All the Little Live Things Read online

  Next to the real-estate folks lives a former All-American center who married the daughter of an Italian chocolate maker from San Francisco. They are horsy and hunt-clubby, friendly when encountered but definitely Society. In the guest cottage on their place, living in astonishing simplicity, is the ousted dictator of a banana republic. Once as we were walking across country on a hot fall afternoon, we saw him on the lawn in shorts, being squirted with the garden hose by his tall and striking wife. But they didn’t invite us in and make intimates of us.

  That was about it. East of us the pressing suburbs and tracts, with a few stubborn ranchers clinging to residual orchards and vineyards. Down the road, Tom Weld, busy figuring how he could subdivide and make a million: nobody we wanted to show off to the Catlins. Yet shortly we saw that the Welds and Catlins were on friendly terms. The women stood chatting at the mailboxes, Weld’s daughter played sometimes with Debby, though she was a dull little girl, somewhat retarded. Weld’s son worked around the Catlin place cleaning and burning trash and making firewood. He was a willowy, sinewy boy, burned black with sun above the waist. He liked to wear a .22 target pistol in a loaded cartridge belt when he worked. His hair was skinned off and the top flattened so close that a bald spot showed on the crown. On his wrists he wore leather-strap supports that I imagine were more ornamental than orthopedic, designed not to support weak joints but to call attention to muscles. He drove a molded, raked 1957 Mercury so hiked up behind that its front wheels looked smaller than the rear ones. It went down the road like a ground hog just about to disappear in a hole.

  Even these natives, illuminated by Marian’s friendly interest, came to have a look of rightness. Like harmless weeds, they served to complete the local flora. What if they did give me hay fever? Marian and John, accepting them, persuaded me that even these had some place in nature’s beneficent plan.

  Once he got his spring disking done in the orchard, Tom Weld seemed to have a lot of business downtown. If I had known what he was working on, I would have watched less complacently from the terrace when, in bathrobe and slippers, I came out to consult the spring mornings and see what Catarrh had created on the mat. I would not have assumed so casually that the people who on several occasions walked around Weld’s hill with him, setting the beagles crazy, were merely friends or potential renters of pasture.

  Nearly every afternoon Julie LoPresti rode past, uphill or down, with her frizzle-chinned mongrel padding so close to the horse’s heels that it was a wonder he didn’t get his nose split by a calk. I remarked to Ruth that this misbegotten mutt was a rather apt symbol of the ties that bind family to family, and men to other men, and the living to the unborn, whether they elect to be bound or not. I thought I sounded rather like Joseph Conrad in an elevated mood, but Ruth only looked at me with her sharp raccoon face and said that it was clear whom I had been talking to. All right, I accepted the soft imputation. I talked to Marian every chance I got, and so far as I could see, so did everybody else around here.

  And actually Ruth and I had more reason to see her frequently than anybody else did. We had a commission to keep an eye on her. One evening in April, before going down to Guadalupe Island off Baja California to study sea elephants, John came up our hill and asked us seriously, as a great favor, if we would sort of look out for her while he was gone.

  He did not have any trouble persuading us. It was like being a small boy asked to hold somebody’s thorough-bred. But his request gave me a fresh respect for John. Until then, I suppose I had looked upon him as a genial and attractive boy, fond of his wife but not really in her class. That afternoon, while he stood talking to us in the drive, I saw lines in his face that I hadn’t noticed before, and they seemed to me lines of sobriety, responsibility, masculine resolution. It struck me that his life had been adventurous and daring, and that if he was overshadowed by his vivacious wife, he was so because he wanted to be. If I had been a father with a daughter I was anxious about I couldn’t have found a son-in-law to whom I would have been more willing to entrust her.

  “You know how it is with her,” he said. “There’s been absolutely no recurrence, and she goes in to the clinic every few weeks for a check. She seems stronger to me —it’s been good for her out here. But pregnancy sometimes speeds these things up, female hormones seem to act like carcinogens. So I’d feel a lot better if I knew you were here for her to come to.”

  It would be pure pleasure, we assured him. And shouldn’t she be kept from doing too much, shouldn’t she rest more than she did?

  That made him smile. “If you can keep her from doing too much you’re better than I am. She’ll do all she can do, and a little more. As long as I know you’re here, and ready to help if anything should go wrong, I won’t worry about her. If anything does go wrong, I wish you’d call this number in San Diego, Bill Barger. If you can’t get him, try the Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla. Well be in touch with both of them every day by radio.”

  He handed me a three-by-five card with the two addresses and telephone numbers typed on it. He shook my hand, he kissed Ruth’s cheek, he said he would see us in about a month, he backed up a step or two, turning to go.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Does Marian know we’re her keepers?”

  John laughed. “Do you think I want to break up a fine friendship? No, keep it dark. She’d come to you anyway. I just wanted to ask you for that little extra watchfulness. She needs to be looked after, but she hasn’t found that out yet.”

  Off he went, hand in air. Before he got to the turn he was running. We heard him thudding down the steep road, vigorous as a young hart upon the mountains. It was reassuring to think that Marian had all that health supporting her, and exhilarating to think that now we temporarily replaced it.

  You would have thought, and you would have been right, that the principal lack in our life up to then was a little responsibility. Ruth never went by without stopping to see if she could take anybody anywhere or pick up anything at the market. I developed the habit of stopping every day when I walked down for the mail. There was rarely anything we could do for Marian, but we tried to do things for Debby. I spent a day building her a playhouse in the grove, but I never observed that she used it. Marian admitted a little apologetically that it suffered by contrast with Peck’s treehouse, to which Debby and Julie went whenever they found Peck home. Marian was less inclined to object because she was troubled by the lack of children Debby’s age in the area. The Weld girl was three years older, and her bus got her home late from school. Marian yearned for more playmates for her child. She believed in something called “block play,” and she sometimes wondered if they should have brought Debby out into the country. She and John loved it so much they hadn’t thought of Debby. This miserable only-child business. She knew all about it from her own childhood. Later on, with a little brother or sister, she’d be better off. Or if she had a pony. Julie LoPresti seemed to require nothing else in life.

  Well, why not? I said. They could put up a ring, and a tack shed if they wanted, down there in the bottoms between their cottage and Peck.

  Oh, she said, delighted, could they? Would I rent them that land?

  Rent nothing, I told her. If I could afford to let Peck live in my tree, I could let them make use of a piece of unused pasture.

  I was all the more willing because it appeared to me that Marian needed a pony more than Debby did. She spent half her time taxiing the child to piano lessons, to friends’ houses, to parties, to the park, to the Junior Museum. When she wasn’t taking Debby somewhere to be intellectually stimulated and emotionally refreshed, she was working with her to build birdbaths, feeding trays, frog-and-turtle pools, fern and flower collections. The introduction of a horse into that family would probably add twenty hours of rest time to Marian’s week.

  So we drove them around looking at stables and ranches until we found a fifteen-year-old piebald gelding, marbled like a cake even to the eyes. He was, the man said, as gentle as a kitten. As if to demonstrate,
a pair of achromatic white kittens that had been chasing one another around the corral flew with their tails up along the fence and one of them raced up a fence post and the other, seeing a little darkly with its miscolored eyes, ran up the piebald’s leg and hung there above the knee with its claws sunk in. The piebald only quivered. Marian bought him on the spot, to be delivered as soon as we could prepare quarters for him.

  That was the week in May when the wind blew hard and dry from the north, and the hills under it went green-bronze and then gold, the whole landscape changing within three days, emerging into another set of colors like a drying color print. Against the gold hills the oaks were round, dense, almost black. The fields overnight were impossible to walk through, horrible with barbed seeds. I did not fail to point out the change to Marian, but I took some pleasure in it: it was another thing to show her about California. That seasonal change is as remarkable, in its way, as the stealthy spring that begins with the coming of winter. You go to bed on a May night with flowery smells on the air and the peepers singing, and awake to dusty summer, cracking adobe, and the first of the season’s gnats.

  2

  Some sort of prologue ended with the finding of the horse and the swift coming of summer. Another act began when we drove down the hill one Saturday morning and found a horse trailer backed up to the trail gate and John, Dave Weld, and the stable man unloading the piebald.

  We stopped, we shook hands, asked about the sea elephants, that sort of thing. John was as black as a pirate, blacker even than young Weld. With his shirt off he showed himself to be muscled like a prize fighter. “Sea elephants!” he said. “I hadn’t been home ten minutes till Debby had me turned into a horse wrangler. Dave and I are taking his dad’s pickup in for some fencing right now, to put in a ring. You’re the indulgent owner, you can supervise. ”

  “Supervise hell, I’ll drive a nail,” I said.

  I sent Ruth into town alone, and I was waiting with posthole auger and shovel and hammer when the pickup came back with posts and redwood two-by-fours. By spontaneous combustion we found ourselves in a neighborhood work party. Julie was there, leading Debby around on the piebald and giving all sorts of trouble to her mutt dog, who insisted on staying at the heels of Julie’s horse and kept getting stepped on by Debby’s. Dave Weld, peeled to his walnut hide, with his target pistol strapped down to his leg and his transistor radio blasting out a Pirates-Giants game, was augering out postholes in the cementlike adobe. Gunslinger, strong and silent, he strained and twisted, gleaming with sweat and ropy with young muscle, his wrists strapped in leather, his face still and stern. Marian, catching me looking at him, half closed her eyes and made swooning motions with her head. She and Ruth, having fed us sandwiches and salad, were sitting in the back patio in the shade of a little walnut tree watching us swarm like ants around the bottom land.

  “I’m going to trot him,” Julie said, looking back at Debby as she led the horse across the flat. “Just let your legs hang. Point your toes out.” She hunched her horse into a trot, sitting him loose and heavy and smooth, and Debby came behind on the stretch-necked piebald, bouncing on his fat back and screaming to stop. Julie stopped.

  “She’s good with Debby,” I heard Ruth say. “She’s going to be just right. You’re lucky.”

  “Except I’ll never get Debby into a dress again,” Marian said. “Now it’s jeans and an old sweatshirt with the arms cut off, notice?”

  Through the heat of the afternoon we worked together in the sun and dust, young Weld digging holes, John and I setting posts. Actually I didn’t work much. I held the level on them while he shoveled in earth and tamped it down with a length of two-by-four. Down in the grass, the transistor reported strike-outs, hits, double plays; the thin crickety roar of the crowd came up out of the weeds as if there were a trap door down into some region of the strengthless but unappeased dead. We talked about seals, their varieties, their migration habits, their breeding grounds, and the recovery of some of the species from near-extinction. Later on, in June, John was going up to the Pribilof Islands to be there when the female fur seals pupped. He wanted to study their learning rate. Any animal that could learn to swim and look after itself in a week struck him as interesting.

  I eased my back, straightening up, and he did the same. I said, “You’ll be gone part of the summer, too, then.”

  He knew what was on my mind; his heavy shoulders went up, his mouth went down, his hands went out in a gesture so Gallic it seemed he was imitating someone. “She won’t hear of anything else. The gestation of seals is supposed to be more important to me and my career than her own is.” I found his eyes on me. “She says she’s gotten along fine. Is that right?”

  “I think so. Ruth does too. She’s gained a little weight, she’s brown, she’s out in the sun a lot. Don’t you think she looks better?”

  “I do,” John said. “I’m grateful to you both.”

  “It’s total pleasure.”

  He looked at me with his sharp blue fisherman’s eyes, and smiled as if his mind were somewhere else. Exercise had gathered pebbles of sweat on his brown forehead, his chest and shoulders looked oiled. “What the hell,” he said, “why are we slaving here as if we had a contract ? I’m only going to be home three days. How about some feminine companionship? After sea elephants it looks pretty good.” He threw the shovel clanging on the hard adobe. “Dave? Let’s take five. How about a Coke or a beer?”

  Young Weld drew a core of shining black adobe from the hole and knocked it out of the auger. Julie was leading Debby through the trail gate. The mongrel stood aside, ducking to try to get between the horses. His draggled beard was matted with burrs. As we walked up to where Marian and Ruth sat with a bucketful of iced drinks on the table beside them, the sweat flies buzzed around me with a noisy, frantic insistence to entrap themselves in the hairs of my ears, and I had an epiphany, an instant bright awareness of how that ridiculous dog must feel all the time.

  Dave Weld stood a moment by the pail, slanted a look at us, and picked out a can of beer. He went halfway back to the corral and sat down with his back against an oak and pulled the tab off the can and drank. His eyes were fixed on something across the creek. I looked, and there was Peck, on the porch of his tent.

  It annoyed me to see him there, spying on our pleasant neighborhood labors. Young Weld and Julie, both ordinarily part of the diurnal irritation, had been won over and brought in. And there sat Peck, watching us for God knew how long without even giving us good day. Why hadn’t he swung on his Tarzan rope across the creek and offered to help? The Catlins had been kind to him, he knew that John was just back, all the junior admirers of his treehouse were present, why not join in? Was he, I wondered, annoyed that his privacy was going to be invaded by the horsy activities of those girls? I was myself annoyed enough to hope so.

  “What’s he doing, watching the squares work?” I said to Ruth.

  Marian leaned over and motioned me to her side. From there I got a clearer view between the trees. “Watch!” Marian said, and shrugged her shoulders up around her ears like a gleeful little girl.

  Peck was sitting on the deck, his head as big as a keg with hair, his bare back straight, his eyes fixed straight ahead into the brush, oblivious. The transistor talked to itself down in the grass to our left, and I heard Julie say something to Debby in the lane, but I paid no more attention than Peck did. He stared straight ahead, I stared at him.

  “What is he, in a trance or something?” I said.

  “Yoga!” Ruth whispered in scorn. “He’s exercising.”

  “Are you sure he’s alive? How long has he been there?”

  “Ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “He’ll wear himself out,” I said. “All that violence is bound to have an effect on his system.”

  “Oh, you know about yoga, for goodness’ sake,” Ruth said. “You do it sitting down, a lot of it. You’re exercising muscles deep inside.”

  “Every system has its own rules,” Marian said.
/>   “You’re right,” I said. “But a rule that might apply to all systems is that when people have been friendly to you, and you see them doing something laborious, you offer to lend a hand. Or at least you say hello.”

  “What a moralist,” Ruth said. “Watch this, you might learn something that would be good for your back.”

  From our shade we looked across the blazing, trampled bottoms to the tree-backed stage where Peck sat between his legs in his cut-off jeans. I could not see him move one single muscle, though perhaps he was taking one of those locks, chin or tongue, or contracting his anal sphincters, or doing something else inward. After a long time he rocked suddenly forward and kicked himself into a headstand. His hands were clasped around the back of his neck, his elbows made a tripod on which he balanced a moment, wobbling. Then his legs, which had been folded insectlike on his chest, straightened until his bare toes pointed upward. “Ahhhhh!” said the admiring women on my right and left.

  I held the watch on him until he curved his spine and rolled into a sitting position a few feet ahead of where he had sat before. “Three minutes and twenty seconds,” I said. “What’s the record?”

  They were much too interested to pay any attention to my carping. They sat breathlessly watching. Braced against the tree, the beer can forgotten in his hand, Dave Weld was watching while the ballgame shrilled unheeded from the grass. Julie, bringing her pack train in the gate, saw us all sitting there entranced, and now she was watching. What the hell, we were all watching. With that many eyeballs focused on him he might have felt as if he were being caressed by the suction cups of an octopus. But he didn’t watch us. He was above us, beyond us, way out.

  In a pig’s-eye. He was aware of us as an actor is aware of his audience. Intent on his act, he lay back and bridged from head to heels, thrusting his skinny rib cage into the air. Then he lowered himself until his spine was flat along the deck. Then he pushed up again. His upthrust beard quivered. Strain or heat waves?