by T. C. Boyle
The first of a series of muffled shots sounds from deep in the bowels of the house. ‘Were you here when he died? Can you tell me anything about that, what it was like, I mean?’
‘Because of the storms,’ Andrea is saying from the far side of the room, a hint of exasperation in her voice, ‘because of the flooding – ’
And Chuy, fencing with his own circle of microphones: ‘No, man, I’m corriendo, you know, up out of el garaje, and Dandy, he’s muy malo – ’
Pop. Pop. Pop–pop. That’s what I’m hearing, but what I’m seeing is dead lions, dead peccaries, jackals, vultures, living flesh converted to so much furred and feathered meat, extinction in a wheelbarrow.
‘There are wild animals in the house,’ the reporter is saying, and he’s trying to work a little moral outrage into his voice, ‘living right here in the rooms and wandering the halls. Isn’t that right?’
Pop. Pop–pop. I nod my head. Wearily.
The sheen of his glasses, the thrust of the mike. ‘Maybe you can explain it for me, because I think I’m missing something here – isn’t that dangerous?’
After the cops, after the scribblers and the talking heads, after the lawyers, bereaved fans, curiosity seekers and relic peddlers, the book editors start dribbling in from New York, Berlin, Los Andiegoles. Mac’s been buried three days when the first of them shows up (the funeral was in Detroit, televised of course, and it was built around a six–hour memorial concert featuring pop stars of the past, distant past and present hammering out ensemble renditions of Mac’s big hits while legions of weeping fans swayed in place and held up candles and cigarette lighters in a blaze so prodigious it must have added half a degree to the average temperature of the globe). Our position here – mine, Andrea’s, April Wind’s, Chuy’s, the surviving animals’ – is tenuous, to say the least. Mac died intestate, and the lawyers representing his four wives, real and putative mistresses, children legitimate and il-, not to mention the various record companies that claim rights in various songs and recordings, are fighting a battle royal over his estate. I have no claim on anything. I don’t even have an income. Or health care. The animals – we’ve still got a few peccaries left, a pair of honey badgers, three Egyptian vultures and Petunia – have even less.
What I’m trying to say is, I’m scared – rudderless, incomeless, Social Security—less and soon to be homeless too, no doubt – and I’m ready to welcome this editor with open arms (not to be mercenary about it, but if there’s money in it I’ll do an as–told–to account of my years with Mac and my life as a monkeywrencher and push April Wind’s hagiography of Sierra on him too). And who is he? Ronnie Bott, of Bertelsmann West, the biggest – the only – publishing house in New York. He comes the way of Randy Bowgler and the rest of the parade of lawyers, journalists and deranged fans (several of whom are even now peering in at the windows, despite the efforts of the rent–a–cop outfit Mac’s first wife’s lawyer hired to keep them at bay): across the all–but–dried–up Pulchris River, currently breached by a crude bridge of whorled imitation–plywood slabs laid out in the mud. It’s 9:00 a.m. and a hundred and ten degrees, with a screaming wind out of the southeast, when the ‘Chariots of Love’ theme re–echoes through the house. Andrea’s in bed, of course, and April Wind, who’s arranged this whole thing, is locked in her room doing her Tantric exercises, so it’s Ty Tierwater, aching knees and all, to the door again.
What do I do? I fix the man a tall glass of iced tea and settle him down in the Motown Room, just under the glowing electronic portrait of the Four Tops. He looks to be no more than fourteen (though I know he must be older), sporting one of the wide–collared shirts and patterned vests that seem to have come back into fashion, along with the bell–bottoms and high–heeled boots. As for the rest: long hair, no hint of musculature or even a beard, a spatter of what could only be acne clinging to his right cheek. I ease into the chair across from him, clutching my own sweating glass of iced tea, and give him a look of wisdom and ready access.
‘So,’ he says, shifting in his seat and crossing, then uncrossing, his legs, ‘you ran Maclovio Pulchris’ private menagerie, is that right?’
’Ten years of shoveling shit,’ I say, and look down at the wedge of lemon floating round the rim of my glass.
‘You were in charge of the lions, then?’
‘That’s right. They required plenty of shit–shoveling too. And meat. Of course, with the world the way it is, it was no easy thing keeping them fed and reasonably healthy, and if it wasn’t for the permanent fucking El Niño we’ve got going here they’d be’ – and here I have to pause to deal with a sudden constriction in the back of my throat that just about chokes off my windpipe – ‘they’d be fine still. And so would Mac’
The editor – what was his name?, because I’ve lost it – he just nods.
‘You know who I am,’ I say, ‘right?’
He nods again.
I lean into the platform of my bony old man’s knees and give him my cagiest look, and I can see myself in shadowy reflection in the sheen of Marvin Gaye’s portrait, hanging opposite. I look like a Yankee horse–trader, a used–car salesman – or, worse, a fundamentalist preacher. ‘You want a book, I’ll give you a book. Not just about Mac or my daughter, but about me and what I’ve been through trying to save this woebegone planet and the, the’ – there it is again, the involuntary contraction at the back of my throat – ‘the animals.’ And here I have to pause a minute to collect myself. My heart is heavy. My mind is numb. There’s moisture gathering in the desiccated corners of my old man’s eyes and I have to pinch it away with two trembling fingers.
‘That’s what we were trying to do here, Mac and me,’ I say, and I’m pleading with him, I can’t help myself, ‘save the animals. It’s too late for the earth. Or for us. But the animals, if only we can keep them from extinction until we’re gone – they’ll adapt, they will, and something new will come up in our place. That’s our hope. Our only hope.’
I guess by this point I’ve got to my feet and I’m trying to marshal my thoughts to tell him about extinction, about how we’re at the very end of the sixth great extinction to hit this planet, caused by us, by man, by progress, and how speciation will occur after we’re gone, an explosion of new forms springing up to fill all the vacated niches, a transformation like nothing we’ve known since the Cambrian explosion of five hundred seventy million years ago, but he’s not listening. It’s 9:15 a.m., he’s come all the way from New York and he’s stifling a yawn on Mac’s couch beneath the undulating portrait of the Four Tops in the Motown Room. He doesn’t want to hear about the environment – the environment is all indoors now anyway, right on down to the domed fields that produce the arugula for his salads and the four–walled space he calls home. The environment is a bore. And nobody wants to read about it – nobody wants to hear about it – and, for all April Wind’s machinations (and Andrea’s), nobody wants to hear about Sierra either. Or me. No, what they want – and it comes to me with a clarity I can only attribute to the neurobooster cap I popped earlier this morning – what they want is to know if the weather will ever go back to normal and what Maclovio Pulchris’ sex life was like.
And here, right on cue, is tiny, cute little not–so–young April Wind, baby–stepping across the room like some idol of the Ituri pygmies, to tell all.
If Ronnie Bott and Bertelsmann West don’t give two shits about my daughter and the sacrifices she made or the world beyond their computer screens, I do, I still do, and I can’t help myself. Call it the intransigence of age. Call it nostalgia. But after skirting April Wind for five months and resenting the hell out of her wheedling questions and the whole idea of a Sierra Tierwater biography, now that it’s gone I want it back more desperately than I wanted it to disappear in the first place. Does that make sense? All right, call it senility, then. Call it hope, resentment, despair, call it anything you like, but I want to testify, and I will, even if I have to slip into April Wind’s room, filch the manuscript a
nd finish the thing myself.
Sierra gave up everything for an ideal, and if that isn’t the very definition of heroism I don’t know what is. Once she was up in her tree, that was it, her life was over. She never had children, never had a house, a pet, an apartment even, she never again went shopping, bought something on impulse, watched TV or a movie, never had a friend or a lover. She was separated from her father by six hundred and thirteen horizontal miles and one hundred and eighty vertical feet, and she might as well have been in prison too. For three years, through the refrigerated winter and the kiln that was summer, she never bathed. Her clothes stank, her skin burned, she ate rice and vegetables six days a week and lentil soup on Sundays. She squatted over a bucket to move her bowels. Her fingers and toes felt as if they were going to fall off, her back ached worse than her father’s, she had a cavity in one of her upper molars and it threatened to bore right through her head. She never went to Paris. Never went to grad school. Never stretched out on a couch in front of a fire and listened to the rain on the roof.
Coast Lumber tried to ignore her at first, but after El Niño failed to dislodge her, she became an embarrassment – and, worse, a liability. Because the longer she held out, the more people began to take notice. No one had been up a tree more than twenty days before Sierra climbed up into Artemis, and as she reached the one–month mark the press started to converge on her dwindling grove in the Headwaters Forest. Teo, never one to miss an opportunity, led them to the base of the tree himself, and even helped hoist some of the hardier ones up to the lower platform (she had two by then, one at a hundred feet, which she used for interviews and cooking; the other at one eighty, which was her private space, for meditation and sleep). Andrea gave her a cell phone too, and by the end of the second month, she was spending two or three hours a day on it, chatting with her father and stepmother sometimes, sure, but mainly giving interviews, educating the public, throwing down a gauntlet in the duff.
The other two tree–sitters – a skinny girl with a buzz cut and a sad–eyed, bearded nineteen–year–old known only as Leaf, each perched in a neighboring grove – had given up after the first week of unappeasable rain and fifty–mile–per–hour gusts, and Coast Lumber, I’m sure, felt vindicated. Sit on your hands, that was their policy. Avoid force. Squelch bad press before it can poke its ugly head out of its hole and bite you in the foot. But my daughter was something they hadn’t reckoned with. She wasn’t your ordinary body–piercing neo–hippie college kid chanting slogans and chaining herself to the bumpers of corporate town–cars on her summer vacation, she was a shining symbol high up in the tower of her tree, she was immovable, unshakable, Joan of Arc leading her troops into battle, with nothing to lose but the bones of her flesh. They had to get rid of her. They had no choice.
Pick a morning, midway through the second month. Seven a.m. A light rain falling with the slow, shifting rhythm of the infinite, the serried trees, the sky so close it seems illuminated from within. Sierra is asleep. Encased in her thermals, wrapped in her mummy bag, stretched out on her insulated mat beneath the roof of her Popsicle–orange tent on her cramped wooden platform one hundred and eighty feet above the ground. The forest breathes in and out. A marbled murrelet perches on a branch fifty feet below her. She’s dreaming of flying. Not of falling – that’s a dream she refuses to entertain up here in a bed this high above the earth, even in her unconscious – but of sprouting wings and diving off the platform to swoop low over the lumber mill and then rise up aloft until the forest falls away and then the hills and even the ocean, higher and higher until she’s dodging satellites in the glittering metallic bands of their orbits and can gaze down on the earth unobstructed. The blue planet. It’s there in her half–waking mind, right there behind her eyelids, sustained in nothing but the cold black reaches, when, suddenly, the platform shudders.
She wakes. Looks through the aperture at the south end of her tent. And sees a hand, a human hand, tensed there on the corner of the platform like a bird–eating spider hatched in the forests of the Amazon. She’s dreaming. Surely she’s still dreaming, asleep and awake at the same time. There’s a grunt, and then another hand appears – and in the next instant a head pops into view, presumptive eyes, the sliver of a mouth, a face framed in a beard the color of used coffee grounds. It is a face of insinuation, and it belongs to Climber Deke, a twenty–eight–year–old employee of Coast Lumber who specializes in ascending trees and escorting trespassers to the ground, where they can be duly arrested and charged.
One hundred and eighty feet above the ground. From that height, looking down, it might as well be three hundred feet. People are the size of puppets, the squirrels and chipmunks rocketing through the duff all but invisible, downed branches, manzanita bushes and boulders like the pattern in a tribal carpet. Sierra disdains ropes, harnesses or any other sort of safety devices. She goes barefoot, the better to grip the bark, and she relies on Artemis – her tree, the spirit of her tree – to sustain her. ‘Who – ?’ she says, and can’t get the rest of it out.
He’s got a knee on the platform now, and his eyes have never left hers, no diffidence here, no higher feelings about slipping into a girl’s bedroom while she sleeps or invading a stranger’s space. And the thing is, he’s not bad–looking: every hair in place, the beard neatly clipped, the sliver of a mouth widening in a smile, the eyes friendly now and warm. ‘Good morning, Sierra,’ he says, and she likes his voice too, wondering if he isn’t one of the new support people from E.F.! or maybe a truly intrepid journalist, but then, in the same moment, she’s annoyed. They know she doesn’t give interviews this early – and they should know enough to call first, too. Her hair is a disaster. She claps a knit cap over it, sits up and kicks her legs out of the sleeping bag. And Climber Deke? He’s crouched at the end of her platform in his spiked shoes – six–by–eight, that’s all she’s got here, two sheets of plywood, and he’s halving her space, she can feel the weight of him, can feel her platform adjusting itself to accommodate him. ‘You know who I am?’
Under the orange canopy, her feet bare and already cold, sweats and a parka and thermals on underneath. Is this some sort of quiz, is that what it is? She looks into his eyes and watches them go cold, even though he’s smiling still. ‘No,’ she says, her breath hanging there as if the single syllable were concrete. Everything is wet. And slick. It can’t be much more than forty degrees.
He’s wearing a flannel shirt, wet with sweat or the rain or a combination of the two, jeans, a thermal T–shirt the color of dried blood visible at his open collar, some sort of elaborate tech–pro watch, and suspenders – red suspenders. ‘My name’s Deke,’ he says, ‘Climber Deke is what they call me, actually,’ and his smile has become a grin, as if this were the world’s richest joke. She knows who he is. Now she knows. The suspenders would have told her if he hadn’t. ‘I’m here to bring you down. And we can do it the easy way – the civilized way – or we can get rough, if that’s how you want it. But you’re coming down out of this tree, little lady, and you’re coming down now.’ He pauses to shift his weight to his knees and the platform trembles. ‘And don’t look to your friends for help, because we just happened to detain and arrest three of them on their way in here from the road this morning – trespassing, that’s the charge – and I’m afraid I had to dismantle your lower platform, the one with all the food and your camp stove? Yeah, honey, you’d just starve up here anyways, so why don’t you just dump what you want to take over the side here and we’ll be on our way.’
‘Okay,’ she says – that’s what my daughter says, ‘okay’ – and her voice is so soft he can barely hear her. But he nods – she really hasn’t got any choice, she’s breaking the law up here and he’d strap her to his back if it came to that, and handcuff her too – and settles down on his flanks to give her time to bring down the tent and roll up her sleeping bag and get rid of the damned New Age hippie mural of a butterfly she’s painted on a piece of canvas as if this were a walkup on Ashbury or something
. Sierra crawls out of the tent – six by eight – and rises to her feet so that she’s standing over him, just inches away from his crossed ankles, and she makes as if to loosen the cord at this end of the tent.
Makes as if. That distracts him a moment – he’s in command here, and who is she but a slim moon–faced young woman with a braid of a hair like a hawser and dirty feet and clothes that stink – and that moment is all she needs. Before he lets out a breath and breathes in again, she’s gone. In a single motion, she grips the branch above her and flips herself up like a an acrobat, and then, her feet gripping the slick, corrugated bark, she climbs high up into the crown of the tree, even as he struggles up after her, and there are no safety lines here, not for her or for him. ‘Come back here, you little bitch!’ he shouts, digging his spikes in, thrusting upward. His reward is a faceful of redwood bark, threads and splinters kicked up by her feet and sifting down into his eyes, his nostrils, his mouth.
Climber Deke is a lumberman. A timber person. He’s agile and muscular and cocksure. If she wants to play, he’ll play. She goes higher. So does he. And what’s she going to do – ultimately? Sprout wings and fly away?
He doesn’t know my daughter. She finds a limb and she goes out on it. And when he gets to that limb and he’s facing her over a gap of maybe ten feet or so, he stops. Redwood tends to shear. The trees are forever dropping branches as the crowns rise higher and the lower limbs become expendable. The limb Sierra is crouched on won’t support two people – in fact, from Climber Deke’s perspective, it doesn’t look as if it’ll support one much longer. And what does he say, face to face with my daughter, two hundred feet above the ground? ‘You cunt,’ that’s what he says. ‘You tree–hugging cunt.’
‘Go ahead,’ she says, ‘curse all you want.’ The rain has picked up now. Far below them a pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) flits through layers of light, its wings extended and then drawn down and up again with an audible snap of its crisp black feathers. ‘But even if there were fifty of you, you couldn’t get me down from this tree.’
