A Friend of the Earth (22 page)

‘Said he's coming up next week – wants to talk to you.'

Tierwater had the refrigerator door open. He was extracting heads of lettuce, carrots, broccoli from the paper bags and dropping them into the vegetable crisper. ‘Who?'

‘What do you mean, “who”? Teo. Who're we talking about?' Ratchiss was giving him a look, lips pursed over the bite of his drink, eyes narrowed to slits.

All right, look at me
, Tierwater was thinking, belligerent suddenly. If Teo came up, somebody might follow him. And if somebody followed him, it wasn't Ratchiss who was going to jail, it was Tyrone O'Shaugh–nessy Tierwater. And his wife. And his daughter. ‘Isn't that dangerous?' Tierwater said, backing away from the refrigerator, all the peace gone out of the day like air from a hissing balloon.

‘Bloody hell, you don't think he's going to
drive
, do you?'

‘How else is he going to get here – by parachute?'

There was a moment of silence, Ratchiss studying him, the squirrels chittering in the trees outside the window, a soft exclamation of despair or joy – he couldn't tell which – drifting in from the grudge match on the porch. ‘He's no fool – he's hiking in. Having some friend drive him to the trailhead at Camp Orson, and you know Teo – I'd bloody well like to see some lawman try to keep up with him on the trail. No, not to worry, Ty: these people are professionals.
We're
professionals, I should say.' He took a step forward, set his drink down on the counter and held out his hand –
a callused, hard, sinewy hand, chilled by cold gin – which Tierwater duly took in his own. ‘Nobody's going to give you up, don't you worry.'

Andrea was committed to the cause – one of the charter members of Earth Forever!, a paid, full–time proselytizer and rabble rouser – but Tierwater could see she hadn't counted on this. Living underground, living anonymously, living as Dee Dee Drinkwater in a place as remote from the bright lights as you could get, beautiful scenery, sure, but where was the action? Her forte was traveling the enviro circuit, making contacts over the cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, showing the slides, giving the peroration and passing the hat. She looked good up there onstage, tall and commanding, with her low–cut blouse and scorching eyes, very persuasive, very seductive – as Tierwater could testify. She hadn't said anything yet, but he sensed she was looking for a way out, a deal maybe, a way to cut their losses and generate some publicity. Teo was coming. He wanted to talk. And what did that mean? More lawyers? More Freds? Tierwater didn't want any part of it – he was Tom Drinkwater now, faceless and hidden, and if he was going to go down he was going to go down in flames.

He was in the kitchen, half an hour after his chat with Ratchiss, helping Andrea dice vegetables for the salad that would complement the casserole and the mighty slabs of meat Ratchiss was incinerating on the grill out back, when he broached the subject of Teo's visit. ‘Teo's coming up next week, you know.'

He turned his head to study her in profile, the hard bump of her nose, the slash of her cheek, hair falling to her shoulders in laminated coils. ‘Philip told me.'

Outside, in the gathering shadows, Ratchiss hunched over the fire, drink in one hand, tongs in the other. He was whistling something, faint and atonal, something maddeningly familiar – ‘Seventy–six Trombones'? The theme from
The Magnificent Seven?

‘He did?' Tierwater was surprised. And somehow – he couldn't help himself – annoyed.

She was watching her hands, the knife that deftly julienned the carrots on the chopping block. ‘He gave me a letter from him too, E.F.! business mostly.' She shot him a sidelong glance. ‘Robin Goldman? Remember her? The one that loaned us the car? Well, she quit. Didn't say a word to anybody, just quit.'

‘No lawyers,' Tierwater said, ‘and no deals. They pushed me, and I'm
going to push back. You want to see sabotage, you want to see destruction like nobody's ever seen, well, that's what I'm devoting the rest of my fucking life to, and I don't care – '

‘You want to see the letter? It's up on the night table, right by the bed.' The heel of the knife hit the board, slivers of carrot flew, chop, chop, chop. ‘Go ahead, read it yourself

‘I don't want to read it. Just tell me what the deal is, because I'm getting pretty stressed out here – I mean, every step I've taken since we, since I met you, has been a fucking disaster, one fucking disaster after another, and I want to know what's going on.'

Down went the knife. She turned to face him, wiping her hands on the flanks of her shorts. ‘Nothing,' she said. ‘Nothing's going on. And it was you who couldn't control yourself, slamming into that goon out in the Siskiyou, breaking out of the hospital, going up there to Sierra when I told you – '

‘Yeah, you told me, all right.' He pinched his voice in a mocking falsetto: ‘ “You think I'd take Sierra along if I wasn't a hundred percent sure it was safe?” If Sierra doesn't go that night, then we're not here now, then my life isn't fucked, ever think of that?' He was shouting, he couldn't help himself, though he knew Ratchiss was listening, and, somewhere, Sierra too.

‘All right. I made a mistake. What do you want me to do, bleed for it?'

‘I just want to know one thing,' he said, and he got his voice under control, or tried to. ‘Did you ever have anything going with him?'

‘What are you talking about? With who?'

He dropped his voice, way down low, so low he could barely hear it himself: ‘Teo.'

Later, at dinner, after Sierra had expressed her disgust over the bleeding mound of sliced tri–tip Ratchiss had set down in the middle of the table (‘What do you call that – carpaccio?'), and Ratchiss had told a pungent, sweltering anecdote about tracking down a wounded leopard in thick bush and removing its head with a double blast of his shotgun as it hung in the air two feet from his face, Tierwater began to feel better. It wasn't so much Teo that was bothering him as what Teo represented. Intrusion. The outside world. Business as usual. These past three weeks had been an idyll, and Tierwater knew it, but he wanted the idyll to go on forever. He looked at Andrea, at her hands and arms and the way she cocked her head first with amusement and then intrigue and finally something like fear as Ratchiss spun out his story, and wished he could freeze the moment.

‘You know, really,' Ratchiss was saying, ‘my life's come a full three hundred sixty degrees.'

‘One eighty,' Andrea said automatically. ‘From one pole to the other. If you'd gone three sixty, you'd be back where you started.'

‘That's just what I mean: I'm back where I started.' Red–faced, his skin baked to the texture of jerky, Ratchiss took a gulp of Pinot Noir and looked round the table. ‘You see, I started out loving animals – and, by extension, nature – then, suddenly, I hated them and wanted to kill everything with claws and hoofs that moved across the horizon, and now I'm as committed a friend of the earth and the animals as you'd want to find.'

Sierra had been toying with her utensils, filling up on Diet Coke and chips. She didn't really care for eggplant, and salad was salad. ‘How could anybody
hate
animals?' she said.

‘Oh, it's easier than you might imagine. Ever think of what our ancestors must have felt when Mummy was snapped up by a big croc while washing out her loincloth in the river? Or when they glanced up from the fire to see Grandpa dangling from the jaws of some cave bear the size of that tree out front? Or, more to the point, the thousands of poor Africans taken by leopards every year? You think they love leopards? Or do you think they want to exterminate them ASAP?' He leaned back to light a cigarette, and Sierra made a face. ‘Let me tell you a story, a true story, about why I came to hate wild animals – why I gave up my desk job to go to Africa. It was because of something that happened to me when I was little, or not so little – how old are you now?'

‘Thirteen.'

‘Thirteen. Well. Maybe I was a year or two younger, I don't know. But, anyway, my father took the family on a vacation, to see the country, he said, all the way from Long Island, where I grew up, to Pikes Peak, the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Park – not far from where we sit right here tonight, in fact. I had a sister then, Daphne, and she must have been about four at the time, a little girl with bangs and dimples and a barrette in her hair, and for the last two hundred miles all we talked about was the bears. Would there really be bears in Yosemite? Wild bears? And could we see them? Would we? My father was a solid man in his fifties – he married late and my mother was twenty years younger – and he'd got rich during the war in the canning business. He had one of those little masking–tape mustaches then, I remember, the kind you see on the dashing types in the old movies. Anyway, he just turned around in his seat and said, Sure, of course we'll see them. That's what the park's famous for. Bears.

‘This was in the forties, by the way, just after the war. We had a Packard then, big as a hearse, in some deep shade of blue or maroon, I can't remember… And the bloody bears were there all right, a hundred of them, lined up along the road into the park like peanut vendors at Yankee Stadium, bears of all colors, from midnight black to dogshit brown and peach, vanilla and strawberry blond. You see, those were the days when the Park Service was actively trying to encourage tourism, and so they encouraged the bears too, by dumping garbage instead of hauling it out, because people wanted to see Bridalveil Falls and all that, sure, but if they were going to experience nature, they figured,
really
experience it, well, bears were the ticket.

‘Every car was stopped, and every car had a bear at the window, and people were photographing them up close – from inches away – and feeding marshmallows and bologna sandwiches, candy bars, whatever they had, right into their mouths, as if they were just big shaggy dogs. Some people had their windows rolled down, leaning halfway out of the car to offer up a morsel of this or that, and the bears played it up, sitting on their rumps, doing tricks, woofing in that nasal, back–of–the–throat way that always makes me think of a trombone played in a closet. This was the thrill of my life. I was so excited I was practically bouncing off the ceiling of the car, and my sister too, but for some reason all the bears were occupied and none of them came up to us, or not right away. What's the matter, Dad? I whined. Why won't they come to us? And my father rolled down the window – we all rolled down our windows, even my mother – and he leaned way out and tossed a packet of American–cheese slices out onto the blacktop about ten feet from the nearest bear, all the while making these mooching noises to attract it. I remember the bear. It was medium–sized, black as the car tires, with too–small eyes that seemed to melt into its head.

‘Well, it must have heard my father – or the soft wet thwap of the cheese hitting the pavement – and it turned, sniffed and vacuumed up the cheese, wax paper and all, and then it ambled up to the car, swinging its head to catch the scent, and it was like two huge dogs wrapped in an old rug. I remember the smell of it – still, and after all these years and all the animals I've tracked and shot and skinned. It was rank and wild and it engulfed us as if the car had suddenly rolled down a hill and into a swamp or a cesspool, and it made me afraid, but only momentarily, and not so afraid I didn't hang out the window and feed it a whole bag of popcorn, kernel by kernel, and the marshmallows we were going to roast over the fire that night.

‘By this time, people were getting out of their cars all up and down the line, so many people you could hardly see the bears for them. They all had cameras, and some of them were offering the bears more elaborate things, like hot dogs on a stick and jars of peanut butter – one guy even held out a pineapple to a bear, and though I'm sure the bear had no idea what it was, it ate it, prickly skin and all. That was when my father closed in on our bear – the black one with the melted eyes, a thing that barely came up to his waist – and decided he wanted a picture with one of us kids mounted on the thing's back.'

‘You've got to be kidding,' Tierwater said. Sierra darted a glance out the window. She was hunched over her plate, rhythmically knocking her knees. She didn't say a word.

Ratchiss just shook his head. ‘I was too big, obviously, so he got my mother to hold the camera and he lifted my sister up into the air, thinking to swing her over the bear's shoulders for just an instant as it nosed at the popcorn on the pavement. My sister was wearing a white dress, with pink roses on it, that's what the pictures show, and a ribbon, I remember a ribbon.' He pushed back from the table, drew on his cigarette and let out a long slow exhalation. ‘And that was it. My father was six months in the hospital. My sister, what was left of her, we had to bury.'

Andrea leaned forward, both hands cupped over the rim of her wineglass. ‘You must have been devastated – ‘

‘I saw the whole thing, my mother screaming, my father wrestling with this snarling bolt of stinking primitive energy, my sister, and I didn't do a thing, nothing, just stood there … It took me half my life, looking at my father's disfigured face and the looping white scars down his back every time we went to the beach or the pool, to understand that it wasn't the bear's fault.'

‘She died?' Sierra said, but nobody answered her.

After a suitable pause, during which Ratchiss stared down at the juices congealing on his plate and they all took a moment to listen to the silence of the woods brooding over the house, the conversation moved on to other things. There was coffee, and hot chocolate for Sierra, and then they retired to the big room to throw a log on the fire and sit watching the flames chew away at it. At some point, Andrea and Ratchiss talking in low tones about gut–shot buffalo and wild dogs, Tierwater poking through Emerson and Sierra hunched in the corner over a magazine, the telephone rang – but it didn't just ring; dropped into that well of silence, it was like an explosion. On the first ring, Tierwater felt as if he'd
been hit in the back of the head with a hammer; on the second, he wanted to leap up and tear the cord from the wall. He was jumpy, and who wouldn't be? They could come for him at any moment.