All the Little Live Things (30 page)

“Well now look, Mr. Allston,” Peck said finally. “You’ve got some kind of wrong idea. This isn’t really a party, we’re not just putting on a blast. We’ve got an experiment going, we’re getting close to something very important psychologically.”

“And making much too much noise in the process.”

“I told you,” he said patiently, “it can’t be done
without
some noise.”

“Then cancel it.”

A pause. “I don’t believe you mean that, Mr. Allston,” said the soft voice from the tree. “After all, you gave me your
permission
to live here.”

I quote him accurately. That is exactly what he said. Permission, he said, forgetting the stolen electricity, the stolen water, the unburied litter and garbage, the fires, the unauthorized sheds and mailboxes, the paper and the beer cans. And now this unendurable music and this deafening banging on a stolen culvert in the spirit of scientific research.

I keep wondering now, as I think back on it, what might have happened if I had explained. If I had said, “Look, Mrs. Catlin is ill, the last thing she needs is to be kept awake all night.” If I had crossed the creek and sat by their fire and had a beer with them. If I had turned their experiment and their brawl into a bull session and let them try to tell me what they thought they were about. I wonder if they would have let me in or shut me out. I wonder if I might have gone home that night understanding them any better or liking them any better. I think not, but I almost wish I had tried.

For instead, I got mad, and getting that mad leaves me fluttery and nauseated. And I bawled out a grown man, or what passed for one, which is nothing to be enjoyed.

“Permission?” I said. “I now take it back. I gave you permission to camp, not to start a fleabag ashram. And I take it back. You’ve got a week to get your place torn down and get out of here. And you’ll close up this party right now.”

I stood there, and Peck leaned in his tree with his hands on the limb. The others were silent, letting the Mahatma cope. For a while he said nothing—he had that knack of keeping his cool, so that my fury reverberated in the succeeding quiet. Finally he said mildly, “You seem all upset, Mr. Allston. O.K., of course we’ll keep the noise down, if it bothers you that much.”

“You’ll turn it
off,”
I said. “If you don’t, you’ll be entertaining some guests in uniform, and I doubt that you’d welcome that. Also there are two cars parked in Mrs. Catlin’s drive. I want those out of there right now.”

“We’re staying all night,” a voice said.

“I don’t care if you’re staying the whole last week, get those cars moved. You had no business parking there in the first place.”

“Right now, you want them moved?”

“Right now.”

They looked up at Peck. He was still leaning casually, but I felt the lines of antagonism between us as intricate as the web of lines and cables in the tree. At last he shrugged. “All right, we’ll move them. Whose are they?”

Two boys, one of those in pipestem pants and one of the beards, stood up and started to shuffle across the swinging bridge. Behind them rose a murmur of complaint and anger, not loud. The Mahatma had failed them, the Establishment had the power to put him down. It was not exactly triumph, it was more like disgust, that moved me when I thought how impotent he was against the ownership, authority, and law that I could bring to bear on him. I would much rather have been representative of something he had to respect for its manifest solidity and goodness, not for its power. And for that, who was to blame? Peck, with his compulsion to break all laws and deny all authority, or I with my emotional inability to accept anything he stood for? Had I oppressed him in a way that he obscurely wanted to be oppressed in? They hate us Youth, was that it? Something he had to prove, and so kept pushing and pushing until he brought it about?

The boys came off the bridge and passed me in single file, eying me sourly. One had a row of buttons pinned across his shirt like service ribbons. JESUS WAS A DROPOUT, one said. Another said, WANT COLOR TV? TRY LSD.

I said no more to Peck, but followed the two across the bottom and stood by the gate while they started their cars and drove them down to park them by the mailboxes. In silence, they came up past me and went on across toward the fire. “Thank you,” I said as they passed. They did not reply. No noise from the camp except the low sound of voices. The light through the drapes on Marian’s window lay dimly against the oak in the patio. No sound from there, either. I wondered if she had heard me shouting at the revelers. Without using the flashlight I walked up the lane and climbed heavily into the car beside Ruth.

Altogether, the Fourth had lived up to its omens. The air, as we crossed the patio to the front door, was sour with smog. The mockingbird that had been disturbed by the fireworks was greeting a last-quarter moon with querulous chirpings.

O
N JULY 6 I was at the San Francisco airport three-quarters of an hour ahead of John’s plane, and I was in the front line at the gate when he came up the ramp with the unloading passengers. He must have left Saint-Paul Island on an hour’s notice, for he was wearing khaki pants and field boots and carrying a stained quilted jacket. In his other hand, along with a flight bag, he had an aluminum rod case, and I had a moment of irrational dislike of him, as if he had been irresponsibly off fishing while Marian made her bleak choices at home.

He saw me waiting, tilted back his head and smiled. His face was sun-blackened even after three weeks of Aleutian fogs; his clothes, when he made the top of the ramp and shifted his luggage to shake my hand, had a wild, gamy smell. His eyes searched my face.

“Joe,” he said. “It’s good of you to meet me. How is she?”

“How is she?” I said. “Brave. Undaunted. Which means nothing at all, because she’s given up.”

I felt him watching me as we edged around a knot of people and into the open corridor on the way to the baggage claim. His eyes were streaked, his face the square, strong, rather coarse-skinned face that makes athletes look older than they are. “How do you mean, given up?” he said.

“She won’t take any treatments. She says they might harm the baby.” Though I looked for signs of surprise or dismay in his face, he did not seem surprised. He only knitted his brows slightly and walked on in silence. Still in silence, he stepped on the escalator and rode it down with one hand on the rubber rail. At the bottom I said, “Doesn’t that seem to you ... mad? Totally wrong?”

“It’s something she’s talked of, as a possibility,” John said.

“With
you?”

“Yes.”

“And you
let
her? You could have stopped that before it ever got fixed in her head! Do you want this baby more than you want her?”

Standing by a pillar while the baggage chute began to spill suitcases onto the slow ring, he gave me a quick, sharp, streaked glance of dislike. “No,” he said briefly.

His canvas B-
₄
bag was one of the first pieces of luggage that tumbled from the chute. He grabbed it before I could get hold, but let me take the rod case. The irritation that had showed in his face creased into an expression sober but friendly. He hit my shoulder lightly with his free hand as we went out into the parking garage.

“When did she find this out?”

“The third.”

“Why didn’t she try to reach me sooner?”

“Why ask me?” I said bitterly. “I don’t understand anything she does. I guess she didn’t want to interrupt your work. When she told us, the night of the Fourth, we made her promise to call.”

“Hmm,” John said.

“Didn’t you talk with her? How did she reach you?”

“Radio out from Anchorage,” John said. He threw the B-
₄
bag into the back end of the car when I opened it, and stood rubbing his hands down the thighs of his wrinkled khakis. “All it said was that the doctors had given up on her. Is that right?”

“That’s what she says.” I followed the yellow arrows around, rolled down into the street, slid into the fast traffic headed for the Bayshore Freeway. “But good God, John,” I said, not willing to look at him but not able to keep still either, “good
God,
she doesn’t have to accept what they say! How can they make a statement like that, that she hasn’t a chance? Not one chance? How do they know? They can be wrong like anybody else.”

“She must have thought they had the evidence.”

“All right!” I said. “Suppose they did? Miracles happen all the time. Somebody could make a break-through tomorrow. Keep her alive an extra sixty days and she might live another fifty years.”

His cheek was as weathered as an old board. Only the bloodshot whites of his eyes showed that there might be a limit to his taciturn impassivity. When he rubbed his hand back and forward over his bristly scalp his shoulder bumped massively against mine. I wanted to shout and pound at him; it seemed to me he could not possibly realize what had brought him home; I thought him a block, incapable of feeling, dense even.

“Maybe they’re wrong,” he said. “Maybe she’s wrong. Well have to see. She was never one to kid herself.” Accidentally almost, when he fished for a cigarette, his tired eyes touched mine, and I realized that he could not have slept at all the night before, unless for catnaps in the Anchorage and Seattle airports. His voice was slightly hoarse, the Maine accent strong. “It takes some getting used to, even when you’re braced,” he said, and said hardly another word all the way back. Only when we had entered the hills and were going up through the little canyon on the county road he stirred himself, the way a dog riding into familiar ground will stir sometimes, and begin to whine out the window. He was sitting forward when we bounced over the rattle-trap bridge, and before I had quite stopped in the drive he had the door open.

No one was in sight. Then the house door banged back against the wall and Debby came flying to hurl herself around his legs. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” He lifted her and hugged. “Ah, baby! How’s my girl?”

I got out and lifted the B-
₄
from the trunk and set it by John’s feet. “John,” I said into the chattering and the kissing, “you’ve got to persuade her. You
must
!”

With his lips still at Debby’s cheek and ear, he turned, sober-faced, to say something. Then I saw his eyes switch their direction, and his body grow still. He was looking past his daughter’s fair head to the doorway where Marian stood smiling.

I waved blindly, I got in and stepped on the throttle and drove out of there and left them alone with it.

Up on the hill I couldn’t get the tableau of their meeting out of my mind. It was no use trying to talk to Ruth, who had been with Marian almost constantly for a day and a half, and who was now lying in the darkened bedroom with a migraine. In default of anything else I patched up the cut fence, and then I started taking turns around the house. Catarrh followed me for the first couple of rounds, and then sat down on the bricks and let me keep coming back to him. The weather had made its dramatic change-over from the heat of the Fourth: the fogfall lay in a cottony roll along the skyline, fingers of mist reached down across saddles and into ravines, and though the sun was bright the wind was chilly. I went on around and around.

Then I heard the noise of a motorcycle on our hill, and as I came into the patio I saw Peck in orange suit and helmet coasting toward me. It was the first time I had ever seen him on the hilltop. Hastily, to prevent his ringing the doorbell and disturbing Ruth, I went out into the drive to meet him.

He had cut the motor as he topped the hill, and now he sat balancing with his padded boots a-tiptoe. He wore a sly smile among his whiskers, and his voice was the soft, warm voice, almost as caressing as Fran LoPresti’s, that he had cultivated since giving up meditation in favor of interpersonal relations. He used it the way women use their eyes; I did not doubt that on occasion it was accompanied by the palms-together gesture of Hindu greeting. Love, love, that’s the word. “Ah, Mr. Allston,” he said,

“Mr. Peck,” I said.

His smile widened. If he had not been astride the motorcycle he might have embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks. He oozed good will and warmth. His helmeted head was tilted a little to one side, his alert eyes studied my face. “I don’t like to bother you,” he said. “I know you value your privacy as much as I do. But I thought I’d better come up and apologize if we disturbed you the other night, and make sure you didn’t mean that about moving out.”

How was it that I somehow always found myself dealing with him when I had something else, generally something distressing, on my mind? He had a faculty for the inopportune as great as what I sometimes disliked in myself. And yet I didn’t want to think about Marian and John down there talking; for an hour I had been trying to walk off my feelings and forget them. I should probably have welcomed this diversion, but instead it only irritated me. I said, “Suppose I did mean it.”

Peck laughed. It seemed I had said something amusing. “I don’t blame you for being upset,” he said. “I thought I’d better—
you
know—explain.”

Though his voice was tuned to suggest a relaxed afternoon conversation between friends who understood one another, everything about him was in motion. He rolled his shoulders, squinted his eyes, tilted his head, drew down his mouth, bounced on the Honda’s seat, took his hands off the handlebars to make gestures as if he were releasing birds into the air. Trying to equate this jittery, confidential smooth-talker with the Peck I knew as lordly, superior, and amusedly alert, I concluded that he was uneasy, he really was afraid I would throw him out. All the time I felt his watchful eyes.

I waited.

“I told you,” Peck said. “We were conducting a little experiment.”

“I remember, yes.”

Hunch of shoulders, humorous downturn of lips, spread of hands. “Nothing very far out. People have done it with drums for centuries. But the increase in sound level, that was the idea. See if it helped people shake their hangups, get them over being jealous and hostile and all that, you know? Just compare it with other methods, like.”