The Followed Man (18 page)

They gave Luke coffee, and
tomato juice with secret ingredients in it that he identified as
Worcestershire sauce and probably vodka.

"Too bad about the
quarreling," Ham said brightly, a little bleary in the eyes if
one looked too closely. "But so it goes, huh? Nothing serious.
We're all friends here, right?"

"All friends," Luke
said.

"Jesus," Ham said.
"Didn't we tie one on?"

"Sozzeled, absolutely,"
Luke said.

"Mashed, squashed,
pie-eyed," Ham said.

"All bent out of shape,"
Jane said.

"Yeah, you better believe
it!" Ham said.

In the next few days, out of
some sort of penance, Luke be­lieved, he went through things,
chose and discarded, packed and transported, and finally all of those
possessions he had saved for some vague future use took up a space in
Joe the Mover's ware­house about the size of a small room. He
sold hundreds of ephe­meral books to a secondhand book jobber,
selling them because he couldn't just throw them away. He borrowed a
battery charger from the local service station, got the Hornet
running and sold it at a loss to the dealer Helen had bought it from.
He gave clothes, toys and other things to the Salvation Army and to
neighbors. The number, the sheer bulk, the complexity, the horrendous
ini­tial expense, of the machines, utensils, implements,
equipment, furniture, vestments, supplies
contained
in his
house amazed him; if all the houses on his street, in the town and
across the vast coun­try were so crammed with goods, what had
happened to necessity and use in his civilization? And yet the
discarding was hard—with each choice a surprisingly deep
dismemberment occurred: wouldn't he ever have a use for an electric
food processor called a Cuisinart? He could not see his life ahead of
him, and so he didn't know, but instinct told him to discard, sell,
divest himself of possessions.

Now that daydream of years ago
came back as reality, a wish that had been cursed as it was made.
What did a man need? His eyes and ears, his good arms and legs. Some
clothes. A good knife. A horse (his beat-up station wagon). But when
you got into horses the world began to get complicated again, with
saddle and bridle, blanket and cinch and other tools and tack.

Until he had some idea of where
he was going, how could he put anything into his car except his
toothbrush, which was worn out and should be replaced anyway?

He stood alone in the kitchen,
the house bare of those things that had been personal, except for a
couple of suitcases of clothes that were seasonal and a few cardboard
boxes full of working pa­pers, a few books, one dictionary, pens
and pencils and note­books, a few things that were unclassifiable
as to need, such as a clipboard, an ashtray Gracie had made for him
in second grade before she stopped condoning his smoking, a stapler—a
birthday present from Johnny—and his typewriter. From one of
the card­board boxes he took an address book and looked through
it. It was an old one, not kept up to date very well, many of the
ad­dresses surely obsolete. At one time it had seemed to him that
he had many friends, maybe too many, before they had scattered to far
places. What had happened to Dick Knight, who had, at least as of ten
years ago, been teaching at a college in northern Califor­nia? Or
Dick Mulner, who when last heard from was running for Congress from
Marin County, whatever district that was in? Or, to keep on with
Dicks, Dickie Greenblatt, who took over his father's woolen mill in
New Hampshire? Other couples—John and Rose, Jerry and Vera,
John and Lois, Weldon and Dot, George and Fu-miko, Nathan and Angela.
How attractive all the young wives were, and Helen was: there was a
season when all the women wore simple dresses called chemises, which
showed how young and slender and graceful they were. He was in love
with all of them, as if all their variousness of height and color
were somehow invested in Helen's own vividness at night when he made
love to her. They were all pregnant or not, nursing or not, and the
whole race seemed beautiful then. Wives were named Fern, and Fran and
Pat. In those days he and Helen, or any of their friends, could have
packed all of their belongings into a small U-Haul trailer and been
gone. Which happened, though none of them thought of loss then. They
seemed to have no secrets from each other, none at all, though there
was much tact between men and men, women and women, men and women.
Small strangenesses and quirks that surely would later become
irritating or even ugly were then, within the tense purity of
youthful flesh, merely interesting oddi­ties of character. Many
were now divorced. Some were dead, some insane, whether ambulatory or
not. Or had been when last heard of. But they had all been so
valuable in their equality and potential. Then, as he had moved from
place to place, from more or less regular jobs to his present
independence from one place of work, most of those old friends had
faded into their own lives, in near or distant places. Most of them
were as unsure of his present state and address as he was of theirs,
he knew. Some still sent Christmas cards or an occasional note, but
in their communica­tions was the feeling of how long ago it had
all been, how the years had gone, how amazing it was that time had
flown so quickly and left them older, established in other worlds.

Then came a crisis of loss, in
which his vision shattered. The sunlight on the counters turned
prismatic, and the windows cracked silently without falling from
their frames. The house was full of empty closets and drawers, which
changed its basic echo, even that of his own pulse. The bodies of his
family were not here and he would never hear their voices.

On Wednesday he went to the
closing at the savings bank. Ham was there, and Luke's lawyer for
this occasion, an older man named Lewis who was partly deaf, and
Glennis and Clifford Ruppert, both in their late thirties, and their
lawyer, and an officer of the bank. Ham's commission was surprisingly
large, but evidently the standard one. Insurance, taxes, water and so
on would be pro­rated, Luke paying through the second week of
June and then no more. He would receive $244.53 every month for
twenty years, a sum and a time which once would have seemed large and
long.

Afterwards Ham reminded him to
terminate the electricity and telephone, and to get his deposit back.
They walked out onto the street with Clifford Ruppert, a soft,
balding man with protuberant brown eyes. His wife, whose name Luke
had already forgotten, had to do some shopping nearby, so Ruppert
suggested that they have a drink on it. They went into the chilled
darkness of a bar and sat in a leather or Naugahyde booth in the
slowly lightening gloom.

"So everything's about concluded," Ham said. "A pretty good deal for all, I'd
say."

"I'll go along with that,"
Ruppert said. A waitress came and Ruppert supervised the ordering of
drinks. He had been looking at Luke with an intensity that implied a
question he wanted to ask but didn't yet know how. When his Scotch
came and he'd taken a couple of good swallows, he said, "So
you've got everything stored or sold and what you need is all packed
in your car, right?"

"Right," Luke said.

"So you can just slide
behind the wheel, turn the key and go wherever you want!" He
shook his head, curious and eager, his big eyes gleaming with envy.

"I've got a little
unfinished business here and there," Luke said.

"Your article. Right,"
Ham said.

"Yeah, there's always
something," Ruppert said. "Sometimes if I think about all
the things I've got to do I get depressed. I mean from the IRS to
getting the oil changed and a lube job to a haircut to insurance to
filling out forms or getting somebody to fix some­thing or honor
a warranty or if it isn't one thing it's another." But he was
still looking at Luke with envy, and it was those main
re­sponsibilities of wife and family that he considered being
free of. The sheen in those soft brown eyes was moist and libidinous,
a quality that could not be hidden for a moment. Ah, the easy and
willing young women of a generation he had missed out on by a few
years! Maybe Luke was being unfair to this husband, but Rup­pert
was of the age to hear that music, those distant, slippery, liq­uid
notes, and young enough not to divine the truth about grant­ed
wishes.

By four in the afternoon he was
back again at the house he no longer owned. Ham had asked him to come
for dinner, but he'd lied and said he had to leave town this
afternoon. On the way back he'd stopped at the Post Office and told
them to hold his mail in General Delivery until he had an address,
but there was today's mail in his mailbox. He immediately recognized
the elite typeface on a stamped envelope. This time the postmark was
Wellesley, MA. He looked up and down the street, across lawns, then
all around once more as he closed the kitchen door. Wellesley was too
close; the exercise was suddenly more than literary. In the house he
found a place by the hall telephone where he couldn't be observed
through any window as he opened the envelope.

Dearest Lukie-Dukie,

You prickie-wickie I have got you in my sites and I am going to pull
the trigger-wigger.

Mr. Death

His revulsion was somewhat
postponed until he read the note again. The mind revealed here was
frightening and boring at the same time, talentless and needful,
banal and self-satisfied, and it came to him with an absolute clarity
he hoped was not permanent that the only thing to do with a being
that bored and frightened at the same time was to kill it.

This was the third note; the
reality of the Avenger increased. Presumably the police were there to
cope with this sort of thing, but he had dealt with the police on
other matters and he didn't want to get involved with them now. If he
must be alone he would be alone, free, singular, responsible to no
one. Either this blob was seriously going to try to kill him or was
just being creative. He had no idea who it might be and therefore
neither would the police, who would have to wait until further
developments, such as an ac­tual attempt on his life. Well, he
would wait for that alone, without the cop-civilian dialogue he
could, if he wished, write out before­hand in his mind.

Then an interesting, almost
thrilling little instinctive thing hap­pened to his right hand.
It went to a holster that was not at his waist—was, in fact, in
a wooden chest in New Hampshire. His in­dex finger had familiarly
curled to undo the clasp of the holster flap, the hand moving without
thought through the complications of the leather to the firm butt of
the pistol. If it had been there the pistol would now be in his hand,
the hammer cocked, the grip safety properly depressed so that the
heavy yet precise instrument would be ready to fire at his will, a
lethal vector of force extending from his hand. In Korea he had found
that he was a good shot, single-or double-handed; he'd had the
patience to take the short time necessary to care more for the
alignment of his sights than the clarity of his target, which would
soon have a large hole in it anyway and could be examined at leisure.

The Avenger, or Blob, unless
these notes were improbably de­ceptive, called gunsights,
"sites," which seemed to cancel out his familiarity, and
thus his skill, with at least one order of lethal ma­chines. But
that might be a false conclusion. He knew nothing about the Avenger
except the most important and technically use­less thing of
all—that in these notes he revealed what Luke per­haps
hated most in his fellow man. It was not the semiliteracy, but the
supreme confidence of tone. Yes, exactly
tone
, always the nasty little progenitor of hurt—literary, conversational, carnal,
mortal—every little backstabber's game and justification.

He would leave here. The house
and garage had been stripped of all that the Rupperts hadn't wanted
to buy. There was some­thing he should do. The telephone. The
Rupperts Would take care of the electricity. He called the telephone
company and in his official voice arranged all that. No, he didn't
want another tele­phone at another address, not yet; he would let
them know.

He took one last quick look
through the house and was sur­prised to find that he hadn't
looked into the kitchen liquor cabi­net. Among opened bottles of
bourbon, blended whiskey, gin and vermouth, and also various unsavory
liqueurs that had been there forever, was a fifth of good Scotch,
unopened. He threw out the liqueurs, put all the whiskey, gin and
vermouth in one of the card­board boxes in the rear of the
station wagon, and left the Scotch on the counter as a present.

He was leaving. At the last
moment, having some room in the car he hadn't expected to have, he
took the dented old toolbox and its contents from the garage. He
seemed to be supplying himself for a trip, but a trip to where? All
he had to do, as Clifford Ruppert had said, was slide himself behind
the wheel, turn the key and go anywhere he wanted to go.

One more quick look through the
house, and the telephone caught him.

"Mr. Luke Carrr?" said
a man's voice, a sneezy, high, phlegmy man's voice with a rising
inflection in the slurred last syllable of his name.

"Yes," Luke said.

"This is Mr. Smarmalurgis
from the Prumalator Company?"

"Yes?"

"There's the matter of the
bifold invoices indicating a leased debit balance of one hundred
thirteen dollars and fifty-nine cents overdue now seven and one-half
months?"

"What was the name of your
company again?"

"The Permolator Company,
Mr. Carr? A division of Weston, Watts, Porgis Corporation? At two
percent interest per month the immediate sum, if remitted on or
before six, fifteen, amounts to one hundred twenty-six dollars and
ninety cents?"