"I'm never sure I understand Freddie that well," she said, "but you're the one building a cabin on the Carr Trail, right?"
"Yes." He had the absurd, disastrous urge to tell her about having seen her and the boy at the brook—to describe her to herself—but didn't do it. Or even confess to her that she was his wife come back from the dead, made of the synthesis of memory, safe now, uncrushed, untorn, unburned. And the young boy was his to nurture and protect, though their family was not yet complete because there was a daughter, too, as yet uncreated by them. Oh, the value, the perfection—a moan of joy he heard at an interior distance, thinking he was insane, his outer self unmoving. He would be polite and attentive to this stranger who tormented him, knowing that she would not suspect what she was.
"What's your last name?" he asked. No one seemed to be around them except the boy, who had placed the bottle on a chair and knelt on the floor, chin in hands, to observe the strange green light.
"Gilbert," she said. "This is my son, Harwich, the proto-entomologist—at least for this summer." At the sound of his name Harwich looked up, saw that his mother perhaps patronized him because of his youth, and looked back at his fireflies. Who took love to be a constant didn't need that fond smile.
"It's not easy to catch fireflies, " Luke said, "when your hands are small, without squashing them."
"I squashed one," Harwich admitted. "The light gooed on my fingers and then it went out. It didn't burn."
"Cold light," Adrienne said.
"It wasn't cold," Harwich said.
"I meant that it wasn't hot," she said, and Harwich resumed his study of the fireflies.
"Do you live in a yurt?" Luke asked.
"No." She smiled, glancing over toward where the yurt people must be. "We've just been coming up to the lodge on and off this summer."
He couldn't look away from her. Surely she must see that he was unstable, that it was unlike him to stare at her so.
"From the city?"
"Yes, from Boston. My mother and father were members of the Club from way back, and I've been a member since I was Harwich's age."
"They're not alive?" he said.
"They were killed. An accident several years ago, on the Cape."
"An accident," he said, not having meant to say the word.
"Yes. A car accident." She looked down at her hands and he measured the shape of her head, the bones that had miraculously fused, the clear strands of dull gold covering her head. She looked up, and then said, "Freddie's signalling from his portable bar. What would you like?"
"Nothing, nothing," he said.
"He'll feel hurt if we don't let him play bartender."
"Whatever you're having," he said.
They walked together across the room, where Freddie had set up what looked like a large plywood suitcase on a table.
"White potions, magic effluvia," Freddie intoned. "The grape, the grain, the poison that liberates, the water of life!" His wide round eyes were like windows through which nothing could be seen but blue. He selected a small brass key from his key ring and with a flourish of his pudgy hand unlocked a panel that came down to reveal bottles, stainless shakers, long stirring rods, forks, strainers, openers, corkscrews, lemon peelers and all the gleaming professional gear of a bar. Two young men came from the kitchen, one bearing a wine cooler, the other a large silver bowl full of cracked ice. A young woman brought a basket of limes, lemons and oranges.
"Alcohol without ceremony is anathema to the gods," Freddie half sang. "The curse of the solitary, devil's sweat, the piss of Beelzebub, death, corruption, madness, murder and beyond."
"Stick your ceremonies up your ass!" Coleman called across the room. "Pour the booze and shut up, you fat little fuck!"
"Here, " Freddie said, "we have a living cautionary tale, a souse, his eyes bleary, his arse a pinhole, his jewels paste and his leather a feather."
To Luke all of this seemed beside the point. He looked at Adrienne, having to see what she made of it. She turned toward him, shrugging her shoulders, not at all upset. Who should be upset by Coleman Sturgis? She said something to Freddie that Luke didn't catch, Freddie nodded, got to work at his magic effluvia and soon turned around to them with a small dewy glass in each of his round pink hands. They took the glasses and moved off somewhere. No one else seemed to be near them. She led him out to the porch, Harwich a dark shape small as a dog moving in and out of the bright green around the lantern light, chasing fireflies with silent intensity.
He wanted to tell her that it was all right now, that whatever terrors and dangers she had been through were over. He would be here to build for them all. She sat on the porch railing, her slim center leaning there against a vertical.
"Try it," she said, holding her glass out toward his, as if for a toast. "I don't know what's in it. Freddie won't tell me."
He placed the cool glass against his lips, as she did with hers, and sipped the strange, evaporative liquid.
"What is it?" she said. "What's in it?"
"Ethanol, no doubt," he said. "What else, I don't know. Anise? Bitters? Vanilla?" The fluid seemed to pass straight into his lips and tongue, nothing left to swallow.
"Are you going to stay and eat with us?"
"Yes, but I'm not too hungry for lasagna."
"What are you hungry for?"
He could not answer that, so he shrugged and said, thinking this also dangerous, "You know, I saw you at the brook, at the pool on my land, you and your son."
"Zach Brook!" she said. "What a beautiful place."
"It was beautiful that day. I heard the boy crying and didn't know what the sound was. I thought it might have been the blat of a wounded fawn, so I moved down through the hemlocks very quietly and there you were."
"And you watched."
"I felt like a thief, but I watched."
"I don't mind," she said.
He had never, in spite of his profession, been very curious about what people did for a living, how many brothers and sisters they had, where they lived, where they went to school, even their names. For one, they revealed all soon enough. Just a presence revealed more than he could assimilate anyway, or try to make accurate with words. She showed no shock, coyness or cute modesty, though he had painfully expected something of the sort, and now he was more anxious because his possible loss would be the greater. How few times would one ever encounter a voice that leapt a generation and was still unshoddy and precise.
At the dinner table he sat across from her and they talked, Adrienne mostly. He was in love; he had that secret that should be demonstrated but never told. What did the young talk about? Nothing much, endlessly and excitedly. The old always wanted to choose a topic, form a committee, categorize and only then endlessly re'peat, though they had heard it all before, each surprise more a compulsion than a surprise, like hearing an unfunny joke or, more likely, given the dust and worn bearings of age, being tone deaf at a concert. But watching her he heard again the immeasurable in the ordinary. Nothing could ever end or be definable. It didn't matter what they said. Harwich sat next to his mother, liking the lasagna, Freddie next to Harwich, both talking with mouths full, evidently understanding each other. Adrienne spoke to him as if there had been months to make up, so many things having had to wait to be said. He heard his own answers and questions without remembering the effort of formulation; so this was how easy it had been.
Freddie looked across at him, his bland blue eyes undecipherable, and just then there was a noise at the main doorway, at his back, across the long room, not that it mattered, but the eyes of those across from him glanced over there, including her eyes, which grew in intensity from even the lively regard she had shared with him. "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" Harwich yelled, jumping back over the bench he sat on, his paper napkin tucked in his collar. She followed Harwich down the long table and around, both running toward a young man in city clothes who put down a suitcase so that he could hold both of his arms out to them, a
man who might have been himself disguised by a dark wig and the taut, smooth posture of youth.
22.
He guided his truck down the southern slope of the mountain on the narrow gravel road, branches reaching out at eye level in his headlights, then sweeping skyward as he passed beneath them, as though his truck were a submarine forcing its way through a green sea. At his camp all would be dark, wet with dew, the new wood clammy and slippery, the tent silver and cold. But out of the dark Jake would be there to greet him, an intelligence mostly affection and need. "Hello, Jake," he said aloud in the cab of his moving truck, alone, with the bottle of beer in his crotch. After the first hysterical flurry of greeting and accusation, when the light went on Jake would look up at him, thinking as hard as he could about joy and guilt, having slept in the fragrant, forbidden hollow between Luke's pillow and blanket. Joy and worry all at once. Jake couldn't help it; it was a terrible dilemma of love and obedience.
As for his own found and lost love, he cursed himself for a fool and an idiot; his head might well be as flat above his sad brown eyes as Jake's. There had been a time in his life when he was the one to triumphantly return. He might say to that young man, Beware. Do you know what you are getting into? You can't keep it, and you can't have it over.
The memory of Helen, or of Adrienne, hurt him so badly now that he moaned. Over the engine and road noises he heard his foolish moans.
He was a few miles past Cascom square and up the mountain road toward his camp when headlights cruised in behind him, swirls of mist dimming them, then blowing aside in the night wind so that they turned too bright again in his mirrors.
"What the hell is this?" he said. He couldn't make out the car or truck behind the headlights. They were there, glaring, a presence following him. They didn't turn off onto the last side road, they didn't stop at the two hunting camps, they kept their light on him, on his truck. It shouldn't be Lester Wilson because he had paid quits to Lester, hadn't he? George? Coleman or Freddie in the Jeep? No, the headlights were too far apart for a Jeep. He got out the pistol and put it on the seat beside him. Oh, God damn it, he thought, I'm the wrong one to mess with right now, you son-of-a-bitch, whoever you are. The old rage at being followed grew in him until the skin on the backs of his hands burned. He turned off into the farm road and the headlights followed him in. He let them follow until they reached the darkest growth of spruce and then, with a precision that was past rage, stopped the truck, put it in reverse so the backup lights were on, took the pistol and fell out the door to the ground. In control, he felt like a cat as he sprinted the few yards to the other car. It was yellow; it was Lester's. It tried to reverse but ground gears and stalled as he pulled open the door and reached in with his right hand for the driver. His hand grabbed an arm or a neck and hauled that person out onto the ground. He was shouting or he would have heard sooner the counterpoint of immature and female screams that came from the car and from his feet. What he had grabbed was too soft and filmy, and had been too easily bent and jerked from the car.
"You following me? You following me?" He had stopped shouting the words but they were still somewhere between echo and memory. Before him all was hysteria—a baby strangling on its own rage, a young child's terror as pure sound, no quarter expected, and the woman bawling and shrieking at his feet.
Though he felt a primal urge to join them, to add a contrapuntal tenor to the despairing choir, he put his pistol in his pocket and lifted Claire to her feet.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
She bawled at him as if she were talking to him, pure connotation. How these animals communicated their suffering; again he wanted to join the pack and howl.
"Come on, now. It's all right. I'm not going to hurt you," he kept saying, or crooning, to their fear, no denotation really meant, and after a while there did seem to be a subsidence. She raised her hands from her sides and placed them on her face, at least, to show that a lesser state of disorganization had been reached. Inside the car the baby still screamed for what it wanted, but the older child had quieted.
"All right, stop crying now," he said. "What do you want? Why were you following me? Claire? That's your name, isn't it?"
She wiped tears and mucus from her white face; he knew that she cried for more reasons than his sudden attack upon them. Her voice was constricted and hoarse. "Waiting at Sturgis's," she said. "Nobody home and I seen you come on by."
"Well, what's the matter?"
The child in the front seat looked to be a boy, with the pale bony face and bluish eye hollows of the malnourished or maltreated. His hair was straight and black, and his small round ears stuck out from his head. The boy watched with the concentration of one who is totally and unselfconsciously in danger.
"You give him all that money and he bought the hard stuff!"
Her hair in the reflected lights of the cars was a varnished, wiry red that seemed to have drawn all the color from her face. White as paper, he thought. Translucent, dangerous; he couldn't have her and her children here.
He found out, finally, in phrases, words, parts of sentences and odd references he was evidently supposed to understand, that Lester had bought whiskey—bad, bad news with him—and broken up the furniture, beat up the boy, her, threatened the baby, and when he passed out she tried to find the rest of the money but couldn't find it. She wanted to take the children to her sister's in Providence, Rhode Island, but she didn't have any money for gas, so she'd gone to Coleman Sturgis but he wasn't home. Then she recognized Luke's truck and he must have lots of money because he gave Lester so much. But she really had nowhere to go, she cried; she wouldn't be welcome barging in on her sister with a kid and a crying baby. Her sister had her own family, her own problems, her own life. In the island of light in the overhanging spruce, mist rising along the ground and flowing underneath the cars, Luke stood and listened to this young woman whose disasters seemed older than she could possibly be. The baby's mewling seemed exhausted, beyond need. The yellow car's interior smelled of old beer, bundled feces and tobacco smoke. Claire seemed too immature to have been laden with breasts tumescent with the milk that came through her clothes to stain her red blouse in splotches. The boy in the front seat stared at his mother and the stranger, his levels of fear and expectation in a region of helplessness Luke could no longer bear to think about.
He took out his wallet and found thirty-five dollars, thank God, and put it into her hand. "For gas. That ought to be plenty for gas. Can you back out of here?" he said in a panicky haste he though unseemly. "Let me back it out to the road." Before she could say anything he pushed her back into the car and carefully, carefully revving the huge zooming engine, using the brake lights, a touch at a time, for orientation, backed out until he reached the gray opening at the road. He turned the car so that it pointed down, away, out toward the wide world to the south.
He got out and she thanked him with emotion and gratitude for the little he had given, saying that she would pay him back when she could. "Coleman never had five bucks in his pocket anyway," she said, and he came out of his controlled panic long enough to look at her. The green eyes Coleman had called simple were now illuminated by the lighted face of a large tachometer mounted on the steering column, and Luke saw that Coleman's story was nearly all fabrication, a creative effort. Louise had once mentioned that he wrote fiction.
Then the straight-through mufflers rumbled and the car went down the road. Let them be safe elsewhere, let the car not run off the road, let them pass out of his ken forever. He walked back toward his truck through the dark vault of spruce until he could see his own backup lights, the empty truck making its silent light in the woods.
Jake was there in front of the tent, joyous and anxious as he always was when Luke came home after dark. After the greetings, when Luke brought the rifle into the tent and worked its action a few times before putting it away, Jake found that weapon fascinating.
"Well, old friend," Luke said, "we are no
w officially each other's property." It had cost him a hundred for Juke, ninety for the rifle, and thirty-five to get rid of the family. Strange to be customer and broker for Lester Wilson, to separate the man from his possessions.
Suppose he had comforted the young woman, the boy and the baby, taken the three waifs down to his camp, fed and gentled them, vowing his strength and protection, which in fact he had to give. He thought of Shem, up there all those years alone, where even the ghosts of the buried farm slowly faded from memory. Shem had lost everyone—Carrie, Samuel, his dogs one by one, no matter how sharp and skillful he'd been all through his life.
In the morning he began his rafters and the framing for his main solar window. As the beams rose the cabin became even more real, though not as real as it would become when the roof panels began to block out the sky. The inner dimensions seemed larger as the long reaches of the outdoors were excluded and kept from scale.
He didn't go down the mountain for two weeks, and by then the long lights of triple-glazed glass were set in the framing of the big window, caulked and anchored. The plywood roofing panels were on and squared, the sky no longer his ceiling.
He took a day to cull hardwood—maple, beech, ash, cherry, yellow birch, white birch—to thin out a grove and let the trees lie so their dying leaves would suck moisture from the wood. Then, in late fall, he would buck them up and split them for his winter supply.
He made a list of what he needed in the way of materials, groceries and other supplies. When he went to the truck, Jake came along and suggested that he go, too, which would have been all right, now, but this time the cab and the body of the truck would probably be full.
"You stay, Jake," he said, and Jake sat down, sad but still eager for a change in that decision. He lifted one white forepaw and then the other, shifting his weight back and forth, his question as simple and wholehearted as a question could be. Luke continued to look at him, at the dog full of the one emotion. He remembered what some theologian or other had written in a chiding way about the essential frivolousness of the human race, that upon their entrance to heaven, "There are those who would not sit down with angels, 'till they had recovered their dog."
The Followed Man Page 33
