The Followed Man Page 4

  "Sure, Mike," Luke said. "Sure. It's a dangerous occupation."

  "A dangerous occupation. You hit the nail on the head, Luke." Mike nodded seriously, tipped his hard hat and smoothed back his sparse gray hair.

  "Hey, Rizzo! Hey, Rizzo!" someone was shouting from across the street. "Hey, Rizzo, you going to bullshit all day? Jesus Christ!"

  "My engineer," Mike said, pointing to the square mass of the crane on its base of crossed timbers. It looked substantial enough until Luke followed the boom up, up, far beyond what all of his calculations about leverage, all of his experiences in childhood and after had told him was the very edge of possibility. But the boom still rose into the yellow haze, beyond logic and sanity.

  He followed Mike over to the crane and its engineer, Jimmo McLeod, who, in spite of his angry yelling, seemed now a mild, friendly man of thirty-five or so who shook Luke's hand with pleasure.

  "It's too high," Luke said, pointing up at the boom.

  "That's nothing," Mike said. "You could put a jib on it and add another sixty-five feet."

  "I can't believe how high it is now," Luke said. "How can you ex­pect me to believe that?"

  Jimmo McLeod laughed, pleased. "It rocks a bit sometimes," he said.

  Beneath the outriggers that were extended from the base of the crane, old square timbers were stacked to take the strain off the huge truck tires beneath. Then he saw what he might have ex­pected to see anywhere else but here on a creosoted timber. A dragonfly had alighted, its four shimmering wings faintly vibrat­ing in their stillness, the irridescent green body absolutely still. This desert of fumes and asphalt and metal seemed no place at all for such delicate wild fragility.

  "I miss old Mickey, though, I'll tell you that," Mike said.

  "Oh! Yeah," Jimmo said. Luke looked up to see Jimmo's plain pale face squeeze together, startled and sorrowful.

  After a moment Luke said, "Mickey?" carefully.

  "Mickey Rutherford," Mike said. "Engineer."

  "Derrick operator," Jimmo said.

  "Everything fell on him," Mike said.

  3.

  Luke walked back across Manhattan the way he and Robin Flash had come by taxi that morning. Jimmo and Mike had gone back to work and Luke had stayed to see the crane hoist a steel beam or header almost out of sight in the soiled sky. Then he crossed Broadway again, still continually startled almost to the point of fatigue by the strange people who seemed to move with a jerky intensity that reminded him of people at a racetrack. "This is where the money is," he remembered the young businessman saying that morning in the Biltmore. But it seemed more than money; they all moved toward some drama, tragic or triumphant, their eyes shining with excitement or hatred or avarice. Except for the boy nodder, who had still been on his bench in the filtered sunlight. The gray-faced old woman had left, as had the young black who had soundlessly harangued the city.

  He remembered the name, Rutherford, in the first list of next-of-kin Annie had sent him, and a first name. Margo? Marjorie? He would go back to his room and look at those lists. He would look at them carefully, but to call any of those people seemed right now out of the question. It would be too brutal to demand anything from them.

  He walked the long blocks between the avenues. The midday air was at once sultry and full of nerves, weary in its heat yet clang­ing with sudden hard sounds, the only movement in it the harsh gusts of exhaust and traffic. A fat man in a soiled brown suit, his face and mustache the color of iron, let slam a metal trapdoor in the sidewalk. A truck's air horn, meant to be heard at highway speeds, shrieked beside him among the stalled trucks and cars. He thought of all the hot grease in those axles and transmissions, the trapped pistons in the cylinders, moved by fire; explosion was the final desperate action of the imprisoned gas.

  He was not hungry. He went into a bar and bought a pack of cigarettes, wondering, as he lit one, that the cigarette seemed not an addition to the poisons of the air but a kind of deadly antidote. The bar was dark, narrow, full of the yeasty bread smell of old beer, sour but nostalgic. It was a cell, this place that seemed to have no name and was as narrow and deep as a railroad car. He took a stool at the wooden bar and ordered a draft beer, his eyes opening to the dim light where people sat quietly in near-dark­ness. Once he had felt a pleasant but undefined promise in places like this, not of people but of the powerful magic in all the potions dispensed by bartenders much like this one, a dim man with a flash of white apron, competent in his movements to spigot, sink, register, wiping cloth.

  The beer, too, seemed an antidote; its bitter aftertaste made him remember the first time he had tasted beer, though it didn't taste the way it had then. Most of the power had gone. He finished the beer and cigarette and left, having a chill just as he re-entered the heat and noise of the street.

  In his room he again stood at the windows and looked down across the relatively quiet canyon, across to the massive dome of Grand Central. How grand it thought man was. But all was transi­tory now, having more to do with the abstractions of bookkeeping than with any human use. It all seemed insane, like the hive of manic wasps and the queen dead.

  Marjorie Rutherford was left without a warm husband, without money.

  He looked back at the old hotel room, its faded but not quite shoddy wallpaper—expensive and from another time. For six months he hadn't slept with a woman beside him, that matching other half. Now fading in a grave, motionless, drying into blue-gray, the sordid color of death. No, don't go there to the coffin. Coffins, all of his were in coffins. Caskets, vaults, the fallow grave­yard earth. How surprised he'd been when he first wished that he were the one dead, and they were still in the air and sunlight.

  If he found it impossible within the next hour or two to call and talk to the survivors, he would call Martin and quit this project.

  Marjorie Rutherford, Michael G. Rutherford's widow, lived on Mosholu Parkway, in the Bronx. There was the telephone, here was the number. He reached for the telephone, called room serv­ice and ordered a turkey club sandwich, toasted, and two bottles of Heineken beer. That done, he lit a cigarette and went to the windows, where he could see all those windows across the way, a wall of windows like his own. They all seemed dark, black, the rooms behind them unoccupied.

  The phone rang, startling him. Thinking that it was room service calling back, he picked it up and said hello.

  "Luke?" It was Robin Flash.

  "Yeah, Robin," he said. "How're you doing?"

  "Right now I'm lathered all over with honey, man. But what's new? You get a line on anything?"

  "I'm trying to get up enough nerve to call a widow, and I'm not sure I can get up enough nerve, but I'll let you know if I do. Tell me where you'll be."

  "Okay. But do you mind if I come over there and take a show­er? My old lady's got a nose for love's sweet effluent, man."

  "Sure, Robin. Be my guest."

  "Thanks. I'll see you in a while."

  A waiter brought him his club sandwich and the two cold green bottles of beer, including two glasses. Into one glass he put a half inch of bourbon; in the other he poured light beer. A grown man, of course, should not have to do this.

  Marjorie Rutherford's telephone number, its seven unmemorable digits, was there before him. Out of the unimaginable number of unknown people in the city, the mind-boggling millions and millions, that number focused down upon the one person, just the one. If he called that number and she were home in her apart­ment she would answer, he would hear her voice, and through that one voice her loss would attach itself forever to him.

  The bourbon nearly gagged him; the cool beer made him dizzy for a moment. Anxiety's static charges, small but as unmistakable as pinched nerves, for a moment stopped his breath. Another cig­arette appeared, lighted, in his lips. Why, exactly, was he so much afraid of Marjorie Rutherford? Somehow he had chosen her, and that choice could not be amended. One practical reason was that he would find out more about her husband from Mike Rizzo and Jimmo McLeod, who he would see
again tomorrow at noon.

  The hotel switchboard dialed her number, which rang once, twice, far away across seething Manhattan, across the hazy terra incognita of the Bronx.

  "Hello?" said a breathless woman from over there.

  "Mrs. Rutherford?" His voice trembled.

  "Yuh."

  "My name is Luke Carr, and I'm doing a magazine article on the tragic accident that took your husband's life. I wonder if I might talk to you sometime."

  God, what horrible words to hear coming from his own mouth.

  "Magazine article?" She seemed surprised, not suspicious but confused. Her voice was low, breathy, with a city accent: magizine aatikle, he spelled in his head.

  "Yes, for Gentleman magazine. It's a follow-up story on the acci­dent. If you'd like to check on it, you can call the editorial offices of Gentleman and ask them about me."

  "Lewkah?"

  "Luke, Carr—C-a-r-r. Two names. "

  "Okay, but you better let me call you back. I got two kids in the tub."

  "All right. I'm at the Biltmore, Room 1040. The hotel's number is Murray Hill 7-7000. But you might want to check with Gentle­man. The editor is Martin Troup. You could ask for him."

  "Just a second while I write that number down. Them kids are splashing all over the place. I can hear . . . Marcia! Mickey! You stop that splashing!" Her shouting was dimmer, her hand no doubt partly over the mouthpiece. He expected to have to give her the information again, but after a moment she said, "Okay, I'll call you back in a little while."

  "Thank you," he said.

  "Good-bye now."

  He put the phone down. Now that the first part of it was over he felt great relief, as though he had done something admirable. But the relief could hardly last; if Marjorie Rutherford did call back it would mean that she would see him and then he would have to talk to her. Where? In her home, of course, so that he could run his judging eyes over her possessions and come to all sorts of easy sociological conclusions. He could do that so well. He had done it so many times before and probably much of it was true, but a chill waited for him here. Now it would be a widow, young enough to have two kids splashing in the bathtub. What had she ever done to deserve the cool regard of the readership of Gentleman?

  A knock on the door. It was Robin Flash, straps and boxes, glinting clothes, disheveled blond hair. To Luke's nose, love's sweet effluent seemed a bit sour as Robin passed beneath it. Sour but nostalgic, if nostalgia did not mean the recreation of desire but only its recollection. He did remember the desire to pump himself into a woman's sweet receptive bulk, there where she was broadest and deepest. Whether or not he would ever feel that way again did not seem terribly important, and that was only sad.

  Robin half-strutted into the room, talking and seeming athletic in his wiry, moist way. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. "Cool in here! Better. Jesus, it was hot in that goddam Toronado. Sweating brown and white meat all over the upholstery—I'll bet we looked like a turkey roll." He put down his equipment and from a leather box took a cellophane package containing a new pair of jockey shorts. "It's funny, you know. She took a dislike to me—that was obvious—and when we went at it, she's glaring at me all the time. Some way, that made it even sexier, even if she could have squashed me like a lead soldier if she wanted to put a scissors on me. But you know that glare I mean? Those brown eyes bugging out? I mean, you know that devil-god mothering mammy-glare? And she wouldn't say a word. Not one goddam word!"

  While he spoke he pulled off his clothes, his hairy, muscular body almost the miniature of a grown man's. "I mean, I know she does it for money, and Ruiz would cut her ass if she didn't do what he said, but still . . ." He stood next to the bathroom door, in his shorts, shaking his head in wonder. "But, still, here we were, man, as close as you can get without coming out on the other side. I mean, she's a woman and I'm a man, and all the glands and mem­branes and ducts are working like crazy out of their minds except she hates me. Figure that one out sometime. I mean, don't use my name, but write that all out sometime."

  "I'll put it in my article," Luke said.

  "Well, maybe you better not," Robin said, laughing. Then he turned pensive again. "I mean, I know fucking is not love, but the two are not fucking incompatible, right?"

  "I wouldn't think so," Luke said.

  "But do you really know? I mean everybody says so, but do you really know? I mean out of your own goddam experience, Luke, can you truly-bluely say, so help you God, that you know?"

  "I'm beginning to forget the question."

  "No, you're not."

  "Okay. While you take take your shower I'll think about it. Meanwhile, can I order you anything? I'm waiting on a phone call."

  "Yeah. Order me a hot pastrami on light rye, yellow mustard, and a Coke."

  When Robin came out of the shower, Marjorie Rutherford still hadn't called. Room service came with the hot pastrami Robin said was medium cold, the Coke, and another bottle of Heineken.

  "I never drink alcohol," Robin said. "Who needs it? Not that I've got anything against it, but I'd rather fuck."

  "Are the two incompatible?" Luke said.

  "Alcohol dulls the senses, right?"

  "I suppose so."

  "Then who needs it?"

  "Those who need their senses dulled," Luke said.

  "Profound, man. Profound! And is that kind of the answer to the first question?"

  "Robin," Luke said, feeling affection for this little satyr, "I'm sure we'd be able to answer any question if the question were properly posed; but I feel that we haven't really posed the ques­tion you want answered."

  "Pro-fucking-found, man," Robin said admiringly, and took another bite of his pastrami.

  Then the phone rang. "Mr. Cah?"

  "Yes," he said. "Mrs. Rutherford?"

  "Yes," she said, and he felt that she wouldn't ordinarily have said "yes"—that she was imitating something high-class she thought she had detected in his voice.

  They arranged to meet at her "home" the next afternoon at three. There seemed to be some hesitation, or even embarrass­ment on her part, and then she said that her friend would be there, too, if he didn't mind. He assured her that it was all right if she wanted to have a friend present, that he just wanted to ask some questions and if she didn't want to answer any of the ques­tions that was fine; he didn't want to invade her privacy.

  Robin was chewing and grinning at him from across the room.

  Luke's assurances seemed to cheer her up, and she said, "Good­bye now," with a light, pleased, anticipatory lilt.

  "You didn't tell her about your friend with the cameras," Robin said.

  "I thought I ought to go first and then, if she begins to trust me, suggest the need for the pictures." But he knew she would have agreed, probably, to the pictures. He hadn't wanted to add that to his demands, that was all.

  "Yeah, maybe you're right," Robin said. "But they really go for the photos, man. I mean unless they're really gross freaks, and happen to know it, they really cream off having their picture in the papers."

  "Well, I wonder what she does look like," Luke said.

  "She's a vision of loveliness," Robin said. "What kind d'you like, anyway, Luke?"

  "What kind do I like?" For a moment he didn't know what Robin was asking. The kind of person to interview? Then he said, "My God, what an idea."

  "You mean you never thought of it?"

  "You mean trying to put the make on this poor widow?"

  "Why not? What is she, some kind of a Martian or something? Some kind of an it? Maybe she's a good-looking chick, man, horny as a snake. You mean you wouldn't even consider it?"

  "Now you sound moral about the whole thing," Luke said, then suddenly gave out a horrified little laugh that he felt to be de­meaning and inadequate.

  "I mean, don't you ever think about it?" Robin asked, with what seemed to be sincere curiosity.

  "Look," Luke said, "I'm thinking about her situation. She's got at least two little kids tha
t splash too much in the bathtub, and probably token insurance from his union and maybe no other kind, unless he was in the service and that wouldn't amount to much. It's a matter of survival I'm thinking about, and sorrow and grief and no resources. Maybe I'm wrong, but how can I . . ."

  "Maybe because of your family and all that?" Robin said hesi­tantly. "I can understand . . ."

  "Maybe that's part of it. Or maybe it's that I think this whole city is a cancerous growth of some kind."

  "Hey, man! Wow! I mean, that's pretty heavy, huh? This city? It's where we all are. It's what's going on."

  Yes, it was what was going on everywhere, and that was not to be thought about, but he couldn't not think. That sense should be dulled. Now he wanted Robin gone. He could not dislike the shin­ing little man, though Robin's energies seemed to him half-mad.

  Robin did leave soon, both of them having agreed to meet to­morrow noon at the building site. Then he was alone again in this old, expensive room, a place where, perhaps because of the im­perative of the two rigidly geometrical beds, he could not think of sitting down to work. Not at that desk-bureau with its thick glass top, not in that stuffed chair. The shape of the room, its amber, used shadows, the height and breadth of the windows, the high moist cell of its bathroom, its closet of hangers like disembodied shoulders—all was wrong for sitting down with his pencil and notes and that last twisting of the mind that might turn chaos into thought.

  He had a quick desire for whiskey that jerked his shoulders to­ward the bottle as though cords had snapped—a weakness, almost like falling, before he caught his balance again. He said out loud, "If I could think of what to do, where to be, I would not need that drug." The voice remained alive in the room, directed by some other self toward his listening self, which now lost all pride or in­dependence at all. As he poured some whiskey in a glass the other voice said shame, death: there are places in this world which, with­out your self-pitying despair, are beautiful beyond imagination, the very models of our conception of heaven.