A Friend of the Earth (37 page)

His lips curl into a tight, litigious smile. ‘I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist.'

‘Yeah,' I say, and my heart is still jumping at my ribs four hours after the fact, ‘well, fuck you too,' and I slam the door in his face.

What's going on here is chaos of the worst and blackest sort. Dandelion, as best we can tell, is back down in the basement with Amaryllis and Buttercup. What he did to Mac is worse, far worse, than anything I'd heard about in rap sessions in prison or seen in the old nature clips of the Serengeti. Mac's insides – heart, liver, lungs, intestines – are the first thing the lion apparently consumed, and then, before Chuy and I could get back up the stairs with the Nitro and the dart gun, he dragged the meatier of the Als to the dumbwaiter and disappeared into the basement with him. The other Al was sprawled across the sofa with one arm bent the wrong way at the elbow and his scalp torn back so the parietal bone showed white beneath it, and both the servants had been swatted down like insects, Zulfikar crumpled in the corner in a dark pool and his wife draped over a chair with her throat torn out. April Wind we found whimpering inside one of the compartments in the sideboard. We helped her out, boarded up the dumbwaiter on all three floors and called 911.

No sooner do I shut the door than the ‘Chariots of Love' theme starts up again, and then again, and I'm wondering, how in Christ's name did this ghoul find out already? Did he have a direct hookup to 911? Had he paid somebody off? Was he circling the house on leather wings? No matter. The Nitro is propped up against the wall behind me, and I just pluck it up, aim it letter–high and swing open the door again. I admit it – I'm agitated and maybe not entirely in my right mind, whatever that is. Anyway, I level the thing at him and growl something out of the corner of my mouth and he actually takes a step back, but by now a very wet crew with a minicam is sprinting across the lawn and flashbulbs are popping in the distance, and I figure it's a losing proposition. Down goes the gun. In comes the lawyer.

Mac's death is big news. Not as big maybe as McCartney's or Garth Brooks', but it's really something. Within the hour, the HDTV screen is showing images of the death scene intercut with clips of Mac at various stages of his career and the shock and disbelief registering on the faces of fans from Buenos Aires to Hyderabad and Martha's Vineyard (now largely under water, by the way). I'm sitting there in the Grunge Room, trying to catch my breath, cops, journalists and lawyers flitting back and
forth like flies dive–bombing a plate of custard, when April Wind appears on the big screen across from the bed. She's squinting into the camera not two hundred feet from where I'm sitting, a dazzled look on her face, the dwarf become a giant. Like all Americans, she was born with the ability to talk to a camera. ‘It was horrible,' she's saying, ‘because we were eating eggs, or we were just about to, and then there's this like roar, and I, I – '

The camera never wavers, April Wind's face revealed in every pixil and particle, a sorrowful face, the face of tragedy and woo–woo gone down in flames, but a voice slips in over her own, lathered with concern: ‘You were his last lover, isn't that right?'

Of all the journalists there that afternoon and late into the night – young hotshots, most of them, scud studs and the like – only one of them has been around long enough to take a second look at me. He's maybe fifty, fifty–five. Short, glasses, frizz of a beard gone white around the gills. It's getting dark out by this time, and we're all gathered in the Motown Room – even Chuy – for what I suppose you'd call a press conference, though there's precious little conferring going on. ‘You're —' he sputters, police everywhere, the lions roaring from the basement, film rolling, Andrea and April Wind pinned in the corner with two dozen microphones jabbing at them like the quills of a porcupine
(Erethizon dorsatum
, now endangered throughout its range) – ‘you're Tyrone Tierwater, aren't you – the eco–radical?'

My back hurts. My feet. I have a headache. My gums are aching round the cold porcelain of my dental enhancements, I could use a drink and I'm hungry – we never did get those eggs, or anything else for that matter. I wave a hand in deprecation. ‘Eco–what?'

‘You're him, aren't you?' There are lights everywhere, heads talking, sound bites crackling from every room of the house. ‘What was it – twenty years ago? The Cachuma Incident, right?'

The man's a historian, no doubt about it, and right here, right now, in the midst of all this chaos, he takes me back to a dark, pitching lake and a boat that trembled under my feet like a false floor that drops you headlong into the infinite.
The Cachuma Incident
. What can I say? There's no excuse or exculpation for what I did, or tried to do. My daughter was dead and my wife may as well have been, and the names of the animals were on my lips day and night – six billion of us at that point and how many gorillas, chimps, manatees, spotted owls, Amboseli lions?

It was my darkest moment – skull–and–crossbones time, hyena time. I was fighting a war, you understand, and maybe I lost my judgment, if I
ever had any. In the company of an FBI agent posing as a disaffected scientist from BioGen and a shit by the name of Sandman (more on him later), I found myself out on those windswept waters with eight big plastic buckets of tetrodotoxin at my feet. The lake was in the Santa Ynez Valley and it constituted the water supply for the city of Santa Barbara. The toxin, the very same concentrated in the liver of the puffer fish – fugu, that is – was produced by the
Alteromas
bacteria, it was twelve hundred and fifty times more deadly than cyanide, and it had been mutated in the lab to adapt itself to fresh water. Or so it appeared, but appearances can be deceiving.

In truth, Sandman and the FBI agent (tattoos, tongue stud, the true look of the transgenetic nerd) had set me up, hoping, I think, to use me to get to the leadership of E.F.!, but by then Andrea and Teo and all the rest of them had turned their backs on me, so it was this or nothing. And when it came right down to it, when it was time to tip the buckets and begin evening the score in favor of the animals, I couldn't do it. Though I'd steeled myself, though I seethed and hated and reminded myself that to be a friend of the earth you have to be an enemy of the people, though Sandman and I had agreed a hundred times that if a baby and an anteater fell in a drainage ditch at the same time the baby would have to be sacrificed, though this was the final solution and I the man chosen to administer it, when it came right down to it, I faltered. I did. Believe me. Give me that much at least.

‘Am I right?' The man's face is anxious, blistered, peeled back like a skinned grape. ‘You're the one they called the human hyena, aren't you?'

I'm in a chair in the front hallway. I can hear Andrea's cracked, vinegary old lady's voice going on for the hundredth time about Dandelion and how ‘he was just suddenly there, as if he appeared out of thin air.' I've never seen so many cops – in plain clothes, in blue, in the dun of the highway patrol. Down in the basement, sniffing warily, is a SWAT team from San Luis Obispo, ready to do what needs to be done. My heart is broken – or, no, it's smashed, laid out on the chopping block and beaten with a mallet till all the fibers have been reduced to paste. Mac is gone. And the animals are next in line. I don't bother to answer.

‘But what are you doing here?' the man says, and he's got a microphone too, a slim black thing like the barrel of a gun pointing at my face. ‘Do you know Maclovio Pulchris? Or did you, I mean?'

I'm thinking about that, about Mac and how he gave me a break when I got out of prison for the last time – me, a nobody, one of five or six
lackeys charged with looking after the Vietnamese pot–bellied pigs, the emus, horses and dogs, no job more menial on the whole estate. But it was a beginning, and I was glad for it. And it wasn't long before he singled me out and we began to talk – about the pigs and their diet at first, but then about other things too, far–ranging things like the weather and the death of the planet and the possibility of God and who I really was – my name wasn't Tom Drinkwater, was it? He recognized me. Behind those shades and eel whips and all the rest, Mac went deeper than you might think. He'd known all along. Known who I was and taken a chance. After that, well, the others fell by the wayside, all except for Chuy, that is, and Mac and I hatched our scheme to do what nature and the zoos were incapable of – and we almost succeeded too. But, of course, to say ‘almost' is meaningless. We could have succeeded, let's put it that way – if things had been different. Vastly different.

The first of a series of muffled shots sounds from deep in the bowels of the house. ‘Were you here when he died? Can you tell me anything about that, what it was like, I mean?'

‘Because of the storms,' Andrea is saying from the far side of the room, a hint of exasperation in her voice, ‘because of the flooding – '

And Chuy, fencing with his own circle of microphones: ‘No, man, I'm
corriendo
, you know, up out of
el garaje
, and Dandy, he's
muy malo – '

Pop. Pop. Pop–pop
. That's what I'm hearing, but what I'm seeing is dead lions, dead peccaries, jackals, vultures, living flesh converted to so much furred and feathered meat, extinction in a wheelbarrow.

‘There are wild animals in the house,' the reporter is saying, and he's trying to work a little moral outrage into his voice, ‘living right here in the rooms and wandering the halls. Isn't that right?'

Pop. Pop–pop
. I nod my head. Wearily.

The sheen of his glasses, the thrust of the mike. ‘Maybe you can explain it for me, because I think I'm missing something here – isn't that dangerous?'

After the cops, after the scribblers and the talking heads, after the lawyers, bereaved fans, curiosity seekers and relic peddlers, the book editors start dribbling in from New York, Berlin, Los Andiegoles. Mac's been buried three days when the first of them shows up (the funeral was in Detroit, televised of course, and it was built around a six–hour memorial concert featuring pop stars of the past, distant past and present hammering out ensemble renditions of Mac's big hits while legions of
weeping fans swayed in place and held up candles and cigarette lighters in a blaze so prodigious it must have added half a degree to the average temperature of the globe). Our position here – mine, Andrea's, April Wind's, Chuy's, the surviving animals' – is tenuous, to say the least. Mac died intestate, and the lawyers representing his four wives, real and putative mistresses, children legitimate and il-, not to mention the various record companies that claim rights in various songs and recordings, are fighting a battle royal over his estate. I have no claim on anything. I don't even have an income. Or health care. The animals – we've still got a few peccaries left, a pair of honey badgers, three Egyptian vultures and Petunia – have even less.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm scared – rudderless, incomeless, Social Security—less and soon to be homeless too, no doubt – and I'm ready to welcome this editor with open arms (not to be mercenary about it, but if there's money in it I'll do an as–told–to account of my years with Mac and my life as a monkeywrencher and push April Wind's hagiography of Sierra on him too). And who is he? Ronnie Bott, of Bertelsmann West, the biggest – the only – publishing house in New York. He comes the way of Randy Bowgler and the rest of the parade of lawyers, journalists and deranged fans (several of whom are even now peering in at the windows, despite the efforts of the rent–a–cop outfit Mac's first wife's lawyer hired to keep them at bay): across the all–but–dried–up Pulchris River, currently breached by a crude bridge of whorled imitation–plywood slabs laid out in the mud. It's 9:00 a.m. and a hundred and ten degrees, with a screaming wind out of the southeast, when the ‘Chariots of Love' theme re–echoes through the house. Andrea's in bed, of course, and April Wind, who's arranged this whole thing, is locked in her room doing her Tantric exercises, so it's Ty Tierwater, aching knees and all, to the door again.

What do I do? I fix the man a tall glass of iced tea and settle him down in the Motown Room, just under the glowing electronic portrait of the Four Tops. He looks to be no more than fourteen (though I know he must be older), sporting one of the wide–collared shirts and patterned vests that seem to have come back into fashion, along with the bell–bottoms and high–heeled boots. As for the rest: long hair, no hint of musculature or even a beard, a spatter of what could only be acne clinging to his right cheek. I ease into the chair across from him, clutching my own sweating glass of iced tea, and give him a look of wisdom and ready access.

‘So,' he says, shifting in his seat and crossing, then uncrossing, his legs, ‘you ran Maclovio Pulchris' private menagerie, is that right?'

'Ten years of shoveling shit,' I say, and look down at the wedge of lemon floating round the rim of my glass.

‘You were in charge of the lions, then?'

‘That's right. They required plenty of shit–shoveling too. And meat. Of course, with the world the way it is, it was no easy thing keeping them fed and reasonably healthy, and if it wasn't for the permanent fucking El Niño we've got going here they'd be' – and here I have to pause to deal with a sudden constriction in the back of my throat that just about chokes off my windpipe – ‘they'd be fine still. And so would Mac'

The editor – what was his name?, because I've lost it – he just nods.

‘You know who I am,' I say, ‘right?'

He nods again.

I lean into the platform of my bony old man's knees and give him my cagiest look, and I can see myself in shadowy reflection in the sheen of Marvin Gaye's portrait, hanging opposite. I look like a Yankee horse–trader, a used–car salesman – or, worse, a fundamentalist preacher. ‘You want a book, I'll give you a book. Not just about Mac or my daughter, but about me and what I've been through trying to save this woebegone planet and the, the' – there it is again, the involuntary contraction at the back of my throat – ‘the animals.' And here I have to pause a minute to collect myself. My heart is heavy. My mind is numb. There's moisture gathering in the desiccated corners of my old man's eyes and I have to pinch it away with two trembling fingers.