A Friend of the Earth

Lompoc/Los Angeles, September — October 1991

It had to be one of the stranger transformations-from a penis sheath and limitless horizons to prison-issue cotton and a twelve-foot chain-link fence with concertina wire strung across the top. Tierwater let his legs dangle from the upper bunk in the room (not cell, room) he shared with Bill Driscoll, stock swindler, scam artist and interstate bilker of the elderly, and turned it over in his mind. Most offenders, white-collar or blue-, were either taken in the act or surprised in their own beds at 4:00 a. M., But how many went from a state of nature to civilization and incarceration in one fell swoop? Tierwater pictured some Wild West desperado hunkered over a jackrabbit stew one day and tossed into the Yuma Territorial Prison the next. Or the Bushmen themselves, run down on horseback and converted to slaves by their Boer masters. Or, even more poignantly, an animal captured in the wild, one of Uncle Sol's orangutans torn from the trees and fitfully gnashing at the alien mesh of the wire cage, the elephant trapped in the kraal and chained to a stake, the eagle with its wings clipped.

But if he felt like an animal, it wasn't a wild or even a feral one-no, he felt like a domesticated beast, a child's pony with its nose in the feedbag, the bloated dog curled up on a rug in front of the fireplace. For thirty days last year he'd subsisted on roots, insects and fish no longer than his index finger, and when they locked him up in here, he ate like three men, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, Boston cream pie, sloppy joes, pizza, spaghetti, french fries and onion rings, three scoops of ice cream with chocolate syrup and a can of root beer to wash it down. He was in possession of a belly for the first time in his life, and he'd even developed something resembling buttocks to fill out his prison-issue trousers. There was that, and the fact that this place-Club Fed, they called it-wasn't much more rigorous than Boy Scout camp. But Boy Scouts got to go home, and, however you sliced it, Tierwater was still in jail-locked up, incarcerated, separated from his wife and daughter and his checkbook and his cause — and he hadn't done a thing to deserve it.

They'd wanted to pin the fire on him — and the. Destruction of all that costly equipment belonging to Coast Lumber — but he got angry, got incensed, and denied everything with the self-righteous rage of the falsely accused, and, of course, they had no proof. Not a shred. Though they let Quinn in on the interrogation, and Quinn, rasping and nodding and scratching, was certain he was guilty, and did everything he could to prod the state and federal investigators into extending the list of charges. They didn't. Tierwater pled guilty to interstate flight and kidnapping, as per the plea bargain worked out by Fred and his team of wild-eyed, paper-shufflers, the other charges against him dropped in both federal and state courts. He was sentenced to three hundred and sixty days at the Federal Prison Camp in Lompoc, the state sentence to be served concurrently with the federal.

At first he'd been glad to come in out of the cold, happy just to find himself in a bed at night or following his nose to the dining hall three times a day. He was dead to everything else, as if he were recuperating from a serious illness. He didn't even see the other inmates, didn't see their shuffling feet or their faces frozen in fear, lust, rage and hate. All he saw was the plate, the food, the Twix bar and the Milky Way at the prison commissary. That didn't last long. Four or five days maybe. A week. Then he began to notice the guards as if they'd materialized out of a dream, he saw the fence, the barred windows, the sly and all-knowing faces ranged round him like masks on a wall. He was a criminal. He was in jail. And though the other inmates learned to stay out of his way, though there were classes to attend in everything from Zen to auto mechanics to poetry writing and there were three blacktop tennis courts and a workout room at his disposal, the fact of his incarceration began to gnaw at him till he could barely sleep at night. This was what the system had done to him. The machine. Progress.

Each day was eternal, but not in the way of those shimmering, unconscious days in the wilderness when all his senses were on fire and every least rustle of the leaves screamed food in his brain, but in the way of stupefaction, of boredom so black and viscous it was like sludge poured through a funnel into a very small container. He read, he slept, he watched TV with the other emasculated idiots. Out of desperation, and because Fred said it could reduce his sentence (it didn't), he took a class called "Salutary Self-Expression and the Paradox of the Me" from an embittered unpublished poet who taught part-time at the local community college and confessed that he was "attracted to the criminal mind." He worked in the prison printshop, turning out government forms. He played cards, checkers, chess, Parcheesi, chewed gum, put model airplanes together from kits Andrea brought him. Three times a week he played savage stinging sets of tennis with a young bankrobber by the name of Amaury Benitez, who'd been arrested on his doorstep twenty minutes after passing a note to the teller scrawled on the back of one of his own deposit slips. At night, when Bill Driscoll's breathing derailed itself and fell away into the twisting tunnels of deep sleep, he thought of Andrea, naked in the wild, and masturbated in a slow dream, making it last as long as he could.

Well, he was at the end of all that now, due for release in twenty-six days. Twenty-six days. And then he could go back to his normal life, meeting with his parole officer every Monday and slipping out in the wee hours to do his bit to bring the whole system crashing down, and don't think he hadn't had plenty of time to draw up an exhaustive list of key players — the very props and supports of the machine-with Sheriff Bob Hicks, Judge Duertner and Siskiyou Lumber right at the top. Ah, yes: freedom. And what was the day like out there beyond the barred windows and the chain-link fence? Sunny and cool, with an ocean breeze that smelled of sea wrack and clams-geoducks-dug wet from the sand and minced for chowder.

As Tierwater eased himself down from the bed so as not to wake Bill Driscoll, who seemed intent on sleeping out his sentence, he felt good, renewed, ready for anything. This was Saturday, visiting day, and he was expecting Andrea and Sierra in the early afternoon. He'd kiss his wife-once at the beginning of the visit, and once at the end, as sanctioned by the regulations — and he'd pat his daughter's hand and listen to her go on about school, boys and the mall and how she was so totally glad to be out of that hick town and the whole Sarah Dorkwater thing. He wanted to open up to her, to tell her how much he missed her and how he was going to make everything up to her as soon as he got out, but he couldn't; she always seemed so muted in the visitors' hall, intimidated by the place — and, he began to suspect, by her father too. He stared across the table at her, and didn't know what to say.

He saw her once a month, and each time she was a new person, nothing like the scrawny red-faced infant he'd thrown over his shoulder like a rug, or the little girl slashing away at the out-of-tune violin while the sun crashed through the trees, or even the loose-limbed teenager playing Monopoly on the steps of Ratchiss' cabin. She was growing up without him. She was fifteen now, nearly as tall as Andrea, and with the flowering figure of a woman, and he had so much to tell her. Or he thought he did. But when she was actually there, sitting across the table from him, and Bill Driscoll was complaining in a thunderous voice about the food to the bob-nosed little exercise freak who was his wife and Amaury Benitez's mother was sobbing into a handkerchief the size of a beach towel, he couldn't seem to summon any advice, fatherly or otherwise.

But now, now he hitched up his pants and ambled down the hall and out the door into the courtyard, stunned all over again by the reach of the sky and the feel of the sun on his face, and he didn't have a worry. Twenty-six days. It was nothing. He'd move into the house Andrea had rented for them in Tarzana and mow the lawn and take the trash out, and he'd drive Sierra to school in the morning and be there for her in the afternoon, and he'd take her shopping, for ice cream, to the movies, and it would be like it used to be, before Teo and Sheriff Bob Hicks came onto the scene. Yes. And then there was Andrea. He'd love her in the flesh-all night, every night — and not in the pathetic theater of his mind.

A couple of the inmates were sunning themselves against the south wall of the dormitory-Anthony Imbroglio, a small-time gangster from Long Beach, and his muscle, a perpetually smirking fat-headed goon by the name of Johnny Taradash — and Tierwater gave them a noncommittal nod, not friendly exactly, but not disrespectful either. That was the thing here, respect. Even though the place was for nonviolent and first-time offenders-nothing like the maximum — or even medium-security prisons, where your fellow inmates were armed robbers, killers and gang members and you were locked in cells on a cellblock just like in an old George Raft movie-you could still get hurt here. For all the overweight accountants, pigeon-chested scam artists and inside traders with flat feet and staved-in eyes, there were drug offenders too, muscle-bound high-school dropouts, ethnic groups with gang affiliations-black, Latino, Native American — and all of them were angry, and they all pumped iron instead of worrying about their investment portfolios.

At the end of Tierwater's first week, Johnny Taradash had come to him and suggested he might want to have Andrea deposit a hundred dollars a month in Anthony Imbroglio's account at First Interstate in Los Angeles. For his own protection, that is. Tierwater was weak still, skinny as a refugee, but his temper-that uncontainable flood of rage that came up in him like Blitzkrieg at the most inopportune times-was as muscular as ever. He told Johnny Taradash to fuck off, and Johnny Taradash let out a weary sigh and began tearing up the room in a slow methodical way, ripping the covers off books, crumpling magazines, that sort of thing, and he left Tierwater gasping for breath on the concrete floor. The next day Tierwater smuggled a wrench and screwdriver out of the printshop and spent the better part of the afternoon removing a dull-gray scuffed metal leg from the desk in his room. He lingered in the doorway that evening, while Bill Driscoll turned to the wall and moaned in his sleep and the shadows solidified in the trees beyond the window, till he caught sight of Johnny Taradash's big head floating down the hall from the TV room, just behind the sleek, neatly barbered form of his boss. He waited. Held his breath. Then stepped out and hit Johnny Taradash flat across the plane of his face, swinging for the fences with everything he had. After that, there was respect.

He'd almost reached the visitors' hall when Radovan Divac, the Serbian chess fiend, came at him out of nowhere, demanding a game. Divac was a gangling, morose-looking character with a nose like a loaf of French bread and a pair of negligible eyes who'd tried to rob a federal credit union with a water pistol. "Come on, Ty," he pleaded, "I give you queen and, and — knight's bishop. Fi 'dollar, you beat me."

"Sorry, Rado," he said, brushing past him, "I've got visitors."

The Serb held up a fist choked with black pieces. "And the rook — I give you both rook. Fi 'dollar, come on!"

Tierwater gave his name to the guard at the door of the visitors' facility and went on into the long low rectangular room with its wrung-out light, its smell of flooding glands and the dust that hung eternally in the air. A segmented table divided the room: on one side were women in dresses, makeup and heels, accompanied by the occasional squirming infant or fiercely scrubbed toddler; on the other were the prisoners. Tierwater took one of the only two seats available-on the far end, next to a guard named Timson who must have weighed three hundred pounds. They were like umpires, the guards-bloated, titanic men with dead faces who called all the strikes balls and the balls strikes, enemies of the game and the players alike. Tierwater had learned not to expect much from them. He was listening to one of the new inmates tell his wife or girlfriend how thoroughly he was going to fuck her when he got out in six months-Right on down to the spaces in between your toes, baby-when Andrea and Sierra came through the door.

Andrea was wearing heels and a tight green dress with spaghetti straps that showed off her arms and shoulders. Sierra, in baggy jeans, high-tops and a sweatshirt that featured the name of her high school stamped across the front of it, stood against the wall just inside the door while one of the guards-another flesh-monster born of doughnuts and Kentucky Fried-frisked Andrea for contraband. Up and down her front with the portable metal-detector, both sides, now turn around, the wand re-creating each dip and bulge, the hair falling across her face in a shimmering, fine white-blond sheet, every prisoner watching with that starved prison light in his eyes, even the ones with their pregnant sixteen-year-old girlfriends propped up across from them like tombstones. Then Andrea was crossing the room, everything in motion, and Tierwater stood to place his hands flat on the table and lean into her for the kiss.

The kiss was the big feature of every visitors' hall encounter, and every inmate lingered over it, dreaming of another place and another time, savoring the female smell and the female taste as long as humanly possible. Tierwater was no different. Three hundred and thirty-four days without sex. That was paying your debt to society, all right. With interest. He clung to her with his lips as long as he could, and then they were sitting on opposite sides of the table, his erection throbbing insistently, and they talked about the things that counted for nothing, the mundane things, the things of the world outside the wire. "The deal's all but done," she said, "What do you mean — the shopping center '?"

"Uh-huh. Teo knew somebody back east-remember I told you last time? — and he came in and got it closed. No reflection on that Realtor you were stuck on, but she was a low-grade moron with about as much chance of selling that place as I've got of being named premier of China-"

"Elsa was a friend of my father."

"Yeah, well, she couldn't have sold that place if it was the last piece of property on the East Coast. She was tired. She was old, Ty — I mean, what is she: Sixty? Seventy?"

"What'd we get, just out of curiosity? I mean, this is what we're going to be living on for the rest of our lives, that's all. No big deal."

She pursed her lips. Shifted her buttocks. Let her hair fall and then swept it back again. "One three," she said.

For a vivid moment he saw the place he'd abandoned, the Mongolian barbecue that used to be a dry cleaner that used to be a notions shop, the dirty-windowed vacancy of the deserted drugstore, the model shop he'd haunted as a brainless teenager, the yarn store, the pet shop with its grimy aquariums and enervated birds and its smell of superheated death. It was a prime property, or at least it used to be, back in the sixties, when his father built the place. One three. Well, one three was better than nothing, and who would be crazy enough to buy the place anyway-even for half the price?

"That doesn't include the office building and all that parcel," she was saying.

He was doing the math. One three minus the six-hundredthousand second mortgage and the forty-odd for the Realtor's fee and the taxes on top of that-it would still leave them a nice piece of change. How many flyers could they print up with that? How many culverts could they block?

"Or the house, though we did get one low-ball bid on that, and the property out back of the development is something we-you-should sit on. That's going to go through the roof one of these days, I know it is…"

Then there was Sierra. Andrea got up and Sierra took her place, slouching across the room and dropping into the chair as if she'd been struck by paralysis, the other inmates moistening their lips and shooting her covert glances-she was a woman, she was, and for half the pedophiliac bastards it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Flesh, that's all they cared about it, flesh and orifices. He wanted to get up and punch somebody. Hurt them. Make them pay.

"Hi, Dad," she whispered.

Bill Driscoll had apparently roused himself from his dreams in time for visiting hours. Tierwater heard him before he saw him-he was three seats down, leaning into the table with both elbows while his wife, Bunny, sat across from him, her posture so rigid she might have been nailed to the seat. "Some of those, what do you call them, caramels?" He boomed. "Like you get in the supermarket with the little scoop? And those other chewy things I like, with the three layers and the coconut shreds? A pound bag. Of each."

"What," Tierwater said, "no kiss?"

Sierra glanced down at her lap, and her face was a legitimate miracle, the silken eyelids, the lashes thick and dark and mascara-free, his mother's nose, Jane's eyes. Then she stood, and he stood, and they placed their hands flat on the table, and pecked their mutual kisses. "No makeup," he observed, settling back into the chair. "Is it because of" — he nodded at the long row of chairs and the inmates, mostly young, crouched over them and leaning into the table as if into a wind that would suck them out the door to freedom- "because of them?"

"I'm a vegan now," she said.

"So?"

"That means no animal products of any kind, no eggs, no milk even. And makeup-you know what they do to those poor lab animals just to test it? I mean, eyeliner-you really think a rabbit, hundreds of rabbits, should have to die just for us to smear up our eyes? Ever hear of the Draize test? Did you?"

He shrugged.

"They put these chemicals in the animals' eyes — the stuff they're going to use in mascara and eyeliner? — and they superconcentrate it to see what would happen if some lady like used twelve tons of it on her face, just to see if the rabbits and white mice'll go blind. You think that's right?"

Nothing was right. Not injecting chimps with the AIDS virus or creating mice with human immune systems or clear-cutting the Sierras. Of course it wasn't right. But none of that mattered in here. "No more gloom — and — doom '?" He said. "What about the Cure? And all your black clothes-did you donate them to the vampire club or something?"

"Dad," she said, and he knew it was all right.

"You walking the dog?" Bill Driscoll's voice, heavy with bass, rose above the general clamor. He should have been a radio announcer, Tierwater was thinking, one of those gonzo morning-drive types. Or, better yet, a TV evangelist. He certainly had the background for it. "Twice a day like you promised? Because, I'm telling you, she needs it, for her bladder, and I swear I'm not paying the vet bills-"

"Everything okay at school?" Tierwater said. "At home? You getting along with Andrea?"

Sierra nodded.

"Because you're one lazy-ass bitch, Bunny, you were born lazy, and if I'm stuck in here and you can't get your skinny ass off the couch twice a day-"

"I'm getting out soon, you know-twenty-six more days — and then it's going to be just like it used to be, you and me-"" — and Andrea."

"Yeah, and Andrea." He ducked his head and drew in a breath. "But I know I've dime some things I shouldn't have, and I really should have paid more attention to you, your needs, I mean — I should have put you first — and I'm going to do that as soon as I get out of here. I promise."

She was watching him now, the gray eyes, the sweet full-moon of her face, hair pulled back in a braid, her hands clasped in her lap. "You don't have to apologize to me, Dad. I think what you're doing — and Andrea and Teo too-is the greatest thing anybody could do. The only thing." She glanced up as Bunny Driscoll stifled a sharp sob, then came back to him. "I think you're a hero."

(What's the first thing you do when you get out of prison? Scoot your wife over and get behind the wheel of the car. What car? Any car. In my case, it was the new Jeep Laredo Andrea had bought me on the promise of real-estate cash, and the simple prosaic act of driving-of going where the whim takes you, of opening it up on 101 South and watching the hills and the trees roll by and all the law-abiding motorists fall away from you like leaves in a gutter-was the sweetest thing I'd ever known. I hammered it, pedal to the metal all the way, windows down, radio cranked, the sun stuck overhead and the ocean spread out ion the right, freshly spanked and blue as a gun barrel. Then it was the restaurant, a real restaurant, with prissy waiters and fish on the menu — and wine, wine in an iced bucket right there at hand. We ate outside, in the sun, then went to a movie, my wife and daughter and I, like real human beings. Finally, it was home, the new house, twelve-month lease, big lawn, pepper trees along the street, isn't this nice. Then bed. And sex.) But Tierwater had to face a gauntlet of reporters before he could get to the car, minicams whirring, mikes thrust in his face: Mr. Tierwater, Mr. Tierwater, hey, Ty, over here, Ty, Ty. Do you think the forests can be saved? Flow did they treat you in there? What about the spotted owl? Are you planning any new protests? Do you believe in nudism? Vegetarianism? Crystal power? He squeezed his daughter, squeezed his wife, kissed them both for the cameras, and he stood there outside the gates for half an hour giving speeches and pontificating and posing with Teo and the E. F.I Santa Barbara chapter president, famous birdwatchers and nationally known tree-huggers till Andrea whisked him away and he had the car keys in his hand and the car was rolling down the blacktop road to the freeway. "Tell me," he said, swinging round to rest his eyes first on his grinning wife and then on his worshipful daughter in the back seat, "did the Fox ever have it this good?"

No, the answer was no. Because there was no feeling like this, nothing in his vocabulary to express it. He was supercharged with emotion, dancing in his socks, rocking in his seat. Touch the accelerator and watch the car go, hit the brakes and feel it stop. In the morning, he sang in the shower and let the water run till it went cold. The toaster was a miracle, the smell of rye toast, the light in the windows. Every ordinary moment of every ordinary day made him want to cry for the beauty of it. Pushing the start button on the dishwasher, flicking the remote to bring the TV to life, standing under the walnut tree out back and watching the crowned sparrows flit through the branches: these were the expressions of the inestimable richness of his newly anointed life. The microwave made him weep. Beer in a six-pack. The bedspread.

Still, for all that-for all the exhilaration of those first few days and the steady trickle of interviewers at the door with their mikes and tape recorders and yellow pads, and for all his prison vows about overseeing Sierra's book reports and attending parent/teacher conferences and seeding and mowing and fertilizing and mulching like any other suburban drone-Tierwater was bored right on down to the hems of his socks before the week was out. Or it wasn't just boredom--prison was boring-it was more a restlessness, a feeling of emptiness and impotence, a growing certainty that all this was a charade. The animals were dying, the forests falling. There were scores to be settled.

He didn't say a word to anybody. Just waited till Andrea went off to work the phones at the E. E! Office half a mile up the street and Sierra was safely deposited at school, then rummaged through the garage for the watchcap and face paint, the crowbar, bolt-cutters and wrenches wrapped in black electrical tape to dull the kiss of metal on metal and the flashlight with the red nail polish smeared across the lens. And what were the terms of his parole? To remain within the city limits of Los Angeles, to report to his parole officer once a week, to protest nothing, demonstrate against nothing, abjure all tree-huggers and — spikers, and above all to steer clear of illegal activity of any kind. No extracurricular activities. No nightwork. No monkeywrenching. The judge made that abundantly clear.

Yes. Well, fuck the judge.

Black jeans, black T-shirt, black hiking boots: Tierwater looked like any other middle-aged Angeleno climbing aboard the RTD bus at the end of the block. He set the backpack-black and logoless-on the seat beside him and watched the mini-malls, restaurants, discount houses and tire shops scroll by the crusted windows till Budget Car presented itself amid a field of humped and gleaming automobiles. Inside, he was transformed into Tom Drinkwater, and though he knew it wouldn't wash if he was caught, he handed the man at the counter a Tom Drinkwater Visa card and showed him Tom Drinkwater's California driver's license, replete with a stunned-looking portrait of himself fixed in the lower left-hand corner.

There wasn't much on the radio all the long way up through the Central Valley-country or Mexican, take your pick — but somewhere around Stockton he picked up an oldies channel featuring the hypnotic noodling of Jerry Garcia, followed by an eternal raga of the sort Ravi Shankar used to inflict on audiences in the sixties. That was all right. The guitar climbed the stairs and came back down again, then climbed them, and came down, and climbed them, and the sitar jumped like a nervous bird from branch to branch of a spreading tree. He felt the music-he saw it — and it took him back to a time when he and Jane wore flowered shirts and pants so wide they were like flapping sails, a time when they subscribed to everything and never thought twice about it. Drugs were part of his life then. And protests. Political protests. Flag-burning. Jeering. Painting your face for the sheer hell of it.

There was none of that in what he was doing now What he was doing now-in this car, on this highway-was the prelude to an act of revenge. It was as simple as that, and he had no illusions about it. He drove with the calm that comes of purpose, sticking to the slow lane except to squeeze past the hurtling caravans of trucks, not daring to push the wheezing crackerbox of a rental car much more than ten miles over the limit: it wasn't worth the risk of getting pulled over. There was no point in having people see his face either, so he stopped only for gas, and when he got gas he picked up a chili-cheese dog or a microwave burrito and a Coke or a cup of coffee, one more anonymous traveler in a whole nation of them. He drove through the high-crowned afternoon and into the evening and the fall of day, and then it was the stars and the headlights until he crossed the Oregon border in a kind of trance in the unsteady light of dawn. His stomach was queasy-all that grease — and the caffeine had turned to sludge in his veins, so he steered his way off the interstate and down a series of increasingly small roads till he found a place where he could pull over and sleep beneath the trees.

It was past four in the afternoon when he woke. He thought of Andrea briefly, and of Sierra. They'd be worried, and in Andrea's case angry-he could hear her voice already, You idiot, you jackass, what are you, thinking? Enough, Ty. Enough already. Let it go. The voice was in his head, the argument as familiar as any litany, but he was unmoved. He drifted off into the woods, chewing the cold stub of a bean burrito and swilling from a plastic bottle of water. When he was finished with breakfast, he made his ablutions in a stream, relieved himself (properly, with every thought and care to contamination and the stream's drainage), and spent the rest of the daylight hours in a bed of pine boughs, watching the sky.

For long stretches, he thought nothing, but then he was thinking of Chris Mattingly, and the article he'd written about the Tierwaters' venture into aboriginal life. It had made the cover of Outside magazine, and it put them on the map, that was for sure. After that, practically every publication in the country, from People to the New York Times to the Enquirer, wanted to know what he and Andrea thought about the rain forest, the holes in the ozone layer, the decline of frogs worldwide, what it felt like to live naked and make love in a hut. The article had run to twelve pages, with photos, and each line added another layer to the myth till the canonization was complete: they were the saints of the Movement, and forget the Fox, forget Abbey and Leopold and Brower and all the rest. Tierwater must have read it twenty times, lingering over the photos as he lay in his bunk in prison, remembering the texture of the rock, the smell of the night air and the taste of water fed on alpine snow. And the cover photo-he could see it now-of him and Andrea from the waist up, their faces reddened and smudged, the sun-bleached ends of her hair blowing across her face, both of them healthy still and sleek, looking like naked rock stars on the cover of Rolling Stone. It was a charge. But what, he wondered, would Chris Mattingly think of this, of what was going to come down tonight? Would that be a saintly thing? Would that be worthy of the cover?

He drifted off, and then darkness came, attached to a fine drizzle, and he sat in the car to get out of the wet, listening to the radio and letting his mind go numb. It was too early yet to get down to business-he'd wait till twelve at least, maybe later. He tried to sleep-it was going to be a long night, and a longer day, because he was driving straight through the minute he was done, and he would be sitting right there in the living room in front of the TV when Jimmy Chavez, his parole officer, came round to ask him if he'd heard anything about what had gone down in Oregon last night.

At quarter past twelve, he put the car in gear and followed a snaking series of back roads to Grants Pass. It was nothing to find addresses for Judge Harold P. Duermer and Sheriff Robert R. Hicks — they were both listed in the phone book — and he already knew where the police station was. He drove by the judge's house twice, then parked round the corner, on a street so dark it was like the inside of a cave. The drizzle had turned to a persistent shower by this time, and when he came up the judge's long macadam drive, it shone like a dark river in the light of the gas lamp over the garage door. There was no sound at all, but for the hum of a transformer on the telephone pole overhead: no crickets, no frogs, not the hoot of an owl or the soft shoosh of a passing car. Tierwater stuck to the shadows and reconnoitered.

The judge lived well, in a big colonial-style place that stood on the crest of a hill, surrounded by lawns and flowerbeds, and with a swimming pool and clay tennis court out back, and Tierwater didn't begrudge him that. The man was a tool of the machine-why wouldn't he live well? All he had to do was toss a bunch of protestors in the slammer, break up families and terrorize little girls, and somehow, with the good grace of the timber company, convert all that ponderous legal activity into something tangible, the yacht in the harbor, the white Mercedes 500SL, the condo in Aspen and a good month here and there in Cancim or Saint-Moritz, maybe a shopping spree in the Big Apple for Mrs. Justice Duermer herself.

No lights on in the house, no dogs, sleeping or otherwise. Tierwater tried the door at the back of the garage, barely a creak of the hinges, and then he was inside. The pinkish glow of the flashlight revealed three cars, and what was this — a Lexus? Two Lexuses-Lexi-one silver, one black, his and hers. And some sort of sportscar, an old Jaguar, it looked like, big wire wheels, running boards-lovingly, as they say, restored. Imagine that-imagine Judge Duermer, robeless, a porkpie cap pulled down over his fat brow, wedged into the puny leather seat of the roadster, Sunday afternoon, maaaaarrrrrr, hi, judge, and a safe sweet taste of the bohemian life to you too. But Tierwater wasn't there to imagine things, and it took him less than five minutes to locate the cars' crankcases, lovingly tap a few ounces of silicon carbide into each and close the hoods with a click as soft as the beat of a moth's wing.

There were lights on at the police station, some poor drone-Sheets, maybe it was Sheets-putting in his time by the telephone, waiting for the call from the old woman who'd lost her glasses or maybe the one with the raccoon in her kitchen. The town stood still. The rain fell. Tierwater could see his breath steaming in front of his face. He couldn't get at the hoods of the two cruisers parked out front of the place, but they hadn't thought to put locking caps on the gas tanks. It hurt him to have to settle for slashing the tires, jamming the locks with slivers of wood and pouring diatomaceous earth into the gas tanks, but there wasn't much more he could do, short of firebombing the station itself, and he didn't want to alert anybody to what was going down here, especially not Sheriff Bob Hicks. Because Sheriff Bob Hicks (wife, Estelle), of 17 Spruce Lane, was next on the list.

This was where things got tricky. Sheriff Bob Hicks lived outside of town, on a country road fringed with blackly glistening weeds and long-legged shrubs, no other house in sight, rainwater gurgling in the ditches and no place to pull over-at least no place where the car wouldn't be seen if anyone passed by. It was getting late, too-quarter past four by Tierwater's watch — and who knew what hour people around here got up to let the cat out, pour a cup of coffee and stare dreaming into the smoke of their first cigarette? Tier-water found the mailbox set out on the road, number 17, the house dark beyond it, and drove on by, looking for a turnout so he could double back, do what he had to do and head back to the bosom of his family. But the road wasn't cooperating. It seemed to get progressively narrower. And darker. And the rain was coming down harder now, raking the headlights in sheets so dense he could barely see the surface of the road.

For a minute he thought about giving it up-just getting out of there and back to the interstate before he got the car stuck in a ditch or wound up getting shot at or thrown in jail. What he was doing wasn't honorable, he knew that, and it wasn't stopping the logging or helping the cause in even the most marginal way — andrea was right: he should let it go. But he couldn't. What they'd done to him — the sheriff, the judge, Boehringer and Butts (and he'd like to pay them a visit too, but life was short and you couldn't settle every score) — was no different from what Johnny Taradash had done. Or tried to do. Just thinking about it made the blood come up in him: a year in jail, a year listening to Bill Driscoll moan in his sleep, a year torn out of his life like a chapter from a book. And for what? For what? When he saw a driveway emerge from the vegetation up on his left, he jerked the wheel and spun the car around, and so what if he took some stupid hick's mailbox with him?

The rain was blinding, absolutely, and where was the damn house anyway? Was that it up there? No. Just another bank of trees. He swiped at the moisture on the inside of the window with an impatient hand, fumbled with the defroster. And then he came around a bend in the road and saw a sight that shrank him right down to nothing: there was Sheriff Bob Hicks' mailbox, all right, illuminated in the thin stream of the headlights, but a long, flat, lucent object had been coughed up out of the night beside it. It might have been a low-slung billboard, a cutout, the fixed reflective side of a shed or trailer, but it wasn't: it was a police cruiser. Sheriff Bob Hicks' police cruiser. And Sheriff Bob Hicks, a long-jawed, white-faced apparition in a floppy hat, was frozen there at the wheel, as if in an overexposed photo.

Tierwater's first impulse was to slam on the brakes, but he resisted it: to stop was to invite disaster. Windshield wipers clapping, defroster roaring, tires spewing cascades of their own, the rental car crept innocuously past the driveway, Tier-water shrinking from the headlights that lit up the front seat like a stage — and would the sheriff be able to see the slashes of greasepaint beneath his eyes, the watchcap clinging to his scalp? Would he recognize him? Was he looking? Did he wear glasses? Were they fogged up? And what was the man doing up at this hour, anyway? Had he gotten a call from the station, Better get on down here, Chief some asshole's gone and slashed the tires on two of the squad cars, was that it?

Sheriff Bob Hicks could have turned either way on that road-he could have backed up the driveway and gone back to bed, for that matter — but he turned right, the headlights of the patrol car shooting off into the night and then swinging round to appear in Tierwater's rearview mirror. Heart in mouth, Tierwater snatched off the watchcap, cranked the window enough to wet it and used the rough acrylic weave to scrub the greasepaint from his face. He was doing, what, thirty, thirty-five miles an hour? Was that too fast? Too slow? Weren't you supposed to drive according to the conditions? The rain crashed down; the headlights closed on him.

For an instant, he thought of running-of flooring it and losing the bastard — but he dismissed the idea as soon as it came into his head. He didn't even know what kind of car he was driving — the cheapest compact, some Japanese piece of crap that wouldn't have outrun an old lady on a bicycle — and besides, nothing had happened yet. There was no reason to think he'd be pulled over. He just had to stay calm, that was all. But here were the headlights looming up in his mirror and then settling in behind him, moving along at the same excruciatingly slow pace that he was. His hands gripped the wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet. He tried to project innocence through the set of his shoulders, the back of his head, his ears. He sped up ever so slightly.

The worst thing was Andrea. Or no, Sierra. How was he going to explain this to her? Out of jail a week and a half, and back behind bars already? He hadn't even attended a parent/teacher conference yet. And Chris Mattingly and all the rest of them-what were they going to think? He could see the headlines already, eco-hero tarnished; e. F.! Tire-slasher; tierwater a petty vandal. Then he had a vision of Lompoc, Judge Duermer, Fred: this time it wouldn't be prison camp. Oh, no: this time it would be a cell on a cell-block, gangs, rape, intimidation, level two at least, maybe worse. Violation of parole, in possession of burglary tools, breaking and entering, destruction of private and public property, use of an alias in the commission of a crime- But then a miracle happened. Slowly, with all the prudence and slow, safe, peace-officerly care in the world, Sheriff Bob Hicks swung the cruiser out to the left and for the smallest fraction of a moment pulled up even with Tierwater before easing in ahead of him. Through two rain-scrawled side windows and the intermediary space of the rain-thick night, Tierwater caught a glimpse of the man himself, the incurious eyes and pale bloated face that was like something unearthed from the ground, the quickest exchange of hazy early-morning looks, and then the sheriff was a pair of taillights receding in the gloom.

Santa Ynez, April 2026

The first one to show up, aside from the county sheriff and the coroner, is a lawyer, and if that isn't emblematic of what we've become, then I don't know what is. He's about the size you think of when you think of regular, with a pillbox of kinky hair set up high against a receding hairline, teeth that look as if they've been filed and a pair of five-hundred-dollar fake-grain vinyl shoes so encrusted with mud he's had to remove them and stand there on the doorstep in his muddy socks. His suit is soaked through. His tie is twisted up under his collar like a hangman's noose. And his briefcase-his briefcase is just a crude clay sculpture, with a long trailing fringe of pondweed. In the confusion of that house, in the shock, horror and trauma following in the wake of Mac's death, there's nobody to answer the door, and while the sheriff and his men are prowling around upstairs and the coroner's people zipping up the body bags, I'm the one who responds to the "Chariots of Love" theme and swings open the door on the eighteenth repetition of that unforgettable melody. "Good afternoon," he says, as if we're standing in the hallway at the county courthouse, "I'm Randy Bowgler, of Bowgler and Asburger? I represent Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Pulchris. May I come in?"

Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose: that'd be Mac's third wife, the real-estate heiress, the one with eyes like two cold planets glittering in the night.

I'm looking out over the hill in front of the house, the ambulance and police cruiser stuck up to their frames in the muck of the receding river and the media vans beginning to gather on the horizon like the vanished herds of old. It must be a hundred and fifteen degrees out there. "I don't think so," I say.

"I'm here to protect my client's interests, Mr., Ah — I didn't catch your name?"

"I already gave at the office," I tell him.

His lips curl into a tight, litigious smile. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist".

"Yeah," I say, and my heart is still jumping at my ribs four hours after the fact, "well, fuck you too," and I slam the door in his face.

What's going on here is chaos of the worst and blackest sort. Dandelion, as best we can tell, is back down in the basement with Amaryllis and Buttercup. What he did to Mac is worse, far worse, than anything I'd heard about in rap sessions in prison or seen in the old nature clips of the Serengeti. Mac's insides-heart, liver, lungs, intestines-are the first thing the lion apparently consumed, and then, before Chu) / and I could get back up the stairs with the Nitro and the dart gun, he dragged the meatier of the Als to the dumbwaiter and disappeared into the basement with him. The other Al was sprawled across the sofa with one arm bent the wrong way at the elbow and his scalp torn back so the parietal bone showed white beneath it, and both the servants had been swatted down like insects, Zulfikar crumpled in the corner in a dark pool and his wife draped over a chair with her throat torn out. April Wind we found whimpering inside one of the compartments in the sideboard. We helped her out, boarded up the dumbwaiter on all three floors and called 911.

No sooner do I shut the door than the "Chariots of Love" theme starts up again, and then again, and I'm wondering, how in Christ's name did this ghoul find out already? Did he have a direct hookup to 911? Had he paid somebody off?

Was he circling the house on leather wings? No matter. The Nitro is propped up against the wall behind me, and I just pluck it up, aim it letter-high and swing open the door again. I admit it-I'm agitated and maybe not entirely in my right mind, whatever that is. Anyway, I level the thing at him and growl something out of the corner of my mouth and he actually takes a step back, but by now a very wet crew with a minicam is sprinting across the lawn and flashbulbs are popping in the distance, and I figure it's a losing proposition. Down goes the gun. In comes the lawyer.

Mac's death is big news. Not as big maybe as McCartney's or Garth Brooks', but it's really something. Within the hour, the HDTV screen is showing images of the death scene intercut with clips of Mac at various stages of his career and the shock and disbelief registering on the faces of fans from Buenos Aires to Hyderabad and Martha's Vineyard (now largely under water, by the way). I'm sitting there in the Grunge Room, trying to catch my breath, cops, journalists and lawyers flitting back and forth like flies dive-bombing a plate of custard, when April Wind appears on the big screen across from the bed. She's squinting into the camera not two hundred feet from where I'm sitting, a dazzled look on her face, the dwarf become a giant. Like all Americans, she was born with the ability to talk to a camera. "It was horrible," she's saying, "because we were eating eggs, or we were just about to, and then there's this like roar, and I, The camera never wavers, April Wind's face revealed in every pixel and particle, a sorrowful face, the face of tragedy and woo-woo gone down in flames, but a voice slips in over her own, lathered with concern: " You were his last lover, isn't that right?"

Of all the journalists there that afternoon and late into the night-young hotshots, most of them, scud studs and the like-only one of them has been around long enough to take a second look at me. He's maybe fifty, fifty-five. Short, glasses, frizz of a beard gone white around the gills. It's getting dark out by this time, and we're all gathered in the Motown Room-even Chuy-for what I suppose you'd call a press conference, though there's precious little conferring going on. "You're-" he sputters, police everywhere, the lions roaring from the basement, film rolling, Andrea and April Wind pinned in the corner with two dozen microphones jabbing at them like the quills of a porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum, now endangered throughout its range) — "you're Tyrone Tierwater, aren't you — the ecoradical?"

My back hurts. My feet. I have a headache. My gums are aching round the cold porcelain of my dental enhancements, I could use a drink and I'm hungry-we never did get those eggs, or anything else for that matter. I wave a hand in deprecation. "Eco-what?"

"You're him, aren't you?" There are lights everywhere, heads talking, sound bites crackling from every room of the house. "What was it-twenty years ago? The Cachuma Incident, right?"

The man's a historian, no doubt about it, and right here, right now, in the midst of all this chaos, he takes me back to a dark, pitching lake and a boat that trembled under my feet like a false floor that drops you headlong into the infinite. The Cachuma Incident. What can I say? There's no excuse or exculpation for what I did, or tried to do. My daughter was dead and my wife may as well have been, and the names of the animals were on my lips day and night-six billion of us at that point and how many gorillas, chimps, manatees, spotted owls, Amboseli lions?

It was my darkest moment-skull — and — crossbones time, hyena time. I was fighting a war, you understand, and maybe I lost my judgment, if I ever had any. In the company of an FBI agent posing as a disaffected scientist from BioGen and a shit by the name of Sandman (more on him later), I found myself out on those windswept waters with eight big plastic buckets of tetrodotoxin at my feet. The lake was in the Santa Ynez Valley and it constituted the water supply for the city of Santa Barbara. The toxin, the very same concentrated in the liver of the puffer fish-fugu, that is-was produced by the Alteromas bacteria, it was twelve hundred and fifty times more deadly than cyanide, and it had been mutated in the lab to adapt itself to fresh water. Or so it appeared, but appearances can be deceiving.

In truth, Sandman and the FBI agent (tattoos, tongue stud, the true look of the transgenetic nerd) had set me up, hoping, I think, to use me to get to the leadership of E. F. I, but by then Andrea and Teo and all the rest of them had turned their backs on me, so it was this or nothing. And when it came right down to it, when it was time to tip the buckets and begin evening the score in favor of the animals, I couldn't do it. Though I'd steeled myself, though I seethed and hated and reminded myself that to be a friend of the earth you have to be an enemy of the people, though Sandman and I had agreed a hundred times that if a baby and an anteater fell in a drainage ditch at the same time the baby would have to be sacrificed, though this was the final solution and I the man chosen to administer it, when it came right down to it, I faltered. I did. Believe me. Give me that much at least.

"Am I right?" The man's face is anxious, blistered, peeled back like a skinned grape. "You're the one they called the human hyena, aren't you?"

I'm in a chair in the front hallway. I can hear Andrea's cracked, vinegary old lady's voice going on for the hundredth time about Dandelion and how "he was just suddenly there, as if he appeared out of thin air." I've never seen so many cops-in plain clothes, in blue, in the dun of the highway patrol. Down in the basement, sniffing warily, is a SWAT team from San Luis Obispo, ready to do what needs to be done. My heart is broken — or, no, it's smashed, laid out on the chopping block and beaten with a mallet till all the fibers have been reduced to paste. Mac is gone. And the animals are next in line. I don't bother to answer.

"But what are you doing here?" The man says, and he's got a microphone too, a slim black thing like the barrel of a gun pointing at my face. "Do you know Maclovio Pulchris? Or did you, I mean?"

I'm thinking about that, about Mac and how he gave me a break when I got out of prison for the last time-me, a nobc;dy, one of five or six lackeys charged with looking after the Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, the emus, horses and dogs, no job more menial on the whole estate. But it was a beginning, and I was glad for it. And it wasn't long before he singled me out and we began to talk-about the pigs and their diet at first, but then about other things too, far-ranging things like the weather and the death of the planet and the possibility of God and who I really was — my name wasn't Torn Drinkwater, was it? He recognized me. Behind those shades and eel whips and all the rest, Mac went deeper than you might think. He'd known all along. Known who I was and taken a chance. After that, well, the others fell by the wayside, all except for Chuy, that is, and Mac and I hatched our scheme to do what nature and the zoos were incapable of — and we almost succeeded too. But, of course, to say "almost" is meaningless. We could have succeeded, let's put it that way — if things had been different. Vastly different.

The first of a series of muffled shots sounds from deep in the bowels of the house. "Were you here when he died? Can you tell me anything about that, what it was like, I mean?"

"Because of the storms," Andrea is saying from the far side of the room, a hint of exasperation in her voice, "because of the flooding-"

And Chuy, fencing with his own circle of microphones: "No, man, I'm corriendo, you know, up out of el garaje, and Dandy, he's muy malo-"

Pop. Pop. Pop-pop. That's what I'm hearing, but what I'm seeing is dead lions, dead peccaries, jackals, vultures, living flesh converted to so much furred and feathered meat, extinction in a wheelbarrow.

"There are wild animals in the house," the reporter is saying, and he's trying to work a little moral outrage into his voice, "living right here in the rooms and wandering the halls. Isn't that right?"

Pop. Pop-pop. I nod my head. Wearily.

The sheen of his glasses, the thrust of the mike. "Maybe you can explain it for me, because I think Pm missing something here-isn't that dangerous?"

After the cops, after the scribblers and the talking heads, after the lawyers, bereaved fans, curiosity seekers and relic peddlers, the book editors start dribbling in from New York, Berlin, Los Andiegoles. Mac's been buried three days when the first of them shows up (the funeral was in Detroit, televised of course, and it was built around a six-hour memorial concert featuring pop stars of the past, distant past and present hammering out ensemble renditions of Mac's big hits while legions of weeping fans swayed in place and held up candles and cigarette lighters in a blaze so prodigious it must have added half a degree to the average temperature of the globe). Our position here-mine, Andrea's, April Wind's, Chuy's, the surviving animals'-is tenuous, to say the least. Mac died intestate, and the lawyers representing his four wives, real and putative mistresses, children legitimate and it-, not to mention the various record companies that claim rights in various songs and recordings, are fighting a battle royal over his estate. I have no claim on anything. I don't even have an income. Or health care. The animals-we've still got a few peccaries left, a pair of honey badgers, three Egyptian vultures and Petunia-have even less.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm scared-rudderless, incomeless, Social Security — less and soon to be homeless too, no doubt — and I'm ready to welcome this editor with open arms (not to be mercenary about it, but if there's money in it I'll do an as-told-to account of my years with Mac and my life as a monkeywrencher and push April Wind's hagiography of Sierra on him too). And who is he? Ronnie Bott, of Bertelsmann West, the biggest — the only-publishing house in New York. He comes the way of Randy Bowgler and the rest of the parade of lawyers, journalists and deranged fans (several of whom are even now peering in at the windows, despite the efforts of the rent-a-cop outfit Mac's first wife's lawyer hired to keep them at bay): across the all — but — driedup Pulchris River, currently breached by a crude bridge of whorled imitation-plywood slabs laid out in the mud. It's 9:00 A. M. And a hundred and ten degrees, with a screaming wind out of the southeast, when the "Chariots of Love" theme re-echoes through the house. Andrea's in bed, of course, and April Wind, who's arranged this whole thing, is locked in her room doing her Tantric exercises, so it's Ty Tierwater, aching knees and all, to the door again.

What do I do? I fix the man a tall glass of iced tea and settle him down in the Motown Room, just under the glowing electronic portrait of the Four Tops. He looks to be no more than fourteen (though I know he must be older), sporting one of the wide-collared shirts and patterned vests that seem to have come back into fashion, along with the bell-bottoms and high-heeled boots. As for the rest: long hair, no hint of musculature or even a beard, a spatter of what could only be acne clinging to his right cheek. I ease into the chair across from him, clutching my own sweating glass of iced tea, and give him a look of wisdom and ready access.

"So," he says, shifting in his seat and crossing, then uncrossing, his legs, "you ran Maclovio Pulchris' private menagerie, is that right?"

"Ten years of shoveling shit," I say, and look down at the wedge of lemon floating round the rim of my glass.

"You were in charge of the lions, then?"

"That's right. They required plenty of shit-shoveling too. And meat. Of course, with the world the way it is, it was no easy thing keeping them fed and reasonably healthy, and if it wasn't for the permanent flicking El Nino we've got going here they'd be" — and here I have to pause to deal with a sudden constriction in the back of my throat that just about chokes off my windpipe- "they'd be fine still. And so would Mac."

The editor — what was his name? Because I've lost it-he just nods.

"You know who I am," I say, "right?"

He nods again.

I lean into the platform of my bony old man's knees and give him my cagiest look, and I can see myself in shadowy reflection in the sheen of Marvin Gaye's portrait, hanging opposite. I look like a Yankee horse-trader, a used-car salesman or, worse, a fundamentalist preacher. "You want a book, I'll give you a book. Not just about Mac or my daughter, but about me and what I've been through trying to save this woebegone planet and the, the" — there it is again, the involuntary contraction at the back of my throat- "the animals." And here I have to pause a minute to collect myself. My heart is heavy. My mind is numb. There's moisture gathering in the desiccated corners of my old man's eyes and I have to pinch it away with two trembling fingers.

"That's what we were trying to do here, Mac and me," I say, and I'm pleading with him, I can't help myself, "save the animals. It's too late for the earth. Or for us. But the animals, if only we can keep them from extinction until we're gone — they'll adapt, they will, and something new will come up in our place. That's our hope. Our only hope!'

I guess by this point I've got to my feet and I'm trying to marshal my thoughts to tell him about extinction, about how we're at the very end of the sixth great extinction to hit this planet, caused by us, by man, by progress, and how speciation will occur after we're gone, an explosion of new forms springing up to fill all the vacated niches, a transformation like nothing we've known since the Cambrian explosion of five hundred seventy million years ago, but he's not listening. It's 9:15 A. M., He's come all the way from New York and he's stifling a yawn on Mac's couch beneath the undulating portrait of the Four Tops in the Motown Room. He doesn't want to hear about the environment — the environment is all indoors now anyway, right on down to the domed fields that produce the arugula for his salads and the four-walled space he calls home. The environment is a bore. And nobody wants to read about it-nobody wants to hear about it — and, for all April Wind's machinations (and Andrea's), nobody wants to hear about Sierra either. Or me. No, what they want — and it comes to me with a clarity I can only attribute to the neurobooster cap I popped earlier this morning-what they want is to know if the weather will ever go back to normal and what Maclovio Pulchris' sex life was like.

And here, right on cue, is tiny, cute little not-so-young April Wind, baby-stepping across the room like some idol of the Ituri pygmies, to tell all.

If Ronnie Bott and Bertelsmann West don't give two shits about my daughter and the sacrifices she made or the world beyond their computer screens, I do, I still do, and I can't help myself. Call it the intransigence of age. Call it nostalgia. But after skirting April Wind for five months and resenting the hell out of her wheedling questions and the whole idea of a Sierra Tierwater biography, now that it's gone I want it back more desperately than I wanted it to disappear in the first place. Does that make sense? All right, call it senility, then. Call it hope, resentment, despair, call it anything you like, but I want to testify, and I will, even if I have to slip into April Wind's room, filch the manuscript and finish the thing myself.

Sierra gave up everything for an ideal, and if that isn't the very definition of heroism I don't know what is. Once she was up in her tree, that was it, her life was over, She never had children, never had a house, a pet, an apartment even, she never again went shopping, bought something on impulse, watched TV or a movie, never had a friend or a lover. She was separated from her father by six hundred and thirteen horizontal miles and one hundred and eighty vertical feet, and she might as well have been in prison too. For three years, through the refrigerated winter and the kiln that was summer, she never bathed. Her clothes stank, her skin burned, she ate rice and vegetables six days a week and lentil soup on Sundays. She squatted over a bucket to move her bowels. Her fingers and toes felt as if they were going to fall off, her back ached worse than her father's, she had a cavity in one of her upper molars and it threatened to bore right through her head. She never went to Paris. Never went to grad school. Never stretched out on a couch in front of a fire and listened to the rain on the roof.

Coast Lumber tried to ignore her at first, but after El Nirio failed to dislodge her, she became an embarrassment — and, worse, a liability. Because the longer she held out, the more people began to take notice. No one had been up a tree more than twenty days before Sierra climbed up into Artemis, and as she reached the one-month mark the press started to converge on her dwindling grove in the Headwaters Forest. Teo, never one to miss an opportunity, led them to the base of the tree himself, and even helped hoist some of the hardier ones up to the lower platform (she had two by then, one at a hundred feet, which she used for interviews and cooking; the other at one eighty, which was her private space, for meditation and sleep). Andrea gave her a cell phone too, and by the end of the second month, she was spending two or three hours a day on it, chatting with her father and stepmother sometimes, sure, but mainly giving interviews, educating the public, throwing down a gauntlet in the duff.

The other two tree-sitters — a skinny girl with a buzz cut and a sad-eyed, bearded nineteen-year-old known only as Leaf, each perched in a neighboring grove-had given up after the first week of unappeasable rain and fifty-mile-perhour gusts, and Coast Lumber, I'm sure, felt vindicated. Sit on your hands, that was their policy. Avoid force. Squelch bad press before it can poke its ugly head out of its hole, and bite you in the foot. But my daughter was something they hadn't reckoned with. She wasn't your ordinary body-piercing neo-hippie college kid chanting slogans and chaining herself to the bumpers of corporate town-cars on her summer vacation, she was a shining symbol high up in the tower of her tree, she was immovable, unshakable, Joan of Arc leading her troops into battle, with nothing to lose but the bones of her flesh. They had to get rid of her. They had no choice.

Pick a morning, midway through the second month. Seven A. M. A light rain falling with the slow, shifting rhythm of the infinite, the serried trees, the sky so close it seems illuminated from within. Sierra is asleep. Encased in her thermals, wrapped in her mummy bag, stretched out on her insulated mat beneath the roof of her Popsicle — orange tent on her cramped wooden platform one hundred and eighty feet above the ground. The forest breathes in and out. A marbled murrelet perches on a branch fifty feet below her. She's dreaming of flying. Not of falling-that's a dream she refuses to entertain up here in a bed this high above the earth, even in her unconscious — but of sprouting wings and diving off the platform to swoop low over the lumber mill and then rise up aloft until the forest falls away and then the hills and even the ocean, higher and higher until she's dodging satellites in the glittering metallic bands of their orbits and can gaze down on the earth unobstructed. The blue planet. It's there in her half-waking mind, right there behind her eyelids, sustained in nothing but the cold black reaches, when, suddenly, the platform shudders.

She wakes. Looks through the aperture at the south end of her tent. And sees a hand, a human hand, tensed there on the corner of the platform like a bird-eating spider hatched in the forests of the Amazon. She's dreaming. Surely she's still dreaming, asleep and awake at the same time. There's a grunt, and then another hand appears — and in the next instant a head pops into view, presumptive eyes, the sliver of a mouth, a face framed in a beard the color of used coffee grounds. It is a face of insinuation, and it belongs to Climber Deke, a twenty-eight-year-old employee of Coast Lumber who specializes in ascending trees and escorting trespassers to the ground, where they can be duly arrested and charged.

One hundred and eighty feet above the ground. From that height, looking down, it might as well be three hundred feet. People are the size of puppets, the squirrels and chipmunks rocketing through the duff all but invisible, downed branches, manzanita bushes and boulders like the pattern in a tribal carpet. Sierra disdains ropes, harnesses or any other sort of safety devices. She goes barefoot, the better to grip the bark, and she relies on Artemis-her tree, the spirit of her tree-to sustain her. "Who-?" She says, and can't get the rest of it out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrea is stretched out supine on the bed in the Grunge Room, naked. And sweating. She looks good, very good, especially in those places where the sun hasn't had much of a chance to wreak havoc with her epidermis, and for the briefest fraction of a second I'm wondering when we last had sex — or made love, as we used to say — and then I'm waving the eviction notice in her face.

She won't even look at it. "The heat," she says. "This is worse than Arizona. Be a sweetheart, will you, Ty, and go get me something cold to drink — a Diet Coke, maybe? With lots of ice?"

What am I supposed to say: Sure, honeybiln. Want me to give you a sponge bath too? Rub your feet with alcohol? I don't know, because this is not an ideal relationship and this is not an ideal planet and we don't live in a sitcom reality. Check that: maybe we do — but this has got to be the sit- part of it, because it's very far from funny. 1 Wave the notice till it generates the least part of a cooling draft and she murmurs, "Oh, that feels good, that's sweet, don't stop-"

"It's an eviction notice," I say, nothing in my voice at all. "We have to be out in thirty days."

Andrea sits up, and that's a shame, because her breasts, which had fanned out fetchingly across her rib cage as she lay there sweating atop the sheets, now have no choice but to respond to gravity and show their age. She snatches the notice from my hand, swings round to bend to the page (no glasses for her, reading or otherwise-radial keratotomy corrected her to 20/10 in her left eye, 20/20 in the right, and don't think she doesn't lord it over me).

When she turns back round, she lets the notice fall to the floor and gives me a long look, as if she's deciding something. "I know where we can go," she says finally, and the plural pronoun makes my heart leap up: sure, and we're in this together, aren't we?

"Where?"

"Ratchiss' cabin.".

It takes me a minute. "Isn't he dead?" (The question is strictly rhetorical — or maybe strategic. Ratchiss has in fact been dead for twenty-odd years, a victim of nature and his own apostasy. It seems he'd gone back to hunting finally, having given up on everything else after the meteorological dislocations at the turn of the century. Why bother, that was his thinking, and he got it in his head that he was going to go down in history as the agent of extinction of a given species, one that was barely hanging on by a thread. He chose the California condor, of which there were then a hundred and ten individuals extant, some fifty of those released into the wild from a captive breeding program at the soonto-be-defunct L. A. Zoo. The way I heard it was that he'd managed to hit two of them as they wheeled overhead in the remote hills of the Sespe Preserve, and he was reloading for a shot at yet another when one of the perforated birds came hurtling down out of the sky, purely dead and extinguished, and hit him in the back of the head with all the force of a soggy beach umbrella dropped from a cliff. He never regained consciousness.) She purses her lips, gives me the look that used to burn holes in rednecks, polluters and their shills. "Yes," she says, "he's dead. But his cabin isn't."

"Well, we can't just… Who lives there now?"

She's staring off into the distance, no doubt individuating each strand of Kurt Cobain's hair with her surgically enhanced vision. "Nobody. He left the place to E. F.I, To us, and last I checked, there was nobody there."

"But we can't just move in, can we?"

"You got a better plan?"

"What about money, food? We can't live on pine needles and duff. I haven't got more than fifteen hundred bucks in the bank — if the bank's even still there."

And here comes her smile, rich and blooming right up there at the focal point of her naked young-old lady's body. "We've been selling things," she says, "April and me."

I'm slow. I admit it. Slow and confused and old. "What things?"

The smile blooms till it begins to lose its petals and she glances away before bringing her eyes back to mine. "Oh, I don't know," she says, and she nods in the direction of Kurt Cobain's locks without pulling her eyes back- "call them relics."

The temperature must have gone up another five degrees by the time I get back out to Chuy. The heat is like a fist — a pair of fists-boom-boom, hitting me in the chest and pelvis till I can barely lift my feet, and let me tell you, the wind is no help. It's only blowing at about twenty miles per hour, nothing compared with what's coming in the next few months, as the season heats up and the winds suck in off the desert, but still the ground is in constant motion, dust devils everywhere, scorched grains of windborne detritus clogging my nostrils and stinging the back of my throat, all the tattered trees throwing their rags first this way, then the other. Normally I'd be wearing a gauze mask this time of year, but after the mucosa fiasco I just can't stand the idea of having anything clamped over my mouth again (except maybe Andrea's sweet, supple young-old lips, and then only once a week, at best), so I just clench my face, squint my eyes and stagger on.

Chuy looks as if he's been slow-cooked on a rotisserie. His skin is prickled, his color bad, his clothes are so shiny with sweat they might have been dredged in olive oil. He's managed to set four posts in concrete, one at each corner of the pen he can envision in the damaged runnels of his mind, yet he's having trouble with the salvaged board he means to nail to them. Or not the board, actually, but the hammer and nails. Each time he steadies the hammer, the nail slips through his fingers, and when he finally gets the nail in position, the hammer fails him. It's the Dursban. I'm no physiologist, but it seems that when he exerts himself too much-when he sweats, in particular — the nerve cells start to misfire all over again. His eyes are spinning in their sockets and his fingers playing an arpeggio on a single three-inch nail when I lay a hand on his shoulder. "Forget it, Chuy," I tell him.

The nail is suddenly too hot to handle, the hammer even hotter, and he drops them both in the dust at his feet. "Forget it?" He echoes, squinting up at me from his crouch.

I'm not even looking at him, just staring out over the burning landscape, the regular dull thump of reconstruction echoing across the hill from the tumbledown condos, the wind kicking up its miniature cyclones, no animate thing visible, not even a bird. I'm thinking of the dead lions (the carcasses disappeared, and I wonder which of the SWAT-team cowboys has a lion skin draped over his couch), and I'm thinking of Mac and how he wanted to do something for all the ugly animals out there, the ones nobody could love, and I'm thinking of my own eternally deluded self, just out of prison and imagining there was something I could do, something to accomplish, even at my age. "We're all done here," I say. "It's over."

The next day, at lunch, April Wind is heroically squirroily. Andrea and I are eating ancient beef from Mac's freezers, along with a medley of steamed vegetables and reconstituted potatoes au gratin, and washing it down with a '92 Bordeaux that's as rich and thick as syrup and with a bouquet as heady as what God might have served Adam that first night in the garden. It's good stuff. Believe me. April Wind, wrinkling her nose at the beef, pushes the vegetables around on her plate the way Sierra used to do when she was a child, and after refilling her glass twice, announces, "It's been fun."

I give Andrea a look, but Andrea's look tells me she already knows what's coming. In detail.

"I just wanted to say thank you, Ty," April Wind says, homing in on the little purse of her mouth with a knuckle of steamed cauliflower, only to have it drop unerringly into her wineglass. The wine reacts by dribbling down the stem of the glass, an ominous red stain spreading across the tablecloth as she finishes her thought: "For everything. I mean Mac, and all. And the earth too-for loving the earth. And the animals?'

She's leaving, that's what all this means. All right, fine. We've got twenty-nine days to make other arrangements, and the conservator — a skinny, evil woman in a black tube of a dress that looks as if she found it in the back of a surf shop-has already got a dozen people methodically working their way through the house, cataloguing Mac's vast holdings of memorabilia, jewelry, artwork, furniture and Les Paul guitars. I'm relieved, I am. And I don't say a word.

April Wind fishes the cauliflower out of her wine, plops it in her mouth and begins tapping idly at the rim of her wineglass with the dull blade of her butter knife. The wine stain has settled into a definitive shape, something recognizable, like the face of Jesus revealed or Picasso's Head of a Woman Weeping, but I can't say what it is. "I'm going to New York," she says, giddy with the idea of it, "with Ronnie. He's sending a car for me at one." A pause. "I'm going to meet my co-writer, you know, like the as-told-to guy who did the book on Gywneth Paltrow? And I'm going to be on the Wes Starkey Show and everything-"

I don't know whether to congratulate her or commiserate with her, so I just nod, sip my wine and wonder what it is about this moment that makes me feel old beyond any Baby Boomer's most distant hope or expectation.

But that's that. Goodbye to April Wind, and then comes an evening when the evil woman in the tube dress and her cataloguers are tucked safely away in their beds at the Big Ranchito Motel in Buellton, and Andrea and I, by mutual consent, begin to load up the Olfputt while the sun festers on the horizon and Chuy backs the pimento-red Dodge Viper out of the garage with the fifteen hundred dollars cash I gave him tucked deep in the pocket of his blue jeans. (I gave him the Viper too. "IQue estas diciendo?" He said, his eyes chasing each other like bugs round his face. "You say this car is mine?" I signed the registration over to him, imitating Mac's EKG scrawl as best I could. "Go ahead," I said. "You've earned it") Andrea didn't have a whole lot with her when she showed up on my doorstep back in November-cosmetics, Indian jewelry, a selection of halter tops and clingy dresses calculated to drive males in the young-old range into a fever of sexual nostalgia — and she doesn't have much more now. What she does have, though, is a healthy selection of Maclovio Pulchris memorabilia, all of it neatly folded away before the lawyers descended and the conservator opened up shop. This we load into the back of the Olfputt, along with the raggedy odds and ends of mine that had survived the inundation of the guesthouse and the ensuing months of rot. We work without talking, work like a team, instinctively, each looking out for the other, and we think to take along a selection of venerable meats in a big cooler and as much fine wine as we can reasonably cram in under the seats (no more sake for me, local or otherwise). Is what we're doing strictly legitimate — or even legal? Of course not, But Mac, I like to think, would have no objections. I gave him ten years without complaint, after all, longer by far than any of his wives.

The car is packed. The keys to the house are in my hand. There's one more thing: the animals. I'd determined, the minute that notice of eviction found its way into my hand, to set them free. It didn't matter a damn anymore, and nothing was ever going to get better. Two honey badgers, one male, one female. Where would they go, what would they do? In times gone by, they were native to Africa and India, fierce omnivores that fed on everything from snakes to insects to rats, tubers, fruit and (yes) honey, but the whole world is Africa now, and India, Bloomington, Calcutta and the Bronx, all wrapped in one. The megafauna are gone, the habitat is shrunk to zero, practically no animals left anywhere but for the R-species and the exotics. So why not? Let them go and hope for the best.

I'm standing well back from the cage, with the Nitro cradled under one arm, when I pull the trip wire Chuy rigged up and let them go. They can be irredeemably nasty, going directly for their adversary's sexual organs in any dispute or confrontation, and I suppose I feel a slight twinge about unleashing them on the condos and the put-upon population of Sakapathians and all the rest eking out a living there, but ultimately, as Andrea and I watch their slinking white-crowned forms make their way across the open ground and into the dead brush along the dried-up watercourse, I feel nothing but relief. Maybe they'll find the living easy, feasting on rats and opossums-maybe they'll breed and a whole new subspecies will spring up, Mellivora capensis pulchrisia.

The peccaries are easy. They'd once been native to the Southwest in any case, and all I have to do is open three doors — the one in the bowling alley, two in the lower hall — and watch them snort off into the fading light until they're no more strange or unexpected than the dust and rocks and mesquite itself. And the Egyptian vultures — they're purely a pleasure. These are the birds, by the way, that used to be featured in the old nature films, cream white with ratty black trailing feathers and hooked yellow beaks, the ones that would drop rocks on ostrich eggs in order to get through the tough outer tegument-when there were ostriches, that is. I hood them individually and make use of a leather gauntlet one of Mac's Saudi Arabian friends left behind years ago. Then we're out on the lawn- or where the lawn will be when the irrepressible landscape architect gets himself back in business.

The heat has died down into the eighties. Everything smells of life. The birds grip my arm and sit still as statues, and then, one by one, off come the hoods, and they lift into the air with a furious beating of their shabby wings. For a long while, we watch them climb into the sky, the night settling in behind them while a deep stippled cracked egg of a sunset glows luminously over the hills and the hint of a breeze finds its way in off the sea.

That leaves Petunia.

"I can't do it," I say. "I just can't."

Andrea considers this as we stand there in the drive, the lights of the house glowing softly behind us. There is no sound, nothing, not the roar of an engine or the wail of a distant siren, and all at once a solitary cricket, incurable optimist, starts up with a creaking, teetering song all his own. She touches me then, her fingers gently stroking the sagging, tired flesh of my forearm and the raised reminder there of my thirty-two stitches and all the wounds I never knew I'd sustained.

She understands. Andrea, my wife of a thousand years ago, and my wife now Her voice is soft. She says, "Why don't we take her with us?"

Los Angeles, September 1993 /Scotia, December 1997

Tierwater came home shaken from his Oregon adventure, and for a good long while thereafter-nearly two years-he lived the life of a model citizen, exemplary father and devoted husband. Or at least he tried to. Tried hard. He didn't work, not at anything so ordinary or tedious as a j obthe only thing he was qualified for was running antiquated shopping centers into the ground, and there wasn't much call for that in southern California, where all the maxi- and mini-malls seemed to have been built in the last ten minutes — and his father's money, the money Andrea and Teo had squeezed out of the stone that bad been hanging round his neck all these years, was plenty enough to last for a good long time to come. So what he did was throw himself headlong into suburban life, though suburban life was the enemy of everything he hoped to achieve as an environmentalist, but never mind that: it was safe. And it provided a cocoon for Sierra. She was what mattered now, and what she needed was a regular father, a suntanned grinning uncomplicated burger-flipping dad greeting her at the door and puzzling over her geometry problems after dinner, not some incarcerated hero.

Still, for all that, the days seemed to go on forever. Andrea was at work, knocking down eighty-five thousand dollars a year as a member of E. F.I 'S board of directors, and Sierra was at school, maneuvering her way out of the Goth crowd and into the inchoate grip of the makeupless neo-hippie vegan earth-saving contingent. So what did Tierwater do, apart from becoming an inveterate house husband, deviser of three-course meals and underassistant coach of Sierra's recleague soccer team? He gardened. Or landscaped, actually.

The place was a rental, yes, but they had an option to buy, and Tierwater would have gone ahead with his planting, mulching, digging and trenching in any case-it was a compulsion, or it became one. The house was a classic sprawling ranch dating from the late forties and sitting on a full acre in a decidedly upscale neighborhood. The problem was that all the plantings-pittosporum, wisteria, crepe myrtle, cycad, banks of impatiens, ivy geranium and vinca-were artificial, nonnative, wasteful of water and destructive of the environment. He tore them out. Tore out everything, reducing stem, branch and bole to fragments in a roaring wood-chipper, and began replanting with natives. In the back of the house he planted sycamore, walnut and valley oak, and on the west-facing slope beyond that he put in ceanothus, redshanks, Catalina cherry and big stabbing swaths of yucca. He was equally decisive with the pool. He couldn't live with it-it was as simple as that. There it was, artificially shimmering in the sun, devouring electricity, chemicals, water piped all the way down from the Sacramento and Colorado Rivers. It was obscene, that's what it was. And before the first two months of his tenure were out, and despite Andrea's objections, he'd fired the pool man, drained off the top three feet of water and tossed rocks and dirt and debris into the basin until he'd created a marsh where waterfowl could frolic side by side with the red-legged frog and the common toad.

The next-door neighbor — Roger something or other; Tier-water never did catch the man's surname-questioned the wisdom of this. Roger was an investment broker, and he wore long-sleeved pinstriped shirts even while pruning his roses or overwatering his lawn with a snaking green garden hose. "It'll breed mosquitoes," he opined one afternoon, thrusting the stalk of his neck over the redwood fence that separated their yards. Tierwater had already stocked the pond with mosquito fish (Gambusia (Ones holbrooki), but he didn't tell Roger that. "Better than suburban drones," he said.

The front lawn came up in strips, and where unquenchable grass had been, he created a xeroscape of native plants, and, like any good and true denizen of suburbia, told the cavilers among his neighbors to go fuck themselves. He felt good. Self-righteous. He was doing his part to restore at least a small swath of the ecosystem, even if nobody else was doing theirs. And if they all converted, if they all pitched in, all his Mercedes-driving, bargain-obsessed neighbors, then everything would be fine — if they had the further good sense to go out back to their mulch piles, bury their designer-clad torsos in leaves and grass clippings and shoot themselves in the back of the head, that is.

All right, maybe he was something of a crank-he'd be the first to admit it. But at least he stayed out of trouble, which pleased Andrea and his parole officer, and, he liked to think, Sierra too. But one day, all the trees had been planted — and the bushes and the succulents and cacti — and the frogs cried lustily from the reconverted swimming pool, and Tierwater found himself craving more, craving action. It was an addiction, exactly that: once you'd identified the enemy, once you'd struck in the night and felt the magnetic effect of it, you were hooked. The passive business was fine, restoring an ecosystem, digging up a lawn, handing out flyers and attending rallies, but there was nothing like action, covert, direct, devastating: block enough culverts, destroy enough Cats, squeeze enough blood out of the corporate sons of bitches, and they'd back off. That was Tierwater's thinking, anyWay. He'd just about served out his parole, and his daughter was growing up fast, seventeen years old, a senior in high school and already talking about UC Santa Cruz, the cheerful sylvan campus of which he and Andrea had dutifully visited with her during spring break. Two years was a long time to play Father Knows Best. And he was sick to death of it.

Of course, there was Andrea to consider. She might have been happy to show him the tricks of the ecoteur's trade at one time, but things were different now She had a position to maintain — and so did he. And it did nobody any good if he was in jail. He remembered an evening somewhere toward the end of his two-year stint as house husband and suburban drone, when for the first time in a long while he broached the subject of nightwork. It was after dinner and they were lingering over a glass of wine. Sierra was in her room, on the phone, nouveau folkies harmonizing through her speakers like a gentle fall of rain on a still lake. Outside, beyond the window screens, the red-legged frogs were working up a good communal croak to celebrate the setting of the sun. "No," Andrea said, "it's too risky."

She was responding to a comment Tierwater had just made about the local electric company and its plans- "plans already in the implementation stage, for Christ's sake, bulldozers, bacichoes, habitat loss, you name it" — to bring a new power grid in over the Santa Susana Mountains at the opposite end of the Valley. "It's nothing," Tierwater countered, running a finger round the rim of his wineglass. "I've been up there hiking every afternoon for the past week-did you know that? — and it's nothing. Like what you said about the Siskiyou thing — a piece of cake. But truly. In fact. No guards, no night watchmen, no nothing. They're just whacking away at everything, just another job, guys in hardhats who never heard from ecology and think a monkeywrench is something you tighten bolts with."

"Uh-uh, Ty," she said, and there were those ridges of annoyance climbing her forehead right on up into her hairline. She swept her hair back and cocked her head to stare him in the face. "No more guerrilla tactics. We can't afford it. Every time some eco-nut blows something up or spikes a grove of trees, we lose points with the public, not to mention the legislature. Seventy-three percent of California voters say they're for the environment. All we need to do is to get them to vote — and we are. We're succeeding. We don't need violence anymore — I don't know if we ever did."

Tierwater said nothing. Eco-nut. Is that what he was now? A loose cannon, an embarrassment to the cause? Well, he was the one who'd done the time here, while she and Teo and all the rest of them held hands and skipped through the fields — and made money, don't forget that. Sure. And what was environmentalism but just another career? He lifted the glass to his lips and let the wine play on his palate. It smelled like mineral springs and fruit fat with the sun, but he took no pleasure in it because the smell was artificial and the grapes that gave up their juice for it had been dusted with sulfur and Christ knew what other sorts of chemicals. Oak trees had fallen to make that wine. Habitat had been gobbled up. Nothing lived in a vineyard, not even nematodes.

"I'm not saying we don't need direct action-especially against people like the Axxam Corporation and the mining companies and all the rest. But it's got to be peaceable — and legal." The light of the setting sun glowed pinkly off the plaster walls, kitchen fixtures and hanging plants, and it fixed Andrea. In her chair as if in a scene of domestic tranquillity-Seated Woman with Wineglass — which was what this was. So far. "We did a great thing up there in the Sierras, Ty, and everybody's tuned in now, you know that. Tuned in to us, to you and me. I'll say it again-we can't afford to slip up."

"I'm not going to slip up."

She came right back at him: "I know you're not."

He didn't like her tone, heavy with the freight of implication: he wasn't going to slip up because he wasn't going to do anything much more than flap his mouth and wave his hands, that's what she was saying. And further, if he did dare to fish out the watchcap and the greasepaint and bolt-cutters, there would be no more domestic tranquillity, not in this house, and not with this wife. "Listen to yourself," he said. "You sound like some sort of corporate whore. Is that what this is all about-rising to the top of the food chain? Politics? A fat paycheck? Is that what it is?"

She tipped back her head and drained her glass, When she set it down, the base of the glass hitting the tabletop with a force just this side of shattering, he saw how angry she was. "I was out there on the front lines when I was twenty-three years old-where were you?"

"How many species you think were lost when we were running around bare-assed in the mountains? Tell me that," he said, ignoring the question. "How many did we save in those thirty days? And how many roads were built, how many trees came down? Worldwide: Not just in California and Oregon, but worldwide." Tierwater's hand went for the bottle. The wine might have been poison for the environ-. Ment, but it sang in his head. "And while we're on the subject of numbers, how many guys did you fuck while I was in Lompoc?"

It all stopped right there, dead in its tracks.

"Huh?" He demanded, and he felt low, felt like a toad, a criminal, a homewrecker. "I don't hear you? How many? Or was it just Teo?"

She was on her feet now, and so was he. The look she gave him had no reserve of love in it, not the smallest portion. She was beyond exasperation, beyond contempt even. If she'd been a dog — or a hyena or a Patagonian fox-she'd have snarled. As it was, she just jerked her head to take the hair out of her face, turned her back and stalked out of the picture.

And Tierwater? He hit the wall so hard with the bottle he could feel the jolt of it all the way down to the base of his spine. He stood there a minute, the neck of the bottle sprouting from his hand like a bouquet of hard green flowers, and then he went out to the garage to look for the watchcap.

Furniture in lane two, some maniac blocking an on-ramp with his pickup truck and threatening suicide-take your pick. When wasn't there a problem on the freeway? Tier-water sat there, stalled in traffic, fuming. There were cars as far as he could see in either direction, cars hemmed in by apartments and condos, restaurants, parking lots and auto malls, each of them pumping its own weight in carbon into the atmosphere each year, every year, forever. The radio played talk and scandal. A baseball game. Oldies. He listened to the oldies and felt nothing but old. The traffic crept forward like an army converging on some distant objective and he crept with it, cursing his fellow drivers, squeezing the Jeep over one foot at a time until he reached the nearest off-ramp, which just happened to be blocked, along with the surface streets it fed.

Sierra had the right idea. She refused to drive. Refused even to get her learner's permit. The bus is good enough for me, she said. And boys. Boys'lI always take me where I want to go. They're lined up out there, Dad, twenty deep. Boys. Yeah, he said, sure, and he winked, because he wouldn't rise to the bait. But you tell them your heart belongs to Daddy.

That was when-yesterday? A week ago? He was thinking about that, his rage dissipating, the Jeep rolling forward — the whole line moving now, the car at the head of the train lurching into motion, and then the next in line, and the next, motion communicated through hands and feet and gas pedals in an unbroken chain-until he was staring bewildered into the brake lights of the car ahead of him and hitting his own brakes, hard. At the very instant everyone had lurched forward, a boxy little foreign car shot into the gap that opened between the first and second vehicles, and suddenly, all along the line, twenty drivers — the old, the suspect, the drunk, the suffering-were slamming on their brakes in succession. Before he could think-before he could even squeeze his eyes shut or clench his teeth-Tierwater was jerked forward in his seat and wrung back again, as the car behind him rode up his bumper, crumpled the rear end of the Jeep and drove him helplessly into the next car up the line.

He'd never understood what whiplash was until that moment, muscle fibers fraying, the back of his neck and shoulders stinging as if he'd been slammed with a board, blindsided, knocked down for the count, but it didn't prevent him from leaping out of the car to confront the jackass who'd hit him. What was wrong with these people? How could they live like this? Didn't they realize there was a natural world out there?

The smog was like mustard gas, burning in his lungs. There was trash everywhere, scattered up and down the off-ramp like the leavings of a bombed-out civilization, cans, bottles, fast-food wrappers, yellowing diapers and rusting shopping carts, oil filters, Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts. The grass was dead, the oleanders were buried in dust. A lone eucalyptus, twelve thousand miles removed from the continent where it had evolved, presided over the scene like an advertisement for blight. There were shouts in the distance, curses, the screaming, uncontainable blast of one car's horn after another, and sirens, the ubiquitous sirens, playing a thin dirge over it all.

Tierwater wrenched open the door of the car behind him, no need for rationality here, some threshold crossed and crossed again, Andrea, Teo, the shithole that was the human world, and he was capable of anything. Here, here in this ratcheting, stinking, crumpled hulk of steel, was the face of his enemy, an enemy as specific and unequivocal as Johnny Taradash, and he had his left hand on the door handle and his right balled into a fist, all the horns in the world shrieking and then he saw that face and stopped.

She was an Asian girl, seventeen, eighteen, no older than Sierra, with eyes like the bottom of a well and three bright tributaries sectioning her face into a delta of blood, and though he hated everybody and everything, though he had an acetylene torch and a tank of oxygen and a sack of silicon carbide in the back of the Jeep, he reached into the wrecked car, pulled her out and held herein his arms till the ambulance came.

What did that mean to him? Nothing, nothing at all. Sure, there were individuals out there, human beings worthy of compassion, sacrifice, love, but that didn't absolve them of collective guilt. There were too many people in the world, six billion already and more coming, endless people, people like locusts, and nothing would survive their onslaught. It took Tierwater less than a week — the rear end of the Jeep hammered roughly back into shape, his neck immobilized in an antiseptic white brace that would have glowed like a light bulb if he hadn't blackened it with shoe polish — and he was back in action. First, though, he'd had to sit through a dinner with Teo, Andrea and three other E. E! Honchos, at which they discussed things like the electorate, Congress, letter-writing campaigns and ways to attract more green-friendly donors. Teo was wearing a four-hundred-dollar suit. Teo. Liverhead. Sitting there like he'd already been nominated for state senator. Plates of Pilaf Thai, ginger shrimp and glass noodles circulated round the table. Nobody said a word about the earth.

Tierwater excused himself before the dessert came- "My neck's killing me," he said, giving Andrea a pathetic look, "Teo'll drop you off, won't you, Teo?" — and before the hour was out he was parking in a quiet cul-de-sac in a development less than a mile from where General Electric (or the DWP or whoever, it was all the same to him) was rearranging the earth in the name of progress. That was when he got out the shoe-blacking and his watchcap and all the rest. In hindsight, he shouldn't have acted alone. Always work in pairs, that was the monkeywrencher's first rule, because a lookout was absolutely essential, especially if you were wearing welder's goggles and you couldn't move your neck more than half an inch in either direction, let alone look over your shoulder. But he was done with the law now-he'd paid his dues and then some — and he was eager to get back into the game, to act, to do something meaningful. And he was fed up too, terminally fed up, with Andrea and Teo and the rest of the do-nothings. So he took a chance. Who could blame him?

It was just after eleven when he left the car, a few lights on in the houses still, but nobody out and nothing moving, not even the odd dog or cat. He slipped noiselessly down the street, ready to duck into the bushes if a car should happen by-it would be difficult to explain the way he was dressed and just what his mission was, and even if he was able to explain himself he could expect little sympathy from the concerned homeowner, who no doubt applauded General Electric and its mission to bring more electricity to the Valley in order to create yet more homes and, by extension, concerned homeowners. He saw himself sitting at a kitchen table trying to explain island biogeography, extinction and ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere to a yuppie homeowner with a never-used. 38 Special pointed at his neck brace. No, anybody who caught even the most cursory glimpse of him would mistake him for a burglar, and the passing cop, if cops came out this far, would take one look at him and start shooting.

He skirted a house with its porch light burning, then made his way through the one lot left vacant in the whole creeping five-hundred-home development and on into the chaparral behind it. Here he could breathe. Here were the smells of sage and sun-baked dirt strewn with the chaff and seeds of the plants that sprang from it, desert lives and desert deaths. He sat on a slab of sandstone to draw the heavy black socks on over his boots and saw the San Fernando Valley spread out below him like a dark pit into which all the stars in the universe had been poured. Each light out there, each of those infinite dots of light, marked a house or business, and what would his father think? What would Sy Tierwater, the developer, the builder of tract homes and shopping centers, think about all this spread out beneath him? This was the fruit of ten thousand Tierwaters, a hundred thousand, the city built out beyond any reason or limit. Would he say enough is enough — or would he applaud all those intrepid builders, say a prayer of thanksgiving for all those roofs erected over all those aspiring heads? An owl hooted emphatically, as if in answer, and then Tierwater detected the sound of its wings and lifted his head painfully to watch the dark form beat across a moonless sky.

The answer was self-evident: Sy Tierwater would have loved all this, and hated what his son was about to do.

The night was shrunk down to nothing, the stars glowing feebly through a shroud of smog, the yellow bowl of light pollution halving the sky at his back. He came down off the ridge behind the development and into the moonscape of the construction site on muffled feet, every step sure, not so much as a kicked stone or snapped branch to give him away. He wasn't reckless. He knew what jail was and he wasn't going back, that was for sure, and he knew what Andrea's wrath meant, and her love and attachment too. There could be no slip-ups tonight. The very fact of his being here would outrage her, if she knew about it — and by now, he supposed, she did. He was risking everything, he knew that. But then, what was one marriage, one daughter, one suburban life compared with the fate of the earth?

Sometimes, hiking the trails, dreaming, the breeze in his face and the chaparral burnished with the sun, he wished some avenger would come down and wipe them all out, all those seething masses out there with their Hondas and their kitchen sets and throw rugs and doilies and VCRs. A comet would hit. The plague, mutated beyond all recognition, would come back to scour the land. Fire and ice. The final solution. And in all these scenarios, Ty 'Tierwater would miraculously survive — and his wife and daughter and a few others who respected the earth — and they would build the new uncivilized civilization on the ashes of the old. No more progress. No more products. Just Iife.

He turned first to the heavy equipment — the earth movers, a crane, a pair of dump trucks. It was nothing, the routine he'd gone through a dozen times and more: locate the crankcase, fill it to the neck with grit and move on to the next diesel-stinking hulk. He'd waited for the dark of the moon so he could work without fear of detection, and though the shapes were indistinct, he was blessed with excellent night vision, and yes, he took his multiple vitamins every morning and a beta-carotene supplement too. The usual night sounds blossomed around him, the distant hum of the freeways, crickets and peepers, a pair of coyotes announcing some furtive triumph. He felt relaxed. He felt good.

This was the point at which he should have called it a job well done and gone home to bed. But he didn't. He wanted to do something big, make a grand statement that would pique interest out there in the dens and kitchens of the Valley, generate news clippings and wow the hard-core Earth Forever! Cadre, the ones who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty. In his backpack was the acetylene torch and an oxygen bottle made of aluminum. This was a heavy-duty torch, the sort of thing that could cut through steel like a magic wand, just wave it at the blade arms of a bulldozer or a section of railroad track and it would do the trick in less than a minute. Tierwater had been instructed in the use of the thing by an Oregon E. F.I Er by the name of Teddy Scruggs, a twenty-five-year-old welder with a lazy eye, bad skin and long trailing hair that generated enough grease to lubricate machinery-no more idiocy like the dance around the cement bags in the Siskiyou, not for Tierwater. He was a professional now, a veteran, and he prided himself on that.

The power company had sheared off the top of a hill here and run a dead zone back into the mountains as far as you could see. And they'd erected a chain of steel towers, bound together by high-tension wires, marching one after another on up the hill into the blue yonder — and soon to reach down on the near side into the Valley itself. He'd given some thought to waiting till the project was complete and the power up and running, but bringing down those towers when they were carrying God knew how many megavolts of electricity was just too risky Not that he meant to cut all the way through the supports-no, he would merely weaken them, slice neatly through the steel right at the base, where it plunged into the concrete footings. Then he'd go home and wait for the wind to blow-as it would tomorrow, according to the newspaper, Santa Anas gusting up to fifty miles per hour in the mountains and passes. Just about the time they'd be wondering what was wrong with the trucks, the towers would come thundering down, each yoked to the other, bang-bang-bang, like a chain of dominoes.

And what was that going to accomplish? He could hear Andrea already, and Teo-though Teo would have to give him his grudging admiration. Oh, yes, and the rest of the armchair radicals too. Because the answer was: plenty Because all it took was public awareness — if they only knew what that electricity ultimately cost them, if they only knew they were tightening the noose round their own throats, day by day, kilowatt hour by kilowatt hour, then they'd rise up as one and put an end to it. And to make sure that they did know, to make sure they understood just what the environmental movement was all about, Tierwater had drafted a ten-page letter to the Los Angeles Times, on a used typewriter he'd bought for cash at a junk shop in Bakersfield and discarded in a Dumpster in Santa Monica, and that letter was his testament, his manifesto, a call to arms for every wondering and disaffected soul out there. He'd signed it, after much deliberation, The California Phantom.

It was a good plan. But the problem with the torch, aside from the obvious disadvantage of its awkwardness and the weight of the tanks, was visibility. On a dismal black smog-shrouded night like this, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything much brighter than an oxy-fuel torch, except maybe one of those flares they used to shoot off over the trip wire in Vietnam so they could count how many teeth each of the Viet Cong had before blowing them away in a hail of M-16 fire. Tierwater considered that-he even thought about waiting till dawn, when the big light in the sky would efface the glare of the torch — but he went ahead with it anyway. There was nobody out here, and if he waited till dawn he ran the risk of running into an overeager GE employee or some suburban dog-walker with a photographic memory for license-plate numbers. He bent for the pack, hefted it and ambled up the grade to where the first of the towers stood skeletal against the night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Sample conversation, Tierwater and his daughter, the table between them, the shriek and gibber of two dozen voices, Fat Frank, the puffed-up guard, looming over them like an avalanche about to happen.

Sierra: Yeah, well, chickens have rights too. They do. It's just species chauvinism is what it is.

Tierwater: What what is?

Sierra: Saying they're just dumb animals as a rationale for penning them up in a space the size of a shoebox for their whole lives, with a what-do-you-call-it — a conveyor belt-underneath it to carry off their waste. Well, they used to say the same thing a hundred and fifty years ago about African Americans.

Tierwater: I'm not following you-you want to liberate the chickens and deep-fry African Americans, is that it? Sierra: Dad.) Then there was Sandman. Sandman-Geoffrey R. Sandman, the "R." Signifying nothing, but giving the extra bit of heft to a name that had to look good at the bottom of a bad check-was Tierwater's cellmate during the better part of the thirty-eight months of the state sentence he wound up serving. It was Sandman who kept him sane (if "sane" was an accurate description, and there were plenty who would debate that), and kept him safe too. Sandman was in for armed robbery-he'd taken down a Brinks guard coming out of the neighborhood Safeway with the day's receipts, then shot the man at the wheel in both feet when he stepped out to come to his partner's aid, and on top of that he wound up stealing the armored car for a glorious two-hour chase on the 605 Freeway — and he was a force to be reckoned with. He was tall, six three or four, and he put in his time in the weight room. Tierwater's reputation had preceded him — the Johnny Taradash incident, a few other minor but indicative things at Lompoc and the sheer craziness of the nude stunt and trying to take out General Electric — and that gave him at least some initial respect on the cellblock. Together, they formed a gang of two.

They were sitting in the cell one night, half an hour before lockdown, playing take-no-prisoners chess for five-dollar chits (Tierwater already owed his cellmate something like three hundred and twenty dollars at that point) and sharing the last of a pack of Camels (a nasty habit, sure, but what else were you going to do in prison?). There were the usual sounds, the jabbering, the cursing, the rucking up of clots of phlegm, the persistent tuh-tuh of sunflower seeds spat into a fist or a cup. The usual smells too, the body reek of caged animals, of vomit, urine and disinfectant, cut by the sweet cherry perfume of pipe tobacco or the scent of beer nuts or a freshly cracked bag of salt — and — vinegar potato chips. From the radio that hung from the bars in the exact spot where the reception was best came the low thump of bass and the high breathy wheeze of Maclovio Pulchris rendering the ineluctable lyrics of his latest hit: I want you, I want you, I want you, / Ooo, baby, 000, baby, 000!

"Christ, I hate that shit," Sandman said, maneuvering his bishop in for the kill-he still had better than half his pieces on the board; Tierwater was down to his king, an embattled queen and two pawns. "Every time he opens his mouth he sounds like he's pissing down his leg."

"I don't know," Tierwater said, "I kind of like it." Sandman gave him a look of incredulity-what he liked to call his "tomcat-sniffing-a-new-asshole look" — but he let it drop right there. He had the most malleable face Tierwater had ever seen, and he used it to his advantage, acting, always acting, but ready to underscore any performance with a ready brutal violence that was no act at all. When Tierwater first met him, Sandman was thirty-two, his face tanned from the yard, with a pair of casual blue eyes and a beard so carefully clipped it was like a shadow tracing the line of his jaw and underscoring the thrust of his chin. He was handsome, as handsome as the kind of actor who specializes in the role of the wisecracking world-beater and gets paid for it, and he used his looks to his advantage. People instinctively liked him. And he used their prejudices-no bad guy could look like that, they thought, certainly no con — and turned them upside down. "I spent years looking into the mirror," he'd told Tierwater, "till I got every look down, from 'don't fuck with me' to 'holy reverend taking the collection' to 'would you please put the money in the paper sack before I remove your flicking face.'"

"The lyrics might be a little weak," Tierwater admitted, "but with Pulchris it's the beat, that's what it's all about."

Sandman waved a hand in extenuation, then swooped in on the board to replace Tierwater's queen with a black rook that seemed to come out of nowhere. "Hah, got her, the bitch!"

"Shit. I didn't even see it."

"Ready to concede? And by the way, speaking of bitches, how's your ex doing?" He leaned forward to collect the pieces. "I mean, I saw you all tangled up with her there this afternoon, and you didn't look too happy-"

"What about your own bitch of an ex-wife?" Tierwater just sat there, trading grins with him. Andrea was a subject he didn't want to talk about. Or think about. It was like thinking about water when you're out on the desert, or pizza when you're in South Dakota.

"I ever tell you I've been married five times?" Sandman was leaning forward, grinning, the heavy muscles of his upper arms bunched under the thin fabric of his T-shirt. "Five times, and I'm only still a child yet. But the first one, Candy, Candy Martinez, she was my high-school sweetheart? — She was the worst. Soon as I went up the first time, she turned around and flicked everybody I ever knew, as if it was an assignment or something — I mean, my brother, my best bud, the guy across the street, even the shop teacher, for shit's sake, and he must've been forty, at least, with like those gorilla hands with the black hairs all over them-"

Tierwater pushed himself up off the bunk, took two paces right, two paces left — the cell was fifty-one square feet, total, so it was no parade ground. He just needed to shake out his legs, that was all. "Thanks, Sandman," he said, working up his best mock-sincere voice, "thanks for sharing that with me. I feel a lot better now."

Prison. Tierwater endured it, and there's not much more to be said about it. Every day he regretted going out there with that torch, but the regret made him harder, and he would have done it again without thinking twice about it-only, of course, as in all fantasies and theoretical models, he wouldn't get caught this time. He wound up serving the better part of his sentence, a block of good days (good-behavior days, that is, two days' credit for every day served in state) subtracted from his record because of an unfortunate incident with two child-sized members of a Vietnamese gang in the prison mess hall, and then he went back to Lompoc, minimum security again, because he wasn't going anywhere with six months left to serve.

And who visited him there? Sierra, sometimes, though it was a real haul for her on the Greyhound bus, and Andrea too, of course, though every time he pressed his lips to hers and felt her tongue in his mouth he knew it was wrong, knew it was over, knew she'd already written him off and was just playing out the game like a good sport. That hurt him. That put the knife in him and twisted it too. And who else visited, right in the middle of that stunned and stuporous time when he walked and talked and thought like a zombie and wondered how he'd ever gone from his father's boy in a clean house in a nice development surrounded by trees and flowers and all the good things of life to this? Who else?

Sandman, that's who. Geoffrey R. Sandman, in a suit and tie and looking like a lawyer or a brain surgeon. "How the hell are you, Ty?" He wanted to know while the guards edged from one foot to the other. "Anything you need, you just tell me."

And then came the day, OA vu, Andrea waiting for him in the parking lot, the little bag of his belongings, goodbye, Lompoc. He'd served out his sentence, and they unlocked the cage and let him go. Not in time to see his daughter cock the mortarboard down low over one gray, seriously committed eye and accept her degree, cum laude, in environmental science, but that was the way it was when you did the stupid things, the things that put you in their power, the things you swore you would never do again. That was what every prisoner told himself-I'll never do it again — but Tierwater didn't believe it. Not for a minute. He knew now, with every yearning, hating, bitter and terminally bored fiber of his being, why prison didn't reform anybody. Penitentiary. What a joke. The only thing you were penitent for was getting caught. And the more time you did, the more you wanted to strike back at the sons of bitches and make them wince, make them hurt the way you did. That was rehabilitation for you.

This time the car was a smooth black BMW-one of the pricey models, 740i, Andrea's car, and who'd bought it for her? "You did, Ty, and I love you for it. We needed something with a little class for pulling up at the curb when they've got the cameras going, you know? Anyway, I thought I'd surprise you. You like it, don't you?" He did. And this was déjà vu too, hammering the accelerator, the ocean, the wind, outdoors on the patio of the restaurant, waiters, a menu, real food, and then home to bed and sex. Only Sierra wasn't there this time-she was in Arizona, at Teo's Action Camp, undergoing a course of indoctrination in nonviolent protest, as if she hadn't already earned three Ph. D. 'S in it — and the sex wasn't there either. Oh, they took off their clothes, he and Andrea, and he built a monument to her body, the smell of her, the taste, her eyes and teeth, the sound of her voice, the simple unadulterated miracle of sitting at breakfast in a sun-struck kitchen and seeing her there across the table in her robe, but it was different. It was like Sandman said, reminiscing in the minutest sexual detail over his third wife and her multifarious betrayals, or maybe it was his fourth: What do you expect?

Tierwater kept his head down. He was a blind man given a pair of eyes, and he didn't want to look too hard for fear of going blind again. Andrea took the black BMW to work and he went out in the yard and dug holes and stuck plants in the ground. There was a pair of mallards in the swimming pool, and that pleased him — they'd been flying off in the spring and coming back every fall, Andrea told him — and the red-legged frogs splashed randily in the water while the mosquito fish pocked the surface with thin-lipped kisses. He saw Sandman a couple of times-he was living in Long Beach, working for a biotech firm, "That's where the money is, bro, and the future too" — but Andrea didn't exactly shine to the man, ex-con and violent offender that he was, and Tierwater let the relationship cool. Teo came back at the end of October, and Andrea seemed to fly south herself, emotionally anyway, and Tierwater was ready to get out the decoys and the shotgun and find out once and for all how things stood, but Sierra came back then too, and he got distracted.

For a month, he and his daughter held an ongoing reunion. They went to Disneyland and Magic Mountain, hiked the San Gabriels, the Santa Monicas and the Santa Susanas, ate out-every meal, every day — and saw A Doll's House ("I'll never be like her") and The Misanthrope at a theater in Brentwood. She was grown up now, a woman, nearly the age Jane was when they'd first met. Everywhere they went, he watched the men watching her, and that made him feel strange and protective, all those doggy and envious eyes, men of all ages-grandfathers, even-craning their necks for a look at her in her clean-limbed beauty. What did she wear? Shorts, skirts, T-shirts, blouses made of silk or rayon, nothing especially provocative, no makeup, no nonsense, but she had a gift of beauty and every man who wasn't already dead responded to it. One afternoon, over lunch at a place that had the vegan seal of approval-lentil-paste sandwiches, eggplant a la paysanne, peanut-vinaigrette salad and tofu shakes-he asked her about that, about men, that is. "Rick, wasn't that his, name? Whatever happened to him?"

She was chewing, her cheeks full and round, sunlight painting the tiles around a little fountain, a murmur of voices from the other diners, the soft swish of cars on the boulevard. It took her a moment, her eyes tight with some secret knowledge. "Oh, him," she said finally. "That was sophomore year. He was — I don't know, he liked sports."

Tierwater, puzzled: "You don't like sports?"

"You know what I mean." A pause. Somewhere, very faintly, a Coltrane tune was playing, a tune that bad ravished him when he was her age. "I liked Donovan Kurtz senior year, remember I told you? He was in my environmental-issues class? He had a- Do you want to hear this?"

Iced tea, that's what Tierwater wanted. He flagged down the waitress and they both sat in silence while she refilled his glass. "Sure," he said, and let the corners of his mouth drop.

"He was a music major and he used to sing to me when we were making love."

"Let me guess," Tierwater said, plunging in to cover his embarrassment, his daughter making love, " 'I've Been Working on the Railroad'?"

"Dad."

" 'When the Saints Go Marching In'?"

Was it his imagination, or did she color, just a bit? Coltrane ran distantly up and down the scales, magnificent. Changes, the ice tinkled in his glass. He said, "So what happened to him?"

Sierra set down her sandwich, looked away, shrugged. "He got married."

Yes, and then she was up in northern California, in Scotia, getting set to trespass on Coast Lumber's property and take possession of one of Coast Lumber's prime trees, and Tierwater was behind the wheel of the black BMW hurtling up 101, Andrea at his side sorting through the CDs ("How about this one, how about Barbecue You?"), Teo in back, all that watery sun-pasted scenery scrolling past the windows. The talk was of Washington lobbyists, sanctimonious Sierra Clubbers, the banners they'd be waving when Sierra rose up into the sky — and the speed limit. "Slow down, Ty-it's fifty-five through here," Andrea kept saying. "You don't want to get pulled over, do you? And have to explain to the cop why you're not in Los Angeles?"

"What are you talking about?" He was irritated, of course he was irritated: all he could think about was that trip back from the Siskiyou, more déjà vu, and Sierra left behind in the hands of the enemy. And now what were they doing? Rushing back into the fray, ready to sacrifice her all over again. Because of Teo. Because of Teo and his Action Camp. "You think some Gilroy yokel is going to know or care who I am or what the deal is?"

"Computers," came Teo's voice from the back.

"Bullshit," Tierwater said, but he slowed down.

Then there was the pretense of the motel, Tierwater and Andrea in one room, king-size bed, magic fingers, no sex, and Teo in another, no confessions yet, no avowals or disavowals, something bigger than the three of them in the making, let's focus, let's go team, hooray for our side. Early breakfast. Dim and overcast, fog like the wallpaper of a dream, a smell in the air that was like graves being turned. Tierwater was uneasy. He lit a cigarette, nasty habit, and Andrea told him to go outside.

It was just past nine when they reached the turnoff outside of Scotia and the dusty, compacted lot beyond it that was really nothing more than the result of a pass or two with the Cat during some bygone logging operation. Trees stood tall along the road — the fence, as the timber company called it, to keep motorists from apprehending that the facade was all there was — and there were cars everywhere, sensible cars, Corollas, Accords, Saturns, the faded mustard Volvos and battered VW buses of the Movement. It was a Sunday. There was smoke in the air, a taste of the marijuana-scented past, the chink-chink of tambourines and the skreel of nose flutes. Tierwater pulled a baseball cap down over his balding head and stepped out of the car.

Andrea was dressed down for the occasion in jeans, threehundred-dollar cowboy boots and white spandex with a red E. F.I Sweater knotted round her neck and her hair pulled back in a knot. She had a clipboard in one hand, a bottle of Evian in the other, and she was out of the car before it had come to a halt-Tierwater could see her across the lot, the center of a group of mostly young people with placards, her elbows jerky, one hand fluttering like a wounded bird, already lecturing. There was a quick fusillade of flashbulbs, a knot of journalists sympathetic to the cause converging on her, Chris Mattingly among them. Teo was more deliberate. He took his time gathering his things out of the back seat-pamphlets, copies of the press release, a bullhorn to rally the troops — and then he was standing there, dressed in his muscles, on the far side of the car, giving Tierwater a slit-eyed look over the hump of the sculpted roof. "You going to be okay with this, Ty?" He asked. "No violence, no hassles, real low profile, right?" He turned to gaze off at the crowd before he had his answer, and Tierwater understood that he wasn't really asking. "Oh, and pop the trunk, would you?"

AXXAM OUT! The placards said. SAVE THE TREES! STOP THE SLAUGHTER!

In the trunk was a picnic basket, a hamper with the ruby necks of two bottles of Bordeaux peeping out of one corner. Tierwater was dumbstruck. A picnic basket. His daughter was going up a tree and they were going to have a picnic. He heard Teo, the surfer's inflection, vowels riding the waves still, "Would you mind grabbing that basket?"

There were a lot of things here that rubbed Tierwater wrong, too many to count or even mention, but this, this picnic basket, really set him off. They were right there, the two of them, shoulder to shoulder at the open trunk of the blackly gleaming car, an excited chirp of voices burbling up all around them like springs erupting from the earth, movement everywhere, dust. "You're fucking my wife," Tierwater said.

Teo just looked at him, and he was wearing shades though the day was overcast, two amber slits that narrowed his face and made the gleaming stubblefield of his head seem enormous. "What? What did you say?"

"I said you're fucking my wife, aren't you, Teo? Be a man. Admit it. Come on, you son of a bitch, come on-"

Liverhead. He flexed his biceps and the muscles that ran in cords down either side of his neck, and he stood there as straight as a post driven into the ground. "This isn't the place, Ty," he said, and the pamphlets were bookbagged under one arm, the bullhorn under the other. "You've been gone a long time. Cut her some slack."

So this was it. This was the admission he'd been waiting for. Sandman had been right all along — and so had he, so had he. He wanted to hurt somebody in the space of that moment, the picnic basket in his hand, the nose flutes starting up with a shriek, flashbulbs popping-he wanted to hurt Teo, hurt him badly. But then somebody was there, some kid in a tie-dye T-shirt trying to grow into his first beard- "Teo, Teo, man, Teo" — the kid was saying, pumping Teo's hand and reaching to help with the pamphlets at the same time, and Teo, ignoring the kid, turned to Tierwater and let the extenuation melt into his voice: "Ty, look," he said, "you got to understand — we're all in this together."

Yes. And then they lifted his daughter up into the shattering light-struck reaches of that tree and everybody cheered, everybody, the whole mad circus, but Tierwater, alone in himself, felt nothing but hate and fear.

The Sierra Nevada, May 2026

It's hot. That seems to be the main feature of the experience Andrea, Petunia and I are having as we maneuver the Olf — putt over nondiscriminating roads — downed trees, splintered telephone poles, potholes and craters everywhere, anything less than a 4x4 or a military vehicle and you're done for. Sure, there are road crews out there beyond the tinted windows — 131° F. According to the LED display on the dash, and the wind so dirty it's like something out of Lawrence of Arabia — but they've got a lot of work ahead of them. Then the rains will come and the roads will wash out again, and they'll have a whole lot more. Andrea's driving. I'm looking out the window. Petunia, restrained by muzzle, harness and leash but otherwise free to roam around the back if she can find a place to stand amid all the provisions, fine wines, relics and household goods we've brought along, is sweating. And stinking.

We're stopped in traffic-ROAD WORK AHEAD — and I'm thinking about the mountains, about the tall trees and the sweet breath of the nights up there and the good times we had, the family times, back when we were the Drinkwaters. At the risk of sounding hackneyed, I'd say the usual, that it seems like an ice age ago, but it was, it was. There are squatters up there now, squirrel hunters and the like trying to live off the land, and I hear the trees have really taken a beating after a quarter-century of floods, droughts, beetles and windstorms. At least we don't have to worry about clear-cuts anymore-nothing but salvage timber now.

There's a pioneering stream of sweat working its way down my spine, the inside of the car smells like the old cat-house at the San Francisco Zoo, and the stiff no-nonsense seat of the Olfputt is crucifying my back. We've been on the road for four hours and we haven't even reached Bakersfield yet. "Crank the air-conditioning, will you?" I hear myself say.

"It's on full." Andrea gives me a smile. She's enjoying this. For her it's an adventure, one more take on the world and let's see what shakes out this time.

I'm stiff. I'm aggravated. I need to take a leak. Plus, Petunia's got to have a chance to do her business, if we ever hope to leash-train her anyway, and up ahead-we're crawling now, vroom-vroom, up and down over the pits and into and out of a gully the size of the Grand Canyon — I can make out the lights of a restaurant, El Frijole Grande. "What do you think about some lunch?" I say.

The lot is gouged and rutted and there's wind-drift everywhere, tumbleweeds, trash, what used to be a fence, the desiccated carcass of a cat (Felis catus). I step shakily out of the car — the hips! The knee! — and fall into the arms of the heat. It's staggering, it truly is. The whole world's a pizza oven, a pizza oven that's just exploded, the blast zone radiating outward forever, particles of grit forced right up my nose and down my throat the instant I swing open the door — accompanied by the ominous rattle of sand ricocheting off the scratch-resistant lenses of my glasses. I'm just trying to survive till I can get inside the restaurant, thinking about nothing but that, and yet here's Andrea's face, still floating behind me in the cab of the 4x4, and she seems to be screeching something, something urgent, and suddenly I'm whirling round with the oxidized reflexes of the young-old just in time to catch Petunia's leash as she comes hurtling out the door.

Leggy, stinking, her fur matted till it has the texture of wire overlaid with a thin coating of concrete, she rockets from the car, airborne for the instant it takes to snap the leash like a whip and very nearly tear my abused shoulder out of the socket. But I hold on, heat, age and the exigencies of a full bladder and enlarged prostate notwithstanding. This is the only Patagonian fox left in North America, and I'm not about to let go of her. She doesn't fully appreciate that yet, new to leash protocol as she is, and she goes directly for my legs, all the while snarling like a poorly sampled record and trying to bite through the muzzle while her four feet, sixteen toenails and four dewclaws scrabble for purchase on the blistered macadam.

I'm down on the pavement, born of sweat, and Petunia's on top of me, trying to dig a hole in my chest with her forepaws, when Andrea comes to the rescue. "Down, girl," she's saying, jerking at the leash I still refuse to let go of, and all I can think is to apportion blame where blame is due. This was her idea from the start. She didn't want to bring a cage along- "Don't be crazy, Ty, there's no room for it" — and she reasoned that Petunia was doglike enough to pass. "They are the same species, aren't they?"" Genus, "I told her-" or family, actually. But they still make an awful mess on the rug."

At any rate, the wounds aren't serious. The back of my shirt is a collage of litter and pills of grit, and two buttons are missing in the front, but Petunia hasn't managed to do much more than break the skin in three or four places before the two of us are able to overpower her. Despite the wind and the heat, we manage to hobble-walk her around the lot until she squats and does a poor, meager business under the front tire of a school bus draped with a banner reading Calpurnia Springs, State Champions, B-League. (Champions of what, I'm wondering-desert survival?) After a brief debate about what to do with her next-we can't leave her in the Olfputt in this heat — I decide to chain her to the bumper and hope for the best. Then we're inside, where it's cool, and the hits of the sixties-reconfigured for strings-are leaking through hidden speakers while people of every size, color and shape flock past in a mad flap and shriek.

The place is more arena than restaurant, massed heads, jabbering voices, the buzz and tweet of video games. The theme is Mexican — a couple of shabby parrots and half a dozen drooping banana trees in enormous pots — but the smell is of the deep-fryer, deep-fried everything. I'm bleeding through the front of my shirt. My pants are bound to my crotch with sweat. "I'll bet they don't have a bar," I say.

Andrea doesn't respond. She's a ramrod, eyes like pincers, sprung fully formed from the tile in front of the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign. Run five minutes off the clock. Run ten. We're still standing there, though three hostesses in their twenties have managed to seat whole busloads ahead of us. What it is, is age discrimination. We young-old, we of the Baby Boom who are as young and vital in our seventies as our parents were in their fifties, we who had all the power and invented the hits of the sixties, have suddenly become invisible, irrelevant, window dressing in an overpopulated, resource-stressed world. What are all these young people telling us? Die, that's what. And quickly.

They don't know Andrea. In the next moment she's got a startled-looking hostess with caterpillar hair in the grip of one big hand and the manager in the other and we're being led to our table right in the middle of that roiling den of gluttony and noise, sorry for the wait, no problem at all, enjoy your meal. I want a beer. A Mexican beer. But they don't have any beer. "Sorry," the twelve-year-old waiter says, looking at me as if my brain's been ossified, "only sake"

What else?

Andrea orders the catfish enchilada and a sake margarita, and after vacillating between the catfish fajitas and the Bagre al carbon before finally settling on the former, I lift my glass of sake on the rocks and click it against the frosted rim of her margarita. "To us," I offer, "and our new life in the mountains."

"Yes," she says, a quiet smile pressed to her lips, and I'm thinking about that, about our life together as it stretches out before me, a pale wind-torn sun in the windows, voices roaring around us, and I can't help wondering just what it's going to be like. We could live another twenty-five or fifty years even. The thought depresses me. What's going to be left by then?

"You're not eating," she says. A dozen kids-children, babies-run bawling down the aisle, ducking under the upraised arms of as many waiters, and disappear into the sea of faces. They are infinite, I am thinking, all these hungry, grasping people chasing after the new and improved, the super and imperishable, and I stand alone against them — but that's the kind of thinking that led me astray all those years ago. Better not to think. Better not to act. Just wave the futilitarian banner and bury your nose in a glass of sake. "Mine's good," Andrea says, proffering a forkful of pus-yellow catfish basted in salsa. "Want a bite?"

I just shake my head. I want to cry. Catfish.

Her voice is soft, very low, so low I can barely hear her in the din: "You know" — and she's digging through her purse now, a purse the size of a steamer trunk suspended from two black leather straps- "I have something for you. I thought you'd want it."

What do I show her in response? Two dog's eyes, full and wet and pathetic. There is nothing I want, except the world the way it was, my daughter restored to me, my parents, all the doomed and extinguished wildlife of America — the white-faced ibis, the Indiana bat, the margay, the Perdido Key beach mouse, the California grizzly and the Chittenango ovate amber snail-put back in their places. I don't want to live in this time. I want to live in the past. The distant past. "What?" I ask, and my voice is dead.

The rustle of paper. The strings rumble and then reach high to wash all the life out of a down-tempo version of "Sympathy for the Devil." I watch her hand come across the table with it, a sheaf of paper-real paper — and the bands of type that are like hieroglyphs encoded on it. And now I'm holding it out at arm's length, squinting till my eyes water and patting down my pockets for my reading glasses.

"I borrowed it," she says. "Stole it, actually."

Pm about to say, "What? What is it?" When the glasses find their way to the bridge of my nose and I can see for myself.

It's a manuscript. A book. And the title, suddenly revealed, stares out at me from beneath the cellophane wrapper of the cover: MARTYR TO THE TREES: THE SIERRA TIERWATER STORY BY APRIL F. WIND I already know how it ends.

But here it is, a concrete thing, undeniable, a weight in my hands. April F. Wind? And what does the "E" stand for? I wonder, Flowing? Full of? Forever? I rifle the pages, the crisp sound of paper, the printout, the stuff of knowledge as it used to be before you could plug it in. No need to talk about the inaccuracies here, or the sappy woo-woo-drenched revisionism or New Age psychoanalysis, but only the end, just that.

Sierra set the record. Set it anew each day, like Kafka's hunger artist, but, unlike the deluded artist, she had an audience. A real and ever-growing audience, an audience that made pilgrimages to the shrine of her tree, sent her as many as a thousand letters a week, erected statues to her, composed poems and song lyrics, locked arms and marched in her name till Axxam showed black through to the core. In all, she spent just over three years aloft, above the fray, the birds her companions, as secure in her environment as a snail in its shell or a goby in the smooth, sculpted jacket of its hole.

In the beginning-in the weeks and months after Climber Deke's frustrated effort to dislodge her — the timber company initiated a campaign of harassment designed either to bring her down or to drive her mad, or both. They logged the trees on all sides of her, the screech of the saws annihilating the dawn and continuing unabated till dark, and all around her loggers cupping their hands over their mouths and shouting abuse. Hey, you little cunt-want to put your lips around this? There's five of us here and we'll be up tonight, you wait for us, huh? And keep the slit clean, 'cause I got sloppy seconds. At night they set up a wall of speakers at the base of the tree and blared polkas, show tunes and Senate testimony into the vault of the sky till the woods echoed like some chamber of doom. They brought in helicopters, the big workhorses they used for wrestling hundred-foot logs off of remote hilltops, and the helicopters hovered there beside her tree, beating up a hurricane with the wash of their props. It was funny. It was a joke. She could see the pilots grinning at her, giving her the thumbs-up sign, A-OK, and let's see if we can blow you out of there. Do you copy? Roger and out.

They tried starvation too. On the morning after Climber Deke made off with the lower platform and all her cooking gear and foodstuffs, the hired goons established a perimeter around the grove and refused to let her support team in. For three nights running, in the company of a loping, rangy kid named Starlight who haltingly confessed that he was in love with my daughter and wanted to marry her as soon as she came down from her tree, I lugged supplies in to her, and for many more nights than that I wandered the dark woods with a baseball bat, just praying that one of those foul-mouthed sons of bitches would try to make good on his threats. Sierra was unfazed. They couldn't intimidate her. "Don't worry, Dad," she whispered one night as she descended as low as she dared to collect the provisions we'd brought her (Starlight straining against gravity from the top rung of an aluminum ladder while I braced him from below). "They're all talk." Her face glowed palely against the black vacancy that was her tree. "They're scared, that's all."

Andrea and Teo got the press involved- "Coast Lumber Starving Tree-Sitter," that sort of thing — and the timber company backed off. The support team returned, more determined than ever, the lower platform was rebuilt and Coast Lumber turned its back on the whole business. If my daughter wanted to trespass in one of their trees, they weren't going to deign to respond. Because any response-short of suspending all logging and restoring the ecosystem-would be used against them, and they knew it. They would wait her out, that was their thinking. The longer she stayed up there, the less anybody would care, and before long she'd get tired of the whole thing, hold a press conference and leave them to strip every last dollar out of the forest and nobody to say different.

By this point, Sierra had begun to take on the trappings of the mad saint, the anchorite in her cell, the martyr who suffers not so much for a cause but for the sake of the suffering itself. She became airier, more distant. She'd been studying the teachings of Lao Tzu and the Buddha, she told me. She was one with Artemis, one with the squirrels and chickadees that were her companions. There was no need to come down to earth, not then, not ever. She didn't care — or didn't notice-that she was the idol of thousands, didn't care that she was incrementally extending the record for consecutive days aloft till no one could hope to exceed it, and she barely mentioned Coast Lumber anymore. Toward the end, I think, she'd forgotten what she was doing up there in that tree to begin with.

The end, that's right-this is about the end of all that.

Can I tell you this? I was there-her father was there-when it happened. I'd moved out of the house in Tarzana, leaving the mosquito fish and mallards — and my wife-to fend for themselves. Why? I was embarrassed. Ashamed of myself. All along I'd been wrong about Andrea and Teo- there was nothing between them, and after we left Sierra in her tree that first weekend they both sat across the table from me at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Willits with the drawn-down faces of the martyred saints and made me understand that. (Later, long after it was over between Andrea and me, they'd have their time together, and I couldn't help thinking I was the one who'd been campaigning for it all along.) The parole board gave me permission to move to Eureka, where I had a job lined up — a nothing job, clerk in a hardware store, but it was enough to get me out of L. A. So I could be close to my daughter. I packed the Jeep while Andrea was at work. I left a note. I don't know-we never discussed it — but I think she must have been relieved.

My apartment wasn't much bigger than the cell I'd shared with Sandman. A sitting room with a bed and a TV, a kitchen the size of the galley on a thirty-foot sailboat, toilet. And shower, a patch of dirt out back with a rusting iron chair bolted to a slab of concrete in the middle of it. I could have had more-any time I wanted I could have drawn on the money we'd invested in Earth Forever! And nobody at GE the wiser — but I didn't want more. I wanted less, much less. I wanted to live like Thoreau.

My chief recreation was Sierra. Four, five, even six days a week, I'd hike out to her tree and chat with her if she wasn't busy with interviews or her journal. Sometimes she'd come down in her harness and float there above me, the soles of her feet as black as if they'd been tarred; other times we'd chat on the cell phone, sometimes for hours, just drifting through subjects and memories in a long, unhurried dream of an afternoon or evening, her voice so intimate right there in my ear, so close, it was as if she'd come down to earth again.

We had a celebration to commemorate her third anniversary aloft-her support team, a dozen journalists, a crowd of the E. F.I Rank and file. Andrea and Teo drove up, and that was all right, a kiss on the cheek, a hug, "You okay, Ty?

Really? You know where I am if you need me, "Andrea so beautiful and severe and Tierwater fumbling and foolish, locked into something that was going to have to play itself out to the end. I got her a cake that was meant, I think, for somebody's wedding-four tiers, layered frosting, the lonely plastic figurine of a groomless bride set on top. I was trying to tell my daughter something with that forlorn bride: it was time to come down. Time to get on with life. Go to graduate school, get married, have children, take a shower, for Christ's sake. If she got the meaning of the lone figurine, she didn't let on. She kept it, though — the figurine-kept it as if it were one of the dressed-up dolls she'd invented lives for when she was a motherless girl alone in the fortress of her room.

A week later. Forty-eight degrees, a light rain falling. Those trees, that grove, were more familiar to me than the sitting room in my apartment or the house I grew up in. There was a smell of woodsmoke on the air, the muted sounds of the forest sinking into evening, a shrouded ray of sunlight cutting a luminous band into her tree just above the lower platform — which was unoccupied, I saw, when I came up the hill and into the grove, already punching her number into the phone. It was four-fifteen. I'd just got out of work. I was calling my arboreal daughter.

Her voice came over the line, hushed and breathy, the most serene voice in the world, just as I reached the base of the tree. "Hi, Dad," she whispered, that little catch of familiarity and closeness in her voice, ready to talk and open up, as glad to hear my voice as I was glad to hear hers, "what's up?" I was about to tell her something, an amusing little story about work and one of the loggers-timber persons-who'd come in looking for a toggle switch but kept calling it a tuggle, as in "You got any tuggles back there?" When her voice erupted in my ear.

She cried out in surprise- "Oh!" She cried, or maybe it was "Oh, shit!" — Because after all those years and all the sure, prehensile grip of her bare, hardened toes, she'd lost her balance. The phone came down first, a black hurtling missile that was like a fragment dislodged from the lowering black sky, and it made its own distinctive sound, a thump, yes, but a kind of mechanical squawk too, as if it were alive, as if it were some small, tree-dwelling thing that had made the slightest miscalculation in springing from one branch to another. And that was all right, everything was all right-she'd only lost her phone, I'd get her a new one, and hadn't I seen an ad in the paper just the other day and thought of her?

But then the larger form came down-much larger, a dark, streaking ball so huge and imminent the sky could never have contained it. There was a sound-sudden, roaring, wet — and then the forest was silent.

Petunia is not a dog. She's a Patagonian fox. Above all, I've got to remember that. It seems important. It's the kind of distinction that will be vitally important in the life to come, whether it's on top of the mountain or in a cloning lab somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. Petunia is not a dog. I seem to be repeating this to myself as we wind our way up the fractured mountain road, the hot glare of the day ahead of me, Andrea nodding asleep at my side. What I'm noticing, at the lower elevations, is how colorless the forest is. Here, where the deciduous trees should be in full leaf, I see nothing but wilt and decay, the skeletal brown stalks of the dead trees outnumbering the green a hundred to one. The chaparral on the south-facing slopes seems true, the palest of grays and milky greens, twenty shades of dun, but each time we round a bend and the high mountains heave into view, the colors don't seem right — but maybe that's only a trick of memory. Just to be here, just to be moving through the apparent world after all these years, is enough to make everything all right.

Of course, there are the inevitable condos. And traffic. This was once a snaking two-lane country road cut through national forest lands, sparsely populated, little-traveled. Now I'm crawling along at fifteen miles an hour in a chain of cars and trucks welded into the flanks of the mountain as far as I can see, and I'm not breathing cooling drafts of alpine air either-wind-whipped exhaust, that's about it. Where thirty-five years ago there were granite bluffs and domes, now there is stucco and glass and artificial wood, condos banked up atop one another like the Anasazi cliff-dwellings, eyes of glass, teeth of steps and railings, the pumping hearts of air-conditioning units, thousands of them, and no human face in sight. Am I complaining? No. I haven't got the right.

Andrea sleeps on, her old lady's double chin vibrating through a series of soft, ratcheting old lady's snores. Petunia, quietly stinking, is licking up a puddle of her own vomit in the space between three cases of fine wine and an ice chest crammed with immemorial beef. I'm whispering to myself, jabbering away about nothing, a kind of litany I began devising in prison as a way of bearing witness to what we've lost on this continent alone-bonytail chub, Okaloosa darter, desert pupfish, spot-tailed earless lizard, crested caracara, piping plover, the Key deer, the kit fox, the Appalachian monkeyface pearly mussel — but I can't keep it up. I'm depressing myself. The top of the mountain looms ahead. Joy. Redemption. The wellspring of a new life. I switch on the radio, hoping for anything, for "Ride Your Pony," but all I get is a very angry man speaking in what I take to be Farsi- or maybe it's Finnish — and a station out of Fresno devoted entirely to techno-country. Right. I switch off the radio and start muttering again-just to entertain myself, you understand.

The traffic begins to thin out at five thousand feet, where the narcoleptic community of Camp Orson has been transformed into Orsonville, a booming mid-mountain burg of mobile homes, mini-malls, condos, video stores and take-out pizza (Try Our Catfish Fillet/Pepperoni Special!). I keep my young-old eyes on the road, maneuvering around monster trucks, dune buggies and jacked-up 4x4s, and then we're on the final stretch of the road to Big Timber. The road is a good deal rougher here, washouts every hundred yards, the severed trunks of toppled trees like bad dentition along both shoulders, the fallen-rock zone extended indefinitely. But the Olfputt-one hundred and twelve thousand dollars' worth of Mac's money made concrete-is humming along, indestructible on its road-warrior tires. There are only two cars ahead of us now and they both turn off at Upper Orsonville, and whether this is a good sign or bad I can't tell, I have a sneaking suspicion that its bad-nobody wants to go any farther because the road is so buckled and blasted and there's no there there once you arrive — but it's too late to turn back now. And on the positive side, the temperature has dropped to just over a hundred.

Half an hour later, Andrea wakes with a snort as we creep into Big Timber, where the Big Timber Bar and Mountain Top Lodge still stands-ramshackle, in need of paint and a new roof maybe, and with a dead whitebark pine in the fifty-ton range canted at a forty-five-degree angle over the windows of the restaurant, but there still and to all appearances not much changed since we first stepped through its doors as the Drinkwaters all those years ago. But what has changed, and no amount of footage on the nightly news could have prepared us for it, is the forest. It's gone. Or not gone, exactly, but fallen-all of it, trees atop trees, trees bent at the elbows, snapped at the base, uprooted and flung a hundred yards by the violence of the winds. All the pines — the sugar, the yellow, the Jeffrey, the ponderosa — and all the cedars and the redwoods and aspens and everything else lie jumbled like Pick-up-Sticks. Mount St. Helens, that's what it looks like. Mount St. Helens after the blast.

Andrea lets out a low whistle and Petunia's ears shoot up, alert. "I knew it was going to be bad," she says, and leaves the thought for me to finish.

I'm just nodding in agreement, as stunned as if I'd been transported to Mars. It's eighty-six degrees out there, accompanied by a stiff wind, and the snow-all of it, the crushing record snow that obliterated everything the winds and the beetles and the drought couldn't reach-is gone. Do I see signs of hope? A few weeds poking through the tired soil at the end of the lot where three weather-beaten pickups sit clustered at the door to the bar, the stirring of buds like curled fingers on the branches of the arthritic aspens, and what else? A bird. A shabby, dusty mutant jay the color of ink faded into a blotter with a wisp of something clenched in its beak, "I need a drink," I say.

Inside, nothing has changed: a few stumplike figures in dirty T-shirts and baseball caps hunched over the bar, knotty pine, a ratty deer's head staring out from the wall, discolored blotches on the floor where the roof has leaked and will leak again, dusty jars of pickled eggs and even dustier bottles that once held scotch, bourbon, tequila. And the screen, of course, tuned to a show called Eggless Cooking that features a sack-faced chef in toque and apron whisking something vaguely egglike in a deep stainless-steel bowl. If you're looking for the young or even the middle-aged here, you'll be disappointed. I see faces as seamed and rucked as the road coming up here, rheumy eyes, fallen chins, clumps of nicotine-colored hair bunched in nostrils and ears-we're among our own at last. I pull out a stool for Andrea, the only lady present, and await the slow shuffle of the bartender as he makes his way down the length of the bar to us. He's wheezing. He has a coffee mug in his hand. He draws even with us, no hint of recognition on his face, and lifts his eyebrows. "Scotch," I say hopefully, "and for my wife, how about a vodka Gibson."

"Up," she says, "two olives, very dry. And a glass of water. Please."

There's a murmur of conversation from the far end of the bar, tired voices, a punchline delivered, a tired laugh. Andrea's hand seeks mine out where it rests in my lap. "My wife?" She says.

I like the look in her eyes. It's a look I once fell in love with, many jail terms ago. "What am I supposed to say-`Get one for my ex here? '"

The bartender sets down two glasses of murky sake and a glass of water, no ice, and I'm trying to pull the years off his face, straighten out his shoulders, erase his gut: do I know him? "You been here long?" I ask.

He's wearing a full beard in four different shades of gray, the kind that fans out from the cheekbones as if a stiff wind is blowing round his head. He's bracing himself against the bar, and I read half a dozen ailments into that: tender liver, bad feet, bursitis, arthritis, hip replacement, war wounds. "Nineteen sixty-two," he says, and throws a wet-eyed glance down the front of Andrea's dress.

She says, "What happened to all the trees? It used to be so beautiful here."

There's a moment then, the chef on the screen nattering on about olestra and the processed pulp of the opuntia cactus, a sound of wind skirting the building, pale sun, the jay out there somewhere like a misplaced fragment of a dream, when I feel we're all plugged in, all attuned to the question and its ramifications, the three young-old men at the end of the bar, the bartender, Andrea, me. What happened, indeed. But the bartender, a wet rag flicking from hand to hand like the tongue of a lizard, breaks the spell. He shrugs, an eloquent compression of his heavy shoulders. "Beats the hell out of me," he says finally.

No one has anything to add to that, and the bar is quiet a moment until one of the men at the far end mutters, "Oh, Christ;" and we all look up to see a new red van rolling into the lot, its tires pouring in and out of the ruts like a glistening black liquid. The van noses up to the front steps, so close it's practically kissing the rail, and the bartender lets out a low stabbing moan. "Shit," he says, "it's Quinn."

Quinn? Could it be? Could it possibly be?

"Drink up, Bob," one of the stumpmen says, and then they're pushing back their barstools, patting their pockets for keys, groaning, wheezing, shuffling. "Got to be going, so long, Vince, see you later."

I'm sitting there rapt, watching the spectacle of the tomato-red door of the van sliding back automatically and a mechanical device lowering a wheelchair from high inside it, when Andrea takes my arm. "We've got to be going too, Ty — I have no idea what kind of shape the cabin is going to be in-sheets, bedding, the basics. We could be in for a disappointment — and a lot of work too. And I don't feature sleeping in the car tonight, uh-uh, no way, absolutely not." She's standing there now, right beside me, the handbag thrown over one shoulder. "I'm just going to use the ladies'-"

Quinn was old thirty-five years ago. A little monkey-man with a dried-up face and a head no bigger than a coconut, the snooping furtive eyes, every walking cell of him preserved in alcohol. He must be ninety, ninety-five. And there he is, outside the window, lowering himself gingerly into the chair and flicking the remote with a clawlike finger as the tomato-red door slides shut behind him. And now the chair is moving and the front door of the bar swings open, and in he comes.

There is no guilt in me, not a shred of it-I'm all done with that. But I'm curious, I am, and maybe a bit angry too. Or vengeful, I suppose. I feel big, I feel notorious all over again, Tyrone 0 'Shaughnessy Tierwater, Eco-Avenger, the Phantom of California, Human Hyena. "Hi," I say, leaning down to smile in his face as the motorized chair pulls him past me, "how they hangin'?"

Nothing. He's as drawn down and shriveled as a shrunken head preserved in salt with the body still attached, a little man of mismatched parts suspended in the gleaming steel and burnished aluminum of the wheelchair. "Vincent," he calls out, and his voice is like the creaking of an old barn door, "I'll have the usual!'

A bottle of scotch-real scotch, Dewar's, an antique treasure-magically appears, and we both watch as the bartender removes a cocktail glass from the rack over his head, measures out a generous pour and adds a splash of water. Then he comes out from behind the bar, all the way round, and inserts the glass carefully between the old insurance man's crabbed fingers_ A shaky ride to the lips, and Quinn takes half the drink in a gulp, then cradles the glass in his lap and turns his battered old face to me. "So, Mr. New Guy," he says, "you're all so friendly with that big smile stuck on your face — but don't I know you from someplace?"

I'm not going to make this easy for him. I just shrug, but I see Andrea out of the corner of my eye, crossing the room in her sensible flats, blusher and lipstick newly applied.

It takes him a minute, the convolutions of a brain even older than the head it's in, and it takes Andrea's appearance at my side too, but then his eyes narrow and he says, "I do know you. I know just who you are."

Andrea tries on a smile. She has no idea what's happening here.

He makes as if to lift the drink to his lips again, a stalled grin on his face, a glint of calculation flashing deep in his clouded eyes. His nose-he's fooling with his nose, working a finger up under the flange, and then he fumbles around in his pocket for a handkerchief and brings it to his face. We watch in silence as he rotates his head on the unsteady prop of his neck and gives his nose a long deliberate cleansing, and then we watch him fold the handkerchief up and carefully replace it in his pocket as if we've never seen anything like it. "Tell me," he says then, "now that all the years-" And he pauses, as if he's lost his train of thought, but it's only a game, and I can see he's enjoying himself. But so am I. So am I. "What I wanted to say is, you did set that fire, didn't you? And destroy all that equipment? Hm? Didn't you?"

The bartender blinks as if he's just wakened from a dream. Andrea puts a hand on my arm. "Just to satisfy an old man's curiosity," Quinn wheezes.

I lean in close, Andrea holding tight to me, the bartender dumped over the rail of the bar like a sack of grain, and take some time with my enunciation and the complications of my dental enhancements. "Yes," I say, as clearly as I can, so there'll be no mistake about it, "I set the fire and demolished it all, and you know what? I'd do it again. Gladly."

Oh, the look. He's the wise man of the ages, the quizmaster, the oracle in his cave. His dewlaps are trembling and the drink, forgotten, is canted dangerously in his lap. "And what did you accomplish? Look around you-just look around you and answer me that."

This is it, the point we've been working toward, the point of it all, through how many years and how many losses I can't begin to count, and the answer is on my lips like a fleck of something so rank and acidic you just have to spit it out: "Nothing," I say. "Absolutely nothing."

Epilogue The Sierra Nevada, June-July 2026 There's a phrase I've always liked- "Not without trepidation," as in "Not without trepidation, they turn the corner onto what used to be Pine Street and catch their first glimpse of the staved-in, stripped-down and gutted shack in which they will have to measure out the remainder of their young-old lives." I'm not going to use that phrase here, though it's on my lips as the sun-blasted roof of Ratchiss' place, obscured by what looks like the work of a dozen forty-ton beavers, comes into view. There are so many trees down we can't actually get to the house, though in some distant era somebody came by with a chainsaw and cut a crude one-lane gap into the street itself — and I can see that person, a vigorous young-old man like me, bearded maybe, in a lumberjack's shirt with a lumberjack's red suspenders holding up his dirt-blackened jeans, and I can see that person giving up in despair as one storm climbs atop another and flings down hundred — and — fifty-foot trees as if they were hollow cane.

I stop the car, get a firm grip on Petunia's leash and step out into the late-afternoon glare of the sun. The air isn't so thick here or so hot, and there's a smell wrapped up in it that brings me back, something indefinable and austere, a smell of the duff, aspen shoots, the first unfolding wildflowers — or meat bees, maybe that's it: meat bees swarming over some dead thing buried out there under the tangle of downed trees. All right. But at least Petunia is no problem-she comes out limp as a rag, blinking her canine eyes, and no, Petunia, this is not Patagonia and these are not the pampas-while Andrea, rested and lit up with sake, slams the passenger's-side door with real vigor, her chin thrust forward, a look I know only too well burning in her own eyes. Right in front of us, five feet from the bumper of the car, is a fallen tree so big around she has to go up on tiptoe to see over it. "It doesn't look too bad," she says. "Considering."

"Considering what?" I counter to the accompaniment of Petunia's urine sizzling on the pavement. "The end of the world? Collapse of the biosphere? Ruination of the forest and everything that lives in it?"

"There's a tree down over the roof, I can see that from here — and it looks like the chimney's gone, or half of it. And the windows. But it looks like-yes, somebody's been here to board them up, most of them anyway." She turns to me, flush with this latest triumph of her surgically assisted vision, and I wonder if I shouldn't start calling her Hawkeye. "You think-?"

"Mag," I say. "Or Mug."

And that's something to contemplate-maybe Mag is in there now, feasting on memories of savannas trodden and gemsbok speared, in no way receptive to our invading his living space. Or no, no, not Mag-he's in a condo someplace, planted in front of the screen in his polo shirt and Dockers, like everybody else. From what I can tell through the refracted lens of a good concentrated squint, the place doesn't look occupied, except maybe by carpenter ants and fence lizards. But there's one way to find out, and Andrea, always a step ahead of me, already has the ax in her hand.

It takes half an hour, but we manage to remove a section of waist-thick branches from the tree in front of us, and then, leaving Petunia tied to the bumper of the Olfputt, I help Andrea over the bald hump of the dead tree and then she helps me. I'm standing on the other side of it, two feet on the ground, fifty yards from the house, and it's as if I've entered a new world. Or an old one, a world that exists only in the snapping tangle of neurons in my poor ratcheting brain. There's the front deck, still intact, the steps where Sierra used to sit over a game of chess or Monopoly, the door Ratchiss shouldered his way through with his bags of groceries. For the first time in a long time I feel something approaching optimism, or at least a decline in the gradient of pessimism. This is going to work, I tell myself, it's going to be all right.

Inside, it's about what you'd expect after fifteen years or more of neglect — or not only neglect, but an active conspiracy of the elements to bring the place down. The tree that rests like the propped-up leg of some sleeping giant across the peak of the roof is the biggest problem — and it's going to be an insurmountable problem when the storms come — but we'll just have to work around it. Andrea, standing there amid the wreckage with all the determination of her squared-off chin and thrust-back shoulders, is thinking along the same lines. "We'll just have to live out of the back rooms in winter," she says, bending idly to pluck a bit of yellowish fluff the size of a pot holder from the floor. It takes me a minute, and I have to feel it, rub it between thumb and forefinger, but then I understand what it is — the remains of the lion rug, gnawed upon by generations of wood rats and the like. And birds. Don't forget the birds, because they're still out there, they're still alive, some of them anyway. I get the sudden image of a junco lining its nest with lion fur, and why does that make me want to smile?

For the rest, the sable and bushpig, the tribal shields and rifles have long since been pried from the walls by the looters who seem to have taken everything else of value, including the bathroom fixtures, there are holes in the floor you could drop a bowling ball through, the hot tub is a stew of algae and mosquito larvae, and at least 75 percent of the cedar shakes — the lion's share, that is-have been torn from the roof and flung off over the continent like so many splinters of nothing. And in the wreckage of the kitchen, sprawled out ignominiously on the floor beneath a heap of battered pans, broken glass and dish towels, is the Maneater of the Luangwa himself, still snarling and still affixed to the heavy iron stand via the stake running up his spine. Andrea lets out a little exclamation, and then she's fishing a cold, hard glittering sphere out of the bottom of a frying pan filled with sawdust and mouse droppings. And what is it? The maneater's glass eye, a big golden cat's-eye marble with the black slit of the pupil sunk into it.

That relic, that object, fills me right up to the back of the throat with emotion, and I can't say why. There it is, in my palm, the glittering manufactured thing, succedaneum for the real. All I can think to say is, "Poor Mac."

Andrea's rolling up her sleeves, looking for a broom, a mop, heavy-duty garbage bags, yet she pauses a minute to take my hand in hers. She nods in a sad, slow, elegiac way, but she's the optimist here and make no mistake about it. "As horrible as it was," she says, "at least it was, I don't know, special."

"Special? What are you talking about?"

The light through the high, shattered window behind her is like syrup spread over the rafters of the ceiling and the belly of the big tree poking through it, night on earth, night coming down. It's very still. "Think about it, Ty-of all the billions of us on the planet, he's the last one ever to-to go like that. It's really almost an honor?'

For the rest of it, time takes hold of us and we find ourselves drifting through the days in a pattern as pure and uncomplicated as anything I've ever known-it's almost like being in the wilderness all over again. Up with the sun, to bed at nightfall, no thought for anything but making a life, minute by minute, hour by hour. We bag up the trash and haul it away, scrub the floors till the tile comes back to life and the wood glows under a fresh coat of wax. We crush carpenter ants, battle wasps, chase mice and birds and bats back out into the wild, where they belong. Andrea takes the Olfputt into Orsonville and comes back with sixteen precut and measured windowpanes and wields the putty like a glazier's apprentice, or maybe the glazier himself. Do I know how to mix cement? Sure, I do. And before long I've gathered up the tumble of bricks in the yard and rebuilt the chimney so we can sit around the hearth when winter comes, sipping that fine red wine, gnawing beef, listening to the wind in the hollow places and the whisper of the snow. There'll be no lack of firewood, that's for sure.

The locals are here still, living out there amid the devastation in reroofed cabins, gathering at the lodge on Thursdays for potluck suppers, nothing but time on their bands. With the help of the stumpmen and a few of the others, we're able to restore Pine Street as a viable, if rutted, means of ingress and egress, and we've even got the major portion of the tree off the roof. Even better, Andrea reveals a hitherto unsuspected talent-her father taught her how to split cedar shakes when she was a girl in Montana. "Nothing to it," she says, and there she is out in the yard spitting into the callused palms of her big hands and swinging the ax over her head. And don't forget GE. They've hooked us up — the thinnest black cable buried in a trench alongside the street like nothing so much as a long extension cord — and we've got electricity now, the house glowing against the gathering dark like some celestial phenomenon set down here on earth in a nest of fallen trees and the deep shades of the night.

And there's something else too. The woods — these woods, our woods-are coming back, the shoots of the new trees rising up out of the graveyard of the old, aspens shaking out their leaves with a sound like applause, willows thick along the streambeds. At night you can hear the owls and the tailing high shriek of coyotes chasing down the main ingredient of their next meal. We haven't seen any squirrel hunters yet, or any survivalists either — and that suits us just fine.

Then there comes a soft pale evening in the middle of the summer, wildflowers on fire in the fields, toads and tree frogs in full song down by the creek, and my wife and I strolling down the verge of the open street, arm in arm, Petunia trotting along beside us on a braided leather leash I found in one of the cupboards in the basement. She's adjusting pretty well, Petunia, and so am I, because I'm through with contradictions. We don't need the muzzle anymore, or a cage either. She sleeps at the foot of the bed, curled up on the throw rug, no memory of any other life in her canine brain. "Come," I tell her, "Sit,"" Stay."

"See if she'll heel, Ty," Andrea says, and I dig into my pocket for a Milkbone, pitch my voice low- "Heel," I command — and she tosses up her ears and sits right down at my feet on the warm pavement.

That's when the girl appears, dressed all in black, a slight hunch to her shoulders, the long stride, high-laced black boots and hair the color of midnight in a cave. She's got her head down, watching her feet, and she doesn't see us until she's almost on us. "Oh, hi," she says, not startled, not surprised, and I can see the glint of the thin silver ring punched through her left nostril. How old is she? I'm a poor judge, but I'd guess thirteen or fourteen. "You must be the new people, right?" She says, and there's a chirp to her voice that brings me back thirty-seven years.

Andrea's giving her a world-class smile. "We're the Tier-waters," she says. "I'm Andrea, this is Ty."

The girl just nods. She's looking at Petunia now, the smallest frown bunched round her lips. "Isn't that a, what do you call them, an Afghan?"

"That's right," I say, "that's right, she's a dog." And then, for no reason I can think of, I can't help adding, "And I'm a human being."