All the Little Live Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”
    “I don’t smoke,” he said. His mouth went on steadily smiling out of the beard, but his eyes were more than ever the eyes of someone about to pull something off. I held them; we dueled, in a way, without a word said. His eyes told me that he was not afraid of me, that he did not care a fig for old bald-headed bastards of my type, and that he dared me to deny him anything.
    I broke off the ocular lunge-and-riposte. “Nevertheless,” I said, and steered Ruth past him.
    We had gone perhaps twenty feet when I heard the starter go down and the motor burst on. Here he came up beside us, rolling so slowly that he wobbled, balancing the cycle with his walking feet. He was saying something, ceaselessly smiling.
    I stopped. He said something else, but I didn’t catch it because of the motor. So he said it again, and just as he said it, idly twisted the throttle so that the motor noise surged up. I said to myself, Don’t let this punk get your goat, that’s what he wants. So I waited, and he waited, a hairy grotesque, gleaming with teeth and eyes. In a minute I started us walking again, and then he goosed the motor to pull even, and shut it off.
    “What is it?” I said.
    “... ask you a favor.”
    A favor. But as insolently as possible, to remove any taint of servility or inferiority. He said it as he might have said—and I was sure would have said if he had spoken his full mind—Fuck you, you old fart. And where did that antagonism come from? Did I incite it, or was it there between us like the suspicion between cat and dog? I am not likely ever to be sure.
    “If it’s O.K. for me to camp down here,” he said.
    At least he had the faculty of being unexpected. “Camp ? ” I said. “In a tent?”
    “Maybe a tent. I’d have to have some kind of shelter for when it rains.”
    “Don’t they have student housing at your college?”
    He only rolled up his moist brilliant eyes and tilted his head and puckered his lips into the semblance of a turkey’s behind.
    “There must be apartments in town, surely.”
    “I’m not making myself clear,” he said. “I want to camp.”
    We stood in the country stillness, eying each other. His pickpocket eyes were shrewd, but his voice had been soft, with a little burble in it. He didn’t wheedle, he simply blinked once and stood there guileless.
    “No,” I said, “it’s out of the question.”
    “Joe ...” Ruth said. After a pause to see if she would go on—he was reading us as a sailor reads weather signs—Caliban said in his temperate,