T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

Yesterday I was whistling, today I'm in no mood. Breakfast (oatmeal with bran and brewer's yeast spooned in for ballast, the crab already sacrificed for love), is barely settled, I haven't seen the paper or suffered over the toilet yet, and this wind from the past blows in. A wind with a face. All I can think of is a Peter Max poster, with Helios in one corner, Aeolus in the other, battling over the weather. Back then, of course, the sun always won out.

"You remember April, Ty," Andrea says, and she's not making a question of it. I watch her as she pulls one of the mold-spattered kitchen chairs across the room and perches girlishly on the edge of it, her bare feet splayed over the rungs. The way she does it, the way she maneuvers the chair and settles herself — and more, the tone of her voice, the smell of her-plumbs some deep inversion layer in the unstirred lake of my memory. But that's what this is all about, isn't it? Memory? In Memoriam, Sierra Tierwater, 19762001. Requiescat in Pace. Fat chance.

"I said, you remember April, don't you, Ty?"

Ah: and now it's a question. I can stall. I can put on my old-man-with-a-postnasal-drip — and — a-glued-up-bra in act, but what will it get me — a sixty-second reprieve? Andrea's tough. She wants something here-I'm not exactly sure what it is yet, but I know she'll get it. Besides which, I'm not really that old, not in the way my grandparents were — or Andrea's decrepit father and foot-shuffling old withered wreck of a mother, who for the final two years of her life thought Andrea was the cleaning lady's cat-because my generation never let go of its (pharmaceutically and surgically assisted) youth, till death do us part. April Wind knows that. And Andrea especially knows it. Of course, I could duck into the bedroom, bad back and chewed-up arm notwithstanding, dig out the. 470 Nitro Express elephant gun I stole from Philip Ratchiss a thousand years ago and make the two of them into hyena food, but, despite reports to the contrary, I've never been a violent man. Or not especially. Or excessively. "Yeah," I mumble, "sure,"

A bright look comes into the eyes of the woman who talks to trees, the kind of look you see in a serval when it detects movement in the high grass. She must be about Sierra's age, suppose — the age Sierra would be now, that is, if she were still among those of us who pass for the living. Forty-nine, fifty maybe. 1 Can't begin to see Sierra's face in hers, though, and I wouldn't want to, because there's an exercise in futility and unquenched sorrow if you ever wanted one: My daughter? Now? She'd be beautiful, a head-turner still, nothing at all like this wizened little buck-toothed poppet of a woman in rotting Doc Martens and a dress a sixth-grader couldn't get into.

"Nice to see you again," April Wind says, and she has to crank up her voice just a notch to be heard over the blow outside (storm number three in the latest succession hit down about an hour ago). "And thanks for granting me this interview. I really appreciate it."

Look out, here it comes: Saint Sierra. "I didn't grant it."

The look on April Wind's face-you'd think I'd just punched her in the stomach, I give her my best impression of a bitter glare, clenching my jaw and hard-cooking my eyes, but what I'm really doing is looking over her shoulder to where the snails are riding their slime trails up and down the windowpane, fully prepared to inherit the earth we've made for them. I remember her, all right. The woo-woo queen. Endless nights in a drafty teepee, the pitilessly chirpy voice, totems in a bag strung round her neck-she couldn't sit down to eat without some loopy prayer to the earth goddess. / C an totally see your aura, and it's blue shading to magenta on the edges, and I already know I'm attracted to you in a like major way because our birth planets are in the same house.

"But I thought, like-"

"Still wearing your totems? What was that one — the toad, wasn't it? Weren't you a toad?" Pause, one beat, listen to the buckets catch the eternal drip. "So what do you do when your totem animal's not just dead but extinct?"

Andrea into the breach: "April? Would you like a cup of tea?"

The child's fingers go to something under the neck of the dress, the little muslin bag there, quick nervous fingers. She smoothes the damp cotton over her thighs, throws a tentative glance at Andrea, then me. Mama told me there d be days like this. "No, thanks, I'm fine. Really."

"You sure?"

"No, really."

But Andrea, who didn't exist two days ago and now owns me, the house and everything in it, is selling tea here this morning. "It warms you," she says. "I mean, not that it's cold out, not the way it used to be this time of year-remember the Stanislaus River, the way it rained and then we froze our butts off for, what was it, two days out there in the woods? But when you're wet all the time--"

"What have you got?"

"Lapsang souchong." A glance for me. "I brought it with me."

Somehow, the women find this funny, as if I'm some sort of barbarian who couldn't be trusted to have a teabag in the house, and all the tension I'd been trying to inject into the moment evaporates. This is the laughter of relief, of camraderie and nostalgia, but of something else too, something conspiratorial. I recognize this-I'm the target with the bull's-eye painted on it here, and let's not forget it — but Andrea's back, I tell myself, Andrea, and you may as well ride with it wherever it's going to go. So I laugh too. And it's a genuine laugh, it is, the unstoppered whinny that always used to get me in trouble in redneck bars, because I'm caught up in it too. I was there at the Headwaters and Mono Lake and a dozen other places, just like them. I can laugh. I can still laugh. Why not? You never forget how to ride a bicycle, do you? Ha-ha, ha-ha.

"Screw the tea," I hear myself saying, my miserable cramped two-room shack with the splootching buckets and the stink of terminal mold and animal feces suddenly alive and musical with the laughter of women. "Let's just break out a bottle of sake."

The one he has the clearest recollection of is the one named Boehringer. There were three of them, their names stenciled in black above the right breast pockets of their camouflage fatigues: Boehringer, Butts and Jerpbak. They climbed out of the jeep with faces that said, This is no joke, the sledgehammers slung over their shoulders like rifles, Sheriff Bob Hicks of Josephine County nodding his approval even as he fished the dark slim tube of a twenty-ounce Pepsi out of a cooler in the police cruiser and pressed it to his lips. "Pot commandos," Teo said under his breath.

So these are pot commandos, Tierwater was thinking, but the thought didn't go much further than that. He watched them dispassionately, tired to the bone, tired of the sun, the trees, the hard dirt road he'd been sitting on for what seemed half his life. At this point, he was thinking nothing, dwelling deep inside himself, his lips raw beneath the tape, each breath tugged through his nostrils like an overinflated balloon, no thought but to get this over with and take his daughter and his wife and go back home and bury his head in the sand. Or maybe he wasn't quite so whipped as he appeared. Maybe he was thinking of Thoreau, his hero of the moment (along with Messrs. Muir, Leopold and Abbey): The authority of government can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. Yes. Sure. Sure, he was. But of course he was right at the very beginning of a fool's progress that was to be like no other.

Collectively, Boeluinger, Butts and Jerpbak had never heard of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold or Abbey — or Jefferson, for that matter. And even if they had, it wouldn't have mattered much more than a flea on an elephant. They were part of an elite force of five hundred paramilitary gun-loving whiperack Marine Corps rejects who'd been organized to interdict clandestine marijuana operations on Forest Service lands. That was their stated purpose, but in fact-since all but the most oblivious and terminally stoned potheads had long since taken their plants indoors to escape detection — they were actually being used to intimidate people like Tyrone Tierwater and his wife and daughter: that is, anybody who dared to get in the way of the profits to be made in the plunder of the national forests. Not that he'd want to preach.