Horace Afoot Read online

  A crew works to hoist the two overturned containers that have spilled their litter into the snow like a sprinkling of vital fluids. The drivers in the oncoming cars all slow to look upon the scene in curious empathy, then speed off on their way as though personally invulnerable. 106 cars have been hauled to the side of the highway, and one is upended headfirst in the ditch of the median. Rear wheels in the air, it looks more derelict and deranged than the rest. There is no sign of driver or passengers.

  “Goddamn kids,” a voice mutters from behind. I turn to see Ed Maver coming toward me. His car is parked at the other end of the overpass. He lifts a hand in greeting, then leans over the railing and peers down at the highway. “Saw them being hauled into the station. Little bastards.”

  “Who?”

  “Kids throwing snowballs caused this whole mess.” He points out the broken windshield on the cab of one of the trucks. “Driver broke his neck. Had to fly him out in a helicopter. Goddamn kids. Parents probably won’t even find out little Johnny’s in trouble ’til they get home from work.” Maver pushes away from the rail, sticks out his hand. “Long time no see, buddy.” We shake. “And you’re still without an automobile, I see. What’d you do? Walk all the way out here?”

  I nod and watch the trucks working below. Maver steps up to share the view. The truck with the broken windshield has been uprighted and is sagging on its broken axles on one side of the road. The road crew is now standing in a ring discussing the strategy for the next job. “Incredible,” Maver shakes his head. I don’t know if he’s referring to the efforts of the crew or the general scene of the accident or if he’s referring to the havoc wrought by a gang of kids throwing snowballs.

  “Did anyone besides the truck driver get hurt?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Three or four people got taken away in ambulances. I’ll say one thing for sure, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those trucks must’ve been rolling along at a pretty good clip to wipe out like that. Combination of speed and ice and goddamn snowballs crashing through the windshield.” He shakes his head. “They oughta throw the book at the little bastards. Put ’em in boot camp. Straighten ’em out. My oldest, Jim. He began cutting up around sixteen. Couldn’t even list the stunts that boy pulled. Dropped out of high school and crapped around, good for nothing. Then he went into the Marines, and boy oh boy, you should’ve seen his mother’s face when he came home after that. It was a different kid standing at the door. His mother and me couldn’t believe it. ‘It’s not Jim,’ she kept saying over and over. Now he’s got a wife and two kids, and I swear I never knew a straighter goddamn flyer my whole life. Goes to church fifty-two Sundays a year and twice on Christmas, and that’s something I quit doing years ago.”

  As Maver talks I turn and lean against the rail. The sun is beginning to sink and the wind has picked up. Our elongated shadows stretch across the roadway, over the opposite rail, eastward ho. I won’t get home until long after dark. A car drives past. Maver waves to the driver.

  “Well, I’ll be off now.” I step away from the rail.

  “Lemme give you a lift,” Maver says.

  “Thanks, but I enjoy the walk.”

  “Suit yourself,” Maver says and offers his hand. We shake, and I turn to leave. “Hold on a second,” Maver erupts. “I almost forgot to say.”

  “What’s that?”

  “About a month ago. No, wait a minute. It was before Christmas. That’s right. It was two months ago. Two months ago I stopped in at Rice’s Pharmacy to pick up some flu medicine. Guess what I saw?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “That girl we dragged out of the cornfield last summer! Would you believe?” He cuts himself off and scrutinizes me for signs of shock, surprise, incredulity. It half occurs to me to remind him that neither of us dragged her from the field and that, in fact, all he did was drive to the hospital. “There she was. Working behind the prescription counter. Don’t think she recognized me, but I sure as hell remembered her. Couldn’t take my eyes off her the whole time.”

  “Did you say anything to her?”

  “Hell no, I didn’t. I just stood there looking dumb. Paid and left. What am I gonna say? ‘Dragged you bare-assed out of a cornfield last summer?’ Hell no. I just paid and left. Said thank you. Truth is, I was pretty goddamn embarrassed. Christ, I even felt my whole face going all red. And that’s not something that happens to Ed Maver too easily, I’ll tell you that for sure.” He pauses to gauge my reaction, then gestures to his car. “C’mon. I’ll drive you back into town. You can go in and see for yourself.”

  I decline the invitation and turn to leave before Maver’s good-old-boy jollity forces me to say something nasty. “So long there, buddy,” he calls after me, sensing that he has hit a raw nerve.

  The walk home takes longer than I expected. Darkness comes quickly, and the way is lighted by a half moon that rises over the bowl-shaped glow of the town like a forgotten piece of celestial furniture. Streetlights begin at the town limit, which is marked by a small sign. The snow, blue in moonlight, turns orange-yellow there.

  Jane Doe has merged with my memory of cornfields and van Gogh and Hemingway, no longer imminent but part of a vague diffusion of considerations, cogitations, and ideas. Maver’s story has reanimated her. I can picture her across the pharmacy counter handing a bottle of pills to the bug-eyed and embarrassed Ed Maver, who is caught at a loss for words for the first time in years. As I walk she condenses in my imagination. I try to fend her off. sensing an unwholesome preoccupation coming on like symptoms of flu. Don’t think about it. Don’t think of the left ear of a camel. It’s useless. Maver has planted a germ in my imagination that will not easily go away. And the more I am curious about Jane Doe, the more I must wonder what underlies my curiosity. The first thing that occurs to me is that I might go and introduce myself to her, ask her how she is recovering from her ordeal. But that idea is soon submerged by a flood of uncertainties. What for? I can see myself standing across from her at the counter—just as Maver did—and getting a look that says, And now I suppose you have come to collect the reward? Or, Thank you for remembering me. Would you now please let me get on with my life? Or, I’ve recommended you for the Congressional Medal of Honor. You should be getting a letter from Washington any day now. Maybe I should go in and say, I’d forgotten all about you, but when I heard you were working here I figured I just had to come by and say hello. Or, to indicate that yes, I do have a reason for seeking her out: Could I have my shirt back?

  The center of town is deserted. I walk past the library. One of the lamps at the entrance is burned out, and the other is flickering on the verge of extinction. The streets are almost clear. A layer of ice is forming despite all the salt and sand. The temperature is dropping quickly. I continue past the Town Hall and along Main Street. There is a smell of wood and fireplaces in the air. The houses are set farther from the road the farther up Main Street you go. They seem stranded at the end of long, deep trenches cut into the snow from curb to front door. Windows are lit, driveways are cleared, cars are tucked into garages.

  I stop at a corner underneath a streetlight and glance back toward the center of town. Not a car on the road. The wind picks up, blowing a fine mist of snow. I imagine myself, an icy statue, standing in this spot forever while people come and go from their houses and cars speed past during all seasons and airplanes take off and land out at the airport and everything slips past in timeless silence.

  After three or four minutes my feet get cold, and I continue on toward home.

  Snow falls for three full days. I dust and clean, oil my boots, wash clothes, and hang them on a line near the stove to dry. I commit passages from Horace and Selected Philosophical Essays to memory, continuing the graft of this fanciful self of mine from the newly cut boughs piling up at my feet. Remaining indoors helps, but despite all efforts of concoction—and with the snow piling up outside to suspend my own and the daily rhythms of the town—a kind of private ob
literation occurs so that after the third full day indoors, I find I have begun to play around in Cartesian fashion with doubts about my own existence. The game is surprisingly entertaining, and the hot stove in the living room helps. But it doesn’t last long. In the end I am forced to admit that there is no existence to obliterate, merely a purely contingent self that finds the roaring flesh satisfying and irrecusable.

  The telephone has been out, and this has added to my sense of seclusion. I haven’t missed it. The image of toppled poles and tangled wires, of civilization interrupted by a broken flow of electrons (and no one bothering to report it) is amusing. Mohr is the only person who ever calls anyway. As far as spontaneous dialogue, I haven’t felt much of an urge.

  I haven’t seen Tom Schroeder since the summer. I never recovered my notebook, and none of my complaints to the police seem to have resulted in anything. I walk to the police station. The desk sergeant recognizes me. “How about this storm?” he asks. “Holding up against it?”

  “So far,” I answer. “The reason I stopped by …”

  “You mean you didn’t come by just to say hello?”

  “I was wondering what happened with that kid I complained about last summer. Tom Schroeder.”

  The sergeant taps his pen on the desk, squints into the distance to summon his memory. He picks up the phone. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  While he talks on the phone I wander over to browse the Wanted posters, a gallery of black-and-white pictures hanging on a corkboard just inside the main entrance. Murderers, rapists, bank robbers, kidnappers, pedophiles. A wall of faces tied to specific acts, blotched and blemished and wearing the sullen look of imprecation that turns each into the hero of his own crime and so poorly masks the secret joy of it.

  The sergeant puts down the phone. “The kid left town last August, he says. Hasn’t been back since.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The detective.”

  “Ross?”

  “No. Blucher. Ross is in Florida on vacation.” The sergeant taps his pen on the desk. “Ross the Boss. Wish I was in Florida.”

  “What about Schroeder?”

  “Kid’s in college. Got a scholarship to Notre Dame.”

  “College?”

  “Maybe it’ll straighten him out. He’s a smart kid. Anyway, if he comes back we’ll be keeping an eye on him.”

  “Were other people complaining?”

  “No complaints. Just hanging around a bad crowd. Notre Dame’ll straighten him out. I’ve seen worse,” the sergeant says with a lilt, points his pen at me with a flick of his wrist, then resumes tapping it on the desk.

  Mrs. Entwhistle nods at me as I pass by the reading room and head for the staircase that leads to the second floor. I’ve been more or less asked to force myself on the place, and by obliging I seem to be perpetuating a fantasy of mutual need. Mohr, it seems, likes having me around, and I enjoy the welcome feeling.

  I find Mohr upstairs hunched over his paper-strewn desk, talking on the telephone. He looks up as I enter and nods at me. He has a furtive, conspiratorial style on the telephone, head dropped, voice lowered, receiver pressed against the side of his head. I peel out of my snow gear and seat myself in an old wooden office chair that squeaks and squeals and tilts back at an awkward angle.

  The room has undergone several stages of transformation since my first visit. There are boxes and boxes and stacks and piles of photocopied documents. The originals are piled on a table in the center of the room. The fluorescent hood still hangs over the long table, and the new Xerox machine stands along the wall. Boxes of documents that had been stored in other parts of the building are now stacked against the rear wall of the office. They contain the paper legacies of other families of the town who thought enough of themselves to have left to posterity their yellowing papers and secret diaries and photo albums and letters and genealogies scrawled on grease-stained napkins. The town seems to have been inhabited for a time by a variety of impulsives and obsessives, egotists, graphomaniacs, and collectors. Many boxes are marked Private. One, donated by an anonymous gentleman, contains a collection of erotic postcards from French West Africa depicting native men and women cavorting in their newly colonized Eden. Pith-helmet porn, Mohr calls it. Another box is labeled The Geographical and Geological History of the Region Reconstructed from the Fossil Evidence Collected and Cataloged by Mr. Joseph Goldsborough.

  Mohr seems to have been inspired by the offer to purchase the Wilkington material. Some dormant vision for the library has been rekindled, his ambition stoked. He has convinced himself that the entire archive of local history must be duplicated in order to preserve it, so every document is first being Xeroxed onto acid-free paper and the originals packed away. The copying machine I donated has stimulated his appetite for more machinery, and now he has undertaken a campaign to raise money for the library. He seems so contented lately that I don’t think it matters if he raises any or not. His efforts are sincere, although I tend to see them as a last stand against his own moribund condition. He is happy with the illusion, call it progress—the perpetual approach to some forever receding goal. The difference between Mohr and me is that having defined for himself a goal he believes to be worth pursuing, his contentment comes from the act of pursuit, whereas I think it is futile to state goals or pursue “progress,” unless it be defined simply as peace of mind—and in that case I would say the only worthy pursuit is the avoidance of goals. To see Mohr on the telephone conferring in breathless sentences and behaving as if he were some busy politician garnering votes makes me see how terrified he really is of the end he is facing.

  “How are you?” he asks, hanging up the telephone.

  “How are you?”

  He shrugs meekly, then launches into an explanation of his most recent efforts. I drag my chair up to the corner of the long table in the center of the room and glance casually at a letter from Major Wilkington dated October 2, 1861 … raising an army for the defense of the Union …

  “It’s a marvelous opportunity. A coalition of businesses in the area is going to donate money and equipment to digitize the entire archive,” he says.

  I am distracted by Wilkington’s letter, in which he describes his efforts to raise a force of volunteers to go off and fight the Civil War. I read the entire text while Mohr talks. “Digitize?”

  “It means every document will be scanned into a computer that will convert the image so it can be stored electronically.”

  “And what happens after that?”

  Mohr looks at me as though I haven’t understood and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Well, most importantly, the material will be preserved. And of course, anyone who wants to look at a document or a photograph can look at it on a computer.”

  “An image of it.”

  “Exactly. The originals can be locked away. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. The documents will only rarely ever need to be handled. And searching through the archive will be a matter of keystrokes.”

  “So all this photocopying has been a waste of time?”

  Mohr shrugs. “Not entirely. We will have a duplicate paper archive to fall back on.”

  “How convenient.”

  “The technology is very accessible now. Everyone is digitizing their collections. The opportunities are marvelous. Eventually we can make the archive—the history of the whole town—available on the Internet!”

  “Internet?”

  “The information superhighway. The World Wide Web. It’s transforming the way we go about our lives. Don’t tell me you never heard of it.”

  I shrug, not wanting to provoke him further and only mildly shocked at his newfound technological positivism. He picks up the telephone. “Do you have time today?”

  “I think I’ll go downstairs and read for a little while.”

  “Come back up before you go.”

  I go downstairs and retrieve my books from their shelf behind the circulation desk. Mrs. Entwhistle is chat
ting with an elderly lady about a book the woman is checking out. There are a few people scattered in chairs around the reading room. I go directly to an empty table and sit down, placing the books so the titles on the spines are facing toward me.

  As far as progress goes, I suppose the digitization of documents is a step toward the perfect archive—if the perfect archive is simply a place where papers are locked away and preserved over time. The technology that has Mohr so excited permits the separation of the physical document from its contents while preserving the original holograph. I suppose that it is progress of a sort. I browse the spines of the books on the table. They too are an archive. The volume of Horace lying before me, one in a series of regressing shadows, manuscripts labeled Milan, Ambros. O.136 sup (olim Avennionensis), s. IX/X. Or Berne 363, s. IX2—which was written in a continental Irish scriptorium in northern Italy sometime in the ninth or tenth century. All are shadows of some ancient codex, iterated and reiterated through a warp of time and changing language into the bilingual Latin/Modern English edition lying before me now. Everything mortal dies. And language has yet a briefer span of pleasing life. It is a truth that Mohr’s digitized archive cannot negate. His holographs, paper and electronic, will be as remote a thousand years from now as the text of Horace’s satires copied out in monastic scriptoria are to us today.

  In an hour I go back upstairs. Mohr is waiting for me. “It looks good,” he says without any preamble.

  “What does?”

  A sepulchral grin distorts his face. He stands up and walks around his desk. “The money.” He leans against the edge of his desk and crosses his thin arms over his chest. “I wouldn’t have guessed there were so many people interested in the history of the town. They’re practically falling over each other to contribute to the project.”

  I listen while he spells it all out and then concludes by saying, “It’s the technology. That’s what has them interested. They think it will make them want to come in and use it. If I were asking for funds to rebind damaged books—forget it. Nobody would give me a dime. But mention technology and everybody says, ‘Oh, how educational! It’s about time we got up to speed with the technology.”’