The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  And then he did see a world, strangely a place of deep winter, with himself in it. In moonlight, a small field half-grown-up in gray birch and poplar, surrounded by dark woods. The moon was cold, distant, almost at the full, its miracle a pale silence in which the cold, glittering across the snow, seemed to have frozen the air itself. It was a world of crystal, deathly blue-silver, brittle, motion­less. A step would cause the snow to scream, if a step could be taken in this interstellar cold. But at one edge of the field a small window gave a dim yellow light. There was a cabin there, nearly submerged in the deep snow; that one small yellow eye, and a white ray of smoke that rose straight as a column, proved that something here was alive.

  Now he became embodied in this wilderness. He was on cross­country skis, the light wooden wands bearing him easily, as if he were nearly weightless. He was cold, feet and fingers and face, but not chilled. He wore a light pack on his back, and his arms as they held his long bamboo poles were weary yet strong. He glided easi­ly toward the small windowlight, the snow squeaking cleanly along his narrow skis. What would he find in that buried cabin? What would it be like? As he approached he seemed to know the cabin with a maker's knowledge, and at the same time it was new to him.

  The snow had pillowed up over the cabin from the west, drifted in a whorl over the low gable, and he saw as he approached its roofed porch and log columns that it was the classic, neolithic log cabin which lent, it was said, its spatial harmonies to the Parthenon. Sidestepping, he skied down the several feet of a snowdrift into the blue shadows of the porch where split hardwood—maple, ash and beech—had been stacked so evenly, each two-foot stick fitted so carefully, the piled warmth seemed a work of architec­ture itself.

  He removed his skis in the dim light from the small window be­side the heavy wooden door, cleaned their bindings of snow and leaned them against the firewood. Inside he knew he would find warmth in that yellow light, but now he stood before the door, his light cross-country boots in a skein of drifted powder. He raised his hand to knock on the door, then knew that he shouldn't knock because it was not necessary. It was his right to enter the warm in­terior with its peeled log walls, sturdy furniture of the same lus­trous wood gleaming in lamplight and a dark-enameled wood-stove alive with heat. In fact he must enter, because he had skied too far through the frozen wilderness. He knew in his body the exact reserves of vigor and warmth that were left, and to try to re­turn the long miles would be to risk death.

  There the vision stopped and the sighs and distant clashings of the city pushed into his tenth floor room. The interior of that cab­in would have to be perfect, because it would have to be the room in which he could be alone, content to be alone, serene in his one­ness. In it would be a sturdy desk and a chair, placed and lighted so that the four walls, the beams and purlins, the frosted windows, the stove, the bed, the kitchen, all of the harmonious and practical interior would enable him to write the truth that had either es­caped him or that he had avoided all his life. When the stove cooled into embers he would rake the ashes, add the heavy wood and return, warmed and grateful, to his work. Outside, only the clean and implacable cold would search the joinings and closures of his shelter.

  4.

  Jimmo McLeod opened his lunchbox and without looking into it brought out a sandwich wrapped in a Baggie, the soft bread compressed like pale flesh. "You don't live here," he said, his sandwich hand indicating the streets, the whole city. "You exist. This is where the money is." He sat on one of the timbers that sup­ported his crane. Mike Rizzo sat below him on an upturned gal­vanized bucket. Luke wondered if the bucket rested on soil or some sort of pavement covered by a compressed layer of fallout resembling dirt. Where was soil here? Once this same Broadway was a dirt road among working farms, lowing cattle, moist sweet hay; before that had been the purity of wilderness. This morning he had looked down a long cross street to the Hudson River and for a moment had a sense of the lay of the land, as if Murray Hill were a hill again, and he felt nostalgia for an island he had never seen, though he had lived here as a child.

  "Hey, Luke," Mike said. "You a vet?"

  "Three years in the army," Luke said.

  "Any combat?"

  "In Korea."

  "What branch you in?"

  "Infantry. Twenty-fourth Division."

  "I was in the Eighty-second Airborne. One combat jump and three battle stars."

  "In Europe, then," Luke said.

  "The Bulge. Bastogne. I got shell fragments in the ass, this son of a bitch cook beat me to my own foxhole."

  "I remember that war. I was just a kid," Jimmo said. "Mickey Rutherford got wounded in Vietnam."

  "You know his wife Marjorie?" Luke asked hesitantly. "I'm go­ing to talk to her this afternoon."

  "What about?" Jimmo said, frowning, his jaws no longer chew­ing. Mike looked at him sternly, too.

  "About the accident. How she's making it. Background stuff—you know."

  Both of them seemed reassured by the professional-sounding words, and nodded.

  "Sure, I know Marjorie," Jimmo said. "Mickey and me were in the same lodge—Elks. Mickey was a great family man, you know. He was always heading for home. I drunk many a beer at his house. Marjorie's one handsome-looking woman, she was crazy about old Mick, too. And their two kids, well, for the both of them those kids hung the moon." He shook his head and the sides of his mouth turned down. "Without a father, I don't know. Christ if it ain't hard enough as it is."

  "Yeah," Mike said, "hard enough as it is. Hard enough as it is."

  "You said it," Jimmo said.

  "I don't know what's going on," Mike said. "I'm a Catholic and I don't even know what's going on with the Church, not to mention the kids. You follow me? You Jewish, Luke?"

  "No," Luke said.

  "I just wondered, you being a writer. What I mean is, they just sit around like zombies. Even out on the street, just standing around like zombies. You follow me? We used to play stickball, ringalevio, swim in the East River, you follow me? Only maybe they're smarter than we were, I read that somewhere lately. Maybe they get that from the television, but none of the kids do anything anymore. I get that impression, I don't know. I got a daughter eighteen, she don't want to do nothing. She don't want to go on to college, she don't want to get married, what the hell does she want? And now they say we're going to have married priests, homosexual priests, morphodite priests, woman priests. What's a man supposed to believe? You follow me, Luke?"

  "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 b
righter 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.