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. Tier-water 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 E. F.I 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 hint 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 dispirited 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, a 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?"
14 T. C. BOYLE 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 wearing mirror shades that give him an evil insectoid look, no mercy, no appeal — and suddenly he's outraged, ready to kilclass="underline" 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.