The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  Then an interesting, almost thrilling little instinctive thing hap­pened to his right hand. It went to a holster that was not at his waist—was, in fact, in a wooden chest in New Hampshire. His in­dex finger had familiarly curled to undo the clasp of the holster flap, the hand moving without thought through the complications of the leather to the firm butt of the pistol. If it had been there the pistol would now be in his hand, the hammer cocked, the grip safety properly depressed so that the heavy yet precise instrument would be ready to fire at his will, a lethal vector of force extending from his hand. In Korea he had found that he was a good shot, single-or double-handed; he'd had the patience to take the short time necessary to care more for the alignment of his sights than the clarity of his target, which would soon have a large hole in it anyway and could be examined at leisure.

  The Avenger, or Blob, unless these notes were improbably de­ceptive, called gunsights, "sites," which seemed to cancel out his familiarity, and thus his skill, with at least one order of lethal ma­chines. But that might be a false conclusion. He knew nothing about the Avenger except the most important and technically use­less thing of all—that in these notes he revealed what Luke per­haps hated most in his fellow man. It was not the semiliteracy, but the supreme confidence of tone. Yes, exactly tone, always the nasty little progenitor of hurt—literary, conversational, carnal, mortal—every little backstabber's game and justification.

  He would leave here. The house and garage had been stripped of all that the Rupperts hadn't wanted to buy. There was some­thing he should do. The telephone. The Rupperts Would take care of the electricity. He called the telephone company and in his official voice arranged all that. No, he didn't want another tele­phone at another address, not yet; he would let them know.

  He took one last quick look through the house and was sur­prised to find that he hadn't looked into the kitchen liquor cabi­net. Among opened bottles of bourbon, blended whiskey, gin and vermouth, and also various unsavory liqueurs that had been there forever, was a fifth of good Scotch, unopened. He threw out the liqueurs, put all the whiskey, gin and vermouth in one of the card­board boxes in the rear of the station wagon, and left the Scotch on the counter as a present.

  He was leaving. At the last moment, having some room in the car he hadn't expected to have, he took the dented old toolbox and its contents from the garage. He seemed to be supplying himself for a trip, but a trip to where? All he had to do, as Clifford Ruppert had said, was slide himself behind the wheel, turn the key and go anywhere he wanted to go.

  One more quick look through the house, and the telephone caught him.

  "Mr. Luke Carrr?" said a man's voice, a sneezy, high, phlegmy man's voice with a rising inflection in the slurred last syllable of his name.

  "Yes," Luke said.

  "This is Mr. Smarmalurgis from the Prumalator Company?"

  "Yes?"

  "There's the matter of the bifold invoices indicating a leased debit balance of one hundred thirteen dollars and fifty-nine cents overdue now seven and one-half months?"

  "What was the name of your company again?"

  "The Permolator Company, Mr. Carr? A division of Weston, Watts, Porgis Corporation? At two percent interest per month the immediate sum, if remitted on or before six, fifteen, amounts to one hundred twenty-six dollars and ninety cents?"

  "What, exactly, is a permolator, Mr. Smarmalurgis?"

  "Hormel N. Sturgis, Mr. Carr. A perfulator monitors your wa­ter system as to ionization and turbidity?"

  "A perfulator? I don't think I have a perfulator."

  "A permulator, Mr. Carr. If you will look you will find a white enameled tank one foot in diameter by four diameters appended to your main?"

  In the silence following this apparently reasonable statement, knowing that he never thought very well over the telephone, Luke tried to choose from among several clamoring attitudes the one he would take toward this fellow. If he'd heard correctly, and it was certainly possible he hadn't, the man—or maybe the voice was that of a throaty woman—was not being consistent in its pronun­ciations. For a moment caution won. "Why don't you send me a bill, Mr. Sturgis?"

  "This was a non-billing lease, Mr. Carr, meaning three points less per annum? I have the lease before me, signed by one Mrs. L. Carr, dated five, one, seventy-six?"

  "Well, Mr. Sturgis, append the three annum points and send me a bill, okay?" Now he was on the edge of saying something out­rageous, but caution was still there. What was this device, some kind of water softener that Helen had had installed? He was tired and bored, bored with the telephone that connected him to all the vacuousness of the world out there, and this strange hermaphro­ditic voice.

  "Very well, Mr. Carr. In that case the due amount will be in­creased three dollars and eighty-one cents, making the total one hundred thirty dollars and seventy-one cents?"

  "Yes, fine," he said.

  "As you instruct us, Mr. Carr."

  "Right. Good-bye."

  He would have paid one hundred and whatever dollars and cents not to have had that call, but now it was too late! Evidently the telephone company hadn't immediately disconnected his phone, which reminded him that he hadn't called Robin to say whether or not he'd go on with the Gentleman piece. He just couldn't make up his mind. Maybe cancelling the phone had been a decision not to do the piece, but then he'd put his typewriter and notes and other material in the car, so he was still hanging there, not wanting to do it, unable to give up, hating the words he would have to write down and type and rewrite and proofread—that whole process he'd once found rewarding.

  A permolator? Permulator? Prufolator? A white enameled tank? He went down to the basement and traced the water pipe from the meter. The only white enameled tank was the electric water heater, called a Hot Roc, made by Ford Steel Products Corp., Tarrytown, N.Y. He traced the lines to the washing ma­chine and up to kitchen and bathrooms and there was no prufola­tor or permolator or simply any room for such a thing in any clos­et or wall. There was no tank one foot in diameter and four feet long in this house.

  Still, he was willing to believe that he had been the one to mis­understand, that his mind, always precarious on the telephone, had jumped to all sorts of visual conclusions about some white enameled tank. Maybe the tank was somewhere else, in some other building somewhere. Maybe it was installed inside or under­neath the water heater. But he knew better, and when the tele­phone rang right beside him he jumped, thinking that the strange damp voice of Mr. or Ms. Sturgis must be the one waiting for him to answer.

  "Hello? Luke Carr?" It was not that voice, but a familiar one, a woman's, harshened by the circuits. It was Marjorie Rutherford, and his hands shook with embarrassment.

  He said, "Yes?" a lie because he knew.

  "Luke." She was quiet for a few seconds. "Luke, this is Marjorie Rutherford, in New York. You know."

  "How are you, Marge?"

  "Terrible."

  "What's the matter?"

  "I know Robin told you."

  Now he was silent, trying to make up his mind. He was silent a little too long.

  "He did tell you. I knew it! Men always tell everything about women!" She was crying, and angry too.

  "Hey, Marge," he said. "I understand. ]esus, of course I do. Come on, it's all right." His soothing voice.

  "I don't think it's all right!" She cried the words, and he couldn't help trying to visualize some sort of phonetic spelling: Aien non thing utz alraieeent! But at the same time the words, which he felt tear her throat, twisted his own throat.

  "So I don't want you to write about me!"

  "Do you think I'd write that?"

  "I don't know! I read the Gentleman for this month and they said terrible things about everybody. Horrible things about real live people!"

  Gentleman still lay on the telephone table in front of him, the studded leather whip-woman leering. "I guess I don't blame you," he said. He could see how her capitulation to Robin could be used, all right. The breakdown of e
verything, including the poured floors of skyscrapers, the mad wasps regurgitating and building for no procreative reason because the center itself rotted, and so on. Mike Rizzo's priests were "morphodites" and Jimmo McLeod's life was nothing but existence, self-admitted. And below, in the garbage-strewn streets, among the rats, were the blacks, the blacks, waiting for the lights to go out. They'd love that at Gentle­man; this was the age of interesting literary simplifications, and apocalypse was nothing if not fashionable.

  "I bet you both thought it was a big joke, didn't you!"

  "No. Robin wouldn't have told me if you hadn't called Gentle­man, I'm sure."

  " 'Cause you'd be ashamed of me!"

  "I was surprised, maybe, but I think I understand."

  "Understand!" she cried, and went on crying. He held the black telephone, from which a woman sobbed, against his head.

  Soon she stopped sobbing and breathed a few deep, moist breaths. "I'm sorry," she said. "None of it's your fault. I just wish you never called me in the first place."

  "It looks as if I won't write the article anyway," he said.

  "I wanted to have our pictures in Gentleman, I don't know why. It would make us sort of out of the ordinary," Marjorie said.

  He didn't know how much longer he could stand here, not knowing what to say or wanting to say anything. He felt that he didn't understand people at all and should have nothing to do with them. He never knew what they wanted or what they were going to do or say next. He could hear the television in the room in the Bronx, where Mickey and Marcia were no doubt watching some late afternoon soap opera; all that feigned emotion, those widened eyes and dramatic statements—he wondered if they un­derstood any of it. Maybe they just watched the people move and talk and weep, not knowing why or even following the simplest words. Enough, maybe, that they looked like real people and something seemed to happen each moment.

  He was now planning his escape.

  "I'd like to see you again, Luke," she said. "I liked talking to you."

  "Me, too," he said. "Maybe we'll see each other again sometime, Marge." No, no, they never would.

  "You never can tell," she said. "Maybe I'll come up there to Massachusetts and visit you sometime."

  "Sure, why not?"

  "Sure. Yeah. Well, it was nice talking to you. I hope everything works out for you."

  "You, too."

  "Good-bye, Luke," she said, and the connection ended.

  Why should he have to feel that he was no help? Well, he wouldn't be of any help. In the issue of Gentleman that lay before him was an article about the joys of "bondage," its straps and whips—tongue in cheek, of course, as they liked to say, and God, they liked to say. Also the straight chic poop on "snuff" movies, in which the actress, after having participated in the usual oral, anal, what-have-you exercises, is informed on camera that she is going to die, and actually does go screaming and whimpering to actual death, for the gratification of the viewers. Hey, man, you know, the real thing.

  If he stayed around this echoing house much longer someone would show up—Ham or the Rupperts—so he left. All he had to do was slide under the wheel, turn the key, and go anywhere he wanted. The loaded car moved through the balmy June air, heavy and steady on its wheels. In a little while he was on Route 128, heading north. There was only one place on earth that was his, where he would not have to rent or be a guest, where no one else had a right to be and wouldn't be.

  10.

  When the interstate crossed the New Hampshire line he first consciously looked in his rearview mirror to see if he were being followed. The official sign at the border said:

  LIVE FREE OR DIE

  BIENVENUE AU

  WELCOME TO

  NEW HAMPSHIRE

  Now, as if the line were really a frontier, he examined those who might follow him across. If he were not being followed, say, by that blue Oldsmobile Cutlass he now realized had been behind him for some time, then no one knew where he was going. He couldn't remember telling anyone in Wellesley or in New York that he might go to New Hampshire, because he hadn't really known it then himself.

  It was seven o'clock; there would be at least two more hours of light, so he would get to the farm at dusk. It was a destination that would at least give him two hours of definition. He was going somewhere.

  The blue Cutlass with Massachusetts plates was fifty yards be­hind him, its driver alone in the car. He kept his speed at fifty-nine, which seemed to satisfy the driver of the Cutlass, who might have been a man or a woman, he couldn't tell.

  If he were actually being followed he would become angry in a way no threatening letter or strange telephone call would ever cause. He watched the Cutlass carefully as it came with him on curve and rise, keeping its distance as the landscape passed. That the Cutlass had appropriated his exact speed seemed in itself a vi­olation of his freedom, and he began to sense the first aura of a rage that he had felt only a few times in his life. He would not knowingly be followed; his freedom would not be abridged that way.

  There was a time when he and Helen had been married only a few months and hadn't yet found out what they were as married people, defined by marriage, that declaration of permanence and emotional license. They hadn't even had much of an argument between them then. But one night they were driving back to their apartment and a pickup truck turned out of a side street directly in front of them, so he had to swerve to miss it and accelerate to pass it, no doubt looking reckless as he did so. The truck, which had some sort of municipal decal on its cab door, followed them, and pulled up beside them as he parked. Helen was frightened by his reaction, and he couldn't blame her. It was the physical follow­ing, the presumption of that power, that caused him to pull the man out of the cab of his truck onto his knees on the street and to scream at him; "Are you following me, you son of a bitch? Are you following me?"

  "All right, all right," the man said, whatever chiding or lecture he'd had in mind forgotten, and Luke let him get back in his truck and drive away.

  Helen was silent and thoughtful for the rest of the evening. The next morning she said, "I never saw you act like that before."

  He tried to explain how the man had nearly caused an accident and then followed him to give him a lecture, and it was just bloody infuriating, but he was truly sorry he'd acted that way.

  She was still pensive, no matter what he said. They moved carefully with each other, then, through touching to discussion, slowly in their different ways, using for each other what they did know, until the matter grew less important. But in truth he still felt that the crime deserved punishment, and he had never been sorry about what he'd done.

  And there behind him was the blue Cutlass, bound to him by that driver's intention. That the Avenger might want to kill him caused caution and a certain amount of nervousness, yes, but it was the following itself that began the anger. He would not change his speed because that might give away his suspicions and put him at a disadvantage. The anger brought with it a coolness of thought on that simple level; it was the son of a bitch who followed him who was in the clearest danger.

  But then the blue Cutlass fell back a little and peeled onto an off-ramp, like an airplane turning away. Slowly his anger subsid­ed, leaving him free again. He remembered the anger as an ab­straction only, as if its force had occurred in some other person whose emotions were not his at all.

  When he left the interstate north of Concord, no one followed him onto the two lane highway. He thought briefly of stopping somewhere to eat, but that might cause him to arrive after dark, so he went on. When he had climbed the mountain road out of Cascom, its last part gravel, and passed through the long tunnel of spruce into the lighter air of the farm, the sun had just gone be­hind Cascom Mountain, though the sky seemed as bright as mid­day.

  There was the sinking hulk of the house, the collapsed barn and the sheds bent down over whatever metal they had once shel­tered, but the sprouting fields and trees were fresh, full of a light that seemed to issue from stem a
nd leaf rather than the blue-white sky. In this weather there would be another three-quarters of an hour of light, so he must make his camp, knowing now ex­actly where, among all the acres of meadow and woods, he would sleep. He had been coming toward the farm for a long time, even toward the specific place in the lower pasture, across the brook—a level expanse of meadow grass beside a cairn of stones he would make into his fireplace.

  He went to the rear of the station wagon and pulled out John­ny's nylon pack bag, which contained in its various zippered pock­ets all of Johnny's Camp Ontowah gear, each piece lovingly cleaned and polished at the end of last summer in anticipation of the next year's canoe trip on the Allagash (where Johnny would have been right now, on June's high water). He looked through the pack, found a small bottle of insect repellent and used it be­fore he did anything else. From the cardboard box of canned goods and staples he'd taken from the kitchen cupboards he chose a can of baked beans, a package of Swedish hardtack, a bottle of instant coffee and a can of red salmon, and put them in Johnny's pack. He thought for a moment before he put the half-full bottle of bourbon in there too, saying out loud, "We shall see."

  From the old toolbox he took a hatchet, and that seemed to be enough. Even though he'd be only a quarter of a mile from the car he didn't want to have to come back to it until tomorrow. He changed quickly into dungarees and boots, though not quickly enough to avoid one or two mosquitoes. Johnny's pack would con­tain everything else he needed. He lengthened its straps, put it on and descended through the overhanging brush of the old road to­ward the brook and the lower pasture. The valley's coolness came up over him like ghost water as he went down into its darkening green. The sigh of the brook grew louder until he could identify individual rapids along its curve through the small valley.