The Followed Man (23 page)

But there was the pistol, now on
his belt in its large protective holster, and it spoke to him of a
sort of partnership, indissoluble, as though a contract had come to
be written which specified a cer­tain nearness, a distance in
reach, a multiple of the length of his arm but only such and such a
multiple. Or time—three seconds from awareness of need to the
bulky feel of steel and walnut; or two seconds, the feel also the
weight of seven cartridges and the mild give and tick as the grip
safety released under the pressure of the crotch of his hand.

Something moved exactly behind
him, ten feet behind him, and he turned quickly, all of his senses
shocked by a presence. It was a dog, its brown eyes now apprehensive
at the quick defensive movement, but still and questioning. It was a
black and tan beagle, or part beagle, looking straight at him with
the ancient question always expressed by the whole body of a hound:
Friend, or not?

"Friend," Luke said.

The white tip of the tail moved
an inch, back an inch, and stopped. The eyes of this hound were
unusually bright and deep.

"Friend or not, it doesn't
matter, does it?" Luke said, but he squatted down, keeping his
hands on his knees. The dog came forward without cringing or
hesitation and smelled his hands, then wagged his tail a few times,
calmly, to indicate friendship or the possibility of it. The dog was
also interested in smelling the holster of the freshly fired pistol,
and may have come to the shots. Luke scratched behind the long, soft
ears. On the dog's collar was a tag, pop-riveted to the leather
rather than hung from a link.

MY NAME IS

JAKE

I BELONG TO

LESTER WILSON

CASCOM, N.H.

"Hello, Jake," Luke
said. At the sound of his name, the dog looked up at Luke's eyes
again.

Lester Wilson seemed a familiar
name, one Luke had heard lately. George or Phyllis Bateman must have
mentioned it in some context or other, but he couldn't remember.

Jake made a tour of the tent,
car, collapsed buildings, left his scent on a corner of the house
foundation, then came back to Luke, who was still unloading the car,
barked his hound yowl once, as if to say good-bye, and ranged off into the brush to the South.

Jake may have been a roamer,
like many beagles, but if Lester Wilson lived down in the village,
the dog was at least seven miles from home. Maybe Lester Wilson was
fishing a mountain brook and was not too far away. Certainly no
hunting season was open. He'd have to ask George or Phyllis who
Lester Wilson was.

George had talked about Luke's
nearest neighbors in this upper valley. The two hunting camps on the
road below belonged to Massachusetts people who came up weekends in
deer season, sel­dom any other time of year. Three miles on, over
the shoulder of the mountain, some "hippies," according to
George, had built shacks and a cabin and periodically tried to be
farmers, going away often to earn money enough to come back for a
while and try to farm the inhospitable land again. Beyond the hippies
was the extensive land and the old log lodge of the Cascom Mountain
Club, a semipublic group of hikers and skiers based in Boston. The
young woman and child at the brook, if he had actually seen them—the
memory was so vivid yet out of place here it flickered in and out of
actuality—might have come from there. But from what he had
heard of the CMC people over the years, they main­tained their
own trails and stayed on them, rarely if ever bush­whacking.

Then he remembered who Lester
Wilson was—the young part-time chief of police with the
supercar and six-pack George spoke of during his right-to-bear-arms
outburst. It seemed strange that he now remembered George's reference
to Lester Wilson, as if such skill in remembering an odd name were
exemplary in some way, a talent he hadn't known he had. And then he
thought, look­ing over at the submerging kitchen corner of the
farmhouse, that he should have come to see Shem once more before Shem
died. The old man had always liked him, looked at him a little more
fiercely, grinned harder at him than at other people. "He learns
pretty good," Shem had once told his father, and when his father
told him what Shem had said, he was a little more afraid of Shem. He
thought he knew that Shem hadn't meant to frighten him. Maybe not
anyone. He thought he knew it as a child, but was still frightened
and fascinated. Whenever one of his own statements or jokes had
caused that sort of tension in another, he had been surprised,
because he had never meant to cause tension or fear. But it had
happened. One never knew one's own power to threat­en, and others
hid their vulnerability. But Shem was dead and he was alone.

It took him some time to fit a
shovel handle, to fit the peavey handle better than he had done it in
haste at the spruce grove, and to cut some saplings for braces. Then
he began to pry, brace and dig his way through the slanted and
collapsed walls into what had been the kitchen.

Here all was damp and must, wood
leached of its color and strength, slabs of ancient wallpaper, lath
still embraced by grainy plaster, clapboards that had twisted and
sprung as the studding buckled. He chopped into the large old
two-by-fours. Some still had a little hardness and life in them, and
some received his ax with the slow giving of cheese. Part of one
wall, freed of its join­ings, he pushed outward with a sapling
and let it fall with a rotten softness to the grass. Half of the
kitchen had been one story high, and the main part of the house, the
second story that half-covered it, had collapsed to the north, so he
soon began to see a recogniz­able though canted kitchen floor,
with its brown wear-runs in the patterned linoleum. The old wood
stove seemed intact, though rusted in its ungreasy places to a
sand-textured primer red. The faint odor of the old kitchen was still
there in its walls, or it might have been a memory of baking meat,
sweet and brown, steam, acid, spice, bread, cider, all now set, cold
and faint amid the pota-toey, cellary fresh chill of rot.

He came upon the old kitchen
table, protected somewhat by its ragged oilcloth, its varnished
wooden chairs surprisingly intact, though damp and gray with mildew
on their leather seats. There was Shem's cot, mice in the shredded
blankets, the pillow open to feathers soggy as fresh mortar. The
floor there was doubtful; the rusted metal cot, its sodden mattress
and bedclothes brown with stains that had been there long before the
house fell in, would slide in the general list toward the cellar hole
below.

Pots and pans, silverware,
bowls, glasses, kitchen knives and utensils he collected, saving all
of them, remembering all of them, even odd forks, a knife worn to a
thin ribbon of steel, a spoon etched with a scene from Wichita,
Kansas, an aluminum potato masher which squeezed a boiled potato out
into white worms, a greasy spatula he remembered clean and shining in
a drawer. All the old white plates were gone, and all of the cups,
though there were many saucers stacked in a tilted cabinet. In the
slate sink were an enameled cup, a blue-enameled pie plate, a cast
iron fry­ing pan and a large silver-plated spoon, all gleaned by
the teeth of mice. Shem's Morris chair was salvageable, but not its
cushions.

He would clear out the rotten
wood and pile it to burn, then himself glean from the house whatever
he could use. He could see now that it would take him days to find
everything that he wanted to find here. Shem's spectacles, his pipes,
a tomato can half-full of pipe ashes, the old television set now
cracked in its wooden ve­neer, the tube's face a dead gray—these
he would let fall to the cellar hole, but he must touch them first,
and catalogue them in his mind. The hand-pump at the sink he would
remove and set up at the dug well in the yard, using new plastic
pipe. The other plumbing, including the electric pump that Shem
hadn't used for years, might not be worth probing for, but he would
see. When he was through, this ruin would no longer be a junkyard; it
would be smooth as a grave.

He worked all day in the wreck
of the house, until the rot and soddenness of what he remembered
square and had thought eter­nal depressed him and made him yearn
for the fresh logs and un­created, unspoiled dimensions of his
own cabin, which would grow clean and bright on new land.

It was eight o'clock, the sky
still light but a darkness sliding into the shadows, when he stopped,
cleaned up the kitchen table and chairs by rubbing off their mold
with his hands, and took them to his tent. With the oilcloth removed
the table top was dark as ma­hogany, though made of pine. He set
his new stove up on the ta­ble and opened a can of beef stew and
a can of stewed tomatoes, then had a drink while the stove hissed
blue flame.

Someday he was not going to feel
the newness and relief of be­ing alone. As the light died he sat
in the doorway of the tent and watched the mountain grow black and
flat against the sky, then the sky fade little by little as if by the
blinks of his eyes, into the night that always came. A bat flew,
fluttering silently and swiftly through its angular courses, then
still flew when it could not be seen. The evening star fell toward
the mountain and a cold haze grew in the southeast as the moon rose.
The night was cold, for June, though it was usually several degrees
colder up here than down in the town. All the people were down there,
now, with the farms gone from the hills and the trees coming in.
There was a place on the farm, a granite knob—or really Kinsman
monzonite, he'd discovered in some research project or other—from
which the lake and distant lights could be seen, miles down and away
to the southeast. Driving to town didn't seem that far, but it was a
long way for a creature on foot, or a creature sighting the distant
lights of others of his kind. Tomorrow was Sunday and he couldn't get
on with his dealings with those he must hire or buy from, so after
working on the ruins he might walk the borders of the farm and look
down the miles from that minor pinnacle.

His lamp made no noise, but
called up the strobic hysteria of the moths until he temporarily
draped the entrance of the tent with mosquito netting. Some found
their way in still, to bash and burn themselves on the hot glass
chimney, or to become, briefly, as incandescent as the white mantle.

After he had eaten he went to
the old well, by flashlight, and lowered a bucket for the water to do
his dishes. The rusted bucket had pinhole leaks in it, but with it he
filled a pot with the water that was heavy but nearly invisible in
the beam of his flashlight. From the stone-walled darkness of the
well came this clear silver weight.

As he did the dishes he thought
of twenty years ago, when he had inhabited a body quite similar to
this one. He had been singular then, too. He was the editor and
part-owner of a magazine that was a filler in the Saturday editions
of over a hundred small city and suburban dailies which had no Sunday
editions, and for the times and for his age he was comparatively
rich. In a year or so he had saved twenty thousand dollars and
planned to stay with the magazine, which wasycalled
This Weekend,
for another year at the most. Because of his time in the army he
hadn't yet graduated from college, so that summer he went back to the
state university to take the two courses he needed in order to
graduate. His part­ners thought it a crazy thing to do, and he
hadn't known it then but one of them, a man he thought a friend, was
planning to force him out—one reason being that summer school
was supposed to have taken so much of his time he abrogated an
agreement. Or perhaps he did suspect Ron Sevas, who was older—in
his thir­ties—who in the war had been a major in the air
force. Or at least said he had been a major; veterans said a lot of
those things in those days, thinking such matters important.

When he finished the dishes he
sat at the old table, his chair's legs slowly sinking into the turf.
That was the summer he first saw Helen. He lit a cigarette and
suddenly, though motionless, he was falling again. Grief was like the
void beneath the last lost hand­hold. He thought how nearly
anything could be rationalized, or ameliorated, or made the best of.
But all the time he fell too fast to doubt that it was fatal. There
was nothing to do but fall and never land. He could shoot himself;
that would end the falling. He had never suspected that grief was
like anxiety. He had lost what he didn't know how to lose.

He lay on his folding cot, on
the thin quilted mattress, the opened sleeping bag over him and a
rolled-up shirt for a pillow. The tent smelled of the clean,
over-strong canvas fabrics of the army when he was young. He turned
off the Aladdin lamp and watched its white light fade into the warmer
tones of fire as it died, its last cone in his eyes in the darkness.
Moonlight grew like frost on the mosquito netting at the tent's
doorway.

So he was alone on the mountain.
Surely he was not the first or the most intensely bereaved. He would
remember Helen Benton, who had decided, once, firmly and completely,
to be his wife—that young woman whose accidental perfections
struck him into the acceptance of permanence, literally at first
sight, and whose other qualities, luckily and happily, were such that
it all held. Pure luck, because in the beginning he would have
settled—no, not set­tled, but gone through it all like a
dreaming idiot—for any woman who moved as she did and looked
like Helen. Some were lucky in their insanity, when for the first
time out of all women in the known world of women the one appeared.

He was twenty-five when he first
saw her, in 1957, and she was twenty-two, ages that now seemed
immature to the point of in­competence, but then seemed old; he,
at least, thought himself more than a little jaded by the abrasions
of experience.