I'm With the Bears (4 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I'm hungry. I'm tired. I want to go home.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the pickup truck all over again, only worse: the four of them shouting till the veins stand out in their necks, Andrea and Teo waving their arms over their heads, the sweat of fear and mortal tension prickling at their scalps and private places, and that's exactly what the man on the Cat wants. He knows perfectly well what's going on here—they all do by now, from the supervisors down to the surveying crews, and his object is intimidation, pure and simple. All those gleaming pumping tons of steel in motion, the big tractor treads burning up the road and the noise of the thing, still coming at them at full speed, and Tierwater can't see the eyes of the lunatic at the controls—
shades, he's wearing mirror shades that give him an evil insectoid look, no mercy, no appeal
—and suddenly he's outraged, ready to kill: this is one sick game. At the last conceivable moment, a raw-knuckled hand jerks back a lever and the thing rears like a horse and swivels away from them with a kind of mechanized grace he wouldn't have believed possible.

But that's only the first pass, and it carries the bulldozer into the wall of rock beside them with a concussive blast, sparks spewing from the blade, the shriek of one unyielding surface meeting another, and Tierwater can feel the crush of it in his feet, even as the shards of stone and dirt rain down on him. He's no stranger to violence. His father purveyed it, his mother suffered it, his first wife died of it—the most casual violence in the world, in a place as wild as this. He's new at pacifism or masochism or whatever you'd want to call what they're suffering here, and if he could free his legs for just half a minute, he'd drag that tight-jawed executioner down off his perch and instruct him in the laws of the flesh, he would. But he can't do a thing. He's caught. Stuck fast in the glue of passive resistance, Saint Mahatma and Rosa Parks and James Meredith flashing through his mind in quick review. And he's swearing to himself
Never again, never
, even as the man with the stick and eight tons of screaming iron and steel swings round for the second pass, and then the third and the fourth.

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

Andrea cursed the deputies, and they cursed her back. Teo glared from the cave of his muscles. Tierwater was beside himself. He raged and bellowed and threatened them with everything from aggravated assault to monetary damages and prosecution for police brutality—at least until the sheriff, Sheriff Bob Hicks of Josephine County, produced a roll of duct tape and shut his mouth for him. And his daughter, his tough, right-thinking, long-haired, tree-hugging, animal-loving, vegetarian daughter—she folded herself up like an umbrella over the prison of her feet and cried. Thirteen years old, tired, scared, and she just let herself go
.
(
They shuffled their workboots and looked shamefaced then, those standard-issue badge-polishers and the Forest Service officials who drove up in a green Jeep to join them
—
they probably had daughters themselves, and sons and dogs and rabbits in a hutch
—
but there was nothing any of them could do about my little girl's grief. Least of all me
.)

Grateful for a day's reprieve, the Pacific salamanders curled up under the cover of their rocks, the martens retreated into the canopy and the spotted owls winked open an eye at the sound of that thin disconsolate wail of human distress. Tierwater's hands were bound, his mouth taped. Every snuffle, every choked-back sob, was a spike driven into the back of his head.

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

The zoo was on the edge of a wide desert valley, with a view of cactus-dotted hills above and, in the flats spread out beneath, flocks of small white houses. He went there after a meeting in Scottsdale, to fill an empty afternoon. He was restless in his hotel and had seen the zoo in a tourist brochure, with a picture of a wolf.

In a series of arid gardens connected by pathways there was a hummingbird enclosure and an aviary, a beaver pond and a pool for otters; there were Mexican parrots squawking, bighorn sheep on artificial cliffs, an ocelot curled up in a rocky crevice and a sleek bobcat pacing restlessly. He passed a lush pollinator garden and a series of low and inconspicuous buildings; an elderly, white-haired docent stood with a watchful bird perched on her hand, waiting for interest. He wandered over and looked at the bird closely. It had large eyes in a beautiful face, and was compact but fierce looking.

“American kestrel,” said the docent. “One of the smaller raptors. This gal is almost nine inches long, but weighs less than four ounces. Beautiful, isn't she?”

A few minutes later he stood bracing himself with his hands on a low wall over a moat. Across the moat slept a black bear on a sunny ledge. This was a zoo of animals native to the region, and though bears did not live in the hot flatlands a handful of them still roamed the piney mountains that rose above the desert floor. He had read that every so often a bear was found dead atop a power pole, where it had climbed suddenly in terror, escaping from a car or a noise, and been electrocuted.

He watched the bear sleep, and in the lull of the sun and the heat and the stillness felt like dozing off himself.

Then the stillness was disturbed by yelling boys, hitting each other in the face. The father, in shorts, stood at T.'s elbow, looking down into his camera and adjusting a ring on the lens. A projectile—someone had lobbed a balled-up piece of litter. It hit the bear a glancing blow on the ear and he stirred, disoriented, turned around once and then settled down again.

“Too soon, I wasn't set up yet. Missed the shot,” said the man, shaking his head. “Go again.”

The wife looked around for something else to throw and T. felt heat filling his face. A tension bowed in him: he felt a rush of fury.

“Are you kidding?” he asked, turning to the wife. She wore large mirrored sunglasses. “You're throwing garbage at the bear? For a
picture
?”