The Man Who Followed Women

by Bert Hitchens

  He wondered if Randy would ask to go with him again today, and then an idea occurred to him, a way to test the kid, and he decided that if Randy asked he would agree.

  He washed up and sat down at the outdoor table, and Bucklen served breakfast for the three of them. Kernehan found himself with an unexpected appetite. No doubt about it, the open air made you ravenous. Breakfast over, Kernehan offered to help wash up; Bucklen shook his head.

  “I got all day,” the old man said. “Need something to keep me busy.”

  “Maybe you’ll have some customers today,” Kernehan said, nodding toward the store tent.

  “I might,” Bucklen agreed.

  “When was the last—before I came?”

  “Week ago. Two prospectors. Fellers in a jeep. Didn’t buy much, they just kind of looked around. They figured I was here for something besides raising hens. Uranium, they thought They kind of snuck around with Geiger counters when they thought I wasn’t looking.” A wry smile touched Bucklen’s lips.

  “Think they found anything?”

  “Any uranium ain’t been found yet is so far up in the hills they’ll need flying machines to get to it,” Bucklen declared.

  “I guess that’s right.” Kernehan had gone to his car, folded the borrowed blankets, took them to Bucklen’s tent. Then he had checked the water bottles and made other obvious preparations to take off, watching to see if Randy intended to come along. The kid was helping his grandad and kept glancing in Kernehan’s direction.

  Finally, Kernehan got in behind the wheel and gunned the motor. Randy left the camp site and came over, not too close, looking at Kernehan in the dazzle of morning light. “Where you heading today?”

  “Further than we went yesterday,” Kernehan said. “Out to that salt lake, maybe beyond.”

  “That dry lake’s almost five miles across,” Randy said.

  “Well—like your grandad said, I’ve got all day.”

  Randy seemed to hesitate over something he wanted to say. Kernehan wondered if the kid disliked the role he was supposed to play, the role of spy; and then dismissed it. The kid wasn’t that subtle. Most likely he simply wanted to come along and thought that perhaps Kernehan didn’t want him.

  “How about it?” Kernehan asked. “Coming along?”

  “Sure.” There was a sudden wide grin; it looked genuine. “I’ll tell Grandad.” He ran to Bucklen, and they held a brief conversation. The old man seemed to make some weak protest which the kid argued down. Then he came hurrying back to the car. “I can show you the road. You have to know where to turn, in this country. Some places, it’s all washed out and even the ruts are gone.”

  “Good deal.”

  Kernehan drove to the fork where the side road turned to Tarwater. To his right the main track led down between the two ranges of deeply eroded gray hills; the salt flats glittered in the sun. “Maybe you can help drive part of the way,” Kernehan suggested.

  “Oh, I don’t drive,” Randy said hastily. He didn’t glance at Kernehan; he was looking at the road.

  “Don’t you drive the truck?”

  “No.”

  Kernehan said, “Do you mean that you don’t know how to drive, or that you’re not allowed to?”

  “My grandad doesn’t let me.”

  “He’s kind of strict. A lot of kids of your age have their own cars.”

  Randy shrugged, still not turning to meet Kernehan’s eyes. “Yes, I guess so.”

  Covering up, Kernehan thought. It was obvious that the kid was hiding something, that the something involved old man Bucklen, who held a whip hand over him.

  Kernehan abruptly changed the subject. “Isn’t there a railroad out here somewhere? Should be, if I remember the map. Cuts across from Vermillion on the river. Headed for L.A.”

  “I can show you the tracks,” Randy agreed, something relieved about his tone. He was glad Kernehan had gotten off the subject of why he didn’t drive. “You have to cross that salt lake, though.”

  “I was going to cross it anyway.”

  Now Randy gave him a curious stare. “Why do you want to see the railroad?”

  “Hell, I don’t know.”

  “There isn’t a depot or a station, or anything like that.”

  “I don’t see why there would be, country as empty as this.”

  Randy said, “Jack rabbits don’t buy train tickets.”

  They were almost at the foot of the first row of eroded hills. Kernehan could see how deeply gullied and serrated they were. The soft clay had been worn into knife-edged promontories, terraces, and pinnacles. The hard strata between stuck out like frosting oozing from layers of a cake. Under the stark morning light it had a bright unreality like a landscape from another planet.

  Dry, too, Kernehan thought, aware of the desert’s ever-present threat. A world where you could die of thirst without any trouble at all. “How far to the next water hole?” he wondered to Randy.

  “There’s an old mine about fifteen miles the other side of the dry lake. But Grandad says the water’s bad, it’s full of alkali. He says that when the mine was running, years ago, they could use it to wash ore. But they had to haul their drinking water.”

  “He seems to know a whole lot about this part of the country.”

  “He was born here,” Randy said, not without a touch of pride. “He lived in Vermillion when it was still a fort. He saw the last of the river steamers.”

  Kernehan was thinking: if the birds he and Farrel were looking for had wanted somebody to run store for them, to contact them across the trackless miles, they couldn’t have found a better man than Bucklen.

  “You were born here, too?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Randy said promptly. There was an abrupt silence.

  “What about your folks, your mother and father?”

  “My dad died with a heart attack when I was five years old,” Randy said, something in his tone careful and guarded. “My mom is sick. She’s in the county hospital. She’s got T.B.”

  “Tough luck,” Kernehan said, and meant it “How long have you been with your grandad?”

  “Two years.”

  “Did you go to school in Vermillion before you moved out here?”

  “No.” Randy shifted as if the line of talk made him uneasy. “Look, you’re coming to the salt flats, you’d better watch where you drive. You can get stuck out here real easy.”

  “I guess you know the way better than I do,” Kernehan said, “and so how about you driving for a while?”

  He sensed the temptation that seized the kid. Randy looked at the wheel with visible eagerness. The hands spread on the knees of the denim jeans opened and shut twice. Then his expression closed. Without looking at Kernehan he said, “Ah, Grandad wouldn’t like it.”

  “He isn’t here, he doesn’t have to know.”

  The voice turned stubborn. “I’d better not.”

  Old man Bucklen had trained the kid to obey, even when he wasn’t with him. Kernehan decided that the stakes must be pretty big, the instructions pretty emphatic.

  Kernehan picked his way along a road that was simply two packed ruts in a wilderness of glittering white salt-and-sand. The wind whipped up a little dust, and it had a clinging and silty quality that made Kernehan want to wash out his mouth and spit. And then, again, ghost-like came the memory of the fine dust in Jennings’s clothes, the tag end he always stumbled over, as if someone had tried to tell him something and he had missed it.

  The dust seeped into the car, though they had rolled up the windows. “Look at it,” Kernehan muttered. “Like a fog.”

  “Washed down here, I guess, when it was still a lake,” Randy offered.

  It took almost an hour of careful driving, some of it in low gear, to get across the sandy sink. Kernehan could feel the fine dust in his nose and throat, seeped down under his collar, even—it seemed—inside his socks.

  When the road rose from the salt sink into a fringe of rocky hills, Kernehan pulled up and set the brake. “Let�
��s have a drink of water and take a look around.”

  “Here?” Randy gazed out as if seeking something Kernehan might have seen.

  “Why not?” Kernehan reached back for a water jug, offered it to Randy. Randy drank—warily, somehow.

  Kernehan got out of the car and walked over to a ridge of bare rock and kicked some of the loose rock with his boots. Randy came after him, stood watching. “I thought you wanted to find the railroad tracks.”

  “We’ve got plenty of time.” Kernehan saw tire tracks in the dust, tried to judge how fresh they were. They looked pretty fresh. He pointed them out to Randy. “How would these get here? I haven’t heard a car go by your grandad’s place since I’ve been there.”

  “I don’t know. Somebody might have come as far as this salt sink from the river, then turned back.”

  “This road goes all the way to the river?”

  “Grandad says it does.”

  “But not to Vermillion?”

  “No, north of there, an old river-boat landing.”

  Kernehan was watching him. The kid seemed puzzled over his interest in all this, nothing more—on the surface. “Have you ever been over there?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “I guess there are more roads out here than I thought there’d be.”

  Randy nodded. “Most of them aren’t even on the map. Of course, if there’s a washout, a flash flood, they have to make a new road anyhow. Sometimes it’s easier just to take a whole new route.”

  Kernehan was studying the make-up of the country this side of the sink. The hills were lower and rounder and less eroded, with big stony outcroppings. There were fewer soft claybanks, a lot more shale and granite. Probably a geologist would know all about it.

  “How long since your grandad’s been over this way?”

  “Quite a while.” Randy was following Kernehan around, as if Kernehan might find something of interest and he should be on hand. “Last time, it was when a guy came through from this direction in a jeep, said they were going to rebuild Waybole’s Mine and open it up. Grandad drove over there to see.” Randy pointed northeast.

  “You went along?”

  “Sure. We didn’t find a thing. Waybole’s hasn’t been worked for thirty years, according to Grandad. It’s all fallen in, the machinery’s rusted. I wanted to go in the tunnel, but he wouldn’t let me, he said the timbers might be rotten.”

  Kernehan thought this over. The old man’s rushing off to inspect Waybole’s Mine could mean that the rumor had alarmed him with its promise of strangers in the vicinity. Or something about Waybole’s itself could be important. “How far is it?”

  “It’s kind of on the way to the railroad tracks,” Randy offered.

  The kid hadn’t been warned, then, to keep people away. Kernehan and the boy got back in the car. The road wound upward through the granite outcroppings, forked on the other side of a low ridge. Randy showed Kernehan where to turn.

  Waybole’s Mine seemed to be just what Randy had said it was. The buildings had collapsed into a much worse state of ruin than the town of Tarwater. The ore-crushing machinery was a tangle of old gears and rusted cables. The sun shone on the ruin with impartial brightness. All around them the hills gleamed copper-colored. Kernehan walked about, Randy following. “What did they mine here?”

  “Silver. It played out.”

  “Is this the mine with the alkali spring?”

  “Oh no,” Randy said. “That’s a lot further. It’s past that spur of the mountains over there.” He pointed out a tawny, far-off ridge that swam against the sky like a mirage.

  “How would you get there, if you wanted to?”

  “You wouldn’t want to,” Randy assured him. “I’ve heard Grandad warn people about the road and the bad water. Something happens to your car in country like that, you’re dead.”

  “You’re dead anywhere out here,” Kernehan said, looking at the land.

  “Oh no, not if you stay on the main roads.”

  The kid talked as if they had been traveling a highway, Kernehan thought wryly.

  Kernehan strolled over to the yawning black opening in the side of the hill and stepped inside. Instantly he felt the coolness and smelled the earth-odor from the darkness beyond. He looked at the framing at the entrance; there were dusty patches on the timbers, a hint of rot or of termites. He came back out. “Well, let’s go.”

  They drove off, northeastward. Randy seemed quieter now, and Kernehan wondered if the kid was puzzled over the change in his own spurious interest, from rock hunting to exploring old mines and hunting for a railroad.

  They passed through miles of country that seemed to duplicate itself, one rocky ridge and one shallow desert valley after another—and then, in the distance, from a slight rise Kernehan caught sight of twin rails gleaming in the sun.

  Randy pointed. “There it is.” He glanced at Kernehan. “There isn’t anything here but the tracks.”

  “I can see that.” The rails cut westward across the barren desert, the only changes a couple of fills and a culvert to protect the tracks against damage by flash floods. The road didn’t cross the tracks, but turned east some hundred yards this side. Kernehan drove up to the turn, parked the car, got out. Again Randy followed; Kernehan noted there were no questions now, but a quiet kind of observation. He didn’t like it.

  He climbed to the top of the slight grade. What he had hoped to see were tire tracks, some marks on the earth, anything to indicate this might have been the scene of a robbery from the cars; but there was nothing. In the silence he could hear the desert insects singing, a subdued buzzing.

  “Are you going to wait for a train?” Randy asked suddenly, as if this might expain Kernehan’s interest.

  “Guess not.” Kernehan went back down the embankment, digging in his heels. The earth was hard-baked by the sun. There were a few scrubby desert bushes, dwarf mesquite and ocotillo. Kernehan stood by the car and looked eastward. “How far to the Colorado from here?”

  “I haven’t been much further than here,” Randy said, still looking at him curiously. “I guess it’s twenty miles or so.”

  “How’s the road?”

  “Washed out in spots.”

  “Does the road run near the railroad all the way?”

  “I don’t think so. The road goes to the old river station,” Randy reminded. “The train goes to Vermillion.”

  “They must cross somewhere out there,” Kernehan said, thinking aloud.

  “I guess they do.”

  There was a funny silence, and Kernehan wondered what the kid was thinking.

  Chapter 17

  Kernehan would have liked to continue eastward, but there were several objections he could think of. He wasn’t sure of the kid, one way or another—crooked or otherwise. Then, he had to make a trip to town for a cot to sleep on, and to call L.A. and see if Pete had had any luck with the numbers on those tires.

  He turned, without explaining to Randy, and drove back the way they’d come. They passed a spot where someone had made camp by the road; there was a clutter of a half dozen or so rusting tin cans, and suddenly Kernehan remembered the rest of his plan. He braked to a stop. He grinned at Randy. “How about some target practice? Just for the hell of it?”

  “Some what?” Randy stared as if doubting what Kernehan had said.

  “Shooting. Bang, bang.” Kernehan opened the dash compartment and took out the police revolver. Randy’s eyes widened, and he sucked in a breath, seemed to draw himself flatter against the back of the seat.

  Kernehan waggled the gun under his nose. “How about it? Think you can bounce a can around? Are you a good shot?”

  Randy seemed to control his sudden fright. “I can’t. I’m not allowed—”

  “Oh, now, stow it! What’s the harm in a few pot shots out here next to nowhere?” Kernehan jumped from the car and ran out and lined up some of the cans, propping them on some granite outcroppings, slipped off the safety, and let off a couple of shots. The still ai
r vibrated with the echo, and two cans sprang into the air as if alive. He looked back. Randy was still in the car; there was that eagerness again, like hunger denied, as when Kernehan had offered him the wheel of the car. But there was something else, too: a haunted guilt. My God, Kernehan thought, the old man really has him bugged.

  He walked to the open window on Randy’s side. “What’s with you, kid?”

  “Nothing, sir. Nothing at all,” Randy said formally.

  “Don’t like to shoot?” Randy’s eyes wavered; Kernehan added, “Most kids would jump at the chance.”

  “I guess so, sir.”

  Randy kept looking at the gun in Kernehan’s fist. Kernehan said, “You can come out here and watch me, then.”

  “I’ll just wait in the car. If you don’t mind.”

  “You think I’d tell your grandad?”

  “I know you wouldn’t.”

  “Well …”

  Randy seemed to bite back on something he had to say, and then he blurted, “It’s just that he trusts me.”

  Kernehan went back to popping cans and thought that over. He didn’t believe that Randy refused to shoot because of any respect for the old man’s wishes. Kernehan thought to himself, hell, I know kids. I know how they think, how they feel. They get away with everything they can. So it isn’t that the old man trusts him, it’s that Randy knows something around here is so big and so dangerous that he can’t risk breaking one little rule.

  Satisfied, Kernehan got back into the car. They plowed through the salty waste to the other side, climbed the hilly grade toward Tarwater. “I’m going on into town,” Kernehan said, unable to resist one final test. “Want to come along?”

  “I can’t. I’d like to, though.” Randy’s tone seemed almost wistful. If you didn’t know better, Kernehan thought, you’d believe that it was just the old man’s picayune rules that kept him in line.