A Friend of the Earth (18 page)

No sex, though – that would have been crazy.

Still, when Jane lit up a joint and slid bare–legged into his sleeping bag, he couldn't seem to keep his hands from making a mute appeal to her – and she seemed to be having the same problem he was. She pulled him to her. They kissed, long and hard, and then, panting and hot, they forced themselves apart. They lay there under the canopy of the tent, fighting for
self–control – ‘We can fool around, can't we? Maybe just a little?' – listening to the condensation drip from the trees as the fire outside settled into its embers, and what with the stillness and the pot and the electricity of their bodies, things got out of hand. They hadn't seen a grizzly, hadn't heard one, hadn't seen tracks or scat or stumps gutted for ants. They took a chance. They couldn't help themselves. And it was all the more intense for the danger of it – for the fractured resolve, for the tease – and when it was over they made themselves get up out of the sleeping bag and follow the beam of the flashlight down to the pond, where they slipped into the icy envelope of the water to scrub themselves with scendess soap till their teeth chattered and their lips turned blue.

Tierwater chewed the cud of his pancakes, the atomized rain collecting in his hair, and stared up into the canopy of the trees, opening up to everything there was. He was feeling rich, feeling blessed, and – he was only twenty–nine then, so you'll have to forgive him – feeling all but invulnerable. When Jane cried out he almost laughed, it was so comical. ‘Oh!' she said, and that was all – just ‘Oh' – as if she'd been surprised in the dark or fallen out of bed. It wasn't ‘Oh, shit!' or ‘Oh, fuck!' – just ‘Oh.' Jane didn't curse, couldn't bring herself to it, and though they'd played at being street–smart and tough when that was the thing to do and smoked countless bowls with countless stoners and shouted their lungs out in dark overheated clubs and reeling outdoor arenas, Jane clung to her core of small–town propriety. Tierwater always thought that if it weren't for him she would have grown up to be the kind of woman who sat on the PTA board and went to church in a veiled hat and white gloves. And he loved that, he loved that about her. The world was full of obscenity, full of hard cases, antichrists and nutballs – he didn't need that. Not at home. Not in a wife.

‘Oh!' she cried, and she jumped up from the dish of pancakes as if she'd been stung.
As if
, he says – but that was exactly what had happened. A bee had stung her. Or not a bee – a yellow jacket,
Vespula maculifrons
, the gold–and–black–banded wasp the locals called a meat bee because of its love for burgers, steaks and chops fresh off the grill. Not to mention carrion.

It was almost funny. A bee sting. But the incredible thing was that Jane had gone through an entire life, all twenty–five years of it, without ever having been stung before – or not that her mother could remember anyway. So this wasn't funny, wasn't the casual mishap it might have been for 99 percent of the species, the lucky ones, the nonallergjc and resistant.
It was death, that's what it was. Though Tierwater, fully engaged in the bliss of natural being and chewing his cud of semi–blackened buckwheat meal, didn't yet realize it. He got up, of course, set down the tin plate and went to her, the fire smoking, the trees dripping, the swatted yellow jacket lying on its back in the dirt and kicking its six moribund legs as if it could live to sting another day.

Jane's face went red. Her eyes sank into their sockets and bounced back at him like two hard black balls. She couldn't seem to stop blinking. She couldn't catch her breath. All this, and still he had no idea, no conception, not the vaguest hint that the plug had been pulled on everything he'd known as life to this moment. ‘What is it,' he said, trying to laugh it off, ‘a bee sting? Is that it?'

She couldn't answer him. He held her – what else could he do? He'd never heard of anaphylactic shock, never heard of epinephrine or histamines, he knew from zero to nothing about first aid and CPR, and he was twelve miles from the nearest road. And, besides,
it was only a bee sting
. Yes, but her heart was trying to tear its way out of her chest even as he held her, and she wet herself, hot urine down her leg in a smear of dirt, the smell of it like vinegar burned in a pan, and here she was on the ground, on her side, vomiting up the blackened paste of the pancakes. Water, he brought her water, and cleared the hair away from her mouth, but there was nothing in her eyes and she was as cold as the dirt she was lying in.

He didn't know how long he sat there with her, alternately feeling for a pulse and trying to force air down her throat through the ache in his lungs, trying to make her breathe, stir, get up and walk it off, for Christ's sake. Prayers came back to him then, the faces of the dead,
ora pro nobis
, and though he was panicked – or because he was panicked – he couldn't bring himself to move her, even after the mist turned to drizzle and the drizzle to rain. Finally, though – and it must have been late in the afternoon – he pulled her up out of the mud and slid her over one shoulder, nothing heavier in the world, nothing, not stone or lead or all the mountains marching off in neat ranks to Canada. Down the trail then, down the trail to the trailhead, and out to the road and the car and the hospital in Whitefish. He brought her back, all the way back, out of the tall trees and the wet and the sting of the everlasting day, but it didn't matter to him or to anybody else, because he didn't bring her back alive.

I can't sleep
. Christ knows I'm tired enough, my knee throbbing, my back gone into permanent retirement, every muscle in my body stretched to the tearing point and both my shoulders hanging on threads like a puppet's. I'm beat, whipped, done in and played out. It's been a day. I'm in bed, in Mac's place, in a room bigger than a bus station, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. Andrea is here beside me, curled up like a question mark and snoring so softly I can barely hear her, and Mac's pink satin sheets are flowing like bathwater over and under my grateful old man's feet. Do you want to define cozy? This is it.

Outside, it's different. Outside is the wind, the horizontal rain, the rending and the howling, outside is the wreckage of the place I've called home for the past ten years and all the pens and cages we contrived to design and build for the greater welfare and happiness of the animals. Gone. Just like that. Where the guesthouse used to be there's a river now, all roiling muscle and deep–brown ribs, no more Rancho Seco, no more Lupine Hill condos, nothing but sirens and searchlights and people clinging to one piece of wreckage or another.

But that's not what's keeping me awake. I've been through the list of the animals twice already, and I'm satisfied on that score, and Andrea managed to salvage most of my personal belongings (yellowing boxer shorts, the food compressor, the toaster, my beat–up copies of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
and
The Dharma Bums
, the odd bottle of
sake
and assorted foodstuffs). Things are nothing to me anyway. I could rebuild, pack up and move on, live in a ditch or a teepee – or a six–by–eight platform in a redwood tree, for that matter. No, the problem here seems to be my brain – it just won't shut down. For a while I tried to trace the whole convoluted chain of my thoughts back to the first image – that works most of the time, because sooner or later I forget what the point of the exercise is and then it's six o'clock in the morning – but perversely, and maybe because there's been such radical change in my staid and
limited sphere here in the past few days, new thoughts kept spinning out of the recovered ones, so that, in going back from the idiosyncrasies of Andrea's snoring to my mother's when she fell asleep on the couch with a quilt pulled up to her chin and her drink gone to water in her hand to the way the light came through the kitchen window in the house in Peterskill to Anthony's Nose and Dunderberg and all the hikers coming down with Lyme disease on the Appalachian Trail, I found myself wondering about the new breed of nature–lovers who take their TV attachments every place they go because the real thing has nothing to offer anymore. Then I got stuck on TV, my boyhood in front of the tube, and before I knew it I was reprising the entire CBS, NBC and ABC schedules for a given week in 1959 or so. That's how I got to Ronald Reagan. I went through each of the weekdays like beads on a string, got to Saturday night and
Have Gun, Will Travel
, then Sunday, Ed Sullivan, eight to nine, followed by
The General Electric Theater
, hosted by the future governor of California and fortieth president of the United States.

I'd stretch out on the rug that smelled of carpet cleaner with my school books scattered round me, and watch the jugglers, comedians and dancing horses that made up Sullivan's pretty dull affair, and then, if I wheedled and pled, I'd get to stay up half an hour more to watch the drama that followed, because anything was better than bed. And there he was, Ronald Reagan. I was nine years old and I had no idea who he was – I'd never heard of
Bedtime for Bonzo
or
Hellcats
or the Gipper or any of the rest of it. I just saw him there, bland and anonymous but for the amazing glistening meatloaf of hair glued to his head and the motto of the company he shilled for:
Progress is our most important product
. Sure. Of course it is. That makes sense, doesn't it? We move forward, conquer and foster and discover – plug it in, tune it up – and life just gets better. And what about that house they built for him and his wife in the Pacific Palisades? An intercom in every room, electric switches to close the drapes, electric barbecue and hedge clippers, three TVs, two ranges, two ovens, three refrigerators, two freezers, heat lamps, electric eyes, washers, dryers, a retractable canopy roof for al–fresco dining. That's progress. And so is naming James Watt your secretary of the interior.

My guts are rumbling: gas, that's what it is. If I lie absolutely still, it'll work through all the anfractuous turns and twists down there and find its inevitable way to the point of release. And what am I thinking? That's methane gas, a natural pollutant, same as you get from landfills, feedlots and termite mounds, and it persists in the atmosphere for ten years, one
more fart's worth of global warming. I'm a mess and I know it. Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, enviro–eco–capitalistico guilt: I can't even expel gas in peace. Of course, guilt itself is a luxury. In prison we didn't concern ourselves overmuch about environmental degradation or the rights of nature or anything else, for that matter. They penned us up like animals, and we shat and pissed and jerked off and blew hurricanes out our rectums, and if the world collapsed as a result, all the better: at least we'd be out.

In between gusts the volume comes up on the rain and I can hear it patiently eroding the lashed–down tiles of the roof (two years ago Mac had steel mesh welded over the entire thing and so far it's held up – no splootching buckets here).
Ssssssss
, the rain sizzles, fat in a fryer. Andrea snorts, mutters a few incomprehensible syllables and rolls over. More rain. An unidentified flying object hits the side of the house with a thud, a dull booming reverberation that sets tinkling the flesh–toned figurines in the display case (each of the guest bedrooms is decorated after an era in rock–and–roll history – we're in the Grunge Room, replete with replicas of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam in action, as well as a framed lock of Kurt Cobain's hair over the legend ‘A Lock of Kurt Cobain's Hair'). This is crazy. How can I sleep through this? How can anybody sleep through it? How can Andrea, April Wind, Mac, Chuy, Al and Al?

More to the point: how can the animals? And yes, I admit it, I
am
concerned about them, or concerned all over again, because that's the way it is with insomnia – the brain, diligent organ that it is, will always manage to come up with something to forestall the inevitable shutdown. Very still now, Andrea between breaths, the wind making a snatch at the rain, and I swear I can hear one of the lions coughing two floors beneath me. I'm not imagining this – there it is again. Sounds like Amaryllis. I can picture them down there, exploring their new quarters, scent–marking the walls, gutting the furniture, ripping up carpets, settling in.

The amazing thing is, no one got hurt.

All those claws, all those teeth, all those hundreds of pounds of irascibility and recalcitrance, the wind blowing up a tornado, the water waist–deep and running slick and fast, and me at seventy–five with my bad knee, savaged back and chewed–up arm and nobody to help but Chuy and five conscripts: this is a recipe for disaster. I didn't need April Wind, I needed the Marine Corps. But Chuy, never to be mistaken for a genius, especially since the pesticide seemed to have annulled most of the cognitive functions of his brain, really came to the rescue. He did. He
saved the day and no doubt about it. Because his idea of roping the cats (and, ultimately, Lily and Petunia) and forcing them to swim for it, as ridiculous as it might sound, was the one thing that ultimately worked. While Mac and the women went off to hood the Egyptian vultures and prod the honey badgers into their carrying cages, I unlocked the gate on the chain–link fence and stepped into the lion compound, Chuy right beside me with a coiled–up rope. Al and Al sat in the Olfputt, flexing their muscles and looking very small in the face: they wanted no part of this, and who could blame them?

I never liked darting the animals. Too risky. We were using a mixture of Telezol and Xylazine, and it worked like a charm – if you got the dosage right. Too much, and you had a dead animal on your hands; too little, and you ran the risk of becoming a dead animal yourself. I'd worked out the dosage as best I could under the conditions (duress, flooding, excitable women and a hysterical Mac, inundated kitchen, floating table, that sort of thing), and I figured I'd try half a dose for starters – enough to make them groggy, but not so much that they couldn't swim behind the Olfputt and find their way through the open basement door to where dry accommodations, some hastily scattered straw and the freshly drowned carcass of an emu awaited them.