The Followed Man (27 page)

"Never was much for
listening anyway," George said. "You get him going and
he'll tell you stories, you could write a book."

They were both proud of Eph, as
though he were one of Cas-com's natural resources.

Luke said he was serious about
looking at trucks tomorrow, and he'd pick George up about nine if he
still wanted to help him make a choice.

"You come for breakfast
then," Phyllis said. "I suspect you could use a good
breakfast."

Luke drove in to Leah on the
high road. He'd forgotten to think about supper and decided to skip
it, so he went to the Laun­dromat and did his laundry while he
looked at a copy of
Gentle­man,
which seemed a strange
document to find in Leah in a Laun­dromat. The cover was a
collage of the heads of people who were famous though they possessed
no talent, each photographed head on a cartoon body—the
implication being that they were all, ex­cept for the fact of
publicity, created out of nothing. Here was
Gentleman
again
living off what it pretended to despise. But he did feel a little
guilty about his unwritten article, and remembered, as if it had been
long ago, Mike Rizzo, Jimmo McLeod, Robin Flash, Marjorie Rutherford,
Annie Gelb and Martin Troup, those frag­ile people threading
their lives through the dangerous cliffs and cables, gasses and
voltages of New York City.

On the way out of Leah he
stopped at a small store and bought a six-pack of beer. He drank one
as his headlights probed yellowly, the lines on the road gleaming
past, trees thicker and more overhanging as he went through the
village of Cascom and climbed the mountain. When the asphalt ended
and the gravel made its loose tones he felt as if he were coming
home, yet at the same time it would be dark there, totally dark
except for any light he made himself. There were no stars or moon
tonight. The trees stood motionless in the darkness, only seeming to
bend as his headlights passed beneath them. A raccoon crossed the
road ahead, giving a masked gleam of a look from the brush before it
was gone.

He began to think he might see a
human figure somewhere in the woods beside the road, if he looked
carefully enough, know­ing that if he did look carefully some
stump or blowdown would suggest such a presence to him, but not
clearly enough to make him stop to make sure, just enough to make him
wonder, and that would not be good in the night.

The pistol, its clip loaded, was
there beneath his feet.

He turned off down through the
tunnel of spruce and came to the farm, where his tent waited in the
dark.

That night he dreamed that he
deliberately cut off his right hand with a hacksaw, some important
idea motivating him. When the hand was completely severed, above the
wrist, he found him­self holding it by some sort of hand on the
same arm, which was impossible, so he chided himself, saying that was
wrong and he'd have to change that, not do that anymore, because if
he had only one hand left—his left hand—he couldn't hold
his severed right hand in anything but that one. But there he was,
holding it, now in his left hand, and cutting off pieces of its
fleshier parts with a knife that must be held somehow by something or
other on his right arm. The white bones stuck out of the wrist, the
finger pads and palm meat brownish, as though cooked, and he sliced
off the fleshy pieces and ate them. It was Shem's knife he used, and
it was sharp. There wasn't much but skin and tendons on the back of
the hand, but he sliced off a wide flake of it and ate it.

Then he wasn't really the person
who had willfully cut off his own hand—the left hand, this
time—because he was standing to the side and a doctor was
telling that person in a disgusted voice that the bones in his
forearm would have to be cut back and a pad of flesh made to cover
the stump. Now the idea of having cut the hand off seemed a little
shameful, its importance gone. The white bones, ringed with pale and
in places dark red blood, protruded an inch or two from the withdrawn
flesh of the forearm. The bones were cut squarely so that the marrow
in radius and ulna formed clear red circles. He, however, was the one
who had sliced off pieces of palm, finger pads and skin and eaten
them.

Awake in the blackness of the
night, he pondered his lack of distaste for that flesh. The dream
should be more horrible to him than it was, and the sick feeling of
loss and broken taboo was not so much from the dream as from his lack
of concern or terror. Maybe there was nothing he wouldn't do now.
Maybe he was a man who had only thought he was governed by instincts
that were civilized, moral, rational, basically kind. Maybe that had
all been delusion, but it was sad to feel a whole life's values,
whether they had been honored or not, blink out.

So he had quarantined himself up
here on the mountain. He would live alone because he was dangerous,
and knew it; why else had he the cruelty to survive?

He lay awake until light came
slowly to the doorway of his tent—cool, damp light, his eyes'
sustenance. Little by little through grayness it came until his tent
pole was a hard structural line against it. It came into the tent and
all around him, all over the fields, brush, trees, hills, the
mountain, its lucid changes wash­ing the dream away until there
was only the white bone and pale blood, and it all seemed to have
happened to someone else. The brown flesh that had entered his mouth
to be ground by his teeth was more like rabbit, or venison, really,
or just the meat others slaughter for us.

He and George spent most of the
day looking at trucks and at glossy brochures, that most thoughtfully
seductive form of litera­ture. Here were dashing, triumphant,
shining trucks, their hand­some drivers given a power that made
them not mad but euphor­ic, alert and potent. No dirt and grease,
short circuits, dents, sprung metal, rust, forgotten bolts or welds,
bent chassis, mis­alignments, cracks, punctures—after a
while he began to look more closely at the secondhand trucks around
the peripheries of the lots, those veterans of truckdom wounded in
clashes and cam­paigns one could only imagine. He didn't trust
cosmetic perfec­tion and disliked ornament, yet those trying to
sell him thought he must be enamored and wanted to charge him for his
folly.

The basic full-sized American
half-ton pickup truck, he began to discern through the options and
glitter, was one or two hun­dred dollars less than four thousand
dollars—like one that stayed in his mind, a pearlish gray Dodge
with a six-cylinder engine and the narrower but lighter and mere
symmetrical bed that went be­tween rear fenders rather than a bed
that contained the wheel wells.

"George," he said
while they were between dealers, having coffee at the Welcum Diner,
"if you could order your perfect, ideal bloody truck, what would
it be?"

"If I was me, or if I was
you?"

"Start with you."

"Well, first off, to be
honest, I don't need no four-wheel drive. It might come in handy
once, twice in the course of a year, but it ain't worth it to lug
around an extra thousand pounds the other three hundred sixty-three
days. Gas mileage, what it costs in the first place, which is over a
thousand bucks extra, not to mention it gets you
in
places you
need a helicopter to get back out of—no, you can have your
four-wheel drive, far as I'm concerned. It's handy for plowing if you
plow, but I got my doubts about plowing with a pickup—won't
take the strain. Even a three-quarter ton. You want to get in and out
of your camp in the snow, I'd pay the town (course if you lived there
permanent they'd have to do it free on account of it's still a town
road)—I'd pay the town to do it with the deuce-and-a-half or
the grader, and I'd get me a tractor and snowblower to clean up or
for emergencies when the town equip­ment broke down."

"You don't think I need
four-wheel drive then?"

"For me, I get
irritated
when I think I paid too much for some­thing I don't need.
Gets me down. I get mean, start to hate my own property. Now, that
ain't no good. I had a fancy lemon once. Shortened my goddam life.
Not worth it."

"Maybe I'll just get a
plain truck. What about a limited slip dif­ferential?"

"Had that once.
Positraction, they called it. Throws you in the ditch. Any crown in
the road, you're in the ditch. Forget it. Get yourself a good set of
lugged tire chains."

"George, I have a feeling
you're going to save me a lot of money."

"You
can't hold that against a man," George said, pleased but trying
not to show it too much. "That limited-slip rear end—what
happens is, both wheels turn at the same time, so if you're on a
slant in anything greazy, or on ice, you break free and commence to
slide over sideways. It's fine if you're on a flat incline—it'll take you right out, but there ain't much that's level around here.
Roads all crowned, plenty of waterbars."

George's lore, Luke suspected,
was real. There were those who wanted to impress with their
knowledge, and those who merely imparted it.

"My ideal truck,"
George said, "is one they don't make. A pretty
fair
truck
is the one I got. I like it all right and I can live with it. If it
don't blow up I'll keep it probably ten years, or till the salt eats
it, whichever comes first."

"You remember that gray
Dodge half-ton we looked at this morning?"

"Ayuh. Slant-six engine.
Heard good things about that engine."

"I'm thinking about that
one."

"Pretty stripped down,
ain't it?"

"What do you think it
needs?"

"Trailer hitch and wiring
harness, set of tire chains, radio, broom to sweep out the bed and
you're in business. It ain't the pussy wagon you was talking about
yesterday, but if it ain't a lem­on, knock on wood, it ought to
do you."

Better, better, Luke thought: a
plain truck, as plain as one could be these days, to carry real
things like hardware, nails and lumber. They stopped back at Leah
Dodge, where the smoothing process of mutual desire overcame all
technicalities. They gave him an ac­ceptable trade-in price for
his car, and said they would get right on the trailer hitch, harness
and radio. He could pick up the truck tomorrow afternoon and register
it in Cascom, where Phyllis, as town clerk, would assess him his
taxes and create him a resident.

Luke picked up his mail at the
Post Office, jammed it in the dash compartment without looking at it,
and drove them back to Cascom, where he let George off, thanking him
again, and went back up the mountain thinking he had done much,
though he hadn't really. The glints and flashes of light off chrome,
the strange instant relationships one had with salesmen, the fatigue
of many short journeys—all these convinced him that he could
not get out his chainsaw and begin a new career this day.

He would own a truck he hadn't
even bothered to try out; that was sad. Maybe there were no toys for
him.

The
clouds had thinned, then turned into small white frag­ments that
looked as though they were buttered as they hit and missed the sun.
He took his mail from the car, a thick rolled hand­ful of it, and
sat in front of the tent to look at it. As he shuffled out the
catalogues and junk he came upon a familiar typeface on a stamped
envelope, then without thinking went to the car, got the pistol,
pulled back the slide to arm it, put on the thumb safety and fastened
the webbed belt and holster to his waist. As part of the same
reaction he went to the cooler and got himself a bottle of beer,
though this did make him wonder, because alcohol would not enhance
the alertness necessary for survival, or at least not the kind of
survival suggested by the pistol.

He had known people who didn't
drink because they felt the world constantly dangerous and needed all
their wit and wariness about them. Ron Sevas, his old partner, was
one of those. Or in Ron's case sobriety had been more an edge he used
against other people who did let down their guard, whether through
trust, affection, or booze.

He decided to open the other
mail first; perhaps the other mes­sages would be sane. That elite
typeface on the unbidden white squareness of the envelope was an
intrusion into his life that en­raged him. If he were guilty
because all of his people had died that was his own guilt, his own
miserable property. For a moment he thought of shooting great holes
in the envelope, muzzle blast shredding it into the ground. Of course
he would have to open it before the other mail.

Luke Carr:

Soon we will meet you will die but not before you suffer what you did
to here you scumbag. Do you want to know what I look like. Ha Ha! ! !
?

Mr. Death

"Here" was probably a
typo for "her," but "scumbag" was the operative
word. He hadn't heard it for many years, but it referred to a condom,
and then to a woman. A bag for scum, or gism. "That old
scumbag"—from the ancient "baggage." He could
tell certain things about the writer, he supposed, providing the
writ­er's brain was not so chaotic that nothing signified. An old
word—an older writer. But the word misused. The Avenger, Mr.
Death, was either too stupid or too smart for such analysis. Probably
too stupid. The letters were all too depressingly illiterate to have
been faked, unless faked by someone who knew how not to overdo it.
But maybe not. This was the fourth one. It was like an itch he
couldn't scratch. He found himself humming, or growling, a low
monotone that seemed out of control, so he put the note in his
briefcase with the other three, finished the beer and shook him­self
before opening the the other mail.

Ham Jones sent a document for
him to sign—they'd overlooked a water bill, a matter of thirty
dollars, which Ham said he'd pay out of his commission. "Where
the hell are you?" Ham asked.