Horace Afoot (24 page)

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?”

“Yup. My daughter.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“She’s deaf. Been deaf all her life. Anyway, the hernia. I’ve had it for years. Happened just after my wife died. Who’d you say you were?”

“Horace.”

“Don’t believe I know you.”

“You don’t.”

“What’re you calling for?”

“To find out if you’ve noticed the flowers.”

“You ain’t a social worker, are you?”

“No.”

“I been telling you people over there to stop pestering me.”

I try a few more, but nobody seems as distracted by the news as I am, so I put the telephone away and eat an early lunch. Around midday I head out to the mound to see if the archaeologists have turned up yet. Mohr says they’ve got all the permits they need. About a month ago the professor from the university came to go through the archives one more time. I didn’t have a chance to meet her. I was sick with a cold I caught walking back from Sylvia’s house. It was the worst cold I’ve ever had. It lingered for weeks. I haven’t seen or heard from Sylvia since that night. Every now and then I consider going over to the pharmacy to say hello. But something keeps me away, and I don’t know what it is. Or maybe I do.

All the way out Old Route 47 I notice the daffodils. The air is cool and clear. Small puffs of cloud move across the sky. A recent selected philosophical essay informs me that there is an
ordo amoris
at work in the world, a basic ethos. It is, simultaneously, the subjective ordering of love
and hate that lies at the center of our perception of the world
and
the objective order of what is worthy of love in all things, an independent order that can’t be created or destroyed but simply is. On the subjective side, it can be trampled and deformed and confused by any number of things: personal trauma, world events, the tenor of the times. The damage is not easy to repair. I wonder if Sylvia’s can ever be fixed?

Early spring is when the
ordo amoris
is most apparent—when the vast world swarms and stirs the heart and the passions and rekindles a many-sided interest in the things of this world. The philosopher wrote that the
ordo amoris
is what attracts and repels us to everything. It is what makes flowers beautiful. I have been struggling to get my
ordo
to work properly so that on this fine spring morning I may feel myself drawn outside toward whatever fate has in store for me. The daffodils help. And as I stride along the shoulder of the road I remind myself that without the
ordo amoris
, I could easily slip back into fearing contingencies, as I did for most of the winter, rather than offering myself up for them to do with me what they will.

There aren’t any archaeologists at the mound when I arrive. The padlock that secures the gate is rusted and shows no signs of having been opened recently. The ground is too soft for digging. They must be waiting for the weather to get warmer and the ground to dry so they can dig and sift more easily.

I climb the fence at my usual spot near the gate and drop into the perimeter, feeling more like an intruder than I did in winter when deep snow blanketed the ground. The path is muddy and slick. I lose my footing twice on the way up and wipe the mud from my palms on the trunk of the elm tree growing near the top. The snow has melted to reveal the same old charred logs in the fire pit. It is comforting to recognize these little details of the ground after so long and deep a winter. Something of a surprise too. I search for and find the remains of the empty Marlboro box in which I found the cigarette I smoked when the sheriff came to arrest me. I wish I had a cigarette to smoke now. The grass is damp, and I sit on a fallen branch on the side of the mound that faces town. The fields all around have been plowed. Brown furrows extend for acres in machine-dug parallel lines. The parking lot of Semantech is almost empty.

I sit for an hour in the warming rays of the sun. A few cars blow by but do not stop. They don’t even slow down. Birds in the elm tree keep up a steady chirping. I watch one high among the branches as it builds a nest. It flies away and returns again and again carrying the small twigs and sticks of its new home in its beak. The
ordo amoris
—if it is anything—is what comes to life at the observation of all these little facts of the world. I wonder where the bird’s old nest is? Was it corrupted by the passing of time? Did it fall? Or do birds abandon their homes and build new ones every season? The image of the abandoned nest begins to crowd my thoughts and forces an urgent inspiration.

It is time, again, to change my name.

At Town Hall a clerk shuffles through a filing cabinet and hands me a series of forms, circling the instructions with a pencil. “Come back when you’re done with step number four,” he says, scratching behind an ear with the end of the pencil. “We’ll fix you up with a court date.”

“The paperwork isn’t enough?”

“Not in this state it ain’t.” He taps the papers with his body-prober pencil. “Just do what I said and follow the instructions.” The petty authority in his voice is irritating. I gather the papers up and leave, feeling the man’s extruded presence cleaving to me until I’ve left the building.

I walk over to the library to fill out the forms. Mrs. Entwhistle and Mohr are standing next to the circulation desk when I enter the reading room. Mohr is not wearing his wig. His head is shaved, and he is dressed in a stylishly cut dark suit and tie.

“Horace. I’m glad you’re here,” he says with his usual difficulty. Mrs. Entwhistle stops speaking and nods curtly. Since Mohr left, a little over two months ago, she is growing less and less tolerant of my presence in the library. My reserve-shelf privileges are already being threatened on the grounds that space behind the circulation desk is limited. She makes a point of being nice to me. This she does in a nasal middle American vernacular so overladen with phony pleasantry it actually
hurts to hear it. Horace, I just haaate to have to have to aaask you. I hope you don’t miiiind … etc., etc.

“I like your suit.”

Mohr produces a dark gray fedora and perches it on his bald head, tugging the rim down rakishly to one side. The hat is a good touch and looks better than that awful wig; it adds some weight to him and gives the attenuated, lonely tendons at the back of his neck something to support. He looks like Fernando Pessoa—or one of his heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, maybe, Assistant Bookkeeper of the City of Lisbon—or just any mortally conscious poet from the first half of this century. He steps back so I can regard him more fully, produces a cane, and leans forward on it, both hands on the polished silver handle.