T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

Donnie didn't know of any. Tierwater got out of the car. "Hi," he said, the length of his car and the old lady's Cadillac between them. "Sorry about this, but I guess I stopped to look at the map and the lady" — a gesture for the old lady, white gloves clamped on the steering wheel, eyes locked straight ahead-she seemed to just stop here behind me and, well, I don't know — I mean, I can move the car…"

Smiling wider. "Oh, that's Mrs. Toffler. She's all right. A little confused, is all. Nothing to worry about." And now the building inspector was on the blacktop, moving round the fins and up the long coruscating fender to the driver's-side door — helpful; helpful, friendly and neighborly — the whole world a sweet and peaceable place.

That was when Sierra burst through the gleaming turquoise door of the house behind them and fled out onto the lawn, a dog and two scrawny teenaged girls at her heels. "Dad!" She screamed. "Dad, Dad!"

Tierwater froze. He watched as a new look came into the building inspector's eyes, a look that said, Dad? Who Dad? The man was clearly bewildered. He glanced from Tierwater to Andrea and then over his shoulder at the charging trio and the yapping dog, and all the while Sierra kept shouting out that most intimate and filial sobriquet, her bare feet flapping on the lawn like precious white fish, her braces gleaming in the sunlight, her face saturated with a martyr's ecstasy. Tierwater felt his heart move in his chest, a deep-buried tectonic movement that made him shudder in every cell: the imposture was over. Time to improvise.

Meanwhile, the building inspector had begun to show signs of a dawning grasp of the situation, his eyes hardening first with suspicion, then anger and, finally, outrage. Behind him, still poised at the open passenger's door of the Subaru, the bull-necked kid settled into his shoulders as if awaiting the referee's whistle. "You, you," sputtered the man, the building inspector, his face gone red suddenly, "you know you can't, you're not allowed-"

Sierra was coming on, pumping her arms, shouting, the dog-some kind of terrier-making a game of it, the other two girls falling back and jeering in their piping, incomprehensible adolescent voices. Tierwater glanced at Andrea, who hadn't moved a muscle, Andrea, his ally and accomplice, and what was her face telling him? I told you so, that's what. Her face was telling him that he was in the biggest trouble of his life, far bigger than anything Judge Duermer or Sheriff Bob Hicks had dished out yet-he was in direct violation of a court order and he'd better get a good long look at his daughter because he wasn't going to see her again till she was eighteen, not even a glimpse, not after this. "No contact!" The building inspector barked, and he was moving rigidly along the length of the Cadillac and past the sculpture of the old woman locked at the wheel, moving toward Tierwater with what could only be violent intent, and here came the bull-necked kid in a linebacker's trot down the apron of the lawn, even as Sierra, in perfect synchronization with the dog, leapt the ditch and threw herself into her father's arms.

"No!" Was all the building inspector could say, and he was vehement on this point of law and order and propriety, into the fray now and one hand locked on Tierwater's right arm and the other on Sierra's, trying to thrust them apart with the sort of effort he might have used on a pair of recalcitrant elevator doors.

(I have to say that I've never really enjoyed strangers taking hold of my arm, and that alone would have been enough to set me off, but this four-square WASP of a child-harboring Oregonian Child Protective Services person was trying to separate me from my daughter — and to what end, I could only imagine. Layer Andrea on top of that and the kid with the flattop and the terminally yapping, heat-seeking dog, and I don't think you could blame me for reacting in a way that would have disappointed Sheriff Bob Hicks.) At first, Tierwater merely tried to protect his daughter, clutching her to him and interposing the mantle of his upper back between the sticks of her arms and the building inspector's clawing hands, but that was the stratagem of a rapidly dissolving moment. She'd fallen into his arms. He wanted to hold her, wanted to protect her. Was that a crime? He didn't think so, but before he could consider the issue or even draw his breath, the bull-necked kid was there, thick wrists and fat swollen fingers jerking at Sierra's shoulders, tug of war, the dog coming in low to complicate matters by snapping at Tierwater's unprotected shins and drooping socks. For one long suspended moment, they were doing a dance, all four of them, arms wrestling with arms, feet shuffling on the blacktop, grunting and straining while the dog played throat music and Andrea and the two skinny-legged girls shouted instructions from the sidelines, and then Tierwater found himself in another arena altogether.

He looked into the bull-necked kid's swollen face and saw release. That was all. Nothing he'd planned or even thought about, but when he brought his fist in over his daughter's shoulder and planted it in the center of that looming fat-constricted face, he felt himself sail right off the ground, as if gravity no longer operated on him. The kid fell magically away, all two hundred linebacking pounds of him, even as Tierwater turned to the building inspector. The man was still clawing at him, a look of anguish and prayerful appeal on his face, but the elbow Tierwater slashed to his windpipe was like a wing, fluttering and flapping and holding him aloft and out of harm's way.

He was thinking nothing, his posture defensive, but his daughter was behind him now and Andrea somehow in the driver's seat of the turd-brown car, shouting, "Ty! Ty!" He looked at Sierra. Her face was bloodless and raw. She glanced over her shoulder at Andrea, and then looked back at the girls on the lawn and the turquoise house and the building inspector writhing on the blacktop with both hands wrapped around his throat, and she broke for the car with a tight little smile of triumph on her face. As for Tierwater, high as be was, he had no choice but to sidestep the kid when the kid came back at him in the spastic sort of lunge he might have made at a tackling dummy, and for good measure he gave the dog a deft kick that sent it skittering into the ditch with a yelp of surprise. And so what if he could see the lips of both the skinny girls working as they repeated the license-plate number to fix it in their memories? So what?

He had his daughter back now, and nobody was going to take her away again.

For the first ten miles, no one said a word. Gas fled down the throat of the carburetor, the tires screeched, Andrea hammered the accelerator and fought the wheel with spasmodic jerks of her big hands, and everything-farmhouses, sagging pickups, shirts, faces, clothes on a line, bark, branches, leaves-clapped by the windows like images in a rifled deck. She was going too fast, her eyes jumping at the rearview mirror, the borrowed car rocketing down one country lane after another, and there was nothing to say. Because this was no passive resistance, no peaceful protest, this was no mere violation of a court order or even the willful destruction of private property along the shoulder of Interstate 5-this was the serious business now Tierwater knew it, Andrea knew it, and even Sierra, clinging to him in the back seat and struggling to breathe through the muffled hoarse rasp of her sobs, must have known it. There was no coming back from this.

They drove on. A meadow appeared and vanished, two horses, a culvert, a narrow bridge. Andrea swerved through a series of S-turns, the car like a big oarless boat shooting down the rapids of some wild river, and finally Tierwater found himself breaking the silence with a pointed question: "Where're we going?"