A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  This is going to be interesting.

  The parking lot is flooded, two feet of gently swirling shit–colored water, and there go my cowboy boots – which I had to wear for vanity’s sake, when the gum boots would have done just as well. I sit there a minute cursing myself for my stupidity, the murky penny–pincher lights of Swenson’s beckoning through the scrim of the rain–scrawled windshield, the Mex–Chinese take–out place next door to it permanently sandbagged and dark as a cave, while the computer–repair store and 7-Eleven ride high, dry and smug on eight–foot pilings salvaged from the pier at Gaviota. The rain is coming down harder now – what else? – playing timbales on the roof of the 4x4, and the wind rattles the cab in counterpoint, picking up anything that isn’t nailed down and carrying it off to some private destination, the graveyard of blown things. All the roofs here, where the storms tend to set down after caroming up off the ocean, have been secured with steel cables, and that’s a company to invest in – Bolt–A–Roof, Triple AAA Guaranteed. Of course, everything I ever had to invest, every spare nickel I managed to earn and everything my father left me, went to Andrea and Teo and my wild–eyed cohorts at Earth Forever! (Never heard of it? Think radical enviro group, eighties and nineties. Tree–spiking? Ecotage? Earth Forever! Ring a bell?)

  It takes me that long minute, mulling things over and delaying the inevitable in the way of the old (but not that old, not with all the medical advances they’ve thrust on us, what with our personal DNA codes and telomerase treatments and epidermal rejuvenators, all of which I’ve made liberal use of, thanks to Maclovio Pulchris’ generosity), and then I figure what price dignity, jerk off the boots, stuff my socks deep in the pointed toes of them and roll my pants up my skinny legs. The water creeps up my shins, warm as a bath, and I tuck the boots under my slicker, tug the beret down against the wind and start off across the lot. It’s almost fun, the feel of it, the splashing, all that water out of its normal bounds, and the experience takes me back sixty–five years to Hurricane Donna and a day off from school in Peterskill, New York, splash and splash again. (And people thought the collapse of the biosphere would be the end of everything, but that’s not it at all. It’s just the opposite – more of everything, more sun, water, wind, dust, mud.)

  I’m standing under the jury–rigged awning (steel plates welded to steel posts set in concrete), trying to balance on one bare foot and administer a sock and boot to the other, when the door flings open and two drunks, as red in face and bare blistered arm as if they’ve been baked in a tandoori, trundle out to gape at the rain. ‘Shit,’ the one to my right says, and I’m squinting past him to the bar, to see if Andrea’s there, ‘may as well have another drink.’ His companion blinks at the deluge as if he’s never seen weather before – and maybe he hasn’t, maybe he’s from Brazil or New Zealand or one of the other desert countries – and then he says, ‘Can’t. Got to get home to’ (you fill in the name) ‘and the kids and the dog and the rats in the attic … but fuck this weather, fuck it all to hell.’

  I take a deep breath, dodge around them, and step into the restaurant. I should point out that Swenson’s isn’t the most elegant place – elegance is strictly for the rich, computer repairmen, movie people, pop stars like Mac – but it has its charms. The entryway isn’t one of them. There’s an empty fish tank built into the cement block wall on your immediate right, a coat rack and umbrella stand on the left. Music hits you – oldies, the venerable hoary inescapable hits of the sixties, played at killing volume for benefit of the deaf and toothless like me – and a funk of body heat and the kind of humidity you’d expect from the Black Hole of Calcutta. No air–conditioning, of course, what with electrical restrictions and the sheer killing price per kilowatt hour. Go straight on and you’re in the bar, turn left and you’ve got the dining room, paneled in mismatching pine slats recycled from the classic California ranch houses that succumbed to the historical imperative of mini–malls and condos. I go straight on, the bar teeming, Shiggy glancing up from the blender with a nod of acknowledgment, some antiquated crap about riding your pony blistering the overworked speakers.

  No Andrea. Ride your pony, ride your pony. My elbows find the bar, cheap sake (tastes of machine oil, brewed locally) finds me, and I scan the faces to be sure. I even slide off my glasses and wipe them on my sleeve, a gesture as habitual as breathing. Replace them. Study the faces now, in depth, erasing lines and blotches and liver spots, pulling lips and eyes up out of their fissures, smoothing brows and firming up chins, and still no Andrea. (Swenson’s, in case you’re wondering, caters strictly to the young–old, the fastest–growing segment of the U.S. population, of which I am a reluctant yet grateful part, considering the alternative.)

  A woman in red at the end of the bar catches my eye – that is, I catch hers – and my blood surges like a teenager’s until I realize she can’t be more than fifty. I look again as she turns away and lets out a laugh in response to something the retired dentist at her elbow is saying, and I see she’s all wrong: Andrea, and I don’t care what age she might be – sixty, eighty–five, a hundred and ten – has twice her presence. Ten times. Yes. Sure. She’s not Andrea. Not even close. But does that make it any less depressing to admit that I’m really standing here on aching knees in a dress–up shirt and with a sopping–wet beret that looks like a chili–cheese omelet laid over my naked scalp, waiting for a phantom? A blood–sucking phantom at that?

  Ride your pony, ride your pony. What is it Yeats said about old age? It wasn’t ride your pony. An aged man is but a paltry thing, that’s what he said. A tattered coat upon a stick. In spades.

  But what is this I feel on the back of my neck? Dampness. Water. Ubiquitous water. I’m looking up, the ceiling tiles giving off a gentle ooze, and then down at the plastic bucket between my feet – I’m practically standing in it – when I feel a pressure on my arm. It’s her hand, Andrea’s hand, the feel of it round my biceps as binding as history, and what can I do but look up into her new face, the face that’s been molded like wet clay on top of the one glazed and fired and set on a shelf in my head. ‘Hello, Ty,’ she says, the bucket gently sloshing, the solid air rent by the blast of the speakers, the crowd gabbling, her unflinching eyes locked on mine. I can’t think of what to say, Shiggy moving toward us on the other side of the bar, mountainous in a Hawaiian shirt, the bartender’s eternal question on his lips, and then she’s smiling like the sun coming up over the hills. ‘Nice hat,’ she says.

  I snatch it off and twist it awkwardly behind me.

  ‘But, Ty’ – a laugh – ‘you’re bald!’

  ‘Something for the lady?’ Shiggy shouts over the noise, and before I’ve said a word to her I’m addressing him, a know–nothing I could talk to any day of the week. ‘Sake on the rocks,’ I tell him, ‘unless she’s paying for her own – and I’ll take a refill too.’ The transaction gives me a minute to collect myself. It’s Andrea. It’s really her, standing here beside me in the flesh. Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain. ‘We all get older,’ I shout, swinging round with the drinks,’ – if we’re lucky.’

  ‘And me?’ She takes a step back, center stage, lifting her arms in display. For a minute I think she’s going to do a pirouette. But I don’t want to sound too cynical here, because time goes on and she’s looking good, very good, eight or nine on a scale of ten, all things considered. Her mouth settles into a basket of grooves and lines when the smile fades, and her eyes are paler and duller than I remembered – and ever so slightly exophthalmic – but who’s to quibble? She was a beauty then and she’s a beauty still.

  ‘You look terrific,’ I tell her, ‘and I’m not just saying that – it’s the truth. You look – I don’t know – edible. Are you edible?’

  The smile returns, but just for a second, flashing across her face as if blown by the winds that are even now rattling the windows – and rattling them audibly, despite the racket of the place and my suspect hearing (destroyed sixty years ago by Jimi
Hendrix and The Who). She’s wearing a print dress, low–cut of course, frilly sleeves, a quarter–inch of makeup, and her hair – dyed midnight black – bunches at her shoulders. She fixes on my eyes with that half–spacey, half–calculating wide–eyed look I know so well – or used to know. ‘Is there someplace we can talk?’

  Most people don’t relate to hyenas. You say ‘hyena’ to them and they give you a long stare, as if you’re talking about a mythical beast – which it practically is nowadays. The more enlightened might remember the old nature shows where the hyenas gang–pile a corpse or disembowel the newborn wildebeest and devour it in ragged bloody lumps before the awareness has left its eyes, but that’s all they remember, the ugliness and the death. I knew an African game–hunter once (Philip Ratchiss, and more on him later) who used to cull elephants for the Zambian government, back when there was a Zambian government, and he’d had some grisly encounters with all three species of hyena. When he retired to California, he brought his Senga gunbearer with him, a man named Mag or Mug – I could never get it straight – who’d had his face removed by a hyena one night as he lay stretched out drunk in front of the campfire. Ratchiss dressed him up in Dockers and polo shirts and got his teeth fixed for him, but Mag – or Mug – didn’t want anything to do with plastic surgery. He had an eye left, and a pair of ears. The rest of his face was like a big pitted prune.

  The reason I mention it is because people can’t understand why Mac wants to save hyenas – in Lily’s case, the brown hyena – when the cheetahs, cape buffalo, rhinos and elephants are gone. And what do I tell them? Because they exist, that’s why. And if we can’t manage to impregnate Lily with sperm from the San Diego Zoo’s lone surviving male, we’ll clone her – and clone the clones, ad infinitum. I want to save the animals nobody else wants,’ Mac told me when we entered into our present arrangement. ‘The ones nobody but a mother could love. Isn’t that cool? Isn’t that selfless and cool and brave?’ I told him it was. And we got rid of the peacocks and Vietnamese pot–bellied pigs, and the dogs and cats and goats and all the rest, and concentrated on the unglamorous things of the world, the warthogs, peccaries, hyenas and jackals, with the three lions thrown in for the excitement factor. Mac likes to hear them cough and roar when he turns in at night. When he’s here, that is. Which is precious little this time of year.

  Anyway, Lily looms up in my mind when Andrea leans into the table and asks me what it’s like to work for Maclovio Pulchris. We’re seated in the candlelit dining room, waiting for our order, deep into the sake now and too civilized – or too old – to let all the bitterness of the past spoil our little reunion. I’m rattling on about Mac, how he likes to stay up all night with a bottle of champagne and a favorite lady and sit out in the yard listening to the anteaters snore while Lily roams her cage, sniggering over the rats she traps between her four–toed paws. And then I’m on to Lily, the virtuosity of her digestive tract, her calcified bowel movements (all that pulverized bone), the roadkill we feed her when we get lucky – opossums mostly, another R–species – when Andrea clears her throat in a pre–emptive way.

  I duck my head in embarrassment – my shining bald dome of a head (Flow it, show it/Long as God can grow it/My hair). Suck at the metallic patchwork of my old man’s teeth. Fumble with the sake cup. I haven’t shut up since we sat down – and why? Because, for all my bravado back at the house, all my macho notions of remining an old vein, of exploiting her body in some superheated motel room and then writing her off, good night, goodbye and thanks for the masterful application of the lips, I find myself riveted by her, racked in body and nerve, ready to be slit open and sacrificed all over again. I’m nervous, that’s what it is. And when I’m nervous I can’t stop talking.

  ‘Do you remember that girl, April Wind – she was about Sierra’s age?’ Andrea is watching my face, looking for the crack into which she can drive the first piton and begin her ascent to my poor quivering brain. I give her nothing. Nothing at all. My eyes are glass. My face a sculpture by Oldenburg, monumental, impenetrable. Sierra – the famous Sierra Tierwater, martyr to the cause of the trees – is my daughter. Was my daughter. April Wind I’ve never heard of. Or at least I hope I haven’t.

  ‘She was part of that tree–sitting thing, summer of ’01?’

  All my danger sensors are on alert – I should have stayed home with my hyena, I knew it. I’m hurt. I’m lonely. I’m old. I haven’t got time for this. But Andrea will persist, she will – if there’s one thing I know about her, it’s that. Something’s afoot here, something I’m not going to like one bit, and once she’s sprung it she’ll get down to more practical matters – she needs to borrow money, food, clothes, medical supplies, she absolutely has to stay with me a while, a couple of weeks, a month, she needs me, wants me, and suddenly she’ll lean forward and we’ll kiss with sushi on our lips and her hand will snake out under the table and take hold of me in the one place that’s even more vulnerable than my brain.

  Her lips, I’m watching her lips – I know she’s had collagen implants, and her face is too shining and perfect to be natural, but who wants natural at my age? ‘You remember her,’ she insists, picking at her food with an absent squeeze of her chopsticks (she’s having the spicy catfish roll, tilapia sushi, smoked crappie and koi sashimi, a good choice – or the best available, anyway. And it’s not going to be cheap, but, knowing Andrea, I came prepared with a new five–hundred–dollar debit card). ‘She came straight to us from Teo’s Action Camp? Tiny, she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds? Asian. Or half Asian? She swore the trees talked to her, remember?’

  I’m beginning to remember, but I don’t want to. And the mention of Teo shoots a flaming brand into my gut, where it ignites the wasabi lurking there in a gurry of carp roe and partially digested tilapia. ‘What about Teo?’ I say, just as the wind comes up in a blast that shakes the place as if it were made of straw.

  ‘I hate this,’ she hisses, bracing for the next blast. A sound of rending, some essential piece of the roof above us scraping across the tiles and plucking briefly at the strings of steel cable before hurtling off into the night. People have been decapitated by roofing material, crushed, pole–axed, impaled – you hear about it every day on the news. A woman in the Lupine Hill condos was taking out the trash last year when a flagpole came down out of the sky like a javelin and pinned her to the Dumpster like an insect to a mounting board. And then there are the eye and lung problems associated with all the particulate matter in the air, not to mention allergies nobody had heard of twenty years ago. A lot of people – myself included – wear goggles and a gauze mask during the dry season, when the air is just another kind of dirt. But what can I say? I told you so?

  This is the world we’ve made. Live in it.

  ‘You get used to it,’ I say, and give her a shrug. ‘But you’ve got your own problems in Arizona – that’s where you’ve been living, right?’

  She nods, a tight economical dip of the chin that says, Ask no more.

  ‘So Teo,’ I persist, trying to sound casual though I’m chewing up my insides and wishing I were home in front of the tube with a bottle of Gelusil and the lions coughing me to sleep. ‘Is he still in the picture, or what?’

  Right then is when I begin to notice that my feet are wet, and when I lift first one, then the other from the floor, the rug gives like a sponge. Out of the corner of my eye I can see one of Shiggy’s daughters busy at the rear door with a mop and a mountain of napkins, furious activity, but not enough to stanch the flow of water seeping inexorably into the room. Shiggy should have built on pilings and he knows it, but he inherited the place from his father, who ran a successful smorgasbord out of the location for forty years, and the expense of jacking up the building was prohibitive. And Shiggy, like everyone else, kept waiting for the weather to break. ‘No problem, sir, no problem,’ Shiggy’s daughter is saying to a solitary diner in the corner, ‘we’ll have this mopped up in a minute.’

  Distracted – my boots
are ruined for sure – I’ve forgotten all about the question I left hanging in the dank air of the place, forgotten where I am or why or even who I am, one of those little lapses that make life tolerable at my age, ginkgo biloba, caffeine and neuroboosters notwithstanding. For a whole ten seconds I’ve managed to disconnect my gut from my brain. ‘He’s dead,’ Andrea says into the silence.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Teo.’

  Dead? Teo dead? Well, and now I’m back in the moment, as alert as Lily when she sees me reach into the big greasy plastic bag for another chicken back. I’m beginning to enjoy myself. I feel expansive suddenly. I want details. Did he suffer? Was it lingering? Did he lose control of his bowels, his dick, his brain? ‘I thought it would take a silver bullet,’ I hear myself say. ‘Or a stake through the heart.’

  Her eyes draw down, drop the curtains and pull the shades. Her smallest voice: ‘It was quick.’

  ‘How quick?’

  Whoa, shouts the wind, whoa, whoa, whoa, and now there’s a steady drip of water – the ghost of Teo, his slick aqueous heartbeat – thumping down on the table, just to the left of my chopsticks. I’m watching her, feeding on this, but my back hurts – it always hurts, will always hurt, has hurt without remit since I was in my mid–thirties – and the arthritis in my right foot isn’t being helped any by the dampness of the floor. I have a premature hard–on. I resist the impulse to snatch a look at my watch. ‘How quick?’ I repeat.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she says, ‘because that’s not why I – that’s not what I wanted to … It was a meteor, all right?’