The Followed Man Read online

  The loaded pistol was in his hand, ready to blast the air apart with its contained explosions, the copper-jacketed lead bullets sta­bilized in flight by a counterclockwise twist. It would blast the si­lence of this quiet, misty day. The echo would come and come again from the western hill. But did he want to make such a state­ment to the valley? It was better to creep in, kill silently and be gone.

  Me must shoot the gun, and no one would hear, or if hearing know what the shot was or where it came from. No one was here to kill or be killed. This was his land and he could do anything he wanted here. He sat down, cocked the hammer and held the pistol in both hands, his elbows around his knees for stability. The black dot swayed, the square sights wavering in and out of alignment in a way he could not remember. He took a deep breath and let it half out, willing the sights steady as he pulled the pad of his right index finger toward him on the trigger. Always the first shot was anticipated with mild apprehension, but then the pistol jumped backward, the explosion not so much loud as a tremendous vacu­um of sound, and a smaller black dot appeared a few inches from his bullseye. Now he remembered the kick, which was smooth and pleasant; the pistol had reloaded itself and was ready. Echoes re­verberated across the valley until they died, and a bluejay flew screaming from a birch.

  He fired six more times, until the valley seemed as used to the sound and its rolling as an orchestral hall. His bullets moved a lit­tle closer together, near enough together and to the bull so that he wouldn't bother to adjust the sights. He might never fire the pistol again, but he would have it somewhere nearby in its holster, just the clip loaded. He knew that much, but not exactly why. He hadn't come here to be in Indian territory. The enemy he wanted was the inevitable and beautiful turning of the spheres that turned the seasons, not creatures that had to be shot. There was the Avenger, who was so far purely literary, except perhaps for the telephone call, though he had just about come to believe that some other Carr was involved there.

  But there was the pistol, now on his belt in its large protective holster, and it spoke to him of a sort of partnership, indissoluble, as though a contract had come to be written which specified a cer­tain nearness, a distance in reach, a multiple of the length of his arm but only such and such a multiple. Or time—three seconds from awareness of need to the bulky feel of steel and walnut; or two seconds, the feel also the weight of seven cartridges and the mild give and tick as the grip safety released under the pressure of the crotch of his hand.

  Something moved exactly behind him, ten feet behind him, and he turned quickly, all of his senses shocked by a presence. It was a dog, its brown eyes now apprehensive at the quick defensive movement, but still and questioning. It was a black and tan beagle, or part beagle, looking straight at him with the ancient question always expressed by the whole body of a hound: Friend, or not?

  "Friend," Luke said.

  The white tip of the tail moved an inch, back an inch, and stopped. The eyes of this hound were unusually bright and deep.

  "Friend or not, it doesn't matter, does it?" Luke said, but he squatted down, keeping his hands on his knees. The dog came forward without cringing or hesitation and smelled his hands, then wagged his tail a few times, calmly, to indicate friendship or the possibility of it. The dog was also interested in smelling the holster of the freshly fired pistol, and may have come to the shots. Luke scratched behind the long, soft ears. On the dog's collar was a tag, pop-riveted to the leather rather than hung from a link.

  MY NAME IS

  JAKE

  I BELONG TO

  LESTER WILSON

  CASCOM, N.H.

  "Hello, Jake," Luke said. At the sound of his name, the dog looked up at Luke's eyes again.

  Lester Wilson seemed a familiar name, one Luke had heard lately. George or Phyllis Bateman must have mentioned it in some context or other, but he couldn't remember.

  Jake made a tour of the tent, car, collapsed buildings, left his scent on a corner of the house foundation, then came back to Luke, who was still unloading the car, barked his hound yowl once, as if to say good-bye, and ranged off into the brush to the South.

  Jake may have been a roamer, like many beagles, but if Lester Wilson lived down in the village, the dog was at least seven miles from home. Maybe Lester Wilson was fishing a mountain brook and was not too far away. Certainly no hunting season was open. He'd have to ask George or Phyllis who Lester Wilson was.

  George had talked about Luke's nearest neighbors in this upper valley. The two hunting camps on the road below belonged to Massachusetts people who came up weekends in deer season, sel­dom any other time of year. Three miles on, over the shoulder of the mountain, some "hippies," according to George, had built shacks and a cabin and periodically tried to be farmers, going away often to earn money enough to come back for a while and try to farm the inhospitable land again. Beyond the hippies was the extensive land and the old log lodge of the Cascom Mountain Club, a semipublic group of hikers and skiers based in Boston. The young woman and child at the brook, if he had actually seen them—the memory was so vivid yet out of place here it flickered in and out of actuality—might have come from there. But from what he had heard of the CMC people over the years, they main­tained their own trails and stayed on them, rarely if ever bush­whacking.

  Then he remembered who Lester Wilson was—the young part-time chief of police with the supercar and six-pack George spoke of during his right-to-bear-arms outburst. It seemed strange that he now remembered George's reference to Lester Wilson, as if such skill in remembering an odd name were exemplary in some way, a talent he hadn't known he had. And then he thought, look­ing over at the submerging kitchen corner of the farmhouse, that he should have come to see Shem once more before Shem died. The old man had always liked him, looked at him a little more fiercely, grinned harder at him than at other people. "He learns pretty good," Shem had once told his father, and when his father told him what Shem had said, he was a little more afraid of Shem. He thought he knew that Shem hadn't meant to frighten him. Maybe not anyone. He thought he knew it as a child, but was still frightened and fascinated. Whenever one of his own statements or jokes had caused that sort of tension in another, he had been surprised, because he had never meant to cause tension or fear. But it had happened. One never knew one's own power to threat­en, and others hid their vulnerability. But Shem was dead and he was alone.

  It took him some time to fit a shovel handle, to fit the peavey handle better than he had done it in haste at the spruce grove, and to cut some saplings for braces. Then he began to pry, brace and dig his way through the slanted and collapsed walls into what had been the kitchen.

  Here all was damp and must, wood leached of its color and strength, slabs of ancient wallpaper, lath still embraced by grainy plaster, clapboards that had twisted and sprung as the studding buckled. He chopped into the large old two-by-fours. Some still had a little hardness and life in them, and some received his ax with the slow giving of cheese. Part of one wall, freed of its join­ings, he pushed outward with a sapling and let it fall with a rotten softness to the grass. Half of the kitchen had been one story high, and the main part of the house, the second story that half-covered it, had collapsed to the north, so he soon began to see a recogniz­able though canted kitchen floor, with its brown wear-runs in the patterned linoleum. The old wood stove seemed intact, though rusted in its ungreasy places to a sand-textured primer red. The faint odor of the old kitchen was still there in its walls, or it might have been a memory of baking meat, sweet and brown, steam, acid, spice, bread, cider, all now set, cold and faint amid the pota-toey, cellary fresh chill of rot.

  He came upon the old kitchen table, protected somewhat by its ragged oilcloth, its varnished wooden chairs surprisingly intact, though damp and gray with mildew on their leather seats. There was Shem's cot, mice in the shredded blankets, the pillow open to feathers soggy as fresh mortar. The floor there was doubtful; the rusted metal cot, its sodden mattress and bedclothes brown with stains th
at had been there long before the house fell in, would slide in the general list toward the cellar hole below.

  Pots and pans, silverware, bowls, glasses, kitchen knives and utensils he collected, saving all of them, remembering all of them, even odd forks, a knife worn to a thin ribbon of steel, a spoon etched with a scene from Wichita, Kansas, an aluminum potato masher which squeezed a boiled potato out into white worms, a greasy spatula he remembered clean and shining in a drawer. All the old white plates were gone, and all of the cups, though there were many saucers stacked in a tilted cabinet. In the slate sink were an enameled cup, a blue-enameled pie plate, a cast iron fry­ing pan and a large silver-plated spoon, all gleaned by the teeth of mice. Shem's Morris chair was salvageable, but not its cushions.

  He would clear out the rotten wood and pile it to burn, then himself glean from the house whatever he could use. He could see now that it would take him days to find everything that he wanted to find here. Shem's spectacles, his pipes, a tomato can half-full of pipe ashes, the old television set now cracked in its wooden ve­neer, the tube's face a dead gray—these he would let fall to the cellar hole, but he must touch them first, and catalogue them in his mind. The hand-pump at the sink he would remove and set up at the dug well in the yard, using new plastic pipe. The other plumbing, including the electric pump that Shem hadn't used for years, might not be worth probing for, but he would see. When he was through, this ruin would no longer be a junkyard; it would be smooth as a grave.

  He worked all day in the wreck of the house, until the rot and soddenness of what he remembered square and had thought eter­nal depressed him and made him yearn for the fresh logs and un­created, unspoiled dimensions of his own cabin, which would grow clean and bright on new land.

  It was eight o'clock, the sky still light but a darkness sliding into the shadows, when he stopped, cleaned up the kitchen table and chairs by rubbing off their mold with his hands, and took them to his tent. With the oilcloth removed the table top was dark as ma­hogany, though made of pine. He set his new stove up on the ta­ble and opened a can of beef stew and a can of stewed tomatoes, then had a drink while the stove hissed blue flame.

  Someday he was not going to feel the newness and relief of be­ing alone. As the light died he sat in the doorway of the tent and watched the mountain grow black and flat against the sky, then the sky fade little by little as if by the blinks of his eyes, into the night that always came. A bat flew, fluttering silently and swiftly through its angular courses, then still flew when it could not be seen. The evening star fell toward the mountain and a cold haze grew in the southeast as the moon rose. The night was cold, for June, though it was usually several degrees colder up here than down in the town. All the people were down there, now, with the farms gone from the hills and the trees coming in. There was a place on the farm, a granite knob—or really Kinsman monzonite, he'd discovered in some research project or other—from which the lake and distant lights could be seen, miles down and away to the southeast. Driving to town didn't seem that far, but it was a long way for a creature on foot, or a creature sighting the distant lights of others of his kind. Tomorrow was Sunday and he couldn't get on with his dealings with those he must hire or buy from, so after working on the ruins he might walk the borders of the farm and look down the miles from that minor pinnacle.

  His lamp made no noise, but called up the strobic hysteria of the moths until he temporarily draped the entrance of the tent with mosquito netting. Some found their way in still, to bash and burn themselves on the hot glass chimney, or to become, briefly, as incandescent as the white mantle.

  After he had eaten he went to the old well, by flashlight, and lowered a bucket for the water to do his dishes. The rusted bucket had pinhole leaks in it, but with it he filled a pot with the water that was heavy but nearly invisible in the beam of his flashlight. From the stone-walled darkness of the well came this clear silver weight.

  As he did the dishes he thought of twenty years ago, when he had inhabited a body quite similar to this one. He had been singular then, too. He was the editor and part-owner of a magazine that was a filler in the Saturday editions of over a hundred small city and suburban dailies which had no Sunday editions, and for the times and for his age he was comparatively rich. In a year or so he had saved twenty thousand dollars and planned to stay with the magazine, which wasycalled This Weekend, for another year at the most. Because of his time in the army he hadn't yet graduated from college, so that summer he went back to the state university to take the two courses he needed in order to graduate. His part­ners thought it a crazy thing to do, and he hadn't known it then but one of them, a man he thought a friend, was planning to force him out—one reason being that summer school was supposed to have taken so much of his time he abrogated an agreement. Or perhaps he did suspect Ron Sevas, who was older—in his thir­ties—who in the war had been a major in the air force. Or at least said he had been a major; veterans said a lot of those things in those days, thinking such matters important.

  When he finished the dishes he sat at the old table, his chair's legs slowly sinking into the turf. That was the summer he first saw Helen. He lit a cigarette and suddenly, though motionless, he was falling again. Grief was like the void beneath the last lost hand­hold. He thought how nearly anything could be rationalized, or ameliorated, or made the best of. But all the time he fell too fast to doubt that it was fatal. There was nothing to do but fall and never land. He could shoot himself; that would end the falling. He had never suspected that grief was like anxiety. He had lost what he didn't know how to lose.

  He lay on his folding cot, on the thin quilted mattress, the opened sleeping bag over him and a rolled-up shirt for a pillow. The tent smelled of the clean, over-strong canvas fabrics of the army when he was young. He turned off the Aladdin lamp and watched its white light fade into the warmer tones of fire as it died, its last cone in his eyes in the darkness. Moonlight grew like frost on the mosquito netting at the tent's doorway.

  So he was alone on the mountain. Surely he was not the first or the most intensely bereaved. He would remember Helen Benton, who had decided, once, firmly and completely, to be his wife—that young woman whose accidental perfections struck him into the acceptance of permanence, literally at first sight, and whose other qualities, luckily and happily, were such that it all held. Pure luck, because in the beginning he would have settled—no, not set­tled, but gone through it all like a dreaming idiot—for any woman who moved as she did and looked like Helen. Some were lucky in their insanity, when for the first time out of all women in the known world of women the one appeared.

  He was twenty-five when he first saw her, in 1957, and she was twenty-two, ages that now seemed immature to the point of in­competence, but then seemed old; he, at least, thought himself more than a little jaded by the abrasions of experience.

  He saw Helen for the first time at a New Hampshire beach called Wallis Sands. She was with a fellow whose name he could not now recall, though he believed he remembered everything else about that July afternoon, as though each moment were then set in glass, so that for all the years he could reexamine it at lei­sure, nothing lost.

  He was alone, not lonesome. His current girl was in New York. It seemed to him that in the last few years, after getting out of the army, he had had too many women and had spent too much time having too many women. It had come to be a cloying, even evil game, dishonest because only he could win. At least that was the way it had begun to seem to him then. Those girls, each lovely in her way, each flawed to him, each believing an implication he did not really make; he shuddered, as if he were a criminal being sen­tenced.

  But that day in July, on the beach at Wallis Sands, as if to prove that lust was renewable, that the game was not rigged, he saw Hel­en walk from the minor surf in a yellow, one-piece bathing suit, pull off her white bathing cap and shake out her dark blond hair. He smelled kelp and the hot salt sand. She was his discovery. She walked to a blanket near his and knelt, the ac
t of kneeling entirely too intimate toward the boy she was with, a mediocre specimen of mankind, a clod just not genetically endowed with the ability to see what was there. Pearls before swine. He thought then, as he watched her, that this woman would have to be a monster in order to disenthrall him, and she never was and never did. No later an­ger, argument, guilt, pettishness, illogic or stupidity in all the years disenthralled him. Bravery, loyalty, responsibility, care, generosity—these qualities he could not have discerned there on the beach as he lost his judgment and caution. It was his luck.

  He watched her. The boy she was with seemed pleasant, soft and bland, made out of inferior materials. Luke had never felt such an imperative; she couldn't get away from him. He had nev­er realized that there were certain dimensions, colors, expres­sions, sounds that must have been imprinted upon him, or whose necessity to him were as deep as whatever his genetic makeup had come to be through all the generations that had made him. Before he knew her name he wanted to have children with this woman. She was the one. He could hear her voice but couldn't quite hear her sentences. He hadn't known before that a woman had to have certain precise physical characteristics—that she had to be small, but not too small, be narrow but not too narrow in the waist, have comparatively broad shoulders, be slim in her bones yet firm at thighs and upper arms. Strength and delicacy at once. He had never before believed the power of the purely visual; if he'd been asked before he saw her he would have said that such things were superficial, not that important at all. He was wrong; it was all in the way this female animal moved upon her given bones. She seemed so familiar to him he felt that he shouldn't have to in­troduce himself to her. She was his by the right of her perfection in his eyes. He was aware that the intensity of this reasoning amounted to a kind of dementia, and since he was a practical per­son, used to the avoidance of failure, he tried to be careful. He thought of following them when they left the beach, of all the ways he might plausibly approach them. She had a book and note­book with her, so he assumed she was a student. It seemed an ex­traordinary problem; he saw himself disappearing, sinking under too much thought, so he got up, went across the hot sand the few giving, sifting steps to their blanket and simply asked them their names. The boy's name was Chuck something—he remembered the first name now, at least—and hers was Helen Benton. Chuck was not pleased by his company, but was civilized about it. Luke found this civility hard to understand; in all the years he would al­ways be surprised when someone did not covet Helen as he did.