But that's enough. That's enough right there. Tyrone Tier-water 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 watchcaps 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 standand 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 leaves 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 ax, 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?
Santa Ynez, November 2025
It's still raining when we wake up — or when I wake up, anyway. I'm awake before her, long before her, and why wouldn't I be? I'm feeling historical here. Eggs and bacon, that's how I'm feeling, but you don't see much of those commodities any more (eggs maybe, but you can forget bacon) and there's her purse on the table, big as the head of an elephant and stuffed with used Kleenex, debit slips, gum wrappers, keychains full of keys to doors in houses that no longer exist. I'm an archaeologist, that's what I am, prising one potsherd after another out of the dung heap of my life. Andrea sleeps late. I knew that. I've lived with that. But for twenty-odd years until now, it didn't operate, not in my sphere. We've had, let's say, an interesting night, highly stimulating, drenched in nostalgia and heartbreak, a night that was finally, if briefly, sexual, and I've got no complaints on that score. I think I'm actually whistling as I dodge round the splootching cans and buckets in the living room/kitchen, preparatory to fixing something nice for her to eat when she gets around to it.
How am I feeling? Moist. Moist in the tear ducts and gonads, swelled up like a lungfish that's been buried in the sand through a long desiccated summer till the day the sky breaks apart and the world goes wet again. The smell of coffee is taking me back-1 don't drink it myself anymore, too expensive and it raises hell with my stomach — and I feel to the past I'm in danger of disappearing without making a ripple. She's snoring. I can hear it-no delicate insuck and outhale, but a real venting of the airways, a noise as true in its way as anything Lily could work up. The rain slaps its broad hand on the roof, something that wasn't tied down by somebody somewhere hits the wall just above the window, the world shudders, Andrea sleeps. It's a moment.
Unfortunately, our idyll doesn't last much longer than that moment, because, before I can think whether to serve her the tuna salad I've been storing in the food compressor the past three years for a special occasion or just to go ahead and open up that last can of crab because life doesn't last forever, especially if you're a crab, Chuy is at the door. He's agitated. Dancing on his feet, working his jaws and lips and tongue and generally trying, without success, to communicate something to me. He's hatless and slickerless, the hair glued to his scalp, his eyes so naked you can almost see through them to his Dursban-dusted brain. How old is he? He doesn't know-doesn't even remember what town he was born in, though the country, he's pretty sure-almost "a hunerd and ten percent, or maybe a hunerd and twenty" — was Guatemala. I'm not as good at judging people's ages as I once was, because everybody looks young to me except the old-old, but I'd figure him for forty, forty-five. Anyway, he's on my doorstep, and this is what he says, more or less: "Some people… Some people, Mr. Ty-"
"What people?" I'm standing there at the open door, the sky like an inverted fishbowl, big propellers of wind chasing sticks, papers, leaves across the swamp of the yard, the immemorial coffee smell behind me, the heater, the bed, Andrea. Chuy might as well be standing under Niagara Falls. My slippers are wet. The fringe of my bathrobe. Everything is wet, always-molding and wet-books falling apart on the shelves, slugs climbing out of the teapot, the very chairs turning green under our hind ends and sprouting again. Exasperated, I take Chuy by the collar and drag him into the room. I'm not a patient man.
"The, the people-" A gesture, mostly spastic, in the direction of the condos.
"The people at Lupine Hill?"
"Ellos, si, the ones sobre the hill, they, they — they encuentran Petunia. In the laundry."
Petunia is the Patagonian fox. She stands two and a half feet tall at the shoulder, thin red ribbons for legs, a black shag of bristling hair laid over her back like a rug. The laundry rooms, as I understand these things, are communal to every ten units at Lupine Hill. As for the Spanish, this is the language Chuy reverts to when the pesticide clogs up the pathways scored in his brain by the contortions of English.