Horace Afoot Page 7

  The humid summer heat has the entire town stalled indoors. Everything is still, motionless. Even the trees. I wandered in the woods behind the house for a while yesterday, surprised to find it no cooler than out in the scrubby expanses of my yard. This morning I found a small hand trowel in the cabinet under the sink. I went outside and with monkish intention began to dig in an overgrown flowerbed next to the house. I’ve always admired the gardening sensibility, the bald-headed, bare-chested simplicity, the solitary attentiveness. But after an hour I sat back on my haunches, smeared sweat from my forehead and chest with a muddy hand, and realized I hadn’t the faintest clue what to do in all that newly upturned dirt. I stood up and surveyed what I’d done. It looked like the bed had been invaded by a family of burrowing rodents. I plunged the trowel into the ground to its hilt and left it sticking there, something to mark the effort. Mollis inertia cur tantan diffuderit imis oblivionem sensibus: Why should softness of indolence so have imbued all my senses and lulled me into lethargy? Lulled? Am I lulled here? No. Not lulled. Quelled. By my own instincts. Oblivionem sensibus. Much as if I, in a parching of thirst, had been greedily drinking the waters of forgetfulness.

  I drop the pen and again admire my powers of recollection. It has been years since I committed these lines to memory, changed my name, and re-presented myself to the world as Quintus Horatius Flaccus. The only difference between the Quintus Horatius Flaccus of Augustan times and myself, the QHF of the here and now, is that the first Horace—who retired to his Sabine farm to escape the bustle of Rome—was a social climber and a nice guy, whereas I am without any social ambitions whatsoever and have never considered myself, nor do I know how to be, nor have I ever striven to be—nice.

  Still, my identity is bound to the name I have taken, Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Call it an act of forced continuity that has bound me to the name while leaving the poet to roam freely in the surviving body of his work. I have found justification for my wanton act in countless passages from Selected Philosophical Essays. It doesn’t matter to me which views are current and which outmoded. The thought is the significant proposition, right? So I’ll take whatever I can get from philosophers and from poets alike. I am QHF for the present. I might just as well be Diogenes or Marcus Aurelius or Jesus Christ. But, thankfully, I lack most of the discipline and all of the ambition.

  It is time to go out and get some groceries. Fortified by wine, I gather my pack and put on my shoes and step outside into the evening. The air has cooled.

  The walk is almost twice as far as Foodway, but I won’t go there anymore since the manager shooed me away for loitering. I wasn’t loitering. I was observing—and with great ethnographic detachment, I should add. Riteway is at the northern end of town, on the strip that caters to the people who live in the suburban ranch tracts, the white-shirted engineers of Semantech who moved here in one of the plate-tectonic shifts of the American economy. Riteway is spanking new, a cavernous bazaar filled not just with household provisions but with all sorts of prepared exotica. Its name suggests the shifting premise of consumerism, a shift from the practical to the fanciful. While the name Foodway is pragmatic and informative, the name Riteway is precisely the opposite and, in subtle and complex language, suggests the rite of consumption as an aesthetic ritual. On top of everything, I hate the walk out here. There are no sidewalks, and there is no way around the four-lane highway or the bottle-strewn underpasses.

  I enter the supermarket. The harsh neon stabs at my eyes, and I pause for a moment inside the pneumatic entrance to allow them to adjust. From moonless, starlit streetlight to the hard blue-white, twenty-four-hour daylight of Riteway.

  I take a plastic hand basket and begin my search up and down the aisles. My mouth is dry from walking and red wine. I drink an entire bottle of Crystal Mountain Spring Water, to the astonishment of a lady pushing a mountain of groceries. She maneuvers around me, casts a look of suspiscion, her child riding marsupially in the burgeoning cart. I drop the empty bottle into my basket along with another one for the walk home and continue up the aisle behind the moving mountain. She takes up three-quarters of the aisle with her bulk. She moves slowly on tiny running-shoe-shod feet, her head swinging side to side like a tiller as she selects among brand names, a wad of clipped coupons in her fist. She stops and backs her cart up slightly, blocking the aisle. I turn and walk back the other way.

  There is a steady flow up and down each aisle. I try to adjust myself to the pace but am unable to get it right. It seems timed; people sweeping along to Muzak down aisle after sterile aisle of colorful packaging and stock display. As I dart up and down I imagine the infrared God’s-eye view of this neon-lit parade of hungry organisms.

  At last I find the rice. I can choose between boxes or plastic bags or boiling pouches or premeasured, EZ-Pour containers. I heft one ten pound bag of white and one ten pound bag of brown. Twenty pounds should keep me away from here for the next month.

  “You can buy bulk out at the co-op,” a voice from behind me intones.

  I turn. It’s the librarian, Mohr, looking pale and splotchy under his wig and behind his thick horn-rims.

  “Horatius Quintus Flaccus, I presume.” He smiles, a strange clacking at the corners of his mouth, and extends a hand.

  “Mr. Mohr. Hello.” I grasp his hand lightly, a weak articulation of bones, and almost ask what he is doing here. It is hard to believe that he actually eats.

  “The prices are more reasonable at the co-op.”

  I hold the basket with both hands, bounce it lightly against my knees. “A co-op?”

  Mohr nods. “I buy everything I can there. Come here only out of absolute necessity.”

  I look at the contents rolling around in his basket. It is an effort for him to push the metal cart around. His breathing is audible.

  He is still talking. “Out of town a way, about ten miles north on 47. It’s in a barn that used to be part of a dairy. It’s really very handy.”

  “Not for me, I’m afraid. I don’t have a car.”

  “Oh. Well, yes. Then it is too far.”

  We stand there for a moment. Mohr seems unsure what to say next. He is looking into my basket. “How do you manage all of that?”

  “I carry it in my pack.” I turn slightly so he can see it hanging empty on my back.

  “You can carry it all on your back?”

  I nod.

  “I see,” he says, gripping the handle of his cart as if he needs it to hold him up. With the wig slightly askew on his head, he looks like something that came to life under a Christmas tree sometime during the last century. I shift my basket into my left hand and step around him. He moves the cart slightly to accommodate me, looking at my basket as though he were trying to imagine lifting it himself.

  “See you at the library.” I continue down the aisle.

  As I reach the end of it, the fat woman rounds the corner and swings her cart into me. We face off for a startled moment, a tinge of red twisting into her round Dutch-boy face. Instead of backing away so I can pass, the woman tries to maneuver around me, pinning me between a pillar and the row of shelves.

  “Back up,” I tell her, but she ignores me, suety little arms struggling with the mountain of food.

  “Back up,” I repeat.

  She lets out little puffs of air. “I’m trying!” The child riding in the cart has twisted around to look, a purple fruit bar jammed into its mouth. The woman gives the cart a mighty tug and pulls it backward, but she can’t contain the momentum and it swerves into a display, bringing down an avalanche of cereal boxes. The child lets out a yelp. The woman’s face becomes a panicked red. “I have a child here,” she manages to splutter with indignation. “I have a child with me.” I slide around her cart and step over the pile of boxes. “Do you understand? A child!”

  I don’t have the slightest idea what she means. She says it as though I have violated some subtle supermarket etiquette that gives her the right of way.

  “A child. Do you understand?” She
seems to want me to respond. I can’t imagine what it is she is trying to tell me, so I turn and heft my basket for her to see. “And I have rice. Long-grain basmati rice!”

  A clerk sweeps by us and begins to restack the fallen boxes. The woman begins babbling at him. I go stand in the checkout line.

  “Can I offer you a lift?”

  Mohr has lined up behind me, holding his giant metal cage before him like a battering ram. “That would be great,” I tell him, emptying the items from my basket onto the conveyer belt. I follow them up toward the waiting cashier. Mohr pushes in behind me, lifts the items from his cart, 62 assembles them neatly on the conveyor belt, laying down a plastic rod to separate his things from mine.

  The cashier drags my purchases across the scanner, and I put them into my pack.

  “Soon we’ll have this stuff too.” Mohr is talking to me. “Scanning technology. The state is promising it by the end of the year. The information superhighway.” He fishes in his billfold as he talks. “Of course, all the technology in the world won’t get people to read books. Or return them on time.” He pays the cashier, who drops the bag containing his groceries into his shopping cart. “Or stop stealing.”

  I follow him out the door and offer to carry his bag, but he waves me off with a wobbly gesture, saying he can manage. The arc-lit lot hums with electricity and idling cars and the strains of Muzak piped outside through speakers recessed into the store’s awning. Mohr walks slowly. I try to imagine which car is his and am surprised when he stops beside an enormous old station wagon, the kind with fake wooden panels.

  Mohr’s facility with the outsized vehicle amazes me. We whip out of the lot and into the flow of traffic. He drives with exaggerated ease, the way some older people do, as though the automobile were a giant prosthetic device. The back of the car is filled with boxes that, I assume, must contain books.

  “Where do you live?”

  “West Street.”

  He thinks for a minute. “I don’t think I know where that is.”

  I explain that I’m not sure of the best route and point out the general direction. “I’ve always walked,” I tell him.

  “I see,” he says. “That’s a long walk with that weight on your back.”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “You would have to be.”

  We drive in silence for the rest of the way. As he turns onto West Street, Mohr begins to cough, a few light hacks that, by the time we pull up to my house, become a fit.

  “Are you all right?” I ask before getting out.

  Mohr holds onto the wheel with one hand and with the other holds a handkerchief to his mouth, coughing blindly into it. “Just … a … 63 …” The tendons on his neck strain beneath his collar, his wig askew, face deep red.

  “Come inside,” I tell him. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  Mohr nods, holds the handkerchief to his mouth, and tries to clear his throat. “Just need. A minute,” he manages to say.

  “You want me to bring it to you?”

  He shakes his head, gets out of the car, and follows me up the walkway toward the house.

  The back door slams, stopping me in my tracks. “Wait here.” I peel the pack from my shoulders and drop it on the ground, sprint around the house. It is too dark to see, but as I round the corner I hear the sound of someone crashing through the underbrush in the woods behind the house. I halt, squint into the darkness. As my eyes adjust I begin to walk across the open yard toward the wall of trees at the bottom of the yard. Without a moon it is impossible to make out anything but indistinct shapes. In the woods a flashlight beam slices through the darkness, then shuts off. I plunge toward it but stumble in the thicket. The beam flashes on again, this time farther away. I cup my hands to my mouth. “I know it’s you! You little fucker!” I stand and wait. The beam flicks on again, then off. He has reached the rail line and will follow it out of the woods.

  I hear Mohr coughing as I make my way back across the yard to the house. He is sitting on the porch steps when I return. “A burglar?”

  I fetch my pack from the middle of the walkway where I dropped it. “Let’s see.”

  The front room is undisturbed. Mohr follows me into the kitchen and stands in the doorway. There is shattered glass on the floor, and the back door is wide open.

  “Be careful,” Mohr wheezes behind me.

  “My wine glass.” I stoop and pick up the flat disk that was the base. The empty bottle is still on the table. “He knocked it over when he ran out.”

  “You’d better call the police,” Mohr says.

  I leave the kitchen to check upstairs. The second floor seems undisturbed. The bedroom is as I left it, sheets turned down on the bed. Selected Philosophical Essays face down on the floor, window open. A warm breeze. No signs of intrusion.

  “Did you call?” Mohr asks when I return to the kitchen. He is standing by the sink holding a glass of water. It is the first time I’ve seen him in light other than library or grocery-store neon. He looks less wilted. His wig seems more natural; his features are etched, not sunken.

  “I don’t think I want to. I’ve had enough of police lately.”

  “But someone broke in.”

  “They didn’t take anything.”

  “You should report it.”

  I open the broom closet. My case of Château Bel-Air is still there. I lift the lid, no bottles missing. It is the only thing I can think of I might miss. That and my—notebook! I turn to look at the table. The notebook is gone. “Goddamnit!”

  Mohr is startled.

  “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn him!”

  Mohr puts his glass in the sink. “Call the police,” he intones.

  “They won’t do anything. Goddamnit! Besides, I know who it was.”

  “Report him.”

  I go upstairs to call. When I come back down Mohr is standing outside on the front porch. He seems unsure whether to stay or to leave.

  “The little bastard stole my notebook.”

  Mohr lowers himself onto the top step and sits with his back hunched. “Nothing is safe,” he says.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  Mohr nods. “Thank you, yes.”

  I stay inside, behind the screen. A slight breeze blows through it into the house.

  “I have these coughing fits fairly often.” He clears his throat, his back still turned, facing into the yard. “I have lung cancer and a touch of emphysema.”

  I let the screen door slam behind me and sit down on the rocking chair. The chirping of cicadas in the trees fills the silence, and I resist the temptation to say I’m sorry. I rock for a moment, waiting for Mohr to continue. But he doesn’t. His shoulders rise and fall with the effort of breathing. “How long do they say you’ll live?”

  Mohr lets out a weak guffaw that makes his shoulders shudder. He looks back at me with crooked mirth, seeming to appreciate the brutal banality of the question. “I was supposed to die six months ago.”

  We sit in silence, the warm summer air circulating by a breeze that seems to be picking up. I watch the moths swarm around the bare light-bulb that juts from the wall at the far end of the porch and wonder if it will rain. What is there to say?

  The police arrive. The patrol car glides to a stop directly behind Mohr’s car. A figure emerges, tests a flashlight beam against the blackness, then approaches.

  “Someone call in a complaint?”

  Mohr stands up, keeping a hand on the post for support.

  “This kid keeps harassing me,” I begin.

  The cop tucks his long flashlight under his arm and holds up both hands to stop me. He asks if I am the one who called in the complaint.

  “Yes,” I say and begin to tell him what happened.

  The cop interrupts me after a few seconds. “You chased him into the woods?”

  “He was already in the woods by the time I got to the back of the house.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Nothing happened. He got away. I ca
me inside and found a broken glass and my notebook missing.”

  “Notebook?”

  “My journal.”

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  I escort the cop inside. Mohr stays out on the porch. I tell the cop about Schroeder, and he asks a few questions that I can’t answer—where he lives, if he goes to school, where he works. We go back outside, where Mohr is still leaning against the post. The cop switches his flashlight back on and says he’s going to walk around the house.

  “I’ll be on my way now,” Mohr says as the cop clops past him down the steps. “Sorry about the trouble.”

  “Do you drink wine?”

  “With all the drugs I’m on?”

  “Have a glass before you go.” The impulsive tone in my voice startles him.

  He hesitates. “It’s late. I should go.”

  “It’ll do you good,” I say with the false authority that can only be used with the troubled, the sick, and the dying.

  Mohr accepts with a delighted nick of the head.

  The cop reappears. “That about does it, I guess.”

  “I hope you find the little bastard and lock him up.”

  “We’ll look into it, sir.”

  Mohr has a nervous tick that I imagine would be more pronounced if he weren’t sick. As we sit at the kitchen table he bounces his leg, holding onto his kneecap as though to steady it. It seems to exhaust him, and, unable to sustain the level of energy, he shifts around on his chair uncomfortably, taking unsteady sips from the glass I’ve poured him. We face each other across the table, each trying to be good company in his own way and to take this unexpected bout of sociability in stride. Mohr seems as unused to amiable conversation as I am. Under the yellow light we begin groping toward a topic of conversation. The Wilkington Mound starts us off. Mohr begins with the Dutch Reformed minister who moved his congregation here in the 1840s and who wanted to build his church on top of the mound.

  “Are you prepared to die?” The question pops out spontaneously. I immediately regret having asked it.