The Followed Man Read online

  They had stopped in traffic by a parking garage when Robin jumped up in his seat. "Look!" he said. "See that little spade in the fur hat!"

  A small, dapper, glittering little black man—literally glittering with diamonds, even what looked like diamonds on the tongues of his yellow elevated shoes and in the band of his visored fur hat—was yelling at three tall black girls, two of them slender but one a yellow-brown giantess in short-shorts and knee socks. "Wow!" Ro­bin said. "That's a new one! Will you just bother to look at that ass?"

  The giantess' reddish Afro seemed as wide as an umbrella, wid­er even than her great thighs and buttocks.

  "Wait here a minute. Can you pull over for a second?" Robin asked the cabby, who pulled over two feet, stopped and then, as if he had long had a violent grudge against the honking cabby be­hind him, tore himself screaming and cursing from his cab and ran back past Luke. Robin left by his door, yelling, "Hey, Ruiz! Hey, Ruiz!"

  The small black man shot the cuffs of his magenta shirt and hunched the sharp shoulders of his maroon jacket. He was still mad at his girls, but he smiled a glittering smile at Robin. They spoke for a while, seemingly about the giantess, who was sullen. Finally Robin and the cabby both came back, the cabby cursing and shaking as he lit a cigarette. Robin's eyes slid up into his head. With a strange, libidinous twist to his mouth that made him look like a child who had to go to the bathroom, he crooned, "Ooo, ummm! I back at twelve for a bit of a noonie, friend. I mean did you see that super-gash? Did you ever see such a monumental ass? I mean wouldn't you like to goddam drown in all that yaller hon­ey, man?"

  "Is that a question?" Luke asked.

  "Well, yeah," Robin said, curious now.

  "No," Luke said. "Some other time I might have, I suppose, but I can hardly remember when."

  The cab jerked forward, honking its own horn.

  "Oh, yeah, I suppose, what with what happened. Yeah, I guess I understand. Well, no, I guess I don't."

  "I don't either," Luke said. "No doubt she is a young, smooth, healthy girl giant, but. . . ."

  "I like 'em big," Robin said. "I like a continental ass and global goddam boobs."

  "And you're coming back at noon?"

  "Yeah. See, they got an arrangement with the guys run the parking garage, you know? So you get it in some limousine or oth­er—Caddie, Lincoln Continental, something like that. Actually a Rolls Royce is smaller inside, you know that? Anyway, I'm doing some feelthy photos for Ruiz, so I get a break." Then he went on, shaking his head in wonder, "I bet I can't reach all the way around one of those thighs, man! I mean you could hide in that beaver! You could ambush somebody from outta that bush!"

  In Luke, who thought himself knowing, who had seen much of the world and of man's foibles, including war, Robin's en­thusiasms produced an intense feeling of weakness, or weariness, and he wondered why. Once he would not have felt this aliena­tion. Though he might not have desired to join Robin's games, he wouldn't have felt them so far beyond the pale, beyond fun. He had never been very partial to whores, though he had gone to them occasionally long ago. But it was more than that now; there was the feeling that Robin's compulsions were normal, usual, the common urge of men, and that his own fastidiousness in the mat­ter was unnatural, even sick. Maybe he was too tender, too brittle, for this city and its blood passions.

  The cab made feints at everything it jumped at—warnings like the nasty showing of teeth before it jerked back into its minimal and always threatened margins. Every part of the cab was bent, dented, tarnished with grime so deep and chemical its shabbiness seemed etched into the metal and cracked plastic. A prisoner of this careening madness, Luke squeezed the faintly slimy edges of his seat with both hands.

  At Broadway they left the cab, the paying and tipping of the driver a process at once mechanical and sad, the driver himself suddenly sighing and pensive, like a man who had just returned from some necessary yet rued brutality.

  And now, here at "The Crossroads of the World," as a tempo­rary sign on an uncompleted skyscraper proclaimed, Luke stood with Robin Flash on the gritty sidewalk open to a clamor that was constant and frantic. Unmuffled compressor engines roared and stopped; donkey engines, roaring yet stationary, were unlike the constantly nudging and then sprinting traffic; a fat man, bare to the waist, wearing a red hard hat too small for his head, pounded insanely on an I beam with a sledgehammer as if he wanted noth­ing less than its destruction—the deep, shimmering gong of metal on metal that hurt deep into the spine.

  Across Broadway was the building of the accident, still all I beams and trusses and open floors, going up forever into the realm of screaming vertigo. The air seemed the color of sand, the insane verticality of the skyscraper false as a picture; yet men moved up there, and upon the thin threads of crane and derrick cables horrendous tonnages of steel rose turning over the un­protected streets. He saw that all the noise, the brutal energy ex­pended here, was being expended on impermanence, on process, and he thought of a hive of wasps in late summer, when the queen goes mad or dies, and the workers build insanely, without plan, while the center rots and the hive itself grows outward in grandi­ose but useless bulges and tumors.

  On the next block battering rams, balls of solid iron, turned ma­sonry into curves before the bricks fell five stories, spreading huge spinnakers of yellow dust. Everything was shooting up, plummet­ing down. There was no level, no calm horizon; in this world the perpendicular had run amok.

  On the island in the middle of the metallic and gaseous avenue a young black man stood shaking with rage, his arms flailing out in oratorical paroxysms, his mouth moving as he screamed his ar­guments at everything in general—but no sound came out of his mouth. Who needed more sound? After a glance or two he was ig­nored by those who passed.

  A girl who sold ice cream from a cart regarded her customers with langorous, stoned beatitude, her hands moving always in slow motion. A blind man with a sign, "Do You Thank God That You Can See?" moved slowly along, shaking his tin cup and smil­ing gratefully—grateful in every direction, to everybody out there in the light. At a movie theater on the street where they stood the bill was, "Male Film Festival—Pledge of Flesh—Male Nude Shorts." A woman at least sixty-five years old minced by in mini­skirt, eye paint of the deepest cerulean, a bouffant blond wig, pan­cake makeup over the surface of the moon. She smiled and smiled, seeming so wonderfully pleased by life, by her believed appearance of desirability and youth. But many passed along mumbling and cursing to themselves. Luke saw a man who had no mouth, or at least he couldn't tell which tortured convolution of his face contained his mouth. And here were more hookers, mod pimps, nodders. Sly window shoppers stared impassively at the porno shops' illustrations—Band-Aided crotches behind the glass. Everywhere were small, squashed-looking businessmen in drab suits, men he thought must sell something vaguely undignified, like urinal deodorant cakes. A well-dressed man in a straw hat stared avidly up at the bulging masonry of the building being de­stroyed. And for the nose and lungs there was the one greeting, all others being mere variations, and it was the exhaust gas of a million internal combustion engines.

  "The Crossroads of the World!" Robin said, spacing his half-shouted words between the mad sledgehammer's gongs. "Any­way, now what? You want some pictures of the building?"

  Luke nodded.

  "I want to set up a tripod somewhere, and that's illegal without a permit, which I don't got. So anyway, keep an eye out for the fuzz, okay? We just don't want to attract a crowd." Robin, his leather boxes flying, suddenly ran across the side street and backed up against a drugstore window. Luke waited for the light and followed. Across Broadway the fatal building's red steel gird­ers and beams clanged as workers dragged and flopped wooden planks across an open floor several stories up. At the base was a long orange semitrailer that was the office, GERDE & FALCONE painted on its side. Wooden steps led up to its rear door.

  "We've got to go over there and knock on that door," Luke said.

  Robin was
pulling out the legs of a tripod. "Okay, but you do the talking. Those types don't always like my type, if you know what I mean." He set up his tripod, screwed a Nikon camera on it, took several pictures and then changed lenses for some more, the camera now pointing up at the rising steel. Next to the office trail­er a crane rocked slowly and dangerously on its supporting tim­bers as it raised a long and seemingly unbalanced beam, one man across the street trying to guide its rotation with a line as narrow as clothesline.

  It would be foolish to go over there beneath that beam. In fact it was just as foolish to be here; any of the hurrying, jerking cars and trucks and buses on this avenue could at any moment jump the curb and smash him or anyone into the glass among the vibrators, suppositories and sunglasses. But there was another danger waiting over there, a greater one, and it was the danger of anger. He had never taken anger well, and now he hadn't any knowledge of his control, if he had any control at all. He didn't have to do this. And if he did interview every person he could find, and got them all to talk, what would he write?

  Someone was looking at him. Quickly he looked, then looked all around, at and beyond the passing people. He saw no policeman. But someone's eyes had caught his and his alone, just the intense, deep, choosing glance before they'd left him. It seemed strange because none of the people seemed to know each other, to look at each other, or if they looked momentarily at another person there was the impression that it would take some outrageous physical aberration to cause a second glance. Two heads, or a third arm nakedly gesticulating from a sternum; or something as odd as the young black man's silent screaming. But they would at least un­derstand the reasons for that young man's behavior. To Luke it seemed reasonable; he could write those unvoiced words—at least in his own vernacular: Oh, you bastards, pricks, shits, mother­fuckers, shit-eating murderers, look what has happened to me, what has been done to me!

  Luke himself could leave here; he had the whole world to travel in, to rent, to partake of, but that young man was a prisoner, was literally a prisoner of what he was and what had happened to him. Tears he immediately scorned came into his eyes.

  When Robin had telescoped his tripod into its leather box they crossed Broadway by way of the island, where on a bench a boy of thirteen or so, his head shaved to the ebony, nodded, leaned, nod­ded, leaned against an old gray-faced woman with paper shop­ping bags between her knees. She ignored the touch of the boy's thin shoulder.

  At the wooden steps to the trailer office Robin turned to him. "What are you going to say, anyway? They're probably going to boot our asses out of there in about twenty-one seconds."

  "I don't know," Luke said. "You got any ideas?"

  "Me! All I do is go click-click, man. I don't write the scenarios."

  All around them moved the frantic, unhappy energy of the city, its traffic, its builders and destroyers. Robin looked up at him curi­ously. "It's a living, right?" he said.

  Luke felt himself smiling and recognized that constriction of the face. It was one of the possible reactions to incipient combat, mortal danger. But certainly the hard hats were not going to kill either one of them. It was, however, as unpleasant a prospect—he heard in his head the words, "as unpleasant a prospect" and smiled harder, wanting to laugh because he was terrified. He was more terrified than he had ever been at the prospect of actual death by shell fragments or machine gun fire, and maybe it was because he was home—this was his country and he had lived in this city and these were his people. They were not strangers at all, any of them, even the manipulators and moneymen who were causing all of this. He thought quickly of suggesting to Robin that they go to a nearby bar and have a drink and think it over. No. He had to go here first and see what the initial, somewhat official, reaction would be. Then he could take the names and addresses supplied by Annie and see what had happened to those people who were survivors and relatives. And all the time he was writing the article in his head. The silently screaming black man would be in it, yes; and the taxi driver, the ancient seductress in wig and mi­niskirt, the mad sledgehammerer and the blind man.

  "Let's go," he said to Robin, just as a young ironworker passed them and went up the steps. He was an Indian, from his looks, and just a boy, his brown face round and plump, wearing horn­rimmed glasses that gave him a scholarly look even in his hard hat. Luke followed him up the steps, Robin coming along behind. The young Indian opened the door and went in. Luke hesitated a moment, then knocked on the doorframe and went in himself. The young Indian, an older man who was probably a supervisor, and a younger man, all in hard hats, turned to look at Luke and Robin.

  In his nervousness Luke was hardly aware of his words, but he said who they were and asked if they could talk to the men and take some pictures.

  The younger man, who wore chino pants and a Marine shirt with a lance corporal chevron on one of the sleeves, suddenly said, "Gentleman! You want to take a picture of my ass?"—turned, bent over and presented his gaunt, muscular rear end to them, a strange form of violence Luke would think about. Gentleman had, he supposed, a risqué reputation from years back when it was a rather naughty magazine with its airbrushed, long-legged but never nude cartoon girls. But the young man's reaction had to be some kind of hysteria. Luke didn't have time to sort out this inter­pretation, however, because the supervisor's attitude was more explicit. His large red face, stubbled with gray bristles, grew red­der in places, white in certain wrinkled areas.

  "I got a buildnabuild!" he yelled.

  "Well, we know that," Luke said.

  "I ain't authorized to let nobody on this job, you understand that?"

  "Sure."

  "Fuckin' ghouls, anyway," he said, turning away, dismissing them. He handed some papers to the young Indian. "Joe Hayes your new pusher. Report to him." Then, over his shoulder in a milder tone he said, "I can't talk to nobody, neither. I can't keep you off the sidewalk and I can't keep you from taking pictures or talking to the men on their lunch breaks. But don't come on the job and bother me or nobody. We got a buildnabuild. You got that straight?"

  "Sure," Luke said. "Thank you."

  The supervisor looked at Robin, his nose and upper lip wrin­kling. "Shuh!" he said in disgust.

  So they left the trailer-office, its impressions printed in Luke's mind. Relief to be leaving, of course, but there were the piles of red hard hats in one corner, a desk with sheaves of architectural drawings soiled all around their edges, a dark corner with hot plate, a strange domestic corner with lamp and chair. This was the real world, not what he and Robin would seem to them—hobgoblins from Gentleman.

  But Gentleman meant something powerful and fascinating to the men. At eleven-thirty when the lunch breaks began, Luke and Robin stood on the sidewalk, Robin taking all the pictures he wanted, Luke trying to talk to too many of the men at once. The word had flown all over the job, vertically and horizontally, that they were there. Soon Robin, with a wink, a shrug and a crypto bump and grind, left crosstown for his assignation with the giant­ess, and Luke was left trying to get names, titles and the state­ments of the men written down in his spiral notebook.

  They came on, at first, with a kind of arrogance that almost amounted to shoving. Later he did feel that he had been shoved up against the brick wall behind him, or that his tie had been grasped in a fist as some of them spoke. But they hadn't actually touched him. What did he want? they wanted to know. A shop steward wanted to know what the hell a girly magazine wanted to know about the construction the hell for, anyway. A connector, down forty stories by vertical column, ladders and elevator, want­ed to make sure Luke knew that it was a goddam dangerous job, but somebody had to do it. Why couldn't they get insurance that didn't cost more than the goddam payments on a car? You took your chance and the pay was good and when you fell or a cable whipped your fucking arm off or a column or a header or the fucking hooks squashed your head it was good-bye and good luck, baby. It was a complicated business and there were a thousand and three ways to kill a man on the steel or down belo
w.

  "Never mind him," another man said. "He thinks he's Tarzan of the fucking Apes." This was said with a certain amount of em­barrassment because the first connector had come on so strongly about the dangers of the profession. "I been connecting since he was a punk, and I still got all my extremities."

  They laughed, but the information had been given, and none of them were about to deny it. Out of the declarations, jokes, in­sults and demandingly precise terminology Luke began, at least, to sense how little he knew and how much he would have to ask before he could ask what he wanted to ask. They all knew he was here because of the one horrendous accident, and they were skep­tical, growing a little narrow-eyed when he said that he was less in­terested in it than in its aftermath, and in their work itself.

  "Yeah," one dark, small man said. "Them things always hap­pen. Guy's just as dead if it happens one at a time, right?"

  Though Luke hadn't said much, and hadn't had to, he saw that they were beginning to know him. He had always had that strange talent, that they began to know him. The dark, wrinkled-faced man was Mike Rizzo, an oiler, which meant that he maintained a crane; an engineer ran it and Mike Rizzo kept it oiled and greased and running. "Luke," he said when the others had begun to re­turn to their work, "I'll tell you something. I used to work on the steel. I fell twenty-five feet once, landed in a sand pile, didn't hurt a bit. Let me tell you. I was thirty years old, now I'm fifty-two, and I can't climb up a seven and a half foot stepladder without getting the shakes. You follow me?"

  Mike was a small, wiry man, his dark face creased and whorled as a walnut. He looked fierce, but he was a talker, slightly patro­nized by the others, who were exasperated by him though fond of him.

  "Luke," Mike said, "nobody knows exactly what happened— you follow me? Maybe there ain't nobody to blame. A little mis­take here, a little legal cutting of a corner there, maybe the steel a little out of plumb here, maybe a guy pours a little too much in the hopper there, maybe a rodman's got a sore arm or a hangover here—you follow me? Maybe the architect pushed the wrong but­ton on his calculator—hit the divide instead of the multiplier—you follow me? Too much sand, not enough air in the concrete? Scuttlebutt, Luke; even scuttlebutt don't know the answer. Any­way, Luke, I wouldn't shit you, now. You know that? You follow me, Luke?"