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

relaxing into death – or so he imagined, secreted behind the door as the nurses soft–stepped up the hallway. Then, a cold draft playing off his genitals, he flung open the door marked
stairwell
and plunged through it.
    In the process, he startled a morose–looking woman sneaking a smoke, but she dropped her eyes and never said a word, and the stairs vibrated under his feet. He cracked the door on the ground floor – early yet, very early, but there was more traffic here – and waited for the golden moment when everybody seemed to disappear simultaneously through separate doorways. Freedom glowed in the glass panels of the door at the main entrance, just past the gift shop and reception desk. What was it – fifty feet, seventy–five? Now or never. He pinched the gown closed behind him and made for the door, deaf to the startled cries of the two women at the desk (young nursey types, with hamburger faces and plasticized hair, and
Sir!
they cried;
Sir! Can I help you, sir?),
the sweet, fresh, as–yet–uncorrupted Oregon air in his face and an endless field of scrub and weed heaving into view just beyond the dead expanse of the parking lot.
    If this were a movie, he was thinking – and his every move to this point had been dictated by what he’d witnessed repeatedly on the big screen – he would slip into a late–model sports sedan, punch the ignition with a screwdriver, hotwire the thing and be gone in a glorious roil of smoke and gravel. Or the heroine, looking a lot like Andrea, with a scoop neckline and killer brassiere, would at that moment wheel up to the curband he’d say,
Let’s move it
. Or
Let’s rock and roll
. Isn’t that what they said in every definable moment of heroic duress? But this was no movie, and he had no script. In the end, he had to settle for making his way on all fours through the briars and poison oak, awaiting the inevitable clash of sirens and uproar of excited voices.
    (How long was I out there – at large, that is? Let me tell you, I don’t know, but it was the longest better part of a morning I ever spent in my life. And then it was the dogs – or dog – and the humiliation of that on top of the concrete and the diapers and the tight shit–eating smirks of the Freddies and their sledgehammering minions. I gave myself up. Of course I did. How far was I going to get in a hospital gown?)
    Tierwater had plenty of time to nurse his grievances and contemplate the inadvisability – the sheer unreconstructed foolishness, the howling idiocy – of what he’d done that morning in extricating himself from the personal jurisdiction of Deputy Sheets and, by extension, the Josephine County Sheriff’s Department. He sat there in the heavy brush, not five hundred yards from the hospital entrance, scraped and begrimed, his feet bleeding in half a dozen places, the paper gown bunched up around his hips, thinking of what they would do to him now, on top of everything else. If he’d been tentative two nights ago in the fastness of the Siskiyou and purely outraged when they went after his daughter, now he was almost contrite. Almost. But not quite. They’d humiliated him and terrorized his wife and daughter – there was no coming back from that.
    He listened to the wail of the sirens in the distance, and, more immediately, to the songbirds in the trees and the insects in the grass. His breathing slowed. After a while, the sun burned through the early–morning haze and warmed him. He laid his head back in the cradle of his hands and became an observer, for lack of anything better to do. The tracery of the plants – saxifrage, corn lily, goldenrod – stood illuminated against the sky, every leaf and stem trembling with animate life. Grasshoppers, moths, ants, beetles, spiders, they were the gazelles here and the lions, prowling a miniature veldt that was plenty big enough for them – at