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

discomfort. And as he settles in, the concrete gripping his ankles like a dark set of jaws, the stars receding into the skullcap of the silvering sky and every bird alive in every tree, he tells himself,
Somebody’s got to do it.
    He must have dozed. He did doze – or sleep, would be more accurate. He slumped over his knees, put his head to rest and drifted into unconsciousness, because there was no sense in doing anything else, no matter his dreads and fears – nothing was going to happen till seven–thirty or eight at the earliest, and he put all that out of his mind and orchestrated his dreams to revolve around a man in bed, a man like him, thin as grass but big across the shoulders, with no gut or rear end to speak of and the first tentative fingers of hair loss massaging his skull, a man in an air–conditioned room in blissful deep non–REM sleep with something like Respighi’s ‘The Birds’ playing softly in the background.
    And what does he wake to? Is it the coughing wheeze of a poorly tuned pickup beating along the road, the single mocking laugh of a raven, the low–threshold tocsin of his daughter’s voice, soft and supple and caught deep in her throat, saying, ‘Uh … Dad. Dad, wake up?’ Whatever it is, it jerks him up off the narrow stool of the bucket in one explosive motion, like a diver surging up out of the deepest pool, and he tries to lift his feet, to leap, to run, to escape the hammering in his chest. But his feet are locked in place. And his body, his upper body, is suddenly floundering forward without support, even as the image of the burnt–orange pickup with its grinning bumper and the swept–back mask of the glassed–in cab comes hurtling down the road toward him, toward
them …
but the knee joint isn’t designed to give in that direction, and even in the moment of crisis
—Jesus Christ, the shithead’s going to hit us! —
he lurches back and sits heavily and ignominiously on the bucket that even now is squirting out from under him. ‘Stop,’ he roars, ‘stop!,’ against a background of shrieks and protests, and somehow he’s on his feet again and reaching out to his left, for his daughter, to pull her to him and cradle her against the moment of impact … which, mercifully, never comes.
    He wouldn’t want to talk about the diapers, not in this context. He’d want to address the issue of the three intensely bearded, red–suspendered timber people wedged into the cab of that pickup, that scorching–orange Toyota 4x4 that comes to rest in a demon–driven cloud of dust no more than ten feet from them. And the looks on their faces – their seven–thirty–in–the–a.m. faces, Egg McMuffins still warm in their bellies, searing coffeesloshed in their laps, the bills of their caps askew and their eyes crawling across their faces like slugs. This is the look of pure, otherworldly astonishment.
(Don’t blame these men – or not yet, anyway. They didn’t expect us to be there – they didn’t expect anything, other than maybe a tardy coyote or a suicidal ground squirrel – and suddenly there we were, like some manifestation of the divine, like the lame made to walk and the blind to see.)
    â€˜Oh, God,’ Andrea murmurs, and it’s as if the air has been squeezed out of her lungs, and they’re all standing now, erect and trembling and holding hands for lack of anything better to do. Tierwater cuts a swift glance from the stalled pickup to the face of his daughter. It’s a tiny little dollop of a face, shrunken and drawn in on itself, the face of the little girl awake with the terror of the night and the scratchy voice and the need for reason and comprehension and the whispered assurance that the world into which she’s awakened is the ancient one, the imperturbable one, the one that will go on twisting round its axis