The Followed Man (45 page)

He wanted to tell her that it
was all right now, that whatever ter­rors and dangers she had
been through were over. He would be here to build for them all. She
sat on the porch railing, her slim center leaning there against a
vertical.

"Try it," she said,
holding her glass out toward his, as if for a toast. "I don't
know what's in it. Freddie won't tell me."

He placed the cool glass against
his lips, as she did with hers, and sipped the strange, evaporative
liquid.

"What is it?" she
said. "What's in it?"

"Ethanol, no doubt,"
he said. "What else, I don't know. Anise? Bitters? Vanilla?"
The fluid seemed to pass straight into his lips and tongue, nothing
left to swallow.

"Are you going to stay and
eat with us?"

"Yes, but I'm not too
hungry for lasagna."

"What are you hungry for?"

He could not answer that, so he
shrugged and said, thinking this also dangerous, "You know, I
saw you at the brook, at the pool on my land, you and your son."

"Zach Brook!" she
said. "What a beautiful place."

"It was beautiful that day.
I heard the boy crying and didn't know what the sound was. I thought
it might have been the blat of a wounded fawn, so I moved down
through the hemlocks very quietly and there you were."

"And you watched."

"I felt like a thief, but I
watched."

"I don't mind," she
said.

He had never, in spite of his
profession, been very curious about what people did for a living, how
many brothers and sisters they had, where they lived, where they went
to school, even their names. For one, they revealed all soon enough.
Just a presence re­vealed more than he could assimilate anyway,
or try to make accu­rate with words. She showed no shock, coyness
or cute modesty, though he had painfully expected something of the
sort, and now he was more anxious because his possible loss would be
the great­er. How few times would one ever encounter a voice that
leapt a generation and was still unshoddy and precise.

At the dinner table he sat
across from her and they talked, Adrienne mostly. He was in love; he
had that secret that should be demonstrated but never told. What did
the young talk about? Nothing much, endlessly and excitedly. The old
always wanted to choose a topic, form a committee, categorize and
only then end­lessly re'peat, though they had heard it all
before, each surprise more a compulsion than a surprise, like hearing
an unfunny joke or, more likely, given the dust and worn bearings of
age, being tone deaf at a concert. But watching her he heard again
the im­measurable in the ordinary. Nothing could ever end or be
defina­ble. It didn't matter what they said. Harwich sat next to
his moth­er, liking the lasagna, Freddie next to Harwich, both
talking with mouths full, evidently understanding each other.
Adrienne spoke to him as if there had been months to make up, so many
things having had to wait to be said. He heard his own answers and
ques­tions without remembering the effort of formulation; so this
was how easy it had been.

Freddie looked across at him,
his bland blue eyes undeciphera­ble, and just then there was a
noise at the main doorway, at his back, across the long room, not
that it mattered, but the eyes of those across from him glanced over
there, including her eyes, which grew in intensity from even the
lively regard she had shared with him. "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!"
Harwich yelled, jump­ing back over the bench he sat on, his paper
napkin tucked in his collar. She followed Harwich down the long table
and around, both running toward a young man in city clothes who put
down a suitcase so that he could hold both of his arms out to them, a
man who might have been himself disguised by a dark wig and the taut,
smooth posture of youth.

He guided his truck down the
southern slope of the mountain on the narrow gravel road, branches
reaching out at eye level in his headlights, then sweeping skyward as
he passed beneath them, as though his truck were a submarine forcing
its way through a green sea. At his camp all would be dark, wet with
dew, the new wood clammy and slippery, the tent silver and cold. But
out of the dark Jake would be there to greet him, an intelligence
mostly affection and need. "Hello, Jake," he said aloud in
the cab of his moving truck, alone, with the bottle of beer in his
crotch. After the first hysterical flurry of greeting and accusation,
when the light went on Jake would look up at him, thinking as hard as
he could about joy and guilt, having slept in the fragrant, forbidden
hollow between Luke's pillow and blanket. Joy and worry all at once.
Jake couldn't help it; it was a terrible dilemma of love and
obedience.

As for his own found and lost
love, he cursed himself for a fool and an idiot; his head might well
be as flat above his sad brown eyes as Jake's. There had been a time
in his life when he was the one to triumphantly return. He might say
to that young man, Beware. Do you know what you are getting into? You
can't keep it, and you can't have it over.

The memory of Helen, or of
Adrienne, hurt him so badly now that he moaned. Over the engine and
road noises he heard his foolish moans.

He was a few miles past Cascom
square and up the mountain road toward his camp when headlights
cruised in behind him, swirls of mist dimming them, then blowing
aside in the night wind so that they turned too bright again in his
mirrors.

"What the hell is this?"
he said. He couldn't make out the car or truck behind the headlights.
They were there, glaring, a presence following him. They didn't turn
off onto the last side road, they didn't stop at the two hunting
camps, they kept their light on him, on his truck. It shouldn't be
Lester Wilson because he had paid quits to Lester, hadn't he? George?
Coleman or Freddie in the Jeep? No, the headlights were too far apart
for a Jeep. He got out the pistol and put it on the seat beside him.
Oh, God damn it, he thought, I'm the wrong one to mess with right
now, you son-of-a-bitch, whoever you are. The old rage at being
followed grew in him until the skin on the backs of his hands burned.
He turned off into the farm road and the headlights followed him in.
He let them follow until they reached the darkest growth of spruce
and then, with a precision that was past rage, stopped the truck, put
it in reverse so the backup lights were on, took the pistol and fell
out the door to the ground. In control, he felt like a cat as he
sprinted the few yards to the other car. It was yellow; it was
Lester's. It tried to reverse but ground gears and stalled as he
pulled open the door and reached in with his right hand for the
driver. His hand grabbed an arm or a neck and hauled that person out
onto the ground. He was shouting or he would have heard sooner the
counterpoint of immature and female screams that came from the car
and from his feet. What he had grabbed was too soft and filmy, and
had been too easily bent and jerked from the car.

"You following me? You
following me?" He had stopped shout­ing the words but they
were still somewhere between echo and memory. Before him all was
hysteria—a baby strangling on its own rage, a young child's
terror as pure sound, no quarter expect­ed, and the woman bawling
and shrieking at his feet.

Though he felt a primal urge to
join them, to add a contrapun­tal tenor to the despairing choir,
he put his pistol in his pocket and lifted Claire to her feet.

"I'm sorry," he said.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She bawled at him as if she were
talking to him, pure connota­tion. How these animals communicated
their suffering; again he wanted to join the pack and howl.

"Come on, now. It's all
right. I'm not going to hurt you," he kept saying, or crooning,
to their fear, no denotation really meant, and after a while there
did seem to be a subsidence. She raised her hands from her sides and
placed them on her face, at least, to show that a lesser state of
disorganization had been reached. Inside the car the baby still
screamed for what it wanted, but the older child had quieted.

"All right, stop crying
now," he said. "What do you want? Why were you following
me? Claire? That's your name, isn't it?"

She wiped tears and mucus from
her white face; he knew that she cried for more reasons than his
sudden attack upon them. Her voice was constricted and hoarse.
"Waiting at Sturgis's," she said. "Nobody home and I
seen you come on by."

"Well, what's the matter?"

The child in the front seat
looked to be a boy, with the pale bony face and bluish eye hollows of
the malnourished or maltreat­ed. His hair was straight and black,
and his small round ears stuck out from his head. The boy watched
with the concentration of one who is totally and unselfconsciously in
danger.

"You give him all that
money and he bought the hard stuff!"

Her hair in the reflected lights
of the cars was a varnished, wiry red that seemed to have drawn all
the color from her face. White as paper, he thought. Translucent,
dangerous; he couldn't have her and her children here.

He found out, finally, in
phrases, words, parts of sentences and odd references he was
evidently supposed to understand, that Lester had bought whiskey—bad,
bad news with him—and bro­ken up the furniture, beat up the
boy, her, threatened the baby, and when he passed out she tried to
find the rest of the money but couldn't find it. She wanted to take
the children to her sister's in Providence, Rhode Island, but she
didn't have any money for gas, so she'd gone to Coleman Sturgis but
he wasn't home. Then she recognized Luke's truck and he must have
lots of money because he gave Lester so much. But she really had
nowhere to go, she cried; she wouldn't be welcome barging in on her
sister with a kid and a crying baby. Her sister had her own family,
her own prob­lems, her own life. In the island of light in the
overhanging spruce, mist rising along the ground and flowing
underneath the cars, Luke stood and listened to this young woman
whose disas­ters seemed older than she could possibly be. The
baby's mewling seemed exhausted, beyond need. The yellow car's
interior smelled of old beer, bundled feces and tobacco smoke. Claire
seemed too immature to have been laden with breasts tumescent with
the milk that came through her clothes to stain her red blouse in
splotches. The boy in the front seat stared at his mother and the
stranger, his levels of fear and expectation in a region of
helplessness Luke could no longer bear to think about.

He took out his wallet and found
thirty-five dollars, thank God, and put it into her hand. "For
gas. That ought to be plenty for gas. Can you back out of here?"
he said in a panicky haste he though unseemly. "Let me back it
out to the road." Before she could say anything he pushed her
back into the car and carefully, carefully revving the huge zooming
engine, using the brake lights, a touch at a time, for orientation,
backed out until he reached the gray opening at the road. He turned
the car so that it pointed down, away, out toward the wide world to
the south.

He got out and she thanked him
with emotion and gratitude for the little he had given, saying that
she would pay him back when she could. "Coleman never had five
bucks in his pocket anyway," she said, and he came out of his
controlled panic long enough to look at her. The green eyes Coleman
had called simple were now illuminated by the lighted face of a large
tachometer mounted on the steering column, and Luke saw that
Coleman's story was near­ly all fabrication, a creative effort.
Louise had once mentioned that he wrote fiction.

Then
the straight-through mufflers rumbled and the car went down the road.
Let them be safe elsewhere, let the car not run off the road, let
them pass out of his ken forever. He walked back toward his truck
through the dark vault of spruce until he could see his own backup
lights, the empty truck making its silent light in the woods.

Jake was there in front of the
tent, joyous and anxious as he al­ways was when Luke came home
after dark. After the greetings, when Luke brought the rifle into the
tent and worked its action a few times before putting it away, Jake
found that weapon fascinat­ing.

"Well, old friend,"
Luke said, "we are now officially each other's property."
It had cost him a hundred for Juke, ninety for the rifle, and
thirty-five to get rid of the family. Strange to be customer and
broker for Lester Wilson, to separate the man from his posses­sions.

Suppose he had comforted the
young woman, the boy and the baby, taken the three waifs down to his
camp, fed and gentled them, vowing his strength and protection, which
in fact he had to give. He thought of Shem, up there all those years
alone, where even the ghosts of the buried farm slowly faded from
memory. Shem had lost everyone—Carrie, Samuel, his dogs one by
one, no matter how sharp and skillful he'd been all through his life.

In the morning he began his
rafters and the framing for his main solar window. As the beams rose
the cabin became even more real, though not as real as it would
become when the roof panels began to block out the sky. The inner
dimensions seemed larger as the long reaches of the outdoors were
excluded and kept from scale.

He didn't go down the mountain
for two weeks, and by then the long lights of triple-glazed glass
were set in the framing of the big window, caulked and anchored. The
plywood roofing panels were on and squared, the sky no longer his
ceiling.

He took a day to cull
hardwood—maple, beech, ash, cherry, yel­low birch, white
birch—to thin out a grove and let the trees lie so their dying
leaves would suck moisture from the wood. Then, in late fall, he
would buck them up and split them for his winter sup­ply.

He made a list of what he needed
in the way of materials, groceries and other supplies. When he went
to the truck, Jake came along and suggested that he go, too, which
would have been all right, now, but this time the cab and the body of
the truck would probably be full.