THE SISKIYOU, JULY 1989
by T. C. Boyle
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 the loggers,
Oregon, the motel room, her. Outside, three steps from the door, Teo’s Chevy
Caprice (anonymous gray, with the artfully smudged plates) sat listing in its
appointed slot. He came out of the bathroom with a crayon in one hand, a
glittering, shrink-wrapped package of Halloween face paint in the other.
There were doughnuts on the bed in a staved-in carton, paper coffee cups
subsiding into the low fiberboard table. “Forget it, Ty,” she said. “I keep
telling you, this is nothing, the first jab in a whole long bout. You think I’d
take Sierra along if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was safe? It’s going to
be a stroll in the park, it is.”
A moment evaporated. He looked at his daughter, but she had nothing to
say, her head cocked in a way that indicated she was listening, but only
reflexively. The TV said, “—and these magnificent creatures, their range
shrinking, can no longer find the mast to sustain them, let alone the carrion.”
He tried to smile, but the appropriate muscles didn’t seem to be working. He
had misgivings about the whole business, especially when it came to Sierra—
but as he stood there listening to the insects sizzle against the bug zapper
outside the window, he understood that “misgivings” wasn’t exactly the word
he wanted. Misgivings? How about crashing fears, terrors, night-sweats? The
inability to swallow? A heart ground up like glass?
There were people out there who weren’t going to like what the four of
them were planning to do to that road he didn’t want to call a road. Bosses,
under-bosses, heavy machine operators, CEOs, power-lunchers, police,
accountants. Not to mention all those good, decent, hard-working and
terminally misguided timber families, the men in baseball caps and red
suspenders, the women like tented houses, people who spent their spare time
affixing loops of yellow ribbon to every shrub, tree, doorknob, mailbox and
car antenna in every town up and down the coast. They had mortgages,
trailers, bass boats, plans for the future, and the dirt-blasted bumpers of their
pickups sported stickers that read Save a Skunk, Roadkill an Activist and Do
You Work for a Living or Are You an Environmentalist? They were angry—
born angry—and they didn’t much care about physical restraint, one way or
the other. Talk about misgivings—his daughter is only thirteen years old, for
all her Gothic drag and nose ring and the cape of hair that drapes her
shoulders like an advertisement, and she’s never participated in an act of civil
disobedience in her life, not even a daylit rally with minicams whirring and a
supporting cast of thousands. “Come on,” he pleaded, “just under the eyes,
then. To mask the glow.”
Andrea just shook her head. She looked good in black, he had to admit it,
and the watchcap, riding low over her eyebrows, was a very sexy thing.
They’d been married three months now, and everything about her was a
novelty and a revelation, right down to the way she stepped into her jeans in
the morning or pouted over a saucepan of ratatouille, a thin strip of green
pepper disappearing between her lips while the steam rose witchily in her
hair. “What if the police pull us over?” she said. “Ever think of that? What’re
you going to say—‘The game really ran late tonight, officer’? Or ‘Gee, it was
a great old-timey minstrel show—you should have been there.’ ” She was the
one with the experience here—she was the organizer, the protestor, the
activist—and she wasn’t giving an inch. “The trouble with you,” she said,
running a finger under the lip of her cap, “is you’ve been watching too many
movies.”
Maybe so. But you couldn’t really call the proposition relevant, not now,
not here. This is the wilderness, or what’s left of it. The night is deep, the road
intangible, the stars the feeblest mementos of the birth of the universe. There
are nine galaxies out there for each person alive today, and each of those
galaxies features 100 billion suns, give or take the odd billion, and yet he can
barely see where he’s going, groping like a sleepwalker, one foot stabbing
after the other. This is crazy, he’s thinking, this is trouble, like stumbling
around in a cave waiting for the bottom to fall out. He’s wondering if the
others are having as hard a time as he is, thinking vaguely about beta carotene
supplements and night-vision goggles, when an owl chimes in somewhere
ahead of them, a single wavering cry that says it has something strangled in
its claws.
His daughter, detectable only through the rhythmic snap of her gum, asks in
a theatrical whisper if that could be a spotted owl, “I mean hopefully, by any
chance?”
He can’t see her face, the night a loose-fitting jacket, his mind ten miles up
the road, and he answers before he can think: “Don’t I wish.”
Right beside him, from the void on his left, another voice weighs in, the
voice of Andrea, his second wife, the wife who is not Sierra’s biological
mother and so free to take on the role of her advocate in all disputes, tiffs,
misunderstandings, misrepresentations and adventures gone wrong: “Give the
kid a break, Ty.” And then, in a whisper so soft it’s like a feather floating
down out of the night, “Sure it is, honey, that’s a spotted owl if ever I heard
one.”
Tierwater keeps walking, the damp working odor of the nighttime woods in
his nostrils, the taste of it on his tongue—mold transposed to another element,
mold ascendant—but he’s furious suddenly. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t
like it at all. He knows it’s necessary, knows the woods are being raped and
the world stripped right on down to the last twig and that somebody’s got to
save it, but still he doesn’t like it. His voice, cracking with the strain, leaps out
ahead of him: “Keep it down, will you? We’re supposed to be stealthy here—
this is illegal, what we’re doing, remember? Christ, you’d think we were on a
nature walk or something, And here’s where the woodpecker lives, and here
the giant forest fern.”
A chastened silence, into which the crickets pour all their Orthopteran
angst, but it can’t hold. One more voice enters the mix, an itch of the larynx
emanating from the vacancy to his right. This is Teo, Teo Van Sparks. Now
he’s a voice on the EF! circuit (Eco-Agitator, that’s what his card says),
thirty-one years old, a weightlifter with the biceps, triceps, lats and abs to
prove it, and there isn’t anything about the natural world he doesn’t know. At
least not that he’ll admit. “Sorry, kids,” he says, “but by most estimates
they’re down to less than five hundred breeding pairs in the whole range,
from BC down to the Southern Sierra, so I doubt—”
“Fewer,” Andrea corrects, in her pedantic mode. She’s in charge here
tonight, and she’s going to rein them all in, right on down to the finer points
of English grammar and usage. If it was just a question of giving out
instructions in a methodical, dispassionate voice, that would be one thing—
but she’s so supercilious, so self-satisfied, cocky, bossy. He’s not sure he can
take it. Not tonight.
“Fewer, right. So what I’m saying is, more likely it’s your screech or
flammulated or even your great gray. Of course, we’d have to hear its call to
be sure. The spotted’s a high-pitched hoot, usually in groups of fours or
threes, very fast, crescendoing.”
“Call, why don’t you,” Sierra whispers, and the silence of the night is no
silence at all but the screaming backdrop to some imminent and catastrophic
surprise. “So you can make it call back. Then we’ll know, right?”
Is it his imagination, or can he feel the earth slipping out from under him?
He’s blind, totally blind, his shoulders hunched in anticipation of...
