lifts the bota bag to his lips for the hundredth time, Andrea reminds him to conserve water. âThe way itâs looking,â she says, and here is the voice of experience, delivered with a certain grim satisfaction, âwe could be here a long time yet.â
And then, far off in the distance, a sound so attenuated they canât be sure theyâve heard it. Itâs the sound of an internalâcombustion engine, a diesel, blatâblatting 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 heâs blind, the shovel lowered to reap the standing crop of them, to shear them off at the ankles like a row of driedâout cornstalks. Tierwater is on his feet suddenly, on his feet again, reaching out instinctively for his daughterâs hand, and âDad,â sheâs saying, âdoes he know? Does he know we canât move?â
Itâs 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 thatâs exactly what the man on the Cat wants. He knows perfectly well whatâs going on here â they all do by now, from the supervisors down to the surveying crews â 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 fullâspeed, and Tierwater canât see the eyes of the lunatic at the controls â
shades, heâs wearing mirror shades that give him an evil insectoid look, no mercy, no appealâ
and suddenly heâs outraged, ready to kill: this is one sick game. At the last conceivable moment, a rawâknuckled hand jerks back a lever and the thing rears like a horse andswivels away from them with a kind of mechanized grace he wouldnât have believed possible.
But thatâs 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. Heâs no stranger to violence. His father purveyed it, his mother suffered it, his first wife died of it â the most casual violence in the world, in a place as wild as this. Heâs new at pacifism or masochism or whatever youâd want to call what theyâre suffering here, and if he could free his legs for just half a minute, heâd drag that tightâjawed executioner down off his perch and instruct him in the laws of the flesh, he would. But he canât do a thing. Heâs 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 heâs 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 thatâs enough. Thatâs enough right there. Tyrone Tierwater wouldnât 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 itâs legal to bulldoze a dead zone through a federally designated roadless area? No. He handcuffed the four of them â even Sierra â and
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