Torched Page 8

  “A lynx?” Richter shook his head. “There aren’t any lynx in Oregon. He just said that so that people would really be committed to staying up in the trees.” He sighed. “You didn’t record anything else?”

  Anything else? “I’ve got a couple of hours recorded, but what I told you was the important part. It’s what you asked for. Proof that they are considering violence.”

  Richter shrugged. “But by itself, it means nothing. I need actual plans, not just talk.” In a slightly louder voice, he said, “Would you like a piece of gum?” Before I could answer, he pressed the pack of gum as well as something cool and smooth into my hand. Looking down, I saw it was a watch identical to the one I was wearing. In a softer voice, he added, “Give me back your first watch when you hand me back the gum. It’s a start. But I still need you to get us more.”

  I’m never going to be free. “So everything I’ve done—it’s not enough?” I hissed. “I’m lying to people I care about, I’m helping destroy things, I’m being chased in the middle of the night, and you want me to do more?”

  He scratched the dog behind its ear. “Look, Ellie, I’m sorry. I know this is hard on you. But you’re our only chance to get inside this group. We need proof. Something that will stand up in court. And you have to get it. That’s the basis of our deal. That means you need to stick with them. If they go up in the trees, you go up in the trees.”

  “But I’ve got finals. School isn’t over until next week.”

  “School.” His stern expression eased a little. “Sometimes I forget about that. How is that going? How are your grades?”

  I shrugged. “Not where they should be. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

  If he heard the sarcasm, Richter didn’t show it.

  “And there’s another thing . . .” I hesitated before blurting out, “I’m afraid of heights.”

  “Look,” he said, “you have to prove you’re a true believer. I’m not asking you to pretend you’re not scared. But if you want to get your parents off the hook, you’re going to have to bring us more. And to do that, you have to be right in the middle of them. You need to bring me back something I can act on. I want you out there as soon as school is over.”

  “Doggie!” Cinda Jane squealed.

  She had finally spotted Richter’s dog. She ran toward us, fearless. I wondered if the dog was even his. It was hard to imagine Richter having a personal life.

  But with Cinda Jane, he was all smiles. “Whoa, little lady. Don’t run up to a strange dog. First you have to ask me if it’s okay if you pet it.”

  She looked at me uncertainly. I nodded. In a small voice, she said, “Okay?”

  “Yes, it’s okay,” he said. “Then you should make a fist for him to sniff.” He held out his own fist, and she did, too. Her hand was less than half the size of his. Finally, he let her pet the dog.

  He must have a family, I thought, changing my mind. He’s got children, a wife, a life outside the FBI.

  Richter stood and showed Cinda Jane what to do if she were ever attacked by a dog. “Pretend you’re a tree,” he told her, and the two of them stood stiff and still, until finally Cinda Jane began to laugh and Richter did, too. The sound was oddly rusty.

  When I got home, Laurel met me at the front door. “So are you done? Is it finished?”

  I had managed to keep my emotions tucked in around Richter, but now tears sprang to my eyes. “No. He said he needs more.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “The good news is we think the lynx is back in Oregon,” Coyote told Matt and Laurel. Coyote and I were sitting on opposite sides of the couch in our living room. Laurel and Matt were in their matching recliners, Laurel with her macramé—the hippie version of knitting—on her lap. Coyote was there to persuade my dad to let me go up into the trees with the MEDics.

  “Lynx?” Laurel echoed. “I didn’t know any lived in Oregon.”

  “They haven’t for years and years. But one’s been sighted in a forest near Bend that’s slated for clear-cutting. And Stonix, the company that owns the land, is denying that it’s there at all. If we can’t get the logging stopped, it will drive the lynx right back out of Oregon.”

  “So what can you do to stop it?” Matt said. He took a bite of one of Laurel’s millet cookies. Even from across the room, I could hear the millet seeds popping between his molars as he chewed.

  “A bunch of us are going out Monday to build tree-sits. Once we’re in the trees, they won’t be able to cut down anything in their vicinity.” Coyote spoke around his own mouthful of cookie.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Laurel asked.

  “You wear a safety harness at all times,” Coyote said. “It’s more a matter of getting over it mentally. Once you do, you realize you’re as safe as if you were in this house. And the important thing is that by doing it, we’ll stop the logging.”

  Matt leaned forward, enthralled. “Won’t Stonix try to stop you from going up?”

  “Well, for one thing, we’re going to do it at night. We’ll bring the platforms, haul them up and get the sits built before they even know what’s going on. And by the time they do, it will be too late.”

  “It sounds like you’ve done this before,” Matt said. He looked livelier than I had seen him in weeks.

  “Down in Eugene. Last fall.” Coyote licked his finger and used it to pick up some of the tiny yellow seeds that had fallen on the legs of his jeans. “Until it got too cold. And you couldn’t keep dry. Even with the tarps, the rain soaked everything. That’s why it’s good we’re doing this now, when it’s warmer. You can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a tree. It’s like you’re a bird.”

  He brushed his knees clean. “As soon as Ellie finishes her finals, we’re hoping you’ll let her come out and join us in one of the sits. She can take the Greyhound out and someone will pick her up.”

  “A tree-sit,” Matt said with a sigh. “Damn, I wish I could join you guys, but I’m not eighteen anymore. . . .” He sat back, unconsciously putting his hand on his chest. Then he frowned at me. “But you don’t like heights, Ellie.” He turned to Coyote. “Once, when she was little, we went to this amusement park where you climbed all these stairs to go down a huge, wavy plastic slide. She begged to go. But when we got to the top, she just froze. She was too scared to go down the slide and too scared to even climb back down the stairs. I finally had to put her on my lap and slide down, and she kicked and screamed all the way.”

  “Matt,” I said as my cheeks flushed, “I was, what, three or something?”

  Coyote sat up straighter. “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of her, sir.”

  I tried to keep my face expressionless. Nobody ever called Matt sir.

  To my surprise, Matt nodded approvingly. Secretly, even though that would just make everything worse, I had hoped he might forbid it.

  “Besides,” Coyote continued, “these trees have stood for hundreds of years. We’ll build the sit right, and Ellie will wear a safety harness at all times. There’s not really any way things can go wrong.”

  After Coyote had left, Matt heaved a sigh. “I wish we could do this with you, too.”

  Laurel got up and began to pick up empty plates, her movements quick and sharp. “First of all, the climb would be too much for your heart. Second, we can’t get mixed up with anything illegal. Not when the Feds are just looking for an excuse to bust us.”

  “What about Ellie?”

  Laurel shot me a warning look. “She’ll keep her nose clean. She knows not to get in any trouble.”

  Matt laced his fingers across his stomach. “All right, you heard Laurel. Tree-sits, yes. Sugar in the gas tanks of the logging equipment, no.” Then he winked at me.

  I winked back. If only you knew.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Blue greeted me at the Greyhound station with a rib-squeezing hug. Instantly, I felt awake and alive. Only a few minutes earlier, I had been exhausted from the long bus ride and from the hours of studying I had put in for my
finals. My grades had gotten so bad that I needed Marijean to cram with me. I prayed that all the last-minute efforts might bump my grades back up into B territory. Or at least to a C-plus.

  After Blue released me, I collected my backpack from underneath the bus. It was heavy with the items Coyote had told me were essential for a tree-sitter: wool socks, pants and hat; a headlamp; T-shirts; binoculars and a sleeping bag. Wool seemed like overkill for what was shaping up to be a hot summer, but Coyote said that where we were going, it might snow no matter what the calendar said. I had also brought food—granola, chocolate, dried fruit and water. Although part of Blue’s job was to help supply the sitters, I had been warned there would be times she wouldn’t be able to make it in.

  Blue led to me to her unlocked orange Volvo. “Do you need to pee?” she asked as I threw my backpack into trunk. “We’re renting a motel room not too far from here, and I could stop by before we head out.”

  “Yes, please. I couldn’t bring myself to go on the bus.” I wrinkled my nose. “The whole back half of the bus smelled like disinfectant.”

  “You’d better enjoy a flush toilet while you can.” She grinned as she started the car. “From now on, it’s going to be a bucket.”

  A bucket. I had known that, of course, but I still didn’t want to think about it.

  Blue drove a half mile to a cinder block motel that had been painted white about fifty years earlier. She unlocked the door to reveal a soulless, musty-smelling space with two sagging beds and weird stains on the walls. At the back lay the bathroom, as well as a tiny kitchen with a dorm-sized refrigerator and an ancient white oven. “This looks like the kind of place where people don’t ask too many questions,” I said.

  “Which is the polite way of saying it looks like a dump.” Blue gave me a crooked smile. “We’re just trying to keep a low profile.”

  As I washed my hands, I eyed myself in the bathroom mirror. Was I ready for this? Was I ready to climb a tree and spend days hundreds of feet in the air? Then I remembered Matt’s face when he had hugged me good-bye at the bus station. No matter how angry I had been, if it meant saving his life, I would do it. I would do anything.

  “So how are the sits going?” I asked when I came out of the bathroom.

  Blue shrugged as I followed her out to the car. “We’re slowing the logging down, but I worry that it’s not enough. The lynx needs more than what we’re saving.” As we pulled out of the motel parking lot, she said, “You’re lucky, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were brought up already knowing what’s important. Would you believe that when I joined MED, I was a cheerleader living in a sorority?”

  I tried to picture her without black overalls and wearing makeup. Actually, with her cute little pigtails, Blue looked the part. I imagined her turning cartwheels, jumping up and down and clapping her hands.

  “What made you change?”

  “Hawk was going to school then. He was in one of my classes. We got assigned to do a project together. He talked about things I’d never heard about. It was like he opened my eyes. I saw how bad things were and how they were only getting worse.”

  “So you joined MED?”

  She nodded. We turned off the highway, and suddenly there was nothing around us but darkness and the impression of trees lined up right to the edge of the road. I could barely see her. “It wasn’t long before I was tearing up some experimental seedlings at Portland State’s research lab. That was my first action.” She made a sound that was a cross between a sigh and a laugh. “But I got caught. The university made me a deal. They said they would drop the charges if I dropped out. But even though I left school, I stayed with MED, because they are the only ones who are really dedicated to making a difference. Hawk and I, well, maybe we’re not always on the same page about methods, but we agree that we have to do something to save the planet before it’s too late.”

  I looked out at the blackness. Even though Blue had switched to high beams, it was as dark as if we were driving through a tunnel. “Sometimes he scares me a little—he seems so intense,” I said.

  “It’s practically a requirement for being a MEDic. Anybody who’s willing to put their freedom on the line is going to be a little intense. Like, Coyote is trying to be one hundred and eighty degrees different than his family, especially his grandfather—has he told you about him?”

  I nodded, feeling jealous that he had shared those stories with other girls in MED. “A little bit. What about the others? Why are they part of MED?”

  “Liberty’s stepfather is a vice president at US Bank—she’s always trying to shock him. She’s probably friends with Meadow because Meadow was a total emo when they met, which freaked out Liberty’s stepdad. And then Liberty met Hawk when he was protesting outside a ski resort. That’s how she and Meadow both got involved in MED. Grizz probably should have been born two hundred years ago. Then he could have been a real mountain man. Jack Rabbit goes to Reed College and smokes a lot of weed, but he wants to become an environmental lawyer. And Seed is kind of a lost soul who lives with a million stray animals. She even has a baby raccoon that she found by the side of the road.”

  “My parents’ friends are all kind of like that,” I said. “Counterculture types, that’s the way they’d put it.”

  Blue sighed. “I just wish I had had my eyes opened sooner. I’m embarrassed when I think of how I used to live my life. I treated everything like it was disposable—clothes, cell phones, whatever. I never thought about the impact I was making. That’s why you’re so lucky. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

  If you only knew. I was glad it was dark, that she couldn’t see the blush that made my face feel like it was on fire. “But it wasn’t like I made the choice to grow up the way I did. It wasn’t really my decision. Just like how you used to treat everything like you could throw it away—that wasn’t really your decision, either. You were just doing what your parents taught you. We can only be responsible for the decisions we make.”

  For a long moment, the only sound was the thrum of the tires. Then Blue said, “But are you saying that you’re only doing this because it’s your parents’ idea?”

  “Of course not,” I said quickly. “I can see what’s happening to the Earth as well as my parents can. Maybe better, because they’re more used to the fact that it’s all screwed up. It’s just that I didn’t really start to think about it seriously until recently. And if my parents hadn’t been who they were, it might have taken a lot longer.” Looking for a way to end the conversation before I heard her praise my honesty again, I yawned. “I’m going to take a little nap,” I said, leaning my head against the window.

  Although I hadn’t meant to, I really did fall asleep. I woke up forty-five minutes later with a crick in my neck. Blue was nosing the Volvo into a small clearing next to a narrow road. She pulled behind a line of trees and turned off the engine. “We’ll leave the car here and hike in. It’s a couple of miles.”

  “In the dark?”

  “We’re away from the city. We’ve got the moon and the stars. And Mother Earth will guide us.” The words “Mother Earth” should have sounded silly, but they didn’t.

  We got out of the car. Blue put on a headlamp. I fished mine out of my pack and did the same. The small circle of light it provided was only enough to sketch in the barest outlines of what was in front of me. We shouldered our packs and headed into the forest. I followed close behind Blue, trying not to step on dead branches that cracked noisily.

  At first I shivered in the chill air, but in a few minutes I had warmed up. With the help of the full moon, my eyes slowly adjusted so that I could see beyond the light from my headlamp. We were on some kind of trail. Every now and then, Blue stopped to check a compass.

  “If we’re going where the logging is, couldn’t we just take a logging road in?” I complained after I had tripped over a stone or a root for the dozenth time.

  “Sorry!” Blue said. “We don’t want to t
ake the chance of them stopping you before you even get up in the sit. Just be glad you’re not hauling in the pieces of plywood to make it.”

  When we got to a rise, I could see stars twinkling in one part of the ridgeline. There was a gap in the velvety fullness of the forest where a swath of trees was already gone. “Is that where they are cutting?” I pointed to the space.

  “Yeah. There’s nothing there now but stumps.” Her voice was bitter. “No way any lynx is going be able to hunt or den there.” After a long moment, we both turned and started walking again.

  We hiked for nearly two hours. We skirted rocks and roots, climbed over fallen trees. When Blue finally stopped, I almost ran into her.

  “Here we are,” she said. “That’s your tree.” She pointed to a tall tree about fifty feet away. A faint line of rope ran up the length of the trunk.

  Waiting for me.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I craned my neck, my eyes straining to see. Way, way up in the branches, I could make out a tiny blue square that caught the light of the moon. It looked like a broken kite.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Is that the sit? It’s so tiny.”

  Blue walked up to the tree and patted the trunk as if it were an animal. Next to her hand, the rope snaked up into the darkness. It was only about the width of my thumb. I couldn’t even see where it ended.

  “This tree has stood here for hundreds of years. We call it the Old Man.” Blue stroked the trunk with her palm again and said, “Give me your hands.”

  Obediently, I held them out. She took a roll of white first-aid tape and began to wrap my palms and fingers. In the light of my headlamp, the tape had a ghostly glow.

  “You’ll thank me for doing this,” Blue remarked as she finished my left hand and started in on my right. “Otherwise, your skin would get ripped to pieces. We call it tree-climber’s stigmata.” Finished, she stepped away from me and put the tape back in her backpack. “Okay, that should keep you from getting too banged up.”