A Friend of the Earth (7 page)

Andrea cursed the deputies, and they cursed her back. Teo glared from the cave of his muscles. Tierwater was beside himself. He raged and bellowed and threatened them with everything from aggravated assault to monetary damages and prosecution for police brutality – at least until the sheriff, Sheriff Bob Hicks of Josephine County, produced a roll of duct tape
and shut his mouth for him. And his daughter, his tough, right–thinking, long–haired, tree–hugging, animal–loving, vegetarian daughter – she folded herself up like an umbrella over the prison of her feet and cried. Thirteen years old, tired, scared, and she just let herself go.
(They shuffled their workboots and looked shamefaced then, those standard–issue badge–polishers and the Forest Service officials who drove up in a green jeep to join them – they probably had daughters themselves, and sons and dogs and rabbits in a hutch – but there was nothing any of them could do about my little girl's grief. Least of all me.)

Grateful for a day's reprieve, the Pacific salamanders curled up under the cover of their rocks, the martens retreated into the leaves and the spotted owls winked open an eye at the sound of that thin disconsolate wail of human distress. Tierwater's hands were bound, his mouth taped. Every snuffle, every choked–back sob, was a spike driven into the back of his head.

Yes. And here's the irony, the kicker, the sad, deflating and piss–poor denouement. For all they went through that morning, for all the pain and boredom and humiliation, there wasn't a single reporter on hand to bear witness, because Sheriff Bob Hicks had blocked the road at the highway and wouldn't let anyone in – and so it was a joke, a big joke, the whole thing. He can remember sitting there frying like somebody's meal with a face, no ozone layer left to protect them from the sun, no water, no hat and no shade and all the trees of the world under the ax, while he worked out the conundrum in his head: if a protest falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

It's still raining when we wake up – or when I wake up, anyway. I'm awake before her, long before her, and why wouldn't I be? I'm feeling historical here. Eggs and bacon, that's how I'm feeling, but you don't see much of those commodities any more (eggs maybe, but you can forget bacon) and there's her purse on the table, big as the head of an elephant and stuffed with used Kleenex, debit slips, gum wrappers, keychains full of keys to doors in houses that no longer exist. I'm an archaeologist, that's what I am, prising one potsherd after another out of the dung heap of my life. Andrea sleeps late. I knew that. I've lived with that. But for twenty–odd years until now, it didn't operate, not in my sphere. We've had, let's say, an interesting night, highly stimulating, drenched in nostalgia and heartbreak, a night that was finally, if briefly, sexual, and I've got no complaints on that score. I think I'm actually whistling as I dodge round the splootching cans and buckets in the living room/kitchen, preparatory to fixing something nice for her to eat when she gets around to it.

How am I feeling? Moist. Moist in the tear ducts and gonads, swelled up like a lungfish that's been buried in the sand through a long desiccated summer till the day the sky breaks apart and the world goes wet again. The smell of coffee is taking me back – I don't drink it myself anymore, too expensive and it raises hell with my stomach – and I feel myself slipping so far into the past I'm in danger of disappearing without making a ripple. She's snoring. I can hear it – no delicate insuck and outhale, but a real venting of the airways, a noise as true in its way as anything Lily could work up. The rain slaps its broad hand on the roof, something that wasn't tied down by somebody somewhere hits the wall just above the window, the world shudders, Andrea sleeps. It's a moment.

Unfortunately, our idyll doesn't last much longer than that moment, because, before I can think whether to serve her the tuna salad I've been storing in the food compressor the past three years for a special occasion or
just to go ahead and open up that last can of crab because life doesn't last forever, especially if you're a crab, Chuy is at the door. He's agitated. Dancing on his feet, working his jaws and lips and tongue and generally trying, without success, to communicate something to me. He's hatless and slickerless, the hair glued to his scalp, his eyes so naked you can almost see through them to his Dursban–dusted brain. How old is he? He doesn't know – doesn't even remember what town he was born in, though the country, he's pretty sure – almost ‘a hunerd and ten percent, or maybe a hunerd and twenty' – was Guatemala. I'm not as good at judging people's ages as I once was, because everybody looks young to me except the old–old, but I'd figure him for forty, forty–five. Anyway, he's on my doorstep, and this is what he says, more or less: ‘Some people … some people, Mr. Ty – ‘

‘What people?' I'm standing there at the open door, the sky like an inverted fishbowl, big propellers of wind chasing sticks, papers, leaves across the swamp of the yard, the immemorial coffee smell behind me, the heater, the bed, Andrea. Chuy might as well be standing under Niagara Falls. My slippers are wet. The fringe of my bathrobe. Everything is wet, always – molding and wet – books falling apart on the shelves, slugs climbing out of the teapot, the very chairs turning green under our hind ends and sprouting again. Exasperated, I take Chuy by the collar and drag him into the room. I'm not a patient man.

‘The, the people – ‘ A gesture, mostly spastic, in the direction of the condos.

‘The people at Lupine Hill?'

‘Ellos, sí,
the ones
sobre
the hill, they, they – they
encuentran
Petunia. In the laundry.'

Petunia is the Patagonian fox. She stands two and a half feet tall at the shoulder, thin red ribbons for legs, a black shag of bristling hair laid over her back like a rug. The laundry rooms, as I understand these things, are communal to every ten units at Lupine Hill. As for the Spanish, this is the language Chuy reverts to when the pesticide clogs up the pathways scored in his brain by the contortions of English.

‘She have, what do you call, some catch in her mouth. Maybe
un gato
. And maybe they shut the door. So we, we – '

‘We need to get over there ASAP.'

Streaming, grinning, flicking the hair out of his eyes: ‘Yes, Ess–A–Pee.'

That's the moment Andrea chooses to emerge from the back room, hair in her face, eyes vacant, legs bare to the follicles – and good legs,
because legs are the last thing to go in a beautiful woman, hardly any cellulite and no varicosities to speak of. She's wearing one of my shirts, I notice (black silk, fanciest thing I own, a gift from Mac, of course, because Tyrone Tierwater the animal man is strictly no frills), and there's nothing underneath that but what she was born with. Or evolved into. I follow Chuy's eyes to the black shirt and the place in front, down low, where she hasn't bothered with the bottom two buttons. I can see her private hair, and it's white, white as a winter ptarmigan (now extinct), and then we're both staring at the glossy dyed black marvel of her head. I have to admit it: I'm embarrassed. And before I can think, I'm crossing the room and moving into her, fastening the buttons like a doting husband. Or maybe a lovesick dog – one with bad breath and the mange and a habit of getting whipped and liking it. ‘Andrea,' I say, ‘Chuy. Chuy, Andrea.'

Chuy is giving her a watery stare of amazement, as if she's materialized out of one of the animal pens, and he's looking hard at me too, reevaluating everything we've said and done together over the past decade in an entirely new light – the revivifying beers, meat cooked out in the open, animals dying on us in a welter of shit and blood, the bites, bruises and festering claw–wounds and the breakneck trips to the emergency room, Lori and her melting smile and love of high–end
sake,
the rare ‘95 Qupé Chardonnay out of Mac's cellars the three of us would share on special occasions, Mac – Mac himself – all of it. And Andrea – she just gives him a bright–eyed look and says, ‘You staying for breakfast?'

I can see Chuy wrestling with the response to that one, and I'm right on the verge of answering for him, my George to his Lennie, when there comes a fearsome thumping at the door. Who is it? Delbert Sakapathian, of #1002B, Avenida Lupine Hill, Santa Ynez, California. He's a big man with a cueball head, younger than the young–old, sixty maybe, and with the kind of gut you used to see a lot more of around the turn of the century, when junk food was a staple. Now people crave meat and fish and broccoli, sweet potatoes, chard, wheat germ, the things they can't get the way they used to, and forget the Ho–Ho's and Pop Tarts and Doritos Extra–Spicy Meat–Flavored Tortilla Chips – that crap they can't give away. ‘You him?' Delbert Sakapathian says, poking a finger the size of a souvenir bat in my face.

I don't have time for this sort of thing, I really don't, but if it'll get me Petunia back, I guess I'll see if my secretarial staff can cancel one of my morning appointments and work Mr. Sakapathian in. I nod. ‘I'm him,' I say.

The doorframe isn't big enough to contain him, besides which the rain isn't doing much for my carpet, not to mention the reddish muck melting off his gum boots and the steady divestiture of water from his slicker (and there's another business to invest in – Slickers, Inc., or maybe Slickers ‘R' Us). ‘Well, goddamnit,' he spits. ‘Goddamnit to hell.'

And then a voice zeroes in over my shoulder, as accurate as a smart bomb. ‘Lighten up,' Andrea says, and I know that tone, though it hasn't been directed at me, not this time around, not yet anyway. ‘And shut the door, clod – you're ruining the carpet.'

The big streaming cueball ducks, chin to chest, and then Delbert Sakapathian is in the room, the door thundering shut behind him. He's chastened, but not for long. ‘You got to get that thing, whatever it is, out of there, because it's got my, my' – and here a wave of emotion peaks in his eyes and I think he's going to break down – ‘Pitty–Sing, my cat, and I think, I mean, by Christ you better, because, if anything happens to her, I'll, I'll – '

And then we're fighting the wind, all four of us, slickered and booted and hatted like tars rounding the Horn on a clipper ship, except that this is dry land – or should be, or used to be – and I've got the shock–stick in one hand and Andrea's big warm mitt clenched in the other, Chuy leading the way with the wire net and Delbert Sakapathian bringing up the rear with an asthmatic wheeze. I'm hopeful. Not so much for the cat – let's face it, if Petunia got hold of it more than thirty seconds ago, it's history – but for my fox and Patagonia and the barren pampas Mac and I are going to repopulate one day in the not–too–distant future. (By the way, I'm not the one responsible for the asinine names of the animals around here – give them a little dignity, that's what I say. No, it's Mac. He thought it would be nice – ‘utterly and fantastically groovy' – if they all had the names of flowers. One of the lions, to my everlasting embarrassment, is called Dandelion.)

When we get there – up the hill, through the claws of the blasted trees and the crazy growth of invasives and into the perpetually flooded basement of Building B, or ‘Sunshine House,' as the plaque out front identifies it – we find a group of condo–dwellers gathered expectantly outside a rotting plywood door marked
laundry
in fading green letters. There are a couple of kids there, their faces so small and featureless they might have been painted right on the skin, and women in bare feet, braving ankle–deep water the color of graveyard seepage. No one says a word. But they all step back when I slosh past them and brandish the
shock–stick. ‘Unkink that net, Chuy,' I say, about 90 percent certain I'm going to get bitten at least once, but hopefully not to the bone, and Andrea – my Andrea, newly restored to me and conjugal as all hell – whispers, ‘Be careful, Ty.'

Of course, this is a fox we're talking about here. Not a normal fox, maybe – a fox the size of a wolf – but a fox for all that. It's not as if one of the lions got loose. Or Lily, who could crush your spine and rip out your intestines with a single bite. Still, here we are, and you never can tell what's going to happen. ‘Petunia,' I croon in my sweetest and–here's–a-chicken–back-for–you-too voice, gently pushing the door open with the stick, and then I'm in the room, washers, dryers, a couple of sinks, and somebody's socks and brassieres tumbled out of a straw basket to the (very wet) floor.

Nothing. A drip of water, cheap fluorescents flickering, the inescapable hiss of the storm outside. And then, from behind the sink to my right, the sound of a chainsaw if a chainsaw had a tongue, a palate and a set of lips to muffle it:
RRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Chuy, I should say, is a master of stating the obvious, and he gives me a demonstration of his uncanny talent at this very crucial moment.
‘Yo pienso que
he's up under the sink, Mr. Ty, is what I am thinking,
verdad?'

Verdad
. A pair of flaming eyes, the red paws, the scrabble of claws digging into the buckling linoleum, and why is the theme to
Bom Free
running through my head like mental diarrhea? Sure enough, she's got the limp white carcass of a Siamese cat (lilac–point) clenched in her jaws, and that's good, I'm thinking, because she can't chew and bite at the same time, can she? ‘Okay, Chuy,' I hear myself say, and though my knee doesn't like it or my back either, I'm down there poking the stick in the thing's face, afraid to use the electric shock for fear of electrocuting her and maybe myself into the bargain. No fear. All I have to do is touch her and she launches herself out from under the sink like a cruise missile to perforate my forearm with her canines and the dainty cutting teeth in front of them, me on my posterior in the water, the corpse of the cat floating free, Chuy fumbling with the net and Andrea wading in to grab hold of Petunia by the ears. Which she does. And this is a good move, from my point of view. An excellent move. Because Petunia, cornered, lets go of my arm for just the quarter of a second it takes Chuy to wrap the wire net round the most dangerous part of her, and after that, it's all she wrote.