The Followed Man (34 page)

"I feel grateful you let
me," he said.

"You don't think the little
bitch
needs
a big prick in her?"

"You're pretty bitter."

"You should have known my
husband, not to mention the other emotional cripples that came
after."

"Why did you finally get
divorced?"

"I don't think I want to
talk about it. Maybe sometime, if you ever want to come back."

"I'll come back. We're
neighbors."

She gave a twisting yawn and
stretch, took him briefly in her mouth and then kissed his belly.
"God, I hope so. I'm so full, I'm just sloshing with your gism.
See, I'm crazy and truthful at the same time, and I never wait for
anything, so I scare people half to death. Aren't you scared of me?
Don't say anything. Sooner or lat­er you'll think I'm a crazy
neurotic grubby-colored bitch who's too ambivalent about sex, life or
anything else. I know."

She did have a talent, whether
self-destructive or self-protec­tive, for modulating tenderness,
or for suddenly changing its en­vironment. He held her, and she
pleased him beyond the thoughts she kept pushing at him. But don't
ignore the thoughts, he told himself, sad that they couldn't have the
same thoughts.

When he entered her again she
was like silk.

They got up at dawn and made
breakfast, talking about her stu­dio and her work. She had been
an art major at Smith, but not in ceramics; should she use fiberglass
or foam insulation on the barn ceiling? She liked to work hard, that
was one thing she could do. She could turn out the finished
commercial stuff in bulk, then fool with experiments, glazes and
designs. Their talk was businesslike, and he didn't know if she
really wanted it that way or not. Should he, when the time came, say
so long, see you, and leave? When the time came, shortly after they
heard Coleman groaning awake up­stairs, he put his hands
underneath her bathrobe on her buttocks and pulled her against him.
"Will you come back?" she asked. "When?"

"Tonight, if you want,"
he said.

"You don't want to, do you?
That's too soon—isn't it?"

"No."

"Yes. You want to do your
solitary thing up there on the moun­tain. Listen. You know you've
never said my name to me and I've never said yours to you? That's
right."

"If I come tonight will you
be here?"

"I'll be here and in heat,
but don't come tonight. I don't want you to come tonight. I really
mean it!" Her strange eyes were a lit­tle mad. He kissed her
on the lips and left.

He drove his pleasing truck up
the mountain, alone, feeling beautifully light, empty of all the
fluids and pressures she had re­lieved him of, and guilty that it
had been so natural to take her, the strange woman not his wife. With
the guilt, the unreasonable and unlegal guilt, he wondered if she had
used some sort of con­traceptive. Maybe the pill—he didn't
know and hadn't thought to mention the subject. The subject was
connection and responsi­bility, and the ghost was a small,
demeaning fear.

By the middle of July the
mosquitoes were rare, the blackflies had lost their aggressiveness,
and only now and then a deerfly, slow and easy to kill against his
head when it landed, came to irri­tate him at his work.

The old farmhouse, sheds and
barn were gone, the cellar hole and barn foundations now set like
prehistoric stones in smooth new grass that waved at their bases in
the wind. Four new poles took the power line down the hill to the
valley and his cabin site. Marple & Son had set forms and poured
his footings, all plumb­ing and waterproofing were done, and with
his new farm tractor, called a Kubota, Luke had pushed back the soil
so that the cabin, as it grew, would sit more pleasingly upon the
land, its back to the north and the heavy spruce. The mountain rose
to the west, seem­ing one long slope until, in certain kinds of
weather, mist defined the many ridges and depressions that cut
between the valley and the bald granite peak.

His tent was now set up near the
cabin. Under electric light in the evenings he drew his plans,
changed them, improving the not yet existent spaces of his cabin,
trying to feel those spaces through the two-dimensional of paper,
pencil and rule. It was something he had been good at in his life—to
see shapes where blankness or bland solidity hid them, or in the dark
to find a wall, drawer or doorway.

Or the parts of women. He had
seen Louise Sturgis several times, until a week ago when she had
discovered, or treated it as a discovery, that he had arranged
somehow to see her exactly twice a week. He didn't think it was that
precise, and hadn't thought it deliberate on his part, but she
accused him of using her, as she said men had always used her, to
relieve an urge that was to them as self-centered as evacuation. He
didn't think that was true, ei­ther, and he didn't think she
thought it true. He wanted to be fond of her; she said that she loved
him and then, perhaps with the cold insight of the mad, wounded his
ability to love her. They could never think in harmony; her surprises
were always jarring. He thought it her fear of trusting him. Last
week, before ordering him to put on his clothes and go, she had been
near orgasm, he easing her and in his mind a smooth clarity in which
she was per­fect; he loved her joy and the nearly painful little
pullings and cracklings of nerves he felt in her, in her nearness to
release. Then she went limp, dead still, and then cried long sobs
mixed with hiccups. "Why are you crying?" he asked. "You
prick, you're trying to make me love you, aren't you?" she said.
"So get the hell out of here! Now! Go!"

And so he left, but not until he
was certain that she meant it and it wasn't just a test. But he left
with a phrase in his head, which he said aloud out by his truck.
"That is a crazy lady, Luke Carr. Watch out, old buddy."
The phrases were sane, true, and sad. Gone was some transcendent mood
or other, something high and pure that now seemed ridiculous. So she
had gone to California, Coleman told him, for a couple of weeks at
least, to visit an old girlfriend.

He mixed his mortar in a small,
rented electric cement mixer, sifted his sand, added the gray, floury
cement, then some mason­ry cement and then the precise amount of
water so that the muck would be plastic enough to hold on the
vertical. His trowel became a skillful extension of his hand, and
little by little the interior wall grew, a very few square feet of
facing each day. He spent much of the time staring at and into
stones, turning them over and over in his hands, heavy stones, some
of them, that weighed nearly a hun­dred pounds. His arms and
shoulders grew bulky and taut, and hard muscles appeared in his
abdomen, symmetrical rises and depressions he hadn't seen since his
school athletic days. His gloves kept wearing out at the fingertips,
then his skin, so that heat and rough textures were painful. But the
wall grew toward the floor level, where it would be visible in his
living spaces.

He picked up his mail whenever
he found that he needed mate­rials and had to drive to the
lumberyard or to Follansbees' in Leah. There had been no new letter
from the Avenger. Martin Troup wanted him to come to New York at
Gentleman's
expense and talk about the article on death and
building, or at least call and talk about it, and why in hell didn't
he have a telephone?

Jake was gone for three days,
then came back limping badly, a tooth broken, a bare abrasion on his
head and a round lump on his ribs, the size of an orange, Luke first
thought a herniated intestine. Jake had come slowly up to him where
he was sifting sand into his wheelbarrow, Jake's tail down and curled
under his belly, standing awkwardly, hangdog and as if ashamed. Luke
soon found the bruises and then read in Jake's eyes that he should
help him, that it was up to him to do something. Jake yelped in pain
as he lifted him up into the cab of the truck. He took him to a
veteri­nary hospital in Leah, where the vet diagnosed the lump as
a bad bruise full of fluid that would be reabsorbed. It wasn't a dog
fight, the vet said, because there were no canine tooth punctures or
cuts. Either the dog had been hit and his stretched skin run over by
a car, or someone had beaten him with something like a baseball bat.

The vet at first thought Luke
must be Lester Wilson, from the tag on Jake's collar. He was a young
man just recently come to the area. "Heartworm is here now,"
he said. "Has he been tested for it? A few years ago they never
saw a case up here, but it's coming north." So Luke had the vet
take some of Jake's blood and test him for heartworm, and when the
test was negative bought seven dollars worth of preventive pills.
Jake weighed thirty-five pounds, so he'd have to take half a pill
each day with his food. "It's really serious here now," the
vet said. "We've had four dogs with it this summer. Two died.
After they get it the heart's so full of worms if you kill the worms
too quickly you kill the dog." The disease, he said, was
transmitted by mosquitoes.

Luke looked at Jake who, though
sick with his aches and bruises, trembled with well-mannered
nervousness about being at the veterinary hospital among too many
distant yips, mews, growls and strong odors. His coat had turned
waxy, and stank about twice as strongly of dog as it did on the
mountain. Jake be­longed to Lester Wilson; it said so right on
his collar. Was it Lester Wilson who had beaten him up? No way of
knowing. And now Luke would be giving him medication along with the
food he probably shouldn't be giving him, so he would have to
confront Lester Wilson again, one way or another.

He paid the vet's secretary and
went back to the mountain, Jake a little sedative-logy and content to
curl up on the seat. Whatever choices had been given to Jake in his
dog's world had evidently been made. Unfortunately Luke hadn't been
given much of a choice. He'd never thought of having a dog now.
They'd had a springer for seven years as the kids grew up, a dull
good dog who was killed by a car. He didn't want a dog. With this
thought came guilt because he really had enjoyed having Jake around
with his ears and nose, his specialized and undemanding intelligence.

So he put the question off and
went back to work. Let Lester Wilson come up here and complain. Of
course, maybe Lester had already come up and collared Jake; maybe
that accounted for the three-day disappearance. Maybe Lester had
taken him back to that rickety shed next to his trailer and beaten
him with a baseball bat. For how long? How many blows?

In this life one could rarely be
sure of things like that. Maybe Jake had been bothering a bitch in
heat, and the owner had run him off with a baseball bat, or he had
been partly run over; a bea­gle could practically turn around
inside his own skin, and a car tire could have pinched out that
orange-sized lump, the bumper, muffler, tie rod or rear-end housing
having shaved and battered his head.

Jake lay in the grass nearby,
still too sick to go off on his rounds, moving a little as the sun's
turning rearranged his shade. Luke built his wall. The valley
whispered in a light wind and the brook spoke and hissed faintly from
down across the field by the eastern hill. In the dry, even warmth of
the July day it seemed the most peaceful, meaningful and benevolent
place in the world. Luke found a stone that was a near perfect
cornerstone, a gift. It was gray, like frozen flannel, with opaque
white felspar squares set in it. It seemed to weigh little in his
hands, though it weighed nearly thirty pounds. His arms were a smooth
reddish brown flecked with dried splashes of gray mortar. Holding the
stone easily in one hand he made a soft bed of mortar for it, knew
just the pebble that would tilt it correctly, set it into its place
and placed mortar around it. Each stone was important not just for
itself but for the as yet unfound stones it would support. He had to
think ahead and upward, into nothing but the clear vertical spaces he
would slowly build through.

At five-thirty in the afternoon,
more tired than he'd thought, he dropped a stone on his foot, the
pain so sudden and commanding he could not move for a while. His
whole left leg was so weak he had to stand and let the pain pass at
its own speed—a feeling so momentous it was like a close call
with death. He was tired, just physically tired, but he'd built a
section three by four by two, a cu­bic rectangle of sturdy (when
it took its first set), respectable ada­mantine bloody wall. His
foot was not broken, or even badly bruised. He was so familiar with
his using body now he knew that kind of thing at once. Tomorrow he
would hardly notice the resi­dual soreness.

He took a towel and soap and
crossed the brushy pasture to the brook pool. He'd cut down alders
and pincherries so the after­noon sun could come into the pool
and its banks, making the rushing water and the boulders a warm
golden room in the green, columned hall of leaves the brook followed.
Taking off his boots, socks and dungarees seemed, out of doors, in
this active and sigh­ing place, like sexual preparation. His
feet, on the unstable organ­ic earth—lichens, hemlock
needles, roots, parts of insects left in molt, the paths of
salamanders, white mushrooms being eaten by orange, shell-less
snails—were a tender part of all the miniature violence and
life they touched. Tender in feeling yet strong from labor, his newly
tightened body gave him a small narcissistic thrill that eased him
into the cold water. He arched his chest against the thudding pushes
of the water beneath the chute and felt the openness of his skin to
this astounding new element, his anus licked by cold fingers at his
ribs and scrotum. He grew a numbed, looping, partial erection. Long
ago he and Helen had made love just here in the buffeting water, one
warm summer night. Maybe it had been here, underwater, that Johnny
had been conceived; he'd always swum like a fish.