The Followed Man (2 page)

To say "My uncle,"
just as it had once been to say, "My mother," or "My
father," had been a hedge against death. Those older peo­ple
were, after all, in the first line. Each time he'd mentioned Shem,
while Shem was alive, he'd thought of this, as if he were us­ing
the old man in a slightly dishonorable way.

He remembered when the tops of
Shem's rubber boots, as he went authoritatively about the work of the
farm, were as high as Luke's waist. Looking up at the man working, as
Shem always was then, seemed to make him more distant and forbidding,
unlike his own more urban father, whom he saw only after work, at
home. Shem had seemed more important than his father, his
es­sentially good-humored jokes funny yet dangerous, coming as
they did from up there where the grizzled beard was, high above the
manure or soil or oily wood his great boots trod.

But when Shem's wife died, and
then his only son, Samuel—a strange, silent boy who never went
anywhere, never married—and he passed into his seventies, all
he did was cut and split wood for his stove. The animals were all
gone; his last dog, a beagle named Gretchen who lived fourteen years,
also dead. He had a 1941 half-ton Chevy pickup that never quite
seemed to die, al­though it was certainly rusted out and
asthmatic. But then he hadn't bothered to register it for years, just
put the white-on-green plates on in even years, the green-on-white in
odd. The lo­cal police knew this, but finally it got to be so
much of a joke in town the State Police heard of it. By then he
didn't see too well anyway, and with the truck settling in a shed
that soon settled over it, neighbors brought him supplies every few
weeks. Spam and beans, canned corn and peas, a loaf of Wonder Bread,
potatoes, coffee and tobacco. He'd used to drink hard cider he made
him­self, but in the last ten years his stomach couldn't take
that any­more. And he never changed his pants, stank, wasn't
polite to any­one who came by, whether it was to help him or not.
He wouldn't look at the television set someone gave him, or listen to
the radio, or read anything, what did he do all the years of days in
the col­lapsing house? He wouldn't leave it; upon that rock of
intention he lived out his time, until his eighty-third year, when he
stopped.

When he finished this assignment
Luke would go up to New Hampshire and look at Shem's grave, buy him a
stone, and see what was left of the farmhouse and the fields he
remembered as if they were two places—the working hill farm of
his childhood and the jungle of growth and rot he'd last seen several
years ago. Six years ago, to be exact, when he'd been in New
Hampshire to do an article about a commune of young people trying to
subsistence farm a long-abandoned mountain place as
unpromising as Shem's, the natural produce of which was, as a county
forester told him, rocks and trees.

He should have made himself
emerge from his funk when Shem's letter came, and gone to see him,
knowing it would most likely be for the last time. But he hadn't.
Maybe he hadn't really emerged from his funk at all, even now. The
thought of tomor­row's assignment made him tremble with
apprehension. He must connect with other lives nudged and chilled by
accident, by death. He would talk to shop stewards, engineers, re-rod
men, wives and children, fellow workers who had survived. Some would
be idiots proud of their survival, feeling chosen. Fools, he would
have to think as he listened, feeling dishonest. Others would twist
him dry, their grief real, or their anger real.

He broke the seal on the bourbon
and poured himself an inch of it. There was no ice and he didn't want
to speak to anyone so he put some tapwater into the glass and sipped.
There. The familiar bite and chill would give him a measure of not
caring, maybe enough to get him down to the lobby and a restaurant.

Now he would look again at the
second letter, which had come just before he left for New York. It
was typed in a very small elite face on unwatermarked white paper,
sent in a post office stamped envelope. The postmark was Grand
Central Annex.

Luke Carr:

You are a murderer. You know it, tho no one else does but me. You
used her and when she was used up, poof! I am going to kill you. I
will do it when and how I want to.
This is no joke!

He had received crank letters
before, always addressed in care of a magazine or newspaper or
publisher, usually a threat having to do with his written opinions,
or a question about them that was really an accusation, always in
language that sooner or later revealed some kind of madness,
political or personal.

At first he had found this
letter interesting enough to distract him, to let him spend some
strangely relaxing moments thinking about it. Studying it for exactly
what evidence it offered was an ex­ercise that freed him, if just
for moments, from his loss.

First was the elite typeface. If
the machine belonged to the writ­er, and had been chosen by him
or her—probably him, though that deduction was more instinctive
then logical—that in itself was interesting. If it were a man,
that delicate typeface seemed more dangerous. Then there were the two
words, "tho" and "poof!" And there were no
contractions, such as "I'll" or "I'm," but
per­haps the stern tone precluded them.

"Tho" made him think
of the
Chicago Tribune
and the quirky orthography left over,
he supposed, from Colonel McCormick. But it did place the writer
fairly exactly on an educational-cultural scale. "Poof!"
was a small wonder in itself, which he would think about.

The woman being "used up"
strongly suggested that the writer was a man. The avenging male—a
relative, or a lover?

And what woman? Was murder a
metaphor for the using and discarding, or was actual murder meant?

He hadn't thought of his wife at
all, at first. After nineteen years of marriage she seemed, for
better or worse, his wife and no other man's concern whatsoever. And
she certainly hadn't been "used up." First he'd gone back,
searching for the proper woman he'd "used up" or broken off
with. Presumably this had to be a woman he'd wanted less than she'd
wanted him. Going back, very far back, he thought of several and
stopped; no way to come to any conclusions there, really. He couldn't
think of any men (boys) who might have been this writer and borne
such hatred.

But did he have time for a
little chill, a little fear that this semi-literate avenging angel
was real? Not quite yet; maybe that chill, if it came, would be a
measure of his recovery.

But that elite typeface again:
perhaps to the avenger those small letters would seem
diamondlike—hard, concise, dark, deadly.

Then, with no transition for
warning, came a vision of Helen and John, and Gracie, prisoners of
height in the crowded fusel­age. Now, the heaviness of the warm
bourbon in his throat, came a
crise
in which his deepest
definition of who he was fell all apart because he was in between
being a husband and a father and sud­denly was an orphan, a
solitary in the world, having friends but only friends, not the
blood-centered, defined prisoner of his responsibilities, heavy with
unavoidable love. In the middle still, fragmented like a blown cloud,
he began to fall, not a cloud but pieces of a man.

It was unbelievable to him and
must be wrong, or if true it all must be undone.

Into the irrational again, said
a voice that must have been one of his own cooler voices. It was
important, the voice claimed, that he hold on, right now. And also
not to fall into the bottle, because drinking while unhappy was the
certain way of the lost.

All he seemed to remember of his
past were the times he had wanted to be free. The first was when he
and Helen had been married about three months. Helen was out shopping
and he was sitting alone in the little apartment they'd had on Beacon
Hill. Suddenly, out of no context at all came a cool chill down his
back and the firm knowledge that he couldn't just take his passport
and go alone to Paris. He was twenty-six, Helen twenty-three. She was
working for a publisher of religious and philosophical books and
tracts, not making very much. He was a subeditor on the house or­gan
of AFEMCO, a ubiquitous corporation whose acronym he translated as
the Anti-Free Enterprise Monopoly Cartel Organiza­tion, famous
for price fixing, restraint of trade and fierce celebra­tion of
the American Free Enterprise System.

Okay, think of that sort of
thing instead, he thought, breaking it off in the wound. Johnny was
the first born. In his arms he held the hard little body, sturdy and
muscular even as a baby, always wanting to climb. Three years later
came Gracie, whose green eyes always looked steadily at him, seeming
to ask questions long before she had words.

But there were times he'd wanted
to be free of them all. How he had misunderstood! How could the
theoretical be so wrong? It was the three wishes of a fairy tale, and
the first thoughtless wish had been granted. But where were the other
two wishes, the ones that might undo the first illicit one? In the
bottle? No, he'd found no wishes lurking there. Now it was a question
of living, or not liv­ing. Wasn't the world forever new,
fascinating, beautiful? It all seemed such an abstract idea, the
world.

Yes, but he was not really
sympathetic to the idea that life was not worthwhile. He was
breathing, wasn't he? He had some money. Some might even consider him
well-off, with money in the bank, a house in Wellesley,
Massachusetts, with no more than ten thousand left in the mortgage, a
car one year old and another three years old, the house full of all
the furniture and appliances and gadgets and toys of the middle
class. Then there had been the envelope with the flight insurance
policies, addressed to him in Helen's hand. Hello from the Other
Kingdom, in haste, with love.

How far had the airplane fallen;
how many minutes or seconds had they known, or half-known, that
something was awfully wrong? Johnny pushes his feet against the
footrest under the seat ahead of him, his square hands tight on his
armrests, his body straight, his stomach doing the windmill of
knowledge. Gracie senses it all, and asks, asks; no one can answer.
Helen reaches for Grade's hand, always to reassure, but Gracie sees
that her moth­er's neck is pale, blue-veined. Helen's
woman-center is cold with the anxiety that is exactly intolerable.
For herself, for them. Here it comes.

Why did human animals get so
entangled in love for each other, if at the same time they insisted
upon all this height and speed and the insane momentum of their
uncontrollable playthings?

Maybe he couldn't face this
assignment. He would call Martin Troup and tell him he was sorry, he
couldn't. But that decision looked like the entrance to a long,
sloping corridor stinking of booze and self-hatred.

He must put an end to the memory
of his wish for freedom. It was not so uncommon, after all, and
perhaps his guilt was a form of self-indulgence. Now he would go out
of this quiet, old-fash­ioned room, down the long carpeted
corridors to the old eleva­tors, then out into the high lobby, a
man of indeterminate age and condition dressed in a medium-expensive
gray suit of lightweight material, sturdy shoes, conservative tie—a
man not to be remem­bered very clearly by anyone whose attention
he might fleetingly engage. He would eat, come back and read some
more about fer­roconcrete, see the television news and then go to
bed and shut his eyes.

He'd thought of walking a few
blocks to a Japanese-Korean restaurant he knew, but off the lobby was
a standard chophouse of the dark-interiored sort, so he went there
and had a beer, a salad and a steak, then went back through the
nearly empty hotel to his quiet room.

As he read about ferroconcrete
construction he experienced a strange drying of his sinuses. He
didn't
like
ferroconcrete con­struction or the
architectural forms it took. But why should he de­velop this
sudden aversion that was, what? Aesthetic? No, more than that. This
was an active dislike verging on hatred, and in his mind he began to
review whatever he'd offhandedly learned and seen of architecture and
construction in his life, all of it mixed in time and most of it,
until this moment, only mildly interesting. Classical, Romanesque,
Renaissance, Baroque, Beaux Arts, Bauhaus, Skyscraper, French Norman
(redundant?), Modern, Organ­ic (where did that fit in?), Slum,
Suburban, Colonial, Federal, Georgian, Shack, Cave, Tent, House
Trailer, Holiday Inn. And the makers—Saarinen, Wright, Stone,
Wren, Pei, Fuller, Sullivan, Gropius, van der Rohe, Le Corbusier—not
bad; and the one who was shot by a jealous husband? Stanford White. A
mishmash of half-knowledge at best, so he couldn't understand this
sudden twist of hatred that made him feel as though he were trying to
breathe dust.

He put the book down and turned
on the television news; all over the world the news was death.

Sometime or other he went to
sleep, because he woke up in the night and turned off the hissing
television. He didn't look at his watch; he wanted no hour there, no
calculation as to the long hours that might be left before he would
be called at 9:00 a.m.

Then in a little squall of
something like fear he saw that a man stood over in the dark next to
the closet. He froze, half-frightened and curious. Dim light from the
city sky filled the two windows and came across the room in rich,
thick amber.

He had bolted the door, he knew.
No door led into an adjoining room. But he must do something about
that silent presence over there. He took his pillow by one corner and
with a smooth, whip­ping motion sailed it across the room at the
man. It flew quietly through the shadow figure, hit the wall and
dropped to the floor.

An odd confluence of shadows had
created that intangible aveng­er, who was still there. Luke could
almost see his eyes. For a mo­ment he believed that if he could
just make out the features of that creation of shadows, they would be
the features of the one who had sent him the letter.