Horace Afoot (8 page)

“I helped get her to the hospital. That’s all.”

“Could you tell me what happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine. I understand. Could I get your name?”

“What do you want my name for?”

“For the record.”

“I don’t want my name used.” I feel my voice quaver and a wave of tension rising up my neck, the beginning of a headache. “Do you understand that?”

She nods.

“Turn on the tape.”

A startled smile comes over her features; she wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and holds the machine for me to speak into.

“I am a private citizen, and I want to be left alone, so don’t come looking for me.”

She nods, eager for me to cut to the details, holding the machine up.

I lean toward it and, measuring my words, say, “If you print my name or mention anything about me in print, including this conversation, I’ll sue you and your paper for invading my privacy.”

The woman snaps the tape recorder off and stuffs it into her bag. “That was uncalled for.” Her face has reddened. “That was obnoxious and completely uncalled for,” she says and stalks back into the station.

I skip down the steps and begin walking briskly toward the center of
town. Some instinct for escape takes hold, and I obey it. A curious constellation of thoughts begins forming as I walk: the relationship—logical and otherwise—that exists between pairs of opposites, between guilt and innocence, memory and forgetting, anger and sorrow, pity and vengeance, love and hate. And especially the strange transmutation that often occurs between them and binds them together in a unity that seems bizarre until one recognizes it as part of the eternal order of things. I increase my pace.

The sheriffs car pulls alongside. He rolls down the window and leans over on his side. “C’mon back,” he says and pops the front door open.

“Why? They told me I could go.”

“She wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“Who? The woman. That’s who.”

A green-aproned waitress is standing in front of the Corn Tassel, one of only a handful of people outside on this hot day. A few people sit in the diner, visible through the large windows. She lifts a cigarette to her lips and turns to look the other way while pulling on it. Then she turns back to watch, a cloud of smoke issuing from her mouth and nostrils.

“C’mon. Get in.” The sheriff pushes the passenger door wide open, spilling some of the cool interior out into the heat. The radio squawks and blinks. I slide into the seat and close the door. Without a word he swings the big police cruiser into a tight U-turn and we return to the police station.

“She remembered you,” the sheriff says, getting out of the car. “But that’s as far as we’ve been able to get. She’s a complete blank. The doctor says it’s shock. The whole thing—
pfffft
—blanked out.”

“I wish I could do that too.”

“When she saw you she blinked.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. She remembered you. She’s not very talkative, but the doc was able to get her to say she remembered your face.”

“Wait a minute.” I get out of the car and talk across the roof. “You said she asked to see me.”

The sheriff turns and strides toward the station. “You’ll see what I mean,” he says, and gestures for me to follow him.

“I’m not going in.”

The Sheriff turns to me. With one hand in his pocket he jingles his change. “Look. She recognized you, that’s all. We asked if you were the man who attacked her, and she said no. The doc thinks seeing you might help her remember more.”

“Is that why you brought me into the lineup? To help her remember?”

“Yup. That’s right.” The sheriff opens the door and holds it for me.

“Why didn’t they just ask me to come to the hospital?”

“Because if she had identified you as the man who attacked her, we would have had to bring you here anyway. It saved us a trip.” He grins maliciously and tries to put his hand on my shoulder. I draw away. “Relax, pal. It’s just a joke. Nobody’s making any accusations. You’re doing a good deed is all.”

We walk down the corridor. The reporter from the
Sentinel
suddenly appears. She shoots me an I-don’t-need-you-anyway look and begins to ask the sheriff a question. “Not now, honey. Later.” He waves her off and opens the door to his office, where a man is waiting.

“This is Detective Ross.” We enter the flag- and mugshot- and plaque decorated room. “He’s been assigned to the case.”

Detective Ross gets up and offers his hand.

“Where is she?” I ask.

“I’d like to ask you a couple of questions before we go in to see her,” the detective says.

My eyes revert to the sheriff, behind his desk now and opening a drawer. “Why didn’t you tell me you were bringing me here to be questioned ?”

“Didn’t think it mattered,” he says, then adds with a supercilious grin, “and you didn’t ask.”

A flash of anger causes my throat to constrict and my stomach to tighten. “What the
fuck
do you want with me?” Heat is rising up into my face.

“Cool it, mister. Just cool it.” The sheriff plants both palms flat and leans stiffly over his desk. “Or I’ll lock you up.”

The detective cuts in. “Calm down, both of you,” he says and interposes himself between the sheriff and me. He turns to me. “I just want to get a sense of what happened. There’s nothing to be upset about.” He pinches his trousers at each knee and sits down in a chair next to the sheriffs desk. He is a middle-aged, flabby black man with a graying mustache, close-cropped hair, and a large cushion of flesh that squeezes above his collar. He is wearing a blue seersucker suit that seems casual and old fashioned among the starched uniforms of the station. He gestures for me to sit down in the chair across from him, ignoring the sheriff, who has his back to us and is unpinning papers from the cork wall at the back of the office.

“Let me see if I got your name right,” the detective begins, reading from his notepad. “Quintus Horatius Falcus?”

“Fiaccas.”

“Flaccus. Flaccus. Quintus Horatius Flaccus,” he pronounces. “Mind if I ask where you got a name like that?”

“I gave it to myself.”

“Where are you from, Mr. Flaccus, originally?”

“You mean where was I born?”

“That’s right.”

“New York.”

“And would you mind telling us what name appears on your birth certificate?” He eyes me ironically. “You don’t have to, but we could find out easily enough for ourselves.”

“Be my guest.”

“All right, Mr., ah, Flaccus.”

“Call me Horace.”

The detective grins. “Okay, Horace. Could you tell me exactly what happened the other day? Exactly as you remember it.” He pulls a blank pad across the desk toward him and prepares to take notes, his face contracting into a frown of concern and concentration.

I try to recount the episode for him, the shots, the birds, the whole thing exactly as it happened. Ross lets me talk without interruption, then holds up his hand. “Was she walking or running?”

“She was stumbling. Her hands were tied.”

“In front or behind?”

“Behind.”

“Did it look like she fell? Or did she collapse?”

His questions strike me as completely superfluous. “I suppose she collapsed. That’s what it looked like to me.”

“How far away were you when you first saw her?”

“I don’t know, about a hundred feet or so.”

“So she could have fallen.”

“I suppose so. What difference does it make?”

The detective jots as I talk. “Just going for as much detail as possible. Bear with me. Now,” he asks, leaning toward me, “was she running toward you or away from you when you first saw her?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Just try to remember.”

“Neither. She just collapsed.”

“Before or after she saw you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think about it. Did she come out of the field, turn, see you, and then collapse?”

I shake my head. “She stumbled straight out of the field and collapsed onto the embankment at the side of the road. I have no idea if she saw me or not.”

“When you approached her, was she frightened?”

“Scared shitless.”

“Did she let you approach her? Or did she try to get away?”

“I said I wasn’t going to hurt her and held my hands up so she could see them. She had tape on her mouth and was having trouble getting enough air. She let me approach her to take the tape off. After that I untied her.”

“Describe how you did it.”

The detective continues writing as I speak, demanding details that finally leave me exasperated. “I just dropped it. I didn’t crumple it in my hands. I didn’t throw it. I just let it drop on the ground. Jesus Christ, what difference does it make?”

“And that’s when you took off your shirt and gave it to her?” The
detective leans back, slides a hand into his pocket. I half expect him to produce the cord we have been talking about, but instead he takes out a handkerchief and blows his nose. He folds it and slides it back into his pocket, leaving his hand tucked along his fat thigh.

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“I guess that’s all I need for now,” he says, speaking half to me and half to the sheriff. “You can go visiting when you’re ready.”

They bring me into an adjoining office, and I am introduced to a woman I hardly recognize by a matronly psychiatrist who has accompanied Jane Doe here from the psych ward of the county hospital. Jane sits primly on a bright orange vinyl chair. Her hair is combed up and tied into a straggling black tail that begins high on her scalp. She has sea-blue eyes that seem to water at the sight of anything, and her nose is red, from crying, I suppose. She looks older than I remember her.

Dr. Henley, the psychiatrist, does the talking while I stand across the room. Jane Doe stares at me in blank astonishment.

“How are you feeling?” I ask her.

She looks at me as though I hadn’t spoken a word.

“This is the man you said you remembered. Do you still remember him?”

Jane begins to fidget in her lap. A few moments elapse. Then her head bobs.

“Wonderful. Very good,” the doctor exclaims.

I feel as though I am sinking into the floor, sensing the shame that has suddenly swelled and thickened the air in the room. I look at the woman, whose eyes are cast down, and guess that I must fit into her trauma as some horrible frill. I glance at the doctor and signal that I am ready to leave, but the doctor sits on the worn wooden arm of Jane’s chair and begins talking quietly to her.

“I have to go,” I mutter and turn to leave.

“Just a moment, please.” The doctor escorts me out of the room with a briskness that defies the sullen circumstances. In the hallway she offers me her hand and thanks me for cooperating. “You can’t imagine how important this has been for her.”

“You have to hand it to these police.”

“You misunderstand. It was my idea. I thought it might help her to remember. The police were very obliging.”

“When it’s in their interest to be.”

“And thank you for cooperating.”

I nod my head slightly, wanting only to get out of there.

“She recognized you. It is an important first step.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“When you came into the room with those other men, she pointed to you and said, ‘I remember him.”’ She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she tells me, “she remembers you as the person who helped her. Not as her attacker.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I ask.

“The symptoms resemble a combination of post-traumatic stress disorder and psychogenic amnesia, a dissociative disorder.”

“Was she hit over the head?”

“There are no physical signs of concussion. But she has been badly traumatized, and there’s no telling how long the amnesia will persist. She could snap out of it any moment, or it could take weeks, even months.”

“She has no idea what happened to her?”

“She remembers what happened to her but has no memory of the person who attacked her or of her own identity. That’s why it’s significant that she recognized you.”

“The police think so too.”

The doctor’s eyes shift away. “Well, I don’t know what to say about that.”

“Neither do I.”

The faucet in the bathroom drips. Lying awake in bed, I can hear the sound echo down the hallway. It stays in the foreground. In the background the night chirrup of cicadas, a faint breeze blowing in the trees, the pulse of blood in my ear marking lonely time in the dark.

Drip drip drip drop

Squeak

I sit up. Someone is in the house … or on the porch. The bedsprings shatter the silence. A thin shaft of blue moonlight illuminates the room. I swing my legs off the bed, stand up slowly. Carefully. A board squeaks underfoot. My pulse beating hard, I am motionless, listen, then tiptoe into the hallway and pause at the top of the stairs.

Squeak squeak drip drip drip

On the porch. Not inside. I exhale slowly through my nostrils, try to control my breathing. My ears are hot. The thought that I have no weapon occurs to me at the same moment I realize I’m naked. I stand at the top of the stairs, motionless. The springs on the screen door begin to crack as it is pulled open. The front door is never locked.