The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  What suddenly did seem important was that a canary yellow Dodge was following him. The car was so elevated in the rear by its springs and oversized rear tires it looked like a tracking animal, nose down, snuffling after him. It had closely tailgated the truck for the last mile into Cascom, where it could easily have passed, and now followed him up the mountain road. It was Lester Wil­son, of course, his thick shoulders and wide head visible when the light changed on curves and the shadows and reflections of branches or sky wiped across the car's windshield. Luke first thought cop; was he guilty? Then of the power Lester would as­sume, then of the ragged, almost pitiable man who acted out his fantasies of authority. There was no one certain way to treat the man if it came to a confrontation. He might be properly civil and even meek toward this fantasist, or cite the law, or use his class-given authority composed of literacy, property and influence; but from beneath these practicalities he heard a more primitive voice asking, Are you following me? Are you following me, you son of a bitch?

  He had begun, he realized, to consider the upper part of the mountain road, where there were no more year-round houses, his private road, as if it were his own driveway, and the farm turnoff itself as private as the doorway to his house. The long days of soli­tary work, no sounds but his, Jake's phlegmy sleeping breaths nearby, the cries of birds and the sighing of the brook, were real­ity now, and anything else an excursion or an interruption.

  The yellow Dodge followed him past the asphalt, onto the dirt road. A morning shower had damped down the dust, unfortu­nately, or Lester Wilson would be eating it. In the narrow places between banks and trees Luke could hear the half-muffled roar.

  The bastard was pushing him, trying to intimidate, changing him toward rage, the fool. When he came to the farm road he would stop right there, and if Lester wanted anything he would have to stop with his own car still in the middle of the main road. Or if Lester wasn't alert enough maybe the Dodge's grille would kiss the truck's step-bumper and trailer hitch. Luke would have it out on the edge of his property.

  When they came to the farm road he waited to put on his turn signal until the last moment, a chilly compromise between his an­ger and legal foresight, turned in and stopped instantly. The Dodge swerved, drifted on the dirt, straightened and went on up the road, its engine cutting back in with a long, blapping rise and the clack of gravel in the wheel wells.

  Luke waited, lighting a cigarette this time, and after a minute or so, having found a place to turn around, the yellow car came back, accelerating past him down the narrow road with such noise and recklessness Luke thought Lester might lose control on the next curve. He backed out on the road to see, but Lester had made it, at least that curve, and was out of sight.

  He drove on in, down the hill, across the log and plank bridge and across the field, stopping within the framework of his equip­ment shed. He trembled in the aftermath of this violation, this in­vasion. Jake appeared from within the tent, where he had no doubt been sneaking his rest on Luke's forbidden pillow. Out of sight, out of shame. Though he felt weak at first, Luke's strength came back as he walked the crated refrigerator down planks to the concrete, removed the skeletal crating and plugged the shiny white box into a heavy-duty extension cord. It rumbled, clicked its relays and the hum of its pump began, so he wiped the dust from it, inside and out, and transferred to it his perishables, those that hadn't already perished in the ice chest, then rigged a tarp over it to protect it from the rain until he possessed a roof.

  Jake followed him into the tent, looking fairly innocent in his joy at Luke's return. "Jake," Luke said, "you know and I know you've been sleeping on my pillow." This meant nothing to Jake except that it was nice to hear a voice. He scratched Jake's back just forward of his tail, an area unreachable by Jake and the stim­ulation of which, for some personal reason, made Jake grin, wag his tail and raise a brushlike line of hair from his tail to his collar.

  Jake belonged, legally, paralegally, conventionally or whatever, to Lester Wilson. So why, he asked himself again, didn't he either take the dog back, or, if he wanted the dog around, offer to buy him from Lester? Why keep putting off a possible solution? It had, he thought, aside from his not wanting to talk to or even look at Lester Wilson, to do with Jake's freedom of choice in the mat­ter. Jake was, after all, a unit, a sentient being with his own de­sires; how could he be owned? One could own a machine, a house, a knife. One could not own another person. Did one own one's wife, for instance? Did Ham Jones own Jane Jones? Should he have felt like a thief? It had been Jane's choice, right or wrong; if he had not done what she wanted him to do because he didn't think she should cheat on Ham, wouldn't that have been cruel? Was this clear? It would have meant to her that she was not a per­son but a possession. Had he made love with a singular, indepen­dent, self-contained, free animal, or to another man's wife?

  And then, the accident. Should he have been paid all that money because someone's negligence or bad luck had killed his family? Had someone, then, destroyed his property? The posses­sive we so casually used; the vet had referred to Jake as "your dog," and that had made him think, No, not my dog, just a dog. I own no one.

  19.

  He had just hosed down and turned off his rented cement mix­er when he heard a car, or some machine, coming down the hill toward his bridge, engine and gears whining. Jake heard it and rose painfully to his feet, giving a single warning howl, his hair up along his back. Luke didn't think it was Lester Wilson's supercar, or George's truck. Because of brush he could just see part of the bridge, where whatever it was would have to pass. His hand went to his hip: cops and robbers, small chills and a suspicion of melo­drama. He went quickly to the truck, got the holstered pistol from its hanger up under the dash, took it to the tent and hung it on a nail on the center pole. He didn't want to be unprepared for at­tack, to show his resentment of this intruder, or to look silly, like some idiot imitating Wyatt Earp, though that last hesitation had no doubt killed many of the overly civilized. Clear ultimatums were seldom issued.

  There would still be several hours of daylight. He wanted to continue to work on his cabin, toward that vision of blowing snow and warm windowlight. The car came to the bridge and stopped, still hidden, then moved across the bridge. It was dark blue, new-looking, an American car of some kind. It came slowly toward him on his driveway across the pasture, the wide grille dipping. A Massachusetts license plate. Because he had no idea who it was, and couldn't make out the driver, he looked for clues in the car it­self, in its posture and expression, in the width of its eyes, as if in the mass-produced design there had to be small defects that might show its intentions.

  He stood in the entrance to the tent, waiting. A step backward and he could reach the pistol. Shem's other guns were in the wooden chest. An ax imbedded in a small stump three feet away tilted its handle toward his hand.

  The car stopped. The wide door opened on the driver's side and it was Robin Flash, his kinky blond beard and hair vaguely fuzzy until the bright blue eyes stabilized his face as he recognized Luke. He wore a plaid leisure suit with lots of red in it.

  "Hey, man!" he said. "I wasn't sure it was you and I've been lost for ten miles. Didn't want to get my balls shot off for trespassing. You look like a goddam pioneer or something! I mean, Jesus! What are you doing out here?" He reached into the car for a cam­era and put its carrying strap over his sharp shoulder as he came closer. "It is you, isn't it? Or am I a goner?"

  "It's me," Luke said. "How are you, Robin?"

  Robin looked around the valley, at the mountain rising toward bald rock, into the nearer spruce with their corridors that led into twilight. "Gives me the creeps," he said. "I don't go for all this green. There wasn't another car on the road for miles back there, and I thought what if this Avis iron breaks down? Photographer lost, dies of exposure, bitten by snakes, shot by hunters, eaten by bears."

  "Well, it's not hunting season. You've got enough red on you to keep from being shot, anyway."

  "Yeah,
but is it wise-ass New York Jew season? I'm just a city boy and don't know the local customs. I have this vision, see? I keep going down this one-way road, unpaved, and I come to this rundown farm, there's this retarded kid playing the banjo and these fat, inbred weirdos with guns, kind of giggling softly to each other and they tell me to get down on my hands and knees."

  "You're safe now. Relax. You want a beer? Coffee?" Luke brought out a chair for him.

  "Coffee and a Valium. No, hold the Valium. My nerves are coming back. Maybe I'll have a beer. Yeah."

  "I thought you didn't drink."

  "Maybe I'll take it up. Things not so good in the big city, Luke." He took a beer and held it in his hand without trying it. "Amy split with the kid. This time I think she really means it."

  Jake nosed Robin's shoes, limped slowly over to piss on one of the car's tires, then lay down by Luke's chair. Robin paid no atten­tion to him.

  "She's done it before?" Luke asked.

  "Once after Marjorie blew the whistle, twice so far in July."

  "Twice?"

  "Yeah. She's totally irrational. Flipped out. I love her and I love the kid, you got to believe it. I told her, you know, I said none of this other shit means anything, it's just the way I am. She says, 'What about the shit with me?' and 'How'd you like it if some big stud was laying me?' I said, 'Amy, I'd have to try to understand.' That's when the shit really hit the fan. You figure it out."

  "It's not too hard, I guess. Have you thought about it much?"

  "Yeah. It sounded pretty reasonable at the time, but reasonable doesn't apply. Like why I keep going back to Marjorie, for in­stance."

  "You do?"

  "Yeah. I can't help it. There's something about that big smooth long-legged innocent broad I can't fucking resist. She's with me now, at the motel down on the lake."

  "With her kids?"

  "They're back in the Bronx with Sheila Ryan. Remember that cold-turkey Harp bitch? Does she hate my guts? But I've got Mar­jorie to jump up and down on for a few days. The world's crazy, n'est-ce pas? So I was born a sex fiend, how can you fight it? Marjorie's mad at me too, sort of in a sultry semi-sulk, just because I was looking cross-eyed at this cute little yokel waitress this morning. Cute but freaky. You ever noticed how many of the chicks up here have tops that don't go with their bottoms? Freaky, freaky gash.

  You know what I mean? Long skinny legs with short torsos and big boobs? Or teeny-weeny petite tops and tits and great solid asses and legs like elephants? What is it, inbreeding? Long cold winters? Too many porks and beans? Oh, God, Luke, all I know is I want to bang 'em all!"

  After this outburst Robin was thoughtful, and stared across the field, seeing, Luke supposed, amorphous green with no nameable parts to it but light and shade, texture and composition.

  About Marjorie Luke felt, if he had any right to have feelings about her, sad that she had been so uprooted, startled and changed.

  "Didn't she want to come up here with you?" he asked.

  "You think I'm scared of all these man-eating trees, you should see Marjorie. It's like I suggested we paddle up the Amazon. Any­way, she's embarrassed she lets me hump her; in some freaky Waspy way you're her conscience. But she'd like to see you. Figure that one out."

  "Well, I'm fifteen or sixteen years older than she is."

  "Yeah, yeah. Lots of things. Like . . . death, you know. You've been where she's been." Robin looked at him, worried, and they spoke of other things. Luke showed him around the construction. The shed was now roofed, and sided with board and batten; the cabin's joists and sub-flooring were in, and the interior stone wall, or heat well, had grown several feet above floor level. Luke ex­plained how the low winter sun would hit the wall, which would also be heated internally by the stove gases. Robin seemed im­pressed by all this, not as if Luke were a mere mortal like himself who had learned to build a house, but as if Luke were one of them, those others who did such things and sometimes deigned to hint at their mysteries.

  "Far out," Robin kept saying. He seemed to look as often through the viewfinder of his reflex camera as he did with his naked eyes. "But Luke, you going to live out here? Man, that's sick!"

  "Maybe it is," Luke said, "but I'll only have to cope with my own illness. When winter socks in here it lasts from November till April mud season. Six months or more."

  "But what'll you do all that time?"

  "Stoke my fire."

  "You can't haul your own ashes, unless you've got an awfully sexy mitt."

  "I'm going to try it, anyway."

  "Creepy."

  Robin told him the latest he'd heard about Gentleman, that they were going to try a new format, making it more topical, thinner and bringing it out every two weeks, or else they were going to make it thicker, glossier, sexier and have it appear every other month, or else it was folding, or else it was going to print nothing but high-class intellectual stuff and old-fashioned line drawings, monochromatic from stem to stern, or else it was simply going to be a house organ-tax loss deal for R.I.C. Corporation, and so on. Luke didn't tell him about Martin Troup's letter.

  At five-thirty Robin looked worried again and asked him if he'd come down to the motel and have dinner with them; Marjorie had made him promise to ask.

  "And I want to get back down to what is laughingly called civili­zation before it gets dark and the Sasquatch come out," Robin said. "I'm not kidding, either. All this nothing around here is sucking out my juices. I need carbon monoxide and neon signs that go on and off, man. Maybe it's irrational, but as nameless dreads go, it's not bad. Marjorie's got it worse than me. I mean, there ain't a berserk taxi driver or a Spade mugger within a hun­dred miles of this godforsaken wilderness."

  "If she feels so funny about you two, why does she want to talk to me? I don't get it either," Luke said.

  "It woman bidniss," Robin said in a deep, mysterious black ac­cent. "Yo cain unnerstan it cause yo ain got no pussy."

  Luke didn't see how he could not go, if they had come all the way from Boston, where Robin's assignment had been, just to see him. He must, just this one last time; they would both have to go back to New York and their wrenched lives. He shook Jake's pill bottle and Jake, resigned and sad over the inevitable, came slowly over to him and sat down. He broke a pill in half, opened Jake's wet, toothy mouth and stuck the pill down into Jake's throat as far as his finger would reach, shut the mouth and rubbed Jake's throat to force him to swallow. Jake didn't object to all this, but could be clever in holding the pill in clew or gum somewhere and later spitting it out. Luke opened a can of dog food and put it in Jake's blue pie plate, formerly Shem's. Jake was mildly pleased by this, though he preferred human food.

  "A watchdog to keep the wolves at a distance, huh?" Robin said.

  "Oh, he's small but fierce," Luke said.

  He washed up at the hose, which had warmed in the sun, rinsed in the cold water that came after and put a kettle on his Coleman stove to heat for shaving. Robin looked into the tent and saw the pistol hanging there. "Is that for real? Jesus!" he said. Luke took out the clip, unloaded the chamber and handed it to him. Robin quickly handed it back. "What do you shoot with it?"

  "Nothing yet, but you never can tell."

  "That thing scares me more than the Sasquatch," Robin said. "I mean, do you really need it around here?"

  "To me it's just a friend."

  "Weirder and weirder," Robin said. "Let's hurry up and get the hell out of here." He was even more puzzled when, before they left, Luke reloaded the pistol and put it back in the truck.

  He followed Robin down the mountain, through the village and out along the lakeshore road to the Lake Cascom Motel and Din­ing Room, an old wooden inn that had grown outward into long, one-story motel units, nearly every one, now, in the summer sea­son, with a car nosing its parent cubicle. Across the broad blue lake the hills rose up toward Cascom Mountain, which did look impressively steep and rocky from here.

  Marjorie had just come back from the beach across the road. She
wore a filmy light blue dressing gown open upon a bright or­chid bathing suit, a two-piece semi-bikini that revealed smooth reaches of white skin now tinted pink, a near sunburn, on those curves that by their amplitude had been offered directly to the sun.

  "Hi, Marge," Luke said. She was shy, yet prepared, as though she had thought a lot about this meeting and was as ready as any­one could be. She smiled and said hello, but was terribly embarrassed. She seemed bound by it, kept back a certain distance from them toward the far wall of the room. She was larger than he re­membered her to be, a tender giant in the clashing feminine col­ors. She looked directly at him once, as if to say, "Look what's hap­pened to me, of all people," with some of the wry humor of the fallen. They talked about the lake, the clear cold water, the green­ness of the hills, her first time way up here in New Hampshire, the difference from the city. Robin made gin and tonics for them, plain tonic for himself.

  Marjorie was grave, impressed by the ceremony of all of this. It was as if her body were the immensely important but somehow shameful offering that had caused it all. She was excited, pre­pared to be shamed or praised, knew she was in a foreign land in a compromising room with two men who were strange, attractive, rich, glamorous and judgmental, and who had nothing to do with her real life. Yet she was here, and they all knew she had lain naked with one of them. At least that was the way Luke had to read her high emotion. She, Marjorie Burns Rutherford, her life, soul, worth, morals, her freaky licentious behavior, her cheap­ened but still sinfully magnetic sexual attractiveness, was at the center of this moment.