T. Boyle: A Friend of the Earth

Right beside him, from the void on his left, another voice weighs in, the voice of Andrea, his second wife, the wife who is not Sierra's biological mother and so free to take on the role of her advocate in all disputes, tiffs, misunderstandings, misrepresentations and adventures gone wrong: "Give the kid a break, Ty." And then, in a whisper so soft it's like a feather floating down out of the night, "Sure it is, honey, that's a spotted owl if ever I heard one."

Tierwater keeps walking, the damp working odor of the nighttime woods in his nostrils, the taste of it on his tongue-mold transposed to another element, mold ascendant — but he's furious suddenly. He doesn't like this. He doesn't like it at all. He knows it's necessary, knows that the woods are being raped and the world stripped right on down to the last twig and that somebody's got to save it, but still he doesn't like it. His voice, cracking with the strain, leaps out ahead of him: "Keep it down, will you? We're supposed to be stealthy here-this is illegal, what we're doing, remember? Christ, you'd think we were on a nature walk or something — and here's where the woodpecker lives, and here the giant forest fern."

A chastened silence, into which the crickets pour all their Orthopteran angst, but it can't hold. One more voice enters the mix, an itch of the larynx emanating from the vacancy to his right. This is Teo, Teo Van Sparks, aka Liverhead. Eight years ago he was standing out on Rodeo Drive, in front of Sterling's Fur Emporium, with a slab of calf's liver sutured to his shaved head. He'd let the liver get ripe-three or four days or so, flies like a crown of thorns, maggots beginning to trail down his nose — and then he'd tear it off his head and lay it at the feet of a silvery old crone in chinchilla or a starlet parading through the door in white fox. Next day he'd be back again, with a fresh slab of meat. Now he's a voice on the E. F.I Circuit (Eco-Agitator, that's what his card says), thirty-one years old, a weightlifter with the biceps, triceps, lats and abs to prove it, and there isn't anything about the natural world he doesn't know. At least not that he'll admit. "Sorry, kids," he says, "but by most estimates they're down to less than five hundred breeding pairs in the whole range, from B. C. Down to the southern Sierra, so I doubt-"

"Fewer," Andrea corrects, in her pedantic mode. She's in charge here tonight, and she's going to rein them all in, right on down to the finer points of English grammar and usage. If it was just a question of giving out instructions in a methodical, dispassionate voice, that would be one thing — but she's so supercilious, so self-satisfied, cocky, bossy. He's not sure he can take it. Not tonight.

"Fewer, right. So what I'm saying is, more likely it's your screech or flammulated or even your great gray. Of course, we'd have to hear its call to be sure. The spotted's a high-pitched hoot, usually in groups of fours or threes, very fast, crescendoing."

"Call, why don't you?" Sierra whispers, and the silence of the night is no silence at all but the screaming backdrop to some imminent and catastrophic surprise. "So you can make it call back. Then we'll know, right?"

Is it his imagination, or can he feel the earth slipping out from under him? He's blind, totally blind, his shoulders hunched in anticipation of the first furtive blow, his breath coming hard, his heart hammering at the walls of its cage. And the others? They're moving down the road in a horizontal line like tourists on a pier, noisy and ambling, heedless. "And while we're at it," he says, and he's surprised by his own voice, the vehemence of it, "1 just want to know one thing from you, Andrea-did you remember the diapers? Or is this going to be another in a long line of, of-"

"At what?"

"It. The subject of stealth and preparedness."

He's talking to nothing, to the void in front of him, moving down the invisible road and releasing strings of words like a street gibberer. The owl sounds off again, and then something else, a rattling harsh buzz in the night.

"Of course I remembered the diapers." The reassuring thump of his wife's big mannish hand patting the cross-stitched nylon of her daypack. "And the sandwiches and granola bars and sunblock too. You think I don't know what I'm doing here? Is that what you're implying?"

He's implying nothing, but he's half a beat from getting excruciatingly specific. The honeymoon is over. He's out here risking arrest, humiliation, physical abuse and worse — and for her, all for her, or because of her, anyway — and her tone irritates him. He wants to come back at her, draw some blood, get a good old-fashioned domestic dispute going, but instead he lets the silence speak for him.

"What kind of sandwiches?" Sierra wants to know, a hushed and tremulous little missive inserted in the envelope of her parents' bickering. He can just make out the moving shape of her, black against black, the sloped shoulders, the too-big feet, the burgeoning miracle of tofu-fed flesh, and this is where the panic closes in on him again. What if things turn nasty? What then?

"Something special for you, honey. A surprise, okay?"" Tomato, avocado and sprouts on honey wheatberry, don't spare the mayo?"

A low whistle from Andrea. "I'm not saying."" Hummus-hummus and tabouleh on pita. Whole-wheat pita."

"Not saying."

"Peanut butter-marshmallow? Nusspli?"

A stroll in the park, isn't that what she said? Sure, sure it is. And we re making so much racket we might as well be shooting offfireworks and beating a big bass drum into the bargain. What fun, huh? The family that monkey wrenches together stays together? But what if they ARE listening? What if they got word ahead of time, somebody finked, ratted, spilled the beans, crapped us out? "Look, really," he hears himself saying, trying to sound casual but getting nowhere with that, — you've got to be quiet. I'm begging you — Andrea, come on. Sierra. Teo. Just for my peace of mind, if nothing else:-"

Andrea's response is clear and resonant, a definitive non-whisper. "They don't have a watchman, I keep telling you that-so get a grip, Ty." A caesura. The crickets, the muffled tramp of sneaker ed feet, the faintest soughing of a night breeze in the doomed expanse of branch and bough. "Tomorrow night they will, though-you can bet on it."

It's ten miles in, and they've given themselves three and a half hours at a good brisk clip, no stops for rest or scholarly dissertations on dendrochronology or Frigidaire calls, their caps pulled down tight, individual water rations riding their backs in boat bags as fat and supple as overfed babies. They're carrying plastic buckets, one apiece, the indestructible kind that come with five gallons of paint at Dunn-Edwards or Color — tone. The buckets are empty, light as nothing, but tedious all the same, rubbing against their shins and slapping at the outside of his bad knee just over the indentation where the arthroscope went in, scuffing and squeaking in a fabricated, not-made-for — this-earth kind of way. But there's no talking, not anymore, not once they reach the eight-mile mark, conveniently indicated by a tiny Day-Lo E. F. I sticker affixed to the black wall of a doomed Douglas fir — a tree that took root here five hundred years before Columbus brought the technological monster to a sunny little island in the Caribbean.

But Tierwater wouldn't want to preach. He'd just want to explain what happened that night, how it stuck in him like a barbed hook, like a bullet lodged too close to the bone to remove, and how it was the beginning, the real beginning, of everything to come.

All right.

It's still dark when they arrive, four-fifteen by his watch, and the concrete-all thirty bags of it-is there waiting for them, not ten feet off the road. Andrea is the one who locates it, with the aid of the softly glowing red cap of her flashlight-watchman or no, it would be crazy to go shining lights out here, and the red, she explains, doesn't kill your night vision like the full glare of the white. Silently, they haul the concrete up the road-all of them, even Sierra, though sixty pounds of dead weight is a real load for her. "Don't be ridiculous, Dad," she says when he asks if she's okay — or whispers, actually, whispers didactically- "because if Burmese peasants or coolies or whatever that hardly weigh more than I do can carry hundred — and — twenty-pound sacks of rice from dawn to dusk for something like thirty-two cents a day, then I can lift this."