T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

She gave him a wild glance, her eyes extruded and hard. "Out of here, what do you think? You're the one — if you hadn't pushed it, if you didn't-you had to see her, didn't you? You couldn't leave well enough alone. I told you Fred was going to take care of it, didn't I?"

"Fred," he spat, all but obliterating the name under the weight of his disgust. His face had come up out of its huddle. The countryside rushed by. He was scared, of course he was, but he was exhilarated too-he'd done something, finally done something — and his heart was racing faster than the Nova's straining engine. He was worked up, shot full of adrenaline, wild and angry and not to be denied. "All right, sure, let's argue about it. Let's talk about whose idea it was to go into the flicking Siskiyou in the first place, all right? Because that's going to do us a lot of good right now." A car loomed up on the left and shot by with a soft whoosh. Somewhere behind them the phone lines were busy, very busy. "But where are we going? You know where you are?"

He watched her shoulders, furious shoulders, as she dug into the glove compartment. It took her a minute, and then she flung a map over the seat. "You figure it out. You're the lunatic. You're the one they're after."

That was when Sierra lifted her face from the cavity of his left arm. She'd buried it there when he leapt into the car and held his arms out to her, and through every jolt and dip of the road he'd felt the heat of her breath on his skin, the gentle swaying orbit of her body as the centrifugal forces threatened to pull her away from him. The car hit a bump and he watched her head wobble on the uncertain fulcrum of her neck. She was wearing mascara, and the tears had smeared it across her face in a dark wet paste. "They took my nose ring," she sobbed. "They, they said it wasn't Christian."

He intoned the automatic words- "It's all right, honey" — and Andrea intoned them too, all the rage gone out of her voice. The car decelerated a moment in sympathy, but then she floored it again.

"I mean, they were horrible people-you wouldn't believe it. They made you sit straight up in your chair like some sort of marine or something, and, and" — she broke down again, and Tierwater felt his stomach sink- "and they made you pray before you could eat!"

That was something, he was thinking-prayer, no less — but before he could absorb this information, before he could chew it over and let his eyes narrow over the implications and ramifications of this particular brand of child abuse ("They didn't touch you, did they, honey? I mean, nobody laid a hand on you in any way, did they?"), Andrea let out a low exclamation of surprise. "Oh, shit!" She said, and gave the wheel a sudden savage spin. In the next moment he was thrown into his daughter, both of them rocked across the seat in a helpless surge of dead weight and flailing limbs. He snatched at the window crank for support, but it came off in his hand, one more useless scrap of metal.

When he regained his equilibrium he saw that they were on a dirt road now, the car fishtailing from one side to the other, tires spewing gravel, a contrail of dust spinning out behind them — and what else? What was that sound? It came to him with a jolt of recognition: it was a siren — a siren! — S creaming in the distance. Andrea fought the wheel and the car skidded to a stop in a clump of weeds just off the road, and they all three turned to stare out the back window at the intersection behind them. Tierwater saw a pall of sunstruck dust, a tunnel of pine, the natural world reaching out to them. His heart was pounding. The siren screamed, and screamed again. And then he saw it, a red streak flashing past the mouth of the dirt road, hook and ladder, men in T-shirts and hardhats-one glimpse and it was gone. "It's a firetruck," he said, and he couldn't seem to catch his breath. "It's only a firetruck."

The sky had begun to close up, a low dirty rug of cloud stretched out on a line and beaten till the bright corners went dark. Tierwater lay on his back in a nest of grass, the wadded-up plaid shirt supporting his head, the 49ers cap perched on his chest like a sleeping pet, and watched the clouds unravel. He smelled chlorophyll, mold, the vague tangy scent of wildflowers he didn't know the names of. In half an hour, it would be raining.

Twenty feet away, Sierra and Andrea were busy scooping mud out of a culvert alongside the road and flinging it at the car. - They were aiming for a Jackson Pollock effect, an intricate web of abstraction that would somehow transmute the car into something harmless and inconspicuous, something a local might drive, with plates so muddied you couldn't tell at a glance whether they'd been issued in California or Oregon — or Saskatchewan, for that matter. Tierwater could have told them they were wasting their time — the rain would wash the car clean, no doubt about it — but he didn't want to dampen their enthusiasm. Besides, it gave them something to do, good healthy activity to while away the hours till dark, when they would make a run for the California border and get lost in the traffic that swept down out of the north in dense hurtling clots of steel and glass.

Andrea was making a game of it, and Sierra, with her mother's moon face and churning awkward legs, was laughing, actually laughing, as the mud flew and Robin Gold-man's Chevy Nova became a work of art. This was good-she'd been scared, no doubt about it, scared and confused, the slab-faces whispering in one ear, the cops and her lawyer in the other — and if the past month had been hell for Tierwater, he could only imagine what it must have been like for her. But Andrea was the charm. Andrea took her in her arms and they sat down and talked it out, sharing a stale sandwich and a can of tepid root beer, and Tierwater was right there, his arms around both of them, so moved he could barely speak.

"I know there's no way we can ever make it up to you, honey," Andrea said, "and its my fault, my fault entirely, you have to understand that. Your father didn't want to take you-he was right, and I should have listened, because you know we would never do anything to consciously hurt you or even if we thought there was the slightest risk… But I never dreamed… These are real sons of bitches we're dealing with here, major — league, and they'll do anything to bring us down. You'll be stronger for this, you will."

(It was a dubious proposition, and it made no mention of the future, of the safe house, the underground, the assumed names and paranoia and the shuttling from one school to another — but my daughter was only thirteen years old and so glad to be rescued, to be out of the iron hands of the do-gooders, she never questioned it. And how do you give birth to a radical? I could write the manual.) Sierra ducked her head, the half-eaten sandwich in one hand, her eyes like wolves' eyes, darker than the sky, wild already. "I know," she whispered.

But now Tierwater was lying in the grass and the solemnity was over. His wife and daughter were splashing the car with mud, giggling, crying out, feinting at one another with dripping palms, their bare feet black and glistening. He lay back and watched the clouds, smelled the rain, and it shouldn't have surprised him in the least that it was Jane he was thinking of, because she was the one he couldn't rescue, didn't rescue, the one who slipped away from him for good.

How do you want your pancakes-that's what she'd asked him on the morning of the day she died, and he could hear her voice like a half-remembered melody floating through his head-burned black or semi-black? He saw her in a pall of smoke-smoke that rose around her and ascended into the trees in thin white coils. She was wearing shorts, hiking boots, a New York Rangers sweatshirt-she was an upstate girl, from Watertown, hockey her passion. He hated hockey — a bunch of pumped-up yahoos slamming each other into the boards and grunting out violent epithets in Quebecois French while the ice held its breath — but he loved her. That was the fact, though he hardly knew it himself and never expressed it aloud except in moments of erotic confusion. They didn't talk about abstractions, they talked about the baby, his job, her job, they talked about marmots and grizzly bears and what they were going to have for breakfast.