Free The Followed Man by Thomas Williams

want to add to your tragedy, even in little ways."
    "Is that what reporters
say?"
    "It's what I say, anyway,"
he said.
    "I thought just now you
were going to cry," she said. "Now, if I do, my mascara
will get all gooey and my false eyelashes might fall off. You know,
tears look funny on pancake makeup. They sort of roll down like they
were on oil or something." She laughed again, her eyes, which he
now saw were light green, looking out of their heavily darkened rims
at him.
    "Why do you wear it?"
he asked, a question he hadn't intended.
    She thought, frowning at him,
though not in anger. She blinked, and he wondered if her lids felt
sticky. Closed, her eyes were ragged black slits in fleshcolored
paste.
    "If I'm going to have to
cry I'll take it all off," she said. "I don't know why I
didn't think I'd have to cry. You're going to ask about Mickey and
where we went when we went on trips to the country. We went to
Pennsylvania sometimes, sometimes Vermont, or At­lantic City.
Sometimes on Sunday we just drove around in the suburbs looking at
houses. You know, with a yard, a garage and grass. Neither of us ever
lived in a house, but I always wanted to try it. Just think! Your own
house? Do you live in a house?"
    "Yes," he said.
    "Is it nice? Trees and
grass and all?"
    "Yes, it's nice. You'd like
it."
    "I'd like to see it
sometime. Where is it?"
    "In Wellesley,
Massachusetts."
    "But you know, with all
those doors and windows on every side, don't you feel funny? Like,
somebody could look in, or break in. Like, here, we got the door with
the police lock, and bars on the windows. I mean if somebody tries to
get in at least I know what door." She stopped and shook her
head, the high golden crown of her hair seeming too massive to rotate
that quickly. "But you want to ask questions, right?"
    "Well, you're answering
them before I even ask," he said.
    "You mean you want to know
things like we wanted to live somewhere else? Anyway, who wouldn't?"
    He asked her about her life
before she was married, and she told him that she came from the
Bronx, grew up in the Bronx, graduated from high school and worked as
a receptionist-secre­tary in a private clinic. She met Mickey
Rutherford because she sometimes dated his younger brother, who was
in high school when she was. Mickey never went to regular high
school, but he got an equivalency certificate in the army, where he
was a techni­cian—a mechanic. In Vietnam he was wounded in
the back when a rocket landed thirty feet away from him. Then when he
got out of the army his uncle, who was a shop steward, got him into
the IUOE. He was only on permit a year before he got his card.
    Mickey loved his kids. He was a
home-loving man. "I still can't believe sometimes he's not
coming home. Sometimes I have to shake myself, around five or six,
because without knowing it I been expecting to hear his key in the
lock. And then I got to know he's not ever going to come busting in
and grab me and the kids ever again."
    She put her fingers to her eyes,
then looked at them. "I better go wash my face," she said.
"Look, I don't want to weep all over the place. I'm not a
crybaby. ..." She got up, trying to suppress a high whinny of
grief, and went into the bathroom past the sign,
    MICK IN THOUGHT.
    As the water ran in the bathroom
he considered flight from her, but that would be betrayal. She
wouldn't know why he had left. She would wonder, and feel bad on that
account as well. He liked her, and felt that she was good. He was
aware of his mental note-taking: ILLIGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM on that
plaque from a gift house or souvenir shop supposedly meant, Don't let
the bastards wear you down. A conversation piece. He thought about
the social implications of that, of everything; but the woman behind
the bathroom door was real, a system of life exquisitely tuned to
feel pain.
    All his life he'd had the
feeling that he thought about things other people didn't think
about—not because of their lack of imagination or