All the Little Live Things Read Online Free PDF

controlled voice, “Why out of the question?” He seemed genuinely and conversationally interested.
    I should perhaps have told him straight out that I didn’t want him on the place, as he already knew perfectly well. Instead, I weakly gave reasons, and not the real ones. “Fire hazard,” I said. “Sanitation. Our well’s right over there.”
    “I saw it,” he said. “But I was thinking of across the creek. If you’ll come back a minute I’ll show you.”
    “There’s absolutely no point.” But Ruth’s hand was on my arm, her eyebrows were up, she shrugged. Her signals were as plain to Caliban as to me. He put his Honda up on its kickstand and led us back under the bay tree. Following his back, brilliant as a tanager’s, down the path, I said out of the comer of my mouth, “For Christ’s sake, it’s like being captured by Martians.” Ruth said nothing.
    Across from the bay tree the bottoms forked into two valleys, each with its dry stream bed, vertical moats ten feet or so wide and a dozen deep. These combined, between us and the Thomas house, to form a main moat, wider but no deeper. The horse trail crossed the trunk of the Y below the junction. Inside the Y was a little flat covered with poison oak, out of which rose two big live oaks with ropy poison-oak vines wrapped around their trunks. Back of the flat the hill rose nearly as steep as a cliff, choked with brush and trees.
    “Over there,” Caliban said.
    I had to laugh, it was so inevitably the sort of place twelve-year-olds would have picked for a woods hide-out. “You’d need wings.”
    “I can take care of that.”
    “So?” I said. “Why there? Why not right here under this tree, for instance?”
    “Because over there you’d have your back against the hill and the creek in front and nobody could get at you at all.”
    “Why, is somebody after you?”
    It was no effort for either of us. One look, one word, and we were circling like wrestlers looking for a hold. After a second he said, smiling and smiling, “I don’t like being available to just anybody that comes along.”
    I felt like reminding him that if we hadn’t been available to anybody that came along, we wouldn’t be holding this preposterous conversation now. Instead, I only remarked that nobody ever came through here but us. And from the look in his eye understood that we were precisely the ones he had in mind. He made it incomparably plain by saying, “I’d respect your privacy, I’d expect you to respect mine.”
    After an incredulous second I permitted myself to laugh aloud. My amusement put a little extra fixity in his grin. There we stood, predestined antagonists, beaming at each other. He said, “I assume you value your privacy. You’ve got a PRIVATE ROAD sign out.”
    “Yes,” I said, “I didn’t suppose you’d noticed that.”
    Beam of that smile from ambush, unaltered watchfulness of the bandit eyes. To make my denial both final and reasonable, I said, “That’s all poison oak over there anyway.
    “I’d grub it out. Improve your property for you.”
    He said it like a dare, and I would have taken it, too, but at my side Ruth said treacherously, “What would you do for water?”
    “There’s a tap on the pressure tank at your well. I’d only need a pail or so a day.”
    “And sanitary facilities?” I said, knowing I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t yield even to the point of asking unanswerable questions, I should wipe out the whole proposal with a word.
    “Chemical john,” Caliban said. “It’s no problem.”
    “You’ve got it all figured out.”
    “That’s what I was sitting here meditating about.”
    As plainly as if she spoke aloud, I could hear Ruth asking me what difference it would make to us if we let a student live in that useless tangle. I was standing both of them now. I said again that I was afraid of fire. Even if he didn’t smoke, he would have to cook. He said he knew where he could borrow’a Coleman stove, and anyway he