The Followed Man (28 page)

Martin Troup wrote to ask the
same question, but again reas­sured him that there would be no
hard feelings if he didn't write the piece.

Robin Flash wrote that
Gentleman
had been bought by R.I.C., a conglomerate that owned companies
that made everything from resistors to salt water taffy, and the
rumor was that Martin Troup was soon to go. Robin's note was written
with a wide black italic pen on heavily textured buff stationery. Amy
and he were in bad shape, marriagewise, he said, and he was going to
be in Boston to shoot a commercial, so if Luke would tell him where
he was he'd buy him a cherry soda.

Luke wrote short answers to each
of these, wondering what made him so casually reveal his hiding
place. It was the compul­sion to answer a question, he supposed.
Helen, who had taught English at Moorham Community College for the
last few years, had told him that he suffered from this even more
than she did.

The Avenger might be one of her
students. He hadn't thought of that. Some continuing-education
student, older, half-literate, infatuated by his, or her, professor.
He still wasn't sure if the Avenger was a man or a woman; it was the
quality of mind he thought he knew too well, and that could reside in
any body. Hel­en's marking books, some unreturned themes and
other papers were in a cardboard box in storage at Joe the Mover's.
It would be against probability to find the same typeface on one of
those themes, but he might. What he really wanted was that the
letters stop, just stop.

He would recognize the
typewriter, though. The lower case
e
was slightly bent. The
right hand serif of the capital
T
was shorter than the left one. He'd
noticed that right away, in the first note, and in the others. One
couldn't help noticing, cataloguing, solving the most stupid puzzles.

The first two of the Avenger's
letters had been mailed in New York City, the last two in Wellesley.
Strange.

Then he looked up to see
something that was also strange. Coming along the road from the
direction of the mountain was a short fat man in green lederhosen and
vest, thick hiking boots, a green porkpie hat with a long red brush
in the band, pushing a small bicycle wheel ahead of him. The wheel
was connected to a shaft he held in his hand as he walked, his thick
red knees rubbing together with each step. When he came even with
Luke he stopped, carefully put the wheel on its side and said in a
high, de­lighted voice, "Tickle your ass with a feather!"

Luke's expression was evidently
confused, so the little fat man said in the same bright, clipped
voice, "Particularly sweaty weath­er!" Then he took out
a large red bandanna and wiped his face and the folds of his neck.
"Freddie Hurlburt from the C.M.C.!" he said. "How do
you do!"

Luke got up from his chair and
said, "Luke Carr."

"Carr! Carr!" Freddie
Hurlburt said, sounding like a startled crow. "Oh, yes, the Carr
farm! This is the Carr farm! On the geo­detic map, of course. Are
you the Carr that goes with the farm?"

"Yes," Luke said. "A
descendant, anyway."

"How interesting! I'm
chairman of the Trails Committee this year, you know. Freddie
Hurlburt—that's H-u-r-l-b-u-r-t. Tend to talk too fast
sometimes."

"Hurlburt," Luke said.
He looked carefully at Freddie Hurl-burt's face, seeing no irony.
What was strange about it was that in the face crowded by flesh were
two large blue eyes, smooth, clear and expressionless. They seemed
very young, the skin around them unwrinkled and unpressured, as
though they were decorative objects meant to be looked at rather than
instruments to be used.

"I am now," Freddie
said, bending with difficulty toward a little gauge on his wheel
shaft, "seven miles from the lodge, having tak­en the Beaver
Dam Cutoff, the George R. Phelan and finally, from Grand Forks
Junction, this, which we call the Carr Trail, which hasn't been
brushed out or much used for ten years and probably won't be for
another ten. Your Trail Committee chairmen, or chairpersons, as they
are supposedly called these days, haven't done their jobs, the result
of syphilis in the ass of a pig."

"The result of what?"
Luke said.

" 'Simply not wishing to
get on the stick,' as my father used to say. This sort of corpulence
runs in the family, you know, but it never stopped a Hurlburt! Some
discussion of that at the last meeting at Beacon Street. Told them
they knew my father and some of them my grandfather. 'Fat as toads,
never stopped
them,'
I said. 'You want the trails walked and
measured, you call on a Hurlburt!' " From a canvas map case he
had slung over his shoul­der he took a sheaf of maps, a sighting
compass and a can of John­son's Baby Powder. First he uncapped
the powder and shook it liberally down into the front of his
lederhosen, did a little shimmy to distribute it, then spread a map
out on the ground. "Seven point one miles to the Carr House.
House not in the best of re­pair."

"You'd better make it
'cellar hole,'" Luke said. "I'm filling it in."

"Commendable!" Freddie
said, marking his map with a felt pen. He folded his map, took a
sighting along the road with his compass and put his gear away. "You
must come for dinner at the lodge. Is it Luke? I'm Freddie. You must
be our guest. Simple fare, family style. Any Friday, Saturday or
Sunday from now through October. Plenty of food, no need to call in
advance, just drop in. Dinner at seven, come early and have a drink.
New cook, I'm afraid, rather too fond of illicit ass to stir his
hots, no end of shaping up necessary, but learning."

"Too fond of what?"

"Pasta, great steaming pots
of it. Very heavy on the semolina. I don't mind, myself, but some
complaints have been voiced. Actually not bad sauce. Well, now, sir,
good day! I've another mile to go, I believe, to where we left the
Jeep this morning. I wonder what happened to Louise, that tiresome
woman."

"Louise?"

"Oh she'll be along,
limping exaggeratedly, no doubt."

Freddie righted his bicycle
wheel and went on, a fine snow of Johnson's Baby Powder sifting onto
his black Peter Limmer boots. Luke watched him go. A strange little
man, even from a club not­ed for its eccentrics, and disquieting
with his little slips into doubletalk. The voice was certainly not
that of the Permolator-Purfulator telephone call, and the device was
different. Or was his own head scrambling syllables, hearing the
taboo phrases when they hadn't actually been said? Never, even in
what you consider your most lucid moments, he thought, trust any
system. Things can be misunderstood, avoided, hysterically
exaggerated. He hadn't been too sane since January, and he had
failed, or was in the process of failing, to do an assignment he had
agreed to do, which was out of character, or at least out of the
ordinary.

Then, from the direction of the
mountain, a woman appeared, trudging along slowly, her shoulders
moving as though she waded through deep water. She didn't see Luke or
the tent until she was a few yards away, and then she stopped,
startled. Her black hair was wet, her dungarees patched with sweat,
her yellow halter top wet through. She was in her thirties, he
thought, and though she was terribly disgruntled and unhappy at the
moment, which might obscure her general character, he saw in her a
kind of rangy neurotic humor that had some appeal.

"Hello," he said. "Hot
day."

"Hot!" she said. "My God, I'm being broiled in Off! Have you seen a repulsive, fat little
man pass by here?"

"That's a hard question to
answer," Luke said.

"A fat little man, then,"

"Yes, a few minutes ago.
You must be Louise."

"Did he say how far it was
to the Jeep? "

"A mile."

"Oh, my God! A mile!"
She slumped to the ground and sat In­dian fashion, her head
drooping toward her lap. "Have you got a cigarette?"

He brought her one and held a
match for her. "Thank God," she said. "Nobody has any
cigarettes anymore and if you smoke they look at you as if you're
some kind of monster. Mine fell in a stupid brook back there
somewhere." Then her eyes, which were an odd olive color,
widened in fright. He was startled, and stepped back.

"A
gun!"
she
said. "You're wearing a
gun!
My God, you've got a
gun!"

"Well, yes," he said.
"It seems I do have a gun. Don't let it frighten you." He'd
been wearing it when Freddie Hurlburt was there, too. Maybe Freddie
hadn't chosen to mention it, or hadn't noticed it hanging there
beneath the tail of his shirt.

"Oh, my God, that's all I
need!" she said. "A
gun!"

He resisted asking her if she
hadn't yet heard about the escaped grizzly bear that had eaten the
hikers.

She got to her feet, her eyes on
the big holster with the black handle sticking out of it. She was now
not so much afraid as judg­mental. "Why do you carry a gun?"
she said in a voice that meant the verdict was in.

"Are you interested in
why?" he asked.

"Obviously you want to
shoot someone, kill, see the blood gush out."

"Why did you ask if the
answer is so obvious?"

"You're not some redneck.
By your vocabulary you're an edu­cated man, so you must be sick."

"Maybe you're right,"
he said, feeling an improbable change in his attitude toward her. She
stood with her hands on her hips, the cigarette rather bravely
dangling from her lip, he thought. Her face had a gaunt, almost
ravaged look. No, not ravaged, really, but hardened by experience,
exercised by gravity. She must be in her late thirties, a tough, slim
woman. Perhaps her sanctimony wasn't terminal. She was one of those
people who seem to be the same color all over, the same tone—in
her case a dark tan slightly lighter than the olive of her irises.
Her hair was as glossy black as an Oriental's.

"So you're camping here,"
she said, "waiting for a poor little deer to come by so you can
blast it dead with your big fat gun. Is that it?"

"No, it's not deer season,"
he said.

"That's right. The state
tells you when you can murder them, doesn't it."

"Generally in November,"
he said.

"Sick, sick," she
said, shaking her head in a way that was not a signal to him, but to
some higher authority she was in communica­tion with.

"I imagine my feeling about
guns is more complicated than yours," he said, hearing his voice
turn fakely calm and gentle. People who began arguments with
strangers, unless severely pro­voked, always amazed him. What a
pain in the ass, he thought; how often someone who looked interesting
displayed a flaw of personality as lurid as an open wound.

"Guns are to
kill
with!
What else are they for? If you carry one you want to kill something.
What's so complicated about that?" she said rather shrilly. "So
I suppose you're going to tell me that you only shoot at targets.
Well, that's just practice for shooting animals and people and you
know it!"

As she spoke he looked at her
teeth, which were slightly colored by tobacco, at her pink gums and
the lines at the corners of her mouth. He wondered about all the
arguments of her life, and the anger her face must have expressed
over so many issues. A history in the form of disagreement. He
wondered if she ever cried, and what that emotion must have done to
the skin around her eyes and mouth. Thank God she would soon be on
her way.

She took a step, and winced. Her
sneakers were old, and must have thin soles.

"Would you like me to give
you a ride to your Jeep?" he asked, motioning toward his car.

"Oh!"

He watched the conflict between
her exhaustion and the protec­tion of her righteousness. She was
tired and sore and didn't want to walk another mile.

"Who are you, anyway?"
she asked, resenting her position.

"Luke Carr, at your
service. This is my farm, such as it is." He waved his arm
toward the wrecks of barn, sheds and house.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"About the farm?"

"No, it's just that I can't
think of a reason for carrying a gun. I can't think of a situation,
any
situation, in which it would be better to have a gun."

"You know that doesn't make
much sense to my atavistic mind."

"Have you ever shot
anyone?" She shivered, and her voice, which had been a little
jarring in its clangorous certainty, turned lower.

"Yes," he said.

"Oh, my God, I think you
really have. In a war?"

"Yes."

"Ugh! How horrible! And yet
you still want to carry that ob­scene thing? Did you
like
killing people?"

"No, I was scared to death.
What I really wanted was to be somewhere else."

"So why do you wear it?"

"Maybe I'm still scared to
death, Anyway, this gun belonged to my uncle, who died in that house
last winter."

"I don't understand. I
really don't understand. But why don't you get sarcastic and
defensive, like all the rest?"

"The rest?"

"All you gun people."

"It's a temptation.
Sanctimony doesn't bring out the best in any­one. I almost told
you there was a grizzly bear loose around here."

"Sanctimony!"

"The word came to my mind."

She was about to say something,
but shivered again, goose-flesh spreading evenly over her shoulders
and arms as if a thousand pins were trying to push up through her
dark skin. Her sweat was cooling her off too quickly now that the sun
was in its late after­noon fall toward the mountain. In her damp
black hair were a few silver strands. He went into the tent, stashing
the pistol under his sleeping bag, and brought her out a large
bathtowel. As he put it over her shoulders she seemed to turn
smaller, her chill and the silence of her opinions shrinking her
until he felt there was a place between his chest and right arm where
her shoulders might fit, her salt sweat against his skin.