The Followed Man (19 page)

"What, exactly, is a
permolator, Mr. Smarmalurgis?"

"Hormel N. Sturgis, Mr.
Carr. A perfulator monitors your wa­ter system as to ionization
and turbidity?"

"A perfulator? I don't
think I have a perfulator."

"A permulator, Mr. Carr. If
you will look you will find a white enameled tank one foot in
diameter by four diameters appended to your main?"

In the silence following this
apparently reasonable statement, knowing that he never thought very
well over the telephone, Luke tried to choose from among several
clamoring attitudes the one he would take toward this fellow. If he'd
heard correctly, and it was certainly possible he hadn't, the man—or
maybe the voice was that of a throaty woman—was not being
consistent in its pronun­ciations. For a moment caution won. "Why
don't you send me a bill, Mr. Sturgis?"

"This was a non-billing
lease, Mr. Carr, meaning three points less per annum? I have the
lease before me, signed by one Mrs. L. Carr, dated five, one,
seventy-six?"

"Well, Mr. Sturgis, append
the three annum points and send me a bill, okay?" Now he was on
the edge of saying something out­rageous, but caution was still
there. What was this device, some kind of water softener that Helen
had had installed? He was tired and bored, bored with the telephone
that connected him to all the vacuousness of the world out there, and
this strange hermaphro­ditic voice.

"Very well, Mr. Carr. In
that case the due amount will be in­creased three dollars and
eighty-one cents, making the total one hundred thirty dollars and
seventy-one cents?"

"Yes, fine," he said.

"As you instruct us, Mr.
Carr."

"Right. Good-bye."

He would have paid one hundred
and whatever dollars and cents not to have had that call, but now it
was too late! Evidently the telephone company hadn't immediately
disconnected his phone, which reminded him that he hadn't called
Robin to say whether or not he'd go on with the
Gentleman
piece.
He just couldn't make up his mind. Maybe cancelling the phone had
been a decision not to do the piece, but then he'd put his typewriter
and notes and other material in the car, so he was still hanging
there, not wanting to do it, unable to give up, hating the words he
would have to write down and type and rewrite and proofread—that
whole process he'd once found rewarding.

A permolator? Permulator?
Prufolator? A white enameled tank? He went down to the basement and
traced the water pipe from the meter. The only white enameled tank
was the electric water heater, called a Hot Roc, made by Ford Steel
Products Corp., Tarrytown, N.Y. He traced the lines to the washing
ma­chine and up to kitchen and bathrooms and there was no
prufola­tor or permolator or simply any room for such a thing in
any clos­et or wall. There was no tank one foot in diameter and
four feet long in this house.

Still, he was willing to believe
that he had been the one to mis­understand, that his mind, always
precarious on the telephone, had jumped to all sorts of visual
conclusions about some white enameled tank. Maybe the tank was
somewhere else, in some other building somewhere. Maybe it was
installed inside or under­neath the water heater. But he knew
better, and when the tele­phone rang right beside him he jumped,
thinking that the strange damp voice of Mr. or Ms. Sturgis must be
the one waiting for him to answer.

"Hello? Luke Carr?" It
was not that voice, but a familiar one, a woman's, harshened by the
circuits. It was Marjorie Rutherford, and his hands shook with
embarrassment.

He said, "Yes?" a lie
because he knew.

"Luke." She was quiet
for a few seconds. "Luke, this is Marjorie Rutherford, in New
York. You know."

"How are you, Marge?"

"Terrible."

"What's the matter?"

"I know Robin told you."

Now he was silent, trying to
make up his mind. He was silent a little too long.

"He did tell you. I knew
it! Men always tell everything about women!" She was crying, and
angry too.

"Hey, Marge," he said.
"I understand. ]esus, of course I do. Come on, it's all right."
His soothing voice.

"I don't think it's all
right!" She cried the words, and he couldn't help trying to
visualize some sort of phonetic spelling:
Aien non thing utz
alraieeent!
But at the same time the words, which he felt tear
her throat, twisted his own throat.

"So I don't want you to
write about me!"

"Do you think I'd write
that?"

"I don't know! I read the
Gentleman
for this month and they said terrible things about
everybody.
Horrible
things about real live people!"

Gentleman
still lay on
the telephone table in front of him, the studded leather whip-woman
leering. "I guess I don't blame you," he said. He could see
how her capitulation to Robin could be used, all right. The breakdown
of everything, including the poured floors of skyscrapers, the mad
wasps regurgitating and building for no procreative reason because
the center itself rotted, and so on. Mike Rizzo's priests were
"morphodites" and Jimmo McLeod's life was nothing but
existence, self-admitted. And below, in the garbage-strewn streets,
among the rats, were the blacks, the blacks, waiting for the lights
to go out. They'd love that at
Gentle­man;
this was the
age of interesting literary simplifications, and apocalypse was
nothing if not fashionable.

"I bet you both thought it
was a big joke, didn't you!"

"No. Robin wouldn't have
told me if you hadn't called
Gentle­man,
I'm sure."

" 'Cause you'd be ashamed
of me!"

"I was surprised, maybe,
but I think I understand."

"Understand!"
she
cried, and went on crying. He held the black telephone, from which a
woman sobbed, against his head.

Soon she stopped sobbing and
breathed a few deep, moist breaths. "I'm sorry," she said.
"None of it's your fault. I just wish you never called me in the
first place."

"It looks as if I won't
write the article anyway," he said.

"I wanted to have our
pictures in
Gentleman,
I don't know why. It would make us sort
of out of the ordinary," Marjorie said.

He didn't know how much longer
he could stand here, not knowing what to say or wanting to say
anything. He felt that he didn't understand people at all and should
have nothing to do with them. He never knew what they wanted or what
they were going to do or say next. He could hear the television in
the room in the Bronx, where Mickey and Marcia were no doubt watching
some late afternoon soap opera; all that feigned emotion, those
widened eyes and dramatic statements—he wondered if they
un­derstood any of it. Maybe they just watched the people move
and talk and weep, not knowing why or even following the simplest
words. Enough, maybe, that they looked like real people and something
seemed to happen each moment.

He was now planning his escape.

"I'd like to see you again,
Luke," she said. "I liked talking to you."

"Me, too," he said.
"Maybe we'll see each other again sometime, Marge." No, no,
they never would.

"You never can tell,"
she said. "Maybe I'll come up there to Massachusetts and visit
you sometime."

"Sure, why not?"

"Sure. Yeah. Well, it was
nice talking to you. I hope everything works out for you."

"You, too."

"Good-bye, Luke," she
said, and the connection ended.

Why should he have to feel that
he was no help? Well, he wouldn't be of any help. In the issue of
Gentleman
that lay before him was an article about the joys of
"bondage," its straps and whips—tongue in cheek, of
course, as they liked to say, and God, they liked to say. Also the
straight chic poop on "snuff" movies, in which the actress,
after having participated in the usual oral, anal, what-have-you
exercises, is informed on camera that she is going to die, and
actually does go screaming and whimpering to actual death, for the
gratification of the viewers. Hey, man, you know, the
real thing.

If he stayed around this echoing
house much longer someone would show up—Ham or the Rupperts—so
he left. All he had to do was slide under the wheel, turn the key,
and go anywhere he wanted. The loaded car moved through the balmy
June air, heavy and steady on its wheels. In a little while he was on
Route 128, heading north. There was only one place on earth that was
his, where he would not have to rent or be a guest, where no one else
had a right to be and wouldn't be.

When the interstate crossed the
New Hampshire line he first consciously looked in his rearview mirror
to see if he were being followed. The official sign at the border
said:

LIVE FREE OR DIE

BIENVENUE AU

WELCOME TO

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Now, as if the line were really
a frontier, he examined those who might follow him across. If he were
not being followed, say, by that blue Oldsmobile Cutlass he now
realized had been behind him for some time, then no one knew where he
was going. He couldn't remember telling anyone in Wellesley or in New
York that he might go to New Hampshire, because he hadn't really
known it then himself.

It was seven o'clock; there
would be at least two more hours of light, so he would get to the
farm at dusk. It was a destination that would at least give him two
hours of definition. He was going somewhere.

The blue Cutlass with
Massachusetts plates was fifty yards be­hind him, its driver
alone in the car. He kept his speed at fifty-nine, which seemed to
satisfy the driver of the Cutlass, who might have been a man or a
woman, he couldn't tell.

If he were actually being
followed he would become angry in a way no threatening letter or
strange telephone call would ever cause. He watched the Cutlass
carefully as it came with him on curve and rise, keeping its distance
as the landscape passed. That the Cutlass had appropriated his exact
speed seemed in itself a vi­olation of his freedom, and he began
to sense the first aura of a rage that he had felt only a few times
in his life. He would not knowingly be followed; his freedom would
not be abridged that way.

There was a time when he and
Helen had been married only a few months and hadn't yet found out
what they were as married people, defined by marriage, that
declaration of permanence and emotional license. They hadn't even had
much of an argument between them then. But one night they were
driving back to their apartment and a pickup truck turned out of a
side street directly in front of them, so he had to swerve to miss it
and accelerate to pass it, no doubt looking reckless as he did so.
The truck, which had some sort of municipal decal on its cab door,
followed them, and pulled up beside them as he parked. Helen was
frightened by his reaction, and he couldn't blame her. It was the
physical follow­ing, the presumption of that power, that caused
him to pull the man out of the cab of his truck onto his knees on the
street and to scream at him; "Are you following me, you son of a bitch? Are you following me?"

"All right, all right,"
the man said, whatever chiding or lecture he'd had in mind forgotten,
and Luke let him get back in his truck and drive away.

Helen was silent and thoughtful
for the rest of the evening. The next morning she said, "I never
saw you act like that before."

He tried to explain how the man
had nearly caused an accident and then followed him to give
him
a
lecture, and it was just bloody infuriating, but he was truly sorry
he'd acted that way.

She was still pensive, no matter
what he said. They moved carefully with each other, then, through
touching to discussion, slowly in their different ways, using for
each other what they did know, until the matter grew less important.
But in truth he still felt that the crime deserved punishment, and he
had never been sorry about what he'd done.

And there behind him was the
blue Cutlass, bound to him by that driver's intention. That the
Avenger might want to kill him caused caution and a certain amount of
nervousness, yes, but it was the following itself that began the
anger. He would not change his speed because that might give away his
suspicions and put him at a disadvantage. The anger brought with it a
coolness of thought on that simple level; it was the son of a bitch
who followed him who was in the clearest danger.

But then the blue Cutlass fell
back a little and peeled onto an off-ramp, like an airplane turning
away. Slowly his anger subsid­ed, leaving him free again. He
remembered the anger as an ab­straction only, as if its force had
occurred in some other person whose emotions were not his at all.

When he left the interstate
north of Concord, no one followed him onto the two lane highway. He
thought briefly of stopping somewhere to eat, but that might cause
him to arrive after dark, so he went on. When he had climbed the
mountain road out of Cascom, its last part gravel, and passed through
the long tunnel of spruce into the lighter air of the farm, the sun
had just gone be­hind Cascom Mountain, though the sky seemed as
bright as mid­day.

There was the sinking hulk of
the house, the collapsed barn and the sheds bent down over whatever
metal they had once shel­tered, but the sprouting fields and
trees were fresh, full of a light that seemed to issue from stem and
leaf rather than the blue-white sky. In this weather there would be
another three-quarters of an hour of light, so he must make his camp,
knowing now ex­actly where, among all the acres of meadow and
woods, he would sleep. He had been coming toward the farm for a long
time, even toward the specific place in the lower pasture, across the
brook—a level expanse of meadow grass beside a cairn of stones
he would make into his fireplace.