The Followed Man (5 page)

They laughed, but the
information had been given, and none of them were about to deny it.
Out of the declarations, jokes, in­sults and demandingly precise
terminology Luke began, at least, to sense how little he knew and how
much he would have to ask before he could ask what he wanted to ask.
They all knew he was here because of the one horrendous accident, and
they were skep­tical, growing a little narrow-eyed when he said
that he was less in­terested in it than in its aftermath, and in
their work itself.

"Yeah," one dark,
small man said. "Them things always hap­pen. Guy's just as
dead if it happens one at a time, right?"

Though Luke hadn't said much,
and hadn't had to, he saw that they were beginning to know him. He
had always had that strange talent, that they began to know him. The
dark, wrinkled-faced man was Mike Rizzo, an oiler, which meant that
he maintained a crane; an engineer ran it and Mike Rizzo kept it
oiled and greased and running. "Luke," he said when the
others had begun to re­turn to their work, "I'll tell you
something. I used to work on the steel. I fell twenty-five feet once,
landed in a sand pile, didn't hurt a bit. Let me tell you. I was
thirty years old, now I'm fifty-two, and I can't climb up a seven and
a half foot stepladder without getting the shakes. You follow me?"

Mike was a small, wiry man, his
dark face creased and whorled as a walnut. He looked fierce, but he
was a talker, slightly patro­nized by the others, who were
exasperated by him though fond of him.

"Luke," Mike said,
"nobody knows exactly what happened— you follow me? Maybe
there ain't nobody to blame. A little mis­take here, a little
legal cutting of a corner there, maybe the steel a little out of
plumb here, maybe a guy pours a little too much in the hopper there,
maybe a rodman's got a sore arm or a hangover here—you follow
me? Maybe the architect pushed the wrong but­ton on his
calculator—hit the divide instead of the multiplier—you
follow me? Too much sand, not enough air in the concrete?
Scuttlebutt, Luke; even scuttlebutt don't know the answer. Any­way,
Luke, I wouldn't shit you, now. You know that? You follow me, Luke?"

"Sure, Mike," Luke
said. "Sure. It's a dangerous occupation."

"A dangerous occupation.
You hit the nail on the head, Luke." Mike nodded seriously,
tipped his hard hat and smoothed back his sparse gray hair.

"Hey, Rizzo! Hey,
Rizzo!"
someone was shouting from across the street. "Hey, Rizzo,
you going to bullshit all day? Jesus Christ!"

"My engineer," Mike
said, pointing to the square mass of the crane on its base of crossed
timbers. It looked substantial enough until Luke followed the boom
up, up, far beyond what all of his calculations about leverage, all
of his experiences in childhood and after had told him was the very
edge of possibility. But the boom still rose into the yellow haze,
beyond logic and sanity.

He followed Mike over to the
crane and its engineer, Jimmo McLeod, who, in spite of his angry
yelling, seemed now a mild, friendly man of thirty-five or so who
shook Luke's hand with pleasure.

"It's too high," Luke
said, pointing up at the boom.

"That's nothing," Mike
said. "You could put a jib on it and add another sixty-five
feet."

"I can't believe how high
it is now," Luke said. "How can you ex­pect me to
believe that?"

Jimmo McLeod laughed, pleased.
"It rocks a bit sometimes," he said.

Beneath the outriggers that were
extended from the base of the crane, old square timbers were stacked
to take the strain off the huge truck tires beneath. Then he saw what
he might have ex­pected to see anywhere else but here on a
creosoted timber. A dragonfly had alighted, its four shimmering wings
faintly vibrat­ing in their stillness, the irridescent green body
absolutely still. This desert of fumes and asphalt and metal seemed
no place at all for such delicate wild fragility.

"I miss old Mickey, though,
I'll tell you that," Mike said.

"Oh! Yeah," Jimmo
said. Luke looked up to see Jimmo's plain pale face squeeze together,
startled and sorrowful.

After a moment Luke said,
"Mickey?" carefully.

"Mickey Rutherford,"
Mike said. "Engineer."

"Derrick operator,"
Jimmo said.

"Everything fell on him,"
Mike said.

Luke walked back across
Manhattan the way he and Robin Flash had come by taxi that morning.
Jimmo and Mike had gone back to work and Luke had stayed to see the
crane hoist a steel beam or header almost out of sight in the soiled
sky. Then he crossed Broadway again, still continually startled
almost to the point of fatigue by the strange people who seemed to
move with a jerky intensity that reminded him of people at a
racetrack. "This is where the money is," he remembered the
young businessman saying that morning in the Biltmore. But it seemed
more than money; they all moved toward some drama, tragic or
triumphant, their eyes shining with excitement or hatred or avarice.
Except for the boy nodder, who had still been on his bench in the
filtered sunlight. The gray-faced old woman had left, as had the
young black who had soundlessly harangued the city.

He remembered the name,
Rutherford, in the first list of next-of-kin Annie had sent him, and
a first name. Margo? Marjorie? He would go back to his room and look
at those lists. He would look at them carefully, but to call any of
those people seemed right now out of the question. It would be too
brutal to demand anything from them.

He walked the long blocks
between the avenues. The midday air was at once sultry and full of
nerves, weary in its heat yet clang­ing with sudden hard sounds,
the only movement in it the harsh gusts of exhaust and traffic. A fat
man in a soiled brown suit, his face and mustache the color of iron,
let slam a metal trapdoor in the sidewalk. A truck's air horn, meant
to be heard at highway speeds, shrieked beside him among the stalled
trucks and cars. He thought of all the hot grease in those axles and
transmissions, the trapped pistons in the cylinders, moved by fire;
explosion was the final desperate action of the imprisoned gas.

He was not hungry. He went into
a bar and bought a pack of cigarettes, wondering, as he lit one, that
the cigarette seemed not an addition to the poisons of the air but a
kind of deadly antidote. The bar was dark, narrow, full of the yeasty
bread smell of old beer, sour but nostalgic. It was a cell, this
place that seemed to have no name and was as narrow and deep as a
railroad car. He took a stool at the wooden bar and ordered a draft
beer, his eyes opening to the dim light where people sat quietly in
near-dark­ness. Once he had felt a pleasant but undefined promise
in places like this, not of people but of the powerful magic in all
the potions dispensed by bartenders much like this one, a dim man
with a flash of white apron, competent in his movements to spigot,
sink, register, wiping cloth.

The beer, too, seemed an
antidote; its bitter aftertaste made him remember the first time he
had tasted beer, though it didn't taste the way it had then. Most of
the power had gone. He finished the beer and cigarette and left,
having a chill just as he re-entered the heat and noise of the
street.

In his room he again stood at
the windows and looked down across the relatively quiet canyon,
across to the massive dome of Grand Central. How grand it thought man
was. But all was transi­tory now, having more to do with the
abstractions of bookkeeping than with any human use. It all seemed
insane, like the hive of manic wasps and the queen dead.

Marjorie Rutherford was left
without a warm husband, without money.

He looked back at the old hotel
room, its faded but not quite shoddy wallpaper—expensive and
from another time. For six months he hadn't slept with a woman beside
him, that matching other half. Now fading in a grave, motionless,
drying into blue-gray, the sordid color of death. No, don't go there
to the coffin. Coffins, all of his were in coffins. Caskets, vaults,
the fallow grave­yard earth. How surprised he'd been when he
first wished that he were the one dead, and they were still in the
air and sunlight.

If he found it impossible within
the next hour or two to call and talk to the survivors, he would call
Martin and quit this project.

Marjorie Rutherford, Michael G.
Rutherford's widow, lived on Mosholu Parkway, in the Bronx. There was
the telephone, here was the number. He reached for the telephone,
called room serv­ice and ordered a turkey club sandwich, toasted,
and two bottles of Heineken beer. That done, he lit a cigarette and
went to the windows, where he could see all those windows across the
way, a wall of windows like his own. They all seemed dark, black, the
rooms behind them unoccupied.

The phone rang, startling him.
Thinking that it was room service calling back, he picked it up
and said hello.

"Luke?" It was Robin
Flash.

"Yeah, Robin," he
said. "How're you doing?"

"Right now I'm lathered all
over with honey, man. But what's new? You get a line on anything?"

"I'm trying to get up
enough nerve to call a widow, and I'm not sure I can get up enough
nerve, but I'll let you know if I do. Tell me where you'll be."

"Okay. But do you mind if I
come over there and take a show­er? My old lady's got a nose for
love's sweet effluent, man."

"Sure, Robin. Be my guest."

"Thanks. I'll see you in a
while."

A waiter brought him his club
sandwich and the two cold green bottles of beer, including two
glasses. Into one glass he put a half inch of bourbon; in the other
he poured light beer. A grown man, of course, should not have to do
this.

Marjorie Rutherford's telephone
number, its seven unmemorable digits, was there before him. Out of
the unimaginable number of unknown people in the city, the
mind-boggling millions and millions, that number focused down upon
the one person, just the one. If he called that number and she were
home in her apart­ment she would answer, he would hear her voice,
and through that one voice her loss would attach itself forever to
him.

The bourbon nearly gagged him;
the cool beer made him dizzy for a moment. Anxiety's static charges,
small but as unmistakable as pinched nerves, for a moment stopped his
breath. Another cig­arette appeared, lighted, in his lips. Why,
exactly, was he so much afraid of Marjorie Rutherford? Somehow he had
chosen her, and that choice could not be amended. One practical
reason was that he would find out more about her husband from Mike
Rizzo and Jimmo McLeod, who he would see again tomorrow at noon.

The hotel switchboard dialed her
number, which rang once, twice, far away across seething Manhattan,
across the hazy terra incognita of the Bronx.

"Hello?" said a
breathless woman from over there.

"Mrs. Rutherford?" His
voice trembled.

"Yuh."

"My name is Luke Carr, and
I'm doing a magazine article on the tragic accident that took your
husband's life. I wonder if I might talk to you sometime."

God, what horrible words to hear
coming from his own mouth.

"Magazine article?"
She seemed surprised, not suspicious but confused. Her voice was low,
breathy, with a city accent:
magizine aatikle,
he spelled in
his head.

"Yes, for
Gentleman
magazine. It's a follow-up story on the acci­dent. If you'd
like to check on it, you can call the editorial offices of
Gentleman
and ask them about me."

"Lewkah?"

"Luke, Carr—C-a-r-r.
Two names. "

"Okay, but you better let
me call you back. I got two kids in the tub."

"All right. I'm at the
Biltmore, Room 1040. The hotel's number is Murray Hill 7-7000. But
you might want to check with
Gentle­man.
The editor is
Martin Troup. You could ask for him."

"Just a second while I
write that number down. Them kids are splashing all over the place. I
can hear . . . Marcia! Mickey! You stop that splashing!" Her
shouting was dimmer, her hand no doubt partly over the mouthpiece. He
expected to have to give her the information again, but after a
moment she said, "Okay, I'll call you back in a little while."

"Thank you," he said.

"Good-bye now."

He put the phone down. Now that
the first part of it was over he felt great relief, as though he had
done something admirable. But the relief could hardly last; if
Marjorie Rutherford did call back it would mean that she would see
him and then he would have to talk to her. Where? In her home, of
course, so that he could run his judging eyes over her possessions
and come to all sorts of easy sociological conclusions. He could do
that so well. He had done it so many times before and probably much
of it was true, but a chill waited for him here. Now it would be a
widow, young enough to have two kids splashing in the bathtub. What
had she ever done to deserve the cool regard of the readership of
Gentleman
?

A knock on the door. It was
Robin Flash, straps and boxes, glinting clothes, disheveled blond
hair. To Luke's nose, love's sweet effluent seemed a bit sour as
Robin passed beneath it. Sour but nostalgic, if nostalgia did not
mean the recreation of desire but only its recollection. He did
remember the desire to pump himself into a woman's sweet receptive
bulk, there where she was broadest and deepest. Whether or not he
would ever feel that way again did not seem terribly important, and
that was only sad.

Robin half-strutted into the
room, talking and seeming athletic in his wiry, moist way. He wiped
his brow with the back of his hand. "Cool in here! Better.
Jesus, it was hot in that goddam Toronado. Sweating brown and white
meat all over the upholstery—I'll bet we looked like a turkey
roll." He put down his equipment and from a leather box took a
cellophane package containing a new pair of jockey shorts. "It's
funny, you know. She took a dislike to me—that was obvious—and
when we went at it, she's glaring at me all the time. Some way, that
made it even sexier, even if she could have squashed me like a lead
soldier if she wanted to put a scissors on me. But you know that
glare I mean? Those brown eyes bugging out? I mean, you know that
devil-god mothering mammy-glare? And she wouldn't say a word. Not one
goddam word!"