A Friend of the Earth (8 page)

‘Ty,' Andrea says.

‘Andrea,' Ty says.

And then we're on the way to the emergency room, where they've got a stretcher and an IV unit named in honor of me, snuggling, actually snuggling (though Andrea's got her right hand clamped round the pressure point in front of my elbow and Chuy is jerking at the wheel like a Dursban–addled stock–car driver), and for the life of me I just can't seem to recall the name of that woman who talks to the trees. She'll be here tomorrow, though. ‘I invited her for tomorrow,' is the way Andrea puts it, Chuy slithering all over the road as if the car were a big Siamese walking catfish, traffic stalled all the way to Monterey and here we go up on the shoulder – look out, we're coming through. ‘What do you mean, “tomorrow”?' I say, and she tightens her grip on the artery running up my arm.

She says – and the wind is raging, the Olfputt pitching, the blood flowing free – ‘I mean the day after today. Honey.'

Mexico City, São Paulo, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Tokyo, Dhaka, Cairo, Calcutta, Reykjavik, Caracas, Lagos, Guadalajara, Greater Nome, Sakhafinsky, Nanking, Helsinki – all bigger than New York now. Forty–six million in Mexico City. Forty in São Paulo. New York doesn't even rank in the top twenty. And how does that make me feel? Old. As if I've outlived my time – and everybody else's. Because the correction is under way – has been under way for some time now. Let's eat each other, that's what I propose – my arm tonight and yours tomorrow – because there's precious little of anything else left. Ecology. What a joke.

I'm not preaching. I'm not going to preach. It's too late for that, and besides which, preaching never did anybody any good anyway. Let me say this, though, for the record – for the better part of my life I was a criminal. Just like you. I lived in the suburbs in a three–thousand-square–foot house with redwood siding and oak floors and an oil burner the size of Texas, drove a classic 1966 Mustang for sport and a Jeep Laredo (red, black leather interior) to take me up to the Adirondacks so I could heft my three–hundred-twenty–dollar Eddie Bauer backpack and commune with the squirrels, muskrats and fishers. I went to the gym. Drank in fern bars. Bought shoes, jackets, sweaters and hair–care products. I guess I was dimly aware – way out there on the periphery of my consciousness – of what I was doing to the poor abused corpus of old mother earth, and I did recycle (when I got around to it, which was maybe twice a year), and I
thought a lot about packaging. I wore a sweater in the house in winter to conserve energy and turn the flame down on global warming, and still I burned fuel and more fuel, and the trash I generated plugged its own hole in the landfill like a permanent filling in a rotten tooth.

Worse, I accumulated things. They seemed to stick to me, like filings to a magnet, a whole polarized fur of objects radiating from my fingertips in slavish attraction. Paper clips, pins, plastic bags, ancient amplifiers, rusted–out cooking grills. Clothes, books, records, CDs. Cookware, Ginzu knives, food processors, popcorn poppers, coffeemakers, my dead father's overcoats and my dead mother's shoes. I kept a second Mustang, graffitied with rust, out behind the garage, on blocks. There were chairs in the attic that hadn't been warmed by a pair of buttocks in fifty years, trunks of neatly folded shorts and polo shirts I hadn't worn since I was five.

I drove fast, always in a hurry, and stuffed the glove box so full of tickets it looked like a napkin dispenser in a restaurant. I dated (women, whole thundering herds of them, looking – in vain – for another Jane). I parented. Cooked. Cleaned. Managed my dead father's crumbling empire – you've heard of him, Sy Tierwater, developer of tract homes in Westchester and Dutchess Counties? – and paid bills and collected rents and squeezed down the window of my car to add my share of Kleenex, ice–cream sticks and cigarette wrappers to the debris along the streaming sides of the blacktop roads.

Want more? I drank wine, spent money, spoiled my daughter and watched her accumulate things in her turn. And just like you – if you live in the Western world, and I have to assume you do, or how else would you be reading this? – I caused approximately two hundred fifty times the damage to the environment of this tattered, bleeding planet as a Bangladeshi or Balinese, and they do their share, believe me. Or did. But I don't want to get into that.

Let's just say I saw the light – with the help of a good nudge from Andrea, Teo (may he rot in hell or interplanetary space or wherever) and all the other hard chargers down at Earth Forever! Forces were put in motion, gears began to grind. I sold the house, the cars, the decrepit shopping center my father left me, my wind surfer and Adirondack chair and my complete set of bootleg Dylan tapes, all the detritus left behind by the slow–rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth. Friendship. That's what got me into the movement and that's what pushed me way out there on the naked
edge of nothing, beyond sense or reason, or even hope. Friendship for the earth. For the trees and shrubs and the native grasses and the antelope on the plain and the kangaroo rats in the desert and everything else that lives and breathes under the sun.

Except people, that is. Because to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.

I've got no health care, of course – nobody does, the whole system long since gone bankrupt, and don't bother to ask about Social Security – but they're happy to see a paying customer hustling through the emergency–room doors. Whatever it takes – and in this case it won't be much – they know Mac is good for it. Maclovio Pulchris. It's a magical name, better than cash, because you can only carry so much of that – Mac's my Medicare and Social Security, all wrapped up in one. And now I've got Andrea too, a woman who breeds emergencies, one night of love and here we are. She's lending me support – literally – as we crabwalk through the doors, Chuy somewhere behind us, hurtling up the ramp of the parking structure as if he's trying to launch the 4x4 out of the atmosphere. ‘What's the problem?' the attendant wants to know, a monster of a man who looks vaguely familiar (Swenson's? last night?), his nose, lips, scalp and forearms a patchwork of skin cancers past and present. ‘It's nothing, moron,' Andrea says, and there's that snarl again – ‘he's just bleeding to death, that's all.'

Then it's the ordeal of the forms – there must be twenty, twenty–five pages of them. Andrea squeezes up close beside me, her big thumb still locked in place over the wound, the woman behind the desk yawning, the intercom hissing, somebody strolling off to find a ligature of some sort and wake one of the doctors out of his trance. All the windows are boarded up because they got tired of replacing them every third or fourth day, and the quality of the light is what you might expect from a high–end mausoleum. Depressing. Depressing in the extreme. Just to lighten things up, I make a joke about how it's a good thing Petunia got my left arm or I'd be up shit creek as far as checking off the relevant box is concerned. Nobody laughs. And even here, deep in the recesses of the bleach–rubbed and almost spanking–clean corridors, with six floors of steel and concrete and body fluids above us, I can hear the rain.
Ssssssss,
it hisses, background music to every mortal drama,
ssssssss.

What does it take? Thirty–two stitches and half a mile of gauze, no big deal and no offense, I tell the doctor, but I've been hurt worse. A whole
lot worse. I give Andrea a meaningful glance, but her mind is off someplace else. With each stitch, that little burn and the bigger hurt to follow, I study her, first in profile and then from the rear as she moves across the room to gaze out the window that isn't a window at all but the naked whorled face of some sort of artificial plywood with predrilled holes for easy application (and
there's
another business). I still can't get used to her. How can that old lady's face belong to those shoulders and legs? That's what I'm thinking as the doctor – an infant of twenty–and-something who probably doesn't even shave yet – sticks his needle in me, and more: If you want to start gauging degrees of pain, what does it mean that she's finally come back?

April Wind is sunk deep in the dog–stinking couch I inherited with this place ten years ago. I don't own dogs. Never have. When you've got hyenas, Patagonian foxes and spectacled bears, what do you need dogs for? The fact is, one of Mac's roadies died here – right here, on the floor under the window, where you can still see the stains if you look closely enough – after an unfortunate and wholly preventable accident involving a noose, a plastic bag, two women and three twenty–four-ounce squeeze bottles of ketchup; his effects, as they say, came down to me. Or is it
on
me? Anyway, there she is, and forget the thrill in my arm, the stoked fires raging away in my lower back (expertly jammed against the open door of one of the dryers when Petunia went for me) or the fact that I've had a satisfactory and highly reminiscent sexual experience for the second night in a row – I'm a stranger in my own house, and my house is getting crowded.

Yesterday I was whistling, today I'm in no mood. Breakfast (oatmeal with bran and brewer's yeast spooned in for ballast, the crab already sacrificed for love), is barely settled, I haven't seen the paper or suffered over the toilet yet, and this wind from the past blows in. A wind with a face. All I can think of is a Peter Max poster, with Helios in one corner, Aeolus in the other, battling over the weather. Back then, of course, the sun always won out.

‘You remember April, Ty,' Andrea says, and she's not making a question of it. I watch her as she pulls one of the mold–spattered kitchen chairs across the room and perches girlishly on the edge of it, her bare feet splayed over the rungs. The way she does it, the way she maneuvers the chair and settles herself – and more, the tone of her voice, the smell of
her – plumbs some deep inversion layer in the unstirred lake of my memory. But that's what this is all about, isn't it? Memory?
In Memoriam, Sierra Tierwater, 1976–2001. Requiescat in Pace
. Fat chance.

‘I said, you remember April, don't you, Ty?'

Ah: and now it's a question. I can stall. I can put on my old–man–with-a–postnasal-drip–and-a–glued-up–brain act, but what will it get me – a sixty–second reprieve? Andrea's tough. She wants something here – I'm not exactly sure what it is yet, but I know she'll get it. Besides which, I'm not really that old, not in the way my grandparents were – or Andrea's decrepit father and foot–shuffling old withered wreck of a mother, who for the final two years of her life thought Andrea was the cleaning lady's cat – because my generation never let go of its (pharmaceutically and surgically assisted) youth, till death do us part. April Wind knows that. And Andrea especially knows it. Of course, I could duck into the bedroom, bad back and chewed–up arm notwithstanding, dig out the .470 Nitro Express elephant gun I stole from Philip Ratchiss a thousand years ago and make the two of them into hyena food, but, despite reports to the contrary, I've never been a violent man. Or not especially. Or excessively. ‘Yeah,' I mumble, ‘sure.'

A bright look comes into the eyes of the woman who talks to trees, the kind of look you see in a serval when it detects movement in the high grass. She must be about Sierra's age, I suppose – the age Sierra would be now, that is, if she were still among those of us who pass for the living. Forty–nine, fifty maybe. I can't begin to see Sierra's face in hers, though, and I wouldn't want to, because there's an exercise in futility and unquenched sorrow if you ever wanted one: My daughter? Now? She'd be beautiful, a head–turner still, nothing at all like this wizened little buck–toothed poppet of a woman in rotting Doc Martens and a dress a sixth–grader couldn't get into.

‘Nice to see you again,' April Wind says, and she has to crank up her voice just a notch to be heard over the blow outside (storm number three in the latest succession hit down about an hour ago). ‘And thanks for granting me this interview. I really appreciate it.'

Look out, here it comes:
Saint Sierra.
‘I didn't grant it.'

The look on April Wind's face – you'd think I'd just punched her in the stomach. I give her my best impression of a bitter glare, clenching my jaw and hard–cooking my eyes, but what I'm really doing is looking over her shoulder to where the snails are riding their slime trails up and down the windowpane, fully prepared to inherit the earth we've made for
them. I remember her, all right. The woo–woo queen. Endless nights in a drafty teepee, the pitilessly chirpy voice, totems in a bag strung round her neck – she couldn't sit down to eat without some loopy prayer to the earth goddess.
I can totally see your aura, and it's blue shading to magenta on the edges, and I already know I'm attracted to you in a like major way because our birth planets are in the same house.

‘But I thought, like – ‘

‘Still wearing your totems? What was that one – the toad, wasn't it? Weren't you a toad?' Pause, one beat, listen to the buckets catch the eternal drip. ‘So what do you do when your totem animal's not just dead but extinct?'

Andrea into the breach: ‘April? Would you like a cup of tea?'

The child's fingers go to something under the neck of the dress, the little muslin bag there, quick nervous fingers. She smoothes the damp cotton over her thighs, throws a tentative glance at Andrea, then me.
Mama told me there'd be days like this.
‘No, thanks, I'm fine. Really.'

‘You sure?'

‘No, really.'

But Andrea, who didn't exist two days ago and now owns me, the house and everything in it, is selling tea here this morning. ‘It warms you,' she says. ‘I mean, not that it's cold out, not the way it used to be this time of year – remember the Stanislaus River, the way it rained and then we froze our butts off for, what was it, two days out there in the woods? But when you're wet all the time – ‘