T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

The stanchions were thicker than he'd supposed. No problem, though-he was ready for anything; hell, he could have taken the George Washington Bridge down if he'd had enough time and enough fuel and oxygen. He did feel a twinge in the back of his neck as he bent to attach his hoses and the oxygen regulator — the brace shoved at his chin and held his head up awkwardly, as if he were about to lay it out flat on the chopping block or into the slit of the guillotine. But the torch took away his pain. He flipped down his goggles, turned up the flame and began to slice through high-grade Korean steel as if he were omnipotent.

Tierwater had always been a careful worker, precise where another might be approximate, a model of concentration who never allowed himself to be distracted, even when he was a boy putting models together on a noisy playground or sitting at his father's drafting table creating his own blueprints of imaginary cities. His mother praised him for what was really an extraordinary ability in one so young, and his teachers praised him too. There was one in particular, an art teacher in the fifth or sixth grade-what was her name? — He could see her as clearly as if she were standing before him now, a tiny smiling woman not much older than Morty Reich's big sister-who really thought he had a talent, and not just because he'd mastered perspective drawing in a week and could sketch an unerring line, like the one he was drawing now, but — He never got to finish the thought. Because just then, though the neck brace prevented him from turning round to acknowledge it, he felt a firm, unmistakable tap at his shoulder.

They came down hard on him this time. The State of California arraigned him on four counts of felony vandalism, and then the feds stepped in to charge him with violating parole, and that was the unkindest cut of all, because at the time of his arrest he had less than three weeks left till he was in the clear. Fred — and the defense attorney Tierwater had to hire to replace him when Fred begged off the minute he made bail-could do nothing. The press jumped gleefully on the case-this was Tierwater, Tyrone () 'Shaughnessy Tier-water, the nudist radical who'd spent a naked month in the Sierras with his naked and busty wife, Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, the high-flying E. E1 director and spokesperson, and here were the photos of that infamous stunt dredged up out of the files and reprinted with remarkable clarity on page one of the Metro section, nipples and genitalia airbrushed out so as not to offend puerile sensibilities, of course. The DA wouldn't bend, not with all that light shining on him. He made Tierwater plead to the face-plead on all counts, that is — and be was sentenced to two years on count one, the other three eight-month counts to be served consecutively, after which he'd be going back to Lompoc for six months under federal supervision. Tierwater was no mathematician, but no matter how he juggled the figures, they added up to fifty-four months-four and a half stupefying years.

But it got worse. He was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of eight hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for damage to the vehicles and earth-moving equipment, not to mention the compromised stanchion, which required full replacement of the tower in question. The press wasn't calling him a hyena yet-that would come later — but there wasn't a friendly reporter out there, not even Chris Mattingly, who went on the record condemning any sort of monkeywrenching as anarchy, pure and simple. Newsweek ran a feature on ecotage, replete with the usual diagrams, a titillating breakdown of the various techniques employed, from tree-spiking to fire-bombing corporate offices, and a photo of a watchcapped and greasepainted Tierwater in a little box on the front cover. And the good honest law-abiding image-conscious hypocrites at Earth Forever! Fell all over themselves denying any involvement. Which was why Fred had to bow out- "It just wouldn't look right," he said. "I hope you understand?'

All right, so Fred was a coward, like the rest of them. But he was there the first day to bail Tierwater out and, along with Andrea, to creatively restructure the Tierwater holdings, both in real property and in the mutual-fund investments into which the shopping-center profits had gone. It was like this: Fred had foreseen the judgment and already had the instrument in hand that would shift all Tierwater's assets to the Earth Forever! Preservation Trust, under his wife's name and control. "Before the court gets it," Fred reasoned, pacing back and forth across the living-room carpet of the rented house in Tarzana, the frogs croaking and birds singing obliviously in the trees Tierwater wouldn't be seeing again for some time to come. "Or GE. You don't want to see GE get everything you have, do you?"

Tierwater was in a state of shock. He held himself rigid against the smudged neck-brace and bent awkwardly to sign the papers. And Andrea, as prearranged, filed for divorce. "Yes, I'm pissed off," she said, "of course I am, and disappointed and hurt too — I can't begin to tell you the harm you've done, Ty, and not just to me and Sierra, but to the whole organization. You're so goddamned mindless and stupid it just astonishes me" — a shadow swept by the window on swift wings, Sierra sat white-faced on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin, Fred stood by- "but I'm not deserting you, though no one would blame me if I did. This is just a maneuver, don't you see? We're biding your assets and hoping the other side won't find out you have anything more than a closet full of old camping equipment, a beat-up Jeep and a rental house. If you don't have anything, what can they take?"

(Speeches. I heard one after the other, everybody so practical, so reasonable, but what it amounted to was the fleecing of Ty Tierwater, once and forever, my father's last hard-earned dollars poured down the funnel and into the money-hungry gullet of Earth Forever! The incorporated earth-savers, Rallies R Us, rah-rah-rah. Andrea and I never did remarry, although she was there for me, nominally at least, when I got out. Do I sound bitter? I am. Or I was. But none of it matters anymore, not really.) So Tierwater, officially penniless, shackled at the ankles and handcuffed at the wrists, took a bus ride to the state prison at Calpatria, a big stark factory of a place in the blasted scrubby hills of the Mohave Desert. What can he say about that place? It was no camp, that was for sure. Forget the tennis courts, the strolls round the yard, the dormitory. It was cellblock time. A lockup for the discerning criminal, no amateurs here. Your cell consisted of a metal-frame bunk, a lidless steel toilet, two metal counters with attached swing-out stools, a sink, a single overhead lightbulb and a sheet of polished metal bolted into the wall for a mirror. The guards didn't like to be called guards — they were "correctional officers" — and they called everybody else "shitbird," regardless of race or crime or attitude. What else? The cuisine was shit. The work was shit. Your fellow inmates were shit. You got drunk on a kind of rancid thin liquid made from bread, oranges, water and sugar fermented for four days in a plastic bag hidden in the back of your locker. Drugs came in in the vaginas of girlfriends and wives, tucked into condoms that made it from the female mouth to the male during that first long lingering kiss of greeting. Tierwater didn't do drugs. And he didn't have a girlfriend. His wife — or exwife-visited him once a month if he was lucky. And his daughter-to her eyes, and hers alone, he was still a hero-tried to come when she could, but she, was in college now, and she had papers to write, exams to take, rallies to attend, protests to organize, animals to liberate. She wrote him every week, long discursive letters on the Gaia hypothesis, rock and roll, fossil love and her roommate's hygienic habits. Once in a while she'd take the bus down to Calpatria and surprise him.