T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

And then it was his birthday, and both Teo and Ratchiss showed up. It was dusk, and they were out on the back deck, charring meat, when Teo ambled out of the woods in a pair of shorts and hiking boots. Ratchiss had arrived an hour earlier, the silver Land Cruiser packed to the ceiling with gifts and goodies, and he looked up from the grill and raised his gin and bitters in salute. "All hail," he said. And then: "Methinks yond Teo has a lean and thirsty look. How about a drink, my friend?"

Teo dropped his backpack on the planks and accepted a glass of iced gin with a splash of vermouth. He was shirtless, though the evening had begun to take on a chill (there was still snow out there in the woods, especially on the north-facing slopes), but then that was his pose: the insensible, the indefatigable, the iron man of the Movement. "It's been a while," he said, ducking his head and taking Tierwater's hand, "but hey, happy birthday, man." He nodded democratically at Mag, who stood behind the grill in a torpedoed freighter of smoke, basting the meat with his secret sauce, and then he was embracing Sierra and digging into his pack for the plain-wrapped gift he'd brought her. There were the usual exclamations- "You're as tall as me now" and "Let's get this girl a basketball scholarship!" — and then Andrea, who'd gone into the house for a sweater, stepped out onto the deck.

It was just a moment in a history of moments, but it bore watching. She was buttoning the sweater up the front, her hair swept forward, barefoot in a pair of jeans. "Teo," she exclaimed, and Tierwater saw the anticipatory smile, the quickened stride, watched them embrace, the tall woman and the short man, and he knew the answer to his question as surely as he knew it would be dark in half an hour and the sky would spill over with stars: of course she'd had sex with him. Fucked him, that is. Of course she had. Any fool could see that from the way they moved around each other, the familiarity of one organism with the other, all those dark and secret places, the commingled breath and shared fluids and supercharged emotions. But so what? So what? That was before he'd even met her-so what if she'd fucked whole armies? Tierwater was no puritan. And he wasn't jealous. Not a bit.

After the meat and before the cake, there was a lot of discussion of strategy-of the upcoming "Redwood Summer" campaign, of Andrea's dyeing her hair or wearing a wig and coming down off the mountain to work behind the scenes and, eventually, of her coming in out of the cold altogether. Fred was working on it. A plea bargain, no time, just maybe community service, something like that. "And what about me?" Tierwater had said. "Am I just supposed to stay here forever? And won't it look a little fishy here — I mean, if my wife suddenly ups and deserts me?"

Teo just gave him a blank stare. Ratchiss looked away. And Sierra, who'd adjusted to her rural surroundings by ritualistically re-embracing the Gothic look (graveyard black, midnight pallor, ebony lipstick, the reinserted nose ring that drained all the remaining light from the sky), set down her soy burger and pitched her voice to the key of complaint: "And me?"

"You're out of the loop, Ty, at least for now," Teo said, flashing Sierra a quick smile of acknowledgment, and then coming back to him. "You've got to be patient. And nobody's deserting anybody. I just think Andrea can be more effective if she-"

"And what does she think?" Tierwater said, cutting him off and turning to his wife. "Isn't that what matters here? Isn't that what we're talking about?"

Andrea wouldn't look him in the eye — or she did look him in the eye, but it was the sort of look that flickered and waned and said, I want no part of this. She'd been unusually restrained all night, except when she was buzzing with Teo over tactics and the campaign to mobilize college kids for the protests, and now she just said, "It's complicated, Ty. Beyond complicated. Can't we talk about it later?"

And Ratchiss said, "Yeah, isn't this supposed to be a celebration?"

It was. And Tierwater, itching with his insecurities and angers, drank himself into celebratory oblivion.

Now, two weeks later, he'd almost forgotten about it. Teo was gone, as were Ratchiss and Mag, and Andrea was still here, still playing Dee Dee Drinkwater to his Tom. It was night. All was calm. Tierwater had his leg propped up, a drink in his hand, four good chunks of wind-toppled pine on the fire, no sound but for the snap of the flames and the doomed doleful wail of Sierra's Goth-rock leaking out of her speakers and through the locked door of her room like some new and invasive force of nature. He was just about to lift the drink to his lips when there was the dull thump of footsteps on the front deck, followed by a light rap at the door.

That altered things, all right.

He was transformed in that instant from the bruised ecowarrior taking his ease to the hunted fugitive living under a false name and called suddenly to task for his multifarious crimes. He froze, his eyes as glassy and dead as the eyes of the butchered animals staring down at him from the walls. The knock came again. And then a voice, gruff and hearty at the same time: "Tom? Tom Drinkwater? You in there?"

Where was Andrea? 'Andrea! "He shouted." Can you get that? Andrea! There's someone at the door. "But Andrea couldn't get it, because she wasn't in the house, a small but significant piece of information that rose hopelessly to the surface of his' consciousness even as he called out her name. She'd gone out half an hour ago with the flashlight and a sweater. Where? To walk the mile and a half to the bar and sit outside in the phone booth and await a call from Teo, very secretive, hush-hush, E. F. I business, Ty, so don't give me that look-" Tom?"

"Just a minute, I — " Tierwater's gaze fell on the rack of big-bore rifles Ratchiss kept mounted on the wall just inside the door, and then he was up out of the chair and limping across the room. "Hold on, hold on, I'm coming!"

At first he didn't recognize the figure standing there at the door. The weak yellow lamplight barely clung to him, 'and there was the whole brooding owl-haunted Sierra night out there behind him, a darkness and fastness that was like a drawn shade and this man on the doorstep a part of its fabric. "Tom-Jesus, I didn't mean to scare you… Don't you recognize me?"

The man was in the room now, uninvited, and it was the nagging raspy wheeze of the voice that gave him away, even more than the boneless face and dishwater eyes. It was Declan Quinn, the insurance investigator, all hundred and ten bleached alcoholic pounds of him, and Tierwater saw why he hadn't recognized him right away: he was wearing some sort of camouflage outfit, buff, khaki and two shades of green, and his face was smeared with a dully gleaming oleaginous paint in matching colors. Greasepaint, that's what it was, the very thing Tierwater himself employed on his midnight missions.

"Jesus, Tom," he repeated, and the very way he said it Jaysus-marked him for an immigrant, if not a recent one, and why hadn't Tierwater noticed that before? "You look as if the devil himself had come for you." And then he let out a laugh, a quick sharp bark that trailed off into a dry cough. "It's the getup, isn't it? I completely forgot myself — but I'm not intruding, am IT'" Oh, no, no, I was just- "Tierwater caught a glimpse of himself in the darkened window and saw a towering monument to guilt, staved-in eyes, slumped shoulders, slack jaw and all. He'd been caught in a weak moment, taken by surprise, and though he was as articulate as anybody and fully prepared to act out his role onstage before a live audience, if that's what it took, he couldn't help wishing Andrea were here. For support. And distraction. This man was an investigator, a detective, and what was he doing in Tierwater's living room, if Tierwater himself wasn't a suspect?