The Followed Man Read online

  "I'll do that. Also I want to buy a pickup."

  "New one? What kind?"

  "I'm not sure. Chevy, Ford, Dodge, International—I don't know."

  "I've had pretty good luck with Fords, but I suppose it's six of one and half a dozen of the other. Depend on what you want it for. Four-wheel drive? Half-ton, three-quarter?"

  They discussed it. George was curious and excited by a man just up and buying a new truck, and Luke caught the excitement. A brand new truck, a shiny, powerful new truck. "Maybe I'll do it up brown, George," he said. "Get the deluxe of the deluxe, every­thing on it you can think of except air conditioning."

  "God!" George said. "Power takeoffs, winch, CB, step bumper, trailer hitch and harness, Warn hubs, oil cooler, heavy duty elec­trical system and suspension—good Lord, Luke, cost you a mint!"

  "And those monster oversize tires—they worth it?"

  "Well, you got eight to ten thousand dollars to play with?"

  "Sure, if I get my money's worth."

  "God damn, I got to see this!"

  "Come with me tomorrow, if you've got the time, and we'll hit every dealer in Leah and Northlee."

  "Done!"

  "Now, Luke," Phyllis said. "Don't get him too excited. He never did get over playing with trucks."

  "I ain't going to have no heart attack, if that's what's worrying you," George said.

  " 'Course it worries me," she said, and George looked up at her, both of them smiling until a shade passed over both of their faces like a wing of the Angel of Death, and then their clear regard of each other lasted a second more.

  George and Phyllis left soon, Phyllis having asked Luke if he wanted to come for supper. He said he needed to do some more work, but that he'd come down later to call Eph Buzzell. And he would come Saturday at seven o'clock sharp; he hadn't forgotten or anything. As he said this he felt foolish—that he was doing Phyllis a favor to come to her house for supper and meet the peo­ple she wanted him to meet. Phyllis's instincts, archaic as they might be, were to get him involved with people, specifically with a woman. No man should live alone; we must conjugate, for the hills were cold and empty of cheery hearths and the happy ring of children's laughter, and so on. What a lovely world she had in mind, more than a century out of date.

  This made him sad, the sadness coming over him with unex­pected force. Blackflies, in the gray light, were eating him, so he put on fresh clothes and put all his dirty clothes in the car to take to the laundromat. He had no more work he wanted to do this evening. It was six o'clock, and it wouldn't be dark until eight or nine, but he was through for the day that had turned an iron gray beneath the single cloud mass that covered the whole sky. The mountain rose like a somber fist.

  He washed the coffee cups and his breakfast dishes, then dragged Shem's chest into the tent. He wished for a door to lock when he had to go down the mountain. He was not hungry; the dull sky and motionless trees, the temperature which was neither warm nor cold, made the world comatose, memories of desire weak or false. Only the blackflies seemed desperate for continu­ance.

  Then he heard the dog on a rabbit, far away, the sharp yelps homing in over the valley like pinpricks from that distant chase. The rabbit would be easing along, always knowing where the frantic dog cast for his scent, hopping ahead, loping, waiting, doubling back, making long circles to cross his own scent and try to confuse the dog, whose nearly hysterical enthusiasm he must understand as the desire for his flesh. That, animals must know.

  But without a man in ambush with a gun, the dog could never mouth the rabbit. A snowshoe rabbit, or varying hare, never went to ground, just moved on. and sooner or later the dog would have to give it up.

  The sharp sounds, made faint by distance, dimmed and grew as the circles changed. Luke poured himself a drink of bourbon, lit a cigarette and sat in a kitchen chair by the tent's doorway listening to the new dimension the far excitement gave to the rises and depressions of the land.

  In this season he couldn't help the dog, though he felt responsi­ble, his race having bred such instincts sharp through a thousand generations. Hares could take care of themselves.

  The sound of the dog hunting was not a sad one. It was just that there was so much of our progress to forget, or ignore, in order to get back to what the body knew. And maybe it wasn't all bad that it was the bourbon, that ancient potion, that helped him out of his despair. It was Jake's voice, though, that turned the valley good again, saying motion, dimension, purpose that couldn't be fault­ed. Nothing against the hare, who was sacred. We carnivores don't hate our food, our prey, our true mentors. Jake's tail would be wagging, his face eager, no irritation or hatred in him as he crawled through blowdown, jumped, cast about, climbed and ran through brush and thorns.

  After a long time the yelps ceased, and with them went the true knowledge that dog and hare had run. At seven-thirty Jake came trotting across the broken pasture toward the tent. He stopped when he saw the man there; to look and think, then came on more slowly until he was certain that they had met before. He came up to Luke and signified friendship, then slipped into the tent to check out the blue-enameled pie plate. It was empty, so he came back, no hard feelings, and lay down at Luke's feet, tongue out and dripping.

  "Well, Jake, I guess I'd better take you home," Luke said. "Not that I mind your company." In acknowledgment of the voice, Jake's tail thumped the ground twice; he would rest now.

  Luke tied the tent flaps shut and went to the car. With a quizzi­cal attitude toward himself, he put the pistol beneath the floormat under the seat. "Come on, Jake," he said in an ordinary voice, and Jake immediately came over and jumped up into the car. "Move over," Luke said, and Jake did. As they drove out of the farm and down the mountain road, Jake laid his head and lolling tongue on the passenger side windowsill, sifting and utilizing the passing air.

  Luke stopped at the Batemans' and asked where Lester Wilson lived, saying he'd be back as soon as he delivered the dog.

  "On the River Road to Leah," George said. "There's a whole goddam village of Wilsons out there. Go about a mile past the old mill and when you see four or five trailers and seventeen junk cars, you're there. Lester's trailer's the pink and blue one with the falling down sheds and lean-tos along the backside of it."

  Luke had told Jake to stay in the car, and he did. George came out to take a look at him. "Good-looking beagle hound, I must say, 'spite of the shit-for-brains owns him," George said.

  "You know, George," Luke said. "I wouldn't want to have you mad at me."

  George looked at him, then smiled. "Well, I try not to be too hard on a fella."

  Luke remembered when the River Road was the main road to Leah, before the higher road had been graded and widened so that in places it looked like a superhighway. He drove along the winding dark asphalt beneath elms, most of them dead or dying. It was not quite dark when he came to the trailers and the junked, wide and long old cars and station wagons that looked as though they had been deposited over the landscape by a flood. Some were on their sides, chrome and streamlining askew, some were propped up, front or back or both, on cement blocks. He turned in at the pink and blue trailer and stopped between a V-8 engine on the oily dirt and a yellow Dodge with huge tires on its rear wheels that made it look a little hunchbacked. Jake looked around, recognized the place, but displayed no enthusiasm. When Luke got out he remained in the car.

  Luke picked a place to knock beneath the louvered window on the narrow metal door. The sounds of television seemed to leak here and there from the body of the trailer. A roof on wooden studs had been set up over the whole trailer, he noticed now, the bare studs driven into the ground so that they would rot out in a year or two. He knocked harder, and after a few moments the door opened partway upon the face of a young woman who was afraid of him.

  "Is Lester Wilson here?" he asked. "I've got his dog."

  Her red hair was piled up above her pale face in metallic curls, but the rest of her looked undone, unwashed. Her blue blouse w
as torn or worn out at the shoulder, and her short black skirt was wet across the belly at sink level. Her eyes moved to her right, to the main part of the trailer, then back to look vaguely at him again, a vagueness that made him think of a schoolchild who was too frightened to listen to a question.

  "Is this Lester Wilson's place?" he asked.

  A large young man appeared beside her, pushed her out of the way and came out the door, forcing Luke to take two steps back­ward. He stared at Luke without expression or with the intent to have no expression. It was the desire to intimidate, or the need to, and Luke recognized it with a sense of weariness. The man want­ed to project, force, possess a presence. His eyes, however, flicked to the Massachusetts license plate on Luke's car—an error, since they should have seen that earlier, seen everything, known every­thing. Jake was not visible. This poor fellow was not equipped to be the man he wanted to be, and Luke knew that his own calmness in this silent confrontation meant danger, or at least bother; why make an enemy? But his attitude could not be disguised.

  "I've brought your dog. Thought he might have been lost up on the mountain," Luke said.

  After a calculated silence, Lester Wilson said flatly, "You brought my dog." This meant that Luke's statement was ridicu­lous, that he had "brought" a dog was a pretentious, meaningless and even embarrassed thing to say, a statement that could only have been made by someone who was frightened and thus dishon­est, who needed his comeuppance.

  But a front tooth was missing; Lester Wilson was in the country process of losing his teeth early, which meant at least that his den­tures would fit better. He did have a pretty good ominous hunch to his upper body, and the skin of his scalp shone between rows of short black bristles even here in the dying light.

  "What you got to do with my dog," Lester said. It didn't sound like a question.

  "He's been at my place on the mountain for a couple of days. I thought he might be lost," Luke said, trying to hide the weary pa­tience in his voice. "He's in my car."

  "Around here you don't mess with another man's dog," Lester said. "Get your ass in a sling."

  Another of Lester's mistakes was that he didn't know who Luke was, though Luke had been in town long enough so that he should have known. When he found out he would be startled, and he would probably never forgive that.

  "I thought I was doing you a favor," Luke said. "Pardon me." He went to the car, opened the door and told Jake to get out. "Come on, Jake," he said. Jake was pretending to be asleep on the front seat; this dog was indeed out of the ordinary. Jake half-opened his eyes, squirmed toward a more comfortable position, sighed and closed his eyes again. "Come on, Jake. Get out," Luke said. Reluctantly, almost with some truculence, Jake got out of the car. Lester grabbed him by the collar and without a word half threw him into a shed and shut the door, Jake giving one high yelp of surprise and pain.

  "You don't have to tell me if he was lost, I guess," Luke said, getting into his car.

  "Listen, Buster," Lester said. "What I do with my dog's none of your business, and I mean none a your business. You got that?"

  In a way, Luke was amused by his own anger. He was tempted to say something unforgivable, something stupid, but he didn't need the trouble. To hell with it. He backed out of Lester Wilson's yard, careful not to hit an engineless pink 1967 Oldsmobile, and drove back to the Batemans'.

  "You give him his dog?" George said, keeping a straight face.

  "I don't know what he thought I was doing."

  "Come on pretty strong, did he?"

  "I guess he did."

  "If we had a need for a chief of police around here, he wouldn't be it," George said. "His dad, now, Raymond—he was a good man, but that whole family went bad. House and barn burned in the '58 fires, Raymond died the following year, and everything went to hell over there. Pigs in shit."

  "Well, I'm afraid I made an enemy," Luke said.

  "Puh!" George said.

  "I must say I didn't like the way he treated the dog."

  "Dog's lucky he ain't his wife or his kids."

  "But why make him a policeman at all?"

  "He wanted it, is why. Took a course with the state police and barely qualified. I still think he used a little M-l pencil on his scores, but that's neither here nor there."

  "Has he shot anybody yet?"

  George smiled grimly and shook his head. "Lester, he kind of thinks he's a real old Yankee type. You know, don't take shit from nobody. Trouble is, he don't know shit from Shinola in the first place."

  "Well," Phyllis said, "old Eph Buzzell won't give you that kind of reception. You just call him up and tell him what you want done. He'll be through with his milking by now."

  Phyllis found him Eph Buzzell's telephone number and then brought him a cup of coffee. She limped, and her stiff fingers curled in a dishlike fashion around the base of the coffee mug, but she didn't seem to be in pain, or at least didn't show it. "You're better now?" Luke said.

  She seemed pleased by his asking, almost flattered. "Much bet­ter! Why, after riding up the mountain today—all that jounc­ing—I got right down out of that truck and walked right up the back steps like I used to!"

  "You used to run up them steps," George said. "Never saw you walk up no steps." He turned to Luke. "She used to sort of get a jiggle to her and trot right up any steps she came to."

  Phyllis laughed. "I hardly ever used to just plain walk, that's true."

  Luke said, "I remember when I was a little kid you could run like a deer."

  Phyllis was delighted. "They said I could run faster than a boy!"

  "She could run faster'n me, but then I got short legs," George said.

  "I could out-run you, George, that's true."

  "Ayuh," George said with a grim look. "A few times you had to."

  She put her hand on his arm. "Oh, I don't mean those times. We don't think about those times. So long ago."

  "Amen," George said.

  Between them a sad look passed; whatever it had been, it had never been resolved.

  To change the subject they told him about Eph Buzzell, whom he remembered as a friend of Shem's who visited the farm some­times to help with the haying, sap collecting or some other large task, but never as someone to be paid for that help. He'd been a talkative man Shem liked with a sort of wonder at all that lan­guage. Luke remembered wondering himself why Shem never put Eph down as a prattler, but just listened and chuckled with uncharacteristic tolerance.

  The money to buy the heavy equipment Eph liked to play with, they told him, came from the Buzzell farm having been along the lake, where cottage lots were so expensive it was hard to believe. So whenever Eph wanted some money he just sold an acre or part of one, which didn't even have to have lake frontage these days, just so it had beach rights. Of course he'd done a lot of lumbering in the area, too, buying when land was cheap, stripping off the timber, then selling the land when it went up in price. He kept up the farm mainly out of habit, because he probably didn't break even with the livestock.

  "That's the general opinion, anyways," Phyllis said, "but with an old fox like Eph you never know. He might be a millionaire and he might be broke. He'll talk about anything but money."

  "Sometimes he don't seem to care about money at all," George said. "Hard to tell about Eph."

  Luke called and a woman answered. "Just a minute," she said. "He's just coming in this moment. He's been out to the barn, has to take off his rubber boots."

  Luke heard some clumping in the background. "It's the tele­phone," the woman said. "Who? Why, I never thought to ask."

  "H'lo," Eph Buzzell said. "Standing here in my stocking feet, so speak up." The voice was high, smooth, and didn't have the grat­ings, seams, cracks and breaths of an old voice.

  Luke told him who he was.

  "Well, my," Eph said. "You was that little tad nephew Shem had. Running around under everybody's feet. Asking questions. What can I do for you?"

  Luke told him.

  "Well, now. Ther
e's gravel enough down across the brook. Probably all growed up in trees, though. How's the bridge?"

  "It's gone altogether," Luke said.

  "Well, Luke, you cut me four maple stringers, about eight inches to a foot through, and if they're anywhere near the road where I can grab onto 'em with the cherry picker, we'll put you in a bridge. I got some elm planks we can use on top of the stringers, then we can do the road and what all. You know where the old gravel pit was? As I recall, on the right sidehill beyond the lower pasture. You cut any trees might keep me out of there with the loader. Now, remember—cut them stringers—ash is all right too—on this side of the brook. That might appear pretty obvious, but maybe you ain't as smart as you used to be, having lived in Massachusetts so long. Let's see, now. Today's Sunday. I'm doing some grading and hauling for the town. Be done in a day or two. How about Friday?"

  "That's great. Fine," Luke said. He still didn't believe it could be this easy.

  "Friday. Unless something breaks, I'll be there. Most likely bring the loader up Thursday evening and leave it. All right, sir, now I can put on my slippers. Good-bye."

  "Good-bye, and thanks," Luke said.

  "Ain't done nothing yet. Good-bye."

  Luke was thinking of the tall maples along the road, trying to remember which ones would do. Later he would replace the ma­ple stringers with steel I beams when the wood grew doubtful as it aged.

  "He says he'll do it Friday," he said to Phyllis and George.

  "Unless something breaks down," George said, "you can count on it."

  "That's what he said. 'Unless something breaks.'"

  "You think of a man eighty years old," Phyllis said. "You think he's going to be the one to break, not his machinery."

  "He's a spry old son of a bitch," George said. "Must have a back made out of spring steel. Sits on his D-5 Cat or his John Deere loader all day long. Funny thing, though; Eph don't like to drive a car or a truck on the road. Tillie does most of the road driving."