T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

She's leaving, that's what all this means. All right, fine. We've got twenty-nine days to make other arrangements, and the conservator — a skinny, evil woman in a black tube of a dress that looks as if she found it in the back of a surf shop-has already got a dozen people methodically working their way through the house, cataloguing Mac's vast holdings of memorabilia, jewelry, artwork, furniture and Les Paul guitars. I'm relieved, I am. And I don't say a word.

April Wind fishes the cauliflower out of her wine, plops it in her mouth and begins tapping idly at the rim of her wineglass with the dull blade of her butter knife. The wine stain has settled into a definitive shape, something recognizable, like the face of Jesus revealed or Picasso's Head of a Woman Weeping, but I can't say what it is. "I'm going to New York," she says, giddy with the idea of it, "with Ronnie. He's sending a car for me at one." A pause. "I'm going to meet my co-writer, you know, like the as-told-to guy who did the book on Gywneth Paltrow? And I'm going to be on the Wes Starkey Show and everything-"

I don't know whether to congratulate her or commiserate with her, so I just nod, sip my wine and wonder what it is about this moment that makes me feel old beyond any Baby Boomer's most distant hope or expectation.

But that's that. Goodbye to April Wind, and then comes an evening when the evil woman in the tube dress and her cataloguers are tucked safely away in their beds at the Big Ranchito Motel in Buellton, and Andrea and I, by mutual consent, begin to load up the Olfputt while the sun festers on the horizon and Chuy backs the pimento-red Dodge Viper out of the garage with the fifteen hundred dollars cash I gave him tucked deep in the pocket of his blue jeans. (I gave him the Viper too. "IQue estas diciendo?" H e said, his eyes chasing each other like bugs round his face. "You say this car is mine?" I signed the registration over to him, imitating Mac's EKG scrawl as best I could. "Go ahead," I said. "You've earned it") Andrea didn't have a whole lot with her when she showed up on my doorstep back in November-cosmetics, Indian jewelry, a selection of halter tops and clingy dresses calculated to drive males in the young-old range into a fever of sexual nostalgia — and she doesn't have much more now. What she does have, though, is a healthy selection of Maclovio Pulchris memorabilia, all of it neatly folded away before the lawyers descended and the conservator opened up shop. This we load into the back of the Olfputt, along with the raggedy odds and ends of mine that had survived the inundation of the guesthouse and the ensuing months of rot. We work without talking, work like a team, instinctively, each looking out for the other, and we think to take along a selection of venerable meats in a big cooler and as much fine wine as we can reasonably cram in under the seats (no more sake for me, local or otherwise). Is what we're doing strictly legitimate — or even legal? Of course not, But Mac, I like to think, would have no objections. I gave him ten years without complaint, after all, longer by far than any of his wives.

The car is packed. The keys to the house are in my hand. There's one more thing: the animals. I'd determined, the minute that notice of eviction found its way into my hand, to set them free. It didn't matter a damn anymore, and nothing was ever going to get better. Two honey badgers, one male, one female. Where would they go, what would they do? In times gone by, they were native to Africa and India, fierce omnivores that fed on everything from snakes to insects to rats, tubers, fruit and (yes) honey, but the whole world is Africa now, and India, Bloomington, Calcutta and the Bronx, all wrapped in one. The megafauna are gone, the habitat is shrunk to zero, practically no animals left anywhere but for the R-species and the exotics. So why not? Let them go and hope for the best.

I'm standing well back from the cage, with the Nitro cradled under one arm, when I pull the trip wire Chuy rigged up and let them go. They can be irredeemably nasty, going directly for their adversary's sexual organs in any dispute or confrontation, and I suppose I feel a slight twinge about unleashing them on the condos and the put-upon population of Sakapathians and all the rest eking out a living there, but ultimately, as Andrea and I watch their slinking white-crowned forms make their way across the open ground and into the dead brush along the dried-up watercourse, I feel nothing but relief. Maybe they'll find the living easy, feasting on rats and opossums-maybe they'll breed and a whole new subspecies will spring up, Mellivora capensis pulchrisia.

The peccaries are easy. They'd once been native to the Southwest in any case, and all I have to do is open three doors — the one in the bowling alley, two in the lower hall — and watch them snort off into the fading light until they're no more strange or unexpected than the dust and rocks and mesquite itself. And the Egyptian vultures — they're purely a pleasure. These are the birds, by the way, that used to be featured in the old nature films, cream white with ratty black trailing feathers and hooked yellow beaks, the ones that would drop rocks on ostrich eggs in order to get through the tough outer tegument-when there were ostriches, that is. I hood them individually and make use of a leather gauntlet one of Mac's Saudi Arabian friends left behind years ago. Then we're out on the lawn- or where the lawn will be when the irrepressible landscape architect gets himself back in business.

The heat has died down into the eighties. Everything smells of life. The birds grip my arm and sit still as statues, and then, one by one, off come the hoods, and they lift into the air with a furious beating of their shabby wings. For a long while, we watch them climb into the sky, the night settling in behind them while a deep stippled cracked egg of a sunset glows luminously over the hills and the hint of a breeze finds its way in off the sea.

That leaves Petunia.

"I can't do it," I say. "I just can't."

Andrea considers this as we stand there in the drive, the lights of the house glowing softly behind us. There is no sound, nothing, not the roar of an engine or the wail of a distant siren, and all at once a solitary cricket, incurable optimist, starts up with a creaking, teetering song all his own. She touches me then, her fingers gently stroking the sagging, tired flesh of my forearm and the raised reminder there of my thirty-two stitches and all the wounds I never knew I'd sustained.

She understands. Andrea, my wife of a thousand years ago, and my wife now Her voice is soft. She says, "Why don't we take her with us?"

Tierwater came home shaken from his Oregon adventure, and for a good long while thereafter-nearly two years-he lived the life of a model citizen, exemplary father and devoted husband. Or at least he tried to. Tried hard. He didn't work, not at anything so ordinary or tedious as a j obthe only thing he was qualified for was running antiquated shopping centers into the ground, and there wasn't much call for that in southern California, where all the maxi- and mini-malls seemed to have been built in the last ten minutes — and his father's money, the money Andrea and Teo had squeezed out of the stone that bad been hanging round his neck all these years, was plenty enough to last for a good long time to come. So what he did was throw himself headlong into suburban life, though suburban life was the enemy of everything he hoped to achieve as an environmentalist, but never mind that: it was safe. And it provided a cocoon for Sierra. She was what mattered now, and what she needed was a regular father, a suntanned grinning uncomplicated burger-flipping dad greeting her at the door and puzzling over her geometry problems after dinner, not some incarcerated hero.