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.’
‘See if she’ll heel, Ty,’ Andrea says, and I dig into my pocket for a Milkbone, pitch my voice low – ‘Heel,’ I command – and she tosses up her ears and sits right down at my feet on the warm pavement.
That’s when the girl appears, dressed all in black, a slight hunch to her shoulders, the long stride, high-laced black boots and hair the color of midnight in a cave. She’s got her head down, watching her feet, and she doesn’t see us until she’s almost on us. ‘Oh, hi,’ she says, not startled, not surprised, and I can see the glint of the thin silver ring punched through her left nostril. How old is she? I’m a poor judge, but I’d guess thirteen or fourteen. ‘You must be the new people, right?’ she says, and there’s a chirp to her voice that brings me back thirty-seven years.
Andrea’s giving her a world-class smile. ‘We’re the Tierwaters,’ she says. ‘I’m Andrea, this is Ty.’
The girl just nods. She’s looking at Petunia now, the smallest frown bunched round her lips. ‘Isn’t that a, what do you call them, an Afghan?’
‘That’s right,’ I say, ‘that’s right, she’s a dog.’ And then, for no reason I can think of, I can’t help adding, ‘And I’m a human being.’
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Marie Alex, Russell Timothy Miller and Richard Goldman for their advice and assistance.
A Note on the Author
T.C. Boyle’s novels include World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Tortilla Curtain, Riven Rock, A Friend of the Earth, Drop City (which was a finalist for the National Book Awards), The Inner Circle and, most recently, When the Killing’s Done. His short story collections include Tooth and Claw and Wild Child, and his stories appear regularly in most major magazines, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Granta and the Paris Review. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages.
T.C. Boyle was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in California.
BLOOMSBURY
Also available by T. C. Boyle
Talk Talk
Dana sits in a courtroom with her legs shackled as a long list of charges is read out. But there has been a terrible mistake – she didn’t commit any of these crimes. She and her lover Bridger set out to clear her name and find the person who is living a blameless life of criminal excess at her expense.
The Inner Circle
In 1939 on the campus of Indiana University, a revolution has begun. The stir is caused by Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist who, behind closed doors, is a sexual enthusiast of the highest order and as a member of his ‘inner circle’ of researchers, freshman John Milk is called on to participate in experiments that become increasingly uninhibited…
Tooth and Claw
This collection of short stories finds Boyle at his mercurial best. Inventive, wickedly funny, sometimes disturbing, these are stories about drop–outs, deadbeats and kooks. With a unique deftness of touch and a keen eye for the telling detail, Boyle has mapped the strange underworld of America.
After the Plague
After the Plague is a masterful collection of short stories – tales that superbly veer from the psychological to the slapstick, from surrealism to satire, once again proving T. C. Boyle to be one of America’s most formidable writers.
Drop City
Star has travelled to Drop City to be free from society’s constraints, but when the hippies decamp to the wilds of Alaska where they intend to live off the land, the group runs into trouble, unexpected friendships are made and dangerous enemies are born.
East is East
Hiro Tanaka impetuously jumps off a boat near the coast of Georgia, only to wash up on a barrier island populated by rednecks, descendants of black slaves and a colony of crazed artists. Tanaka is caught up in a hilarious and complicated spider’s web of misunderstandings. And his sole place of refuge on the island only sinks him deeper…
Riven Rock
Shortly after marrying Katherine, Stanley McCormick suffers a nervous breakdown, is diagnosed with a tormenting sex mania and is imp
risoned in the forbidding mansion known as Riven Rock. Stanley is confined for the next twenty years, yet Katherine remains strong in her belief that one day he will return to her whole.
World’s End
Walter is a dreamer, and a lover of drugs, alcohol and speeding on his motorbike, until he crashes into a barrier and loses his right foot. Walter is a descendant of Dutch yeomen and since the day of the accident he has been haunted by their ghosts and becomes determined to find his father who deserted his family years ago, and to uncover the secrets of his ancestors.
Visit Bloomsbury.com for more about T. C. Boyle
By the Same Author
Novels
When the Killing’s Done
The Women
Talk Talk
Tooth & Claw
The Inner Circle
Drop City
Riven Rock
The Tortilla Curtain
The Road to Wellville
East Is East
World’s End
Budding Prospects
Water Music
Short Stories
Wild Child
Tooth and Claw
After the Plague
The Human Fly
T.C. Boyle Stories
Without a Hero
If the River Was Whiskey
Greasy Lake
Descent of Man
First published in Great Britain 2000
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2000 by T. C. Boyle
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
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make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
eISBN 9781408826836
www.tcboyle.com
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T. Coraghessan Boyle, A Friend of the Earth
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