The Followed Man (24 page)

He saw Helen for the first time
at a New Hampshire beach called Wallis Sands. She was with a fellow
whose name he could not now recall, though he believed he remembered
everything else about that July afternoon, as though each moment were
then set in glass, so that for all the years he could reexamine it at
lei­sure, nothing lost.

He was alone, not lonesome. His
current girl was in New York. It seemed to him that in the last few
years, after getting out of the army, he had had too many women and
had spent too much time having too many women. It had come to be a
cloying, even evil game, dishonest because only he could win. At
least that was the way it had begun to seem to him then. Those girls,
each lovely in her way, each flawed to him, each believing an
implication he did not really make; he shuddered, as if he were a
criminal being sen­tenced.

But that day in July, on the
beach at Wallis Sands, as if to prove that lust was renewable, that
the game was not rigged, he saw Hel­en walk from the minor surf
in a yellow, one-piece bathing suit, pull off her white bathing cap
and shake out her dark blond hair. He smelled kelp and the hot salt
sand. She was his discovery. She walked to a blanket near his and
knelt, the act of kneeling entirely too intimate toward the boy she
was with, a mediocre specimen of mankind, a clod just not genetically
endowed with the ability to see what was there. Pearls before swine.
He thought then, as he watched her, that this woman would have to be
a monster in order to disenthrall him, and she never was and never
did. No later an­ger, argument, guilt, pettishness, illogic or
stupidity in all the years disenthralled him. Bravery, loyalty,
responsibility, care, generosity—these qualities he could not
have discerned there on the beach as he lost his judgment and
caution. It was his luck.

He watched her. The boy she was
with seemed pleasant, soft and bland, made out of inferior materials.
Luke had never felt such an imperative; she couldn't get away from
him. He had nev­er realized that there were certain dimensions,
colors, expres­sions, sounds that must have been imprinted upon
him, or whose necessity to him were as deep as whatever his genetic
makeup had come to be through all the generations that had made him.
Before he knew her name he wanted to have children with this woman.
She was the one. He could hear her voice but couldn't quite hear her
sentences. He hadn't known before that a woman had to have certain
precise physical characteristics—that she had to be small, but
not too small, be narrow but not too narrow in the waist, have
comparatively broad shoulders, be slim in her bones yet firm at
thighs and upper arms. Strength and delicacy at once. He had never
before believed the power of the purely visual; if he'd been asked
before he saw her he would have said that such things were
superficial, not that important at all. He was wrong; it was all in
the way this female animal moved upon her given bones. She seemed so
familiar to him he felt that he shouldn't have to in­troduce
himself to her. She was his by the right of her perfection in his
eyes. He was aware that the intensity of this reasoning amounted to a
kind of dementia, and since he was a practical per­son, used to
the avoidance of failure, he tried to be careful. He thought of
following them when they left the beach, of all the ways he might
plausibly approach them. She had a book and note­book with her,
so he assumed she was a student. It seemed an ex­traordinary
problem; he saw himself disappearing, sinking under too much thought,
so he got up, went across the hot sand the few giving, sifting steps
to their blanket and simply asked them their names. The boy's name
was Chuck something—he remembered the first name now, at
least—and hers was Helen Benton. Chuck was not pleased by his
company, but was civilized about it. Luke found this civility hard to
understand; in all the years he would al­ways be surprised when
someone did not covet Helen as he did.

And so they lived happily ever
after, except for all the superfi­cial screams and accusations,
sulks and the mutually petty inter­ludes of an intense marriage.
Of course that was a simplification, but after all the years, and
after the particular, instantaneous form of her loss, she and his
unfinished children were gone.

His analysis was an avoidance of
the unthinkable. Worse things had happened to other survivors. His
task of building his cabin, his tomb, was suspect. He detested
self-pity.

Or suicide, he thought as he
reached for a cigarette. He found the matches and lit a candle so he
would be able to see the smoke as it left his lungs, then looked at
the white tube of the cigarette. He had begun to smoke late, in the
infantry, out of boredom and fear. It was stupid to have a minor
pleasure which killed you.

Something moved at the door of
the tent. The netting bulged in at the bottom and stretched into
pressure lines toward the apex of the triangle. His hand went down
beside the cot and came up with the pistol.

A low yet impatient yowl came
from out there:
Are you going to let me in? Don't we have an
understanding?
No, it was more compli­cated than that:
I've
been waiting here to be let in; why don't you know I'm here, as I
know you're there?

Luke got up, removed the stick
that weighted the folded end of the netting to the ground, and let
the dog enter. There had been even more said: the dog had implied
that he was a dog, man's nat­ural companion, and of course had a
right to shelter, no matter how short a time they'd known each other.

"Well, Jake," Luke
said. "You're welcome."

Jake looked around the tent, his
nose busy in the air, his tail in­dicating approval. He went to
the paper bag that contained the empty tomato and stew cans, nosed it
and asked if there were something of the sort for him.

"The question is whether I
should feed you, or not," Luke said.

Jake thought he should, though
in this area Jake would not be reliable. What a dog knew, he knew
totally, and if a man looked and listened, he would understand. But
the wants of Lester Wilson, a dog owner, were another matter. At
least Jake was not over­weight. While Jake watched, knowing, Luke
went through the canned goods he'd brought from Wellesley and found a
can of Prudence beef hash, which he served cold in Shem's old
blue-enameled pie plate. Jake found it acceptable, ate it in four or
five gobbets and then made himself a nest in the grass beneath Luke's
cot. Without further communication he curled up there, sighed and
shut his eyes.

"Good night," Luke
said.

One white paw moved, a minor
adjustment. In the strange way that a dog was company, Jake was
company. No small talk, just the primal considerations of food,
warmth, proximity, sleep. And in return, if a dog were not stupid or
psychically wounded, he con­tributed the skills of his ears and
nose. No animal or man could approach undetected this night, which
was a small though sur­prising relief. Luke was tired, and now he
lay down, that other breathing intelligence his sentinel.

He woke in a tent baking in the
morning sun, its canvas oils al­most suffocating, yet not
desperately so because the heavy air, though excessive with the
perfume of the fabric, seemed part of an erotic dream he couldn't
quite remember. His penis was stiff, electrolytic, acid and base. It
seemed an electrode powerful and not understood, precarious to touch.
Its ridges and planes were sensitive, almost in pain, yet willing
toward a general conception of woman that was hollow, watery, smooth
at the center, the wom­an no one woman. If he thought of one
particular woman all the complications, quirks, other needs, demands
and schedules would overcome and dissipate the force he held gently
between his palms. If he thought of Helen it was of the dead, and all
was gone. She passed vaguely, monochromatic as a shadow, over the
screen of his vision. Smooth thighs were open, welcoming him past the
dark entrance to a needful center that was not darkness but another
element in which part of him saw without eyes or light. A strange
other entered there and discharged, in a rush of fluid. Too much
pleasure and none given: gratitude, but to no one, and the faint aura
of sinful excess, the precious slime drowning in the air on the skin
of his fingers.

Now why, how, from where, had
the need come back to jolt him, when he had never understood the need
or its fulfillment? All his life he had experienced it in one form or
another, from his earliest memories, such as the smooth young sides
of Phyllis Follansbee so long before he knew and could do what made
the plea­sure culminate in this humid thoughtful limbo.

But it was over now, and he
could get on with things. He thought of a shower, shaving, breakfast.
Breakfast he could man­age. Later, when he walked the borders of
the land, he might take a bath at the brook pool. When his cabin was
built he would have every small, snug luxury he wanted. He would take
a shower while a blizzard buried the woods and howled at his flue.

Jake had left, having found a
way around the netting. His round bed of pressed grass and the
cleaned pie plate were there on the ground to prove his visit. If he
came by again today Luke would have to believe he was lost and take
him home.

After breakfast he worked on the
house, proceding from the kitchen to places that had fallen in
earlier, where the level of rot was more advanced. By noon he decided
that he would lever up no more rotten walls, that whatever remained
in the house would go down in its grave. When he hired someone to fix
the road, the same loader could move all the rotten wood of house,
sheds and barn into the cellar hole, then pile dirt on top. He would
sow grass over it all and let it work—bluegrass, clover and rye
among the plantain, hawkweed and dandelions that would seed
themselves.

For lunch he had a can of cold
beans and a Spam sandwich, left his dishes for later and began his
tour of the vaguely remembered borders of the land. He found ghost
pastures, vistas dimmed by leaves, stone walls going through dense
woods, barbed wire grown deep into the trunks of trees. In the
eighteen hundreds and into the nineteen hundreds all the hills below
the mountain were clear pasture or cropland, all open to wind and
airy long views, a different world. But there had been migrations,
economic changes, wars and years of frost, and the trees that had
waited on the ridges and in the swamps moved forward.

He found the northwest corner of
the land, where a right an­gled turn of barbed wire ran through a
great beech tree below the dark scars of blazes. On the trunk of the
gray tree were the old dashed clawmarks of a bear.

He descended through hemlock and
yellow birch, whose gold­en bark shone against the dark green of
the hemlock. Down and to his left, if he could remember, was a place
he had found as a child, a dark, wet, rocky place of several acres,
where tall swamp maples grew seemingly out of stones and in the wet
seasons water dark as rust. It had been a quiet, twilit other world,
useless to the farm, where the maples were forced to grow tall
without deep roots, so that when a gust caught one at the right angle
it would lean, all of its height moved over to rest against its
neighbor, its wide pedestal of roots tipped up so that he could see
beneath, in that round place as wide as a room, space that had been
in dark­ness as long as the tree was old. It had been still and
foreign among the tall columns because no one ever went there. The
wood was not worth the trouble of the boulders and water, so the
trees grew, sometimes tilted by the wind, and died in their own time.

He found the place again. It
seemed exactly the same as it had when he was half his height, so the
trees had grown. He stepped over water, from rock to boulder to rock,
as he entered its twi­light. There a tree that must be seventy
feet tall had recently been blown against another. Its roots still
held damp earth in the grasp of the new filaments. Probably, if it
were blown back, or tilted back upright, those rootlets would again
grow down and outward to anchor the tree to the ground. A man with a
block and tackle or a chainfall could pull it back upright. He
wondered how many years would then pass before a freak gust might
again tilt it over, or if it would die sometime hence and lose its
sails, so the stump would never move again. A good place to hide
something. A body, for instance, if one had to get rid of a body. Who
would look beneath a living, fifty-year-old maple? That dense wood
was ancient, per­manent, slow-grown, its gnarled roots a mesh of
inanimate muscle that would block such a thought before it ever
occurred. That place would be as invisible as, unthought of as a
parallel universe.

The roots would grow and
proliferate in the absolute dark, sur­round and rend that
nutriment, calcium and all.

Gruesome thoughts to have in
this dark place, but why should he mind his thoughts? The land was
his world to know in all of its bright and dismal, drained and
undrained, fertile and barren places, and if the land jarred his
thoughts in strange ways, let it.

The pistol, heavy on his hip,
was a dark power worth having there.

He went back to the line,
bushwacking among the living and dy­ing trees that were always
growing and falling, birth and death everywhere, always reminding. He
crossed the brook a quarter of a mile above the pool and bridge,
where the line took a jag to the right, following the brook west and
up. Then he was lucky to no­tice old blazes on a hemlock that
told him to turn southeast, though from here on his memory was
doubtful at best. He climbed to the southeast, hoping that he was not
following a false slope. He should have a compass, should have
thought to take Johnny's, because the sun always turned confusingly.
Here old apple trees, dead for years, had strangled reaching for
light. As he climbed he entered spruce, some very old, and finally
came to the bald knob of monzonite flecked with lozenges of white
felspar. Down across valleys to the southeast was part of the blue
lake, a thin crescent from here, and beyond the lake more hills,
hills upon hills into the haze of distance. The town of Cascom was
in­visible in its summer leaves; from this hill on the side of
Cascom Mountain, except for the long thin cut of a powerline miles
away, the land might have been empty of all but trees.