Horace Afoot (6 page)

“Have the police been informed?”

I shake my head. “Not yet.”

“Do you know her?”

“No.”

“Do you know her name?”

I shake my head again. “I’ve never seen her before.”

The man looks me over for a moment. “Have a seat,” he tells me and points to the waiting area with the pencil he is holding.

“Would you mind giving me my shirt back?” I hug my shoulders. “It’s cold in here.”

The man behind the desk picks up the telephone. He doesn’t respond to me now that he has told me where to wait. I ask again, and he points with the pencil in the annoying way desk clerks have of issuing small orders.

Maver enters through the automatic doors, spots me sitting in a corner of the waiting area, and barrels over.

“What’s the scoop?”

I shrug.

He sits down next to me and begins to talk. I tune him out, realizing that he will be impossible to get rid of. I sit with my arms crossed over my chest for warmth.

“You think she was raped?” Maver asks.

A pit opens up in my stomach. It feels like mild stage fright but without the flutters. I look at him without answering. Rape? It hadn’t occurred to me. Really. And the fact that it hadn’t hits me squarely over the head. How dumb. How could such an obvious thought have evaded me like that? Somehow all speculation stopped when I’d made the connection with the gunshots. Someone was shooting at her, and that was as far as I’d taken it. Rape hadn’t occurred to me at all. I leave Maver and go back to the desk.

“Can you get me my shirt?” I ask. “It’s freezing in here.”

The man looks at me as though he’s never seen me before. I notice the way his glasses pinch his fleshy temples. “Just a minute,” he says.

“I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes already.”

The man waves an orderly over to the desk. “See if you can find him a gown.”

“I don’t want a gown. I want my shirt back.”

“I’m afraid you can’t have it back.”

“Why not?”

“Because the police will want it for evidence.”

“Evidence? It’s my shirt.”

He turns away without response.

An orderly appears, hands me a white hospital gown. I slip it on like a robe despite his instructions to put it on with the opening at the back. Just then the sheriff walks through the automatic doors holding a clipboard. He approaches the desk with his permanently askew elbows and brushes past me without the faintest flicker of recognition. I stand a few paces away and listen as he talks to the man behind the desk.

“She’s being examined,” the man says. After a brief exchange that I can’t make out, he nods at me and says, “He’s the one who brought her in.”

The sheriff turns to me. I sense the you-again in his otherwise expressionless face. Maver is standing by, eager to tell his story.

“What happened?”

“I was walking along Old Route 47.”

The sheriff interrupts immediately. “What time?”

“I’m not sure exactly.”

“How long ago?”

“Two hours, about.”

Maver cuts in. “It was two fifteen when he pulled me over. By my car clock.”

The sheriff turns to Maver. “You part of this too, Ed?”

Maver nods.

The sheriff takes the clipboard from the counter and gestures to the waiting area. “Why don’t we sit down and go over this.”

Maver tells his story first. He has answers to every one of the sheriff’s questions about time and place and exactly this and precisely that. They share a dialect that allows each to anticipate and respond to the other with unbelievable precision. Forty yards, forty-two tops. Two—ah—seventeen
p.m.
by the digital clock in my car. Fourteen minutes, point to point. It must be connected to some element of shared ambition and culture. The military, perhaps. Since I don’t share their language or their mutual familiarity, I am cast under suspicion.

They talk until the thread of Maver’s narrative arrives at the point where I must take it up, and the sheriff turns to me with a furrowed look that is meant to dredge the truth out of me. There’s no trusting strangers, it says. I describe exactly how the woman burst from the field, how I un-gagged and untied her and gave her my shirt and flagged down the first car that came by.

“Where are those items?” the sheriff asks, jotting on his clipboard.

“The tape and the cord? I left them there.”

“Will we be able to find them?”

The question strikes me as odd. “If they’re still there, yes.” I try to imitate Maver’s forensic precision but see that the sheriff interprets my manner as insolence.

“Also, I think she was being shot at.”

The sheriff stops writing and looks up at me with that furrowed expression again.

“I heard shots. Several of them. At first I thought it was the farmer scaring birds out of the field.”

“Farmers don’t do that,” Maver interrupts.

“Quiet, Ed,” the sheriff says. “How many shots did you hear?”

“I can’t remember. Several. They sounded far off at first. Then the last one or two seemed very close.”

“Did you see anyone in the field?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone at all? Tell me exactly what you saw. Describe the scene to me
exactly
as you remember it.”

I pull the thin hospital gown more tightly around my shoulders and go over the details. The words
short, shuffling indeterminism
come back to me and with them the whole mystery of memory and pseudomemory, of signs and symbols, of particular things and events and moments that seem to converge and scatter at random. To be absolutely accurate, I would have to say a naked woman burst out of a cornfield into my idea of cornfields, which is connected to my knowledge of the suicides of van Gogh and Hemingway. But then I would have to explain everything to the sheriff down to the last detail, and that is virtually impossible. I might have started from the beginning and explained the overly theoretical sense of self that I have acquired from reading
Selected Philosophical Essays
. I would have had to explain myself as a “knowing subject lost in the object that is known,” or as someone “dispossessed of narrative continuity,” or simply as a “text.” I would have had to explain that, at the very moment I heard the shots, I had somehow linked my existence to the idea of cornfields and the deaths of van Gogh and Hemingway and, by extension, all suicides and the world—the way a French semiologist once linked himself with Proust by captioning a baby picture of himself and calling attention to the fact that, at the time he was learning to walk, Proust was finishing
A la Recherche du Temps perdu
. Why not? If a French pedant can make such connections, then I can link myself and my birth and childhood to events such as, say, the Kennedy-Khrushchev Vienna Conference or the establishment of the World Food Program.

“Can you remember seeing anything else?” the sheriff prods again.

“A car. No. Two cars drove past me while I was walking.”

“Which direction?”

I thought for a moment. “One toward town, the other away.”

“Do you remember what make?”

“No.”

“The color?”

“No. I was standing with my back to the road looking into the field.”

“So you were looking into the field.”

“Watching the birds. They were flocking because of the gunshots.”

“You didn’t tell me there was shooting going on when I picked you up.” Maver speaks as if I’d betrayed him.

“What type of gun would you say it was?” The Sheriff is making notes furiously.

“I don’t know anything about guns. I couldn’t say.”

“Was it a rifle or a pistol shot?” Maver asks.

“Ed, please.”

“Was it a rifle or a shotgun? Or a handgun?” Maver smirks, satisfied with his forensic acuity, crosses his arms over his chest.

I shrug.

“Was it
a pop
” the sheriff asks, “like a firecracker?”

“Or a
crack
?” Maver again.

“
A pop
.”

“Are you sure?”

“Definitely. But it wasn’t anything like a firecracker.”

“Not a
bang
?”

“No. It sounded like
pop
to me.”

The sheriff writes this down.

“Probably a .38,” Maver says.

The sheriff writes without looking up from his pad.

At last a doctor appears and signals the sheriff. Maver and I are told to wait. The cop swaggers over to the desk, where the doctor is looking over some papers, a surgical mask hanging casually around his neck. There is something leisurely about the way he looks. I think of the smashed-up woman and the antiseptic smells and the doctor’s
post-emergency repose. A renewed sense of pity wells up, a sense that the danger is past but the suffering is about to begin. The full horror of the woman’s plight becomes apparent the way the contours of a photograph slowly emerge in a chemical bath. I can’t explain the delayed reaction. Perhaps sympathy can begin only after shock wears off. The image that locks into my memory is the way she twisted and dipped her shoulder as she pitched forward out of the field, the way she stumbled and fell. The hapless moment, the moment beyond help. And the chill in her eyes that said she had already emigrated to that polar region beyond the reach of compassion.

The sheriff returns. “They’ve sedated her,” he says officiously. “And I’ve got all I need for the time being.”

“Was she raped?” Maver asks.

The sheriff ignores the question. “You can leave now,” he says.

“Did they say what happened to her?” Maver insists. “Was she raped ?”

“That’s not your concern, Ed,” says the sheriff.

Maver gets up. “Well, I guess I’ve had about all the excitement I can take.” He turns to me. “You need a ride someplace?”

“I’ll walk, thanks.”

“I’ll give you a lift,” the sheriff says.

I accept the sheriff’s offer for the sheer perversity of it. The sheriff gestures toward the door with his clipboard. “Oh, and Ed. I’ll need you to answer a few more questions in the next day or two.”

“Right,” Maver says. “Anytime. You know where to find me.”

This time I ride in the front seat of the sheriffs car.

“You’ll be available to answer questions too?”

I nod.

After a pause: “You seem to gravitate toward that mound an awful lot.”

“I enjoy the walk.”

He shakes his head and is silent for the rest of the ride.

The neighbor’s kid is standing in the driveway when we pull up in front of my house. He ogles the sheriffs car, stands stock still. As I get out he drops the hose he is holding and runs inside.

Discounting self-interest and sociobiology, instances of real Samaritanism are rare. I sit and rock on my front porch, thinking of the one or two, my own one or two. I am showered. Fresh. Fresh shirt, fresh pants. No shoes. The kid next door has resumed watering the driveway and is studiously ignoring me. His mother pokes her head out the side door to shout an order or two and glances over. My porch is about even with their kitchen door, and when Dad’s pickup isn’t pulled all the way up the driveway they have a clear view across the low chain-link fence. I ignore them as generously as I can. But I can sense that the sheriffs escort and the hospital gown I was wearing when I arrived back home have made an impression and renewed their interest in me. Wacko. I can hear the dinner-table talk. Now you stay clear, boy. Hear me? Forks wave. He’s wacko.

I lift a leg into the chair, rock with purpose. Into mind pops a line from a poem.
If you never do anything for anyone else, you are spared the tragedy of human relationships
. I like to think the poet meant it. Unfortunately, I think he was just being ironic. I don’t at all agree with the idea that a beneficent and thoroughgoing altruism can negate the tragedy of human relationships, can somehow reverse and obliterate it. Human relationships are tragic a priori, and the true Samaritan acts, not to change this condition—but in spite of it. The idea, implanted over the centuries by sentimental Christianity and taken over in our time by political propaganda, advertising, and the movies, is that by good deeds we negate this tragic condition and transform it into something better. But there is nothing better. The world is not so neatly divided. Good is not accomplished merely by negation of the bad.

I get up and go inside. The thought merits a phone call.

“Horace here.”

“May I help you?”

“I’m glad you put it that way.”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you like Saint Bernards?”

“Saint Bernard? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Not the saint. The dog. You know, the big shaggy things they use in the Alps to rescue people lost in the snow?”

“Yes, I know. Those huge, slobbery animals, the ones with the little wooden barrels around their necks. What about them?”

“What do you think about them?”

“What I think?”

“Yes.”

“Not a whole lot. Frankly, I hate dogs. They scare me.”

“I see. But what about in principle?”

“Are you calling from the Humane Society?”

“No.”

“Because if you are, I’m not interested. I have a cat I took in as a stray, and as far as I’m concerned I’ve done my duty by little furry mammals.”