The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  Jake kept asking, saying that of course it was all right, really, if he had to stay here, but how much nicer it would be if Luke would change his mind. Luke had a shiver of the fear of losing this friend, and said, "Okay," opened the door and Jake was there im­mediately, ground to floor to passenger seat, where he sat up, sniffed and looked out as though they were already passing through the interesting air.

  Luke drove down the mountain and on into Leah, where he made his stops, managing to put everything in the truck bed, and paying by check. Jake howled if Luke went out of his sight, but never tried to jump out of the open window, which seemed to be relatively sophisticated behavior, or at least somewhat complicat­ed behavior; from what Luke knew of beagles, their immediate desires usually voided all commandments. In the matter of howl­ing when unhappy, however, Jake was normal for the breed.

  Luke went to the Leah Trust Company to find if the mortgage payments from the Rupperts were coming in, which they were; then, with the usual misgivings, he stopped at the Post Office.

  Again they had kept his mail past the return deadline for gen­eral delivery. He paid a dollar and thirty-eight cents and took the bundle to his truck. With relief, and yet at the same time a surpris­ing feeling of abandonment, he found not one first-class letter. Not one. No person, for good or ill, had sat down to write to him. That intensity was not out there, so maybe he was free, untargeted.

  Coleman was at the truck window, the man's usually loose, pale face looking like a clenched fist. He seemed to have been running, or he was in the midst of some frantic emotional progression Luke couldn't understand.

  "Why didn't you come and see her?" Coleman said.

  "Why? I don't know," Luke said. "I wasn't sure she want­ed. . . "

  "You could have taken time from your goddam fucking hobby horse."

  "My what?"

  "Well, she made it this time."

  "Made it?"

  "Yeah, she made it, Buffalo Bill. She wasn't fucking around this time."

  "Tell me what you mean, Coleman," Luke said, though he knew. He thought he knew.

  "You just used her when you wanted it, right? Little poontang, right? Get your ashes hauled, huh, buddy? Fuck 'em and forget 'em, right?"

  Luke thought of Jane Jones. Out of the instantaneous guilt came Ham's letter, and the sentence, "Jane, my wife, is sick." But was there a reason for that guilt? And how sick? What sick?

  "Coleman, hey," Luke said. He got out of the truck and put his arms around the man, who had almost fallen down. Luke held him up. "Hey, hey," he said, chiding, trying to comfort. "Come on, get in." He pushed Coleman up into the truck, Jake moving over, and got in himself. "Now, tell me what happened."

  Coleman sniffled and sobbed.

  "Come on, tell me what happened."

  "You got a drink?"

  "A case of beer in the back. You want some?"

  "Yeah."

  Luke got a six-pack from the back and brought it into the cab. Jake was nosing Coleman in a friendly fashion, trying to get some affection out of him but not succeeding.

  "I never thought she'd do it," Coleman said. He sobbed and hi-cupped, then nursed his beer, or the beer nursed him, Luke thought, thinking how the thought was avoidance. If Louise was dead, she was dead. That was the first and last impression; one tried to avoid the others in between. When people were dead, the most obvious effect was that they were never around again, and had so little effect on the world. It was hard to believe how little effect the dead had. He thought of Patrice Lumumba and Tom Mboya—but why had he gone to Africa for the absent ones? And they had been murdered.

  "We went to Wellesley to get her car. She got her license back—there was the D.W.I., I guess you didn't know about that. Six months' revocation and all that shit. I had something to do, so I .... " Coleman was quiet.

  "So you?"

  "So I wasn't with her, see? So she went and had all her prescrip­tions refilled. She was good at that. I mean, getting doctors to give her all kinds of renewables. Plausible. I never thought she meant to go all the way. Maybe she didn't mean to."

  "When did it happen?"

  "I was out last night. She thought I was coming back, but I got drunk and drove to Wellesley and stayed there last night. When I got back today and found her and got her to Northlee she didn't have any brain waves left. She died a couple of hours ago. I've got to go make some telephone calls. Aunts and uncles. Her step­mother." Coleman made motions, and Luke let him out. His Toyota was parked a few cars down the street. He held his beer in his palm, the neck of the bottle up his sleeve. He walked rigidly to his car, the guilty drinking driver.

  Was there going to be a funeral? Luke might have asked that question but he hadn't, because no matter where it was or when it was, he would not attend. He had perishables in his truck. He drove back to the mountain, Jake scanning the wind with his lively instruments. Visions of Louise were fragmentary—a curved plane of dark skin, a swatch of silky fur. Sounds of smoothness. The face was as obscure as its expressions had been unexpected. Warmth, motion, liquid, now still as a photograph. Some of us survive.

  By dark, both planes of his gable roof were felted, the edging on all around and the chinmey flashed to the tiles. Tomorrow, in the sun that would make it flexible, he would nail, tar and apply his double-coverage roofing.

  Jake didn't like it when Luke was on the roof; he wanted to be up there too, but couldn't manage the ladder. He tried, but could only brave standing with his front feet on the third rung, one hind foot nervously on the first rung. Dogs, he cried, must go where you go, but can't climb trees.

  Two more days and the chimney was done, curing under a dampened bandage of mortar bags so the sun wouldn't dry out the narrow headings before they set. It was a good square chim­ney, expertly vertical. He was proud of his work; he walked around the cabin, seeing how it set into the land and the trees. It was new and the logs were still shiny, but when they weathered the cabin would grow into the valley and seem inevitable, part of this wild place, defining by its snug interior the breadth of the wil­derness outside.

  One clear day in September he struck the tent, folded it and took it back to George. He was on his way into Leah to pick up his wood stove and the wiring, fuse boxes, relays and circuit breakers George was going to help him install.

  "You must be coming right along," George said. "We ain't seen you in near a month. Thought you might have throwed it all up and gone back to the city, 'cept Phyllis seen your truck going past now and again."

  George went into Leah with him to make certain he got the right electrical gear. Jake was happy to share the front seat with them. "Hi, there, feller," George said to Jake. "Good-looking hound. You heard Claire Wilson run off, I guess, left Lester and nobody can blame her. And that about Louise Sturgis, that was a shocker. Coleman still shows up weekends sometimes, though he's back teaching at his college. Life goes on, don't it."

  In Leah they loaded on the crated stove, which weighed over five hundred pounds, though Luke would be able to disassemble it somewhat when he moved it into the cabin. After they'd been to the electrical supply house on Northlee Street, Luke thought of the Post Office, but finally drove on by and back to the mountain.

  George was really impressed by the cabin, impressed beyond po­liteness. "Crackerjack!" he exclaimed over and over as he ex­amined joinings and stonework with a professional eye. "Crackerjack!" Then a look at Luke that said all sorts of assumptions about his cityness had been wrong. There was admiration there. "But this ain't no hunting camp, Luke Carr," he said slyly. "This is what they call a whole goddam way of life." There was friendly suspi­cion there, and a narrowing of the eyes. "You going to live up here?"

  Phyllis had guessed that earlier, and Luke wondered if she'd ever discussed it with George. If she hadn't, that was a strange ret­icence. But there were many reticences in Cascom; he had quite a few himself.

  "I'm going to stay here this winter, anyway," he said.

  "Ah, yes," George said. "You're
still in mourning, kind of, ain't you."

  They worked all afternoon with the speed of George's real professionalism, and by five o'clock all of the wiring was in, 220 and 110. George insisted that they install the stove before Luke took him back down to the village, so they did, George strong and proud of his strength, Luke a little worried about the old man's exertions.

  And of course he had to come to dinner with them that night, the meal a strange reverse payment for George's help. Before they left he showed George the Marlin he'd bought from Lester. George admired it, hefted it. "Best lever-action deer rifle still made," George said. "Only one trouble with it. In cold weather, you got heavy gloves on, the damn trigger's hard to find. Ain't that bad a problem though. Seems to me I read an article in The National Rifleman a year or so back, how that Microgroove rifling, it don't distort the bullet so much as lands and grooves, you know, so the accuracy is damned good, for a lever action."

  "I'll zero it in tomorrow," Luke said, "since I'm waiting on a few things."

  Phyllis had made dinner for them. She was getting around pret­ty well these days, she said. And how was Luke eating, up there all alone? He looked skinny to her. Men didn't know how to feed themselves. She'd prepared sweet corn, peas and small potatoes in milk, meat loaf, pickles and steamed chard, tapioca pudding for dessert. "You've been working hard. You ought to eat right," she said.

  "I eat good things," Luke said. "They just don't taste as good as this. I eat to live, I guess."

  "You going to live up there all winter, huh?" George said. "Long about February you're going to get a bad case of cabin fe­ver, I wouldn't be surprised. Start thinking about Boston and all them city lights."

  "Ugh! Boston!" Phyllis said. "You get restless you come down and see us. Enough going on right here in Cascom to keep your mind occupied. Interesting people moving in to town these days." Then, thinking of Louise, she made a strange face and the three of them had to smile, not without pity or dismay.

  At ten-thirty he came back through the spruce onto his land, that darkness surrounded by miles and hills of night-black woods. Jake greeted him and they went into the bare cabin. In there it was cool, fresh-smelling of paint and cut, planed and sanded wood. He made a small fire in the stove, open now in its fireplace mode, and Jake, who knew what hounds and fires were for, lay down in front of it to warm his white belly. One bulb on a drop-cord lit up the beamed ceiling with faint but glaring light, the large solar windowpanes dark mirrors to the room.

  He set up his cot near the fire and lay down to sleep, but after a while he rose up, saying, "Oh, God!" out of a great and desperate unhappiness he couldn't understand. Then he said to Luke Carr, "You shit, what have you ever done to prevent or to help?" But the dead were not there. They were, in the plainest way, not there, and meant nothing.

  23.

  Luke awoke at dawn with no memory of dreams, the cool light printed on the big window, Jake scratching at the door to get out. He made breakfast, getting coffee water from the hose outside.

  It would be a good day to go to Wellesley to Joe the Mover's, rent a large U-Haul trailer and bring up those things he had stored. He could go through them later and discard or keep. The bookshelves were ready for the books he had saved—books of plausible history and presumed fact, reference books and also the fiction of the few odd voices he trusted. He would have no book here that he didn't trust. Maybe some winter night he would start reading again.

  Before he left he was bothered by a phrase, or a vaguer memo­ry, something he'd said. It was yesterday, and to George. The rifle—that he would zero it in, or at least see where it shot. That didn't sound like a promise, or anything binding or important, but he took out the rifle, cleaned it with Shem's equipment, care­fully dried the oil from the barrel with several patches and loaded its magazine with six shells. A rifle shot differently with its tubular magazine loaded than it did when one shell at a time was fed into its chamber, and the first shot was always the most important, so he would target it from the loaded magazine.

  With a felt marking pen he made a three-inch black dot on a piece of typewriter paper, paced off fifty yards and tacked the pa­per to an expendable aspen. He put a rolled-up blanket on the hood of his truck, laid the rifle over it, then breathed correctly, held it, squeezed and the rifle pushed back against his shoulder. The sound washed off into space and wind. From here he could see no mark at all on the paper, but when he walked up he saw that the back of the tree had been blown out into white splinters and in the bullseye was a crisp hole. Either it had been a fluke shot or whoever had zeroed in the rifle had happened to have taken the same sight picture he did. He put two more shots into the bull and one touching it; he wouldn't have to fool with the sights at all. Jake showed up then, all excited by the shots, but was disappoint­ed when Luke put the rifle away.

  He couldn't take Jake with him for the whole day, or didn't want to have to deal with Jake's needs, so left him with meaningless reassurances and drove on down into Leah. Here he remembered that the pistol was still under his dash, and that in Massachusetts there was a mandatory, supposedly non-avoidable one-year prison sentence for having an unlicensed gun in your possession. Signs on the highways leading into the state made this clear enough, and he certainly didn't need the worry of breaking that law. Then, as if it were a breakthrough of the mind compara­ble, say, to the formulation of the theory of relativity he realized that Joe the Mover could easily put the pallets containing his household goods on a truck and bring them to Cascom and to his cabin door. He wouldn't have to go to Wellesley at all. He made a telephone call and it was arranged. Maybe his brain was growing weak from the solitude, the altitude or the company, mainly, of a beagle.

  He went to the bank and got some cash, then stopped at the Post Office. He really expected to get nothing but bills and junk, as he had last time; no one should want to write to him, none of the living, not if they had any sense. He wrote to no one. Nothing could make him write a letter. When he'd got out the piece of paper for a target he'd noticed a light frost of mildew on the black leatherette of his typewriter case.

  He went through his mail and found nothing personal, no let­ter even from the Avenger. It was not there, the elite typeface on the stamped envelope. It had been so long since he'd seen one of those envelopes, and he had done so many things, the memory of them had actually begun to fade, as dreams faded.

  He wanted to be back at his cabin, on his land, as if that place were a sanctuary, Jake an incorruptible sentry, the woods his out­er fortifications.

  He drove back toward Cascom with too much urgency, as though his trip to Wellesley would have been a disaster and he had, by a quirk of insight or luck, barely avoided it, or almost avoided it. He couldn't be certain until he returned to his safe, good place. He drove faster than usual, with an anxiety that seemed to restrict his peripheral vision, he was so intent on get­ting there. He was going over sixty on the high road, thinking only of where he must go, when strange signals came to him as a distraction, not at first concentrated upon at all. Flashing head­lights or reflections, then a siren; then he looked more deliberate­ly into his rearview mirrors and a green car was behind him, strobic blue lights coming not from the top as they would have from the bubblegums of a police car, but from behind the grille. But strobic blue meant police, and he pulled over to the shoulder, cursing, saying out loud, "You asshole! You idiot!" What a stupid time to get caught speeding, by whatever sort of police had caught him. He hated being caught this way, for any reason, which was why he was always alert for police. Even in his hurry he couldn't understand how he'd failed to notice the green car behind him.

  He opened the cab door to get out, and the passenger in the other car got out too, a short, thick man in green work clothes, wearing pale yellow shooting glasses, a big leather holster on his belt. It was George Bateman. "Luke!" George called, and mo­tioned him to come over. As he went to the green car he recog­nized the driver as young Jim Pillsbury, the game warden. George tried to kee
p a stern, professional face, but there was a marvelous excitement in him. He opened the rear door of the car and got in the back seat, motioning Luke into the front. A radio hissed and barked fragments of words and numbers, as if doors were con­stantly shutting in the middle of sentences, cutting off, along with breath, the necessary pauses for understanding and acknowledg­ment.

  "Lester Wilson," George said. "He went crazy and killed his family, shot his wife and the two kids, shot his brother-in-law in the stomach, though he's still alive. Shot himself, too, or tried to, but he botched it up."

  "What?" Luke said. He heard all this but he was still getting over the fact that they were not after him.

  "Shot his ear off or something. Rhode Island police got that from the sister-in-law. Anyways, he come back here before they could catch him, State Police seen his car—that yellow hopped up Dodge—on a 1-89 off ramp down around Baker. 'Course he's got the radio, too, so's he could hear everything, took the back roads, most likely. Armed and dangerous. Fugitive warrant. They figure he's somewheres in Cascom, is where he's come to hole up, where he knows the woods. He don't know much else, that's for certain."

  "He shot them?"

  "Ayuh," Jim Pillsbury said. "It ain't that rare. Kind of out of my line of work, though."

  "Husband shoots estranged wife and children, kills self," George said. "Only that dumb shit Lester, you got to figure he couldn't finish himself off. Anyways, you'll find a State Police roadblock up ahead. We're going around the Leah side of the mountain—old logging roads, camps and all, some ain't even on the geodetic map."

  "They can't find his car?"

  "Not yet," Jim Pillsbury said. "When they do they'll bring on the bloodhounds and it'll be over shortly. They'll be a helicopter look­ing too—I just heard that on the radio."