A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle Read Free Book Online Page A

diminutive feet, feet no bigger than Sierra’s – in the cone of light descending from Andrea’s hand. Tierwater can picture him, though, squat and muscular, his upper body honed from pumping iron and driving his longboard through the surf, his face delicate, his wrists and ankles tapered like a girl’s. He’s so small and pumped he could be a special breed, a kind of human terrier, fearless, indefatigable, tenacious, and with a bark like – But enough. They need him here. They need him to say, ‘Shit, let’s just dump the stuff and get it over with.’
    And so they do. They slit the bags and let the dependable force of gravity empty them. They haul the water in a thickening miasma of mosquitoes, swatting, cursing, unceremoniously upending the buckets atop the dry concrete. And then they mix and slice and chivy till the trench is uniformly filled with something like cold lava, and the hour is finally at hand. ‘Ready, everybody?’ Tierwater whispers. ‘Teo on the outside, Andrea next to Teo – and, Sierra, you get in between me and Andrea, okay?’
    â€˜Aren’t you forgetting something?’ This is Andrea, exhausted, but reclaiming the initiative.
    He looks round him in the dark, a wasted gesture. ‘No, what?’
    A slight lilt to the tone, an edge of satisfaction. She’s done her homework, she’s seen the movie, memorized the poem, got in touch with her inner self. She has the information, and he doesn’t. ‘The essential final step, the issue you’ve been avoiding all week except when you accused me of forgetting it –
them
, I mean?’
    Then it hits him. ‘The diapers?’
    Eighteen per package, at $16.99. They’ve had to invest in three different sizes – small, medium and large, for Sierra, Andrea and Teo, and himself, respectively – though Andrea assures him they’ll use them up during the next direct action, whenever and wherever that may be. Either that, or give them away to volunteers. They’re called, comfortingly enough, Depends, and on her advice they’ve chosen the Fitted Briefs for Extra Absorbency. He can’t help thinking about that for just the smallest slice of a moment –
Extra Absorbency —
and about what it is the diapers are meant to absorb.
    There’s a moment of silence there in the dark, the naked woods crepitating round them, the alertest of the birds already calling out for dawn, when they’re all communally involved in a very private act. The sound of zippers, the hopping on one foot, arms jerked out for balance, and then they’re diapered and the jeans rise back up their legs to grab at their bellies and buttocks. He hasn’t worn diapers – or pads, as the professionals euphemistically call them so as not to offend the Alzheimer’s patients and other walking disasters who have to be swathed in them day and night – since he was an infant, and he doesn’t remember much of that. He remembers Sierra, though, mewling and gurgling, kicking her shit–besmeared legs in the air, as he bent to the task on those rare occasions when Jane, the perfect mother, was either absent or unconscious. They feel – not so bad, not yet anyway. Like underwear, like briefs, only thicker.
    And now, finally, the time has come to compete the ritual and settle down to slap mosquitoes, slumber fitfully and await the first astonished Freddies (Forest Service types) and heavy–machine operators. They join hands for balance, sink their cheap tennis sneakers into the wet concrete as deep as they’ll go and then ease themselves down on the tapered bottoms of their upended buckets. He will be miserable. His head will droop, his back will scream. He will bait mosquitoes and crap in his pants. But it’s nothing. The smallest thing, the sacrifice of one night in bed with a book or narcotized in front of the tube – that, and a few hours ofphysical