A Friend of the Earth (2 page)

Chuy is squinting up at me, my personal reclamation project, his eyes loopy, no control of his jaws or tongue, every nerve fried and sizzling still. ‘No poison, Mr. Ty, road tracks.' And he lifts the hind end of the thing to show the mangled legs and crushed spine.

Well, and this is good, a real bonus, and as the two of us hoist the sodden carcass to the level of our armpits and heave it up over the chicken wire to where Lily, interested, lurches up out of the mud, I can't help thinking of Andrea and what shirt I'll wear and whether or not I should bother with a sportcoat. I'm picturing us there at the bar at Swenson's, her irreducible eyes and deep breasts, no change in her at all because change is inconceivable, Andrea at forty–three, a knockout, a killer, hello, look at me, and then Lily gets hold of the dog and all I can hear is the crunch of bone.

The lions have had their horsemeat and the giant anteaters
(Myrmecophaga tridactyla)
are busy with some half–rotted beams full of Formosa termites, lunch enough, I expect, when finally I develop the sense to come in out of the wet. By this time – it must be four, four–thirty – the rain has slackened off a bit and the wind, which always seems to be peaking at Force 10 lately, seems a bit quieter too. What would you call it? – hat–extracting velocity. A strike and a spare and eight more frames to go. Gusty. Blustery. Not–quite–gale–force. It rattles the hood of my slicker, slapping my cheeks with wet vinyl, thwack–thwack, and my glasses are riding up and down the bridge of my nose as if it's been greased. Things are a mess, and no doubt about it, every step a land mine, the shrubs tattered like old sails, the trees snapped in two and then snapped in two
again. But what can I do? I leave all that to Mac's gardeners and the masochistic pup of a landscape architect who keeps popping up, unfazed, whenever the rain lets up for an hour – though with all the topsoil running off and the grass gone to seed, I can see we'll be living in the middle of a desert here in the dry season. If it ever comes.

As part of my arrangement with Mac, I occupy a two–room guesthouse on the far verge of the estate, just under the walls of Rancho Seco, the gated community to the east of us. It was built back in the nineties, with all the modern conveniences, and it's a cozy–enough place but for the fact that the winds have long since torn off the gutters and three–quarters of the shingles and the fireplace is bricked up, as per state law. Still, I have a space heater, and it never gets too cold here, not like in the old days – never below sixty, anyway – and I'm field marshal over an army of old pots and paint cans that catch at least half the rain at least half the time. Yet how can I account for the fact that I'm shivering like a cholera victim by the time I actually shrug off the slicker and stamp out of my boots and take a towel to my head? Because I'm old, that's how. Because sixty degrees and wet at my age is like the temperature water turned to ice when I was thirty–nine, the year I met Andrea.

The place smells of mold – what else? – and rats. The rats – an R–selected species, big litters, highly mobile, selected for any environment – are thriving, multiplying like there's no tomorrow (but of course there is, as everybody alive now knows all too well and ruefully, and tomorrow is coming for the rats too). They have an underlying smell, a furtive smell, old sweat socks balled up on the floor of the high–school locker room, drains that need cleaning, meat sauce dried onto the plate and then reliquefied with a spray of water. It's a quiet stink, nothing like the hyena when she's wet, which is all the time now, and I forgive the rats that much. I'm an environmentalist, after all – or used to be; not much sense in using the term now – and I believe in Live and Let Live, Adat, Deep Ecology, No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.

Andrea. Oh, yes, Andrea. She burned me in that crucible, with her scorching eyes and her voice of ash, and her body, her beautiful hard backpacker's body, stalwart legs, womanly hips and all the rest. She's on her way to Swenson's to meet me. Maybe there already, the
sake
cup like a thimble in her big female hands, leaning into the bar to show off what she has left, stupefying Shigetoshi Swenson, the bartender, who can't be more than sixty–four or – five. The thought of that scenario wakes me up, just as surely as it ever did, and the next minute I'm in the bedroom
pulling a sweater from the bureau drawer (black turtleneck, to hide the turkey wattles under my chin), thinking, No time for a shower and I'm wet enough as it is. I find a semi–clean pair of jeans hanging from a hook in the closet, step into my imitation–leather cowboy boots and head for the door – but not before I finish off the ensemble with the crowning touch: the red beret she sent me the second time I went to jail. I pull it down low over the eyebrows, like a watchcap. For old times' sake.

There's a whole crowd out on the road, storm or no storm, commuters, evening shoppers, repair crews, teenagers jazzed on a world turned to shit, and I have to be careful with the wind rocking the car and the jolts and bumps and washed–out places. This used to be open country twenty–five years ago – a place where you'd see bobcat, mule deer, rabbit, quail, fox, before everything was poached and encroached out of existence. I remember stud farms here, fields running on forever, big estates like Mac's set back in the hills, even an emu ranch or two
(Leaner than beef, and half the calories, try an Emu Burger today!)
. Now it's condos. Gray wet canyons of them. And who's in those condos? Criminals. Meat–eaters. Skin–cancer patients. People who know no more about animals – or nature, or the world that used to be – than their computer screens want them to know.

All right. I'll make this brief. The year is 2025, I'm seventy–five years old, my name is Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, and I'm half an Irish Catholic and half a Jew. I was born in the richest county in the suburbs of the biggest city in the world, in a time when there were no shortages, at least not in this country, no storms (except the usual), no acid rain, no lack of wild and jungle places to breathe deep in. Right now, I'm on my way to share some pond–raised catfish sushi with my ex–wife Andrea, hoist a few, maybe even get laid for auld lang syne. Or love. Isn't that what she said?
For love?
The windshield wipers are beating in time to my arrhythmic heart, the winds are cracking their cheeks, the big 4x4 Olfputt rocking like a boat at sea – and in my head, stuck there like a piece of gum to the sole of my shoe, the fragment of a song from so long ago I can't remember what it is or how it got there.
Down the alley the ice wagon flew … Arlene took me by the hand and said, Won't you be my man?

This is going to be interesting.

The parking lot is flooded, two feet of gently swirling shit–colored water, and there go my cowboy boots – which I had to wear for vanity's sake,
when the gum boots would have done just as well. I sit there a minute cursing myself for my stupidity, the murky penny–pincher lights of Swenson's beckoning through the scrim of the rain–scrawled windshield, the Mex–Chinese take–out place next door to it permanently sandbagged and dark as a cave, while the computer–repair store and 7-Eleven ride high, dry and smug on eight–foot pilings salvaged from the pier at Gaviota. The rain is coming down harder now – what else? – playing timbales on the roof of the 4x4, and the wind rattles the cab in counterpoint, picking up anything that isn't nailed down and carrying it off to some private destination, the graveyard of blown things. All the roofs here, where the storms tend to set down after caroming up off the ocean, have been secured with steel cables, and that's a company to invest in – Bolt–A–Roof, Triple AAA Guaranteed. Of course, everything I ever had to invest, every spare nickel I managed to earn and everything my father left me, went to Andrea and Teo and my wild–eyed cohorts at Earth Forever! (Never heard of it? Think radical enviro group, eighties and nineties. Tree–spiking? Ecotage? Earth Forever! Ring a bell?)

It takes me that long minute, mulling things over and delaying the inevitable in the way of the old (but not that old, not with all the medical advances they've thrust on us, what with our personal DNA codes and telomerase treatments and epidermal rejuvenators, all of which I've made liberal use of, thanks to Maclovio Pulchris' generosity), and then I figure what price dignity, jerk off the boots, stuff my socks deep in the pointed toes of them and roll my pants up my skinny legs. The water creeps up my shins, warm as a bath, and I tuck the boots under my slicker, tug the beret down against the wind and start off across the lot. It's almost fun, the feel of it, the splashing, all that water out of its normal bounds, and the experience takes me back sixty–five years to Hurricane Donna and a day off from school in Peterskill, New York, splash and splash again. (And people thought the collapse of the biosphere would be the end of everything, but that's not it at all. It's just the opposite – more of everything, more sun, water, wind, dust, mud.)

I'm standing under the jury–rigged awning (steel plates welded to steel posts set in concrete), trying to balance on one bare foot and administer a sock and boot to the other, when the door flings open and two drunks, as red in face and bare blistered arm as if they've been baked in a tandoori, trundle out to gape at the rain. ‘Shit,' the one to my right says, and I'm squinting past him to the bar, to see if Andrea's there, ‘may as well have another drink.' His companion blinks at the deluge as if he's never seen
weather before – and maybe he hasn't, maybe he's from Brazil or New Zealand or one of the other desert countries – and then he says, ‘Can't. Got to get home to' (you fill in the name) ‘and the kids and the dog and the rats in the attic … but fuck this weather, fuck it all to hell.'

I take a deep breath, dodge around them, and step into the restaurant. I should point out that Swenson's isn't the most elegant place – elegance is strictly for the rich, computer repairmen, movie people, pop stars like Mac – but it has its charms. The entryway isn't one of them. There's an empty fish tank built into the cement block wall on your immediate right, a coat rack and umbrella stand on the left. Music hits you – oldies, the venerable hoary inescapable hits of the sixties, played at killing volume for benefit of the deaf and toothless like me – and a funk of body heat and the kind of humidity you'd expect from the Black Hole of Calcutta. No air–conditioning, of course, what with electrical restrictions and the sheer killing price per kilowatt hour. Go straight on and you're in the bar, turn left and you've got the dining room, paneled in mismatching pine slats recycled from the classic California ranch houses that succumbed to the historical imperative of mini–malls and condos. I go straight on, the bar teeming, Shiggy glancing up from the blender with a nod of acknowledgment, some antiquated crap about riding your pony blistering the overworked speakers.

No Andrea.
Ride your pony, ride your pony
. My elbows find the bar, cheap
sake
(tastes of machine oil, brewed locally) finds me, and I scan the faces to be sure. I even slide off my glasses and wipe them on my sleeve, a gesture as habitual as breathing. Replace them. Study the faces now, in depth, erasing lines and blotches and liver spots, pulling lips and eyes up out of their fissures, smoothing brows and firming up chins, and still no Andrea. (Swenson's, in case you're wondering, caters strictly to the young–old, the fastest–growing segment of the U.S. population, of which I am a reluctant yet grateful part, considering the alternative.)

A woman in red at the end of the bar catches my eye – that is, I catch hers – and my blood surges like a teenager's until I realize she can't be more than fifty. I look again as she turns away and lets out a laugh in response to something the retired dentist at her elbow is saying, and I see she's all wrong: Andrea, and I don't care what age she might be – sixty, eighty–five, a hundred and ten – has twice her presence. Ten times. Yes. Sure. She's not Andrea. Not even close. But does that make it any less depressing to admit that I'm really standing here on aching knees in a dress–up shirt and with a sopping–wet beret that looks like a chili–cheese
omelet laid over my naked scalp, waiting for a phantom? A blood–sucking phantom at that?

Ride your pony, ride your pony
. What is it Yeats said about old age? It wasn't ride your pony. An aged man is but a paltry thing, that's what he said. A tattered coat upon a stick. In spades.

But what is this I feel on the back of my neck? Dampness. Water. Ubiquitous water. I'm looking up, the ceiling tiles giving off a gentle ooze, and then down at the plastic bucket between my feet – I'm practically standing in it – when I feel a pressure on my arm. It's her hand, Andrea's hand, the feel of it round my biceps as binding as history, and what can I do but look up into her new face, the face that's been molded like wet clay on top of the one glazed and fired and set on a shelf in my head. ‘Hello, Ty,' she says, the bucket gently sloshing, the solid air rent by the blast of the speakers, the crowd gabbling, her unflinching eyes locked on mine. I can't think of what to say, Shiggy moving toward us on the other side of the bar, mountainous in a Hawaiian shirt, the bartender's eternal question on his lips, and then she's smiling like the sun coming up over the hills. ‘Nice hat,' she says.

I snatch it off and twist it awkwardly behind me.

‘But, Ty' – a laugh – ‘you're bald!'

‘Something for the lady?' Shiggy shouts over the noise, and before I've said a word to her I'm addressing him, a know–nothing I could talk to any day of the week. ‘
Sake
on the rocks,' I tell him, ‘unless she's paying for her own – and I'll take a refill too.' The transaction gives me a minute to collect myself. It's Andrea. It's really her, standing here beside me in the flesh. Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain. ‘We all get older,' I shout, swinging round with the drinks,' – if we're lucky.'