T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

The first one to show up, aside from the county sheriff and the coroner, is a lawyer, and if that isn't emblematic of what we've become, then I don't know what is. He's about the size you think of when you think of regular, with a pillbox of kinky hair set up high against a receding hairline, teeth that look as if they've been filed and a pair of five-hundred-dollar fake-grain vinyl shoes so encrusted with mud he's had to remove them and stand there on the doorstep in his muddy socks. His suit is soaked through. His tie is twisted up under his collar like a hangman's noose. And his briefcase-his briefcase is just a crude clay sculpture, with a long trailing fringe of pondweed. In the confusion of that house, in the shock, horror and trauma following in the wake of Mac's death, there's nobody to answer the door, and while the sheriff and his men are prowling around upstairs and the coroner's people zipping up the body bags, I'm the one who responds to the "Chariots of Love" theme and swings open the door on the eighteenth repetition of that unforgettable melody. "Good afternoon," he says, as if we're standing in the hallway at the county courthouse, "I'm Randy Bowgler, of Bowgler and Asburger? I represent Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose Pulchris. May I come in?"

Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose: that'd be Mac's third wife, the real-estate heiress, the one with eyes like two cold planets glittering in the night.

I'm looking out over the hill in front of the house, the ambulance and police cruiser stuck up to their frames in the muck of the receding river and the media vans beginning to gather on the horizon like the vanished herds of old. It must be a hundred and fifteen degrees out there. "I don't think so," I say.

"I'm here to protect my client's interests, Mr., Ah — I didn't catch your name?"

"I already gave at the office," I tell him.

His lips curl into a tight, litigious smile. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist".

"Yeah," I say, and my heart is still jumping at my ribs four hours after the fact, "well, fuck you too," and I slam the door in his face.

What's going on here is chaos of the worst and blackest sort. Dandelion, as best we can tell, is back down in the basement with Amaryllis and Buttercup. What he did to Mac is worse, far worse, than anything I'd heard about in rap sessions in prison or seen in the old nature clips of the Serengeti. Mac's insides-heart, liver, lungs, intestines-are the first thing the lion apparently consumed, and then, before Chu) / and I could get back up the stairs with the Nitro and the dart gun, he dragged the meatier of the Als to the dumbwaiter and disappeared into the basement with him. The other Al was sprawled across the sofa with one arm bent the wrong way at the elbow and his scalp torn back so the parietal bone showed white beneath it, and both the servants had been swatted down like insects, Zulfikar crumpled in the corner in a dark pool and his wife draped over a chair with her throat torn out. April Wind we found whimpering inside one of the compartments in the sideboard. We helped her out, boarded up the dumbwaiter on all three floors and called 911.

No sooner do I shut the door than the "Chariots of Love" theme starts up again, and then again, and I'm wondering, how in Christ's name did this ghoul find out already? Did he have a direct hookup to 911? Had he paid somebody off?

Was he circling the house on leather wings? No matter. The Nitro is propped up against the wall behind me, and I just pluck it up, aim it letter-high and swing open the door again. I admit it-I'm agitated and maybe not entirely in my right mind, whatever that is. Anyway, I level the thing at him and growl something out of the corner of my mouth and he actually takes a step back, but by now a very wet crew with a minicam is sprinting across the lawn and flashbulbs are popping in the distance, and I figure it's a losing proposition. Down goes the gun. In comes the lawyer.

Mac's death is big news. Not as big maybe as McCartney's or Garth Brooks', but it's really something. Within the hour, the HDTV screen is showing images of the death scene intercut with clips of Mac at various stages of his career and the shock and disbelief registering on the faces of fans from Buenos Aires to Hyderabad and Martha's Vineyard (now largely under water, by the way). I'm sitting there in the Grunge Room, trying to catch my breath, cops, journalists and lawyers flitting back and forth like flies dive-bombing a plate of custard, when April Wind appears on the big screen across from the bed. She's squinting into the camera not two hundred feet from where I'm sitting, a dazzled look on her face, the dwarf become a giant. Like all Americans, she was born with the ability to talk to a camera. "It was horrible," she's saying, "because we were eating eggs, or we were just about to, and then there's this like roar, and I, The camera never wavers, April Wind's face revealed in every pixel and particle, a sorrowful face, the face of tragedy and woo-woo gone down in flames, but a voice slips in over her own, lathered with concern: " You were his last lover, isn't that right?"

Of all the journalists there that afternoon and late into the night-young hotshots, most of them, scud studs and the like-only one of them has been around long enough to take a second look at me. He's maybe fifty, fifty-five. Short, glasses, frizz of a beard gone white around the gills. It's getting dark out by this time, and we're all gathered in the Motown Room-even Chuy-for what I suppose you'd call a press conference, though there's precious little conferring going on. "You're-" he sputters, police everywhere, the lions roaring from the basement, film rolling, Andrea and April Wind pinned in the corner with two dozen microphones jabbing at them like the quills of a porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum, now endangered throughout its range) — "you're Tyrone Tierwater, aren't you — the ecoradical?"

My back hurts. My feet. I have a headache. My gums are aching round the cold porcelain of my dental enhancements, I could use a drink and I'm hungry-we never did get those eggs, or anything else for that matter. I wave a hand in deprecation. "Eco-what?"

"You're him, aren't you?" There are lights everywhere, heads talking, sound bites crackling from every room of the house. "What was it-twenty years ago? The Cachuma Incident, right?"

The man's a historian, no doubt about it, and right here, right now, in the midst of all this chaos, he takes me back to a dark, pitching lake and a boat that trembled under my feet like a false floor that drops you headlong into the infinite. The Cachuma Incident. What can I say? There's no excuse or exculpation for what I did, or tried to do. My daughter was dead and my wife may as well have been, and the names of the animals were on my lips day and night-six billion of us at that point and how many gorillas, chimps, manatees, spotted owls, Amboseli lions?

It was my darkest moment-skull — and — crossbones time, hyena time. I was fighting a war, you understand, and maybe I lost my judgment, if I ever had any. In the company of an FBI agent posing as a disaffected scientist from BioGen and a shit by the name of Sandman (more on him later), I found myself out on those windswept waters with eight big plastic buckets of tetrodotoxin at my feet. The lake was in the Santa Ynez Valley and it constituted the water supply for the city of Santa Barbara. The toxin, the very same concentrated in the liver of the puffer fish-fugu, that is-was produced by the Alteromas bacteria, it was twelve hundred and fifty times more deadly than cyanide, and it had been mutated in the lab to adapt itself to fresh water. Or so it appeared, but appearances can be deceiving.

In truth, Sandman and the FBI agent (tattoos, tongue stud, the true look of the transgenetic nerd) had set me up, hoping, I think, to use me to get to the leadership of E. F. I, but by then Andrea and Teo and all the rest of them had turned their backs on me, so it was this or nothing. And when it came right down to it, when it was time to tip the buckets and begin evening the score in favor of the animals, I couldn't do it. Though I'd steeled myself, though I seethed and hated and reminded myself that to be a friend of the earth you have to be an enemy of the people, though Sandman and I had agreed a hundred times that if a baby and an anteater fell in a drainage ditch at the same time the baby would have to be sacrificed, though this was the final solution and I the man chosen to administer it, when it came right down to it, I faltered. I did. Believe me. Give me that much at least.