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

fumbling with the net and Andrea wading in to grab hold of Petunia by the ears. Which she does. And this is a good move, from my point of view. An excellent move. Because Petunia, cornered, lets go of my arm for just the quarter of a second it takes Chuy to wrap the wire net round the most dangerous part of her, and after that, it’s all she wrote.
    â€˜Ty,’ Andrea says.
    â€˜Andrea,’ Ty says.
    And then we’re on the way to the emergency room, where they’ve got a stretcher and an IV unit named in honor of me, snuggling, actually snuggling (though Andrea’s got her right hand clamped round the pressure point in front of my elbow and Chuy is jerking at the wheel like a Dursban–addled stock–car driver), and for the life of me I just can’t seem to recall the name of that woman who talks to the trees. She’ll be here tomorrow, though. ‘I invited her for tomorrow,’ is the way Andrea puts it, Chuy slithering all over the road as if the car were a big Siamese walking catfish, traffic stalled all the way to Monterey and here we go up on the shoulder – look out, we’re coming through. ‘What do you mean, “tomorrow”?’ I say, and she tightens her grip on the artery running up my arm.
    She says – and the wind is raging, the Olfputt pitching, the blood flowing free – ‘I mean the day after today. Honey.’
    Mexico City, São Paulo, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Tokyo, Dhaka, Cairo, Calcutta, Reykjavik, Caracas, Lagos, Guadalajara, Greater Nome, Sakhafinsky, Nanking, Helsinki – all bigger than New York now. Forty–six million in Mexico City. Forty in São Paulo. New York doesn’t even rank in the top twenty. And how does that make me feel? Old. As if I’ve outlived my time – and everybody else’s. Because the correction is under way – has been under way for some time now. Let’s eat each other, that’s what I propose – my arm tonight and yours tomorrow – because there’s precious little of anything else left. Ecology. What a joke.
    I’m not preaching. I’m not going to preach. It’s too late for that, and besides which, preaching never did anybody any good anyway. Let me say this, though, for the record – for the better part of my life I was a criminal. Just like you. I lived in the suburbs in a three–thousand-square–foot house with redwood siding and oak floors and an oil burner the size of Texas, drove a classic 1966 Mustang for sport and a Jeep Laredo (red, black leather interior) to take me up to the Adirondacks so I could heft my three–hundred-twenty–dollar Eddie Bauer backpack and commune with the squirrels, muskrats and fishers. I went to the gym. Drank in fern bars. Bought shoes, jackets, sweaters and hair–care products. I guess I was dimly aware – way out there on the periphery of my consciousness – of what I was doing to the poor abused corpus of old mother earth, and I did recycle (when I got around to it, which was maybe twice a year), and Ithought a lot about packaging. I wore a sweater in the house in winter to conserve energy and turn the flame down on global warming, and still I burned fuel and more fuel, and the trash I generated plugged its own hole in the landfill like a permanent filling in a rotten tooth.
    Worse, I accumulated things. They seemed to stick to me, like filings to a magnet, a whole polarized fur of objects radiating from my fingertips in slavish attraction. Paper clips, pins, plastic bags, ancient amplifiers, rusted–out cooking grills. Clothes, books, records, CDs. Cookware, Ginzu knives, food processors, popcorn poppers, coffeemakers, my dead father’s overcoats and my dead mother’s shoes. I kept a second Mustang, graffitied with rust, out behind the garage, on blocks. There were chairs in the attic that hadn’t been warmed by a pair of buttocks in fifty years, trunks of neatly