T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

And this was where things got interesting. The dog, dragging a cop who might have been Sheets' brother (thin as a wading bird, a stick of an arm at the end of the leash), made a show of it, barking ferociously, hysterically even, and right behind cop and dog was the inevitable reporter, camera flashing away. She was a female, this reporter, a little blonde with bangs, short skirt and running shoes, and Tierwater couldn't help trying to smooth his hair down and maybe even work up a smile for her. Say "cheese? 'Behind her was Sheets, looking hangdog, and the stomping, massive, outraged figure of Sheriff Bob Hicks himself.

The dog was encouraged to come in close and to nip at the ankles without drawing any evidentiary blood, the cops dutifully produced service revolvers and handcuffs and Tier-water was led out of the bush and across the lot, wincing on bare feet. A crowd was gathered to watch the sheriff consummate his duty by shoving the cuffed and subdued desperado into the back of the patrol car-Publicity, that's what we came here fin: Tierwater kept telling himself, trying to transmute defeat into victory, humiliation into triumph, but he was half-naked, his hair was a mess and he felt less like a crusader than a figure out of the Opera Bouffe.

"Get in there, shithead," the sheriff said under his breath as he spread a big hand over the crown of Tierwater's head and forced him into the car, where Deputy Sheets sat awaiting him. For an instant, everything confused in his mind, Tierwater thought of kicking open the door and making a hobbled run for it, because things were out of hand here — a peaceful protest, and look what it had led to — and it tore his heart out to give them the satisfaction of beating him down like this. Better to die than submit. His jaw ached from gritting his teeth. He was sweating. His heart was pounding, his eyes were crazy, there were twigs and bits of seed and chaff in his hair. Kick the door! S creamed a voice in his head. Kick the door!

He didn't kick the door. He didn't have to. Andrea was there — andrea and an attorney with beard and briefcase — and Teo, shadowing them on a pair of crutches. "We've come to bail him out," Andrea said, and through the window of the cruiser Tierwater could see the winged creases ascending her forehead.

Officious, already moving round the front of the car while the door slammed shut like the lid of a coffin, Sheriff Bob Hicks let out a short mocking bark of a laugh. "Bail? Bail hasn't been set yet-he hasn't even been arraigned."

The lawyer, in high dudgeon, countered with something Tierwater couldn't hear. Andrea bent to peer in the window, and Tierwater the desperado pressed his fingers to the glass, and it was just like the movies, exactly-visiting hour at the penitentiary, time's up, boys, this way, ladies. She was saying something, her lips moving, the police dog barking for the sheer love of it, the crowd jeering, something about Sierra-" — too sick to go to jail, "the sheriff was saying, pointing a finger in the lawyer's face," and then he pulls this crap, this escape from custody, and what do you have to say to that, Fred, huh?"

Fred had plenty to say, most of which escaped Tierwater, but during the course of the ensuing debate, he was able to lean forward to where the Plexiglas divider gave onto the front seat and the convenient flap there for purposes of criminal/peace-officer communication. "Where's Sierra?" He shouted into his wife's hovering face.

"Child Protective Services."

"What? What do you mean?"

This was where Deputy Sheets, seated beside him on the hard serviceable seat, got into the act. Deputy Sheets had been embarrassed professionally, and he wasn't amused. "Juvenile Hall," he said, giving a jerk at the handcuffs to get Tierwater's attention. "She's in there with your runaways, your shoplifters, your junkies and murderers. And she's going to stay there till the judge makes his ruling."

"His ruling?" Tierwater's heart was pounding. "Ruling on what?"

"What do you think? On whether you're a fit parent or not."

He jerked back round to read Andrea's face, a black gulf of despair and regret opening up inside him, limitless, unbreachable. He knew it. He'd known it all along. Trouble is a given in a world ruled by accident, sure, and lightning hits too, but only a fool-strike that: an inveterate idiot-goes looking for it.

Deputy Sheets cleared his throat. "Got two more charges for you," he said, and his voice was so rich with triumph he sounded as if he were announcing the winners of the Fourth of July sack race. "Attempted escape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor."

Eight months earlier, Tierwater was busy leading his life of quiet desperation, aimless, asleep at the wheel, watching his father's empire fall away into dust like all the geriatric empires before it-Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! It was December, bleak and wind-knifed. Ice one day, slush the next, then refrozen slush the day after that. Pathetic cardboard Santas and cutout menorahs clung to the dirty windows of the stores in the shopping center — the ones that hadn't gone dark for lack of tenants — and half the bulbs were burned out in the relict strings of Christmas lights he'd looped over the bent and rusting nails his father had hammered into the stucco fascia twenty years earlier. Sierra was twelve, insufferably motherless, inappropriately dressed (Jodie Foster, Taxi Driver), addicted to TV, gloom and doom, vegetarianism. Her face was a falling ax, and it fell on him twice a day: in the morning, when he drove her to school in the Jeep Laredo, and in the evening, when he got home from work and she was there infesting the house with her evil friends.

For his part, Tierwater tried to do his best, puzzling over geography and the Golden Book of Literary Treasures with her, taking her out for a weekly bonding ritual at the Mongolian Barbecue in the shopping center, withholding judgment when she came home with a nose ring from the brand — new sixty-seven-shop enclosed mall that was killing him, tearing his heart out, flattening his feet and destroying his digestion. His love life was null and void. A month earlier he'd withdrawn as tactfully as possible from a six-month affair with a skinny ungenerous woman named Sherry who wore her weedy hair kinked out in a white-blond corona that grazed the lintel of every door, she passed through (to his secretary: "Tell her it was a mountaineering accident and they never recovered my body"). He hadn't met anyone since. In fact, during all that time, no woman so much as gave him a glance-not even in Cappelli's, the bar in the shopping center that was the only place that seemed to be doing any business at all. Single mothers clustered around shrinking tables and hung off the shoulders of single fathers as if all they needed were crampons and rope, cosmetologists wept over the thunderous hits of the sixties, aerobics instructors showed off their tightly clamped buttocks round the pool table, but none of them had time for Tierwater. He was depressed, and he wore his depression like a lampshade over his head. But then fate intervened. ( "We are turned round and round in this world, and Fate is the handspike." I don't know exactly what a handspike is, but I like the quote — and Melville had it right, especially i f a handspike is something you can drive into the back of somebody's head.) Reflexively, without giving it much thought, Tienvater had sent a check to the Sierra Club, a year's membership. Before his parents died — they were stopped in traffic, 44th and Lexington, when a crane hoisting steel girders capitulated to the force of gravity-he'd been chasing down a B. S. In wildlife biology, after having dropped out twice in his drug-tranced days, and nature had always glimmered somewhere out there on the horizon of his consciousness. This little gesture, this check delivered in a good cause, was like a Band — Aid slapped over a big gaping crater in his psyche, and he knew that, but there it was. He was a member of the Sierra Club. And as a member, he got onto a mailing list that entitled him to receive whole cordilleras of junk mail-talk about conserving paper-including, but not limited to, invitations to attend meetings, swim with the dolphins, save whales and remember the Himalayas. He felt guilty, but he never accepted any of these high-minded invitations, and worse, he never recycled a scrap of them.