T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

Teo's car was cramped on the way back to Los Angeles, but not as cramped as it had been on the way up. Tierwater sat up front, next to Teo, because of the length of his legs, and Andrea stretched out across the back seat because of the length of hers. Sierra was represented by a pink over — theshoulder bag with the grinning face of a Disney character impressed on the front flap, a relic of her childhood. It was tucked away on the floor behind Tierwater's seat, and it contained a pair of cut-off jeans, a spandex top, socks, underwear, cosmetics, seven home-made gloom — and — doom tapes in cracked plastic cases and a backup vampire novel the size of a pocket dictionary. Though they'd been on the road for two hours-in California now, Mount Shasta appearing and vanishing through first one window, then another, like a conjuror's illusion-Tierwater hadn't said a word. He stared straight ahead, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt.

Andrea and Teo talked around him, the truncated vowels of Teo's glad-handing surfer's voice banging up against the country inflections of her Montana drawl, on and on, and the only subject was tactics. Not Sierra. Not how they were going to wrest her away from the judge-Judge Duermer, fat as a rutting sea lion and twice as belligerent — and the slab-faced puritans down at Child Protective Services. Because this was the fact: Sierra's lawyer, assigned by the state, had filed a dependency petition in the Name of the People against Tierwater as an unfit parent, a parent who endangers his child and contributes to her delinquency, and she was in Juvenile Hall with the hard cases and he was heading home to California. On fifty thousand dollars' bail and facing a plea bargain negotiated by Fred- "They'll drop all the charges if you plead to assault on a peace officer" — that could, that would, put him in jail for as much as three months. And then what would his daughter do?

"I say we go for the jugular, man-like play up Ty as Father Knows Best and Siskiyou Lumber and the Josephine County Sheriff's Department like a cross between the KGB and the Ayatollah."

The worn tires sang on the pavement, cars clustered round them, fell back, moved ahead, the radio coughed up static. Tierwater was paralyzed. He was a fragile thing in a soft container. He'd forgotten how to blink. How to swallow. Andrea's voice came to him from a thousand miles away: "Sure, sure, of course. This is worth fifty protests. If we can just figure a way to get it into the papers — and you're on to it, Teo, you're totally right, I mean, separating a father from his daughter, it's like dropping a nuclear bomb on a Girl Scout picnic-"

Teo, muscles working the wheel, jaws pounding gum to a private beat, left ankle wrapped in gauze: "Yeah, but all I've seen so far is that thing in their Mickey Mouse newspaper-you know, Ty going berserk on an officer of the law, escaping from the hospital and all that. All that shit, I mean. Because that's what it is. It's like the Chicago Seven or the Jonesboro Boys or something. People can see that. They're not stupid."

Andrea came forward suddenly, her head floating over the seat like a satellite drifting into orbit. "Oh, yes, they are. Stupid as dirt. But we've got to give this to Shep and Suziethey'll run with it, they'll spin it and spin it again. We need the L. A. Times, Newsweek Woman's Day, Time."

"CBS News-TV, that's the way to go:' Tierwater took all this in-not consciously, not alertly, but in the way of a sponge absorbing a slow trickle of water. This was his wife speaking, the woman he loved, the woman who set him on fire, and the man who'd stepped in to win the role of his best friend in the abbreviated space of a few short months. This was his life talking here, a Life so radically altered he couldn't have imagined it a year ago. Get married, draw down the bank accounts, sell off the movables and put the house and the shopping center on the market and never mind whether you take a beating or not-just get out, all the way out, all the way to the San Fernando Valley in the Jeep Laredo, and then sell that too, find a school for Sierra and stare at the palm trees rising up out of the smog like the tapering, reticulated necks of Mesozoic beasts. Sure. And commit criminal acts in the night.

What about Sierra? H e wanted to say. What about me?

He hadn't responded, even to a direct question, for hours, and he couldn't blame them if they went on as if he weren't there. Or yes, he could. And he did. They talked over him, around him, through him, as if he were laid out on a gurney in the trauma ward. Their voices rose and fell. They were pillars of outrage, righteous, scheming, Trotsky and Lenin plotting to bring down Kerensky, Woodward and Bernstein with their heads together in the back room. Tierwater stared straight ahead. The rattling Caprice sliced through the apparent world and for the longest time he saw nothing at all. But then- Then things slowed down and the real world coalesced for him with the dull rolling thunder of epiphany. Up ahead, on the right, was a construction site. They — the anonymous, omnipresent and ever-industrious-were apparently constructing an overpass here, slabs of concrete studded with rebar, steel beams, survey stakes trailing their raggled banners of pink and orange plastic, dirt in a violent state of disarrangement. And a Cat. A big solid D7 Cat, sitting idle beneath the gray film of dusk, the sun drawn down the sink of the sky, dead brush, the crippled fingers of the scarified trees. Tierwater saw this picture, a murky still-life, and in the same instant saw himself at the center of it, and suddenly he was snatching at the steering wheel. "Pull over," he said.

Teo, his jaws working beneath the blond stubble of his head, looked alarmed. But just for a moment. Tierwater watched the light come into his eyes, saw his hands relax on the wheel. "You need to take a leak, Ty?" A glance back to Andrea, the makings of a grin. "Is that it?"

Nothing. Tierwater just looked out the window, but he kept his hand locked on the wheel, and in the next moment they were slowing and the tires began to sing a new song on the raw corrugations of the exit ramp. "Over there," Tier-water heard himself say, "on the crossroad, just behind the Cat there."

"Wait a minute, Ty," Andrea said, her hands on his shoulders, sweet breath and her look of concern, "you're not thinking-?"

But Tierwater was already out of the car, the heat rising in his face, lizards scuttling for cover, already fingering the matches he'd idly lifted from the ashtray in the Rest Ye May Motel. They had his daughter, that's what he was thinking — they had him, had him by the balls — and now they were going to start paying for it, right now, now and forever. "Ty!" She was calling, Andrea, out of the car already, a wind coming up out of nowhere to whip that perfect sheet of hair across her face while the gray cars hunted along the freeway behind the steady pulse of their headlights. Everything was gray now, washed out, rinsed of color and definition. Could they see him? Could they see what he was doing, what he was about to do? (At that point, I have to tell you, I honestly didn't care — they'd hit me, hard, and I was going to hit them back and damn the consequences.) His head was down, looking for something, a scrap of paper to stuff into the fuel tank, the fuse that would give him ten seconds, because that was all he was going to need, and "Ty!" Andrea was calling, "Ty, don't be crazy!" There was trash everywhere. Of course there was-what else would you expect? He bent to it mechanically, paper, take-out coffee cups, cans, bottles, and found what he was looking fora rust-colored rag stained with machine oil. It took him a minute to locate the fuel tank and wrench the cap off of it-she was back in the car now, in the rear seat, her face drawn down to nothing, a pale bulb preserved behind the dark glass and you'd better plant it now and hope for flowers in the spring — and then he touched a match to the rag and the thinnest, blackest little coil of smoke crawled up into the air.