All the Little Live Things (29 page)

We kissed her, we found smiles to answer the one she flashed for us, we made her promise all over again to try to reach John the first thing in the morning and bring him home no matter if he missed everything he had gone up there for. We told her to call us, no matter what the hour, if she got lonely or afraid. We said we would be down in the morning right after breakfast. Then we were out in the parking area, and the door that had framed her as we said good night was closed.

“Oh, God damn, God damn, God damn,” I said.

We did not get into the car, but stood as if waiting for something. Ruth came close and put her hand under my arm, and I squeezed it against me with my elbow. It was an unnaturally warm night, the air soft and damp. The living-room light went out, then some remoter light, and the cottage squatted blackly before us. I visualized Marian walking softly into the back bedroom, where she would undress her mutilated, misshapen body and lie down. Would she stare at herself in the mirror, searching for signs of what was happening within?

Then I became aware of the undiminished forces of disorder in the night. The intrusive automobiles were still parked without permission beside her old station wagon, the hounds were still baying off in the dark hills, the raffish crowd at Peck’s burst out bawling to a guitar, singing with gusto.

On the sluggish air moving down the gully I smelled the wild fragrance of their fire. All the restless blood in that well-tempered exurb was out and roaming, turning night into day and yelling the delights of chaos, the mystical and curative pleasures of uncontrol. And in the gray cottage, in the still bedroom, in the organs and blood stream of the girl who liked the hard and painful things because they could so persuade her she was fully alive, and who believed the universe began in order and proceeded toward the perfection of consciousness, the stealthy cells, rebellious against the order that had created them, went on splitting to form their fatal isotopes.

The song bawled on through another verse and into the next chorus. Bleakly we stood and listened, and when it stopped we looked at one another doubtfully in the dark and I opened the door of the car for her to get in. Just as I did so the terrific banging that I had heard from the hill began again, this time in the beat of the singing.
Gimme that
BANG BANG BANG,
Gimme that
BANG BANG BANG,
Gimme that
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!

“Oh for Christ’s sake!” I said. I dug the flashlight out of the glove compartment and shoved Ruth across under the wheel. “Drive up to the foot of the hill and wait for me. I’m going to put that hoodlum outfit down.”

“Joe,” Ruth said, “do you think ... ? She said she didn’t mind.”

“Maybe she won’t be sleeping,” I said, “but she might want to think. She’s got plenty to think
about.”

I was going through the trail gate by the time she got turned and started. I didn’t need the flashlight because of her brightening lights that showed up the cars, the ratty shed, the path, the corral beyond. And the fire, with its jumping shadows, made a target for me to walk toward.

The lights moved past me up the lane and left me in deep darkness. The intolerable din across the creek stopped abruptly, and was succeeded by hoots, yells, screeches, laughter. “Next! Next! Hey, Miles, come on, emancipate the old ego! Man, that puts bees in your head!”

Easing along the path by feel, I ran into the corral fence and stopped to let the red glow of the fire fade off my retina as a green afterimage. It smelled like a Navaho encampment there in the bottoms—horse, wood-smoke, dung, leather, dust. The horses snorted softly, their feet thudded in the powdered adobe. I saw the shadow of a head and neck against the sky, the shine of an eyeball, and putting out a hand I felt a velvet nose and the moist hot blast of breath. The head pulled away, a shoe clinked on a rock. From my zone of darkness and soft sounds I saw the red light and black shadows across the creek, and heard the cacophony of their voices talking loudly and all at once.

I did not even then flick on the flashlight, because I was curious to know what that banging had been, and I didn’t want to scare them off whatever they were doing. While I stood there one of those amplified guitar records came on—loud, loud. Was there something the matter with their ears, that they needed that level of noise? Was it a protective result of growing up in an overcrowded, rackety world that they couldn’t have a good time without a boiler-factory uproar? And did they have no awareness that people who lived within range of that raucous uproar might take less delight in it than they?

I guided myself along the corral rail until I was as close as the corral came to the bay tree. Between me and the fire, which now threw up a shower of sparks as someone poked it, the looping bridge and all Peck’s rigging of lines and cables hung like lianas across the face of some fantastic jungle. Any minute bands of apes could have come swarming out on them hand over hand. But the apes, and I supposed their Tarzan too, seemed to be busy doing something else. A cluster of them was gathered over to the right of the tent; others were watching from the tent deck and from the porch of the treehouse. I moved a little to get a better look at those off to the right.

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.