The Followed Man (42 page)

There was another dangerous
thing going on at the Sturgis house. He could smell it, divine it
with the most primitive sense, the one that was never wrong when it
nosed the primitive. Maybe Coleman was more than a little suicidal
himself. He remembered the metal sheen of Lester's wife's red hair,
her soiled clothes and her pale skin, but mainly the fear of Lester
that had made her ap­pear stupid.

There among the dying elms were
the dead and wounded cars, the detritus of a battle or a flood, and
the pink and blue trailer be­neath its stilted second roof, like
the wreck of the Burlington Ze­phyr, or some once glittering
streamlined wonder, windows fash­ioned into parallelograms
signifying speed. The V-8 engine still sat in its oil on the ground.

When he turned off his engine he
heard the murmur of televi­sion and a child's high, gasping
whine, a lament that sounded practiced and tired. He wished he had
gone to George and Phyllis first, and discussed with them his coming
here, but that would have been a weakling's attempt to gain courage.
He wasn't a child, but he didn't want to knock on the metal door. His
pistol, that tool of the simpleminded, was in its place under the
dash. It all de­pended upon what world within a world he was
about to enter.

He went up to the door. There
was a doorbell but its square, cream colored button was stuck flat
into its orifice as if by the thumb-grease of generations. He knocked
on the tinny door, the sour stench of poverty flowing from its brown,
tinted jalousies.

The frame of the trailer shook
as steps came to the door, and as the door opened upon not much but
the big body of Lester Wil­son, in green chinos, Lester's voice
blared back into the trailer a word, or words, that Luke thought at
first foreign, or inner trailer language:
"Shunnerap!"
Harsh, strangled language Luke figured out, he thought, to mean,
"Shut her up." Then the big head turned down toward Luke,
almost the deadly, sclerotic, smooth-bristled, stupid bully of a
child's nightmares. The lips were wet where the teeth were missing or
rotten, and there were shoals of black dots of stubble, but not many
yet, for the fellow was only in his twenties. "What do you
want?" he said, with some emphasis on the "you." He
stood there to intimidate what was on his doorstep, his eyes too
bleary for his age, his green belly soiled.

"I want to buy your dog
from you," Luke said. Again, because there might be a real
reason to fear this man, Luke could not keep a countering disdain out
of his voice.

"You want to what?"—to
make Luke repeat himself.

"I want to buy your dog. He
seems to want to stay at my place, and. . . ."

"He 'seems to want'? What
fucking dog you talking about? I suggest you twirl your ass around
and get along home."

"I'll be glad to do that,
but I want to get this business straight first. You know what I'm
talking about."

"You giving me some lip,
mister?"

"Jesus," Luke could
not keep himself from saying. "Do you live like this all the
time?"

"What's that you said?"

It had been so many years since
these youthful wells of adrenalin had been tapped. What a dance it
was, the tarantella of violence! He could say, then Lester would say,
then he could say, and soon they would cleanly transcend the
compromises of civili­zation. Lester was not wearing his
revolver, but for authority he would be the police, and his property
was in question. Luke would have the possible beating of that
property, the dog, who had cer­tain vaguely specified rights,
too, but mainly Luke would have middle class, landowner, old family
status; the prior discussion would have to be violent enough to cause
amnesia on both sides before the action became primordial, but that
could happen, if Luke wanted it to happen. He didn't want it to
happen, and so he controlled himself in order to be in control.

He said, "Just to get it
all straightened out, the dog's name is Jake, and I'm offering you a
hundred dollars for him. I brought him back to you once, but he
didn't choose to stay. I have wit­nesses to say I brought him
back to you." If the man could, or would, listen, Luke could
choose his own weapons, which would be words fashioned into plausible
lies. He went on, "As you may know, the animal's volition in
this matter is a small but valid point of law, and in any case it
remains a civil matter. The dog, however, was later beaten, a fact
documented in the records of the Leah Veterinary Hospital, and this
matter is not civil, but a case in tort, or criminal law, animals
having certain rights generally espoused by the ASPCA and written
into the codes having to do with hu­mane treatment. Of course you
may not have actually beaten the dog, but a beating did take place,
and given your general reputa­tion, as I understand it, a
prima
facie
inference would certainly ex­ist. However, I'm willing
to ignore all that, not press charges, and in fact buy the dog from
you."

"You going to stay around
here after I told you to git?" Lester said, but he had been
gravely touched.

Luke saw it so clearly, and had
seen it so many times, how the essentially powerless feared the word.
Lester was a bully and a brute, but he had only a minor clientele, in
a small circle of hell. It would be so much more honorable to hit
Lester with a fist. It was disgusting, boring; how could he have ever
considered Lester Wil­son a real danger, or have been so angry at
the beating of a dog?

"Who says I beat up a dog?"

"No one; the fact remains
that the dog was so badly beaten he had to be taken to a veterinary
hospital for treatment. That is a fact; the rest, as the law would
imply, is a presumptive inference." What a fluent liar he was.
He could see that Lester suspected that he was being had, but didn't
quite dare to call.

"None of your goddam
business what happens to my dog. Now you move your ass out of here
and take your money with you. I'll get my dog back when and how I
feel like it!"

How poor, that "when and
how," and how stupid of Lester to try to fight with words.

Ten minutes later they sat in
the trailer's kitchen, at the chrome-legged Formica table, the
kitchen grimily polished where hands and feet had travelled it, a
jade plant strangling on the counter beside the sink, diapers fuming
in a corner. Through an archway could be seen a torn red sofa bed, a
figured carpet, the pink-green-blue cyanotic faces of television and
a pale child; a baby cried somewhere down there.

Lester had no doubt decided out
of caution, which was a sort of fear, to trim and deal. He may have
suspected that to Luke the money was shit, a small purse tossed to a
peasant. Tense joviality did not become him, and even he would be
afraid that he might give the impression of groveling before his
better. They discussed the size and number of trout in Zach Brook.
Luke made out a bill of sale for the dog and Lester pretended to
gloat inwardly over the high price by saying too many times what a
good rabbit dog Luke had there. He had a beer opened already, and he
opened one for Luke.

"Lots of deer up there,
too, though the dog ain't one to run deer. Building yourself a camp,
I hear. You got yourself a good deer rifle? I got one I bought at the
State auction, Marlin .35 Rem. Sell it to you cheap. Fish and Game
took it off some deer jacker last year."

Luke thought about this offer;
if Lester could think he got the best of it in a matter unrelated to
the dog, one in which he hadn't any reason to suspect he'd been
manipulated, it might be helpful when the resentment flared again, as
it would.

Lester got the rifle from a
corner, where it and several other guns leaned, wiped the kitchen
dust from it with his hand, and handed it to Luke. It was fairly new,
with only a little superficial rust from sweaty hands. It was lever
action, with iron sights and a leather sling. Luke opened it, put his
finger in the breech and looked down the barrel at the light
reflected from his finger. The rifling seemed good.

"Ninety dollars,"
Lester said, "and I'll throw in a box of shells, five missing
from the box of twenty."

The last time Luke had to
research commercial rifles was sever­al years ago, but even then
this rifle, with the extra sights, sling and sling hardware, would
have cost more than that. So if he bought it he would have a bargain
anyway, especially with the fifteen shells, each worth about a
quarter.

"Sold," he said. He
made Lester a check on the Leah Trust Company, and wrote, "Rifle,
Marlin Mod. 336" on the bottom of the check.

Lester said, "You got a
good buy. Got the new Microgroove rifl­ing, you know. You're
going to like the way she shoots." He folded the check and put
it in his breast pocket. Now there would be, hopefully, some genuine
triumph in it for him.

As Luke was leaving with his
rifle and box of shells, the yellow Dodge rumbled up outside. At the
door he met the young red-haired woman whom Coleman Sturgis had
called Claire. She was astounded to see him, and flustered. Her white
face seemed grimy with a kind of general abuse, ghost bludgeonings.
She lowered her head without speaking and went into the trailer.
Lester, standing large in the kitchen, looked steadily at her, saying
noth­ing as she went past him.

Luke sat in the Sturgises' long
living room with a too-dark bour­bon and water in his hand.
Coleman was both drinking and smok­ing. Luke had taken a couple
of drags from the fat yellow joint Coleman had made, then said he
didn't need any more. As Cole­man spoke he held the joint in
sterling silver roach tweezers.

"To tell you the truth,
Luke, though it might not sound too brotherly, Louise has begun to
bore me with her drills, so to speak. I love her dearly and all that,
but the constant repetition of sheer panic somewhat dulls one's
edge." He took a long drag on the joint, held it with eyes and
cheeks bulging, then seemed to hold it for a second long breath, or
non-breath, before he let out a diminished gray wisp. "By the
way," he said, "what business had you with the loathsome
Lester?"

Luke explained about the dog,
and said he'd finally bought him. "I gave Lester some
pseudo-legal doubletalk, accused him of beating the dog beyond what
the law allows, and finally he let me buy him for about four times
what he's worth."

"And did he beat the dog?"

"Oh, yes. With a baseball
bat or a two-by-four. Lucky he didn't kill him. But dogs are pretty
tough critters."

"A violent man,"
Coleman said, and his eyes flicked to Luke's.

Maybe Coleman needed a
confidant. He remembered when he'd felt the same. Once he'd always
had, it seemed, a good friend to whom he could confide things, nearly
anything. He'd had Hel­en, too, depending upon the nature of the
thing to be confided. But now he had no one. Everyone he knew seemed
flawed, dan­gerous, too interested or needful, and so he kept
things to him­self, like a plotter. Whatever had happened to his
equals, his friends, except that they were gone to far places and
age? That was enough, that was enough.

Coleman was about his age, but
aware.

"I gather, as they say,"
Coleman said, "that you smelled a rat this afternoon. I
shouldn't say, 'a rat,' though. What should I say? That I was,
indeed, alone here with Miss Claire—Mrs. Wilson—and so
on. You may read it that I like to live dangerously."

"I suspected something like
that," Luke said. Coleman was wearing dark slacks, loafers, a
white shirt open at the collar, and he seemed quite dapper and jaunty
in the face of his danger. Luke wondered how he had so easily left
the subject of Louise, whose situation, repetitious or not, didn't
seem all that casual. But this was Coleman's drama, not Louise's and
Coleman had from the first struck him, with that winsome, watery look
that peered around as if for credit, if not for praise, as a little
boy.

"You might well ask how I
dared to get involved with the young wife of such a violent man, and
I'd have to answer that I think it's utterly insane, dangerous and
doomed. But Claire, strange Claire, is more than she seems."

"Most people are,"
Luke said.

"Not necessarily. Perhaps
if you'd been a teacher for sixteen years, as I've been, you'd come
to realize how repetitive the gene pool actually is, in everything
from hair color and handwriting to the distribution of adipose tissue
and analogical thought patterns.

"But Claire—how
interesting it was when I first saw that though she was terrified of
me by definition, because I was a man, she did have submerged needs
that hadn't been destroyed by her experiences. At twelve, and
thereafter, she was raped by a brother. Her father beat her mother
bloody with whatever came to hand, in­cluding split stove wood.
There was no romance, tenderness or even seduction involved in her
marriage to Lester. She can barely read or do simple arithmetic. She
knows little about the household arts, such as hygiene, medicine,
nutrition, anatomy or sex. We had to teach her many of the simple
chores she comes here once a week to do. Television itself is quite
often a mystery to her, its jokes and simple ironies over her head.
What she sees on the screen are moving images, seeming alive and
energetic but essentially motiveless.

"Physically she was given
that garish hair that makes her look, in some lights, almost
artificial, and with it eyes as clear, green and simple as emeralds.
Many so-called red heads have unfortunate skin—freckles,
coarseness, bristles—but hers is that rare, pure white that
comes as close as any Occidental skin to deserve that ad­jective.
Because of a lack of the proper exercise and horrendous nutrition she
has a protuberant belly that hasn't and won't recover from the trauma
of two pregnancies, but it, too, accented by her gaudy orange pubic
hair, is white. One thinks of snow, of per­cale—no, more of
a satin, or even velvet, there being on that skin an infinitesimal
velour. The bluish to green bruises caused by Lester are the only
flaws in this admirable dermis, and they of course come and go."