AXXAM OUT! The placards said. SAVE THE TREES! STOP THE SLAUGHTER!
In the trunk was a picnic basket, a hamper with the ruby necks of two bottles of Bordeaux peeping out of one corner. Tierwater was dumbstruck. A picnic basket. His daughter was going up a tree and they were going to have a picnic. He heard Teo, the surfer's inflection, vowels riding the waves still, "Would you mind grabbing that basket?"
There were a lot of things here that rubbed Tierwater wrong, too many to count or even mention, but this, this picnic basket, really set him off. They were right there, the two of them, shoulder to shoulder at the open trunk of the blackly gleaming car, an excited chirp of voices burbling up all around them like springs erupting from the earth, movement everywhere, dust. "You're fucking my wife," Tierwater said.
Teo just looked at him, and he was wearing shades though the day was overcast, two amber slits that narrowed his face and made the gleaming stubblefield of his head seem enormous. "What? What did you say?"
"I said you're fucking my wife, aren't you, Teo? Be a man. Admit it. Come on, you son of a bitch, come on-"
Liverhead. He flexed his biceps and the muscles that ran in cords down either side of his neck, and he stood there as straight as a post driven into the ground. "This isn't the place, Ty," he said, and the pamphlets were bookbagged under one arm, the bullhorn under the other. "You've been gone a long time. Cut her some slack."
So this was it. This was the admission he'd been waiting for. Sandman had been right all along — and so had he, so had he. He wanted to hurt somebody in the space of that moment, the picnic basket in his hand, the nose flutes starting up with a shriek, flashbulbs popping-he wanted to hurt Teo, hurt him badly. But then somebody was there, some kid in a tie-dye T-shirt trying to grow into his first beard- "Teo, Teo, man, Teo" — the kid was saying, pumping Teo's hand and reaching to help with the pamphlets at the same time, and Teo, ignoring the kid, turned to Tierwater and let the extenuation melt into his voice: "Ty, look," he said, "you got to understand — we're all in this together."
Yes. And then they lifted his daughter up into the shattering light-struck reaches of that tree and everybody cheered, everybody, the whole mad circus, but Tierwater, alone in himself, felt nothing but hate and fear.
The Sierra Nevada, May 2026
It's hot. That seems to be the main feature of the experience Andrea, Petunia and I are having as we maneuver the Olf — putt over nondiscriminating roads — downed trees, splintered telephone poles, potholes and craters everywhere, anything less than a 4x4 or a military vehicle and you're done for. Sure, there are road crews out there beyond the tinted windows — 131° F. According to the LED display on the dash, and the wind so dirty it's like something out of Lawrence of Arabia — but they've got a lot of work ahead of them. Then the rains will come and the roads will wash out again, and they'll have a whole lot more. Andrea's driving. I'm looking out the window. Petunia, restrained by muzzle, harness and leash but otherwise free to roam around the back if she can find a place to stand amid all the provisions, fine wines, relics and household goods we've brought along, is sweating. And stinking.
We're stopped in traffic-ROAD WORK AHEAD — and I'm thinking about the mountains, about the tall trees and the sweet breath of the nights up there and the good times we had, the family times, back when we were the Drinkwaters. At the risk of sounding hackneyed, I'd say the usual, that it seems like an ice age ago, but it was, it was. There are squatters up there now, squirrel hunters and the like trying to live off the land, and I hear the trees have really taken a beating after a quarter-century of floods, droughts, beetles and windstorms. At least we don't have to worry about clear-cuts anymore-nothing but salvage timber now.
There's a pioneering stream of sweat working its way down my spine, the inside of the car smells like the old cat-house at the San Francisco Zoo, and the stiff no-nonsense seat of the Olfputt is crucifying my back. We've been on the road for four hours and we haven't even reached Bakersfield yet. "Crank the air-conditioning, will you?" I hear myself say.
"It's on full." Andrea gives me a smile. She's enjoying this. For her it's an adventure, one more take on the world and let's see what shakes out this time.
I'm stiff. I'm aggravated. I need to take a leak. Plus, Petunia's got to have a chance to do her business, if we ever hope to leash-train her anyway, and up ahead-we're crawling now, vroom-vroom, up and down over the pits and into and out of a gully the size of the Grand Canyon — I can make out the lights of a restaurant, El Frijole Grande. "What do you think about some lunch?" I say.
The lot is gouged and rutted and there's wind-drift everywhere, tumbleweeds, trash, what used to be a fence, the desiccated carcass of a cat (Felis catus). I step shakily out of the car — the hips! The knee! — and fall into the arms of the heat. It's staggering, it truly is. The whole world's a pizza oven, a pizza oven that's just exploded, the blast zone radiating outward forever, particles of grit forced right up my nose and down my throat the instant I swing open the door — accompanied by the ominous rattle of sand ricocheting off the scratch-resistant lenses of my glasses. I'm just trying to survive till I can get inside the restaurant, thinking about nothing but that, and yet here's Andrea's face, still floating behind me in the cab of the 4x4, and she seems to be screeching something, something urgent, and suddenly I'm whirling round with the oxidized reflexes of the young-old just in time to catch Petunia's leash as she comes hurtling out the door.
Leggy, stinking, her fur matted till it has the texture of wire overlaid with a thin coating of concrete, she rockets from the car, airborne for the instant it takes to snap the leash like a whip and very nearly tear my abused shoulder out of the socket. But I hold on, heat, age and the exigencies of a full bladder and enlarged prostate notwithstanding. This is the only Patagonian fox left in North America, and I'm not about to let go of her. She doesn't fully appreciate that yet, new to leash protocol as she is, and she goes directly for my legs, all the while snarling like a poorly sampled record and trying to bite through the muzzle while her four feet, sixteen toenails and four dewclaws scrabble for purchase on the blistered macadam.
I'm down on the pavement, born of sweat, and Petunia's on top of me, trying to dig a hole in my chest with her forepaws, when Andrea comes to the rescue. "Down, girl," she's saying, jerking at the leash I still refuse to let go of, and all I can think is to apportion blame where blame is due. This was her idea from the start. She didn't want to bring a cage along- "Don't be crazy, Ty, there's no room for it" — and she reasoned that Petunia was doglike enough to pass. "They are the same species, aren't they?"" Genus, "I told her-" or family, actually. But they still make an awful mess on the rug."
At any rate, the wounds aren't serious. The back of my shirt is a collage of litter and pills of grit, and two buttons are missing in the front, but Petunia hasn't managed to do much more than break the skin in three or four places before the two of us are able to overpower her. Despite the wind and the heat, we manage to hobble-walk her around the lot until she squats and does a poor, meager business under the front tire of a school bus draped with a banner reading Calpurnia Springs, State Champions, B-League. (Champions of what, I'm wondering-desert survival?) After a brief debate about what to do with her next-we can't leave her in the Olfputt in this heat — I decide to chain her to the bumper and hope for the best. Then we're inside, where it's cool, and the hits of the sixties-reconfigured for strings-are leaking through hidden speakers while people of every size, color and shape flock past in a mad flap and shriek.