by T. C. Boyle
I can’t pull my laugh in. Sharp and resounding, it explodes from my runaway lips and startles the couple two tables over. ‘You’re putting me on.’
‘Eleven and a half billion people on the earth, Ty, sixty million of them right here in California. Meteors hit the earth, okay? They’ve got to land somewhere.’
‘You mean it actually hit him? How big? And when? When was this – ten years ago, yesterday or what?’
‘I won’t lie to you, Ty: I loved him. Or at least I thought I did.’
‘Yeah, and you thought you loved me too. That did me a lot of good.’
‘Listen, I don’t want to get into this, all right? This is not why I came –’
‘What, did it hit him like a bullet? Go through the roof of his house?’
‘He was making a soft–boiled egg. In the kitchen. He was living in one of those group homes for people like me who never saved for retirement – and don’t ask, because I’m not going to say a word about my present circumstances, so don’t.’ Patting at her lips with the napkin, pausing to take a doleful sip of faintly greasy sake, the best the house has to offer. (Have I mentioned that grapes are a thing of the past? Napa–Sonoma is all rice paddies now, the Loire and Rhine Valleys so wet they’d be better off trying to grow pineapples – though on the plus side I hear the Norwegians are planting California rootstock in the Oslo suburbs.)
‘He never knew what hit him,’ she’s saying, chasing me down with her eyes. ‘His son told me they found the thing – it was the size of a golf ball – embedded in the concrete in the basement, still smoldering.’
I’m in awe. Sitting there over my sake and a plate of cold fish, holding that picture in my head – a soft–boiled egg! The world is a lonely place.
‘Ty?’
I look up, still shaking my head. ‘You want another drink?’
‘No, no – listen. The reason I came is to tell you about April Wind – ’
I do everything I can to put some hurt and surprise in my face, though I’m neither hurt nor surprised, or not particularly. ‘I thought you said you wanted to see me for love – isn’t that what you said? Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression was you wanted to, well, get together – ’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Or yes, yes, I do. But the thing that got me here, the reason I had to see you, is April Wind. She wants to do a book. On Sierra.’
I don’t get angry much anymore, no point in it. But with all I’ve been through – not just back then, but now too, and who do you think is going to have to track down the Patagonian fox and the slinking fat pangolins on feet that are like cement blocks? – I can’t help myself. ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I say, and somehow I’m standing, the carpet squelching under my feet, the whole building vibrating under the assault of another gust. My arm, my right arm, seems to be making some sort of extenuating gesture, moving all on its own, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. ‘She’s dead, isn’t that enough? What do you want – to make some sort of Joan of Arc out of her? Open the door. Look around you. What the fuck difference does it make?’
She’s a big woman, Andrea, big still – in her shoulders, the legs tucked up under her skirt, those hands – but she reduces herself somehow. She’s a waif. She’s put–upon. She’s no threat to anybody and this isn’t her idea but April Wind’s, the woman who talks to trees. ‘I think it’s a good idea,’ she says. ‘For posterity.’
‘What posterity?’ My arm swings wide. ‘This is your posterity.’
‘Come on, Ty – do it for Sierra. Let the woman interview you, tell your story – what’ll it hurt?’
Everything compresses to rush into the vacuum inside me, the winds dying as if on the downstroke of a baton, the rain taking a time–out, the mop finally prevailing at the door. Andrea is standing now too, and we’re a matching pair of the young–old, as rejuvenant as any couple you’d see in New York or Paris or in those TV ads for transplants, poised over the table as if we’re about to sweep off across the floor in some elaborate dance routine. ‘What’s it in for you? A finder’s fee?’
No response.
‘And how did you track me down, anyway?’
There’s no malice in her smile – a hint of smugness, maybe, but no malice. She holds up her fingers, all ten of them. ‘The Internet. Search for Maclovio Pulchris and you’d be amazed at what turns up – and as far as what’s in it for me, that’s easy: you. You’re what I want.’
I’m stirred, and there’s no denying it. But I’m not taking her home with me, never, no matter what. I’m grinning, though – a grin so glutinous you could hang wallpaper on it. ‘You want to go to a motel?’
‘You don’t have to do that.’
Still grinning, all my dental enhancements on display, my naked gums anaesthetized with sake fumes and my eyes on fire behind the twin discs of my glasses: ‘I want to.’
The wind comes back for an encore. Snatches of music drift in from the bar. Everything is roaring, the whole world, noise and more noise. ‘I won’t stay long,’ she says. ‘And I’ll help with the animals. You know how I love animals – ’
Part One
Bring ’Em Back Alive
The Siskiyou, July 1989
This is the way it begins, on a summer night so crammed with stars the Milky Way looks like a white plastic sack strung out across the roof of the sky. No moon, though – that wouldn’t do at all. And no sound, but for the discontinuous trickle of water, the muted patter of cheap tennis sneakers on the ghostly surface of the road and the sustained applause of the crickets. It’s a dirt road, a logging road, in fact, but Tyrone Tierwater wouldn’t want to call it a road. He’d call it a scar, a gash, an open wound in the body corporal of the forest. But for the sake of convenience, let’s identify it as a road. In daylight, trucks pound over it, big D7 Cats, loaders, wood–chippers. It’s a road. And he’s on it.
He’s moving along purposively, all but invisible in the abyss of shadow beneath the big Douglas firs. If your eyes were adjusted to the dark and you looked closely enough, you might detect his three companions, the night disarranging itself ever so casually as they pass: now you see them, now you don’t. All four are dressed identically, in cheap tennis sneakers blackened with shoe polish, two pairs of socks, black tees and sweatshirts and, of course, the black watchcaps. Where would they be without them?
Tierwater had wanted to go further, the whole nine yards, stripes of greasepaint down the bridge of the nose, slick rays of it fanning out across their cheekbones – or, better yet, blackface – but Andrea talked him out of it. She can talk him out of anything, because she’s more rational than he, more aggressive, because she has a better command of the language and eyes that bark after weakness like hounds – but then she doesn’t have half his capacity for paranoia, neurotic display, pessimism or despair. Things can go wrong. They do. They will. He tried to tell her that, but she wouldn’t listen.
They were back in the motel room at the time, on the unfledged strip of the comatose town of Grants Pass, Oregon, where they were registered under the name of Mr. and Mrs. James Watt. He was nervous – butterflies in the stomach, termites in the head – nervous and angry. Angry at the loggers, Oregon, the motel room, her. Outside, three steps from the door, Teo’s Chevy Caprice (anonymous gray, with the artfully smudged plates) sat listing in its appointed slot. He came out of the bathroom with a crayon in one hand, a glittering, shrink–wrapped package of Halloween face paint in the other. There were doughnuts on the bed in a staved–in carton, paper coffee cups subsiding into the low fiberboard table. ‘Forget it, Ty,’ she said. I keep telling you, this is nothing, the first jab in a whole long bout. You think I’d take Sierra along if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was safe? It’s going to be a stroll in the park, it is.’
A moment evaporated. He looked at his daughter, but she had nothing to say, her head cocked in a way that indicated she was listening, but only reflexively. The TV said, ‘ – and these magnificent creatures, their range shrinking, can no lon
ger find the mast to sustain them, let alone the carrion.’ He tried to smile, but the appropriate muscles didn’t seem to be working. He had misgivings about the whole business, especially when it came to Sierra – but as he stood there listening to the insects sizzle against the bug zapper outside the window, he understood that ‘misgivings’ wasn’t exactly the word he wanted. Misgivings? How about crashing fears, terrors, night sweats? The inability to swallow? A heart ground up like glass?
There were people out there who weren’t going to like what the four of them were planning to do to that road he didn’t want to call a road. Bosses, underbosses, heavy–machine operators, CEOs, power–lunchers, police, accountants. Not to mention all those good, decent, hardworking and terminally misguided timber families, the men in baseball caps and red suspenders, the women like tented houses, people who spent their spare time affixing loops of yellow ribbon to every shrub, tree, doorknob, mailbox and car antenna in every town up and down the coast. They had mortgages, trailers, bass boats, plans for the future, and the dirt–blasted bumpers of their pickups sported stickers that read Save a Skunk, Roadkill an Activist and Do You Work for a Living or Are You an Environmentalist? They were angry – born angry – and they didn’t much care about physical restraint, one way or the other. Talk about misgivings – his daughter is only thirteen years old, for all her Gothic drag and nose ring and the cape of hair that drapes her shoulders like an advertisement, and she’s never participated in an act of civil disobedience in her life, not even a daylit rally with minicams whirring and a supporting cast of thousands. ‘Come on,’ he pleaded, ‘just under the eyes, then. To mask the glow.’
Andrea just shook her head. She looked good in black, he had to admit it, and the watchcap, riding low over her eyebrows, was a very sexy thing. They’d been married three months now, and everything about her was a novelty and a revelation, right down to the way she stepped into her jeans in the morning or pouted over a saucepan of ratatouille, a thin strip of green pepper disappearing between her lips while the steam rose witchily in her hair. ‘What if the police pull us over?’ she said. ‘Ever think of that? What’re you going to say – “The game really ran late tonight, officer”? Or “Gee, it was a great old–timey minstrel show – you should have been there.”’ She was the one with the experience here – she was the organizer, the protestor, the activist – and she wasn’t giving an inch. ‘The trouble with you,’ she said, running a finger under the lip of her cap, ‘is you’ve been watching too many movies.’
Maybe so. But you couldn’t really call the proposition relevant, not now, not here. This is the wilderness, or what’s left of it. The night is deep, the road intangible, the stars the feeblest mementos of the birth of the universe. There are nine galaxies out there for each person alive today, and each of those galaxies features a hundred billion suns, give or take the odd billion, and yet he can barely see where he’s going, groping like a sleepwalker, one foot stabbing after the other. This is crazy, he’s thinking, this is trouble, like stumbling around in a cave waiting for the bottom to fall out. He’s wondering if the others are having as hard a time as he is, thinking vaguely about beta–carotene supplements and night–vision goggles, when an owl chimes in somewhere ahead of them, a single wavering cry that says it has something strangled in its claws.
His daughter, detectable only through the rhythmic snap of her gum, asks in a theatrical whisper if that could be a spotted owl, I mean hopefully, by any chance?’
He can’t see her face, the night a loose–fitting jacket, his mind ten miles up the road, and he answers before he can think: ‘Don’t I wish.’
Right beside him, from the void on his left, another voice weighs in, the voice of Andrea, his second wife, the wife who is not Sierra’s biological mother and so free to take on the role of her advocate in all disputes, tiffs, misunderstandings, misrepresentations and adventures gone wrong: ‘Give the kid a break, Ty.’ And then, in a whisper so soft it’s like a feather floating down out of the night, ‘Sure it is, honey, that’s a spotted owl if ever I heard one.’
Tierwater keeps walking, the damp working odor of the nighttime woods in his nostrils, the taste of it on his tongue – mold transposed to another element, mold ascendant – but he’s furious suddenly. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like it at all. He knows it’s necessary, knows that the woods are being raped and the world stripped right on down to the last twig and that somebody’s got to save it, but still he doesn’t like it. His voice, cracking with the strain, leaps out ahead of him: ‘Keep it down, will you? We’re supposed to be stealthy here – this is illegal, what we’re doing, remember? Christ, you’d think we were on a nature walk or something – And here’s where the woodpecker lives, and here the giant forest fern:’
A chastened silence, into which the crickets pour all their Orthopteran angst, but it can’t hold. One more voice enters the mix, an itch of the larynx emanating from the vacancy to his right. This is Teo, Teo Van Sparks, aka Liverhead. Eight years ago he was standing out on Rodeo Drive, in front of Sterling’s Fur Emporium, with a slab of calf’s liver sutured to his shaved head. He’d let the liver get ripe – three or four days or so, flies like a crown of thorns, maggots beginning to trail down his nose – and then he’d tear it off his head and lay it at the feet of a silvery old crone in chinchilla or a starlet parading through the door in white fox. Next day he’d be back again, with a fresh slab of meat. Now he’s a voice on the E.F.! circuit (Eco–Agitator, that’s what his card says), thirty–one years old, a weightlifter with the biceps, triceps, lats and abs to prove it, and there isn’t anything about the natural world he doesn’t know. At least not that he’ll admit. ‘Sorry, kids,’ he says, ‘but by most estimates they’re down to less than five hundred breeding pairs in the whole range, from B.C. down to the southern Sierra, so I doubt – ’
‘Fewer,’ Andrea corrects, in her pedantic mode. She’s in charge here tonight, and she’s going to rein them all in, right on down to the finer points of English grammar and usage. If it was just a question of giving out instructions in a methodical, dispassionate voice, that would be one thing – but she’s so supercilious, so self–satisfied, cocky, bossy. He’s not sure he can take it. Not tonight.
‘Fewer, right. So what I’m saying is, more likely it’s your screech or flammulated or even your great gray. Of course, we’d have to hear its call to be sure. The spotted’s a high–pitched hoot, usually in groups of fours or threes, very fast, crescendoing.’
‘Call, why don’t you,’ Sierra whispers, and the silence of the night is no silence at all but the screaming backdrop to some imminent and catastrophic surprise. ‘So you can make it call back. Then we’ll know, right?’
Is it his imagination, or can he feel the earth slipping out from under him? He’s blind, totally blind, his shoulders hunched in anticipation of the first furtive blow, his breath coming hard, his heart hammering at the walls of its cage. And the others? They’re moving down the road in a horizontal line like tourists on a pier, noisy and ambling, heedless. ‘And while we’re at it,’ he says, and he’s surprised by his own voice, the vehemence of it, I just want to know one thing from you, Andrea – did you remember the diapers? Or is this going to be another in a long line of, of – ’
‘At what?’
‘It. The subject of stealth and preparedness.’
He’s talking to nothing, to the void in front of him, moving down the invisible road and releasing strings of words like a street gibberer. The owl sounds off again, and then something else, a rattling harsh buzz in the night.
‘Of course I remembered the diapers.’ The reassuring thump of his wife’s big mannish hand patting the cross–stitched nylon of her daypack. ‘And the sandwiches and granola bars and sunblock too. You think I don’t know what I’m doing here? Is that what you’re implying?’
He’s implying nothing, but he’s half a beat from getting excruciatingly specific. The honeymoon is over. He’s out here risking arrest, humiliation, p
hysical abuse and worse – and for her, all for her, or because of her, anyway – and her tone irritates him. He wants to come back at her, draw some blood, get a good old–fashioned domestic dispute going, but instead he lets the silence speak for him.
‘What kind of sandwiches?’ Sierra wants to know, a hushed and tremulous little missive inserted in the envelope of her parents’ bickering. He can just make out the moving shape of her, black against black, the sloped shoulders, the too–big feet, the burgeoning miracle of tofu–fed flesh, and this is where the panic closes in on him again. What if things turn nasty? What then?
‘Something special for you, honey. A surprise, okay?’
‘Tomato, avocado and sprouts on honey wheatberry, don’t spare the mayo?’
A low whistle from Andrea. ‘I’m not saying.’
‘Hummus – hummus and tabouleh on pita. Whole–wheat pita.’
‘Not saying.’
‘Peanut butter – marshmallow? Nusspli?’
A stroll in the park, isn’t that what she said? Sure, sure it is. And we’re making so much racket we might as well be shooting off fireworks and beating a big bass drum into the bargain. What fun, huh? The family that monkeywrenches together stays together? But what if they ARE listening? What if they got word ahead of time, somebody finked, ratted, spilled the beans, crapped us out? ‘Look, really,’ he hears himself saying, trying to sound casual but getting nowhere with that, ‘you’ve got to be quiet. I’m begging you – Andrea, come on. Sierra. Teo. Just for my peace of mind, if nothing else – ’
Andrea’s response is clear and resonant, a definitive nonwhisper. ‘They don’t have a watchman, I keep telling you that – so get a grip, Ty.’ A caesura. The crickets, the muffled tramp of sneakered feet, the faintest soughing of a night breeze in the doomed expanse of branch and bough. ‘Tomorrow night they will, though – you can bet on it.’