by T. C. Boyle
No lights on in the house, no dogs, sleeping or otherwise. Tierwater tried the door at the back of the garage, barely a creak of the hinges, and then he was inside. The pinkish glow of the flashlight revealed three cars, and what was this – a Lexus? Two Lexuses – Lexi – one silver, one black, his and hers. And some sort of sportscar, an old Jaguar, it looked like, big wire wheels, running boards – lovingly, as they say, restored. Imagine that – imagine Judge Duermer, robeless, a porkpie cap pulled down over his fat brow, wedged into the puny leather seat of the roadster, Sunday afternoon, roaaaaarrrrrr, hi, judge, and a safe sweet taste of the bohemian life to you too. But Tierwater wasn’t there to imagine things, and it took him less than five minutes to locate the cars’ crankcases, lovingly tap a few ounces of silicon carbide into each and close the hoods with a click as soft as the beat of a moth’s wing.
There were lights on at the police station, some poor drone – Sheets, maybe it was Sheets – putting in his time by the telephone, waiting for the call from the old woman who’d lost her glasses or maybe the one with the raccoon in her kitchen. The town stood still. The rain fell. Tierwater could see his breath steaming in front of his face. He couldn’t get at the hoods of the two cruisers parked out front of the place, but they hadn’t thought to put locking caps on the gas tanks. It hurt him to have to settle for slashing the tires, jamming the locks with slivers of wood and pouring diatomaceous earth into the gas tanks, but there wasn’t much more he could do, short of firebombing the station itself, and he didn’t want to alert anybody to what was going down here, especially not Sheriff Bob Hicks. Because Sheriff Bob Hicks (wife, Estelle), of 17 Spruce Lane, was next on the list.
This was where things got tricky. Sheriff Bob Hicks lived outside of town, on a country road fringed with blackly glistening weeds and long–legged shrubs, no other house in sight, rainwater gurgling in the ditches and no place to pull over – at least no place where the car wouldn’t be seen if anyone passed by. It was getting late too – quarter past four by Tierwater’s watch – and who knew what hour people around here got up to let the cat out, pour a cup of coffee and stare dreaming into the smoke of their first cigarette? Tierwater found the mailbox set out on the road, number 17, the house dark beyond it, and drove on by, looking for a turnout so he could double back, do what he had to do and head back to the bosom of his family. But the road wasn’t cooperating. It seemed to get progressively narrower. And darker. And the rain was coming down harder now, raking the headlights in sheets so dense he could barely see the surface of the road.
For a minute he thought about giving it up – just getting out of there and back to the interstate before he got the car stuck in a ditch or wound up getting shot at or thrown in jail. What he was doing wasn’t honorable, he knew that, and it wasn’t stopping the logging or helping the cause in even the most marginal way – Andrea was right: he should let it go. But he couldn’t. What they’d done to him – the sheriff, the judge, Boehringer and Butts (and he’d like to pay them a visit too, but life was short and you couldn’t settle every score) – was no different from what Johnny Taradash had done. Or tried to do. Just thinking about it made the blood come up in him: a year in jail, a year listening to Bill Driscoll moan in his sleep, a year torn out of his life like a chapter from a book. And for what? For what? When he saw a driveway emerge from the vegetation up on his left, he jerked the wheel and spun the car around, and so what if he took some stupid hick’s mailbox with him?
The rain was blinding, absolutely, and where was the damn house anyway? Was that it up there? No. Just another bank of trees. He swiped at the moisture on the inside of the window with an impatient hand, fumbled with the defroster. And then he came around a bend in the road and saw a sight that shrank him right down to nothing: there was Sheriff Bob Hicks’ mailbox, all right, illuminated in the thin stream of the headlights, but a long, flat, lucent object had been coughed up out of the night beside it. It might have been a low–slung billboard, a cutout, the fixed reflective side of a shed or trailer, but it wasn’t: it was a police cruiser. Sheriff Bob Hicks’ police cruiser. And Sheriff Bob Hicks, a long–jawed, white–faced apparition in a floppy hat, was frozen there at the wheel, as if in an overexposed photo.
Tierwater’s first impulse was to slam on the brakes, but he resisted it: to stop was to invite disaster. Windshield wipers clapping, defroster roaring, tires spewing cascades of their own, the rental car crept innocuously past the driveway, Tierwater shrinking from the headlights that lit up the front seat like a stage – and would the sheriff be able to see the slashes of greasepaint beneath his eyes, the watchcap clinging to his scalp? Would he recognize him? Was he looking? Did he wear glasses? Were they fogged up? And what was the man doing up at this hour, anyway? Had he gotten a call from the station, Better get on down here, Chief, some asshole’s gone and slashed the tires on two of the squad cars, was that it?
Sheriff Bob Hicks could have turned either way on that road – he could have backed up the driveway and gone back to bed, for that matter – but he turned right, the headlights of the patrol car shooting off into the night and then swinging round to appear in Tierwater’s rearview mirror. Heart in mouth, Tierwater snatched off the watchcap, cranked the window enough to wet it and used the rough acrylic weave to scrub the greasepaint from his face. He was doing, what, thirty, thirty–five miles an hour? Was that too fast? Too slow? Weren’t you supposed to drive according to the conditions? The rain crashed down; the headlights closed on him.
For an instant, he thought of running – of flooring it and losing the bastard – but he dismissed the idea as soon as it came into his head. He didn’t even know what kind of car he was driving – the cheapest compact, some Japanese piece of crap that wouldn’t have outrun an old lady on a bicycle – and besides, nothing had happened yet. There was no reason to think he’d be pulled over. He just had to stay calm, that was all. But here were the headlights looming up in his mirror and then settling in behind him, moving along at the same excruciatingly slow pace that he was. His hands gripped the wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet. He tried to project innocence through the set of his shoulders, the back of his head, his ears. He sped up ever so slightly.
The worst thing was Andrea. Or no, Sierra. How was he going to explain this to her? Out of jail a week and a half, and back behind bars already? He hadn’t even attended a parent/teacher conference yet. And Chris Mattingly and all the rest of them – what were they going to think? He could see the headlines already, ECO–HERO TARNISHED; E.F.! TIRE–SLASHER; TIERWATER A PETTY VANDAL. Then he had a vision of Lompoc, Judge Duermer, Fred: this time it wouldn’t be prison camp. Oh, no: this time it would be a cell on a cellblock, gangs, rape, intimidation, level two at least, maybe worse. Violation of parole, in possession of burglary tools, breaking and entering, destruction of private and public property, use of an alias in the commission of a crime –
But then a miracle happened. Slowly, with all the prudence and slow, safe, peace–officerly care in the world, Sheriff Bob Hicks swung the cruiser out to the left and for the smallest fraction of a moment pulled up even with Tierwater before easing in ahead of him. Through two rain–scrawled side windows and the intermediary space of the rain–thick night, Tierwater caught a glimpse of the man himself, the incurious eyes and pale bloated face that was like something unearthed from the ground, the quickest exchange of hazy early–morning looks, and then the sheriff was a pair of taillights receding in the gloom.
Santa Ynez, April 2026
The first one to show up, aside from the county sheriff and the coroner, is a lawyer, and if that isn’t emblematic of what we’ve become, then I don’t know what is. He’s about the size you think of when you think of regular, with a pillbox of kinky hair set up high against a receding hairline, teeth that look as if they’ve been filed and a pair of five–hundred–dollar fake–grain vinyl shoes so encrusted with mud he’s had to remove them and stand there on the doorstep in his muddy socks. His suit i
s soaked through. His tie is twisted up under his collar like a hangman’s noose. And his briefcase – his briefcase is just a crude clay sculpture, with a long trailing fringe of pondweed. In the confusion of that house, in the shock, horror and trauma following in the wake of Mac’s death, there’s nobody to answer the door, and while the sheriff and his men are prowling around upstairs and the coroner’s people zipping up the body bags, I’m the one who responds to the ‘Chariots of Love’ theme and swings open the door on the eighteenth repetition of that unforgettable melody. ‘Good afternoon,’ he says, as if we’re standing in the hallway at the county courthouse, ‘I’m Randy Bowgler, of Bowgler and Asburger? I represent Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Pulchris. May I come in?’
Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose: that’d be Mac’s third wife, the real–estate heiress, the one with eyes like two cold planets glittering in the night.
I’m looking out over the hill in front of the house, the ambulance and police cruiser stuck up to their frames in the muck of the receding river and the media vans beginning to gather on the horizon like the vanished herds of old. It must be a hundred and fifteen degrees out there. ‘I don’t think so,’ I say.
‘I’m here to protect my client’s interests, Mr., ah – I didn’t catch your name?’
‘I already gave at the office,’ I tell him.
His lips curl into a tight, litigious smile. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, and my heart is still jumping at my ribs four hours after the fact, ‘well, fuck you too,’ and I slam the door in his face.
What’s going on here is chaos of the worst and blackest sort. Dandelion, as best we can tell, is back down in the basement with Amaryllis and Buttercup. What he did to Mac is worse, far worse, than anything I’d heard about in rap sessions in prison or seen in the old nature clips of the Serengeti. Mac’s insides – heart, liver, lungs, intestines – are the first thing the lion apparently consumed, and then, before Chuy and I could get back up the stairs with the Nitro and the dart gun, he dragged the meatier of the Als to the dumbwaiter and disappeared into the basement with him. The other Al was sprawled across the sofa with one arm bent the wrong way at the elbow and his scalp torn back so the parietal bone showed white beneath it, and both the servants had been swatted down like insects, Zulfikar crumpled in the corner in a dark pool and his wife draped over a chair with her throat torn out. April Wind we found whimpering inside one of the compartments in the sideboard. We helped her out, boarded up the dumbwaiter on all three floors and called 911.
No sooner do I shut the door than the ‘Chariots of Love’ theme starts up again, and then again, and I’m wondering, how in Christ’s name did this ghoul find out already? Did he have a direct hookup to 911? Had he paid somebody off? Was he circling the house on leather wings? No matter. The Nitro is propped up against the wall behind me, and I just pluck it up, aim it letter–high and swing open the door again. I admit it – I’m agitated and maybe not entirely in my right mind, whatever that is. Anyway, I level the thing at him and growl something out of the corner of my mouth and he actually takes a step back, but by now a very wet crew with a minicam is sprinting across the lawn and flashbulbs are popping in the distance, and I figure it’s a losing proposition. Down goes the gun. In comes the lawyer.
Mac’s death is big news. Not as big maybe as McCartney’s or Garth Brooks’, but it’s really something. Within the hour, the HDTV screen is showing images of the death scene intercut with clips of Mac at various stages of his career and the shock and disbelief registering on the faces of fans from Buenos Aires to Hyderabad and Martha’s Vineyard (now largely under water, by the way). I’m sitting there in the Grunge Room, trying to catch my breath, cops, journalists and lawyers flitting back and forth like flies dive–bombing a plate of custard, when April Wind appears on the big screen across from the bed. She’s squinting into the camera not two hundred feet from where I’m sitting, a dazzled look on her face, the dwarf become a giant. Like all Americans, she was born with the ability to talk to a camera. ‘It was horrible,’ she’s saying, ‘because we were eating eggs, or we were just about to, and then there’s this like roar, and I, I – ’
The camera never wavers, April Wind’s face revealed in every pixil and particle, a sorrowful face, the face of tragedy and woo–woo gone down in flames, but a voice slips in over her own, lathered with concern: ‘You were his last lover, isn’t that right?’
Of all the journalists there that afternoon and late into the night – young hotshots, most of them, scud studs and the like – only one of them has been around long enough to take a second look at me. He’s maybe fifty, fifty–five. Short, glasses, frizz of a beard gone white around the gills. It’s getting dark out by this time, and we’re all gathered in the Motown Room – even Chuy – for what I suppose you’d call a press conference, though there’s precious little conferring going on. ‘You’re —’ he sputters, police everywhere, the lions roaring from the basement, film rolling, Andrea and April Wind pinned in the corner with two dozen microphones jabbing at them like the quills of a porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum, now endangered throughout its range) – ‘you’re Tyrone Tierwater, aren’t you – the eco–radical?’
My back hurts. My feet. I have a headache. My gums are aching round the cold porcelain of my dental enhancements, I could use a drink and I’m hungry – we never did get those eggs, or anything else for that matter. I wave a hand in deprecation. ‘Eco–what?’
‘You’re him, aren’t you?’ There are lights everywhere, heads talking, sound bites crackling from every room of the house. ‘What was it – twenty years ago? The Cachuma Incident, right?’
The man’s a historian, no doubt about it, and right here, right now, in the midst of all this chaos, he takes me back to a dark, pitching lake and a boat that trembled under my feet like a false floor that drops you headlong into the infinite. The Cachuma Incident. What can I say? There’s no excuse or exculpation for what I did, or tried to do. My daughter was dead and my wife may as well have been, and the names of the animals were on my lips day and night – six billion of us at that point and how many gorillas, chimps, manatees, spotted owls, Amboseli lions?
It was my darkest moment – skull–and–crossbones time, hyena time. I was fighting a war, you understand, and maybe I lost my judgment, if I ever had any. In the company of an FBI agent posing as a disaffected scientist from BioGen and a shit by the name of Sandman (more on him later), I found myself out on those windswept waters with eight big plastic buckets of tetrodotoxin at my feet. The lake was in the Santa Ynez Valley and it constituted the water supply for the city of Santa Barbara. The toxin, the very same concentrated in the liver of the puffer fish – fugu, that is – was produced by the Alteromas bacteria, it was twelve hundred and fifty times more deadly than cyanide, and it had been mutated in the lab to adapt itself to fresh water. Or so it appeared, but appearances can be deceiving.
In truth, Sandman and the FBI agent (tattoos, tongue stud, the true look of the transgenetic nerd) had set me up, hoping, I think, to use me to get to the leadership of E.F.!, but by then Andrea and Teo and all the rest of them had turned their backs on me, so it was this or nothing. And when it came right down to it, when it was time to tip the buckets and begin evening the score in favor of the animals, I couldn’t do it. Though I’d steeled myself, though I seethed and hated and reminded myself that to be a friend of the earth you have to be an enemy of the people, though Sandman and I had agreed a hundred times that if a baby and an anteater fell in a drainage ditch at the same time the baby would have to be sacrificed, though this was the final solution and I the man chosen to administer it, when it came right down to it, I faltered. I did. Believe me. Give me that much at least.
‘Am I right?’ The man’s face is anxious, blistered, peeled back like a skinned grape. ‘You’re the one they called the human hyena, aren’t you?’
I’m in a chair in the front hallway. I can hear Andrea’s cracked, vinegary old lady�
��s voice going on for the hundredth time about Dandelion and how ‘he was just suddenly there, as if he appeared out of thin air.’ I’ve never seen so many cops – in plain clothes, in blue, in the dun of the highway patrol. Down in the basement, sniffing warily, is a SWAT team from San Luis Obispo, ready to do what needs to be done. My heart is broken – or, no, it’s smashed, laid out on the chopping block and beaten with a mallet till all the fibers have been reduced to paste. Mac is gone. And the animals are next in line. I don’t bother to answer.
‘But what are you doing here?’ the man says, and he’s got a microphone too, a slim black thing like the barrel of a gun pointing at my face. ‘Do you know Maclovio Pulchris? Or did you, I mean?’
I’m thinking about that, about Mac and how he gave me a break when I got out of prison for the last time – me, a nobody, one of five or six lackeys charged with looking after the Vietnamese pot–bellied pigs, the emus, horses and dogs, no job more menial on the whole estate. But it was a beginning, and I was glad for it. And it wasn’t long before he singled me out and we began to talk – about the pigs and their diet at first, but then about other things too, far–ranging things like the weather and the death of the planet and the possibility of God and who I really was – my name wasn’t Tom Drinkwater, was it? He recognized me. Behind those shades and eel whips and all the rest, Mac went deeper than you might think. He’d known all along. Known who I was and taken a chance. After that, well, the others fell by the wayside, all except for Chuy, that is, and Mac and I hatched our scheme to do what nature and the zoos were incapable of – and we almost succeeded too. But, of course, to say ‘almost’ is meaningless. We could have succeeded, let’s put it that way – if things had been different. Vastly different.
