All the Little Live Things Read Free Page B

something more to wake us—first a long, loud ringing of the alarm, and then something softer: a touch.
    The alarm went off a year ago. The touch on the lips that brought us fully awake did not happen until last March.

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    Ordinarily this is not good walking country. In wet weather the adobe is like tar, and through the summer and early fall the open country is unpleasant with barbed and prickly seeds. In those seasons our walking is confined to roads and lanes. But when a rain or two has flattened the weeds and started the new grass without soaking the ground, then cross-country walking can be marvelous.
    Last year, as this, the rains came early, and in October you would have seen us any afternoon, bald head following white head, country corduroy behind country tweed, me brandishing a blackthorn stick that an Irish poet once left at the apartment, starting through the Shieldses’ pasture fence. We followed the path made by Julie LoPresti’s black gelding, a path so uniformly double-grooved that it might have been made with skis. This ran into a trampled space under an oak where he used to sleep on his feet and switch flies, and then out again along the fence separating the pasture from Weld’s apricot orchard.
    Somewhere along there we always stopped to admire the view, with our backs to the orchard and our faces toward the pasture and woodland rolling steeply down and then more steeply up, ravine and ridge, to the dark forested mountainside and the crest. Across the mountain the pale air swept in from remote places—Hawaii, Midway, illimitable Japans. I have never anywhere else had so strong a feeling of the vast continuity of air in which we live. On a walk, we flew up into that gusty envelope like climbing kites.
    The Shieldses, who own the pasture, have been abroad for a year. We pass their lane, turn left, turn right again past the LoPresti entrance. Almost any afternoon we could look down and see Julie working her horse in the ring or currying the dust out of his hide, and at the house, Lucio laying up adobes for another wing. (Ruth suggested that he unraveled each night what he had laid up during the day.) Fran would be chiseling or sanding languidly at one of her driftwood sculptures, sometimes crowding under the shade of the patio umbrella, sometimes quenched under a straw hat a yard across. She has had a couple of moles removed by needle, and fears actinic cancer.
    From Lucio and Fran, a wave, perhaps a minute of shouted conversation. From their daughter, nothing. She was not nearsighted, she was just a girl who didn’t know how to smile, and was not inclined to acknowledge the flappings and hoo-hooings of neighbors who meant no more to her than her horse’s droppings. She had a certain cold ferocity of antagonism to her mother, a contemptuous toleration of her father, and a passion of attachment to her gelding. Those, I believe, constituted her total emotional life last October. By now, a year later, her capacity for feeling should be enlarged.
    Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions—just pat them and feel how warm! I wonder, on the contrary, if Julie didn’t spend all her time with her horse because she had no other friends and because riding let her indulge her fantasies of having a bit in her father’s mouth and a Mexican spur in her mother’s side. She was a dark-browed girl, fifteen or sixteen, somewhat flat-chested, big in the behind. Off the horse she was rawboned and awkward; mounted, she was almost beautiful. She always rode bareback.
    So there we went one day last fall. A wave from Lucio, a flutter of Fran’s uplifted glove across some sort of mosaic panel laid out on sawhorses. No Julie—apparently not yet home from school—but the