The Followed Man Page 15

  At the brook he filled the quart polyethylene water bottles from the side pockets of the pack, crossed on stones and then crossed the pasture around juniper and between aspen until he came to the cairn of stones and the still-open grass. Here it was far enough irom the brook so that the rush of water would not cover the sounds of wind and the night flutters and calls of animals.

  By full dark, the cool air passing and folding over him from the west where the great wooded mountain was a world-heavy pres­ence, he had strung a nylon tarp over saplings to keep out the dew, spread a nylon groundcloth and the thin foam pad beneath Johnny's light summer sleeping bag, and had a small fire of dead-wood going in the cairn between two stones that supported an alu­minum billy full of water. He sat Indian fashion on the tarp, on the soft sod of the meadow, in a small island of orange light that flickered and pulsed in the light wind. The can of beans, punc­tured a few times in the top by the clip blade point of Shem's knife, half floated in the water in the billy, warming fast enough while he sipped bourbon and cold brook water from Johnny's mess kit cup and smoked a cigarette. He felt good, now, a moun­tain himself because he was so alone, so far from any other of his kind in this pre-moon darkness. Miles of woods and nearly a thou­sand feet of altitude were between him and any other person.

  He knew that later, in the damp of night, after sleep's sponging away of force and confidence, he would awake half-blind, his fire out, to a more vulnerable mood, more near nakedness and an­cient terror. He would wake in the midst of that fear, he knew, but now the small fire crackled and gave light, and the valley, though wild and dark all around him, seemed at peace with his presence here. A great horned owl in the woods to the south gave his brea­thy hoots in series, to the rhythm of hip-hip, hip-hip, hooray, a sad-sounding but not really mournful cheer from that predatory night world.

  The animals, except for those small fliers who wanted only a pinhead's worth of his blood, whose high voltaic whines he could ignore, would know very well that he was here and would not challenge him because they were sane, their business being surviv­al; men were dangerous. But another part of his education told him he was vulnerable in the open, before a fire that not only made him visible but by its small cracklings made him unable to hear sounds within a certain range of decibels. The lessons of bi­vouac and infiltration (where was his pistol?) did not apply here except in his imagination. No mortar rounds, grenades or snipers' bullets would come from these woods. No Chinese bugles would signal a charge that would turn into tracers and burnt cordite.

  But who was the Avenger? First, being carefully logical about it, if the Avenger was that strange sexless voice on the telephone, he was (or she was) cleverer than his notes would indicate, and in fact the word "sites " applying to the sights on a rifle, might have been deliberately misleading. If so, and if the Avenger had somehow followed him, his head might be in those sights right now.

  This was ridiculous; his sudden, involuntary ducking of his head was ridiculous, a boggle. No one knew he was here, unless someone in Cascom happened to recognize his car. But the whole thing was boggling. If there were an authority to appeal to he would shout in an outraged voice, "What's happening here? I'm a man who's lost his family!"

  That was not logical, just reasonable. If he could stop being out­raged long enough to think, he might try to figure it out. Recent­ly, on the radio, he'd heard this reasonable story: a man, driving his car out onto the street from his driveway, swerved to avoid a gray squirrel. His door, not properly closed, swung open and his left foot slid out of the car. Another car, also trying to avoid the squirrel, hit his open door, which closed, cleanly severing his left foot above the ankle. On the man's rear bumper was a sticker say­ing, "I Brake for Animals." No, that wasn't part of the news item, that fatuous, sanctimonious bumper sticker; you can find, or cre­ate, meaning in the misfortune of another, so do it in your own case, or in Marjorie Rutherford's case.

  The water in the billy boiled with a hiss. It didn't really matter if the beans were warm or not, just so the pot backened on the fire and he was alone. In Johnny's pack he found a two-cell flashlight with weak but functioning batteries, and a GI thumb-style can opener. He also found a folding tin and mica candle lantern and a supply of short steroid candles, so he set the lantern up on its own rock, undid the spoon, fork and knife set, opened the beans and ate them with the spoon.

  He was alone here; no needful or hurtful person had followed him. That was why he was here. This dark valley had its own pow­er, this benevolent night being only a small respite in its seasons. The small chill between his shoulders was a reminder of crisp, pure, deadly cold to come.

  Beans, hardtack, bourbon and the cold water of Zach Brook—there was a proper meal. The Civil War had been fought on such a diet, among the other wars, shoot-outs, rapes and fiascos that had occupied his ancestors. Add a little beef. Now he was the last of his line, though there were plenty of people named Carr, and he wasn't sure how such things were reckoned. His grandfather was born on this land, and now it was his—though not quite so much at night. There were things he would not think about be­cause he didn't have to think about them here; they didn't exist here. He took off his boots, blew out the candle lantern and got into the thin sleeping bag. The fire was quietly embering now. The cool earth was close beneath him, a bed miles wide.

  He awoke knowing from his swept mind and odd fragments of dreams that he had slept for several hours. His coverings seemed frail though he was not cold. The world had two colors, pale silver and blue, and every blade of grass, stone, coverlet and line was as wet as if immersed in water. He had to get out of his dry bed and urinate, a function that could be put off, but not forever and at the price of no more sleep. He could read his watch by the three-quarter moon: two thirty-five.

  The wet grass was cold, old stalks from the year before like little spikes against his tender feet. A mosquito got him on the ankle be­fore he finished, a tiny imperative his other foot had to rub, the wet like cool oil against the feverish little itch. Back in the sleeping bag his feet would dry and the chills would leave his back, but as he ducked beneath the suspended tarp a rivulet of moon-cold wa-there were hazards he would have to learn again.

  Back in the dry warmth of the bag he removed his shirt and pushed it down toward his feet. Anything in the outside air would be soaked by morning. He found his cigarettes and matches down there in one of his boots, lit a cigarette and lay propped on his el­bow watching the silver smoke drift out and away. The woods and field were drenched and silent, the brook a whisper from the east where the dark blue woods rose up the hill toward the ruined buildings of the farm. Even though those buildings were fallen and rotted, their people all dead, in that direction was a far civili­zation where people at least lived at one time. Down here was the beginning of wilderness, where the bear marked their trees and dug up anthills and rotten stumps for grubs. It had been that way even when he was a child and the farm was still a farm. So he felt now like a child who had through a dare made in daylight agreed to sleep out and away from the warmth of light and company, in the night world that was so different from the world in sunlight.

  Though he knew he was not in any real danger, an ancient, bone-deep, deeper than bone, a marrow of the bone terror was still there, waiting, not to be quite thought away because it was primal, racial, before thought. How flickering and puny was his warmth here below the moon's distant and indifferent light. It was animal loneliness, not a desire for any named person—as if he were not just the last of his line, but the last of his race. He could put on his boots and get out of here, go back across the field and brook and up the dark hill to his car, that familiar room with its engine noise and lights. There was that cowardly choice to make.

  He put out his cigarette in the dew and after its last hiss listened to the night. The owl had stopped its hooting or moved over a ridge. The woods dripped with dew. It would begin to turn to­ward dawn in an hour and a half or so, he thought, though he was out of touch with d
awns. He would not go back to his car and to that world. He would tremble if he must, and listen with the fear­ful intensity of the hunted if he must. In the morning he would rise, wash and eat, then make plans for his permanent shelter here. As he imagined that shelter, it would be of stone and wood, built against this enlivening terror as well as against water, wind and cold. By winter he would be snug, solitary, cousin of the black bear and the yarded deer.

  That thought had the power of a resolution. Made in spite of night fear, it seemed as binding as whatever resolution had caused Shem Carr to live out his life alone on this land. Why should he need other people with their wants he could never quite antici­pate, like their wanting him to love them, or even their wanting to kill him?

  It was the vision of a room, part log cabin, part massive stone, that he saw now, with its warmth and soft yellow light. He might be near that room or even within the yards of space it would sur­round. In the morning he would look and see, thinking of its orientation and elevations, drainage, footings and joinings. His rough construction skills would return in the service of that shel­ter. He could see the clean stone and wood surrounding a spare, sinewy man who would age and cure in his labors, hurting no one, surviving no one.

  He slept again for a while, this time waking cold, with a cold light growing behind the wooded eastern hill. Chickadees and bluejays began their morning business, and a red squirrel sang in the dark spruce. Soon the granite of the mountain in the west turned a warm rose, the spruce on its slopes a paler green than they would be in full daylight. He watched as the shadowy dim­ness washed out from the valley and changed its nature; just to be able to see into its interior spaces changed it, and as the darkness passed, his loneliness passed. When the sun itself came above the trees its warmth slowly reversed his chill. Heat then came from outside his covers, toward him rather than from the energy of his own body, so that nature supported his comfort.

  When the dew burned off his little pile of dead branches he re­kindled the fire and boiled water for coffee, opened the can of red salmon and ate its cold delicate chunks and bones with hardtack and the coffee.

  The new sun grew warm and then hot. Soon his clothes, tarps and pack were dry, as was the meadow hay and the trunks and leaves of the saplings. He packed up, leaving only the drowned ashes of his fire to show he'd been here. The pressed grass would rise back within a few days, like the beds of the deer.

  If the cabin were here, if he had spent a night alone within its future walls, he would have meadow to the south, deep spruce to the north, and the brook down across the meadow to the east. The dense spruce would protect him from the north and northwest winds, and from the south would come the radiant heat of the low winter sun. The cabin would be the perfect shelter; he must study this. He had read many things about heat and cold and thermal efficiency in the last few years, as had everyone, he supposed, and he had some theories of his own. In his mind the cabin grew, changed, widened. Logs fit upon logs; stone (a bad insulator—think about that) fit into near-eternal mosaics, storing heat and letting it go. There were inflexible laws he must know and use, be­cause he would be solitary in a February blizzard followed by weeks of below zero weather. He'd been in the woods when the sun seemed to have no heat in it at all, just cold light. In those times the deer didn't move because they would lose more energy finding food than they could get from the food. The bear drowsed in their dens, living off their own bodies, and the par­tridge flew deep into the snow, away from the killing air, and wait­ed. The deer could starve then, and the partridge might be caught by a quick melt and a freeze, imprisoned beneath the crust until they died. That was the dangerous season, life at its most precarious balance, and he yearned for his own readiness then. He would be here, alone in a clean and deadly world, knowing his comfort.

  11.

  His tasks now had no hurtful or pleasurable significance to any­one else; they were his alone—finite, immediate, once done, done. Memories came to him at will, many in Shem's voice: "A softwood log peels in spring. You can run a spud right down the length of it slicker'n goose grease."

  He bought a chainsaw, a Homelite with a sixteen-inch bar at Follansbees' in Leah. He'd used one years ago, most recently help­ing a friend remove a tree blown down on a suburban lawn, but he read the directions carefully. So much power to cut was there in the light machine, its engine not much bigger than his two fists, his hand on the grip and trigger throttle causing it to roar and heave with torque. Its teeth didn't know what they cut.

  At first he stayed at the Hi-Way Motel in Leah, ate breakfast at dawn at the Welkum Diner and drove to the farm. In the evenings he drew tentative plans and calculated the number of spruce logs he would need. He would cut at least half again as many as his vague dimensions called for—another message of Shem's from long ago: "If it's wood, get once and a half as much as you think you need. If it's stone, double that and add a third more. If it's shit, don't worry, you'll have plenty." He picked out the straight-est spruce, each a foot or more in diameter at the base, cut and limbed with the snarling saw, then peeled them using the chisel end of his car's lug wrench. The sap was thin, hardly sticky, and the bark that looked so rugged on the outside was skin-smooth and slippery beneath. The logs lay white and naked through the spruce groves, smelling fresh and sweet for a day or so until the watery sap dried. His hands blistered, cracked and hardened.

  Phyllis and George Bateman would know he was in town, so af­ter a few days he stopped in to see them.

  "Been cuttin' wood, have you?" George said. "I see you got wood chips in your bootlaces. Spruce, by the looks of it."

  Phyllis nailed him to a date for supper with the interesting new people she'd mentioned before. He could find no way to refuse. Her arthritis was better, so she could get around in the kitchen and do the cooking she wanted to do. "No saying how long it'll last," she said. "I just know you'll like these folks, Luke."

  George was interested in the woodcutting, so Luke told him he was building a camp, which was almost not a lie, out of logs.

  "Lots of tricks to a log house," George said. "You know how to do it?"

  "I'm going to study up on it as soon as I get my logs peeled."

  "Cut a half more than you think you'll need," George said. They went to the shed to Shem's wooden chest, and while Luke selected an ax, ax handle, wedges, a peavey head, a tape measure and folding rule, they talked about it. They sat, smoking, until it was supper time and Luke had to stay for supper.

  George said he had an old twelve-by-twelve tent Luke could use, if it wasn't rotted out. It hadn't been used in ten years. So they went to the shed loft and found the big bundle of khaki canvas with its ropes wound around it, and five wooden poles.

  "If it's rotted, burn it," George said. "Don't give it a thought. But it seems to me I dried it out good before I put it away, so it might do to keep the rain off. No sign of mice in it I can see."

  They put the tent and poles in Luke's car, and then, that bundle of canvas suggesting that he would actually set up his camp in the wilderness, Luke went back to Shem's chest and opened it to the shelf containing the guns. He took out the .45 automatic, its hol­ster, a cleaning kit and two boxes of the old ammunition. The .22 version was still there, so he took it in to George, who had gone back to the house.

  "This is yours, you know. Did you try it?" he said.

  "I tried it, and I been studying up on it. That ain't a Colt con­version unit, you know. Some hotshot gunsmith did that special and it's probably worth a fortune. It works like a charm."

  "Well, whatever it's worth, it's yours."

  "Don't know as I can accept it."

  "I'll take it out in trade. I want you to teach me how to lay up stone."

  "That's some camp you're going to build, anyway," George said, which was at least a partial acceptance of the gift.

  They'd discussed location, foundations, roofing materials. Luke brought up solar orientation, which George wasn't much interest­ed in. He liked double-hung window
s and not very many of them.

  After supper they sat at the table having coffee.

  "I'll show you how to lay up stone," George said, "but it ain't something you can learn right off, you know. You got to look right into a stone to find its proper face, and some don't even have a face. You can turn 'em over a thousand times and you still won't find a face. Some of 'em have false faces that'll trick you if you don't know stones. As I say, it ain't something you learn right off." His gray skin and gray eyes seemed to have been coated with a fine oil.

  Phyllis said, "When you get sick of your own cooking up there, you come for supper anytime. There's always plenty here."

  "Thanks, Phyllis," Luke said. "Anyway, I'll remember next Sat­urday. Don't worry about that." He felt the vague dread again about new people.

  That night at the motel he drew plans for a cabin, finding that it kept getting larger. Too many aesthetic ideas of space and design kept getting in his way. He should begin again with the smallest space he needed, the minimum number of cubic feet to heat and care for. But there was that baronial vision of cavernous beams and a tall stone fireplace column, the lone romantic figure by the great fire while in the eaves the wind howled its white fury across the mountains. "... A crag of a wind-grieved Apennine ..." Tennyson? Wordsworth? Beyond the general condescension he had been taught in school, why shouldn't that vision have its ap­peal?

  He folded his sketchy designs and dropped them in the plastic wastebasket. The motel room was smooth, carpeted, polished at the factories that had made its parts. As soon as he had the tent up and a few more things he needed he would leave.

  He was well-tired by physical work, with a sense of the shapes of his muscles. His upper arms had grown larger, hard to sleep on. His waist felt slimmer, his hips and thighs indicating to him their unity of nerve, tendon and bone. He took a shower and slid like a muscular eel into the cool sheets.