Horace Afoot (2 page)

“Everything was published before 1914. My collection stops at World War I.”

“Why?”

“No reason. I just decided to keep it that way.”

“Why do you collect the stuff?”

“Like to play them. On my Hammond.”

“I never heard anything like it before.”

“Won’t hear nothing like it again, neither. These songs are so old my grandmother can’t remember them.” The tape played on, leaving me to look out at the passing landscape. He let me out at the interstate exit for Oblivion.

“You sure you want to get out here?”

I said yes.

“Just because you like the name of the town?”

I said yes again.

He shook his head, let out a long and heartfelt Sweeeet Jesus, and let me go, honking the horn good-bye.

I walked the four miles into the center of town and bought a newspaper. Nobody paid attention to me as I sat on the bench in front of the Town Hall. I liked that and looked through the classifieds, saw an ad for a house to rent, and walked out to where I now live. What I liked about the house were the scrubby little bird nests under the eaves of the sinking front porch.

“I’ll clear those away tomorrow,” the landlord said. He was a small, thin man with missing teeth. He said he’d been living alone in the house ever since his wife died. Cancer got her.

“Leave the nests,” I said.

“Whatever you want.”

We shook hands, and the following week he moved to Florida.

At the bank Derringer, the manager, waits for me at his desk. Everybody in Oblivion thinks I’m a lunatic. But Derringer just thinks I’m a loafer. He has put the word out, and the word is that I’m not insane,
just a rich weirdo. People generally leave me alone. Not because being weird is intimidating but because being rich is. Derringer pats his fingertips together, asks me what I think of such and such and so and so and up and down, and I always say I don’t know. This is only a formality. All day long as he manages the bank, Derringer manipulates a rubber ball in his hand. He rolls the ball between his palms, on his desk top, squeezes it. He would like to become my friend. He thinks there’s a secret he will discover by making friends with me. He squeezes his rubber ball and leans back in his chair and grins. “How much do you need today?” I tell him, and he always gets it for me. He likes to fill out all the slips of paper, and I don’t. A nice arrangement all around.

I leave the bank and sit on the bench in the square in front of the Town Hall, the one I sat on when I first arrived in Oblivion. Across the street are Oblivion’s first buildings, built around the turn of the century. Recently renovated, their facades newly painted, they are now occupied by Oblivion’s young professional establishment. A lawyer’s office in the old mayor’s house, a real estate broker, an accountant, a dentist, and the temporary offices of a candidate for the state Senate. There is a sandwich shop that is never open and a movie theater that is losing business to the multiplex out at the mall. In a building on the corner dated 1919, someone has set up a shop called Purrfection that sells things to people who love cats: jewelry with cats, lawn and garden accessories with cat motifs, tee shirts and key chains and toys and games—all having to do with cats. On the next block is my bank, the public library, a restaurant called the Corn Tassel, and a building with an auto-parts store on the ground floor and a secondhand bookstore above it. That block looks slightly shabbier than the one directly across from the Georgian-style Town Hall with the plaza and the bench and the monument to the sons of Oblivion who died in the two World Wars.

I eat a stalk of celery, pretend there are no trucks or cars or foul-smelling air. I sit to pass the time. Sometimes I’ll have company on the bench, and sometimes that company will want to talk. I usually go along, depending on the topic. If I’ve had a string of bad luck on the telephone the night before, I’ll try to steer the conversation. It’s hard to get people to respond to certain things. On the telephone people are spontaneous.

“Nice morning.”

“Yes.” I nod and take another stalk of celery from the pocket of my jacket. I chew slowly and think of all the forged and phony Christian sayings I’m capable of, the ones that resemble the twittering of birds and that always dissolve in my mouth before they can be uttered—such as, “The love and peace of Jesus Christ be with you, my brother.” Or something like that. I wish I could make myself talk like that. I know that if I did the word would go out that yes, I’m a nut—but a pious one, and if that happened they’d probably want to elect me mayor of the town.

“I remember when that there was a feed store.” The man inclines his head in the direction of Purrfection, leans forward with his elbows on his knees, and rubs his hands. “Can’t figure how they stay in business.”

“With cats, it would seem.”

“That’s what I mean. I can’t figure.”

“Was it always a feed store?”

“Feed store moved out, let’s see, around 1963, I’d say. Then Harlan’s Hardware opened up, stayed there must’ve been twenty, twenty-five years. Then they moved out. Now it’s a goddamn pet shop that don’t even sell pets.” He rubs his palms together for a moment, then turns and offers me a handshake. “Name’s Maver. Ed Maver.”

I take his hand. “Horace,” I say. “Quintus Horatius Flaccus.”

“That’s some name you got there, son. What do people call you?”

“Horace. Just Horace.”

“Pleased to meet you, Horace. I seen you walking around here for a while now. Been meaning to make your acquaintance. You live in town?”

“West Street.”

“That’s a fair hike.”

I nod.

“You don’t own an automobile, I’ve noticed.”

“No, I don’t.”

He nods, leans back, and crosses a knob-kneed leg. I finish my celery, and we sit watching a large truck maneuver a tight left turn onto Main Street.

“My son-in-law is sales manager over at Chevyland. If you ever get around to it.”

“Do they sell cats there?”

Maver laughs. “Not unless you call a Chevrolet a cat.” He idly rubs the ankle resting on his knee. “Come to think of it, what in hell is a Chevrolet?”

“A word invented by General Motors.”

“It don’t mean nothing? What about Chevy? There’s a word that’s got to mean something.”

“It’s a variant of chivvy.”

“What in hell does chivvy mean?”

“To harass.”

Maver looks at me from the corner of his eye. But his instinct is to talk on, to dispel his intuition. “Well, is that a fact? I’ll have to tell Pete that. He’ll appreciate it.”

These sorts of conversations come my way every so often. I find myself going along on a ride I never asked for. Occasionally I’ll pop a few questions, the telephone sort. But more often I end up with somebody like Maver whose presence becomes tedious the moment the talk veers into the personal. As expected, he goes right into let me tell you about my this, and I have a that, and such and such reminds me of the time so and so. I sit and chew my stalk of celery while Maver talks.

“I told Pete there was nothing doing. The man can’t expect to get up and move his whole family.…” His volubility and passion for anecdote soon combine into a frothing storytelling mess that leaves me wondering if he’ll ever notice I’m not listening to a word he is saying. I can’t stand to listen to people when they launch into anecdotal orbit and drift along as if nobody and nothing else matters. The sameness of people’s orations makes me realize how common all individual experience really is. Is subjectivity just an illusion? Certainly, the more a person prattles on about his or hers, the duller and duller he or she becomes. But the marvelous objectivity of this observation doesn’t strike me as all that grand in the end, either. Every life is many days, day after day. Funny how this monotonous little statement elevates the fact of everyday existence to the realm of Truth. I like Truth because silence is its natural companion. Facts are loud and boring.

I interrupt Maver. “Someone once wrote that every life is many days, day after day.”

Maver turns to me with a puzzled smile, scratches the back of his head, and nods. “True. True.” Then he returns to Pete, his son-in-law manager at Chevyland, whom, I assume, he has mentioned so I’ll go buy a car from him.

I get up to leave and for no particular reason say, “The peace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you, Mr. Maver.”

Maver is silenced. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Horace,” he calls after me.

I walk up Main Street, the thoroughfare leading into and out of town, and turn onto Liberty, a quiet, shaded street where the well-to-do families of Oblivion built their homes almost a century ago. There are sidewalks here, concrete slabs nicely upturned by the roots of the old elms that grow along the street. The houses are set back from the road, their wide lawns shaded by the mature trees. A car passes by. I hear a thud and a crack. The car slows, stops. The driver gets out, leaving his door open.

“Did you see them?” He approaches me, a man in his thirties wearing a suit.

“Who?”

“The kids.”

“No.”

“This is the second time I’ve come down this street. They’ve been at it all morning.” He fumes and steps back toward his car to have a look. He runs his fingers over a tiny dent in the side door. “Goddamn kids are throwing rocks.”

“What a good idea.”

The man is engrossed in his inspection. I want to tell him the kids are only trying to preserve the tranquillity of their street by discouraging people like him from driving down it. Suddenly he discovers a crack in the passenger window. “Goddamn those little bastards!” He leaps into his car and pulls over to the curb. He slams the door and stalks across a lawn to the nearest house. I try to spot the band of little Luddites. But they are well concealed in the bushes and trees of their neighborhood, tittering
quietly among themselves as the enraged driver goes from house to house complaining.

It is noon. The sky is clear. I sit in a rusty, wrought-iron gazebo at the end of Liberty Street. It is set in the center of a small, weedy park that forms the southern boundary to this section of the town. A plaque on the gazebo reads
Bequest of Major Perry Wilkington, USA, in memory of his beloved wife and daughter
. I’ve seen all of their tombstones in the Presbyterian cemetery. Major Perry Wilkington lived from 1851 until 1920. He is buried with his wife, Ann S. Wilkington; his daughter, Martha Wilkington Murrow; and his grandson, Perry Wilkington Murrow. His wife, who was also born in 1851, died in 1884. His daughter was born in 1871 and died on August 6, 1894. In childbirth, it would appear. Perry Wilkington Murrow, his grandson, lived only from August 6, 1894, to August 12, 1894. I’ve knitted together an outline of their lives based on the gazebo plaque and the dates on their tombstones, and I imagine the following: Martha married a man named Murrow. Since he isn’t buried with her, I surmise that he left the town soon after August 12, 1894, and never returned. I surmise too that Murrow was a cad, a seducer; maybe he married her for her money. When she died, either the old major ran him out of town or he ran away of his own accord. I’ve found no Murrow buried anywhere in the cemetery. None of the women in the major’s life lived for very long. I imagine that the last twenty-six years of his life were spent in kind of dignified sorrow and that he erected the gazebo as a monument to both his family and his grief.

A dog appears at my feet, looks up at me, panting. I glance around for the owner.

“I see we’re alone.”

The dog pants, sits at my knee, and stares at me.

Stomachs infrequently hungry disdain any commonplace victuals
, I quote from my Roman namesake. A car turns up Liberty Street, then screeches to a stop as a hail of stones falls on it. The driver, a woman, gets out to inspect the car, then continues on slowly, scanning the street for culprits. I’m in an expansive mood and continue with a few fragments of Horace’s second satire.
Values of simple and frugal existence, good friends, is my subject.
Not any notion of mine, but the doctrine of farmer Oféllus, unsystematic philosopher, schooled in no wisdom but Nature’s
.

The dog begins to sniff around the bench. I pat it and it looks at me, tongue lolling. I take a carrot from my pocket and begin to eat it. The dog sits and watches me, begging.