The Followed Man (26 page)

Luke stopped at the Batemans'
and asked where Lester Wilson lived, saying he'd be back as soon as
he delivered the dog.

"On the River Road to
Leah," George said. "There's a whole goddam village of
Wilsons out there. Go about a mile past the old mill and when you see
four or five trailers and seventeen junk cars, you're there. Lester's
trailer's the pink and blue one with the falling down sheds and
lean-tos along the backside of it."

Luke had told Jake to stay in
the car, and he did. George came out to take a look at him.
"Good-looking beagle hound, I must say, 'spite of the
shit-for-brains owns him," George said.

"You know, George,"
Luke said. "I wouldn't want to have you mad at me."

George looked at him, then
smiled. "Well, I try not to be too hard on a fella."

Luke remembered when the River
Road was the main road to Leah, before the higher road had been
graded and widened so that in places it looked like a superhighway.
He drove along the winding dark asphalt beneath elms, most of them
dead or dying. It was not quite dark when he came to the trailers and
the junked, wide and long old cars and station wagons that looked as
though they had been deposited over the landscape by a flood. Some
were on their sides, chrome and streamlining askew, some were propped
up, front or back or both, on cement blocks. He turned in at the pink
and blue trailer and stopped between a V-8 engine on the oily dirt
and a yellow Dodge with huge tires on its rear wheels that made it
look a little hunchbacked. Jake looked around, recognized the place,
but displayed no enthusiasm. When Luke got out he remained in the
car.

Luke picked a place to knock
beneath the louvered window on the narrow metal door. The sounds of
television seemed to leak here and there from the body of the
trailer. A roof on wooden studs had been set up over the whole
trailer, he noticed now, the bare studs driven into the ground so
that they would rot out in a year or two. He knocked harder, and
after a few moments the door opened partway upon the face of a young
woman who was afraid of him.

"Is Lester Wilson here?"
he asked. "I've got his dog."

Her red hair was piled up above
her pale face in metallic curls, but the rest of her looked undone,
unwashed. Her blue blouse was torn or worn out at the shoulder, and
her short black skirt was wet across the belly at sink level. Her
eyes moved to her right, to the main part of the trailer, then back
to look vaguely at him again, a vagueness that made him think of a
schoolchild who was too frightened to listen to a question.

"Is this Lester Wilson's
place?" he asked.

A large young man appeared
beside her, pushed her out of the way and came out the door, forcing
Luke to take two steps back­ward. He stared at Luke without
expression or with the intent to have no expression. It was the
desire to intimidate, or the need to, and Luke recognized it with a
sense of weariness. The man want­ed to project, force, possess a
presence. His eyes, however, flicked to the Massachusetts license
plate on Luke's car—an error, since they should have seen that
earlier, seen everything, known every­thing. Jake was not
visible. This poor fellow was not equipped to be the man he wanted to
be, and Luke knew that his own calmness in this silent confrontation
meant danger, or at least bother; why make an enemy? But his attitude
could not be disguised.

"I've brought your dog.
Thought he might have been lost up on the mountain," Luke said.

After a calculated silence,
Lester Wilson said flatly, "You brought my dog." This meant
that Luke's statement was ridicu­lous, that he had "brought"
a dog was a pretentious, meaningless and even embarrassed thing to
say, a statement that could only have been made by someone who was
frightened and thus dishon­est, who needed his comeuppance.

But a front tooth was missing;
Lester Wilson was in the country process of losing his teeth early,
which meant at least that his den­tures would fit better. He did
have a pretty good ominous hunch to his upper body, and the skin of
his scalp shone between rows of short black bristles even here in the
dying light.

"What you got to do with my
dog," Lester said. It didn't sound like a question.

"He's been at my place on
the mountain for a couple of days. I thought he might be lost,"
Luke said, trying to hide the weary pa­tience in his voice. "He's
in my car."

"Around here you don't mess
with another man's dog," Lester said. "Get your ass in a
sling."

Another of Lester's mistakes was
that he didn't know who Luke was, though Luke had been in town long
enough so that he should have known. When he found out he would be
startled, and he would probably never forgive that.

"I thought I was doing you
a favor," Luke said. "Pardon me." He went to the car,
opened the door and told Jake to get out. "Come on, Jake,"
he said. Jake was pretending to be asleep on the front seat; this dog
was indeed out of the ordinary. Jake half-opened his eyes, squirmed
toward a more comfortable position, sighed and closed his eyes again.
"Come on, Jake. Get out," Luke said. Reluctantly, almost
with some truculence, Jake got out of the car. Lester grabbed him by
the collar and without a word half threw him into a shed and shut the
door, Jake giving one high yelp of surprise and pain.

"You don't have to tell me
if he was lost, I guess," Luke said, getting into his car.

"Listen, Buster,"
Lester said. "What I do with my dog's none of your business, and
I mean
none
a your business. You got that?"

In a way, Luke was amused by his
own anger. He was tempted to say something unforgivable, something
stupid, but he didn't need the trouble. To hell with it. He backed
out of Lester Wilson's yard, careful not to hit an engineless pink
1967 Oldsmobile, and drove back to the Batemans'.

"You give him his dog?"
George said, keeping a straight face.

"I don't know what he
thought I was doing."

"Come on pretty strong, did
he?"

"I guess he did."

"If we had a need for a
chief of police around here, he wouldn't be it," George said.
"His dad, now, Raymond—he was a good man, but that whole
family went bad. House and barn burned in the '58 fires, Raymond died
the following year, and everything went to hell over there. Pigs in
shit."

"Well, I'm afraid I made an
enemy," Luke said.

"Puh!" George said.

"I must say I didn't like
the way he treated the dog."

"Dog's lucky he ain't his
wife or his kids."

"But why make him a
policeman at all?"

"He wanted it, is why. Took
a course with the state police and barely qualified. I still think he
used a little M-l pencil on his scores, but that's neither here nor
there."

"Has he shot anybody yet?"

George smiled grimly and shook
his head. "Lester, he kind of thinks he's a real old Yankee
type. You know, don't take shit from nobody. Trouble is, he don't
know shit from Shinola in the first place."

"Well," Phyllis said,
"old Eph Buzzell won't give you that kind of reception. You just
call him up and tell him what you want done. He'll be through with
his milking by now."

Phyllis found him Eph Buzzell's
telephone number and then brought him a cup of coffee. She limped,
and her stiff fingers curled in a dishlike fashion around the base of
the coffee mug, but she didn't seem to be in pain, or at least didn't
show it. "You're better now?" Luke said.

She seemed pleased by his
asking, almost flattered. "Much bet­ter! Why, after riding
up the mountain today—all that jounc­ing—I got right
down out of that truck and walked right up the back steps like I used
to!"

"You used to run up them
steps," George said. "Never saw you walk up no steps."
He turned to Luke. "She used to sort of get a jiggle to her and
trot
right up any steps she came to."

Phyllis laughed. "I hardly
ever used to just plain walk, that's true."

Luke said, "I remember when
I was a little kid you could run like a deer."

Phyllis was delighted. "They
said I could run faster than a boy!"

"She could run faster'n me,
but then I got short legs," George said.

"I could out-run you,
George, that's true."

"Ayuh," George said
with a grim look. "A few times you had to."

She put her hand on his arm.
"Oh, I don't mean those times. We don't think about those times.
So long ago."

"Amen," George said.

Between them a sad look passed;
whatever it had been, it had never been resolved.

To change the subject they told
him about Eph Buzzell, whom he remembered as a friend of Shem's who
visited the farm some­times to help with the haying, sap
collecting or some other large task, but never as someone to be paid
for that help. He'd been a talkative man Shem liked with a sort of
wonder at all that lan­guage. Luke remembered wondering himself
why Shem never put Eph down as a prattler, but just listened and
chuckled with uncharacteristic tolerance.

The money to buy the heavy
equipment Eph liked to play with, they told him, came from the
Buzzell farm having been along the lake, where cottage lots were so
expensive it was hard to believe. So whenever Eph wanted some money
he just sold an acre or part of one, which didn't even have to have
lake frontage these days, just so it had beach rights. Of course he'd
done a lot of lumbering in the area, too, buying when land was cheap,
stripping off the timber, then selling the land when it went up in
price. He kept up the farm mainly out of habit, because he probably
didn't break even with the livestock.

"That's the general
opinion, anyways," Phyllis said, "but with an old fox like
Eph you never know. He might be a millionaire and he might be broke.
He'll talk about anything but money."

"Sometimes he don't seem to
care about money at all," George said. "Hard to tell about
Eph."

Luke called and a woman
answered. "Just a minute," she said. "He's just coming
in this moment. He's been out to the barn, has to take off his rubber
boots."

Luke heard some clumping in the
background. "It's the tele­phone," the woman said.
"Who? Why, I never thought to ask."

"H'lo," Eph Buzzell
said. "Standing here in my stocking feet, so speak up." The
voice was high, smooth, and didn't have the grat­ings, seams,
cracks and breaths of an old voice.

Luke told him who he was.

"Well, my," Eph said.
"You was that little tad nephew Shem had. Running around under
everybody's feet. Asking questions. What can I do for you?"

Luke told him.

"Well, now. There's gravel
enough down across the brook. Probably all growed up in trees,
though. How's the bridge?"

"It's gone altogether,"
Luke said.

"Well, Luke, you cut me
four maple stringers, about eight inches to a foot through, and if
they're anywhere near the road where I can grab onto 'em with the
cherry picker, we'll put you in a bridge. I got some elm planks we
can use on top of the stringers, then we can do the road and what
all. You know where the old gravel pit was? As I recall, on the right
sidehill beyond the lower pasture. You cut any trees might keep me
out of there with the loader. Now, remember—cut them
stringers—ash is all right too—on this side of the brook.
That might appear pretty obvious, but maybe you ain't as smart as you
used to be, having lived in Massachusetts so long. Let's see, now.
Today's Sunday. I'm doing some grading and hauling for the town. Be
done in a day or two. How about Friday?"

"That's great. Fine,"
Luke said. He still didn't believe it could be this easy.

"Friday. Unless something
breaks, I'll be there. Most likely bring the loader up Thursday
evening and leave it. All right, sir, now I can put on my slippers.
Good-bye."

"Good-bye, and thanks,"
Luke said.

"Ain't done nothing yet.
Good-bye."

Luke was thinking of the tall
maples along the road, trying to remember which ones would do. Later
he would replace the ma­ple stringers with steel I beams when the
wood grew doubtful as it aged.

"He says he'll do it
Friday," he said to Phyllis and George.

"Unless something breaks
down," George said, "you can count on it."

"That's what he said.
'Unless something breaks.'"

"You think of a man eighty
years old," Phyllis said. "You think he's going to be the
one to break, not his machinery."

"He's a spry old son of a
bitch," George said. "Must have a back made out of spring
steel. Sits on his D-5 Cat or his John Deere loader all day long.
Funny thing, though; Eph don't like to drive a car or a truck on the
road. Tillie does most of the road driving."

"Tillie?"

"She's the one answered the
phone. Eph's housekeeper."

"And chauffeur,"
Phyllis said.

"And about everything else,
too," George said. "I once asked him why he never married
her—they been together now forty years—and he claimed she
don't want to get married. Says he offered to marry her ten, eleven
times."

"How old is she?"

"Tillie?" Phyllis
said, thinking. "She must be in her sixties. I think she was
about twenty when she went to live with Eph. There was a lot of
scandal about it at the time."

George interrupted. "She
come from Leah. Ran away from home. Her father and brothers come to
take her back and Eph damn near killed the lot of 'em. Eph had a
reputation as a kind of a sissy, 'cause he talked so much, so you can
imagine their sur­prise!"

"There were three
brothers," Phyllis said. "Cole was their name. I wonder
what ever happened to that family."

"Died off or moved away,"
George said. "Been a long time."

"Eph never cared what
anybody thought," Phyllis said.