Her dark eyes, like dots in her round white face, were as black as her hair had once been. They had seemed larger, once, but as her face had grown soft and round with age they remained the same, like mineral beads that would outlast their settings. The little eyes peered off over his shoulder. "I don't know why I should bring that up," she said. "I can't believe it's much of a lesson, if a lesson's anything I'd have a right to give you in the first place." She made a sound half sigh, half judgmental exclamation: "Humph. It was during the war, and you got to know what the times was like. I mean not the way they might have been to you, down in Massachusetts, a young boy. But to a girl from Cascom, her new husband gone off to war, no children to take care of, who liked dancing and going out. Oh, my, I guess it's an old story happened to many a girl. It seems kind of frivolous and even a little cheap, now—the places we went, with sawdust on the floor, and the songs—'Don't Get Around Much Anymore,' or was that 'Lonesome Saturday Night'? 'Rum and Coca-Cola,' 'Moonlight Cocktail,' 'If I Loved You'—unless you knew what it was like then it might appear kind of shoddy, the whole business, the music and the Cuba Libres and the beer. Gas rationing. My father was a Follansbee but he never worked in the store, he run the old farm on the River Road, so we always had T-stamps left over. Such big things was going on in the world it seemed nothing would ever last, everything would change, and we all come to care less about Cascom and Leah and what might happen after. The movies was the same—nothing mattered but the war. Everybody in the world was fighting and going places, sometimes dying. Everybody seemed to be saying hello or good-bye and who knew if the war would ever be over. It just got sort of normal for it to be war and the men gone or going. The places we went, they seemed part of all the excitement. The Rosebud Ballroom in Northlee, or the dances in the town halls of all the little towns, or the Casino Ballroom on the lake, or if I could get a T-stamp or two from my father maybe even over in Vermont or down to Claremont on the Connecticut River. I'd go with a girlfriend, we'd just dance or sometimes just look but then I met this boy he was in the navy, in the Officer Candidate School they had at Northlee College. George was in North Africa, or Sicily, or Anzio, with his Engineers. My girlfriend, her mother was a schoolteacher, so we had a car we could use, a DeSoto, it was. Howard—that was the name of my Officer Candidate, Howard Gould—he'd always find a date for Loris. To tell you the truth, Luke, it don't sound like me, not now. It seems like history, like it happened to some other young girl married and without her husband—like something I read in a book a long time ago and can't recall the name of the book.
"Meantime, I had this sweet boy in his handsome uniform, and one thing followed another and I was pregnant. Shortly after I knew, Howard flunked out of the Officer Candidates and was sent off to sea someplace. I heard the Seventh Fleet, in the Pacific. I never knew the name of his ship or whatever happened to him. Maybe one of them kamikazes got him, or he's living back in Philadelphia, where he come from, or he's dead of natural causes. Men don't live as long as women and he'd be sixty years of age. It don't seem that long ago, just that it happened to somebody else.
"Later events seem like they happened to me. I went off to Manchester and worked as long as I could in a defense plant, making canvas duffel bags. The allowance from George's pay kept coming, too. Then when I got too big I just waited and had the baby, a boy I called John. There was no natural way he could have been George's child, no way in the world. I considered putting the baby up for adoption, but for one thing I couldn't do it and for another I figured I could never keep a secret like that anyway. When the war was over and George was in a camp in France I wrote and told him everything, saying it was up to him to do what he thought right, and I'd go along with whatever he thought best.
"Which he did. Which he thought he did. Instead of divorcing me he come home and took John as his own but John wasn't his own. George tried, but something in him denied what he thought he could do. He never could forgive me, and whenever he laid eyes on John it was like he was looking at a spider or some little beast that was ten times more dangerous than its size. It drove George crazy, and that's the truth of it. He never forgive me, though you never seen a man try so hard.
"Bill was born in 1947—George's real son.
"George's mother died insane, you know, down to Concord, and George always had the terrible suspicion the same thing would happen to him. It was bad. Bad years. George worked, but at night he drank and whenever he was on the hard stuff he broke up the house and wrecked his cars. They was terrible years for all of us, but it was worst for John. God knows I tried my best to give him what he needed, but at the age of fifteen, that was in 1959, January 15, John hung himself from a crossbeam, out in the shed.
"So who's to forgive what all there is to forgive, Luke? Maybe it fades a little, but that's the best we can ask. You live in and around and about whatever happened, but it's always with you and you you just live every day, starting over each time."
Phyllis moved too suddenly, then gave a blank stare of pain for a moment as she lifted herself, using the arms of her chair. She let herself settle back again, her spine as straight as she could make it. "I've got to go to the little biffy George made for me," she said, lifting herself to her feet this time. "It's the coffee. I drink too much of it." Using her cane, she walked slowly across the room.
He thought of the shed, where he and George had talked and smoked, the crossbeams and the body of the fifteen-year-old in the January freeze.
When Phyllis came back she sat down slowly, giving Luke an icy twinge of sympathy pain in the vicinity of his prostate. She said, "You're not building a camp up there, you're building a house to live in."
"Who knows?" he said, startled into the inane question.
"George described it to me, so I guess I know. You going to live by yourself, like a hermit?"
"Maybe."
"Hmm."
It was as if she looked straight at him for the first time. Her small eyes, black shiny things in the soft white folds of her lids, might almost have been evil, or else he was suddenly too much on the defensive. Not so much on the defensive as on the very edge of any knowledge of his plans or desires, where he had no sure footing at all.
But her eyes were not evil, only old and curious; she meant no harm, she just wanted to have a hand in things. Here was this rarity, an unencumbered man, a widower, a curiosity indeed. That and their old fondness for each other when he'd been a child and she a young woman. He wondered if she had any recollection, and if she had, whether she thought it strange or important in any way, that she had let that child climb upon her smooth, naked body, the child in a kind of night-warm paradise.
He didn't know how to ask that, but she looked at him with a tolerant, fond, knowing expression as they said good-bye.
He went on into Leah on the High Road and bought groceries at Follansbees' and a ten-cubic-foot refrigerator from the Electric Coop Store. Two men helped him slide it off the loading platform into the truck and he roped it, still in its crate, in a front corner of the truck bed. He would decide how to get it off the truck later, probably with a couple of two-by-eight planks. Lumber for joists, roof, sills and beams had been delivered by the lumber yard and was stacked by the cabin site, shrouded in black polyethylene that whispered and flapped.
He forgot to stop at the Post Office for his mail and was on the road back to Cascom when he thought of it, decided to get it another day, then turned around and went back for it. He didn't want any mail, yet, in order to avoid closer confrontations, needed to know who exactly did want to communicate with him. This seemed a trap, unfair; but then he had foolishly told people where he was. In time, maybe, if he slowly and carefully retreated, no one would think to write to the Hermit of Cascom Mountain. So far he hadn't been doing too well.
He picked up his mail, paid forwarding charges and went back to the truck to read it, the hot, fumy breezes of the town square blowing through the windows.
The August issue of Gentleman; he w
ondered if he would actually read any of it. A letter from the Avenger, postmarked Wellesley, MA. He held the envelope in his hands. It was as if he were blind, trying to get hold of someone in a room in which the other could see. It was addressed to Luke Carr, General Delivery, Leah, N.H. One step closer. There was a letter from Jane Jones, and another from Martin Troup on Martin's own stationery. The rest was junk he could throw away without opening.
First the Avenger. As he opened the envelope he felt almost sick. This asshole, this shit-for-brains, was soiling his freedom.
Then he tried to imagine someone who would actually be flattered by such attention. Maybe he could imagine that person; maybe even himself, once, when he wasn't known and wanted to be known.
Luke Carr:
You will die slow with you're dirty, nasty gonads and prick cut off. How would you like to eat it???
Mr. Death
So the Avenger now seemed more interested in method than in justification. If Luke had any insight into the matter at all, he had to find this note somewhat reassuring, since literary creation of this sort was rewarding in itself—a nice thrill to write nasty like that. Maybe the Avenger's kick was just creative writing.
The pistol was stashed under the dash, however, where he could reach it quickly. He'd spent some time arranging a hidden but accessible place there for the holster.
He opened Jane's letter, which was written on flowered blue stationery, her name and address embossed at the top and on the envelope by one of those pliers-like gadgets.
Mrs. Hamilton Jones
206 Winthrop St.
Wellesley, MA.
Dear Luke,
I arrived a few minutes ahead of Ham—about 11:45—so he didn't have to worry about me, thank the Good Lord and 1-93! I keep thinking of everything that happened in your Mountain Greenery. I was a fool to barge in on you like that, but that's the way I am. It was so lovely. We mustn't do it again but I shall always remember those wonderful moments.
I'm sorry I was so anxious to get back. I was nearly out of my mind when we said good-bye. Forgive me.
If you ever get down this way again, please come and see us.
Love,
Jane
Hmm. It didn't sound like Jane, and because it didn't sound like her, what could it tell him? Perhaps Jane was one of those people who spoke one way and wrote another. But which was the truth? He wanted out of it, and she seemed to be allowing him to be out of it. Her handwriting was nervous and angular, the tails of letters stabbing straight down into sharp points before they shot upward again. Lord, he thought, this wasn't over. She'd get the itch for some more adultery and turn up again. Maybe he was being small and mean. He felt shame. Hadn't he loved her at all? Whatever power of desire she'd caused was gone, and now all he wanted was cool freedom.
He was sweating in the hot wind from the pavement and the passing traffic, a bad sweat. The two notes mixed in his head, reinforcing each other. He put them in the dash compartment and opened Martin Troup's.
Dear Luke,
As you can see, I'm not using Gentleman's letterhead this time and I'm typing this myself. We've been friends, I fondly think, for a long time and I've got some questions I'd like to ask that I don't want anybody at Gentleman to know about. Anybody. Mainly, what have you heard about Gentleman and specifically me, lately? I'd like to stop right here without telling you any more and see what you'd have to say, but, Old Buddy, I'm about to blow my top, there's about nobody else I half-way trust, Charlene and I have parted but that was no surprise (I know why you shied off coming to supper and don't blame you), I've got five kids by three goddam horrible marriages, one in an expensive college, two in expensive prep schools and two in an expensive grade school where they wear leotards a lot.
Don't know why I got onto that, but stay with me, boy, you're hearing a lonesome roar of pain from a trapped bear. I can see the white of my own leg bone in the steel, and there's a couple of poisoned arrows in my back.
Maybe you and me weren't meant for this fucking political-ego-power-performance shit, where a man's word's nothing but a fart in a whirlwind or a piss hole in the snow. If you trust a man, like I trusted Merlin Richards, or for Christ's sake even Jimmy Barnes—can you believe that? Jimmy? Why, son, you're just a fool. I even find myself wondering about Annie Gelb, for Christ's sake.
Anyway, to spare your sensitive hide from too many details, what happened was when the new owners came around, Merlin, a man I brought in here and treated like a son—he's talented enough—and trusted, along with Jimmy Barnes, who I once thought was my friend, or at least a fairly honorable man, began stabbing me in the back, making up, and I mean made up out of nothing but their wily imaginations, all kinds of things I was supposed to have done, said, not done, etc. How do I know about it? For one thing, finally, when I began to get ominous little signals from upstairs, I asked Merlin if he knew what was coming down and with the straightest face you ever saw he told me how he heard with his own ears and saw with his own eyes these fictions. He said that I said things to him that I do not remember saying and that, in fact, are not even in my psychic language. He evidently made them up, and now—what chutzpah, Luke!—he tells me what I am supposed to have done and said that hurt morale, sowed dissention, convinced my colleagues I was a sadist, a drunk or a nut.
You've met the fellow. I suddenly know more about him now, and it makes a bad list. Plausibility is his talent, omniscience is his delusion, and power is his game. I was so sick when he told me all this shit I thought I might do him a favor and end his miserable existence on the spot. I guess I looked kind of funny, because he asked me if I was "getting any help." From a shrink, I guess he meant. That night I went home and fucking blubbered. The death of friendship, the death of trust, Luke. That's a wound that never heals.
I know you're up there in the clean woods someplace, where you won't hear much, up there in that strange state of New Hampshire that's more of a culture lag than Mississippi these days, communing with the deer or something. But I've got to try to fight this thing, make a stand somehow, keep my pride in my work, which you might think frivolous sometimes but, dammit, has always been receptive to your kind of thing, too. So if you know anything, have heard anything, or can think of anything, buy a pencil and a piece of paper and let me know. Or if they've got a telephone over to the village you might even try one of them infernal instruments. Just ask the operator for Martin Troup, in New York City, where a man's as good as his word.
Martin
Luke read the letter again, feeling empty, like loss, and distant; Martin had never claimed anything from him in the past but decent work. He must be truly hurt, not just because of his job, because there were other jobs and it was musical chairs in the profession—but who knew? Martin had been there for a long time, and had been part of Gentleman's transition from slick, girly sophistication to whatever lively mixture it was now. The feeling was like hearing of the destruction of something old, dependable and more meritorious than not, or even like hearing of a death. As for the truth of Martin's accusations, one incident came immediately to mind. Several years ago, when he'd met Merlin Richards, Merlin had addressed Martin as "Sir," no irony or humor implied. Luke had been a little startled, and had looked at Merlin's bland face to see. He felt then that Martin liked Merlin enough, for some reason, to overlook small indicators, but hadn't thought much more of it.
This outburst, however, was all wrong; this last roar was fatal by definition. How could he help? If things had gone as far as Martin said, with ominous signals coming down, he should be out of there already. No one was ever considered, except in his own delusions, unexpendable. And gratitude was not a chip to be cashed.
He had to call Martin and didn't know what to say to him. Of course he couldn't remember Gentleman's telephone number and his address book was in the tent, so he would have to call information; the complications of that, on top of all the other complications, made him want to run back up the mou
ntain. He always did what other people wanted him to do. He never did anything he wanted to do, just responded, responded, all of his life. He got some change in Trask's Pharmacy, went to the telephone booth and with weary, nearly panicked clumsiness deciphered the instructions in the telephone book, got the number and called collect. He finally got Annie Gelb, who said she would accept the call. Martin was in conference.
"Mr. Carr . . . Luke," Annie said.
"Martin asked me to call," he said.
"I know," she said, meaning that she knew everything.
"Tell him I don't know anything except what Robin Flash told me about the new owners. What's going on?"
"It's awful. Everybody's looking for other jobs."
"Is Martin okay?"
"No, I wouldn't say so. He's upset. He says nobody will give him any answers." She was silent after that, and then, just as he decided that he would have to say something, she said quickly, "Your name was on a list of people they wanted information about. Your name keeps coming up and Martin worries about that, too."
"I don't know anything about that, Annie. In any case, I'm not for hire. Tell him that. Tell him my word's still good and I'm a hermit, now, terminal case. Tell him to keep his pecker up, okay?"
"All right."
"Good luck to you both, huh?"
"I'll tell him. I wish you luck, too, Mr. Carr."
So he'd got out of it without having to promise to call back. Feeling a little dishonorable, he went back to his personal, singular, paid-for, registered, inspected and insured, functional truck. He sat behind the wheel and lit a cigarette, which he soon put out. In this truck, or while working on the cabin, and lately on his equipment shed, he found that he rarely smoked. It was as though he had forbidden himself any of those small, addictive rewards until some major part of the construction was finished. Then he would sit down and have a slow, solitary, contemplative little celebration. He yearned for walls and ceilings now, protective spaces.
He drove around the square and back to Cascom, through the green hills and the warm summer air. What happened to anything as ephemeral as a magazine was hardly cause for thought. He wondered why even Martin Troup cared, really, aside from salary and benefits. It was all words, words, glossy photographs, drawings, jokes, stuff blabbed out over and over again, opinions that were standardly fashionable and amusing or pseudo-shocking. It was hard to remember his own interest in reading Gentleman, or any other magazine, but then he'd read it, usually, while sitting on the hopper, a captive position that precluded deep seriousness.
The Followed Man Page 27
