The Followed Man

by Thomas Williams

  He read the letter again, hearing in it disapproval, just the slightest, taking-everything-into-consideration disapproval, of his absence from Shem's funeral, including, maybe, his long absence from Cascom. He had known Phyllis Bateman for many years, be­ginning when he was three or four and she was in her teens, long before she married George Bateman. Her maiden name was Follansbee. She was pretty then, with black hair, though she was al­ways squarish and plump. He hadn't seen her for six years, and now she must be getting to be an old woman. Years ago there had been a tragedy in her family—the suicide of one of her sons—but he couldn't remember the son's name.

  He would have to go to New Hampshire and buy Shem a stone, a ritual he did not anticipate with pleasure, A telephone bill, overdue. He must pay for messages that had all been unhappy.

  Then a stamped envelope with no return address, his name and address typed in an elite face that was more immediately recogniz­able than he expected it to be. He opened the envelope, thinking that maybe it wasn't the semiliterate Avenger striking again, also thinking that he really didn't need this, God damn it, but if this were a second message maybe this wacko was for real after all. Again the postmark was Grand Central Annex.

  Luke Carr:

  How is God offended that your filth entered her Sacred Body! The Day will come, I have promised Him!

  All right, he thought. If it were tapering off from murder to­ward theological niceties maybe the whole thing would eventually go away. But what woman did this person have in mind? Helen? Another woman? He didn't want to think about old lusts and pas­sions. And of all the women he could think of, none had been any less an accomplice than he. But that case probably wasn't arguable in the court of the Avenger's mind. A joke—maybe this was all a joke, he tried to think, done by somebody who didn't know what had happened. But he couldn't make that believable. Of course it was possible that he might even know the Avenger; one could know someone for a long time without learning what bells gonged in the silence of the head. He had once been clearly betrayed by a friend, which had been a shock deeper than any historical or liter­ary example had prepared him for.

  Suddenly he realized that he was exhausted, that he hadn't slept much last night and the only thing he had taken into his system, and kept there, was the bourbon at the airport. The rest of the mail looked like bills, so he left it for later. When he got up his body was weak. "Dangerously weak," he said aloud in the people-less room. "Dangerously weak—did you hear that? Do you hear me?" Who? He half staggered out to the car and brought in his suitcase and briefcase, then fell on the couch. His head seemed lighter as he lay back, but that symptom, which said not to lie back, was not warning enough against the weakness. He was like a fluid, lighter than water. He thought, at the last, that he should lock the kitchen door.

  He was awake, aware of the loss of time, that bereavement of life that always saddened and depressed him when he slept in day­light and awoke to find the day ending. The southern window-wall, meant to catch the low winter sun but eaved against the high summer sun, revealed the hay of the neglected lawn in a twilight that seemed ancient.

  He had been helpless in his sleep—sick, unconscious and vis­ible; he should at least have locked the kitchen door. The inside of his mouth was sticky. He wondered if the letter had made him this apprehensive, or if he would ordinarily have been aware of an un­locked door in Wellesley on a summer afternoon, a car in the ga­rage and one in the driveway, no mail in the mailbox. The un­kempt lawn might tempt a burglar, but that was all. He'd meant to get a neighborhood high school boy to mow it, but had kept for­getting. Ah, these responsible little domestic impulses. He used to like to mow the lawn, making and remaking that finished emerald smoothness in which his family's house was set.

  The phone in the kitchen began to ring. When he got up he started to faint, but bent over and let the dizziness slide away.

  It was Ham Jones. "Luke? Glad to have you back, buddy! Your mind still made up?"

  "I guess so," Luke said.

  "Okay! Can I bring these people over tomorrow morning, say around ten?"

  "Sure. Okay."

  "Okay! See you then! No problems! Good-bye!"

  So. What that meant was that he would go through with it. It didn't seem his proper sort of duty to have to go through the rooms and pick out what would be saved, what given to the Salva­tion Army, what thrown out. Helen was good at that sort of thing. What would he do with things like the trophy Johnny won swim­ming at Camp Ontowah? The cheap, brave, silver-colored sta­tuette stood on Johnny's chest of drawers between a Sopwith Pup and a Fokker D-VII. The clothes would go to the Salvation Army.

  What about the books? There must be a thousand books in the house—cookbooks, gardening books, kids' books, novels, refer­ence books, history books, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, dictionar­ies, scrapbooks, notebooks, photograph albums, ledgers, bank­books, checkbooks, paperback books, little magazines, non-books, fashionable books, unread books, unreadable books. And things, gadgets—TV sets, radios, hi-fi, calculators, skis, sleds, skates, hair driers, mixers, toys, bicycles, sprayers, shoes, paints, boots, brushes, medicines, hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, snow-blower, mowers, clippers, bulbs, watches, saws, clocks, musical in­struments, vacuum cleaner, plumber's helpers, brooms, mops, pots and pans and broilers, silver and condiments and cutlery and nutcrackers; God, he had hardly begun. Where did all those things come from? How could there be room here for all of those things? The energy and expense that had gone into their acquisi­tion was stunning; and now what a shock it was to be left alone, as if with your sins at the final reckoning, with all this dreck that once must have seemed absolutely necessary when the living ones were here.

  Before those people came tomorrow to look at the house he must clean out the children's rooms of their clothes and toys, books and trophies. And Helen's closet and bureau, their bath­room's douches, toothbrushes, shampoos, creams and menstrual supplies. He must remove all of the evidence. Those poor people, knowing what had happened—if they saw the rooms as they were right now it would hurt them. It would break their hearts.

  He had to eat something first or he would fall down. He was not thinking very well. He would have the movers come and pack and store everything—everything down to the last worn toothbrush and book of paper matches with two matches left in it, the relics of his family put away in the dark until he could face the choices.

  He couldn't be here when those people came tomorrow. He didn't have to be here. Let Ham Jones earn his commission; he would leave a note on each door, and be gone when they arrived. He would travel light. Ah. He would go to New Hampshire. He must be practical now. Let us flee the past with all its accidents and betrayals.

  He stood in front of the refrigerator, wondering why the word betrayal had come back. He wondered why he was standing in front of the refrigerator. Because there might be something in­side it, and he had to eat something today.

  The door opened, its magnets reluctant. Something was rotten in there—the cold sour stench of refrigerated meat gone bad. It was a pound of hamburger he'd bought and never opened. He tore the bloody plastic from the body of it and pushed the meat into the disposal, where it roared stickily into the nether regions. The milk was sour, so it went down as well, with a wash of cold wa­ter as a chaser. The disposal, unburdened, hummed contentedly before he turned it off, hearing, as it wound down and stopped, the last few clicks of its teeth.

  In the freezer compartment he found a package of green beans and some pork chops, but the idea of cooking those things was beyond consideration. He went to the canned goods cupboard and found a small can of pork and beans, opened it on the electric can opener, took a spoon and wolfed the beans down cold. There. The electric can opener still held the can cover, so he took it away, plucking it free and into the trash, the little disc sailing down among its own, gold-silvery, with a clink.

  It was getting dark, now, the kitchen's white countertops and bright metal fading. He took his suitcase from t
he hall and went upstairs to their bedroom, dreamlike in the growing darkness. He put down his suitcase and went out into the hallway, then to Gra­de's room, its Raggedy Ann rug smiling up at his lowered eyes as in a dream. On her dresser was a small cloisonné" box, a gift from Helen. He opened it and found there, just still visible, seven fold­ed dollar bills and forty-three cents in tarnished coins. Gracie was a saver of her allowance. Money was not ever personal; yes, he did think that, and put that saved, time-cured money in his pocket. Her dolls, drawings, her bed made neatly for going on a trip, her small possessions flickering across his vision, he left her room and went down the hall to Johnny's.There was the trophy between the two jaunty model airplanes, and on the wall the poster of "The First American," a red Indian, noble and long in the cranium. The trophy's glued-on plaque was engraved, John Carr, 1st Place, Across the Lake Swim, Camp Ontowah, 1976. He left Johnny's room, closed the door, and went back to their room, where the big bed faded slowly in the dusk.

  He slid open the door of Helen's closet and put his hands in among her hanging clothes, the skirts and blouses giving way with liquid acquiescence, slippery and cool. A vague, clean yet power­ful scent was still there. He took his hands away from the gar­ments so light on their hangers, and shut the door.

  6.

  He woke up, naked on their bed, to the clamor of partly re­membered dreams and an erection that was so dead and distant, so purely physiological, that the thick organ might have been con­nected to him by a leather strap.

  There was always the small distance of the return from dream to the facts of his life now, and he slid along that ice until he was completely aware of where he was. The digital clock in the radio said 7:50. He would get up and do the mechanical things, dress in dungarees, work shirt and leather boots for his evasive trip to New Hampshire. Evasive was a strange word to come to mind; he had no one to whom he owed his presence. It was like the word betrayal that had come into his head last night as he stood in front of the refrigerator. Never mind. He would leave notes on the doors for Ham Jones, the keys on the counter. He would call Ham tonight.

  He looked into his study before he left. Dust covered his type­writer's dustcover. Manuscript pages seemed to be turning faintly yellow at their edges. The idea of sitting down to write was so alien to him it gave him a twinge of actual nausea. It was as though the man who once worked in this room had been doing something so frivolous and inaccurate as to be dishonorable. Dishonorable—another of those abstractions that seemed to follow him, baggage from a previous life. No words seemed to apply to his present sit­uation. He didn't seem to be in a situation, to have a situation; he was a man without a situation.

  He was not even hungry. His body moved through the tasks he had set for it this morning without pain or stress.

  He took the Plymouth station wagon, which had been, more or less, his car. Helen had chosen the newer car, the Hornet, because she had been impressed by its guarantee. It had sat there in the garage for six months without being used; probably its battery was dead, its tires low, its oil stratified and gummy. He would sell it when the time came—or maybe turn it and the Plymouth in on something else. A small flash of nostalgic interest there, because he had once been quite interested in cars, even in their mechanics and engineering.

  He stopped before Route 128 for gas, then went on. He still wasn't hungry. A cigarette, in the draft of the open window, burned in his lips like a small forge. He snuffed it out, thinking as always that it would be the last one he would ever light and inhale and crush out. On Interstate 93 he passed into New Hampshire, no perceptible difference in the landscape or in the commercial drabness of the buildings. Occasionally an old white farmhouse would appear, high and many-windowed, framed by dead or dy­ing elms, television antennae another skein above dark brick chimneys.

  By noon he was above Concord, where he left the interstate and entered Saxon County on a two lane road that climbed hills and circled mountains. This part of the journey had hardly changed since he was a boy, before the interstate, when they had to go through the centers of towns and cities. The land here had changed only in that the fields were smaller and fewer, the trees coming in over wall and brook to cover them as the old farms died and the farmhouses either rotted or had the sterile, over-painted look of summer places. There were a few working farms left, but not many now. His father once told him that he could remember when there were four places up the mountain beyond Shem's, but now those cellar holes and barn foundations were all shaded by deep woods, the day lilies, roses, lilacs, and even the apple trees, though they would try in the end to stretch up into the sun, all dead of the green shade.

  There was no restaurant or even a store left in Cascom, so he went past the green square, the wooden church, the former Grange Hall that was now the Town Hall, then five miles further into the larger town of Leah, where he stopped downtown at the Welkum Diner. One must put food into the body, which was, after all, a machine. He would let all those involuntary processes con­tinue.

  The old diner was the same, the short order cook another in a long line of cadaverous bottle-hiders. When he was ten he would rather have eaten the Welkum Diner's hamburgers and hot greasy French fries, with an Orange Crush, than any other food in the world. It had always been a treat when his father took him here. And even now, whenever he passed a diner that looked old enough, its exhaust fan's greasy dustlets a swath down a side of it, he still thought of food that was so different from home, so good, so bad for you that he remembered with pleasure that old com­plicity between him and his father.

  One change was that the Welkum Diner now had a liquor li­cense, which seemed the wrong sort of bad influence altogether. He had coffee with his hamburger and fries, feeling in himself at least a relic of that lost appetite. He and his father always sat at the counter, never in one of the narrow booths, so they could watch the great chromed boilers, gauges and spigots of the coffee ma­chine, and the bubbling glass dome full of a purple drink he had never seen anyone order.

  He entered the food into his body, paid for it and went across the street to his car. It was one of those June days that are so bright and still they seem improbable, out of time, as if they could only occur during vacation. A few thick white fair weather clouds moved like trains across the blue, coming from Vermont and trav­eling straight east, their speed so silent, the air here so still, there seemed a disconnection between that element and this, as if he were watching a vast silent movie. His car was sultry, baking, but then as he drove back over the hills to Cascom it caused its own wind and clamor.

  George and Phyllis Bateman lived in a small white clapboard house on the Cascom town square, with a large garden behind it extending to a pine woods that someone had planted in even rows at least forty years before. He drove into their gravel driveway and parked behind their pickup truck. George was in the garden so he went around back and walked down its edge. George, wear­ing the dark green chino work pants and shirt that were the rural working man's uniform, was bent with the intensity of a wood-chuck over the row of carrots he was thinning. With that same alert attention he suddenly turned his head and saw Luke, picked out one of the pencil-sized carrots, and while still looking at Luke drew it through his fingers to wipe the dirt from it and ate it. Luke didn't know if he was recognized. The gray-stubbled chin chomped the thin carrot until only the fringy green top was left.

  George was in his late sixties, a short, square-faced, husky man. He had been a stonemason, among other things, for most of his life. From beneath gray eyebrows the faded gray eyes calmly ex­amined him, then George nodded once and said slowly, "I thought you looked kind of natural."

  "You recognize me, then?" Luke said.

  "Well, it's been a while. You're Shem Carr's brother's boy, Luke." George wrung off the tops of his culled carrots, picked up the colander and carefully stepped over the rows of carrots, chard and beans. He wiped his right hand on his thigh and they shook hands. "Been a while," he said, smiling, though Luke thought he he
ard some disapproval in George's words. Then George's face went stern. "About your family, now, Luke. When we heard, it was like the world come to a stop." He looked away, embarrassed, scowling so hard he might have been threatening someone. "The goddam things that happen," he said. "Ayuh, and you never get used to 'em. Come on in the house. Phyllis was wondering if you'd come and see us one of these days. She'll be glad you did."

  Luke thought of the suicide of one of their sons, so long ago. He remembered, too, that at one time George had a reputation as a violent and disputatious man. One story was that once he'd thrown all of the furniture in his house out onto the front lawn.

  George went on ahead, then stopped and turned at the kitchen door, his voice lowered. "She's got the arthritis pretty bad now, you know. You'll notice she don't get around the way she used to." He scraped and stamped the garden dirt from his boots before he opened the screened door, then went in first himself, because he was the one burdened, to put his colander in the sink.

  Luke followed him into the dark, cool kitchen, the small dou­ble-hung windows filled with potted plants. At first it smelled like a greenhouse, but then came an old farmhouse's grave-whiff of cellar, and of ferment—vinegar, cider, and then the faint odor of creosote from the somnolent cast iron woodstove, its fires out for the summer. In winter the black range, whose name, cast into its oven door, was FORTRESS UNION, would be the warm center of the kitchen, but now it had lost its power and was in the shadows, with potted plants on its warming shelves. A small white-enameled gas stove beside the sink cooked the summer meals.

  After George had washed the garden dirt from his hands they went through the small dining room with its oilcloth-covered table and crowded glass-fronted cabinets full of dishes, over the big floor register and into the front room. Phyllis sat with her back to them at a maple rolltop desk, her thick back as upright as if she were playing a piano. When she turned on her swivel chair she was startled, took off her hornrimmed glasses and peered at Luke.