"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 S 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 arc 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 of physical 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. I — 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 coffee sloshed 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.) "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 whether we're here to spin it or not. That face paralyzes him. What are they thinking? What are they doing?
"Christ Jesus, what is goin' on here?" Comes the voice of the pickup, the unanimous voice, concentrated in the form of the pony-tailed and ginger-bearded head poking through the open window of the wide-swinging driver's-side door. "You people lost or what?" A moment later, the rest of the speaker emerges, workboots, rolled-up jeans, a flannel shirt in some bleached-out shade of tartan plaid. His face is like an electric skillet Like a fuse in the moment of burning out "What in Christ's name is wrong with you? I almost-you know, I could of-" He's trembling too, his hands so shaky he has to bury them in his pockets.
Tierwater has to remind himself that this man — thirtyfive, flat dead alcoholic eyes, the annealed imprint of a scar like a brand stamped into the flange of his nose-is not the enemy. He's just earning his paycheck, felling and loading and producing so many board feet a year so middle-class Americans can exercise their God-given right to panel their family rooms and cobble together redwood picnic tables from incomprehensible sets of plans. He's never heard of Arne Naess or Deep Ecology or the mycorrhizal fungi that cling to the roots of old growth trees and make the forest possible. Rush Limbaugh wrote his bible, and the exegesis of it too. Lie has a T-shirt in a drawer at home that depicts a spotted owl in a frying pan. 1-Le knows incontrovertibly and with a kind of unconquerable serenity that all members of the Sierra Club are "Green Niggers" and that Earth Forever! Is a front for Bolshevik terrorists with homosexual tendencies. But he's not the enemy. His bosses are, "We're not letting you through," Teo announces, and there he is, a plug of muscle hammered into the ground, anchoring the far end of the human chain. All he needs is a slab of liver.