The Followed Man Page 20

  "Tillie?"

  "She's the one answered the phone. Eph's housekeeper."

  "And chauffeur," Phyllis said.

  "And about everything else, too," George said. "I once asked him why he never married her—they been together now forty years—and he claimed she don't want to get married. Says he offered to marry her ten, eleven times."

  "How old is she?"

  "Tillie?" Phyllis said, thinking. "She must be in her sixties. I think she was about twenty when she went to live with Eph. There was a lot of scandal about it at the time."

  George interrupted. "She come from Leah. Ran away from home. Her father and brothers come to take her back and Eph damn near killed the lot of 'em. Eph had a reputation as a kind of a sissy, 'cause he talked so much, so you can imagine their sur­prise!"

  "There were three brothers," Phyllis said. "Cole was their name. I wonder what ever happened to that family."

  "Died off or moved away," George said. "Been a long time."

  "Eph never cared what anybody thought," Phyllis said.

  "Never was much for listening anyway," George said. "You get him going and he'll tell you stories, you could write a book."

  They were both proud of Eph, as though he were one of Cas-com's natural resources.

  Luke said he was serious about looking at trucks tomorrow, and he'd pick George up about nine if he still wanted to help him make a choice.

  "You come for breakfast then," Phyllis said. "I suspect you could use a good breakfast."

  Luke drove in to Leah on the high road. He'd forgotten to think about supper and decided to skip it, so he went to the Laun­dromat and did his laundry while he looked at a copy of Gentle­man, which seemed a strange document to find in Leah in a Laun­dromat. The cover was a collage of the heads of people who were famous though they possessed no talent, each photographed head on a cartoon body—the implication being that they were all, ex­cept for the fact of publicity, created out of nothing. Here was Gentleman again living off what it pretended to despise. But he did feel a little guilty about his unwritten article, and remembered, as if it had been long ago, Mike Rizzo, Jimmo McLeod, Robin Flash, Marjorie Rutherford, Annie Gelb and Martin Troup, those frag­ile people threading their lives through the dangerous cliffs and cables, gasses and voltages of New York City.

  On the way out of Leah he stopped at a small store and bought a six-pack of beer. He drank one as his headlights probed yellowly, the lines on the road gleaming past, trees thicker and more overhanging as he went through the village of Cascom and climbed the mountain. When the asphalt ended and the gravel made its loose tones he felt as if he were coming home, yet at the same time it would be dark there, totally dark except for any light he made himself. There were no stars or moon tonight. The trees stood motionless in the darkness, only seeming to bend as his headlights passed beneath them. A raccoon crossed the road ahead, giving a masked gleam of a look from the brush before it was gone.

  He began to think he might see a human figure somewhere in the woods beside the road, if he looked carefully enough, know­ing that if he did look carefully some stump or blowdown would suggest such a presence to him, but not clearly enough to make him stop to make sure, just enough to make him wonder, and that would not be good in the night.

  The pistol, its clip loaded, was there beneath his feet.

  He turned off down through the tunnel of spruce and came to the farm, where his tent waited in the dark.

  That night he dreamed that he deliberately cut off his right hand with a hacksaw, some important idea motivating him. When the hand was completely severed, above the wrist, he found him­self holding it by some sort of hand on the same arm, which was impossible, so he chided himself, saying that was wrong and he'd have to change that, not do that anymore, because if he had only one hand left—his left hand—he couldn't hold his severed right hand in anything but that one. But there he was, holding it, now in his left hand, and cutting off pieces of its fleshier parts with a knife that must be held somehow by something or other on his right arm. The white bones stuck out of the wrist, the finger pads and palm meat brownish, as though cooked, and he sliced off the fleshy pieces and ate them. It was Shem's knife he used, and it was sharp. There wasn't much but skin and tendons on the back of the hand, but he sliced off a wide flake of it and ate it.

  Then he wasn't really the person who had willfully cut off his own hand—the left hand, this time—because he was standing to the side and a doctor was telling that person in a disgusted voice that the bones in his forearm would have to be cut back and a pad of flesh made to cover the stump. Now the idea of having cut the hand off seemed a little shameful, its importance gone. The white bones, ringed with pale and in places dark red blood, protruded an inch or two from the withdrawn flesh of the forearm. The bones were cut squarely so that the marrow in radius and ulna formed clear red circles. He, however, was the one who had sliced off pieces of palm, finger pads and skin and eaten them.

  Awake in the blackness of the night, he pondered his lack of distaste for that flesh. The dream should be more horrible to him than it was, and the sick feeling of loss and broken taboo was not so much from the dream as from his lack of concern or terror. Maybe there was nothing he wouldn't do now. Maybe he was a man who had only thought he was governed by instincts that were civilized, moral, rational, basically kind. Maybe that had all been delusion, but it was sad to feel a whole life's values, whether they had been honored or not, blink out.

  So he had quarantined himself up here on the mountain. He would live alone because he was dangerous, and knew it; why else had he the cruelty to survive?

  He lay awake until light came slowly to the doorway of his tent—cool, damp light, his eyes' sustenance. Little by little through grayness it came until his tent pole was a hard structural line against it. It came into the tent and all around him, all over the fields, brush, trees, hills, the mountain, its lucid changes wash­ing the dream away until there was only the white bone and pale blood, and it all seemed to have happened to someone else. The brown flesh that had entered his mouth to be ground by his teeth was more like rabbit, or venison, really, or just the meat others slaughter for us.

  14.

  He and George spent most of the day looking at trucks and at glossy brochures, that most thoughtfully seductive form of litera­ture. Here were dashing, triumphant, shining trucks, their hand­some drivers given a power that made them not mad but euphor­ic, alert and potent. No dirt and grease, short circuits, dents, sprung metal, rust, forgotten bolts or welds, bent chassis, mis­alignments, cracks, punctures—after a while he began to look more closely at the secondhand trucks around the peripheries of the lots, those veterans of truckdom wounded in clashes and cam­paigns one could only imagine. He didn't trust cosmetic perfec­tion and disliked ornament, yet those trying to sell him thought he must be enamored and wanted to charge him for his folly.

  The basic full-sized American half-ton pickup truck, he began to discern through the options and glitter, was one or two hun­dred dollars less than four thousand dollars—like one that stayed in his mind, a pearlish gray Dodge with a six-cylinder engine and the narrower but lighter and mere symmetrical bed that went be­tween rear fenders rather than a bed that contained the wheel wells.

  "George," he said while they were between dealers, having coffee at the Welcum Diner, "if you could order your perfect, ideal bloody truck, what would it be?"

  "If I was me, or if I was you?"

  "Start with you."

  "Well, first off, to be honest, I don't need no four-wheel drive. It might come in handy once, twice in the course of a year, but it ain't worth it to lug around an extra thousand pounds the other three hundred sixty-three days. Gas mileage, what it costs in the first place, which is over a thousand bucks extra, not to mention it gets you in places you need a helicopter to get back out of—no, you can have your four-wheel drive, far as I'm concerned. It's handy for plowing if you plow, but I got my doubts about plowing with a pickup—w
on't take the strain. Even a three-quarter ton. You want to get in and out of your camp in the snow, I'd pay the town (course if you lived there permanent they'd have to do it free on account of it's still a town road)—I'd pay the town to do it with the deuce-and-a-half or the grader, and I'd get me a tractor and snowblower to clean up or for emergencies when the town equip­ment broke down."

  "You don't think I need four-wheel drive then?"

  "For me, I get irritated when I think I paid too much for some­thing I don't need. Gets me down. I get mean, start to hate my own property. Now, that ain't no good. I had a fancy lemon once. Shortened my goddam life. Not worth it."

  "Maybe I'll just get a plain truck. What about a limited slip dif­ferential?"

  "Had that once. Positraction, they called it. Throws you in the ditch. Any crown in the road, you're in the ditch. Forget it. Get yourself a good set of lugged tire chains."

  "George, I have a feeling you're going to save me a lot of money."

  "You can't hold that against a man," George said, pleased but trying not to show it too much. "That limited-slip rear end—what happens is, both wheels turn at the same time, so if you're on a slant in anything greazy, or on ice, you break free and commence to slide over sideways. It's fine if you're on a flat incline—it'll take you right out, but there ain't much that's level around here. Roads all crowned, plenty of waterbars."

  George's lore, Luke suspected, was real. There were those who wanted to impress with their knowledge, and those who merely imparted it.

  "My ideal truck," George said, "is one they don't make. A pretty fair truck is the one I got. I like it all right and I can live with it. If it don't blow up I'll keep it probably ten years, or till the salt eats it, whichever comes first."

  "You remember that gray Dodge half-ton we looked at this morning?"

  "Ayuh. Slant-six engine. Heard good things about that engine."

  "I'm thinking about that one."

  "Pretty stripped down, ain't it?"

  "What do you think it needs?"

  "Trailer hitch and wiring harness, set of tire chains, radio, broom to sweep out the bed and you're in business. It ain't the pussy wagon you was talking about yesterday, but if it ain't a lem­on, knock on wood, it ought to do you."

  Better, better, Luke thought: a plain truck, as plain as one could be these days, to carry real things like hardware, nails and lumber. They stopped back at Leah Dodge, where the smoothing process of mutual desire overcame all technicalities. They gave him an ac­ceptable trade-in price for his car, and said they would get right on the trailer hitch, harness and radio. He could pick up the truck tomorrow afternoon and register it in Cascom, where Phyllis, as town clerk, would assess him his taxes and create him a resident.

  Luke picked up his mail at the Post Office, jammed it in the dash compartment without looking at it, and drove them back to Cascom, where he let George off, thanking him again, and went back up the mountain thinking he had done much, though he hadn't really. The glints and flashes of light off chrome, the strange instant relationships one had with salesmen, the fatigue of many short journeys—all these convinced him that he could not get out his chainsaw and begin a new career this day.

  He would own a truck he hadn't even bothered to try out; that was sad. Maybe there were no toys for him.

  The clouds had thinned, then turned into small white frag­ments that looked as though they were buttered as they hit and missed the sun. He took his mail from the car, a thick rolled hand­ful of it, and sat in front of the tent to look at it. As he shuffled out the catalogues and junk he came upon a familiar typeface on a stamped envelope, then without thinking went to the car, got the pistol, pulled back the slide to arm it, put on the thumb safety and fastened the webbed belt and holster to his waist. As part of the same reaction he went to the cooler and got himself a bottle of beer, though this did make him wonder, because alcohol would not enhance the alertness necessary for survival, or at least not the kind of survival suggested by the pistol.

  He had known people who didn't drink because they felt the world constantly dangerous and needed all their wit and wariness about them. Ron Sevas, his old partner, was one of those. Or in Ron's case sobriety had been more an edge he used against other people who did let down their guard, whether through trust, affection, or booze.

  He decided to open the other mail first; perhaps the other mes­sages would be sane. That elite typeface on the unbidden white squareness of the envelope was an intrusion into his life that en­raged him. If he were guilty because all of his people had died that was his own guilt, his own miserable property. For a moment he thought of shooting great holes in the envelope, muzzle blast shredding it into the ground. Of course he would have to open it before the other mail.

  Luke Carr:

  Soon we will meet you will die but not before you suffer what you did to here you scumbag. Do you want to know what I look like. Ha Ha! ! ! ?

  Mr. Death

  "Here" was probably a typo for "her," but "scumbag" was the operative word. He hadn't heard it for many years, but it referred to a condom, and then to a woman. A bag for scum, or gism. "That old scumbag"—from the ancient "baggage." He could tell certain things about the writer, he supposed, providing the writ­er's brain was not so chaotic that nothing signified. An old word—an older writer. But the word misused. The Avenger, Mr. Death, was either too stupid or too smart for such analysis. Probably too stupid. The letters were all too depressingly illiterate to have been faked, unless faked by someone who knew how not to overdo it. But maybe not. This was the fourth one. It was like an itch he couldn't scratch. He found himself humming, or growling, a low monotone that seemed out of control, so he put the note in his briefcase with the other three, finished the beer and shook him­self before opening the the other mail.

  Ham Jones sent a document for him to sign—they'd overlooked a water bill, a matter of thirty dollars, which Ham said he'd pay out of his commission. "Where the hell are you?" Ham asked.

  Martin Troup wrote to ask the same question, but again reas­sured him that there would be no hard feelings if he didn't write the piece.

  Robin Flash wrote that Gentleman had been bought by R.I.C., a conglomerate that owned companies that made everything from resistors to salt water taffy, and the rumor was that Martin Troup was soon to go. Robin's note was written with a wide black italic pen on heavily textured buff stationery. Amy and he were in bad shape, marriagewise, he said, and he was going to be in Boston to shoot a commercial, so if Luke would tell him where he was he'd buy him a cherry soda.

  Luke wrote short answers to each of these, wondering what made him so casually reveal his hiding place. It was the compul­sion to answer a question, he supposed. Helen, who had taught English at Moorham Community College for the last few years, had told him that he suffered from this even more than she did.

  The Avenger might be one of her students. He hadn't thought of that. Some continuing-education student, older, half-literate, infatuated by his, or her, professor. He still wasn't sure if the Avenger was a man or a woman; it was the quality of mind he thought he knew too well, and that could reside in any body. Hel­en's marking books, some unreturned themes and other papers were in a cardboard box in storage at Joe the Mover's. It would be against probability to find the same typeface on one of those themes, but he might. What he really wanted was that the letters stop, just stop.

  He would recognize the typewriter, though. The lower case e was slightly bent. The right hand serif of the capital T was shorter than the left one. He'd noticed that right away, in the first note, and in the others. One couldn't help noticing, cataloguing, solving the most stupid puzzles.

  The first two of the Avenger's letters had been mailed in New York City, the last two in Wellesley. Strange.

  Then he looked up to see something that was also strange. Coming along the road from the direction of the mountain was a short fat man in green lederhosen and vest, thick hiking boots, a green porkpie hat with a long red br
ush in the band, pushing a small bicycle wheel ahead of him. The wheel was connected to a shaft he held in his hand as he walked, his thick red knees rubbing together with each step. When he came even with Luke he stopped, carefully put the wheel on its side and said in a high, de­lighted voice, "Tickle your ass with a feather!"

  Luke's expression was evidently confused, so the little fat man said in the same bright, clipped voice, "Particularly sweaty weath­er!" Then he took out a large red bandanna and wiped his face and the folds of his neck. "Freddie Hurlburt from the C.M.C.!" he said. "How do you do!"

  Luke got up from his chair and said, "Luke Carr."

  "Carr! Carr!" Freddie Hurlburt said, sounding like a startled crow. "Oh, yes, the Carr farm! This is the Carr farm! On the geo­detic map, of course. Are you the Carr that goes with the farm?"

  "Yes," Luke said. "A descendant, anyway."

  "How interesting! I'm chairman of the Trails Committee this year, you know. Freddie Hurlburt—that's H-u-r-l-b-u-r-t. Tend to talk too fast sometimes."

  "Hurlburt," Luke said. He looked carefully at Freddie Hurl-burt's face, seeing no irony. What was strange about it was that in the face crowded by flesh were two large blue eyes, smooth, clear and expressionless. They seemed very young, the skin around them unwrinkled and unpressured, as though they were decorative objects meant to be looked at rather than instruments to be used.

  "I am now," Freddie said, bending with difficulty toward a little gauge on his wheel shaft, "seven miles from the lodge, having tak­en the Beaver Dam Cutoff, the George R. Phelan and finally, from Grand Forks Junction, this, which we call the Carr Trail, which hasn't been brushed out or much used for ten years and probably won't be for another ten. Your Trail Committee chairmen, or chairpersons, as they are supposedly called these days, haven't done their jobs, the result of syphilis in the ass of a pig."

  "The result of what?" Luke said.

  " 'Simply not wishing to get on the stick,' as my father used to say. This sort of corpulence runs in the family, you know, but it never stopped a Hurlburt! Some discussion of that at the last meeting at Beacon Street. Told them they knew my father and some of them my grandfather. 'Fat as toads, never stopped them,' I said. 'You want the trails walked and measured, you call on a Hurlburt!' " From a canvas map case he had slung over his shoul­der he took a sheaf of maps, a sighting compass and a can of John­son's Baby Powder. First he uncapped the powder and shook it liberally down into the front of his lederhosen, did a little shimmy to distribute it, then spread a map out on the ground. "Seven point one miles to the Carr House. House not in the best of re­pair."