All the Little Live Things (34 page)

So it was, so it was. And closer every morning.

Waiting is one of the forms of boredom, as it can be one of the shapes of fear. The thing you wait for compels you time after time toward the same images, the same feelings, which become only further repetitive elements in the sameness of the days. Here, even the weather enforces monotony. The mornings curve over, one like another, for a week, two weeks, three weeks, unchanging in temperature, light, color, humidity, or if changing, changing by predictable small gradations that amount to no changes at all. Never a tempest, thunderstorm, high wind; never a cumulus cloud, not at this season. Hardly a symptom to tell you summer is passing into autumn, unless it is the dense green of the tarweed that late in summer, against all the dry probabilities, appears in patches on the baked hills. Its odor and its unseasonable green become manifest together, until the smell covers a whole district, lifts on the slightest wind, fills the head, perfumes shoes and trousers and cats that have passed through it, and closets where shoes and trousers have been stored, and hands that have stroked the cat’s fur.

In recollection, those weeks of waiting telescope for me as all dull time does. They were interminable while passing, but looked back upon they seem only an accelerating hour, scented, with tarweed. When August had blurred into September, and school had begun, and John had begun taxiing Debby mornings and afternoons as Marian had used to do, the smell of tarweed was in every breath we drew.

Most of the time we were as isolated with the Catlins’ trouble as if we had been adrift with them on a raft. Other neighbors, other concerns, passed largely un-hailed, outside the latitude of our obsession. Tom Weld rattled in and out in his pickup, and walked the hill with surveyors. White stakes sprouted, and we saw by the paper that a subdivision plan was before the planning commission. Ordinarily it would have desolated us; in our preoccupation with Marian we noticed it only as one more betrayal of what we had come for, and hardly felt anger. Mrs. Weld blossomed into September in a yellow Impala, evidently a down payment on prosperity. Lou LoPresti, encountered on a walk, wore a pucker in his forehead and a shamed air as if he had been forbidden to speak to us. Maybe he had. Fran we practically never saw, nor Julie; when we did see Julie, she was not on her horse but in Dave Weld’s Mercury, and generally headed for the skyline. Once I met Peck on the county road, buzzing along on his Honda, a messenger from nirvana with the wind like
a fire hose
in his beard. He did not greet me.

Wraiths, shadows of dissolving cloud, meaningless apparitions. They meant no more to us than the latest Tokyo student riot or yesterday’s military coup in Syria.

Holding ourselves available for the Catlins’ need, we accepted no invitations and issued none. And because they had no immediate family to call on, and had been so briefly in California that their acquaintance was small, they let us help. I like to believe that their resolution was not as rocklike as it seemed, and that they felt a little less desperate because of us. Pity was part of it, too: we took Marian’s condition so hard that they both felt sorry for us.

Ruth cooked and cleaned and laundered, I played driver and yardman; occasionally we were able to take Debby off their hands. Regularly, when John was at the lab in the mornings, we stopped in to do what we could. By taking over little household jobs, Ruth released Marian to other, more troubling tasks. She put Debby’s clothes completely in order. She went through her desk and storage cupboards and bundled together photographs, sorted letters, burned some, sent others back to their writers. She wrote to people she had valued and left behind in her thirty years. Slowly, saving herself and thinking about what she was doing, and resting frequently, she cleaned up the small debris of her life. From day to day we saw little change in her. Yet whenever our telephone rang we hurried to answer it with adrenalin pumping into our blood, for fear this, now, here, was the moment.

One evening in mid-September it rang while we were eating supper in the patio. I hurried in and got it in the middle of the third ring. “Hello?” I said.

Fran’s voice, not glutinous but tense and tight, full of hatred and venom. Oh, she could have poisoned me through the porches of my ear. “I just wanted you to know what your beatniks have been up to.”

“Fran,” I said, “they’re not
my
beatniks, I’m as unhappy about them as you are, and I did run them ...”

“No you’re not,” she said. “You couldn’t possibly be. Dirty, filthy, hairy animals! Do you know what they’ve done to that miserable child of mine?”

I was afraid I did, but I said I didn’t.

“They’ve got her
pregnant!”
Fran said. Her voice swelled so that I held the receiver away from my ear; it went on shouting at me. “Pregnant! Not sixteen yet, and pregnant! And not ashamed of it one bit, my God! Throws it in my face! Runs away to live with them in that ... coop ...pigpen....”

“Fran, Fran,” I said. “I
am sorry
,
believe me
. When did you find this out?”

“Yesterday. Last night. Today she’s gone, but I know exactly where. I had Lou trail that Weld boy one day. He’s as bad as she is, poisoned, simply poisoned by those ...”

“Did she say who was responsible?”

Her hard, unpleasant laugh made me move the receiver out again. “Why, don’t you know about modem youth?” she said. “They don’t have fathers any more, there’s nothing so old-fashioned as an affair. You know what she told me? My God, you know what she said? She said it might have been any of a half dozen. To my face.”

“Oh Lord.”

“Yes, oh Lord. I wanted you to know, I thought you’d be interested.”

“Fran, honestly ...”

“Well,” she said, “there won’t be any more of this, I can promise you that. I know right where that little bitch is, in their old summer cottage up there on the ridge, and I’m going up there with the police and I’m going to clean that nest out. You hear me?” I heard her all right, and I heard the strangled sound of crying underneath her furious words. “I wanted you to know,” she said. “That gang should never have been allowed to form.”

“I regret my part in it,” I said. “I regret it very much. But Fran, if you’ll forgive my speaking up, are you sure you want to go up there with the police? Wouldn’t it be easier on you and on Julie if you and Lou just went by yourselves?”

“I’m going up there,” said her hoarsening voice, “and I’m going to see that they’re all thrown in jail! I’ll have them up for using drugs, tampering with a minor, rape. I’ll throw the book at the filthy things.”

“But from what Julie told you, it wasn’t rape.”

“With a minor it’s always rape,” Fran said, and then her voice got away from her and she was shouting a foot from my ear. “God, who knows what it was? The dirty, lying little beast!” In the harsh pause I heard her breathing. “I just wanted you to know what you started,” she said, and hung up, bang.

If I started it, Fran finished it, and she didn’t wait. Before noon the next day a police car pulled up our hill and its driver, a uniformed cop from the next county, got out his notepad and took down my answers to a lot of questions about Jim Peck. How long had he lived down below? What were the arrangements, did he pay rent, or what? Had I known him before I let him camp down there? Ever notice anything queer about him or any of his friends? Act high ever? Wild parties maybe? Women coming in and out? Did I know what marijuana looked like, growing? That sort of thing.

I gathered that Peck had been raided, but the policeman wasn’t telling me anything. Obviously he regarded me as a possible accessory, possibly a queen. He was alert for any dirt that blew, and his visit annoyed and bothered me so much that I did not go down for the mail, for fear I would have to talk with Marian about it. But I couldn’t wait indefinitely. At three, when the afternoon paper would be there, I walked down, and of course there she was in the grove, and John with her, and they had the paper in their hands. I joined them, though I would rather have had an errand somewhere else.

It was front page, text and pictures: RAID UNCOVERS YOUTH DRUG-SEX RING. IRATE PARENT FLOORS HIPPIE. Here was Peck, beard and coveralls, holding his eye, his elbows held by stem deputies. Here was a ramshackle shingled cottage dwarfed by redwoods. Here was a disapproving district attorney with a tableful of evidence before him: a tobacco can said to contain grass, several bottles of barbiturates, a giant economy-size bottle of contraceptive pills. Here was the sex goddess Margo continued on page four, hair wild, hand raised in adjuration, while she talked sexual liberty and legalized abortion to a reporter. No other pictures of the people taken into custody, presumably because half of them were juveniles.

But luscious details, piquant beside the enthusiastically aired theories of Margo and the accusations from Peck about police harassment and invasion of privacy. Such details as were provided by some of the juveniles, frightened by what they had got into. Several said that pot was commonly smoked among the group, and that they themselves had obtained it through Peck. One admitted that he had been taken up into the treehouse in the place formerly used by the gang and there taken on an LSD “trip” under Peck’s supervision. He thought that almost all of them had taken at least one trip, some many. He also said that sex was “pretty loose” in the camp, and that girls, including juveniles, were sometimes traded around among sleeping bags.

The furious father of one of the juveniles had crowded in when the gang was being booked and knocked Peck down.

I raised my eyes from the paper and found Marian sitting nervously straight, watching me. John was moodily smoking a cigarette. “I can’t imagine Lucio hitting anybody,” I said. “Was it Lucio?”

“Tom Weld,” John said.

“Oh, great,” I said. “The whole neighborhood gets in the act. Was that cop down here asking questions?”

Marian nodded. “Fran too. We’ve had a session.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry they bothered you with it. What did she want?”

“Wanted Marian to persuade Julie to have an abortion,” John said.

“What? Why you?”

She smiled a wincing smile. “Apparently I have influence over her. She’ll listen to me.”

It was superb. Fran charging up to Marian, pregnant and dying and unalterably addicted to life, and proposing that she advise for another the abortion she would die rather than have performed on herself. In one flickering glance I assured myself that John and I were in complete accord on that one. My sympathy for Fran, which had been considerable, and considerably mixed with guilt, instantly diminished.

“What’s the matter with an old-fashioned shotgun marriage?” I said.

John laughed. “Find the man. Julie won’t say. Even if she would, can you imagine Fran welcoming any of Peck’s boys for a son-in-law?”

“What about Dave?” I said, and as soon as I said it acknowledged the stupidity of the remark. Through her cocker bitch, tied however snugly to the clothesline, Fran had already had experience with the Weld genius for creatirig consequences. She would want Dave Weld no more than she would have wanted Peck himself.

“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Which does a lot of good. Are you going to advise Julie to get it aborted? You could get Margo to help persuade her.”

Marian stared at me so long, with such a blank, concentrated expression, that I thought she must be watching something behind me. I thought I saw her shake her head very slightly. John stepped on his cigarette and said, “No, she’s not going to advise her one way or the other. She’s not going to get involved. She’s not going to waste her strength feeling sorry or worrying about that kid, because the kid will do exactly what she pleases in any case. She won’t tell who the father is, assuming she knows. She won’t agree to an abortion. Why would she? She says they gave her pills and she threw them away. She wanted to get pregnant to spite Fran, and now she has, and that’s it.”

“She says?” I said. “Have you talked to her?”

“Oh, sure. Fran brought her over.”

“Good God!” I said. “Hasn’t she got any better sense than to ...”

“I don’t know,” Marian said. “If there was something I could conscientiously do, I’d be so glad to do it! Poor sullen Julie. Poor Fran, too, she’s being torn apart. And the Welds, my goodness, they had no idea what was happening, they just got called down to the station. It was like having something fall on you out of a window. You knew it was Dave who got scared and talked to the police?”

“Gunslinger? He always seemed the strong silent one.”

“Julie’s vicious about him. She calls him the squealer.”

“Forget it,” John said. “Put it all out of your mind.”

She mused, relaxing back against the lounge and examining her pink palm. “I’m a naïve,” she said. “I thought, because they all seemed so sort of natural and good-natured and liked the outdoors and only seemed to dislike artificial things like shaving, that we could
set them some sort of
example—you
know, show them
that all their kicks were artificial too, and unnecessary. Your own five senses ought to be more than enough. Hmmm?”

“Nothing.”

“But I guess they probably thought I was pretty square. I’m sure they liked me, and I liked them, they were so full of vitality and a sort of spirit of adventure. But beliefs, that’s something else. They must have thought what I believe was something suitable for Girl Scouts.”

“Forget them,” I said. “Forget the whole business. They aren’t worth ten minutes of your time, isn’t that right, John?”

“That’s right,” John said. “They couldn’t get an abortion in California anyway. It never was your problem, Marian. You couldn’t help even if they’d let you.”

He did not say it, but we all understood as precisely as if he had: You’ve got your own problem to handle. Fran LoPresti is not the only one who has a crisis in her life.