Andrea sleeps on, her old lady’s double chin vibrating through a series of soft, ratcheting old lady’s snores. Petunia, quiedy stinking, is licking up a puddle of her own vomit in the space between three cases of fine wine and an ice chest crammed with immemorial beef. I’m whispering to myself, jabbering away about nothing, a kind of litany I began devising in prison as a way of bearing witness to what we’ve lost on this continent alone – bonytail chub, Okaloosa darter, desert pupfish, spot–tailed earless lizard, crested caracara, piping plover, the Key deer, the kit fox, the Appalachian monkeyface pearly mussel – but I can’t keep it up. I’m depressing myself. The top of the mountain looms ahead. Joy. Redemption. The wellspring of a new life. I switch on the radio, hoping for anything, for ‘Ride Your Pony,’ but all I get is a very angry man speaking in what I take to be Farsi – or maybe it’s Finnish – and a station out of Fresno devoted entirely to techno–country. Right. I switch off the radio and start muttering again – just to entertain myself, you understand.
The traffic begins to thin out at five thousand feet, where the narcoleptic community of Camp Orson has been transformed into Orsonville, a booming mid–mountain burg of mobile homes, mini–malls, condos, video stores and take–out pizza (Try Our Catfish Fillet/Pepperoni Special!). I keep my young–old eyes on the road, maneuvering around monster trucks, dune buggies and jacked–up 4x4s, and then we’re on the final stretch of the road to Big Timber. The road is a good deal rougher here, washouts every hundred yards, the severed trunks of toppled trees like bad dentition along both shoulders, the fallen–rock zone extended indefinitely. But the Olfputt – one hundred and twelve thousand dollars’ worth of Mac’s money made concrete – is humming along, indestructible on its road–warrior tires. There are only two cars ahead of us now and they both turn off at Upper Orsonville, and whether this is a good sign or bad I can’t tell. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s bad – nobody wants to go any farther because the road is so buckled and blasted and there’s no there there once you arrive – but it’s too late to turn back now. And on the positive side, the temperature has dropped to just over a hundred.
Half an hour later, Andrea wakes with a snort as we creep into Big Timber, where the Big Timber Bar and Mountain Top Lodge still stands – ramshackle, in need of paint and a new roof maybe, and with a dead whitebark pine in the fifty–ton range canted at a forty–five–degree angle over the windows of the restaurant, but there still and to all appearances not much changed since we first stepped through its doors as the Drinkwaters all those years ago. But what has changed, and no amount of footage on the nightly news could have prepared us for it, is the forest. It’s gone. Or not gone, exactly, but fallen – all of it, trees atop trees, trees bent at the elbows, snapped at the base, uprooted and flung a hundred yards by the violence of the winds. All the pines – the sugar, the yellow, the Jeffrey, the ponderosa – and all the cedars and the redwoods and aspens and everything else lie jumbled like Pick–up–Sticks. Mount Saint Helens, that’s what it looks like. Mount Saint Helens after the blast.
Andrea lets out a low whistle and Petunia’s ears shoot up, alert. ‘I knew it was going to be bad,’ she says, and leaves the thought for me to finish.
I’m just nodding in agreement, as stunned as if I’d been transported to Mars. It’s eighty–six degrees out there, accompanied by a stiff wind, and the snow – all of it, the crushing record snow that obliterated everything the winds and the beetles and the drought couldn’t reach – is gone. Do I see signs of hope? A few weeds poking through the tired soil at the end of the lot where three weather–beaten pickups sit clustered at the door to the bar, the stirring of buds like curled fingers on the branches of the arthritic aspens, and what else? A bird. A shabby, dusty mutant jay the color of ink faded into a blotter with a wisp of something clenched in its beak. ‘I need a drink,’ I say.
Inside, nothing has changed: a few stumplike figures in dirty T–shirts and baseball caps hunched over the bar, knotty pine, a ratty deer’s head staring out from the wall, discolored blotches on the floor where the roof has leaked and will leak again, dusty jars of pickled eggs and even dustier bottles that once held scotch, bourbon, tequila. And the screen, of course, tuned to a show called Eggless Cooking that features a sack–faced chef in toque and apron whisking something vaguely egglike in a deep stainless–steel bowl. If you’re looking for the young or even the middle–aged here, you’ll be disappointed. I see faces as seamed and rucked as the road coming up here, rheumy eyes, fallen chins, clumps of nicotine–colored hair bunched in nostrils and ears – we’re among our own at last. I pull out a stool for Andrea, the only lady present, and await the slow shuffle of the bartender as he makes his way down the length of the bar to us. He’s wheezing. He has a coffee mug in his hand. He draws even with us, no hint of recognition on his face, and lifts his eyebrows. ‘Scotch,’ I say hopefully, ‘and for my wife, how about a vodka Gibson.’
‘Up,’ she says, ‘two olives, very dry. And a glass of water. Please.’
There’s a murmur of conversation from the far end of the bar, tired voices, a punchline delivered, a tired laugh. Andrea’s hand seeks mine out where it rests in my lap. ‘My wife?’ she says.
I like the look in her eyes. It’s a look I once fell in love with, many jail terms ago. ‘What am I supposed to say – “Get one for my ex here?”’
The bartender sets down two glasses of murky sake and a glass of water, no ice, and I’m trying to pull the years off his face, straighten out his shoulders, erase his gut: do I know him? ‘You been here long?’ I ask.
He’s wearing a full beard in four different shades of gray, the kind that fans out from the cheekbones as if a stiff wind is blowing round his head.
He’s bracing himself against the bar, and I read half a dozen ailments into that: tender liver, bad feet, bursitis, arthritis, hip replacement, war wounds. ‘Nineteen sixty–two,’ he says, and throws a wet–eyed glance down the front of Andrea’s dress.
She says, ‘What happened to all the trees? It used to be so beautiful here.’
There’s a moment then, the chef on the screen nattering on about olestra and the processed pulp of the opuntia cactus, a sound of wind skirting the building, pale sun, the jay out there somewhere like a misplaced fragment of a dream, when I feel we’re all plugged in, all attuned to the question and its ramifications, the three young–old men at the end of the bar, the bartender, Andrea, me. What happened, indeed. But the bartender, a wet rag flicking from hand to hand like the tongue of a lizard, breaks the spell. He shrugs, an eloquent compression of his heavy shoulders. ‘Beats the hell out of me,’ he says finally.
No one has anything to add to that, and the bar is quiet a moment until one of the men at the far end mutters, ‘Oh, Christ,’ and we all look up to see a new red van rolling into the lot, its tires pouring in and out of the ruts like a glistening black liquid. The van noses up to the front steps, so close it’s practically kissing the rail, and the bartender lets out a low stabbing moan. ‘Shit,’ he says, ‘it’s Quinn.’
Quinn? Could it be? Could it possibly be?
‘Drink up, Bob,’ one of the stumpmen says, and then they’re pushing back their barstools, patting their pockets for keys, groaning, wheezing, shuffling. ‘Got to be going, so long, Vince, see you later.’
I’m sitting there rapt, watching the spectacle of the tomato–red door of the van sliding back automatically and a mechanical device lowering a wheelchair from high inside it, when Andrea takes my arm. ‘We’ve got to be going too, Ty—I have no idea what kind of shape the cabin is going to be in—sheets, bedding, the basics. We could be in for a disappointment—and a lot of work too. And I don’t feature sleeping in the car tonight, uh–uh, no way, absolutely not.’ She’s standing there now, right beside me, the handbag thrown over one shoulder. ‘I’m just going to use the ladies’ – ‘
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.’
Epilogue
The Sierra Nevada, June-July 2026
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.