tandem until all the world’s war cries and wild calls turn into thanksgiving. Long past the hour when his clenched fists would have given out, they whoop descant to the storm.
LATE THE NEXT MORNING, three loggers appear at the foot of Mimas. “You two all right? A lot of windthrow last night. Big trees down. We were worried about you.”
INCREDIBLY, the police make the video. A year ago, it would have been the kind of shaky, blurred proof the police destroyed. But the tactics of the lawless are changing. Against them, the police need new experiments. Methods that must be documented, evaluated, and refined.
The camera pans across the crowd. People spill down the street past the burnished company sign. They surround the headquarters, nestled lodge-like against a rim of spruce and fir. Not even an apprehensive cameraman can make it seem like anything but democracy in America, the right of people peaceably to assemble. The crowd stands well back from the property line, singing their songs and shaking their bedsheet banners: STOP ILLEGAL HARVESTING. NO MORE DEATH ON PUBLIC LANDS. But police wander in and out of the frame. Officers on foot and horseback. Men seated in the back of vehicles that look like armored personnel carriers.
MIMI SHAKES HER HEAD in wonder. “I didn’t know this town had so many cops.” Douggie limps beside her, bowlegged. “You know we don’t have to do this. At least half a dozen people would be happy to stand in.”
He spins to face her and almost stumbles. “What are you talking about?” He’s like a golden retriever whacked with the rolled-up newspaper he just so proudly fetched. “Wait.” He touches her shoulder, confused. “Are you scared, Meem? Because you don’t have to do anything you—”
She can’t bear it, his goodness. “Fine. I’m just saying don’t be a hero this time.”
“I wasn’t being a hero last time. How could I know they’d melt down the old family jewels?”
She saw, the day his denim was sheared open to the breeze. The family jewels, flapping in the air, burned with chemicals. He has wanted to show her again, so often, since: the miraculous recovery—almost a resurrection, you might say. She just can’t bring herself. She loves the man, maybe more than she cares for anyone but her sisters and their children. It’s a constant amazement to her that a man so artless has made it to the age of forty. She can’t imagine not watching out for him. But they’re different species. This cause they’ve given themselves to—this defense of the immobile and blameless, the fight for something better than endless suicidal appetite—is all they have in common.
They head toward the deployment vehicle, where the protest’s new secret weapon, the steel-bar black bears, are being handed out. “Damn straight we’re doing this, woman. What do you think? That wasn’t my first Purple Heart. Or my last. Gonna end up with a whole string of them, just like an earthworm.”
“Douggie. No more injuries. I can’t take it today.”
He points his chin toward the line of police, waiting for something to happen. “Take it up with them.” And then, like a creature with no memory except for the sun, “Geez! Look at all these people! Is this a movement or what?”
THE FIRST CRIME—crossing the line onto corporate property—happens off-camera. But the lens soon finds the action. The automatic focus slurs and locks in as a few peaceful assemblers cross the parkway onto the manicured lawn. There, they stand and shout responses to the calls of the megaphone.
A people! United! Can never be defeated! A forest! Once blighted! Can never be re-seeded!
Two officers approach the trespassers and ask them to step back. Their words are muffled on the recording, but polite enough. Soon, though, the clump turns into a rolling bait ball. People challenge and jeer—precisely the standoff the police hoped to avoid. One white-haired, hunchbacked woman shouts, “We’ll respect their property when they respect ours.”
The camera swings hard to the left, where a group of nine people dash across the lawn. The first altercation turns out to be a well-executed diversionary tactic to draw police away from the building’s entrance. Each beelining figure carries a shallow, vee-bent steel tube three feet long, thick enough to insert an arm.
Then a cut. The scene shifts indoors. The activists have chained themselves into a ring around a pillar in the foyer. Curious employees pour out of the hallways. Police come from behind the cameraman, trying to manage the disintegrating situation.