Horace Afoot Page 5

  This time I ride in the front seat of the sheriffs car.

  “You’ll be available to answer questions too?”

  I nod.

  After a pause: “You seem to gravitate toward that mound an awful lot.”

  “I enjoy the walk.”

  He shakes his head and is silent for the rest of the ride.

  The neighbor’s kid is standing in the driveway when we pull up in front of my house. He ogles the sheriffs car, stands stock still. As I get out he drops the hose he is holding and runs inside.

  Discounting self-interest and sociobiology, instances of real Samaritanism are rare. I sit and rock on my front porch, thinking of the one or two, my own one or two. I am showered. Fresh. Fresh shirt, fresh pants. No shoes. The kid next door has resumed watering the driveway and is studiously ignoring me. His mother pokes her head out the side door to shout an order or two and glances over. My porch is about even with their kitchen door, and when Dad’s pickup isn’t pulled all the way up the driveway they have a clear view across the low chain-link fence. I ignore them as generously as I can. But I can sense that the sheriffs escort and the hospital gown I was wearing when I arrived back home have made an impression and renewed their interest in me. Wacko. I can hear the dinner-table talk. Now you stay clear, boy. Hear me? Forks wave. He’s wacko.

  I lift a leg into the chair, rock with purpose. Into mind pops a line from a poem. If you never do anything for anyone else, you are spared the tragedy of human relationships. I like to think the poet meant it. Unfortunately, I think he was just being ironic. I don’t at all agree with the idea that a beneficent and thoroughgoing altruism can negate the tragedy of human relationships, can somehow reverse and obliterate it. Human relationships are tragic a priori, and the true Samaritan acts, not to change this condition—but in spite of it. The idea, implanted over the centuries by sentimental Christianity and taken over in our time by political propaganda, advertising, and the movies, is that by good deeds we negate this tragic condition and transform it into something better. But there is nothing better. The world is not so neatly divided. Good is not accomplished merely by negation of the bad.

  I get up and go inside. The thought merits a phone call.

  “Horace here.”

  “May I help you?”

  “I’m glad you put it that way.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you like Saint Bernards?”

  “Saint Bernard? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Not the saint. The dog. You know, the big shaggy things they use in the Alps to rescue people lost in the snow?”

  “Yes, I know. Those huge, slobbery animals, the ones with the little wooden barrels around their necks. What about them?”

  “What do you think about them?”

  “What I think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a whole lot. Frankly, I hate dogs. They scare me.”

  “I see. But what about in principle?”

  “Are you calling from the Humane Society?”

  “No.”

  “Because if you are, I’m not interested. I have a cat I took in as a stray, and as far as I’m concerned I’ve done my duty by little furry mammals.”

  “I see.”

  “A dog is out of the question. And a big dog? If you ask me, I think keeping gigantic pets is cruel. They need the outdoors. They need open spaces to run in. I don’t know whose idea it was to make pets out of them, but in my opinion they have perpetrated a giant cruelty. Your organization should speak out against it.”

  “Against pets?”

  “Against big pets. Yes. I’ve seen some of the literature you put out. About neutering and overpopulation and such things. But I’ve never seen anything about pet size. I mean, how big is big enough and how big is too big already? That’s what you people should be concerned with. My neighbor down the street keeps a pig! Can you imagine? A pig. He says it’s from Vietnam, but I don’t care where he got it. Keep a pig as a pet? In the house? It’s disgusting. You people should do something about it.”

  “I hear pigs are smart.”

  “Smart has nothing to do with it. My grandson is smart—but do I let him climb all over the furniture? To let a pig into the house—I’m sorry. It’s disgusting. Now if you don’t mind, I have to go. Sorry about the dog. I hope you find a nice home for it in Switzerland someplace.”

  A thunderstorm that has been brewing for the past hour finally rolls over Oblivion and pins the town where it lies with bright cracks of lightning and tearing sheets of wind and water. In seconds the weedy lot that is my front yard becomes a muddy bog. Water cascades from the roof overhanging the porch and makes me feel hidden, cozy and safe behind the waterfall. Moments before the storm broke I rushed through the house to close all the windows and have been monitoring the steady drop in temperature by the gooseflesh on my arms and my quickened olfactory sense. I can smell the rain. How clear the air suddenly becomes. Lines seem to straighten and corners sharpen in a thunderstorm. Water flies in dense sheets that sweep past with fierce momentum sustained by wind and the crackling clouds above. The violent crashes of thunder and the monotone russhhh of countless gallons splashing to the ground create a feeling of peace and serenity. I have been wondering about the woman in the cornfield for a full day now.

  I called the hospital early this morning, but they wouldn’t tell me anything except that she is still listed as Jane Doe. I thought of taking a walk out to the hospital to pay her a visit but stalled myself with a swirl of considerations. The thunderstorm is now my best excuse for not going. It’s not that I don’t want to see her, but that she might not want to see me. It’s also likely that, for tightly argued bureaucratic reasons that I can anticipate all too easily, I won’t be allowed to see her. Can anonymous patients be allowed anonymous visitors? More specifically, can Jane Doe be allowed to visit with someone she does not know and who doesn’t know her? I expect she has already forgotten me. Why humiliate her all over again by forcing her to remember? I can imagine her resting in a state of mild sedation. The sterile atmosphere of hospitals promotes anonymity and all the derivative comforts, primary among them the comfort of knowing one is not alone in suffering. The shapeless gowns with their bare-buttocked openings, the institutional noises and colors and everything on wheels and in flux—a whirlpool of septic humanity passing into and out of existence.

  The rain intensifies. I lean in the front doorway, hypnotized by the steady beating on the roof. Water collects in puddles that are rapidly becoming large pools. What will it be like come winter when snow falls and accumulates for days at a time? Since arriving here I haven’t thought once about winter. The fireplace in the living room doesn’t seem to have been used in years, and I realize it will be necessary to make sure the chimney is clear before lighting a fire. The sudden drop in temperature and the thought of fires and winter send me upstairs to look for a warmer shirt to put on. I lie on the bed and close my eyes, listening as the storm rattles the windows and shrinks me deeper into autism.

  When the sheriff arrives to escort me to a lineup my first impulse is to throw Selected Philosophical Essays at him. “You want me to stand in a lineup?”

  “It’s part of the investigation, purely voluntary. You’d be helping us out.”

  Rather than ask him to explain, I run my thumb over the pages of my book and consider his request. “Purely voluntary,” he repeats. He says it as though in volunteering I am exempted from all suspicion, whereas I know that my consent is only a legal formality and that he could just as well haul me into the station in chains. He stands squarely in front of me, filling up the door frame with his bulk. The patrol car idles at the curb.

  “If I’d been allowed to visit her, none of this would be necessary. She could have told you it wasn’t me.”

  The sheriff wipes his muddy shoes on the straw mat. The path to the front door is a strip of mud, and there is no way around it except across the soggy yard. “That’s not the way it works,” he sa
ys blandly. “Those rules are for her protection.”

  I go upstairs to dress while he waits on the front porch. In a sense, I am glad to oblige. I tried twice to visit the woman and both times found the way barred. I left the flowers with the nurse. Now I’m being asked to be part of a lineup. I put on a clean white shirt and roll the sleeves high up my arm so I look like the sort of convict who can deliver long, extemporaneous discourses on nihilism and existentialism. Jean Genet. Someone like that.

  “You ought to try laying down some gravel on that walkway,” the sheriff complains as we hop across the soggy yard to his car. My neighbor is standing on his front steps looking over with his hands on his hips. To make the pageant complete, the sheriff makes me ride, like a convict, in the back seat.

  It is impossible not to think of punishment and innocence and pity and compassion as I ride to the station, a list of accomplished and yet-to-be-accomplished acts ticked off, deed by deed. Protesting isn’t appropriate. Instinct tells me that. It would seem too much like whining. Moral perception is like a photographic negative, where the blackest shades develop into the lightest hues and vice versa. The best liars come out of the chemical bath lily white. Those who can’t lie take the gray, grim blame. And the more the innocent complain of injustice, the more blackly they are perceived.

  The sheriff escorts me into a waiting room. “Want a magazine?” he asks before leaving.

  A magazine? Is this part of the shakedown? Part of the modus tollendo ponens of the lineup? Either A or B; not A; therefore B. We have all been subjected to this logic. Even children understand burdens of proof. It’s a part of their instinctual makeup. So is finger pointing. So is lying.

  Four others are escorted into the windowless green cube of a waiting room. I take a seat in the corner and look around, legs casually crossed. The others in the room hunker down, scratch upper arms, and look at the floor. I try to imagine the circumstances that have cast them under suspicion and begin to feel relieved. The logical necessity of my innocent presence in a lineup that might include one or more guilty men seems clear. I am the control, the reality check, the standard of innocence against which to measure the guilty. Right?

  Good God. A ten-year-old wouldn’t fall for that. What if the woman points a finger at me? I can protest all I want: I didn’t do it! I swear I didn’t do it! For Christ’s sake! I glance around again. There is no logic here. My stomach churns loudly as I evaluate my fellow suspects. One of these fuckers is guilty. Not me. My boyhood wits remind me that the best hope of escaping an accusation is to make certain it falls on someone else’s head. Modus ponendo tollens: Either A or B; A; therefore not B. He did it! It wasn’t me!

  “Got a match?”

  The man is sitting three chairs away. He looks as if he were dragged here straight from a bar stool. An ugly wart grows just above his left eyebrow. His shirt sleeves are rolled halfway up his forearm and reveal a tattoo that has some Vietnam War association: Tunnel Rat.

  I shake my head and on impulse ask, “Got a cigarette?”

  The man pinches one out of his shirt pocket and offers it to me. Then he turns to the man on his right and asks the question in the same monotone: “Got a match?”

  A hand holds out a lighter. I put the cigarette between my lips, and the man passes me his lit cigarette, squeezing it in the middle with his thick, cracked fingers. I decline with a polite nick of the head as the hand with the lighter gestures for me to avail myself. I walk over and lean into the flame, mumbling thanks as I straighten up, inhale deeply, and let my eyes wander down to the other end of the room. A guard is standing just inside the door, keeping a vigilant watch over the five of us. Two other suspects are talking quietly. They seem to be friends. Accomplices, maybe. They are young and, if it were up to me, guilty as hell. I sit back down, enter these faces into the modal logic of my innocence, my permanent, unassailable innocence, the innocence that I bring everywhere to everything—even smoking this cigarette, which has infused a raw and complicated taste into my mouth and the back of my throat.

  At last we are shepherded into a long, narrow notch of a room. Three steps up onto a platform. Three other men join us, escorted in from a separate door by a different guard. They look distinctly convictlike. The lights glare. Behind us the wall is marked in feet and inches. We face a two-way mirror set into a frame in the wall like some large and minimal piece of art. The guard calls out instructions. Face right. Turn around. I expect to feel a cold hand clamp down on my shoulder. Come with me. But nothing of the sort happens, and in three minutes it is all over. We file offstage and out the door.

  “You can leave now,” the guard tells us. The Tunnel Rat shambles off, followed by the others.

  “What about those other three?” I ask.

  “They’re going back to jail.”

  “Back to jail? Wait a minute.” I ask the guard to explain. “How can you come up with suspects from jail?”

  The cop frowns, looks at me as he must look at all the countless wastes of time he must endure every day. He is young, blond, with clipped hair that sprouts from his head as though implanted. “They’re not suspects,” he says.

  “Not suspects?” My pulse begins to race. Modus pollens bursts apart. Either A or B; not A; therefore not B? Impossible! “If they aren’t suspects, then what are they doing here?”

  The cop closes the door and stands sentry in front of it with his hands behind his back. “It’s part of the workup.”

  “Workup?”

  The cop nods. “First we start with photographs. Then we do a drawing. Sometimes we have to look at real people. You know, types. They’re supposed to be getting a computer any day now.”

  “A computer?”

  “That can do composites.”

  “So I’m not a suspect?”

  He shrugs. “You’ll have to ask the detective.”

  The cop disappears through the door. I hadn’t reckoned with being used as a mnemonic boot to kick the woman in the head with. I thought they had suspects. I thought they were going to arrest somebody.

  The air outside is sticky hot. I pause on the steps of the station to wonder what the poor woman—if it were she behind the glass—said when she saw us. Did she recognize me? Or, following the logic of the procedure, did I remind her of someone else? Were the lot of us dismissed with a sigh—nothing, sorry—and a crushed cigarette? Back to the drawing board?

  “Excuse me.” A young woman has appeared at my side. She had been among a group of people waiting outside the sheriffs office when I was brought in. “May I ask you a few questions?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Oh, sorry. I’m with the Sentinel} The newspaper? Can you answer a few questions about the rape?”

  “Who told you to ask me?”

  The woman is unsettled by my tone. She fumbles with her bag and takes out a small tape recorder. “Someone inside said you were a witness.”

  “I didn’t witness anything, and I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “Could you tell me what you saw?”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  The woman holds the tape machine in the palm of her hand without turning it on.

  “I helped get her to the hospital. That’s all.”

  “Could you tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fine. I understand. Could I get your name?”

  “What do you want my name for?”

  “For the record.”

  “I don’t want my name used.” I feel my voice quaver and a wave of tension rising up my neck, the beginning of a headache. “Do you understand that?”

  She nods.

  “Turn on the tape.”

  A startled smile comes over her features; she wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and holds the machine for me to speak into.

  “I am a private citizen, and I want to be left alone, so don’t come looking for me.”

  She nods, eager for me to cut to t
he details, holding the machine up.

  I lean toward it and, measuring my words, say, “If you print my name or mention anything about me in print, including this conversation, I’ll sue you and your paper for invading my privacy.”

  The woman snaps the tape recorder off and stuffs it into her bag. “That was uncalled for.” Her face has reddened. “That was obnoxious and completely uncalled for,” she says and stalks back into the station.

  I skip down the steps and begin walking briskly toward the center of town. Some instinct for escape takes hold, and I obey it. A curious constellation of thoughts begins forming as I walk: the relationship—logical and otherwise—that exists between pairs of opposites, between guilt and innocence, memory and forgetting, anger and sorrow, pity and vengeance, love and hate. And especially the strange transmutation that often occurs between them and binds them together in a unity that seems bizarre until one recognizes it as part of the eternal order of things. I increase my pace.

  The sheriffs car pulls alongside. He rolls down the window and leans over on his side. “C’mon back,” he says and pops the front door open.

  “Why? They told me I could go.”

  “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?”

  “Who? The woman. That’s who.”

  A green-aproned waitress is standing in front of the Corn Tassel, one of only a handful of people outside on this hot day. A few people sit in the diner, visible through the large windows. She lifts a cigarette to her lips and turns to look the other way while pulling on it. Then she turns back to watch, a cloud of smoke issuing from her mouth and nostrils.

  “C’mon. Get in.” The sheriff pushes the passenger door wide open, spilling some of the cool interior out into the heat. The radio squawks and blinks. I slide into the seat and close the door. Without a word he swings the big police cruiser into a tight U-turn and we return to the police station.

  “She remembered you,” the sheriff says, getting out of the car. “But that’s as far as we’ve been able to get. She’s a complete blank. The doctor says it’s shock. The whole thing—pfffft—blanked out.”