The Followed Man (25 page)

He sat on a roll of the dry
rock, its history of violent fire and gla­cial wear so ancient it
was peaceful here where patches of gray-green lichens slowly worked.
Below him was a hardwood forest and behind him the spruce advanced.
He lit a cigarette and let his vision move out over the forest as if
all of him were levitated on some sort of glider that moved
dangerously away from its starting point and was supported only by
the air, all that space between earth's trees and a low strata of
gray cloud coming in from over the mountain to the west.

From behind him, on his trail,
he heard a patter and breathing, but this time knew at once that it
was the dog. Before it saw him it came by its nose, casting for the
effluvium, invisible and undetect­able to a man, that was a dog's
best evidence of all. When Jake came within a yard of him he stopped,
almost as if surprised, and changed his senses over to vision, then
touch as he placed his face against Luke's hands and knees, wagging
his tail and expressing something near joy.

"Hello there, dog,"
Luke said. "You following me?"

Jake suddenly turned, flopped
down on his side and delicately bit with his white teeth an itch high
on his hind leg. That done, he got up and thrust his head beneath
Luke's hand. Luke scratched behind his ears and relieved his collar
of bunched hair. Jake was black, tan and mostly white beneath, by
Luke's estimation four or five years old. There was a brightness in
his eyes one didn't always find in a beagle; even in pleasure the
eyes did not go simple, but still watched, expressing something more
complicated than ecsta­sy.

Soon Jake signified that he had
been touched enough, and went off to cast around for the scent of a
rabbit, hunting with this man he had found in the woods, who should
now recognize a dog's clearly superior talent in this matter.

But Luke was not here for that.
He felt a need to tell Jake not to expend his energy on the hunt,
then was amused by this. There were broad areas of understanding
between a man and a dog, in­stantaneous ones, but to try to go
beyond them was stupid. Jake would hunt, and he would continue to
follow the borders of the land. Jake would come back if he wanted to,
or go home if he wanted to and knew the way.

Luke followed old wire from the
knob down and toward the east, then to the northeast, and finally
came to the mountain road, the eastern border of the farm. He
followed the dirt road for a half mile without a car passing, then
turned west away from the road to foflow the brook upstream, jumping
from stone to stone where the alders were too thick along its banks.
He left the brook where wire crossed it, and eventually came to the
beech tree on the northwest corner, where he had started. By now it
was late af­ternoon, so he headed back toward the brook pool
across woodlot and brushy pasture, past the site he had decided for
his cabin, a vision of substantiality there and then not there.

The pool swirled invisibly over
its amber floor. It would be cold, but at this moment, in the sweaty
exuberance of his exercise, it in­vited him to enter. He thought
of going back to his tent to get soap, towel and fresh clothes, but
in his heated physicality decided to wash first and then go naked,
except for boots on his tender feet, back up the hill. He took off
his clothes and half dove into the shocking water, which after its
cruel welcome was numbingly warm. He could take the cold. The sun was
behind the low clouds that had slid in across the mountain and now
covered what sky he could see through the trees, a gray unstriated
ceiling over the land.

He scrubbed himself brittlely,
squeaking his half-numb hands over his body in a way that seemed
young, pleased by his hard ab­domen and pectorals, buttocks,
triceps—the terms of youth's pride in its parts. He seemed for
this brisk moment recovered from the conception of himself as a
bereft, middle-aged being who was only a widower, landowner,
taxpayer—a merely civil en­tity, as vague physically as a
statistic. Different, too, from the way he'd felt in New York, with
all its constant frantic surges. He did not feel tender here. Here it
would be the likes of Robin Flash who wouldn't quite understand, who
would mistrust and misread the signs.

He came out of the water and
stood where the young woman had stood naked, in that space, a space
full of her ghost, and Hel­en's ghost. He shook himself and wiped
the water from his hard flesh with his hands. He hadn't entered a
woman for six months, and wondered if he ever would again. It had
been in the morning, before he drove them in to Logan Airport. He
woke with Helen's hand on him, both of them feeling him grow until he
was so rigid he thought of the ball of a trailer hitch. She had to
know and feel him grow hard for her, she said, because if she could
cause all that involuntary engorgement, that steely purpose in him,
it made her forget age and time. He didn't know the why of it; it had
always happened. While he grew hard, she grew soft and slippery. That
was the way it happened.

As he walked back up the hill,
his clothes and pistol in a bundle under his arm, a mosquito or
blackfly enjoying his shoulderblade, he thought of the words of his
trade of words, that there were words he would never use no matter
how close they came to the desired meanings. They might flicker
through his mind, these summations, but they meant not quite what was
real. Now that he was not writing anymore he might, without the small
fearful flut­ter of care, or the fear of breaking his own
euphonic or alliterative rules, make a list having no principle of
organization whatsoever: anal, oral, nexus, ontology, gnosis,
epistemology, phylogeny, pos­itivism, relativism, existentialism,
structuralism, methodology, phenomenology, protean, antinomy,
quotidian, acculturation, hermeticism, telos, heuristic, aporias,
voluntaristic, irredentist, Manichaean, Oedipal—God, what a
pile of baggage he'd brought here to this wild land where he walked
naked except for his boots.

Before he came into the open he
saw that a pickup truck was parked next to his car, so he stopped to
put on his dungarees, which was a pain because he had to take his
boots off his sticky bare feet before he could put the dungarees on,
then force his feet back into the boots. The effort, done for old
reasons of tact, irritated him and seemed a waste of the time he had
to live.

George and Phyllis Bateman sat
in the truck. "Thought you'd be needing the tools in your chest
pretty soon," George said. "My son Bill was by yesterday so
he helped me load it on the truck. Strong as a damn ox."

Phyllis opened her door but
didn't try to get out of the truck. "So the house is gone
altogether," she said.

"Was a good house, once,"
George said. He came around to the back of the truck and he and Luke
eased the chest off and onto the ground. "Get some three mil
poly to cover it till you get your house done."

"I remember this place so
well," Phyllis said. "I can just see the fields and the
barn and the cows."

"The woods come back, "
George said.

Luke thanked him for bringing
the chest and they discussed who he should hire to fix the road and
smooth over the ruins.

"Eph Buzzell, if you can
get him started," George said.

"Eph Buzzell, Junior?"

"No, there ain't any
Junior. I mean the original Eph Buzzell. He's only eighty now, still
likes to play with his mechanical toys!" George shook his head
in admiration for a man Luke remem­bered, a friend and
contemporary of Shem's. "I bet he'd come up here just to see the
place again. He's doing some work for the town but I think he's about
done with that. Come down this eve­ning and call him up on the
telephone. He'll tell you right off if he'll do it. The old bastard's
sharp as a tack. Talk your arm and leg off."

"I'll do that. Also I want
to buy a pickup."

"New one? What kind?"

"I'm not sure. Chevy, Ford,
Dodge, International—I don't know."

"I've had pretty good luck
with Fords, but I suppose it's six of one and half a dozen of the
other. Depend on what you want it for. Four-wheel drive? Half-ton,
three-quarter?"

They discussed it. George was
curious and excited by a man just up and buying a new truck, and Luke
caught the excitement. A brand new truck, a shiny, powerful new
truck. "Maybe I'll do it up brown, George," he said. "Get
the deluxe of the deluxe, every­thing on it you can think of
except air conditioning."

"God!" George said.
"Power takeoffs, winch, CB, step bumper, trailer hitch and
harness, Warn hubs, oil cooler, heavy duty elec­trical system and
suspension—good Lord, Luke, cost you a mint!"

"And those monster oversize
tires—they worth it?"

"Well, you got eight to ten
thousand dollars to play with?"

"Sure, if I get my money's
worth."

"God
damn,
I got to
see this!"

"Come with me tomorrow, if
you've got the time, and we'll hit every dealer in Leah and
Northlee."

"Done!"

"Now, Luke," Phyllis
said. "Don't get him too excited. He never did get over playing
with trucks."

"I ain't going to have no
heart attack, if that's what's worrying you," George said.

" 'Course it worries me,"
she said, and George looked up at her, both of them smiling until a
shade passed over both of their faces like a wing of the Angel of
Death, and then their clear regard of each other lasted a second
more.

George and Phyllis left soon,
Phyllis having asked Luke if he wanted to come for supper. He said he
needed to do some more work, but that he'd come down later to call
Eph Buzzell. And he would come Saturday at seven o'clock sharp; he
hadn't forgotten or anything. As he said this he felt foolish—that
he was doing Phyllis a favor to come to her house for supper and meet
the peo­ple she wanted him to meet. Phyllis's instincts, archaic
as they might be, were to get him involved with people, specifically
with a woman. No man should live alone; we must conjugate, for the
hills were cold and empty of cheery hearths and the happy ring of
children's laughter, and so on. What a lovely world she had in mind,
more than a century out of date.

This made him sad, the sadness
coming over him with unex­pected force. Blackflies, in the gray
light, were eating him, so he put on fresh clothes and put all his
dirty clothes in the car to take to the laundromat. He had no more
work he wanted to do this evening. It was six o'clock, and it
wouldn't be dark until eight or nine, but he was through for the day
that had turned an iron gray beneath the single cloud mass that
covered the whole sky. The mountain rose like a somber fist.

He washed the coffee cups and
his breakfast dishes, then dragged Shem's chest into the tent. He
wished for a door to lock when he had to go down the mountain. He was
not hungry; the dull sky and motionless trees, the temperature which
was neither warm nor cold, made the world comatose, memories of
desire weak or false. Only the blackflies seemed desperate for
continu­ance.

Then he heard the dog on a
rabbit, far away, the sharp yelps homing in over the valley like
pinpricks from that distant chase. The rabbit would be easing along,
always knowing where the frantic dog cast for his scent, hopping
ahead, loping, waiting, doubling back, making long circles to cross
his own scent and try to confuse the dog, whose nearly hysterical
enthusiasm he must understand as the desire for his flesh. That,
animals must know.

But without a man in ambush with
a gun, the dog could never mouth the rabbit. A snowshoe rabbit, or
varying hare, never went to ground, just moved on. and sooner or
later the dog would have to give it up.

The sharp sounds, made faint by
distance, dimmed and grew as the circles changed. Luke poured himself
a drink of bourbon, lit a cigarette and sat in a kitchen chair by the
tent's doorway listening to the new dimension the far excitement gave
to the rises and depressions of the land.

In this season he couldn't help
the dog, though he felt responsi­ble, his race having bred such
instincts sharp through a thousand generations. Hares could take care
of themselves.

The sound of the dog hunting was
not a sad one. It was just that there was so much of our progress to
forget, or ignore, in order to get back to what the body knew. And
maybe it wasn't all bad that it was the bourbon, that ancient potion,
that helped him out of his despair. It was Jake's voice, though, that
turned the valley good again, saying motion, dimension, purpose that
couldn't be fault­ed. Nothing against the hare, who was sacred.
We carnivores don't hate our food, our prey, our true mentors. Jake's
tail would be wagging, his face eager, no irritation or hatred in him
as he crawled through blowdown, jumped, cast about, climbed and ran
through brush and thorns.

After a long time the yelps
ceased, and with them went the true knowledge that dog and hare had
run. At seven-thirty Jake came trotting across the broken pasture
toward the tent. He stopped when he saw the man there; to look and
think, then came on more slowly until he was certain that they had
met before. He came up to Luke and signified friendship, then slipped
into the tent to check out the blue-enameled pie plate. It was empty,
so he came back, no hard feelings, and lay down at Luke's feet,
tongue out and dripping.

"Well, Jake, I guess I'd
better take you home," Luke said. "Not that I mind your
company." In acknowledgment of the voice, Jake's tail thumped
the ground twice; he would rest now.

Luke tied the tent flaps shut
and went to the car. With a quizzi­cal attitude toward himself,
he put the pistol beneath the floormat under the seat. "Come on,
Jake," he said in an ordinary voice, and Jake immediately came
over and jumped up into the car. "Move over," Luke said,
and Jake did. As they drove out of the farm and down the mountain
road, Jake laid his head and lolling tongue on the passenger side
windowsill, sifting and utilizing the passing air.