But what is this I feel on the back of my neck? Dampness. Water. Ubiquitous water. I'm looking up, the ceiling tiles giving off a gentle ooze, and then down at the plastic bucket between my feet — I'm practically standing in it — when I feel a pressure on my arm. It's her hand, Andrea's hand, the feel of it round my biceps as binding as history, and what can I do but look up into her new face, the face that's been molded like wet clay on top of the one glazed and fired and set on a shelf in my head. "Hello, Ty," she says, the bucket gently sloshing, the solid air rent by the blast of the speakers, the crowd gabbling, her unflinching eyes locked on mine. I can't think of what to say, Shiggy moving toward us on the other side of the bar, mountainous in a Hawaiian shirt, the bartender's eternal question on his lips, and then she's smiling like the sun coming up over the hills. "Nice hat," she says.
I snatch it off and twist it awkwardly behind me. "But, Ty" — a laugh — "you're bald!"
"Something for the lady?" Shiggy shouts over the noise, and before I've said a word to her I'm addressing him, a know-nothing I could talk to any day of the week. "Sake on the rocks," I tell him, "unless she's paying for her own — and I'll take a refill too." The transaction gives me a minute to collect myself. It's Andrea. It's really her, standing here beside me in the flesh. Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain. "We all get older: 'I shout, swinging round with the drinks," — if we're lucky."
"And me?" She takes a step back, center stage, lifting her arms in display. For a minute I think she's going to do a pirouette. But I don't want to sound too cynical here, because time goes on and she's looking good, very good, eight or nine on a scale of ten, all things considered. Her mouth settles into a basket of grooves and lines when the smile fades, and her eyes are paler and duller than I remembered — and ever so slightly exophthalmic — but who's to quibble? She was a beauty then and she's a beauty still.
"You look terrific," I tell her, "and I'm not just saying that — it's the truth. You look — I don't know — edible. Are you edible?"
The smile returns, but just for a second, flashing across her face as if blown by the winds that are even now rattling the windows — and rattling them audibly, despite the racket of the place and my suspect hearing (destroyed sixty years ago by Jimi Hendrix and The Who). She's wearing a print dress, low-cut of course, frilly sleeves, a quarter-inch of makeup, and her hair — dyed midnight black — bunches at her shoulders. She fixes on my eyes with that half-spacey, half-calculating wide-eyed look I know so well — or used to know. "Is there someplace we can talk?"
Most people don't relate to hyenas. You say "hyena" to them and they give you a long stare, as if you're talking about a mythical beast — which it practically is nowadays. The more enlightened might remember the old nature shows where the hyenas gang-pile a corpse or disembowel the newborn wildebeest and devour it in ragged bloody lumps before the awareness has left its eyes, but that's all they remember, the ugliness and the death. I knew an African game-hunter once (Philip Ratchiss, and more on him later) who used to cull elephants for the Zambian government, back when there was a Zambian government, and he'd had some grisly encounters with all three species of hyena. When he retired to California, he brought his Senga gunbearer with him, a man named Mag or Mug — I could never get it straight I — who'd had his face removed by a hyena one night as he lay stretched out drunk in front of the campfire. Ratchiss dressed him up in Dockers and polo shirts and got his teeth fixed for him, but Mag — or Mug — didn't want anything to do with plastic surgery. He had an eye left, and a pair of ears. The rest of his face was like a big pitted prune.
The reason I mention it is because people — can't understand why Mac wants to save hyenas — in Lily's case, the brown hyena — when the cheetahs, cape buffalo, rhinos and elephants are gone. And what do I tell them? Because they exist, that's why. And if we can't manage to impregnate Lily with sperm from the San Diego Zoo's lone surviving male, we'll clone her — and clone the clones, ad infinitum. "I want to save the animals nobody else wants," Mac told me when we entered into our present arrangement. "The ones nobody but a mother could love. Isn't that cool? Isn't that selfless and cool and brave?" I told him it was. And we got rid of the peacocks and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, and the dogs and cats and goats and all the rest, and concentrated on the unglamorous things of the world — the warthogs, peccaries, hyenas and jackals, with the three lions thrown in for the excitement factor. Mac likes to hear them cough and roar when he turns in at night. When he's here, that is. Which is precious little this time of year.
Anyway, Lily looms up in my mind when Andrea leans into the table and asks me what it's like to work for Maclovio Pulchris. We're seated in the candlelit dining room, waiting for our order, deep into the sake now and too civilized — or too old — to let all the bitterness of the past spoil our little reunion. I'm rattling on about Mac, how he likes to stay up all night with a bottle of champagne and a favorite lady and sit out in the yard listening to the anteaters snore while Lily roams her cage, sniggering over the rats she traps between her four-toed paws. And then I'm on to Lily, the virtuosity of her digestive tract, her calcified bowel movements (all that pulverized bone), the roadkill we feed her when we get lucky — opossums mostly, another R-species — when Andrea clears her throat in a pre-emptive way.
I duck my head in embarrassment — my shining bald dome of a head (Flow it, show it/Long as God can grow it/My hair). Suck at the metallic patchwork of my old man's teeth. Fumble with the sake cup. I haven't shut up since we sat down — and why? Because, for all my bravado back at the house, all my macho notions of remining an old vein, of exploiting her body in some superheated motel room and then writing her oft; good night, goodbye and thanks for the masterful application of the lips, I find myself riveted by her, racked in body and nerve, ready to be slit open and sacrificed all over again. I'm nervous, that's what it is. And when I'm nervous I can't stop talking.
"Do you remember that girl, April Wind — she was about Sierra's age?" Andrea is watching my face, looking for the crack into which she can drive the first piton and begin her ascent to my poor quivering brain. I give her nothing, Nothing at all. My eyes are glass. My face a sculpture by Oldenburg, monumental, impenetrable. Sierra — the famous Sierra Tierwater, martyr to the cause of the trees — is my daughter. Was my daughter. April Wind I've never heard of. Or at least I hope I haven't.
"She was part of that tree-sitting thing, summer of '01?"
All my danger sensors are on alert — I should have stayed home with my hyena, I knew it. Pm hurt. I'm lonely. I'm old. I haven't got time for this. But Andrea will persist, she will — if there's one thing 1 know about her, it's that. Something's afoot here, something I'm not going to like one bit, and once she's sprung it she'll get down to more practical matters-she needs to borrow money, food, clothes, medical supplies, she absolutely has to stay with me a while, a couple of weeks, a month, she needs me, wants me, and suddenly she'll lean forward and we'll kiss with sushi on our lips and her hand will snake out under the table and take hold of me in the one place that's even more vulnerable than my brain.
Her lips, I'm watching her lips — I know she's had collagen implants, and her face is too shining and perfect to be natural, but who wants natural at my age? "You remember her," she insists, picking at her food with an absent squeeze of her chopsticks (she's having the spicy catfish roll, tilapia sushi, smoked crappie and koi sashimi, a good choice — or the best available, anyway. And it's not going to be cheap, but, knowing Andrea, I came prepared with a new five-hundred-dollar debit card). "She came straight to us from Teo's Action Camp? Tiny, she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds? Asian. Or half Asian? She swore the trees talked to her, remember?"