The next-door neighbor — Roger something or other; Tier-water never did catch the man's surname-questioned the wisdom of this. Roger was an investment broker, and he wore long-sleeved pinstriped shirts even while pruning his roses or overwatering his lawn with a snaking green garden hose. "It'll breed mosquitoes," he opined one afternoon, thrusting the stalk of his neck over the redwood fence that separated their yards. Tierwater had already stocked the pond with mosquito fish (Gambusia (Ones holbrooki), but he didn't tell Roger that. "Better than suburban drones," he said.
The front lawn came up in strips, and where unquenchable grass had been, he created a xeroscape of native plants, and, like any good and true denizen of suburbia, told the cavilers among his neighbors to go fuck themselves. He felt good. Self-righteous. He was doing his part to restore at least a small swath of the ecosystem, even if nobody else was doing theirs. And if they all converted, if they all pitched in, all his Mercedes-driving, bargain-obsessed neighbors, then everything would be fine — if they had the further good sense to go out back to their mulch piles, bury their designer-clad torsos in leaves and grass clippings and shoot themselves in the back of the head, that is.
All right, maybe he was something of a crank-he'd be the first to admit it. But at least he stayed out of trouble, which pleased Andrea and his parole officer, and, he liked to think, Sierra too. But one day, all the trees had been planted — and the bushes and the succulents and cacti — and the frogs cried lustily from the reconverted swimming pool, and Tierwater found himself craving more, craving action. It was an addiction, exactly that: once you'd identified the enemy, once you'd struck in the night and felt the magnetic effect of it, you were hooked. The passive business was fine, restoring an ecosystem, digging up a lawn, handing out flyers and attending rallies, but there was nothing like action, covert, direct, devastating: block enough culverts, destroy enough Cats, squeeze enough blood out of the corporate sons of bitches, and they'd back off. That was Tierwater's thinking, anyWay. He'd just about served out his parole, and his daughter was growing up fast, seventeen years old, a senior in high school and already talking about UC Santa Cruz, the cheerful sylvan campus of which he and Andrea had dutifully visited with her during spring break. Two years was a long time to play Father Knows Best. And he was sick to death of it.
Of course, there was Andrea to consider. She might have been happy to show him the tricks of the ecoteur's trade at one time, but things were different now She had a position to maintain — and so did he. And it did nobody any good if he was in jail. He remembered an evening somewhere toward the end of his two-year stint as house husband and suburban drone, when for the first time in a long while he broached the subject of nightwork. It was after dinner and they were lingering over a glass of wine. Sierra was in her room, on the phone, nouveau folkies harmonizing through her speakers like a gentle fall of rain on a still lake. Outside, beyond the window screens, the red-legged frogs were working up a good communal croak to celebrate the setting of the sun. "No," Andrea said, "it's too risky."
She was responding to a comment Tierwater had just made about the local electric company and its plans- "plans already in the implementation stage, for Christ's sake, bulldozers, bacichoes, habitat loss, you name it" — to bring a new power grid in over the Santa Susana Mountains at the opposite end of the Valley. "It's nothing," Tierwater countered, running a finger round the rim of his wineglass. "I've been up there hiking every afternoon for the past week-did you know that? — and it's nothing. Like what you said about the Siskiyou thing — a piece of cake. But truly. In fact. No guards, no night watchmen, no nothing. They're just whacking away at everything, just another job, guys in hardhats who never heard from ecology and think a monkeywrench is something you tighten bolts with."
"Uh-uh, Ty," she said, and there were those ridges of annoyance climbing her forehead right on up into her hairline. She swept her hair back and cocked her head to stare him in the face. "No more guerrilla tactics. We can't afford it. Every time some eco-nut blows something up or spikes a grove of trees, we lose points with the public, not to mention the legislature. Seventy-three percent of California voters say they're for the environment. All we need to do is to get them to vote — and we are. We're succeeding. We don't need violence anymore — I don't know if we ever did."
Tierwater said nothing. Eco-nut. Is that what he was now? A loose cannon, an embarrassment to the cause? Well, he was the one who'd done the time here, while she and Teo and all the rest of them held hands and skipped through the fields — and made money, don't forget that. Sure. And what was environmentalism but just another career? He lifted the glass to his lips and let the wine play on his palate. It smelled like mineral springs and fruit fat with the sun, but he took no pleasure in it because the smell was artificial and the grapes that gave up their juice for it had been dusted with sulfur and Christ knew what other sorts of chemicals. Oak trees had fallen to make that wine. Habitat had been gobbled up. Nothing lived in a vineyard, not even nematodes.
"I'm not saying we don't need direct action-especially against people like the Axxam Corporation and the mining companies and all the rest. But it's got to be peaceable — and legal." The light of the setting sun glowed pinkly off the plaster walls, kitchen fixtures and hanging plants, and it fixed Andrea. In her chair as if in a scene of domestic tranquillity-Seated Woman with Wineglass — which was what this was. So far. "We did a great thing up there in the Sierras, Ty, and everybody's tuned in now, you know that. Tuned in to us, to you and me. I'll say it again-we can't afford to slip up."
"I'm not going to slip up."
She came right back at him: "I know you're not."
He didn't like her tone, heavy with the freight of implication: he wasn't going to slip up because he wasn't going to do anything much more than flap his mouth and wave his hands, that's what she was saying. And further, if he did dare to fish out the watchcap and the greasepaint and bolt-cutters, there would be no more domestic tranquillity, not in this house, and not with this wife. "Listen to yourself," he said. "You sound like some sort of corporate whore. Is that what this is all about-rising to the top of the food chain? Politics? A fat paycheck? Is that what it is?"
She tipped back her head and drained her glass, When she set it down, the base of the glass hitting the tabletop with a force just this side of shattering, he saw how angry she was. "I was out there on the front lines when I was twenty-three years old-where were you?"
"How many species you think were lost when we were running around bare-assed in the mountains? Tell me that," he said, ignoring the question. "How many did we save in those thirty days? And how many roads were built, how many trees came down? Worldwide: Not just in California and Oregon, but worldwide." Tierwater's hand went for the bottle. The wine might have been poison for the environ-. Ment, but it sang in his head. "And while we're on the subject of numbers, how many guys did you fuck while I was in Lompoc?"
It all stopped right there, dead in its tracks.