by T. C. Boyle
‘I don’t know,’ Mac says, ‘it was only a minute. Maybe she was asleep or something.’
I’m shaken. I’m angry. And though he’s my employer, though he’s my lifeline in the dark churning Social Security—less waters of the perilous young–old life, I let him know it. ‘What do you think, you can just leave the door wide open and she’s going to curl up like some fat lapdog?’
Mac wants to answer – I can see a response gathering itself in his naked, faintly yellowish eyes – but the opportunity dissolves into the sudden ringing of the doorbell. Or it doesn’t ring exactly, but chimes the opening bars of Mac’s biggest hit, ‘Chariots of Love,’ from the Chariots of Love album. It’s a curious thing, the ringing of that bell – because no one rings the bell, ever. No one, even in normal (or less abnormal) times, can get through the big gates out front and past the surveillance cameras and Al and Al and even me and Chuy and the day–workers and gardeners and all the rest to arrive at the door and find the button to depress in the first place. And as if that isn’t enough of a feat under ordinary conditions, now we’re even further isolated by the flooding. So who’s ringing the bell? Lily? God? The Ghost of Christmas Past?
Down the stairs we go, judiciously of course, the Nitro Express and I shielding Mac from the front, Chuy and his Dursban–saturated hide screening him from the rear, and then we creep cautiously down the first floor hallway and out into the vestibule even as the bell chimes again and the two Als materialize grimly from the surveillance–control room to the left of the main entrance. The taller Al, after giving his employer a warning glance, pulls open the door.
There, in the strange subaqueous glow of the storm, stands Delbert Sakapathian, the cat–lover, he of the cueball head and overinflated gut. He’s lost his slicker and his rain hat, his clothes cling wetly and what hair he has left is painted to his skull. But that’s not all: beside him, wrapped so tightly in a black slicker he looks as if he’s been extruded from a tube, is an old man – or maybe an old woman. It’s hard to tell, because this person is one of the old–old, the ancient old, the antediluvian, artifactual, older–than–knowledge old, so old that he/she has been rendered utterly sexless. We see the tube of the slicker, the monkey hands, the face like a peeled grape, toothless, chinless, cheekless, a scraped and blasted black hole of humanity. Neither of them is wearing a gauze mask.
‘Mr. Pulchris,’ Delbert Sakapathian says, addressing Mac with all the awe and humility of a communicant in the church of celebrity, ‘we need help. I – this is Old Man Foley, from the Lupine Hill Retirement Home? – and there’s nothing left over there but wreckage, and he needs shelter, I mean, if you can spare it, just till they can get the emergency crews in there to rebuild or take people to a gymnasium somewhere or something. He’s been wet through to the skin for days now.’
The rain keeps up its steady sizzling. And the smell is there, so sharp it makes me wince – the smell of the underside of things, of decay, of death.
‘Look, I’m not asking for myself – Lurleen and me are okay, I’ve got my canoe out there tied to the railing and they can condemn the condos all they want but they’re going to have to shoot me to get me out of there, at least till the rain stops…’ He looks at me now, at the two Als and Chuy, making a mute appeal.
Finally, Mac, in his sweetest voice, says no. Shakes his head wearily, the eel whips slipping across the slick surface of his restored shades. ‘I’d like to help,’ he says, ‘I really would, but I just can’t – we can’t – risk it. It’s the mucosa. You understand, don’t you? I want to help. I do. Money’s no problem. You want money?’
I’m watching Delbert Sakapathian’s face. His expression says, Shit and die, all of you, you fools on a hill, you animal lovers and epicene rock stars; it says, I’m worth ten of you because I’m a human being still and you’re just things in a cage. Chuy gives me a look. The two Als brace themselves. And that is the precise moment when Lily appears.
The noise she emits – a low chuff of warning or surprise – is so faint as to be barely audible over the sibilance of the rain, and anybody who hasn’t watched her eat, sleep and scratch round her pen for ten years probably wouldn’t have recognized it as an animal vocalization at all. I turn my head. That’s all – just turn it, a simple flexion and release of the appropriate muscles – and Lily is gone, a brownish streak, black stripes, gray head, dodging past Delbert Sakapathian and the extruded old man to vanish into the storm.
For a moment, nobody moves. Then a breeze comes up, and that smell with it, and one of the tinfoil angels scratches its wings against the ceiling. That’s when I step forward, not a word for Mac or Chuy or the two men standing on the doorstep. The doorknob is in my hand, the rain hissing like static, the smell of it, and then the door somehow swings closed till it hits the frame with a shivering thud.
And then? Then I bolt it.
A week later, I find myself sitting in front of a faux fire, rain spitting at the windows, April Wind crouched on a footstool at my feet with a tape recorder the size of a matchbox. She’s wearing a denim dress with thin two–inch strips of material sewn randomly to it, fringed suede boots and a belt of what looks to be at least two boxes of Kleenex knotted together. The overall effect is of a big unfledged bird with buck teeth and a head too small for its body. Have I mentioned that I have no use for this whittled–down little stick of a woman? That I hate the past, have limited tolerance for the present and resent this or any other form of interrogation? That I’m sitting still for it for one reason only and that that reason is spelled A–n–d–r–e–a?
‘So,’ April Wind breathes, setting the tape in motion with a practiced flick of her index finger, ‘tell me about the whole tree–sit thing, from the beginning, because I didn’t join E.F.! till after Sierra – well, till after she was already up there in the arms of Artemis. What I wanted to know is, whose idea was it – was she pushed into it by Teo? Or Rolfe? Or what’s–his–name, Ratchiss?’
We’re in the James Brown Room, surrounded by images of the godfather of soul, his sunken eyes, glistening pompadour and thrusting chin replicated over and over till the walls seem to shift like the walls of a planetarium and his multiplied eyes become the stars in the sky. It’s quite a trope, I know, but then I’m suffering from indigestion, the gauze mask is like a smotherer’s hand clamped over my mouth and my mind is already playing tricks on me. Papa’s got a brand new bag, oh, yes, indeed.
‘Or was this her own thing, something spontaneous, something she just had to do? For love of the earth, I mean?’
I’m fumbling around for an answer, suddenly ambushed by an image of my daughter that’s as palpable as the portrait of the Famous Flames leering at me from the place of honor over the fireplace. She’s twenty–one, long–limbed and lean, with the cleft chin she inherited from her mother and her mother’s heat–seeking eyes, wearing running shoes, cut–off jeans and a thermal T–shirt. Her hair is in a braid as thick as a hawser, and there’s no trace of the makeup she used to baste herself with when she was fourteen and terminally angry. I see a whole tribe of tree–huggers and vegans and post–hip hippies gathered round her, pounding on bongos and congas, somebody playing a nose flute, the spice of marijuana in the air and the big ancient trees rising up out of the duff like the pillars that keep the sky from crashing down. It’s the first day, the day of the ascension, and her feet are on the ground still. And me? I’m in the picture too. I’m there to see her off.
‘Well?’ April Wind wants to know.
I try to shrug, but the catch in my shoulders makes me wince. It’s the weather. It makes me feel twenty years older than I already am. ‘For love, I guess.’
‘Nobody put any pressure on her? You didn’t, did you?’
I shake my head, and even that hurts. Pressure her? I tried to talk her out of it, tried to remind her what peaceful protest had got us in the Siskiyou and the whole sorry downward spiral that had spun out of that, but of course she wouldn’t listen. She was fresh from Teo’s Actio
n Camp, in love with the idea of heroic sacrifice and so imbued with the principles of Deep Ecology she insisted on the ethical treatment not only of plants and animals, but even rocks and dirt. ’Rocks?’ I said. ’Dirt?’ She just nodded. She was lit up in the glow of all that attention, the cynosure of the Movement, the sacrificial virgin who was going to dwell in a tree while the rest of them went home to their TVs and microwaves, and I looked into her eyes and barely recognized her.
‘Everything in the ecosystem has its integrity,’ she assured me, leaning back against her tree and sipping a concoction of papaya, wheatgrass and yogurt from a glossy red plastic mug with the Earth Forever! logo stamped on it (another of Teo’s ideas, and he was a marketing genius, all right, never doubt that. If there was an angle, Teo would exploit it). ‘Really,’ she said, glancing up as the drummers shifted into another gear and the dancers swayed round the trees with their goat bells and tambourines ajingle, ‘it’s not just about wolves and caribou and whooping cranes – it’s about the whole earth. I mean, you have to think about what right do we have to dig up the ancient soil and disturb the fungus and microbes, the springtails and pill bugs and all the rest, because without them there’d be no soil, and we have even less right to manufacture and mutate things into new forms – ’
‘Like that mug in your hand,’ I said. ‘Or that shirt that’s going to keep you warm tonight.’
‘Compromises,’ she said, ‘everything’s a compromise.’
This was in December of 1997, just outside of Scotia, in Humboldt County, California. I was an ex–con at the time, a jailbird, an absentee father, a name on a card in the mail, and I hadn’t seen much of her over the course of the past four years. I didn’t want her up in that tree – Teo wanted her there, Andrea did, all the northern–California Earth Forever! tribe and their ragtag constituency were clamoring for it – but I was there to give her my love, unconditionally, and to worry over her and maybe tug on the long cord that had bound us together through all the years of her life and convince her to let somebody else – some other virgin princess or square–jawed dragon–slayer – deliver themselves up to the enemy. I knew this: once she set foot in that tree, she was theirs.
Deep Ecology – Adat – says that all elements of a given environment are equal and that morally speaking no one of them has the right to dominate. We don’t preserve the environment for the benefit of man, for progress, but for its own sake, because the whole world is a living organism and we are but a humble part of it. Try telling that to the Axxam Corporation when they’re clear–cutting thousands of acres of old growth to pay down the junk–bond debt accrued in their hostile takeover of Coast Lumber, and you find yourself in a philosophical bind. They’re going to cut, and Earth Forever! is going to stop them, any way they can. Hence Sierra, up in the tree.
I hugged her to me, held her for as long as she could stand it. Then I pressed a knapsack full of granola bars, dried fruit, books and toilet paper on her, and walked away from her, through the crowd and into the trees. I couldn’t afford to stick around for the denouement – all this noise was designed to bring on the goons, and all these people were going to jail – but I waited long enough, on the fringes, to watch them haul her up the tree to the platform that already awaited her, one hundred eighty feet above the ground.
It was cold. There was a smell of rain on the air. A thickening mist clung like gauze to the high branches and a pair of birds fled through it as if they’d been shot out of a gun. How can I say what I felt? The pulleys creaked, the drummers drummed and my daughter rode up into the mist, higher and higher, till the pale–white bulb of her face was screened from view, and the last things visible – the dark, gently swaying soles of her running shoes – finally disappeared aloft.
That night it rained. But this was no ordinary shower or even a downpour, this was an El Niño event, evil harbinger of the apocalyptic weather to come, and it was accompanied by high winds and a drop of twenty degrees inside of an hour. I was in a motel room in Eureka at the time, working my way through a bag of Doritos and a six–pack of Black Cat malt liquor (choice of environmentalists everywhere), while watching Humphrey Bogart grimace in black and olive on a pale–green motel TV screen and waiting for Andrea and Teo to be set free on bail. The wind came up out of nowhere, flinging a hail of rubbish against the door and rattling the windows in their cheap aluminum frames. A framed list of motel do’s and don’ts fell from the wall and landed face–up on the bed, right about where the back of my head would have been if I’d been asleep. I went to the door first, then thought better of it and brushed aside the curtains to peer out the window just as the rain exploded across the parking lot.
The fall of water was so violent it dimmed the lights across the street, and within seconds it was leaping up from the pavement in a thousand dark brushstrokes, as if gravity had been reversed. I had three beers in me and three to go, and when the next gust bowed the window, I backed away and sat on the bed, thinking of Sierra in her tree. What if a branch tore loose? What if the tree fell – or was struck by lightning? And what of her fear and desolation? There were no painted renegades out there now, no nose–fluters or drummers, nobody making lentil stew or chanting slogans – no one at all, not even the enemy. Who would haul away her bucket of waste, already overflowing with all this excess water, who would talk to her, comfort her, keep her dry and warm?
She was twenty miles away, on property owned and jealously guarded by Coast Lumber – a hypervigilant and enraged Coast Lumber, awakened now to the undeniable fact that my daughter was occupying their turf, high up in one of the grandest and most valuable of their trees, thumbing her nose at them, making a statement, saving the world all on her own – and even if I could get that far in the storm and locate the place to park the car off the public highway and find my way through the big trees to her, what then? She wasn’t just rocking in a hammock – she was a hundred and eighty feet up, and there was no way for me to reach her. On a clear, calm day, sure, maybe – bring on the harness and jumars, and I’ll do my best, though I have to admit I’ve never been one for heights (roller coasters leave me cold and ski lifts scare the living bejesus out of me). And with the wind and the crash of the rain, she probably wouldn’t even be able to hear me shouting from down below. But I would be there. At least I would be there.
I left a note for Andrea, fired up the black BMW she’d bought while I was putting in my time at Vacaville and Sierra was doing the same at another state institution (not to worry: it was UC Santa Cruz), and headed off into the storm with my three remaining cans of Black Cat. It wasn’t a night to be out. Trees were down, and they’d taken power lines with them, and though this was the first heavy rain of the season, the roads were already running black with water and debris. I dodged logs, fenceposts, bicycles, boogie boards, cooking grills and a ghostly dark herd of cattle with tags in their ears. And I fought it, fought through everything, forty–seven years old, nearsighted and achy and already hard of hearing, the radio cranked up full, a sweating can of malt liquor clenched between my thighs, the headlights illuminating a long dark tunnel of nothing.
Three times I went by the road I wanted and three times had to cut U–turns in a soup of mud, rock and streaming water, until finally I found the turnout where we’d parked that afternoon. It had been compacted dirt then, dusty even, but now it was like an automotive tar pit, a glowing headlighted arena in which to race the engine and spin the tires till they stuck fast. I didn’t care. Sierra was up there on top of the ridge before me, up there in the thrashing wind, scared and lonely and for all I knew dangling from some limb a hundred and eighty feet in the air and fighting for her life. I had five beers in me. I was her father. I was going to save her.
What was I wearing? Jeans, a sweater, an old pair of hiking boots, some kind of rain gear – I don’t remember. What I do remember is the sound of the wind in the trees, a screech of rending wood, the long crashing fall of shattered branches, the deep–throated roar of the rain as it combed
the ridge and made the whole natural world bow down before it. I was ankle–deep in mud, fumbling with the switch of an uncooperative flashlight, inhaling rain and coughing it back up again, thinking of John Muir, the holy fool who was the proximate cause of all this. One foot followed the other and I climbed, not even sure if this was the right turnout or the right ridge – path? what path? – and I remembered Muir riding out a storm one night in the Sierras, thrashing to and fro in the highest branches of a tossing pine, just to see what it was like. He wasn’t trying to save anything or anybody – he just wanted to seize the moment, to experience what no one had experienced, to shout his hosannas to the god of the wind and the rain and the mad whirling rush of the spinning earth. He had joy, he had connection, he had vision and mystical reach. What he didn’t have was Black Cat malt liquor.
I spat to clear my throat, hunched my shoulders and hovered over the last can. I was halfway up the ridge at that point, sure that at any moment a dislodged branch would come crashing out of the sky and pin me to the ground like a toad, and when I threw back my head to drink, the rain beat at my clenched eyelids with a steady unceasing pressure. Three long swallows and my last comfort was gone. I crushed the can and stuffed it into the pocket of the rain slicker and went on, feeling my way, the feeble beam of the flashlight all but useless in the hovering black immensity of the night. I must have been out there for hours, reading the bark like Braille, and the sad thing is I never did find Sierra’s tree. Or not that I know of. Three times that night I found myself at the foot of a redwood that might have been hers, the bark red–orange and friable in the glow of the flashlight, a slash of charred cambium that looked vaguely familiar, the base of the thing alone as wide around as the municipal wading pool in Peterskill where Sierra used to frolic with all the other four–year–olds while I sat in a row of benches with a squad of vigilant mothers and tried to read the paper with one eye. This was her tree, I told myself. It had to be.