T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

"I think so," Tierwater murmured, going through a mental checklist of his body parts, just to be sure everything was still there. Since childhood, he'd had a fear of waking up in a hospital bed (not this one — a grainy, grayish, black — and white — movie bed) with a doctor standing over him saying, I'm afraid the other leg's going to have to go too. "I mean, I don't remember-"

"You're in the Ida P. Klipspringer Memorial Hospital. You passed out. Heat exhaustion is what the doctor called it." The deputy's eyes were the same color as the walls. He screwed them up and gave Tierwater a look that had no hint of sympathy in it.

"Heat exhaustion? Your friends or colleagues or whoever punched me in the goddamned stomach — and with my hands tied behind my back and, and duct tape over my mouth, for Christ's sake-punched me till I was out cold. You listen here" — and he was up on his elbows now, stoked with the recollection- "we're talking police brutality, we're talking a methodical, premeditated. And your sheriff was right there drinking a Pepsi and he never said a word."

"That's right," the deputy said, nodding his head on the long stalk of his neck till it was like a hand at the end of a wrist, waving goodbye. "And that's a violation of the penal code-two of 'em, actually. Resisting arrest, and assault and battery on a peace officer. That's in addition to the charge of disturbing the peace — and trespassing."

"Trespassing? Are you out of your mind? The Siskiyou National Forest is public property and you know it as well as I do-"

"Listen, mister-sir — and I tell you it really rankles me to have to be professional with people like you, but what I know or don't know isn't the issue here-it's what the judge knows. And you'll be seeing him soon enough."

At this juncture of his life, Tyrone Tierwater was prone to volatility, and he would have been the first to admit it. The term "slow burn" meant nothing to him. He was a pile of mesquite branches on a windy day, a rag soaked in paint thinner. What did he know? He thought things mattered, believed in the power of individuals to influence events, illuminate issues, effect change, resuscitate the earth. None of this did his digestion any good. Or his bank account either. Now, in the face of intransigence and stupidity, in the face of Deputy Sheets, he sat up. All the way up, and tore the IV from his arm as if he were swatting a mosquito. "Where's my wife and daughter?" He demanded. Or no: he roared, his voice erupting from the deepest cavity of his chest to boom off the walls and evoke a responsive tinkle from the instruments on the metal shelf in the corner.

Deputy Sheets never flinched, He gave Tierwater a tight, encapsulated smile. He was wearing his firearm, and he let his right hand go to it, as much to reassure himself as to let Tierwater know exactly what the parameters were here. His lips barely moved as he spoke. "In custody," he said.

"What do you mean, in custody '? Where?"

He didn't answer, not right away. Just squared his shoulders and turned his head to the side, as if to spit, but then he caught himself, all the linoleum tiles agleam from his boots to the foot of the bed. "No worries on that score. Soon as the doctor says so, friend," he breathed, letting his eyes go cold, "you'll be joining 'em."

This hospital room wasn't the first Tierwater had inhabited. He'd had his tonsils out at the Peterskill Municipal Hospital when he was six, and he was back again a few years later with a fractured arm-after an ill-fated decision to intervene in one of his parents' more physical discussions. Oh, his father was destroyed-never has there been such sorrow, not since Abraham offered up Isaac — and his mother was a fragrant sink of pity and consolation and he pushed his face of greed into gallon after gallon of the butter-brickle ice cream proffered as compensatory damages. Sure. But violence breeds violence, and though neither parent ever laid a finger on him again, there it was, a rotten seed, festering. He was in the hospital again for the birth of his daughter, though the venue was a theater of pain and confusion, women crying out from behind the thin trembling walls of curtains on sliding hooks-Oh, God! Oh, my God! S hrieked one anonymous soprano voice for forty-five solid minutes — and he made it as far as the emergency room in Whitefish, Montana, with Jane, but she wasn't breathing by then, and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't-what? They couldn't do shit.

There was nothing wrong with him, but the doctor — a pale, towering bald-headed man with a pelt of laminated black hair climbing out of the V-neck of his scrubs-wanted to run some tests. Just to be sure. Deputy Sheets stood at the door, a look of disgust pressed into his skeletal features, scrutinizing the doctor's every move. "I'm all right, really," Tierwater insisted while the doctor studied his chart and paced back and forth, a broad-beamed scurrying nurse at his elbow. "I feel fine, I do. I just want to get out of here, okay?"

All three of them-Tierwater, the doctor and his nurse-turned to look at Deputy Sheets. "I don't like your blood pressure," the doctor said, swinging back round again. His arms were unnaturally long, ape's arms, the knuckles all but grazing his knees, and even in his extremity, Tierwater couldn't help puzzling over a species so recently come down from the trees and yet so intent on destroying them. "Les dangerously elevated. And I'm going to have to ask you not to interfere with the intravenous drip. You've been dehydrated, We need to replenish your fluids?'

That put a scare into him-dangerously elevated, Uncle Sol, where are you? — but he fought it down. "What do you expect? I've been gagged and beaten and left out in the sun all day by your, your-"

Sheets' voice, from the door: "Nobody laid a finger on him. He's one of those activists is what he is. From California."

The doctor gave Tierwater a cold look. Josephine County was a timber county, replete with timber families, and timber families paid the bills. "Yes, well? 'The doctor said, and he was practically scraping the ceiling with the big shining globe of his head," you're not going anywhere" — peering at the chart- "Mr. Tierwater. Not to jail and not to California either-not till we stabilize you."

"But what about my daughter?" He demanded, and his blood pressure was going up, through the roof, sure, and what did they expect, the sons of bitches? He hadn't been away from Sierra for a single night since her mother died — and if he hadn't been away from her then, if he and Jane had just stayed put, stayed home where they belonged, then Jane would be alive today. "Don't I get a phone call at least? I mean, what is this, the gulag?"

No one bothered to answer, least of all the doctor, whose looming hairy frame was already passing through the door, on his way out, but the nurse lingered long enough to reinsert the IV with the abraded tips of her cold, rough fingers. The stab of it was no more than a bee sting, the merest prick, but he couldn't help thinking they were taking something from him-draining him, drop by drop-instead of putting something back in.

When he woke again, he checked his watch, and his watch told him it was morning. There was no confusion about where he was, none of the dislocation he'd experienced a hundred times in pup tents and motel rooms or on the unforgiving couch at a friend's house-he woke to full consciousness and saw everything in the room as if it were an oil painting he'd spent the whole night composing. Central to the composition was Deputy Sheets, seated, thin cloth pressed to narrow shanks, skull thrown back against the wall behind him, mouth agape. Long shadows. Early light. Deputy Sheets was asleep. Stationed by the door, it's true, but lost in the wilderness of dreams.