A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle

whether we’re here to spin it or not. That face paralyzes him. What are they thinking? What are they doing?
    â€˜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 – thirty–five, 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. He has a T–shirt in a drawer at home that depicts a spotted owl in a frying pan. He knows incontrovertibly and with a kind of unconquerable serenity that all members of the Sierra Club are ‘Green Niggers’ andthat Earth Forever! is a front for Bolshevik terrorists with homosexual tendencies. But he’s not the enemy. His bosses are.
    â€˜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.
    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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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