T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

He was running by then, thirty-nine years old and mortgaged to the eyeballs, his right knee tender, teeth aching, hair undergoing a daily transmigration from head to comb, and he never stopped running till he was in the car and the car was slamming down the road and the shining big new D7 Cat was breathing fire like a dragon, yellow, orange and red.

So we laugh. It feels good, feels good to be looped on cheap sake at quarter past ten in the morning too, even though my nose is dripping and my head seems to be waterlogged. (It's the weather, of course, everybody indoors all the time, the great biomass of humanity a juicy, snuffling, shuffling culture medium for the sly and patient viruses, and I just pray it's not the mucosa plague making a comeback. But that's the thrill of life on this blistered planet: you never know which sniffle is going to be your last.) And my arm — they injected it, dusted it, stitched and wrapped it, and there's no hint of pain from that quarter. Not yet, anyway. In fact, it doesn't even feel attached to me, and here I am resting my haunches on the kitchen table and draining one tiny glass after another of fermented rice wine, casual as an amputee, my guard down-definitely down — and the women laughing along with me. Things could be worse.

Plus, we got Petunia back, and that's cause for celebration. Chuy rigged up a plywood enclosure at the corner of her pen where the chicken wire had been torn loose in the storm. And he buried the bottom end of it three feet in the ground so she can't dig under it, or wouldn't want to. Not that she isn't hot to get loose-all the animals are — but she's got to be the laziest Patagonian fox in the world (of course, since the set of Patagonian foxes is tiny and dwindling, the subset of lazy ones must be infinitesimal). At any rate, she's there, hunkered over a bowl of dog meal and the freshly trapped corpses of a couple of rats Chuy tossed her as a welcome-home present, and I know all about it because I was out in the pens myself before the sun came up, scattering straw over the mud to make her comfortable. And Delbert Sakapathian is satisfied too, because I got Mac's secretary to hand — deliver him a check for a thousand bucks, to make up for the loss of his cat. Everything wraps up neatly, doesn't it?

Still, that's April Wind over there sunk into the couch, and I might be laughing now, but I know that sooner or later a perforated chuckle or premoistened guffaw is going to stick in my throat like a catfish bone. "Remember the time," Andrea's saying, and we're all remembering, grinning wide, a day in the Tehachapis, dry and hot and with a sky so blue it was like somebody's eye-all. Right, God's eye, if He wants to exist — and the shock of that creek, instant deep-freeze. We were eluding the Freddies, and somebody-Teo? Me? — Insisted on the creek, throw them off the scent, and how deep is it, somebody else asked, knee-deep, that's all, knee-deep." — and then Ty stepped off that rock and came up sputtering like a polar bear? "Oh, yes. Yes. Ha-ha.

"So that was, like, when?" April Wind is wondering. "Before or after Sierra… Because I don't remember her there, correct me if I'm wrong-"

Boom! G oes the wind, choosing the perfect moment to rattle my shack [Enter Ghost; Exeunt Peace, Sanity and Determination.] They're both looking at me, Andrea with her reconstructed face and midnight hair, eyes so glassy and opaque you could lather up and shave in them, and April Wind, the amazing dwarf woo-woo woman with a stare like two screws boring into a four-by-four. "After," I say, and listen to the hiss of the rain swelling to fill the silence.

But what am I seeing? Sierra Tierwater, twenty-four years old, staring down at me out of Jane's fleshed-in circle of a face (perfectly round, round as the Doughboy's), the long braid of her hair dangling like a bell pull and a fine rain of particles sifting down from the weathered platform high up in her tree. Her redwood tree. Her one-thousand — year-old, two-hundred-foot-tall redwood that weighed something like a hundred tons and contained an estimated twenty thousand board feet of lumber, four hundred thousand dollars stacked up in the middle of an old-growth forest and there for the taking. That tree. The one that made her famous. Artemis, she called it, the Lady of Wild Things.

Sure. That's what I'm seeing, Sierra, my daughter, perched up there halfway to the sky in a blizzard of mystical, earth-mothering, New Wave crap, woo-woo on parade, and every ravening nutball with a grudge and a chainsaw stalking round down below.

"So you were pretty broken up by that," April Wind inserts into the howling silence-literally howling, Force 8 at least, a whole universe of untethered objects hurtling in a dismal blur past the only window that hasn't been boarded up yet. "Is that when you really, like, started to, you know-"

"Broken up?" I throw it back it at her on the heels of two quick burning hits of sake, and forget the delicate little cups, it's my lips now and the wet viridian throat of the bottle. "Is that what you came to hear about? This is the interview, right? We're not laughing anymore, are we, anything for the cold naked page and let's take down the last ten trees in the world for the paper to print it on. But what's the angle, what's the deal-does anybody really give a shit anymore? Because I don't. I really don't."

Oh, they look uncomfortable now, the shifting buttocks and nervous little flicks of the head, fingers twirling twists of hair, eyes left, eyes right, eyes crawling up the walls. And what a coincidence that Andrea should come back to me the day before the little reporter shows up. It's money, sure, some publisher's money-we always need the next hagiography — but there's more to it than that, and I can see it glittering in their eyes. Andrea and April Wind, Am I crazy to think they have an agenda?

"All right, Ty, we'll be straight with you." Andrea is up out of the chair now, at the stove, all brisk elbows and saluting shoulders, rattling the teapot. "Maybe we've had enough sake-it's too early for me. Tea, anyone?" And she swings round with a smile.

And me? I just perch there, buttock to table, my mouth grim, waiting.

A sigh. The smile flutters and flaps off. "First of all," she says, "I came to you because I missed you and I need you, so don't think — and plus, as I'm sure you suspected all along, I've got nowhere else to go. And nothing. I mean nothing. April and I thought-well, a book, you know? I need the money-we need the money-yes, that's true, but we really felt it was time to tell Sierra's story — and yours-so people can see that we tried, and that we can try again."

"Not that they would care," I say, bitter to the dregs. Another hit of sake, straight from the bottle, and it tastes like machine oil.

"They would, you know they would." This from the little face of April Wind, clenched round her conviction.

"I may as well tell you, Ty-we're starting up E. F.I Again. For the survivors, I mean." Andrea lights the stove with a soft whoosh of gas, sets the teapot on the burner. She can't look me in the eye.

For the survivors. That was the kind of thinking that got me crazy, that got me put in prison, not to mention reviled and caricatured and labeled "a human hyena" by the San Francisco Chronicle and half a dozen other papers. "You know something I don't?"

This has got to be the worst of the storms yet — the rain is nearly horizontal now, roofing nails shot out of a gun, and the yard seems to be in motion, one soupy swirl of muck and water. I need to get out there and see to the animals. I need to get hold of Chuy. Mac. The National Guard. But here 1 am, drunk on sake, a withered, rapier-nosed, hunched-over relic, holding my breath and listening to hear the worst of the bad news.