A Friend of the Earth (25 page)

But back to Christmas, because Christmas is what's happening here, floods,
mucosa
and irate quadrupeds notwithstanding. The two Als, left with no discernible use or employment since there's no one within half a mile to protect Mac from, have been co–opted by the interior–decorating department (Mac and Andrea, working in concert) to string lights and pin tinfoil angels to the walls. It all feels – I don't know –
vestigial
somehow. And sad. The empty ceremony of a forgotten tribe. Christmas means nothing to me, except maybe as a negative, the festival of things, of gluttony, light the candles and rape the planet all over again. Even the Japanese got in on the act at the end of the last century, but they saw the Yule season for what it was – wall–to–wall shopping and nothing more.

I know, I know. We had Christmas when I was a boy, because of my mother, and there was magic in the world then – there was redemption. Hope. And more than that: there was a reason, for us and the beasts and the plants and everything else. That's all gone now. Long gone. And though I'm utterly practical and unsentimental, as stripped of illusion as any captive of the Mohawk, the first time I come down the hall and spot those silverfoil angels crowding the ceiling on their crimped and glittering wings, it's all I can do to keep from blubbering into my gauze mask. And how do you like that for a confession?

In fact, I'm standing there in the downstairs hallway, overcome with emotion, ten o'clock in the morning and eight more shopping days to
Christmas, when Chuy materializes from behind a lifesize marble statue of Elvis, chopping along the Persian runner in his quick purposive way. I can see from his body language – head down, shoulders bunched up around his ears, feet snipping at the carpet like lawn shears – that he's looking for me, and that he's looking for me because something has gone suddenly and irremediably wrong. ‘Mr. Ty,' he calls, his eyes already running away from him, ‘I don't want to tell you, but
la puerta del cuarto de regalos? —
the gift room? – this is open. Open wide.'

What am I thinking? Lily, that's what. She's over six feet long from snout to tail, weighs a hundred and sixty pounds, with a big gray head shaped like an anvil and black stripes on her legs. The bulk, the fur, the collapsible rear and ungainly legs – don't let appearances fool you. This is an animal that can run better than thirty miles an hour in a burst, and run all night long, designed by evolution as an eating machine, pure and simple. No codes, no ethics. See it, kill it, eat it – that's the motto of the family Hyaenidae. And now the door's open, open wide, and the hoped–for, prayed–for, one–in–a–thousand–chance miracle – that's she's snoring and sated in a midden of gnawed bones and foil gift wrap – is not a thing I'm counting on. She's too smart for that. Too devious. Too wild.

My first impulse is to fly up the stairs on my seventy–five–year–old feet and see for myself, maybe even slam the big mahogany door and turn the key in the lock, but I suppress it. That's what an impetuous forty–year–old would do – or even a headstrong fifty- or sixty–year–old. Sure. And have his head crushed and his bowels ripped out in the process. No, the wisdom of age speaks in my ear (life might be shit, but why curtail it here, before the end of the story?), and my aching feet take me down the corridor in the direction of the back stairway, Chuy hurrying along beside me with an inscrutable look. Is he concerned, frightened, excited? With Chuy, it's hard to say. His eyes are like trick mirrors and he never loses that loopy, gold–inlaid smile, no matter what happens. We're being stealthy, though, both of us – we're in lock–step on that score – and we slip down the hall to the Grunge Room as quietly as possible.

Ten feet from the door, both of us stop dead: something isn't right. Something, in fact, is very wrong: the door is ajar. What I'm feeling all of a sudden is nothing less than panic. My heart is pounding, my eyes are burning – vinegar, somebody's poured vinegar in my eyes – and I can't seem to swallow. It's me. My fault. I'm old, forgetful, a fool and worse, because I'm the one who must have left that door open when I slipped into my jeans and boots and staggered down the corridor to breakfast.
Andrea, I'm thinking, Andrea, even as I lean into the howling depths of that still and silent room and fumble for the light switch on the wall inside the door. I can't find it, at least not right away, because I'm just a guest here, because my fingers are trembling and I'm old and I want to be back in my own house, amid my own things, and away from all this.

The room is deep, high–ceilinged, cavernous. I can't see a thing. The weather has been so bad it's hard to tell morning from night anyway, but Andrea keeps the big brocade curtains drawn to squelch any hint of daylight till she drags herself out of bed, usually about noon. She's there now, a hyena–sized mound in the center of the bed, all the stories of African witches shape–shifting and taking on the form of the sneaking graveyard robber come back to haunt me (‘And what big teeth you have, Grandma') till she rips off a sudden burst of crackling old–lady snores and I can breathe again.

Then the light, and I see that the room is empty, but for Kurt Cobain's hair and the heap of molding artifacts that represent my worldly wealth, the salvage of the guesthouse rudely dumped in the far corner. In amongst the junk, though, duly cleaned and lubricated with a rag soaked in 3-in–l Oil, is the .470 Nitro Express rifle that once belonged to Philip Ratchiss. I've never hunted a thing in my life, not to kill it – I'm with Thoreau:
No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does —
but I go straight to the gun, force the cartridges in the chamber and sight experimentally down the length of the barrel.

Andrea (half awake): ‘Ty?'

Me: ‘Yeah?'

Andrea: ‘You're not – ? What are you doing? Is that a gun?'

Me (hard, cold, tough as the callus on the heel of a fakir's foot): ‘I'm going hunting.'

It's all a pose. Because I'm not that tough. Nobody is. Except maybe Ratchiss. Or Teo – the
late
Teo, and why does it give me such satisfaction to turn that phrase over on my tongue? I have no illusions here: Lily is going to have to die, the soft–point bullets tearing a hole in her you could stuff an encyclopedia into, and Lily is one of – what, two, three hundred? – of her kind left on earth. She's been with me since the beginning, a scruffy yearling we got from the L.A. Zoo before it went under, and she was here for me when Andrea wasn't. How many morsels have I tossed her in the space of ten years, how much roadkill, how many chicken backs? (And if you've never tossed a chicken back to a hyena,
how can I begin to describe the satisfaction of hearing the snap of those iron jaws, the gorge descending, the efficiency of the animal, my animal, as it consumes and thrives and grows into the very image of the shaggy wild–eyed thing that trotted across Olduvai Gorge when we were still toolless apes bolting our own meat raw?) This is Lily we're talking about here,
Lily —
I'd as soon have to shoot Old Yeller.

Out in the hallway, stalking now, Chuy at my back: ‘Mr. Ty,' he whispers, ‘you
quiere
for me maybe to get the wire net, I think maybe?' And then, when I don't answer:
‘No le vas a disparar
— you no shoot Lily, Mr. Ty?'

I just grit my teeth – or what's left of them, anyway.

‘The dart gun,
por qué no
we just dart her?'

I'm busy stalking. Crouched over my screaming septuagenarian lower back muscles, the gun as heavy as a hod of bricks in my weak wet hands, eyes watering, hearing shot, I haven't got the energy to respond. You don't dart an animal like this, not at close quarters – even if you did manage to hit her, she'd have removed your face before the drug began to take the spring out of her legs, and she'd have her head deep in your intestines by the time she felt a yawn coming on. This is no Patagonian fox. This is no stitch job at the local hospital. This is finality. Good night, all she wrote, sheet–over–the–face time.

Upstairs, there's nothing. The bedroom doors are all firmly shut, the fluorescent energy–savers glow in their sconces, silence reigns. I say nothing to Chuy, and he says nothing to me. It's all we can do to breathe, the air thick in our nostrils, almost solid with the stench of hyena, urine, excrement, rotting meat. The gift–wrapping room is up ahead on our left, three doors down. What I want more than anything in the world is for that door to be closed, for Chuy to have mistaken it for another one, for all this to be nothing more than a false alarm, a joke on me, the smallest little inconsequential miscue to laugh about over coffee and crullers. But it's not, and that's an affirmative, Captain, because we're close enough now to see that the door is indeed open, open wide, flung all the way back on its hinges like a big toothless mouth.

That freezes me up, all right. My legs feel as if they've been sawed off and put on backward, my fingers are rigid, I think I'm having a heart attack. And the gun – suddenly the gun weighs as much as a howitzer. ‘The chair,' I whisper, jerking my chin first at Chuy and then at some priceless antique from the nineties, all molded black plastic and chrome, until Chuy catches my meaning and inches the chair away from the wall
and into my purview. Now I'm resting the gun on the back of the chair, finger on the trigger, the barrel trained on the open door at optimal hyena height, and now Chuy – the most tentative man in the world, an acrobat on a wire stretched high over a pit of snakes – is inching toward the door.

I've had a lot of bad moments in my life, bad moments like little missives from the Fates, whole truckloads of them, but this is one of the worst. I am ready for anything – or as ready as a mostly broken–down young–old man with deteriorating reflexes and a serious loss of faith can expect to be – but it's not Lily that comes sailing through the door, it's Mac.
Mac
. He's wearing the usual getup, half drum major, half hood from a forties B–movie, his legs gliding on silk strings, a stack of gift–wrapped boxes in his arms, and he's whistling – actually whistling – some Motown tune of the sixties. It takes me a minute, and then I've got it – The Supremes, ‘Stop in the Name of Love.'

I can't seem to find my voice. But Chuy, who doesn't seem capable of construing things with the same degree of complexity as I do, has no trouble finding his. ‘Mr. Mac,' he says, waving his rope–walker's arms for balance, ‘I think you better maybe look out.
Cuidado
, you know?'

As I've said, my hearing could be better, the vestigial buzz of Hendrix's ‘Voodoo Child' forever vibrating in the cochlea of my left ear, and I can't make out Mac's gauze–muffled response. ‘Muffins on marmalade,' he seems to be saying, or maybe it's the other way around. He's arrested there in the doorway, not ten feet from the barrel of the gun, and I can see that his lips are moving behind the gauze film of the mask. Meanwhile, my hands are trembling so hard I'm afraid I'm going to squeeze the trigger in some sort of involuntary reflex, so I let go of it, rise up to my full height (which is two full inches less than it was when I was middle–aged, another of the humiliations of longevity), and tear my own mask off. ‘Mac, for Christ's sake, will you get out of the way!'

No response.

‘It's Lily!' I shout.
‘Lily!'

In pantomime now, the spilling legs, floating packages, eyes bugging behind the silver lenses of his shades: a glance over his shoulder, a glance for me, and then the packages are left to the mercy of gravity and Mac is at the door, flinging it shut like the lone defender at the gates. He's so stunned, so consternated, so much at a loss, he forgets all about cool and contagion and strips off both his shades and the gauze mask in one frantic motion. ‘Holy —,' he says, searching for the expression, because Mac doesn't curse, ‘I mean holy crap! What was I thinking? I wasn't, Ty, that's
just it, I wasn't thinking. It's just like I mean it was Christmas and I – she didn't get out, did she? Is she loose?'

I shrug. ‘How would I know? But my guess is yeah, sure, she's loose. Long gone, in fact.'

The three of us take a minute to look both ways up and down the long corridor, as if we expect to see her scrag of a tail poking out from beneath one of the memorabilia cases that line the walls on either side. (No suits of armor or crossed halberds here – this is nothing less than a shrine to the genius of Maclovio Pulchris, and I don't mean that sarcastically. He
is
a genius. Or was. Maybe he's gone a little bit overboard with the self–deifying aspect of it, I won't deny that. It's a question of proportion, I suppose, because it's all here, Pulchrisized for the ages. Not only has he got photos and oil portraits of himself staring out from the walls wherever you look, but every record and CD he's ever recorded is on permanent display, not to mention tour souvenirs, ticket stubs, T–shirts, yellowing press releases and fanzine articles, even the outfits he's worn onstage, all of it meticulously arranged according to release dates, artistic period and hairstyle.)

‘I don't know,' Mac says, ‘it was only a minute. Maybe she was asleep or something.'

I'm shaken. I'm angry. And though he's my employer, though he's my lifeline in the dark churning Social Security—less waters of the perilous young–old life, I let him know it. ‘What do you think, you can just leave the door wide open and she's going to curl up like some fat lapdog?'

Mac wants to answer – I can see a response gathering itself in his naked, faintly yellowish eyes – but the opportunity dissolves into the sudden ringing of the doorbell. Or it doesn't ring exactly, but chimes the opening bars of Mac's biggest hit, ‘Chariots of Love,' from the
Chariots of Love
album. It's a curious thing, the ringing of that bell – because no one rings the bell, ever. No one, even in normal (or less abnormal) times, can get through the big gates out front and past the surveillance cameras and Al and Al and even me and Chuy and the day–workers and gardeners and all the rest to arrive at the door and find the button to depress in the first place. And as if that isn't enough of a feat under ordinary conditions, now we're even further isolated by the flooding. So who's ringing the bell? Lily? God? The Ghost of Christmas Past?