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wanted me to do it.”
    “Yes.”
    “I wish I knew why.”
    She stopped, leaning uphill with one hand on her knee. Without turning her head she said, “Oh, Joe, you know! You couldn’t miss it. There are so many of them it makes you think it’s something they can’t help. What if Curtis had gone to someone and asked for something like this, would you rather they said yes or rather they refused?”
    “And after they said yes, would they be glad they had, or sorry ? ”
    “Well,” she said, “I can’t help thinking it’s healthier camping in the woods than sleeping in auditoriums and classrooms.”
    It was the same note she had struck when Curtis took up surfing: Anyway it’s a healthier life than that zoo down in the Village. And look, I almost said to her, how that came out.
    Her face, usually perky and sharp and amused, looked tired, and she went on putting one foot after the other up the hill with her eyes on the toes of her shoes. I knew she thought I had bristled at this Peck boy precisely because he was like Curtis. A chance, she was probably thinking. No matter how crazy they act, they have to be given every chance.
    I wondered if she remembered how many chances Curt had, and how many he muffed. For all I knew—for we hardly talked about him any more—she might have persuaded herself that just one more chance would have saved him, that he was on the way out of his moral paralysis when he drowned. The bitterness, for her, might be that he never had the opportunity to demonstrate that he was saved. Or did she think an indefinite indulgence of one phase after another might have let him outgrow and survive them one by one? And for that lack of indulgence had she always blamed me?

3
    I had thought I could make Jim Peck up out of the odds and ends of intellectual faddism and emotional anarchy and blind foolishness that have been improving our world for the last ten years, but in one way he surprised me. If all the idiocies of the later twentieth century had collected in his skull like DDT in the livers of birds and fishes, I shortly had to grant that something else had collected in him too.
    For one thing, he was physically tough. He had none of that affectation of ill-health and that contempt for strength and well-being that I was used to among the literary intellectuals. For another, he liked to work with his hands. He was no good at it, he was a fumbling amateur, but he liked it, he was Homo fabricans at heart.
    Driving out the lane a couple of days after our encounter, I saw brown movement through the trees, and stopped where I could see down to the creek. Peck, skinny and hairy in a pair of cut-off Levis, was testing a knot-ended swing rope he had hung in the bay tree on this side. A run, a takeoff, a swish, and he landed in the waist-high poison oak across the creek; a reverse run and takeoff, and he came swishing back. I saw him look my way, I saw him see me there in the stopped car, but he did not wave or nod. Presumably he was afraid I was going to invade his privacy. If he had acknowledged me, I might have gone on down and offered to help him get squared away. He didn’t, and I didn’t. Rather irritably, I drove on.
    We did not see him again for ten days, though I observed that he had done some clearing in the little flat. Then one Saturday we heard the sound of hammering, and when I walked down for the mail I saw two motorcycles parked under the bay tree and Peck and a fellow beard building a platform of some kind across in the cleared space. Next morning a brown tent was pitched on it. A few days later, when we took advantage of the continuing Indian summer to make our loop up through the school land and back along the horse trail, we found that Peck had begun a bridge. Since he was not there to object, we violated his privacy and took a look.
    He had sunk four strong six-by-six posts, two on each side of the creek, and strung two pairs of cables between them, top to top and bottom to bottom.