T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

Andrea murmured something, a snippet of dream dialogue, and rolled over. The windows were infused with the green light of seven-thirty in the morning, and when Tierwater lifted the covers and slid in beside her, the tranquil hot familiar odor of the nesting animal rose to envelop him, the smell of his wife's body, her beautiful naked slumbering body, rich in all its properties and functions. He nuzzled at her ear and worked an arm underneath her so he could cup her breasts in both hands. He was excited. Burning up with it. She murmured again, moved her buttocks against him in a sleepy, precoital wriggle. "You're back," she said. "I am," he whispered, and felt her nipples harden. He was thinking of Jane and Sherry and half a dozen other girls and women he'd known, and then she turned to face him, to kiss him, and he was thinking of her, nobody but her.

Afterward, they lay side by side and stared up into the rafters as the house began to stir beneath them. There was the sound of a flushing toilet, then the wheeze of the refrigerator door and the low hum of Sierra's tape deck as the muted throb of gloom and doom filtered up through the floorboards. Voices. Sierra's, Teo's. The swat of the screen door, and then Ratchiss' "What ho!" And Teo's whispered response.

"You smell like smoke," Andrea said.

"Me?" Tierwater knew he'd gone too far, knew they'd suspect arson once the machines went down, and he'd heard the first of the planes rumbling in to attack the fire even as he legged it on up the trail home. The lookout at Saddle Peak or the Needles must have been up early, because the helicopters were in the sky before he'd had a chance to catch his breath, and within the hour the drone of the bombers saturated the air and he looked up to see three of them scraping overhead with their wings aglow and their bellies full of fire retardant.

She was up on one elbow now, watching him. "You didn't start a campfire out there last night, did you? Because that would be stupid, really stupid-"

"Are you kidding? It went great, every minute of it. I was like the Phantom and the Fox rolled into one, so efficient it was scary. It was a rush, it was."

He could feel her eyes on the side of his face, the eyes that brooked no bullshit and reduced every complexity to the basics. She was sniffing-first the air, and now him-hovering over him, her breasts soft on his chest, ruffling his hair, sniffing. "I don't know," she said, "but you smell like you spent the night in the chimney."

"Maybe that's it," he lied- "I started a fire when I came in, just to take the chill off the morning."

That seemed to satisfy her, at least for the moment-until she heard the bombers for herself, that is, and walked down to the mailbox and smelled the smoke on the air and saw the Forest Service buses rolling down the highway crammed to the windows with the impassive dark-faced immigrants they hired at minimum wage to beat back the flames bush by bush and yard by yard. Then she'd know. And Teo would know, and Ratchiss. He could hear them already-Are you crazy? Right in our own backyard? You think these people are stupid? You want to jeopardize everybody and everything — the whole organization, for Christ's sake-just because you're out of control? Huh? What's your problem?

Suddenly he was exhausted. He'd been up all night, hiked nine miles each way, destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of heavy equipment. His knee ached, and his upper back, which he must have strained somehow-probably fighting one fitting or another. He was no mechanic.

"You want to get some rest?" Andrea said, and already she was in motion, the bed pitching like a rubber raft in deep water, a lingering glimpse of her nude body, and then she was shrugging into T-shirt, panties and shorts.

"Yeah, that would be nice," he said, "but you never answered my question."

"What question?"

"About you and Teo. All those nights on the road, Connecticut, New Jersey, wherever. You slept with him, didn't you?"

"What does it matter? It was before I even met you."" You did, didn't you?"

Somewhere, far overhead, there was the thin drone of an airplane. The wind must have shifted, at least temporarily, because he could smell the smoke now too, as if the air had been perfumed with it. "I'm not going to lie to you, Ty-we're both grownups, aren't we? You want to know the answer? Did I sleep with him?" He closed his eyes. He'd never been so tired in his life. "No," he said. "No, forget it."

Mac has always made a big deal of the holidays-glitter, he just loves it, cookies in the oven, blinking lights, fa- la-la-la-la, that sort of thing — and this year is no exception. So what if conditions are a little extreme? So what if we live on what amounts to an island and can't get out to the supermarket, hospital, sushi bar or feedlot? So what if the basement is full of shifting, snarling, pissed-off and dislocated animals? Let's decorate, that's his thinking. Two years ago he brought in a crew of fifty to string lights in parallel strips up and down the walls of the house so the whole place looked like a gift box on a hill (or, more accurately, a huge electric toaster as seen from the inside out), something like twenty thousand bulbs burning up electricity nobody has and nobody can afford, and he wasn't even here. Last year a crew nearly as big showed up on the first of December, but the winds were so intense the workers kept getting blown off their ladders and out of their cherry pickers, while the lights they did manage to string just slapped against the side of the house till there was nothing left but a long chain of empty sockets chattering in the breeze. Mac wasn't here then either. He's here now, though, here with a vengeance, and if we can't have Christmas outside because of the unremitting meteorological cataclysm that seems to be lashing away day and night at everything that isn't buried ten feet underground, then we're going to have it inside.

Which to my mind is purely asinine. What's to celebrate? That's what I want to know. That we had a forty-eight-hour respite from the rain last week? That April Wind has started her Sierra — the-martyr book with me as the chief and captive source? That Lily seems to have adjusted to her new surroundings as if she'd been born between paneled walls and that the rock-hard pendulous corpses of cattle, pigs and turkeys look to tide us over right on through the next millennium? Piss poor, that's what I say. The end is nigh. What fools these mortals be.

We're wearing masks still, all of us, though we might as well be on a coral atoll for all the contact we've had with the outside world, and when I'm not disinterring the past with April Wind or watching Andrea cozy up to Mac, I try to stay busy with the animals. Chuy and I are doing a creditable job of feeding them, I think, but feeding isn't the problem. Captive breeding, and that's been our biggest goal here, right from the start, is nothing less than impossible under conditions like these. We have no real access to the animals-it's just too risky to try to tiptoe up to a reinforced wooden door and surprise any creature that isn't deaf, blind and comatose. And forget the cleaning, it's just too dangerous, particularly with Lily, Petunia and the lions — and you'd be surprised how cantankerous and subversive even a warthog can be. Open the door of the bowling alley, and you hear nothing, not so much as a snort or whimper; half a heartbeat later you've got two angry pairs of tusks swiping at your gonads. Someday, in the dry season, if it ever comes, Mac will have to rip up the carpets, tear out the pissed-over paneling and burn it, that's all. And then we can start again, with new pens and new animals — or some new breeding stock, at least.

But back to Christmas, because Christmas is what's happening here, floods, mucosa and irate quadrupeds notwithstanding. The two Als, left with no discernible use or employment since there's no one within half a mile to protect Mac from, have been co-opted by the interior — decorating department (Mac and Andrea, working in concert) to string lights and pin tinfoil angels to the walls. It all feels — I don't know-vestigial somehow. And sad. The empty ceremony of a forgotten tribe. Christmas means nothing to me, except maybe as a negative, the festival of things, of gluttony, light the candles and rape the planet all over again. Even the Japanese got in on the act at the end of the last century, but they saw the Yule season for what it was-wall-to-wall shopping and nothing more.