The Followed Man (46 page)

"You stay, Jake," he
said, and Jake sat down, sad but still eager for a change in that
decision. He lifted one white forepaw and then the other, shifting
his weight back and forth, his question as simple and wholehearted as
a question could be. Luke continued to look at him, at the dog full
of the one emotion. He remembered what some theologian or other had
written in a chiding way about the essential frivolousness of the
human race, that upon their en­trance to heaven, "There are
those who would not sit down with angels, 'till they had recovered
their dog."

Jake kept asking, saying that of
course it was all right, really, if he had to stay here, but how much
nicer it would be if Luke would change his mind. Luke had a shiver of
the fear of losing this friend, and said, "Okay," opened
the door and Jake was there im­mediately, ground to floor to
passenger seat, where he sat up, sniffed and looked out as though
they were already passing through the interesting air.

Luke drove down the mountain and
on into Leah, where he made his stops, managing to put everything in
the truck bed, and paying by check. Jake howled if Luke went out of
his sight, but never tried to jump out of the open window, which
seemed to be relatively sophisticated behavior, or at least somewhat
complicat­ed behavior; from what Luke knew of beagles, their
immediate desires usually voided all commandments. In the matter of
howl­ing when unhappy, however, Jake was normal for the breed.

Luke went to the Leah Trust
Company to find if the mortgage payments from the Rupperts were
coming in, which they were; then, with the usual misgivings, he
stopped at the Post Office.

Again they had kept his mail
past the return deadline for gen­eral delivery. He paid a dollar
and thirty-eight cents and took the bundle to his truck. With relief,
and yet at the same time a surpris­ing feeling of abandonment, he
found not one first-class letter. Not one. No person, for good or
ill, had sat down to write to him. That intensity was not out there,
so maybe he was free, untargeted.

Coleman was at the truck window,
the man's usually loose, pale face looking like a clenched fist. He
seemed to have been running, or he was in the midst of some frantic
emotional progression Luke couldn't understand.

"Why didn't you come and
see her?" Coleman said.

"Why? I don't know,"
Luke said. "I wasn't sure she want­ed. . . "

"You could have taken time
from your goddam fucking hobby horse."

"My what?"

"Well, she made it this
time."

"Made it?"

"Yeah, she made it, Buffalo
Bill. She wasn't fucking around this time."

"Tell me what you mean,
Coleman," Luke said, though he knew. He thought he knew.

"You just used her when you
wanted it, right? Little poontang, right? Get your ashes hauled, huh,
buddy? Fuck 'em and forget 'em, right?"

Luke thought of Jane Jones. Out
of the instantaneous guilt came Ham's letter, and the sentence,
"Jane, my wife, is sick." But was there a reason for that
guilt? And how sick? What sick?

"Coleman, hey," Luke
said. He got out of the truck and put his arms around the man, who
had almost fallen down. Luke held him up. "Hey, hey," he
said, chiding, trying to comfort. "Come on, get in." He
pushed Coleman up into the truck, Jake moving over, and got in
himself. "Now, tell me what happened."

Coleman sniffled and sobbed.

"Come on, tell me what
happened."

"You got a drink?"

"A case of beer in the
back. You want some?"

"Yeah."

Luke got a six-pack from the
back and brought it into the cab. Jake was nosing Coleman in a
friendly fashion, trying to get some affection out of him but not
succeeding.

"I never thought she'd do
it," Coleman said. He sobbed and hi-cupped, then nursed his
beer, or the beer nursed him, Luke thought, thinking how the thought
was avoidance. If Louise was dead, she was dead. That was the first
and last impression; one tried to avoid the others in between. When
people were dead, the most obvious effect was that they were never
around again, and had so little effect on the world. It was hard to
believe how little effect the dead had. He thought of Patrice Lumumba
and Tom Mboya—but why had he gone to Africa for the absent
ones? And they had been murdered.

"We went to Wellesley to
get her car. She got her license back—there was the D.W.I., I
guess you didn't know about that. Six months' revocation and all that
shit. I had something to do, so I .... " Coleman was quiet.

"So you?"

"So I wasn't with her, see?
So she went and had all her prescrip­tions refilled. She was good
at that. I mean, getting doctors to give her all kinds of renewables.
Plausible. I never thought she meant to go all the way. Maybe she
didn't mean to."

"When did it happen?"

"I was out last night. She
thought I was coming back, but I got drunk and drove to Wellesley and
stayed there last night. When I got back today and found her and got
her to Northlee she didn't have any brain waves left. She died a
couple of hours ago. I've got to go make some telephone calls. Aunts
and uncles. Her step­mother." Coleman made motions, and Luke
let him out. His Toyota was parked a few cars down the street. He
held his beer in his palm, the neck of the bottle up his sleeve. He
walked rigidly to his car, the guilty drinking driver.

Was there going to be a funeral?
Luke might have asked that question but he hadn't, because no matter
where it was or when it was, he would not attend. He had perishables
in his truck. He drove back to the mountain, Jake scanning the wind
with his lively instruments. Visions of Louise were fragmentary—a
curved plane of dark skin, a swatch of silky fur. Sounds of
smoothness. The face was as obscure as its expressions had been
unexpected. Warmth, motion, liquid, now still as a photograph. Some
of us survive.

By dark, both planes of his
gable roof were felted, the edging on all around and the chinmey
flashed to the tiles. Tomorrow, in the sun that would make it
flexible, he would nail, tar and apply his double-coverage roofing.

Jake didn't like it when Luke
was on the roof; he wanted to be up there too, but couldn't manage
the ladder. He tried, but could only brave standing with his front
feet on the third rung, one hind foot nervously on the first rung.
Dogs, he cried, must go where you go, but can't climb trees.

Two more days and the chimney
was done, curing under a dampened bandage of mortar bags so the sun
wouldn't dry out the narrow headings before they set. It was a good
square chim­ney, expertly vertical. He was proud of his work; he
walked around the cabin, seeing how it set into the land and the
trees. It was new and the logs were still shiny, but when they
weathered the cabin would grow into the valley and seem inevitable,
part of this wild place, defining by its snug interior the breadth of
the wil­derness outside.

One clear day in September he
struck the tent, folded it and took it back to George. He was on his
way into Leah to pick up his wood stove and the wiring, fuse boxes,
relays and circuit breakers George was going to help him install.

"You must be coming right
along," George said. "We ain't seen you in near a month.
Thought you might have throwed it all up and gone back to the city,
'cept Phyllis seen your truck going past now and again."

George went into Leah with him
to make certain he got the right electrical gear. Jake was happy to
share the front seat with them. "Hi, there, feller," George
said to Jake. "Good-looking hound. You heard Claire Wilson run
off, I guess, left Lester and nobody can blame her. And that about
Louise Sturgis, that was a shocker. Coleman still shows up weekends
sometimes, though he's back teaching at his college. Life goes on,
don't it."

In Leah they loaded on the
crated stove, which weighed over five hundred pounds, though Luke
would be able to disassemble it somewhat when he moved it into the
cabin. After they'd been to the electrical supply house on Northlee
Street, Luke thought of the Post Office, but finally drove on by and
back to the mountain.

George was really impressed by
the cabin, impressed beyond po­liteness. "Crackerjack!"
he exclaimed over and over as he ex­amined joinings and stonework
with a professional eye. "Crackerjack!" Then a look at
Luke that said all sorts of assumptions about his cityness had been
wrong. There was admiration there. "But this ain't no hunting
camp, Luke Carr," he said slyly. "This is what they call a
whole goddam way of life." There was friendly suspi­cion
there, and a narrowing of the eyes. "You going to
live
up
here?"

Phyllis had guessed that
earlier, and Luke wondered if she'd ever discussed it with George. If
she hadn't, that was a strange ret­icence. But there were many
reticences in Cascom; he had quite a few himself.

"I'm going to stay here
this winter, anyway," he said.

"Ah, yes," George
said. "You're still in mourning, kind of, ain't you."

They worked all afternoon with
the speed of George's real professionalism, and by five o'clock all
of the wiring was in, 220 and 110. George insisted that they install
the stove before Luke took him back down to the village, so they did,
George strong and proud of his strength, Luke a little worried about
the old man's exertions.

And of course he had to come to
dinner with them that night, the meal a strange reverse payment for
George's help. Before they left he showed George the Marlin he'd
bought from Lester. George admired it, hefted it. "Best
lever-action deer rifle still made," George said. "Only one
trouble with it. In cold weather, you got heavy gloves on, the damn
trigger's hard to find. Ain't that bad a problem though. Seems to me
I read an article in
The National Rifleman
a year or so back,
how that Microgroove rifling, it don't distort the bullet so much as
lands and grooves, you know, so the accuracy is damned good, for a
lever action."

"I'll zero it in tomorrow,"
Luke said, "since I'm waiting on a few things."

Phyllis had made dinner for
them. She was getting around pret­ty well these days, she said.
And how was Luke eating, up there all alone? He looked skinny to her.
Men didn't know how to feed themselves. She'd prepared sweet corn,
peas and small potatoes in milk, meat loaf, pickles and steamed
chard, tapioca pudding for dessert. "You've been working hard.
You ought to eat right," she said.

"I eat good things,"
Luke said. "They just don't taste as good as this. I eat to
live, I guess."

"You going to live up there
all winter, huh?" George said. "Long about February you're
going to get a bad case of cabin fe­ver, I wouldn't be surprised.
Start thinking about Boston and all them city lights."

"Ugh! Boston!" Phyllis
said. "You get restless you come down and see us. Enough going
on right here in Cascom to keep your mind occupied. Interesting
people moving in to town these days." Then, thinking of Louise,
she made a strange face and the three of them had to smile, not
without pity or dismay.

At ten-thirty he came back
through the spruce onto his land, that darkness surrounded by miles
and hills of night-black woods. Jake greeted him and they went into
the bare cabin. In there it was cool, fresh-smelling of paint and
cut, planed and sanded wood. He made a small fire in the stove, open
now in its fireplace mode, and Jake, who knew what hounds and fires
were for, lay down in front of it to warm his white belly. One bulb
on a drop-cord lit up the beamed ceiling with faint but glaring
light, the large solar windowpanes dark mirrors to the room.

He set up his cot near the fire
and lay down to sleep, but after a while he rose up, saying, "Oh,
God!" out of a great and desperate unhappiness he couldn't
understand. Then he said to Luke Carr, "You shit, what have you
ever done to prevent or to help?" But the dead were not there.
They were, in the plainest way, not there, and meant nothing.

Luke awoke at dawn with no
memory of dreams, the cool light printed on the big window, Jake
scratching at the door to get out. He made breakfast, getting coffee
water from the hose outside.

It would be a good day to go to
Wellesley to Joe the Mover's, rent a large U-Haul trailer and bring
up those things he had stored. He could go through them later and
discard or keep. The bookshelves were ready for the books he had
saved—books of plausible history and presumed fact, reference
books and also the fiction of the few odd voices he trusted. He would
have no book here that he didn't trust. Maybe some winter night he
would start reading again.

Before he left he was bothered
by a phrase, or a vaguer memo­ry, something he'd said. It was
yesterday, and to George. The rifle—that he would zero it in,
or at least see where it shot. That didn't sound like a promise, or
anything binding or important, but he took out the rifle, cleaned it
with Shem's equipment, care­fully dried the oil from the barrel
with several patches and loaded its magazine with six shells. A rifle
shot differently with its tubular magazine loaded than it did when
one shell at a time was fed into its chamber, and the first shot was
always the most important, so he would target it from the loaded
magazine.

With a felt marking pen he made
a three-inch black dot on a piece of typewriter paper, paced off
fifty yards and tacked the pa­per to an expendable aspen. He put
a rolled-up blanket on the hood of his truck, laid the rifle over it,
then breathed correctly, held it, squeezed and the rifle pushed back
against his shoulder. The sound washed off into space and wind. From
here he could see no mark at all on the paper, but when he walked up
he saw that the back of the tree had been blown out into white
splinters and in the bullseye was a crisp hole. Either it had been a
fluke shot or whoever had zeroed in the rifle had happened to have
taken the same sight picture he did. He put two more shots into the
bull and one touching it; he wouldn't have to fool with the sights at
all. Jake showed up then, all excited by the shots, but was
disappoint­ed when Luke put the rifle away.