The Followed Man (38 page)

He had begun, he realized, to
consider the upper part of the mountain road, where there were no
more year-round houses, his private road, as if it were his own
driveway, and the farm turnoff itself as private as the doorway to
his house. The long days of soli­tary work, no sounds but his,
Jake's phlegmy sleeping breaths nearby, the cries of birds and the
sighing of the brook, were real­ity now, and anything else an
excursion or an interruption.

The yellow Dodge followed him
past the asphalt, onto the dirt road. A morning shower had damped
down the dust, unfortu­nately, or Lester Wilson would be eating
it. In the narrow places between banks and trees Luke could hear the
half-muffled roar.

The bastard was pushing him,
trying to intimidate, changing him toward rage, the fool. When he
came to the farm road he would stop right there, and if Lester wanted
anything he would have to stop with his own car still in the middle
of the main road. Or if Lester wasn't alert enough maybe the Dodge's
grille would kiss the truck's step-bumper and trailer hitch. Luke
would have it out on the edge of his property.

When they came to the farm road
he waited to put on his turn signal until the last moment, a chilly
compromise between his an­ger and legal foresight, turned in and
stopped instantly. The Dodge swerved, drifted on the dirt,
straightened and went on up the road, its engine cutting back in with
a long, blapping rise and the clack of gravel in the wheel wells.

Luke waited, lighting a
cigarette this time, and after a minute or so, having found a place
to turn around, the yellow car came back, accelerating past him down
the narrow road with such noise and recklessness Luke thought Lester
might lose control on the next curve. He backed out on the road to
see, but Lester had made it, at least that curve, and was out of
sight.

He drove on in, down the hill,
across the log and plank bridge and across the field, stopping within
the framework of his equip­ment shed. He trembled in the
aftermath of this violation, this in­vasion. Jake appeared from
within the tent, where he had no doubt been sneaking his rest on
Luke's forbidden pillow. Out of sight, out of shame. Though he felt
weak at first, Luke's strength came back as he walked the crated
refrigerator down planks to the concrete, removed the skeletal
crating and plugged the shiny white box into a heavy-duty extension
cord. It rumbled, clicked its relays and the hum of its pump began,
so he wiped the dust from it, inside and out, and transferred to it
his perishables, those that hadn't already perished in the ice chest,
then rigged a tarp over it to protect it from the rain until he
possessed a roof.

Jake followed him into the tent,
looking fairly innocent in his joy at Luke's return. "Jake,"
Luke said, "you know and I know you've been sleeping on my
pillow." This meant nothing to Jake except that it was nice to
hear a voice. He scratched Jake's back just forward of his tail, an
area unreachable by Jake and the stim­ulation of which, for some
personal reason, made Jake grin, wag his tail and raise a brushlike
line of hair from his tail to his collar.

Jake belonged, legally,
paralegally, conventionally or whatever, to Lester Wilson. So why, he
asked himself again, didn't he either take the dog back, or, if he
wanted the dog around, offer to buy him from Lester? Why keep putting
off a possible solution? It had, he thought, aside from his not
wanting to talk to or even look at Lester Wilson, to do with Jake's
freedom of choice in the mat­ter. Jake was, after all, a unit, a
sentient being with his own de­sires; how could he be owned? One
could own a machine, a house, a knife. One could not own another
person. Did one own one's wife, for instance? Did Ham Jones own Jane
Jones? Should he have felt like a thief? It had been Jane's choice,
right or wrong; if he had not done what she wanted him to do because
he didn't think she should cheat on Ham, wouldn't that have been
cruel? Was this clear? It would have meant to her that she was not a
per­son but a possession. Had he made love with a singular,
indepen­dent, self-contained, free animal, or to another man's
wife?

And then, the accident. Should
he have been paid all that money because someone's negligence or bad
luck had killed his family? Had someone, then, destroyed his
property? The posses­sive we so casually used; the vet had
referred to Jake as "your dog," and that had made him
think, No, not
my
dog, just a dog. I own no one.

He had just hosed down and
turned off his rented cement mix­er when he heard a car, or some
machine, coming down the hill toward his bridge, engine and gears
whining. Jake heard it and rose painfully to his feet, giving a
single warning howl, his hair up along his back. Luke didn't think it
was Lester Wilson's supercar, or George's truck. Because of brush he
could just see part of the bridge, where whatever it was would have
to pass. His hand went to his hip: cops and robbers, small chills and
a suspicion of melo­drama. He went quickly to the truck, got the
holstered pistol from its hanger up under the dash, took it to the
tent and hung it on a nail on the center pole. He didn't want to be
unprepared for at­tack, to show his resentment of this intruder,
or to look silly, like some idiot imitating Wyatt Earp, though that
last hesitation had no doubt killed many of the overly civilized.
Clear ultimatums were seldom issued.

There would still be several
hours of daylight. He wanted to continue to work on his cabin, toward
that vision of blowing snow and warm windowlight. The car came to the
bridge and stopped, still hidden, then moved across the bridge. It
was dark blue, new-looking, an American car of some kind. It came
slowly toward him on his driveway across the pasture, the wide grille
dipping. A Massachusetts license plate. Because he had no idea who it
was, and couldn't make out the driver, he looked for clues in the car
it­self, in its posture and expression, in the width of its eyes,
as if in the mass-produced design there had to be small defects that
might show its intentions.

He stood in the entrance to the
tent, waiting. A step backward and he could reach the pistol. Shem's
other guns were in the wooden chest. An ax imbedded in a small stump
three feet away tilted its handle toward his hand.

The car stopped. The wide door
opened on the driver's side and it was Robin Flash, his kinky blond
beard and hair vaguely fuzzy until the bright blue eyes stabilized
his face as he recognized Luke. He wore a plaid leisure suit with
lots of red in it.

"Hey, man!" he said.
"I wasn't sure it was you and I've been lost for ten miles.
Didn't want to get my balls shot off for trespassing. You look like a
goddam pioneer or something! I mean, Jesus! What are you
doing
out
here?" He reached into the car for a cam­era and put its
carrying strap over his sharp shoulder as he came closer. "It is
you, isn't it? Or am I a goner?"

"It's me," Luke said.
"How are you, Robin?"

Robin looked around the valley,
at the mountain rising toward bald rock, into the nearer spruce with
their corridors that led into twilight. "Gives me the creeps,"
he said. "I don't go for all this green. There wasn't another
car on the road for miles back there, and I thought what if this Avis
iron breaks down? Photographer lost, dies of exposure, bitten by
snakes, shot by hunters, eaten by bears."

"Well, it's not hunting
season. You've got enough red on you to keep from being shot,
anyway."

"Yeah, but is it wise-ass
New York Jew season? I'm just a city boy and don't know the local
customs. I have this vision, see? I keep going down this one-way
road, unpaved, and I come to this rundown farm, there's this retarded
kid playing the banjo and these fat, inbred weirdos with guns, kind
of giggling softly to each other and they tell me to get down on my
hands and knees."

"You're safe now. Relax.
You want a beer? Coffee?" Luke brought out a chair for him.

"Coffee and a Valium. No,
hold the Valium. My nerves are coming back. Maybe I'll have a beer.
Yeah."

"I thought you didn't
drink."

"Maybe I'll take it up.
Things not so good in the big city, Luke." He took a beer and
held it in his hand without trying it. "Amy split with the kid.
This time I think she really means it."

Jake nosed Robin's shoes, limped
slowly over to piss on one of the car's tires, then lay down by
Luke's chair. Robin paid no atten­tion to him.

"She's done it before?"
Luke asked.

"Once after Marjorie blew
the whistle, twice so far in July."

"Twice?"

"Yeah. She's totally
irrational. Flipped out. I love her and I love the kid, you got to
believe it. I told her, you know, I said none of this other shit
means anything, it's just the way I am. She says, 'What about the
shit with me?' and 'How'd you like it if some big stud was laying
me?' I said, 'Amy, I'd have to try to understand.' That's when the
shit really hit the fan. You figure it out."

"It's not too hard, I
guess. Have you thought about it much?"

"Yeah. It sounded pretty
reasonable at the time, but reasonable doesn't apply. Like why I keep
going back to Marjorie, for in­stance."

"You do?"

"Yeah. I can't help it.
There's something about that big smooth long-legged innocent broad I
can't fucking resist. She's with me now, at the motel down on the
lake."

"With her kids?"

"They're back in the Bronx
with Sheila Ryan. Remember that cold-turkey Harp bitch? Does she hate
my guts? But I've got Mar­jorie to jump up and down on for a few
days. The world's crazy,
n'est-ce pas?
So I was born a sex
fiend, how can you fight it? Marjorie's mad at me too, sort of in a
sultry semi-sulk, just because I was looking cross-eyed at this cute
little yokel waitress this morning. Cute but freaky. You ever noticed
how many of the chicks up here have tops that don't go with their
bottoms? Freaky, freaky gash.

You know what I mean? Long
skinny legs with short torsos and big boobs? Or teeny-weeny petite
tops and tits and great solid asses and legs like elephants? What is
it, inbreeding? Long cold winters? Too many porks and beans? Oh, God,
Luke, all I know is I want to bang 'em all!"

After this outburst Robin was
thoughtful, and stared across the field, seeing, Luke supposed,
amorphous green with no nameable parts to it but light and shade,
texture and composition.

About Marjorie Luke felt, if he
had any right to have feelings about her, sad that she had been so
uprooted, startled and changed.

"Didn't she want to come up
here with you?" he asked.

"You think
I'm
scared
of all these man-eating trees, you should see Marjorie. It's like I
suggested we paddle up the Amazon. Any­way, she's embarrassed she
lets me hump her; in some freaky Waspy way you're her conscience. But
she'd like to see you. Figure that one out."

"Well, I'm fifteen or
sixteen years older than she is."

"Yeah, yeah. Lots of
things. Like . . . death, you know. You've been where she's been."
Robin looked at him, worried, and they spoke of other things. Luke
showed him around the construction. The shed was now roofed, and
sided with board and batten; the cabin's joists and sub-flooring were
in, and the interior stone wall, or heat well, had grown several feet
above floor level. Luke ex­plained how the low winter sun would
hit the wall, which would also be heated internally by the stove
gases. Robin seemed im­pressed by all this, not as if Luke were a
mere mortal like himself who had learned to build a house, but as if
Luke were one of them, those others who did such things and sometimes
deigned to hint at their mysteries.

"Far out," Robin kept
saying. He seemed to look as often through the viewfinder of his
reflex camera as he did with his naked eyes. "But Luke, you
going to
live
out here? Man, that's sick!"

"Maybe it is," Luke
said, "but I'll only have to cope with my own illness. When
winter socks in here it lasts from November till April mud season.
Six months or more."

"But what'll you do all
that time?"

"Stoke my fire."

"You can't haul your own
ashes, unless you've got an awfully sexy mitt."

"I'm going to try it,
anyway."

"Creepy."

Robin told him the latest he'd
heard about
Gentleman,
that they were going to try a new
format, making it more topical, thinner and bringing it out every two
weeks, or else they were going to make it thicker, glossier, sexier
and have it appear every other month, or else it was folding, or else
it was going to print nothing but high-class intellectual stuff and
old-fashioned line drawings, monochromatic from stem to stern, or
else it was simply going to be a house organ-tax loss deal for R.I.C.
Corporation, and so on. Luke didn't tell him about Martin Troup's
letter.

At five-thirty Robin looked
worried again and asked him if he'd come down to the motel and have
dinner with them; Marjorie had made him promise to ask.

"And I want to get back
down to what is laughingly called civili­zation before it gets
dark and the Sasquatch come out," Robin said. "I'm not
kidding, either. All this nothing around here is sucking out my
juices. I need carbon monoxide and neon signs that go on and off,
man. Maybe it's irrational, but as nameless dreads go, it's not bad.
Marjorie's got it worse than me. I mean, there ain't a berserk taxi
driver or a Spade mugger within a hun­dred miles of this
godforsaken wilderness."

"If she feels so funny
about you two, why does she want to talk to me? I don't get it
either," Luke said.

"It woman bidniss,"
Robin said in a deep, mysterious black ac­cent. "Yo cain
unnerstan it cause yo ain got no pussy."