Horace Afoot (35 page)

“Horace. You asleep?” A creak of footsteps coming toward the bed. A few moments pass—eternally long. My eyes flutter under tightly clamped lids. Rustling. The sheet is lifted, and her warm body is suddenly next to me.

“Hey!” I open my eyes.

She puts her fingertips to my lips, fumbles with the buttons on my shirt. I twist away. She leans over, presses her lips to mine, and my body goes slack. I lie motionless while she struggles with buttons and zippers. Begin to cooperate, hands seeking her. In moments the bed is a tumble of sheets and clothes. She straddles me. “C’mon, Horace,” she whispers, manipulating me with her hands, her lips. It is dawn and the room is
growing lighter. I lift my head from the pillow and watch while she tries to lick and suck me into hardness. Minutes fly. Nothing happens.

“I can’t.” I twist to break away, dejected, also half relieved.

“It’s okay,” she says softly and slides her slender body alongside me. “It’s okay.”

“I want to,” I find myself saying, half true, half false.

“I know. Don’t worry. It’s okay.” She runs a hand through my hair. “It’s better this way.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. Because it just is.” She cuddles next to me. The bed is too small for the two of us. I feel the lump of gun underneath the mattress. We lie together in silence while the room grows slowly light. A din of contradictory longings—withering desire. Contentment and unfulfillment. Have I been waiting for this all along? I think I have. I don’t know.

“Why did you come here?”

The question is ambiguous. She doesn’t answer immediately. “I’m lonely,” she says after a while.

I want to ask her about Schroeder, but jealousy prevents me. Already I am making calculations. “Why did you break in?” I wait for her to answer, and when she doesn’t respond I follow up with the first tallied sum. “Obviously it wasn’t because you wanted to fuck me.”

She sits up, embraces her knees. “I told you already,” she says. “I need money.”

I am already sorry for what I have said but am also helpless and can’t stop the whirring of calculations. I see the vertebrae of her spine, a gentle arch. I begin to count them. I begin to count everything, arms, legs, fingers. I am helpless for counting. I want to count her, to trap her with my counting. “To pay off debts?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

“What for?”

No response. I begin to feel myself giving in to the modal logic of emotional need. “What for?”

“To get out of here.”

The room is light now. Dawn gives way to early morning. I am tumbling, drawn to her and repelled, happy and disgusted with myself—
240 prick and all. Were we to make tender love, go away, and live together happily ever after I don’t think my self-disgust could be allayed. Neither could it were we to reaffirm all the delusions of love and romance to each other and strive instead for friendship or some variation of the platonic ideal. Neither could it were we to go our separate ways and pretend this little interlude never happened.

I climb over her and go to the window. Sylvia remains in bed. We do not speak but quietly take in the strange languor of the morning. I am unembarrassed by my nakedness.

“How much money do you need?”

She turns to me, unsmiling, and pulls the sheet to her chin. “Enough for me and Tom to get to Mexico. Or farther.”

The mention of Schroeder’s name sends the calculator whirring again, jealousy, plain and simple. She turns her face to the wall, intuiting my reaction. I lean against the window, cold balls on the sill. “Meet me at the bank this afternoon,” I tell her, calculator spitting tape out all over the floor. “Don’t tell Schroeder. Just come alone.”

She turns to me. Her face betrays nothing. She throws off the sheet. “I want to fuck you for it,” she says evenly. “I want to fuck you for every cent of it.”

“You can have the money.”

“No way,” she says. “I want you to pay it to me.”

She is lying on the bed, breasts splayed across her chest, hands moving across her pubis. An effort of arousal. I notice her sour smell, alcohol and perspiration, the wrinkles at her eyes, the cold stubs of her painted toes. The calculator crashes. She is as remote from me as any stranger, and I am a stranger to myself. She cannot know me nor I her and as these thoughts fly through my head a vacuum yawns inside and my prick begins to stiffen.

Around noon I am awakened by knocking. Sylvia has gone. I go downstairs and open the door.

The neighbor kid is on the porch examining the crow in the basket. “They attacked the bus and killed all the terrorists,” he tells me.

I stand in the doorway, shirtless, uncomprehending. The kid thinks I’m waiting for him to continue. “They killed seven civilians too.”

“Wait a minute.” I go into the kitchen to get my money. When I return the kid is patting the crow on the head. “Careful. She’s been hurt.”

“Can she talk?” the kid asks.

“You’re thinking of mynah birds. She’s a crow.” I hand the kid his dollar. “Thanks for the update.”

The kid crams the bill into his pocket, gives the crow one last stroke with his finger. “Good girl, Dracula,” he says and then leaps from the porch and races off.

The police are at the mound. I see their cars from a distance, sheriff, deputy sheriff, State Highway Patrol. The sky is cloudless, the air hot and stagnant. There are no flocks of birds today. Passing by the field—a short, shuffling indeterminism—I don’t think of Hemingway or van Gogh and suicides but of her. All morning I have had little else on my mind. Despite all efforts to dissuade myself from thinking so, today seems marked off from all previous ones. Making love with Sylvia has caused some ineffable change in the chemistry of the universe. Things look different, color, shape, the arrangement and dispersal of objects in space. A reaction has occurred that can’t be reversed, and I am helpless over and against it. Strangest of all, my feelings seem completely independent of my will. All morning I have tried to take it in stride. A fuck is a fuck is a fuck. It is what I will have to think when, later today, I meet her at the bank to pay her for it.

I return once again to the question
of ordo amoris
, where the logic of the heart doesn’t borrow from the logic of the understanding and the heart can love blindly and the understanding hate insightfully ad infinitum and vice versa. There is no law in this strange
ordo
that stipulates that the two can or must ever be in accord. What then of the
ordo tranquillus
? Or, at the very least, a dumb state of the emotions where the conflicts between heart and head have been put down and our inner language no
longer riots at our core but we are internally bathed in the rhetoric and psychology of contented feeling states. Is that happiness? I hope not. I can’t decide which is worse—loony riot or stupid contentment. Both seem equally bad.

The first person who comes into view as I approach is Detective Ross. He is conferring with the sheriff, Dr. Palmer, and two others. An ambulance idles at the far end of the lot. Middleton and Norris are sitting on the rotten picnic bench smoking cigarettes.

Ross sees me from the corner of his eye and waves without breaking the conversation. I go to the bench. The two archaeologists nod hello.

“What’s going on?”

Norris puffs on his cigarette and gives his beard a tug before answering. “We found a body.”

“Remains, more like it,” says Middleton.

“Remains, body.” Norris puffs again, waves his cigarette. “Intrusive burial.”

Middleton, toying with her black braid, chuckles. “That it was, for sure. But not, strictly speaking, of an archaeological nature.”

“More of a forensic one, I’d say, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Middleton?”

“I’ve dug up my fair share of bones, Norris.”

“Wearing jeans and Nikes?”

They are both amused.

“Where did you find it?”

Norris points up to the summit, where poles and stakes protrude from the earth like pins from a cushion. The police are unfurling a yellow tape, sealing off the area.

“You’ve taken a good chunk off the top.”

“Not enough,” says Middleton. “The good stuff is way down. We’re still finding last year’s picnics.”

“And bodies.”

“Intrusive burial number one.”

“Can’t have a mound and not have intrusives,” says Norris. “By the way, how is Mr. Mohr?”

“He’s so cute,” Middleton says.

“He’s not doing too well. I doubt he’ll be back out.”

“That’s sad,” Middleton says. “I love the way he got all dressed up for us. It was sweet.”

“A regular Schliemann,” says Norris.

Palmer walks over with a cowled expression and sits down at the end of the bench. “Give me a cigarette,” she says. Norris offers her his pack, and she fishes in it with a slender finger, addresses herself to her colleagues. “They’re shutting us out.”

“They’re what?”

Palmer lights up, inhales deeply, then speaks, letting the smoke stream from her nostrils. “Until a forensics team has gone over the site.”

“They’ll ruin it,” Middleton says.

Palmer nods, runs a hand through her chopped hair.

Middleton stands up. “What did you tell them?”

“What could I say? We found them a body. Now they want to take over.”

“The whole site?”

“That’s right.”

“The whole fucking site? Why not just the burial?”

“The whole Tucking site.” Palmer masks her agitation with exaggerated coolness.

“We might as well clear out now,” Middleton says. She is pacing, hands in her back pockets. “Shit. This’ll put us back a week.”

“They’re talking two.” Palmer says evenly.

“Two! What for?”

“For the bureaucracy. Our permit is suspended. We have to reapply.”

“Son of a bitch! They can’t do that to us.”

“Tell the sheriff,” Palmer says, smoking calmly. “Do you know what a grackle is?”

Norris is caught short. “A grackle?”

“Some kind of bird, isn’t it?” says Middleton.

“That’s right. A black bird. And this is some kind of grackle nesting ground, and the local grackle club is upset that we are out here messing it up.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Christ! Look at that factory across the street! Are they upset about that too? I fucking doubt it.”

“The sheriff thinks it is possible that it might come up during the review of the permit. They complained about not having been consulted the first time around.”

“That’s ridiculous. They’re going to make us wait two weeks?”

“I’m not waiting two weeks,” Middleton says. “I’ll come back, but no way I’m wasting two weeks here.”

“I need a drink,” says Norris.

Detective Ross, the sheriff, and two people from the State Highway Patrol are conferring by the ambulance. “Don’t go anywhere, Mister,” the sheriff tells me. “I got some questions for you.”

“For me?”

“That’s right. Stick around.”

I peer inside the back door of the ambulance. A wire mesh litter and on it an industrial olive-green bag. Zipped shut. A clump of grass and muddy handprints on the bag, mild reek of newly upturned earth and rubber. Ross approaches. “Been meaning to drop by Mr.—ah—Quintus, is it?”

“Lucian.”

We shake hands. The detective scratches the back of his head. “Now, I don’t recall …”

“I changed my name to Lucian of Samosata.”

Ross reaches for his handkerchief. “Now, why’d you go and do that? I kind of liked Quintus Horatio Flack jacket.” He is wearing his signature blue summer seersucker minus the jacket, tie loosened around his neck, collar unbuttoned. He peers into the back of the ambulance. “They think he’s been buried there about a year. We’ll see what the coroner says.” He steps away from the ambulance, motions for me to follow. “Sheriff tells me you still been spending a fair amount of time out here.”

“I walk out now and then.”

“Remember seeing anything looked like a funeral?” He grins.

I shake my head.

“Down there, back around?” He points. “Underneath a bush?”

“No.”

“Whoever put him there wasn’t in too big of a hurry. They got down almost two feet.”

“They said the body was decomposed. How do you know it was a man?”