T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

"Am I right?" The man's face is anxious, blistered, peeled back like a skinned grape. "You're the one they called the human hyena, aren't you?"

I'm in a chair in the front hallway. I can hear Andrea's cracked, vinegary old lady's voice going on for the hundredth time about Dandelion and how "he was just suddenly there, as if he appeared out of thin air." I've never seen so many cops-in plain clothes, in blue, in the dun of the highway patrol. Down in the basement, sniffing warily, is a SWAT team from San Luis Obispo, ready to do what needs to be done. My heart is broken — or, no, it's smashed, laid out on the chopping block and beaten with a mallet till all the fibers have been reduced to paste. Mac is gone. And the animals are next in line. I don't bother to answer.

"But what are you doing here?" The man says, and he's got a microphone too, a slim black thing like the barrel of a gun pointing at my face. "Do you know Maclovio Pulchris? Or did you, I mean?"

I'm thinking about that, about Mac and how he gave me a break when I got out of prison for the last time-me, a nobc;dy, one of five or six lackeys charged with looking after the Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, the emus, horses and dogs, no job more menial on the whole estate. But it was a beginning, and I was glad for it. And it wasn't long before he singled me out and we began to talk-about the pigs and their diet at first, but then about other things too, far-ranging things like the weather and the death of the planet and the possibility of God and who I really was — my name wasn't Torn Drinkwater, was it? He recognized me. Behind those shades and eel whips and all the rest, Mac went deeper than you might think. He'd known all along. Known who I was and taken a chance. After that, well, the others fell by the wayside, all except for Chuy, that is, and Mac and I hatched our scheme to do what nature and the zoos were incapable of — and we almost succeeded too. But, of course, to say "almost" is meaningless. We could have succeeded, let's put it that way — if things had been different. Vastly different.

The first of a series of muffled shots sounds from deep in the bowels of the house. "Were you here when he died? Can you tell me anything about that, what it was like, I mean?"

"Because of the storms," Andrea is saying from the far side of the room, a hint of exasperation in her voice, "because of the flooding-"

And Chuy, fencing with his own circle of microphones: "No, man, I'm corriendo, you know, up out of el garaje, and Dandy, he's muy malo-"

Pop. Pop. Pop-pop. That's what I'm hearing, but what I'm seeing is dead lions, dead peccaries, jackals, vultures, living flesh converted to so much furred and feathered meat, extinction in a wheelbarrow.

"There are wild animals in the house," the reporter is saying, and he's trying to work a little moral outrage into his voice, "living right here in the rooms and wandering the halls. Isn't that right?"

Pop. Pop-pop. I nod my head. Wearily.

The sheen of his glasses, the thrust of the mike. "Maybe you can explain it for me, because I think Pm missing something here-isn't that dangerous?"

After the cops, after the scribblers and the talking heads, after the lawyers, bereaved fans, curiosity seekers and relic peddlers, the book editors start dribbling in from New York, Berlin, Los Andiegoles. Mac's been buried three days when the first of them shows up (the funeral was in Detroit, televised of course, and it was built around a six-hour memorial concert featuring pop stars of the past, distant past and present hammering out ensemble renditions of Mac's big hits while legions of weeping fans swayed in place and held up candles and cigarette lighters in a blaze so prodigious it must have added half a degree to the average temperature of the globe). Our position here-mine, Andrea's, April Wind's, Chuy's, the surviving animals'-is tenuous, to say the least. Mac died intestate, and the lawyers representing his four wives, real and putative mistresses, children legitimate and it-, not to mention the various record companies that claim rights in various songs and recordings, are fighting a battle royal over his estate. I have no claim on anything. I don't even have an income. Or health care. The animals-we've still got a few peccaries left, a pair of honey badgers, three Egyptian vultures and Petunia-have even less.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm scared-rudderless, incomeless, Social Security — less and soon to be homeless too, no doubt — and I'm ready to welcome this editor with open arms (not to be mercenary about it, but if there's money in it I'll do an as-told-to account of my years with Mac and my life as a monkeywrencher and push April Wind's hagiography of Sierra on him too). And who is he? Ronnie Bott, of Bertelsmann West, the biggest — the only-publishing house in New York. He comes the way of Randy Bowgler and the rest of the parade of lawyers, journalists and deranged fans (several of whom are even now peering in at the windows, despite the efforts of the rent-a-cop outfit Mac's first wife's lawyer hired to keep them at bay): across the all — but — driedup Pulchris River, currently breached by a crude bridge of whorled imitation-plywood slabs laid out in the mud. It's 9:00 A. M. And a hundred and ten degrees, with a screaming wind out of the southeast, when the "Chariots of Love" theme re-echoes through the house. Andrea's in bed, of course, and April Wind, who's arranged this whole thing, is locked in her room doing her Tantric exercises, so it's Ty Tierwater, aching knees and all, to the door again.

What do I do? I fix the man a tall glass of iced tea and settle him down in the Motown Room, just under the glowing electronic portrait of the Four Tops. He looks to be no more than fourteen (though I know he must be older), sporting one of the wide-collared shirts and patterned vests that seem to have come back into fashion, along with the bell-bottoms and high-heeled boots. As for the rest: long hair, no hint of musculature or even a beard, a spatter of what could only be acne clinging to his right cheek. I ease into the chair across from him, clutching my own sweating glass of iced tea, and give him a look of wisdom and ready access.

"So," he says, shifting in his seat and crossing, then uncrossing, his legs, "you ran Maclovio Pulchris' private menagerie, is that right?"

"Ten years of shoveling shit," I say, and look down at the wedge of lemon floating round the rim of my glass.

"You were in charge of the lions, then?"

"That's right. They required plenty of shit-shoveling too. And meat. Of course, with the world the way it is, it was no easy thing keeping them fed and reasonably healthy, and if it wasn't for the permanent flicking El Nino we've got going here they'd be" — and here I have to pause to deal with a sudden constriction in the back of my throat that just about chokes off my windpipe- "they'd be fine still. And so would Mac."

The editor — what was his name? Because I've lost it-he just nods.

"You know who I am," I say, "right?"

He nods again.

I lean into the platform of my bony old man's knees and give him my cagiest look, and I can see myself in shadowy reflection in the sheen of Marvin Gaye's portrait, hanging opposite. I look like a Yankee horse-trader, a used-car salesman or, worse, a fundamentalist preacher. "You want a book, I'll give you a book. Not just about Mac or my daughter, but about me and what I've been through trying to save this woebegone planet and the, the" — there it is again, the involuntary contraction at the back of my throat- "the animals." And here I have to pause a minute to collect myself. My heart is heavy. My mind is numb. There's moisture gathering in the desiccated corners of my old man's eyes and I have to pinch it away with two trembling fingers.