A Friend of the Earth

The Siskiyou, July 1989

This is the way it begins, on a summer night so crammed with stars the Milky Way looks like a white plastic sack strung out across the roof of the sky. No moon, though-that wouldn't do at all. And no sound, but for the discontinuous trickle of water, the muted patter of cheap tennis sneakers on the ghostly surface of the road and the sustained applause of the crickets. It's a dirt road, a logging road, in fact, but Tyrone Tierwater wouldn't want to call it a road. He'd call it a scar, a gash, an open wound in the body corporal of the forest. But for the sake of convenience, let's identify it as a road. In daylight, trucks pound over it, big D7 Cats, loaders, wood-chippers. It's a road. And he's on it.

He's moving along purposively, all but invisible in the abyss of shadow beneath the big Douglas firs. If your eyes were adjusted to the dark and you looked closely enough, you might detect his three companions, the night disarranging itself ever so casually as. They pass: now you see them, now you don't. All four are dressed identically, in cheap tennis sneakers blackened with shoe polish, two pairs of socks, black tees and sweatshirts and, of course, the black watch-caps. Where would they be without them?

Tierwater had wanted to go further, the whole nine yards, stripes of greasepaint down the bridge of the nose, slick rays of it fanning out across their cheekbones — or, better yet, blackface — but Andrea talked him out of it. She can talk him out of anything, because she's more rational than he, more aggressive, because she has a better command of the language and eyes that bark after weakness like hounds — but then she doesn't have half his capacity for paranoia, neurotic display, pessimism or despair. Things can go wrong. They do. They will. He tried to tell her that, but she wouldn't listen.

They were back in the motel room at the time, on the unfledged strip of the comatose town of Grants Pass, Oregon, where they were registered under the name of Mr. And Mrs. James Watt. He was nervous — butterflies in the stomach, termites in the head-nervous and angry. Angry at the loggers, Oregon, the motel room, her. Outside, three steps from the door, Teo's Chevy Caprice (anonymous gray, with the artfully smudged plates) sat listing in its appointed slot. He came out of the bathroom with a crayon in one hand, a glittering, shrink-wrapped package of Halloween face paint in the other. There were doughnuts on the bed in a staved-in carton, paper coffee cups subsiding into the low fiberboard table. "Forget it, Ty," she said. "I keep telling you, this is nothing, the first jab in a whole long bout. You think I'd take Sierra along if I wasn't a hundred percent sure it was safe? It's going to be a stroll in the park, it is."

A moment evaporated. He looked at his daughter, but she had nothing to say, her head cocked in a way that indicated she was listening, but only reflexively. The TV said," — and these magnificent creatures, their range shrinking, can no longer find the mast to sustain them, let alone the carrion. "He tried to smile, but the appropriate muscles didn't seem to be working. He had misgivings about the whole business, especially when it came to Sierra — but as he stood there listening to the insects sizzle against the bug zapper outside the window, he understood that" misgivings "wasn't exactly the word he wanted. Misgivings? How about crashing fears, terrors, night sweats? The inability to swallow? A heart ground up like glass?

There were people out there who weren't going to like what the four of them were planning to do to that road he didn't want to call a road. Bosses, underbosses, heavy-machine operators, CEOs, power-lunchers, police, accountants. Not to mention all those good, decent, hardworking and terminally misguided timber families, the men in baseball caps and red suspenders, the women like tented houses, people who spent their spare time affixing loops of yellow ribbon to every shrub, tree, doorknob, mailbox and car antenna in every town up and down the coast. They had mortgages, trailers, bass boats, plans for the future, and the dirt-blasted bumpers of their pickups sported stickers that read Save a Skunk, Roadkill an Activist and Do You Work for a Living or Are You an Environmentalist? They were angry-born angry — and they didn't much care about physical restraint, one way or the other. Talk about misgivings-his daughter is only thirteen years old, for all her Gothic drag and nose ring and the cape of hair that drapes her shoulders like an advertisement, and she's never participated in an act of civil disobedience in her life, not even a daylit rally with minicams whirring and a supporting cast of thousands. "Come on," he pleaded, "just under the eyes, then. To mask the glow."

Andrea just shook her head. She looked good in black, he had to admit it, and the watchcap, riding low over her eyebrows, was a very sexy thing. They'd been married three months now, and everything about her was a novelty and a revelation, right down to the way she stepped into her jeans in the morning or pouted over a saucepan of ratatouille, a thin strip of green pepper disappearing between her lips while the steam rose witchily in her hair. "What if the police pull us over?" She said. "Ever think of that? What're you going to say-`The game really ran late tonight, officer '? Or `Gee, it was a great old-timey minstrel show-you should have been there.'" She was the one with the experience here-she was the organizer, the protestor, the activist — and she wasn't giving an inch. "The trouble with you," she said, running a finger under the lip of her cap, "is you've been watching too many movies?'

Maybe so. But you couldn't really call the proposition relevant, not now, not here. This is the wilderness, or what's left of it. The night is deep, the road intangible, the stars the feeblest mementos of the birth of the universe. There are nine galaxies out there for each person alive today, and each of those galaxies features a hundred billion suns, give or take the odd billion, and yet he can barely see where he's going, groping like a sleepwalker, one foot stabbing after the other. This is crazy, he's thinking, this is trouble, like stumbling around in a cave waiting for the bottom to fall out. He's wondering if the others are having as hard a time as he is, thinking vaguely about beta-carotene supplements and night-vision goggles, when an owl chimes in somewhere ahead of them, a single wavering cry that says it has something strangled in its claws.

His daughter, detectable only through the rhythmic snap of her gum, asks in a theatrical whisper if that could be a spotted owl, "I mean hopefully, by any chance?"

He can't see her face, the night a loose-fitting jacket, his mind ten miles up the road, and he answers before he can think: "Don't I wish."

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."

He wants to say something to relieve the tension no one but him seems to be feeling, something about the Burmese, but they're as alien to him as the headhunters of the Trajan Valley-don't some of them make thirty-six cents a day, the lucky ones? — and the best he can do is mutter "Be my guest" into the sleeve of his black sweatshirt. Then he's bending for the next bag, snatching it to his chest and rising out of his crouch like a weightlifter. The odd grunt comes to him out of the dark, and the thin whine of the first appreciative mosquitoes.

In addition to the concrete, there are two shovels and a pickax secreted in the bushes. Without a word, he takes up the pick, and once he gets his hands wrapped round that length of tempered oak, once he begins raising it above his head and slamming it down into the yielding flesh of the road, he feels better. The fact that the concrete and the tools were here in the first place is something to cheer about — they have allies in this, confederates, grunts and foot soldiers — and he lets the knowledge of that soothe him, his shoulders working, breath coming in ragged gasps. The night compresses. The pick lifts and drops. He could be anywhere, digging a petunia bed, a root cellar, a grave, and he's beginning to think he's having an out-of-body experience when Andrea takes hold of his rising arm. "That's enough, Ty," she whispers.

Then it's the shovels. He and Teo take turns clearing the loose dirt from the trench and heaving it into the bushes, and before long they have an excavation eighteen inches deep, two feet wide and twelve feet across, a neat black line spanning the narrowest stretch of the road in the roseate glow of Andrea's flashlight. It may not be much of a road by most standards, but still it's been surveyed, dozed, cleared and tamped flat, and it brings the machines to the trees. There's no question about it — the trucks have to be stopped, the line has to be drawn. Here. Right here. Our local friends have chosen well, he thinks, leaning on the shovel and gazing up into the night, where two dark fortresses of rock, discernible now only as the absence of stars, crowd in over the road: block it here and there's no way around.

They're tired, all of them. Beat, exhausted, zombie. Though they dozed away the afternoon at the Rest Ye May Motel and fueled themselves with sugar-dipped doughnuts and reheated diner coffee, the hike, the unaccustomed labor and the lateness of the hour are beginning to take their toll. Andrea and Teo are off in the bushes, bickering over something in short, sharp explosions of breath that hit the air like body blows. Sierra, who has an opinion on everything, is uncharacteristically silent, a shadow perched on a rock at the side of the road-she may want to save the world, but not at this hour. He can hardly blame her. He's sapped too, feeling it in his hamstrings, his shoulders, his tender knee, and when he tries to focus on anything other than the stars, random spots and blotches float across his field of vision like paramecia frolicking under the lens of a microscope. But they're not done yet. Now it's the water. And again, their comrades-in-arms have chosen well. Shut your eyes and listen. That's right. That sound he's been hearing isn't the white noise of traffic on a freeway or the hiss of a stylus clogged with lint-it's water, the muted gargle of a stream passing into a conduit not fifty feet up the road. This is what the buckets are for — to carry the water to the trench and moisten the concrete. They're almost home.

But not quite. There seems to be some confusion about the concrete, the proportion of water to mix in, and have any of them-even he, son of a builder and thirty-nine years on this earth-ever actually worked with concrete? Have any of them built a wall, smoothed out a walk, set bricks? Teo once watched a pair of Mexican laborers construct a deck round the family pool, but he was a kid then and it was a long time ago, He thinks they just dumped the bags into a hand — cranked mixer and added water from the hose. Did they need a mixer, was that the problem? Andrea thinks she can recall setting fenceposts with her father on their ranch in Montana, and Tierwater has a vague recollection of watching his own father set charges of dynamite on one of his job sites, stones flung up in the air and bang and bang again, but as far as concrete is concerned, he's drawing a blank. "I think we just dump the bags in the trench, level it out and add water to the desired consistency," he concludes with all the authority of a man who flunked chemistry twice.

Andrea is dubious. "Sounds like a recipe for cake batter."

Teo: "What consistency, though? This is quick-set stuff, sure, but if we get it too runny it's never going to set up in two hours, and that's all we've got."

A sigh of exasperation from Sierra. "I can't believe you guys-1 mean, three adults, and we come all the way out here, with all this planning and all, and nobody knows what they're doing? No wonder my generation is going to wind up inheriting a desert." He can hear the plaintive, plangent sound of her bony hands executing mosquitoes. "Plus, I'm tired. Really like monster-tired. I want to go home to bed."

He's giving it some thought. How hard could it be? The people who do this for a living-laying concrete, that is-could hardly be confused with geniuses. "What does it say on the package? Are there any directions?"

"Close one eye," Andrea warns, "because that way you don't lose all your night vision, just in case, I mean, if anybody-" and then she flicks on the flashlight. The world suddenly explodes in light, and it's a new world, dun-colored and circumscribed, sacks of concrete like overstuffed brown pillows, the pipestems of their legs, the blackened sneakers. He's inadvertently closed his good eye, the one that sees up close, and he has to go binocular — and risk a perilous moment of night-blindness-to read what it says on the bag.

King Kon-Crete, it reads, over the picture of a cartoon ape in sunglasses strutting around a wheelbarrow, Premium Concrete. Mix Entire Bag with Water to Desired Consistency. Keep Away from Children.

"Back to consistency again," Teo says, shuffling his feet round the bag, and that's all that can be seen of him, his feet-his diminutive feet, feet no bigger than Sierra's-in the cone of light descending from Andrea's hand. Tierwater can picture him, though, squat and muscular, his upper body honed from pumping iron and driving his longboard through the surf, his face delicate, his wrists and ankles tapered like a girl's. He's so small and pumped he could be a special breed, a kind of human terrier, fearless, indefatigable, tenacious, and with a bark like — but enough. They need him here. They need him to say, "Shit, let's just dump the stuff and get it over with."

And so they do. They slit the bags and let the dependable force of gravity empty them. They haul the water in a thickening miasma of mosquitoes, swatting, cursing, unceremoniously upending the buckets atop the dry concrete. And then they mix and slice and chivy till the trench is uniformly filled with something like cold lava, and the hour is finally at hand, "Ready, everybody?" Tierwater whispers. "Teo on the outside, Andrea next to Teo — and, Sierra, you get in between me and Andrea, okay?"

"Aren't you forgetting something?" This is Andrea, exhausted, but reclaiming the initiative.

He looks round him in the dark, a wasted gesture. "No, what?"

A slight lilt to the tone, an edge of satisfaction. She's done her homework, she's seen the movie, memorized the poem, got in touch with her inner self She has the information, and he doesn't. "The essential final step, the issue you've. Been avoiding all week except when you accused me of forgetting it — them, I mean?"

Then it hits him. "The diapers?"

Eighteen per package, at S 16.99. They've had to invest in three different sizes-small, medium and large, for Sierra, Andrea and Teo, and himself, respectively-though Andrea assures him they'll use them up during the next direct action, whenever and wherever that may be. Either that, or give them away to volunteers. They're called, comfortingly enough, Depends, and on her advice they've chosen the Fitted Briefs for Extra Absorbency. He can't help thinking about that for just the smallest slice of a moment-Extra Absorbency — and about what it is the diapers arc meant to absorb.

There's a moment of silence there in the dark, the naked woods crepitating round them, the alertest of the birds already calling out for dawn, when they're all communally involved in a very private act. The sound of zippers, the hopping on one foot, arms jerked out for balance, and then they're diapered and the jeans rise back up their legs to grab at their bellies and buttocks. He hasn't worn diapers — or pads, as the professionals euphemistically call them so as not to offend the Alzheimer's patients and other walking disasters who have to be swathed in them day and night-since he was an infant, and he doesn't remember much of that. He remembers Sierra, though, mewling and gurgling, kicking her shit-besmeared legs in the air, as he bent to the task on those rare occasions when Jane, the perfect mother, was either absent or unconscious. They feel-not so bad, not yet anyway. Like underwear, like briefs, only thicker.

And now, finally, the time has come to compete the ritual and settle down to slap mosquitoes, slumber fitfully and await the first astonished Freddies (Forest Service types) and heavy-machine operators. They join hands for balance, sink their cheap tennis sneakers into the wet concrete as deep as they'll go and then ease themselves down on the tapered bottoms of their upended buckets. He will be miserable. His head will droop, his back will scream. He will bait mosquitoes and crap in his pants. But it's nothing. The smallest thing, the sacrifice of one night in bed with a book or narcotized in front of the tube-that, and a few hours of physical discomfort. And as he settles in, the concrete gripping his ankles like a dark set of jaws, the stars receding into the skullcap of the silvering sky and every bird alive in every tree, he tells himself, Somebody's got to do it.

He must have dozed. He did doze — or sleep, would be more accurate. He slumped over his knees, put his head to rest and drifted into unconsciousness, because there was no sense in doing anything else, no matter his dreads and fears-nothing was going to happen till seven-thirty or eight at the earliest, and he put all that out of his mind and orchestrated his dreams to revolve around a man in bed, a man like him, thin as grass but big across the shoulders, with no gut or rear end to speak of and the first tentative fingers of hair loss massaging his skull, a man in an air-conditioned room in blissful deep non-REM sleep with something like Respighi's "The Birds" playing softly in the background.

And what does he wake to? Is it the coughing wheeze of a poorly tuned pickup beating along the road, the single mocking laugh of a raven, the low-threshold tocsin of his daughter's voice, soft and supple and caught deep in her throat, saying, "Uh. Dad. Dad, wake up?" Whatever it is, it jerks him up off the narrow stool of the bucket in one explosive motion, like a diver surging up out of the deepest pool, and he tries to lift his feet, to leap, to run, to escape the hammering in his chest. But his feet are locked in place. And his body, his upper body, is suddenly floundering forward without support, even as the image of the burnt — orange pickup with its grinning bumper and the swept-back mask of the glassed-in cab comes hurtling down the road toward him, toward them. But the knee joint isn't designed to give in that direction, and even in the moment of crisis-Jesus Christ, the shithead's going to hit us. I — he lurches back and sits heavily and ignominiously on the bucket that even now is squirting out from under him. "Stop," he roars, "stop!" Against a background of shrieks and protests, and somehow he's on his feet again and reaching out to his left, for his daughter, to pull her to him and cradle her against the moment of impact… Which, mercifully, never comes.

He wouldn't want to talk about the diapers, not in this context. He'd want to address the issue of the three intensely bearded, red-suspendered timber people wedged into the cab of that pickup, that scorching — orange Toyota 4x4 that comes to rest in a demon-driven cloud of dust no more than ten feet from them. And the looks on their faces — their seven-thirty in-the-A. M. Faces, Egg McMuffins still warm in their bellies, searing coffee sloshed in their laps, the bills of their caps askew and their eyes crawling across their faces like slugs. This is the look of pure, otherworldly astonishment. (Don't blame these men — or not yet, anyway. They didn't expect us to be there — they didn't expect anything, other than maybe a tardy coyote or a suicidal ground squirrel — and suddenly there we were, like some manifestation of the divine, like the lame made to walk and the blind to see.) "Oh, God," Andrea murmurs, and it's as if the air has been squeezed out of her lungs, and they're all standing now, erect and trembling and holding hands for lack of anything better to do. Tierwater cuts a swift glance from the stalled pickup to the face of his daughter. It's a tiny little dollop of a face, shrunken and drawn in on itself, the face of the little girl awake with the terror of the night and the scratchy voice and the need for reason and comprehension and the whispered assurance that the world into which she's awakened is the ancient one, the imperturbable one, the one that will go on twisting round its axis whether we're here to spin it or not. That face paralyzes him. What are they thinking? What are they doing?

"Christ Jesus, what is goin' on here?" Comes the voice of the pickup, the unanimous voice, concentrated in the form of the pony-tailed and ginger-bearded head poking through the open window of the wide-swinging driver's-side door. "You people lost or what?" A moment later, the rest of the speaker emerges, workboots, rolled-up jeans, a flannel shirt in some bleached-out shade of tartan plaid. His face is like an electric skillet Like a fuse in the moment of burning out "What in Christ's name is wrong with you? I almost-you know, I could of-" He's trembling too, his hands so shaky he has to bury them in his pockets.

Tierwater has to remind himself that this man — thirtyfive, flat dead alcoholic eyes, the annealed imprint of a scar like a brand stamped into the flange of his nose-is not the enemy. He's just earning his paycheck, felling and loading and producing so many board feet a year so middle-class Americans can exercise their God-given right to panel their family rooms and cobble together redwood picnic tables from incomprehensible sets of plans. He's never heard of Arne Naess or Deep Ecology or the mycorrhizal fungi that cling to the roots of old growth trees and make the forest possible. Rush Limbaugh wrote his bible, and the exegesis of it too. Lie has a T-shirt in a drawer at home that depicts a spotted owl in a frying pan. 1-Le knows incontrovertibly and with a kind of unconquerable serenity that all members of the Sierra Club are "Green Niggers" and that Earth Forever! Is a front for Bolshevik terrorists with homosexual tendencies. But he's not the enemy. His bosses are, "We're not letting you through," Teo announces, and there he is, a plug of muscle hammered into the ground, anchoring the far end of the human chain. All he needs is a slab of liver.

The other two have squeezed out of the truck by now, work-hardened men, incongruously bellied, looks of utter stupefaction on their faces. They just stare.

"What are you," the first man wants to know, the driver, the one in faded tartan, "environmentalists or something?" He's seen housewives, ministers, schoolchildren, drug addicts, drunks, ex-cons, jockeys, ballplayers, maybe even sexual deviates, but you can tell by the faltering interrogatory lift of the question that he's never in his life been face to face with the devil before.

"That's right," Tierwater says, radicalized already, gone from suburban drudge to outside agitator in eight months' time, "and you ought to be one too, if you want to keep your job beyond next year or even next month." He glances up at the palisade of the trees, needles stitched together like a quilt, the sun stalking through crowns and snags in its slow progress, across the sky, and then he's confronting those blunted eyes again. And this is the strange part: he's not in bed dreaming, but actually standing in the middle of a concrete trench in a road in the middle of nowhere, wearing diapers and giving a speech-at seven-thirty in the morning, no less.

"What are you going to cut when all the trees are gone? You think your bosses care about that? You think the junk-bond kings and the rest of the suits in New York give the slightest damn about you or your children or the mills or the trees or anything else?"

"Or retirement," Teo puts in. "What about retirement? Huh? I can't hear you. Talk to me. Talk to me, man, come on: talk to me."

He isn't one for debate, this man, or consorting with environmentalists either. For a long moment he just stands there staring at them-at Tierwater, at Sierra, Andrea, Teo, at their linked hands and the alien strip of concrete holding them fast at the ankles. "Piss on you," he says finally, and in a concerted move he and his companions roll back into the pickup and the engine fires up with a roar. A screech of tires and fanbelt, and then he's reversing gears, jerking round and charging back down the road in the direction he came from. They're left with dust. With the mosquitoes. And the sun, which has just begun to slash through the trees and make its first radiant impression on their faces and hands and the flat black cotton and polyester that clothe them.

"I'm hungry. I'm tired. I want to go home."

His daughter is propped up on her bucket, limp as an invertebrate, and she's trying to be brave, trying to be an adult, trying to prove she's as capable of manning the barricades as anybody, but it isn't working. The sun is already hot, though it's just past ten by Tierwater's watch, and they've long since shed their sweatshirts. They've kept the caps on, for protection against the sun, and they've referred to their water bags and consumed the sandwiches Andrea so providentially brought along, and what they're doing now is waiting. Waiting for the confrontation, the climax, the reporters and TV cameras, the sheriff and his deputies. Tier-water can picture the jail cell, cool shadows playing off the walls, the sound of a flushing toilet, a cot to stretch out on. They'll have just long enough to close their eyes, no fears, no problems, events leaping on ahead of them-bailed out before the afternoon is over, the E. F.I Lawyers on alert, everything in place. Everything but the sheriff, that is. What could be keeping him?

"How much longer, Andrea? Really. Because I want to know, and don't try to patronize me either."

He wants to say, It's all right, baby, it'll be over soon, but he's not much good at comforting people, even his own daughter-Bear up, that's his philosophy, Tough it out. Think of the Mohawk, whose captives had to laugh in the face of the knife, applaud their own systematic dismemberment, cry out in mirth as their skin came away in bloody tapering strips. He leaves it to Andrea, who coos encouragement in a voice that's like a salve. Numbed, he watches her reach out to exchange Sierra's vampire novel (which, under the circumstances, hasn't proved lurid enough) for a book of crossword puzzles.

Teo, at the opposite end of the line, is a model of stoicism. Hunched over the upended bucket like a man perched on the throne in the privacy of his own bathroom, his eyes roaming the trees for a glimpse of wildlife instead of scanning headlines in the paper, he's utterly at home, unperturbed, perfectly willing to accept the role of martyr, if that's what comes to hint Tierwater isn't in his league, and he'd be the first to admit it. His feet itch, for one thing — a compelling, imperative itch that brings tears to his eyes — and the concrete, still imperceptibly hardening, has begun to chew at his ankles beneath the armor of his double socks and stiffened jeans. He has a full-blown headache too, the kind that starts behind the eyes and works its way through the cortex to the occipital lobe and back again in pulses as rhythmic and regular as waves beating against the shore. He has to urinate. Even worse, he can feel a bowel movement coming on.

Another hour oozes by. He's been trying to read-Bill McKibben's The End of Nature — but his eyes are burning and the relentless march of dispirited rhetoric makes him suicidal. Or maybe homicidal. It's hot. Very hot, Unseasonably hot. And though they're all backpackers, all four of them exposed regularly to the sun, this is something else altogether, this is like some kind of torture-like the sweat box in The Bridge on the River Kwai — and when he lifts the bota bag to his lips for the hundredth time, Andrea reminds him to conserve water. "The way it's looking," she says, and here is the voice of experience, delivered with a certain grim satisfaction, "we could be here a long time yet."

And then, far off in the distance, a sound so attenuated they can't be sure they've heard it. It's the sound of an internal-combustion engine, a diesel, blat-blatting in the interstices between dips in the road. The noise grows louder, they can see the poisoned billows of black exhaust, and all at once a bulldozer heaves into view, scuffed yellow paint, treads like millwheels, a bulbous face of determination and outrage at the controls. The driver lumbers straight for them, as if he's blind, the shovel lowered to reap the standing crop of them, to shear them off at the ankles like a row of dried-out cornstalks. Tierwater is on his feet suddenly, on his feet again, reaching out instinctively for his daughter's hand, and "Dad," she's saying, "does he know? Does he know we can't move?"

14 T. C. BOYLE It's the pickup truck all over again, only worse: the four of them shouting till the veins stand out in their necks, Andrea and Teo waving their arms over their heads, the sweat of fear and mortal tension prickling at their scalps and private places, and that's exactly what the man on the Cat wants. He knows perfectly well what's going on here — they all do by now, from the supervisors down to the surveying crews — and his object is intimidation, pure and simple. All those gleaming, pumping tons of steel in motion, the big tractor treads burning up the road and the noise of the thing, still coming at them at full-speed, and Tierwater can't see the eyes of the lunatic at the controls-shades, he wearing mirror shades that give him an evil insectoid look, no mercy, no appeal — and suddenly he's outraged, ready to kill: this is one sick game. At the last conceivable moment, a raw-knuckled hand jerks back a lever and the thing rears like a horse and swivels away from them with a kind of mechanized grace he wouldn't have believed possible. But that's only the first pass, and it carries the bulldozer into the wall of rock beside them with a concussive blast, sparks spewing from the blade, the shriek of one unyielding surface meeting another, and Tierwater can feel the crush of it in his feet, even as the shards of stone and dirt rain down on him. He's no stranger to violence, His father purveyed it, his mother suffered it, his first wife died of it — the most casual violence in the world, in a place as wild as this. He's new at pacifism or masochism or whatever you'd want to call what they're suffering here, and if he could free his legs for just half a minute, he'd drag that tight jawed executioner down off his perch and instruct him in the laws of the flesh, he would. But he can't do a thing. He's caught. Stuck fast in the glue of passive resistance, Saint Mahatma and Rosa Parks and James Meredith flashing through his mind in quick review. And he's swearing to himself, Never again, never; even as the man with the stick and eight tons of screaming iron and steel swings round for the second pass, and then the third and the fourth.

But that's enough. That's enough right there. Tyrone Tier-water wouldn't want to remember what that did to his daughter or the look on her face or the sad sick feeling of his own impotence. The sheriff came, with two deputies, and he took his own sweet time about it. And What did he do when he finally did get there? Did he arrest the man on the Cat? Close down the whole operation and let the courts decide if it's legal to bulldoze a dead zone through a federally designated roadless area? No. He handcuffed the four of them — even Sierra — and his deputies had a good laugh ripping the watchcaps off their heads, wadding them up and flinging them into the creek, and they caught a glimpse of the curtains parting on redneck heaven when they cut the straps of the bota bags and flung them after the hats. And then, for good measure, smirking all the while, these same deputies got a nice little frisson out of kicking the buckets out from under Tierwater and his wife and daughter and good friend, one at a time, and then settling in to watch them wait three interminable hours in the sun for the men with the sledgehammers.

Andrea cursed the deputies, and they cursed her back. Teo glared from the cave of his muscles. Tierwater was beside himself. He raged and bellowed and threatened them with everything from aggravated assault to monetary damages and prosecution for police brutality-at least until the sheriff, Sheriff Bob Hicks of Josephine County, produced a roll of duct tape and shut his mouth for him. And his daughter, his tough, right-thinking, long-haired, tree-hugging, animal-loving, vegetarian daughter-she folded herself up like an umbrella over the prison of her feet and cried. Thirteen years old, tired, scared, and she just let herself go. (They shuffled their workboots and looked shamefaced then, those standand issue badge-polishers and the Forest Service officials who drove up in a green jeep to join them — they probably had daughters themselves, and sons and dogs and rabbits in a hutch — but there was nothing any of them could do about my little girl's grief Least of all me.) Grateful for a day's reprieve, the Pacific salamanders curled up under the cover of their rocks, the martens retreated into the leaves and the spotted owls winked open an eye at the sound of that thin disconsolate wail of human distress. Tierwater's hands were bound, his mouth taped. Every snuffle, every choked-back sob, was a spike driven into the back of his head.

Yes. And here's the irony, the kicker, the sad, deflating and piss-poor denouement. For all they went through that morning, for all the pain and boredom and humiliation, there wasn't a single reporter on hand to bear witness, because Sheriff Bob Hicks had blocked the road at the highway and wouldn't let anyone in — and so it was a joke, a big joke, the whole thing. He can remember sitting there frying like somebody's meal with a face, no ozone layer left to protect them from the sun, no water, no hat and no shade and all the trees of the world under the ax, while he worked out the conundrum in his head: if a protest falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Santa Ynez, November 2025

It's still raining when we wake up — or when I wake up, anyway. I'm awake before her, long before her, and why wouldn't I be? I'm feeling historical here. Eggs and bacon, that's how I'm feeling, but you don't see much of those commodities any more (eggs maybe, but you can forget bacon) and there's her purse on the table, big as the head of an elephant and stuffed with used Kleenex, debit slips, gum wrappers, keychains full of keys to doors in houses that no longer exist. I'm an archaeologist, that's what I am, prising one potsherd after another out of the dung heap of my life. Andrea sleeps late. I knew that. I've lived with that. But for twenty-odd years until now, it didn't operate, not in my sphere. We've had, let's say, an interesting night, highly stimulating, drenched in nostalgia and heartbreak, a night that was finally, if briefly, sexual, and I've got no complaints on that score. I think I'm actually whistling as I dodge round the splootching cans and buckets in the living room/kitchen, preparatory to fixing something nice for her to eat when she gets around to it.

How am I feeling? Moist. Moist in the tear ducts and gonads, swelled up like a lungfish that's been buried in the sand through a long desiccated summer till the day the sky breaks apart and the world goes wet again. The smell of coffee is taking me back-1 don't drink it myself anymore, too expensive and it raises hell with my stomach — and I feel to the past I'm in danger of disappearing without making a ripple. She's snoring. I can hear it-no delicate insuck and outhale, but a real venting of the airways, a noise as true in its way as anything Lily could work up. The rain slaps its broad hand on the roof, something that wasn't tied down by somebody somewhere hits the wall just above the window, the world shudders, Andrea sleeps. It's a moment.

Unfortunately, our idyll doesn't last much longer than that moment, because, before I can think whether to serve her the tuna salad I've been storing in the food compressor the past three years for a special occasion or just to go ahead and open up that last can of crab because life doesn't last forever, especially if you're a crab, Chuy is at the door. He's agitated. Dancing on his feet, working his jaws and lips and tongue and generally trying, without success, to communicate something to me. He's hatless and slickerless, the hair glued to his scalp, his eyes so naked you can almost see through them to his Dursban-dusted brain. How old is he? He doesn't know-doesn't even remember what town he was born in, though the country, he's pretty sure-almost "a hunerd and ten percent, or maybe a hunerd and twenty" — was Guatemala. I'm not as good at judging people's ages as I once was, because everybody looks young to me except the old-old, but I'd figure him for forty, forty-five. Anyway, he's on my doorstep, and this is what he says, more or less: "Some people… Some people, Mr. Ty-"

"What people?" I'm standing there at the open door, the sky like an inverted fishbowl, big propellers of wind chasing sticks, papers, leaves across the swamp of the yard, the immemorial coffee smell behind me, the heater, the bed, Andrea. Chuy might as well be standing under Niagara Falls. My slippers are wet. The fringe of my bathrobe. Everything is wet, always-molding and wet-books falling apart on the shelves, slugs climbing out of the teapot, the very chairs turning green under our hind ends and sprouting again. Exasperated, I take Chuy by the collar and drag him into the room. I'm not a patient man.

"The, the people-" A gesture, mostly spastic, in the direction of the condos.

"The people at Lupine Hill?"

"Ellos, si, the ones sobre the hill, they, they — they encuentran Petunia. In the laundry."

Petunia is the Patagonian fox. She stands two and a half feet tall at the shoulder, thin red ribbons for legs, a black shag of bristling hair laid over her back like a rug. The laundry rooms, as I understand these things, are communal to every ten units at Lupine Hill. As for the Spanish, this is the language Chuy reverts to when the pesticide clogs up the pathways scored in his brain by the contortions of English.

"She have, what do you call, some catch in her mouth. Maybe un gato. And maybe they shut the door. So we, we-"" We need to get over there ASAP."

Streaming, grinning, flicking the hair out of his eyes: "Yes, Ess-A-Pee."

That's the moment Andrea chooses to emerge from the back room, hair in her face, eyes vacant, legs bare to the follicles — and good legs, because legs are the last thing to go in a beautiful woman, hardly any cellulite and no varicosities to speak of. She's wearing one of my shirts, I notice (black silk, fanciest thing I own, a gift from Mac, of course, because Tyrone Tierwater the animal man is strictly no frills), and there's nothing underneath that but what she was born with. Or evolved into. I follow Chuy's eyes to the black shirt and the place in front, down low, where she hasn't bothered with the bottom two buttons. I can see her private hair, and it's white, white as a winter ptarmigan (now extinct), and then we're both staring at the glossy dyed black marvel of her head. I have to admit it: I'm embarrassed. And before I can think, I'm crossing the room and moving into her, fastening the buttons like a doting husband. Or maybe a lovesick dog-one with bad breath and the mange and a habit of getting whipped and liking it. "Andrea," I say, "Chuy. Chuy, Andrea."

Chuy is giving her a watery stare of amazement, as if she's materialized out of one of the animal pens, and he's looking hard at me too, re-evaluating everything we've said and done together over the past decade in an entirely new light — the revivifying beers, meat cooked out in the open, animals dying on us in a welter of shit and blood, the bites, bruises and festering claw-wounds and the breakneck trips to the emergency room, Lori and her melting smile and love of high-end sake, the rare '95 Qupe Chardonnay out of Mac's cellars the three of us would share on special occasions, Mac-Mac himself-all of it, And Andrea-she just gives him a bright-eyed look and says, "You staying for breakfast?"

I can see Chuy wrestling with the response to that one, and I'm right on the verge of answering for him, my George to his Lennie, when there comes a fearsome thumping at the door. Who is it? Delbert Sakapathian, of #1002B, Avenida Lupine Hill, Santa Ynez, California. He's a big man with a cueball head, younger than the young-old, sixty maybe, and with the kind of gut you used to see a lot more of around the turn of the century, when junk food was a staple. Now people crave meat and fish and broccoli, sweet potatoes, chard, wheat germ, the things they can't get the way they used to, and forget the Ho-Ho's and Pop Tarts and Doritos Extra-Spicy Meat-Flavored Tortilla Chips-that crap they can't give away. "You him?" Delbert Sakapathian says, poking a finger the size of a souvenir bat in my face.

I don't have time for this sort of thing, I really don't, but if it'll get me Petunia back, I guess I'll see if my secretarial staff can cancel one of my morning appointments and work Mr. Sakapathian in. I nod. "I'm him," I say.

The doorframe isn't big enough to contain him, besides which the rain isn't doing much for my carpet, not to mention the reddish muck melting off his gum boots and the steady divestiture of water from his slicker (and there's another business to invest in-Slickers, Inc., Or maybe Slickers `R 'Us). "Well, goddamnit," he spits. "Goddamnit to hell."

And then a voice zeroes in over my shoulder, as accurate as a smart bomb. "Lighten up," Andrea says, and I know that tone, though it hasn't been directed at me, not this time around, not yet anyway. "And shut the door, clod-you're ruining the carpet."

The big streaming cueball ducks, chin to chest, and then Delbert Sakapathian is in the room, the door thundering shut behind him. He's chastened, but not for long. "You got to get that thing, whatever it is, out of there, because it's got my, my" — and here a wave of emotion peaks in his eyes and I think he's going to break down- "Pitty-Sing, my cat, and I think, I mean, by Christ you better, because, if anything happens to her, I'll, I'll-"

And then we're fighting the wind, all four of us, slickered and booted and hatted like tars rounding the Horn on a clipper ship, except that this is dry land — or should be, or used to be — and I've got the shock-stick in one hand and Andrea's big warm mitt clenched in the other, Chuy leading the way with the wire net and Delbert Sakapathian bringing up the rear with an asthmatic wheeze. I'm hopeful. Not so much for the cat-let's face it, if Petunia got hold of it more than thirty seconds ago, it's history — but for my fox and Patagonia and the barren pampas Mac and I are going to repopulate one day in the not-too-distant future. (By the way, I'm not the one responsible for the asinine names of the animals around here-give them a little dignity, that's what I say. No, it's Mac. He thought it would be nice- "utterly and fantastically groovy" — if they all had the names of flowers. One of the lions, to my everlasting embarrassment, is called Dandelion.) When we get there-up the hill, through the claws of the blasted trees and the crazy growth of invasives and into the perpetually flooded basement of Building B, or "Sunshine House," as the plaque out front identifies it-we find a group of condo-dwellers gathered expectantly outside a rotting plywood door marked LAUNDRY in fading green letters. There are a couple of kids there, their faces so small and featureless they might have been painted right on the skin, and women in bare feet, braving ankle-deep water the color of graveyard seepage. No one says a word. But they all step back when I slosh past them and brandish the shock-stick. "Unkink that net, Chuy," I say, about 90 percent certain I'm going to get bitten at least once, but hopefully not to the bone, and Andrea — my Andrea, newly restored to me and conjugal as all hell — whispers, "Be careful, Ty."

Of course, this is a fox we're talking about here. Not a normal fox, maybe — a fox the size of a wolf — but a fox for all that. It's not as if one of the lions got loose. Or Lily, who could crush your spine and rip out your intestines with a single bite. Still, here we are, and you never can tell what's going to happen. "Petunia," I croon in my sweetest and — here's — a chicken-back — for — you — too voice, gently pushing the door open with the stick, and then I'm in the room, washers, dryers, a couple of sinks, and somebody's socks and brassieres tumbled out of a straw basket to the (very wet) floor.

Nothing. A drip of water, cheap fluoresbents flickering, the inescapable hiss of the storm outside. And then, from behind the sink to my right, the sound of a chainsaw if a chain-saw had a tongue, a palate and a set of lips to muffle it: RRRRRrrirrrrrrrrrr!

Chuy, I should say, is a master of stating the obvious, and he gives me a demonstration of his uncanny talent at this very crucial moment. "Yo piens° que he's up under the sink, Mr. Ty, is what I am thinking, verdad?"

Verdad, A pair of flaming eyes, the red paws, the scrabble of claws digging into the buckling linoleum, and why is the theme to Born Free running through my head like mental diarrhea? Sure enough, she's got the limp white carcass of a Siamese cat (lilac-point) clenched in her jaws, and that's good, I'm thinking, because she can't chew and bite at the same time, can she? "Okay, Chuy," I hear myself say, and though my knee doesn't like it or my back either, I'm down there poking the stick in the thing's face, afraid to use the electric shock for fear of electrocuting her and maybe myself into the bargain. No fear. All I have to do is touch her and she launches herself out from under the sink like a cruise missile to perforate my forearm with her canines and the dainty cutting teeth in front of them, me on my posterior in the water, the corpse of the cat floating free, Chuy fumbling with the net and Andrea wading in to grab hold of Petunia by the ears. Which she does. And this is a good move, from my point of view. An excellent move. Because Petunia, cornered, lets go of my arm for just the quarter of a second it takes Chuy to wrap the wire net round the most dangerous part of her, and after that, it's all she wrote.

"Ty," Andrea says.

"Andrea," Ty says.

And then we're on the way to the emergency room, where they've got a stretcher and an IV unit named in honor of me, snuggling, actually snuggling (though Andrea's got her right hand clamped round the pressure point in front of my elbow and Chuy is jerking at the wheel like a Dursban-addled stock-car driver), and for the life of me I just can't seem to recall the name of that woman who talks to the trees. She'll be here tomorrow, though. "I invited her for tomorrow," is the way Andrea puts it, Chuy slithering all over the road as if the car were a big Siamese walking catfish, traffic stalled all the way to Monterey and here we go up on the shoulder-look out, we're coming through. "What do you mean, 'tomorrow'?" I say, and she tightens her grip on the artery running up my arm.

She says — and the wind is raging, the Olfputt pitching, the blood flowing free- "I mean the day after today. Honey."

Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Tokyo, Dhaka, Cairo, Calcutta, Reykjavik, Caracas, Lagos, Guadalajara, Greater Nome, Sakhalinsky, Nanking, Helsinki-all bigger than New York now. Forty-six million in Mexico City. Forty in Sao Paulo. New York doesn't even rank in the top twenty. And how does that make me feel? Old. As if I've outlived my time — and everybody else's. Because the correction is under way-has been under way for some time now. Let's cat each other, that's what I propose — my arm tonight and yours tomorrow-because there's precious little of anything else left. Ecology. What a joke.

I'm not preaching. I'm not going to preach. It's too late for that, and besides which, preaching never did anybody any good anyway. Let me say this, though, for the record-for the better part of my life I was a criminal. Just like you. I lived in the suburbs in a three-thousand — square-foot house with redwood siding and oak floors and an oil burner the size of Texas, drove a classic 1966 Mustang for sport and a Jeep Laredo (red, black leather interior) to take me up to the Adirondacks so I could heft my three-hundred-twenty-dollar Eddie Bauer backpack and commune with the squirrels, muskrats and fishers. I went to the gym. Drank in fern bars. Bought shoes, jackets, sweaters and hair-care products. I guess I was dimly aware-way out there on the periphery of my consciousness-of what I was doing to the poor abused corpus of old mother earth, and 1 did recycle (when I got around to it, which was maybe twice a year), and I thought a lot about packaging. 1 Wore a sweater in the house in winter to conserve energy and turn the flame down on global warming, and still I burned fuel and more fuel, and the trash I generated plugged its own hole in the landfill like a permanent filling in a rotten tooth.

Worse, I accumulated things. They seemed to stick to me, like filings to a magnet, a whole polarized fur of objects radiating from my fingertips in slavish attraction. Paper clips, pins, plastic bags, ancient amplifiers, rusted-out cooking grills. Clothes, books, records, CDs. Cookware, Ginzu knives, food processors, popcorn poppers, coffeemakers, my dead father's overcoats and my dead mother's shoes. I kept a second Mustang, graffitied with rust, out behind the garage, on blocks. There were chairs in the attic that hadn't been warmed by a pair of buttocks in fifty years, trunks of neatly folded shorts and polo shirts I hadn't worn since I was five.

I drove fast, always in a hurry, and stuffed the glove box so full of tickets it looked like a napkin dispenser in a restaurant. I dated (women, whole thundering herds of them, looking-in vain-for another Jane). I parented. Cooked. Cleaned. Managed my dead father's crumbling empire-you've heard of him, Sy Tierwater, developer of tract homes in Westchester and Dutchess Counties? — and paid bills and collected rents and squeezed down the window of my car to add my share of Kleenex, ice-cream sticks and cigarette wrappers to the debris along the streaming sides of the blacktop roads.

Want more? I drank wine, spent money, spoiled my daughter and watched her accumulate things in her turn. And just like you — if you live in the Western world, and I have to assume you do, or how else would you be reading this? — I caused approximately two hundred fifty times the damage to the environment of this tattered, bleeding planet as a Bangladeshi or Balinese, and they do their share, believe me. Or did. But I don't want to get into that.

Let's just say I saw the light-with the help of a good nudge from Andrea, Teo (may he rot in hell or interplanetary space or wherever) and all the other hard chargers down at Earth Forever! Forces were put in motion, gears began to grind. I sold the house, the cars, the decrepit shopping center my father left me, my wind surfer and Adirondack chair and my complete set of bootleg Dylan tapes, all the detritus left behind by the slow-rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth. Friendship. That's what got me into the movement and that's what pushed me way out there on the naked edge of nothing, beyond sense or reason, or even hope. Friendship for the earth. For the trees and shrubs and the native grasses and the antelope on the plain and the kangaroo rats in the desert and everything else that lives and breathes under the sun.

Except people, that is. Because to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.

I've got no health care, of course-nobody does, the whole system long since gone bankrupt, and don't bother to ask about Social Security — but they're happy to see a paying customer hustling through the emergency-room doors. Whatever it takes — and in this case it won't be much — they know Mac is good for it. Maclovio Pulchris. It's a magical name, better than cash, because you can only carry so much of that-Mac's my Medicare and Social Security, all wrapped up in one. And now I've got Andrea too, a woman who breeds emergencies, one night of love and here we are. She's lending me support-literally-as we crabwalk through the doors, Chuy somewhere behind us, hurtling up the ramp of the parking structure as if he's trying to launch the 4x4 out of the atmosphere. "What's the problem?" The attendant wants to know, a monster of a man who looks vaguely familiar (Swenson's? Last night?), His nose, lips, scalp and forearms a patchwork of skin cancers past and present. "It's nothing, moron: 'Andrea says, and there's that snarl again-" he's just bleeding to death, that's all."

Then it's the ordeal of the forms — there must be twenty, twenty-five pages of them. Andrea squeezes up close beside me, her big thumb still locked in place over the wound, the woman behind the desk yawning, the intercom hissing, somebody strolling off to find a ligature of some sort and wake one of the doctors out of his trance. All the windows are boarded up because they got tired of replacing them every third or fourth day, and the quality of the light is what you might expect from a high-end mausoleum. Depressing. Depressing in the extreme. Just to lighten things up, I make a joke about how it's a good thing Petunia got my left arm or I'd be up shit creek as far as checking off the relevant box is concerned. Nobody laughs. And even here, deep in the recesses of the bleach-rubbed and almost spanking-clean corridors, with six floors of steel and concrete and body fluids above us, I can hear the rain. Ssssssss, it hisses, background music to every mortal drama, ssssssss.

What does it take? Thirty-two stitches and half a mile of gauze, no big deal and no offense, I tell the doctor, but I've been hurt worse. A whole lot worse. I give Andrea a meaningful glance, but her mind is off someplace else. With each stitch, that little burn and the bigger hurt to follow, 1 study her, first in profile and then from the rear as she moves across the room to gaze out the window that isn't a window at all but the naked whorled face of some sort of artificial plywood with predrilled holes for easy application (and there's another business). I still can't get used to her. How can that old lady's face belong to those shoulders and legs? That's what I'm thinking as the doctor — an infant of twenty and — something who probably doesn't even shave yet-sticks his needle in me, and more: If you want to start gauging degrees of pain, what does it mean that she's finally come back?

April Wind is sunk deep in the dog-stinking couch I inherited with this place ten years ago. I don't own dogs. Never have. When you've got hyenas, Patagonian foxes and spectacled bears, what do you need dogs for? The fact is, one of Mac's roadies died here-right here, on the floor under the window, where you can still see the stains if you look closely enough-after an unfortunate and wholly preventable accident involving a noose, a plastic bag, two women and three twenty-four-ounce squeeze bottles of ketchup; his effects, as they say, came down to me. Or is it on me? Anyway, there she is, and forget the thrill in my arm, the stoked fires raging away in my lower back (expertly jammed against the open door of one of the dryers when Petunia went for me) or the fact that I've had a satisfactory and highly reminiscent sexual experience for the second night in a row-I'm a stranger in my own house, and my house is getting crowded.

Yesterday I was whistling, today I'm in no mood. Breakfast (oatmeal with bran and brewer's yeast spooned in for ballast, the crab already sacrificed for love), is barely settled, I haven't seen the paper or suffered over the toilet yet, and this wind from the past blows in. A wind with a face. All I can think of is a Peter Max poster, with Helios in one corner, Aeolus in the other, battling over the weather. Back then, of course, the sun always won out.

"You remember April, Ty," Andrea says, and she's not making a question of it. I watch her as she pulls one of the mold-spattered kitchen chairs across the room and perches girlishly on the edge of it, her bare feet splayed over the rungs. The way she does it, the way she maneuvers the chair and settles herself — and more, the tone of her voice, the smell of her-plumbs some deep inversion layer in the unstirred lake of my memory. But that's what this is all about, isn't it? Memory? In Memoriam, Sierra Tierwater, 19762001. Requiescat in Pace. Fat chance.

"I said, you remember April, don't you, Ty?"

Ah: and now it's a question. I can stall. I can put on my old-man-with-a-postnasal-drip — and — a-glued-up-bra in act, but what will it get me — a sixty-second reprieve? Andrea's tough. She wants something here-I'm not exactly sure what it is yet, but I know she'll get it. Besides which, I'm not really that old, not in the way my grandparents were — or Andrea's decrepit father and foot-shuffling old withered wreck of a mother, who for the final two years of her life thought Andrea was the cleaning lady's cat-because my generation never let go of its (pharmaceutically and surgically assisted) youth, till death do us part. April Wind knows that. And Andrea especially knows it. Of course, I could duck into the bedroom, bad back and chewed-up arm notwithstanding, dig out the. 470 Nitro Express elephant gun I stole from Philip Ratchiss a thousand years ago and make the two of them into hyena food, but, despite reports to the contrary, I've never been a violent man. Or not especially. Or excessively. "Yeah," I mumble, "sure,"

A bright look comes into the eyes of the woman who talks to trees, the kind of look you see in a serval when it detects movement in the high grass. She must be about Sierra's age, suppose — the age Sierra would be now, that is, if she were still among those of us who pass for the living. Forty-nine, fifty maybe. 1 Can't begin to see Sierra's face in hers, though, and I wouldn't want to, because there's an exercise in futility and unquenched sorrow if you ever wanted one: My daughter? Now? She'd be beautiful, a head-turner still, nothing at all like this wizened little buck-toothed poppet of a woman in rotting Doc Martens and a dress a sixth-grader couldn't get into.

"Nice to see you again," April Wind says, and she has to crank up her voice just a notch to be heard over the blow outside (storm number three in the latest succession hit down about an hour ago). "And thanks for granting me this interview. I really appreciate it."

Look out, here it comes: Saint Sierra. "I didn't grant it."

The look on April Wind's face-you'd think I'd just punched her in the stomach, I give her my best impression of a bitter glare, clenching my jaw and hard-cooking my eyes, but what I'm really doing is looking over her shoulder to where the snails are riding their slime trails up and down the windowpane, fully prepared to inherit the earth we've made for them. I remember her, all right. The woo-woo queen. Endless nights in a drafty teepee, the pitilessly chirpy voice, totems in a bag strung round her neck-she couldn't sit down to eat without some loopy prayer to the earth goddess. / Can totally see your aura, and it's blue shading to magenta on the edges, and I already know I'm attracted to you in a like major way because our birth planets are in the same house.

"But I thought, like-"

"Still wearing your totems? What was that one — the toad, wasn't it? Weren't you a toad?" Pause, one beat, listen to the buckets catch the eternal drip. "So what do you do when your totem animal's not just dead but extinct?"

Andrea into the breach: "April? Would you like a cup of tea?"

The child's fingers go to something under the neck of the dress, the little muslin bag there, quick nervous fingers. She smoothes the damp cotton over her thighs, throws a tentative glance at Andrea, then me. Mama told me there d be days like this. "No, thanks, I'm fine. Really."

"You sure?"

"No, really."

But Andrea, who didn't exist two days ago and now owns me, the house and everything in it, is selling tea here this morning. "It warms you," she says. "I mean, not that it's cold out, not the way it used to be this time of year-remember the Stanislaus River, the way it rained and then we froze our butts off for, what was it, two days out there in the woods? But when you're wet all the time--"

"What have you got?"

"Lapsang souchong." A glance for me. "I brought it with me."

Somehow, the women find this funny, as if I'm some sort of barbarian who couldn't be trusted to have a teabag in the house, and all the tension I'd been trying to inject into the moment evaporates. This is the laughter of relief, of camraderie and nostalgia, but of something else too, something conspiratorial. I recognize this-I'm the target with the bull's-eye painted on it here, and let's not forget it — but Andrea's back, I tell myself, Andrea, and you may as well ride with it wherever it's going to go. So I laugh too. And it's a genuine laugh, it is, the unstoppered whinny that always used to get me in trouble in redneck bars, because I'm caught up in it too. I was there at the Headwaters and Mono Lake and a dozen other places, just like them. I can laugh. I can still laugh. Why not? You never forget how to ride a bicycle, do you? Ha-ha, ha-ha.

"Screw the tea," I hear myself saying, my miserable cramped two-room shack with the splootching buckets and the stink of terminal mold and animal feces suddenly alive and musical with the laughter of women. "Let's just break out a bottle of sake."

The Siskiyou, July 1989

The one he has the clearest recollection of is the one named Boehringer. There were three of them, their names stenciled in black above the right breast pockets of their camouflage fatigues: Boehringer, Butts and Jerpbak. They climbed out of the jeep with faces that said, This is no joke, the sledgehammers slung over their shoulders like rifles, Sheriff Bob Hicks of Josephine County nodding his approval even as he fished the dark slim tube of a twenty-ounce Pepsi out of a cooler in the police cruiser and pressed it to his lips. "Pot commandos," Teo said under his breath.

So these are pot commandos, Tierwater was thinking, but the thought didn't go much further than that. He watched them dispassionately, tired to the bone, tired of the sun, the trees, the hard dirt road he'd been sitting on for what seemed half his life. At this point, he was thinking nothing, dwelling deep inside himself, his lips raw beneath the tape, each breath tugged through his nostrils like an overinflated balloon, no thought but to get this over with and take his daughter and his wife and go back home and bury his head in the sand. Or maybe he wasn't quite so whipped as he appeared. Maybe he was thinking of Thoreau, his hero of the moment (along with Messrs. Muir, Leopold and Abbey): The authority of government can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. Yes. Sure. Sure, he was. But of course he was right at the very beginning of a fool's progress that was to be like no other.

Collectively, Boeluinger, Butts and Jerpbak had never heard of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold or Abbey — or Jefferson, for that matter. And even if they had, it wouldn't have mattered much more than a flea on an elephant. They were part of an elite force of five hundred paramilitary gun-loving whiperack Marine Corps rejects who'd been organized to interdict clandestine marijuana operations on Forest Service lands. That was their stated purpose, but in fact-since all but the most oblivious and terminally stoned potheads had long since taken their plants indoors to escape detection — they were actually being used to intimidate people like Tyrone Tierwater and his wife and daughter: that is, anybody who dared to get in the way of the profits to be made in the plunder of the national forests. Not that he'd want to preach.

(They used sledgehammers to break us loose-did I mention that? — and they didn't much concern themselves with the delicacy of the operation. If a blow went astray and an iron fist struck an ankle or a shinbone, so much the worse. The reasoning went like this, rhetorical flourishes and all: What else did you expect? If you didn't want your ankle broke, then why didn't you stay down there in California with the rest of the faggots and environmentalists? People work for a living around here, and that might just come as a surprise to you, huh? You could put all the owls in the World in a meat grinder for all I care, and I still say they aren't worth one American job.) They looked at nothing, these men, and nothing fazed them-it was all the same to them whether they were torching marijuana plants or hauling activists off to jail. What they hadn't counted on, though, was Andrea. As soon as they filed out of the jeep, her face hardened. And this was no ordinary face-it was a movie screen in miniature, able to leap at you in startling close-up and quick-cut from the soft focus of the love scene in the candlelit restaurant to the raging harsh light of confrontation. She was especially good at confrontation, as Tierwater could testify. Her eyes swelled up pneumatically, and a ridge of three ascending V's formed between her eyebrows, hovering there like birds of prey. Her chin became Mount Rushmore. And her mouth — the mouth that kissed, nibbled, licked, leaked words of tenderness and erotic encouragement-turned parsimonious suddenly, shriveled up like a strip of jerky.

Needless to say, she didn't intimidate easily. And when the blows started to fall and Sierra shielded her eyes against the sudden sharp spray of concrete fragments, she opened up on them in a voice that was like an air-raid siren. "I can't believe you people. You call yourselves men? Or do you think it's a big-dick manly thing to brutalize women and children? Huh, you sons of bitches? I don't hear you. And don't give me that look, you-yes, I'm talking to you, you with the air between your legs and that mongoloid smirk on your lipsOwl-because if you have a wife, which I doubt because what woman would go for a sack of shit like-OW! — or a sister, you must have a sister, everybody's got at least one-because this is wrong, what you're doing here, all of you, and you know it. If you don't stop this now, right here and now, the whole fucking-Ow! And will you get the fuck off me? — The whole fucking biosphere is going to collapse like a balloon with a pin stuck in it, and then where're you going to be with your let's-dress-up — and — play-soldier suits? Huh? Where are you going to go? What are you going to eat? Ever think about that? When they-Ow! — Close down the grocery stores? Huh? What then?"

It hurt. It hurt more than Tierwater could ever have imagined when he sank his sneakered feet into that yielding plastic medium, now hard as stone — stone, in fact — but he gritted his teeth and thought of the Mohawk, The hammers dropped again and again, the dull reverberative thump sucked up in the baffle of the trees. A crack would appear, and they'd go after it, beating a wedge loose here, levering — up a section there. He tried to remain calm through all of this, tried to choke down the rage rising in his throat-passive resistance, that was the ticket, the strategy that brought the British Empire to its knees, stopped the war in Vietnam, humbled George Wallace and Bull Connor — but when his daughter let out a gasp, the smallest exhalation of pained surprise, the faintest whisper built round the thump of the hammer at her ankle, it went right to him.

Before he could think, he rose up off the concrete like a leashed animal and hit the nearest man to him-Boehringer, as it turned out, he of the vacant eyes and narrow, pinched-up shoulders-with everything he had. Which admittedly wasn't much, since his hands were cuffed behind his back, his feet locked in place and his mouth sealed with duct tape beyond even the possibility of bringing his teeth into play. Still, the man who'd made his daughter gasp — Boehringer heaved into the next man, Butts, who was just then raising his hammer, and the two of them embraced briefly and tentatively, just learning the steps, before they went down in a heap of khaki and camouflage.

They didn't stay down long, though. And when they untangled their limbs and pushed themselves up from the dirt of the road, their faces had changed. No more the tight mask of duty and restraint, the averted eyes and diligently clamped jaws, but something looser, more brutal and habitual. One braced the other while Teo cried out to distract them in the high anxious voice of a man selling peanuts at the ballpark, "Hey, officers! Officers, would you please find the people that. Did this to us and arrest them? We'll even press charges — I mean, we were just standing here minding our business when these, these gang members come out of the woods and pour all this concrete on our feet-"

They ignored him. Nor did they take up the sledgehammers again, not right away. It was Butts who grabbed hold of Tierwater's rigid arms and jammed them high up into the wings of his shoulders while Boehringer, the offended party, drove his right fist into the exposed gut-once, twice, then the left, then the right again-till Tierwater the pacifist was back down on the road that wasn't a road sucking at the air through two wholly inadequate nostrils. He couldn't breathe. They'd knocked the wind out of him, which was bad enough — and frightening too; he thought his lungs would never reinflate — but all the worse because his mouth was taped shut. Flat out on his back, arms twisted beneath him, the concrete jerking at his ankles, he thrashed like a freshly caught trout (or a sucker-wouldn't that be more appropriate?), Asphyxiating in the clean sweet untainted air of the Oregon woods.

The third man — this was Jerpbak — paused to watch for the briefest moment before bringing his sledge down on Teo's left ankle, while the sheriff drank Pepsi and the Fred-dies looked the other way. Andrea was screaming, nothing wrong with her lungs, a sound that rang rapturously through the ravine, feeding on itself until there was no other sound in the world, And his daughter-he couldn't focus on her, but he can remember her shrinking into herself, dwindling, growing smaller and ever smaller, a puddle of black, a spot, an insignificant vanishing little speck caught between the mighty legs of the trees and the crushing stupendous lid of the sky.

He woke in a bed, in a room with a TV suspended from the ceiling and stiff white sanitary curtains on the windows, No bars. No toilet clamped to the floor, no must of fermenting bodies, no muttering, no retching, no shadows rising to greet him from a concrete bench bolted to the wall. He wasn't in jail, that much was clear, but he wasn't in the Rest Ye May Motel either. The ceiling tiles were perforated, like ceiling tiles everywhere, and the walls were painted in a clean no-nonsense shade of pale institutional green. But what was this? An IV Inserted in his left arm and taped in place. So that was it. He was in a hospital. The thought of that froze him a moment: Was it a heart attack? At thirty-nine? He thought of his Uncle Sol, the world-beater who'd worked with Frank Buck in Singapore and been mauled and bitten by half the species on earth at one time or another, with a heart so strong it could have pumped blood for ten men, a heart that would have been pumping still, but for the fact that a coronary thrombosis cut him down while he was bending over the bulbul cages one fine sunny morning, and then he thought of his daughter: if he was here, in the hospital, then where was she? For that matter, where was Andrea? Teo?

All these mysteries were resolved for him in the next moment, when Deputy Sheets, of the Josephine County Sheriff's Department, stuck his head in the door, looked round him twice, as if checking the water before taking the plunge, and stepped into the room. Tierwater saw a man as tall and attenuated as a gusher, the uniform shrinking away from his wrists and ankles, his glasses shedding light. "Well," the deputy said, "awake at last."

"I think so," Tierwater murmured, going through a mental checklist of his body parts, just to be sure everything was still there. Since childhood, he'd had a fear of waking up in a hospital bed (not this one — a grainy, grayish, black — and white — movie bed) with a doctor standing over him saying, I'm afraid the other leg's going to have to go too. "I mean, I don't remember-"

"You're in the Ida P. Klipspringer Memorial Hospital. You passed out. Heat exhaustion is what the doctor called it." The deputy's eyes were the same color as the walls. He screwed them up and gave Tierwater a look that had no hint of sympathy in it.

"Heat exhaustion? Your friends or colleagues or whoever punched me in the goddamned stomach — and with my hands tied behind my back and, and duct tape over my mouth, for Christ's sake-punched me till I was out cold. You listen here" — and he was up on his elbows now, stoked with the recollection- "we're talking police brutality, we're talking a methodical, premeditated. And your sheriff was right there drinking a Pepsi and he never said a word."

"That's right," the deputy said, nodding his head on the long stalk of his neck till it was like a hand at the end of a wrist, waving goodbye. "And that's a violation of the penal code-two of 'em, actually. Resisting arrest, and assault and battery on a peace officer. That's in addition to the charge of disturbing the peace — and trespassing."

"Trespassing? Are you out of your mind? The Siskiyou National Forest is public property and you know it as well as I do-"

"Listen, mister-sir — and I tell you it really rankles me to have to be professional with people like you, but what I know or don't know isn't the issue here-it's what the judge knows. And you'll be seeing him soon enough."

At this juncture of his life, Tyrone Tierwater was prone to volatility, and he would have been the first to admit it. The term "slow burn" meant nothing to him. He was a pile of mesquite branches on a windy day, a rag soaked in paint thinner. What did he know? He thought things mattered, believed in the power of individuals to influence events, illuminate issues, effect change, resuscitate the earth. None of this did his digestion any good. Or his bank account either. Now, in the face of intransigence and stupidity, in the face of Deputy Sheets, he sat up. All the way up, and tore the IV from his arm as if he were swatting a mosquito. "Where's my wife and daughter?" He demanded. Or no: he roared, his voice erupting from the deepest cavity of his chest to boom off the walls and evoke a responsive tinkle from the instruments on the metal shelf in the corner.

Deputy Sheets never flinched, He gave Tierwater a tight, encapsulated smile. He was wearing his firearm, and he let his right hand go to it, as much to reassure himself as to let Tierwater know exactly what the parameters were here. His lips barely moved as he spoke. "In custody," he said.

"What do you mean, in custody '? Where?"

He didn't answer, not right away. Just squared his shoulders and turned his head to the side, as if to spit, but then he caught himself, all the linoleum tiles agleam from his boots to the foot of the bed. "No worries on that score. Soon as the doctor says so, friend," he breathed, letting his eyes go cold, "you'll be joining 'em."

This hospital room wasn't the first Tierwater had inhabited. He'd had his tonsils out at the Peterskill Municipal Hospital when he was six, and he was back again a few years later with a fractured arm-after an ill-fated decision to intervene in one of his parents' more physical discussions. Oh, his father was destroyed-never has there been such sorrow, not since Abraham offered up Isaac — and his mother was a fragrant sink of pity and consolation and he pushed his face of greed into gallon after gallon of the butter-brickle ice cream proffered as compensatory damages. Sure. But violence breeds violence, and though neither parent ever laid a finger on him again, there it was, a rotten seed, festering. He was in the hospital again for the birth of his daughter, though the venue was a theater of pain and confusion, women crying out from behind the thin trembling walls of curtains on sliding hooks-Oh, God! Oh, my God! Shrieked one anonymous soprano voice for forty-five solid minutes — and he made it as far as the emergency room in Whitefish, Montana, with Jane, but she wasn't breathing by then, and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't-what? They couldn't do shit.

There was nothing wrong with him, but the doctor — a pale, towering bald-headed man with a pelt of laminated black hair climbing out of the V-neck of his scrubs-wanted to run some tests. Just to be sure. Deputy Sheets stood at the door, a look of disgust pressed into his skeletal features, scrutinizing the doctor's every move. "I'm all right, really," Tierwater insisted while the doctor studied his chart and paced back and forth, a broad-beamed scurrying nurse at his elbow. "I feel fine, I do. I just want to get out of here, okay?"

All three of them-Tierwater, the doctor and his nurse-turned to look at Deputy Sheets. "I don't like your blood pressure," the doctor said, swinging back round again. His arms were unnaturally long, ape's arms, the knuckles all but grazing his knees, and even in his extremity, Tierwater couldn't help puzzling over a species so recently come down from the trees and yet so intent on destroying them. "Les dangerously elevated. And I'm going to have to ask you not to interfere with the intravenous drip. You've been dehydrated, We need to replenish your fluids?'

That put a scare into him-dangerously elevated, Uncle Sol, where are you? — but he fought it down. "What do you expect? I've been gagged and beaten and left out in the sun all day by your, your-"

Sheets' voice, from the door: "Nobody laid a finger on him. He's one of those activists is what he is. From California."

The doctor gave Tierwater a cold look. Josephine County was a timber county, replete with timber families, and timber families paid the bills. "Yes, well? 'The doctor said, and he was practically scraping the ceiling with the big shining globe of his head," you're not going anywhere" — peering at the chart- "Mr. Tierwater. Not to jail and not to California either-not till we stabilize you."

"But what about my daughter?" He demanded, and his blood pressure was going up, through the roof, sure, and what did they expect, the sons of bitches? He hadn't been away from Sierra for a single night since her mother died — and if he hadn't been away from her then, if he and Jane had just stayed put, stayed home where they belonged, then Jane would be alive today. "Don't I get a phone call at least? I mean, what is this, the gulag?"

No one bothered to answer, least of all the doctor, whose looming hairy frame was already passing through the door, on his way out, but the nurse lingered long enough to reinsert the IV with the abraded tips of her cold, rough fingers. The stab of it was no more than a bee sting, the merest prick, but he couldn't help thinking they were taking something from him-draining him, drop by drop-instead of putting something back in.

When he woke again, he checked his watch, and his watch told him it was morning. There was no confusion about where he was, none of the dislocation he'd experienced a hundred times in pup tents and motel rooms or on the unforgiving couch at a friend's house-he woke to full consciousness and saw everything in the room as if it were an oil painting he'd spent the whole night composing. Central to the composition was Deputy Sheets, seated, thin cloth pressed to narrow shanks, skull thrown back against the wall behind him, mouth agape. Long shadows. Early light. Deputy Sheets was asleep. Stationed by the door, it's true, but lost in the wilderness of dreams.

Stealthily, Tierwater slipped the IV from his arm. His thoughts, at this juncture, were uncomplicated. He was getting out of here, that's all he knew, vacating this place, sidestepping the emaciated arm of the law and making his way to his daughter, his wife, the outraged and militant cadre of E. F! Lawyers who would make everything right. And the reporters too-don't forget them. They had to hear about this, about the desecration of the forest, the complicity of the sheriff and the brutality of Boehringer and Butts, and he did want to preach, yes, he did-preach, proclaim and testify. His feet were on the floor, the papery hospital gown rustling at his shoulders, And where were his clothes-his wallet, his keys, his belt? They took those things away from you in jail, that much he knew, but were they as scrupulous at the hospital?

Across the room to the closet. Nothing there. The bathroom. Easing the door shut, one eye on Deputy Sheets, the whir of the fan cyclonic, and he was sure the noise of it would rouse his jailer-Just taking a leak, officer, and I suppose you re going to tell me that's against the law too — but no, Sheets slept on. In his gown, on silent feet, Tierwater vacated the bathroom, slipped past the innocuous lump of creased and pleated matter that was the deputy and out into the corridor. Lie was dimly aware of adding yet another offense to the list Sheets had recited for him, but the great hardwood forests of the East and Midwest had been decimated by men like Sheriff Bob Hicks and Boehringer and their ilk, and the redwoods and Douglas firs were going fast-this was no time for indecision.

The corridor was deserted. Cadaverous light, eternally fluorescent-nobody could look healthy here. His powers of observation told him he was on the second floor, judging from the view to the middle reaches of the trees just beyond the windows at the far end of the hall, and he understood-from the movies, primarily, or maybe exclusively-that the elevator would be a mistake. Nurses, orderlies, gurneys transporting the near-dead and partially alive, anxious relatives and loved ones, interns, candy stripers — they'd all be packed into that elevator, and all wondering aloud about his bare feet and bare legs and the disposable paper gown that left his rear exposed. And that was another thing-what had become of the diapers? The thought shrank him. He pictured the blocky nurse cutting the things of of him, her nose wrinkled in disgust, and then he changed channels and headed down the corridor, looking for the stairwell.

Twice he had to duck into occupied rooms — a subterranean light, tubes, hoses. The electric winking eyes of the machines that took note of every fluctuation and discharge-to avoid detection by prowling nurses. No one seemed to notice. They were busy with their tubes and monitors, busy trying to breathe, a collection of tired old beaks and chins grimly relaxing into death — or so he imagined, secreted behind the door as the nurses soft-stepped up the hallway. Then, a cold draft playing off his genitals, he flung open the door marked STAIRWELL and plunged through it..

In the process, he startled a morose-looking woman sneaking a smoke, but she dropped her eyes and never said a word, and the stairs vibrated under his feet. He cracked the door on the ground floor — early yet, very early, but there was more traffic here — and waited for the golden moment when everybody seemed to disappear simultaneously through separate doorways. Freedom glowed in the glass panels of the door at the main entrance, just past the gift shop and reception desk. What was it-fifty feet, seventy-five? Now or never. He pinched the gown closed behind him and made for the door, deaf to the startled cries of the two women at the desk (young nursey types, with hamburger faces and plasticized hair, and Sir! They cried; Sir! Can I help you, sir?), The sweet, fresh, as-yet-uncorrupted Oregon air in his face and an endless field of scrub and weed heaving into view just beyond the dead expanse of the parking lot.

If this were a movie, he was thinking — and his every move to this point had been dictated by what he'd witnessed repeatedly on the big screen-he would slip into a late-model sports sedan, punch the ignition with a screwdriver, hotwire the thing and be gone in a glorious roil of smoke and gravel. Or the heroine, looking a lot like Andrea, with a scoop neckline and killer brassiere, would at that moment wheel up to the curb and he'd say, Let's move it. Or Let's rock and roll. Isn't that what they said in every definable moment of heroic duress? But this was no movie, and he had no script. In the end, he had to settle for making his way on all fours through the briars and poison oak, awaiting the inevitable clash of sirens and uproar of excited voices.

(How long was I out there-at large, that is? Let me tell you, I don't know, but it was the longest better part of a morning I ever spent in my life. And then it was the dogs- or dog — and the humiliation of that on top of the concrete and the diapers and the tight shit-eating smirks of the Fred-dies and their sledgehammering minions. I gave myself up. Of course I did. How far was I going to get in a hospital gown?) Tierwater had plenty of time to nurse his grievances and contemplate the inadvisability — the sheer unreconstructed foolishness, the howling idiocy-of what he'd done that morning in extricating himself from the personal jurisdiction of Deputy Sheets and, by extension, the Josephine County Sheriff's Department. He sat there in the heavy brush, not five hundred yards from the hospital entrance, scraped and begrimed, his feet bleeding in half a dozen places, the paper gown bunched up around his hips, thinking of what they would do to him now, on top of everything else. If he'd been tentative two nights ago in the fastness of the Siskiyou and purely outraged when they went after his daughter, now he was almost contrite. Almost. But not quite. They'd humiliated him and terrorized his wife and daughter — there was no coming back from that.

He listened to the wail of the sirens in the distance, and, more immediately, to the songbirds in the trees and the insects in the grass. His breathing slowed. After a while, the sun burned through the early-morning haze and warmed him. He laid his head back in the cradle of his hands and became an observer, for lack of anything better to do. The tracery of the plants-saxifrage, corn lily, goldenrod-stood illuminated against the sky, every leaf and stem trembling with animate life. Grasshoppers, moths, ants, beetles, spiders, they were the gazelles here and the lions, prowling a miniature veldt that was plenty big enough for them-at least until the hospital needed a new wing or a developer threw up a strip mall. He tried not to think about mites, chiggers, ticks, though he itched in every part and scratched till his flesh was raw and 'his fingernails bloody. He had no plan. He was here, couched in the bushes, instead of sitting up in bed and addressing a plate of eggs or waffles while CNN droned on about Polish Solidarity or the turmoil in Iran, but why? Because he had to do something, anything-he couldn't just roll over and become their whipping boy. Could he?

For a long while-hours, it seemed — there were the dis-tant sights and sounds of confusion emanating from the front of the hospital. The clash of sirens, raised voices, a flurry of activity centering on two police cruisers. It wasn't until the K-9 Corps arrived, and the first eager lusty deep-chested woofs of the police dog began to ring out over the scrub, that Tierwater developed a plan. He wasn't about to let the dog come careening through the bushes to take hold of his ankle and drag him thrashing out into the open, where the local reporter would snap action shots of his flailing legs and unclothed buttocks for the edification of the local timber families. No way. It simply wasn't a viable scenario. Beyond that, he was hungry, thirsty, sunburned, fed up. He'd made his point. Enough was enough. He stood up and waved his arms. "Over here!" He shouted.

And this was where things got interesting. The dog, dragging a cop who might have been Sheets' brother (thin as a wading bird, a stick of an arm at the end of the leash), made a show of it, barking ferociously, hysterically even, and right behind cop and dog was the inevitable reporter, camera flashing away. She was a female, this reporter, a little blonde with bangs, short skirt and running shoes, and Tierwater couldn't help trying to smooth his hair down and maybe even work up a smile for her. Say "cheese? 'Behind her was Sheets, looking hangdog, and the stomping, massive, outraged figure of Sheriff Bob Hicks himself.

The dog was encouraged to come in close and to nip at the ankles without drawing any evidentiary blood, the cops dutifully produced service revolvers and handcuffs and Tier-water was led out of the bush and across the lot, wincing on bare feet. A crowd was gathered to watch the sheriff consummate his duty by shoving the cuffed and subdued desperado into the back of the patrol car-Publicity, that's what we came here fin: Tierwater kept telling himself, trying to transmute defeat into victory, humiliation into triumph, but he was half-naked, his hair was a mess and he felt less like a crusader than a figure out of the Opera Bouffe.

"Get in there, shithead," the sheriff said under his breath as he spread a big hand over the crown of Tierwater's head and forced him into the car, where Deputy Sheets sat awaiting him. For an instant, everything confused in his mind, Tierwater thought of kicking open the door and making a hobbled run for it, because things were out of hand here — a peaceful protest, and look what it had led to — and it tore his heart out to give them the satisfaction of beating him down like this. Better to die than submit. His jaw ached from gritting his teeth. He was sweating. His heart was pounding, his eyes were crazy, there were twigs and bits of seed and chaff in his hair. Kick the door! Screamed a voice in his head. Kick the door!

He didn't kick the door. He didn't have to. Andrea was there — andrea and an attorney with beard and briefcase — and Teo, shadowing them on a pair of crutches. "We've come to bail him out," Andrea said, and through the window of the cruiser Tierwater could see the winged creases ascending her forehead.

Officious, already moving round the front of the car while the door slammed shut like the lid of a coffin, Sheriff Bob Hicks let out a short mocking bark of a laugh. "Bail? Bail hasn't been set yet-he hasn't even been arraigned."

The lawyer, in high dudgeon, countered with something Tierwater couldn't hear. Andrea bent to peer in the window, and Tierwater the desperado pressed his fingers to the glass, and it was just like the movies, exactly-visiting hour at the penitentiary, time's up, boys, this way, ladies. She was saying something, her lips moving, the police dog barking for the sheer love of it, the crowd jeering, something about Sierra-" — too sick to go to jail, "the sheriff was saying, pointing a finger in the lawyer's face," and then he pulls this crap, this escape from custody, and what do you have to say to that, Fred, huh?"

Fred had plenty to say, most of which escaped Tierwater, but during the course of the ensuing debate, he was able to lean forward to where the Plexiglas divider gave onto the front seat and the convenient flap there for purposes of criminal/peace-officer communication. "Where's Sierra?" He shouted into his wife's hovering face.

"Child Protective Services."

"What? What do you mean?"

This was where Deputy Sheets, seated beside him on the hard serviceable seat, got into the act. Deputy Sheets had been embarrassed professionally, and he wasn't amused. "Juvenile Hall," he said, giving a jerk at the handcuffs to get Tierwater's attention. "She's in there with your runaways, your shoplifters, your junkies and murderers. And she's going to stay there till the judge makes his ruling."

"His ruling?" Tierwater's heart was pounding. "Ruling on what?"

"What do you think? On whether you're a fit parent or not."

He jerked back round to read Andrea's face, a black gulf of despair and regret opening up inside him, limitless, unbreachable. He knew it. He'd known it all along. Trouble is a given in a world ruled by accident, sure, and lightning hits too, but only a fool-strike that: an inveterate idiot-goes looking for it.

Deputy Sheets cleared his throat. "Got two more charges for you," he said, and his voice was so rich with triumph he sounded as if he were announcing the winners of the Fourth of July sack race. "Attempted escape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor."

Eight months earlier, Tierwater was busy leading his life of quiet desperation, aimless, asleep at the wheel, watching his father's empire fall away into dust like all the geriatric empires before it-Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! It was December, bleak and wind-knifed. Ice one day, slush the next, then refrozen slush the day after that. Pathetic cardboard Santas and cutout menorahs clung to the dirty windows of the stores in the shopping center — the ones that hadn't gone dark for lack of tenants — and half the bulbs were burned out in the relict strings of Christmas lights he'd looped over the bent and rusting nails his father had hammered into the stucco fascia twenty years earlier. Sierra was twelve, insufferably motherless, inappropriately dressed (Jodie Foster, Taxi Driver), addicted to TV, gloom and doom, vegetarianism. Her face was a falling ax, and it fell on him twice a day: in the morning, when he drove her to school in the Jeep Laredo, and in the evening, when he got home from work and she was there infesting the house with her evil friends.

For his part, Tierwater tried to do his best, puzzling over geography and the Golden Book of Literary Treasures with her, taking her out for a weekly bonding ritual at the Mongolian Barbecue in the shopping center, withholding judgment when she came home with a nose ring from the brand — new sixty-seven-shop enclosed mall that was killing him, tearing his heart out, flattening his feet and destroying his digestion. His love life was null and void. A month earlier he'd withdrawn as tactfully as possible from a six-month affair with a skinny ungenerous woman named Sherry who wore her weedy hair kinked out in a white-blond corona that grazed the lintel of every door, she passed through (to his secretary: "Tell her it was a mountaineering accident and they never recovered my body"). He hadn't met anyone since. In fact, during all that time, no woman so much as gave him a glance-not even in Cappelli's, the bar in the shopping center that was the only place that seemed to be doing any business at all. Single mothers clustered around shrinking tables and hung off the shoulders of single fathers as if all they needed were crampons and rope, cosmetologists wept over the thunderous hits of the sixties, aerobics instructors showed off their tightly clamped buttocks round the pool table, but none of them had time for Tierwater. He was depressed, and he wore his depression like a lampshade over his head. But then fate intervened. ("We are turned round and round in this world, and Fate is the handspike." I don't know exactly what a handspike is, but I like the quote — and Melville had it right, especially i f a handspike is something you can drive into the back of somebody's head.) Reflexively, without giving it much thought, Tienvater had sent a check to the Sierra Club, a year's membership. Before his parents died — they were stopped in traffic, 44th and Lexington, when a crane hoisting steel girders capitulated to the force of gravity-he'd been chasing down a B. S. In wildlife biology, after having dropped out twice in his drug-tranced days, and nature had always glimmered somewhere out there on the horizon of his consciousness. This little gesture, this check delivered in a good cause, was like a Band — Aid slapped over a big gaping crater in his psyche, and he knew that, but there it was. He was a member of the Sierra Club. And as a member, he got onto a mailing list that entitled him to receive whole cordilleras of junk mail-talk about conserving paper-including, but not limited to, invitations to attend meetings, swim with the dolphins, save whales and remember the Himalayas. He felt guilty, but he never accepted any of these high-minded invitations, and worse, he never recycled a scrap of them.

Then, one day, a postcard slipped out of the pile of bills, letters, invitations, solicitations, violations, entreaties and threats his secretary mounded on his desk each morning. It featured a logo he'd never seen before — a crimson circle with a raised fist in the center of it (his first thought was the Black Panthers — but weren't they all dead, in jail or running Nike outlets?). It wasn't the Black Panthers. It was E. F.I- Earth Forever! — Inviting him to attend a powwow/chili cookoff/apocalyptic lecture/slide show at the home of Linda D 'Piqua-Hoover in Croton. He turned the postcard over in his hand. Dear Mr. Or Ms. Tienvater, it read, Are you concerned about the environment? Do you care about the rape of our forests, the pollution of our streams and rivers, the acid rain killing off the pristine lakes of the Adirondacks? Are you tired of promises? Fed up? Ready for Direct Action? Then come to ow; etc.

He went. Why? Boredom, curiosity, the desire to duck the Sherrys of the world and meet some environmentally minded women who might just want to share a freeze-dried entree and a sleeping bag on the shore of an acidic lake somewhere. And more — and he wouldn't want to make light of this-because he believed. He did. He genuinely did. He needed an awakening, a cause, a call to arms — and here it was.

It was raining the night of the powwow, a cold soulless wintry rain that wrung out the sky like an old cloth and found its way into the seams of his boots and down the collar of his jacket. He stepped out of the office and into a world from which every trace of light had been relentlessly squeezed. The moon imploded, the stars erased — there was no illumination without electricity, and electricity lit his path from the office to the car. The car itself was another kind of environment, a sort of rolling sarcophagus. It spat its fumes into the air, coughed and shook, gave off its stink of incinerated metal. Beyond the rain-scrawled windows lay the shopping center — the Copper Beech Shopping Center-curled into the killing night like the architecture of his nightmares. He sat there breathing the carbon monoxide coming through the floorboards till his classic 1966 Mustang could be coaxed into moving without stalling, and then he was off, rocketing over the potholes like a master of nature and machine alike.

He made an uncanny series of wrong turns, U-turns and gravel-churning retreats, all the while consulting the map reproduced on the back of the card, until finally the D 'PiquaFloover house loomed up out of a dark lane, lit like a supernova. Import cars clustered around it, sleek and menacing in their steel skins. The black lawn glittered in the light of a hundred windows. His feet found the flagstone path, and then a tall woman in post-hippie Birkenstocks was greeting him at the door, so good of him to come and did he know Mrs. Somebody, chair of the Something Committee? He took Mrs. Somebody's limp hand in his own-she must have been seventy — and then made his way toward the bar, the scents of woodsmoke, body heat, perfume and warring chilies rising up to envelop him as he inserted himself into the crowd. A man in cummerbund and bow tie handed him a glass of wine. He wanted scotch. But he accepted the wine, sipped it and took a moment to get his bearings.

That was when he first noticed Andrea. She was in the corner, hunkered over a bowl of yogurt dip with a handful of carrot sticks and broccoli florets, gathering faces round her like a puppet master. Her free hand (ringless, chapped, the nails bitten down to translucent slivers) was in constant motion, underscoring each point she made, and she made a lot of them. She was talking with animation and confidence, lecturing, though he couldn't hear what she was saying from where he stood with his nose in a long-stemmed glass. He must have watched her for a full five minutes, picture only, the sound muted, before he found himself moving toward her — and he wasn't moving consciously, not at all; it was more in the way of a moth following a pheromone trail. He fluttered his wings and sailed across the room.

(I need to describe her as she was then — and none of this black hair dye and she looks pretty good for a sixty-sevenyear-old and all the rest of an old man's twice-burned revisionism-because you have to experience this for yourself Be there. Step into the room, feel the heat of the big hardwood fire carbonizing the air, smell the simmering pots of chili and the burned-dust odor of the slide projector, inhale the aroma ofcoffee-decafand espresso — and the perfume of forty women who want to give the impression that they're wearing nothing at all but the scent they were born with. "Natural" is the word here. Earnest. Committed. And quick now, what's an environmentalist? Somebody who already has their mountain cabin.) She gave him a look — the quickest snatch of her eyes — and admitted him to her circle. She was talking about logging in the West, some forest in Oregon he'd never heard of, old growth going down, weep for the animals, weep for the earth. He wasn't listening. Or not particularly. He was too busy studying her, enjoying her lips and the intensity of her eyes, trying to break her code and assimilate it. She might have been a steelworker or glass blower, her face shining with a light that seemed to radiate from a place just under her chin, the light of hammered ingots, molten silica, fire, and her hands were big and mannish, hands that had done things, accomplished things-An activist's hands, he told himself, as he clutched the glass of wine and moved in still closer, already sick with the romance of it-Save the world, sure, and get laid too.

Her hair was blond in those days — then, and for all the time he knew her, but for those special occasions when they went out in the night to strike back at the machine and she dyed it dirt brown or fish-belly gray — and it was cut and parted in a way that allowed it to fall across her face whenever she tilted her head. The hair would fall-good hair, healthy hair, California hair — and then she would push it back, and you saw her hands, or she'd give her chin a flick so that her hair would grab the light and drop unerringly into place, and you saw her eyes. Tierwater saw them. He saw her. And even before he understood she was the main attraction of the evening-along with Teo, that is-he pushed his way through the scrim of faces hanging at her shoulder and introduced himself. "Hi," he said, showing his teeth in his best imitation of a grin, "I'm Ty Tierwater, and you're-"

What was he wearing? He wouldn't remember. Certainly nothing that could be described as environmentally chic-no Gore-Tex or Bion II or anything like that. He looked like a bum, most likely. And why not? He wasn't going anywhere, Give him a three-day growth of prematurely graying beard (graying to the chin only, and no higher), blue jeans spattered with paint and spackle and other accoutrements of the building-management trade, a bomber jacket so crosshatched with age it looked as if it had been varnished over by one of the Italian masters. Style he didn't have. He would have been the first to admit it. But he wasn't bad-looking, depending on your taste. Thin. Skinny, actually — but at least he hadn't gone to fat like every other thirty-nine-year-old in America. He had most of his hair and a good proportion of his teeth and he could lift anything, throw it over his shoulder and walk to hell and back with it if the right woman were to ask him. And he was a patient, tireless and tender lover, a combination of adjectives and a resonant noun he should have had printed up on a T-shirt. It couldn't have hurt his chances.

Her hand was in his. He felt a roughness there, callus, the horn of work and worry, but a frankness too-no bullshit here, her handshake said. Her lips were moving too. "Andrea? 'She said, in answer to his question, and her voice surprised him, so high and piping, so pure, when he'd expected a rasp, a growl deep in the throat-Let's get down on all fours and fight over the meat-" Andrea Cotton."

Teo's car was cramped on the way back to Los Angeles, but not as cramped as it had been on the way up. Tierwater sat up front, next to Teo, because of the length of his legs, and Andrea stretched out across the back seat because of the length of hers. Sierra was represented by a pink over — theshoulder bag with the grinning face of a Disney character impressed on the front flap, a relic of her childhood. It was tucked away on the floor behind Tierwater's seat, and it contained a pair of cut-off jeans, a spandex top, socks, underwear, cosmetics, seven home-made gloom — and — doom tapes in cracked plastic cases and a backup vampire novel the size of a pocket dictionary. Though they'd been on the road for two hours-in California now, Mount Shasta appearing and vanishing through first one window, then another, like a conjuror's illusion-Tierwater hadn't said a word. He stared straight ahead, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth hurt.

Andrea and Teo talked around him, the truncated vowels of Teo's glad-handing surfer's voice banging up against the country inflections of her Montana drawl, on and on, and the only subject was tactics. Not Sierra. Not how they were going to wrest her away from the judge-Judge Duermer, fat as a rutting sea lion and twice as belligerent — and the slab-faced puritans down at Child Protective Services. Because this was the fact: Sierra's lawyer, assigned by the state, had filed a dependency petition in the Name of the People against Tierwater as an unfit parent, a parent who endangers his child and contributes to her delinquency, and she was in Juvenile Hall with the hard cases and he was heading home to California. On fifty thousand dollars' bail and facing a plea bargain negotiated by Fred- "They'll drop all the charges if you plead to assault on a peace officer" — that could, that would, put him in jail for as much as three months. And then what would his daughter do?

"I say we go for the jugular, man-like play up Ty as Father Knows Best and Siskiyou Lumber and the Josephine County Sheriff's Department like a cross between the KGB and the Ayatollah."

The worn tires sang on the pavement, cars clustered round them, fell back, moved ahead, the radio coughed up static. Tierwater was paralyzed. He was a fragile thing in a soft container. He'd forgotten how to blink. How to swallow. Andrea's voice came to him from a thousand miles away: "Sure, sure, of course. This is worth fifty protests. If we can just figure a way to get it into the papers — and you're on to it, Teo, you're totally right, I mean, separating a father from his daughter, it's like dropping a nuclear bomb on a Girl Scout picnic-"

Teo, muscles working the wheel, jaws pounding gum to a private beat, left ankle wrapped in gauze: "Yeah, but all I've seen so far is that thing in their Mickey Mouse newspaper-you know, Ty going berserk on an officer of the law, escaping from the hospital and all that. All that shit, I mean. Because that's what it is. It's like the Chicago Seven or the Jonesboro Boys or something. People can see that. They're not stupid."

Andrea came forward suddenly, her head floating over the seat like a satellite drifting into orbit. "Oh, yes, they are. Stupid as dirt. But we've got to give this to Shep and Suziethey'll run with it, they'll spin it and spin it again. We need the L. A. Times, Newsweek Woman's Day, Time."

"CBS News-TV, that's the way to go:' Tierwater took all this in-not consciously, not alertly, but in the way of a sponge absorbing a slow trickle of water. This was his wife speaking, the woman he loved, the woman who set him on fire, and the man who'd stepped in to win the role of his best friend in the abbreviated space of a few short months. This was his life talking here, a Life so radically altered he couldn't have imagined it a year ago. Get married, draw down the bank accounts, sell off the movables and put the house and the shopping center on the market and never mind whether you take a beating or not-just get out, all the way out, all the way to the San Fernando Valley in the Jeep Laredo, and then sell that too, find a school for Sierra and stare at the palm trees rising up out of the smog like the tapering, reticulated necks of Mesozoic beasts. Sure. And commit criminal acts in the night.

What about Sierra? He wanted to say. What about me?

He hadn't responded, even to a direct question, for hours, and he couldn't blame them if they went on as if he weren't there. Or yes, he could. And he did. They talked over him, around him, through him, as if he were laid out on a gurney in the trauma ward. Their voices rose and fell. They were pillars of outrage, righteous, scheming, Trotsky and Lenin plotting to bring down Kerensky, Woodward and Bernstein with their heads together in the back room. Tierwater stared straight ahead. The rattling Caprice sliced through the apparent world and for the longest time he saw nothing at all. But then- Then things slowed down and the real world coalesced for him with the dull rolling thunder of epiphany. Up ahead, on the right, was a construction site. They — the anonymous, omnipresent and ever-industrious-were apparently constructing an overpass here, slabs of concrete studded with rebar, steel beams, survey stakes trailing their raggled banners of pink and orange plastic, dirt in a violent state of disarrangement. And a Cat. A big solid D7 Cat, sitting idle beneath the gray film of dusk, the sun drawn down the sink of the sky, dead brush, the crippled fingers of the scarified trees. Tierwater saw this picture, a murky still-life, and in the same instant saw himself at the center of it, and suddenly he was snatching at the steering wheel. "Pull over," he said.

Teo, his jaws working beneath the blond stubble of his head, looked alarmed. But just for a moment. Tierwater watched the light come into his eyes, saw his hands relax on the wheel. "You need to take a leak, Ty?" A glance back to Andrea, the makings of a grin. "Is that it?"

Nothing. Tierwater just looked out the window, but he kept his hand locked on the wheel, and in the next moment they were slowing and the tires began to sing a new song on the raw corrugations of the exit ramp. "Over there," Tier-water heard himself say, "on the crossroad, just behind the Cat there."

"Wait a minute, Ty," Andrea said, her hands on his shoulders, sweet breath and her look of concern, "you're not thinking-?"

But Tierwater was already out of the car, the heat rising in his face, lizards scuttling for cover, already fingering the matches he'd idly lifted from the ashtray in the Rest Ye May Motel. They had his daughter, that's what he was thinking — they had him, had him by the balls — and now they were going to start paying for it, right now, now and forever. "Ty!" She was calling, Andrea, out of the car already, a wind coming up out of nowhere to whip that perfect sheet of hair across her face while the gray cars hunted along the freeway behind the steady pulse of their headlights. Everything was gray now, washed out, rinsed of color and definition. Could they see him? Could they see what he was doing, what he was about to do? (At that point, I have to tell you, I honestly didn't care — they'd hit me, hard, and I was going to hit them back and damn the consequences.) His head was down, looking for something, a scrap of paper to stuff into the fuel tank, the fuse that would give him ten seconds, because that was all he was going to need, and "Ty!" Andrea was calling, "Ty, don't be crazy!" There was trash everywhere. Of course there was-what else would you expect? He bent to it mechanically, paper, take-out coffee cups, cans, bottles, and found what he was looking fora rust-colored rag stained with machine oil. It took him a minute to locate the fuel tank and wrench the cap off of it-she was back in the car now, in the rear seat, her face drawn down to nothing, a pale bulb preserved behind the dark glass and you'd better plant it now and hope for flowers in the spring — and then he touched a match to the rag and the thinnest, blackest little coil of smoke crawled up into the air.

He was running by then, thirty-nine years old and mortgaged to the eyeballs, his right knee tender, teeth aching, hair undergoing a daily transmigration from head to comb, and he never stopped running till he was in the car and the car was slamming down the road and the shining big new D7 Cat was breathing fire like a dragon, yellow, orange and red.

Santa Ynez November 2025

So we laugh. It feels good, feels good to be looped on cheap sake at quarter past ten in the morning too, even though my nose is dripping and my head seems to be waterlogged. (It's the weather, of course, everybody indoors all the time, the great biomass of humanity a juicy, snuffling, shuffling culture medium for the sly and patient viruses, and I just pray it's not the mucosa plague making a comeback. But that's the thrill of life on this blistered planet: you never know which sniffle is going to be your last.) And my arm — they injected it, dusted it, stitched and wrapped it, and there's no hint of pain from that quarter. Not yet, anyway. In fact, it doesn't even feel attached to me, and here I am resting my haunches on the kitchen table and draining one tiny glass after another of fermented rice wine, casual as an amputee, my guard down-definitely down — and the women laughing along with me. Things could be worse.

Plus, we got Petunia back, and that's cause for celebration. Chuy rigged up a plywood enclosure at the corner of her pen where the chicken wire had been torn loose in the storm. And he buried the bottom end of it three feet in the ground so she can't dig under it, or wouldn't want to. Not that she isn't hot to get loose-all the animals are — but she's got to be the laziest Patagonian fox in the world (of course, since the set of Patagonian foxes is tiny and dwindling, the subset of lazy ones must be infinitesimal). At any rate, she's there, hunkered over a bowl of dog meal and the freshly trapped corpses of a couple of rats Chuy tossed her as a welcome-home present, and I know all about it because I was out in the pens myself before the sun came up, scattering straw over the mud to make her comfortable. And Delbert Sakapathian is satisfied too, because I got Mac's secretary to hand — deliver him a check for a thousand bucks, to make up for the loss of his cat. Everything wraps up neatly, doesn't it?

Still, that's April Wind over there sunk into the couch, and I might be laughing now, but I know that sooner or later a perforated chuckle or premoistened guffaw is going to stick in my throat like a catfish bone. "Remember the time," Andrea's saying, and we're all remembering, grinning wide, a day in the Tehachapis, dry and hot and with a sky so blue it was like somebody's eye-all. Right, God's eye, if He wants to exist — and the shock of that creek, instant deep-freeze. We were eluding the Freddies, and somebody-Teo? Me? — Insisted on the creek, throw them off the scent, and how deep is it, somebody else asked, knee-deep, that's all, knee-deep." — and then Ty stepped off that rock and came up sputtering like a polar bear? "Oh, yes. Yes. Ha-ha.

"So that was, like, when?" April Wind is wondering. "Before or after Sierra… Because I don't remember her there, correct me if I'm wrong-"

Boom! Goes the wind, choosing the perfect moment to rattle my shack [Enter Ghost; Exeunt Peace, Sanity and Determination.] They're both looking at me, Andrea with her reconstructed face and midnight hair, eyes so glassy and opaque you could lather up and shave in them, and April Wind, the amazing dwarf woo-woo woman with a stare like two screws boring into a four-by-four. "After," I say, and listen to the hiss of the rain swelling to fill the silence.

But what am I seeing? Sierra Tierwater, twenty-four years old, staring down at me out of Jane's fleshed-in circle of a face (perfectly round, round as the Doughboy's), the long braid of her hair dangling like a bell pull and a fine rain of particles sifting down from the weathered platform high up in her tree. Her redwood tree. Her one-thousand — year-old, two-hundred-foot-tall redwood that weighed something like a hundred tons and contained an estimated twenty thousand board feet of lumber, four hundred thousand dollars stacked up in the middle of an old-growth forest and there for the taking. That tree. The one that made her famous. Artemis, she called it, the Lady of Wild Things.

Sure. That's what I'm seeing, Sierra, my daughter, perched up there halfway to the sky in a blizzard of mystical, earth-mothering, New Wave crap, woo-woo on parade, and every ravening nutball with a grudge and a chainsaw stalking round down below.

"So you were pretty broken up by that," April Wind inserts into the howling silence-literally howling, Force 8 at least, a whole universe of untethered objects hurtling in a dismal blur past the only window that hasn't been boarded up yet. "Is that when you really, like, started to, you know-"

"Broken up?" I throw it back it at her on the heels of two quick burning hits of sake, and forget the delicate little cups, it's my lips now and the wet viridian throat of the bottle. "Is that what you came to hear about? This is the interview, right? We're not laughing anymore, are we, anything for the cold naked page and let's take down the last ten trees in the world for the paper to print it on. But what's the angle, what's the deal-does anybody really give a shit anymore? Because I don't. I really don't."

Oh, they look uncomfortable now, the shifting buttocks and nervous little flicks of the head, fingers twirling twists of hair, eyes left, eyes right, eyes crawling up the walls. And what a coincidence that Andrea should come back to me the day before the little reporter shows up. It's money, sure, some publisher's money-we always need the next hagiography — but there's more to it than that, and I can see it glittering in their eyes. Andrea and April Wind, Am I crazy to think they have an agenda?

"All right, Ty, we'll be straight with you." Andrea is up out of the chair now, at the stove, all brisk elbows and saluting shoulders, rattling the teapot. "Maybe we've had enough sake-it's too early for me. Tea, anyone?" And she swings round with a smile.

And me? I just perch there, buttock to table, my mouth grim, waiting.

A sigh. The smile flutters and flaps off. "First of all," she says, "I came to you because I missed you and I need you, so don't think — and plus, as I'm sure you suspected all along, I've got nowhere else to go. And nothing. I mean nothing. April and I thought-well, a book, you know? I need the money-we need the money-yes, that's true, but we really felt it was time to tell Sierra's story — and yours-so people can see that we tried, and that we can try again."

"Not that they would care," I say, bitter to the dregs. Another hit of sake, straight from the bottle, and it tastes like machine oil.

"They would, you know they would." This from the little face of April Wind, clenched round her conviction.

"I may as well tell you, Ty-we're starting up E. F.I Again. For the survivors, I mean." Andrea lights the stove with a soft whoosh of gas, sets the teapot on the burner. She can't look me in the eye.

For the survivors. That was the kind of thinking that got me crazy, that got me put in prison, not to mention reviled and caricatured and labeled "a human hyena" by the San Francisco Chronicle and half a dozen other papers. "You know something I don't?"

This has got to be the worst of the storms yet — the rain is nearly horizontal now, roofing nails shot out of a gun, and the yard seems to be in motion, one soupy swirl of muck and water. I need to get out there and see to the animals. I need to get hold of Chuy. Mac. The National Guard. But here 1 am, drunk on sake, a withered, rapier-nosed, hunched-over relic, holding my breath and listening to hear the worst of the bad news.

Andrea ducks her head and lets her voice go soft. "They've got the mucosa on the East Coast. A new strain."

That hits me in the stomach, all right. Up comes Lori's face, bobbing to the surface, and then it's gone. Of course, I knew it-could have predicted it — and why not? If not the mucosa, then something else. "No vaccine?"

A shake of her newly minted head. "Not yet:'" So, then, why. Don't understand why you'd-?"

"Sit down, Ty," Andrea says, and April Wind is so wired I think she's going to rocket up off the dog-stinking couch, leap out the window and parachute to safety.

"I am sitting."

"Look, Ty, there's one more thing-"

I'm an old man. My teeth hurt, my knee hurts, my back — and there's a dull inchoate intimation of pain just starting to make its presence known deep in the intertwined muscles of my stitched-up forearm. I just gape at her.

"Maclovio Pulchris. We need him. His money, anyway. Earth Forever! Is going to fly again, in a big way. If this new mucosa strain is what we think it is, then the crash we've been talking about all these years is here, here right now." How did she get across the room so fast? Because here she is, right in my face, looming over me, Andrea, all of her, ready to put the screws to me all over again. "You hear me, Ty? Because you're coming with us."

No time fora a snappy comeback, no time to reflect on being used yet again, no time for volition or even protest. "I am?"

When I was younger-young, that is-everybody I knew was alive. Now pretty much everybody I know, or knew, is dead, and the odd thing is that none of them died a natural death-He expired in his sleep, never knew what hit him, that sort of thing. Uncle Sol was the exception, though his death seemed unnatural too, in the way that all death seems unnatural — I was a teenager then, working with him on his safari ranch in San Diego, both of us up to our elbows in urine-drenched straw and the exotic shit of exotic beasts, and as I say, he was leaning over the bulbul cages one morning and felt the jab of mortality up under his rib cage. Tell me, is that natural? I've had friends succumb to cancer, and Lori-Lori died in my arms, both of us wearing gauze masks, the mucosa so thick in her lungs and throat she couldn't draw a breath, tracheotomy or no, and that's natural, nothing more natural than the disease we spread in our sticky, promiscuous way. But what about my parents, my wife, my daughter, what about Teo? They say that if all disease was cured (and what a joke that fond promise has turned out to be) people wouldn't get much past the age of ninety or so anyway, what with the chances of accident. Actuarial tables? Take it to Las Vegas.

Accident rules the universe, I know that, and there's no escaping it, science or no. But accident gives rise to the concept of luck — and if you believe in luck, you might as well break out your juju beads and get your mojo working, you might as well borrow a totem from April Wind and go out and talk to the trees. Go ahead and pray to the gods, pray to God and Jehovah, pray to Newton and Kepler and Oppenheimer. See what good it does you.

My mother, Bernadette O'Shaughnessy, believed in the mystery with a divine face, believed in heaven, spirits, angels on high. She was the one who sat me in a pew in the hushed, candlelit vaults of the Church of the Assumption in PetersIdll, New York, when I was so small I couldn't see over the rail. Every Sunday morning imploded on the sleepy, dreary, mind-numbing ritual that was mass, nothing left of it now but a welter of reworked sensory impressions misfiring in my septuagenarian brain: my mother's gloved hand like silk in my own, the power of her perfume to drive back the narcotic musk of the incense, the icy dip of the holy water-icy even in summer — and the music of the organ like some exotic feast that fills you to bursting with something that isn't food at all. I attended religious instructions. I was conversant with nuns and priests. I was eight, ten, twelve years old, I was communed and confirmed, bore the mystery of Latin, knew that masturbation was a sin and that God was watching. It was He who created the universe, the gnat-catcher, the canyon wren, the brown hyena and all those fifty-four billion galaxies, and He who created me and created Santa Claus and his elves too and the mountain of foil-wrapped gifts under the tree.

Yeah, sure. And then came science.

Science-empiricism, skepticism, the spirit of inquiry, doubt, debate and outright derision-was a gift of my Jewish father, Seymour Tierwater, the man everyone called Sy (Get it? Sy and 7. 51?) And I called Daddy. He was an MP during the war, a man who cracked heads as casually as he cracked walnuts, an angry man, a big man. He drank vodka. My mother drank scotch. With the backing of my mother's father, a roaring, barking, rock-headed, neo-Cretaceous presence looming large in the dining room and den of my early years, Seymour Tierwater took his brand — new architectural degree from City College and built the development I grew up in. And how did you build a housing development? With divine help and guidance? With incense and magic? With elves? No. You built it with orthogonal angles and real things, concrete things, things made and scavenged by man out of a harsh, alien and godless universe that existed because it existed, and for no other discernible reason.

My father and I never had discussions along the lines of "If God is so good and wise and all-knowing and all-powerful, then why did He create ticks and tapeworms and let all the Jews die in the ovens?" For him, there was no god but science, and never had been. But there must have been an ironclad quid pro quo in my parents' marriage contract-. My grandfather's money, my grandfather's religion-because my father never objected to my early indoctrination, or not that I knew of, anyway. He just bided his time, a look of bemusement or mockery on his face whenever the sacerdotal words-Jesus, God the Father, the Holy Spirit-dropped from his son's lips. Was this a happy marriage? No. Not after the first ten years, anyway, but it lasted, held together by a king-size bed and ice cubes in a glass, till a crane buckled and a beam gave way and I became an orphan at the age of twenty-seven.

I mention all this because it gives me a context for evaluating what Andrea's just told me. If I'm getting it straight, it's this: the world is ending, so we have to write The Lives of the Environmental Saints and fleece Maclovio Pulchris so that we can run off and hide till such time as we can use the booty to rebuild it again. The world, that is.

"You're coming with us: 'she repeats.

"I'm going nowhere. Or scratch that-I'm going to the bathroom. Sake in the morning, you know what 1 mean?" A look for April Wind. "And you must know, right, April? You're getting to that age now, aren't you? Just wait," I tell them, tell them both, and I'm so worked up I can hear the blood singing in my ears, "just wait till you get to be my age."

And then I'm ducking around the eternally overspilling buckets, my shoes sloshing on the sodden carpet, the pyrotechnics in my bowels a direct consequence of being seventy-five years old and foolish enough to think you can imbibe sake at ten o 'clock in the morning and get away with it. Cheap sake, at that. My need is urgent, but still I can't help stopping at the bathroom door to turn a withering look on my ex-wife and current bed-partner. "Did you really say `Earth Forever! Is going to fly again'? Am 1 hearing right? `Fly again '? I mean, how deluded can you get?" Oh, yes, and now I'm full of it, full of myself and gas pains too. "If it ever flew, and don't tell me it ever really did, not in any waythat mattered to anybody except maybe Sierra and a bunch of disaffected lunatics and bush-beaters, then I'm sorry it did, heartily sorry, and I wish I'd been there to cut the wings off of it with a rusty pair of scissors. Or shears. Carpet shears. And a bag of salt to rub, in the wounds.

"And don't try to rattle me with this bullshit about the mucosa, because I know that's what it is: bullshit."

1 Slam the door for punctuation, and then I'm alone in the bathroom. The dimmest of light here — a single amber-shaded fluorescent miser oozing just enough illumination to make me feel like I'm back in prison again — but I dig out my glasses reflexively and pick up the thin crumbling copy of the newspaper I keep on hand to get me through my more punishing bouts on the toilet. We don't see newspapers much anymore, I should tell you that-everybody gets their news electronically now, and the cost of paper, even newsprint, is prohibitive. Still, some of us like the physical feel of the thing, and the Los Andiegoles Times prints up a thin sheet every two weeks for the nostalgic and the deluded, not to mention the constipated. Rattle, rattle. Smooth out the pages. What am I reading? An account of a football game played in an empty leaking dome, the details as irrelevant as the outcome, page three of four, and the rest is about the weather. What's in store for us — or what was in store for us, two, or no, three weeks ago? Rain. Wind. Flooding in the low-lying and mid-lying areas. Hundred-percent chance of tornadoes, waterspouts, tsunamis.

There's a fire down below, no doubt about it, and I sit here waiting it out, reading about fumbles, interceptions and somebody's stout foot, the wind dragging its claws across the pitted stucco outside, my own familiar odor rising poisonously about me. I'll be here a while, a fact of life at my age (and forget the old-old, they might as well have their rectums sewed up), and I'm not hiding from anybody, least of all the two women in the next room, the ones who seem to have taken over my house. I'm not stupid. No matter how Andrea tries to spin it, love is the smallest part of what's involved here — they want access to Mac, that's what this is all about. They want money. And they want me. Or Sierra, that is. Sierra's ghost. So why do I put up with it? Why don't I run both of them out the door and go back to Lily and my anteaters and peccaries?

Because I'm bored. Because I've got nothing to lose. Because 1 know I can put the brakes on if I have to. Roll with it. Ride your pony. Oh, yes, indeed.

When I emerge, the two of them have their heads together, two wan little smiles for me, the lord of the house, and there's a smell in the air-fragrant, fecund, seductive — a smell that rings every bell in my olfactory lobe and knocks my defenses right back down to nothing: they're baking cookies. Cookies. The world has been transformed to shit, I'm about to be turned inside out, gutted, spitted, grilled and filleted, and they're baking cookies. It's too much. I just wave my hand feebly, in surrender, and fade away into the very damp bedroom for a nap.

I wake in darkness, to the sound of the rain. It's steady now, the kind of vertical pounding that brings to mind tin roofs, coconut palms and Singapore slings, but at least the wind has died down. I've been dreaming, a standard dream about a too-big house with too many wings and too many doors that lead to nothing but house and more house, and it takes me a good five minutes to resurrect my conscious mind. But what time is it? It feels like midnight, but then it always feels like midnight. My watch says 12:15-P. M. - and that seems about right. I hold my wrist up to study the glowing numerals against the dim backdrop of the room, my mouth dry, head throbbing, tireder than I was when I staggered in here an hour and a half ago.

For a time I just lie there, putting off the inevitable re-accessing of my dog's life for another sodden minute. (The walls are sweating, I don't need to turn on the light to know that, and the banana slug that lives in the architecturally inconvenient gap under the windowsill will be grazing the algal bloom over the portrait of Thoreau. And the gap itself will have grown perceptibly-subsidence, and with this rain what isn't subsiding?) Want more? There's a new leak in the roof, easily detectable as a kind of snare drumming in the corner over the regular splootching of the bedroom buckets, I'm probably going to have to sandbag the front porch again, and the fullness of the afternoon is going to be spent in a river of muck and hyena shit as Chuy and I try to keep the animals from drowning.

Then the pictaphone is ringing — or speaking, actually: Incoming call, a mechanical voice announces — and I'm lifting my other wrist to answer it. "Yeah?" I say, and I can't help it if my voice lacks enthusiasm-I'm not expecting much out of the day, or for that matter the week, month or year.

"Ty? You there?"

The voice is familiar, soft and sugar-coated, pitched as high as a child's, and I know it, I do, know it as well as my own… "Mac?" I venture.

"Give me a picture, Ty, come on--"

I hit the button, and there he is, Maclovio Pulchris, trapped in a little box on the underside of my wrist. He's wearing the fedora he was born with-it must have been clamped on his head all the way through the birth canal — and there are three strands of slick processed hair (his eel whips, he calls them) clinging to his mirror shades just over the place where his left eye would be. If he ever took his shades off, that is. "Jesus, Ty, you look like shit."

"Thanks. It's the look I'm after. I've been putting a lot of work into it."

"Are you in bed? At this hour?" A pause. All you can see of him, really, is his lips, nose and cheekbones. It's a disguise, and it makes him appear ageless, I suppose, though he's hardly one of the young-young, or even young. And then, in the softest, breathiest, most forlorn fifth-grader's voice: "You're not sick, are you?"

What can I say? Andrea's out there in the other room, and she's a kind of sickness. So's April Wind. And Earth Forever! "Petunia got loose — and don't worry, she's all right, we got her back" — bringing my bandaged arm into view- "but she chewed up my arm and plus it's raining like holy hell here and I was up before dawn scattering straw in the cages, checking on the sandbags, that sort of thing."

"I know."

I'm just looking at his face, and there's no more flexibility to it than you'd find in a carved wooden mask, but I know what my face is showing on his end: befuddlement, age and decrepitude, uncertainty, incompetence, a doddering around the eyes and a pronounced dwindling of the mouth and chin. "What do you mean?"

"I'm here. Back from sunny North Carolina and all those sweet tropical drinks. And it's a gas, it is-up in the nineties every day, sunshine like you wouldn't believe… But Ty, you know what?"

Here I am, the champion of the young-old, in full possession of my faculties and fresh from my latest sexual triumph, and what do I say? Something penetrating, like "Huh?"

The fifth-grader's voice again, pinched and whispery with concern: "I'm worried about the animals."

Well, so am 1,1 want to tell him, what do you think you're paying me for? Unfortunately, I never get the chance. Because at that moment, Chuy comes banging through the door — the bedroom door, and I wonder where my peace and dignity have fled to — and he's waving his arms and opening and closing his mouth on nothing, so excited he can't seem to form the words to tell me about it in either of the two languages at war in his brain. I can see it in his eyes, though-trouble, big trouble — and of course he's dripping and his hair and mustache have just been recovered from the bottom of the sea. "Sorry, Mac," I say to my wrist, "gotta go, talk to you later: 'and break the connection.

"What?" I throw at Chuy, bolt upright in bed now, the light from the other room shining sick and weak on the mossy walls and the banana slug fixed like a lamprey to the image of Thoreau's face. ("Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountain head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world.") "What's the matter?"

"Los edificios, they, they-"

"What edificios?" I'm up now, pulling on my jeans, the anxious faces of Andrea and April Wind hanging on cords in the distance.

"Los, los condos, and Rancho Seco- them too — they are what I think is falling down, I mean like in the corriente, you know, like boom, boom, boom-"

When Frank Buck wanted elephants-that is, when some zoo or circus placed an order-he would cruise over to Ceylon, hire a couple hundred natives and cut down a whole forest's worth of tropical hardwoods to build a pen with a fourhundred-foot chute in front of it. Fifteen-foot-tall logs were set in the ground eighteen inches apart throughout the pen — or kraal, as it was calledand then, using tame elephants to lure the wild ones in close, Buck and his men would stampede the whole lot of them down the chute and into the enclosure as if they were sheep. Uncle Sol, who was there, informed me about this and other peculiarities of the animal trade when I was fifteen, a skinny kid with a mop and shovel, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ordure-shit, that is-his eight Indian elephants produced daily. There was the dust, he said, that was the first thing you noticed, a roiling river of dust fifty feet high, and then you felt the concussion through the soles of your shoes-fifty or sixty panicked animals weighing up to five tons apiece punishing the ground. But it was the screaming he remembered most, like a brass band hitting nothing but high notes, right off the scale, a noise that shivered and humbled you till the big gate dropped and all that ocean of flesh was just one more commodity for sale and export. The elephants went to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, Central Park, the big timbers of the kraal rotted and tumbled over and the jungle sprang back up to conceal the next generation of pachyderms.

That was ninety years ago. Now the elephants are gone, and the forest too-Ceylon, last I heard, was 100 percent deforested, a desert of unemployable mahouts and third-generation twig-gatherers. Uncle Sol had it easy-all he had to do was go out into the wilderness and catch things, and it was a deep wilderness, a jungle full of sights unseen and sounds unheard, raffalii and dorango in the trees, chevrotains, tapirs and yes, pangolins poking through the leaves. It's a little different for me and Chuy. There is no wilderness, and there's nothing left to catch, except maybe rats. Our job, as it turns out on this very wet sixth-consecutive day of rain, is to subdue a menagerie of disgruntled, penned-up and reeking animals named after flowers and escort them to higher ground.

Andrea's going to help. So are April Wind and Mac's two bodyguards. We need all the help we can get, because chaos has been unleashed here, two whole sections of the Lupine Hill condos collapsed like wet cardboard (and where are Delbert Sakapathian and his thousand — dollar check now, I wonder), Rancho Seco gone wet suddenly and looking less like a gated community and more like a riverbed every minute, and my own humble abode flooded right up to the high-water mark on my gum boots. At some point, not long after Chuy's revelation in my darkened bedroom, Mac himself appeared at the front door, wrapped up and hooded in a black slicker that might have been a body bag in another incarnation, his eel whips hanging limp, shades misted over. The bodyguards bookended him. The sky was close. My carpets were fishbait and the Titanic was going down fast, "Everybody," he shouted, and even in his extremity his voice was as breathy and sweet as a kindergarten teacher's, "everybody up the hill to my house!"

We're coming, I want to tell him, Andrea scooping up floating paperbacks and doing triage on the kitchen appliances, and you don't have to ask twice — but, first, the animals. Out there in the thick of it, Chuy and I discover that one of the giant anteaters has drowned. I don't know if you can picture a giant anteater offhand — this is the kind of creature that never looked quite real anyway, what with the Mohawk haircut, the underslung bear's feet and the three lengths of hose stuffed into its snout — but it looks even less convincing now, Just dead. Dead and gone. And probably no more than thirty or forty of them left on earth. Even with the rain, even with Andrea and my knee and Mac and the threat of the mucosa. I want to sit down and cry.

Lily, fortunately, is all right-she's dug herself a mound big as a tumulus, and there she is, curled up on top of it like a wet rug. The lions we find stacked up on the roof of the concrete-block structure at the back of their cage, roaring their guts out. Dandelion, the male, looks as if he's been drowned twice and twice resuscitated, the mane drooping round his jowls like some half-finished macrame project. Amaryllis and Buttercup, the lionesses Mac ordered through a breeding-facility catalogue from some place in Ohio, don't look much better. Their eyes tell me they want to be pacing neurotically up and down the length of the chain-link fence that encloses their half-acre savanna, but the whole thing is a three-foot-deep stew of phlegm-colored water and Siamese walking catfish (have I mentioned that some environmental anarchist let half a dozen of them go in Carpinteria twenty years back, just as the weather started to turn?).

"Chuy," I announce, swinging round on him and the two hopeless-looking bodyguards, "the lions are going to be a problem. If we dart them, they're liable to fall into the slop and drown, and if we just wade in there with the wire net, they'll just as likely chew our heads off."

The bodyguards-both of them are named Al, I think-don't look as if they like the sound of this. They're the ones who are going to have to drag a four-hundred-pound cat bristling with claws and teeth through three feet of water and sling it in the back of the Olfputt, and that's no mean feat, whether it's unconscious or not. And then-stirring news — they'll have to go back for the lionesses.

Chuy, meanwhile, is blinking back the rain, hunched and stringy, considering the problem. His slicker, which is at least three sizes too long for him in the arms, is a pale, faded orange in color, liberally stained with Rorschach blots of oil, mold and animal blood. "They can swim, Mr. Ty, nadan estos gatos, and maybe I think we can tie them like caballos, you know, around the neck, and maybe we hook the rope up to the back of the truck, and, you know-"

I'm dazed. Old and dazed. The rain is like a trillion hammers, blow after blow, staggering me. "You mean, we drag them?"

"Sure. And when they see la puerta open wide to that dry warm basement at Mr. Mac's, then maybe yo pienso que where they want to go, verdad?"

Or we could just leave them. The water's probably not going to get up that high, I tell myself, but even so it can't be good for them to be soaked through for days on end — they'll catch cold, won't they? What about in Africa, though — or Africa as it once was? They didn't have lion pens to snuggle in — or multimillionaire pop stars' carpeted, paneled and Ping-Pong-tabled basements either. Yes. Sure. And they died, every last one of them, flagged, skinned and eaten right down to the bone by the pullulating masses of our own degraded species. Africa doesn't matter anymore. Nature doesn't matter anymore-it's not even nature, just something we created out of a witches' brew of fossil-fuel emissions and deforestation. These lions live here, in the Santa Ynez Valley-this is their natural habitat now. And if the valley floods, then we'll move them to higher ground, a new habitat for the infinitely adaptable New Age lion: Maclovio Pulchris' twelve-thousand — square-foot basement.

And you know what I say? Hallelujah and praise the Lord.

Los Angeles/Titusville, July 1989

What he wanted, more than anything, more than revenge, even-more than Andrea and the trees and the owls-was to get his daughter back. Just that. Just walk her down the steps of Juvenile Hall, put her in the car and drive back to New York with his tail between his legs — and it wasn't too late to go back, the house in escrow, the shopping center on the market still, the old blanket of his old life neatly folded and all ready and waiting to be pulled up over his head again. And Andrea? Forget Andrea, forget sex, forget life. He didn't want to be alive, because if you were alive you hurt, and this hurt worse than anything he'd ever known or imagined. His daughter. They'd taken his daughter away. And why? Because he was an unfit parent.

An unfit parent. That set him on fire, all right, that set him off like a Scud missile, all thrust and afterburners and calamitous rage. There was no fitter parent. Show me one-that was his attitude-just show me one. He'd been father and mother to Sierra since she was three years old and he had to rescue her from her grandmother and tell her that her mommy wasn't coming back anymore because she'd just vanished from the face of this earth like a ghost or a breath of wind. Try that one on for size. Try climbing out of the cavern of sleep to the screams and night alarums of an inconsolable thirty-seven-pound ball of confusion and rage, try dropping her off at nursery school, a single father on his way to mind-numbing, soul-crushing work, and she won't let go of the door handle, no joke, no cajoling, the drooping faces of the nursery-school teachers and pitying mothers banging over the fenders of the car like fruit withered on the vine. A motherless kindergartner, a motherless ten-year-old, a motherless teenager. Tierwater put his life into fixing that — or assuaging it, bandaging it, kissing the hurt to make it better — and no one could tell him different. Not Judge Duermer or the Josephine County Child Protective Services or the Supreme Court either.

But here was the fact: he was in Los Angeles, trapped in a blistering funk of heat and smog and multicultural sweat, and she was in Oregon, where the trees stood tall and the air was cool and sweet-in Oregon, in jail. Or Juvenile Hall. Same difference. They wouldn't let him see her, wouldn't let him correspond with her, wouldn't even let him speak. With her on the phone-he was too evil and corrupting an influence. He was a monster. A criminal. A freak. Three and a half weeks had gone by now, and he'd done nothing but lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. He wanted to be in Oregon, close to her, just to tread the same soil and breathe the same air, but Fred wouldn't hear of it. You'll do more harm than good, he insisted. Stay out of it. Don't go near the state line except for court appearances-don't even think about it. And don't worry: we'll get her released to Andrea, no problem-no matter what happens with you.

The sad fact was that since the day he made bail he'd been back just once-up and down the coast in the space of forty-eight hours-with Andrea and Fred, for a dependency hearing before the judge.

Judge Duermer (triple-chinned, rolling in his robes, the great bulging watery sea lion's eyes): Can you show cause why this juvenile-Sierra Sarah Tierwater-should be returned to the custody of her father and stepmother, both of whom are facing criminal charges in this county?

Fred (short and bald, a blazing wick of vital energy, ap-palled for all the world to see): But, Your Honor, with all due respect, this is a matter of peaceable civil protest, an exercise of my clients' rights to free speech and assembly- Judge Duermer (reading from a sheet in front of him, Sierra nowhere to be seen): Assault on a peace officer, resisting arrest, escape from custody, child endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor? Come on, counsel, these are serious charges, and until such time as they have been adjudicated, I can't see fit to release this child to the parents.

Sierra's Lawyer (Cotton Mather in a three-piece suit, no nose or chin to speak of): Your honor, on behalf of Child Protective Services, I move to have Sierra Sarah Tierwater placed with a foster family until such time as the parents can show that they have taken appropriate measures-parenting classes, for instance, and refraining from further criminal conduct-to assure the court that they are indeed fit to raise this child.

The upshot? Tierwater, still facing up to a year in jail on the criminal charge, was ordered to take approved parenting classes and to keep his own very prominent nose clean for a period of twelve months, after which the court would make its decision. Back again to Los Angeles, doom and gloom and seething hate. He stared out the window of the car and into the trees, and even the shell of the burned-out Cat glimpsed somewhere between Cottonwood and Red Bluff gave him no pleasure. Criminal conduct. The sons of puritanical high — and — mighty bitches — they haven't seen anything yet. That's what Tierwater was thinking, but it came and went. Revenge fantasies got you nowhere. Despair did, though. Despair got you to submit to the gravitational force and become one with the cracked leather couch in front of the eternally blipping TV in a rented house on a palm-lined street in suburbia. (Give me my daughter back and I will pluck the owls and drop them in the flying pan myself, no questions asked, that's how I felt, because I was all about giving up then, a victim, a schmuck, ground under the iron heel of Judge Duermer and Sheriff Bob Hicks) "Come on, Ty," Andrea said, trying for a smile but looking grim underneath it, "snap out of it. We're fighting this, okay? It'll be all right. It will."

It was a morning of common heat, a hundred and three by eleven o 'clock, the San Fernando Valley baking like cheap pottery. The dry wind they called Santa Ana was rattling the leaves of the grapefruit trees in the desiccated backyard-nothing there, not a spike of grass, not even a gopher mound — and knocking the dead fronds out of the palms out front with a sound like sabers rattling. This was in a place called Tarzana, named for the Lord of the Jungle, whose steady earning power had allowed his creator to buy it all up at one time and make it his ranch, his spread, his dusty, spottily irrigated, citrus-tree-studded estate and manor in the New World — and there was a transformation for you. Now it was part of the stinking, creeping, blistered megalopolisTeo's hometown, incidentally — and E. F! Had chosen it as the location for their Los Angeles chapter. Why? Because Teo knew it, and because it was quiet and dull, a place where people had jobs and foreign cars and repainted their classic 19508 ranch houses every other year in the same two basic colors. Ecotage? Never heard of it.

Teo and Andrea didn't have jobs. Neither, any longer, did Tierwater, Teo and Andrea were supported by E. E! Contributions, the money they made stumping in places like Croton, and, ultimately, by Tierwater. And Tierwater was supported by his dead father. This is called the food chain. "Yeah, I know," he said, his voice buried in a swamp of misery and depression, "but it's killing me. It's like going to a shrink when you're a kid-did you ever go to a shrink?"

She was sitting beside him on the couch. Phones were ringing, people moving incessantly from room to room, sweating and conspiratorial. She just lifted her eyebrows, noncommittal.

"Just because you know what the problem is, just because you can express it in so many words, that doesn't mean you can do anything about it. I feel impotent. Castrated. Fucked. I think I'm having a nervous breakdown here. I mean, I've dealt with grief before-grieving — but this is different. Nobody died." The effort of talking was giving him a headache. He was in a hyperbaric chamber, that's what it was, and they'd screwed down the pressure so he could feel it in every pore. "Except maybe me."

She slipped down beside him, the curves and hollows of her body seeking his, holding him, mothering him, but it was no good. For one thing, it must have been ten degrees hotter inside than out. For another, the phones were ringing, a natural irritant, and the voices whispering. And then there was this, the issue he really hadn't dealt with yet: resentment. How could he let himself be soothed by her when she was the one who'd dragged him into this, when she was the one to blame? "Listen," and she was whispering now, her breath sour, the smell of her underarms and the sweat sliding down her temples, one more weight crushing him, "Fred says-"

And here was where the violence spurted out like bad blood, where push came to shove, Andrea on the floor suddenly, Tierwater up off the couch in a single snaking motion. He was shouting. Standing over her and shouting. "Fuck Fred!" He shouted. "Fuck him! And fuck you too!"

And then the letter came. It was in a stained envelope, invitation-size, and it wasn't from his ex-secretary, his real-tor in New York or any of the legal or social-service departments of Josephine County, Oregon. The handwriting — a random conjunction of block letters and an undisciplined, wobbling cursive-brought him out of his slumber. With trembling fingers, he tore open the flap-tore the letter inside into two curling strips, in fact — and saw Sierra's hasty scrawl there on the back of a fast-food napkin. Dad, he read, they've got me at this farmers house in this town called i think Titansville or something come get me I'm going to die here Sierra.

"I'm not going to do anything rash," he told Andrea in a kitchen full of volunteers, the wind flailing branches against the windows, flyers running hot off the Canon copier on the table, Teo on the phone in the corner, rubbing the unfashionable stubble of his athlete's head as if the harder he rubbed, the more money he could conjure up out of the wires. It was two in the afternoon. He wouldn't let her take the letter from him — the napkin, that is, already damp with his sweat — but he spread it across his palm for her to read.

He watched her eyes.

"I mean," and he dropped his voice, "I'm not going to kidnap her or anything. I just want to see her, that's all-just for a minute. Give her some money. Reassure her-"

"No, Ty. Uh-uh. No way in the world."

"She's scared, don't you understand that? Can you even imagine it? She doesn't know what's going on here. Maybe she thinks we abandoned her, maybe that's what she thinks. I want my daughter. I miss her. I can't even sleep, for Christ's sake."

"Forget it, Ty. No."

"You know something, Andrea" — and they were all listening now, the three Pierce College students in their Pierce College sweatshirts, the housewife with the spiked hair and bruised mascara, the unemployed stockboy of forty with the beard, ponytail and multiple earrings- "nobody tells me no, because I don't like to hear that word, not from you, not from Fred, not from anybody. I'm going up there."

"You're out of your mind, Ty. Flat-out crazy." She gestured to Teo, an urgent swipe of the hand, and he whispered something into the phone and hung up. "This is no joke — they're trying to make an example of us up there-of you, and you're the one who had to go and try to escape, and from a hospital, no less-"

"What's the problem?" Teo wanted to know. His face was suddenly interposed between Tierwater's and his wife's, the face of Liverhead, severe and uncompromising, Both of them had to look down at him.

Andrea, her eyes cold as crystal. "Ty wants to go up and rescue Sierra. Show him the letter, Ty."

Tierwater brought his hand out from behind his back, where it had gone instinctively, and held out the limp napkin. Teo scanned the message while Andrea made her case: "I don't think Ty understands just how serious this is — I mean, we could lose her for good, permanently, till she's of legal age anyway. They'll put her in a foster home, they will. In a heartbeat."

Tierwater couldn't appreciate the logic of this. "She's in a foster home now With some farmer. Imagine that? Some farmer. Who the hell is he? Maybe he's a pedophile or something-sure, why wouldn't he be? Aren't they all?"

Teo: "What, farmers?"

"These people that take in kids. Why else would they do it?"

"Come on, Ty-what planet are you living on? For money, for one thing. Because they like kids. Because they have a social conscience." Andrea was turning over one of the flyers in her hand — in a week they'd be staging a protest in the Arizona desert against yet another power plant. "Listen, Ty, I know you're upset — I miss her too, and I regret this whole thing, it's tearing me up, it is — but you've got to stay above ground with this one. Fred'll have her back in a week, trust me, he will."

The Santa Anas tapped at the windowpane and Tierwater looked up to see a tumbleweed (Russian thistle, Salsola kali, another invasive species) hurtle across the yard. The college students, three boys so alike they might have been triplets, shared a laugh over something, their breathless snorts of amusement a counterpoint to the rasp of the wind outside. "A week? You heard what the judge said."

"Fred's working on it."

"Bullshit he is. I'm out the door, I'm telling you — and if you want to come, that's fine with me, but I'm going whether you like it or not." Tierwater's voice got away from him for a minute, and the students' laughter died in their throats. He looked round the room. Nobody said a word. Even the telephones stopped ringing. "This is my daughter we're talking about here."

Tierwater didn't like traffic. He didn't like freeways. He hated the constant nosing for position at seventy, seventy-five, eighty, the big eighteen-wheelers thundering along on either side of you like moving walls, the exhaust, the noise, the heat. He'd come to Los Angeles with his new bride, with Andrea, because that was what she wanted — and it was what Sierra wanted too, or seemed to want. ("This place? You mean, like Peterskill? You've got to be joking, Dad-you really think there's a kid in America that wouldn't choose L. A. Over Peterskill?") He wouldn't kid himself-he wanted out too — and though Andrea moved in with him in the house he shared with his daughter, it was understood that she was a California girl, and once he got his affairs in order (read: sold everything at rock-bottom prices) and Sierra's school let out, they were heading west, as an environmentally correct, newly nuclear family. It might have been different if they'd got there in February, when the sun was pale as milk and the days were long cool tunnels full of light and bloom, but they arrived on the first of June-after truncating Sierra's seventh-grade experience by three and a half weeks — and it was hot. And smoggy. And the freeways were burning up.

And now he was out on the freeway again, in an unfamiliar car, looking to feed into the 405 North from the 101 East — and why couldn't they call the freeways by their proper names, the San Diego and Ventura? — a very pale and bristling Andrea at his side. Trucks swerved, cars shot randomly across lanes, engines coughed and roared and spat out fumes, oleander flashing red and white along the dividers, the palms gone shabby, garbage everywhere. "Jesus Christ," Tierwater swore, crushing the accelerator, "there's too many people in the world, that's what it is, and they're all going the same place we are-all the time. That's what gets to me-you can't even take a crap without six hundred people in line ahead of you."

"And 1 suppose Peterskill's better?"

"At least you could see the road. At least you felt like you were in control."

He swerved and lurched, hit the horn, hit the brakes, randomly punching buttons on the radio, swearing all the while. He was letting the little things get to him, because the big thing-Sierra-was something he didn't want to think about, not yet, not until the 405 became the 5 and he followed it all the long way up the spine of California to Oregon, where he wasn't welcome, definitely wasn't welcome. He had no plan. None whatever. He didn't even know what town she was in, though "Titansville" seemed a pretty good match for Titusville, ten or fifteen miles south of Grants Pass, and that was good enough for him.

They spent the night at a public campground near Yreka, Tierwater dropping off into a dense dreamless sleep the minute he'd unfurled his groundcloth and sleeping bag. It was 3:00 A. M. The sky was open to the stars, not a light showing anywhere, out of the car, low whispers, and that was all till he opened his eyes on ten o 'clock in the morning and Andrea sitting cross-legged beside him. Her face was a deep drenched blue, the color imparted to it by the light sifting through the walls of the tent, and she was studying a map. "You slept like a zombie," she said. "Or no, not a zombie-zombies don't sleep at all, do they?"

He was almost his usual self, and this was his wife, and he loved her. He was almost in Oregon. He was alive. It was the morning of the day on which he was going, to see his daughter, one way or the other.

"Au contraire," he said, "they sleep all day, in their graves. Or for weeks or months at a time. Until the houngan summons them to rise up and commit acts of mayhem, that is. And can you really blame them — the zombies, I mean?" A jay screeched from someplace nearby. He smelled coffee. Heard children-high, colliding voices and running feet. "What does the map say?"

The map said what he already knew: that Titusville was in Josephine County. Period. It didn't indicate whether there was a school there, a gas station, a firehouse or a café where some innocuous tourist or long-lost relative could inquire about farmers who took in foster children. That was all right. He felt good for the first time since he'd stuck his feet in that dark trough of cement-at least he was moving, at least he was doing something. He'd find her. He knew he would. It was the next step he was foundering on: what then? He pictured her out in some cinematic barnyard, all the colors true, geese bobbing, hogs snuffling, and Sierra in the middle of it, pitching hay in a pair of bib overalls in the company of four or five cross-eyed orphans and snub-nosed runaways. And then he saw himself emerging from the car — and he was in her point of view now-emerging from the car in triumph, radiant and tall and unafraid, climbing the fence, striding across the yard and taking her in his arms.

They made Titusville by noon, Tierwater too wrought up to eat breakfast, Andrea placidly munching a stale American cheese on white and washing it down with a Diet Coke as the scenery scrolled by. The town was anonymity itself, fast-food outlets creeping out along the highway, an uneven mouthful of older buildings, hand — lettered signs advertising antiques and going-out-of-business sales, old men on a bench, adolescents clustered around a sleek white convertible. Andrea sauntered into the local gas station and let her halter top do the talking while Tierwater sat hunched in the car, disguised as a timber person (jeans, workboots, plaid shirt and 49ers cap). The car itself was a disguise, a turd-brown Chevy Nova with some damage to both rear fenders, the trunk and the rear bumper, loaned out for the occasion by one of the Los Angeles chapter's volunteers (the housewife, divorced, angry, name of Robin Goldman). He watched Andrea's movements through the crusted window of the garage as she leaned across the counter in black spandex, a refugee from the ballet school in Eugene, and worked the two teenagers there like a fortune-teller. ("You know those foster kids?"" Who, you mean out the Billrays'?" "Who'd you think I was talking about? They're out there past the school, aren't they?"" Uh-huh, second right, Cedar Street." "Big white house?"" Naw, it's blue now. ") It wasn't what Tierwater had been expecting-no farm, no cows, pigs, chickens, goats, not even a dog-just a big shining turquoise house set in a clearing hacked out of the woods. There was a vegetable garden to one side of it, with some sort of plow or rototiller abandoned in the high grass in back of a substantial stand of corn, and a shuttered shed out on the road that advertised SWEET CORN, TOMATOES, SUMMER SQUASH, but nobody, not even a suburban teenager under duress, would describe the place as a farm. A yellow Subaru was parked in the driveway. The windows caught the sun and held it. Nothing moved, not so much as a bird flitting across the lawn or a butterfly suspended over the peonies.

They drove by twice, once at normal speed so as not to arouse suspicion, and then very slowly, falteringly, like the lost tourists they were planning to impersonate. "Go ahead, Ty," Andrea prodded him, "pull into the driveway already — if she's there, maybe we'll see her, signal to her or something. If she's not, she's not. We'll dig some more. Okay? So pull in already."

Tierwater, in this moment of truth, found himself strangely — and sadly-unable to act. He'd brought the car to a stop on the blacktop road just past the driveway, and when he looked over his shoulder to see about backing it up, discovered that there was another car behind him. Directly behind him-right on his bumper, in fact. The driver was an old lady-sixty, seventy, it was all the same to him, senile no doubt, a puff of white hair and some sort of kerchief round her neck. She was just parked there, staring at him, through the outsized lenses of her glasses as if she were at the drive-in waiting for the show to start. He flagged his arm-go on, pass me, I'm just parked here for the rest of my life — but she didn't seem to comprehend the gesture. Out of the corner of his eye he caught movement now up at the house, activity around the Subaru, a kid-not Sierra — and a trim-looking man in a short-sleeved white shirt, slam, slam, the distant soft concussion of both doors shutting simultaneously, followed by the sound of an engine revving. Another gesture for the old lady, but she was planted behind the wheel of the car — a Cadillac of the fin era — and worse, the car was blocking the driveway.

"What now?" Tierwater demanded, his teeth clenched, stomach churning, all the many mountains of shit in the world piled high around him He was looking at Andrea, looking for someone to blame, and she was the prime candidate. By default. "That could be them-that could be them right there-what do I do?"

The Subaru had come to a stop at the end of the drive, two mild faces caught behind the untinted glass of the windshield, looks of mild surprise for the old lady in the Cadillac, but no horn-hammering impatience or big-city sneers, the broadest of neighborly grins already blooming. The trim man — and Tierwater was calculating now-looked to be about thirty, blond hair parted on the left side, a pair of smoked discs clamped over prescription lenses, the sort of thing a building inspector might wear on his day off Next to him was a boy of sixteen or seventeen, eyes gouged into his head as if by the thumbs of a ceramic sculptor, flattop haircut, peach-colored. Andrea stepped out of the car.

"Hello, there," she said, shading her eyes with one hand and shaking out a conciliatory wave with the other. She was moving forward, along the weed-choked ditch that was the shoulder, addressing the windshield of the Subaru rather than the hunched and frozen form of the old lady. "I wonder if you could help us-we seem to've gotten lost. We're looking for" — and here she gave a glance with a smile wrapped round it to the old lady, for form's sake, before coming back to the Subaru- "for the Wilsons' place. Ted and Dodie Wilson?" And then she stopped, just beyond the Cadillac, not five feet from the Subaru's bumper.

The trim man-five eight, one forty-five, ironed right into his clothes-stepped out of the car, the neighborly smile turned up till it could roast meat. The door swung wide, and then the other door creaked open and the boy was standing there on the near side of the car. And what was he? Heavier than Tierwater had thought, meaty arms, the high-school linebacker's neck and shoulders, a look of nullity behind the smile. "The Wilsons?" The trim man said — but let's call him the building inspector, because that's what he was, then and forever, in Tierwater's mind anyway. "Wilkerson I know, and Westons, but nobody named Wilson. Not around here anyways." Turning to the boy. "You know of any Wilsons at school, Donnie?"

Donnie didn't know of any. Tierwater got out of the car. "Hi," he said, the length of his car and the old lady's Cadillac between them. "Sorry about this, but I guess I stopped to look at the map and the lady" — a gesture for the old lady, white gloves clamped on the steering wheel, eyes locked straight ahead-she seemed to just stop here behind me and, well, I don't know — I mean, I can move the car…"

Smiling wider. "Oh, that's Mrs. Toffler. She's all right. A little confused, is all. Nothing to worry about." And now the building inspector was on the blacktop, moving round the fins and up the long coruscating fender to the driver's-side door — helpful; helpful, friendly and neighborly — the whole world a sweet and peaceable place.

That was when Sierra burst through the gleaming turquoise door of the house behind them and fled out onto the lawn, a dog and two scrawny teenaged girls at her heels. "Dad!" She screamed. "Dad, Dad!"

Tierwater froze. He watched as a new look came into the building inspector's eyes, a look that said, Dad? Who Dad? The man was clearly bewildered. He glanced from Tierwater to Andrea and then over his shoulder at the charging trio and the yapping dog, and all the while Sierra kept shouting out that most intimate and filial sobriquet, her bare feet flapping on the lawn like precious white fish, her braces gleaming in the sunlight, her face saturated with a martyr's ecstasy. Tierwater felt his heart move in his chest, a deep-buried tectonic movement that made him shudder in every cell: the imposture was over. Time to improvise.

Meanwhile, the building inspector had begun to show signs of a dawning grasp of the situation, his eyes hardening first with suspicion, then anger and, finally, outrage. Behind him, still poised at the open passenger's door of the Subaru, the bull-necked kid settled into his shoulders as if awaiting the referee's whistle. "You, you," sputtered the man, the building inspector, his face gone red suddenly, "you know you can't, you're not allowed-"

Sierra was coming on, pumping her arms, shouting, the dog-some kind of terrier-making a game of it, the other two girls falling back and jeering in their piping, incomprehensible adolescent voices. Tierwater glanced at Andrea, who hadn't moved a muscle, Andrea, his ally and accomplice, and what was her face telling him? I told you so, that's what. Her face was telling him that he was in the biggest trouble of his life, far bigger than anything Judge Duermer or Sheriff Bob Hicks had dished out yet-he was in direct violation of a court order and he'd better get a good long look at his daughter because he wasn't going to see her again till she was eighteen, not even a glimpse, not after this. "No contact!" The building inspector barked, and he was moving rigidly along the length of the Cadillac and past the sculpture of the old woman locked at the wheel, moving toward Tierwater with what could only be violent intent, and here came the bull-necked kid in a linebacker's trot down the apron of the lawn, even as Sierra, in perfect synchronization with the dog, leapt the ditch and threw herself into her father's arms.

"No!" Was all the building inspector could say, and he was vehement on this point of law and order and propriety, into the fray now and one hand locked on Tierwater's right arm and the other on Sierra's, trying to thrust them apart with the sort of effort he might have used on a pair of recalcitrant elevator doors.

(I have to say that I've never really enjoyed strangers taking hold of my arm, and that alone would have been enough to set me off, but this four-square WASP of a child-harboring Oregonian Child Protective Services person was trying to separate me from my daughter — and to what end, I could only imagine. Layer Andrea on top of that and the kid with the flattop and the terminally yapping, heat-seeking dog, and I don't think you could blame me for reacting in a way that would have disappointed Sheriff Bob Hicks.) At first, Tierwater merely tried to protect his daughter, clutching her to him and interposing the mantle of his upper back between the sticks of her arms and the building inspector's clawing hands, but that was the stratagem of a rapidly dissolving moment. She'd fallen into his arms. He wanted to hold her, wanted to protect her. Was that a crime? He didn't think so, but before he could consider the issue or even draw his breath, the bull-necked kid was there, thick wrists and fat swollen fingers jerking at Sierra's shoulders, tug of war, the dog coming in low to complicate matters by snapping at Tierwater's unprotected shins and drooping socks. For one long suspended moment, they were doing a dance, all four of them, arms wrestling with arms, feet shuffling on the blacktop, grunting and straining while the dog played throat music and Andrea and the two skinny-legged girls shouted instructions from the sidelines, and then Tierwater found himself in another arena altogether.

He looked into the bull-necked kid's swollen face and saw release. That was all. Nothing he'd planned or even thought about, but when he brought his fist in over his daughter's shoulder and planted it in the center of that looming fat-constricted face, he felt himself sail right off the ground, as if gravity no longer operated on him. The kid fell magically away, all two hundred linebacking pounds of him, even as Tierwater turned to the building inspector. The man was still clawing at him, a look of anguish and prayerful appeal on his face, but the elbow Tierwater slashed to his windpipe was like a wing, fluttering and flapping and holding him aloft and out of harm's way.

He was thinking nothing, his posture defensive, but his daughter was behind him now and Andrea somehow in the driver's seat of the turd-brown car, shouting, "Ty! Ty!" He looked at Sierra. Her face was bloodless and raw. She glanced over her shoulder at Andrea, and then looked back at the girls on the lawn and the turquoise house and the building inspector writhing on the blacktop with both hands wrapped around his throat, and she broke for the car with a tight little smile of triumph on her face. As for Tierwater, high as be was, he had no choice but to sidestep the kid when the kid came back at him in the spastic sort of lunge he might have made at a tackling dummy, and for good measure he gave the dog a deft kick that sent it skittering into the ditch with a yelp of surprise. And so what if he could see the lips of both the skinny girls working as they repeated the license-plate number to fix it in their memories? So what?

He had his daughter back now, and nobody was going to take her away again.

For the first ten miles, no one said a word. Gas fled down the throat of the carburetor, the tires screeched, Andrea hammered the accelerator and fought the wheel with spasmodic jerks of her big hands, and everything-farmhouses, sagging pickups, shirts, faces, clothes on a line, bark, branches, leaves-clapped by the windows like images in a rifled deck. She was going too fast, her eyes jumping at the rearview mirror, the borrowed car rocketing down one country lane after another, and there was nothing to say. Because this was no passive resistance, no peaceful protest, this was no mere violation of a court order or even the willful destruction of private property along the shoulder of Interstate 5-this was the serious business now Tierwater knew it, Andrea knew it, and even Sierra, clinging to him in the back seat and struggling to breathe through the muffled hoarse rasp of her sobs, must have known it. There was no coming back from this.

They drove on. A meadow appeared and vanished, two horses, a culvert, a narrow bridge. Andrea swerved through a series of S-turns, the car like a big oarless boat shooting down the rapids of some wild river, and finally Tierwater found himself breaking the silence with a pointed question: "Where're we going?"

She gave him a wild glance, her eyes extruded and hard. "Out of here, what do you think? You're the one — if you hadn't pushed it, if you didn't-you had to see her, didn't you? You couldn't leave well enough alone. I told you Fred was going to take care of it, didn't I?"

"Fred," he spat, all but obliterating the name under the weight of his disgust. His face had come up out of its huddle. The countryside rushed by. He was scared, of course he was, but he was exhilarated too-he'd done something, finally done something — and his heart was racing faster than the Nova's straining engine. He was worked up, shot full of adrenaline, wild and angry and not to be denied. "All right, sure, let's argue about it. Let's talk about whose idea it was to go into the flicking Siskiyou in the first place, all right? Because that's going to do us a lot of good right now." A car loomed up on the left and shot by with a soft whoosh. Somewhere behind them the phone lines were busy, very busy. "But where are we going? You know where you are?"

He watched her shoulders, furious shoulders, as she dug into the glove compartment. It took her a minute, and then she flung a map over the seat. "You figure it out. You're the lunatic. You're the one they're after."

That was when Sierra lifted her face from the cavity of his left arm. She'd buried it there when he leapt into the car and held his arms out to her, and through every jolt and dip of the road he'd felt the heat of her breath on his skin, the gentle swaying orbit of her body as the centrifugal forces threatened to pull her away from him. The car hit a bump and he watched her head wobble on the uncertain fulcrum of her neck. She was wearing mascara, and the tears had smeared it across her face in a dark wet paste. "They took my nose ring," she sobbed. "They, they said it wasn't Christian."

He intoned the automatic words- "It's all right, honey" — and Andrea intoned them too, all the rage gone out of her voice. The car decelerated a moment in sympathy, but then she floored it again.

"I mean, they were horrible people-you wouldn't believe it. They made you sit straight up in your chair like some sort of marine or something, and, and" — she broke down again, and Tierwater felt his stomach sink- "and they made you pray before you could eat!"

That was something, he was thinking-prayer, no less — but before he could absorb this information, before he could chew it over and let his eyes narrow over the implications and ramifications of this particular brand of child abuse ("They didn't touch you, did they, honey? I mean, nobody laid a hand on you in any way, did they?"), Andrea let out a low exclamation of surprise. "Oh, shit!" She said, and gave the wheel a sudden savage spin. In the next moment he was thrown into his daughter, both of them rocked across the seat in a helpless surge of dead weight and flailing limbs. He snatched at the window crank for support, but it came off in his hand, one more useless scrap of metal.

When he regained his equilibrium he saw that they were on a dirt road now, the car fishtailing from one side to the other, tires spewing gravel, a contrail of dust spinning out behind them — and what else? What was that sound? It came to him with a jolt of recognition: it was a siren — a siren! — Screaming in the distance. Andrea fought the wheel and the car skidded to a stop in a clump of weeds just off the road, and they all three turned to stare out the back window at the intersection behind them. Tierwater saw a pall of sunstruck dust, a tunnel of pine, the natural world reaching out to them. His heart was pounding. The siren screamed, and screamed again. And then he saw it, a red streak flashing past the mouth of the dirt road, hook and ladder, men in T-shirts and hardhats-one glimpse and it was gone. "It's a firetruck," he said, and he couldn't seem to catch his breath. "It's only a firetruck."

The sky had begun to close up, a low dirty rug of cloud stretched out on a line and beaten till the bright corners went dark. Tierwater lay on his back in a nest of grass, the wadded-up plaid shirt supporting his head, the 49ers cap perched on his chest like a sleeping pet, and watched the clouds unravel. He smelled chlorophyll, mold, the vague tangy scent of wildflowers he didn't know the names of. In half an hour, it would be raining.

Twenty feet away, Sierra and Andrea were busy scooping mud out of a culvert alongside the road and flinging it at the car. - They were aiming for a Jackson Pollock effect, an intricate web of abstraction that would somehow transmute the car into something harmless and inconspicuous, something a local might drive, with plates so muddied you couldn't tell at a glance whether they'd been issued in California or Oregon — or Saskatchewan, for that matter. Tierwater could have told them they were wasting their time — the rain would wash the car clean, no doubt about it — but he didn't want to dampen their enthusiasm. Besides, it gave them something to do, good healthy activity to while away the hours till dark, when they would make a run for the California border and get lost in the traffic that swept down out of the north in dense hurtling clots of steel and glass.

Andrea was making a game of it, and Sierra, with her mother's moon face and churning awkward legs, was laughing, actually laughing, as the mud flew and Robin Gold-man's Chevy Nova became a work of art. This was good-she'd been scared, no doubt about it, scared and confused, the slab-faces whispering in one ear, the cops and her lawyer in the other — and if the past month had been hell for Tierwater, he could only imagine what it must have been like for her. But Andrea was the charm. Andrea took her in her arms and they sat down and talked it out, sharing a stale sandwich and a can of tepid root beer, and Tierwater was right there, his arms around both of them, so moved he could barely speak.

"I know there's no way we can ever make it up to you, honey," Andrea said, "and its my fault, my fault entirely, you have to understand that. Your father didn't want to take you-he was right, and I should have listened, because you know we would never do anything to consciously hurt you or even if we thought there was the slightest risk… But I never dreamed… These are real sons of bitches we're dealing with here, major — league, and they'll do anything to bring us down. You'll be stronger for this, you will."

(It was a dubious proposition, and it made no mention of the future, of the safe house, the underground, the assumed names and paranoia and the shuttling from one school to another — but my daughter was only thirteen years old and so glad to be rescued, to be out of the iron hands of the do-gooders, she never questioned it. And how do you give birth to a radical? I could write the manual.) Sierra ducked her head, the half-eaten sandwich in one hand, her eyes like wolves' eyes, darker than the sky, wild already. "I know," she whispered.

But now Tierwater was lying in the grass and the solemnity was over. His wife and daughter were splashing the car with mud, giggling, crying out, feinting at one another with dripping palms, their bare feet black and glistening. He lay back and watched the clouds, smelled the rain, and it shouldn't have surprised him in the least that it was Jane he was thinking of, because she was the one he couldn't rescue, didn't rescue, the one who slipped away from him for good.

How do you want your pancakes-that's what she'd asked him on the morning of the day she died, and he could hear her voice like a half-remembered melody floating through his head-burned black or semi-black? He saw her in a pall of smoke-smoke that rose around her and ascended into the trees in thin white coils. She was wearing shorts, hiking boots, a New York Rangers sweatshirt-she was an upstate girl, from Watertown, hockey her passion. He hated hockey — a bunch of pumped-up yahoos slamming each other into the boards and grunting out violent epithets in Quebecois French while the ice held its breath — but he loved her. That was the fact, though he hardly knew it himself and never expressed it aloud except in moments of erotic confusion. They didn't talk about abstractions, they talked about the baby, his job, her job, they talked about marmots and grizzly bears and what they were going to have for breakfast.

Give her dirty legs-scraped, scabbed, mosquito-bittenand hands that could have been cleaner. And smoother. A smudge under her left eye that glistened like a scar. Limp hair. Clothes that smelled of smoke and food and her own rich musk. Give her all that, because they were camping, Glacier Park, special permit, and you could wash all you wanted, but you couldn't escape the dirt, not under those conditions.

He wanted his pancakes semi-black, and he communicated that much from the folds of his sleeping bag, which was laid out next to hers on a neoprene pad in the tent that looked like a big amanita mushroom sprung up out of the earth. It was raining, a soft misting rain that stained the trunks and silvered the needles of the trees. The night before, in the brooding black ringing silence of 11:30 RM., They'd violated the chastity oath they'd taken on entering the park a week earlier: no sex in grizzly territory. No sex. That was common sense, and they'd discussed it dispassionately on the plane into Kalispell, and with real feeling in the motel room the night before they hiked into the back country-she was all skin and heat and hot ratcheting breath and they must have done it ten times against the deprivation to come. But two girls had been killed here-maimed and killed and one of them partially eaten — and they were taking no chances.

This was the wild, or as wild as it got on the planet earth in 1979. Tierwater's heart beat just a little bit faster to know that there were creatures out there that could and would attack a human being and maybe even eat him, big eight- and nine-hundred-pound bears that could outrun a racehorse and outsmell a pack of bloodhounds, real serial killers, the top of the food chain. It thrilled Jane too. This wasn't Westchester County, where the most dangerous thing you'd run into was a black widow in the shower or maybe the quick-moving shadow of a copperhead sucking itself into a crevice in a fieldstone wall. This was raw. This was nature, untamed and unsanitized. "You know what the scientific name for the grizzly is?" He'd asked her as the plane dipped its wings and the landing gear thumped into place. "Ursus arctos Hornbills? Isn't that a gas?"

It was, it was. And he could see it in the sheen of her eyes and the way her face opened up to him. "And those girls? Is it true they were menstruating?"

"You have to realize these things make their living by smell — they have to sniff out spring beauties, whitebarkpine nuts, carrion that's hardly even dead yet. Because they can never have too much to eat, and their whole life is a trip to the salad bar with a nice piece of meat on the side. So yes. The girls were menstruating, and maybe wearing perfume too. A grizzly could smell it — the blood-from miles away. It's like ringing a dinner bell-"

"Come on."

"It is. And that's why there's no sex. They can smell the secretions."

"Come on."

"No, I mean it. Just last summer, right here in Glacier, a couple was killed in their tent. At night. They were-at least this is what the investigators say — they were doing it."

So the pancakes. The pan was black, inside and out, soot like paint running right up the handle. Tierwater slapped mosquitoes and choked down the Jane-fried flapjacks that tasted like incinerated wood pulp and watched his wife eat her portion. There was no syrup. Syrup was too potent an attractant for bears. The beverage of choice? Pond water, fresh from the tin cup.

Of course, what was a potent attractant and what was not really hadn't come into play the night before. They'd been out there a week now-one week down, one to go-collecting the scat of the yellow-bellied marmot in Glad sandwich bags. Jane was working toward her Ph. D. In wildlife management, and one of her professors was studying the dietary predilections of the marmot in Glacier National Park for some reason fathomable only to herself. But, for two weeks, Dr. Rosenthal had to be at a Sciuridae/Rodentia/Mustela conference in Toronto, and Tierwater and Jane jumped at the opportunity to spell her, though it meant leaving Sierra with her grandmother in Watertown. That hurt. And yet there was never any real debate about it-this was a chance for Jane to do fieldwork and to score some bonus points with her friend and mentor, Dr. Sandee Rosenthal, the foremost marmot-person in the world, and it was a chance for Tierwater and his wife to be alone together, romantically alone, in a romantic setting. A second honeymoon, nothing less.

No sex, though-that would have been crazy.

Still, when Jane lit up a joint and slid bare-legged into his sleeping bag, he couldn't seem to keep his hands from making a mute appeal to her — and she seemed to be having the same problem he was. She pulled him to her. They kissed, long and hard, and then, panting and hot, they forced themselves apart. They lay there under the canopy of the tent, fighting for self-control- "We can fool around, can't we? Maybe just a little?" — Listening to the condensation drip from the trees as the fire outside settled into its embers, and what with the stillness and the pot and the electricity of their bodies, things got out of hand. They hadn't seen a grizzly, hadn't heard one, hadn't seen tracks or scat or stumps gutted for ants. They took a chance. They couldn't help themselves. And it was all the more intense for the danger of it-for the fractured resolve, for the tease — and when it was over they made themselves get up out of the sleeping bag and follow the beam of the flashlight down to the pond, where they slipped into the icy envelope of the water to scrub themselves with scentless soap till their teeth chattered and their lips turned blue.

Tierwater chewed the cud of his pancakes, the atomized rain collecting in his hair, and stared up into the canopy of the trees, opening up to everything there was. He was feeling rich, feeling blessed, and — he was only twenty-nine then, so you'll have to forgive him-feeling all but invulnerable. When Jane cried out he almost laughed, it was so comical. "Oh!" She said, and that was all-just "Oh" — as if she'd been surprised in the dark or fallen out of bed. It wasn't "Oh, shit!" Or "Oh, fuck!" — Just "Oh." Jane didn't curse, couldn't bring herself to it, and though they'd played at being street-smart and tough when that was the thing to do and smoked countless bowls with countless stoners and shouted their lungs out in dark overheated clubs and reeling outdoor arenas, Jane clung to her core of small-town propriety. Tierwater always thought that if it weren't for him she would have grown up to be the kind of woman who sat on the PTA board and went to church in a veiled hat and white gloves. And he loved that, he loved that about her. The world was full of obscenity, full of hard cases, antichrists and nutballs-he didn't need that. Not at home. Not in a wife.

"Oh!" She cried, and she jumped up from the dish of pancakes as if she'd been stung. As if, he says — but that was exactly what had happened. A bee had stung her. Or not a bee — a yellow jacket, Yespula maculifrons, the gold — andblack-banded wasp the locals called a meat bee because of its love for burgers, steaks and chops fresh off the grill. Not to mention carrion.

It was almost funny. A bee sting. But the incredible thing was that Jane had gone through an entire life, all twenty-five years of it, without ever having been stung before — or not that her mother could remember anyway. So this wasn't funny, wasn't the casual mishap it might have been for 99 percent of the species, the lucky ones, the nonallergic and resistant. It was death, that's what it was. Though Tierwater, fully engaged in the bliss of natural being and chewing his cud of semi-blackened buckwheat meal, didn't yet realize it. He got up, of course, set down the tin plate and went to her, the fire smoking, the trees dripping, the swatted yellow jacket lying on its back in the dirt and kicking its six moribund legs as if it could live to sting another day.

Jane's face went red. Her eyes sank into their sockets and bounced back at him like two hard black balls. She couldn't seem to stop blinking. She couldn't catch her breath. All this, and still he had no idea, no conception, not the vaguest hint that the plug bad been pulled on everything he'd known as life to this moment. "What is it," he said, trying to laugh it off, "a bee sting? Is that it?"

She couldn't answer him. He held her-what else could he do? He'd never heard of anaphylactic shock, never heard of epinephrine or histamines, he knew from zero to nothing about first aid and CPR, and he was twelve miles from the nearest road. And, besides, it was only a bee sting. Yes, but her heart was trying to tear its way out of her chest even as he held her, and she wet herself, hot urine down her leg in a smear of dirt, the smell of it like vinegar burned in a pan, and here she was on the ground, on her side, vomiting up the blackened paste of the pancakes. Water, he brought her water, and cleared the hair away from her mouth, but there was nothing in her eyes and she was as cold as the dirt she was lying in.

He didn't know how long he sat there with her, alternately feeling for a pulse and trying to force air down her throat through the ache in his lungs, trying to make her breathe, stir, get up and walk it off, for Christ's sake. Prayers came back to him then, the faces of the dead, ora pro nobis, and though he was panicked — or because he was panicked-he couldn't bring himself to move her, even after the mist turned to drizzle and the drizzle to rain. Finally, though — and it must have been late in the afternoon-he pulled her up out of the mud and slid her over one shoulder, nothing heavier in the world, nothing, not stone or lead or all the mountains marching off in neat ranks to Canada. Down the trail then, dawn the trail to the trailhead, and out to the road and the car and the hospital in Whitefish. He brought her back, all the way back, out of the tall trees and the wet and the sting of the everlasting day, but it didn't matter to him or to anybody else, because he didn't bring her back alive.