The Followed Man (22 page)

He had never been jealous of a
child with a woman, but now, perhaps because he didn't know her and
might never know her, he at least understood the possibility of that
feeling in a grown man. She kissed the child's forehead, then his
nipples, then his navel, and then, the child responding with a sudden
laugh to all these kisses, she knelt lower and kissed his small,
cold-rigid penis as he laughed and turned, wanting back into the
clear water.

Luke stood like a stone with
eyes as they waded and swam in the water that was so clear its
surface could be discerned only by opti­cal distortions of their
nakedness—an arm foreshortened, her hips wide, then flattened,
then a submerged squiggle of flesh color. As she surfaced and stood,
gooseflesh erected her nipples. She held the boy in the heavy flow
from the chute while he yelled with excitement and a little fear. The
longer Luke watched the more he seemed to be taking something from
the young woman he didn't deserve. His eyes almost cruelly searched
out her colors and proportions. She noticed that the boy's lips were
getting blue, though he didn't want to leave the water, and she
picked him up under her arm and carried him to the bank. As she bent
to her pack, Luke's probing eyes saw the down on her coccyx, her
pen­ny-sized mole like the mark of one of his fingers, her anus
the warm color of tea and her water-pointed brush. They were not
given for him to see and thus violate, because she didn't know he was
there. But all the time he stared, keeping nothing from his eyes.

Kneeling beside the boy, she
wiped him with her shirt, then dressed him, sat him on a stone and
put on his stockings and shoes while he pulled her wet hair over her
eyes. When he was dressed and impatient she squatted briefly to
urinate, then splashed her­self with a handful of water from the
brook. She put on her wet cotton shirt, her jeans and stubby,
professional looking hiking boots. Her red nylon pack and frame
looked fairly heavy, with a rolled sleeping bag tied on top, but with
good strength she swung it to her shoulders, worked her arms into its
straps and settled it on her back. She looked around carefully to see
that they hadn't left anything, and then she and the boy went on down
the other side of the brook among the alders and were gone.

The water rushed down the stone
chute and submerged into it­self, the silvery bubbles wobbling to
a surface that instantly re­ceived them into nothingness—air
into air. The tawny pool was clear and empty, as he might have found
it in spite of the flute-like cries, its deep turbulence hardly
visible. He had seen the two deli­cate creatures at play here, a
scene innocent and ephemeral ex­cept for his presence. At least
he thought he had seen them, not a memory fleshed out by his mind.
There was the mole, and the child's black hair, but imagination had
the talent to convince itself by adding surprising and disarming
details. Maybe he had imag­ined, if the mind was the last to know
of its own instability, some­thing of what had been lost. A
version of his loss.

He went on down to the pool,
crossed on the stones below it, and looked for a footprint in water
on a stone, or a splash that wouldn't have been caused by the brook
itself, but found none. She had dressed the boy here, sat him on that
stone to put on his shoes, and squatted to urinate there. That last
would be all the evi­dence of her existence an animal would need,
and since he was an animal in some doubt he knelt, put his face down
to the musky leaves and received with the most primitive of the
senses the sea-briny proof of her.

Later, in the black and green
spruce grove, the saw snarled as it ripped the heavy limbs from the
spruce, exposing jagged light wood where the teeth raked. More of the
pale logs lay drying in the openings they had once filled as thickly
branched trees.

He could think while cutting
spruce of the scene at the pool, which was clear, cool and separate
from the hot blast of his saw, but the scene faded in the repetition
of memory. He'd cut and stripped the long slabs of bark from so many
logs today he was quite certain he had enough and more, but he would
have to count them and do his figuring later. The imperatives of the
hard, noisy physical work made that sort of calculation impossible
until he could stop, calm down and let his ears clear of the rip of
explo­sions.

He peeled the last three logs he
had cut. Flayed, they were too slippery to move with his hands, but
he cut an ash sapling and made a handle for the peavey, then lifted
and rolled them up on their own piled branches to dry. He went
through both of the spruce groves he had worked, counting logs. The
cabin, he thought, would be about twenty by thirty feet, with fairly
low eaves—although those dimensions were the largest he had
consid­ered. The logs, over their useful length, averaged about
eight inches in diameter. Lengths varied, but his rough calculations,
not taking door and window openings into consideration, indicated
that he could build two such cabins with what he had. This seemed
wasteful to him, and he promised himself he would be a great deal
more precise with bought lumber and sash.

When he had finished counting
the logs and measuring them with Shem's folding wooden rule, it was
six o'clock and he was hungry, tired and happy—the feeling
there in the finished task; now the air and sun would work for him
every clear day. This day it would soon rain, if he could read the
sky over the mountain as he could as a boy. It was his luck that the
rain had held off for so long, and he didn't want to leave the place
of his work, where he had changed the woods. These trees would be his
house, a mira­culous change he would continue. But it would rain,
so he gath­ered up his pistol and the rest of his equipment and
lugged it all back up the hill to his car and the big tent, which
loomed there like a surprise.

This would be his last night in
the motel. In the morning he would buy what he needed to set up camp
in the tent. Then he would begin clearing up the collapsed buildings
here, salvage what he could, clear the old dug well and put up a base
near the tent for the electric meter and have it connected. What he
wanted left of the farm buildings was smooth earth, green meadow,
where the granite foundation stones, ancient ruins here on the edge
of the wilderness, could weather in the manner of Easter Is­land
or Stonehenge. Then Shem's ghost would be free of oilcans, bottles,
rusted iron and junk, and memories of the working farm could recede
gravely, with dignity.

He would need a truck. Now it
became more serious—as if he weren't serious before. A Ford
F-100? A Chevy, a Dodge, a Jeep, an International? Stick shift,
six-cylinder, four-wheel drive? Half-ton or three-quarter? When, not
thinking why, had he studied these things? Though he might not know
enough about anything, he knew more than he thought he did. It was as
if, in all the pro­jects, assignments, and in the various jobs
he'd held in his life, he'd been picking out certain kinds of
information and storing it away. Ballistics, for instance, or the
names of trees, the qualities of wood, the nature of torque,
leverage, tensility and mass. He had been many things—that is,
he had done certain jobs for money and thus "been" a
carpenter, a welder, a plumber, a sawyer and planer, a painter, a
bulldozer operator, a truck driver, a mechan­ic, a janitor, a
rifleman. He would study the tangible and useful, like an auger, a
beam, a chainfall or a truck.

In bed in the motel, his bones
and muscles said to him as they grew heavy and calm that they had
labored and would rest.

He slept, then in the beginning
of dawn he woke, full of the strange memories of sleep. His thick
left arm, swollen taut from wielding the saw, was uncomfortable to
sleep upon, and it was that which woke him, as if the strange hard
arm belonged to someone else.

He'd had a dream about Helen,
though she hadn't seemed to have been in the dream, just him alone in
a canoe on a swift river with high smooth banks, the water green and
folding in an insane silent run. A quarter of a mile ahead the river
turned and de­scended like a chute, gathering speed, and he
didn't know what rocks and rapids, or even waterfalls, were down and
around that turn, just that there was no way for him to stop, no way
at all, and fear took his breath. It was the silence and speed of the
green wa­ter that was so ominous. In the dream he thought, as if
he were speaking to Helen, How tough the body is, how hard to
dismem­ber or crush, yet life goes out of it so easily.

Follansbees' store was an
anachronism in Leah. It had escaped the great fire of 1958 when most
of the business section of the town had burned, and stood alone. It
was three stories high, clap-boarded, white with green trim. A fixed
beam with a pulley pro­truded from the gable in order to lower
kegs of nails and other hardware from its attic storerooms. This
vertical use of space, along with the store's carrying everything
from fresh meat and groceries to plumbing supplies and oakum, was
part of the ana­chronism; in the new shopping malls to the north
of town all was horizontal, acres of floors of merchandise under
uniform fluores­cent light.

After a hundred and twenty
years, Follansbees' was still owned and run by the Follansbees, a
family that must have had some sort of genetic fix for storekeeping,
which included knowing exactly where everything could be found and
how it worked. There were Follansbees who knew all the trades and
tackle, who knew meat, guns, masonry, glazing, pickling and roofing,
baking and fishing, plumbing and sewing, soldering and painting.

From one of these enthusiasts, a
young, balding Follansbee Luke thought he remembered from six years
ago as a thin ap­prentice with much hair, he bought the supplies
on his list and also a fifty-round box of new .45 ACP cartridges. The
young Follansbee helped him carry everything to his car, which was
still full of the things he'd brought from Wellesley, and immediately
su­pervised the rearranging and loading. "There you go,"
he said when all was properly stowed.

"Thanks," Luke said,
and the competent young Follansbee nod­ded in the manner of his
ancestors.

Luke stopped at the Post Office
to find that his mail hadn't yet been forwarded, a small reprieve,
then drove to Cascom and up the mountain to the farm, passing through
the quiet spruce into the light again.

After pulling the small trees
and brush from the tent floor he smoothed the dirt and grass down as
much as possible and un­loaded most of the things from the car.
When the tent was reason­ably settled he took the box of new
ammunition, unloaded the old shells from the pistol's clip and put
seven of the bright new ones into it against its spring, slid it up
into the pistol handle until it locked, then pulled the slide back
and let it go forward again. The pistol was now loaded. He let the
hammer down on half-cock and placed the pistol in its holster.

From his briefcase he took a
sheet of typing paper and drew a circle on it with a felt marking
pen, then filled it in, a black dot about as large as a fifty-cent
piece, and tacked the paper to a rot­ten barn board. He paced off
twenty yards and turned, the pistol large in his hand, bigger than he
remembered the gun to be, as though his hand, or his indifference to
violence, had diminished since his war. The .45 had been called "a
hand cannon," or "pock­et artillery" often enough,
and the myth—or perhaps it was the truth—about it was
that its cartridge had been designed specifical­ly to stop
suicidally charging Huk tribesmen. The .45 ACP bullet, which was
almost twice as heavy as a military rifle bullet, extin­guished
such passion. The gun itself was originally designed by John Moses
Browning, that odd genius responsible for so many weapons. Luke had
seen at least four of his inventions firing at the same time—this
pistol, the Browning automatic rifle, the .30 caliber light machine
gun and the .50 caliber machine gun. And there was the 37 millimeter
antiaircraft gun, the Browning and Rem­ington semiautomatic
shotguns—legions of animals and men had fallen before his
barrels, cams, inertia sleeves, extractors and feeders.

The loaded pistol was in his
hand, ready to blast the air apart with its contained explosions, the
copper-jacketed lead bullets sta­bilized in flight by a
counterclockwise twist. It would blast the si­lence of this
quiet, misty day. The echo would come and come again from the western
hill. But did he want to make such a state­ment to the valley? It
was better to creep in, kill silently and be gone.

Me must shoot the gun, and no
one would hear, or if hearing know what the shot was or where it came
from. No one was here to kill or be killed. This was his land and he
could do anything he wanted here. He sat down, cocked the hammer and
held the pistol in both hands, his elbows around his knees for
stability. The black dot swayed, the square sights wavering in and
out of alignment in a way he could not remember. He took a deep
breath and let it half out, willing the sights steady as he pulled
the pad of his right index finger toward him on the trigger. Always
the first shot was anticipated with mild apprehension, but then the
pistol jumped backward, the explosion not so much loud as a
tremendous vacu­um of sound, and a smaller black dot appeared a
few inches from his bullseye. Now he remembered the kick, which was
smooth and pleasant; the pistol had reloaded itself and was ready.
Echoes re­verberated across the valley until they died, and a
bluejay flew screaming from a birch.

He fired six more times, until
the valley seemed as used to the sound and its rolling as an
orchestral hall. His bullets moved a lit­tle closer together,
near enough together and to the bull so that he wouldn't bother to
adjust the sights. He might never fire the pistol again, but he would
have it somewhere nearby in its holster, just the clip loaded. He
knew that much, but not exactly why. He hadn't come here to be in
Indian territory. The enemy he wanted was the inevitable and
beautiful turning of the spheres that turned the seasons, not
creatures that had to be shot. There was the Avenger, who was so far
purely literary, except perhaps for the telephone call, though he had
just about come to believe that some other Carr was involved there.