All the Little Live Things Page 10

  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.

  With the sun down among the trees that fringed the hill, it was growing cool in the grove. I could feel the chill puddling around my ankles, and beer was a drink I no longer craved. I hunched closer to the barbecue pit’s warm bricks. Forward leaned John, up went Debby; forward leaned Peck, back came Debby. Down into the leaves came Debby’s second soft drink can. John stooped between shoves to retrieve it and toss it into the barrel by the barbecue, and in his turn Jim Peck—reminded? showing off?-picked up his two cans and barreled them. Marian, glancing from her canvas chair, smiled at him brilliantly. The taming of Caliban. See the rude jungle beast behave like a well-brought-up middle-class boy. See the motorcycle-riding sanyasi, the hot-rod Spirit of Contemplation in his helicopter suit, suffering the little children to come unto him.

  From the swing, staring Debby said suddenly—and I don’t think she had said one word before that—“Do you sleep in your treehouse?”

  “Of course,” Peck said, and gave her outstretched feet a shove. She arched down and then up, and got a shove on the back from John.

  “Do things come in?” she said, soaring back.

  “Things?”

  Up again, back again. “Animals and things?”

  A push on the shoe soles. “Birds.”

  Up, back. “Could I see?”

  “See what? The birds?”

  Already caving away, drawn backward like yearning Eurydice, she screamed it out. “The treehouse!”

  “Debby!” Marian said.

  Forward she came, clenched to the ropes, dress blown into lap, shanks bare, glasses focused on the hairy grin of Caliban, who said, “You want to see my treehouse?” “Yee-e-e-ess!”—in retreat, centrifugally backward soaring to the point of arrest, then arrowing at him, sneakers first. “Yes!”

  “O.K.,” Peck said softly. “O.K., sure.”

  “Maybe we could all see it,” Ruth said a little plaintively from her chair—romantic Ruthie, secretly Jane in a Tarzan movie, ready to line a tree nest with sweet grasses and ferns. She only pretends to be sixty-five. Actually she is fifteen.

  For a second Peck hesitated. I thought it somehow significant of our relations that he glanced at me, and that his eyes had that Arab-pickpocket speculation in them, as if they weighed chances. Maybe he looked my way because I was Ownership and Authority, and he wanted neither in his pad. Or maybe I only wanted him to acknowledge those aspects of me. Accepting me, who obviously made him nervous and aroused his antagonism in spite of his philosophical pretensions, he might come to accept the universe and quit trying to pretend it was something it wasn’t. Anyway, he wiped his beard with the palm of his hand and said softly, fixedly smiling, “I don’t know if you could get across.”

  “I’m a pretty good scrambler,” Ruth said.

  “Are you sure it’s all right?” Marian said
. “I told Debby under no circumstances ...”

  “No, it’s O.K. Only I don’t think any of you except Mr. Catlin could swing over, and the bridge is pretty wobbly.”

  “Oh, let’s try it,” Marian said. “If it wasn’t hard to get to it wouldn’t be Shangri-La.”

  Debby was all over Peck’s heels as far as the trail gate. There, when he pushed the Honda off its kickstand, he looked sideward at her. “Want a ride down?”

  “Yes!”

  He swung her onto the back of the long seat and stepped astride. “Debby!” Marian cried from behind them. “Oh good Lord!” Peck waved a hand—Don’t panic, Ma—stepped on the starter, blasted the air with a couple of bursts, and roared down the path to the bay tree. There went Debby, wallpapered to his garish back, her pony tail bouncing, her little heart undoubtedly going pittypat. Give her another ten years and she’d be sneaking up his tree in a leotard.

  We followed through the grass and then stood in the bay-smelling damp shadow above the sound of the creek, still flowing secretly from the rains. Since the last time I had been down, Peck’s half-assed ingenuity had run wild. The bay and the oak opposite were a spider web of ropes and cables. The far end of the bridge was hauled up in the oak on pulleys and anchored there. In front of the treehouse, like a carrot before a rabbit’s nose, dangled the ladder, also hauled up on a pulley. A security check would have found every avenue of ingress hauled up in the air, and the cables padlocked to ringbolts in bridge posts and trees. Another sort of check around the tent platform would have turned up every bottle, can, pliofilm bag, bread wrapper, and raisin box that Peck had discarded in six months.

  “Do you remember our saying anything about burying his garbage?” I said out of the comer of my mouth to Ruth.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t be an old crab.”

  All right, I would not act the critical owner, I would be part of the curious throng. We watched Jim Peck with a businesslike air (he was proud, I saw with surprise) unlock a padlock that released a length of clothesline that in turn let down his knot-ended swing rope from the bay tree. “You wait over here,” he said. With a run and a spring, he whooshed across the creek and hooked the swing rope to one side in a cleft stake.

  Cheers. “Now me!” Debby said, jumping up and down. “It’s my turn! Now me!”

  “Wait,” her mother said. “He’ll tell us when.” She and John were both laughing, shaking their heads in admiration, looking at me to corroborate their delighted sense of how wackily ingenious the whole place was.

  “It’s like getting into hell,” I said. “All he needs is a Cerberus.”

  “You ought to apply,” Ruth said, and she was looking at me with real irritation. “Nobody would look better with three heads.” I suppose my feelings about Peck had been showing. Well, pazienza.

  Across the creek Peck was unlocking a padlock that fastened a loop-ended cable to a ringbolt in the oak. Down dropped the treehouse ladder. More cheers.

  Another padlock, this time on the bridge post, and now the bridge itself shuddered and started down. If he had had the wit to run the cable through a block, he could have handled it easily; as it was, the weight through the single pulley almost lifted him into the air, and the sag of the bridge pulled out of line the looped cables that were supposed to slip over the posts.

  “Need some help?” John said. “Send over the swing rope and I’ll come and give you a hand.”

  “No,” said sweating Caliban. “I can manage.” Eventually, with the cable belayed around his hip, he held the tottering thing still enough so that he could dart out one, hand and force the loop over a post. With that secure, he strained and reached and got the other one hooked enough to hold, and then let go his pulley cable and pried it into place. At last the upper cables, the handrails. Still more cheers. Debby set her foot on the treads, but they shrank away sideward and downward, and she hung on, afraid. “Here, kiddo,” John said, and with his hands over hers on the upper cables, his feet shuffling behind hers, most cautiously he edged her across. The worst part was after they passed the middle, and had to go uphill. As he jumped down beside Peck, John said, “I can see why you use the rope.”

  “It’s O.K. when you get used to it,” Peck said. “Some girls in high heels came across it the other night.”

  “Well,” I said to Marian and Ruth, “if other girls can make it, you can.”

  While Marian was creeping and squeaking across, Ruth gave me the benefit of her eyebrows. But when her turn came, she got on the thing gamely, and with John helping her from the other side, made it in triumph. “Coming?” she said.

  “I guess not.” I said. “I’m not well enough insured to be crawling around on a thing like that at my age.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s easy.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not that curious.”

  Peck, from the bridgehead, looked at me straight; we had these moments, not too infrequently, when we understood one another perfectly. After a second he smiled. The hell with you, I told him silently, and watched the three Catlins and Ruth, one after the other, climb up the ladder and into the treehouse. The tree nodded a little, the leaves shook. From inside came squeals and exclamations. A light went on, went off.

  “Electricity?” I said.

  Peck turned the gleam of his eyes and teeth straight down the bridge at me. His head hunched down a little between his shoulders. In his soft voice, his smile widening, he said, “I fixed up a flashlight rig for reading at night.”

  Marian’s vivid face appeared in the treehouse door. “Hey, it’s gorgeous!” she cried. “It’s a real bug’s nest. And it seems so high. You can see way up the ravine. It’s like a poem up here!” To Peck she said, “No wonder you pull up the bridge and padlock everything. If you didn’t, you’d have the whole world moving in with you.” Her smile fell like sunshine on the hairy oaf as he leaned on his bridge post looking up at her, and probably up her dress.

  “If the world was the way it ought to be, I wouldn’t mind,” Peck said. “It’s only because of the way people are that I put the locks on. I don’t like them, that’s for sure.”

  I guess he thought that was original, or profound, and showed his purity of motive in an impure world. It seemed to me the justification of every lock ever built, but I kept my peace. He was an original, fascinating. He had built this marvelous mousetrap and all the mice were beating a path to his door. And one mouse that none of us had counted on. For while the Catlins and Ruth were still clustered on the treehouse porch, surveying the appointments and the view and speaking of the advantages of living in trees, there was a splashing, clumping, scrambling noise, the harsh barking of a dog, and there was Julie LoPresti on her black gelding, the horse flattened, ready to bolt, on the bank above the trail crossing. Beside her the ridiculous product of miscegenation between her mother’s cocker and Weld’s Labrador contracted its body in hysterical barking. It was a dog with a fat body and long legs, spaniel ears and a Labrador muzzle, spaniel coat and a long tail. Every time it barked its ears bounced.

  Julie’s face was twisted toward us, staring; the gelding moved nervously and she pulled him up. She shouted at the dog, who stopped barking but moved around behind the horse, watching us, his out-of-proportion body close to the ground and his ears down.

  I smiled, I saluted. For neighborly reasons I always tipped my hat to that wooden Indian of a girl. As usual, I got no response. She was staring past me to where the four looked down from their perch, and Jim Peck, old Nick of the Woods, grinned at her through his vines. It must have been an astonishing vision to a girl who had just been going along minding her own business and hating her parents, not bothering anyone.

  In fact, it was so astonishing that she had to acknowledge my presence. She came riding up beside, me on. the bank. “What is it?”

  “Hello, Julie,” Ruth said from the treehouse. “It’s where Mr. Peck there lives. Isn’t it something?”

  Julie took in Peck, the tent behind him, the ladder, the cr
ooked little gable among the branches, the littered flat. “Gee!” she said. “How neat!”

  So it was unanimous. Would you win the feminine heart? Climb a tree.

  “Marian,” Ruth said. “John. I don’t think you know Julie LoPresti. Her family live off Ladera Lane, over east a half mile or so. Mr. and Mrs. Catlin, Julie. And Jim Peck.”

  She was caught too far off guard to remember to be sullen. For once she looked what she was: young. Still getting an eyeful, she nodded at them. “We’re having a house tour,” Marian said. “Is it all right if she comes over and looks too, Jim?”

  Jim, already.

  For a man who spent so much time insuring his privacy, Peck seemed to be enjoying the intrusion. “Sure,” he said. “She’ll have to leave the horse, though.”

  Oh, very funny, ha ha. Julie blushed dark red, but she slid off, looking for a place to tie the gelding. There was nothing smaller than the bay tree, two feet in diameter, and she ended by laying the reins in the hand I held out. I too had a function and fulfilled a need. Hitchy-boy Allston.

  Lifting one leg in the skintight jeans and giving me a view of her heart-shaped behind stained from riding bareback, Julie tested the bridge, then put her weight on it, got set, and went across like a squirrel across a light cable. When she leaped off the other end they applauded her-There’s the girl the bridge was made for!-and Marian said, “Come on up, this is where it’s fun. Here, I’ll come down and make some room.”

  All but Debby came down. With a look under her dark brows Julie went up, broad-beamed but agile. “Hi,” said Debby’s face, stuck into hers as she topped the platform. “I’ll tell you, let’s play I live here and you’ve come visiting.” Beaming, not in the slightest the petulant little girl we had seen that morning, she waited till Julie was over the edge and then minced up with her hand dangling before her like a hurt paw. “Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Johnson, isn’t this nice, come right into the living room where it’s cool.”