A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  So this is how it is, the sun up there in the sky, me down here thinking lions, the wind out of the southeast ripe with a smell if not of redemption then at least of renewal – and isn’t it supposed to be Easter soon? – when I hear Andrea calling my name. And this is remarkable in itself, because we’re shy of noon by nearly four hours and she hasn’t been up this early since she reinserted herself into my crabbed life back in November. She’s wearing a white flowing dress, low–cut, and half a dozen strings of multicolored beads that bring to mind hippie times, and she’s lifting the hem of the dress to keep it out of the muck and moving in her gum boots with the kind of lightness and grace you wouldn’t expect from an old lady. I watch her pick her way to me, and I know I must have an awestruck look on my face (for a minute there I’m not even sure who I am or what lifetime this is), and then I watch her lips moving and notice her lipstick and hear her say, ‘So there you are.’

  I lift one of my boots from the grip of the muck and point to it: ‘I’m pacing off the new lion compound.’

  She’s got a hand to her forehead, screening her eyes from the sun. ‘Did you remember your sunblock?’ And before I can answer: ‘You should be wearing a hat too. How many carcinomas have you had removed now – what was it, twenty–two, twenty–five?’

  Andrea isn’t wearing a gauze mask, by the way, and neither am I. Nor is Mac or Chuy or April Wind or anybody else in the house. We gave up on all that nonsense back in January, when the screen informed us that the mucosa scare was just that – a scare. It seems there was a localized outbreak of a new and especially virulent strain of the common cold on the East Coast (people died from it, mostly the old–old, but still, it was only a cold), and a certain degree of hysteria was inevitable. Mac insisted on the charade for a week or two after the news became definitive, but we were all relieved when finally, one afternoon, he appeared at lunch with the bridge of his nose and thin, pale, salmon–colored lips revealed for all to see. I remember the sense of liberation I felt when I tore off my own reeking mask and buried my dental enhancements in a thick, chewy chili–cheese burrito without having to worry about getting a mouthful of gauze with every other bite.

  ‘Is that what you came out here to tell me?’ I say, and I’m irritated, just a little, because I know she’s right.

  ‘No,’ and her voice is soft as she moves into me with a slosh of her boots and wraps her big arms around me, ‘I just wanted to tell you we’ve got eggs for breakfast this morning.’

  ‘Eggs?’ We haven’t seen anything even vaguely resembling an egg since the storms started in, and forget the cholesterol, I can already picture a crisp golden three–egg omelet laid out on the plate – or, no, I’m going to have mine poached and runny, so I can really taste them. ‘Where’d you get them?’

  She pulls back to give me a sly smile, then lifts her chin toward the wreckage of the condos across the way. The two buildings that collapsed back in November have gradually subsided into the muck, a spill of ruined sofas, exercise equipment and video attachments littering the far shore under the glare of the sun. ‘The good old barter system,’ she says. ‘There’s a kid over there – a kid, listen to me; I mean, he’s got to be forty–five or so – who says he’s a big Pulchris freak, went to all the shows, lifted all the performance tracks off the Net, that sort of thing – ’

  I smile. ‘And he’s got chickens.’

  ‘He wouldn’t take money, but April gave him a couple of old tour T–shirts – with Mac’s permission, of course.’

  ‘Nothing like living off the past,’ I say, and then I loop my arm through Andrea’s and we slog off across the yard to the house, awash in sunshine.

  I remember there wasn’t much sun the winter Sierra climbed into her tree. El Niño really took it out on us that year, one storm chasing another down the coast, the rivers flooding and the roads washed out, mudslides, rogue waves, windshield–wiper fatigue, drip, drip, drip, everybody as depressed as Swedes. Nobody liked it – except maybe the surfers. And Coast Lumber. Coast Lumber loved it. Coast Lumber couldn’t have been more pleased if they’d ordered up the weather themselves. A tree–hugger by the name of Sierra Tierwater, twenty–one years old and a complete unknown – nobody’s daughter, certainly – was trespassing in one of their grand old cathedral redwoods and the press was waiting for them to send a couple of their goons up to haul her down, as brutally as possible. But they weren’t about to do that. Why bother? Why give her anything? All they had to do was sit back in their paneled offices and let the weather take care of her. And then, quietly, while the eco–freaks and fossil–lovers were hunkered in their apartments watching the rain drool across the windows, they could take that tree down, and all the rest like it, and put an end to the protests once and for all.

  The first night, the night I drove up there to rescue her from the storm, I was so disoriented I couldn’t have found her if she were standing behind the cash register of a 7-Eleven lit up under the trees. All I managed to do was add to my quotient of suffering, inhabiting yet another dark night of the soul, face to face with my own dread and loss of faith. Drunk, I stumbled around through the graveyard of the trees while the wind screamed and the branches fell. I don’t know how long I was out there, but it was a relief when I finally found my way back to the car, though the car was stuck to the frame in mud and there was no hope there either. My head was throbbing, my throat so dry it was as if somebody had been working on it all night with a belt sander, and my clothes were wet through to the skin. I felt dizzy. Nauseous. I was racked with chills. I stripped off my clothes, socks as wet as fishes, underwear like something that had been used to swab out toilets, and then, thinking Sierra, Sierra, I wrapped myself up in Andrea’s mummy bag, and in the next moment I was asleep.

  The morning wasn’t much different from the night that had preceded it. Rain fell without reason or rancor, an invisible creek blustered somewhere nearby, the car settled into the mud. There may have been a quantitative difference in the light, a gradual seep of visibility working its way into the gloom, but it wasn’t much. I pulled on cold wet socks, wet jeans, wet boots and a wet T–shirt, sweater and windbreaker, and went off to find my daughter. This time I walked straight to her tree.

  There were eight redwoods in her grove, two conjoined at the base and blackened by the ancient fire that had scarred the trunk of her tree, and the forest of cedar, fir, ponderosa and other pines was a maze of trunks radiating out across the hillsides from there. Except to the west, where the skin of the earth showed through and there was nothing but debris and stumps as far as you could see. This grove was scheduled next, and my daughter – if she was alive still and not a bag of lacerated skin and fragmented bone flung out of the treetops like a water balloon – was determined to stop the desecration. I was proud of her for that, but wary too. And afraid. I leaned into the wet, dark trunk and peered up into the sky – her platform, the shadowy slab of plywood lashed across two massive branches with nylon cord, was still there. I pushed back from the tree to get a better angle, blinking my eyes against the fall of the rain, and saw the bright aniline–orange flash of her tent trembling in the wind like a wave riding an angry sea. She was there. She was alive. ‘Sierra!’ I shouted, cupping my hands.

  A gust shook the treetops, and Sierra’s tree quaked till I could feel the recoil of it in my feet. I looked up and there she was, her face a distant, drawn–down splash of white in a welter of rocketing green needles. And then her voice, buffeted by the winds and assaulted by the rain, came drifting down like a leaf: ‘Dad!’ she called. ‘Dad!’

  My heart was breaking, but she was smiling, actually smiling, if I was seeing right – and even in those days, my eyes were nothing to brag about. ‘Sierra!’ I called, feeling as if I’d been turned inside out. I didn’t want her up there. I wanted to be up there with her. I wanted to bomb Coast Lumber, neutralize their heavy machinery, throttle their stockholders. ‘Honey,’ I shouted, and my voice broke, ‘do you want to come down?’

  It see
med as if it took an hour for her answer to drift all the way back to me, the tree quaking, the rain thrashing, my heart like a steel disc in the back of my throat, but her answer was no. ‘No!’ she cried, cupping her thin white hands round her mouth to make it emphatic. ‘No!’ And the message fell with the rain.

  I was her father. I knew what she was like, heard the determination in her voice, the fanaticism: she wasn’t coming down, not today, and there was no use arguing. ‘Tomorrow maybe?’ I shouted, my neck already strained from flinging my head back to gape up at her. ‘Till the storm stops, anyway? You can always go back up – when the weather clears!’

  Again the answer drifted down, this time in a long–drawn–out bleat of protest: ‘Nooooo!’

  All right. But did she need anything? ‘Do you need anything?’ I shouted.

  Rain trailed down my back. I was shivering spasmodically. My throat was sore. My head ached. In time, she would need all sorts of things: a chemical toilet, books, magazines, art supplies, a cell phone, fuel for her camp stove, a special harness so she could descend to thirty feet like a big pale spider and conduct the endless press interviews her crusade would generate. But now, on the first morning of her life as an arboreal creature, an evolutionary oddity, a female Homo sapiens of breeding age whose feet never touched the ground and whose biological imperative would have to wait, she needed nothing. Except a favor. ‘Can you do me a favor?’ she called out of the drifting white flag of her face.

  ‘Yeah,’ I shouted, digging at the back of my neck and pushing away from the tree for a less inflammatory angle. ‘Sure. Anything!’

  ‘Take these,’ she called, and suddenly two objects, oblong, pale gray and streaking white, came sailing down out of the tree. It took me a minute to identify them, even after they landed separately in the duff not more than two feet from me. Thump, came the first of them, and then the second, slapping down beside me with the sound of finality. They were her shoes. Her shoes. Her running shoes, walking shoes, walking, breathing and living shoes, the very things that connected her to the earth. But she flung them down to me on that first morning, because she wouldn’t be needing them, not anymore.

  Eggs. Such a simple food, the sort of thing we used to take for granted, the mainstay of every greasy spoon in every town in America, scrambled, soft–boiled, over easy with home fries on the side. I grew up on eggs, in the time before we realized what they did to the arteries, and my daughter grew up on them too, simply because she had to get her protein somewhere. But as I say, eggs have been scarce at Chez Pulchris during the siege. The cook – her name is Fatima, by the way, and her husband is Zulfikar – served up omelets and fresh–baked bread for a week or so after we all moved in, but then the eggs were gone and it’s been meat, rice and canned vegetables since. Oh, the tall Al managed to make it across the Pulchris River once or twice in the beginning, but the supermarkets had been stripped down to the bare shelves – nothing left but cornstarch and pickled beets – and after that even the Olfputt couldn’t breach the floods and we all just stayed put and made do with what we had. So I’m looking forward to a plate of eggs, even if I do have to sop them up with chapatis instead of toast, and I kick off my boots on the doorstep and go in to wash up, change my shirt and slip into the black–and–gold satin tour jacket Mac gave me when I ran out of clothes a month back. Sun floods the windows, and I’m actually whistling – Ride your pony, Ride your pony – as I gaze into the mirror and slap on some of Mac’s three–hundred–dollar–an–ounce aftershave.

  We’re gathering on the third floor, in the Gangsta Rap Room, as it turns out, for a formal brunch – Mac has an announcement to make. As Andrea and I step into the elevator, her arm tucked neatly into the crook of my elbow, I can already guess what he’s going to say: he’s leaving. Going north for the summer – Fairbanks, Winnipeg, maybe one of the big Hokkaido resorts. He’ll climb into a helicopter, and he’ll take the Als with him (and none too soon for the shorter one, who must have put on a good thirty pounds of flab since the rains started). That’s all right. I don’t mind. As long as I have his commitment to rebuild, he can be on the far side of the moon for all it matters to me, not that I don’t enjoy his company, don’t get me wrong, but Mac is going to be Mac, and that means globe–trotting. That means excess. That means Mac in Edinburgh or Reykjavík, bent over the gaming tables or squiring some starlet round the tony eateries where they serve tuna garni or twenty–year–old monkfish at three thousand dollars a plate. I’m used to it.

  At any rate, I’m feeling good as we glide through the door and into the dining room, the sun shining, eggs on the menu, the future looking bright. The table has been set for six (Chuy never joins us for meals, though Mac, I’m sure, would have no objection, being the democrat and humanitarian he is) and we’re the first to arrive, followed shortly by April Wind. ‘Hellooo, Ty!’ she chirps, as if she hasn’t seen me in months, and she bends to peck a kiss to Andrea’s cheek before seating herself at the far end of the table, next to Mac’s place. She’s had an exciting winter, the dwarf woo–woo woman in the size 2 dress, rattling away at her Sierra book (tentatively titled For Love of the Trees) and romancing Mac. That’s right. They found common ground in the Zodiac, Pantheism, holistic medicine, yin yang and the androgynous universe, and crystals, and since she was the only woman under sixty–seven washed up on Pulchris Isle, I guess it was inevitable that she caught Mac’s eye. Not that he isn’t discriminating, just practical.

  Orange juice is on the table (fresh–squeezed, in a stone pitcher), a plate of chapatis and dishes of lime pickle and mango chutney, two bottles of champagne in iced buckets, kiwi fruit, bananas and kumquats from our own inundated orchards. I pour myself a glass of orange juice, twist off the wire and pop the cork on a bottle of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge, 1999, from the Pulchris cellars. ‘So how’s the book going?’ I say, giving April Wind a look.

  ‘Let me have a little of that, Ty.’ This is Andrea speaking. She wants champagne, and who can blame her after all that rotgut sake, but she also wants to deflect my question. She leans forward, tipping her wineglass under the lip of the bottle while I pour. It’s hard to say what she’s thinking, but my guess is that, if she had to choose between me and April, I’d be out the door. And that hurts. It does.

  ‘April?’ I ask, lifting my eyebrows and proffering the bottle.

  ‘No, thanks.’ She has the look of a decrepit child, the limp black hair, the vaguely Asian eyes, the lipstickless mouth. She seems to be hugging her shoulders, which makes them appear even narrower, her miniature hands clasped before her, the totem dangling from her throat in its pathetic little sack. What could Mac possibly see in her?

  I smack my lips over the champagne, dilute it with a splash of orange juice. ‘So the book?’ I repeat, and I hear my father’s voice, the half–mocking tone he’d use when he came into the kitchen at night to refill his drink and saw me sitting there at the table with my homework spread out before me like so much refuse. ‘So nu?’ he’d say.

  April Wind ducks her head. She shrugs. Holds out her glass for orange juice. ‘As well as can be expected.’

  ‘No big publishers beating down the door?’

  ‘Come on, Ty,’ Andrea says, exchanging a look with April Wind. The look says, Forgive him, he’s being a jerk, and I am being a jerk, of course I am – that’s my blood on those pages, and my daughter’s.

  ‘What’s the celebration?’ April Wind wants to know in her tiny piping kindergartner’s voice, and I can’t resist saying, ‘Mac’s going away,’ just to watch her face fall.

  ‘You don’t know that, Ty – ’ There’s an edge to Andrea’s voice, and whose side do you think she’s on here?

  ’Want to bet? You might think you know him, after, what – four, five months? – but I’ve been with him ten years, and I know he’s getting squirrelly, has to be. If it wasn’t for the weather and the mucosa business, he’d have been out of here months ago, believe me.’

  And then the door swings open, right on cue, an
d there he is, Mac, in hat, shades and eel whips, flanked by the two Als. ‘What’s happening, people?’ he sings, spreading his arms wide. ‘Don’t you just love this groovy sunshine? Isn’t this just a day? Do we deserve it or what?’

  The Als have seen better days. Their eyes are haunted by visions of blackjack tables, cocktail waitresses, the track, and their skin is the color of the growth medium in a petri dish. The taller one was a professional wrestler back in the time when people cared about such things, and the shorter one, as I say, has put on so much weight he doesn’t even look human. They take their places heavily, and without joy.

  Mac is grinning. Mac is overflowing with all the emotions his bodyguards lack, and for a minute there I think he’s going to snatch the bust of Chuck D off its pedestal and waltz round the room with it, but he slips into his chair at the head of the table and unfurls his napkin with a practiced snap of the wrist. ‘Eggs today, that’s what I hear,’ he crows, treating us to his famous smile, ‘just like Mama used to whip up when there was eight of us growing up in Detroit, yes, absolutely, eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner – and now they’re a treat, how do you like that?’