The Followed Man Page 18

  And so they lived happily ever after, except for all the superfi­cial screams and accusations, sulks and the mutually petty inter­ludes of an intense marriage. Of course that was a simplification, but after all the years, and after the particular, instantaneous form of her loss, she and his unfinished children were gone.

  His analysis was an avoidance of the unthinkable. Worse things had happened to other survivors. His task of building his cabin, his tomb, was suspect. He detested self-pity.

  Or suicide, he thought as he reached for a cigarette. He found the matches and lit a candle so he would be able to see the smoke as it left his lungs, then looked at the white tube of the cigarette. He had begun to smoke late, in the infantry, out of boredom and fear. It was stupid to have a minor pleasure which killed you.

  Something moved at the door of the tent. The netting bulged in at the bottom and stretched into pressure lines toward the apex of the triangle. His hand went down beside the cot and came up with the pistol.

  A low yet impatient yowl came from out there: Are you going to let me in? Don't we have an understanding? No, it was more compli­cated than that: I've been waiting here to be let in; why don't you know I'm here, as I know you're there?

  Luke got up, removed the stick that weighted the folded end of the netting to the ground, and let the dog enter. There had been even more said: the dog had implied that he was a dog, man's nat­ural companion, and of course had a right to shelter, no matter how short a time they'd known each other.

  "Well, Jake," Luke said. "You're welcome."

  Jake looked around the tent, his nose busy in the air, his tail in­dicating approval. He went to the paper bag that contained the empty tomato and stew cans, nosed it and asked if there were something of the sort for him.

  "The question is whether I should feed you, or not," Luke said.

  Jake thought he should, though in this area Jake would not be reliable. What a dog knew, he knew totally, and if a man looked and listened, he would understand. But the wants of Lester Wilson, a dog owner, were another matter. At least Jake was not over­weight. While Jake watched, knowing, Luke went through the canned goods he'd brought from Wellesley and found a can of Prudence beef hash, which he served cold in Shem's old blue-enameled pie plate. Jake found it acceptable, ate it in four or five gobbets and then made himself a nest in the grass beneath Luke's cot. Without further communication he curled up there, sighed and shut his eyes.

  "Good night," Luke said.

  One white paw moved, a minor adjustment. In the strange way that a dog was company, Jake was company. No small talk, just the primal considerations of food, warmth, proximity, sleep. And in return, if a dog were not stupid or psychically wounded, he con­tributed the skills of his ears and nose. No animal or man could approach undetected this night, which was a small though sur­prising relief. Luke was tired, and now he lay down, that other breathing intelligence his sentinel.

  13.

  He woke in a tent baking in the morning sun, its canvas oils al­most suffocating, yet not desperately so because the heavy air, though excessive with the perfume of the fabric, seemed part of an erotic dream he couldn't quite remember. His penis was stiff, electrolytic, acid and base. It seemed an electrode powerful and not understood, precarious to touch. Its ridges and planes were sensitive, almost in pain, yet willing toward a general conception of woman that was hollow, watery, smooth at the center, the wom­an no one woman. If he thought of one particular woman all the complications, quirks, other needs, demands and schedules would overcome and dissipate the force he held gently between his palms. If he thought of Helen it was of the dead, and all was gone. She passed vaguely, monochromatic as a shadow, over the screen of his vision. Smooth thighs were open, welcoming him past the dark entrance to a needful center that was not darkness but another element in which part of him saw without eyes or light. A strange other entered there and discharged, in a rush of fluid. Too much pleasure and none given: gratitude, but to no one, and the faint aura of sinful excess, the precious slime drowning in the air on the skin of his fingers.

  Now why, how, from where, had the need come back to jolt him, when he had never understood the need or its fulfillment? All his life he had experienced it in one form or another, from his earliest memories, such as the smooth young sides of Phyllis Follansbee so long before he knew and could do what made the plea­sure culminate in this humid thoughtful limbo.

  But it was over now, and he could get on with things. He thought of a shower, shaving, breakfast. Breakfast he could man­age. Later, when he walked the borders of the land, he might take a bath at the brook pool. When his cabin was built he would have every small, snug luxury he wanted. He would take a shower while a blizzard buried the woods and howled at his flue.

  Jake had left, having found a way around the netting. His round bed of pressed grass and the cleaned pie plate were there on the ground to prove his visit. If he came by again today Luke would have to believe he was lost and take him home.

  After breakfast he worked on the house, proceding from the kitchen to places that had fallen in earlier, where the level of rot was more advanced. By noon he decided that he would lever up no more rotten walls, that whatever remained in the house would go down in its grave. When he hired someone to fix the road, the same loader could move all the rotten wood of house, sheds and barn into the cellar hole, then pile dirt on top. He would sow grass over it all and let it work—bluegrass, clover and rye among the plantain, hawkweed and dandelions that would seed themselves.

  For lunch he had a can of cold beans and a Spam sandwich, left his dishes for later and began his tour of the vaguely remembered borders of the land. He found ghost pastures, vistas dimmed by leaves, stone walls going through dense woods, barbed wire grown deep into the trunks of trees. In the eighteen hundreds and into the nineteen hundreds all the hills below the mountain were clear pasture or cropland, all open to wind and airy long views, a different world. But there had been migrations, economic changes, wars and years of frost, and the trees that had waited on the ridges and in the swamps moved forward.

  He found the northwest corner of the land, where a right an­gled turn of barbed wire ran through a great beech tree below the dark scars of blazes. On the trunk of the gray tree were the old dashed clawmarks of a bear.

  He descended through hemlock and yellow birch, whose gold­en bark shone against the dark green of the hemlock. Down and to his left, if he could remember, was a place he had found as a child, a dark, wet, rocky place of several acres, where tall swamp maples grew seemingly out of stones and in the wet seasons water dark as rust. It had been a quiet, twilit other world, useless to the farm, where the maples were forced to grow tall without deep roots, so that when a gust caught one at the right angle it would lean, all of its height moved over to rest against its neighbor, its wide pedestal of roots tipped up so that he could see beneath, in that round place as wide as a room, space that had been in dark­ness as long as the tree was old. It had been still and foreign among the tall columns because no one ever went there. The wood was not worth the trouble of the boulders and water, so the trees grew, sometimes tilted by the wind, and died in their own time.

  He found the place again. It seemed exactly the same as it had when he was half his height, so the trees had grown. He stepped over water, from rock to boulder to rock, as he entered its twi­light. There a tree that must be seventy feet tall had recently been blown against another. Its roots still held damp earth in the grasp of the new filaments. Probably, if it were blown back, or tilted back upright, those rootlets would again grow down and outward to anchor the tree to the ground. A man with a block and tackle or a chainfall could pull it back upright. He wondered how many years would then pass before a freak gust might again tilt it over, or if it would die sometime hence and lose its sails, so the stump would never move again. A good place to hide something. A body, for instance, if one had to get rid of a body. Who would look beneath a living, fifty-year-old maple? That dense wood was
ancient, per­manent, slow-grown, its gnarled roots a mesh of inanimate muscle that would block such a thought before it ever occurred. That place would be as invisible as, unthought of as a parallel universe.

  The roots would grow and proliferate in the absolute dark, sur­round and rend that nutriment, calcium and all.

  Gruesome thoughts to have in this dark place, but why should he mind his thoughts? The land was his world to know in all of its bright and dismal, drained and undrained, fertile and barren places, and if the land jarred his thoughts in strange ways, let it.

  The pistol, heavy on his hip, was a dark power worth having there.

  He went back to the line, bushwacking among the living and dy­ing trees that were always growing and falling, birth and death everywhere, always reminding. He crossed the brook a quarter of a mile above the pool and bridge, where the line took a jag to the right, following the brook west and up. Then he was lucky to no­tice old blazes on a hemlock that told him to turn southeast, though from here on his memory was doubtful at best. He climbed to the southeast, hoping that he was not following a false slope. He should have a compass, should have thought to take Johnny's, because the sun always turned confusingly. Here old apple trees, dead for years, had strangled reaching for light. As he climbed he entered spruce, some very old, and finally came to the bald knob of monzonite flecked with lozenges of white felspar. Down across valleys to the southeast was part of the blue lake, a thin crescent from here, and beyond the lake more hills, hills upon hills into the haze of distance. The town of Cascom was in­visible in its summer leaves; from this hill on the side of Cascom Mountain, except for the long thin cut of a powerline miles away, the land might have been empty of all but trees.

  He sat on a roll of the dry rock, its history of violent fire and gla­cial wear so ancient it was peaceful here where patches of gray-green lichens slowly worked. Below him was a hardwood forest and behind him the spruce advanced. He lit a cigarette and let his vision move out over the forest as if all of him were levitated on some sort of glider that moved dangerously away from its starting point and was supported only by the air, all that space between earth's trees and a low strata of gray cloud coming in from over the mountain to the west.

  From behind him, on his trail, he heard a patter and breathing, but this time knew at once that it was the dog. Before it saw him it came by its nose, casting for the effluvium, invisible and undetect­able to a man, that was a dog's best evidence of all. When Jake came within a yard of him he stopped, almost as if surprised, and changed his senses over to vision, then touch as he placed his face against Luke's hands and knees, wagging his tail and expressing something near joy.

  "Hello there, dog," Luke said. "You following me?"

  Jake suddenly turned, flopped down on his side and delicately bit with his white teeth an itch high on his hind leg. That done, he got up and thrust his head beneath Luke's hand. Luke scratched behind his ears and relieved his collar of bunched hair. Jake was black, tan and mostly white beneath, by Luke's estimation four or five years old. There was a brightness in his eyes one didn't always find in a beagle; even in pleasure the eyes did not go simple, but still watched, expressing something more complicated than ecsta­sy.

  Soon Jake signified that he had been touched enough, and went off to cast around for the scent of a rabbit, hunting with this man he had found in the woods, who should now recognize a dog's clearly superior talent in this matter.

  But Luke was not here for that. He felt a need to tell Jake not to expend his energy on the hunt, then was amused by this. There were broad areas of understanding between a man and a dog, in­stantaneous ones, but to try to go beyond them was stupid. Jake would hunt, and he would continue to follow the borders of the land. Jake would come back if he wanted to, or go home if he wanted to and knew the way.

  Luke followed old wire from the knob down and toward the east, then to the northeast, and finally came to the mountain road, the eastern border of the farm. He followed the dirt road for a half mile without a car passing, then turned west away from the road to foflow the brook upstream, jumping from stone to stone where the alders were too thick along its banks. He left the brook where wire crossed it, and eventually came to the beech tree on the northwest corner, where he had started. By now it was late af­ternoon, so he headed back toward the brook pool across woodlot and brushy pasture, past the site he had decided for his cabin, a vision of substantiality there and then not there.

  The pool swirled invisibly over its amber floor. It would be cold, but at this moment, in the sweaty exuberance of his exercise, it in­vited him to enter. He thought of going back to his tent to get soap, towel and fresh clothes, but in his heated physicality decided to wash first and then go naked, except for boots on his tender feet, back up the hill. He took off his clothes and half dove into the shocking water, which after its cruel welcome was numbingly warm. He could take the cold. The sun was behind the low clouds that had slid in across the mountain and now covered what sky he could see through the trees, a gray unstriated ceiling over the land.

  He scrubbed himself brittlely, squeaking his half-numb hands over his body in a way that seemed young, pleased by his hard ab­domen and pectorals, buttocks, triceps—the terms of youth's pride in its parts. He seemed for this brisk moment recovered from the conception of himself as a bereft, middle-aged being who was only a widower, landowner, taxpayer—a merely civil en­tity, as vague physically as a statistic. Different, too, from the way he'd felt in New York, with all its constant frantic surges. He did not feel tender here. Here it would be the likes of Robin Flash who wouldn't quite understand, who would mistrust and misread the signs.

  He came out of the water and stood where the young woman had stood naked, in that space, a space full of her ghost, and Hel­en's ghost. He shook himself and wiped the water from his hard flesh with his hands. He hadn't entered a woman for six months, and wondered if he ever would again. It had been in the morning, before he drove them in to Logan Airport. He woke with Helen's hand on him, both of them feeling him grow until he was so rigid he thought of the ball of a trailer hitch. She had to know and feel him grow hard for her, she said, because if she could cause all that involuntary engorgement, that steely purpose in him, it made her forget age and time. He didn't know the why of it; it had always happened. While he grew hard, she grew soft and slippery. That was the way it happened.

  As he walked back up the hill, his clothes and pistol in a bundle under his arm, a mosquito or blackfly enjoying his shoulderblade, he thought of the words of his trade of words, that there were words he would never use no matter how close they came to the desired meanings. They might flicker through his mind, these summations, but they meant not quite what was real. Now that he was not writing anymore he might, without the small fearful flut­ter of care, or the fear of breaking his own euphonic or alliterative rules, make a list having no principle of organization whatsoever: anal, oral, nexus, ontology, gnosis, epistemology, phylogeny, pos­itivism, relativism, existentialism, structuralism, methodology, phenomenology, protean, antinomy, quotidian, acculturation, hermeticism, telos, heuristic, aporias, voluntaristic, irredentist, Manichaean, Oedipal—God, what a pile of baggage he'd brought here to this wild land where he walked naked except for his boots.

  Before he came into the open he saw that a pickup truck was parked next to his car, so he stopped to put on his dungarees, which was a pain because he had to take his boots off his sticky bare feet before he could put the dungarees on, then force his feet back into the boots. The effort, done for old reasons of tact, irritated him and seemed a waste of the time he had to live.

  George and Phyllis Bateman sat in the truck. "Thought you'd be needing the tools in your chest pretty soon," George said. "My son Bill was by yesterday so he helped me load it on the truck. Strong as a damn ox."

  Phyllis opened her door but didn't try to get out of the truck. "So the house is gone altogether," she said.

  "Was a good house, once," George said. He ca
me around to the back of the truck and he and Luke eased the chest off and onto the ground. "Get some three mil poly to cover it till you get your house done."

  "I remember this place so well," Phyllis said. "I can just see the fields and the barn and the cows."

  "The woods come back, " George said.

  Luke thanked him for bringing the chest and they discussed who he should hire to fix the road and smooth over the ruins.

  "Eph Buzzell, if you can get him started," George said.

  "Eph Buzzell, Junior?"

  "No, there ain't any Junior. I mean the original Eph Buzzell. He's only eighty now, still likes to play with his mechanical toys!" George shook his head in admiration for a man Luke remem­bered, a friend and contemporary of Shem's. "I bet he'd come up here just to see the place again. He's doing some work for the town but I think he's about done with that. Come down this eve­ning and call him up on the telephone. He'll tell you right off if he'll do it. The old bastard's sharp as a tack. Talk your arm and leg off."