A Friend of the Earth (3 page)

‘And me?' She takes a step back, center stage, lifting her arms in display. For a minute I think she's going to do a pirouette. But I don't want to sound too cynical here, because time goes on and she's looking good, very good, eight or nine on a scale of ten, all things considered. Her mouth settles into a basket of grooves and lines when the smile fades, and her eyes are paler and duller than I remembered – and ever so slightly exophthalmic – but who's to quibble? She was a beauty then and she's a beauty still.

‘You look terrific,' I tell her, ‘and I'm not just saying that – it's the truth. You look – I don't know – edible. Are you edible?'

The smile returns, but just for a second, flashing across her face as if
blown by the winds that are even now rattling the windows – and rattling them audibly, despite the racket of the place and my suspect hearing (destroyed sixty years ago by Jimi Hendrix and The Who). She's wearing a print dress, low–cut of course, frilly sleeves, a quarter–inch of makeup, and her hair – dyed midnight black – bunches at her shoulders. She fixes on my eyes with that half–spacey, half–calculating wide–eyed look I know so well – or used to know. ‘Is there someplace we can talk?'

Most people don't relate to hyenas. You say ‘hyena' to them and they give you a long stare, as if you're talking about a mythical beast – which it practically is nowadays. The more enlightened might remember the old nature shows where the hyenas gang–pile a corpse or disembowel the newborn wildebeest and devour it in ragged bloody lumps before the awareness has left its eyes, but that's all they remember, the ugliness and the death. I knew an African game–hunter once (Philip Ratchiss, and more on him later) who used to cull elephants for the Zambian government, back when there was a Zambian government, and he'd had some grisly encounters with all three species of hyena. When he retired to California, he brought his Senga gunbearer with him, a man named Mag or Mug – I could never get it straight – who'd had his face removed by a hyena one night as he lay stretched out drunk in front of the campfire. Ratchiss dressed him up in Dockers and polo shirts and got his teeth fixed for him, but Mag – or Mug – didn't want anything to do with plastic surgery. He had an eye left, and a pair of ears. The rest of his face was like a big pitted prune.

The reason I mention it is because people can't understand why Mac wants to save hyenas – in Lily's case, the brown hyena – when the cheetahs, cape buffalo, rhinos and elephants are gone. And what do I tell them? Because they exist, that's why. And if we can't manage to impregnate Lily with sperm from the San Diego Zoo's lone surviving male, we'll clone her – and clone the clones, ad infinitum. I want to save the animals nobody else wants,' Mac told me when we entered into our present arrangement. ‘The ones nobody but a mother could love. Isn't that cool? Isn't that selfless and cool and brave?' I told him it was. And we got rid of the peacocks and Vietnamese pot–bellied pigs, and the dogs and cats and goats and all the rest, and concentrated on the unglamorous things of the world, the warthogs, peccaries, hyenas and jackals, with the three lions thrown in for the excitement factor. Mac likes to hear them
cough and roar when he turns in at night. When he's here, that is. Which is precious little this time of year.

Anyway, Lily looms up in my mind when Andrea leans into the table and asks me what it's like to work for Maclovio Pulchris. We're seated in the candlelit dining room, waiting for our order, deep into the
sake
now and too civilized – or too old – to let all the bitterness of the past spoil our little reunion. I'm rattling on about Mac, how he likes to stay up all night with a bottle of champagne and a favorite lady and sit out in the yard listening to the anteaters snore while Lily roams her cage, sniggering over the rats she traps between her four–toed paws. And then I'm on to Lily, the virtuosity of her digestive tract, her calcified bowel movements (all that pulverized bone), the roadkill we feed her when we get lucky – opossums mostly, another R–species – when Andrea clears her throat in a pre–emptive way.

I duck my head in embarrassment – my shining bald dome of a head
(Flow it, show it/Long as God can grow it/My hair)
. Suck at the metallic patchwork of my old man's teeth. Fumble with the
sake
cup. I haven't shut up since we sat down – and why? Because, for all my bravado back at the house, all my macho notions of remining an old vein, of exploiting her body in some superheated motel room and then writing her off, good night, goodbye and thanks for the masterful application of the lips, I find myself riveted by her, racked in body and nerve, ready to be slit open and sacrificed all over again. I'm nervous, that's what it is. And when I'm nervous I can't stop talking.

‘Do you remember that girl, April Wind – she was about Sierra's age?' Andrea is watching my face, looking for the crack into which she can drive the first piton and begin her ascent to my poor quivering brain. I give her nothing. Nothing at all. My eyes are glass. My face a sculpture by Oldenburg, monumental, impenetrable. Sierra – the famous Sierra Tierwater, martyr to the cause of the trees – is my daughter. Was my daughter. April Wind I've never heard of. Or at least I hope I haven't.

‘She was part of that tree–sitting thing, summer of '01?'

All my danger sensors are on alert – I should have stayed home with my hyena, I knew it. I'm hurt. I'm lonely. I'm old. I haven't got time for this. But Andrea will persist, she will – if there's one thing I know about her, it's that. Something's afoot here, something I'm not going to like one bit, and once she's sprung it she'll get down to more practical matters – she needs to borrow money, food, clothes, medical supplies, she absolutely has to stay with me a while, a couple of weeks, a month, she needs me,
wants me, and suddenly she'll lean forward and we'll kiss with sushi on our lips and her hand will snake out under the table and take hold of me in the one place that's even more vulnerable than my brain.

Her lips, I'm watching her lips – I know she's had collagen implants, and her face is too shining and perfect to be natural, but who wants natural at my age? ‘You remember her,' she insists, picking at her food with an absent squeeze of her chopsticks (she's having the spicy catfish roll, tilapia sushi, smoked crappie and koi sashimi, a good choice – or the best available, anyway. And it's not going to be cheap, but, knowing Andrea, I came prepared with a new five–hundred–dollar debit card). ‘She came straight to us from Teo's Action Camp? Tiny, she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds? Asian. Or half Asian? She swore the trees talked to her, remember?'

I'm beginning to remember, but I don't want to. And the mention of Teo shoots a flaming brand into my gut, where it ignites the wasabi lurking there in a gurry of carp roe and partially digested tilapia. ‘What about Teo?' I say, just as the wind comes up in a blast that shakes the place as if it were made of straw.

‘I hate this,' she hisses, bracing for the next blast. A sound of rending, some essential piece of the roof above us scraping across the tiles and plucking briefly at the strings of steel cable before hurtling off into the night. People have been decapitated by roofing material, crushed, pole–axed, impaled – you hear about it every day on the news. A woman in the Lupine Hill condos was taking out the trash last year when a flagpole came down out of the sky like a javelin and pinned her to the Dumpster like an insect to a mounting board. And then there are the eye and lung problems associated with all the particulate matter in the air, not to mention allergies nobody had heard of twenty years ago. A lot of people – myself included – wear goggles and a gauze mask during the dry season, when the air is just another kind of dirt. But what can I say? I told you so?

This is the world we've made. Live in it.

‘You get used to it,' I say, and give her a shrug. ‘But you've got your own problems in Arizona – that's where you've been living, right?'

She nods, a tight economical dip of the chin that says, Ask no more.

‘So Teo,' I persist, trying to sound casual though I'm chewing up my insides and wishing I were home in front of the tube with a bottle of Gelusil and the lions coughing me to sleep. ‘Is he still in the picture, or what?'

Right then is when I begin to notice that my feet are wet, and when I
lift first one, then the other from the floor, the rug gives like a sponge. Out of the corner of my eye I can see one of Shiggy's daughters busy at the rear door with a mop and a mountain of napkins, furious activity, but not enough to stanch the flow of water seeping inexorably into the room. Shiggy should have built on pilings and he knows it, but he inherited the place from his father, who ran a successful smorgasbord out of the location for forty years, and the expense of jacking up the building was prohibitive. And Shiggy, like everyone else, kept waiting for the weather to break. ‘No problem, sir, no problem,' Shiggy's daughter is saying to a solitary diner in the corner, ‘we'll have this mopped up in a minute.'

Distracted – my boots are ruined for sure – I've forgotten all about the question I left hanging in the dank air of the place, forgotten where I am or why or even who I am, one of those little lapses that make life tolerable at my age, ginkgo biloba, caffeine and neuroboosters notwithstanding. For a whole ten seconds I've managed to disconnect my gut from my brain. ‘He's dead,' Andrea says into the silence.

‘Who?'

‘Teo.'

Dead? Teo dead?
Well, and now I'm back in the moment, as alert as Lily when she sees me reach into the big greasy plastic bag for another chicken back. I'm beginning to enjoy myself. I feel expansive suddenly. I want details. Did he suffer? Was it lingering? Did he lose control of his bowels, his dick, his brain? ‘I thought it would take a silver bullet,' I hear myself say. ‘Or a stake through the heart.'

Her eyes draw down, drop the curtains and pull the shades. Her smallest voice: ‘It was quick.'

‘How quick?'

Whoa,
shouts the wind,
whoa, whoa, whoa,
and now there's a steady drip of water – the ghost of Teo, his slick aqueous heartbeat – thumping down on the table, just to the left of my chopsticks. I'm watching her, feeding on this, but my back hurts – it always hurts, will always hurt, has hurt without remit since I was in my mid–thirties – and the arthritis in my right foot isn't being helped any by the dampness of the floor. I have a premature hard–on. I resist the impulse to snatch a look at my watch. ‘How quick?' I repeat.

‘I don't want to talk about it,' she says, ‘because that's not why I – that's not what I wanted to … It was a meteor, all right?'

I can't pull my laugh in. Sharp and resounding, it explodes from my
runaway lips and startles the couple two tables over. ‘You're putting me on.'

‘Eleven and a half billion people on the earth, Ty, sixty million of them right here in California. Meteors hit the earth, okay? They've got to land somewhere.'

‘You mean it actually hit him? How big? And when? When was this – ten years ago, yesterday or what?'

‘I won't lie to you, Ty: I loved him. Or at least I thought I did.'

‘Yeah, and you thought you loved me too. That did me a lot of good.'

‘Listen, I don't want to get into this, all right? This is not why I came –'

‘What, did it hit him like a bullet? Go through the roof of his house?'

‘He was making a soft–boiled egg. In the kitchen. He was living in one of those group homes for people like me who never saved for retirement – and don't ask, because I'm not going to say a word about my present circumstances, so don't.' Patting at her lips with the napkin, pausing to take a doleful sip of faintly greasy
sake,
the best the house has to offer. (Have I mentioned that grapes are a thing of the past? Napa–Sonoma is all rice paddies now, the Loire and Rhine Valleys so wet they'd be better off trying to grow pineapples – though on the plus side I hear the Norwegians are planting California rootstock in the Oslo suburbs.)

‘He never knew what hit him,' she's saying, chasing me down with her eyes. ‘His son told me they found the thing – it was the size of a golf ball – embedded in the concrete in the basement, still smoldering.'

I'm in awe. Sitting there over my
sake
and a plate of cold fish, holding that picture in my head – a soft–boiled egg! The world is a lonely place.

‘Ty?'

I look up, still shaking my head. ‘You want another drink?'

‘No, no – listen. The reason I came is to tell you about April Wind – '

I do everything I can to put some hurt and surprise in my face, though I'm neither hurt nor surprised, or not particularly. ‘I thought you said you wanted to see me for love – isn't that what you said? Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was you wanted to, well, get together – '

‘No,' she says. ‘Or yes, yes, I do. But the thing that got me here, the reason I had to see you, is April Wind. She wants to do a book. On Sierra.'

I don't get angry much anymore, no point in it. But with all I've been through – not just back then, but now too, and who do you think is going to have to track down the Patagonian fox and the slinking fat pangolins on feet that are like cement blocks? – I can't help myself. ‘I
don't want to hear it,' I say, and somehow I'm standing, the carpet squelching under my feet, the whole building vibrating under the assault of another gust. My arm, my right arm, seems to be making some sort of extenuating gesture, moving all on its own,
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
‘She's dead, isn't that enough? What do you want – to make some sort of Joan of Arc out of her? Open the door. Look around you. What the fuck difference does it make?'