A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle Page B

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?’
    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’s wearing mirror shades that give him an evil insectoid look, no mercy, no appeal—
and suddenly he’s outraged, ready to kill: 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 andswivels 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.
    But that’s enough. That’s enough right there. Tyrone Tierwater 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