All the Little Live Things (4 page)

“I don’t smoke,” he said. His mouth went on steadily smiling out of the beard, but his eyes were more than ever the eyes of someone about to pull something off. I held them; we dueled, in a way, without a word said. His eyes told me that he was not afraid of me, that he did not care a fig for old bald-headed bastards of my type, and that he dared me to deny him anything.

I broke off the ocular lunge-and-riposte. “Nevertheless,” I said, and steered Ruth past him.

We had gone perhaps twenty feet when I heard the starter go down and the motor burst on. Here he came up beside us, rolling so slowly that he wobbled, balancing the cycle with his walking feet. He was saying something, ceaselessly smiling.

I stopped. He said something else, but I didn’t catch it because of the motor. So he said it again, and just as he said it, idly twisted the throttle so that the motor noise surged up. I said to myself, Don’t let this punk get your goat, that’s what he wants. So I waited, and he waited, a hairy grotesque, gleaming with teeth and eyes. In a minute I started us walking again, and then he goosed the motor to pull even, and shut it off.

“What is it?” I said.

“... ask you a favor.”

A favor. But as insolently as possible, to remove any taint of servility or inferiority. He said it as he might have said—and I was sure would have said if he had spoken his full mind—Fuck you, you old fart. And where did that antagonism come from? Did I incite it, or was it there between us like the suspicion between cat and dog? I am not likely ever to be sure.

“If it’s O.K. for me to camp down here,” he said.

At least he had the faculty of being unexpected.
“Camp
?
”
I said. “In a tent?”

“Maybe a tent. I’d have to have some kind of shelter for when it rains.”

“Don’t they have student housing at your college?”

He only rolled up his moist brilliant eyes and tilted his head and puckered his lips into the semblance of a turkey’s behind.

“There must be apartments in town, surely.”

“I’m not making myself clear,” he said. “I want to
camp.”

We stood in the country stillness, eying each other. His pickpocket eyes were shrewd, but his voice had been soft, with a little burble in it. He didn’t wheedle, he simply blinked once and stood there guileless.

“No,” I said, “it’s out of the question.”

“Joe ...” Ruth said. After a pause to see if she would go on—he was reading us as a sailor reads weather signs—Caliban said in his temperate, controlled voice, “Why out of the question?” He seemed genuinely and conversationally interested.

I should perhaps have told him straight out that I didn’t want him on the place, as he already knew perfectly well. Instead, I weakly gave reasons, and not the real ones. “Fire hazard,” I said. “Sanitation. Our well’s right over there.”

“I saw it,” he said. “But I was thinking of across the creek. If you’ll come back a minute I’ll show you.”

“There’s absolutely no point.” But Ruth’s hand was on my arm, her eyebrows were up, she shrugged. Her signals were as plain to Caliban as to me. He put his Honda up on its kickstand and led us back under the bay tree. Following his back, brilliant as a tanager’s, down the path, I said out of the comer of my mouth, “For Christ’s sake, it’s like being captured by Martians.” Ruth said nothing.

Across from the bay tree the bottoms forked into two valleys, each with its dry stream bed, vertical moats ten feet or so wide and a dozen deep. These combined, between us and the Thomas house, to form a main moat, wider but no deeper. The horse trail crossed the trunk of the Y below the junction. Inside the Y was a little flat covered with poison oak, out of which rose two big live oaks with ropy poison-oak vines wrapped around their trunks. Back of the flat the hill rose nearly as steep as a cliff, choked with brush and trees.

“Over there,” Caliban said.

I had to laugh, it was so inevitably the sort of place twelve-year-olds would have picked for a woods hide-out. “You’d need wings.”

“I can take care of that.”

“So?” I said. “Why there? Why not right here under this tree, for instance?”

“Because over there you’d have your back against the hill and the creek in front and nobody could get at you at all.”

“Why, is somebody after you?”

It was no effort for either of us. One look, one word, and we were circling like wrestlers looking for a hold. After a second he said, smiling and smiling, “I don’t like being available to just anybody that comes along.”

I felt like reminding him that if
we
hadn’t been available to anybody that came along, we wouldn’t be holding this preposterous conversation now. Instead, I only remarked that nobody ever came through here but us. And from the look in his eye understood that we were precisely the ones he had in mind. He made it incomparably plain by saying, “I’d respect your privacy, I’d expect you to respect mine.”

After an incredulous second I permitted myself to laugh aloud. My amusement put a little extra fixity in his grin. There we stood, predestined antagonists, beaming at each other. He said, “I assume you
value
your privacy. You’ve got a PRIVATE ROAD sign out.”

“Yes,” I said, “I didn’t suppose you’d noticed that.”

Beam of that smile from ambush, unaltered watchfulness of the bandit eyes. To make my denial both final and reasonable, I said, “That’s all poison oak over there anyway.

“I’d grub it out. Improve your property for you.”

He said it like a dare, and I would have taken it, too, but at my side Ruth said treacherously, “What would you do for water?”

“There’s a tap on the pressure tank at your well. I’d only need a pail or so a day.”

“And sanitary facilities?” I said, knowing I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t yield even to the point of asking unanswerable questions, I should wipe out the whole proposal with a word.

“Chemical john,” Caliban said. “It’s no problem.”

“You’ve got it all figured out.”

“That’s what I was sitting here meditating about.”

As plainly as if she spoke aloud, I could hear Ruth asking me what difference it would make to us if we let a student live in that useless tangle. I was standing both of them now. I said again that I was afraid of fire. Even if he didn’t smoke, he would have to cook. He said he knew where he could borrow’a Coleman stove, and anyway he wouldn’t be cooking much, he ate mainly nuts and fruit.

“Boy oh boy,” I said. “What is it, a sanyasi withdrawal? You want to sit over there in a loincloth eating dates and raisins and say
Om Tat Sat
to the birds and squirrels?”

He looked at me, I thought, in surprise. Whatever his costume and the condition of his toilet, there was an elegance in the way one eyebrow went up. “You’ve been doing your homework.”

“Plain living and high thinking and a low protein diet.”

“Exactly.”

“And to hell with the air-conditioned junk yard.”

“Right.”

“God Almighty,” I said. “Do you mind if I summarize your case?”

“Go ahead.”

“Let’s see,” I said, and began counting him out on my fingers. “You’d go into your spiritual retirement in a factory-made, chemically waterproofed tent. You’d have a chemical john utilizing industrial quicklime. Your water would be made available, thanks to myself, by a two-horse electric pump, a product of industry. You’d boil your tea on a gasoline stove—borrowed, but still factory-made. You’d go to and fro on a motorcycle built in Japan and brought to you by a complicated system of international trade supported by a complicated system of political agreements and treaties. The raisins you would live on would be mass-produced. Likewise the salted peanuts. In the evenings you’d relax—I see you play the guitar—with an instrument made in the Martin or Gibson factory. That’s
withdrawal?”

Caliban’s smile modified itself as I spoke, until I couldn’t help being reminded again how much lips surrounded by beard look like another sort of bodily opening. “Why does it bother you?”

“It doesn’t bother me. I just wonder what you expect to teach the air-conditioned junk yard by a phony retirement.”

“I don’t expect to teach it anything. I get only one life. I’m not spending it teaching lessons to a shitty civilization.”

“Let it go to hell.”

“I’ve already said so.”

“So long as it furnishes your personal thirteen hundred pounds of steel, five hundred pounds of cement, two hundred pounds of salt, one hundred pounds of phosphate, and the rest of the twenty tons of stuff it takes to support one individual in this society for one year, even if he pretends to withdraw. You want your Walden with modern conveniences, is that it?”

“If they’re available, fine. If not, fine.”

Obviously he thought he meant It. I might have told him that in California in the 1960s even the land to squat on came high—the taxes on that acre of poison oak were probably seventy-five dollars a year. But he wearied me, standing there stubborn, provocative, and smiling, turning nonsense into reality by the simple refusal to listen to anything but the ticking of his own Ingersoll mind. Yet he spoke some of my opinions, in his incomparably crackbrained way, and I was uneasily aware that in putting him down I was pinning myself. I had retired from our overengineered society as surely as he wanted to, and I lived behind a PRIVATE ROAD sign on a dead-end lane. And our argument, including the half-exposed contempt and hostility in it, reminded me of too many hopeless arguments in the past.

“Well,” I said, “it’s an academic debate anyway.”

As she so often does, Ruth inserted a subject-changer just as I was closing the hall. She was still playing sweet old lady curious about youth, but it wasn’t all acting. She
was
curious about this one. Where was he from? Where was he living now, that made him want to move to the woods?

He told us, in his soft, modulated voice, watching us all the time, his elegant eyebrow lifting occasionally to prompt our astonishment or amusement. He was from Chicago. Living? Nowhere. Who needed the
in-locoparentis
university? A university was properly only students and teachers. So you put a toothbrush and an extra pair of socks and a sleeping bag in your knapsack, and you carried your housing with you, even to class. Want a shower, go over to the gym. (Alas, I thought, how many wasted opportunities.) Nights, you found a spot in the trees or down in the stadium. All last week he had spent the nights in the Auditorium, which was O.K. in that the seats were upholstered, but bad because you had to waste a lot of time hanging around to hide yourself before drama rehearsals stopped and the place closed up. And the janitors were early birds, up and working by seven. Caliban had heard that there were ways of getting through manholes into the heat tunnels, and so entering buildings where there might be hall benches and so on, but he hadn’t bothered to investigate. He was more interested in the camping idea.

His recital got him animated. His flowing voice warmed, he shaped the scholar-gypsy life with his long thin hands. And he watched me all the time to see whether or not he was making it.

“All that to get an education!” Ruth said. He turned his head, big with hair, and pointed his bright eyes and anal lips at her, perhaps wondering if she was making fun of him. She was, but it would have taken somebody brighter than he to find it out for sure. After an inquiring pause he went on.

“One night the cops ran us off campus; I slept out here. Right under this tree. Birds in the morning, dew on the leaves, the whole pastoral bit.” Quick as little crabs among seaweed and moss, his eyes went over me. “I could have slept down here every night since without anybody knowing it,” he said.

And what was that? Pretense at candor? Threat? “I suppose you could have,” I said. “But you couldn’t now.”

He stood five feet from me, scratching his hairy wishbone. Once again I had the impression that he was being deliberately outrageous, or alternately engaging and outrageous, as if he wanted my permission but only my unwilling or even hostile permission, as if it was worth more to him if it came out of my dislike. He would ingratiate himself only so far, and make no promises, and if I refused he would live in my woods in spite of me.

Ruth’s mental telepathy was penetrating me like lasers. I felt unreasonably, in defiance of all sense, that I was being stingy, standing there saying a stubborn no to a proposition that, if I had liked this kid’s type, I would have agreed to readily. My treacherous mind told me that the flat across there was pure wasteland, cut off from any usefulness, cut off from the horse trail, cut off even from prowling boys.

A jay bird charged into the bay tree and yakked at us and charged off. The smell of bacchic disorder emanated from Caliban’s unzipped suit as rank as a goat yard. I wondered how anyone could sit next to him in a class. I wondered if he had any friends.

“Joe,” Ruth said.

I said to myself, This is as stupid as you ever were, and you will undoubtedly regret it. Aloud I said, “All right. You can camp there, on certain conditions. The conditions are that you build no fires, shoot no guns, cut no trees, make a sanitary latrine, and bury your cans and garbage
deep.
And don’t leave that tap open on my pressure tank.”

I don’t know what I expected—a change of expression, at least. He only watched me with his eyebrow up. “All right,” he said. No thanks, no expressed pleasure or obligation. To force him, I put out my hand, and after a minute he shook it. His hand was thin, dry, hard, and gripped like bird claws.

“What’s your name, in case the town comes around complaining?”

“Peck. Jim Peck.” Still no change of expression, no unbending to a jocular or friendly tone. Softly, Jim Peck. Softly, but as if there were a jeer under the voice. There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours. I regretted giving in to him before we had even turned away.