by T. C. Boyle
Leggy, stinking, her fur matted till it has the texture of wire overlaid with a thin coating of concrete, she rockets from the car, airborne for the instant it takes to snap the leash like a whip and very nearly tear my abused shoulder out of the socket. But I hold on, heat, age and the exigencies of a full bladder and enlarged prostate notwithstanding. This is the only Patagonian fox left in North America, and I’m not about to let go of her. She doesn’t fully appreciate that yet, new to leash protocol as she is, and she goes directly for my legs, all the while snarling like a poorly sampled record and trying to bite through the muzzle while her four feet, sixteen toenails and four dewclaws scrabble for purchase on the blistered macadam.
I’m down on the pavement, born of sweat, and Petunia’s on top of me, trying to dig a hole in my chest with her forepaws, when Andrea comes to the rescue. ‘Down, girl,’ she’s saying, jerking at the leash I still refuse to let go of, and all I can think is to apportion blame where blame is due. This was her idea from the start. She didn’t want to bring a cage along – ’Don’t be crazy, Ty, there’s no room for it’ – and she reasoned that Petunia was doglike enough to pass. ‘They are the same species, aren’t they?’ ‘Genus,’ I told her – ‘or family, actually. But they still make an awful mess on the rug.’
At any rate, the wounds aren’t serious. The back of my shirt is a collage of litter and pills of grit, and two buttons are missing in the front, but Petunia hasn’t managed to do much more than break the skin in three or four places before the two of us are able to overpower her. Despite the wind and the heat, we manage to hobble–walk her around the lot until she squats and does a poor, meager business under the front tire of a school bus draped with a banner reading Calpurnia Springs, State Champions, B–League. (Champions of what, I’m wondering – desert survival?) After a brief debate about what to do with her next – we can’t leave her in the Olfputt in this heat – I decide to chain her to the bumper and hope for the best. Then we’re inside, where it’s cool, and the hits of the sixties – reconfigured for strings – are leaking through hidden speakers while people of every size, color and shape flock past in a mad flap and shriek.
The place is more arena than restaurant, massed heads, jabbering voices, the buzz and tweet of video games. The theme is Mexican – a couple of shabby parrots and half a dozen drooping banana trees in enormous pots – but the smell is of the deep–fryer, deep–fried everything. I’m bleeding through the front of my shirt. My pants are bound to my crotch with sweat. ‘I’ll bet they don’t have a bar,’ I say.
Andrea doesn’t respond. She’s a ramrod, eyes like pincers, sprung fully formed from the tile in front of the please wait to be seated sign. Run five minutes off the clock. Run ten. We’re still standing there, though three hostesses in their twenties have managed to seat whole busloads ahead of us. What it is, is age discrimination. We young–old, we of the Baby Boom who are as young and vital in our seventies as our parents were in their fifties, we who had all the power and invented the hits of the sixties, have suddenly become invisible, irrelevant, window dressing in an overpopulated, resource–stressed world. What are all these young people telling us? Die, that’s what. And quickly.
They don’t know Andrea. In the next moment she’s got a startled–looking hostess with caterpillar hair in the grip of one big hand and the manager in the other and we’re being led to our table right in the middle of that roiling den of gluttony and noise, sorry for the wait, no problem at all, enjoy your meal. I want a beer. A Mexican beer. But they don’t have any beer. ‘Sorry,’ the twelve–year–old waiter says, looking at me as if my brain’s been ossified, ‘only sake.’
What else?
Andrea orders the catfish enchilada and a sake margarita, and after vacillating between the catfish fajitas and the Bagre al carbón before finally settling on the former, I lift my glass of sake on the rocks and click it against the frosted rim of her margarita. ‘To us,’ I offer, ‘and our new life in the mountains.’
‘Yes,’ she says, a quiet smile pressed to her lips, and I’m thinking about that, about our life together as it stretches out before me, a pale wind–torn sun in the windows, voices roaring around us, and I can’t help wondering just what it’s going to be like. We could live another twenty–five or fifty years even. The thought depresses me. What’s going to be left by then?
‘You’re not eating,’ she says. A dozen kids – children, babies – run bawling down the aisle, ducking under the upraised arms of as many waiters, and disappear into the sea of faces. They are infinite, I am thinking, all these hungry, grasping people chasing after the new and improved, the super and imperishable, and I stand alone against them – but that’s the kind of thinking that led me astray all those years ago. Better not to think. Better not to act. Just wave the futilitarian banner and bury your nose in a glass of sake. ‘Mine’s good,’ Andrea says, proffering a forkful of pus–yellow catfish basted in salsa. ‘Want a bite?’
I just shake my head. I want to cry. Catfish.
Her voice is soft, very low, so low I can barely hear her in the din: ‘You know’ – and she’s digging through her purse now, a purse the size of a steamer trunk suspended from two black leather straps – I have something for you. I thought you’d want it.’
What do I show her in response? Two dog’s eyes, full and wet and pathetic. There is nothing I want, except the world the way it was, my daughter restored to me, my parents, all the doomed and extinguished wildlife of America – the white–faced ibis, the Indiana bat, the margay, the Perdido Key beach mouse, the California grizzly and the Chittenango ovate amber snail – put back in their places. I don’t want to live in this time. I want to live in the past. The distant past. ‘What?’ I ask, and my voice is dead.
The rustle of paper. The strings rumble and then reach high to wash all the life out of a down–tempo version of ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ I watch her hand come across the table with it, a sheaf of paper – real paper – and the bands of type that are like hieroglyphs encoded on it. And now I’m holding it out at arm’s length, squinting till my eyes water and patting down my pockets for my reading glasses.
‘I borrowed it,’ she says. ‘Stole it, actually.’
I’m about to say, ‘What? What is it?,’ when the glasses find their way to the bridge of my nose and I can see for myself.
It’s a manuscript. A book. And the tide, suddenly revealed, stares out at me from beneath the cellophane wrapper of the cover:
MARTYR TO THE TREES:
THE SIERRA TIERWATER STORY
BY APRIL F. WIND
I already know how it ends.
But here it is, a concrete thing, undeniable, a weight in my hands. April F. Wind? And what does the ‘F.’ stand for? I wonder. Flowing? Full of? Forever? I riffle the pages, the crisp sound of paper, the printout, the stuff of knowledge as it used to be before you could plug it in. No need to talk about the inaccuracies here, or the sappy woo–woo–drenched revisionism or New Age psychoanalysis, but only the end, just that.
Sierra set the record. Set it anew each day, like Kafka’s hunger artist, but, unlike the deluded artist, she had an audience. A real and evergrowing audience, an audience that made pilgrimages to the shrine of her tree, sent her as many as a thousand letters a week, erected statues to her, composed poems and song lyrics, locked arms and marched in her name till Axxam showed black through to the core. In all, she spent just over three years aloft, above the fray, the birds her companions, as secure in her environment as a snail in its shell or a goby in the smooth, sculpted jacket of its hole.
In the beginning – in the weeks and months after Climber Deke’s frustrated effort to dislodge her – the timber company initiated a campaign of harassment designed either to bring her down or to drive her mad, or both. They logged the trees on all sides of her, the screech of the saws annihilating the dawn and continuing unabated till dark, and all around her loggers cupping their hands over their mouths and shouting abuse. Hey, you little cunt –
want to put your lips around this? There’s five of us here and we’ll be up tonight, you wait for us, huh? And keep the slit clean, ‘cause I got sloppy seconds. At night they set up a wall of speakers at the base of the tree and blared polkas, show tunes and Senate testimony into the vault of the sky till the woods echoed like some chamber of doom. They brought in helicopters, the big workhorses they used for wrestling hundred–foot logs off of remote hilltops, and the helicopters hovered there beside her tree, beating up a hurricane with the wash of their props. It was funny. It was a joke. She could see the pilots grinning at her, giving her the thumbs–up sign, A–OK, and let’s see if we can blow you out of there. Do you copy? Roger and out.
They tried starvation too. On the morning after Climber Deke made off with the lower platform and all her cooking gear and foodstuffs, the hired goons established a perimeter around the grove and refused to let her support team in. For three nights running, in the company of a loping, rangy kid named Starlight who haltingly confessed that he was in love with my daughter and wanted to marry her as soon as she came down from her tree, I lugged supplies in to her, and for many more nights than that I wandered the dark woods with a baseball bat, just praying that one of those foul–mouthed sons of bitches would try to make good on his threats. Sierra was unfazed. They couldn’t intimidate her. ‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ she whispered one night as she descended as low as she dared to collect the provisions we’d brought her (Starlight straining against gravity from the top rung of an aluminum ladder while I braced him from below). ‘They’re all talk.’ Her face glowed palely against the black vacancy that was her tree. ‘They’re scared, that’s all.’
Andrea and Teo got the press involved – ‘Coast Lumber Starving Tree–Sitter,’ that sort of thing – and the timber company backed off. The support team returned, more determined than ever, the lower platform was rebuilt and Coast Lumber turned its back on the whole business. If my daughter wanted to trespass in one of their trees, they weren’t going to deign to respond. Because any response – short of suspending all logging and restoring the ecosystem – would be used against them, and they knew it. They would wait her out, that was their thinking. The longer she stayed up there, the less anybody would care, and before long she’d get tired of the whole thing, hold a press conference and leave them to strip every last dollar out of the forest and nobody to say different.
By this point, Sierra had begun to take on the trappings of the mad saint, the anchorite in her cell, the martyr who suffers not so much for a cause but for the sake of the suffering itself. She became airier, more distant. She’d been studying the teachings of Lao Tzu and the Buddha, she told me. She was one with Artemis, one with the squirrels and chickadees that were her companions. There was no need to come down to earth, not then, not ever. She didn’t care – or didn’t notice – that she was the idol of thousands, didn’t care that she was incrementally extending the record for consecutive days aloft till no one could hope to exceed it, and she barely mentioned Coast Lumber anymore. Toward the end, I think, she’d forgotten what she was doing up there in that tree to begin with.
The end, that’s right – this is about the end of all that.
Can I tell you this? I was there – her father was there – when it happened. I’d moved out of the house in Tarzana, leaving the mosquito fish and mallards – and my wife – to fend for themselves. Why? I was embarrassed. Ashamed of myself. All along I’d been wrong about Andrea and Teo – there was nothing between them, and after we left Sierra in her tree that first weekend they both sat across the table from me at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Willits with the drawn–down faces of the martyred saints and made me understand that. (Later, long after it was over between Andrea and me, they’d have their time together, and I couldn’t help thinking I was the one who’d been campaigning for it all along.) The parole board gave me permission to move to Eureka, where I had a job fined up – a nothing job, clerk in a hardware store, but it was enough to get me out of L.A. so I could be close to my daughter. I packed the Jeep while Andrea was at work. I left a note. I don’t know – we never discussed it – but I think she must have been relieved.
My apartment wasn’t much bigger than the cell I’d shared with Sandman. A sitting room with a bed and a TV, a kitchen the size of the galley on a thirty–foot sailboat, toilet and shower, a patch of dirt out back with a rusting iron chair bolted to a slab of concrete in the middle of it. I could have had more – any time I wanted I could have drawn on the money we’d invested in Earth Forever! and nobody at GE the wiser – but I didn’t want more. I wanted less, much less. I wanted to live like Thoreau.
My chief recreation was Sierra. Four, five, even six days a week, I’d hike out to her tree and chat with her if she wasn’t busy with interviews or her journal. Sometimes she’d come down in her harness and float there above me, the soles of her feet as black as if they’d been tarred; other times we’d chat on the cell phone, sometimes for hours, just drifting through subjects and memories in a long, unhurried dream of an afternoon or evening, her voice so intimate right there in my ear, so close, it was as if she’d come down to earth again.
We had a celebration to commemorate her third anniversary aloft – her support team, a dozen journalists, a crowd of the E.F.! rank and file. Andrea and Teo drove up, and that was all right, a kiss on the cheek, a hug, ‘You okay, Ty? Really? You know where I am if you need me,’ Andrea so beautiful and severe and Tierwater fumbling and foolish, locked into something that was going to have to play itself out to the end. I got her a cake that was meant, I think, for somebody’s wedding – four tiers, layered frosting, the lonely plastic figurine of a groomless bride set on top. I was trying to tell my daughter something with that forlorn bride: it was time to come down. Time to get on with life. Go to graduate school, get married, have children, take a shower, for Christ’s sake. If she got the meaning of the lone figurine, she didn’t let on. She kept it, though – the figurine – kept it as if it were one of the dressed–up dolls she’d invented lives for when she was a motherless girl alone in the fortress of her room.
A week later. Forty–eight degrees, a light rain falling. Those trees, that grove, were more familiar to me than the sitting room in my apartment or the house I grew up in. There was a smell of woodsmoke on the air, the muted sounds of the forest sinking into evening, a shrouded ray of sunlight cutting a luminous band into her tree just above the lower platform – which was unoccupied, I saw, when I came up the hill and into the grove, already punching her number into the phone. It was four–fifteen. I’d just got out of work. I was calling my arboreal daughter.
Her voice came over the line, hushed and breathy, the most serene voice in the world, just as I reached the base of the tree. ‘Hi, Dad,’ she whispered, that little catch of familiarity and closeness in her voice, ready to talk and open up, as glad to hear my voice as I was glad to hear hers, ‘what’s up?’ I was about to tell her something, an amusing little story about work and one of the loggers – timber persons – who’d come in looking for a toggle switch but kept calling it a tuggle, as in ‘You got any tuggles back there?,’ when her voice erupted in my ear.
She cried out in surprise – ‘Oh!’ she cried, or maybe it was ‘Oh, shit!’ – because after all those years and all the sure, prehensile grip of her bare, hardened toes, she’d lost her balance. The phone came down first, a black hurtling missile that was like a fragment dislodged from the lowering black sky, and it made its own distinctive sound, a thump, yes, but a kind of mechanical squawk too, as if it were alive, as if it were some small, tree–dwelling thing that had made the slightest miscalculation in springing from one branch to another. And that was all right, everything was all right – she’d only lost her phone, I’d get her a new one, and hadn’t I seen an ad in the paper just the other day and thought of her?
But then the larger form came down – much larger, a dark, streaking ball so huge and imminent the sky could never have contained it. There was a sound – sudden,
roaring, wet – and then the forest was silent.
Petunia is not a dog. She’s a Patagonian fox. Above all, I’ve got to remember that. It seems important. It’s the kind of distinction that will be vitally important in the life to come, whether it’s on top of the mountain or in a cloning lab somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. Petunia is not a dog. I seem to be repeating this to myself as we wind our way up the fractured mountain road, the hot glare of the day ahead of me, Andrea nodding asleep at my side. What I’m noticing, at the lower elevations, is how colorless the forest is. Here, where the deciduous trees should be in full leaf, I see nothing but wilt and decay, the skeletal brown stalks of the dead trees outnumbering the green a hundred to one. The chaparral on the south–facing slopes seems true, the palest of grays and milky greens, twenty shades of dun, but each time we round a bend and the high mountains heave into view, the colors don’t seem right – but maybe that’s only a trick of memory. Just to be here, just to be moving through the apparent world after all these years, is enough to make everything all right.
Of course, there are the inevitable condos. And traffic. This was once a snaking two–lane country road cut through national forest lands, sparsely populated, little–traveled. Now I’m crawling along at fifteen miles an hour in a chain of cars and trucks welded into the flanks of the mountain as far as I can see, and I’m not breathing cooling drafts of alpine air either – wind–whipped exhaust, that’s about it. Where thirty–five years ago there were granite bluffs and domes, now there is stucco and glass and artificial wood, condos banked up atop one another like the Anasazi cliff–dwellings, eyes of glass, teeth of steps and railings, the pumping hearts of air–conditioning units, thousands of them, and no human face in sight. Am I complaining? No. I haven’t got the right.