A Friend of the Earth (14 page)

Then the pictaphone is ringing – or speaking, actually:
Incoming call,
a
mechanical voice announces – and I'm lifting my other wrist to answer it. ‘Yeah?' I say, and I can't help it if my voice lacks enthusiasm – I'm not expecting much out of the day, or for that matter the week, month or year.

‘Ty? You there?'

The voice is familiar, soft and sugar–coated, pitched as high as a child's, and I know it, I do, know it as well as my own … ‘Mac?' I venture.

‘Give me a picture, Ty, come on – '

I hit the button, and there he is, Maclovio Pulchris, trapped in a little box on the underside of my wrist. He's wearing the fedora he was born with – it must have been clamped on his head all the way through the birth canal – and there are three strands of slick processed hair (his eel whips, he calls them) clinging to his mirror shades just over the place where his left eye would be. If he ever took his shades off, that is. ‘Jesus, Ty, you look like shit.'

‘Thanks. It's the look I'm after. I've been putting a lot of work into it.'

‘Are you in bed? At this hour?' A pause. All you can see of him, really, is his lips, nose and cheekbones. It's a disguise, and it makes him appear ageless, I suppose, though he's hardly one of the young–young, or even young. And then, in the softest, breathiest, most forlorn fifth–grader's voice: ‘You're not sick, are you?'

What can I say? Andrea's out there in the other room, and she's a kind of sickness. So's April Wind. And Earth Forever! ‘Petunia got loose – and don't worry, she's all right, we got her back' – bringing my bandaged arm into view – ‘but she chewed up my arm and plus it's raining like holy hell here and I was up before dawn scattering straw in the cages, checking on the sandbags, that sort of thing.'

‘I know.'

I'm just looking at his face, and there's no more flexibility to it than you'd find in a carved wooden mask, but I know what my face is showing on his end: befuddlement, age and decrepitude, uncertainty, incompetence, a doddering around the eyes and a pronounced dwindling of the mouth and chin. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I'm here. Back from sunny North Carolina and all those sweet tropical drinks. And it's a gas, it is – up in the nineties every day, sunshine like you wouldn't believe … but Ty, you know what?'

Here I am, the champion of the young–old, in full possession of my faculties and fresh from my latest sexual triumph, and what do I say? Something penetrating, like ‘Huh?'

The fifth–grader's voice again, pinched and whispery with concern: ‘I'm worried about the animals.'

Well, so am I
, I want to tell him,
what do you think you're paying me for?
Unfortunately, I never get the chance. Because at that moment, Chuy comes banging through the door – the bedroom door, and I wonder where my peace and dignity have fled to – and he's waving his arms and opening and closing his mouth on nothing, so excited he can't seem to form the words to tell me about it in either of the two languages at war in his brain. I can see it in his eyes, though – trouble, big trouble – and of course he's dripping and his hair and mustache have just been recovered from the bottom of the sea. ‘Sorry, Mac,' I say to my wrist, ‘gotta go, talk to you later,' and break the connection.

‘What?' I throw at Chuy, bolt upright in bed now, the light from the other room shining sick and weak on the mossy walls and the banana slug fixed like a lamprey to the image of Thoreau's face.
(‘Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountain head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world.')
‘What's the matter?'

‘Los edificios,
they, they – '

‘What
edificios?'
I'm up now, pulling on my jeans, the anxious faces of Andrea and April Wind hanging on cords in the distance.

‘Los, los condos,
and Rancho Seco – them too – they are what I think is falling down, I mean like in the
corriente,
you know, like boom, boom, boom – '

When Frank Buck wanted elephants – that is, when some zoo or circus placed an order – he would cruise over to Ceylon, hire a couple hundred natives and cut down a whole forest's worth of tropical hardwoods to build a pen with a four–hundred–foot chute in front of it. Fifteen–foot–tall logs were set in the ground eighteen inches apart throughout the pen – or
kraal,
as it was called – and then, using tame elephants to lure the wild ones in close, Buck and his men would stampede the whole lot of them down the chute and into the enclosure as if they were sheep. Uncle Sol, who was there, informed me about this and other peculiarities of the animal trade when I was fifteen, a skinny kid with a mop and shovel, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ordure – shit, that is – his eight Indian elephants produced daily. There was the dust, he said, that was the first thing you noticed, a roiling river of dust fifty feet high, and then you
felt the concussion through the soles of your shoes – fifty or sixty panicked animals weighing up to five tons apiece punishing the ground. But it was the screaming he remembered most, like a brass band hitting nothing but high notes, right off the scale, a noise that shivered and humbled you till the big gate dropped and all that ocean of flesh was just one more commodity for sale and export. The elephants went to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, Central Park, the big timbers of the
kraal
rotted and tumbled over and the jungle sprang back up to conceal the next generation of pachyderms.

That was ninety years ago. Now the elephants are gone, and the forest too – Ceylon, last I heard, was 100 percent deforested, a desert of unemployable mahouts and third–generation twig–gatherers. Uncle Sol had it easy – all he had to do was go out into the wilderness and catch things, and it was a deep wilderness, a jungle full of sights unseen and sounds unheard, raffalii and dorango in the trees, chevrotains, tapirs and yes, pangolins poking through the leaves. It's a little different for me and Chuy. There is no wilderness, and there's nothing left to catch, except maybe rats. Our job, as it turns out on this very wet sixth–consecutive day of rain, is to subdue a menagerie of disgruntled, penned–up and reeking animals named after flowers and escort them to higher ground.

Andrea's going to help. So are April Wind and Mac's two bodyguards. We need all the help we can get, because chaos has been unleashed here, two whole sections of the Lupine Hill condos collapsed like wet cardboard (and where are Delbert Sakapathian and his thousand–dollar check now, I wonder), Rancho Seco gone wet suddenly and looking less like a gated community and more like a riverbed every minute, and my own humble abode flooded right up to the high–water mark on my gum boots. At some point, not long after Chuy's revelation in my darkened bedroom, Mac himself appeared at the front door, wrapped up and hooded in a black slicker that might have been a body bag in another incarnation, his eel whips hanging limp, shades misted over. The bodyguards bookended him. The sky was close. My carpets were fishbait and the
Titanic
was going down fast. ‘Everybody,' he shouted, and even in his extremity his voice was as breathy and sweet as a kindergarten teacher's, ‘everybody up the hill to my house!'

We're coming, I want to tell him, Andrea scooping up floating paperbacks and doing triage on the kitchen appliances, and you don't have to ask twice – but, first, the animals. Out there in the thick of it, Chuy and I discover that one of the giant anteaters has drowned. I don't
know if you can picture a giant anteater offhand – this is the kind of creature that never looked quite real anyway, what with the Mohawk haircut, the underslung bear's feet and the three lengths of hose stuffed into its snout – but it looks even less convincing now. Just dead. Dead and gone. And probably no more than thirty or forty of them left on earth. Even with the rain, even with Andrea and my knee and Mac and the threat of the
mucosa
, I want to sit down and cry.

Lily, fortunately, is all right – she's dug herself a mound big as a tumulus, and there she is, curled up on top of it like a wet rug. The lions we find stacked up on the roof of the concrete–block structure at the back of their cage, roaring their guts out. Dandelion, the male, looks as if he's been drowned twice and twice resuscitated, the mane drooping round his jowls like some half–finished macramé project. Amaryllis and Buttercup, the lionesses Mac ordered through a breeding–facility catalogue from some place in Ohio, don't look much better. Their eyes tell me they want to be pacing neurotically up and down the length of the chain–link fence that encloses their half–acre savanna, but the whole thing is a three–foot–deep stew of phlegm–colored water and Siamese walking catfish (have I mentioned that some environmental anarchist let half a dozen of them go in Carpinteria twenty years back, just as the weather started to turn?).

‘Chuy,' I announce, swinging round on him and the two hopeless–looking bodyguards, ‘the lions are going to be a problem. If we dart them, they're liable to fall into the slop and drown, and if we just wade in there with the wire net, they'll just as likely chew our heads off'

The bodyguards – both of them are named Al, I think – don't look as if they like the sound of this. They're the ones who are going to have to drag a four–hundred–pound cat bristling with claws and teeth through three feet of water and sling it in the back of the Olfputt, and that's no mean feat, whether it's unconscious or not. And then – stirring news – they'll have to go back for the lionesses.

Chuy, meanwhile, is blinking back the rain, hunched and stringy, considering the problem. His slicker, which is at least three sizes too long for him in the arms, is a pale, faded orange in color, liberally stained with Rorschach blots of oil, mold and animal blood. ‘They can swim, Mr. Ty,
nadan estos gatos,
and maybe I think we can tie them like
caballos,
you know, around the neck, and maybe we hook the rope up to the back of the truck, and, you know – '

I'm dazed. Old and dazed. The rain is like a trillion hammers, blow after blow, staggering me. ‘You mean, we drag them?'

‘Sure. And when they see
la puerta
open wide to that dry warm basement at Mr. Mac's, then maybe
yo pienso que
where they want to go,
verdad?'

Or we could just leave them. The water's probably not going to get up that high, I tell myself, but even so it can't be good for them to be soaked through for days on end – they'll catch cold, won't they? What about in Africa, though – or Africa as it once was? They didn't have lion pens to snuggle in – or multimillionaire pop stars' carpeted, paneled and Ping–Pong—tabled basements either. Yes. Sure. And they died, every last one of them, flagged, skinned and eaten right down to the bone by the pullulating masses of our own degraded species. Africa doesn't matter anymore. Nature doesn't matter anymore – it's not even nature, just something we created out of a witches' brew of fossil–fuel emissions and deforestation. These lions live here, in the Santa Ynez Valley – this is their natural habitat now. And if the valley floods, then we'll move them to higher ground, a new habitat for the infinitely adaptable New Age lion: Maclovio Pulchris' twelve–thousand–square–foot basement.

And you know what I say? Hallelujah and praise the Lord.

What he wanted, more than anything, more than revenge, even – more than Andrea and the trees and the owls – was to get his daughter back. Just that. Just walk her down the steps of Juvenile Hall, put her in the car and drive back to New York with his tail between his legs – and it wasn't too late to go back, the house in escrow, the shopping center on the market still, the old blanket of his old life neatly folded and all ready and waiting to be pulled up over his head again. And Andrea? Forget Andrea, forget sex, forget life. He didn't want to be alive, because if you were alive you hurt, and this hurt worse than anything he'd ever known or imagined. His daughter. They'd taken his daughter away. And why? Because he was an unfit parent.

An unfit parent. That set him on fire, all right, that set him off like a Scud missile, all thrust and afterburners and calamitous rage. There was no fitter parent. Show me one – that was his attitude – just show me one. He'd been father and mother to Sierra since she was three years old and he had to rescue her from her grandmother and tell her that her mommy wasn't coming back anymore because she'd just vanished from the face of this earth like a ghost or a breath of wind. Try that one on for size. Try climbing out of the cavern of sleep to the screams and night alarums of an inconsolable thirty–seven–pound ball of confusion and rage, try dropping her off at nursery school, a single father on his way to mind–numbing, soul–crushing work, and she won't let go of the door handle, no joke, no cajoling, the drooping faces of the nursery–school teachers and pitying mothers hanging over the fenders of the car like fruit withered on the vine. A motherless kindergartner, a motherless ten–year–old, a motherless teenager. Tierwater put his
life
into fixing that – or assuaging it, bandaging it, kissing the hurt to make it better – and no one could tell him different. Not Judge Duermer or the Josephine County Child Protective Services or the Supreme Court either.

But here was the fact: he was in Los Angeles, trapped in a blistering
funk of heat and smog and multicultural sweat, and she was in Oregon, where the trees stood tall and the air was cool and sweet – in Oregon, in jail. Or Juvenile Hall. Same difference. They wouldn't let him see her, wouldn't let him correspond with her, wouldn't even let him speak with her on the phone – he was too evil and corrupting an influence. He was a monster. A criminal. A freak. Three and a half weeks had gone by now, and he'd done nothing but lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. He wanted to be in Oregon, close to her, just to tread the same soil and breathe the same air, but Fred wouldn't hear of it. You'll do more harm than good, he insisted. Stay out of it. Don't go near the state line except for court appearances – don't even think about it. And don't worry: we'll get her released to Andrea, no problem – no matter what happens with you.