T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

Andrea is stretched out supine on the bed in the Grunge Room, naked. And sweating. She looks good, very good, especially in those places where the sun hasn't had much of a chance to wreak havoc with her epidermis, and for the briefest fraction of a second I'm wondering when we last had sex — or made love, as we used to say — and then I'm waving the eviction notice in her face.

She won't even look at it. "The heat," she says. "This is worse than Arizona. Be a sweetheart, will you, Ty, and go get me something cold to drink — a Diet Coke, maybe? With lots of ice?"

What am I supposed to say: Sure, honeybiln. Want me to give you a sponge bath too? Rub your feet with alcohol? I don't know, because this is not an ideal relationship and this is not an ideal planet and we don't live in a sitcom reality. Check that: maybe we do — but this has got to be the sit- part of it, because it's very far from funny. 1 Wave the notice till it generates the least part of a cooling draft and she murmurs, "Oh, that feels good, that's sweet, don't stop-"

"It's an eviction notice," Isay, nothing in my voice at all. "We have to be out in thirty days."

Andrea sits up, and that's a shame, because her breasts, which had fanned out fetchingly across her rib cage as she lay there sweating atop the sheets, now have no choice but to respond to gravity and show their age. She snatches the notice from my hand, swings round to bend to the page (no glasses for her, reading or otherwise-radial keratotomy corrected her to 20/10 in her left eye, 20/20 in the right, and don't think she doesn't lord it over me).

When she turns back round, she lets the notice fall to the floor and gives me a long look, as if she's deciding something. "Iknow where we can go," she says finally, and the plural pronoun makes my heart leap up: sure, and we're in this together, aren't we?

"Where?"

"Ratchiss' cabin.".

It takes me a minute. "Isn't he dead?" (The question is strictly rhetorical — or maybe strategic. Ratchiss has in fact been dead for twenty-odd years, a victim of nature and his own apostasy. It seems he'd gone back to hunting finally, having given up on everything else after the meteorological dislocations at the turn of the century. Why bother, that was his thinking, and he got it in his head that he was going to go down in history as the agent of extinction of a given species, one that was barely hanging on by a thread. He chose the California condor, of which there were then a hundred and ten individuals extant, some fifty of those released into the wild from a captive breeding program at the soonto-be-defunct L. A. Zoo. The way I heard it was that he'd managed to hit two of them as they wheeled overhead in the remote hills of the Sespe Preserve, and he was reloading for a shot at yet another when one of the perforated birds came hurtling down out of the sky, purely dead and extinguished, and hit him in the back of the head with all the force of a soggy beach umbrella dropped from a cliff. He never regained consciousness.) She purses her lips, gives me the look that used to burn holes in rednecks, polluters and their shills. "Yes," she says, "he's dead. But his cabin isn't."

"Well, we can't just… Who lives there now?"

She's staring off into the distance, no doubt individuating each strand of Kurt Cobain's hair with her surgically enhanced vision. "Nobody. He left the place to E. F.I, To us, and last Ichecked, there was nobody there."

"But we can't just move in, can we?"

"You got a better plan?"

"What about money, food? We can't live on pine needles and duff. Ihaven't got more than fifteen hundred bucks in the bank — if the bank's even still there."

And here comes her smile, rich and blooming right up there at the focal point of her naked young-old lady's body. "We've been selling things," she says, "April and me."

I'm slow. I admit it. Slow and confused and old. "What things?"

The smile blooms till it begins to lose its petals and she glances away before bringing her eyes back to mine. "Oh, Idon't know," she says, and she nods in the direction of Kurt Cobain's locks without pulling her eyes back- "call them relics."

The temperature must have gone up another five degrees by the time I get back out to Chuy. The heat is like a fist — a pair of fists-boom-boom, hitting me in the chest and pelvis till I can barely lift my feet, and let me tell you, the wind is no help. It's only blowing at about twenty miles per hour, nothing compared with what's coming in the next few months, as the season heats up and the winds suck in off the desert, but still the ground is in constant motion, dust devils everywhere, scorched grains of windborne detritus clogging my nostrils and stinging the back of my throat, all the tattered trees throwing their rags first this way, then the other. Normally I'd be wearing a gauze mask this time of year, but after the mucosa fiasco I just can't stand the idea of having anything clamped over my mouth again (except maybe Andrea's sweet, supple young-old lips, and then only once a week, at best), so I just clench my face, squint my eyes and stagger on.

Chuy looks as if he's been slow-cooked on a rotisserie. His skin is prickled, his color bad, his clothes are so shiny with sweat they might have been dredged in olive oil. He's managed to set four posts in concrete, one at each corner of the pen he can envision in the damaged runnels of his mind, yet he's having trouble with the salvaged board he means to nail to them. Or not the board, actually, but the hammer and nails. Each time he steadies the hammer, the nail slips through his fingers, and when he finally gets the nail in position, the hammer fails him. It's the Dursban. I'm no physiologist, but it seems that when he exerts himself too much-when he sweats, in particular — the nerve cells start to misfire all over again. His eyes are spinning in their sockets and his fingers playing an arpeggio on a single three-inch nail when I lay a hand on his shoulder. "Forget it, Chuy," I tell him.

The nail is suddenly too hot to handle, the hammer even hotter, and he drops them both in the dust at his feet. "Forget it?" He echoes, squinting up at me from his crouch.

I'm not even looking at him, just staring out over the burning landscape, the regular dull thump of reconstruction echoing across the hill from the tumbledown condos, the wind kicking up its miniature cyclones, no animate thing visible, not even a bird. I'm thinking of the dead lions (the carcasses disappeared, and I wonder which of the SWAT-team cowboys has a lion skin draped over his couch), and I'm thinking of Mac and how he wanted to do something for all the ugly animals out there, the ones nobody could love, and I'm thinking of my own eternally deluded self, just out of prison and imagining there was something I could do, something to accomplish, even at my age. "We're all done here," I say. "It's over."

The next day, at lunch, April Wind is heroically squirroily. Andrea and I are eating ancient beef from Mac's freezers, along with a medley of steamed vegetables and reconstituted potatoes au gratin, and washing it down with a '92 Bordeaux that's as rich and thick as syrup and with a bouquet as heady as what God might have served Adam that first night in the garden. It's good stuff. Believe me. April Wind, wrinkling her nose at the beef, pushes the vegetables around on her plate the way Sierra used to do when she was a child, and after refilling her glass twice, announces, "It's been fun."

I give Andrea a look, but Andrea's look tells me she already knows what's coming. In detail.

"I just wanted to say thank you, Ty," April Wind says, homing in on the little purse of her mouth with a knuckle of steamed cauliflower, only to have it drop unerringly into her wineglass. The wine reacts by dribbling down the stem of the glass, an ominous red stain spreading across the tablecloth as she finishes her thought: "For everything. I mean Mac, and all. And the earth too-for loving the earth. And the animals?'