All the Little Live Things (16 page)

“I’m going to trot him,” Julie said, looking back at Debby as she led the horse across the flat. “Just let your legs hang. Point your toes out.” She hunched her horse into a trot, sitting him loose and heavy and smooth, and Debby came behind on the stretch-necked piebald, bouncing on his fat back and screaming to stop. Julie stopped.

“She’s good with Debby,” I heard Ruth say. “She’s going to be just right. You’re lucky.”

“Except I’ll never get Debby into a dress again,” Marian said. “Now it’s jeans and an old sweatshirt with the arms cut off, notice?”

Through the heat of the afternoon we worked together in the sun and dust, young Weld digging holes, John and I setting posts. Actually I didn’t work much. I held the level on them while he shoveled in earth and tamped it down with a length of two-by-four. Down in the grass, the transistor reported strike-outs, hits, double plays; the thin crickety roar of the crowd came up out of the weeds as if there were a trap door down into some region of the strengthless but unappeased dead. We talked about seals, their varieties, their migration habits, their breeding grounds, and the recovery of some of the species from near-extinction. Later on, in June, John was going up to the Pribilof Islands to be there when the female fur seals pupped. He wanted to study their learning rate. Any animal that could learn to swim and look after itself in a week struck him as interesting.

I eased my back, straightening up, and he did the same. I said, “You’ll be gone part of the summer, too, then.”

He knew what was on my mind; his heavy shoulders went up, his mouth went down, his hands went out in a gesture so Gallic it seemed he was imitating someone. “She won’t hear of anything else. The gestation of seals is supposed to be more important to me and my career than her own is.” I found his eyes on me. “She says she’s gotten along fine. Is that right?”

“I think so. Ruth does too. She’s gained a little weight, she’s brown, she’s out in the sun a lot. Don’t you think she looks better?”

“I do,” John said. “I’m grateful to you both.”

“It’s total pleasure.”

He looked at me with his sharp blue fisherman’s eyes, and smiled as if his mind were somewhere else. Exercise had gathered pebbles of sweat on his brown forehead, his chest and shoulders looked oiled. “What the hell,” he said, “why are we slaving here as if we had a contract ? I’m only going to be home three days. How about some feminine companionship? After sea elephants it looks pretty good.” He threw the shovel clanging on the hard adobe. “Dave? Let’s take five. How about a Coke or a beer?”

Young Weld drew a core of shining black adobe from the hole and knocked it out of the auger. Julie was leading Debby through the trail gate. The mongrel stood aside, ducking to try to get between the horses. His draggled beard was matted with burrs. As we walked up to where Marian and Ruth sat with a bucketful of iced drinks on the table beside them, the sweat flies buzzed around me with a noisy, frantic insistence to entrap themselves in the hairs of my ears, and I had an epiphany, an instant bright awareness of how that ridiculous dog must feel all the time.

Dave Weld stood a moment by the pail, slanted a look at us, and picked out a can of beer. He went halfway back to the corral and sat down with his back against an oak and pulled the tab off the can and drank. His eyes were fixed on something across the creek. I looked, and there was Peck, on the porch of his tent.

It annoyed me to see him there, spying on our pleasant neighborhood labors. Young Weld and Julie, both ordinarily part of the diurnal irritation, had been won over and brought in. And there sat Peck, watching us for God knew how long without even giving us good day. Why hadn’t he swung on his Tarzan rope across the creek and offered to help? The Catlins had been kind to him, he knew that John was just back, all the junior admirers of his treehouse were present, why not join in? Was he, I wondered, annoyed that his privacy was going to be invaded by the horsy activities of those girls? I was myself annoyed enough to hope so.

“What’s he doing, watching the squares work?” I said to Ruth.

Marian leaned over and motioned me to her side. From there I got a clearer view between the trees. “Watch!” Marian said, and shrugged her shoulders up around her ears like a gleeful little girl.

Peck was sitting on the deck, his head as big as a keg with hair, his bare back straight, his eyes fixed straight ahead into the brush, oblivious. The transistor talked to itself down in the grass to our left, and I heard Julie say something to Debby in the lane, but I paid no more attention than Peck did. He stared straight ahead, I stared at him.

“What is he, in a trance or something?” I said.

“Yoga!” Ruth whispered in scorn. “He’s exercising.”

“Are you sure he’s alive? How long has he been there?”

“Ten or fifteen minutes.”

“He’ll wear himself out,” I said. “All that violence is bound to have an effect on his system.”

“Oh, you know about yoga, for goodness’ sake,” Ruth said. “You
do
it sitting down, a lot of it. You’re exercising muscles deep inside.”

“Every system has its own rules,” Marian said.

“You’re right,” I said. “But a rule that might apply to all systems is that when people have been friendly to you, and you see them doing something laborious, you offer to lend a hand. Or at least you say hello.”

“What a moralist,” Ruth said. “Watch this, you might learn something that would be good for your back.”

From our shade we looked across the blazing, trampled bottoms to the tree-backed stage where Peck sat between his legs in his cut-off jeans. I could not see him move one single muscle, though perhaps he was taking one of those locks, chin or tongue, or contracting his anal sphincters, or doing something else inward. After a long time he rocked suddenly forward and kicked himself into a headstand. His hands were clasped around the back of his neck, his elbows made a tripod on which he balanced a moment, wobbling. Then his legs, which had been folded insectlike on his chest, straightened until his bare toes pointed upward. “Ahhhhh!” said the admiring women on my right and left.

I held the watch on him until he curved his spine and rolled into a sitting position a few feet ahead of where he had sat before. “Three minutes and twenty seconds,” I said. “What’s the record?”

They were much too interested to pay any attention to my carping. They sat breathlessly watching. Braced against the tree, the beer can forgotten in his hand, Dave Weld was watching while the ballgame shrilled unheeded from the grass. Julie, bringing her pack train in the gate, saw us all sitting there entranced, and now she was watching. What the hell, we were all watching. With that many eyeballs focused on him he might have felt as if he were being caressed by the suction cups of an octopus. But he didn’t watch us. He was above us, beyond us, way out.

In a pig’s-eye. He was aware of us as an actor is aware of his audience. Intent on his act, he lay back and bridged from head to heels, thrusting his skinny rib cage into the air. Then he lowered himself until his spine was flat along the deck. Then he pushed up again. His upthrust beard quivered. Strain or heat waves?

“You still think it’s easy?” Ruth said.

Peck rocked, and once again was sitting between his legs. “Pelvic posture,” Ruth said to Marian. “That’s a basic one.” For a time he sat immovable, unless somewhere inside him some secret muscle was clenching and relaxing. At last he stood up and stooped into the tent, to come out again with a glass which he tilted up for a long mouthful. Leaning out over the edge of the deck, he brought his head and shoulders into a streak of sun, and in an instant his whole hairy top was haloed in spray. With a little more careful staging he might have made a rainbow.

“Elephant mudra,” Ruth said. “You blow water through your nose. It’s one of the cleansings. This is as good as a twenty-dollar lesson.”

Peck took a handkerchief, towel, rag of some sort, off the back of the batwing chair, and pulling his tongue far out of his mouth, he massaged around in his throat. He spat over the edge, he tossed the rag into the chair, he sat down again and pulled first one foot, then the other into his lap. “Can you see?” Ruth was whispering excitedly. “That’s the lotus posture. That’s
hard!
It’s the best one for meditation because your lower limbs are all locked and you’ve got a firm base.”

“You think he’s meditating?” I said. But when their heads turned-Marian’s inquiring, Ruth’s cocked like the head of someone turning to shush a talker behind her at a play—I didn’t go ahead and say what was in my mind: that Peck was a long way from true meditation, that he couldn’t have been more conscious of being watched, that down below there,
wink
! was going his little old anal sphincter, the window of his soul.
Wink
! Wink ! Rubber, you squares.

I drained my can of beer and set it down, not softly. “How about finishing that fence?” I said. “If I watch this any longer I’ll begin to twitch.”

Peck sat immovable upon his locked posterior. The Catlins were both laughing. “Joseph Allston, you have a closed mind,” Marian said.

“Closed to phonies and show-offs.”

“I don’t understand you,” Ruth said. “When Murthi was writing his book you were more interested than I was.”

John and Marian looked inquiring. Who’s Murthi?

“Murthi was a friend of mine, a client,” I said. “He wrote a couple of books interpreting Indian philosophy for Westerners. Sure I was interested. He had a good mind, he was neither a phony nor a show-off. He didn’t convert me, but I listened. When this kid comes out into the view of the crass materialist world to exercise his spiritual rectum, I’m
not
interested. I want to barf.”

Ruth’s eyes definitely disapprove of me, Marian’s are merry and speculative and squinting as she tries to figure out whether I mean this or am mainly kidding. John stands up laughing. “I hope you never get mad at me,” he says. He looks sideward at Peck, immobile and immutable on his pedestal. “Well, the show seems to be over. Shall we go work off your rage?”

“I never get mad,” I said. “I only hold grudges. Ask Ruth.”

It was casual and funny. And yet I really did think Peck had put on his show out of a trivial juvenile desire to show off, and I really couldn’t laugh, as I should have, and feel indulgent. I was definitely grumpy as we went down into the sun where Dave Weld had begun industriously to grind away at another posthole. And it didn’t do my state of mind a great deal of good when I looked over—just once, I couldn’t resist—and saw Jim Peck, cleansed and purified, still blissfully unaware of our presence fifty yards away. He had a book in his hand, up on the deck of his treehouse, but it seemed to me that he was not reading; he was slyly watching us sweat down there in the sun. His right forearm made short, regular jerking motions that meant he was throwing salted peanuts or raisins into the pulsating vacuole in his beard.

About five o’clock all the posts were in. We left Dave Weld nailing on two-by-four rails and went around into the grove, where it was cooler, for a drink. Julie had led Debby off up the horse trail across the creek, but just as we were putting the tools away they came back and tied the horses inside the incomplete corral and went to work on them with currycomb and brush. I had an impression, which considering they were both fifteen or sixteen was natural enough, that Julie was inordinately aware of Dave’s walnut torso working its muscles a little way beyond her, and that he in turn was elaborately oblivious to the presence of anyone else in the world. He set and drove spikes with great blows. His muscles contracted so, under his sweaty skin, that he reminded me of Julie’s mutt dog, now asleep under an oak. Yapping, he contracted his body in just that convulsive way. You could see his bark in his anus. And guess what that brought to mind.
Wink!

Maybe I was beginning to twitch. There were too many people around there exercising their muscles before audiences which they did not deign to notice. I was glad to get around the house and get a cold glass in my hand and lie back in a canvas chair and listen to John, who paid the most scrupulous and smiling attention to every member of his audience, tell us about the social habits of sea elephants.

After a while I became aware that the hammering down in the ring had stopped, and I momentarily expected to see Dave Weld come past the house on his way home in the old Mercury with the red primer on the molded fenders and noise blasting from the twin pipes. But no sign of him, and no sign of Julie and Debby either. Then in a pause we heard the sounds of a guitar being tuned. Marian stood up and called. “Debby? Deb ... by!”

“I’ll take a look,” I said, and went around the back of the house to the patio. The stage of Peck’s tent was more crowded this time. They were all there in a cluster. Movie hero with his six gun, horsy girl with bareback seat, six-year-old with solemn glasses, they sat entranced around their hairy guru, under the bo tree.

So Peck never did exactly join us; he ran a rival shop. Telling myself that he was only a temporary squatter who could be evicted when I chose, I saw him spread like a wild-cucumber vine. He had his split-level pad beyond the defended moat which I could cross neither physically nor spiritually, nor wanted to. His Honda was housed in the unauthorized shed by the trail gate. Sometime in May, shortly after John returned to Guadalupe, and again without asking permission, Peck nailed a secondhand mailbox next to mine and daubed his name on it with a finger dipped in black: J. PECK.

The longer he stayed, the less time he spent in meditation or in solitude. Either his intentions matured during the months while he was getting his tree in order, or he had discovered students whom he could influence. He began, clearly, to think of himself as a guru, and his attractiveness was obviously enhanced by the improvements he had made in my poison-oak patch.

If the Catlins had been bothered, I might have run him out—or would I? Would I? I don’t know. When I wasn’t being excessively irritated by his willingness to stretch into an ell every inch I gave him, I was willing to admit that he was simply a kid, maybe a bright kid, with most of his generation’s idealistic fantasies and a pretty good sense of theater. And yet I never lost my sense that we were adversaries, and that he knew it as well as I, but that Marian and John, who looked upon him and his crowd as anthropologists might have looked upon a village of picturesque head-hunters, had no comprehension of the emotional antagonisms that lay in us like surly dogs at the end of a chain, ready to leap up and growl at a step. If I had eradicated Peck’s nest to simplify my life, I would have been guilty of subtracting from the pleasure the Catlins took in their new life, and I probably would have hated myself to boot. Nevertheless I could not keep my mouth shut.