Free A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle

clipper ship, except that this is dry land – or should be, or used to be – and I’ve got the shock–stick in one hand and Andrea’s big warm mitt clenched in the other, Chuy leading the way with the wire net and Delbert Sakapathian bringing up the rear with an asthmatic wheeze. I’m hopeful. Not so much for the cat – let’s face it, if Petunia got hold of it more than thirty seconds ago, it’s history – but for my fox and Patagonia and the barren pampas Mac and I are going to repopulate one day in the not–too–distant future. (By the way, I’m not the one responsible for the asinine names of the animals around here – give them a little dignity, that’s what I say. No, it’s Mac. He thought it would be nice – ‘utterly and fantastically groovy’ – if they all had the names of flowers. One of the lions, to my everlasting embarrassment, is called Dandelion.)
    When we get there – up the hill, through the claws of the blasted trees and the crazy growth of invasives and into the perpetually flooded basement of Building B, or ‘Sunshine House,’ as the plaque out front identifies it – we find a group of condo–dwellers gathered expectantly outside a rotting plywood door marked
laundry
in fading green letters. There are a couple of kids there, their faces so small and featureless they might have been painted right on the skin, and women in bare feet, braving ankle–deep water the color of graveyard seepage. No one says a word. But they all step back when I slosh past them and brandish theshock–stick. ‘Unkink that net, Chuy,’ I say, about 90 percent certain I’m going to get bitten at least once, but hopefully not to the bone, and Andrea – my Andrea, newly restored to me and conjugal as all hell – whispers, ‘Be careful, Ty.’
    Of course, this is a fox we’re talking about here. Not a normal fox, maybe – a fox the size of a wolf – but a fox for all that. It’s not as if one of the lions got loose. Or Lily, who could crush your spine and rip out your intestines with a single bite. Still, here we are, and you never can tell what’s going to happen. ‘Petunia,’ I croon in my sweetest and–here’s–a-chicken–back-for–you-too voice, gently pushing the door open with the stick, and then I’m in the room, washers, dryers, a couple of sinks, and somebody’s socks and brassieres tumbled out of a straw basket to the (very wet) floor.
    Nothing. A drip of water, cheap fluorescents flickering, the inescapable hiss of the storm outside. And then, from behind the sink to my right, the sound of a chainsaw if a chainsaw had a tongue, a palate and a set of lips to muffle it:
RRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
    Chuy, I should say, is a master of stating the obvious, and he gives me a demonstration of his uncanny talent at this very crucial moment.
‘Yo pienso que
he’s up under the sink, Mr. Ty, is what I am thinking,
verdad?’
    Verdad
. A pair of flaming eyes, the red paws, the scrabble of claws digging into the buckling linoleum, and why is the theme to
Bom Free
running through my head like mental diarrhea? Sure enough, she’s got the limp white carcass of a Siamese cat (lilac–point) clenched in her jaws, and that’s good, I’m thinking, because she can’t chew and bite at the same time, can she? ‘Okay, Chuy,’ I hear myself say, and though my knee doesn’t like it or my back either, I’m down there poking the stick in the thing’s face, afraid to use the electric shock for fear of electrocuting her and maybe myself into the bargain. No fear. All I have to do is touch her and she launches herself out from under the sink like a cruise missile to perforate my forearm with her canines and the dainty cutting teeth in front of them, me on my posterior in the water, the corpse of the cat floating free, Chuy