The Followed Man Page 21

  "You'd better make it 'cellar hole,'" Luke said. "I'm filling it in."

  "Commendable!" Freddie said, marking his map with a felt pen. He folded his map, took a sighting along the road with his compass and put his gear away. "You must come for dinner at the lodge. Is it Luke? I'm Freddie. You must be our guest. Simple fare, family style. Any Friday, Saturday or Sunday from now through October. Plenty of food, no need to call in advance, just drop in. Dinner at seven, come early and have a drink. New cook, I'm afraid, rather too fond of illicit ass to stir his hots, no end of shaping up necessary, but learning."

  "Too fond of what?"

  "Pasta, great steaming pots of it. Very heavy on the semolina. I don't mind, myself, but some complaints have been voiced. Actually not bad sauce. Well, now, sir, good day! I've another mile to go, I believe, to where we left the Jeep this morning. I wonder what happened to Louise, that tiresome woman."

  "Louise?"

  "Oh she'll be along, limping exaggeratedly, no doubt."

  Freddie righted his bicycle wheel and went on, a fine snow of Johnson's Baby Powder sifting onto his black Peter Limmer boots. Luke watched him go. A strange little man, even from a club not­ed for its eccentrics, and disquieting with his little slips into doubletalk. The voice was certainly not that of the Permolator-Purfulator telephone call, and the device was different. Or was his own head scrambling syllables, hearing the taboo phrases when they hadn't actually been said? Never, even in what you consider your most lucid moments, he thought, trust any system. Things can be misunderstood, avoided, hysterically exaggerated. He hadn't been too sane since January, and he had failed, or was in the process of failing, to do an assignment he had agreed to do, which was out of character, or at least out of the ordinary.

  Then, from the direction of the mountain, a woman appeared, trudging along slowly, her shoulders moving as though she waded through deep water. She didn't see Luke or the tent until she was a few yards away, and then she stopped, startled. Her black hair was wet, her dungarees patched with sweat, her yellow halter top wet through. She was in her thirties, he thought, and though she was terribly disgruntled and unhappy at the moment, which might obscure her general character, he saw in her a kind of rangy neurotic humor that had some appeal.

  "Hello," he said. "Hot day."

  "Hot!" she said. "My God, I'm being broiled in Off! Have you seen a repulsive, fat little man pass by here?"

  "That's a hard question to answer," Luke said.

  "A fat little man, then,"

  "Yes, a few minutes ago. You must be Louise."

  "Did he say how far it was to the Jeep? "

  "A mile."

  "Oh, my God! A mile!" She slumped to the ground and sat In­dian fashion, her head drooping toward her lap. "Have you got a cigarette?"

  He brought her one and held a match for her. "Thank God," she said. "Nobody has any cigarettes anymore and if you smoke they look at you as if you're some kind of monster. Mine fell in a stupid brook back there somewhere." Then her eyes, which were an odd olive color, widened in fright. He was startled, and stepped back.

  "A gun!" she said. "You're wearing a gun! My God, you've got a gun!"

  "Well, yes," he said. "It seems I do have a gun. Don't let it frighten you." He'd been wearing it when Freddie Hurlburt was there, too. Maybe Freddie hadn't chosen to mention it, or hadn't noticed it hanging there beneath the tail of his shirt.

  "Oh, my God, that's all I need!" she said. "A gun!"

  He resisted asking her if she hadn't yet heard about the escaped grizzly bear that had eaten the hikers.

  She got to her feet, her eyes on the big holster with the black handle sticking out of it. She was now not so much afraid as judg­mental. "Why do you carry a gun?" she said in a voice that meant the verdict was in.

  "Are you interested in why?" he asked.

  "Obviously you want to shoot someone, kill, see the blood gush out."

  "Why did you ask if the answer is so obvious?"

  "You're not some redneck. By your vocabulary you're an edu­cated man, so you must be sick."

  "Maybe you're right," he said, feeling an improbable change in his attitude toward her. She stood with her hands on her hips, the cigarette rather bravely dangling from her lip, he thought. Her face had a gaunt, almost ravaged look. No, not ravaged, really, but hardened by experience, exercised by gravity. She must be in her late thirties, a tough, slim woman. Perhaps her sanctimony wasn't terminal. She was one of those people who seem to be the same color all over, the same tone—in her case a dark tan slightly lighter than the olive of her irises. Her hair was as glossy black as an Oriental's.

  "So you're camping here," she said, "waiting for a poor little deer to come by so you can blast it dead with your big fat gun. Is that it?"

  "No, it's not deer season," he said.

  "That's right. The state tells you when you can murder them, doesn't it."

  "Generally in November," he said.

  "Sick, sick," she said, shaking her head in a way that was not a signal to him, but to some higher authority she was in communica­tion with.

  "I imagine my feeling about guns is more complicated than yours," he said, hearing his voice turn fakely calm and gentle. People who began arguments with strangers, unless severely pro­voked, always amazed him. What a pain in the ass, he thought; how often someone who looked interesting displayed a flaw of personality as lurid as an open wound.

  "Guns are to kill with! What else are they for? If you carry one you want to kill something. What's so complicated about that?" she said rather shrilly. "So I suppose you're going to tell me that you only shoot at targets. Well, that's just practice for shooting animals and people and you know it!"

  As she spoke he looked at her teeth, which were slightly colored by tobacco, at her pink gums and the lines at the corners of her mouth. He wondered about all the arguments of her life, and the anger her face must have expressed over so many issues. A history in the form of disagreement. He wondered if she ever cried, and what that emotion must have done to the skin around her eyes and mouth. Thank God she would soon be on her way.

  She took a step, and winced. Her sneakers were old, and must have thin soles.

  "Would you like me to give you a ride to your Jeep?" he asked, motioning toward his car.

  "Oh!"

  He watched the conflict between her exhaustion and the protec­tion of her righteousness. She was tired and sore and didn't want to walk another mile.

  "Who are you, anyway?" she asked, resenting her position.

  "Luke Carr, at your service. This is my farm, such as it is." He waved his arm toward the wrecks of barn, sheds and house.

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  "About the farm?"

  "No, it's just that I can't think of a reason for carrying a gun. I can't think of a situation, any situation, in which it would be better to have a gun."

  "You know that doesn't make much sense to my atavistic mind."

  "Have you ever shot anyone?" She shivered, and her voice, which had been a little jarring in its clangorous certainty, turned lower.

  "Yes," he said.

  "Oh, my God, I think you really have. In a war?"

  "Yes."

  "Ugh! How horrible! And yet you still want to carry that ob­scene thing? Did you like killing people?"

  "No, I was scared to death. What I really wanted was to be somewhere else."

  "So why do you wear it?"

  "Maybe I'm still scared to death, Anyway, this gun belonged to my uncle, who died in that house last winter."

  "I don't understand. I really don't understand. But why don't you get sarcastic and defensive, like all the rest?"

  "The rest?"

  "All you gun people."

  "It's a temptation. Sanctimony doesn't bring out the best in any­one. I almost told you there was a grizzly bear loose around here."

  "Sanctimony!"

  "The word came to my mind."

  She was about to say something, but shivered again,
goose-flesh spreading evenly over her shoulders and arms as if a thousand pins were trying to push up through her dark skin. Her sweat was cooling her off too quickly now that the sun was in its late after­noon fall toward the mountain. In her damp black hair were a few silver strands. He went into the tent, stashing the pistol under his sleeping bag, and brought her out a large bathtowel. As he put it over her shoulders she seemed to turn smaller, her chill and the silence of her opinions shrinking her until he felt there was a place between his chest and right arm where her shoulders might fit, her salt sweat against his skin.

  "I'll give you a ride. Come on," he said, and she followed him to the car.

  "No gun, I see," she said as they drove out through the deep spruce. She took off the elastic that held her hair together at the back, and fluffed her hair with part of the white towel, the black glossy and thick now, softening her face and making her seem smaller still.

  When they reached the road he said, "Which way?"

  "I really don't know. We left the Jeep somewhere this morning and Adrienne drove us back to the lodge. Maybe Freddie left a sign."

  They looked, and Freddie had. An arrow had been scratched in the dirt, pointing down the mountain.

  "Is Freddie your husband?"

  "God, no! Really. My husband was a case all right, but not quite as freaky as Freddie. Actually, Freddie is my cousin."

  They came to a yellow Jeep with a white cab, where Freddie pondered his maps, which were spread out over the hood, Fred­die standing on the front bumper so he could see them and make his notations.

  "Ah, Louise!" he said. "Chivalry, chivalry! Maiden in distress and all that! Did you stalk him into bedding your poor little heat?"

  Luke looked at her, but she didn't seem to have heard what he had heard. Maybe she didn't listen to Feddie, who was now fold­ing his maps.

  "He wouldn't drive back and pick me up," she said, "because it wouldn't cross Freddie's fat little mind." Freddie didn't listen to her, either. His maps back in his map case, he climbed up into the Jeep, seeming to need three or four more foot and handholds than anyone else would.

  She turned and put the towel over Luke's shoulder before she climbed up into the Jeep. He rather liked the smell of the clean tqwel and the slight sweat together. "What's your last name?" he asked her.

  "Sturgis," she said. "And thanks for the ride."

  Freddie backed and turned until he got the Jeep facing the right way. Luke wondered why he hadn't driven into the farm road if he were so well supplied with maps of the area. This place was the nearest wide spot on the main road, though. The Jeep bounced at Freddie's inexpert clutching and left a haze of dust which slowly slid off through the leaves to one side of the road.

  Back at his tent, Luke put his face against the white towel. There had been that moment, unaffected by memory or loss, in which he'd felt the woman as woman, that faint but immediate proprietary urge. She was a nut, of course, and the name, Sturgis, bothered some wispy, possibly recent memory. Her husband, the "case," was in the past tense, whatever that meant. Divorce, prob­ably; she had that life-peened look about her, and he could sym­pathize with the husband. In any case, she was gone.

  As the sun was about to touch the side of the mountain a cool wave climbed up from the valley to surge invisibly over him. He put on a jacket and made himself a drink, then sat on a kitchen chair in front of the tent to watch the light diminish. Tomorrow he would get up soon after light and do all the cutting of trees and brush Eph Buzzell wanted done, which shouldn't take more than the morning. In the afternoon he would turn in the station wagon and take possession of a new and sweet-smelling truck, mail his letters, possibly get others. He didn't want letters.

  A small tingle went down his legs from his crotch, a small charge of static electricity, as though his nerves were slightly over­loaded. He had no woman. Several times, in dreams, he'd spoken with Helen, though in the dreams they both knew that she was dead—that strange slippage of logic that always happened in dreams. He couldn't now remember what they'd said to each oth­er, but there she'd been, looking at him and saying things, though she was dead.

  It seemed to him now, not dreaming, that it was all right for men to die, but women should not—illogic without dream. Words, words. He had come here to do, not to think of words.

  He was hungry, but that urge seemed gross to him; what he re­ally wanted was a chance to make everything all right with Helen, to have his children safe, in safe harbor, Helen's face like the sun.

  He drank too much bourbon, his excuse the long waning of the light after the sun had gone. He wore the pistol. The two did not seem compatible. What he ought to do was shoot the next fucking son-of-a-bitch, male, female, human or animal, that came along this road. Or at least shoot in the air a few times and scare the piss out of them, warn them off.

  Except for certain violent episodes in his life he had been too passive, it seemed to him now. Passively he'd interviewed and studied the wild or famous, the sorrowing or exulting members of his race, they living, he observing; they outrageous or pompous or whatever they wanted to be, he taking notes. Or as an editor, more passive still, dealing with writers, photographers, designers, printers and the ones who bought in order to profit more, all of them doing, making, risking, considering themselves more vital than he, and probably right. Passively he'd let people take advan­tage of him, let Ron Sevas take over the magazine long ago. Pas­sively he'd let his family die, and taken himself to bed with his booze and not a peep out of him. He could write the article about the deaths we find so mildly thrilling but the whole thing seemed so obvious it bored him. Of course this and of course that. The assholes always wanted to read what they already thought they knew. By assholes, read the whole asshole race. And one more thing; we are not fit to have too much time to think. Our ambi­tions should always be simple. The best of these is to starve and want food, or to freeze and want heat.

  Craving nothing, he despaired, drank bourbon and pointed his pistol at the shadows.

  Somehow he must have gotten into his cot and gone to sleep, or whatever unconscious state it was. Morning light, or moonlight, found him awake. Moonlight; it was one in the morning by his watch. At the flashlight's beam and spot crossing the tent wall, Jake got up from his bed of grass, his night-green eyes search­lights themselves, and came to the head of the cot to lick with his warm dog's tongue the face and hands of his chosen. Decisions were indeed made by others.

  15.

  Eph Buzzell called him "Sonny" until he found that Luke could operate the great Mack dump truck. First, using the cherry picker on the logging truck, they set the maple logs into the dirt at the abutments, axed off a few uneven places and spiked on the elm planks, Eph's two-pound hammer whacking the spikes in with as much authority as Luke's four-pounder. The only thing that seemed to bother Eph at all was his knees when he had to kneel, or when he tried not to kneel; he didn't know which was worse, he said. He didn't talk much while they were working.

  When the crude bridge was finished they took the logging truck back up to the farmyard and Luke had to ride on top of the cab of the dump truck with his chain saw, cutting off high limbs that might break the windshield or the running lights and bend the outside mirrors. The big red dump truck was new and unbattered and had cost around thirty thousand dollars, so Eph was a little more careful with it. Luke thought it an honor when Eph ran the rubber-tired loader at the gravel pit and let him drive the dump truck up and down the road, letting the gravel sift as he raised and lowered the dump bed. "Sonny" became "Sir " and then, finally, when the road was in good shape and they were figuring out where to dig the cabin's cellar hole, "Luke." George Bateman turned up about that time, too, so they all conferred.

  Eph was a tall old man with a belly that hung out only in front, his belt and suspenders set high above his belly. From front or back, in profile, he looked like an inverted pyramid; only from the side did his hanging sack of guts show his age. He was bald to the top of his head, one saw when h
e shifted his white cotton painter's cap, and wispy white hair fell from there back down to his collar. His eyes were crinkles of cracked gray ice, bright and at first very cold.

  George, as if in respect, became more silent and gruff around Eph. Tillie, who had waited in the cab of whatever truck hadn't been in use, came down to the lower pasture for the discussion about the cabin's cellar hole, though she said nothing. She was a tall, craggy woman in her sixties who wore a blue work shirt and bib overalls—a mark, Luke supposed, of her independence, or strangeness.

  The loader's diesel engine idled patiently. With its loader buck­et on one end and its backhoe curled like the ovipositor of a giant insect on the other, it seemed a huge yellow live thing, but calm and obedient enough. Eph could run its clutches and hydraulics while looking elsewhere, his large mottled hands moving surely from knob to knob across spaces he didn't bother to see.

  "Luke," Eph said in his high, youthful voice, "where do you see this camp of yours?"

  "Right about there," Luke said.

  "Ayuh," Eph said. "That little rise there. Ayuh."

  George looked stern and said nothing.

  "What do you think, George?" Luke said.

  "Colder down in the valley. Kind of a cold pocket down here, you know."

  "I don't care about that. With your advice I'm going to build this place snug and dry."

  "Kind of far from the road, though, ain't it?" George said.