Horace Afoot Read online

  He signals the man on the floor to sit down and pushes the elevator button. “The storm is moving east. Should be a few more hours.”

  “Are there a lot of airplanes waiting to land?”

  He now doubts my faculties, and his manner eases up. He answers my question as if he’s got a big, dumb kid on his hands. “They’ve been diverted to other airports.”

  “Beyond the storm?”

  He nods. “To the south.”

  “What is it that everyone’s watching on the radar screen?”

  The man looks down at his colleagues. “Airplanes above the storm. Between twenty-eight thousand and thirty-five thousand feet.” The elevator doors slide open. The man gestures me in. On the way down he asks if I’m on the Chicago flight. I tell him I’m not. The doors slide open. He escorts me to the end of the corridor, opens the door into the terminal, and holds it open for me. “Things’ll be getting back to normal soon,” he says and closes the door.

  I pass through the chaos of the terminal once again, through the main entrance and back into the silent cold. A few cars are on the road now. I cross the parking lot and follow the fence up toward the other end of the runway. The big plows are still working. The snow continues to fall. The terminal recedes. The control tower juts up, splintered panes gazing across acres and acres of whiteness.

  At the western end of the runway I discover a large pile of branches left by tree cutters clearing the area around the signal-light posts. It has collapsed to form a crude lean-to. By shifting a few branches, I clear out an area inside and soon find myself sitting under a canopy of snow and branches. Colored strobe lights perched atop staggered towers flash in sync, creating a movement of brilliant blue and white light that descends from on high and races along the ground until it reaches the runway. Split-second, epileptic flashes, an illusion of movement. Cocooned in the body suit that guarantees warmth and insulation down to thirty degrees below zero, I settle in with my back against the rear of the shelter, aping the rustic who waits for the river to finish its flow.

  The snowfall slows. It stops. The air becomes still, and a light breeze begins to blow. The clouds begin to lift. Time passes.

  The engines of the stranded airplane begin to wind up. It backs away from the terminal, turns, and rolls toward the eastern end of the runway, red lights flashing. Soon I can only hear its winding engines. Time passes. The roar of engines becomes louder. Thunderous. The huge machine leaps up from the snowfield into view, soft silver underbelly exposed, egg-shaped jet engines hanging from under each gracefully swept-back wing. It roars directly overhead. I can see every rivet and droplet of water coursing along its smoothly preened underbelly.

  Soon it is quiet. The air becomes still again. Snow falls from the over-laden branches of the trees, is blown along in swirls and into drifts. I leave the shelter and start back in the direction of home. It took most of the morning to get out here, and it takes the afternoon to get back. Along the way I see people digging their cars out of snowbanks. The clouds drift higher and higher. It is twilight when I reach the outskirts of town, dark when I reach my house.

  The fire is out. A fresh load of kindling and wood brings it back to life. The stove I bought in the fall heats the entire house. I moved my bed downstairs so I can fall asleep watching the flames through the stove’s glass doors. My snowsuit hangs on a nail in the mantel. Boots on the hearth.

  The telephone rings. It is Mohr.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

  “I was out walking.”

  “In this weather? There are seventeen inches of snow on the ground.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been home all day myself. The whole town’s shut down.”

  “I know. It’s nice.”

  “And you’re out walking around?” He is losing his breath and breaks off to cough. I stare into the flames of the stove and wait for him to finish. “Listen. Horace,” he finally sputters. “Could I ask you a big favor?”

  “A favor?”

  “My car is completely snowed under.”

  “You want me to dig it out for you?”

  “No. I can find someone else to do that.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Could you open the library tomorrow morning? Mrs. Entwhistle is stuck out at her place. You still have the key I gave you, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you mind? Mrs. Entwhistle will be in by noon or so, and I’ll try to get in around then too.” He breaks out coughing again.

  “Maybe you should stay home and rest,” I tell him.

  “Thanks again,” he says and hangs up.

  I have been helping out frequently at the library these days. Microfilming the Wilkington Collection is a tedious affair, and two or three times a week I go in to help with the sorting and shuffling. I’ve also become a benefactor in the form of a Xerox machine and a security system. Mohr gave me a set of keys as a token of gratitude. I needn’t have tried to guard my anonymity. Derringer at the bank knows about my donation because I had to ask him to cut a check. “It’s an anonymous contribution,” I told him. He looked at me as if I’d insulted him. “’Course it is. Of course.” And he winked at me, then watched me through his office window as I carried the check across the street to the library.

  When I agreed to help Mohr with his project I hadn’t realized how much paper was involved—miles of it, mostly devoted to historical, everyday banalities: Accepted today of Mr. Johnson in payment for debt outstanding; one saddle and quirt, two sacks flour. Sorting and keeping it all seems a bizarre waste of energy. These papers of several generations of a family that has long since dispersed itself across the continent couldn’t seem more irrelevant. And yet here they are being duplicated and preserved Mohr refers to the papers as documentation of the town’s social and cultural life during the previous century. I think of them as footprints in the sand. To take all this paper and use it in some taxidermic project so that Major Wilkington may, for a few centuries after his demise, stand stuffed in memory’s dusty corner—hat, boots, cane, and sidewhiskers. If, as Horace says, we are mere ciphers in life, then what is there to say of our detritus? Time doesn’t move forward. It swirls around in confusion and goes straight to the head like a glass of strong red wine. Then it goes away.

  The kitchen is the coldest part of the house. I turn on the oven and open a bottle of wine to sip while I prepare a pot of lentils, carrots, celery, and onion, which I will salt and pepper and serve on rice. The kitchen warms quickly, and I sit at the table and breathe in the aromas of cooking food and the rich bouquet from the wine in my glass. I opened the bottle in the morning and left it out all day. It is rich, meaty wine, a perfect complement to the seventeen inches of snow outside. By the time the lentils are cooked I have finished half the bottle and am suspended in a realm of perfect complacence where time seems to hum in my ears.

  I reach for the telephone.

  “Horace here.”

  “Who?”

  “Horace.”

  “Horace who?”

  “Quintus Horatius Flaccus.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Quintus Horatius Flaccus.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “A Roman name.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding.”

  “Is it really your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your parents gave it to you?”

  “No.”

  “Aha. So it isn’t your real name!”

  “Yes it is.”

  “What name did your parents give you?”

  “I’ve forgotten.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I have.”

  “Come on. Stop kidding me.”

  “I’ve forgotten it. Put it out of mind.”

  “That’s different. So you just don’t want to remember it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But if you wanted to, you could.”

>   “Maybe.”

  “So your real name is probably Dave or Mike or George or something, right?”

  “My real name is Quintus Horatius Flaccus.”

  “Was there a real Quintus Horatius Flaccus?”

  “I am the real Quintus Horatius Flaccus.”

  “Was there another one?”

  “A poet. He lived in the first century before the Christian era. At the time of Augustus Caesar.”

  “Is he your hero or something?”

  “I like to think we are the same person transposed across time.”

  “Uh-huh, right.”

  “To put it another way, the same nature transposed across time.”

  “Are you a poet?”

  “No.”

  “It doesn’t sound possible.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “What you’re saying.”

  “It probably isn’t.”

  “You lost me.”

  “You lost yourself.”

  “Sounds to me more like you lost your self and your mind. Like one of those Elvis impersonator types. Or that kid I heard about who changed his name to Trees of North America because he liked the book.”

  “Whither, Bacchus, am I swept on. Thus possessed by your wine.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What are the groves and caves this new self of mine must behold?”

  “Sounds like you’re toasted, pal.”

  I hang up, cork the bottle, and make a mental note not to use the phone again after I’ve drunk more than one glass. I get confused. I’d have liked to pick up on the Elvis impersonation. To impersonate means to act the part of. It also means to embody, and it’s in that sense I would use it. Not to copy but to consist and be an expression of. It’s not as nefarious or mystical as one might think. Identity is a viscous fluid that spills through all of nature.

  The sun breaks through the clouds as I arrive at the library. A transformation from dull gray to blinding white. Snow is piled high along the road. A fine sprinkling of sand and salt melts the bottom layer of ice. I counted six cars on the way over, drivers leaning over the wheel in grim determination. People with shovels work to cut walkways, 102 driveways and cars. The air is filled with the high whine of two-stroke engines. Automobiles idle while their owners groom them with brooms and brushes and scrapers.

  A man wearing a bright orange snowsuit is blowing his way up the walk to the front door of the library. The path is only about a foot wide. I circle around him through the deep snow. The engine slows. “Building’s closed,” the man shouts.

  I wave to him and continue wading toward the front door.

  “Building’s closed.”

  I dig into my pocket, take out my key, and hold it up for him to see. He nods and waves me on; then the machine winds to life again and snow begins cascading from it.

  The front door is blocked by a drift. I wave to the man pushing the blower, but he is spellbound by the machine and doesn’t look up. I wade back down the steps toward him. He looks up at last and cuts the motor.

  “The door is blocked,” I shout.

  He can’t hear me and cups a gloved hand to his ear.

  “The door is blocked,” I repeat, pointing to the entrance.

  The man nods and points to his truck parked in the street behind a high snowbank. I have no idea what he is trying to say and march toward him. He turns the motor up again and resumes work. When I draw near he cuts the engine. “There’s a shovel in the truck.” He is flushed—whether from cold or exertion or alcohol or all combined, I can’t tell. The snow machine, all blades and blowers, idles on the ground like something Mesozoic. I want to tell him to leave the machine and clear the doorway himself, and I can tell that he is expecting me to say just that. But my response isn’t quick enough, and he brings the motor back to life again and lurches forward, looking for all his motorized paraphernalia and orange gear like some plow-burdened peasant borrowed from the Middle Ages.

  I begin by clearing the doorway and then get carried away and begin to clear a path toward the steps. Soon I find myself clearing the steps, breaking into a sweat that soaks the inside of my suit. The man behind the plow takes my efforts as a cue to slow his own, and the path he is clearing grows wider and wider and the distance between us greater and greater until he is working his way backward and sideways, clearing the snow in every direction except toward the steps, which, he figures, I will clear for him.

  And I do.

  When I’ve finished I plant the shovel into a pile of snow at the side of the walkway and peel the suit from my shoulders. The sun is beginning to get hot, and a slight breeze is blowing. The brightness hurts. The man with the plow looks up and waves, a Tom Sawyer grin on his over-ripened face. I wave back, finding I have enjoyed the exertion, arch my back to ease some of the stiffness caused by leaning over. One could do worse than be a swinger of shovels, I think, standing in the frosty air with the top half of my suit hanging at my waist and watching as the man blows snow in all directions with his machine. There are many and far greater poverties than that.

  The library is like a dungeon inside. I hunt for thermostat, light switches. In several minutes my eyes are adjusted to the fluorescence, and there is nothing for me to do but wait for the heat to come on and for Mohr or Mrs. Entwhistle to arrive. An advantage I enjoy since becoming a benefactor is that I have my own reserve shelf behind the circulation desk. Lined up for my convenience are editions of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, and, naturally, a volume of Horace. I pulled them not so much because I wanted to read each one from beginning to end but because I’ve found that in skating over passages and alternating between books, a curious coherence emerges that is like wandering between pictures in a museum. Except the worlds evoked by books seem to me far less remote than those rendered in pictures.

  I take down the volume of Horace. I have been memorizing it. The way I test myself is to recite from memory and then check myself against the book. Mortalia facta peribunt, nedum sermonum stet honos et gratia vivay.

  I have it correctly. All that mortals make will die and language has yet a briefer span of pleasing life. Or, Everything mortal dies, language is easily broken. Or, straight to the point, Language, too, is mortal and will die. I wonder if by uttering Horace’s Latin I am proving or refuting his point? In the conjunction of identities that is the world, Horace is dead and I am Horace.

  I am alone in the crypt. The dusty clock above the door is dead, a remnant of the days when the building housed a bank. An hour or two passes, and I continue on with Horace. Then I hear the front door open, footsteps in the corridor. It is Mrs. Entwhistle.

  “Thank you so much for coming in,” she says, entering the reading room. “Is Mr. Mohr not here yet?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Has he called?”

  I shake my head. Mrs. Entwhistle pulls off her coat and hangs it in a closet behind the circulation desk. She takes off her boots and slips on a pair of shoes she keeps in the closet, telling me about the problems she had with her car and the condition of the roads, and finishes up by saying, “My, it is quiet in here, isn’t it? Maybe we’ll be lucky and it will stay this quiet all day, and I’ll actually have time to get some work done. Would you like some tea?”

  I glance at my shelf full of books. “Sure, why not?”

  Mrs. Entwhistle hurries off, asking me if I’d be so good as to answer the telephone in case it rings.

  It doesn’t. I find myself thumbing a book about trees on top of the return pile. Custard Apple, Annona family, asimina triloba, or Paw. Leaves deciduous. Fruit edible. Flowers two inches in diameter, three green sepals. Six heavily veined purple petals.

  “Here’s your tea.” Mrs. Entwhistle hands me a large cracked mug with a spoon and a teabag floating in it. She sits at a long table behind the circulation desk, carefully extracts the bag from her cup, and places it on a small saucer on the table. For several moments we blow steam from our tea in abstracted silence.

  Mrs
. Entwhistle is a heavy-lidded, middle-aged woman with platinum hair piled and tucked on her head who speaks in high, reedy tones that make her seem perpetually on the verge of a sudden outburst. All I know about her is what Mohr has told me, which is that her husband teaches chemistry at the high school, that they don’t have children, and that the two of them devote all their time to organizing summer field trips for the church choir they belong to. I can’t help suspecting Mrs. Entwhistle of harboring some secret nastiness, of being the sort of pious, 105-town churchgoer who might also belong to the Ku Klux Klan or bomb abortion clinics on weekends.

  I finish my tea and begin getting ready to leave. The mailman breezes in just as I’m putting on my snowsuit. Mrs. Entwhistle puts her cup down. “Neither snow nor sleet,” she singsongs with phony cheer.

  “Nor gloom of night,” the mailman booms back in his own overused brand of mock cheerfulness, sorting through his shoulder bag. “There’s an e-normous pileup out on the interstate,” he says. “Pretty dag-gone nasty.”

  “Oh my,” Mrs. Entwhistle intones. “Is anybody hurt?”

  “Don’t know for sure yet. Happened just a little while ago.”

  “Why anybody would get on the interstate in this weather is beyond me.” She takes the handful of proffered mail.

  “Some people got no choice,” he says, implying that he is one of them. “All I can say is I’m glad I don’t have to get on it today.”

  Mrs. Entwhistle puts on her reading glasses and begins to flip through the stack of mail. The man turns to leave, sees me struggling to pull my boots back on. I glance up at him. “Lace ’em up tight now,” he says and sweeps past me out the door.

  “Goodbye now,” Mrs. Entwhistle says without looking up. “And thank you very much.”

  By the time I arrive at the iInterstate the fire and rescue squad is struggling to right the overturned tractor trailers. I watch from the overpass. The traffic files along slowly; snow piled up on each side of the highway and along the median creates the impression of two long asphalt furrows stretching away into the horizon. The air is filled with the muffled sound of motors, winches, and the hiss of tires on wet roadway.