All the Little Live Things (23 page)

His writhings sent shudders up the fork handle into my hands. Standing there holding the struggling thing, I was cold goose flesh all over. Horrible. But beautiful too, dusty black crossed with diagonals of white, a creamy belly, a clean whiplike body. And wounded, speared through, blood on the bold coils. Above all, ambiguous, a creature marked with extreme visibility that had been struck because he was underground where his visibility didn’t help him. No hawk would ever have stooped on this one as the redtail last spring had stooped on the gopher snake. The black-and-white whip would have warned him off: too hot to handle. So I stoop on him, myself as blind as a mole, and he never sees his death blow.

I slammed him to the ground and scraped him off the fork, and he gathered his broken body, thickened at the middle with the unmistakable bulge of the swallowed gopher, and faced me with diamond eyes and flickering tongue. But I gave him no moment for defiance. I beat him to bloody twitching with the fork, and at once enlarged the hole out of which I had speared him, and buried him. I reacted as if to an enemy, or to evil itself. Yet he was the natural bane of gophers, mice, moles, rattlesnakes, all the pests hurtful to me and my garden. Though he worked in darkness and shook my pulse with his suddenness, he had been doing me a favor when I killed him.

Queasy and upset, sweating with heat and shock, I stepped out of the trampled flower bed with the spooked feeling that the snake was an omen or symbol whose meaning I ought to catch but couldn’t. Now, I would read him as a riddling revelation of the inadvertent harm we all do, as if our very clothes were deadly, as if harm rose not only from malice, hatred, love, and the other focused passions, but from the most casual contact and the most commonplace act. Step out to watch a sunset and crush a bug—that sort of thing. But that is now. Then, I was sickened and bothered. A day that had not started well anyway was already spoiled.

Well,
absit omen.
I went into the kitchen and poured myself a gin and tonic to quiet my stomach, and got caught at it by Ruth, who lost her temper with me for drinking at midmorning on a day when I would probably blot up ten highballs at the LoPresti party. Think of my liver.

So I sat on the terrace the rest of the morning thinking of my liver and listening to the noise of firecrackers from the eastward, over in subdivision country. Every municipality in California forbids private fireworks, but still I was hearing the shotgun boom of big ones and the musketry rattle of strings of little ones every few minutes. Every time one went off, the beagles in their pen right under my eye rushed back and forth with their saber tails in the air, and put their paws against the wire and stretched their muzzles upward. Owooooo. Owooooo.

“Wouldn’t you think one of those half-witted Welds would get it through his head those damned hounds are a nuisance?” I said.

Ruth lifted her face out of a magazine. Our fuss about the morning drink had been sharper than usual, and we had been a little stiff with each other since. And she was wearing shorts, though I have suggested plenty of times that shorts are for women under fifty. I took these not as a concession to the heat, but as a deliberate challenge to me.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you call them up and tell them?”

“Tell them!” I said. “You know the answer I’d get.”

She shrugged, ever so indifferent. “Why don’t you just sit quiet and console yourself by thinking how if his place catches fire this Fourth of July you’ll let it burn?”

“You should read minds,” I said. “How are you at tea leaves?”

For a half minute she looked at me, pursing her lips. Then she said, “Tea. That’s not a bad idea,” and smiled —having dug me good, she could smile again quite naturally-and went inside. After a time she came out with a glass of iced tea and fruit juice. Maybe it was a peace offering, but I chose to read it as her way of telling me what I was permitted to drink before five o’clock. I took it from her and set it on the bricks beside my chair, and it sat there till lunch time, with its ice melting to scum and wasps drowning in it.

Around noon the pick of hoofs went down our road: Julie going to work for Marian or to visit her kooky friends in the treetops. In my shade it was still and sticky hot. The ugly clutter of pigeon house and dog run on the opposite hill offended my eyes. Every few minutes boom went the sullen air, and
owoooo
said the hounds. Standing on the railing with the binoculars, and looking down to the county road, I saw that Tom Weld had run up a flag before his house. Oh, say can you see.

Lou LoPresti could not have picked a worse day for his potlatch if he had consulted an astrologer.

At three o’clock I awoke from my nap to find the air of the bedroom as motionless and water-saturated as the bottom of a pond. My skin was greasy, my head stuffed. I could taste smog at the back of my tongue. The windows closed and curtained to keep out the heat, also kept out any possibility of a breeze. But outside there was no more breeze than in the bedroom, and the smog taint was worse. The sun had moved around to curl the oak and toyon leaves motionless below the terrace rail. The wooded ravines lay simmering in air as gray as dishwater. The beagles sprawled in their dog-house, and the patriots had run out of ammunition, but our flag was still there.

Warte nur
, said the ghost of Goethe to my discontented mind,
balde ruhest du auch.

On the patio side I found Ruth, barefooted and in shorts, walking the narrow shade picking dead blossoms off the geraniums. Between her and the bank of pyracantha the bricks blazed, colorless with heat. Straightening to look at me, she accidentally put her foot down outside the line of shade, and her expression as she hopped back was eloquent. A fakir used to hot coals would have found that patio up to specifications.

“A great little day for the barbecue,” I said.

Without answering, she bent again and went on picking withered blossoms into the garden cart. It seemed that reconciliation was up to me; evidently that untouched tea offering had made her mad. Well, I had not calculated to alienate her permanently—the only way to live with a woman is in amity. So I unrolled the hose from the reel and turned on the water, which at first came out hot enough to shave in, and then ran cool. Under it the bricks steamed: when I turned the hose away I could see the wet disappearing in them like the fog of breath evaporating off a windowpane.

I took off my shoes and sprayed my feet and ankles. Delicious. I was absorbed. Then, watching my chance, I caught Ruth when she was bent over the geranium bed, and turned the hose full on her stretched backside.

She came up yowling.
“My hairl”
she said. “Oh, damn you!”

I said, “It would be in strings anyway, in this steam bath. Want some more?”

“No, that’s enough! Now quit it!”

I made her dance, popping water at her feet, and when she turned I gave her another good one on the bottom to suggest that shorts deserved no quarter—ladies over sixty would be safe only if properly dressed. Then to forestall reprisals, I turned the hose up in the air and let it rain on me until my shirt and pants were soaked. The humidity was so high that even soaking wet I was warm.

“Turn on the fountain,” Ruth said. “At least we can
sound
cool.”

I went into the garage and turned the switch; the motor hummed in its box. By the time I was back in the patio the jet was toppling into the steel basin above the pool, and shortly the basin began to overflow from its shaped lip. Our scorching hilltop filled with the sound of grottoes. A couple of times we walked from the shade, across the warm wet bricks, and with the sun beating on us stood mid-calf-deep in the pool to let our blood cool at the ankles. We were standing there, wet and reasonably comfortable, when Marian came up around the buttonhook turn at the top of the hill.

Across the fence I watched her stop briefly to rest. Her hair was tied back in a pony tail like Debby’s, her dress was one of those maternity wrap-around things, indefinitely expandable and guaranteed not to look well at any size. Its shade of green didn’t particularly suit her. I thought she looked tired, a stick woman with a bead for a head and a larger bead for a belly, and not even her smile, flashing like a heliograph when she saw me watching her, could remove the impression of fatigue and drabness.

Walking slowly, she came up the drive and around the end of the pool, and in comic collapse fell into the chair I turned for her. Her sandaled feet sprawled before her, she puffed out a great breath. “I ought to have auxiliary oxygen for that hill.”

“You ought to have your head examined,” I said. “Why did you walk up? I was going to come by for you.”

The unbecoming green dress made her brown hair look dull; there were shadows under her eyes darker than the summer tan. As if to see whether or not I was really annoyed at her, she looked at me out of the corners of her eyes. “I’ll get my breath in a minute. I know, you said you’d come by, but I got ... I don’t know, Debby went off with Julie to swim at the Casements’, and I felt sort of smothered down there alone, as if I’d been popped into a double boiler. So I came on up.”

Ruth was staring at her with the absolutely expressionless expression she wears when she is concentrating on something that bothers her. “Are you all right, Marian?”

“Why, of course!” Marian said. Her eyes jumped to Ruth’s, then to mine. Something trembled on her mouth, a begging flicker of the lips gone so fast it might never have been there, and she was saying serenely, making a show of relaxing deeply into the chair, “Just as soon as I get my breath.”

“You sure picked a lovely day for a walk.”

She stirred, I saw her argumentativeness reviving like a game, exhausted puppy at whom somebody has made a playful pass. “I don’t know,” she said. “I sort of
like
the heat.”

“You’re sun-struck,” I said. “Here, take off your sandals.”

“Why?” She looked suspiciously at us both, apparently seeing us clearly for the first time. “You’re both soaking. What have you been doing, falling in the pool?”

“Making a sane response to the weather.” I turned on the hose and squirted her feet, sandals and all. She jerked them back, then stretched them out again, pulling her dress above her brown knees. “Oooo, dreamy! It’s like Keats eating red pepper and then drinking cool wine.”

“The first of the bolts-and-jolts boys,” I said. “Anybody in his right mind would skip the pepper.”

The haggard look which Marian had worn when she arrived was smoothing out, almost as if it had been only the effect of the heat and the hill. I looked for the scared or distressed or begging expression I thought I had caught earlier, and all I saw was her usual amused combativeness. She said to me, “Pain is a form of pleasure, don’t you know that?”

“You mean when it quits.”

“No, pain itself.”

“Only for sadists and masochists,” I said. “For thee and me, pleasure extends only to the near edge of the uncomfortable.”

Considering, she had already begun to shake her head. “But when it’s summer, don’t you like it to be real hot old summer, and when it’s winter don’t you like to
freeze?
Pain makes things valuable. How would women feel if having babies was as easy as picking apples? Don’t you get pleasure—satisfaction—no,
pleasure
it really is—out of all the rough, hot, cold, scratchy, hard, uncomfortable things?”

“No.”

“Oh you do too!”

“No I don’t either. And I don’t think John would want you taking all that pleasure running up hills in a heat wave. You looked ready to collapse when you came in here just now.”

“Really, Marian, he’s right,” Ruth said.

She had a way of seeming to consult some core of seriousness inside her even while she was engaged in one of these joking arguments, the way a girl laughing at something might in the merest flash out of the comer of her eye check her hair in a mirror she was passing. Her hands smoothed the dress over her knees so that the outline of her thighs showed through. She seemed momentarily astonished to find her lap so foreshortened. Then she lifted her clear blue insistent glance and said, “I was as comfortable as could be down below, and that didn’t keep me from being low and lonesome and wishing John was home. So I came up to see you, and now I feel better. That’s what John would want me to do. He wants me to do the things that are good for my
spirit.
Do you know that poem of Frost’s?”

“Of course. Which one?”

She made a completely happy face. “All right. I don’t remember its title. I only remember the last lines. It’s about hard pleasures.”

Primly, ready to laugh, but serious too, meaning it, laughing not at the poem but at the spectacle of herself sitting there
spouting
it, and meaning too that we ought to be open to poetry as to everything else, we shouldn’t be embarrassed to find ourselves repeating verses in somebody’s patio—now
listen,
her bright face said, while embarrassment and amusement and enthusiasm threatened to swamp her,
listen
now:

Saying it brought her forward in her chair. Five minutes after she arrived on our hilltop breathless and tight-mouthed with exhaustion—and with that knowledge that she carried in her, too—here she came at us. Live! Suffer! Enjoy! Wake up! In that body, for sure, the spirit was master of the flesh. She cried happily, “I ran across that just the other day. It says exactly what I’ve felt all my life.”

“I believe it,” I said. “I believe it completely. But Marian, let me tell you, after sixty the capillaries don’t expand properly, the blood boils at a lower temperature. You’re talking to a pair of torpid old souls who can’t do anything on a hot day but sit in the shade and bicker.”