A Friend of the Earth

by T. C. Boyle

  ‘The Maneater of the Luangwa,’ Tierwater said, shifting the weight off his bad leg.

  ‘Yes, sir, mighty impressive.’ Quinn had his back to Tierwater now, gazing up at the lion. ‘Had a bear once,’ he said, ‘nothing as impressive as this, of course, but I’d put the arrow in her myself, if you see what I mean, and I was attached to it. The taxidermist represented her couchant – lying there like a big spaniel, that is – which was all right, I suppose, though I would have preferred her rampant myself. Mavis, my first wife, hated the sight of her, and that was a sad thing, because she wound up taking her to the dump when I was off in Tulare on an arson investigation.’ He sighed, swung round on the rotating pole of one fleshless leg. ‘But I see you’re having yourself a drink there, and I was just wondering – ? Because I’d love one myself. Scotch with a splash of water, if it’s not too much trouble. And if you’ve got Dewar’s, that’d be brilliant.’

  Tierwater had seen this movie too, a hundred times – the self–righteous criminal and the unassuming detective – and yet he was playing right along, as locked into this role, this new role, the one he’d never auditioned for, as if it had been scripted. So he poured the man a drink, not so much nervous now as on his guard, and curious, definitely curious. Was this a friendly visit, one yokel neighbor rubbing up against another? Or was it about the gutted Cats and all the rest, was it about the fire? Because, if it was about the fire, he’d already said all he had to say on that subject – months ago, on a barstool – which is to say, no, he hadn’t seen anything suspicious.

  ‘No, sir,’ Quinn wheezed, poking round the room like a tourist in a museum while Tierwater stood at the counter, pouring scotch, ‘I’m up here enjoying myself now,’ and he might have been talking to himself – or answering Tierwater’s unasked question. ‘My family’s had a cabin here for twenty–some–odd years, did you know that? Up in back of the Reichert place? We got in when they first passed the bill allowing them to develop this little tract – lucky, I guess.’ A pause. He looked Tierwater dead in the eye. ‘To get in before the environmentalists started raising holy hell about it, I mean.’

  ‘Ice?’ Tierwater asked.

  ‘Just a splash of water, thanks.’

  Tierwater saw that he had a magazine in his hand now – The New Yorker — and he seemed to be examining the address label, but Tierwater (or Andrea, actually) had thought of everything, and that label read Tom Drinkwater, Star Route #2, Big Timber, CA 93265. ‘But, no, I’m not up on business this time – though the fire and all that vandalism still dogs me, it does, because I don’t feel I’ve done my job till those skulking cowards and arsonists are behind bars, where they belong; no, I’m just tracking a little bear. For when the bow season opens up – in August, that is. I just like to pick out a sow and follow her around till I know her habits as well as I know my own. Then I know I can get her whenever I want her.’

  So he was a hunter – what else would you expect? A killer of animals, a despoiler of the wild, a shit like all the rest of them. Insurance investigator. Yes. And what did they insure? The means of destruction, that’s what.

  Tierwater handed him his drink and gave him the steadiest look he was capable of under the circumstances. And how had he felt about the fire? In reality? Good, he’d felt good. And more: he’d felt like an avenger, like a god, sweeping away the refuse of the corrupted world to watch a new and purer one arise from the ashes.

  Thirty–five thousand acres, Ty, Andrea had cried, had shouted, so close to his face he could feel the aspirated force of each syllable like a gentle bombardment, thirty–five thousand acres of habitat, gone just like that. What about the deer, the squirrels, the trees and ferns and all the rest? He’d turned away, shrugged. Fire’s natural up here, you know that – the sequoia cones can’t even germinate without it. If you did a little research or even picked up a nature book once in a while instead of plotting demonstrations all the time, you’d know it’s the most natural thing in the world. Coming right back at him, she said, Sure, sure, but not if you start it with a match.

  ‘Cheers,’ Quinn said, as Tierwater handed him the drink. ‘But what happened to your leg – or is it your ankle?’

  Tierwater picked up his own drink – careful now, careful – and settled into the mopane armchair before he answered. ‘Just one of those things. We were out for a walk the other day, Dee Dee and me, right on the road here, and I wasn’t looking and stepped off the shoulder. Twisted my ankle. No big deal.’

  ‘Hah!’ Quinn cried, and he was as wizened as a monkey, all spidery limbs and one big bloated liver. ‘Getting old, is what it is. Reflexes shot, muscles all knotted up. And your knees – they’re the first thing to go. Then this.’ He pointed to his crotch and arched an eyebrow. ‘Oh, I could tell you, believe me.’ Sinking into the chair across from Tierwater, he paused to gulp at his drink – a double, in a glass the size of a goblet, because Tierwater was taking no chances: get him drunk and see if he tips his hand. And then, into the silence that followed on the heels of this last revelation, Quinn dropped his bomb: ‘So how’s the book coming?’

  (I was within an ace of saying, What book?, half cockeyed myself at that point, but panic does wonders for the mind, better than neuroboosters any day, and I barely fumbled over the reply. Which was, ‘Fine.’ This was our cover, of course – I was an aspiring novelist, working on my first book, and we’d come up to the mountain, my wife, Dee Dee, and my daughter, Sarah, and me, to rent our old friend Ratchiss’ place so I could have some peace and quiet to work in.)

  ‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ Quinn said, setting the glass down on the coffee table. ‘I don’t know how you people do it – writing, I mean – it’s just beyond me. People ask me, do I write, and I say yes, sure: checks.’ He had a laugh over that one, wheezed and coughed something up, then took a restorative gulp of Tierwater’s scotch. Or Ratchiss’, actually. ‘A novel, right?’ he said, cocking his head and pointing a single precautionary finger. ‘Would that be fiction or nonfiction?’

  ‘I, uh, well, I’m just in the beginning stages –’ Tierwater lifted his own glass to his lips and drank deeply.

  Quinn leaned forward, all eagerness. ‘So tell me, if it’s not a secret – what’s it about?’

  There was a pause. Tierwater went for his drink again. A hundred plots, subjects, scenarios crowded his brain. He could hear each individual flame licking away at each molecule of the split and seasoned wood, breaking it down, converting matter to energy, murdering the world. ‘Eskimos,’ he said finally.

  ‘Eskimos?’

  Tierwater studied the bloodless face. He nodded.

  Quinn sat stock–still a minute. All this time he’d been in motion, pressing, probing, snooping, rocking back and forth in his chair as if he were hooked up to a transformer, and now, suddenly, he was still. ‘Well, now, that’s a charge,’ he said finally, and gave a low whistle. ‘Now, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it’s your lucky day, Tom. You’re staring at a man who spent two years in Tingmiarmiut among the Inuit – back in the days when I was working for British Petroleum, that is. You spend much time up there?’ Suddenly he slapped his knee and gave out a strangled cry. ‘By Jesus God, I’ll bet you we know some of the same people – ’

  Salvation comes in many forms. This time it came in the form of Sierra. The door of her room flew open and the whole house was suddenly engulfed in a world–weary thump of drums and bass and the scream of a single suicidal guitar rattling round an echo chamber. She was dressed in black jeans with distressed knees, high–heeled boots and a blouse so small and shiny and black it could have been torn out of a baby’s casket. But for the black lipstick, she might have been a young Victorian widow, in mourning for her husband, the late industrialist. ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘have you seen my gum – you know, that bag of Plenti–Paks we bought down the mountain the other day?’

  The room reverberated. It shook. Sierra was already halfway to the fire when she notice
d Quinn huddled there in the chair in his face paint and his fatigues. ‘Oh, wow,’ she said, caught in mid–step, ‘I didn’t know we had company.’ She gave the insurance investigator a look and a tentative smile. ‘Are you guys going to a costume party or something?’

  Andrea passed out red berets all that summer, sold T–shirts imprinted with the raised red fist of the E.F.! logo and, in a wig that made her look like Barbara Bush’s love child, advised accounting majors, aspiring poets and premed students how best to bicycle–lock their heads to bulldozers, log trucks and the front doors of the Axxam Corporation’s headquarters in Severed Root, Kentucky. Teo started up an action camp for neophyte protestors and led marches on half a dozen lumber mills on the North Coast, and Ratchiss stayed at home in Malibu, watching the Discovery Channel and marveling at the way the sun glittered off the water at cocktail hour each day. Tierwater brooded. He dug up everything he could find on Eskimos, lest he should run into Declan Quinn over a plate of runny eggs and home fries at the lodge, played endless games of pitch and Monopoly with his daughter and went vengefully out into the night at least twice a week to beat back the tireless advance of progress.

  In mid–July, almost a year to the day after the Siskiyou fiasco, Tierwater was taking his ease on the rear deck one afternoon, studying the configurations of the clouds from the nest of his hammock and feeling as Thoreauvian as he was likely to. He and Sierra had got up early, driven down the highway and hiked out into the burn, and he’d been gratified to see how many of the big pines and redwoods had resisted the fire. They were scarred, certainly, raked from the ground up as if mauled by a set of huge black claws, but the winter’s snows had already worked the ash into the soil and seedlings were sprouting up everywhere. Better yet: the Penny Pines Plantation was no more, and there were no carved wooden signs announcing the largesse of Coast Lumber – or anything else, for that matter. And where the sawmill trees had stood in all their bio–engineered uniformity, there were now fields of wildflowers, rose everlasting, arnica, fireweed, mountain aster and a dozen others their field guide had no illustrations for. He picked a bouquet for Andrea, and felt he’d sown and nurtured each flower himself. This was nature as it was meant to be.

  Andrea was still in bed, snoring lightly, her hair spilled across the pillow, her mouth sagging open to reveal the glint of a gold–capped molar on the upper left side. Tierwater had stolen into the room an hour earlier and set the vase of flowers on the night table, then retired to the deck. His wife was worn out. She’d been away for the better part of a week, stirring up demonstrators and clandestinely visiting her former dentist, and had gotten in late. Tierwater had waited up for her, and they’d traded gossip and made love in the silent, still shell of the house that floated like a ship in the dark sea of the night. Now he was waiting up for her again. Sky–watching.

  It was no ordinary sky – rags and tatters of cloud unraveled across it like a scroll you could read if only you knew the language – but it put him to sleep nonetheless. When he opened his eyes, Andrea was there, sitting in the chair beside him, cradling a cup of coffee. The shadows had leapt over him. It must have been three in the afternoon.

  She said, ‘You’re awake.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think so.’

  Her hair was wet from the shower, ropy and robbed of its sheen, and she bowed her head to work a comb through it. ‘You see anything of that little snoop while I was gone?’ He watched her fingers, her hands, the snarl of hair. ‘You know, what’s–his–name – the drunk.’

  ‘Quinn?’

  She threw her head back and ran both hands through the wet hair, shaking out the excess moisture; it was so still he could hear the whisper of the odd droplet hitting the deck. ‘I can’t believe you let him in that night. He’s not as stupid as he looks. Or as drunk either.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’

  ‘Tell him you had a headache. Heartburn. The flu. Tell him your wife was in a mood and your father just died. Tell him anything. You think if I was home he would have got two feet inside that door?’

  Tierwater offered her a grin, but she wasn’t receiving it. She’d dipped her head again and the comb was working furiously at a dark knotted tangle. ‘You’re tougher than I am. Everybody knows that.’

  She threw her head back and the hair with it. Now she was glaring. ‘It’s no joke, Ty. He’s on to us – if you can’t see that you’re nuts. And I tell you, we’re not moving again, not with Sierra in school and – ’

  ‘Who said anything about moving?’

  ‘I did. It’s that or go to jail, isn’t it? It’s that or the FB–fucking–I kicking down the door at four in the morning.’

  Tierwater felt a chill go through him. Did she really think that? How would anybody know anything? There was no evidence, not a scrap of it. And any sort of background check would just turn up the clean, sweet, uncomplicated and lovingly fabricated record of Tom Drinkwater, ex–schoolteacher, budding novelist, family man. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  She wasn’t kidding. ‘I warned you,’ she said, and then she launched into a neat little prepackaged speech, one she must have been rehearsing all the way up the coast. She’d been back to Oregon. She’d seen Fred. ‘He’s put in something like two hundred hours on this, Ty – he’s practically bent over and kissed the DA’s ass, not to mention the feds – and he’s got us a deal. No more false names, no more worrying about every knock at the door.’

  Tierwater looked beyond her to where the aspens caught the first hint of a breeze coming in out of the west. It was warm in the sun and the woods were silent but for the drone of the meat bees – the yellow jackets – that nested in the ground every ten feet in every direction for as far as you could see. ‘I’m going to jail,’ he said, ‘right?’ He swung his legs out of the hammock, set his feet down on the deck. ‘But you’re not.’

  ‘That’s right, Ty: I’m not. But I didn’t assault anybody or break out of jail either. Hey, but let’s not argue, because this is right, you know it is, and it’s going to be the best thing for Sierra.’

  He wanted to tell her about the Eskimos, how they had no jails or laws and lived within the bounds of nature – they didn’t even cook their meat, because they had no wood or coal or oil, which is why they’d been called Eskimos in the first place: Eaters of Raw Flesh. And when they had a dispute, they didn’t need lawyers to settle it for them – the injured parties would sing insults at each other till one of them lost his composure. The one who broke down first was the loser, simple as that. Of course, by the same token, Tierwater understood that he wouldn’t fare any better under their system than under Fred and Judge Duermer’s – not with his temper.

  ‘It’s all set,’ Andrea said. ‘The DA – he’s new to the job, a man by the name of Horner, a younger guy? – he understands that all this arose out of a peaceable demonstration and that you were just trying to protect your daughter – ’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean – how much time do I have to do?’

  She looked away, fussed with her hair. ‘Six months,’ she said. ‘To a year. But, listen, I get off with probation only – and we get Sierra back. That’s the important thing. I mean, isn’t it?’

  At first he wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t even consider it. Give himself up? Go to jail? For what? This wasn’t Nazi Germany, was it? This wasn’t Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Jail? He was outraged. So outraged he’d punted a chair into the hot tub, hopped the railing and stalked off across the yard and into the trees. He sat out there in the woods all afternoon with the meat bees, each a perfect replica of the one that had done Jane in, turning it over in his mind. He had a yellow pine for a back rest, and he crossed his outstretched legs at the ankles, brought back down to earth – no more cloud–gazing today. He studied his clasped hands, the scatter of pine cones, the carpenter ants scaling his boots. Every few minutes, as the sun fell through the trees and the ravens called and the chipmunks flew
across the duff like skaters on a pond, a yellow jacket would land on his exposed forearms or the numb monument of his face – not to sting, but to taste, to see if he was indeed made of meat, rent meat, meat sweet with the taste of fresh blood. Finally, at cocktail hour, when all the trees were striped with pale bands of sunlight and the birds began to hurtle through the branches in their prenocturnal frenzy, he got up, brushed himself off and ambled back to the house.

  Andrea was sitting at the kitchen table with Sierra, both of them intent on the fashion magazines she’d brought back with her from the world below. There was something in the microwave, revolving endlessly – macaroni and cheese, from the smell of it. Three places were set at the table, and a bowl of salad, garnished with slices of tomato and avocado, stood on the counter. Tierwater said nothing, aside from a grunt of acknowledgment in response to Andrea’s muted greeting, but went straight to the liquor cabinet and poured two tall vodka–tonics with a squeeze of lime. He took a long swallow from the nearest one, then crossed the room and handed the other to his wife. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay, you’re right.’

  Sierra was absorbed in the page in front of her, gloss and color, some band, some actress, some model. Without looking up, she said, ‘About what?’

  Andrea signaled him with her eyes. ‘Nothing, honey,’ he said automatically, and then he wandered out onto the deck, leaving the sliding door ajar behind him. A moment later, Andrea joined him, drink in hand. He turned to watch her as she slid the door closed.

  ‘Good, Ty,’ she said, ‘it’s for the best. We can get out from under all this.’

  He dropped his eyelids, shrugged, felt the sting of the ice as he lifted the drink to his lips.

  She was in his arms, hugging him, her face pressed to his. ‘But you haven’t heard the best part yet, and this is great, you’re going to love this – ’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, pushing away from her and stepping back to the edge of the deck, ‘I’ll bet. But don’t tell me: you’re going to bake me cookies every week while I’m in jail, right? You’re going to knit me a sweater for those frosty nights on the cellblock when the sons of bitches won’t turn the heat on – ’