All the Little Live Things (12 page)

I started the engine, mother and daughter stepped back, we were a rotating lighthouse of smiles. “You too,” Marian was saying, one arm full of roses, one around Debby. “Soon as we get settled we want to ... John gets a week between quarters, right away soon. Debby, wait, please! Sometimes I wish Daddy hadn’t put that thing up. Talk about peculiarities, you’re a swinger, nothing but. Say goodbye to the Allstons, baby. Goodbye, and thanks for the flowers. And the worms! The worms
especially....”

In the rearview mirror I saw Debby dragging her mother down toward the swing. “The kid’s a tyrant,” I said. “What she needs is the sound of a good firm no.”

“I suppose Marian’s trying to compensate for the upset of moving.”

“And the gorilla man,” I said. “Wouldn’t you know they’d be all buddy-buddy within twenty-four hours?”

“Oh, buddy-buddy! They talked a few minutes.”

“Sure, but I thought he despised square company. He could have grunted and climbed farther out on his limb.”

“Joe,” she said, “you’re fantastic. You’re jealous.”

“Look who’s calling
me
fantastic,” I said. But of course she was right. I resented Marian’s slightest acquaintance with Caliban.

When we came back around three-thirty, John was in the yard with a golf-club-shaped sickle cutting down thistles. I stopped. “What?” I said. “Improving nature?”

“Thistles only,” he said. “They prickle Debby’s legs. I guess if we went around barelegged we’d have had them down before this. How about a beer?”

I looked at Ruth, with the thought she probably had herself: we shouldn’t fall all over people, we shouldn’t get too thick. But obviously we both wanted to. “Have we, got any frozen stuff that will melt?” I asked.

“There are some frozen vegetables, yes.”

“You hop out,” I said. “I’ll run up and put them in the freezer and come back.”

I hurried, too, like a boy bound for a party. When I got back, I swung in against the trail gate to park, and there was Jim Peck’s motorcycle with the white helmet hanging from the handlebar. As soon as I crossed the parking area and could look down into the grove, I saw him there among them in his orange suit, a satyr come to the picnic.

I see that grove as an eighteenth-century landscape, leafy at the top, meadowy at the edges, bronzy at the center where the figures cluster. The sun is low along the hill, and afternoon stretches into the grove in bars and rays to pick out Marian’s faded blue, Ruth’s red, John’s khaki, the hot gold of beer cans on the weathered picnic table. The nylon rope, Maxfield Parrish touch not quite congruous with the rest, becomes a silver cord when Debby’s swinging brings it into the sun. John is pushing with one hand, holding a beer can with the other, turning his head to say smiling things to Ruth and Marian, who are stretched out in canvas chairs. Transparent flames lick up in the barbecue pit, for it is still spring, and not overly warm. The wood smoke that except for the disturbance of Debby’s swinging would go straight up into the leaves is scattered and blown, to wreathe around among gray limbs and drift up to me scented with the nostalgia of a hundred pleasant outings.

Most orderly and neoclassic that pastoral grove, those noble trees, those gracefully disposed figures; most romantic the touch of gaiety and aspiration as the child soars upward in the swing. But also, ines-capably part of the picture, the shape of Disorder stands a little apart, in shadow, gleaming darkly, the orange suit like a gross flower against the brown spring-fallen leaves.

Jim Peck is not one of those apostles of modernity who go stony-faced as if wearing a sign: ALIENATED. KEEP OFF. His wild hair, wild beard, wild eyes, are the components of a true satiric leer. Through his unvarying grin he peers out at the world of civilization and sense like a wild man through a screen of vines. He ought to be ridiculous or pathetic; I am sure his own version of himself contains a good portion of the saintly; and yet the picture that hangs in my mind, remembered or composite or imaginary, places him and half hides him in a way to corroborate my first impression that he is dangerous. He is dangerous, too, and all the more so because, as I now recognize, he has no more malice, than he has sense, and has besides a considerable dedication to beliefs that he unquestionably considers virtuous. Dangerousness is not necessarily a function of malicious intent. If I were painting a portrait of the father of evil, I wonder if I wouldn’t give him the face of a high-minded fool.

Dangerous or not, he is one of us. He has responded to the friendly kindness of the Catlins precisely as the Joseph Allstons have. I wouldn’t allow the unwashed fantast in my house, but, I have to remind myself, it isn’t my house he is being admitted to. And- he doesn’t bother me so much that I am going to give up the Catlins’ company because of him. If he can stand me, I can stand him. I walk on down and join them in the fragrant shade.

I thought Peck looked uneasy in that pleasant grove, among those pleasant older people, and my entrance so obviously added to his social watchfulness that I had to remind myself, lest I begin to feel sorry for him, that in his pretentious withdrawal he was arrogant, and as much a dog in the manger as I had sometimes thought myself for resenting him. Moreover, among his own crowd, when he broke training and came out for a frolic, he was a long way from diffident. He could pick the guitar, sing, drink beer, bang the bongos or the girls, and play the bacchant with the best. I thought I had better keep in mind the occasional girls who rode in and out with him, glued as tight as beetle wings to his back while he leaned too fast into the curves of the lane or bounced across the treads of Weld’s booby-trap bridge; and the vision in the black leotard who had emerged into the morning to demonstrate that one, at least, took Peck seriously enough to sleep with him. There was no need for me to feel any idiotic protective-ness. I was not the hostess here. If he was old enough to be playing saint and screwing girls he was old enough to take his chance in civilized company.

Not that they shut him out. On the contrary. Having hailed him out of friendliness, they made him welcome. A potentially squeaky hinge, he got early grease from both Marian and Ruth; so that, though I might have preferred to be part of the conversation that included Marian, I found myself talking to John about the coming town elections and the threat of a gravel quarry in the hills, while we pushed Debby back and forth between us in the swing. My ear, however, was cocked aside, as Debby’s eyes were: her eyeballs followed Peck the way a portrait’s eyes pursue a tourist around a gallery. It irritated me that I could not ignore him. Why, simply by being there, grotesque in hair and coveralls, did he focus our attention? And to hear what? This:

Did he have to avoid getting too much carbohydrates? Did he gain weight, or lose? (Never paid any attention. Never gained weight, no. Seemed to stay about the same.)

What was he dieting for, health, religion, or what? (Some of both. Also to protest the hypocrisies of meat eating. Every meat eater who thought meat came wrapped in neat cellophane packages should take a tour of the stockyards, he’d never eat it again.)

He seemed sort of—wasn’t he?—sort of Hindu. Was it all kinds of meat he was opposed to, or just the killing of cattle? (All kinds.)

Well, was it the eating of flesh he opposed, or was it the cruelty of the slaughterhouses? Meat eating was natural—guess who is talking—everything belonged to some food chain. Wasn’t it simply the horror of the way animals were killed? (It was meat eating itself he was against. All the largest and strongest animals were vegetarian. He himself wanted to be absolutely
harm
less.
He believed in ahimsa, nonviolence, harmlessness. Besides, the eating of meat had a bad effect on the clarity of his mind. He wanted to keep his mind crystal-clear. He was trying to think his way below all the surfaces, past all the boundaries. The world was shut in. It was the duty of thinkers and intellectuals to help free it. He was writing a book, keeping very full notes on himself as he projected his consciousness farther and farther into unknown or half-known states. If people only knew how, they could get rid of their hangups and their hostilities and come out on the other side into states of pure mind they never even suspected. The longer he stayed, on his strict diet, the longer he worked on his exercises and his sessions of contemplation, the clearer he got, the less he was hung up, the less the world meant, the farther out he pushed the horizons of perception. He had hundreds of pages already, he worked sometimes all night, it came freer and freer, like automatic writing. The things he was discovering were so exciting he didn’t sleep more than an hour or two. And that was something else you could control. You ...)

His voice was soft, musical, with a throb of conviction and passion in it. He squatted, breaking twigs in his long thin fingers in a way that was a little too nervous for the theosophical doctrine he expounded. His eyes, too, retained their wild satiric gleam; he held the two women with his eyes like a pair of wedding guests.

Really? they said, intrigued. Did he do yoga too, was that associated with the diet as part of the way of consciousness? (Oh yes.) And what about organically grown vegetables, use of natural manure, avoidance of chemical sprays, all that? (He smiled; he indulged their worldly questions; he hadn’t had time for any of that-all his effort went into keeping his mind and body transparent so that light could come through.)

Well, there was a health store in town, did he know? where they sold soybean steaks and blackstrap molasses, all the things with natural vitamins, rose hips, all that, an astonishing variety. (He didn’t know. He didn’t have much patience with all that hypocrisy that tried to make honest soybeans taste like sirloin. Simplicity, that was ... )

But he was off the line. They had given him his turn, and were off on their own food fads, which were neither simple nor harmless. Left to listen to recipes for tiger’s milk and other such messes, he crushed his beer can carefully into a four-sided shape and dropped it at his side. John left the swing and opened him another. Debby, coursing up and back in long arcs, yelled to be stopped, dropped her soft-drink can to the ground, dragged her feet, and scrambled out and went to the table to punch holes in a second. “Oh, Debby,” Marian said, “not right before dinner.”

Debby ignored her, prying. Soda fizzed and splashed her. “Here,” Marian said, “let me, then.” She punched two holes and passed the can to Debby, who took it back to the swing. Backing her behind into the board, her eyes already back on Jim Peck, she hooked her wrist around the rope and took a sip from the can in that hand. John pushed her and she went up and back, staring at Peck all the time. He winked a half-crazy eye and irradiated her with his satyr’s grin, and when she came forward again there he was, waiting to push.

So promptly he found his own level. It was almost touching to see him gravitate to the one person there who obviously found him fascinating. I opened another beer for myself and sat down on the ground between Marian and Ruth.

In the brown grove where the oak moths flickered and the air sifted down its pollen and smoke scarved flat among the oaks, Debby went up and back in long white arcs between her crewcut amiable father and the bearded kook. I watched him, wondering if communication could ever be really established with him, supposing one wanted to make the effort. Could one do with a not-very-likable stranger what one had been totally unable to do with one’s son? I was almost tempted to try.

But I thought of all the gibberish I would, have to listen to, all the dyspeptic mixture of unmixables that it would be my duty to try to digest. There would be all the self-realization business, which was itself a mongrel cross between Socrates on the examined life and the Buddha on contemplation. There would be all those far-out states that Peck thought he could reach by diet, by yoga, by fasting, by drugs, and that would begin in Huxley’s Doors of Perception and end in Leary’s LSD cult. There would be a lot of Zen passivism scrambled with a sanyasi withdrawal, and mixed with both a portion of existential disgust. Though there didn’t seem to be much civil-rights militancy in Peck, I was sure he would have a full share of inert sympathy with civil-rights principles and a full share of contempt for the people who, trying harder than he to solve something, were not succeeding. There would likewise be at least a noise of sympathy with all the other activists, the sitters-in, the teachers-in, and the singers-in against authority of whatever kind and whatever degree of repressiveness or responsibility.

Could I stand to see humane feelings and noble ideals come half-baked from that oven? I doubted it. Also this boy would want pot made legal, which wouldn’t trouble me, and he would angrily—or softly, since that was his style—demand the lifting of the ban on LSD and the other psychedelics, and he would have incontrovertible evidence that they were harmless. He would have a smiling sneer for people who took aspirin and denounced drugs, and for incipient alcoholics who objected to other ways of getting high. In the middle of all this there would be considerable heat about sexual conventions and hypocrisy, and a mystic faith in the perfect orgasm as one more way of reaching the desirable state of mindlessness. There would be a belief in the honesty of four-letter words, and a conviction that it was the duty of any disciple of freedom to use them at all times.

And so on, and on. Just thinking about it made my joints ache and my stomach rumble. One at a time, in some coherent order and relationship, with discrimination and with some sense of the possible, I might take and approve most of the ingredients that went into the great underdone pizza of a Jim Peck’s faith, but I didn’t believe I could take them in combination, the mustard on the blueberry pie, the asparagus topped with chocolate ice cream. We were ultimately and temperamentally strangers to one another. For some reason, the considered conviction made me irritable, for I half suspected that the irresponsibility of his search for freedom forced me to be more conservative than I wanted to be.