A Friend of the Earth Read Online Free PDF

motel?’
    â€˜You don’t have to do that.’
    Still grinning, all my dental enhancements on display, my naked gums anaesthetized with
sake
fumes and my eyes on fire behind the twin discs of my glasses: ‘I want to.’
    The wind comes back for an encore. Snatches of music drift in from the bar. Everything is roaring, the whole world, noise and more noise. ‘I won’t stay long,’ she says. ‘And I’ll help with the animals. You know how I love animals – ’

The Siskiyou, July 1989
    This is the way it begins, on a summer night so crammed with stars the Milky Way looks like a white plastic sack strung out across the roof of the sky. No moon, though – that wouldn’t do at all. And no sound, but for the discontinuous trickle of water, the muted patter of cheap tennis sneakers on the ghostly surface of the road and the sustained applause of the crickets. It’s a dirt road, a logging road, in fact, but Tyrone Tierwater wouldn’t want to call it a road. He’d call it a scar, a gash, an open wound in the body corporal of the forest. But for the sake of convenience, let’s identify it as a road. In daylight, trucks pound over it, big D7 Cats, loaders, wood–chippers. It’s a road. And he’s on it.
    He’s moving along purposively, all but invisible in the abyss of shadow beneath the big Douglas firs. If your eyes were adjusted to the dark and you looked closely enough, you might detect his three companions, the night disarranging itself ever so casually as they pass: now you see them, now you don’t. All four are dressed identically, in cheap tennis sneakers blackened with shoe polish, two pairs of socks, black tees and sweatshirts and, of course, the black watchcaps. Where would they be without them?
    Tierwater had wanted to go further, the whole nine yards, stripes of greasepaint down the bridge of the nose, slick rays of it fanning out across their cheekbones – or, better yet, blackface – but Andrea talked him out of it. She can talk him out of anything, because she’s more rational than he, more aggressive, because she has a better command of the language and eyes that bark after weakness like hounds – but then she doesn’t have half his capacity for paranoia, neurotic display, pessimism or despair. Things can go wrong. They do. They will. He tried to tell her that, but she wouldn’t listen.
    They were back in the motel room at the time, on the unfledged strip of the comatose town of Grants Pass, Oregon, where they were registered under the name of Mr. and Mrs. James Watt. He was nervous – butterflies in the stomach, termites in the head – nervous and angry. Angry at theloggers, Oregon, the motel room, her. Outside, three steps from the door, Teo’s Chevy Caprice (anonymous gray, with the artfully smudged plates) sat listing in its appointed slot. He came out of the bathroom with a crayon in one hand, a glittering, shrink–wrapped package of Halloween face paint in the other. There were doughnuts on the bed in a staved–in carton, paper coffee cups subsiding into the low fiberboard table. ‘Forget it, Ty,’ she said. I keep telling you, this is nothing, the first jab in a whole long bout. You think I’d take Sierra along if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was safe? It’s going to be a stroll in the park, it is.’
    A moment evaporated. He looked at his daughter, but she had nothing to say, her head cocked in a way that indicated she was listening, but only reflexively. The TV said, ‘ – and these magnificent creatures, their range shrinking, can no longer find the mast to sustain them, let alone the carrion.’ He tried to smile, but the appropriate muscles didn’t seem to be working. He had misgivings about the whole business, especially when it came to Sierra – but as he stood there listening to the insects sizzle against the bug zapper outside