A Friend of the Earth (32 page)

The days stretched on, each one an eternity unto itself, animal days, days without consciousness or conscious thought. No books. No TV. No sex. Every waking moment consumed with a sort of ceaseless shifting and wandering in search of food, and no set time for meals either, not dawn or high noon or dusk. No, they just fell on whatever they managed to catch or forage – berries, forbs, a brace of lizard smashed to pulp by a perfect strike right down the middle of the plate – and ate greedily, no time for manners or self–abnegation or even civility, no time but primitive time. Andrea had grown up in the outdoors. She'd hiked, fished, camped, ridden horseback for as long as she could remember, and she had the blood of the mad anchorite Joseph Knowles in her veins, but, still, this was too much for her, Tierwater could see that before the first week was out. And it was too much for him too, too much suffering to prove a point, though there were moments when he stared down into the rolling
liquefaction of the waters or up into the starving sky and felt washed clean, no thought of Sierra ensconced on Lake Witcheegono, New York, with her Aunt Phyll, no thought of Sheriff Bob Hicks or the awesome weight of the prison door as it slammed shut behind you or the busy wars of accumulation and want that raged through the world with the regularity of the seasons.

Tierwater lost twenty–five pounds, Andrea nineteen. They were stick people, both of them, as hard and burnished as new leather, and they barely had the strength to drag themselves up and out of the canyon on the last day of their exile. Chris Mattingly led the way with his loping vigorous strides, a man who dwelt deep inside himself, and nobody said a word the whole way back. The path rose gradually out of the gorge and into the higher elevations, and Tierwater had to stop every ten minutes to refocus his energy, Andrea tottering along on the poles of her legs like a furtive drunk, the sky overhead expanding and contracting at will until both of them had headaches so insistent they could barely see. But it was worth it, it was, because when they got there – to the big exfoliated dome of granite where it all began – there was a crowd of five hundred gathered to greet them and they roared like a crowd twice the size.

Teo was there, newspeople with minicams and flashing cameras, children, dogs, E.F.lers, potters, crystal and totem vendors, and every last resident of Big Timber, turned out in flannel shirts and jeans. Declan Quinn was at the front of the press, nodding the parched bulb of his head like a toy on a string, and two cops in uniform flanked him. ‘That's the man,' he rasped, ‘that's him,' and the cop to his left – the one with a face like the bottom of a boot – stepped forward.

It was funny. Though he was making a spectacle of himself in a penis sheath he'd constructed of willow bark and rattlesnake skin, a man of sticks barely able to stand up straight while his wife, the thousand–year–old woman, limped along gamely at his side in a crude skirt and top made of woven grass, though it was over now and they were going to shut him up in a cage, Tierwater felt nothing but relief. He was as calm as Jesus striding out of the Sinai after his thirty days and thirty nights of temptation, and when he felt the cold steel grip of the handcuffs close over his wrists, he could have wept for joy.

And then, one day, the rain stops for good. There it is, the sun, angry and blistered in a sky the color of a bleached robin's egg, steam rising, catfish wriggling, eighty–seven degrees already and it's only eight in the morning. I'm outside, squinting in the unaccustomed light, my feet held fast in the muck of the yard, a flotilla of crippled–looking geese sailing by in the current of what we've dubbed the Pulchris River. What am I feeling? The faintest, tiniest, incipient stirring of hope. That's right. Hope for the animals – and they've suffered, believe me, cooped up in the house like that, no breath of fresh air or touch of the earth under their hoofs and paws, filthy conditions, irregular diet, lack of exercise – and hope for myself and Andrea too. Mac's promised to rebuild on higher ground, state–of–the–art pens and cages for the animals, a bunker for me and Andrea, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. Of course – and this is the sad part – for a good third of our specimens, it's already too late. The warthogs, all fourteen of them, have slipped into oblivion (a swine flu, we think, passed by the peccaries or maybe Chuy, but then I'm no veterinarian), Lily's vanished, the spectacled bear poisoned herself after she broke through the wall into the garage and lapped up a gallon of antifreeze, and there's been a whole host of other calamities I don't even want to get into.

Anyway, I was up at six, the astonishing wallop of the meteorological change registering insistently in my back and hip joints, the pillow gummy with sweat, my glasses misted over the minute I clapped them on the bridge of my nose. Global warming. I remember the time when people debated not only the fact of it but the consequence. It didn't sound so bad, on the face of it, to someone from Winnipeg, Grand Forks or Sakhalin Island. The greenhouse effect, they called it. And what are greenhouses but pleasant, warm, nurturing places, where you can grow sago palms and hydroponic tomatoes during the deep–freeze of the winter? But that's not how it is at all. No, it's like leaving your car in
the parking lot in the sun all day with the windows rolled up and then climbing in and discovering they've been sealed shut – and the doors too. The hotter it is, the more evaporation; the more evaporation, the hotter it gets, because the biggest greenhouse gas, by far and away, is water vapor. That's how it is, and that's why for the next six months it's going to get so hot the Pulchris River will evaporate and rise back up into the sky like a ghost in a long trailing shroud and all this muck will be baked to the texture of concrete. Global warming. It's a fact.

But right now my spirit leaps up: I'm here, I'm alive and the sun is shining. Spring has sprung, and my brain is teeming with plans. I haven't even had breakfast yet or labored over the toilet and already I'm pacing off the rough outline of the new lion pen on a prime piece of high ground, a good half–acre of ochre muck and devilweed wedged between the garage and the gazebo. It's the lions that are suffering most – their hair is falling out, they're too depressed even to cough, let alone roar, and Buttercup seems to have lost most of her carnassial teeth, which makes chewing through all that partially defrosted prime rib a real chore – and I'm determined to get them fixed up first. Besides, they're the most dangerous things in the house (except maybe for Andrea, but who's complaining?), and though we've barricaded the doors and taken every precaution, I shudder to think what would happen if one of them got loose.

So this is how it is, the sun up there in the sky, me down here thinking lions, the wind out of the southeast ripe with a smell if not of redemption then at least of renewal – and isn't it supposed to be Easter soon? – when I hear Andrea calling my name. And this is remarkable in itself, because we're shy of noon by nearly four hours and she hasn't been up this early since she reinserted herself into my crabbed life back in November. She's wearing a white flowing dress, low–cut, and half a dozen strings of multicolored beads that bring to mind hippie times, and she's lifting the hem of the dress to keep it out of the muck and moving in her gum boots with the kind of lightness and grace you wouldn't expect from an old lady. I watch her pick her way to me, and I know I must have an awestruck look on my face (for a minute there I'm not even sure who I am or what lifetime this is), and then I watch her lips moving and notice her lipstick and hear her say, ‘So there you are.'

I lift one of my boots from the grip of the muck and point to it: ‘I'm pacing off the new lion compound.'

She's got a hand to her forehead, screening her eyes from the sun. ‘Did
you remember your sunblock?' And before I can answer: ‘You should be wearing a hat too. How many carcinomas have you had removed now – what was it, twenty–two, twenty–five?'

Andrea isn't wearing a gauze mask, by the way, and neither am I. Nor is Mac or Chuy or April Wind or anybody else in the house. We gave up on all that nonsense back in January, when the screen informed us that the
mucosa
scare was just that – a scare. It seems there was a localized outbreak of a new and especially virulent strain of the common cold on the East Coast (people died from it, mostly the old–old, but still, it was only a cold), and a certain degree of hysteria was inevitable. Mac insisted on the charade for a week or two after the news became definitive, but we were all relieved when finally, one afternoon, he appeared at lunch with the bridge of his nose and thin, pale, salmon–colored lips revealed for all to see. I remember the sense of liberation I felt when I tore off my own reeking mask and buried my dental enhancements in a thick, chewy chili–cheese burrito without having to worry about getting a mouthful of gauze with every other bite.

‘Is that what you came out here to tell me?' I say, and I'm irritated, just a little, because I know she's right.

‘No,' and her voice is soft as she moves into me with a slosh of her boots and wraps her big arms around me, ‘I just wanted to tell you we've got eggs for breakfast this morning.'

‘Eggs?' We haven't seen anything even vaguely resembling an egg since the storms started in, and forget the cholesterol, I can already picture a crisp golden three–egg omelet laid out on the plate – or, no, I'm going to have mine poached and runny, so I can really taste them. ‘Where'd you get them?'

She pulls back to give me a sly smile, then lifts her chin toward the wreckage of the condos across the way. The two buildings that collapsed back in November have gradually subsided into the muck, a spill of ruined sofas, exercise equipment and video attachments littering the far shore under the glare of the sun. ‘The good old barter system,' she says. ‘There's a kid over there – a kid, listen to me; I mean, he's got to be forty–five or so – who says he's a big Pulchris freak, went to all the shows, lifted all the performance tracks off the Net, that sort of thing – '

I smile. ‘And he's got chickens.'

‘He wouldn't take money, but April gave him a couple of old tour T–shirts – with Mac's permission, of course.'

‘Nothing like living off the past,' I say, and then I loop my arm through Andrea's and we slog off across the yard to the house, awash in sunshine.

I remember there wasn't much sun the winter Sierra climbed into her tree. El Niño really took it out on us that year, one storm chasing another down the coast, the rivers flooding and the roads washed out, mudslides, rogue waves, windshield–wiper fatigue, drip, drip, drip, everybody as depressed as Swedes. Nobody liked it – except maybe the surfers. And Coast Lumber. Coast Lumber loved it. Coast Lumber couldn't have been more pleased if they'd ordered up the weather themselves. A tree–hugger by the name of Sierra Tierwater, twenty–one years old and a complete unknown – nobody's daughter, certainly – was trespassing in one of their grand old cathedral redwoods and the press was waiting for them to send a couple of their goons up to haul her down, as brutally as possible. But they weren't about to do that. Why bother? Why give her anything? All they had to do was sit back in their paneled offices and let the weather take care of her. And then, quietly, while the eco–freaks and fossil–lovers were hunkered in their apartments watching the rain drool across the windows, they could take that tree down, and all the rest like it, and put an end to the protests once and for all.

The first night, the night I drove up there to rescue her from the storm, I was so disoriented I couldn't have found her if she were standing behind the cash register of a 7-Eleven lit up under the trees. All I managed to do was add to my quotient of suffering, inhabiting yet another dark night of the soul, face to face with my own dread and loss of faith. Drunk, I stumbled around through the graveyard of the trees while the wind screamed and the branches fell. I don't know how long I was out there, but it was a relief when I finally found my way back to the car, though the car was stuck to the frame in mud and there was no hope there either. My head was throbbing, my throat so dry it was as if somebody had been working on it all night with a belt sander, and my clothes were wet through to the skin. I felt dizzy. Nauseous. I was racked with chills. I stripped off my clothes, socks as wet as fishes, underwear like something that had been used to swab out toilets, and then, thinking
Sierra, Sierra
, I wrapped myself up in Andrea's mummy bag, and in the next moment I was asleep.

The morning wasn't much different from the night that had preceded it. Rain fell without reason or rancor, an invisible creek blustered
somewhere nearby, the car settled into the mud. There may have been a quantitative difference in the light, a gradual seep of visibility working its way into the gloom, but it wasn't much. I pulled on cold wet socks, wet jeans, wet boots and a wet T–shirt, sweater and windbreaker, and went off to find my daughter. This time I walked straight to her tree.

There were eight redwoods in her grove, two conjoined at the base and blackened by the ancient fire that had scarred the trunk of her tree, and the forest of cedar, fir, ponderosa and other pines was a maze of trunks radiating out across the hillsides from there. Except to the west, where the skin of the earth showed through and there was nothing but debris and stumps as far as you could see. This grove was scheduled next, and my daughter – if she was alive still and not a bag of lacerated skin and fragmented bone flung out of the treetops like a water balloon – was determined to stop the desecration. I was proud of her for that, but wary too. And afraid. I leaned into the wet, dark trunk and peered up into the sky – her platform, the shadowy slab of plywood lashed across two massive branches with nylon cord, was still there. I pushed back from the tree to get a better angle, blinking my eyes against the fall of the rain, and saw the bright aniline–orange flash of her tent trembling in the wind like a wave riding an angry sea. She was there. She was alive. ‘Sierra!' I shouted, cupping my hands.