The Followed Man (29 page)

"I'll give you a ride. Come
on," he said, and she followed him to the car.

"No gun, I see," she
said as they drove out through the deep spruce. She took off the
elastic that held her hair together at the back, and fluffed her hair
with part of the white towel, the black glossy and thick now,
softening her face and making her seem smaller still.

When they reached the road he
said, "Which way?"

"I really don't know. We
left the Jeep somewhere this morning and Adrienne drove us back to
the lodge. Maybe Freddie left a sign."

They looked, and Freddie had. An
arrow had been scratched in the dirt, pointing down the mountain.

"Is Freddie your husband?"

"God, no! Really. My
husband was a case all right, but not quite as freaky as Freddie.
Actually, Freddie is my cousin."

They came to a yellow Jeep with
a white cab, where Freddie pondered his maps, which were spread out
over the hood, Fred­die standing on the front bumper so he could
see them and make his notations.

"Ah, Louise!" he said.
"Chivalry, chivalry! Maiden in distress and all that! Did you
stalk him into bedding your poor little heat?"

Luke looked at her, but she
didn't seem to have heard what he had heard. Maybe she didn't listen
to Feddie, who was now fold­ing his maps.

"He wouldn't drive back and
pick me up," she said, "because it wouldn't cross Freddie's
fat little mind." Freddie didn't listen to her, either. His maps
back in his map case, he climbed up into the Jeep, seeming to need
three or four more foot and handholds than anyone else would.

She turned and put the towel
over Luke's shoulder before she climbed up into the Jeep. He rather
liked the smell of the clean tqwel and the slight sweat together.
"What's your last name?" he asked her.

"Sturgis," she said.
"And thanks for the ride."

Freddie backed and turned until
he got the Jeep facing the right way. Luke wondered why he hadn't
driven into the farm road if he were so well supplied with maps of
the area. This place was the nearest wide spot on the main road,
though. The Jeep bounced at Freddie's inexpert clutching and left a
haze of dust which slowly slid off through the leaves to one side of
the road.

Back at his tent, Luke put his
face against the white towel. There had been that moment, unaffected
by memory or loss, in which he'd felt the woman as woman, that faint
but immediate proprietary urge. She was a nut, of course, and the
name, Sturgis, bothered some wispy, possibly recent memory. Her
husband, the "case," was in the past tense, whatever that
meant. Divorce, prob­ably; she had that life-peened look about
her, and he could sym­pathize with the husband. In any case, she
was gone.

As the sun was about to touch
the side of the mountain a cool wave climbed up from the valley to
surge invisibly over him. He put on a jacket and made himself a
drink, then sat on a kitchen chair in front of the tent to watch the
light diminish. Tomorrow he would get up soon after light and do all
the cutting of trees and brush Eph Buzzell wanted done, which
shouldn't take more than the morning. In the afternoon he would turn
in the station wagon and take possession of a new and sweet-smelling
truck, mail his letters, possibly get others. He didn't want letters.

A small tingle went down his
legs from his crotch, a small charge of static electricity, as though
his nerves were slightly over­loaded. He had no woman. Several
times, in dreams, he'd spoken with Helen, though in the dreams they
both knew that she was dead—that strange slippage of logic that
always happened in dreams. He couldn't now remember what they'd said
to each oth­er, but there she'd been, looking at him and saying
things, though she was dead.

It seemed to him now, not
dreaming, that it was all right for men to die, but women should
not—illogic without dream. Words, words. He had come here to
do, not to think of words.

He was hungry, but that urge
seemed gross to him; what he re­ally wanted was a chance to make
everything all right with Helen, to have his children safe, in safe
harbor, Helen's face like the sun.

He drank too much bourbon, his
excuse the long waning of the light after the sun had gone. He wore
the pistol. The two did not seem compatible. What he ought to do was
shoot the next fucking son-of-a-bitch, male, female, human or animal,
that came along this road. Or at least shoot in the air a few times
and scare the piss out of them, warn them off.

Except for certain violent
episodes in his life he had been too passive, it seemed to him now.
Passively he'd interviewed and studied the wild or famous, the
sorrowing or exulting members of his race, they living, he observing;
they outrageous or pompous or whatever they wanted to be, he taking
notes. Or as an editor, more passive still, dealing with writers,
photographers, designers, printers and the ones who bought in order
to profit more, all of them doing, making, risking, considering
themselves more vital than he, and probably right. Passively he'd let
people take advan­tage of him, let Ron Sevas take over the
magazine long ago. Pas­sively he'd let his family die, and taken
himself to bed with his booze and not a peep out of him. He could
write the article about the deaths we find so mildly thrilling but
the whole thing seemed so obvious it bored him. Of course this and of
course that. The assholes always wanted to read what they already
thought they knew. By assholes, read the whole asshole race. And one
more thing; we are not fit to have too much time to think. Our
ambi­tions should always be simple. The best of these is to
starve and want food, or to freeze and want heat.

Craving nothing, he despaired,
drank bourbon and pointed his pistol at the shadows.

Somehow he must have gotten into
his cot and gone to sleep, or whatever unconscious state it was.
Morning light, or moonlight, found him awake. Moonlight; it was one
in the morning by his watch. At the flashlight's beam and spot
crossing the tent wall, Jake got up from his bed of grass, his
night-green eyes search­lights themselves, and came to the head
of the cot to lick with his warm dog's tongue the face and hands of
his chosen. Decisions were indeed made by others.

Eph Buzzell called him "Sonny"
until he found that Luke could operate the great Mack dump truck.
First, using the cherry picker on the logging truck, they set the
maple logs into the dirt at the abutments, axed off a few uneven
places and spiked on the elm planks, Eph's two-pound hammer whacking
the spikes in with as much authority as Luke's four-pounder. The only
thing that seemed to bother Eph at all was his knees when he had to
kneel, or when he tried not to kneel; he didn't know which was worse,
he said. He didn't talk much while they were working.

When the crude bridge was
finished they took the logging truck back up to the farmyard and Luke
had to ride on top of the cab of the dump truck with his chain saw,
cutting off high limbs that might break the windshield or the running
lights and bend the outside mirrors. The big red dump truck was new
and unbattered and had cost around thirty thousand dollars, so Eph
was a little more careful with it. Luke thought it an honor when Eph
ran the rubber-tired loader at the gravel pit and let him drive the
dump truck up and down the road, letting the gravel sift as he raised
and lowered the dump bed. "Sonny" became "Sir "
and then, finally, when the road was in good shape and they were
figuring out where to dig the cabin's cellar hole, "Luke."
George Bateman turned up about that time, too, so they all conferred.

Eph was a tall old man with a
belly that hung out only in front, his belt and suspenders set high
above his belly. From front or back, in profile, he looked like an
inverted pyramid; only from the side did his hanging sack of guts
show his age. He was bald to the top of his head, one saw when he
shifted his white cotton painter's cap, and wispy white hair fell
from there back down to his collar. His eyes were crinkles of cracked
gray ice, bright and at first very cold.

George, as if in respect, became
more silent and gruff around Eph. Tillie, who had waited in the cab
of whatever truck hadn't been in use, came down to the lower pasture
for the discussion about the cabin's cellar hole, though she said
nothing. She was a tall, craggy woman in her sixties who wore a blue
work shirt and bib overalls—a mark, Luke supposed, of her
independence, or strangeness.

The loader's diesel engine idled
patiently. With its loader buck­et on one end and its backhoe
curled like the ovipositor of a giant insect on the other, it seemed
a huge yellow live thing, but calm and obedient enough. Eph could run
its clutches and hydraulics while looking elsewhere, his large
mottled hands moving surely from knob to knob across spaces he didn't
bother to see.

"Luke," Eph said in
his high, youthful voice, "where do you see this camp of yours?"

"Right about there,"
Luke said.

"Ayuh," Eph said.
"That little rise there. Ayuh."

George looked stern and said
nothing.

"What do you think,
George?" Luke said.

"Colder down in the valley.
Kind of a cold pocket down here, you know."

"I don't care about that.
With your advice I'm going to build this place snug and dry."

"Kind of far from the road,
though, ain't it?" George said.

"Well, I want that, too."

"Looks like the boy's made
up his mind, George," Eph said, laughing. Hearing the smooth
laughter, Luke thought how close to death Eph must be. In their
wrinkled green uniforms both he and George looked like veterans of
some long-disbanded army, one that had a code of conduct he wasn't
quite sure of. He won­dered if either of them believed he had the
knowledge, the skills and the industry to build what he said he
wanted to build.

Tillie had brought cups and a
large thermos of lemonade down with her so while the loader idled
they drank and discussed drain­age, cellar walls, footings,
waterproofing, the necessity for a cellar in the first place,
bulkheads, windows, vents, the insulating value of earth—sand,
clay, loam, gravel, hardpan; here, where the brook had worked across
the narrow valley since the last ice age, the subsoil would be
largely gravel, with plenty of rocks and boul­ders.

Should he build forms and pour
the foundation walls, use ce­ment block, or stone?

"Not stone," George,
the stonemason, said. "For your footings you want concrete or
cement block."
Foot-ins,
George pronounced the word.

The lemonade was the taste of
Luke's childhood. He wondered if he had ever liked it, or if it were
a potion that had simply been there, like iodine, or calamine lotion.
Now it was mixed with nos­talgia, whether he wanted to remember
or not. These people were of older generations in which his relatives
had lived and died. Eph had referred to him as a "boy," and
now he was an apprentice to their years. It was good, only good. It
had been so long since he was a student. He would build well, partly
to please them. They might not approve of some of his dimensions, or
even materials, but he would work hard to make them approve of his
joinings.

They cut saplings to sight upon,
white blazes in the dark bark of pin cherries, and measured the hole
Eph then dug with both ends of the loader. Large boulders, three or
more feet in diameter, Eph pushed in among the spruce on the north
side, where the years would gray them into the shadows.

This cabin would work. It
wouldn't leak, cellar or roof or chim­ney. His house in
Wellesley, planned by an architect and built by professionals, leaked
chronically in all three places. An east wind, with rain, even a
small buildup of ice at the chimney cricket, or a soaking rain of any
kind, and the house wept in its joints and in­visible channels,
around the edges of flashing—maybe by osmosis, God knew. Both
Ham Jones and the buyer, Clifford Ruppert, knew of it, but the leaks
were small and seemed normal enough to them. They never had to him. A
house should not leak. Wood and water did not mix and for once in his
life he was not going to ac­cept a compromise.

But how much were the
complications of the material and tech­nical, when it came to
actually building, changing his desire for a wooden cabin and a warm
fire? Plastic, asphalt, steel, mastic, sili­cone, copper,
fiberglass (for the toilet, a system called a Clivus Multrum),
triple-glazed glass, circuit breakers, pumps, resistance coils, solar
collectors and emergency generators; were these part of his romantic
vision of a solitary man in "a crag of a wind-grieved Apennine"?
Yes. He knew how cold it could get, how the frost crept in and broke
pipes and bottles, froze ink, turned oil to cement, canned goods into
mush, split flashings and let in the rot. What we knew, we used. If
he built an outer wall of stone, he would build it of two faces with
four inches of styrene insulation in the middle, the faces held
together at intervals by hidden steel bolts. If he wanted for some
reason to leave the cabin for more than a week or so in the middle of
the winter, he would turn a few valves, empty two or three traps,
store his perishables in a special­ly insulated basement room
that utilized from below the unfreez­ing constant heat of the
earth itself. This cabin was where he would live, and maybe, if this
joy continued, where he might even work. He wanted right now to be
sweating, smelling clean wood as he shaped the skeleton of his house,
wired into it its arteries. The winter sun would enter a great
southern window to heat an inter­nal wall of stone that would
also contain chimney flues, so the wall would be heated from within
and from without, forming a reser­voir of warmth. At night, or
when the sun was not visible, insulat­ed internal shutters would
close the window off.