T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

What he wanted, more than anything, more than revenge, even-more than Andrea and the trees and the owls-was to get his daughter back. Just that. Just walk her down the steps of Juvenile Hall, put her in the car and drive back to New York with his tail between his legs — and it wasn't too late to go back, the house in escrow, the shopping center on the market still, the old blanket of his old life neatly folded and all ready and waiting to be pulled up over his head again. And Andrea? Forget Andrea, forget sex, forget life. He didn't want to be alive, because if you were alive you hurt, and this hurt worse than anything he'd ever known or imagined. His daughter. They'd taken his daughter away. And why? Because he was an unfit parent.

An unfit parent. That set him on fire, all right, that set him off like a Scud missile, all thrust and afterburners and calamitous rage. There was no fitter parent. Show me one-that was his attitude-just show me one. He'd been father and mother to Sierra since she was three years old and he had to rescue her from her grandmother and tell her that her mommy wasn't coming back anymore because she'd just vanished from the face of this earth like a ghost or a breath of wind. Try that one on for size. Try climbing out of the cavern of sleep to the screams and night alarums of an inconsolable thirty-seven-pound ball of confusion and rage, try dropping her off at nursery school, a single father on his way to mind-numbing, soul-crushing work, and she won't let go of the door handle, no joke, no cajoling, the drooping faces of the nursery-school teachers and pitying mothers banging over the fenders of the car like fruit withered on the vine. A motherless kindergartner, a motherless ten-year-old, a motherless teenager. Tierwater put his life into fixing that — or assuaging it, bandaging it, kissing the hurt to make it better — and no one could tell him different. Not Judge Duermer or the Josephine County Child Protective Services or the Supreme Court either.

But here was the fact: he was in Los Angeles, trapped in a blistering funk of heat and smog and multicultural sweat, and she was in Oregon, where the trees stood tall and the air was cool and sweet-in Oregon, in jail. Or Juvenile Hall. Same difference. They wouldn't let him see her, wouldn't let him correspond with her, wouldn't even let him speak. With her on the phone-he was too evil and corrupting an influence. He was a monster. A criminal. A freak. Three and a half weeks had gone by now, and he'd done nothing but lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. He wanted to be in Oregon, close to her, just to tread the same soil and breathe the same air, but Fred wouldn't hear of it. You'll do more harm than good, he insisted. Stay out of it. Don't go near the state line except for court appearances-don't even think about it. And don't worry: we'll get her released to Andrea, no problem-no matter what happens with you.

The sad fact was that since the day he made bail he'd been back just once-up and down the coast in the space of forty-eight hours-with Andrea and Fred, for a dependency hearing before the judge.

Judge Duermer (triple-chinned, rolling in his robes, the great bulging watery sea lion's eyes): Can you show cause why this juvenile-Sierra Sarah Tierwater-should be returned to the custody of her father and stepmother, both of whom are facing criminal charges in this county?

Fred (short and bald, a blazing wick of vital energy, ap-palled for all the world to see): But, Your Honor, with all due respect, this is a matter of peaceable civil protest, an exercise of my clients' rights to free speech and assembly- Judge Duermer (reading from a sheet in front of him, Sierra nowhere to be seen): Assault on a peace officer, resisting arrest, escape from custody, child endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor? Come on, counsel, these are serious charges, and until such time as they have been adjudicated, I can't see fit to release this child to the parents.

Sierra's Lawyer (Cotton Mather in a three-piece suit, no nose or chin to speak of): Your honor, on behalf of Child Protective Services, I move to have Sierra Sarah Tierwater placed with a foster family until such time as the parents can show that they have taken appropriate measures-parenting classes, for instance, and refraining from further criminal conduct-to assure the court that they are indeed fit to raise this child.

The upshot? Tierwater, still facing up to a year in jail on the criminal charge, was ordered to take approved parenting classes and to keep his own very prominent nose clean for a period of twelve months, after which the court would make its decision. Back again to Los Angeles, doom and gloom and seething hate. He stared out the window of the car and into the trees, and even the shell of the burned-out Cat glimpsed somewhere between Cottonwood and Red Bluff gave him no pleasure. Criminal conduct. The sons of puritanical high — and — mighty bitches — they haven't seen anything yet. That's what Tierwater was thinking, but it came and went. Revenge fantasies got you nowhere. Despair did, though. Despair got you to submit to the gravitational force and become one with the cracked leather couch in front of the eternally blipping TV in a rented house on a palm-lined street in suburbia. (Give me my daughter back and I will pluck the owls and drop them in the flying pan myself, no questions asked, that's how I felt, because I was all about giving up then, a victim, a schmuck, ground under the iron heel of Judge Duermer and Sheriff Bob Hicks) "Come on, Ty," Andrea said, trying for a smile but looking grim underneath it, "snap out of it. We're fighting this, okay? It'll be all right. It will."

It was a morning of common heat, a hundred and three by eleven o 'clock, the San Fernando Valley baking like cheap pottery. The dry wind they called Santa Ana was rattling the leaves of the grapefruit trees in the desiccated backyard-nothing there, not a spike of grass, not even a gopher mound — and knocking the dead fronds out of the palms out front with a sound like sabers rattling. This was in a place called Tarzana, named for the Lord of the Jungle, whose steady earning power had allowed his creator to buy it all up at one time and make it his ranch, his spread, his dusty, spottily irrigated, citrus-tree-studded estate and manor in the New World — and there was a transformation for you. Now it was part of the stinking, creeping, blistered megalopolisTeo's hometown, incidentally — and E. F! Had chosen it as the location for their Los Angeles chapter. Why? Because Teo knew it, and because it was quiet and dull, a place where people had jobs and foreign cars and repainted their classic 19508 ranch houses every other year in the same two basic colors. Ecotage? Never heard of it.

Teo and Andrea didn't have jobs. Neither, any longer, did Tierwater, Teo and Andrea were supported by E. E! Contributions, the money they made stumping in places like Croton, and, ultimately, by Tierwater. And Tierwater was supported by his dead father. This is called the food chain. "Yeah, I know," he said, his voice buried in a swamp of misery and depression, "but it's killing me. It's like going to a shrink when you're a kid-did you ever go to a shrink?"

She was sitting beside him on the couch. Phones were ringing, people moving incessantly from room to room, sweating and conspiratorial. She just lifted her eyebrows, noncommittal.

"Just because you know what the problem is, just because you can express it in so many words, that doesn't mean you can do anything about it. I feel impotent. Castrated. Fucked. I think I'm having a nervous breakdown here. I mean, I've dealt with grief before-grieving — but this is different. Nobody died." The effort of talking was giving him a headache. He was in a hyperbaric chamber, that's what it was, and they'd screwed down the pressure so he could feel it in every pore. "Except maybe me."