Horace Afoot Page 4

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I know what I’m looking for.”

  “Very well,” he says and begins to gather the material up from the desk.

  I remain seated, wishing vaguely that I could do something with all this accumulated evidence of the past. But the mound is moot. The past is moot. Nothing remains to be done about either. They simply were.

  “Has anyone ever used these materials? Written a book?”

  “A history of the town?” He twists his mouth into a smile. “Well, yes and no,” he says. “I have been working on something for years. Nothing I’d ever want to publish. There have been county and state histories. But so far nothing about this town alone.”

  I get up to leave, thanking the librarian for his help.

  “Would you sign the log, please?” He slides a clipboard across the table. The last signature is two months old. I sign my name, then print it along with my address. I leave the column marked Purpose of Visit blank.

  “Your name is Horace?”

  “Yes.”

  “We need your last name as well.”

  “I never use it.”

  “We need your full name, address, and telephone number. For our records.”

  I fill out the form as told and hand the clipboard back to him.

  “Quintus Horatius Flaccus?”

  “That’s my full name.”

  Mohr looks at me for a moment, disbelieving.

  “Do you want proof?”

  “I’ll be damned,” he says, shaking his head. He tries to laugh but begins to cough.

  Short, shuffling indeterminism. The phrase pops into my mind on the way to the mound, inspired by my visit with Mohr. The way he spoke in short puffs of breath sent me in search of a metaphor, but all that comes to mind is the phrase a short, shuffling indeterminism. I have no idea what it means.

  I am interrupted by a flock of blackbirds rising up from the cornfield. Two sharp reports—pop pop—and the birds lift up out of the field with a furious beating of wings. The sky fills with animals. They hover for a moment; then as if of one mind, bank away. Another volley of shots. Pop pop pop, and in seconds the flock is gone. Short, shuffling indeterminism.

  A car rushes past me as I stand on the side of the road. Flutter of dust and dirt, of cornstalks and birds, of suicides—van Gogh. I think Hemingway killed himself in a cornfield too. The lives of both men reduced to—a short, shuffling indeterminism? The phrase rises up and up, some sort of coded message shot from my unconscious like a flare from a lifeboat.

  Another car whooshes past. I start walking again. The mound is about a half mile up the road. I stop and scan the sky for more birds but see none. If the road were elevated slightly, I might have a view across the field. But the corn is at its peak, and I am walled in on one side by the field and on the other by the fenced-in grass and asphalt wasteland that surrounds the missile factory, Semantech.

  A figure bursts from the tall corn, stumbles in the shallow ditch that runs along the shoulder of the road. About thirty yards ahead. I see that it is a woman. A naked woman. She glances at me, terror stricken, and stumbles, then falls to the ground, where she remains without getting up. I run to her.

  Her hands are bound behind her back. She twists her head and I see that her mouth is gagged with a piece of silver tape. She struggles to sit up, but the effort is too much and she slumps back onto her side, turns away from me in terror. I walk around so that she can see me, pat the air with my hands. “I won’t hurt you. Let me help you.”

  She nods, squeezes her eyes shut. She struggles for breath. Her dark hair is tangled, clings with perspiration to the back of her neck and the sides of her face. She has scrapes and bruises all up and down her legs and on her arms and back. I lean toward her to remove the tape from her mouth, peel it away. “Oh God,” she wails, gulps in air, and dissolves into a slobbering, whimpering heap.

  “It’s okay,” I repeat like a mantra, knowing it’s not. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” It takes a few minutes for her to catch her breath. I offer to untie her hands, and she rolls onto her side. As soon as they are free she rolls onto her stomach and sobs into the ground, cradling her head in her arms.

  There is no traffic on the road, so I squat next to the woman and tell her in the most reassuring tones I can summon that I will get help and everything will be all right.

  “Were you being shot at?”

  The woman is too convulsed to hear or respond. Her head is a mass of tangled black hair buried in her arms.

  “Was someone shooting at you?”

  The woman does not respond. I begin to pace the side of the road, not knowing what to do. Do I go for help and leave her? No. Waiting is the only option. I pull off my shirt and step back down into the ditch. “Put this on.” The woman lifts her head, looks at me, startled, as though she had already forgotten my presence. Her right cheek is swollen and her face is too beslobbered and contorted to judge her age. I hold the shirt out for her and she takes it and slips it on, then rolls into a fetal curl, facing away. I step back up onto the pavement. The sun is high and the heat is beginning to shimmer off the road. Strong sunlight on my shoulders and back. The air feels leaden. The only sound an ominous rustling of the cornfield.

  At last a car rounds the bend up by the mound. I walk into the middle of the road, wave my arms over my head. The car slows and then pulls over to the side and crawls toward me, stopping cautiously ten yards away. I jog toward it.

  The driver pokes his head out the window. I recognize Ed Maver, the man on the bench. He recognizes me too and pulls the car forward to close the short distance between us.

  “A woman. Have to get her to a hospital.”

  Maver looks puzzled. He doesn’t see anyone.

  “She’s in the ditch over there.”

  Maver is about to get out of the car.

  “No. Wait. I’ll get her.”

  The woman is lying face down. I crouch next to her. “I’m taking you to the hospital. Can you get up?”

  She nods, face still to the ground so that all I see is a nest of dark, tangled hair. She lifts her head, allows me to help her to her feet.

  Maver’s eyes open wide as we approach the car. He leaps out and races around to open the rear door. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” he says.

  The woman crawls across the back seat and collapses on her side. I get in front. Maver yanks the gearshift down and slams the accelerator, kicking up a fierce storm of gravel and dust behind us.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know. She came running out of the cornfield.”

  Maver looks at me, at my bare chest, then over his shoulder into the rear seat.

  “I found her. She ran out of the cornfield and collapsed. I gave her my shirt.”

  Maver looks over his shoulder again. “Whad’ya suppose happened?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Was anyone chasing her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Looks like she’s been roughed up pretty bad.”

  Maver takes a short cut to the hospital, turning down unfamiliar roads.

  “What about the police? Hadn’t we better let them know?”

  “She needs a doctor first.”

  “Well, we oughta at least inform the sheriffs office. This is some sure-as-shit big-time trouble you got here.” Maver pulls up to the emergency room entrance. I go inside to find a nurse. A minute later the woman is being helped onto a stretcher by two orderlies. Maver stands by as the woman is wheeled through the automatic doors to the emergency room. “I’ll go park the car,” he says, hops back into the car, and drives away.

  At the registration desk a young man is waiting for me. There is no sign of the woman. The stretcher has vanished. “I found her on the side of the road,” I tell the man. “She’d been running through a cornfield. Someone was chasing her, but I didn’t see who.”

  “Have the police been informed?”

/>   I shake my head. “Not yet.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  I shake my head again. “I’ve never seen her before.”

  The man looks me over for a moment. “Have a seat,” he tells me and points to the waiting area with the pencil he is holding.

  “Would you mind giving me my shirt back?” I hug my shoulders. “It’s cold in here.”

  The man behind the desk picks up the telephone. He doesn’t respond to me now that he has told me where to wait. I ask again, and he points with the pencil in the annoying way desk clerks have of issuing small orders.

  Maver enters through the automatic doors, spots me sitting in a corner of the waiting area, and barrels over.

  “What’s the scoop?”

  I shrug.

  He sits down next to me and begins to talk. I tune him out, realizing that he will be impossible to get rid of. I sit with my arms crossed over my chest for warmth.

  “You think she was raped?” Maver asks.

  A pit opens up in my stomach. It feels like mild stage fright but without the flutters. I look at him without answering. Rape? It hadn’t occurred to me. Really. And the fact that it hadn’t hits me squarely over the head. How dumb. How could such an obvious thought have evaded me like that? Somehow all speculation stopped when I’d made the connection with the gunshots. Someone was shooting at her, and that was as far as I’d taken it. Rape hadn’t occurred to me at all. I leave Maver and go back to the desk.

  “Can you get me my shirt?” I ask. “It’s freezing in here.”

  The man looks at me as though he’s never seen me before. I notice the way his glasses pinch his fleshy temples. “Just a minute,” he says.

  “I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes already.”

  The man waves an orderly over to the desk. “See if you can find him a gown.”

  “I don’t want a gown. I want my shirt back.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t have it back.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the police will want it for evidence.”

  “Evidence? It’s my shirt.”

  He turns away without response.

  An orderly appears, hands me a white hospital gown. I slip it on like a robe despite his instructions to put it on with the opening at the back. Just then the sheriff walks through the automatic doors holding a clipboard. He approaches the desk with his permanently askew elbows and brushes past me without the faintest flicker of recognition. I stand a few paces away and listen as he talks to the man behind the desk.

  “She’s being examined,” the man says. After a brief exchange that I can’t make out, he nods at me and says, “He’s the one who brought her in.”

  The sheriff turns to me. I sense the you-again in his otherwise expressionless face. Maver is standing by, eager to tell his story.

  “What happened?”

  “I was walking along Old Route 47.”

  The sheriff interrupts immediately. “What time?”

  “I’m not sure exactly.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Two hours, about.”

  Maver cuts in. “It was two fifteen when he pulled me over. By my car clock.”

  The sheriff turns to Maver. “You part of this too, Ed?”

  Maver nods.

  The sheriff takes the clipboard from the counter and gestures to the waiting area. “Why don’t we sit down and go over this.”

  Maver tells his story first. He has answers to every one of the sheriff’s questions about time and place and exactly this and precisely that. They share a dialect that allows each to anticipate and respond to the other with unbelievable precision. Forty yards, forty-two tops. Two—ah—seventeen p.m. by the digital clock in my car. Fourteen minutes, point to point. It must be connected to some element of shared ambition and culture. The military, perhaps. Since I don’t share their language or their mutual familiarity, I am cast under suspicion.

  They talk until the thread of Maver’s narrative arrives at the point where I must take it up, and the sheriff turns to me with a furrowed look that is meant to dredge the truth out of me. There’s no trusting strangers, it says. I describe exactly how the woman burst from the field, how I un-gagged and untied her and gave her my shirt and flagged down the first car that came by.

  “Where are those items?” the sheriff asks, jotting on his clipboard.

  “The tape and the cord? I left them there.”

  “Will we be able to find them?”

  The question strikes me as odd. “If they’re still there, yes.” I try to imitate Maver’s forensic precision but see that the sheriff interprets my manner as insolence.

  “Also, I think she was being shot at.”

  The sheriff stops writing and looks up at me with that furrowed expression again.

  “I heard shots. Several of them. At first I thought it was the farmer scaring birds out of the field.”

  “Farmers don’t do that,” Maver interrupts.

  “Quiet, Ed,” the sheriff says. “How many shots did you hear?”

  “I can’t remember. Several. They sounded far off at first. Then the last one or two seemed very close.”

  “Did you see anyone in the field?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see anyone at all? Tell me exactly what you saw. Describe the scene to me exactly as you remember it.”

  I pull the thin hospital gown more tightly around my shoulders and go over the details. The words short, shuffling indeterminism come back to me and with them the whole mystery of memory and pseudomemory, of signs and symbols, of particular things and events and moments that seem to converge and scatter at random. To be absolutely accurate, I would have to say a naked woman burst out of a cornfield into my idea of cornfields, which is connected to my knowledge of the suicides of van Gogh and Hemingway. But then I would have to explain everything to the sheriff down to the last detail, and that is virtually impossible. I might have started from the beginning and explained the overly theoretical sense of self that I have acquired from reading Selected Philosophical Essays. I would have had to explain myself as a “knowing subject lost in the object that is known,” or as someone “dispossessed of narrative continuity,” or simply as a “text.” I would have had to explain that, at the very moment I heard the shots, I had somehow linked my existence to the idea of cornfields and the deaths of van Gogh and Hemingway and, by extension, all suicides and the world—the way a French semiologist once linked himself with Proust by captioning a baby picture of himself and calling attention to the fact that, at the time he was learning to walk, Proust was finishing A la Recherche du Temps perdu. Why not? If a French pedant can make such connections, then I can link myself and my birth and childhood to events such as, say, the Kennedy-Khrushchev Vienna Conference or the establishment of the World Food Program.

  “Can you remember seeing anything else?” the sheriff prods again.

  “A car. No. Two cars drove past me while I was walking.”

  “Which direction?”

  I thought for a moment. “One toward town, the other away.”

  “Do you remember what make?”

  “No.”

  “The color?”

  “No. I was standing with my back to the road looking into the field.”

  “So you were looking into the field.”

  “Watching the birds. They were flocking because of the gunshots.”

  “You didn’t tell me there was shooting going on when I picked you up.” Maver speaks as if I’d betrayed him.

  “What type of gun would you say it was?” The Sheriff is making notes furiously.

  “I don’t know anything about guns. I couldn’t say.”

  “Was it a rifle or a pistol shot?” Maver asks.

  “Ed, please.”

  “Was it a rifle or a shotgun? Or a handgun?” Maver smirks, satisfied with his forensic acuity, crosses his arms over his chest.

 
I shrug.

  “Was it a pop” the sheriff asks, “like a firecracker?”

  “Or a crack?” Maver again.

  “A pop.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Definitely. But it wasn’t anything like a firecracker.”

  “Not a bang?”

  “No. It sounded like pop to me.”

  The sheriff writes this down.

  “Probably a .38,” Maver says.

  The sheriff writes without looking up from his pad.

  At last a doctor appears and signals the sheriff. Maver and I are told to wait. The cop swaggers over to the desk, where the doctor is looking over some papers, a surgical mask hanging casually around his neck. There is something leisurely about the way he looks. I think of the smashed-up woman and the antiseptic smells and the doctor’s post-emergency repose. A renewed sense of pity wells up, a sense that the danger is past but the suffering is about to begin. The full horror of the woman’s plight becomes apparent the way the contours of a photograph slowly emerge in a chemical bath. I can’t explain the delayed reaction. Perhaps sympathy can begin only after shock wears off. The image that locks into my memory is the way she twisted and dipped her shoulder as she pitched forward out of the field, the way she stumbled and fell. The hapless moment, the moment beyond help. And the chill in her eyes that said she had already emigrated to that polar region beyond the reach of compassion.

  The sheriff returns. “They’ve sedated her,” he says officiously. “And I’ve got all I need for the time being.”

  “Was she raped?” Maver asks.

  The sheriff ignores the question. “You can leave now,” he says.

  “Did they say what happened to her?” Maver insists. “Was she raped ?”

  “That’s not your concern, Ed,” says the sheriff.

  Maver gets up. “Well, I guess I’ve had about all the excitement I can take.” He turns to me. “You need a ride someplace?”

  “I’ll walk, thanks.”

  “I’ll give you a lift,” the sheriff says.

  I accept the sheriff’s offer for the sheer perversity of it. The sheriff gestures toward the door with his clipboard. “Oh, and Ed. I’ll need you to answer a few more questions in the next day or two.”

  “Right,” Maver says. “Anytime. You know where to find me.”