it too. And who else visited, right in the middle of that stunned and stuporous time when he walked and talked and thought like a zombie and wondered how he’d ever gone from his father’s boy in a clean house in a nice development surrounded by trees and flowers and all the good things of life to this? Who else?

  Sandman, that’s who. Geoffrey R. Sandman, in a suit and tie and looking like a lawyer or a brain surgeon. ‘How the hell are you, Ty?’ he wanted to know while the guards edged from one foot to the other. ‘Anything you need, you just tell me.’

  And then came the day, déjà vu, Andrea waiting for him in the parking lot, the little bag of his belongings, goodbye, Lompoc. He’d served out his sentence, and they unlocked the cage and let him go. Not in time to see his daughter cock the mortarboard down low over one gray, seriously committed eye and accept her degree, cum laude, in environmental science, but that was the way it was when you did the stupid things, the things that put you in their power, the things you swore you would never do again. That was what every prisoner told himself – I’ll never do it again — but Tierwater didn’t believe it. Not for a minute. He knew now, with every yearning, hating, bitter and terminally bored fiber of his being, why prison didn’t reform anybody. Penitentiary. What a joke. The only thing you were penitent for was getting caught. And the more time you did, the more you wanted to strike back at the sons of bitches and make them wince, make them hurt the way you did. That was rehabilitation for you.

  This time the car was a smooth black BMW – one of the pricey models, 740i, Andrea’s car, and who’d bought it for her? ‘You did, Ty, and I love you for it. We needed something with a little class for pulling up at the curb when they’ve got the cameras going, you know? Anyway, I thought I’d surprise you. You like it, don’t you?’ He did. And this was déjà vu too, hammering the accelerator, the ocean, the wind, outdoors on the patio of the restaurant, waiters, a menu, real food, and then home to bed and sex. Only Sierra wasn’t there this time – she was in Arizona, at Teo’s Action Camp, undergoing a course of indoctrination in nonviolent protest, as if she hadn’t already earned three Ph.D.’s in it – and the sex wasn’t there either. Oh, they took off their clothes, he and Andrea, and he built a monument to her body, the smell of her, the taste, her eyes and teeth, the sound of her voice, the simple unadulterated miracle of sitting at breakfast in a sunstruck kitchen and seeing her there across the table in her robe, but it was different. It was like Sandman said, reminiscing in the minutest sexual detail over his third wife and her multifarious betrayals, or maybe it was his fourth: What do you expect?

  Tierwater kept his head down. He was a blind man given a pair of eyes, and he didn’t want to look too hard for fear of going blind again. Andrea took the black BMW to work and he went out in the yard and dug holes and stuck plants in the ground. There was a pair of mallards in the swimming pool, and that pleased him – they’d been flying off in the spring and coming back every fall, Andrea told him – and the red–legged frogs splashed randily in the water while the mosquito fish pocked the surface with thin–lipped kisses. He saw Sandman a couple of times – he was living in Long Beach, working for a biotech firm, ‘That’s where the money is, bro, and the future too’ – but Andrea didn’t exactly shine to the man, ex–con and violent offender that he was, and Tierwater let the relationship cool. Teo came back at the end of October, and Andrea seemed to fly south herself, emotionally anyway, and Tierwater was ready to get out the decoys and the shotgun and find out once and for all how things stood, but Sierra came back then too, and he got distracted.

  For a month, he and his daughter held an ongoing reunion. They went to Disneyland and Magic Mountain, hiked the San Gabriels, the Santa Monicas and the Santa Susanas, ate out – every meal, every day – and saw A Doll’s House (‘I’ll never be like her’) and The Misanthrope at a theater in Brentwood. She was grown up now, a woman, nearly the age Jane was when they’d first met. Everywhere they went, he watched the men watching her, and that made him feel strange and protective, all those doggy and envious eyes, men of all ages – grandfathers, even – craning their necks for a look at her in her clean–limbed beauty. What did she wear? Shorts, skirts, T–shirts, blouses made of silk or rayon, nothing especially provocative, no makeup, no nonsense, but she had a gift of beauty and every man who wasn’t already dead responded to it. One afternoon, over lunch at a place that had the vegan seal of approval – lentil–paste sandwiches, eggplant à la paysanne, peanut–vinaigrette salad and tofu shakes – he asked her about that, about men, that is. ‘Rick, wasn’t that his name? Whatever happened to him?’

  She was chewing, her cheeks full and round, sunlight painting the tiles around a little fountain, a murmur of voices from the other diners, the soft swish of cars on the boulevard. It took her a moment, her eyes tight with some secret knowledge. ‘Oh, him,’ she said finally. ‘That was sophomore year. He was – I don’t know, he liked sports.’

  Tierwater, puzzled: ‘You don’t like sports?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ A pause. Somewhere, very faintly, a Coltrane tune was playing, a tune that had ravished him when he was her age. ‘I liked Donovan Kurtz senior year, remember I t
old you? He was in my environmental–issues class? He had a – Do you want to hear this?’

  Iced tea, that’s what Tierwater wanted. He flagged down the waitress and they both sat in silence while she refilled his glass. ‘Sure,’ he said, and let the corners of his mouth drop.

  ‘He was a music major and he used to sing to me when we were making love.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Tierwater said, plunging in to cover his embarrassment, his daughter making love,’ “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”?’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘ “When the Saints Go Marching In”?’

  Was it his imagination, or did she color, just a bit? Coltrane ran distantly up and down the scales, magnificent changes, the ice tinkled in his glass. He said, ‘So what happened to him?’

  Sierra set down her sandwich, looked away, shrugged. ‘He got married.’

  Yes, and then she was up in northern California, in Scotia, getting set to trespass on Coast Lumber’s property and take possession of one of Coast Lumber’s prime trees, and Tierwater was behind the wheel of the black BMW hurtling up 101, Andrea at his side sorting through the CDs (‘How about this one, how about Barbecue You?’), Teo in back, all that watery sun–pasted scenery scrolling past the windows. The talk was of Washington lobbyists, sanctimonious Sierra Clubbers, the banners they’d be waving when Sierra rose up into the sky – and the speed limit. ‘Slow down, Ty – it’s fifty–five through here,’ Andrea kept saying. ‘You don’t want to get pulled over, do you? And have to explain to the cop why you’re not in Los Angeles?’

  ’What are you talking about?’ He was irritated, of course he was irritated: all he could think about was that trip back from the Siskiyou, more déjà vu, and Sierra left behind in the hands of the enemy. And now what were they doing? Rushing back into the fray, ready to sacrifice her all over again. Because of Teo. Because of Teo and his Action Camp. ‘You think some Gilroy yokel is going to know or care who I am or what the deal is?’

  ‘Computers,’ came Teo’s voice from the back.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Tierwater said, but he slowed down.

  Then there was the pretense of the motel, Tierwater and Andrea in one room, king–size bed, magic fingers, no sex, and Teo in another, no confessions yet, no avowals or disavowals, something bigger than the three of them in the making, let’s focus, let’s go team, hooray for our side. Early breakfast. Dim and overcast, fog like the wallpaper of a dream, a smell in the air that was like graves being turned. Tierwater was uneasy. He lit a cigarette, nasty habit, and Andrea told him to go outside.

  It was just past nine when they reached the turnoff outside of Scotia and the dusty, compacted lot beyond it that was really nothing more than the result of a pass or two with the Cat during some bygone logging operation. Trees stood tall along the road – the fence, as the timber company called it, to keep motorists from apprehending that the façade was all there was – and there were cars everywhere, sensible cars, Corollas, Accords, Saturns, the faded mustard Volvos and battered VW buses of the Movement. It was a Sunday. There was smoke in the air, a taste of the marijuana–scented past, the chink–chink of tambourines and the skreel of nose flutes. Tierwater pulled a baseball cap down over his balding head and stepped out of the car.

  Andrea was dressed down for the occasion in jeans, three–hundred–dollar cowboy boots and white spandex with a red E.F.! sweater knotted round her neck and her hair pulled back in a knot. She had a clipboard in one hand, a bottle of Evian in the other, and she was out of the car before it had come to a halt – Tierwater could see her across the lot, the center of a group of mostly young people with placards, her elbows jerky, one hand fluttering like a wounded bird, already lecturing. There was a quick fusillade of flashbulbs, a knot of journalists sympathetic to the cause converging on her, Chris Mattingly among them. Teo was more deliberate. He took his time gathering his things out of the back seat – pamphlets, copies of the press release, a bullhorn to rally the troops – and then he was standing there, dressed in his muscles, on the far side of the car, giving Tierwater a slit–eyed look over the hump of the sculpted roof. ‘You going to be okay with this, Ty?’ he asked. ‘No violence, no hassles, real low profile, right?’ He turned to gaze off at the crowd before he had his answer, and Tierwater understood that he wasn’t really asking. ‘Oh, and pop the trunk, would you?’

  AXXAM OUT! the placards said. SAVE THE TREES! STOP THE SLAUGHTER!

  In the trunk was a picnic basket, a hamper with the ruby necks of two bottles of Bordeaux peeping out of one corner. Tierwater was dumbstruck. A picnic basket. His daughter was going up a tree and they were going to have a picnic. He heard Teo, the surfer’s inflection, vowels riding the waves still, ‘Would you mind grabbing that basket?’

  There were a lot of things here that rubbed Tierwater wrong, too many to count or even mention, but this, this picnic basket, really set him off. They were right there, the two of them, shoulder to shoulder at the open trunk of the blackly gleaming car, an excited chirp of voices burbling up all around them like springs erupting from the earth, movement everywhere, dust. ‘You’re fucking my wife,’ Tierwater said.

  Teo just looked at him, and he was wearing shades though the day was overcast, two amber slits that narrowed his face and made the gleaming stubblefield of his head seem enormous. ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘I said you’re fucking my wife, aren’t you, Teo? Be a man. Admit it. Come on, you son of a bitch, come on – ‘

  Liverhead. He flexed his biceps and the muscles that ran in cords down either side of his neck, and he stood there as straight as a post driven into the ground. ‘This isn’t the place, Ty,’ he said, and the pamphlets were bookbagged under one arm, the bullhorn under the other. ‘You’ve been gone a long time. Cut her some slack.’

  So this was it. This was the admission he’d been waiting for. Sandman had been right all along – and so had he, so had he. He wanted to hurt somebody in the space of that moment, the picnic basket in his hand, the nose flutes starting up with a shriek, flashbulbs popping – he wanted to hurt Teo, hurt him badly. But then somebody was there, some kid in a tie–dye T–shirt trying to grow into his first beard – ‘Teo, Teo, man, Teo’ – the kid was saying, pumping Teo’s hand and reaching to help with the pamphlets at the same time, and Teo, ignoring the kid, turned to Tierwater and let the extenuation melt into his voice: ‘Ty, look,’ he said, ‘you got to understand – we’re all in this together.’

  Yes. And then they lifted his daughter up into the shattering light–struck reaches of that tree and everybody cheered, everybody, the whole mad circus, but Tierwater, alone in himself, felt nothing but hate and fear.

  The Sierra Nevada, May 2026

  It’s hot. that seems to be the main feature of the experience Andrea, Petunia and I are having as we maneuver the Olfputt over nondiscriminating roads – downed trees, splintered telephone poles, potholes and craters everywhere, anything less than a 4x4 or a military vehicle and you’re done for. Sure, there are road crews out there beyond the tinted windows – 131 °F. according to the LED display on the dash, and the wind so dirty it’s like something out of Lawrence of Arabia — but they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them. Then the rains will come and the roads will wash out again, and they’ll have a whole lot more. Andrea’s driving. I’m looking out the window. Petunia, restrained by muzzle, harness and leash but otherwise free to roam around the back if she can find a place to stand amid all the provisions, fine wines, relics and household goods we’ve brought along, is sweating. And stinking.

  We’re stopped in traffic – ROAD WORK AHEAD – and I’m thinking about the mountains, about the tall trees and the sweet breath of the nights up there and the good times we had, the family times, back when we were the Drinkwaters. At the risk of sounding hackneyed, I’d say the usual, that it seems like an ice age ago, but it was, it was. There are squatters up there now, squirrel hunters and the like trying to live off the land, and I hear the trees have really taken a beating a
fter a quarter–century of floods, droughts, beetles and windstorms. At least we don’t have to worry about clear–cuts anymore – nothing but salvage timber now.

  There’s a pioneering stream of sweat working its way down my spine, the inside of the car smells like the old cat–house at the San Francisco Zoo, and the stiff no–nonsense seat of the Olfputt is crucifying my back. We’ve been on the road for four hours and we haven’t even reached Bakersfield yet. ‘Crank the air–conditioning, will you?’ I hear myself say.

  ‘It’s on full.’ Andrea gives me a smile. She’s enjoying this. For her it’s an adventure, one more take on the world and let’s see what shakes out this time.

  I’m stiff. I’m aggravated. I need to take a leak. Plus, Petunia’s got to have a chance to do her business, if we ever hope to leash–train her anyway, and up ahead – we’re crawling now, vroom–vroom, up and down over the pits and into and out of a gully the size of the Grand Canyon – I can make out the lights of a restaurant, El Frijole Grande. ‘What do you think about some lunch?’ I say.

  The lot is gouged and rutted and there’s wind–drift everywhere, tumbleweeds, trash, what used to be a fence, the desiccated carcass of a cat (Felis catus). I step shakily out of the car – the hips! the knee! – and fall into the arms of the heat. It’s staggering, it truly is. The whole world’s a pizza oven, a pizza oven that’s just exploded, the blast zone radiating outward forever, particles of grit forced right up my nose and down my throat the instant I swing open the door – accompanied by the ominous rattle of sand ricocheting off the scratch–resistant lenses of my glasses. I’m just trying to survive till I can get inside the restaurant, thinking about nothing but that, and yet here’s Andrea’s face, still floating behind me in the cab of the 4x4, and she seems to be screeching something, something urgent, and suddenly I’m whirling round with the oxidized reflexes of the young–old just in time to catch Petunia’s leash as she comes hurtling out the door.