A tight group of figures, hard to tell in that light whether male or female—for that matter, in broad daylight it would have taken a medical examination to determine the sex of some of the kids I had seen coming in and out of there. They seemed to be gathered around something, some shed or low tent. Then their mass divided and I saw the dull corrugated gleam of a section of highway culvert four feet or so in diameter and five or six feet long. Someone had evidently done a little nightwork at a road-construction site, and it must have been a job to roll that thing home and get it across the creek. Great energy in dubious causes, that was Peck. But what were they doing with it, or in it? I saw one, then another, crawl in. Some erotic mystery, some rude Eleusis cave? Some refinement on the Marquis de Sade? Several of the group, I saw, had clubs or sticks of wood in their hands.
“O.K.,” somebody said. “Pull in your brains.”
The music blasted out again from the tent, and lined up on both sides of the culvert, the orgiasts began to beat it with their clubs. Blam! Blam! Blam! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The culvert hummed like a steeple, the blows exploded and reverberated, the yelling settled into a rhythmic chant. No wonder I had heard it up on top of the hill. They must have heard it in San Jose. And inside, where the kicks-hunters crouched with their skulls in their hands, how would it be in there? It was unbearable where I stood, a hundred feet away, and I knew it must be pounding against the windows of Marian’s room.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! The clubs came down, one side, then the other. The club wielders capered, yells streaked off into the dark, the firelight shone on eyeballs and teeth and off the tanned hides of some who were stripped to the waist. You couldn’t have found anything to match it short of New Guinea.
One of those inside the culvert came scuttling out crabwise, then the other. The pounding tapered off into ragged thumps, then stopped. The rhythmic chant broke into the jar and clash of separate voices raised above the tom-tom booming of the music that was itself loud enough to vibrate the leaves on the trees. The victims reeled around wowing and hooting and holding their heads. One sat on the edge of the tent porch and pounded his head with the butt of his palm like a swimmer with water in his ear. The music blurted off.
“How’d that go, man? Way out?”
“Holy shit, I was in orbit. I still am. Jesus, that drives you right out of your skull!”
Right where they all wanted to be, out of their skulls. Well, that would be enough disturbance for one evening. I took a step toward the bridge and flicked on the flashlight.
Its cone lifted and widened across twenty feet of trampled ground and came hard against the gray trunk of the bay. I saw a hasty tangle of limbs, bare skin, the white eyes of startled turning faces, a swatch of long dark hair. Then they rolled and scrambled and were gone behind the tree and into the brush. But not before I had recognized, in the face framed by the lank dark hair, Mr. and Mrs. Lucio LoPresti’s difficult daughter.
I had stopped instantly, as startled as they were; my thumb had pushed the flashlight switch to let them escape the light that had nailed them for a panicked, instant against the tree. There I hung, on the brink of turning away myself. I guess it actually shocked me to catch Julie in that state of coitus alarmus. For one thing, I had been inadvertent enough for one day, I hated my capacity for blundering. For another, sexual revolution or no sexual revolution, pill or no pill, I believe that society should restrain kids that young from playing with something of whose explosive consequences they can’t possibly know. And for still another, I was dismayed that my remarks about Peck’s crowd, made more than half facetiously, turned out to be approximately true. They were as promiscuous as howler monkeys, evidently, and they were not careful about confining their activities to the reasonably mature.
I was sorry for Fran, grieved for Lucio, exasperated at Julie, angry at Peck, and it never left my mind that while this orgy went on, Marian lay over there in her dark bedroom, alone with her death. It all came out as rage. In a bound, it seemed, I was at the bridgehead, flicking the flashlight across the faces around the fire, up into the treehouse, over to the crowd by the culvert. I meant to bark at them, curt and peremptory and commanding, but my tongue was so stiff in my mouth I managed only a harsh roar, right into the blast of sound from the record player.
My roar or the light—more probably the light-brought them around like an order to throw up their hands. Their heads jerked around, their faces stared, one half rose as if to run. There were maybe a dozen of them, beards and smooth faces, longhairs and short-hairs, he’s and she’s. I recognized two boys I had seen earlier pouring themselves drinks at the LoPresti party; they sat over there in Pecksville, incongruous in pipestem white jeans and sport shirts, evidence that more of the neighborhood than Julie and Dave Weld had been sucked into the crowd. Peck built quite a mousetrap. I saw Miles, the rather amiable boy who was one of the most devoted disciples, and the sex goddess Margo, but I did not see Dave Weld. Had it been his unkempt head beside Julie’s under the bay tree? And where was Peck? Off in the bushes or up in the treehouse, conducting one of the less public Mysteries?
The boy who had started half to his feet slipped off quietly toward the comer of the tent, and I put the light on him to let him know he was seen. He bolted: off to warn somebody? bury the can of pot? In my anger I took satisfaction in their obvious fear. Like a cop or a night watchman, I moved the light across their faces, and like cornered safe-crackers they stared back into the eye of my accusing lamp. Some now put hands to their eyes, shading them, trying to see. The music banged away unheeded behind them. “What’s the matter?” one of them yelled. “Who is it?”
I held the light on him, one of the Volkswagen boys, with a skimpy reddish beard. “Turn off the music.”
“What?”
“Turn off the damned noise!”
One of them darkened the triangle of the tent opening; the music squawked out. Questions, bending and peering faces, whispers. Who the hell is it? Can you see? Is it the fuzz, or who? A face looked out the treehouse door, and I switched the beam of light upward: female, unknown. I switched it back onto the wispy beard. “You’re making too much racket,” I said. “Turn it down.”
They were beginning to unfreeze. The group by the culvert began to drift to the fire, trying to see. And now someone turned a flashlight on me. The white coal bored into my eyes, dazzling me. There I stood in my bald head and my sport shirt, obviously not the police. Though I could not see against the flashlight, I could hear the buzz and stir of their relief. The insolent light moved down to my feet, then up again, taking me in. “Who says?” said a high voice, incredulous. A girl laughed.
Bang! went my adrenals, and there I was again, shouting at them. It was a time for quiet moral authority and the dignity of an elder. Instead, I roared. “I say! Now turn it off and keep it off!”
The light bored steadily into my eyes. “Who’s I?” someone said. The high voice said, “‘Ell, I’m ’igh meself. If ‘e’s any ’igher than I am ‘e’s really ’igh.” A gust of laughter. Whispers. What’s buggin’ him, anyway? Christ, it isn’t even eleven.
I counted ten before I said, “Is Peck over there?”
It seemed to me that heads turned. Through my slitted eyes I thought I saw the red firelight gleam in the turning eyeballs of a girl near the front. Then I swung the light up toward the treehouse and there Peck was, the god himself, bushy-headed, hairy-chested, skinny-legged, lounging on the rail. “Hello there, Mr. Allston,” his soft voice said—oh, soft, imperturbable, cool, friendly, a rebuke to my shouting. I felt all the ridiculousness of the police function, but I had no intention of backing off.
“Your party’s too loud,” I said.
He was surprised. “Loud? Well, maybe it is, we couldn’t conduct this experiment without some noise. But who’s close enough to be bothered?”
“Anybody within a mile and a half,” I said.
He laughed. “Oh come on, this is the cottony.”
“Where people expect quiet,” I said.
“Anyway, Mrs. Catlin isn’t a mile and a half away, she’s a hundred yards.”
“Did she send you?”
“It makes no difference whether she did or didn’t,” I said. “I won’t have her disturbed, and I’m telling you to keep your party quiet.” My hands were trembling, and I snapped off the flashlight. The boy by the fire left his on me. Up in the tree Jim Peck’s figure darkened and dimmed almost out, then emerged again, touched with red firelight. He put his hands on the limb in front of him and leaned there as if pondering. In the door behind him the girl’s face hovered.
“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.
VI
ON 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 inter
rupt 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.
All the Little Live Things Page 23
