A Friend of the Earth (33 page)

A gust shook the treetops, and Sierra's tree quaked till I could feel the recoil of it in my feet. I looked up and there she was, her face a distant, drawn–down splash of white in a welter of rocketing green needles. And then her voice, buffeted by the winds and assaulted by the rain, came drifting down like a leaf: ‘Dad!' she called. ‘Dad!'

My heart was breaking, but she was smiling, actually smiling, if I was seeing right – and even in those days, my eyes were nothing to brag about. ‘Sierra!' I called, feeling as if I'd been turned inside out. I didn't want her up there. I wanted to be up there with her. I wanted to bomb Coast Lumber, neutralize their heavy machinery, throttle their stockholders. ‘Honey,' I shouted, and my voice broke, ‘do you want to come down?'

It seemed as if it took an hour for her answer to drift all the way back to me, the tree quaking, the rain thrashing, my heart like a steel disc in the back of my throat, but her answer was no. ‘No!' she cried, cupping her thin white hands round her mouth to make it emphatic. ‘No!' And the message fell with the rain.

I was her father. I knew what she was like, heard the determination in
her voice, the fanaticism: she wasn't coming down, not today, and there was no use arguing. ‘Tomorrow maybe?' I shouted, my neck already strained from flinging my head back to gape up at her. ‘Till the storm stops, anyway? You can always go back up – when the weather clears!'

Again the answer drifted down, this time in a long–drawn–out bleat of protest: ‘Nooooo!'

All right. But did she need anything? ‘Do you need anything?' I shouted.

Rain trailed down my back. I was shivering spasmodically. My throat was sore. My head ached. In time, she would need all sorts of things: a chemical toilet, books, magazines, art supplies, a cell phone, fuel for her camp stove, a special harness so she could descend to thirty feet like a big pale spider and conduct the endless press interviews her crusade would generate. But now, on the first morning of her life as an arboreal creature, an evolutionary oddity, a female
Homo sapiens
of breeding age whose feet never touched the ground and whose biological imperative would have to wait, she needed nothing. Except a favor. ‘Can you do me a favor?' she called out of the drifting white flag of her face.

‘Yeah,' I shouted, digging at the back of my neck and pushing away from the tree for a less inflammatory angle. ‘Sure. Anything!'

‘Take these,' she called, and suddenly two objects, oblong, pale gray and streaking white, came sailing down out of the tree. It took me a minute to identify them, even after they landed separately in the duff not more than two feet from me. Thump, came the first of them, and then the second, slapping down beside me with the sound of finality. They were her shoes. Her shoes. Her running shoes, walking shoes, walking, breathing and living shoes, the very things that connected her to the earth. But she flung them down to me on that first morning, because she wouldn't be needing them, not anymore.

Eggs. Such a simple food, the sort of thing we used to take for granted, the mainstay of every greasy spoon in every town in America, scrambled, soft–boiled, over easy with home fries on the side. I grew up on eggs, in the time before we realized what they did to the arteries, and my daughter grew up on them too, simply because she had to get her protein somewhere. But as I say, eggs have been scarce at Chez Pulchris during the siege. The cook – her name is Fatima, by the way, and her husband is Zulfikar – served up omelets and fresh–baked bread for a week or so after
we all moved in, but then the eggs were gone and it's been meat, rice and canned vegetables since. Oh, the tall Al managed to make it across the Pulchris River once or twice in the beginning, but the supermarkets had been stripped down to the bare shelves – nothing left but cornstarch and pickled beets – and after that even the Olfputt couldn't breach the floods and we all just stayed put and made do with what we had. So I'm looking forward to a plate of eggs, even if I do have to sop them up with chapatis instead of toast, and I kick off my boots on the doorstep and go in to wash up, change my shirt and slip into the black–and–gold satin tour jacket Mac gave me when I ran out of clothes a month back. Sun floods the windows, and I'm actually whistling –
Ride your pony, Ride your pony –
as I gaze into the mirror and slap on some of Mac's three–hundred–dollar–an–ounce aftershave.

We're gathering on the third floor, in the Gangsta Rap Room, as it turns out, for a formal brunch – Mac has an announcement to make. As Andrea and I step into the elevator, her arm tucked neatly into the crook of my elbow, I can already guess what he's going to say: he's leaving. Going north for the summer – Fairbanks, Winnipeg, maybe one of the big Hokkaido resorts. He'll climb into a helicopter, and he'll take the Als with him (and none too soon for the shorter one, who must have put on a good thirty pounds of flab since the rains started). That's all right. I don't mind. As long as I have his commitment to rebuild, he can be on the far side of the moon for all it matters to me, not that I don't enjoy his company, don't get me wrong, but Mac is going to be Mac, and that means globe–trotting. That means excess. That means Mac in Edinburgh or Reykjavík, bent over the gaming tables or squiring some starlet round the tony eateries where they serve tuna garni or twenty–year–old monkfish at three thousand dollars a plate. I'm used to it.

At any rate, I'm feeling good as we glide through the door and into the dining room, the sun shining, eggs on the menu, the future looking bright. The table has been set for six (Chuy never joins us for meals, though Mac, I'm sure, would have no objection, being the democrat and humanitarian he is) and we're the first to arrive, followed shortly by April Wind. ‘Hellooo, Ty!' she chirps, as if she hasn't seen me in months, and she bends to peck a kiss to Andrea's cheek before seating herself at the far end of the table, next to Mac's place. She's had an exciting winter, the dwarf woo–woo woman in the size 2 dress, rattling away at her Sierra book (tentatively titled
For Love of the Trees)
and romancing Mac. That's right. They found common ground in the Zodiac, Pantheism, holistic
medicine, yin yang and the androgynous universe, and crystals, and since she was the only woman under sixty–seven washed up on Pulchris Isle, I guess it was inevitable that she caught Mac's eye. Not that he isn't discriminating, just practical.

Orange juice is on the table (fresh–squeezed, in a stone pitcher), a plate of chapatis and dishes of lime pickle and mango chutney, two bottles of champagne in iced buckets, kiwi fruit, bananas and kumquats from our own inundated orchards. I pour myself a glass of orange juice, twist off the wire and pop the cork on a bottle of Mumm's Cordon Rouge, 1999, from the Pulchris cellars. ‘So how's the book going?' I say, giving April Wind a look.

‘Let me have a little of that, Ty.' This is Andrea speaking. She wants champagne, and who can blame her after all that rotgut
sake
, but she also wants to deflect my question. She leans forward, tipping her wineglass under the lip of the bottle while I pour. It's hard to say what she's thinking, but my guess is that, if she had to choose between me and April, I'd be out the door. And that hurts. It does.

‘April?' I ask, lifting my eyebrows and proffering the bottle.

‘No, thanks.' She has the look of a decrepit child, the limp black hair, the vaguely Asian eyes, the lipstickless mouth. She seems to be hugging her shoulders, which makes them appear even narrower, her miniature hands clasped before her, the totem dangling from her throat in its pathetic little sack. What could Mac possibly see in her?

I smack my lips over the champagne, dilute it with a splash of orange juice. ‘So the book?' I repeat, and I hear my father's voice, the half–mocking tone he'd use when he came into the kitchen at night to refill his drink and saw me sitting there at the table with my homework spread out before me like so much refuse. ‘So
nu?'
he'd say.

April Wind ducks her head. She shrugs. Holds out her glass for orange juice. ‘As well as can be expected.'

‘No big publishers beating down the door?'

‘Come on, Ty,' Andrea says, exchanging a look with April Wind. The look says, Forgive him, he's being a jerk, and I am being a jerk, of course I am – that's my blood on those pages, and my daughter's.

‘What's the celebration?' April Wind wants to know in her tiny piping kindergartner's voice, and I can't resist saying, ‘Mac's going away,' just to watch her face fall.

‘You don't know that, Ty – ' There's an edge to Andrea's voice, and whose side do you think she's on here?

'Want to bet? You might think you know him, after, what – four, five months? – but I've been with him ten years, and I know he's getting squirrelly, has to be. If it wasn't for the weather and the
mucosa
business, he'd have been out of here months ago, believe me.'

And then the door swings open, right on cue, and there he is, Mac, in hat, shades and eel whips, flanked by the two Als. ‘What's happening, people?' he sings, spreading his arms wide. ‘Don't you just love this groovy sunshine? Isn't this just a
day?
Do we deserve it or what?'

The Als have seen better days. Their eyes are haunted by visions of blackjack tables, cocktail waitresses, the track, and their skin is the color of the growth medium in a petri dish. The taller one was a professional wrestler back in the time when people cared about such things, and the shorter one, as I say, has put on so much weight he doesn't even look human. They take their places heavily, and without joy.

Mac is grinning. Mac is overflowing with all the emotions his bodyguards lack, and for a minute there I think he's going to snatch the bust of Chuck D off its pedestal and waltz round the room with it, but he slips into his chair at the head of the table and unfurls his napkin with a practiced snap of the wrist. ‘Eggs today, that's what I hear,' he crows, treating us to his famous smile, ‘just like Mama used to whip up when there was eight of us growing up in Detroit, yes, absolutely, eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner – and now they're a treat, how do you like that?'

Before anybody can respond, April Wind draws in an audible breath – a stabbing, shrieking, stifled–in–the–cradle sort of breath – and asks, ‘Is it true, Mac?'

Mac turns his head to me, the shades flinging off the light of the chandelier in a poisonous silver flash, then comes back to April Wind, and I can't help thinking of the tight little smile of satisfaction on her face the first morning I saw her slipping out of Mac's room or the time he held her in his lap like a ventriloquist's dummy all through a showing of
Soylent Green
in the screening room. Good, I think, let her get her comeuppance. Who is she anyway, and how did she weasel her way in here?

Mac's response is so soft, so sweet and lispingly breathy, my old man's ears can barely pick it up. ‘If you mean what I think you mean, baby, then, yes, it's true, we're out of here – Al and Al and me – this afternoon. Business, that is. Up north. You all can stay on, and everything's going to be built back again, so don't you worry, Ty – you know I wouldn't sacrifice those precious sweet creatures down there for anything in the world.'

April Wind wants to say a whole lot more, I can see that, she wants to call on the spirits of the trees and the other animist gods, wants to talk crystals and auras, wants to marshal all the forces of woo–woo to bind Mac to her, to us, but she just gives him a plaintive look and stockpiles her words for later, when she can get him alone. I'm not a betting man, but I give her less than a ten–percent chance of finding a seat on that helicopter when it rises up out of the muck with our resident god aboard. Goodbye, Mac, I'm thinking, and let's get on with it.

Events to this point are still pretty clear in my mind, the champagne, the promise of eggs fried in butter, Mac, April Wind, Andrea, the two Als – all that's been preserved in the hard–drive of my old man's memory. But the rest of it, I'm afraid, suffers from gaps and deletions. It's the shock factor, I suppose, selective memory, repressed material, events so naked and grisly you can't admit them. For better or worse, here's what I
can
bring up:

Fatima, all in black, shoving through the swinging doors to the upper kitchen, which is really just a warming room, connected by dumbwaiter to the main kitchen on the first floor and the incinerator in the basement, and Zulfikar right behind her in his white toque and spattered apron. Both of them carrying big silver chafing dishes and a familiar ambrosial aroma that takes me back to my mother, my grandmother, the kitchens of old, but I can't taste those eggs now, so I don't think we got that far. I see the big silver dishes in the center of the table, Fatima's pitted black eyes peering out of the gap in her yashmak, and then I'm seeing Dandelion, incongruous as that may seem, scraping his way up the dumbwaiter from the basement with a kind of grit and leonine initiative I'd have had to admire under other circumstances. And that's a picture, four hundred— and—some—odd pounds of determined cat, the yellow fire of his eyes, the mane swinging from the back of his head like an ill–fitting wig, the spidering limbs and grasping claws. He defies gravity. He is silent, absolutely, no sound but for the rasp of those hooked claws digging for purchase. Dandelion. Climbing.

The door swings open again, right on Fatima's heels, as if there's another server back there, more to the feast than just eggs – curries and lamb
tikka
, defrosted halibut in a cardamom sauce, unexpected delicacies and further delights – but no human agency has pushed open that door. I don't know who becomes aware of it first. I remember looking up, heads turning, the motion of the door, and then seeing Dandelion there. And smelling him. A lion in the doorway might have been a trick of the fight,
slip off your glasses and polish them on your sleeve, get a new prescription ASAP, but there was no arguing with that smell. That smell was immemorial. That smell was the smell of death.