All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online

refuse us, rather than jumping to refuse him in advance.
    Sometime before Christmas Peck’s isolation began to break down. The beardie pal who had helped him build his platform came back, and his motorcycle was parked beside the Honda for several days. Immediately after that there came a Volkswagen bus with Illinois plates that stood for more than a week by the trail gate above the empty Thomas cottage. Every evening we heard the sounds of partying, singing, banjos and guitars. There was one girl with a voice so good I thought sure they must have Joan Baez down there. Then I concluded it must be a folksong troupe, one of those itinerant outfits that bangs around from hootenanny to festival playing troubadour. But about the fourth night of party the thing began to lose its charm for me. “What does he think he’s doing?” I said to Ruth. “We didn’t authorize a hostel.”
    “Oh, what’s the harm? Nobody that age knows when to go to bed. You have to make allowances, Joe. We aren’t really bothered, and there’s nobody to bother at Thomas’s.”
    “What’s to keep a gang like that from breaking into the Thomas place and using it for a pad?”
    “You want to find them guilty before they even give the slightest indication of doing anything wrong.”
    We were walking out our prebed constitutional, around and around the house in the cold night. Every time we rounded the bedroom corner the singing blew up at us out of the dark. I zipped the parka hood over my chilled skull and shut out some of the entertainment, but I couldn’t shut out Ruth, and didn’t really want to. Fifty steps of silence. Then I said, “Wouldn’t you say we’d had experience? Wouldn’t you say we know the type?”
    “I wonder if we know very much about it at all.”
    “Remember the time the Wilsons let Curtis caretake their place in Roxbury?”
    “Yes, but that was ...”
    “To hole up and write through the winter?” I said, walking on her heels. “Splendid isolation, high purposes?”
    In silence she circled the carport and angled across the kitchen patio, me at her heels, gritting my teeth in the cold, hating myself, yapping after her like some feisty terrier. At the next corner the singing rose once more to meet us, and the very sound and style of it, familiar as the beginning clench of a migraine, made me savage.
    “Remember? Remember what the Wilsons found when they went out there in January? Sink full of unwashed dishes, garbage pails overflowing with bottles, beds full of uninvited unwashed guests? You think I like to remember things like that? But you think I can forget them?”
    “You don’t know about Peck,” Ruth said. I had to pull the hood off and turn my head to hear her through the throb and bang of their music. “He’s been living next to the Thomas place for weeks, and no sign he’s touched it. You just assume things.”
    “I assume them from experience,” I said. “These people are so hell-bent to be individuals that they don’t even exist except as gangs. Alone, they’re nothing. Put all of them in one bag and they blow up the place. If Peck was going to open a hostel and have his goony pals sleeping three-deep all around, he should have asked, shouldn’t he?”
    “And had you refuse.”
    “Why not? Is it our obligation to shelter every underage kook that comes by?”
    “Oh, wait and see,” she flung back. “They’re just visiting. They’ll go away.” On the next round she turned in at the bedroom door, and we went to bed in silence. Privately, I granted that my suspicions had no foundation; but I also felt, and I insisted to myself before I fell asleep, that if Peck would turn his camp into a hostel without asking, he would do a lot more. He was a kind of gas that would expand to fill any amount of space.
    The Volkswagen bus disappeared the day after Christmas, perhaps bound for some place where the comforts were less spartan. For a while we saw only Peck. He was an incorrigible fixer. Because in