All the Little Live Things (3 page)

From Lucio and Fran, a wave, perhaps a minute of shouted conversation. From their daughter, nothing. She was not nearsighted, she was just a girl who didn’t know how to smile, and was not inclined to acknowledge the flappings and hoo-hooings of neighbors who meant no more to her than her horse’s droppings. She had a certain cold ferocity of antagonism to her mother, a contemptuous toleration of her father, and a passion of attachment to her gelding. Those, I believe, constituted her total emotional life last October. By now, a year later, her capacity for feeling should be enlarged.

Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions—just pat them and feel how warm! I wonder, on the contrary, if Julie didn’t spend all her time with her horse because she had no other friends and because riding let her indulge her fantasies of having a bit in her father’s mouth and a Mexican spur in her mother’s side. She was a dark-browed girl, fifteen or sixteen, somewhat flat-chested, big in the behind. Off the horse she was rawboned and awkward; mounted, she was almost beautiful. She always rode bareback.

So there we went one day last fall. A wave from Lucio, a flutter of Fran’s uplifted glove across some sort of mosaic panel laid out on sawhorses. No Julie—apparently not yet home from school—but the horse was hanging his chin on the corral rail waiting. We turned into Ladera Lane under big gum trees whose bark was starting to peel to reveal the delicate pastels underneath and whose fallen buttons, crushed by passing cars, filled the air with the smell I could never dissociate from the 1918 flu epidemic, during which we went around in gauze masks soaked in that pungent oil. Past the riding stable—more girls, no boys—and down a sudden gully smelling of bay and sage, around the comer of a walnut orchard to Roble Road and along it up a long hogback, the first crest visible from our house, until we came out on a windy plateau with puckers of woods below us and hills between us and the mountain.

It is a view that has the quality of bigness without actual size, and it used to comfort me to know that these little mountains, like everything else around, are very lively, very Californian. The range grows, they say, a half inch or so a year, and in the same time moves about that distance northward. It is a parable for the retired. Sit still and let the world do the moving.

The ridge was as far as we let our string out. Reeling in, we turned to the right across the clods of a plowed orchard, climbed through a fence beside a locked trail gate, and found ourselves in the pasture bought from Tom Weld’s father a long time ago by a school district looking to the future. A wall-eyed white horse with a hanging lip and the black nose and black feet he had got from wading around in tarweed watched us; he had a decrepit Hooverville look like an old man dirty from picking through the dump. Angus steers, three-dimensionally black against the dun hill, chewed the cud under a dying grotesque of an oak.

Ahead and to the right the hills flowed into the valley. Roofs and trees and streets receded toward the bay, and in the unsmogged breezy clarity we could see the bridges—Dumbarton, San Mateo, even the Bay bridge—and far off on misty contracostal hillsides the white of continuous city.

Below or above the snuffling of the steers and the lazy rushes of wind through the oak I could hear the sough of traffic in the thousand streets of the valley, and I felt at once elated and besieged. A little more population pressure, that bigger water main that Tom Weld wanted, and our desert island would be quarter-acre lots and beatitude a memory.

A long slope led us down into the wood that thickened along the dry creek bed. There were dusty asters under the brush, an occasional scarlet gilia. Some trodden weed sent up a sudden minty smell. In the path I saw the scat of an animal, fox probably, all knotted up with fur and feathers, and I turned it over with the tip of the blackthorn. “Boy,” I said, “that looks painful. How come a nice wild natural fox suffers from strangulated hemorrhoids?”

Holding her mouth as if she had been interrupted when just about to whistle, Ruth said in her mildest whisper, “I’ve got a Kleenex, if you want to take it home for your collection.”

I made some suitably scatological remark and golfed the thing into the bushes. But there it was. I admire the natural, and I hate the miscalled improvements that spread like impetigo into the hills. But who can pretend that the natural and the idyllic are the same? The natural is often imperfect, and
Homo fabricans,
of whom I am one, is eager to perfect it. So I clean it up and grub out its poison oak and spray for its insect pests and plant things that bear blossoms instead of burrs, and make it all Arcadian and delightful, and all I do is help jar loose a tax increase, bring on roads and power lines, stir up the real-estate sharpies with their unearned increment, and get the hills cut up with roads and building lots. All our woe, with loss of Eden.

If I had three wishes—one would do—I would stop all development in its tracks and put the real-estate people to growing apricots again. Better a country fox with a hemorrhoid than a city fox with a pile. Aesop must have said it.

Through the brushy bottoms trail-riders had cut a ten-foot swath, but the summer’s growth had half closed it in. Fronds of poison oak hung into the trail, dry cucumber vines and bindweed wove the walls of brush together. The ground, trodden by horses when wet, had dried again rough and hard as concrete. Passing under an oak, we got our faces full of late oak-moth caterpillars hanging on their threads, and Ruth was still pawing her face and shuddering when we came to the broken-down place in the bank where the riding trail crossed the creek between the Thomas cottage, then vacant and up for sale, and our south line. We slid down and clambered up, pulling ourselves by exposed roots.

And had a cold, visceral shock, a stoppage of the heart followed by a pounding pulse. For there, down in that quiet creek bottom where nobody but an occasional horseman ever passed, and where the only wheeled tracks were those of the man who periodically serviced our well pump, was this motorcycle sitting quietly, and on its seat this person in orange helicopter coveralls bulging all over with zippered pockets. The suit was unzipped clear to his navel, and his hairy chest rose out of it and merged with a dark, dense beard.

Caliban.

He was not surprised by us as we were by him; I had the feeling he had deliberately sat there soundless and let us startle ourselves. Teetering, tiptoeing his padded boots to balance the cycle (surely the feet inside those boots were cloven), he sat and looked at us. He was young, no more than twenty-two or -three. His hair was long and tousled, even matted where the helmet, now hung on a handlebar, had crushed it down. It crawled over his collar, and was pushed forward on his forehead, hiding his horns. His brown eyes, extraordinarily large and bright, gleamed out of that excess of hair, and his teeth, badly spaced, the eyeteeth long and pointed, were bared in a hanging, watchful, half-crazy grin. His coveralls and his shaggy head were splashed with green and gold as the leaves of the bay tree above him moved in the wind. He creaked like a saddle when he shifted, and he gave off an odor like a neglected gym locker.

The breeze was going in the top of the tree, but down in our hot pocket it was still. The wild mixture of things I smelled—this boy’s rank body odor, bay leaves, crushed weeds, hot oil, gasoline—seemed to me the things I would smell in a camp of bacchants if bacchants rode motorcycles; and I was irresistibly reminded that the maenads were supposed to have intoxicated themselves by chewing bay leaves. In spite of the stillness of his face and body, in spite of his watchful grin, I was not in doubt about this fellow for a second. If I ever saw the incarnated essence of disorder, this was it. He emanated a spirit as erratic, reckless, and Dionysian as his smell, and I had not seen eyes like his since one day in the
suq
in Beirut, when a Bedu boy whom I knew for a pickpocket watched me buy Ruth a gold chain.

“Lost?” I said.

“Oh no.” He had a soft, pliant voice. His hand went inside the open zipper and scratched comfortably at his ribs.

“I didn’t hear your motor.”

“I’ve been here a while.”

Since he had to know he was trespassing, and since he might have guessed that I was the trespassee, I waited for him to explain. When he didn’t, I said, a little sharply, “Doing what?”

The gappy smile widened, I became aware of very red lips among the red-brown beard. His eyes rolled upward eloquently, he seemed ready to laugh. “Meditating,” he said. “Under your bo tree.”

That was as fantastic as the helicopter suit. What is more, he spoke in a tolerantly amused way that said of course I wouldn’t know what he was talking about, and who gave a damn? I said, “Bay tree, bo tree, that shouldn’t make any difference. But I never heard of anybody meditating on a motorcycle.”

I suppose there was some coloration of contempt in my voice. More than once, since that afternoon, I have wondered if, supposing I had responded to him heartily or good-naturedly, we might have begun and ended in good feeling rather than in suspicion and dislike. Marian suggested as much, so did Ruth. But I was jumpy from encountering him down there where I thought everything peaceful and safe; everything about him, from his repudiation of personal cleanliness to his mode of transportation, was a threat aimed straight at me, and I was bound to show it. He flicked his brilliant eyes at me—oh, he was alert, he was as sharp as a pin, he missed nothing in fact or by implication—and said in the tone I remembered too well, the tone of the son not quite keeping his temper before a censorious father, “Look close, and you’ll see this is a Honda, not a Harley. Not everybody that rides a motor is a Hell’s Angel.”

No, I felt like saying, and trespass doesn’t give you any right to get snotty. But I said nothing, for Ruth spoke up beside me, and I heard her warm, interested whisper as he must hear it: weakness, placation, a chink in the old bastard’s armor. “How did you know it was
our
bo tree?” she said.

“Are you Mrs. Allston?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I had a fifty-fifty chance, with only two mailboxes.”

Somehow even the idea of his reading the name on our mailbox offended me. What the hell did he think he was doing, prowling around other people’s property? But Ruth was still talking, saying, “Were you interested in the Thomas house? Because I think you need an appointment to see it.”

“No, no, not the house.” Perhaps it was only a slight narrowing of the eyes, as inadvertent as the gas-pain smile of an infant, that made me think he weighed a strategic move. He said mildly, “I was down here once before. It’s a good place to sit in the quiet and let the air blow through you.”

With his motives I couldn’t quarrel. That bottom was lovely, and he did need an airing. But I didn’t want him getting so attached to the spot that he would make it his standard meditating place, for I felt almost with panic—panic? yes, exactly—the threat of unpeace that lurked there from the moment he set his hoof in the dry duff under that bay tree. Turn away, have nothing to do with him. Danger, danger, danger.

“Are you a student?” Ruth said.

“Yes.” He managed to make it sound as if he had confessed to having chancres under the helicopter suit.

“What year?” Ruth said—oh, interested, interested.

“I’m a graduate student.”

“Studying what?”

“Philosophy.”

“Philosophy! That should be interesting.”

“Yes,” Caliban said. “It should be.”

His smile, I had determined, was semidetached. Whatever it had been at first, before he caught the edge of hostility in my tone, it now hung there, gap-toothed, unvarying, almost imbecilic, quite unrelated to the eyes, which were brilliant and speculative; and nothing to do with his last remark, which came with a sudden spasm of disgust like spitting sideways. His disgust, oddly, made him seem less dangerous, more juvenile: a delayed adolescent projecting his uneasy virility into whiskers and motorcycle, both absolutely standard, and his dramatized alienation into dirtiness and long hair, likewise standard, and his lust for visibility into that orange suit. I granted that it was more individual than the greasy jeans and black leather of the motorcycle corps, or the combat jackets, baggy khakis, and Jesus-sandals of the tribal Outsiders, but even so I felt that I could have made him up out of ingredients available without prescription at any off-campus coffeeshop, and for a small fee I would have offered him a motto for all his kind.

 

DISGUSTED? FIGHT BACK. BE DISGUSTING

 

And yes, when he flexed his right hand on the handgrip, sure enough he wore long horny nails on the middle and index fingers. A guitar-picker, naturally, a lover of the Folk, whom he would conceive as mystically as a 1931 Communist conceived the Masses. Who could persuade him that the Folk who lived simple lives and sang simple songs were also the people who discriminated, segregated, lynched, fought with switchblades, vulgarized everything they touched, saved for a rainy day, bought on credit, were suckers for slogans, loved gadgets, waved the flag, were sentimental about Mother, knew no folksongs, hated beards, and demanded the dismissal of school superintendents who permitted The
Catcher in the Rye
to appear on high-school reading lists? I knew all about the Folk—they were where I came from. I didn’t know where Caliban came from, but I had an idea he came from books. If I opened his saddlebags I thought I might find Alan Watts on Zen snuggled up against Kierkegaard, Eugene Goodheart, Norman Brown, and Paul Goodman, and maybe the hallelujah autobiography of Woody Guthrie. And a copy of
Playboy.

He was a very American product, authentic Twentieth-Century Mixed Style, mass-produced with interchangeable parts from five or six different machines. But seeing him plainly didn’t make him any more attractive. So it was distaste rather than panic—distaste and a great weariness with everything he represented and recalled—that made me lay my hand on Ruth’s arm to start her up the trail toward the gate near the Thomas house. To Caliban I said, “I’d just as soon you didn’t make a habit of coming down here. One cigarette dropped in the weeds, and this place would explode.”