The Followed Man (4 page)

The cab made feints at
everything it jumped at—warnings like the nasty showing of
teeth before it jerked back into its minimal and always threatened
margins. Every part of the cab was bent, dented, tarnished with grime
so deep and chemical its shabbiness seemed etched into the metal and
cracked plastic. A prisoner of this careening madness, Luke squeezed
the faintly slimy edges of his seat with both hands.

At Broadway they left the cab,
the paying and tipping of the driver a process at once mechanical and
sad, the driver himself suddenly sighing and pensive, like a man who
had just returned from some necessary yet rued brutality.

And now, here at "The
Crossroads of the World," as a tempo­rary sign on an
uncompleted skyscraper proclaimed, Luke stood with Robin Flash on the
gritty sidewalk open to a clamor that was constant and frantic.
Unmuffled compressor engines roared and stopped; donkey engines,
roaring yet stationary, were unlike the constantly nudging and then
sprinting traffic; a fat man, bare to the waist, wearing a red hard
hat too small for his head, pounded insanely on an I beam with a
sledgehammer as if he wanted noth­ing less than its
destruction—the deep, shimmering gong of metal on metal that
hurt deep into the spine.

Across Broadway was the building
of the accident, still all I beams and trusses and open floors, going
up forever into the realm of screaming vertigo. The air seemed the
color of sand, the insane verticality of the skyscraper false as a
picture; yet men moved up there, and upon the thin threads of crane
and derrick cables horrendous tonnages of steel rose turning over the
un­protected streets. He saw that all the noise, the brutal
energy ex­pended here, was being expended on impermanence, on
process, and he thought of a hive of wasps in late summer, when the
queen goes mad or dies, and the workers build insanely, without plan,
while the center rots and the hive itself grows outward in grandi­ose
but useless bulges and tumors.

On the next block battering
rams, balls of solid iron, turned ma­sonry into curves before the
bricks fell five stories, spreading huge spinnakers of yellow dust.
Everything was shooting up, plummet­ing down. There was no level,
no calm horizon; in this world the perpendicular had run amok.

On the island in the middle of
the metallic and gaseous avenue a young black man stood shaking with
rage, his arms flailing out in oratorical paroxysms, his mouth moving
as he screamed his ar­guments at everything in general—but
no sound came out of his mouth. Who needed more sound? After a glance
or two he was ig­nored by those who passed.

A girl who sold ice cream from a
cart regarded her customers with langorous, stoned beatitude, her
hands moving always in slow motion. A blind man with a sign, "Do
You Thank God That You Can See?" moved slowly along, shaking his
tin cup and smil­ing gratefully—grateful in every
direction, to everybody out there in the light. At a movie theater on
the street where they stood the bill was, "Male Film
Festival—Pledge of Flesh—Male Nude Shorts." A woman
at least sixty-five years old minced by in mini­skirt, eye paint
of the deepest cerulean, a bouffant blond wig, pan­cake makeup
over the surface of the moon. She smiled and smiled, seeming so
wonderfully pleased by life, by her believed appearance of
desirability and youth. But many passed along mumbling and cursing to
themselves. Luke saw a man who had no mouth, or at least he couldn't
tell which tortured convolution of his face contained his mouth. And
here were more hookers, mod pimps, nodders. Sly window shoppers
stared impassively at the porno shops' illustrations—Band-Aided
crotches behind the glass. Everywhere were small, squashed-looking
businessmen in drab suits, men he thought must sell something vaguely
undignified, like urinal deodorant cakes. A well-dressed man in a
straw hat stared avidly up at the bulging masonry of the building
being de­stroyed. And for the nose and lungs there was the one
greeting, all others being mere variations, and it was the exhaust
gas of a million internal combustion engines.

"The Crossroads of the
World!" Robin said, spacing his half-shouted words between the
mad sledgehammer's gongs. "Any­way, now what? You want some
pictures of the building?"

Luke nodded.

"I want to set up a tripod
somewhere, and that's illegal without a permit, which I don't got. So
anyway, keep an eye out for the fuzz, okay? We just don't want to
attract a crowd." Robin, his leather boxes flying, suddenly ran
across the side street and backed up against a drugstore window. Luke
waited for the light and followed. Across Broadway the fatal
building's red steel gird­ers and beams clanged as workers
dragged and flopped wooden planks across an open floor several
stories up. At the base was a long orange semitrailer that was the
office, GERDE & FALCONE painted on its side. Wooden steps led
up to its rear door.

"We've got to go over there
and knock on that door," Luke said.

Robin was pulling out the legs
of a tripod. "Okay, but you do the talking. Those types don't
always like my type, if you know what I mean." He set up his
tripod, screwed a Nikon camera on it, took several pictures and then
changed lenses for some more, the camera now pointing up at the
rising steel. Next to the office trail­er a crane rocked slowly
and dangerously on its supporting tim­bers as it raised a long
and seemingly unbalanced beam, one man across the street trying to
guide its rotation with a line as narrow as clothesline.

It would be foolish to go over
there beneath that beam. In fact it was just as foolish to be here;
any of the hurrying, jerking cars and trucks and buses on this avenue
could at any moment jump the curb and smash him or anyone into the
glass among the vibrators, suppositories and sunglasses. But there
was another danger waiting over there, a greater one, and it was the
danger of anger. He had never taken anger well, and now he hadn't any
knowledge of his control, if he had any control at all. He didn't
have to do this. And if he did interview every person he could find,
and got them all to talk, what would he write?

Someone was looking at him.
Quickly he looked, then looked all around, at and beyond the passing
people. He saw no policeman. But someone's eyes had caught his and
his alone, just the intense, deep, choosing glance before they'd left
him. It seemed strange because none of the people seemed to know each
other, to look at each other, or if they looked momentarily at
another person there was the impression that it would take some
outrageous physical aberration to cause a second glance. Two heads,
or a third arm nakedly gesticulating from a sternum; or something as
odd as the young black man's silent screaming. But they would at
least un­derstand the reasons for that young man's behavior. To
Luke it seemed reasonable; he could write those unvoiced words—at
least in his own vernacular: Oh, you bastards, pricks, shits,
mother­fuckers, shit-eating murderers, look what has happened to
me, what has been done to me!

Luke himself could leave here;
he had the whole world to travel in, to rent, to partake of, but that
young man was a prisoner, was literally a prisoner of what he was and
what had happened to him. Tears he immediately scorned came into his
eyes.

When Robin had telescoped his
tripod into its leather box they crossed Broadway by way of the
island, where on a bench a boy of thirteen or so, his head shaved to
the ebony, nodded, leaned, nod­ded, leaned against an old
gray-faced woman with paper shop­ping bags between her knees. She
ignored the touch of the boy's thin shoulder.

At the wooden steps to the
trailer office Robin turned to him. "What are you going to say,
anyway? They're probably going to boot our asses out of there in
about twenty-one seconds."

"I don't know," Luke
said. "You got any ideas?"

"Me! All I do is go
click-click, man. I don't write the scenarios."

All around them moved the
frantic, unhappy energy of the city, its traffic, its builders and
destroyers. Robin looked up at him curi­ously. "It's a
living, right?" he said.

Luke felt himself smiling and
recognized that constriction of the face. It was one of the possible
reactions to incipient combat, mortal danger. But certainly the hard
hats were not going to kill either one of them. It was, however, as
unpleasant a prospect—he heard in his head the words, "as
unpleasant a prospect" and smiled harder, wanting to laugh
because he was terrified. He was more terrified than he had ever been
at the prospect of actual death by shell fragments or machine gun
fire, and maybe it was because he was home—this was his country
and he had lived in this city and these were his people. They were
not strangers at all, any of them, even the manipulators and moneymen
who were causing all of this. He thought quickly of suggesting to
Robin that they go to a nearby bar and have a drink and think it
over. No. He had to go here first and see what the initial, somewhat
official, reaction would be. Then he could take the names and
addresses supplied by Annie and see what had happened to those people
who were survivors and relatives. And all the time he was writing the
article in his head. The silently screaming black man would be in it,
yes; and the taxi driver, the ancient seductress in wig and
mi­niskirt, the mad sledgehammerer and the blind man.

"Let's go," he said to
Robin, just as a young ironworker passed them and went up the steps.
He was an Indian, from his looks, and just a boy, his brown face
round and plump, wearing horn­rimmed glasses that gave him a
scholarly look even in his hard hat. Luke followed him up the steps,
Robin coming along behind. The young Indian opened the door and went
in. Luke hesitated a moment, then knocked on the doorframe and went
in himself. The young Indian, an older man who was probably a
supervisor, and a younger man, all in hard hats, turned to look at
Luke and Robin.

In his nervousness Luke was
hardly aware of his words, but he said who they were and asked if
they could talk to the men and take some pictures.

The younger man, who wore chino
pants and a Marine shirt with a lance corporal chevron on one of the
sleeves, suddenly said,
"Gentleman!
You want to take a
picture of my ass?"—turned, bent over and presented his
gaunt, muscular rear end to them, a strange form of violence Luke
would think about.
Gentleman
had, he supposed, a risqué reputation from years back when it was a rather naughty magazine with
its airbrushed, long-legged but never nude cartoon girls. But the
young man's reaction had to be some kind of hysteria. Luke didn't
have time to sort out this inter­pretation, however, because the
supervisor's attitude was more explicit. His large red face, stubbled
with gray bristles, grew red­der in places, white in certain
wrinkled areas.

"I got a
buildnabuild!"
he yelled.

"Well, we know that,"
Luke said.

"I ain't authorized to let
nobody
on this job, you understand that?"

"Sure."

"Fuckin' ghouls, anyway,"
he said, turning away, dismissing them. He handed some papers to the
young Indian. "Joe Hayes your new pusher. Report to him."
Then, over his shoulder in a milder tone he said, "I can't talk
to nobody, neither. I can't keep you off the sidewalk and I can't
keep you from taking pictures or talking to the men on their lunch
breaks. But don't come on the job and bother me or nobody. We got a
buildnabuild.
You got that straight?"

"Sure," Luke said.
"Thank you."

The supervisor looked at Robin,
his nose and upper lip wrin­kling. "Shuh!" he said in
disgust.

So they left the trailer-office,
its impressions printed in Luke's mind. Relief to be leaving, of
course, but there were the piles of red hard hats in one corner, a
desk with sheaves of architectural drawings soiled all around their
edges, a dark corner with hot plate, a strange domestic corner with
lamp and chair. This was the real world, not what he and Robin would
seem to them—hobgoblins from
Gentleman.

But
Gentleman
meant
something powerful and fascinating to the men. At eleven-thirty when
the lunch breaks began, Luke and Robin stood on the sidewalk, Robin
taking all the pictures he wanted, Luke trying to talk to too many of
the men at once. The word had flown all over the job, vertically and
horizontally, that they were there. Soon Robin, with a wink, a shrug
and a crypto bump and grind, left crosstown for his assignation with
the giant­ess, and Luke was left trying to get names, titles and
the state­ments of the men written down in his spiral notebook.

They came on, at first, with a
kind of arrogance that almost amounted to shoving. Later he did feel
that he had been shoved up against the brick wall behind him, or that
his tie had been grasped in a fist as some of them spoke. But they
hadn't actually touched him. What did he want? they wanted to know. A
shop steward wanted to know what the hell a girly magazine wanted to
know about the construction the hell
for,
anyway. A connector,
down forty stories by vertical column, ladders and elevator, want­ed
to make sure Luke knew that it was a goddam dangerous job, but
somebody had to do it. Why couldn't they get insurance that didn't
cost more than the goddam payments on a car? You took your chance and
the pay was good and when you fell or a cable whipped your fucking
arm off or a column or a header or the fucking hooks squashed your
head it was good-bye and good luck, baby. It was a complicated
business and there were a thousand and three ways to kill a man on
the steel or down below.

"Never mind him,"
another man said. "He thinks he's Tarzan of the fucking Apes."
This was said with a certain amount of em­barrassment because the
first connector had come on so strongly about the dangers of the
profession. "I been connecting since he was a punk, and I still
got all my extremities."