The Followed Man (36 page)
Authors: Thomas Williams
He awoke from a dream sometime
in the night, not having recent memories except for the dream,
which was invaded, or surrounded, by actual times and events, so
that dream and memory were mixed. Helen had just returned to
teaching. No, she had taught for six months or so and had changed in
little ways he'd thought not necessarily strange, since one would
naturally change with a change of occupation. The children were old
enough, now, so that they didn't need constant transporting or
supervision, and she went to Moorham only two days each week for her
two freshman English sections and student conferences. Was that
history, or part of the dream? She grew more outwardly affectionate;
she touched him more, with a kind of bawdy, hail-fellow, ribald
jokishness that was unlike her usually passionate solemnity about
sex. One time she came home with a package (dream?) which she opened
late at night on their bed. He watched her take from its box a
strange set of black leather belts and buckles, a truss-like
contraption the like of which he'd never seen. "I just wanted to
show you this weird thing they actually use," she said. It
seemed reasonable, even when she took off her robe and was nakedly,
patiently, trying on the straps, belting them across her
familiar thighs and belly, her brown pubic hair a warm, friendly muff
he knew so well. Finally she'd figured out how the thick straps went,
and then there was the plastic or horn part that belted over her mons
and was a dildo, a huge rigid prick and balls, oversized, molded in
precise male detail and yet the color of old ivory, antique as
scrimshaw. That had to be dream. Then the dream's memory faded into
vague alternatives, one of which was that she told him to get on his
hands and knees, which he did, since in their loving there were no
limits or inhibitions whatsoever, and she placed her warm, loved
hands on his back just before that alternative faded. Another,
so quickly fading from the dream now it might have been his own
waking imagination, was Helen's round, heart-shaped, beautiful
woman's ass, straps cutting waist and thigh, humping and thrusting
down between a woman's long tanned legs.
Jane Jones's legs? "Oh,
God," he said out loud, remembering more recent events. The
dream's details didn't bother him at all, but seemed wonderfully
legitimate and interesting, the gift of having seen and touched Helen
the dispensation of benevolent gods. But the real events of this
night had happened; this was real life with all of its uncontrollable
ensuing disasters.
At eight-thirty Jane had begun
to worry about Ham, who was in Hartford at some sort of insurance
meeting and would be home around midnight. She was more worried than
she tried to show, her hands trembling as she put on her soiled,
dew-damp panties and tennis clothes. Luke suggested that she have
something to eat first, but she had to leave right now. The mountain
night was cool, so he put a heavy cotton shirt over her shoulders,
and drove her up the hill in his truck, past the somnolent farm
foundations, through the deep black of the spruce to the road and her
car, his hand at the hip of this woman he had known. That was the
feeling, not sexual, not yet anxious because it had all seemed
so familiar and normal, but anatomical, or proprietary, because
within the moving center his hand lightly rode were vagina and
cervix, uterus, ovaries and womb and he had been there, his
semen still diving in the moist interior, and that could not be
divorced from care.
The TR-7 seemed too low and flat
to take her all those miles, but she sat deep in the seat and
inserted her long legs toward the engine, then remembered to give him
back his shirt.
"Are you unhappy?" he
asked. "Is it all right?"
"I don't know what I am,"
she said. "I'll let you know." It seemed almost a threat.
Then the engine rapped and
zoomed, the lights came on and in the form of the red taillights her
presence narrowed and disappeared.
On the way back to his camp the
truck's headlights swathed the road and the trees, leaving black
hollows and distances that shifted, corridors into the night.
Halfway down the hill toward the brook he met Jake, who had limped
slowly after him and whose eyes, flashing green in the lights, were
bothered by this traipsing off in the dark. Luke got out and helped
him up into the truck, then down again at the camp, Jake giving only
one short, surprised yelp of pain.
And now Luke lay on his cot in
the filmy nostalgia of the dream. Jane, in whatever mood this evening
might have caused, would be home by now, in bed with her husband and
her secrets. Helen and his children were in their graves. Jake sighed
from his chosen bed beneath his master's bed.
A few days later he stopped in
on his way to Leah to see George, but George wasn't there. Phyllis
had him come in, made some instant coffee and they sat in her
office, which still showed signs of the book stacking George had done
for the party, though new glaciers had begun.
"I read so much," she
said, "and I sometimes think I remember so little of what I read
that it's just like some habit, like biting your fingernails. What's
to remember about that? What happens to you, that's what you
remember. Yet I have odd memories that come up out of nowhere and I
know they never happened to me at all."
"Like dreams," Luke
said.
"Ayuh, like dreams. I got
them, too. I hear Louise went off to California."
"That's what her brother
told me," Luke said.
"You and her get along
pretty well?"
"I don't know, Phyllis. We
went out together, you might say."
"Huh! Stayed in together,
too, I imagine. You don't have to use no euphemisms with me, Luke
Carr."
"I don't know how much
specific information you want. We slept together, but I suppose
that's another euphemism."
"You young people, you
think you're the first ones to break the rules. I could tell you.
Maybe I will. Anyway, I've come to the conclusion Louise is a
little tetched," Phyllis said, proclaiming her loyalty to
Luke.
She sat straight and
thick-bodied, the white flesh of her arms sagging from the bones, her
shiny arthritic knuckles around her coffee mug as if to absorb the
warmth of the porcelain, though it was a warm day in July. Her swivel
chair was well greased in its joints and made no squeaks or creaks
when she moved. George would have seen to that lubrication, something
he could handle.
"Not badly tetched,"
Phyllis said. "I don't mean that. She's smart and she's
talented, too, but I guess men, and a worthless husband, give her a
hard time. She's come and talked to me, you know."
"She said she admired you.
She said you were 'real' or something like that. I agreed."
"That's nice. God knows, I
feel real enough." She slowly shifted herself on her swivel
chair, with the blank look of familiar pain. "You young people
think the old are all set in their ways, all the old sorrows and
mistakes forgiven or forgotten. It don't work that way. You got to
live with them new every day. Nothing ever gets forgiven or
forgotten."
He remembered the story, not
really a story but just an old piece of information, that one of
George's and Phyllis's sons had committed suicide when he was young.
And there were things he had heard about George's having been a hard
man and a violent one, though the information was so old and vague it
might not have been George Bateman at all. Something about throwing
all the furniture out on the lawn, with darker implications. He could
remember nothing more than that.
"We had our bad times too,"
Phyllis said. "Some of it was my fault. I made my mistakes.
Lord, I once made a terrible mistake."
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."
