T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

Christmas morning I'm awake and waiting for the dawn as usual, Andrea snoring lightly beside me, the concept of a good night's sleep as foreign to me now as jogging or biting into an apple sans forethought or even bending to tie my shoelaces without a whole string section of pain playing up and down my spine in a mad pizzicato. Sleep at my age comes like a blow to the back of the head, any time of day or night, and you'd better have a couch or an easy chair handy when you go down for the count (and don't even ask about the old-old — they're nothing more than zombies, staggering around on bird's bones with twenty or thirty years' accumulation of sleep deprivation bleeding out of their eye sockets). Anyway, the first thing I notice is that the rain has stopped. No rattling, no whooshing, no white noise like a lint screen inside your head, nothing but a profound early-Christmas silence, not a creature stirring, not even a Patagonian fox.

Up out of bed and into the clamminess, a pair of powder-blue boxer shorts climbing up my glabrous old man's legs and cradling the brindled spectacle of my old man's sexual equipment. Then the jeans, the plaid shirt and the rinsed-out jeans jacket, Grunge all the way, yes indeed. I'm thinking of Andrea's present — and I know she's expecting one, though every other breath out of her body for the past week has been a pro-forma denial ("Oh, no, no, Ty, you don't have to bother, really") —-wondering what totemic object to dig out of the water-logged mound of my possessions or to beg or borrow from Mac that would express what I'm feeling for her. Because what I'm feeling is gratitude, what I'm feeling is an affection so deep for this big-shouldered oblivious old lady in the bed at my feet that its verging dangerously close to love, and beyond love, to forgiveness and even-dare I say it? — Bliss. I'm in love all over again. I am. Standing there in the dark, the silence so profound it's beating in my veins with an unconquerable force, the force of life undenied and lived right on down to the last tooth in the last head, I'm almost sure of it. On the other hand, it could just be indigestion.

There's no newspaper, of course, what with the flooding, and since magazines are scarce because of the lack of stock-paper, that is — I retreat to the lavatory with a mold-splotched copy of Muir's The Mountains of California. This is a big room, by the way, a room the size of the average condo, with a six-person Jacuzzi and a tiled shower stall with dual heads, recessed lighting and a built-in bench for comfort, and it smells of Andrea, of her perfume and powders and skin rejuvenator. The walls are painted to resemble the aluminum garage doors of old, in honor of garage bands everywhere, the detail true right on down to three-dimensional handles and glittering rust spots (the portrait of Eddie Vedder, all eyes and teeth, I've long since turned to the wall, so as to be able to conduct my business in peace). In any case, I stoop to the faucet for a drink, just to rinse the night-taste out of my mouth, and then settle in for a long pre-Christmasdinner bout with my comatose digestive tract. Relaxing, or trying to, I flip back the page and read of fantastical forests: The trees of the species stand more or less apart in groves, or in small, irregular groups, enabling one to find a way nearly everywhere, along sunny colonnades and through openings that have a smooth, park-like surface, strewn with brown needles and burs. Now you cross a wild garden, now a ferny, willowy stream…

I don't know how long I'm lost in those memorial forests — the better part of an hour, at least-moving on from the unconquered trees to the adventures of the water ouzel and the Douglas squirrel, not even the faintest stirring of a movement down below, when Andrea raps at the door. "Ty?" She calls. "You in there? I have to pee."

"Just a minute." I lurch up off the seat with a jolt of pain in both hips and my left knee, hoist my pants, flush, and close the book on my index finger to mark the place.

Ty?"

"Yeah?"

"Merry Christmas."

The phrase takes me by surprise, the novelty of it, and beyond that, the novelty of the situation. We didn't wish one another a merry Christmas in prison, and, as I say, Chuy and I have been on our own the last few years. Nobody has wished me anything in a long time, not even hate, despair or a lingering death. I'm moved. Moved almost to tears, as I'd been with the tinfoil angel in the hall. I'm halfway to the door, but then I remember to go back and wash up at the nearest of the four sinks, so I have to raise my voice to be heard through the solid plank of the door. "You too," I call, my voice echoing in the tomblike vastness of the place. "Merry Christmas."

Tierwater was feeling his age. He'd turned forty at the beginning of the month, an occasion memorialized by a discreet party out on the redwood deck. It was a small gathering, as it would necessarily have to be if FBI agents were to be excluded, consisting of his wife and daughter, Teo, Ratchiss and Mag (or Mug). Everyone, even Andrea, seemed to be in good spirits. They drank a California Viognier without worrying about the oak trees and other native species the vineyards had displaced, and as the evening turned chill, they disported themselves in the redwood hot tub without a murmur about the ancient giants felled for their momentary pleasure. Sierra-Sarah Drinkwater, that is, the cynosure of the junior high in Springville-went in to write an essay on ancient Mesopotamia after the birthday cake had been set ablaze, wished over, sliced up and divided, while the rest of the party lingered in the hot tub, global warming be damned, at least for the duration of the night. Mag, in a high energetic voice, volunteered the story of how he'd lost his face, with Ratchiss filling in the supporting details (He creep on me, because I am profound inebriate with the strong savor of palm wine on my lips, and I am dreaming of the long rains and millet when he come and snap him jaw), Teo and Andrea hatched plans for her covert participation in a coordinated series of protests along the northern-California coast and Tierwater got so drunk he'd had to go off in the woods and commune with nature a while-it was either that or vomit in the recirculating waters of the hot tub.

Tonight, though, he was only mildly drunk-just drunk enough to take the sting off. He'd twisted his bad knee and nearly fractured an ankle stumbling into a hole while trying to outrun the beam of a watchman's flashlight up in Del Norte County two nights ago, and he was sitting in front of the fireplace, his leg propped up, judiciously anaesthetizing himself. The house was quiet. It had been quiet since the fire last summer, which had sent a ripple-no, a tidal wave-through all the West Coast chapters of Earth Forever! Thirty-five thousand acres had burned, and spokespersons up and down the coast fell all over themselves denying any involvement-E. F.I Ers might have marched in the street and shouted slogans like "Back to the Pleistocene!" But they strictly eschewed any illegal activity; it was only the disaffected fringe that sometimes, out of frustration and an overriding love of the earth, spiked a grove of ancient redwoods or blocked a culvert, but certainly the organization was there to protect the forests, not bum them down. And where did that leave Tierwater? Right where he wanted to be, on the unraveling edge of the disaffected fringe.

Teo, back safe in Tarzana, was especially vocal, deploring everybody and everything, even while the Tulare County Sheriff's Department expanded its investigation and Coast Lumber hired a pair of shuffling retirees from the local community to stand watch over the gleaming new Cats, wood-chippers, loaders and log trucks the insurance money had provided. (In their generosity, the insurers also provided a private investigator by the name of Declan Quinn, a shoulderless relic who sat permanently hunched over a pack of Camels at the Big Timber Bar and Mountain Top Lodge, chain-drinking Dewar's and water and asking endlessly in a cancerous rasp if anyone had seen "anything suspicious.") At the first whiff of smoke, Ratchiss had lit out for Malibu, and Andrea, though she stayed put and went through the motions of mothering and housewifery, devoted her every waking minute to roasting Tierwater for his lack of judgment, juvenility and criminal stupidity. Even Sierra weighed in, "It was really like mega-dumb, Dad," she said one night over home-made manicotti and the steamed vegetables she kept pushing from one corner of the plate to another. "What if they catch you? What if you go to jail? What am I supposed to do then-change my name to Sarah Dorkwater or something?" The idyll was over. Definitely over.