T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

He's got a knee on the platform now, and his eyes have never left hers, no diffidence here, no higher feelings about slipping into a girl's bedroom while she sleeps or invading a stranger's space. And the thing is, he's not bad-looking: every hair in place, the beard neatly clipped, the sliver of a mouth widening in a smile, the eyes friendly now and warm. "Good morning, Sierra," he says, and she likes his voice too, wondering if he isn't one of the new support people from E. F.I Or maybe a truly intrepid journalist, but then, in the same moment, she's annoyed. They know she doesn't give interviews this early — and they should know enough to call first, too. Her hair is a disaster. She claps a knit cap over it, sits up and kicks her legs out of the sleeping bag. And Climber Deke? He's crouched at the end of her platform in his spiked shoes-six-by-eight, that's all she's got here, two sheets of plywood, and he's halving her space, she can feel the weight of him, can feel her platform adjusting itself to accommodate him. "You know who I am?"

Under the orange canopy, her feet bare and already cold, sweats and a parka and thermals on underneath. Is this some sort of quiz, is that what it is? She looks into his eyes and watches them go cold, even though he's smiling still. "No," she says, her breath hanging there as if the single syllable were concrete. Everything is wet. And slick. It can't be much more than forty degrees.

He's wearing a flannel shirt, wet with sweat or the rain or a combination of the two, jeans, a thermal T-shirt the color of dried blood visible at his open collar, some sort of elaborate tech-pro watch, and suspenders-red suspenders. "My name's Deke," he says, "Climber Deke is what they call me, actually," and his smile has become a grin, as if this were the world's richest joke. She knows who he is. Now she knows. The suspenders would have told her if he hadn't. "I'm here to bring you down. And we can do it the easy way — the civilized way — or we can get rough, if that's how you want it. But you're coining down out of this tree, little lady, and you're coming down now." He pauses to shift his weight to his knees and the platform trembles. "And don't look to your friends for help, because we just happened to detain and arrest three of them on their way in here from the road this morning-trespassing, that's the charge — and I'm afraid I had to dismantle your lower platform, the one with all the food and your camp stove? Yeah, honey, you'd just starve up here anyways, so why don't you just dump what you want to take over the side here and we'll be on our way."

"Okay," she says-that's what my daughter says, "okay" — and her voice is so soft he can barely hear her. But he nods-she really hasn't got any choice, she's breaking the law up here and he'd strap her to his back if it came to that, and handcuff her too — and settles down on his flanks to give her time to bring down the tent and roll up her sleeping bag and get rid of the damned New Age hippie mural of a butterfly she's painted on a piece of canvas as if this were a walkup on Ashbury or something. Sierra crawls out of the tent-six by eight — and rises to her feet so that she's standing over him, just inches away from his crossed ankles, and she makes as if to loosen the cord at this end of the tent.

Makes as if That distracts him a moment-he's in command here, and who is she but a slim moon-faced young woman with a braid of a hair like a hawser and dirty feet and clothes that stink — and that moment is all she needs. Before he lets out a breath and breathes in again, she's gone. In a single motion, she grips the branch above her and flips herself up like a an acrobat, and then, her feet gripping the slick, corrugated bark, she climbs high up into the crown of the tree, even as he struggles up after her, and there are no safety lines here, not for her or for him. "Come back here, you little bitch!" He shouts, digging his spikes in, thrusting upward. His reward is a faceful of redwood bark, threads and splinters kicked up by her feet and sifting down into his eyes, his nostrils, his mouth.

Climber Deke is a lumberman. A timber person. He's agile and muscular and cocksure. If she wants to play, he'll play. She goes higher. So does he. And what's she going to do-ultimately? Sprout wings and fly away?

He doesn't know my daughter. She finds a limb and she goes out on it. And when he gets to that limb and he's facing her over a gap of maybe ten feet or so, he stops. Redwood tends to shear. The trees are forever dropping branches as the crowns rise higher and the lower limbs become expendable. The limb Sierra is crouched on won't support two people-in fact, from Climber Deke's perspective, it doesn't look as if it'll support one much longer. And what does he say, face to face with my daughter, two hundred feet above the ground? You cunt, "that's what he says." You tree-hugging cunt."

"Go ahead," she says, "curse all you want." The rain has picked up now Far below them a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) flits through layers of light, its wings extended and then drawn down and up again with an audible snap of its crisp black feathers. "But even if there were fifty of you, you couldn't get me down from this tree."

The rain has picked up now, the needles letting go of it, the rough recessed bark a conduit for a thousand miniature rills and cascades. The moisture flattens Climber Deke's hair, clings in droplets to the pelage of his face. He curses again, his voice flat and hard.

"Fifty of you," my daughter spits. "I'd rather die up here than have some pathetic gutless bastard like you even touch me."

"Then die," he says. "Die. Because we're going to cut this tree whether you're in it or not."

Our eviction notice comes within the week. We — andrea, April Wind, Chuy, the animals and I, that is-are to vacate the premises in thirty days. The interested parties and their platoons of lawyers have agreed on a conservator, and the conservator wants us and our menagerie out, "in order to prevent further damage to the property and assets of Melisma House, Santa Ynez, California." Melisma House. I didn't even know the place had a name. Certainly Mac never used it-he just called it "the Ranch," if he called it anything. But there it is: it's got a name, this place, and we're no longer welcome in it.

I'm in possession of this information because I'm the one standing in the yard risking heat stroke in hundred — and — tendegree heat when the messenger arrives (yes, messenger: they hand — deliver the thing as if it's a subpoena). It's just past eleven in the morning, the sun has never in this lifetime been anywhere but directly overhead, and Chuy and I, incurable fools and optimistic pessimists that we are, are trying to construct cages for the honey badgers, Petunia and the peccaries out of the flotsam left along the banks of the now officially dry Pulchris River. "Yo!" A voice cries out, and here's one of the young-young in a suit of clothes the size and color of a life raft (very hip, I'm told), with one of those haircuts that eliminate the need of a face. "Yo," he repeats. "You Tierwater?"

I am. And I shake out my glasses and read the notice in silence while Chuy wrestles with a twenty-foot strip of artificial wood (think plastic, resins and the pulverized remains of shredded tires) that used to grace the facade of the condos across the way. This is the final blow, the last nail in the coffin of my useless life on this useless planet, but I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't expecting it. Still, it strikes fear in my heart-fear of inanition, the uncertain future and the inevitable end. I'm lost. I'm hurt. I've got no income and no place to go and my only remaining ambition at this juncture is to be one of the old-old. Andrea, I think, Andreali know what to do, and then I'm following my feet across the bleached yard with its browning devil grass and the twisted, gummy clots of flesh that used to be walking catfish scattered round like dark pellets thrown down out of an angry sky. A mutant lizard (two heads, one foot) slithers under a rock to escape my shadow. My throat is dry. "Mr. Ty," Chuy calls, "where you are going?" And what do I say, what do I croak like a parched old turkey cock on his way to the chopping block? "Be back in a minute"