The Man Who Followed Women

by Bert Hitchens

  At Grofsky’s address a patio opened at the side and under a big umbrella he could glimpse a woman in a lounge chair, stretched out and reading a magazine. She seemed perfectly at ease, in contrast to the fidgety creature in the office.

  Farrel decided that Grofsky was either at the edge of ruin, or had a private gold mine.

  Perhaps a private gold mine full of tires.

  Chapter 15

  Mr. Howery parked at the curb at about five-fifteen, went up the walk and unlocked the front door of his flat, let himself in. He made a tour of the apartment, pausing beside the new television set which had been delivered the previous evening. Then he sat down listlessly by a front window. He tried to think of the evening ahead, watching the new TV and having a couple of beers, but his enthusiasm failed to rouse.

  All at once he noticed his mother’s knitting, in its bag in the corner of the couch, and as if suddenly rather indignant over it he got up and took it to a closet, stuffing it into a high shelf. Then he sat down again, and the moping expression gradually returned.

  The job seemed to be taking a lot out of him. He thought, of course he was getting older, driving around all day talking to contractors and their building-supply agents was tough on a man his age. But still, there was more to it somehow than that. There was a loss of zest, of a taste for living, that he couldn’t understand.

  He knew he was trying to fool himself. The loss of interest and excitement was due to one thing—losing that girl named Margie. As long as he’d had her to think about, to plan a meeting with, he’d been fine.

  It couldn’t be love, of course.

  He swallowed nervously at the idea. He couldn’t ever remember being in love. Getting interested in another woman had seemed, vaguely, an affront to his strong-willed mother.

  Mother had been first, and of course his primary loyalty had been to her.

  These memories caused such a feeling of discomfort, almost alarm, that Mr. Howery went into the kitchen, opened a cold can of beer and came back to the corner where the new TV had been installed, and clicked on the switch. He sat down and stared resolutely at the screen.

  When the thing got itself in focus he watched for several minutes before realizing that this was a rerun out of a western series, something about a sheriff who wouldn’t use a gun but instead always trapped the baddies by twirling a horsewhip. He had seen it at least two years before on the old small-screen set, and making it bigger hadn’t improved it. He went over and twitched the knob to other stations, but it was too early for the really good programs. He got cartoons, the weather, a pompous news analyst, a rock-and-roll jamboree at which he stared for a while in near disbelief. Then he switched it off.

  He returned to the window. The spring afternoon outside had a certain softness, not yet that of twilight, but a quiet hint of fading that foretold the end of day. Mr. Howery stepped out on the porch and glanced around for the evening paper. A touch of breeze fanned his face, and he realized that he was sweating.

  He saw the car sitting at the curb. He’d better put it in the garage. He went back inside for the keys, which he’d laid on a table. Then, before picking them up, he went over to the bedroom door and stood there, then crossed to the closet. He found himself reaching for Uncle Sherman’s overcoat, the faded hat.

  Funny the way they changed him. He could go anywhere—he was turning before the mirror, looking at the transformed military figure—he could even go to Colton, for instance, and no one would know him.

  He went back to the living room, stood lost in thought in the middle of the rug. The address on Tamarind Street blazed in his mind.

  The silence of the old-fashioned flat seemed to have a soundless titter behind it, the laughter of an imp driving him on to mischief. At the same time there was a momentous feeling, as if the whole face of the future might be changed by his decision.

  He took off the coat and folded it. Put it on a chair, the hat on it; then sat down to think some more. But with a sudden air of energy he got up, took the folded coat and the hat, his keys, and went out to the car.

  As he drove eastward the twilight darkened. Well and good, Howery thought. He could drive around Colton without being seen too well, and as for the house where the girl had gone—perhaps the shades would be up.

  He ran into a few fog patches the other side of Santa Ana Canyon, worried for a time that he might have trouble getting home again. He remembered the dense fog of the last two weeks … nothing he wanted to sample on a freeway full of traffic. By the time he reached Colton, though, the night was clear. He asked directions at a corner store, finally found Tamarind Street. It was on the outskirts of town. He passed a little grocery with a painted tin sign over the door, advertising wine. The block looked kind of shabby, what he could see of it under the single street light. Beyond, he could see no more houses; he sensed open fields out there, perhaps acres being plowed for spring planting. Howery parked his car just beyond the little grocery, got out, shrugged his way into the coat and put on his hat.

  There were no sidewalks, just grass verges at the edge of the paving. He walked on the grass and examined the houses as he passed them. All of them had lights on, and few shades had been pulled. It seemed to be the kind of neighborhood where people didn’t have much to hide.

  He went down one side of the block to the end. This was the even-numbered side, he realized finally, when he caught sight of a house number. At the end of the block, though it was dark, he could see the broad fields dimly, could smell the plowed earth. Lights twinkled far away; he saw that they were moving, knew that it must be a line of cars on a highway. He turned around, crossing in the shadows, his hands thrust into the pockets of the overcoat. He passed two or three houses, one of them dark. At the fourth he looked in through the unshaded window, and his jaw dropped.

  She was in there. He could see her almost as distinctly as he had that first time in the supermarket. She was standing beside a straight chair, and on the chair was a suitcase with the lid up. She seemed to be inspecting, or repacking, the contents.

  There was another woman in there with her; Howery gave her a brief glance. Then with pounding heart he turned in at the walk—crooked, uneven underfoot—and passed beneath a big pepper tree and mounted the steps to the porch. He was close to the window now. The lights inside made it bright as a stage setting. The girl by the suitcase was bent forward, and her hair had swung against her throat and chin the way he remembered, heavy and silky, moving with an almost liquid weight. He had not known until this moment how vividly her image had impressed him. He recognized with a startling clarity every feature of face and build, and even her movements were familiar, as if he had known her for years.

  He couldn’t find a doorbell. He knocked.

  The girl jerked erect, threw a glance toward the door. Then she looked at the other woman, as if expecting some kind of instructions.

  The other woman grabbed her by the arm and hustled her away, through a door to a rear room. She closed the door, then walked toward the front of the house. Howery got a good look at her. She was young and attractive, about the same age as Margie. A nice figure, inside a cotton print dress. Brown hair cut short, feathered around her face. She came to the front window and yanked down the blind, practically at the end of Howery’s nose. Her expression was one of anger and frustration, as if she regretted not having remembered the window before this.

  Shut out into the dimness of the porch, Mr. Howery half hoped she intended to ignore his knocking. His heart was pounding faster than ever, and the unthinking impulse which had brought him to the door hadn’t had an accompanying increase in courage. Mr. Howery even backed away a couple of steps. Then the light came on above the door, pinning him in a bright circle. At this moment he remembered the glasses, which had so transformed his face—he’d forgotten them. He yanked at the hat brim, licked his lips, felt his heart lurch alarmingly.

  “Who is it?” she said through the closed door.

  “I … I came to see Margie.” Th
e words came out weirdly, almost a squeak. His vocal cords were tight as fiddle strings.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m just a … just a friend.”

  “You have a name?”

  “Mr…. uh … Howery.” Mad, mad, his thoughts echoed; you’ve given her your real name. Must be insane.

  “What do you want to see her about?”

  “I …” Panicky ideas seemed to rattle around inside his head like pebbles dancing in a whirlpool. “Tell her it’s about the things she tried to sell in Los Angeles before she left.”

  “Things?”

  “The notice she wrote for the … the bargain board in the market.”

  There were no further questions. Mr. Howery sensed that she had gone to talk to Margie, though she had moved away without a sound. He waited. He had begun to sweat again, and when the overcoat collar grew damp the moth-repellent smell came out quite distinctly.

  He turned his back on the light, in case she should return and open the door suddenly.

  After some minutes he began to feel uneasy. The house was too quiet. By now, this other girl had had time to ask Margie if she would see him, and come back with Margie’s answer.

  He moved to the edge of the porch, then down a step. The step creaked. Howery started nervously at the unexpected noise. He went down into the yard and waited there, listening for some sound from inside the house. It was utterly quiet. The two women must be in some rear room, hiding there, waiting for him to go away.

  Margie wasn’t going to talk to him.

  He felt a sudden sense of rebuff. Here he had come, quite innocently wanting to help her, to advise her—since she seemed to be in some sort of strange trouble involving freight trains—and she had simply refused to answer the door.

  He was torn between two desires, a common-sense hunch that he had better go away and forget all of this, and another perverse wish to press on to the end, even perhaps to force the girl to listen to him and give him her confidence. Her remembered image swam against the dark, a young and lovely and somehow defeated girl, a girl to whom life hadn’t given ease and luxuries and pretty clothes.

  With a renewed pumping of his pulse, he swung around the corner of the house to the dark yard at the rear.

  He stumbled against something, some wooden pot or tub which was movelessly heavy, filled with dirt and a potted shrub of some kind—as he tried to catch himself his hands flailed amid stickery branches. He got his balance, paused to listen. There was still not a sound.

  In the house next door were lights and radio music. When his eyes had adjusted somewhat, the reflected glow allowed him to make out the immediate area. He saw the back porch, closed in, a rickety set of steps.

  He went to the rear door and lifted his hand to knock. It was quite dark here; there was a latticework and vines the other side of the porch. Just as he started to knock he was aware of danger and tried to draw back. Something whistled toward his head, and there was a smashing noise. Mr. Howery went to his knees, doubled up inside the heavy overcoat. He felt a tremendous gush of cool liquid down the inside of the coat collar, and smelled a stench of wine.

  His hat fell off, and he fumbled for it.

  The second blow was much more solid. Not a bottle. More like a chunk of wood. Mr. Howery toppled over and rolled down the rickety steps to the grass. He lay there, breathing a smell of leaf dust and earth. He was not entirely unconscious. He knew when the two women rolled him over and went through his pockets, unbuttoning the overcoat to get at them.

  They whispered together.

  “Did you ever see him before?”

  “No, never!”

  “He must be one of them.”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t look like anyone Hart ever described to me. I’d remember. He’s not … not husky enough.”

  Mr. Howery tried to open his eyes and stare her down for the insult. Here he was, her friend. And she was belittling him.

  “Maybe he’s the one who handles the business end. Sells the stuff,” the other woman whispered. Her breath carried the same stench, the winey odor, that seeped from his clothes.

  “Look for his wallet.”

  They got his wallet, finally, by unabashedly manhandling his backside. “Can’t read it here,” said the winey one.

  “Here. I’ve got a match in my purse.”

  There was the flicker of match fire, and he could see the two of them, Margie with her bright hair and pretty face, the other one more sulky and sultry. They went through his wallet while he made protesting grunts that somehow didn’t get past his lips. A numbness was spreading through him; his fingers tingled, his toes and the soles of his feet prickled as with a million needles; and then all four extremities went dead. Even semi-conscious as he was, Mr. Howery was struck by the terrifying realization that the blow might have injured his brain and caused a paralysis.

  He tried to sit up. The women had lit several matches while they examined the wallet. Abruptly the last match was blown out, the wallet was flung in his face, and he heard them running. He tried to call after them, he managed a kind of croak. Then a terrible pain, accompanied by expanding red lights behind his eyes, caused him to retch and reel over.

  When he regained consciousness, he crawled on elbows and knees to the back steps. He pushed at the door, but it remained firm. He slid down the steps and began to crawl again. He inched his way past the wooden tub with the growing bush, on into the front yard. Everything seemed bathed and aglow with a strange gray light. There was dew on the grass. It was a while before Mr. Howery realized that the gray light was the beginning of a new day.

  He was on hands and knees, still crawling though he had fallen often on his face, when there was suddenly a horrific scream from one of the houses. An old woman in a red housecoat and two little girls in pajamas ran out and encircled him, the old woman screeching something about bad boys and robbers. In the gray light she and two pig-tailed children had the unreality of demons. Mr. Howery collapsed and lay flat.

  Presently there were more people, and then there was a siren, and the cops.

  “Hell, he’s drunk,” said one cop as he bent over Howery. “Smell him.”

  “Look at the back of his head,” said the other voice. “Wait, don’t move him. Hell, there’s glass in his hair. Somebody conked him.”

  Mr. Howery listened dreamily while the argument went on above. One cop believed him to be a common drunk and wanted to throw him into something—a tank. The other kept saying, in a more intelligent voice, that Howery’s head showed signs of a blow.

  Finally one of the pigtails came running with something—the crowd made a way for her. From the conversation that then went on, Mr. Howery gathered that the little girl had found his hat and his wallet and a blood puddle. The cops went away to look.

  “You poor man.”

  By means of a sidewise glance Mr. Howery made out the old lady who had first discovered him. She had curlers in her gray hair, and on her chin was a brownish mark with a couple of dark hairs growing out of it. Her eyebrows grew straight out, like a line of porcupine quills. The eyes weren’t any color at all. As long as he lived, Mr. Howery thought, he would remember that face against the panorama of gray sky and pepper-tree tops.

  Then his vision closed, like a lens clouding, and everything grew faraway. He was almost out when the ambulance came. One of the cops got into the ambulance with him and the intern and tried to question him on the way to the hospital, until the intern put a stop to it.

  The bed had an antiseptic starchiness, and the doctor’s hands had rough cool palms and hard bony fingers. He poked at Mr. Howery’s skull with the bony tips, then clipped hair off the back of his head (now how will that look? Mr. Howery thought dismally). There was a fierce stinging in the wound, and Mr. Howery jumped.

  “You’re all right, you’re fine,” said the doctor, bending close behind horn-rimmed glasses. “Guess we’ll have you sleep a while. Had a bad knock and some rest will do you good. Any idea who bopped y
ou?”

  “Margie.”

  “Margie, huh? She a friend of yours?”

  Somebody jabbed a hypodermic, and Mr. Howery yelped.

  “Margie Who?” muttered the doctor.

  “I’m never going to follow another woman again,” said Mr. Howery, lapsing into slumber.

  Chapter 16

  Kernehan spent a restless night trying to make himself comfortable in the back seat of his car. It was a horrible way to have to sleep, he thought; he made a promise to himself to go to town in the morning to buy a cot. Finally, however, he stretched out by sticking his feet through the open car door and dropped off into slumber; he was awakened once by the yapping of a coyote on the ridge but went back to sleep at once.

  The sun came up bright and warm in the clear desert sky. Kernehan awoke, unwound himself from the blankets and crawled out. He saw Bucklen over by the outdoor fireplace tending a griddle, a pancake turner in his hand. There was a smell of bacon frying. Randy was washing himself in a basin on a bench by the sleeping tent. He picked up a towel to dry himself, caught sight of Kernehan. He grinned, his teeth looking very white in his tanned face. “Hi!”

  Kernehan waved back, then stretched himself to get the kinks out. The kid showed a liking for Kernehan, though Kernehan couldn’t help but wonder if it was an act. He and Randy had spent the previous afternoon hiking around in the hills nearby, presumably looking for gem stones. Kernehan had, in fact, been looking for hidden roads. His efforts to draw Randy into conversation about the old man’s reasons for coming to Tarwater didn’t produce much, either; Randy seemed to accept the situation philosophically, though Kernehan sensed his inner restlessness and boredom.

  In the evening after dinner Randy and his grandfather had played checkers by the light of a gasoline lantern.

  Kernehan had walked away from camp, off through Main Street to a clear spot where he could see for miles off in the dark, hoping to catch some glimmer of light out there. He stood there to smoke a cigarette, aware of the vastness of the night, the black skies overhead, and the brilliant stars. He had waited for almost a half hour. The unaccustomed hiking and climbing had tired him. He had gone back to the car, wrapped himself in the borrowed blankets, and tried to sleep.