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

dictated at least a telephone call. Is it O.K. if? Do I mind if? I accused his type, as much as him personally. They took, they challenged, they acknowledged nothing.
    It struck me, during our half minute of silent staring at one another, that I hadn’t the slightest notion of what he might be thinking. What went on behind the beard and the dangling grin? What expression was that in his vigilant, feral eyes? Did I imagine our intractable antagonism, or was I only responding, stiffly and wrongly, to my finished but unresolved quarrel with Curtis? Certainly I could make no real case against the treehouse. The oak would carry it as easily as it would carry a jay-bird’s nest. It would be out of reach, almost out of sight. Why should I care? Why should I feel that stiff censorious knotting in my bowels?
    “What do you need a treehouse for, meditation?”
    The upward eyebrow. He had regained his watchful cool. “Sleep.”
    “Too noisy in the tent?”
    He was not one to respond to the jocular tone—not from me. He didn’t even bother to reply, but stood smiling his fixed smile down at me, the interrupted hammer hanging in his hand, waiting for me to go away. He didn’t say, as almost anyone in his position would have said, “Come on over and take a look.” Why not? Something in him, or something in me? Or something that hardened like cooling glass between us whenever we met? Well, since I was the unwilling landlord, I would go over without an invitation. But when I set my foot on the treads of the bridge and took hold of the cable handrail, the whole think slewed sideways and threw me off balance, and I lay along the cable for a second before I could straighten up and step off. I looked up into Peck’s happy grin. Uh-huh, it said. Walk on over, why not.
    Ruth would have said I asked for it, going down there to spy on what he was doing. But I did not think I was going to abdicate control of my own property just because Peck made himself difficult to reach. Furthermore, he had not grubbed out the poison oak from any part of the bottoms except the flat where he had chosen to build. Scraping my shoes clean against his bridge post, using the diversion to take hold of my temper, I said I had come down to ask when he was going to get at the poison oak. It should be grubbed out in the winter, so that the new sproutings could be sprayed in the spring.
    Well, that, he said from his tree. It didn’t appear that he was going to be able to do that, after all.
    Why not? That was part of the bargain.
    Yes, well, at that time he had thought he was immune. But when he cleared out the flat he had got such a dose he had spent a week in the infirmary taking cortisone shots.
    I could have laughed out loud. He gladdened my soul, that arrogant young poop. Trying to treat poison oak the way he treated people, he had found that poison oak insisted on its integrity.
    “You’ll have it again,” I said. “That stuff will be up all around you again in a couple of months.”
    He said that when it came up he intended to spray it.
    Fine, I said. When he sprayed his he could spray mine too.
    The noise of the rain-born creek flushed away between us. It was cold and damp down there in the bottoms. Vapor was congealed on the hairs of Peck’s beard. His eyebrow went up, his smile widened, his nod was almost a bow. I lifted my hand and turned away. As I walked the muddy path back to the gate, the sound of hammering resumed behind me, and I doubt that either Peck or I could have said whether its beat was triumphant because he had put me down, or irritable because he had had to give in.
    The hammering went on for several days. From the lane we saw a birdhouse taking shape in the leafage of the oak, a tiny irregular building perhaps seven by nine feet, with a steep roof that shortly became more visible in a coat of red asphalt shingles. The whole thing was crooked and misproportioned. Ruth thought it charming. “It’s like Hänsel and Gretel,” she