A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘So you were pretty broken up by that,’ April Wind inserts into the howling silence – literally howling, Force 8 at least, a whole universe of untethered objects hurtling in a dismal blur past the only window that hasn’t been boarded up yet. ‘Is that when you really, like, started to, you know – ’

  ‘Broken up?’ I throw it back it at her on the heels of two quick burning hits of sake, and forget the delicate little cups, it’s my lips now and the wet viridian throat of the bottle. ‘Is that what you came to hear about? This is the interview, right? We’re not laughing anymore, are we, anything for the cold naked page and let’s take down the last ten trees in the world for the paper to print it on. But what’s the angle, what’s the deal – does anybody really give a shit anymore? Because I don’t. I really don’t.’

  Oh, they look uncomfortable now, the shifting buttocks and nervous little flicks of the head, fingers twirling twists of hair, eyes left, eyes right, eyes crawling up the walls. And what a coincidence that Andrea should come back to me the day before the little reporter shows up. It’s money, sure, some publisher’s money – we always need the next hagiography – but there’s more to it than that, and I can see it glittering in their eyes. Andrea and April Wind. Am I crazy to think they don’t have an agenda?

  ‘All right, Ty, we’ll be straight with you.’ Andrea is up out of the chair now, at the stove, all brisk elbows and saluting shoulders, rattling the teapot. ‘Maybe we’ve had enough sake — it’s too early for me. Tea, anyone?’ And she swings round with a smile.

  And me? I just perch there, buttock to table, my mouth grim, waiting.

  A sigh. The smile flutters and flaps off. ‘First of all,’ she says, ‘I came to you because I missed you and I need you, so don’t think – and plus, as I’m sure you suspected all along, I’ve got nowhere else to go. And nothing. I mean nothing. April and I thought – well, a book, you know? I need the money – we need the money – yes, that’s true, but we really felt it was time to tell Sierra’s story – and yours – so people can see that we tried, and that we can try again.’

  ‘Not that they would care,’ I say, bitter to the dregs. Another hit of sake, straight from the bottle, and it tastes like machine oil.

  ‘They would, you know they would.’ This from the little face of April Wind, clenched round her conviction.

  ‘I may as well tell you, Ty – we’re starting up E.F.! again. For the survivors, I mean.’ Andrea lights the stove with a soft whoosh of gas, sets the teapot on the burner. She can’t look me in the eye.

  For the survivors. That was the kind of thinking that got me crazy, that got me put in prison, not to mention reviled and caricatured and labeled ‘a human hyena’ by the San Francisco Chronicle and half a dozen other papers. ‘You know something I don’t?’

  This has got to be the worst of the storms yet – the rain is nearly horizontal now, roofing nails shot out of a gun, and the yard seems to be in motion, one soupy swirl of muck and water. I need to get out there and see to the animals. I need to get hold of Chuy. Mac. The National Guard. But here I am, drunk on sake, a withered, rapier–nosed, hunched–over relic, holding my breath and listening to hear the worst of the bad news.

  Andrea ducks her head and lets her voice go soft. ‘They’ve got the mucosa on the East Coast. A new strain.’

  That hits me in the stomach, all right. Up comes Lori’s face, bobbing to the surface, and then it’s gone. Of course, I knew it – could have predicted it – and why not? If not the mucosa, then something else. ‘No vaccine?’

  A shake of her newly minted head. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘So, then, why … I don’t understand why you’d – ?’

  ‘Sit down, Ty,’ Andrea says, and April Wind is so wired I think she’s going to rocket up off the dog–stinking couch, leap out the window and parachute to safety.

  ‘I am sitting.’

  ‘Look, Ty, there’s one more thing – ’

  I’m an old man. My teeth hurt, my knee hurts, my back – and there’s a dull inchoate intimation of pain just starting to make its presence known deep in the intertwined muscles of my stitched–up forearm. I just gape at her.

  ‘Maclovio Pulchris. We need him. His money, anyway. Earth Forever! is going to fly again, in a big way. If this new mucosa strain is what we think it is, then the crash we’ve been talking about all these years is here, here right now.’ How did she get across the room so fast? Because here she is, right in my face, looming over me, Andrea, all of her, ready to put the screws to me all over again. ‘You hear me, Ty? Because you’re coming with us.’

  No time for a snappy comeback, no time to reflect on being used yet again, no time for volition or even protest. ‘I am?’

  When I was younger – young, that is – everybody I knew was alive. Now pretty much everybody I know, or knew, is dead, and the odd thing is that none of them died a natural death – He expired in his sleep, never knew what hit him, that sort of thing. Uncle Sol was the exception, though his death seemed unnatural too, in the way that all death seems unnatural – I was a teenager then, working with him on his safari ranch in San Diego, both of us up to our elbows in urine–drenched straw and the exotic shit of exotic beasts, and as I say, he was leaning over the bulbul cages one morning and felt the jab of mortality up under his rib cage. Tell me, is that natural? I’ve had friends succumb to cancer, and Lori – Lori died in my arms, both of us wearing gauze masks, the mucosa so thick in her lungs and throat she couldn’t draw a breath, tracheotomy or no, and that’s natural, nothing more natural than the disease we spread in our sticky, promiscuous way. But what about my parents, my wife, my daughter, what about Teo? They say that if all disease was cured (and what a joke that fond promise has turned out to be) people wouldn’t get much past the age of ninety or so anyway, what with the chances of accident. Actuarial tables? Take it to Las Vegas.

  Accident rules the universe, I know that, and there’s no escaping it, science or no. But accident gives rise to the concept of luck – and if you believe in luck, you might as well break out your juju beads and get your mojo working, you might as well borrow a totem from April Wind and go out and talk to the trees. Go ahead and pray to the gods, pray to God and Jehovah, pray to Newton and Kepler and Oppenheimer. See what good it does you.

  My mother, Bernadette O’Shaughnessy, believed in the mystery with a divine face, believed in heaven, spirits, angels on high. She was the one who sat me in a pew in the hushed, candlelit vaults of the Church of the Assumption in Peterskill, New York, when I was so small I couldn’t see over the rail. Every Sunday morning imploded on the sleepy, dreary, mind–numbing ritual that was mass, nothing left of it now but a welter of reworked sensory impressions misfiring in my septuagenarian brain: my mother’s gloved hand like silk in my own, the power of her perfume to drive back the narcotic musk of the incense, the icy dip of the holy water–icy even in summer – and the music of the organ like some exotic feast that fills you to bursting with something that isn’t food at all. I attended religious instructions. I was conversant with nuns and priests. I was eight, ten, twelve years old, I was communed and confirmed, bore the mystery of Latin, knew that masturbation was a sin and that God was watching. It was He who created the universe, the gnatcatcher, the canyon wren, the brown hyena and all those fifty–four billion galaxies, and He who created me and created Santa Claus and his elves too and the mountain of foil–wrapped gifts under the tree.

  Yeah, sure. And then came science.

  Science – empiricism, skepticism, the spirit of inquiry, doubt, debate and outright derision – was a gift of my Jewish father, Seymour Tierwater, the man everyone called Sy (Get it? Sy and Ty?) and I called Daddy. He was an MP during the war, a man who cracked heads as casually as he cracked walnuts, an angry man, a big man. He drank vodka. My mother drank scotch. With the backing of my mother’s father, a roaring, barking, rock–headed, neo–Cretaceous presence looming large in the dining room and den of my early years, Seymour Tierwater took his brand–ne
w architectural degree from City College and built the development I grew up in. And how did you build a housing development? With divine help and guidance? With incense and magic? With elves? No. You built it with orthogonal angles and real things, concrete things, things made and scavenged by man out of a harsh, alien and godless universe that existed because it existed, and for no other discernible reason.

  My father and I never had discussions along the lines of ‘If God is so good and wise and all–knowing and all–powerful, then why did He create ticks and tapeworms and let all the Jews die in the ovens?’ For him, there was no god but science, and never had been. But there must have been an ironclad quid pro quo in my parents’ marriage contract – my grandfather’s money, my grandfather’s religion – because my father never objected to my early indoctrination, or not that I knew of, anyway. He just bided his time, a look of bemusement or mockery on his face whenever the sacerdotal words – Jesus, God the Father, the Holy Spirit – dropped from his son’s lips. Was this a happy marriage? No. Not after the first ten years, anyway, but it lasted, held together by a king–size bed and ice cubes in a glass, till a crane buckled and a beam gave way and I became an orphan at the age of twenty–seven.

  I mention all this because it gives me a context for evaluating what Andrea’s just told me. If I’m getting it straight, it’s this: the world is ending, so we have to write The Lives of the Environmental Saints and fleece Maclovio Pulchris so that we can run off and hide till such time as we can use the booty to rebuild it again. The world, that is.

  ‘You’re coming with us,’ she repeats.

  ‘I’m going nowhere. Or scratch that – I’m going to the bathroom. Sake in the morning, you know what I mean?’ A look for April Wind. ‘And you must know, right, April? You’re getting to that age now, aren’t you? Just wait,’ I tell them, tell them both, and I’m so worked up I can hear the blood singing in my ears, ‘just wait till you get to be my age.’

  And then I’m ducking around the eternally overspilling buckets, my shoes sloshing on the sodden carpet, the pyrotechnics in my bowels a direct consequence of being seventy–five years old and foolish enough to think you can imbibe sake at ten o’clock in the morning and get away with it. Cheap sake, at that. My need is urgent, but still I can’t help stopping at the bathroom door to turn a withering look on my ex–wife and current bed–partner. ‘Did you really say “Earth Forever! is going to fly again”? Am I hearing right? “Fly again”? I mean, how deluded can you get?’ Oh, yes, and now I’m full of it, full of myself and gas pains too. ‘If it ever flew, and don’t tell me it ever really did, not in any way that mattered to anybody except maybe Sierra and a bunch of disaffected lunatics and bush–beaters, then I’m sorry it did, heartily sorry, and I wish I’d been there to cut the wings off of it with a rusty pair of scissors. Or shears. Carpet shears. And a bag of salt to rub in the wounds.

  ‘And don’t try to rattle me with this bullshit about the mucosa, because I know that’s what it is: bullshit.’

  I slam the door for punctuation, and then I’m alone in the bathroom. The dimmest of light here – a single amber–shaded fluorescent miser oozing just enough illurnination to make me feel like I’m back in prison again – but I dig out my glasses reflexively and pick up the thin crumbling copy of the newspaper I keep on hand to get me through my more punishing bouts on the toilet. We don’t see newspapers much anymore, I should tell you that – everybody gets their news electronically now, and the cost of paper, even newsprint, is prohibitive. Still, some of us like the physical feel of the thing, and the Los Andiegoles Times prints up a thin sheet every two weeks for the nostalgic and the deluded, not to mention the constipated. Rattle, rattle. Smooth out the pages. What am I reading? An account of a football game played in an empty leaking dome, the details as irrelevant as the outcome, page three of four, and the rest is about the weather. What’s in store for us – or what was in store for us, two, or no, three weeks ago? Rain. Wind. Flooding in the low–lying and mid–lying areas. Hundred–percent chance of tornadoes, waterspouts, tsunamis.

  There’s a fire down below, no doubt about it, and I sit here waiting it out, reading about fumbles, interceptions and somebody’s stout foot, the wind dragging its claws across the pitted stucco outside, my own familiar odor rising poisonously about me. I’ll be here a while, a fact of life at my age (and forget the old–old, they might as well have their rectums sewed up), and I’m not hiding from anybody, least of all the two women in the next room, the ones who seem to have taken over my house. I’m not stupid. No matter how Andrea tries to spin it, love is the smallest part of what’s involved here – they want access to Mac, that’s what this is all about. They want money. And they want me. Or Sierra, that is. Sierra’s ghost. So why do I put up with it? Why don’t I run both of them out the door and go back to Lily and my anteaters and peccaries?

  Because I’m bored. Because I’ve got nothing to lose. Because I know I can put the brakes on if I have to. Roll with it. Ride your pony. Oh, yes, indeed.

  When I emerge, the two of them have their heads together, two wan little smiles for me, the lord of the house, and there’s a smell in the air – fragrant, fecund, seductive – a smell that rings every bell in my olfactory lobe and knocks my defenses right back down to nothing: they’re baking cookies. Cookies. The world has been transformed to shit, I’m about to be turned inside out, gutted, spitted, grilled and filleted, and they’re baking cookies. It’s too much. I just wave my hand feebly, in surrender, and fade away into the very damp bedroom for a nap.

  I wake in darkness, to the sound of the rain. It’s steady now, the kind of vertical pounding that brings to mind tin roofs, coconut palms and Singapore slings, but at least the wind has died down. I’ve been dreaming, a standard dream about a too–big house with too many wings and too many doors that lead to nothing but house and more house, and it takes me a good five minutes to resurrect my conscious mind. But what time is it? It feels like midnight, but then it always feels like midnight. My watch says 12:15—p.m. – and that seems about right. I hold my wrist up to study the glowing numerals against the dim backdrop of the room, my mouth dry, head throbbing, tireder than I was when I staggered in here an hour and a half ago.

  For a time I just lie there, putting off the inevitable reaccessing of my dog’s life for another sodden minute. (The walls are sweating, I don’t need to turn on the light to know that, and the banana slug that fives in the architecturally inconvenient gap under the windowsill will be grazing the algal bloom over the portrait of Thoreau. And the gap itself will have grown perceptibly – subsidence, and with this rain what isn’t subsiding?) Want more? There’s a new leak in the roof, easily detectable as a kind of snare drumming in the corner over the regular splootching of the bedroom buckets, I’m probably going to have to sandbag the front porch again, and the fullness of the afternoon is going to be spent in a river of muck and hyena shit as Chuy and I try to keep the animals from drowning.

  Then the pictaphone is ringing – or speaking, actually: Incoming call, a mechanical voice announces – and I’m lifting my other wrist to answer it. ‘Yeah?’ I say, and I can’t help it if my voice lacks enthusiasm – I’m not expecting much out of the day, or for that matter the week, month or year.

  ‘Ty? You there?’

  The voice is familiar, soft and sugar–coated, pitched as high as a child’s, and I know it, I do, know it as well as my own … ‘Mac?’ I venture.

  ‘Give me a picture, Ty, come on – ’

  I hit the button, and there he is, Maclovio Pulchris, trapped in a little box on the underside of my wrist. He’s wearing the fedora he was born with – it must have been clamped on his head all the way through the birth canal – and there are three strands of slick processed hair (his eel whips, he calls them) clinging to his mirror shades just over the place where his left eye would be. If he ever took his shades off, that is. ‘Jesus, Ty, you look like shit.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s the look I’m after. I’ve be
en putting a lot of work into it.’

  ‘Are you in bed? At this hour?’ A pause. All you can see of him, really, is his lips, nose and cheekbones. It’s a disguise, and it makes him appear ageless, I suppose, though he’s hardly one of the young–young, or even young. And then, in the softest, breathiest, most forlorn fifth–grader’s voice: ‘You’re not sick, are you?’

  What can I say? Andrea’s out there in the other room, and she’s a kind of sickness. So’s April Wind. And Earth Forever! ‘Petunia got loose – and don’t worry, she’s all right, we got her back’ – bringing my bandaged arm into view – ‘but she chewed up my arm and plus it’s raining like holy hell here and I was up before dawn scattering straw in the cages, checking on the sandbags, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I know.’

  I’m just looking at his face, and there’s no more flexibility to it than you’d find in a carved wooden mask, but I know what my face is showing on his end: befuddlement, age and decrepitude, uncertainty, incompetence, a doddering around the eyes and a pronounced dwindling of the mouth and chin. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m here. Back from sunny North Carolina and all those sweet tropical drinks. And it’s a gas, it is – up in the nineties every day, sunshine like you wouldn’t believe … but Ty, you know what?’

  Here I am, the champion of the young–old, in full possession of my faculties and fresh from my latest sexual triumph, and what do I say? Something penetrating, like ‘Huh?’

  The fifth–grader’s voice again, pinched and whispery with concern: ‘I’m worried about the animals.’

  Well, so am I, I want to tell him, what do you think you’re paying me for? Unfortunately, I never get the chance. Because at that moment, Chuy comes banging through the door – the bedroom door, and I wonder where my peace and dignity have fled to – and he’s waving his arms and opening and closing his mouth on nothing, so excited he can’t seem to form the words to tell me about it in either of the two languages at war in his brain. I can see it in his eyes, though – trouble, big trouble – and of course he’s dripping and his hair and mustache have just been recovered from the bottom of the sea. ‘Sorry, Mac,’ I say to my wrist, ‘gotta go, talk to you later,’ and break the connection.