T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it's your lucky day, Tom. You're staring at a man who spent two years in Tingmiarmiut among the Inuit-back in the days when I was working for British Petroleum, that is. You spend much time up there?" Suddenly he slapped his knee and gave out a strangled cry. "By Jesus God, I'll bet you we know some of the same people-"

Salvation comes in many forms. This time it came in the form of Sierra. The door of her room flew open and the whole house was suddenly engulfed in a world-weary thump of drums and bass and the scream of a single suicidal guitar rattling round an echo chamber. She was dressed in black jeans with distressed knees, high-heeled boots and a blouse so small and shiny and black it could have been torn out of a baby's casket. But for the black lipstick, she might have been a young Victorian widow, in mourning for her husband, the late industrialist. "Dad," she said, "have you seen my gum-you know, that bag of Plenti-Paks we bought down the mountain the other day?"

The room reverberated. It shook. Sierra was already halfway to the fire when she noticed Quinn huddled there in the chair in his face paint and his fatigues. "Oh, wow," she said, caught in mid-step, "I didn't know we had company."

She gave the insurance investigator a look and a tentative smile. "Are you guys going to a costume party or something?"

Andrea passed out red berets all that summer, sold T-shirts imprinted with the raised red fist of the- E. F.I Logo and, in a wig that made her look like Barbara Bush's love child, advised accounting majors, aspiring poets and premed students how best to bicycle-lock their heads to bulldozers, log trucks and the front doors of the Axxam Corporation's headquarters in Severed Root, Kentucky. Teo started up an action camp for neophyte protestors and led marches on half a dozen lumber mills on the North Coast, and Ratchiss stayed at home in Malibu, watching the Discovery Channel and marveling at the way the sun glittered off the water at cocktail hour each day. Tierwater brooded. He dug up everything he could find on Eskimos, lest he should run into Declan Quinn over a plate of runny eggs and home fries at the lodge, played endless games of pitch and Monopoly with his daughter and went vengefully out into the night at least twice a week to beat back the tireless advance of progress.

In mid-July, almost a year to the day after the Siskiyou fiasco, Tierwater was taking his ease on the rear deck one afternoon, studying the configurations of the clouds from the nest of his hammock and feeling as Thoreauvian as he was likely to. He and Sierra had got up early, driven down the highway and hiked out into the burn, and he'd been gratified to see how many of the big pines and redwoods had resisted the fire. They were scarred, certainly, raked from the ground up as if mauled by a set of huge black claws, but the winter's snows had already worked the ash into the soil and seedlings were sprouting up everywhere. Better yet: the Penny Pines Plantation was no more, and there were no carved wooden signs announcing the largesse of Coast Lumber — or anything else, for that matter. And where the sawmill trees had stood in all their bio-engineered uniformity, there were now fields of wildflowers, rose everlasting, arnica, fireweed, mountain aster and a dozen others their field guide had no illustrations for. He picked a bouquet for Andrea, and felt he'd sown and nurtured each flower himself. This was nature as it was meant to be.

Andrea was still in bed, snoring lightly, her hair spilled across the pillow, her mouth sagging open to reveal the glint of a gold-capped molar on the upper left side. Tierwater had stolen into the room an hour earlier and set the vase of flowers on the night table, then retired to the deck. His wife was worn out. She'd been away for the better part of a week, stirring up demonstrators and clandestinely visiting her former dentist, and had gotten in late. Tierwater had waited up for her, and they'd traded gossip and made love in the silent, still shell of the house that floated like a ship in the dark sea of the night. Now he was waiting up for her again. Sky-watching.

It was no ordinary sky-rags and tatters of cloud unraveled across it like a scroll you could read if only you knew the language — but it put him to sleep nonetheless. When he opened his eyes, Andrea was there, sitting in the chair beside him, cradling a cup of coffee. The shadows had leapt over him. It must have been three in the afternoon.

She said, "You're awake."

"Yeah," he said. "I think so."

Her hair was wet from the shower, ropy and robbed of its sheen, and she bowed her head to work a comb through it. "You see anything of that little snoop while I was gone?" He watched her fingers, her hands, the snarl of hair. "You know, what's-his-name — the drunk."

"Quinn? She threw her head back and ran both hands through the wet hair, shaking out the excess moisture; it was so still he could hear the whisper of the odd droplet hitting the deck." I can't believe you let him in that night. He's not as stupid as he looks. Or as drunk either."

"What was I supposed to do?"

"Tell him you had a headache. Heartburn. The flu. Tell him your wife was in a mood and your father just died. Tell him anything. You think if I was home he would have got two feet inside that door?"

Tierwater offered her a grin, but she wasn't receiving it. She'd dipped her head again and the comb was working furiously at a dark knotted tangle. "You're tougher than I am. Everybody knows that."

She threw her head back and the hair with it. Now she was glaring. "It's no joke, Ty. He's on to us — if you can't see that you're nuts. And I tell you, we're not moving again, not with Sierra in school and — "

"Who said anything about moving?"

"I did. It's that or go to jail, isn't it? It's that or the FBfucking — I kicking down the door at four in the morning."

Tierwater felt a chill go through him. Did she really think that? How would anybody know anything? There was no evidence, not a scrap of it. And any sort of background check would just turn up the clean, sweet, uncomplicated and lovingly fabricated record of Tom Drinkwater, ex-schoolteacher, budding novelist, family man. "You've got to be kidding."

She wasn't kidding. "I warned you," she said, and then she launched into a neat little prepackaged speech, one she must have been rehearsing all the way up the coast. She'd been back to Oregon. She'd seen Fred. "He's put in something like two hundred hours on this, Ty-he's practically bent over and kissed the DA's ass, not to mention the feds — and he's got us a deal. No more false names, no more worrying about every knock at the door."

Tierwater looked beyond her to where the aspens caught the first hint of a breeze coming in out of the west. It was warm in the sun and the woods were silent but for the drone of the meat bees — the yellow jackets-that nested in the ground every ten feet in every direction for as far as you could see. "I'm going to jail," he said, "right?" He swung his legs out of the hammock, set his feet down on the deck. "But you're not."

"That's right, Ty: I'm not. But I didn't assault anybody or break out of jail either. Hey, but let's not argue, because this is right, you know it is, and it's going to be the best thing for Sierra."

He wanted to tell her about the Eskimos, how they had no jails or laws and lived within the bounds of nature — they didn't even cook their meat, because they had no wood or coal or oil, which is why they'd been called Eskimos in the first place: Eaters of Raw Flesh. And when they had a dispute, they didn't need lawyers to settle it for them — the injured parties would sing insults at each other till one of them lost his composure. The one who broke down first was the loser, simple as that. Of course, by the same token, Tierwater understood that he wouldn't fare any better under their system than under Fred and Judge Duermer's-not with his temper.