Horace Afoot (5 page)

I watch as he sorts through more drawers. Although his back is turned I can sense his pleasure. Like some neglected child with a collection, his identity seems subsumed by the contents of this room. I have no doubt that he knows the history of this town down to the minutest and most insignificant detail. It is also obvious that he is dying.

“So tell me,” he asks as he flips open a file drawer, “why are you interested in the mound?”

I push away from the table. “No particular reason. I pass it frequently on walks and enjoy the view from it.”

“That awful factory spoils it.” He opens a file drawer and begins to browse.

“I was arrested there the other day.”

“At the factory?”

“No, the mound. I saw smoke coming from the top and went to see what was going on, and the sheriff accused me of setting the fire.”

“Oh my. And they arrested you?”

“And fined me five hundred dollars.”

Mohr lurches between the drawers and shelves and vertical files. I wonder how long he has plied the upper story of this library, what he does after the library closes and he returns home. Does he have someone to dote on him? Does he dote on someone? Does he stand in front of the bathroom mirror and cry?

His voice assumes a strained quality. “There are people in the area who consider the mound a sacred place,” he says, hauling an oversized manila envelope from the back of an overfilled drawer.

“Indians?”

“There haven’t been any Indians here for over a century. It’s New Age types. You’re not one of them, I hope.”

I shake my head.

“Good. They come in here now and then asking for books. One came in about a year or so ago and handed me this two-hundred-page manuscript and demanded that I place it in the archive. I put it in the Idiot File over there. The Indians who built the mound, he claims, were tuned into some natural cosmic consciousness, and somehow the mound amplifies and broadcasts it for the benefit of adepts like himself who can tune into
it as if it were some noncommercial public radio station. Really, I don’t know where these people come from. Or where they learn that ecstatic babble.”

“I wonder that myself.”

“And why they feel compelled to sentimentalize the poor Indians. As if they haven’t suffered enough of the white man’s stupidities.” He puts the envelope containing the manuscript in front of me.

“I think I’ll pass.”

“If you’re ever in need of a good laugh,” he says, taking back the envelope and returning it to the drawer marked Idiot File.

“The sheriff called it an official historical site when he arrested me.”

The librarian coughs. “Funny. Don’t you think?”

“That it is called an official site?”

“That the government has appropriated it. As part of its own official history.”

I think about this and find myself wishing there were a telephone handy. I’d prefer to continue the conversation on the phone. Mohr is running out of breath; his sentences are coming out slower and slower. He sets another manila envelope down in front of me, and I pull up tightly to the edge of the table. “What’s this?”

“That is some of Major Wilkington’s correspondence. The mound was on his property. After fighting in the Indian Wars he became an advocate of Indian rights.” Mohr pauses for a moment while I peer into the manila envelope, then continues, “He expended quite an amount of energy preserving the mound. Stipulated that excavation could only be carried out under the auspices of the State Historical Society.” He stops, his breath exhausted.

I slide the contents onto the table and select a letter at random. It is written in an elegant nineteenth-century hand that I find difficult to read at first:

Hon. S. H. Parker
,

My Dear Sir; I am in receipt of your valued favor of recent date, and beg to say that I recently wrote Congressman Farris that I would take up the matter with Mr. Howell. I rather think your suggestion a good one, that a
commission or expert be appointed to investigate the matter. As I never tire of saying, the Indian, with whom over these last years I have had more than passing acquaintance, is being forgotten in the great onward march of civilization. It is only a matter of time when this mode of life will be an uncertain tradition, unless it be preserved in literature or in history. In my association with the Indian I have become aware that they lament this fact, for, like all proud people, they wish to be remembered at their best
.

“Don’t we all?” Mohr says, reading over my shoulder and leaning for support on the back of the chair.

I put the letter on the table. “Don’t we all what?”

“Wish to be remembered at our best.” He walks around to the other side of the table, puts a hand on his hip, shifts his puny weight, and fixes a look on me somewhere between disquiet and discomfort. His eyes swim in their broadened orbits behind his glasses. Then he turns away and looks at the ground.

Wilkington’s letter is spread before me on the table like so many fragile yet tangible moments of the past. Though I haven’t yet seen the lithographed maps and blurry photographs of Wilkington’s Oblivion, his handwriting brings it to life in my mind. I can imagine the wheel-rutted road, the billowing elm trees, the corn crop, the dogs and dust, and the barefoot children. A bucolic, sentimental portrait, and I can see it in the major’s leisurely, elegant scrawl.

“Will you be looking at more?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I know what I’m looking for.”

“Very well,” he says and begins to gather the material up from the desk.

I remain seated, wishing vaguely that I could do something with all this accumulated evidence of the past. But the mound is moot. The past is moot. Nothing remains to be done about either. They simply were.

“Has anyone ever used these materials? Written a book?”

“A history of the town?” He twists his mouth into a smile. “Well, yes and no,” he says. “I have been working on something for years. Nothing I’d ever want to publish. There have been county and state histories. But so far nothing about this town alone.”

I get up to leave, thanking the librarian for his help.

“Would you sign the log, please?” He slides a clipboard across the table. The last signature is two months old. I sign my name, then print it along with my address. I leave the column marked
Purpose of Visit
blank.

“Your name is Horace?”

“Yes.”

“We need your last name as well.”

“I never use it.”

“We need your full name, address, and telephone number. For our records.”

I fill out the form as told and hand the clipboard back to him.

“Quintus Horatius Flaccus?”

“That’s my full name.”

Mohr looks at me for a moment, disbelieving.

“Do you want proof?”

“I’ll be damned,” he says, shaking his head. He tries to laugh but begins to cough.

Short, shuffling indeterminism. The phrase pops into my mind on the way to the mound, inspired by my visit with Mohr. The way he spoke in short puffs of breath sent me in search of a metaphor, but all that comes to mind is the phrase
a short, shuffling indeterminism
. I have no idea what it means.

I am interrupted by a flock of blackbirds rising up from the cornfield. Two sharp reports—
pop pop
—and the birds lift up out of the field with a furious beating of wings. The sky fills with animals. They hover for a moment; then as if of one mind, bank away. Another volley of shots.
Pop pop pop
, and in seconds the flock is gone. Short, shuffling indeterminism.

A car rushes past me as I stand on the side of the road. Flutter of dust and dirt, of cornstalks and birds, of suicides—van Gogh. I think Hemingway killed himself in a cornfield too. The lives of both men reduced to—a short, shuffling indeterminism? The phrase rises up and up, some sort of coded message shot from my unconscious like a flare from a lifeboat.

Another car whooshes past. I start walking again. The mound is about a half mile up the road. I stop and scan the sky for more birds but see none. If the road were elevated slightly, I might have a view across the field. But the corn is at its peak, and I am walled in on one side by the
field and on the other by the fenced-in grass and asphalt wasteland that surrounds the missile factory, Semantech.

A figure bursts from the tall corn, stumbles in the shallow ditch that runs along the shoulder of the road. About thirty yards ahead. I see that it is a woman. A naked woman. She glances at me, terror stricken, and stumbles, then falls to the ground, where she remains without getting up. I run to her.

Her hands are bound behind her back. She twists her head and I see that her mouth is gagged with a piece of silver tape. She struggles to sit up, but the effort is too much and she slumps back onto her side, turns away from me in terror. I walk around so that she can see me, pat the air with my hands. “I won’t hurt you. Let me help you.”

She nods, squeezes her eyes shut. She struggles for breath. Her dark hair is tangled, clings with perspiration to the back of her neck and the sides of her face. She has scrapes and bruises all up and down her legs and on her arms and back. I lean toward her to remove the tape from her mouth, peel it away. “Oh God,” she wails, gulps in air, and dissolves into a slobbering, whimpering heap.

“It’s okay,” I repeat like a mantra, knowing it’s not. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” It takes a few minutes for her to catch her breath. I offer to untie her hands, and she rolls onto her side. As soon as they are free she rolls onto her stomach and sobs into the ground, cradling her head in her arms.

There is no traffic on the road, so I squat next to the woman and tell her in the most reassuring tones I can summon that I will get help and everything will be all right.

“Were you being shot at?”

The woman is too convulsed to hear or respond. Her head is a mass of tangled black hair buried in her arms.

“Was someone shooting at you?”

The woman does not respond. I begin to pace the side of the road, not knowing what to do. Do I go for help and leave her? No. Waiting is the only option. I pull off my shirt and step back down into the ditch. “Put this on.” The woman lifts her head, looks at me, startled, as though she had already forgotten my presence. Her right cheek is swollen and her
face is too beslobbered and contorted to judge her age. I hold the shirt out for her and she takes it and slips it on, then rolls into a fetal curl, facing away. I step back up onto the pavement. The sun is high and the heat is beginning to shimmer off the road. Strong sunlight on my shoulders and back. The air feels leaden. The only sound an ominous rustling of the cornfield.

At last a car rounds the bend up by the mound. I walk into the middle of the road, wave my arms over my head. The car slows and then pulls over to the side and crawls toward me, stopping cautiously ten yards away. I jog toward it.

The driver pokes his head out the window. I recognize Ed Maver, the man on the bench. He recognizes me too and pulls the car forward to close the short distance between us.

“A woman. Have to get her to a hospital.”

Maver looks puzzled. He doesn’t see anyone.

“She’s in the ditch over there.”

Maver is about to get out of the car.

“No. Wait. I’ll get her.”

The woman is lying face down. I crouch next to her. “I’m taking you to the hospital. Can you get up?”

She nods, face still to the ground so that all I see is a nest of dark, tangled hair. She lifts her head, allows me to help her to her feet.

Maver’s eyes open wide as we approach the car. He leaps out and races around to open the rear door. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” he says.

The woman crawls across the back seat and collapses on her side. I get in front. Maver yanks the gearshift down and slams the accelerator, kicking up a fierce storm of gravel and dust behind us.

“What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know. She came running out of the cornfield.”

Maver looks at me, at my bare chest, then over his shoulder into the rear seat.

“I found her. She ran out of the cornfield and collapsed. I gave her my shirt.”

Maver looks over his shoulder again. “Whad’ya suppose happened?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“No.”

“Was anyone chasing her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Looks like she’s been roughed up pretty bad.”

Maver takes a short cut to the hospital, turning down unfamiliar roads.

“What about the police? Hadn’t we better let them know?”

“She needs a doctor first.”

“Well, we oughta at least inform the sheriffs office. This is some sure-as-shit big-time trouble you got here.” Maver pulls up to the emergency room entrance. I go inside to find a nurse. A minute later the woman is being helped onto a stretcher by two orderlies. Maver stands by as the woman is wheeled through the automatic doors to the emergency room. “I’ll go park the car,” he says, hops back into the car, and drives away.

At the registration desk a young man is waiting for me. There is no sign of the woman. The stretcher has vanished. “I found her on the side of the road,” I tell the man. “She’d been running through a cornfield. Someone was chasing her, but I didn’t see who.”