The Followed Man (44 page)

"Would you turn out all but
one of the lights? Watts, volts, amps and such considerations,
right?" Freddie said. "We don't want poor Coleman to spend
the night alone. Get some food into the poor fellow and see if he can
hold it, bed him down at the Club for the night and let him sleep it
off. Then he can compose his apolo­gies, as usual. I'll make him
in the Jeep—knocked my muffler up today, did you hear it?
Outrageous noise. You follow in your truck, or if you want to spend
the night at the Club—plenty of room—you can come with us
and I'll spring your crack in the morning."

"Fink," Coleman said.
"Keep his pecker in his pants."

"Oh, shut up, Coleman,"
Freddie said patiently. "Awfully dis­traught about Louise.
Forgive the poor fellow."

"Pay-no-tention-poor-fellow,"
Coleman said, trying to imitate Freddie. "Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Usual garbage. Bullshit. Get me a beer. Won't go less I get a beer."

Luke went to the kitchen and got
two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, put one in his own pocket,
turned all the lights out except the one in the downstairs bathroom,
and followed them out to Freddie's Jeep, where Freddie folded
Coleman's long thin legs, one at a time, into the cab.

"Give him his little bottle
to suck," Freddie said, "and we'll be on our merry way."

"Bullshit," Coleman
said, accepting the bottle.

"Maybe I'd better be
getting back to my place," Luke said, but Freddie said, "Oh,
come on and have a drink, anyway. It's early." It was just about
to get dark.

He didn't know why he didn't go
back to his camp. It was Jake's usual feeding time, but Jake could
wait. Maybe he wanted to hear some more of Coleman's anger, but he
had to doubt that. He was still thinking about the Avenger, but was
he really looking for him? If Coleman were the Avenger, what would he
do then? Or do with Coleman? He thought of the tilted swamp maple in
the dank slough of woods and in a blink of vision the ground water
black among the trunks and boulders, silver in small streaks where it
reflected what seemed a very distant, unrelated sky.

He followed the Jeep around the
town square. The road to the Cascom Mountain Club left the high road
to Leah and went up the southern slopes of the mountain, so it was
several miles before they turned right and began to climb. His new
rifle began to rattle against a seat strut so he bent down to change
its position and nearly swerved off the gravel road, a small fright.
The Jeep's lights went on and he put on his own. He thought of
opening the beer, but then put it in the dash compartment to drink on
the way home—one for the road. He didn't know why he'd agreed
to fol­low Freddie, but maybe there had been an urgency in
Freddie's voice and in his expression, as if Freddie were really
saying, "I can't explain now, but it's important." If so,
what should he make of that? So he followed, prepared to be bored at
the Club and ea­ger to leave. He must be up at first light to
start roofing in his ca­bin.

Everyone he knew, it occurred to
him, the Jeep's tail lights winding in and out of sight ahead, was
old, mad or some kind of obvious freak. Except Jake. But they were
not; they were what they were, for bad or good, measurelessly
complicated, not defin­able. Maybe he was the simple one, his
sense of r.eality destroyed with his family.

But essentially, not to let this
word restrict all, what he was do­ing was a form of suicide,
because he was building his mausoleum, in which he would retire for
good, forever. No, he must depend only upon what he had learned from
experience, that reality be­fore words. He would kill anything
that threatened him there. He would have to, if it came to that,
because any animal had to pro­tect the place where its short
mortal blink of perception was, of the trees, the night odors of the
woods, the leaves that bowed and were suddenly green in his
headlights along the summer road.

After several more miles, then a
quarter mile of rocky, wash-boarded road, a section not kept up very
well by the town because the Cascom Mountain Club was non-profit and
paid only token taxes on its thousand acres, they came to the lodge
and parked next to several other cars in the graveled parking lot. A
lanterned light on a post illuminated the walk to the wide porch,
behind which yellow lights shone through the low, diamond-paned
win­dows of the old log building.

He had come here as a child with
Shem, to pick up swill for Shem's pigs. It had been one of several
stops for them. They would back around, up a driveway that must be
over there to the right, hand off an empty fifty-five-gallon drum,
then slide a full or partly full drum up a garbage-greased plank to
the bed of Shem's pickup, where it would be roped in place, the cover
clinched on firmly to prevent the slopping of the sweet, bitter-sour
stuff. Lat­er, when he helped Shem bucket the swill to the wooden
troughs in the pens, he would sometimes find a cheap bright knife,
fork or spoon, which would be added to the kitchen cutlery of the
farm—each a prize, wonderful to the child, like finding a
pearl.

The trees were not so thick,
then, and hadn't leaned in so fully over the lodge and across the
way. He had been proud of his high leather boots and farm-tanned
arms, helping with great and even nervous attention his uncle who
thought so much of him and was so fierce and expert about every task.

He followed Coleman and Freddie
into the lodge, where the walls were decorated with sunbursts of
antique skis, snowshoes, crampons, and ice axes. In a large stone
fireplace a small summer fire was like a bonfire seen at a distance
in a field at night. Down the long, gabled room with its log beams
was the dining area, with many long tables, and beyond that, through
open double doors, the brighter lights of a kitchen. Iron bridge
lamps stood around the room among cushioned easy chairs made of ash
with the bark left on, and bookcases that had once been light pine
but were now cured by smoke and age into the color of old leather,
all of them seemingly full of books with red covers faded into pink
and rose.

There were other people in the
room, the older ones regulars, members of the club and Freddie's old
acquaintances. A few tran­sients who were camping out nearby
stayed by themselves in another light island in one corner. Freddie
introduced him to the nearer people, who were tanned, city-outdoors
types, pleasant enough, whose names he would never recall. Coleman
went to the kitchen, came back with another bottle of beer and sat
with these people, morosely acknowledging what they said to him.

Then Freddie turned Luke around
to the younger ones, saying they were neighbors. Two men looked to be
in their late twenties or early thirties. They wore their hair to
their shoulders, one in a ponytail. One had a beard so pervasively
black and curly very little of his face showed, though what showed
seemed friendly. This one, whose name was Bob, introduced his wife, a
plump girl in Mother Hubbard and hiking boots, as Marcia. The other
man, whose name Luke hadn't caught, said that his wife was back in
the yurt babysitting for all. The other person was a slim, rather
short blonde girl who seemed familiar, so familiar it was bothersome,
more than merely puzzling, but then a small child came running in,
boy with black hair, two fireflies in a bottle to show his mother,
and she was the young woman who had bathed with the child in the
brook pool while he'd watched like a thief.

"I got
two!
I got
two!"
the child shouted. His mother knelt down to stare
with him into the bottle at the pulsing cold lights. She was
seriously interested in the fireflies he had caught, and looked at
them closely, gravely, her lack of false excitement understood by the
child, who now also looked carefully into the bottle. When she stood
up again Freddie introduced her as Adrienne, and she put out her warm
dry hand for Luke to shake, looking straight at him with the same
grave, friendly interest she had given her child and his fireflies.

She wore jeans and a faded blue
work shirt. The cloth of her shirt crisply defined her arms and
shoulders, the open collar a subdued flare against her throat and a
rise of collarbone. He was struck by a presence, before he'd heard a
word from her, and it was from his past. She was Helen, at least in
this dimension, with­out sound. Surely she would immediately show
by voice or action, or even by an aggravating habit of speech, that
she was herself, not Helen, not only not his but not at all caring to
be.

"Freddie's told me about
you," she said. Her voice was not at first Helen's, but then it
was. No, it was her own. It was higher, though not harsh or nasal; he
couldn't find the flaw there, at least not yet. This was painful and
dangerous. He didn't need this, of all things. She must do something
to offend him and give him back the balance, or even sanity, he felt
going from him. He was breathless, his pulse high. It was nothing he
showed, but there must be a way to stop or at least slow what was
happening to him. You could go through a whole life and not have this
sort of moment, and now he was having it again as he'd had it on the
beach at Wallis Sands so long ago. But this time he was old, in the
worst way helpless and constrained. He would be the fool.

"He has?" he said,
then had to take a breath. He was for the first time that day
conscious of his sweaty work shirt and his dungarees that were
stained with pitch and ripped where they had worn at the right knee.
He was the fool already to consider such things.

"I'm never sure I
understand Freddie that well," she said, "but you're the
one building a cabin on the Carr Trail, right?"

"Yes." He had the
absurd, disastrous urge to tell her about hav­ing seen her and
the boy at the brook—to describe her to her­self—but
didn't do it. Or even confess to her that she was his wife come back
from the dead, made of the synthesis of memory, safe now, uncrushed,
untorn, unburned. And the young boy was his to nurture and protect,
though their family was not yet complete be­cause there was a
daughter, too, as yet uncreated by them. Oh, the value, the
perfection—a moan of joy he heard at an interior dis­tance,
thinking he was insane, his outer self unmoving. He would be polite
and attentive to this stranger who tormented him, know­ing that
she would not suspect what she was.

"What's your last name?"
he asked. No one seemed to be around them except the boy, who had
placed the bottle on a chair and knelt on the floor, chin in hands,
to observe the strange green light.

"Gilbert," she said.
"This is my son, Harwich, the proto-entomologist—at least
for this summer." At the sound of his name Harwich looked up,
saw that his mother perhaps patronized him because of his youth, and
looked back at his fireflies. Who took love to be a constant didn't
need that fond smile.

"It's not easy to catch
fireflies, " Luke said, "when your hands are small, without
squashing them."

"I squashed one,"
Harwich admitted. "The light gooed on my fingers and then it
went out. It didn't burn."

"Cold light," Adrienne
said.

"It wasn't cold,"
Harwich said.

"I meant that it wasn't
hot," she said, and Harwich resumed his study of the fireflies.

"Do you live in a yurt?"
Luke asked.

"No." She smiled,
glancing over toward where the yurt people must be. "We've just
been coming up to the lodge on and off this summer."

He couldn't look away from her.
Surely she must see that he was unstable, that it was unlike him to
stare at her so.

"From the city?"

"Yes, from Boston. My
mother and father were members of the Club from way back, and I've
been a member since I was Har­wich's age."

"They're not alive?"
he said.

"They were killed. An
accident several years ago, on the Cape."

"An accident," he
said, not having meant to say the word.

"Yes. A car accident."
She looked down at her hands and he measured the shape of her head,
the bones that had miraculously fused, the clear strands of dull gold
covering her head. She looked up, and then said, "Freddie's
signalling from his portable bar. What would you like?"

"Nothing, nothing," he
said.

"He'll feel hurt if we
don't let him play bartender."

"Whatever you're having,"
he said.

They walked together across the
room, where Freddie had set up what looked like a large plywood
suitcase on a table.

"White potions, magic
effluvia," Freddie intoned. "The grape, the grain, the
poison that liberates, the water of life!" His wide round eyes
were like windows through which nothing could be seen but blue. He
selected a small brass key from his key ring and with a flourish of
his pudgy hand unlocked a panel that came down to reveal bottles,
stainless shakers, long stirring rods, forks, strainers, openers,
corkscrews, lemon peelers and all the gleaming professional gear of a
bar. Two young men came from the kitch­en, one bearing a wine
cooler, the other a large silver bowl full of cracked ice. A young
woman brought a basket of limes, lemons and oranges.

"Alcohol without ceremony
is anathema to the gods," Freddie half sang. "The curse of
the solitary, devil's sweat, the piss of Beel­zebub, death,
corruption, madness, murder and beyond."

"Stick your ceremonies up
your ass!" Coleman called across the room. "Pour the booze
and shut up, you fat little fuck!"

"Here, " Freddie said,
"we have a living cautionary tale, a souse, his eyes bleary, his
arse a pinhole, his jewels paste and his leather a feather."

To Luke all of this seemed
beside the point. He looked at Adrienne, having to see what she made
of it. She turned toward him, shrugging her shoulders, not at all
upset. Who should be up­set by Coleman Sturgis? She said
something to Freddie that Luke didn't catch, Freddie nodded, got to
work at his magic effluvia and soon turned around to them with a
small dewy glass in each of his round pink hands. They took the
glasses and moved off some­where. No one else seemed to be near
them. She led him out to the porch, Harwich a dark shape small as a
dog moving in and out of the bright green around the lantern light,
chasing fireflies with silent intensity.