Horace Afoot Read online

  “Shut up and drive,” Sylvia says, slams the door. I adjust the seat and the rearview mirror. “Think you can manage?”

  “What kind of car is this?”

  “It’s not a car. It’s a Bronco.”

  “A Bronco?”

  “Four-wheel drive.”

  “It feels like being in a truck.”

  “This here’s a sport utility vehicle,” she says in mock cowboy talk, patting the dashboard. “Never lets me down. All this here snow? Never even notice the stuff.”

  “It’s too big.”

  “Quit complaining, Horace. Just start it up and let’s get outa here.”

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s to shift into four-wheel drive.”

  “Do I need to do that?”

  “Not unless you plan on driving in the snow.”

  “What’s this?”

  “That there’s a CD changer, pardner. Want to listen to some music?” She touches a button and the speakers in the rear erupt.

  “Turn it off!”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No!”

  She touches the button and there is silence. “That was my favorite band. Nirvana.”

  “Sounded more like Hell.”

  “You never heard of them?”

  “No.”

  “The singer killed himself. Blew his head off. Now his wife’s a big movie star. You must have heard about that.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “They’re great. I saw them in concert once.”

  “I don’t think I want to drive this thing, Sylvia. Let’s see if we can find a cab.”

  “A cab? In this town? There aren’t any cab drivers here. The last one starved to death a few years ago.” She reaches over and twists the key in the ignition. The engine roars to life. “There ain’t any buffalo either. C’mon. I’ll give you a lesson. Put your foot on the brake.”

  I depress the pedal and she yanks the gearshift into reverse. “Now. Back out slowly. No gas. Just ease off the brake.”

  I do as she says, and the truck begins rolling backward. It is dusk, and there is a pink midwinter slant to the last bit of daylight. I look into the rearview mirror, and when we’ve pulled clear of the parking space Sylvia tells me to cut the wheel and reaches over to help. I brush her hand away. “I can do it.” I step on the brake. We are thrown back in our seats.

  “Fucking hell, Horace! Go easy.” Sylvia snaps on her seatbelt and tells me to do the same.

  “I didn’t realize they were so sensitive.”

  “Just go easy on ’em. Everything’s power. And you forgot to turn on the headlights.”

  She points to a lever and I pull it out. Everything inside lights up. “Drive around the lot until you get the feel of it,” she says.

  I steer the enormous vehicle toward the emptiest part of the lot. 157 is coming on quickly, yet the lot is illuminated by tall lamps, the headlights of cars, and the neon emissions of Riteway.

  Sylvia hiccups. “Shit,” she says. “I hate when this up happens.”

  I’m too busy concentrating to pay attention. The moving vehicle has a momentum all its own, reacts at the slightest touch of the steering wheel.

  “Easy,” Sylvia instructs. “You’re up doing fine.”

  “I haven’t even touched the gas yet. The thing just goes by itself.”

  “It’ll up do that.”

  I make a few turns around the lot, stopping and starting again while Sylvia slouches in the seat next to me holding on to a strap above the passenger window and trying to stop her hiccups by holding her breath.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nods her head.

  “Can you give me directions?”

  “Left out of the lot. Take the up bypass north.”

  “The bypass?”

  “North up.”

  “Where the hell do you live?”

  “Outside of town.”

  “How far?”

  “About up fifteen miles.”

  I put on the brakes. We are thrown forward.

  “Shit, Horace. You’re up going to make me up puke.”

  I put the gear lever into park.

  “How am I supposed to get back?”

  Sylvia rests her head in the crook of her arm. “You can up take the up car.”

  “I don’t want to drive at all!”

  “You can up stay at my place and I’ll take you up home later.”

  I drop my hands from the wheel. “What the fuck am I doing here?”

  Sylvia lifts her head from the crook of her arm. “Relax, Horace. I’ll up drive.”

  “You can’t even keep your head up.”

  “What’s the big deal?” She drops her arm into her lap and shifts so that she is sitting straight-backed in the seat. “Now drive. Will you? Before I puke.”

  The bypass north is crowded, and I stay in the right lane hugging the shoulder while cars whip past. Being at the wheel of this growling box has set every fiber of every nerve on edge. Magnitudes of horsepower. The pedal under my foot responds smoothly. I fix my eyes on the road, unable to ignore the caroming around of all the other vehicles, each one inhabited by a placid-faced driver, blissful and complacent in the conjunction of power and private convenience.

  Near the end of the bypass Sylvia directs me onto a quieter road. It grows darker, and all that is visible are the melting heaps of plowed snow along the roadside and the parallel beams of the headlights. I try to keep the car centered in the lane.

  “Sit back, Horace,” Sylvia laughs at one point. “You’re all hunched up like an old lady. Makes me nervous.” I glance over. Her hiccups have gone. She is sitting primly, looking forward, both hands in her lap. “You really never drove before?”

  “I told you that.”

  “I didn’t believe you.”

  I lean back in the seat and ease up on the accelerator. “I’ve never wanted to either.”

  She looks over at me. I keep my eyes on the road ahead and try to return her look peripherally, driver-style. “Still, you gotta admit. Driving’s fun.”

  “For pathological cretins, maybe. I wish they’d all disappear.”

  “Pathological cretins?”

  “And their cars.”

  “Why?”

  A car approaches in the other lane. I slow down, trying to avert my eyes from the headlights without taking my eyes from the road. My pulse quickens. The car whooshes past and the road ahead goes dark again. “Why?” she asks again.

  “Because they’ve turned the world into a big, noisy, stinking brawl.”

  She giggles and says with drunken sarcasm, “Aren’t we being sensitive?”

  The darkness unrolls toward us, and we drive in silence for several more miles. The throbbing engine creates a mysterious lull that hangs between us, two people strapped in a seated position and hurtling through the night in radium-green stillness. The mound comes to mind, the diagrammed attitude of its human contents shut up in silent darkness and hurtling not through space but through time.

  “Turn left at the third mailbox up ahead.”

  I take my foot from the gas, touch the brakes. The machine responds nicely.

  “Not here. Up there.”

  I coast, bring it to a stop with the lightest pressure of my foot on the brake pedal. A driveway appears to the right of the mailbox, and I turn into it. The tires crunch onto gravel. The headlights illuminate a large white house set back from the road behind a wide, snow-covered lawn and a stand of tall trees. Lights come on on the porch and the first floor.

  “Motion detector,” she says. “It turns on the lights automatically.”

  I coast the truck to the end of the drive. “You live in this big place all alone?”

  “I got a roommate. Laura. But she spends most of her time at her boyfriend’s.”

  She shoves open her door and climbs out. I follow her as she weaves her unsteady way toward the house, stoops down, and reaches underneath the first porch step to extract a
hidden key. “My secret,” she says.

  Inside is a jumbled mess of furniture strewn with clothes, shoes, books, magazines. Everything looks as if it has been shoved aside with a sweep of the foot. A sofa and coffee table stand in the center of the room. A television set, wilted potted plants, a stereo.

  “Excuse the mess,” she says, going into the next room. “Want a drink?”

  I follow her into the kitchen, a large, spacious room with a solid-looking square table at one end. There is a faint smell of food left out.

  “I don’t have any wine.” She yanks open the refrigerator. “I’ll make you a bourbon and Coke if you want.”

  “I’ll have a glass of water.”

  She takes a large bottle of Coke from the refrigerator and retrieves a half-gallon bottle of cheap bourbon from a cabinet. “In case you’re wondering why I drink so much. I have trouble sleeping. And I’m afraid of sleeping pills. Dr. Henley wanted to prescribe some to me. But she said it wouldn’t be a good idea unless I agreed to go to AA. Fuck that. I told her I could do just fine without the pills.” An ice tray crashes to the floor. I pick up the scattered cubes and put them in the sink. She hands me a glass and drops some ice into it from the tray. I fill my glass at the sink while she tends to her drink, which she mixes in a large glass beer mug filled to the brim with ice. “God! I almost forgot!”

  “What?”

  “The kiwis! I left them in the car. They’re probably frozen by now.”

  I offer to get them and return outside, knowing I should not have come. I crunch across the frozen gravel toward the Bronco, retrieve both my backpack and the paper bag containing Sylvia’s kiwis. All this is done in a daze, and before returning inside I pause in front of the house and breathe a few drafts of cold air to clear my head. It is much darker out here than on West Street with its pathetic streetlight at the corner and the kilowatt-hungry neighbors piled one against the next. The stars shine brightly. A few dark wisps of cloud move across the sky.

  “I bet these will go great together.” Sylvia holds up the brown oval fruit. “Just peel the fur off.” She hands the kiwi to me and takes a knife from a drawer.

  I peel and slice it for her, sampling a piece of the sweet-sour fruit. It tastes good and cuts the sour wine taste left over from the bar. I haven’t eaten all day, and now that the adrenaline from the drive has subsided I realize I’m hungry.

  Sylvia takes two slices of the kiwi and drops them into her drink, stirs them in with her finger. “I gotta show this to Laura. She always comes up with weird drinks.” She wanders into the living room.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Sylvia asks, sipping off the top of her drink.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, a girlfriend? G-I-R-L friend.” She sips and grimaces. “This is sour!”

  “Why do you ask?”

  She shrugs. “Just curious.” She sits down on the sofa, reaches underneath, and pulls out a mirror. She puts it on the coffee table, takes a small vial from her shirt pocket. She taps a small mound of powder onto the mirror, chops it up with a razor blade, and in a few deft swipes creates a few thin parallel lines. Then she holds a plastic straw to one nostril and snorts. She turns to me, her eyes bluer and more aqueous. She offers the straw, fingers long and slender, each tight little bone in her hand articulated.

  “No.” I am fascinated by the seriousness she brings to the little ritual. She slides a finger across the surface of the mirror, rubs a little powder onto her gums as if brushing her teeth. At last she looks up, slips her finger from her mouth with a satisfied slurp. “You want to fuck me?” She hurls the question like a sharp object. It’s not embarrassment that prevents me from answering but the intuition that a simple yes or no is not the correct response.

  “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

  “You do,” she says and reaches for her mug.

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  She regards me now through the rearranged furniture of a new mood sprung suddenly upon her—hostility mixed with uncertainty, alcohol, cocaine, eros, thanatos, sour kiwi, and a thousand unnameable little gouges. She drinks again with a swagger. “You’re lying,” she says.

  “I don’t know what to say, Sylvia, but you’re mistaken.”

  “Why not?” she demands.

  I don’t want to say anything else to provoke her, so I say nothing and turn to leave the room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get my pack.” I pause for a moment to try and gather whatever it is I must gather in order to make it out the door. I can hear her snort another line, rub the surface of the mirror with her finger. The ice cubes clink in her drink.

  “You’re not going to run away now, are you?”

  I hoist my pack onto my shoulders and return through the dining room. She is standing in the foyer at the bottom of the staircase. “C’mon, Horace,” she says. “Why don’t you ask me if I want to fuck you? Go ahead.” She begins to unbutton her shirt.

  “I have to go,” I say, unable to look at her. My chest is thumping with fear. I do not understand.

  “What’s the matter?” She is leaning against the wall with her shirt open and one hand on her hip. Mock whore posture. The drunkenness has suddenly and mysteriously evaporated from her speech. “You’ve been wondering, right? Don’t deny it. I can tell. You asked if I could remember what happened. What you really meant was, I wonder if she still likes to fuck? Am I right? Tell me. Am I right?”

  I can’t answer her.

  “Go ahead, ask me. Ask me right now.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The hell you don’t. You want to know, so ask me. Go ahead.”

  “I don’t want to know anything.”

  “So then stay here and fuck me and find out for yourself. C’mon. What are you afraid of?”

  “I want to leave, Sylvia. You’re not making sense.”

  “You mean you don’t want to fuck me? Why not?” The tone of her voice is now unsteady and uncertain and drunk again and has an edge of unpurged misery. “I’m a good fuck.”

  I twist the door handle. A blast of cold air sweeps into the house. Sylvia follows me out the door.

  “Stay, Horace. I’m sorry.” Her tone is now conciliatory. “I was just …” she breaks off, standing on the porch buttoning up her blouse.

  I turn to her but can’t find any words to say. I start off across the gravel, the crunch of my boots obliterating the silence.

  “The truth, Horace. You want to know the truth?” she shouts in a taunting voice. I pass by the Bronco and continue on down the drive toward the road. “I remember everything. Everything! You stupid asshole! I never forgot. I remember it all!”

  I pause for a moment, adjust the straps of my pack, turn around. She is standing on the porch, a silhouette, breath condensing in thick clouds above her head. I have nothing to say to her that would make me turn back now.

  “You coward!” she shouts at my back. “I remember everything! You goddamn fucking coward.” The door slams just as I reach the end of the drive.

  Daffodils are blooming all around the house. The ground is soggy and until a week ago was just a cold bog of muddy turf. Now flowers are coming up everywhere. I came outside this morning and there they were, a sea of yellow flowers to drive away the winter.

  The neighbor’s kid is at the door and rattling away excitedly. “A man in Florida killed his wife and put her in the car and they caught him.”

  “Slow down, slow down.” I step out onto the porch, where the kid is standing with his hands crammed into the pockets of a battered jacket.

  The kid continues at a fast clip. “He went to a drive-through and the man at the window saw the body in the back seat of the car and called the police.”

  “He went to a drive-through? What for?”

  “A hamburger, I guess.” The kid swipes his damp nose with the sleeve of his jacket. “He was hungry.”

  “Where’d you hear this?�
��

  “My TV.”

  “So you got it after all. A television.”

  “Yeah. Are you going to pay me?”

  “How much do you think it’s worth?”

  The kid looks at his feet. “I don’t know.”

  I hand him a quarter.

  “That’s all?”

  “How much do you think a recycled old story from TV is worth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think a quarter is too much. Next time get me something more interesting. Closer to home.”

  He slides the coin into the pocket of his pants, turns to leave, then hesitates a moment. “You want me to, like, spy on people?”

  “Not spy. Just keep your eyes and ears peeled.”

  “For what?”

  “Anything that you think I’d want to know about.”

  “Okay,” he says and scuffs his way down the porch steps.

  I go inside to make a few telephone calls.

  “Tire shop.”

  “You sell tires?”

  “Yes sir. Any brand you can name.”

  “Are the daffodils up over there?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The daffodils. Flowers. Are they blooming over by you?”

  “To tell you the truth, I haven’t noticed. Hold on a second. Hey, George! We got flowers coming up out front? Daffodils? Daffodils! Someone on the phone wants to know. Beats me. The landscaper, I guess. Who am I talking to?”

  “Horace.”

  “Says his name is Horace. What? Okay. I’ll tell him. Hello?”

  “Yes.”

  “The boss says if you planted ’em they should be there. He says come out and take a look for yourself.”

  I hang up to try another number.

  “Have you seen the flowers blooming?”

  “Flowers?”

  “Outside. Spring is here.”

  “I don’t go outside anymore. I need a hernia operation.”

  “Look out the window.”

  “Can’t. Don’t want to. I’m in bed, and I need an operation.”

  “Go have one, then.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m afraid. Anyhow, I feel fine. Long as I keep still and don’t move too much.”

  “You have someone looking after you?”