The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  "His name is Ron Sevas—perhaps you've heard of him, since he's more or less in the same business you've been in," Coleman said. He was watching Luke, trying to seem casual himself, unless Luke imagined all this caution.

  "Yeah, I've met him," Luke said.

  "Louise told me you had. I guess she found that out from Ron."

  "Why did she go see him?"

  "To get him going again on the alimony. He's not the most con­scientious of men, to put it mildly."

  "So I've heard," Luke said.

  "He's a strange man, and he did strange things to Louise in those seven years—and since, for that matter," Coleman said. "He's a natural crook, I believe. What I mean by that is that he doesn't just cheat for profit, he enjoys the process of cheating. Any­one, for instance, might steal something he wants, because he wants it badly enough, but Ron steals, cheats and cons because he simply likes to do it. There's a sort of wild bravado or looney brav­ery in him. Also the practical jokes, the constant practical jokes. Anyway, Louise was married to him for seven years or so, and you can't blame her if her mind is slightly boggled. Some of the things he pulled on her are quite simply beyond the pale."

  "Like what?"

  "For instance, the constant money business. It was as if he de­manded that she connive and con and try to cheat him in order to get any money from him. His idea of a great joke was to have the electric company shut off the current because of delinquent bills. He owed everyone, all the time. He borrowed when he didn't need the money, just to do it. If Louise took a car to be repaired and tried to use a credit card, the garage would call an eight hun­dred number and find that the card had been voided for non-pay­ment. She rarely dared to write a check. He made her jump through hoops to get any money at all. That was just a level sort of thing, a constant, but she's told me about other things that hap­pened soon or late in that marriage. Not pretty things, such as the time she woke up in the night being fucked by one of his friends. Nice. Right out of the blue, that was, before her real education had commenced. Later there were all the faddish things, the drug of the week, the kicky kink of the month, and he talked her into all sorts of episodes—like the blue home movies such as The Gang Bang, starring Louise. I'm not really exaggerating, and I don't think Louise was when she told me.

  "But in spite of everything, and there was much, much more, she couldn't get loose from the guy. I'd hesitate to call it love be­cause I'm an incurable romantic and to me love is a pretty private and idyllic sort of episode. But she did love this crook, I guess. Maybe she still does. The suicide stuff began when the divorce was final. And of course there were shrinks, shrinks and more shrinks, anal shrinks, oral shrinks, primal shrinks and vaginal shrinks, and Louise always trying to get money out of dear old Ron, who coun­tered just for the fun of it with lies, jokes, threats and this and that, like using the home movies, and so on. He's married again—at least I think he is—but he can't stop teasing her. She's sort of a hostage or something to this monster. She could do without the alimony. Maybe she can't do without Ron, and he can't do without her brain to fuck with, I don't know. So you ask, 'How's Louise?' Come and see her tomorrow and ask her."

  Coleman had been drinking a lot of bourbon as he talked and paced back and forth. As first he'd had ice in his glass, but then he'd just sloshed in more whiskey from the half-gallon bottle.

  Luke had finished the one very strong drink that Coleman had made him, but couldn't feel that it had done anything to his head at all. Too much raw data, true or false, had been fed to him this day. He felt danger all around him, danger more shadowy and pervasive, as if it stooped over him, than all the unhappiness and cross purposes he'd seen today could warrant. He felt as if this moment, right now, in the long room that had been so self-con­sciously and tastefully decorated with the abstract paintings and interestingly mixed furniture and Scandinavian stoves and minia­ture metal sculpture and books and pots and platters and hooked rugs and polished pine flooring—at this moment, or the next, or a second after that, something would happen that would change ev­erything for good and blow all this away.

  "What I want to say—don't know why, don't know how," Cole­man said, humming the words. "Don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day." Thoughts went in and out of Coleman's mind, his loose, now drunken face reflecting them, wriggling in and out of humor, or irony, or con­frontation. A mood change was taking place in him, toward some drink-inspired drama. Luke didn't know him well enough to pre­dict what mood was coming, but he suspected aggression. The affected locutions had been trying to become more parenthetic, more self-consciously superior in tone, until the gradual disrup­tions of the booze, and maybe the marijuana, had made their transitions less crisp and less satisfying. So now an aggressive, mind-clarifying attitude was perhaps necessary.

  "I was in love with your wife," Coleman said. "Did you know that?" Said with a dramatic pose, arms akimbo, drink sloshing at hip.

  "No, I didn't know that," Luke said. "But I was, too, so we have something in common."

  "Common? Common?"

  "More like 'communal,'" Luke said. "Not to signify the ordi­nary, the prosaic, the infra, Professor. Different connotation."

  "You cold, cruel shit!"

  "That's nice."

  Then they heard the deep explosive rumble of a car out in front of the house, the scraping slide of dirt and gravel, a car door slam­ming and heavy steps at the front entrance.

  Luke thought at first of the common, the ordinary—everyone had heard such sounds throughout a life that had been mostly in­vaded by the ordinary. Then he thought, not at all in panic, that it had to be Lester Wilson. He himself had not had anything to do with the man's wife, though he was here with the criminal, and Lester might think him somehow in cahoots. And minor as it might seem, there had also been the defection of the man's dog. Lester's anger would encompass him too, and he'd better jump out a window and head for the trees; then came the idea that he ought, as a more or less responsible citizen, to try to prevent Cole­man's murder as well as his own.

  But there was nothing but a sedate rap-rap-rap on the front door, Coleman displaying no worry at all, and it was Freddie Hurlburt strutting fatly in after his merely protocol knock.

  But it seemed only very precariously Freddie, as though time could plausibly back up ten seconds and the first heavy steps on the stoop had been followed by the breaking of a door, sawhorses kicked out of the way against the walls of the unfinished hallway and it was Lester Wilson, half-drunk, in soiled green chino, fum­ing with sweat and rage, his .38 Smith & Wesson in his red hand.

  "Well, here we are!" Freddie said. "Here we are, two turds with one bone, so I can ask you both to come and dine with us at the Club!" He wore his green lederhosen, his fat knees peering out above his ribbed stockings like two chubby faces similar to his actual face, but slightly smaller, and without his enormous blue eyes. "Cousin's rather sloshed, at first glance. Despondent about Louise, I imagine, though I saw her today and she seems well on the way to recovery, so let's pop in our vehicles and off to the Club, Coleman obviously not driving, wouldn't you say? Cheer us all up!"

  Coleman had just achieved the moist, bright, glaring stage of his drunkenness and wanted to argue with Luke. He ignored Freddie, poured himself more straight bourbon and said, "Of course the possess—the possessor—is unaware of the value, which is not to be had, you see. Owned, so. . . . " His incoherence in­furiated him so much his face turned even paler than usual. "Hell with it! Mere slick cliche journalist anyway. Beneath contempt. Fink."

  Freddie shook his head, his shoulders moving too. "Poor fel­low's drunk, mouth like a Christian sewer, I believe. All snotted up in the groins. He does get a little combative sometimes, Mr. Carr—Luke. It never lasts long because he's not a bad sort, tons of apologies coming, but in the meantime an excellent lasagna, one thing the new fellow really knows how to make ..."

  "You're a fink!" Coleman shouted at Luke. "I don't care what ..."


  "Oh, shut-shut-shut-shut up, now Coleman," Freddie said, "and take your jacket. That night air, you know, fools and kills."

  "There he sits, you see," Coleman said in a new tone, this one a try at sarcasm, "with the look of a martyr cursed by the gods, a fa­mous living grave legend to us all. You can tell by his unctuous fucking pseudo-dignity."

  "Shut up, now, I said! That man doesn't look like that to me—he looks like a man about to give you a knuckle sandwich, so shut your mouth and take a breath. Here!" Freddie walked over, took Coleman's drink from him and put it down on a table. Coleman, thinking hard, didn't seem to notice. Freddie took him by the arm and led him, Coleman's feet clumping down as if he were in the dark, to the hall closet, selected a tweed jacket and put it on him. "Chilly-chilly," he said as if talking to a child.

  "Would you turn out all but one of the lights? Watts, volts, amps and such considerations, right?" Freddie said. "We don't want poor Coleman to spend the night alone. Get some food into the poor fellow and see if he can hold it, bed him down at the Club for the night and let him sleep it off. Then he can compose his apolo­gies, as usual. I'll make him in the Jeep—knocked my muffler up today, did you hear it? Outrageous noise. You follow in your truck, or if you want to spend the night at the Club—plenty of room—you can come with us and I'll spring your crack in the morning."

  "Fink," Coleman said. "Keep his pecker in his pants."

  "Oh, shut up, Coleman," Freddie said patiently. "Awfully dis­traught about Louise. Forgive the poor fellow."

  "Pay-no-tention-poor-fellow," Coleman said, trying to imitate Freddie. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Usual garbage. Bullshit. Get me a beer. Won't go less I get a beer."

  Luke went to the kitchen and got two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, put one in his own pocket, turned all the lights out except the one in the downstairs bathroom, and followed them out to Freddie's Jeep, where Freddie folded Coleman's long thin legs, one at a time, into the cab.

  "Give him his little bottle to suck," Freddie said, "and we'll be on our merry way."

  "Bullshit," Coleman said, accepting the bottle.

  "Maybe I'd better be getting back to my place," Luke said, but Freddie said, "Oh, come on and have a drink, anyway. It's early." It was just about to get dark.

  He didn't know why he didn't go back to his camp. It was Jake's usual feeding time, but Jake could wait. Maybe he wanted to hear some more of Coleman's anger, but he had to doubt that. He was still thinking about the Avenger, but was he really looking for him? If Coleman were the Avenger, what would he do then? Or do with Coleman? He thought of the tilted swamp maple in the dank slough of woods and in a blink of vision the ground water black among the trunks and boulders, silver in small streaks where it reflected what seemed a very distant, unrelated sky.

  He followed the Jeep around the town square. The road to the Cascom Mountain Club left the high road to Leah and went up the southern slopes of the mountain, so it was several miles before they turned right and began to climb. His new rifle began to rattle against a seat strut so he bent down to change its position and nearly swerved off the gravel road, a small fright. The Jeep's lights went on and he put on his own. He thought of opening the beer, but then put it in the dash compartment to drink on the way home—one for the road. He didn't know why he'd agreed to fol­low Freddie, but maybe there had been an urgency in Freddie's voice and in his expression, as if Freddie were really saying, "I can't explain now, but it's important." If so, what should he make of that? So he followed, prepared to be bored at the Club and ea­ger to leave. He must be up at first light to start roofing in his ca­bin.

  Everyone he knew, it occurred to him, the Jeep's tail lights winding in and out of sight ahead, was old, mad or some kind of obvious freak. Except Jake. But they were not; they were what they were, for bad or good, measurelessly complicated, not defin­able. Maybe he was the simple one, his sense of r.eality destroyed with his family.

  But essentially, not to let this word restrict all, what he was do­ing was a form of suicide, because he was building his mausoleum, in which he would retire for good, forever. No, he must depend only upon what he had learned from experience, that reality be­fore words. He would kill anything that threatened him there. He would have to, if it came to that, because any animal had to pro­tect the place where its short mortal blink of perception was, of the trees, the night odors of the woods, the leaves that bowed and were suddenly green in his headlights along the summer road.

  After several more miles, then a quarter mile of rocky, wash-boarded road, a section not kept up very well by the town because the Cascom Mountain Club was non-profit and paid only token taxes on its thousand acres, they came to the lodge and parked next to several other cars in the graveled parking lot. A lanterned light on a post illuminated the walk to the wide porch, behind which yellow lights shone through the low, diamond-paned win­dows of the old log building.

  He had come here as a child with Shem, to pick up swill for Shem's pigs. It had been one of several stops for them. They would back around, up a driveway that must be over there to the right, hand off an empty fifty-five-gallon drum, then slide a full or partly full drum up a garbage-greased plank to the bed of Shem's pickup, where it would be roped in place, the cover clinched on firmly to prevent the slopping of the sweet, bitter-sour stuff. Lat­er, when he helped Shem bucket the swill to the wooden troughs in the pens, he would sometimes find a cheap bright knife, fork or spoon, which would be added to the kitchen cutlery of the farm—each a prize, wonderful to the child, like finding a pearl.

  The trees were not so thick, then, and hadn't leaned in so fully over the lodge and across the way. He had been proud of his high leather boots and farm-tanned arms, helping with great and even nervous attention his uncle who thought so much of him and was so fierce and expert about every task.

  He followed Coleman and Freddie into the lodge, where the walls were decorated with sunbursts of antique skis, snowshoes, crampons, and ice axes. In a large stone fireplace a small summer fire was like a bonfire seen at a distance in a field at night. Down the long, gabled room with its log beams was the dining area, with many long tables, and beyond that, through open double doors, the brighter lights of a kitchen. Iron bridge lamps stood around the room among cushioned easy chairs made of ash with the bark left on, and bookcases that had once been light pine but were now cured by smoke and age into the color of old leather, all of them seemingly full of books with red covers faded into pink and rose.

  There were other people in the room, the older ones regulars, members of the club and Freddie's old acquaintances. A few tran­sients who were camping out nearby stayed by themselves in another light island in one corner. Freddie introduced him to the nearer people, who were tanned, city-outdoors types, pleasant enough, whose names he would never recall. Coleman went to the kitchen, came back with another bottle of beer and sat with these people, morosely acknowledging what they said to him.

  Then Freddie turned Luke around to the younger ones, saying they were neighbors. Two men looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties. They wore their hair to their shoulders, one in a ponytail. One had a beard so pervasively black and curly very little of his face showed, though what showed seemed friendly. This one, whose name was Bob, introduced his wife, a plump girl in Mother Hubbard and hiking boots, as Marcia. The other man, whose name Luke hadn't caught, said that his wife was back in the yurt babysitting for all. The other person was a slim, rather short blonde girl who seemed familiar, so familiar it was bothersome, more than merely puzzling, but then a small child came running in, boy with black hair, two fireflies in a bottle to show his mother, and she was the young woman who had bathed with the child in the brook pool while he'd watched like a thief.

  "I got two! I got two!" the child shouted. His mother knelt down to stare with him into the bottle at the pulsing cold lights. She was seriously interested in the fireflies he had caught, and looked at them closely, gravely, her lack of false excitement understood by t
he child, who now also looked carefully into the bottle. When she stood up again Freddie introduced her as Adrienne, and she put out her warm dry hand for Luke to shake, looking straight at him with the same grave, friendly interest she had given her child and his fireflies.

  She wore jeans and a faded blue work shirt. The cloth of her shirt crisply defined her arms and shoulders, the open collar a subdued flare against her throat and a rise of collarbone. He was struck by a presence, before he'd heard a word from her, and it was from his past. She was Helen, at least in this dimension, with­out sound. Surely she would immediately show by voice or action, or even by an aggravating habit of speech, that she was herself, not Helen, not only not his but not at all caring to be.

  "Freddie's told me about you," she said. Her voice was not at first Helen's, but then it was. No, it was her own. It was higher, though not harsh or nasal; he couldn't find the flaw there, at least not yet. This was painful and dangerous. He didn't need this, of all things. She must do something to offend him and give him back the balance, or even sanity, he felt going from him. He was breathless, his pulse high. It was nothing he showed, but there must be a way to stop or at least slow what was happening to him. You could go through a whole life and not have this sort of moment, and now he was having it again as he'd had it on the beach at Wallis Sands so long ago. But this time he was old, in the worst way helpless and constrained. He would be the fool.

  "He has?" he said, then had to take a breath. He was for the first time that day conscious of his sweaty work shirt and his dungarees that were stained with pitch and ripped where they had worn at the right knee. He was the fool already to consider such things.