A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle

’em.’
    This hospital room wasn’t the first Tierwater had inhabited. He’d had his tonsils out at the Peterskill Municipal Hospital when he was six, and he was back again a few years later with a fractured arm – after an ill–fated decision to intervene in one of his parents’ more physical discussions. Oh, his father was destroyed – never has there been such sorrow, not since Abraham offered up Isaac – and his mother was a fragrant sink of pity and consolation and he pushed his face of greed into gallon after gallon of the butter–brickle ice cream proffered as compensatory damages. Sure. But violence breeds violence, and though neither parent ever laid a finger on him again, there it was, a rotten seed, festering. He was in the hospital again for the birth of his daughter, though the venue was a theater of pain and confusion, women crying out from behind the thin trembling walls of curtains on sliding hooks –
Oh, God! Oh, my God!
shrieked one anonymous soprano voice for forty–five solid minutes – and he made it as far as the emergency room in Whitefish, Montana, with Jane, but she wasn’t breathing by then, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t – what? They couldn’t do shit.
    There was nothing wrong with him, but the doctor – a pale, toweringbald–headed man with a pelt of laminated black hair climbing out of the V–neck of his scrubs – wanted to run some tests. Just to be sure. Deputy Sheets stood at the door, a look of disgust pressed into his skeletal features, scrutinizing the doctor’s every move. ‘I’m all right, really,’ Tierwater insisted while the doctor studied his chart and paced back and forth, a broad–beamed scurrying nurse at his elbow. ‘I feel fine, I do. I just want to get out of here, okay?’
    All three of them – Tierwater, the doctor and his nurse – turned to look at Deputy Sheets. ‘I don’t like your blood pressure,’ the doctor said, swinging back round again. His arms were unnaturally long, ape’s arms, the knuckles all but grazing his knees, and even in his extremity, Tierwater couldn’t help puzzling over a species so recently come down from the trees and yet so intent on destroying them. ‘It’s dangerously elevated. And I’m going to have to ask you not to interfere with the intravenous drip. You’ve been dehydrated. We need to replenish your fluids.’
    That put a scare into him –
dangerously elevated
, Uncle Sol, where are you? – but he fought it down. ‘What do you expect? I’ve been gagged and beaten and left out in the sun all day by your, your – ’
    Sheets’ voice, from the door: ‘Nobody laid a finger on him. He’s one of those activists is what he is. From California.’
    The doctor gave Tierwater a cold look. Josephine County was a timber county, replete with timber families, and timber families paid the bills. ‘Yes, well,’ the doctor said, and he was practically scraping the ceiling with the big shining globe of his head, ‘you’re not going anywhere’ – peering at the chart – ‘Mr. Tierwater. Not to jail and not to California either – not till we stabilize you.’
    â€˜But what about my daughter?’ he demanded, and his blood pressure was going up, through the roof, sure, and what did they expect, the sons of bitches? He hadn’t been away from Sierra for a single night since her mother died – and if he hadn’t been away from her then, if he and Jane had just stayed put, stayed home where they belonged, then Jane would be alive today. ‘Don’t I get a phone call at least? I mean, what is this, the gulag?’
    No one bothered to answer, least of all the doctor, whose looming hairy frame was already passing through the door, on his way out, but the nurse lingered long enough