All the Little Live Things

by Wallace Stegner

  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.”

  With the afternoon sun straight in his face, he was lighted as if for a camera close-up. He smiled and smiled, squinted, rolled his shoulders. I thought him the most preposterous fool I had ever looked at, all the more intolerable for his apparent conviction that he was snowing me, giving the old square a glimpse of the true faith.

  “You know—people get hung up, especially kids,” he said. “Parents ride them, they can’t make it in school, love problems, all that. They’re shut in, all tangled up in rules, all screwed up, you know. I mean, there have to be ways out, they have to tear out of the net. There are all kinds of ways, we’ve been doing some interesting work on some of them down below. Diet, you know, exercise, fasting, music with a beat—folk rock, like that.” He jiggled, squinting, fixedly smiling. “Drugs, some people use. Take a trip, planetary, leave the whole screwed-up world behind you, you know?” His squint opened into his half-crazy grin, like a nudge, as if he reminded me of things he knew I knew. “You know. Orgasm’s a way. Love is basic. Swim with the world’s big vibrations instead of across them. Read love poetry, it gets the love words out in the open instead of leaving them in there with the dirty words. There’re all kinds of ways. We’ve experimented some, there’s a lot more to do. What you heard the other night was just one step.”

  “I thought what I heard was a very loud party.”

  He was pained that I would not understand. He took his hands off the handgrips and shook them, palms up and fingers spread, as if he expected the words that would enlighten me to come drifting down and settle in them. “Mr. Allston,” he said, “I don’t know if you’ll believe this. But I took notes, I interviewed each one. The informants had different reports—you know, personalities are different, things hit them differently—but every person that went into the culvert the other night testified that he came out, you know, really cleansed. Purified.”

  I held his eye; it didn’t waver. Fantastic con man, or true believer, or nut, or a voice crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord? He smiled with his head on one side.

  “Then what?” I said. “After coming out purified, what did you all do? Did everybody there go home, kiss his parents, forgive his enemies, make up with his girl? Did Julie LoPresti go home and get reconciled with her mother? Are you going back to Chicago and shake your father’s hand and ask his blessing?”

  Not nut, not con man; and if true believer and prophet, then also Adversary. Our incomparable and incorrigible mutual gift for dislike was between us like sudden kicked-up dust. Peck’s lips moved secretly, as if tasting, in the brown beard. “Not quite,” he said. “There’s too much that has to be changed in the Establishment before anybody could be reconciled to it.”

  “So hostility survives your therapy.”

  “I didn’t ask you to subscribe to the theory,” Peck said. “I only came up to explain that there was, you know, a serious purpose to the noise.”

  “You’re seriously telling me that?”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “No.”

  A short silence. His brilliant eyes glittered like wet stones in the sun. He looked away, pressing his red lips together, then looked back. His shoulders lifted and dropped carelessly. “All right, that’s your privilege. But we did turn it off when you asked us.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, you did. But it’s hardly anything you can take a lot of credit for. Because I didn’t ask you, I told you. You’d have been in trouble if you hadn’t.”

  “Yes,” Peck said, studying me. “I wonder if I can explain this so you’ll understand. We’re in trouble now if you make us move. It would crack everything just-wide open. I’ve invested a lot of time and thought and money down there. We’re just beginning to make headway with the sc
hool. A lawyer friend of mine has applied for tax-deductible status for us, and we’ve got three people ready to put up money to get us off the ground. We’re just ...”

  “School?” I said. “What school?”

  The question obviously made him impatient. He didn’t reply.

  “Mr. Peck,” I said, “I don’t know what you take me for. One minute you tell me you’re developing noise therapy, and the next it turns out that without asking me or even telling me you’re founding a school. If I objected to that noise once, doesn’t it strike you I might object to it as a regular classroom exercise?”

  “The noise therapy isn’t basic,” Peck said. “Anyway, we’ve done the fundamental experiment. We can let it go.”

  “Fine,” I said. “But what is this school? I’ve never been asked if you could start a school down there. If I had, I’d have said no. I don’t want the traffic, I don’t want the fire hazard, I don’t want the garbage, I don’t want the liability, I don’t want the nuisance to the Catlins.”

  “I spoke to Mrs. Catlin,” Peck said. “She wasn’t bothered.”

  “You spoke to her? When?”

  “Just now.”

  “Just now? Wasn’t John there?”

  “Yes, they were all there.”

  “Oh, good Christ!” I said. “You rang their doorbell just now, a few minutes ago?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “It just makes it all the more necessary that you move out. I gave you a week. You’ve still got five days.”

  He straddled, head sunk, his arms braced down on the handlebars. His hands squeezed the brakes and let them out again. His feral eyes came up to meet mine. “Why do you hate us?” he said softly.

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “Oh yes you do!”

  “I disapprove of you, I disagree with you, I think you’re dangerous. You want to know why I disapprove of you?”

  “Not particularly,” he said with a curled mouth. “But if it will relieve your hangup.”

  I had trouble keeping my hands at my sides. “Maybe it will,” I said. “So I’ll tell you. From the minute you showed up here, you dared me to. For some reason I equal the Establishment. Do I remind you of your father, or what? You felt for some reason you had to challenge me. You asked me if you could camp, and you wanted to bait me into giving you permission without wanting to. You agreed to several conditions and you deliberately broke them all. You expanded your pad and you put in a shed and a mailbox and you moved in your gang and you threw garbage around and you built fires and you stole power from my pole and water from my well line and now you start a school. Doesn’t it occur to you I might have a right to disapprove?”

  “That’s it, that permission bit, isn’t it?” Peck said. “You’ve got to be asked. You want your authority recognized.”

  “I’d like my rights recognized, and the rights of some other people.”

  He was studying the gravel of the drive, and he wore no trace of the smile that I had thought a permanent fixture of his face. “As long as we’re speaking of rights,” he said, “what about the improvements I’ve made in that property for you? Shouldn’t those be taken into consideration?”

  About that point I found myself as weary as I have ever been of any human being—weary, weary, sick to death of him, and reminded too, as I always was. He was Curtis all over again, but worse, madder, more insistent. I understood him no more than I would have understood a Martian, but I understood the evil things he did to me, the way he had of making me be less than myself. I turned away from him. “That’s fantastic,” I said. “I’ll have to burn the place out to sterilize it.”

  I started toward the house. To my back he said quickly, “Wait. Wait a minute. What’s the answer, then?”

  “The answer to what?”

  “Do we stay, or don’t we? Make your conditions.”

  “There are no conditions, because there never was any question. Of course you don’t stay.”

  He jerked so furiously on the teetering Honda that I thought he was going to leap off and attack me. Then for a second he glared downward between the handlebars, thinking. His hands tightened on the grips, he dropped head and shoulders in a spasmodic, furious gesture. His foot kicked down, the motor caught. There he went, spattering gravel back toward me in a pebbly rain. There he went—wronged innocence, repudiated idealism, frustrated science, thwarted aspiration. And left me feeling how? Relieved? Justified? Oh no. Sick, half nauseated from anger, baffled and unsettled and vaguely guilty.

  2

  Peck didn’t even stick out his legitimate week. I was walking in the lane—accidentally, though he wouldn’t have believed that—when the Volkswagen bus pulled out the gate with a load of miscellaneous junk and Peck came straddling after it on the Honda. I stopped, giving him a chance to get by without an encounter, but he paused at the gate to settle the helmet over his tangle of hair. The morning was overcast and gray. He sat there screwing his neck around, getting the chin strap under his beard, while the Honda chuckled under him. The Catlins had gone to Carmel for a few days, a move that I thoroughly approved, even though it left Ruth and me adrift and wretched. There we were, Peck and I, just the two of us; and there was tension between us like a stretched wire.

  He turned his hairy face—he had been aware all the time that I was there. His eyes glittered under the helmet’s round brow, the smile that had been his trademark for months was missing. Spaceman, kook, barefoot saint, seeker, searcher, rebel, lush, pothead, idealist, bughouse intellectual, Modem Youth, whatever he was, he looked me in the eyes for a second that contained our mutual recognition and abhorrence.

  “We can’t take it all yet,” he said. “I’ll have to leave the stuff in the shed till later. All right?”

  It was not a request, it was still a challenge, but I shrugged. “All right.”

  “Thanks a lot.” So I granted him one last favor, with dislike, and he thanked me with sarcasm, and he gunned his motor and was gone out of my life as abruptly as he had come into it. He left me feeling as if I had just shaken off something slimy that had crawled on my skin, and yet I had too the unsatisfied sense that all through our association of many months I had failed to do something I might have done. What? Try to teach that baboon something? Try to learn something from his gibberings? Try to reach whatever sense of responsibility he had? Build up a moral nature in that wilderness? There had never been a meeting between us, only a handful of confrontations. What if, early in our acquaintance, I had crossed the creek?

  Alone-in the quiet bottoms, too early for the mail, I crossed it that morning for the first time. I found the bridge, which they had left down, difficult but passable, and as I inched across, I wondered why Peck had not destroyed it. Better surrender it to the Philistines than wreck the product of his own creative labor? Or had he left the whole shebang for Debby? Or had he left it simply because it never occurred to him to clean up after himself? Or maybe because he wanted to emphasize his deliberate disregard of my demands?

  Whatever his reasons, it was a grubby gift for Debby, an effective means of giving me the finger. I stepped from the swaying bridge into inch-deep dust. Before me the stained platform, wearing the cleaner rectangular mark of the tent, was littered with rags, papers, gutted books, beer cans, beer bottles, wine jugs, sink sponges, leaves, socks, a woman’s moccasin, a broken peel chair. When I kicked over a fruit basket I exposed a dozen fierce earwigs. Ants were moving up and down the trunk of the oak and clotting around some spilled syrup or honey in a shelf nailed to the tree. Below the shelf their unretrieved, perhaps outgrown motto greeted me from its faded board, the end of it broken Off. BE YOURSELF. GOOD IS THE SELF SPEA

  The ladder to the treehouse, like the bridge, had been left down. Climbing it, I put my face in the door of what had been holy of holies, Ark of the Covenant, love nest, what else: a crooked little room with an old sweater hanging on a nail and the floor drifted with feathers, evidently from a torn sleeping bag.

>   Vaguely disappointed—yet what had I expected to find, snooping around where during Peck’s tenancy I had scorned to go?—I stooped inside. As I did so I kicked an electric wire, and produced a sear of blue sparks, a tingling foot, and a smell of ozone. They had salvaged their electric equipment by simply yanking it off the wire. A true Peckism. If he had left the bridge and treehouse for Debby’s use—and I did not entirely deny the possibility—he had managed to leave it so that she would electrocute herself the first time she came to play.

  My anger was as hot as the sparks. I would have. to clean up his leavings, and not for the first time. But then a few minutes later I stood out on the deck and looked across bare buckeyes, ragged oaks, and green bay trees that filled the gully southward. It occurred to me that Peck, insane as he was, had had a genuine affection for this place, and had availed himself of it with some imagination, and had left it with regret.

  Against the hill that rose sharply behind the tent the poison oak was thin-leafed, already turning red; among the tangle gleamed dozens of beer cans. But even that testimony to Peck’s slovenliness could not drive out of me the feeling that this place without its semihuman occupiers was forlorn. Standing among the Freedom Force’s shabby leavings I had a haunted sense of déjà vu, and immediately I located the source of the feeling: Curtis’s room, mornings when I stood in it and looked with distaste at the results of a week of his occupancy.