The Followed Man (7 page)

"Yeah, I do, Mike." He
had wanted to think that what Mike said was funny, and Mike wanted
him to think that it was, in part at least, funny, but the lined,
dark, walnut-grained face was in real consternation and doubt. It was
as if Mike were asking him, per­haps because he was a writer,
because of the power or magic at­tached to that title, for a real
answer. For a moment he felt his eye­brows knot, his skin turn
hot, and he bade himself not to express the sudden unattached sorrow
he felt.

"Lot of guys out of work
these days," Jimmo said. "It ain't even as steady as it
used to be—if you could call that steady."

Mike said, "I mean I was
drafted and proud to go put my life on the line for my country, but
now it's okay, just tell the country to shove it up the ass and it's
okay. You follow me?"

Because of the din of the
traffic and the constant engine noises, various clangs and booms,
they were all half shouting. In this gen­eral mood of
consternation they talked until the lunch break was over. Other
workers had been watching the three of them, some­what
surreptitiously, and as Luke turned to leave, one of them, the young
man in the Marine lance corporal's shirt who had yes­terday
presented his rear end when he had heard the name
Gen­tleman,
came striding toward him as if propelled. It was as if his
earlier hesitation were a gun that finally projected him toward Luke,
striding on stiff legs, swaggering. Luke watched him come,
recognizing it all, knowing that he had no need to flinch away from
the red face and its pressures.

"Minds!" the worker
shouted. "We got minds, but we also got hands!" He held out
his hands. "Hands that do the work! You un­derstand that? We
got the hands that do the work! We built this country! We're the ones
that build the country, you understand that?"

Before Luke could answer, the
man snorted triumphantly and turned away. "Huh! Huh!" he
said, nodding his head violently as he strode away.

And Luke, since he didn't want
to appear to hang around, walked away too, thinking of what he had or
hadn't learned so far. No one knew for certain what had caused the
accident; most likely it was a chain of large and small errors,
incompetencies scattered over several trades and men of different
unions, different employ­ers, including the engineer-architects.
There was the John Han­cock building in Boston, for instance, all
glass except that the glass panels blew out to shatter like
fragmentation bombs hundreds of feet below in the streets. There were
dams that burst, bridges that took off in a gale like broken birds.
Mickey Rutherford's com­mand post at his derrick's bells, lights
and control levers was in­side the building, below the floors
that had collapsed. They didn't get his body out for several hours.
His head was in his hat, and his hat was in his lap. He was
thirty-one. If something could happen, it would happen. People would
be rent apart, crushed, dismem­bered, burned, suffocated, dropped
through space to their deaths.

But unless it was quick it must
hurt terribly when it happened; there was such a thing as agony. He
walked up Broadway thinking that he must be very alert, though he was
filled with a strange las­situde that was, again, like sorrow.
What in hell did all these peo­ple
want?
For a moment he
would disregard the blacks who would like very much the eight dollars
an hour Mickey Rutherford had earned; not many blacks in the
International Union of Operating Engineers. But that was another
question. He would take the sub­way past Harlem, that dangerous
continent, on his way to the Bronx.

He walked north, toward Central
Park. He still had a slight scar on his calf he'd got skating in
Central Park when he was twelve and cut himself with the blade of his
own skate. They all wore knickers, then; he remembered the cut
through the stocking, even the pattern and color of the stocking,
which was like the de­signs on old linoleum. The cut wasn't deep,
needed no stitches, but unlike other superficial cuts this one had
left a scar that never went away.

On a newsstand he saw the
headlines of the
Daily News:
CRAZED
VET KILLS WIFE, CHILD, SELF.

In Korea he carried a BAR until
he made corporal, and then he carried a carbine, which was
considerably lighter and had no sharp corners to dig into his back.
Once, on detached service with the First Cavalry, he'd carried a .45
automatic for a few weeks. He was thinking about weapons because of
the knife-wielding punks who would decide to mug him on the subway,
of course. Amazing to think of
being
a force again, instead of
being forced. The .45 would do nicely, with its enormous 230 grain
bullet: a cartridge designed specifically to stop gooks and other
dark-skinned types in their wild-eyed, teeth-bared, slavering
charges. A lot of gooks had been laid down in Korea. Bloody ragged
holes. That was a bullet war, particularly intimate on those terrible
hills because you shot at men you could see. Not with the .45 much,
though. With Garands and BARs and the cal. .30 M1914A4 machine gun.

How strange it was to think back
to those days when he was in his teens, to at least think in such a
prosaic way about what was a symptom of the disease that frightened
him now. Those deaths were thought aberrant because they occurred in
war, which was then considered a temporary phenomenon. There was only
one man he was certain that he and he alone had killed, but his
bullets must have entered many other bodies through the bulky cotton
quilting of those winter uniforms.

He didn't know how long it would
take him to get to Mosholu Parkway, but he had nothing else to do, so
he might as well go up and look at the Bronx until three. He found
the right subway out of an ancient memory.

Mosholu Parkway did have some
soiled grass in its boulevard lanes, and some plane and linden trees
that seemed in suspended animation. He found Marjorie Rutherford's
building, a brown brick structure in a row of similar three-story
buildings that were shabby, as if they had been smeared too often by
dirty hands, but without the detritus of poverty. He was half an hour
early, so he looked around the neighborhood and found a cafe with
clean windows and dim furnishings from the thirties, sat at the
counter and ordered a cup of coffee from a heavy, pink-uniformed
wait­ress who served him without actually looking at him.

Robin was supposed to have met
him at the construction site, but hadn't shown up. Perhaps he was
locked in the death grip of those great terrestrial thighs, in the
pleasure-agony of opis­thotonos, his head mashed into the rich
carpeting of a driveshaft hump. A plausible vision that matched,
because of whatever hu­mor it contained, his own near hysteria.
The coffee cup rattled against its saucer as he put it down. The
cigarette was as dry as the wind in an alley.

After twenty minutes he left the
cafe and walked back to Marjorie Rutherford's building. Be not, he
thought, conscious of your feet in your shoes. Be not conscious of
each foot in its own shoe, nor of each toe cramped in its own fashion
too intimately next to its fellows in the dark of cloth and leather.
Be not conscious of parts.

Above the row of mailbox doors
in the entry way was an old Elks sticker from the Vietnam war,
varnished by age: our flag—love it or leave. Old Glory
undulant, faded as an antique painting. Below the mailboxes the word
shit had been incompletely erased, and three identical spray can
graffiti signatures in black were un­decipherable but done with
flair.

In one corner of the foyer was a
grimy abandoned teddy bear, split along its seams, its granulated
yellow stuffing coming out. Luke would never see a stuffed toy
without having to remember how, long ago, his Uncle Shem had a
bluetick hound that had been ripped open by one of the wild boars
that escaped from Corbin's Park after the 1938 hurricane, and how
all down along the hound's ribcage and flank was the stitched scar
that hair had nev­er grown back to cover. "Ayuh," Shem
said, "that's where they put the stuffin' in old Sport."
And Luke, who was eight, for a moment thought yes; but the dog was
alive and running around in its pen, so how could he be a stuffed
dog? Just for a few seconds it had seemed possible and the world had
opened up so that the fantasy of Pooh and Piglet and Tigger was real.
The possibility faded slowly, leaving a sort of welt, a heavy place
in his mind, like a vivid dream that took a while to shake off. As
now, again, he shook off the memory and pushed the black button below
the Rutherfords' mailbox.

In a moment her voice asked,
"Who is it?" and he thought
ha-wizzut?
while he
answered.

"I'll be right down,"
she said. "The buzzer don't work."

He waited for the widow to come
down the stairs to the solid, brown-painted door he faced. He heard
nothing from the other side until the door opened, then had the sense
of looking up at her; though she was about his height, her blond hair
was built up straight above her forehead in a kind of shako, or
busby, of shin­ing gold, circled by a black velvet ribbon. Her
eyes, surrounded by mascara, seemed too round and small and dark for
her large pale face and whitened lips.

"Come on in," she
said, motioning him past. "I got to make sure the door locks
when it shuts."

She wore fawn colored slacks and
a white blouse; her forearms were rose and white, glinting with
golden fuzz. As he followed her up the stairs he thought of the word
"strapping," and watched the power of her buttocks and long
legs as they filled and moved be­neath the thin cloth. Largeness
was not invulnerability, he knew. This was a large and basically
cheerful woman whose man was dead. God knew what she might do when
they spoke of him, but now she said what a nice day it was, not too
hot for June. Her apartment was on the second floor, her friend, a
not so cheerful smaller woman, standing in the open door.

"My friend, Mrs. Ryan,"
Marjorie Rutherford said of the small­er woman, who merely
nodded, turned and went ahead of them into the apartment.

The hallway had been
yellow-brown, an undecorated, indiffer­ently soiled public place,
impersonal as a chute, but once inside the apartment the drabness
ended in a bright plane of color, a hot red wall that met a brighter
yellow one.

He wondered if his expectations
were about to be confounded; maybe Marjorie and Mickey Rutherford
were odd, at least in their taste in interior decoration. But then he
saw that the colors were only a touch of the Scandinavian, or
whatever that fashion for broad primary surfaces was. The sofa was a
plaid print, covered as permanently in transparent plastic as were
the ruffled white lamp-shades. On the bathroom door a varnished maple
board bore the carved words, mick in thought, and there on the dining
alcove wall was the coated copper sunburst clock, and an ornate
plastic plaque with the motto, illigitimi non carborundum.

Two small children sat on the
orange shag rug looking at the large color television, which was
tuned at this hour to an audience participation show full of screamed
numbers and shrieks of glad­ness.

Mrs. Ryan saw her role to be the
protector, fierce though silent. She sat carefully in the chair that
matched the sofa. Marjorie Ru­therford had the children stand to
be introduced: Mickey and Marcia, Mickey dark and jumpy and shy,
Marcia blond and look­ing at him. They were seven and five.

"Well," Marjorie said,
"sit down, Mr. Carr. Can I get you any­thing? A gin and
tonic?"

"That would be nice,"
he said, thinking how a gin and tonic would be a high-class drink to
offer on a June afternoon on Mosholu Parkway, noting his snobbish
eye as it documented, docu­mented; though only in her thirties,
Mrs. Ryan wore harlequin glasses. She was pale, sallow in fact—a
friend of the large woman who had just gone to the kitchenette to
make him a gin and tonic. She sat with her nylons touching at ankle
and knee. What history, he wondered, of mergings and accommodations
with Mr. Ryan, with her children, if any? Any joy? Do not judge so,
he told him­self, though she seemed cold and defensive.

"You're Mrs. Rutherford's
friend," he said, letting her treat it as a question, or not.

"Five years," she
said, nodding once for each word.

"A terrible accident,"
he said, signifying by a conspiratorial glance that neither Marjorie,
who was tinkling ice in the kitch­enette, nor the
television-bound children were listening.

Mrs. Ryan shook her head, sad
all at once. "Yes. Terrible. Ter­rible, and the children no
father. What will happen? What will happen to them, the poor dears?"

He could only shake his head.
Whatever he was here for, it was not to help, and this woman, with
her sternness gone, was no longer definable.

Marjorie brought him his gin and
tonic. He was sitting on the plastic-covered sofa, and the coffee
table, full of potted plants, was over against the wall next to the
television set, so he held the wet glass in his hand, sipped the cool
liquid and felt the lemon slice touch his lip. Marjorie took a
straight chair from the dining al­cove, placed it at a distance
from him that seemed precise to the inch, then carefully sat on it,
her knees together, her hands in her lap. She looked at him brightly.
Over her shoulder was the room's one window, heavily armored with
metal latticework secured by a padlock. From the top of the
television set, gold-framed Kodacolor photographs of two smiling
children looked down upon their subjects, who did not smile but gazed
with grave faces at the now muted excitements of the picture tube.

She was telling him about how
much it cost to garage the car, the Ford station wagon in which they
had taken trips to the coun­try; the garage rent was forty
dollars a month and now it was go­ing to be raised to sixty. They
couldn't leave it outside because it would be vandalized, or stolen,
as it had been once. She was afraid to take the subway into
Manhattan. Mickey had taught her how to drive. She didn't want to
sell the car but was afraid she'd have to now. All this told
cheerfully, brightly. These were mere facts, were they not? She
didn't mean to give the impression of com­plaint, or at least not
more than the usual, ordinary, ongoing com­plaints about the
city.