by T. C. Boyle
The rain has picked up now, the needles letting go of it, the rough recessed bark a conduit for a thousand miniature rills and cascades. The moisture flattens Climber Deke’s hair, clings in droplets to the pelage of his face. He curses again, his voice flat and hard.
‘Fifty of you,’ my daughter spits. ‘I’d rather die up here than have some pathetic gutless bastard like you even touch me.’
‘Then die,’ he says. ‘Die. Because we’re going to cut this tree whether you’re in it or not.’
Our eviction notice comes within the week. We – Andrea, April Wind, Chuy, the animals and I, that is – are to vacate the premises in thirty days. The interested parties and their platoons of lawyers have agreed on a conservator, and the conservator wants us and our menagerie out, ‘in order to prevent further damage to the property and assets of Melisma House, Santa Ynez, California.’ Melisma House. I didn’t even know the place had a name. Certainly Mac never used it – he just called it ‘the Ranch,’ if he called it anything. But there it is: it’s got a name, this place, and we’re no longer welcome in it.
I’m in possession of this information because I’m the one standing in the yard risking heat stroke in hundred–and–ten–degree heat when the messenger arrives (yes, messenger: they hand–deliver the thing as if it’s a subpoena). It’s just past eleven in the morning, the sun has never in this lifetime been anywhere but directly overhead, and Chuy and I, incurable fools and optimistic pessimists that we are, are trying to construct cages for the honey badgers, Petunia and the peccaries out of the flotsam left along the banks of the now officially dry Pulchris River. ‘Yo!’ a voice cries out, and here’s one of the young–young in a suit of clothes the size and color of a life raft (very hip, I’m told), with one of those haircuts that eliminate the need of a face. ‘Yo,’ he repeats. ‘You Tierwater?’
I am. And I shake out my glasses and read the notice in silence while Chuy wrestles with a twenty–foot strip of artificial wood (think plastic, resins and the pulverized remains of shredded tires) that used to grace the façade of the condos across the way. This is the final blow, the last nail in the coffin of my useless life on this useless planet, but I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t expecting it. Still, it strikes fear in my heart – fear of inanition, the uncertain future and the inevitable end. I’m lost. I’m hurt. I’ve got no income and no place to go and my only remaining ambition at this juncture is to be one of the old–old. Andrea, I think, Andrea’ll know what to do, and then I’m following my feet across the bleached yard with its browning devil grass and the twisted, gummy clots of flesh that used to be walking catfish scattered round like dark pellets thrown down out of an angry sky. A mutant lizard (two heads, one foot) slithers under a rock to escape my shadow. My throat is dry. ‘Mr. Ty,’ Chuy calls, ‘where you are going?’ And what do I say, what do I croak like a parched old turkey cock on his way to the chopping block? ‘Be back in a minute.’
Andrea is stretched out supine on the bed in the Grunge Room, naked. And sweating. She looks good, very good, especially in those places where the sun hasn’t had much of a chance to wreak havoc with her epidermis, and for the briefest fraction of a second I’m wondering when we last had sex – or made love, as we used to say – and then I’m waving the eviction notice in her face.
She won’t even look at it. ‘The heat,’ she says. ‘This is worse than Arizona. Be a sweetheart, will you, Ty, and go get me something cold to drink – a Diet Coke, maybe? With lots of ice?’
What am I supposed to say: Sure, honeybun. Want me to give you a sponge bath too? Rub your feet with alcohol? I don’t know, because this is not an ideal relationship and this is not an ideal planet and we don’t live in a sitcom reality. Check that: maybe we do – but this has got to be the sit- part of it, because it’s very far from funny. I wave the notice till it generates the least part of a cooling draft and she murmurs, ‘Oh, that feels good, that’s sweet, don’t stop – ’
‘It’s an eviction notice,’ I say, nothing in my voice at all. ‘We have to be out in thirty days.’
Andrea sits up, and that’s a shame, because her breasts, which had fanned out fetchingly across her rib cage as she lay there sweating atop the sheets, now have no choice but to respond to gravity and show their age. She snatches the notice from my hand, swings round to bend to the page (no glasses for her, reading or otherwise – radial keratotomy corrected her to 20/10 in her left eye, 20/20 in the right, and don’t think she doesn’t lord it over me).
When she turns back round, she lets the notice fall to the floor and gives me a long look, as if she’s deciding something. ‘I know where we can go,’ she says finally, and the plural pronoun makes my heart leap up: sure, and we’re in this together, aren’t we?
‘Where?’
‘Ratchiss’ cabin.’
It takes me a minute. ‘Isn’t he dead?’ (The question is strictly rhetorical – or maybe strategic. Ratchiss has in fact been dead for twenty–odd years, a victim of nature and his own apostasy. It seems he’d gone back to hunting finally, having given up on everything else after the meteorological dislocations at the turn of the century. Why bother, that was his thinking, and he got it in his head that he was going to go down in history as the agent of extinction of a given species, one that was barely hanging on by a thread. He chose the California condor, of which there were then a hundred and ten individuals extant, some fifty of those released into the wild from a captive breeding program at the soon–to–be–defunct L.A. Zoo. The way I heard it was that he’d managed to hit two of them as they wheeled overhead in the remote hills of the Sespe Preserve, and he was reloading for a shot at yet another when one of the perforated birds came hurtling down out of the sky, purely dead and extinguished, and hit him in the back of the head with all the force of a soggy beach umbrella dropped from a cliff. He never regained consciousness.)
She purses her lips, gives me the look that used to burn holes in rednecks, polluters and their shills. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘he’s dead. But his cabin isn’t.’
‘Well, we can’t just … Who lives there now?’
She’s staring off into the distance, no doubt individuating each strand of Kurt Cobain’s hair with her surgically enhanced vision. ‘Nobody. He left the place to E.F.!, to us, and last I checked, there was nobody there.’
‘But we can’t just move in, can we?’
‘You got a better plan?’
‘What about money, food? We can’t live on pine needles and duff. I haven’t got more than fifteen hundred bucks in the bank – if the bank’s even still there.’
And here comes her smile, rich and blooming right up there at the focal point of her naked young–old lady’s body. ‘We’ve been selling things,’ she says, ‘April and me.’
I’m slow. I admit it. Slow and confused and old. ‘What things?’
The smile blooms till it begins to lose its petals and she glances away before bringing her eyes back to mine. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says, and she nods in the direction of Kurt Cobain’s locks without pulling her eyes back – ‘call them relics.’
The temperature must have gone up another five degrees by the time I get back out to Chuy. The heat is like a fist – a pair of fists – boom–boom, hitting me in the chest and pelvis till I can barely lift my feet, and let me tell you, the wind is no help. It’s only blowing at about twenty miles per hour, nothing compared with what’s coming in the next few months, as the season heats up and the winds suck in off the desert, but still the ground is in constant motion, dust devils everywhere, scorched grains of windborne detritus clogging my nostrils and stinging the back of my throat, all the tattered trees throwing their rags first this way, then the other. Normally I’d be wearing a gauze mask this time of year, but after the mucosa fiasco I just can’t stand the idea of having anything clamped over my mouth again (except maybe Andrea’s sweet, supple young–old lips, and then only once a week, at best), so I just clench my face, squint my eyes and stagger on.
C
huy looks as if he’s been slow–cooked on a rotisserie. His skin is prickled, his color bad, his clothes are so shiny with sweat they might have been dredged in olive oil. He’s managed to set four posts in concrete, one at each corner of the pen he can envision in the damaged runnels of his mind, yet he’s having trouble with the salvaged board he means to nail to them. Or not the board, actually, but the hammer and nails. Each time he steadies the hammer, the nail slips through his fingers, and when he finally gets the nail in position, the hammer fails him. It’s the Dursban. I’m no physiologist, but it seems that when he exerts himself too much – when he sweats, in particular – the nerve cells start to misfire all over again. His eyes are spinning in their sockets and his fingers playing an arpeggio on a single three–inch nail when I lay a hand on his shoulder. ‘Forget it, Chuy,’ I tell him.
The nail is suddenly too hot to handle, the hammer even hotter, and he drops them both in the dust at his feet. ‘Forget it?’ he echoes, squinting up at me from his crouch.
I’m not even looking at him, just staring out over the burning landscape, the regular dull thump of reconstruction echoing across the hill from the tumbledown condos, the wind kicking up its miniature cyclones, no animate thing visible, not even a bird. I’m thinking of the dead lions (the carcasses disappeared, and I wonder which of the SWAT–team cowboys has a lion skin draped over his couch), and I’m thinking of Mac and how he wanted to do something for all the ugly animals out there, the ones nobody could love, and I’m thinking of my own eternally deluded self, just out of prison and imagining there was something I could do, something to accomplish, even at my age. ‘We’re all done here,’ I say. ‘It’s over.’
The next day, at lunch, April Wind is heroically squirrelly. Andrea and I are eating ancient beef from Mac’s freezers, along with a medley of steamed vegetables and reconstituted potatoes au gratin, and washing it down with a ’92 Bordeaux that’s as rich and thick as syrup and with a bouquet as heady as what God might have served Adam that first night in the garden. It’s good stuff. Believe me. April Wind, wrinkling her nose at the beef, pushes the vegetables around on her plate the way Sierra used to do when she was a child, and after refilling her glass twice, announces, ‘It’s been fun.’
I give Andrea a look, but Andrea’s look tells me she already knows what’s coming. In detail.
‘I just wanted to say thank you, Ty,’ April Wind says, homing in on the little purse of her mouth with a knuckle of steamed cauliflower, only to have it drop unerringly into her wineglass. The wine reacts by dribbling down the stem of the glass, an ominous red stain spreading across the tablecloth as she finishes her thought: ‘For everything. I mean Mac, and all. And the earth too – for loving the earth. And the animals.’
She’s leaving, that’s what all this means. All right, fine. We’ve got twenty–nine days to make other arrangements, and the conservator – a skinny, evil woman in a black tube of a dress that looks as if she found it in the back of a surf shop – has already got a dozen people methodically working their way through the house, cataloguing Mac’s vast holdings of memorabilia, jewelry, artwork, furniture and Les Paul guitars. I’m relieved, I am. And I don’t say a word.
April Wind fishes the cauliflower out of her wine, plops it in her mouth and begins tapping idly at the rim of her wineglass with the dull blade of her butter knife. The wine stain has settled into a definitive shape, something recognizable, like the face of Jesus revealed or Picasso’s Head of a Woman Weeping, but I can’t say what it is. ‘I’m going to New York,’ she says, giddy with the idea of it, ‘with Ronnie. He’s sending a car for me at one.’ A pause. ‘I’m going to meet my co–writer, you know, like the as–told–to guy who did the book on Gywneth Paltrow? And I’m going to be on the Wes Starkey Show and everything – ’
I don’t know whether to congratulate her or commiserate with her, so I just nod, sip my wine and wonder what it is about this moment that makes me feel old beyond any Baby Boomer’s most distant hope or expectation.
But that’s that. Goodbye to April Wind, and then comes an evening when the evil woman in the tube dress and her cataloguers are tucked safely away in their beds at the Big Ranchito Motel in Buellton, and Andrea and I, by mutual consent, begin to load up the Olfputt while the sun festers on the horizon and Chuy backs the pimento–red Dodge Viper out of the garage with the fifteen hundred dollars cash I gave him tucked deep in the pocket of his blue jeans. (I gave him the Viper too. ‘¿Qué estás diciendo?’ he said, his eyes chasing each other like bugs round his face. ‘You say this car is mine?’ I signed the registration over to him, imitating Mac’s EKG scrawl as best I could. ‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘You’ve earned it.’)
Andrea didn’t have a whole lot with her when she showed up on my doorstep back in November – cosmetics, Indian jewelry, a selection of halter tops and clingy dresses calculated to drive males in the young–old range into a fever of sexual nostalgia – and she doesn’t have much more now. What she does have, though, is a healthy selection of Maclovio Pulchris memorabilia, all of it neatly folded away before the lawyers descended and the conservator opened up shop. This we load into the back of the Olfputt, along with the raggedy odds and ends of mine that had survived the inundation of the guesthouse and the ensuing months of rot. We work without talking, work like a team, instinctively, each looking out for the other, and we think to take along a selection of venerable meats in a big cooler and as much fine wine as we can reasonably cram in under the seats (no more sake for me, local or otherwise). Is what we’re doing strictly legitimate – or even legal? Of course not. But Mac, I like to think, would have no objections. I gave him ten years without complaint, after all, longer by far than any of his wives.
The car is packed. The keys to the house are in my hand. There’s one more thing: the animals. I’d determined, the minute that notice of eviction found itself into my hand, to set them free. It didn’t matter a damn anymore, and nothing was ever going to get better. Two honey badgers, one male, one female. Where would they go, what would they do? In times gone by, they were native to Africa and India, fierce omnivores that fed on everything from snakes to insects to rats, tubers, fruit and (yes) honey, but the whole world is Africa now, and India, Bloomington, Calcutta and the Bronx, all wrapped in one. The mega–fauna are gone, the habitat is shrunk to zero, practically no animals left anywhere but for the R–species and the exotics. So why not? Let them go and hope for the best.
I’m standing well back from the cage, with the Nitro cradled under one arm, when I pull the trip wire Chuy rigged up and let them go. They can be irredeemably nasty, going directly for their adversary’s sexual organs in any dispute or confrontation, and I suppose I feel a slight twinge about unleashing them on the condos and the put–upon population of Sakapathians and all the rest eking out a living there, but ultimately, as Andrea and I watch their slinking white–crowned forms make their way across the open ground and into the dead brush along the dried–up watercourse, I feel nothing but relief. Maybe they’ll find the living easy, feasting on rats and opossums – maybe they’ll breed and a whole new subspecies will spring up, Mellivora capensis pulchrisia.
The peccaries are easy. They’d once been native to the Southwest in any case, and all I have to do is open three doors – the one in the bowling alley, two in the lower hall – and watch them snort off into the fading light until they’re no more strange or unexpected than the dust and rocks and mesquite itself. And the Egyptian vultures – they’re purely a pleasure. These are the birds, by the way, that used to be featured in the old nature films, cream white with ratty black trailing feathers and hooked yellow beaks, the ones that would drop rocks on ostrich eggs in order to get through the tough outer tegument – when there were ostriches, that is. I hood them individually and make use of a leather gauntlet one of Mac’s Saudi Arabian friends left behind years ago. Then we’re out on the lawn – or where the lawn will be when the irrepressible landscape architect gets himself back in business.
&nbs
p; The heat has died down into the eighties. Everything smells of life. The birds grip my arm and sit still as statues, and then, one by one, off come the hoods, and they lift into the air with a furious beating of their shabby wings. For a long while, we watch them climb into the sky, the night settling in behind them while a deep stippled cracked egg of a sunset glows luminously over the hills and the hint of a breeze finds its way in off the sea.
That leaves Petunia.
‘I can’t do it,’ I say. ‘I just can’t.’
Andrea considers this as we stand there in the drive, the lights of the house glowing softly behind us. There is no sound, nothing, not the roar of an engine or the wail of a distant siren, and all at once a solitary cricket, incurable optimist, starts up with a creaking, teetering song all his own. She touches me then, her fingers gently stroking the sagging, tired flesh of my forearm and the raised reminder there of my thirty–two stitches and all the wounds I never knew I’d sustained.
She understands. Andrea, my wife of a thousand years ago, and my wife now. Her voice is soft. She says, ‘Why don’t we take her with us?’
Los Angeles, September 1993/Scotia, December 1997
Tierwater came home shaken from his Oregon adventure, and for a good long while thereafter – nearly two years – he lived the life of a model citizen, exemplary father and devoted husband. Or at least he tried to. Tried hard. He didn’t work, not at anything so ordinary or tedious as a job – the only thing he was qualified for was running antiquated shopping centers into the ground, and there wasn’t much call for that in southern California, where all the maxi- and mini–malls seemed to have been built in the last ten minutes – and his father’s money, the money Andrea and Teo had squeezed out of the stone that had been hanging round his neck all these years, was plenty enough to last for a good long time to come. So what he did was throw himself headlong into suburban life, though suburban life was the enemy of everything he hoped to achieve as an environmentalist, but never mind that: it was safe. And it provided a cocoon for Sierra. She was what mattered now, and what she needed was a regular father, a suntanned grinning uncomplicated burger–flipping dad greeting her at the door and puzzling over her geometry problems after dinner, not some incarcerated hero.