THE FOLLOWED MAN
“Reality isn't unoriginal, it's just unknown.”
— Alberto Giacometti
BOOKS BY THOMAS WILLIAMS
CEREMONY OF LOVE
TOWN BURNING
THE NIGHT OF TREES
A HIGH NEW HOUSE
WHIPPLE'S CASTLE
THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX
TSUGA'S CHILDREN
THE FOLLOWED MAN
THE FOLLOWED MAN
Thomas Williams
Dzanc Books
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
Copyright © 1978 Thomas Williams
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
Published 2015 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-50-6
Cover by Awarding Book Covers
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
For Liz
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Luke Carr stood at a window of his tenth-floor room in the Biltmore. Below him fell the vast vertical walls of a courtyard, the brown brick walls of the old hotel cut by dark windows, hundreds of windows similar to his own, descending many stories to a formal roof garden that was probably the roof of the mezzanine, though the interior turns of hall, and an elevator as large as a room that seemed to have turned as it rose, had confused his sense of direction. The roof garden below was an ashed-out, moon-dust gray, its stone benches, cement planters and tiled avenues all empty except for the gathering acidic fallout of the city's air. Perhaps, decades ago, parties had been held down there among green plantings, women in light dresses dancing with young men.
Across amber space, beyond an avenue he couldn't see, the dome of Grand Central Station, carved stone, dark yet generous in its elegance, ancient in time and attitude, formed the other side of this dim old canyon of Manhattan. An occasional taxi horn rose from the hidden avenue, a sharp nostalgic accent from a distant, muted, busy roar. Because of his skewed orientation (what avenue or street was hidden there?) time itself might have been turned or lost; it might have been thirty years ago and Luke a child excited by the dignified immensities of the great city.
But it was not thirty years ago, and now a man who could make none of the claims of a child stood with the old-fashioned hotel room behind him, itself as hollow and dim as the distant past. On the glass-topped bureau stood a bottle of bourbon. On the luggage bench, opened like jaws, was his suitcase; next to the bottle of bourbon lay his thin leather briefcase, and within the briefcase were the oddments of his profession—newspaper and magazine clippings, mostly photocopies, a short biographical précis of one of his subjects prepared for him by the editorial assistants of Gentleman, the magazine whose assignment he had taken, a magazine whose name, assumed forty years before, was inappropriate to its sophisticated, generally irreverent current attitudes.
The hotel room, this dusted but dusty enclosure nominally his, protected him from other eyes and at the same time bared him to his own expectations of himself. He was alone, a condition he had once desired.
It was six o'clock of a June evening; a half hour ago he'd got off the airport bus at its stop across from Grand Central and walked to the hotel. It was a time of financial depression and the hotel was nearly empty. The old porters, standing silently in the lobby near the famous clock, had formed in groups which seemed to have some sort of ranking order, their uniforms shining with a dull patina similar in tone to that of their elderly faces.
Now he was alone amid the hum and drone of the city. He would go down and eat somewhere and then he would come back and try to read those parts of a book on skyscraper construction that dealt with the reinforcing and pouring of concrete floors. Tomorrow, after reporting to Gentleman and meeting the photographer, he would begin his interviews. A month ago the freshly poured fourth floor of a building that was to be fifty-seven stories high had collapsed, killing seventeen men, including a derrick operator whose load of steel I beams jerked loose from their cable and fell forty stories to the unprotected street where they killed three more people, squashing a taxicab and two private automobiles.
Tomorrow he would begin to interview, and the photographer to photograph, people involved in death, in all that breaking and crushing. He would listen to their guilt, their sorrow, see again how all of it would begin to change because of what he might bring into their lives. Their pictures, their words, their names in Gentleman; on that doubtful rubric, the only one offered them, they would hang their vanity. And hang themselves if he would let them.
There was no one in the world to tell him, or to imply to him by dependency or close relationship, what he ought to do. It was three minutes after six, the air that moved into the quiet canyon below him balmy but not hot. He turned away from the windows and went into the bathroom, its hexagonal floor tiles gritty under his shoes. The bowl and fittings were large, worn, white, the tub massive; the faucets, worn through chrome to the brass, dripped slowly and silently into deltas of sienna stain. In the mirror his face looked to him a tired thirty-five, though that buffeted instrument with all its sensory openings had perceived the world for longer than that. He washed his bland, unmemorable face, decided he didn't have to shave, and combed his brownish hair. It was twelve minutes after six.
The phone rang, as he had expected it to do about now. On his way to it he stopped at the closet and took a small spiral notebook and a pen from his jacket.
"Hello, Luke?" It was the Tennessee voice of Martin Troup, the editor in chief of Gentleman. Martin sounded worried, tentative, the question broader than the words.
"Hello, Martin," Luke said.
"How you doin', Luke?"
"Pretty good."
Martin was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You get the stuff Annie sent you—the clippings and all?"
"Yeah, I got 'em."
"I don't know how to say how sorry I am about what happened to your family. I didn't know when I called you."
"It's all right. What time should I show up tomorrow?"
"Around ten all right?"
"Sure. I'll see you then."
"Okay. Say, you doing anything tonight? You want to come for supper?"
"No, thanks, Martin, but thanks, anyway. I'm going to read that book you sent and go to bed early."
"Okay," Martin said. "Take it easy, now. See you tomorrow."
Luke put down the phone and lay back on the bed. He felt like a ghost. He was the one who always returned, bringing alone with him the memories of those who would never return. He still belonged to another world. Still, after six months, he could not manage to think of himself as a single unit. After having a wife and children for nineteen years he did not have a wife and children, because they were dead.
The thought was like a choke, his mind suddenly blocked and spasmic. In strobic flashes he saw the fair faces, in sunlight, of his son and daughter, framed sometimes by
darkness and sometimes by a gray absence of vision. His wife's turns, angles, hollows of body moved toward him only to fade, only the pale face left as he tried to determine what her expression meant. These visions came from his own mind and memory, yet they were so powerful and uncontrollable they seemed to bear messages from outside. It had been six months and he could not look at any of their photographs. The magnitude of his response to their deaths seemed strange to him; it was nothing he could have foreseen. There were husbands and fathers who were far more deeply involved with their families than he had ever been, though he had been responsible enough. It had hardly bothered him, while they were alive and seemed permanent, that he was always a little detached, a little cool. Perhaps he hadn't been. He didn't think they'd thought him cool.
He hadn't flown with them to his wife's mother's funeral because, he'd said, he had to work. But he had chosen not to go and the two-engine prop-jet had crashed into a low, wooded hill and he was alone in places so deep he'd never even considered them before. He didn't want to name his children or his wife, to think of the strange solidity of their names, common names: John Wilson Carr, Grace Lois Carr, Helen Sarah (Benton) Carr.
He had buried his family in Ohio, in the Benton family plot. He and Helen had never thought of having a plot; it wasn't the kind of thing they'd ever considered—a place to put their dead.
Then, after he had returned to Wellesley and the empty house, his uncle, Shem Carr, died alone in New Hampshire at the age of eighty-three, a death more mete, more timely, one that could be pondered without a sudden loss of breath.
When Martin Troup had called last week he had been half-asleep in his clothes on the living room couch. That voice from the functioning world had made him look around and even begin to smell the funk around him. Without Helen's care the house had seemed to wilt and rot. And then Martin spoke of death, more death, and how we are so busily and aggressively formulating and building traps for ourselves. This time twenty people in a second or two. It was death that had paralyzed him and so, recognizing his desperation, he had agreed to go where death was, to the abomination itself, and see if he could face it again.
He got up and took from his briefcase the book, Ferroconcrete Construction. The coefficients of the thermal expansion of steel and concrete are nearly the same, therefore the tensile strength of one and the non-compressibility of the other combine with tremendous strength. After the concrete sets, that is—a continuing process depending upon many factors, such as heat, moisture content, air content, quality of mix, etc. One summer while he was in college, Luke had worked for a shady contractor and when the owner of the house whose foundation they were pouring came by, the word was whispered, "If he asks, tell him it's five to one." The mixture of gravel and sand to cement was more like ten to one. But maybe it was not that kind of greed that had caused the skyscraper's floor to collapse and kill. Haste, error, who knew? It was not his job to find out why it had happened, but to report its effects and perhaps to comment upon what Martin Troup had once called New York City's "edifice complex." Everywhere the old was being violently torn down and the new and shoddy as violently thrown up. Those sterile, inefficient glass and metal verticalities.
He put Ferroconcrete Construction down and went to his briefcase, where he found two letters. The first was postmarked Leah, New Hampshire, March 3—three months ago. It was written in pencil on lined tablet paper.
Dear Luke, well the snow was just to heavy last month and now I live in the kitchen but a bunch of God damned busybodies want to burn this place and send me to the county farm. It does not leak much except in the pantry but what God damned business is it of theres. If you would come and tell them I think they would haul off. I am not leaving here standing up and that is God's own God damned truth.
Sincerely yours
Your Uncle
Shem G. Carr
And Shem hadn't left there alive. While Luke was in mourning, or whatever his inactive state might have been called, Shem had died in the kitchen of the old farmhouse, evidently the only room left that kept out most of the snow-melt and rain. Phyllis Bateman, the town clerk, had called to tell him the news. She had his address because he had paid the taxes on the old place for years. Shem had a World War I pension and some social security because of the time during the Second World War when he had worked in the woolen mill. It was enough to keep him, but he wasn't good at paying taxes, or for anything that wasn't directly tangible, so Luke had taken care of that—a matter of four hundred dollars a year on the hundred and sixty acres. The barns and sheds had all fallen in, the fields had grown up in poplar, birch, cherry, maple, ash and softwoods. And now the rocky hill farm was his. He hadn't seen the place in years, hadn't gone to Shem's funeral, which was conducted by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He had sent them a check to help pay for it.
To say "My uncle," just as it had once been to say, "My mother," or "My father," had been a hedge against death. Those older people were, after all, in the first line. Each time he'd mentioned Shem, while Shem was alive, he'd thought of this, as if he were using the old man in a slightly dishonorable way.
He remembered when the tops of Shem's rubber boots, as he went authoritatively about the work of the farm, were as high as Luke's waist. Looking up at the man working, as Shem always was then, seemed to make him more distant and forbidding, unlike his own more urban father, whom he saw only after work, at home. Shem had seemed more important than his father, his essentially good-humored jokes funny yet dangerous, coming as they did from up there where the grizzled beard was, high above the manure or soil or oily wood his great boots trod.
But when Shem's wife died, and then his only son, Samuel—a strange, silent boy who never went anywhere, never married—and he passed into his seventies, all he did was cut and split wood for his stove. The animals were all gone; his last dog, a beagle named Gretchen who lived fourteen years, also dead. He had a 1941 half-ton Chevy pickup that never quite seemed to die, although it was certainly rusted out and asthmatic. But then he hadn't bothered to register it for years, just put the white-on-green plates on in even years, the green-on-white in odd. The local police knew this, but finally it got to be so much of a joke in town the State Police heard of it. By then he didn't see too well anyway, and with the truck settling in a shed that soon settled over it, neighbors brought him supplies every few weeks. Spam and beans, canned corn and peas, a loaf of Wonder Bread, potatoes, coffee and tobacco. He'd used to drink hard cider he made himself, but in the last ten years his stomach couldn't take that anymore. And he never changed his pants, stank, wasn't polite to anyone who came by, whether it was to help him or not. He wouldn't look at the television set someone gave him, or listen to the radio, or read anything, what did he do all the years of days in the collapsing house? He wouldn't leave it; upon that rock of intention he lived out his time, until his eighty-third year, when he stopped.
When he finished this assignment Luke would go up to New Hampshire and look at Shem's grave, buy him a stone, and see what was left of the farmhouse and the fields he remembered as if they were two places—the working hill farm of his childhood and the jungle of growth and rot he'd last seen several years ago. Six years ago, to be exact, when he'd been in New Hampshire to do an article about a commune of young people trying to subsistence farm a long-abandoned mountain place as unpromising as Shem's, the natural produce of which was, as a county forester told him, rocks and trees.
He should have made himself emerge from his funk when Shem's letter came, and gone to see him, knowing it would most likely be for the last time. But he hadn't. Maybe he hadn't really emerged from his funk at all, even now. The thought of tomorrow's assignment made him tremble with apprehension. He must connect with other lives nudged and chilled by accident, by death. He would talk to shop stewards, engineers, re-rod men, wives and children, fellow workers who had survived. Some would be idiots proud of their survival, feeling chosen. Fools, he would have to think as he lis
tened, feeling dishonest. Others would twist him dry, their grief real, or their anger real.
He broke the seal on the bourbon and poured himself an inch of it. There was no ice and he didn't want to speak to anyone so he put some tapwater into the glass and sipped. There. The familiar bite and chill would give him a measure of not caring, maybe enough to get him down to the lobby and a restaurant.
Now he would look again at the second letter, which had come just before he left for New York. It was typed in a very small elite face on unwatermarked white paper, sent in a post office stamped envelope. The postmark was Grand Central Annex.
Luke Carr:
You are a murderer. You know it, tho no one else does but me. You used her and when she was used up, poof! I am going to kill you. I will do it when and how I want to. This is no joke!
He had received crank letters before, always addressed in care of a magazine or newspaper or publisher, usually a threat having to do with his written opinions, or a question about them that was really an accusation, always in language that sooner or later revealed some kind of madness, political or personal.
At first he had found this letter interesting enough to distract him, to let him spend some strangely relaxing moments thinking about it. Studying it for exactly what evidence it offered was an exercise that freed him, if just for moments, from his loss.
First was the elite typeface. If the machine belonged to the writer, and had been chosen by him or her—probably him, though that deduction was more instinctive then logical—that in itself was interesting. If it were a man, that delicate typeface seemed more dangerous. Then there were the two words, "tho" and "poof!" And there were no contractions, such as "I'll" or "I'm," but perhaps the stern tone precluded them.
"Tho" made him think of the Chicago Tribune and the quirky orthography left over, he supposed, from Colonel McCormick. But it did place the writer fairly exactly on an educational-cultural scale. "Poof!" was a small wonder in itself, which he would think about.
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