A Friend of the Earth (46 page)

Quinn was old thirty–five years ago. A little monkey–man with a dried–up face and a head no bigger than a coconut, the snooping furtive eyes, every walking cell of him preserved in alcohol. He must be ninety, ninety–five. And there he is, outside the window, lowering himself gingerly into the chair and flicking the remote with a clawlike finger as the tomato–red door slides shut behind him. And now the chair is moving and the front door of the bar swings open, and in he comes.

There is no guilt in me, not a shred of it – I'm all done with that. But I'm curious, I am, and maybe a bit angry too. Or vengeful, I suppose. I feel big, I feel notorious all over again, Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, Eco–Avenger, the Phantom of California, Human Hyena. ‘Hi,' I say, leaning down to smile in his face as the motorized chair pulls him past me, ‘how they hangin'?'

Nothing. He's as drawn down and shriveled as a shrunken head preserved in salt with the body still attached, a little man of mismatched parts suspended in the gleaming steel and burnished aluminum of the wheelchair. ‘Vincent,' he calls out, and his voice is like the creaking of an old barn door, ‘I'll have the usual.'

A bottle of scotch – real scotch, Dewar's, an antique treasure – magically appears, and we both watch as the bartender removes a cocktail glass from the rack over his head, measures out a generous pour and adds a splash of water. Then he comes out from behind the bar, all the way round, and inserts the glass carefully between the old insurance man's crabbed fingers. A shaky ride to the lips, and Quinn takes half the drink in a gulp, then cradles the glass in his lap and turns his battered old face to me. ‘So, Mr. New Guy,' he says, ‘you're all so friendly with that big smile stuck on your face – but don't I know you from someplace?'

I'm not going to make this easy for him. I just shrug, but I see Andrea out of the corner of my eye, crossing the room in her sensible flats, blusher and lipstick newly applied.

It takes him a minute, the convolutions of a brain even older than the head it's in, and it takes Andrea's appearance at my side too, but then his eyes narrow and he says, ‘I do know you. I know just who you are.'

Andrea tries on a smile. She has no idea what's happening here.

He makes as if to lift the drink to his lips again, a stalled grin on his face, a glint of calculation flashing deep in his clouded eyes. His nose – he's fooling with his nose, working a finger up under the flange, and then he fumbles around in his pocket for a handkerchief and brings it to his face. We watch in silence as he rotates his head on the unsteady prop of his neck and gives his nose a long deliberate cleansing, and then we watch him fold the handkerchief up and carefully replace it in his pocket as if we've never seen anything like it. ‘Tell me,' he says then, ‘now that all the years – ‘ And he pauses, as if he's lost his train of thought, but it's only a game, and I can see he's enjoying himself. But so am I. So am I. ‘What I wanted to say is, you did set that fire, didn't you? And destroy all that equipment? Hm? Didn't you?'

The bartender blinks as if he's just wakened from a dream. Andrea puts a hand on my arm. ‘Just to satisfy an old man's curiosity,' Quinn wheezes.

I lean in close, Andrea holding tight to me, the bartender dumped over the rail of the bar like a sack of grain, and take some time with my enunciation and the complications of my dental enhancements. ‘Yes,' I say, as clearly as I can, so there'll be no mistake about it, ‘I set the fire and demolished it all, and you know what? I'd do it again. Gladly.'

Oh, the look. He's the wise man of the ages, the quizmaster, the oracle in his cave. His dewlaps are trembling and the drink, forgotten, is canted dangerously in his lap. ‘And what did you accomplish? Look around you – just look around you and answer me that.'

This is it, the point we've been working toward, the point of it all, through how many years and how many losses I can't begin to count, and the answer is on my lips like a fleck of something so rank and acidic you just have to spit it out: ‘Nothing,' I say. ‘Absolutely nothing.'

There's a phrase I've always liked – ‘Not without trepidation,' as in ‘Not without trepidation, they turn the corner onto what used to be Pine Street and catch their first glimpse of the staved-in, stripped-down and gutted shack in which they will have to measure out the remainder of their young-old lives.' I'm not going to use that phrase here, though it's on my lips as the sun-blasted roof of Ratchiss' place, obscured by what looks like the work of a dozen forty-ton beavers, comes into view. There are so many trees down we can't actually get to the house, though in some distant era somebody came by with a chainsaw and cut a crude one-lane gap into the street itself – and I can see that person, a vigorous young-old man like me, bearded maybe, in a lumberjack's shirt with a lumberjack's red suspenders holding up his dirt-blackened jeans, and I can see that person giving up in despair as one storm climbs atop another and flings down hundred-and-fifty-foot trees as if they were hollow cane.

I stop the car, get a firm grip on Petunia's leash and step out into the late-afternoon glare of the sun. The air isn't so thick here or so hot, and there's a smell wrapped up in it that brings me back, something indefinable and austere, a smell of the duff, aspen shoots, the first unfolding wildflowers – or meat bees, maybe that's it: meat bees swarming over some dead thing buried out there under the tangle of downed trees. All right. But at least Petunia is no problem – she comes out limp as a rag, blinking her canine eyes, and no, Petunia, this is not Patagonia and these are not the pampas – while Andrea, rested and lit up with
sake
, slams the passenger's-side door with real vigor, her chin thrust forward, a look I know only too well burning in her own eyes. Right in front of us, five feet from the bumper of the car, is a fallen tree so big around she has to go up on tiptoe to see over it. ‘It doesn't look too bad,' she says. ‘Considering.'

‘Considering what?' I counter to the accompaniment of Petunia's urine sizzling on the pavement. ‘The end of the world? Collapse of the biosphere? Ruination of the forest and everything that lives in it?'

‘There's a tree down over the roof, I can see that from here – and it looks like the chimney's gone, or half of it. And the windows. But it looks like – yes, somebody's been here to board them up, most of them anyway.' She turns to me, flush with this latest triumph of her surgically assisted vision, and I wonder if I shouldn't start calling her Hawkeye. ‘You think – ?'

‘Mag,' I say. ‘Or Mug.'

And that's something to contemplate – maybe Mag is in there now, feasting on memories of savannas trodden and gemsbok speared, in no way receptive to our invading his living space. Or no, no, not Mag – he's in a condo someplace, planted in front of the screen in his polo shirt and Dockers, like everybody else. From what I can tell through the refracted lens of a good concentrated squint, the place doesn't look occupied, except maybe by carpenter ants and fence lizards. But there's one way to find out, and Andrea, always a step ahead of me, already has the ax in her hand.

It takes half an hour, but we manage to remove a section of waist-thick branches from the tree in front of us, and then, leaving Petunia tied to the bumper of the Olfputt, I help Andrea over the bald hump of the dead tree and then she helps me. I'm standing on the other side of it, two feet on the ground, fifty yards from the house, and it's as if I've entered a new world. Or an old one, a world that exists only in the snapping tangle of neurons in my poor ratcheting brain. There's the front deck, still intact, the steps where Sierra used to sit over a game of chess or Monopoly, the door Ratchiss shouldered his way through with his bags of groceries. For the first time in a long time I feel something approaching optimism, or at least a decline in the gradient of pessimism. This is going to work, I tell myself, it's going to be all right.

Inside, it's about what you'd expect after fifteen years or more of neglect – or not only neglect, but an active conspiracy of the elements to bring the place down. The tree that rests like the propped-up leg of some sleeping giant across the peak of the roof is the biggest problem – and it's going to be an insurmountable problem when the storms come – but we'll just have to work around it. Andrea, standing there amid the wreckage with all the determination of her squared-off chin and thrust-back shoulders, is thinking along the same lines. ‘We'll just have to live
out of the back rooms in winter,' she says, bending idly to pluck a bit of yellowish fluff the size of a pot holder from the floor. It takes me a minute, and I have to feel it, rub it between thumb and forefinger, but then I understand what it is – the remains of the lion rug, gnawed upon by generations of wood rats and the like. And birds. Don't forget the birds, because they're still out there, they're still alive, some of them anyway. I get the sudden image of a junco lining its nest with lion fur, and why does that make me want to smile?

For the rest, the sable and bushpig, the tribal shields and rifles have long since been pried from the walls by the looters who seem to have taken everything else of value, including the bathroom fixtures, there are holes in the floor you could drop a bowling ball through, the hot tub is a stew of algae and mosquito larvae, and at least 75 percent of the cedar shakes – the lion's share, that is – have been torn from the roof and flung off over the continent like so many splinters of nothing. And in the wreckage of the kitchen, sprawled out ignominiously on the floor beneath a heap of battered pans, broken glass and dish towels, is the Maneater of the Luangwa himself, still snarling and still affixed to the heavy iron stand via the stake running up his spine. Andrea lets out a little exclamation, and then she's fishing a cold, hard glittering sphere out of the bottom of a frying pan filled with sawdust and mouse droppings. And what is it? The maneater's glass eye, a big golden cat's-eye marble with the black slit of the pupil sunk into it.

That relic, that object, fills me right up to the back of the throat with emotion, and I can't say why. There it is, in my palm, the glittering manufactured thing, succedaneum for the real. All I can think to say is, ‘Poor Mac.'

Andrea's rolling up her sleeves, looking for a broom, a mop, heavy-duty garbage bags, yet she pauses a minute to take my hand in hers. She nods in a sad, slow, elegiac way, but she's the optimist here and make no mistake about it. ‘As horrible as it was,' she says, ‘at least it was, I don't know,
special'

‘Special? What are you talking about?'

The light through the high, shattered window behind her is like syrup spread over the rafters of the ceiling and the belly of the big tree poking through it, night on earth, night coming down. It's very still. ‘Think about it, Ty – of all the billions of us on the planet, he's the last one ever to – to go like that. It's really almost an honor.'

* * *

For the rest of it, time takes hold of us and we find ourselves drifting through the days in a pattern as pure and uncomplicated as anything I've ever known – it's almost like being in the wilderness all over again. Up with the sun, to bed at nightfall, no thought for anything but making a life, minute by minute, hour by hour. We bag up the trash and haul it away, scrub the floors till the tile comes back to life and the wood glows under a fresh coat of wax. We crush carpenter ants, battle wasps, chase mice and birds and bats back out into the wild, where they belong. Andrea takes the Olfputt into Orsonville and comes back with sixteen precut and measured windowpanes and wields the putty like a glazier's apprentice, or maybe the glazier himself. Do I know how to mix cement? Sure, I do. And before long I've gathered up the tumble of bricks in the yard and rebuilt the chimney so we can sit around the hearth when winter comes, sipping that fine red wine, gnawing beef, listening to the wind in the hollow places and the whisper of the snow. There'll be no lack of firewood, that's for sure.

The locals are here still, living out there amid the devastation in reroofed cabins, gathering at the lodge on Thursdays for potluck suppers, nothing but time on their hands. With the help of the stumpmen and a few of the others, we're able to restore Pine Street as a viable, if rutted, means of ingress and egress, and we've even got the major portion of the tree off the roof. Even better, Andrea reveals a hitherto unsuspected talent – her father taught her how to split cedar shakes when she was a girl in Montana. ‘Nothing to it,' she says, and there she is out in the yard spitting into the callused palms of her big hands and swinging the ax over her head. And don't forget GE. They've hooked us up – the thinnest black cable buried in a trench alongside the street like nothing so much as a long extension cord – and we've got electricity now, the house glowing against the gathering dark like some celestial phenomenon set down here on earth in a nest of fallen trees and the deep shades of the night.

And there's something else too. The woods – these woods, our woods – are coming back, the shoots of the new trees rising up out of the graveyard of the old, aspens shaking out their leaves with a sound like applause, willows thick along the streambeds. At night you can hear the owls and the tailing high shriek of coyotes chasing down the main ingredient of their next meal. We haven't seen any squirrel hunters yet, or any survivalists either – and that suits us just fine.

Then there comes a soft pale evening in the middle of the summer, wildflowers on fire in the fields, toads and tree frogs in full song down by
the creek, and my wife and I strolling down the verge of the open street, arm in arm, Petunia trotting along beside us on a braided leather leash I found in one of the cupboards in the basement. She's adjusting pretty well, Petunia, and so am I, because I'm through with contradictions. We don't need the muzzle anymore, or a cage either. She sleeps at the foot of the bed, curled up on the throw rug, no memory of any other life in her canine brain. ‘Come,' I tell her, ‘Sit,' ‘Stay.'