A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘What?’ I throw at Chuy, bolt upright in bed now, the light from the other room shining sick and weak on the mossy walls and the banana slug fixed like a lamprey to the image of Thoreau’s face. (‘Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountain head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world.’)‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Los edificios, they, they – ’

  ‘What edificios?’ I’m up now, pulling on my jeans, the anxious faces of Andrea and April Wind hanging on cords in the distance.

  ‘Los, los condos, and Rancho Seco – them too – they are what I think is falling down, I mean like in the corriente, you know, like boom, boom, boom – ’

  When Frank Buck wanted elephants – that is, when some zoo or circus placed an order – he would cruise over to Ceylon, hire a couple hundred natives and cut down a whole forest’s worth of tropical hardwoods to build a pen with a four–hundred–foot chute in front of it. Fifteen–foot–tall logs were set in the ground eighteen inches apart throughout the pen – or kraal, as it was called – and then, using tame elephants to lure the wild ones in close, Buck and his men would stampede the whole lot of them down the chute and into the enclosure as if they were sheep. Uncle Sol, who was there, informed me about this and other peculiarities of the animal trade when I was fifteen, a skinny kid with a mop and shovel, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ordure – shit, that is – his eight Indian elephants produced daily. There was the dust, he said, that was the first thing you noticed, a roiling river of dust fifty feet high, and then you felt the concussion through the soles of your shoes – fifty or sixty panicked animals weighing up to five tons apiece punishing the ground. But it was the screaming he remembered most, like a brass band hitting nothing but high notes, right off the scale, a noise that shivered and humbled you till the big gate dropped and all that ocean of flesh was just one more commodity for sale and export. The elephants went to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, Central Park, the big timbers of the kraal rotted and tumbled over and the jungle sprang back up to conceal the next generation of pachyderms.

  That was ninety years ago. Now the elephants are gone, and the forest too – Ceylon, last I heard, was 100 percent deforested, a desert of unemployable mahouts and third–generation twig–gatherers. Uncle Sol had it easy – all he had to do was go out into the wilderness and catch things, and it was a deep wilderness, a jungle full of sights unseen and sounds unheard, raffalii and dorango in the trees, chevrotains, tapirs and yes, pangolins poking through the leaves. It’s a little different for me and Chuy. There is no wilderness, and there’s nothing left to catch, except maybe rats. Our job, as it turns out on this very wet sixth–consecutive day of rain, is to subdue a menagerie of disgruntled, penned–up and reeking animals named after flowers and escort them to higher ground.

  Andrea’s going to help. So are April Wind and Mac’s two bodyguards. We need all the help we can get, because chaos has been unleashed here, two whole sections of the Lupine Hill condos collapsed like wet cardboard (and where are Delbert Sakapathian and his thousand–dollar check now, I wonder), Rancho Seco gone wet suddenly and looking less like a gated community and more like a riverbed every minute, and my own humble abode flooded right up to the high–water mark on my gum boots. At some point, not long after Chuy’s revelation in my darkened bedroom, Mac himself appeared at the front door, wrapped up and hooded in a black slicker that might have been a body bag in another incarnation, his eel whips hanging limp, shades misted over. The bodyguards bookended him. The sky was close. My carpets were fishbait and the Titanic was going down fast. ‘Everybody,’ he shouted, and even in his extremity his voice was as breathy and sweet as a kindergarten teacher’s, ‘everybody up the hill to my house!’

  We’re coming, I want to tell him, Andrea scooping up floating paperbacks and doing triage on the kitchen appliances, and you don’t have to ask twice – but, first, the animals. Out there in the thick of it, Chuy and I discover that one of the giant anteaters has drowned. I don’t know if you can picture a giant anteater offhand – this is the kind of creature that never looked quite real anyway, what with the Mohawk haircut, the underslung bear’s feet and the three lengths of hose stuffed into its snout – but it looks even less convincing now. Just dead. Dead and gone. And probably no more than thirty or forty of them left on earth. Even with the rain, even with Andrea and my knee and Mac and the threat of the mucosa, I want to sit down and cry.

  Lily, fortunately, is all right – she’s dug herself a mound big as a tumulus, and there she is, curled up on top of it like a wet rug. The lions we find stacked up on the roof of the concrete–block structure at the back of their cage, roaring their guts out. Dandelion, the male, looks as if he’s been drowned twice and twice resuscitated, the mane drooping round his jowls like some half–finished macramé project. Amaryllis and Buttercup, the lionesses Mac ordered through a breeding–facility catalogue from some place in Ohio, don’t look much better. Their eyes tell me they want to be pacing neurotically up and down the length of the chain–link fence that encloses their half–acre savanna, but the whole thing is a three–foot–deep stew of phlegm–colored water and Siamese walking catfish (have I mentioned that some environmental anarchist let half a dozen of them go in Carpinteria twenty years back, just as the weather started to turn?).

  ‘Chuy,’ I announce, swinging round on him and the two hopeless–looking bodyguards, ‘the lions are going to be a problem. If we dart them, they’re liable to fall into the slop and drown, and if we just wade in there with the wire net, they’ll just as likely chew our heads off’

  The bodyguards – both of them are named Al, I think – don’t look as if they like the sound of this. They’re the ones who are going to have to drag a four–hundred–pound cat bristling with claws and teeth through three feet of water and sling it in the back of the Olfputt, and that’s no mean feat, whether it’s unconscious or not. And then – stirring news – they’ll have to go back for the lionesses.

  Chuy, meanwhile, is blinking back the rain, hunched and stringy, considering the problem. His slicker, which is at least three sizes too long for him in the arms, is a pale, faded orange in color, liberally stained with Rorschach blots of oil, mold and animal blood. ‘They can swim, Mr. Ty, nadan estos gatos, and maybe I think we can tie them like caballos, you know, around the neck, and maybe we hook the rope up to the back of the truck, and, you know – ’

  I’m dazed. Old and dazed. The rain is like a trillion hammers, blow after blow, staggering me. ‘You mean, we drag them?’

  ‘Sure. And when they see la puerta open wide to that dry warm basement at Mr. Mac’s, then maybe yo pienso que where they want to go, verdad?’

  Or we could just leave them. The water’s probably not going to get up that high, I tell myself, but even so it can’t be good for them to be soaked through for days on end – they’ll catch cold, won’t they? What about in Africa, though – or Africa as it once was? They didn’t have lion pens to snuggle in – or multimillionaire pop stars’ carpeted, paneled and Ping–Pong—tabled basements either. Yes. Sure. And they died, every last one of them, flagged, skinned and eaten right down to the bone by the pullulating masses of our own degraded species. Africa doesn’t matter anymore. Nature doesn’t matter anymore – it’s not even nature, just something we created out of a witches’ brew of fossil–fuel emissions and deforestation. These lions live here, in the Santa Ynez Valley – this is their natural habitat now. And if the valley floods, then we’ll move them to higher ground, a new habitat for the infinitely adaptable New Age lion: Maclovio Pulchris’ twelve–thousand–square–foot basement.

  And you know what I say? Hallelujah and praise the Lord.

  Los Angeles/Titusville, July 1989

  What he wanted, more than anything, more than revenge, even – more than Andrea and the trees and the owls – was to get his daughter back. Just that. J
ust walk her down the steps of Juvenile Hall, put her in the car and drive back to New York with his tail between his legs – and it wasn’t too late to go back, the house in escrow, the shopping center on the market still, the old blanket of his old life neatly folded and all ready and waiting to be pulled up over his head again. And Andrea? Forget Andrea, forget sex, forget life. He didn’t want to be alive, because if you were alive you hurt, and this hurt worse than anything he’d ever known or imagined. His daughter. They’d taken his daughter away. And why? Because he was an unfit parent.

  An unfit parent. That set him on fire, all right, that set him off like a Scud missile, all thrust and afterburners and calamitous rage. There was no fitter parent. Show me one – that was his attitude – just show me one. He’d been father and mother to Sierra since she was three years old and he had to rescue her from her grandmother and tell her that her mommy wasn’t coming back anymore because she’d just vanished from the face of this earth like a ghost or a breath of wind. Try that one on for size. Try climbing out of the cavern of sleep to the screams and night alarums of an inconsolable thirty–seven–pound ball of confusion and rage, try dropping her off at nursery school, a single father on his way to mind–numbing, soul–crushing work, and she won’t let go of the door handle, no joke, no cajoling, the drooping faces of the nursery–school teachers and pitying mothers hanging over the fenders of the car like fruit withered on the vine. A motherless kindergartner, a motherless ten–year–old, a motherless teenager. Tierwater put his life into fixing that – or assuaging it, bandaging it, kissing the hurt to make it better – and no one could tell him different. Not Judge Duermer or the Josephine County Child Protective Services or the Supreme Court either.

  But here was the fact: he was in Los Angeles, trapped in a blistering funk of heat and smog and multicultural sweat, and she was in Oregon, where the trees stood tall and the air was cool and sweet – in Oregon, in jail. Or Juvenile Hall. Same difference. They wouldn’t let him see her, wouldn’t let him correspond with her, wouldn’t even let him speak with her on the phone – he was too evil and corrupting an influence. He was a monster. A criminal. A freak. Three and a half weeks had gone by now, and he’d done nothing but lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. He wanted to be in Oregon, close to her, just to tread the same soil and breathe the same air, but Fred wouldn’t hear of it. You’ll do more harm than good, he insisted. Stay out of it. Don’t go near the state line except for court appearances – don’t even think about it. And don’t worry: we’ll get her released to Andrea, no problem – no matter what happens with you.

  The sad fact was that since the day he made bail he’d been back just once – up and down the coast in the space of forty–eight hours – with Andrea and Fred, for a dependency hearing before the judge.

  Judge Duermer (triple–chinned, rolling in his robes, the great bulging watery sea lion’s eyes): Can you show cause why this juvenile – Sierra Sarah Tierwater – should be returned to the custody of her father and stepmother, both of whom are facing criminal charges in this county?

  Fred (short and bald, a blazing wick of vital energy, appalled for all the world to see): But, Your Honor, with all due respect, this is a matter of peaceable civil protest, an exercise of my clients’ rights to free speech and assembly –

  Judge Duermer (reading from a sheet in front of him, Sierra nowhere to be seen): Assault on a peace officer, resisting arrest, escape from custody, child endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor? Come on, counsel, these are serious charges, and until such time as they have been adjudicated, I can’t see fit to release this child to the parents.

  Sierra’s Lawyer (Cotton Mather in a three–piece suit, no nose or chin to speak of): Your honor, on behalf of Child Protective Services, I move to have Sierra Sarah Tierwater placed with a foster family until such time as the parents can show that they have taken appropriate measures – parenting classes, for instance, and refraining from further criminal conduct – to assure the court that they are indeed fit to raise this child.

  The upshot? Tierwater, still facing up to a year in jail on the criminal charge, was ordered to take approved parenting classes and to keep his own very prominent nose clean for a period of twelve months, after which the court would make its decision. Back again to Los Angeles, doom and gloom and seething hate. He stared out the window of the car and into the trees, and even the shell of the burned–out Cat glimpsed somewhere between Cottonwood and Red Bluff gave him no pleasure. Criminal conduct. The sons of puritanical high–and–mighty bitches – they haven’t seen anything yet. That’s what Tierwater was thinking, but it came and went. Revenge fantasies got you nowhere. Despair did, though. Despair got you to submit to the gravitational force and become one with the cracked leather couch in front of the eternally blipping TV in a rented house on a palm–lined street in suburbia. (Give me my daughter back and I wil pluck the owls and drop them in the frying pan myself, no questions asked, that’s how I felt, because I was all about giving up then, a victim, a schmuck, ground under the iron heel of Judge Duermer and Sheriff Bob Hicks.)

  ‘Come on, Ty,’ Andrea said, trying for a smile but looking grim underneath it, ‘snap out of it. We’re fighting this, okay? It’ll be all right. It will.’

  It was a morning of common heat, a hundred and three by eleven o’clock, the San Fernando Valley baking like cheap pottery. The dry wind they called Santa Ana was rattling the leaves of the grapefruit trees in the desiccated backyard – nothing there, not a spike of grass, not even a gopher mound – and knocking the dead fronds out of the palms out front with a sound like sabers rattling. This was in a place called Tarzana, named for the Lord of the Jungle, whose steady earning power had allowed his creator to buy it all up at one time and make it his ranch, his spread, his dusty, spottily irrigated, citrus–tree–studded estate and manor in the New World – and there was a transformation for you. Now it was part of the stinking, creeping, blistered megalopolis – Teo’s hometown, incidentally – and E.F! had chosen it as the location for their Los Angeles chapter. Why? Because Teo knew it, and because it was quiet and dull, a place where people had jobs and foreign cars and repainted their classic 1950s ranch houses every other year in the same two basic colors. Ecotage? Never heard of it.

  Teo and Andrea didn’t have jobs. Neither, any longer, did Tierwater. Teo and Andrea were supported by E.F.! contributions, the money they made stumping in places like Croton, and, ultimately, by Tierwater. And Tierwater was supported by his dead father. This is called the food chain. ‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, his voice buried in a swamp of misery and depression, ‘but it’s killing me. It’s like going to a shrink when you’re a kid – did you ever go to a shrink?’

  She was sitting beside him on the couch. Phones were ringing, people moving incessantly from room to room, sweating and conspiratorial. She just lifted her eyebrows, noncommittal.

  ‘Just because you know what the problem is, just because you can express it in so many words, that doesn’t mean you can do anything about it. I feel impotent. Castrated. Fucked. I think I’m having a nervous breakdown here. I mean, I’ve dealt with grief before – grieving – but this is different. Nobody died.’ The effort of talking was giving him a headache. He was in a hyperbaric chamber, that’s what it was, and they’d screwed down the pressure so he could feel it in every pore. ‘Except maybe me.’

  She slipped down beside him, the curves and hollows of her body seeking his, holding him, mothering him, but it was no good. For one thing, it must have been ten degrees hotter inside than out. For another, the phones were ringing, a natural irritant, and the voices whispering. And then there was this, the issue he really hadn’t dealt with yet: resentment. How could he let himself be soothed by her when she was the one who’d dragged him into this, when she was the one to blame? ‘Listen,’ and she was whispering now, her breath sour, the smell of her underarms and the sweat sliding down her temples, one more weight crushing him, ‘Fred says – ’

  A
nd here was where the violence spurted out like bad blood, where push came to shove, Andrea on the floor suddenly, Tierwater up off the couch in a single snaking motion. He was shouting. Standing over her and shouting. ‘Fuck Fred!’ he shouted. ‘Fuck him! And fuck you too!’

  And then the letter came. It was in a stained envelope, invitation–size, and it wasn’t from his ex–secretary, his realtor in New York or any of the legal or social–service departments of Josephine County, Oregon. The handwriting – a random conjunction of block letters and an undisciplined, wobbling cursive – brought him out of his slumber. With trembling fingers, he tore open the flap – tore the letter inside into two curling strips, in fact – and saw Sierra’s hasty scrawl there on the back of a fast–food napkin. Dad, he read, they’ve got me at this farmers house in this town called i think Titansville or something come get me I’m going to die here Sierra.

  ‘I’m not going to do anything rash,’ he told Andrea in a kitchen full of volunteers, the wind flailing branches against the windows, flyers running hot off the Canon copier on the table, Teo on the phone in the corner, rubbing the unfashionable stubble of his athlete’s head as if the harder he rubbed, the more money he could conjure up out of the wires. It was two in the afternoon. He wouldn’t let her take the letter from him – the napkin, that is, already damp with his sweat – but he spread it across his palm for her to read.

  He watched her eyes.