Horace Afoot (9 page)

Crack crack
. The springs are straining. I imagine the screen door propped open with a shoulder. The front-door latch rattles quietly. A flashlight beam cuts the darkness, illuminates the wall at the foot of the stairs, skates around, and clicks off. My heart is pounding. I put my left hand on the wall for balance. The flashlight beam sweeps the bottom of the staircase again, clicks off. The front door clicks open.

Aaahhhhhhh
! I rush down the stairs, testicles bouncing. The door slams. Racing footsteps. I charge down the front steps into the middle of the yard. I strain to see the figure running up the street. In seconds it has vanished. I stand, heart pounding, chest and belly wet with sweat. The hollow pit in my stomach, I realize, is not fear but the slowly dawning pain of free-swinging balls. I have racked myself. I withdraw from the yard onto the front porch, one hand clutching my groin. Breath comes in short bursts. The pain swells as the adrenaline ebbs. A moan becomes a growl becomes a howl:
mmmmmm ohhhhhhhh Fuuuuuck
! I pause for another minute; teeth begin to chatter. In the distance the sound of a motorcycle. The pain in my groin spreads upward, turns to nausea. One retch. Another retch.

I go back to bed but can’t sleep. I lie on my back staring at the little orbs of darkness and light that float before my eyes. Sight, in darkness or broad daylight, a function of gathered and filtered globules of viscous light. The pain in my groin has become a dull ache. Words string themselves together in a little rhyme. Do you ever see those little spots? Those
tiny orbs? Those puny dots? Do you ever think you’re going blind? Walking straight ahead? Staying right behind? Your life is veiled by night mucus. The words stick in my head, forming a little jingle.

By dawn the pain in my groin has become a hollow-stomach feeling. I get dressed and go outside. Mist hangs in the air.

I walk to the police station. The desk sergeant looks up from his mug of coffee.

“Got a problem?”

“Someone tried to break into my house last night.”

He puts down his coffee, reaches into a drawer, and takes out a form. He asks me to fill out the top half.

“This doesn’t have to be anything formal.”

“Are you reporting an incident or filing a complaint?”

“Both.”

He reaches into his drawer and brings out another form. “You’ll have to fill this out too.”

“Can’t I just tell you what happened?”

“We’ll get to that part afterward.”

I fill out the forms and hand them back. The sergeant sips his coffee and glances at the papers. Then he fills in his part and asks me to tell him in my own words what happened.

“I didn’t get a good look at him, but I know it was that asshole kid with the motorcycle, Tom Schroeder.”

“What makes you think it was him?”

“I heard his motorcycle.”

“Did you see the motorcycle?”

“No.”

“How do you know it was his?”

“I just do.”

The sergeant looks at me over the rim of his coffee cup. “There’s not much here to go on, but I’ll make a note of it.”

“Have you ever had a beard?” I ask him, thinking that men with loose jowls like his should grow beards.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He frowns.

“I was just curious.”

He puts his hand to his cheek. “It’s against regulations. But it’s funny you should ask. My wife used to ask me to grow one when we were first married.”

“Did you?”

“I couldn’t. I was already on the force. Mustaches are okay, but full beards are against regulations.”

“Who made that regulation?”

He shrugs. “Beats me.” He taps his pen on the desk. “You think I’d look better with a beard?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe when I retire.” He laughs, sips coffee. “I’ll send a detective out to look around if you like.”

“I’ve already looked around. There’s no need.”

“Well then, all I can say is keep your door locked at night and try to get to a phone next time. There’s not much we can do at this point.”

“What’s it going to take for you to catch that little prick?”

“We’ll catch him one of these days; don’t you worry about it.”

I sit at the small table in my kitchen, my notebook open in front of me. On the stove a pot of black beans bubbles and boils as I try to compose a thought worthy of expressing in writing, but except for today’s date I can think of no words to inscribe in the spiral bound pad - no words of my own, that is. So after checking the boiling pot and stirring the thickening mass and opening a bottle of the wine I bought at Winesburg Wine and Liquor yesterday, I find myself scribbling disconnected passages from Horace out of ransacked memory. What comes out onto the paper are the words of an ode that once inspired me.

—what then? When times are good, when times are good …

—and the name sends me scuttering among the overturned tables of all the Horatian poems I ever committed to memory with the thought that by having stored such things inside me, I am partaking more grandly in life by stretching the borders of my own existence backward into time….

—Dellius Dellius Dellius, friend preserved in the alcaic stanzas of dead Latin …

—wine, his own Gevrey-Chambertin …

I put the pen down and read the lines, proud of my capacity to recollect them. I had thought they were gone, wiped out along with all the memories I have tried, with mixed results, to suppress.

I take the pot off the stove, pour the cooked beans into a large bowl, and set them on the counter to cool. If left in the cooking pot, beans acquire an unpleasant metallic taste. An earthy smell now suffuses the kitchen and raises the humidity index of the entire house. I return to the table to look at the shaky black lines I have just put down, sip the wine Anderson sold me—from the storeroom’s remotest corner. I bought a case from him and asked if it could be delivered. He said he’d be more than happy to drop it off on his way home. He tried three times to conceal his surprise: first when I told him I’d take the entire case, then when I told him where to deliver it, and finally later that day when he stood politely at my front door and passed the heavy wooden crate across the threshold as though he were introducing something into the house that shouldn’t belong there.

I haven’t used the telephone now for days. I’ve resisted the temptation, preferring to let the thoughts popping around my brain lie idle along with the rest of me. Drinking wine is a passable substitute.
Earliest use of the wine jar imparts the bouquet that is longest lasting
. Horace’s advice. So I have started using it, reaching for the bottle instead of the cradled receiver, pouring the ruby liquid into a glass, resting my Kilroy nose on the rim to absorb the waft of fumes instead of punching out seven random digits, listening to the clicks and pips, waiting for someone to answer. For the time being, sipping wine has replaced plying questions along the electronic river.

The humid summer heat has the entire town stalled indoors. Everything is still, motionless. Even the trees. I wandered in the woods behind the house for a while yesterday, surprised to find it no cooler than out in the scrubby expanses of my yard. This morning I found a small hand trowel in the cabinet under the sink. I went outside and with monkish intention began to dig in an overgrown flowerbed next
to the house. I’ve always admired the gardening sensibility, the bald-headed, bare-chested simplicity, the solitary attentiveness. But after an hour I sat back on my haunches, smeared sweat from my forehead and chest with a muddy hand, and realized I hadn’t the faintest clue what to do in all that newly upturned dirt. I stood up and surveyed what I’d done. It looked like the bed had been invaded by a family of burrowing rodents. I plunged the trowel into the ground to its hilt and left it sticking there, something to mark the effort.
Mollis inertia cur tantan diffuderit imis oblivionem sensibus: Why should softness of indolence so have imbued all my senses and lulled me into lethargy
? Lulled? Am I lulled here? No. Not lulled. Quelled. By my own instincts. Oblivionem sensibus.
Much as if I, in a parching of thirst, had been greedily drinking the waters of forgetfulness
.

I drop the pen and again admire my powers of recollection. It has been years since I committed these lines to memory, changed my name, and re-presented myself to the world as Quintus Horatius Flaccus. The only difference between the Quintus Horatius Flaccus of Augustan times and myself, the QHF of the here and now, is that the first Horace—who retired to his Sabine farm to escape the bustle of Rome—was a social climber and a nice guy, whereas I am without any social ambitions whatsoever and have never considered myself, nor do I know how to be, nor have I ever striven to be—nice.

Still, my identity is bound to the name I have taken, Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Call it an act of forced continuity that has bound me to the name while leaving the poet to roam freely in the surviving body of his work. I have found justification for my wanton act in countless passages from
Selected Philosophical Essays
. It doesn’t matter to me which views are current and which outmoded. The thought is the significant proposition, right? So I’ll take whatever I can get from philosophers and from poets alike. I am QHF for the present. I might just as well be Diogenes or Marcus Aurelius or Jesus Christ. But, thankfully, I lack most of the discipline and all of the ambition.

It is time to go out and get some groceries. Fortified by wine, I gather my pack and put on my shoes and step outside into the evening. The air has cooled.

The walk is almost twice as far as Foodway, but I won’t go there anymore since the manager shooed me away for loitering. I wasn’t loitering. I was observing—and with great ethnographic detachment, I should add. Riteway is at the northern end of town, on the strip that caters to the people who live in the suburban ranch tracts, the white-shirted engineers of Semantech who moved here in one of the plate-tectonic shifts of the American economy. Riteway is spanking new, a cavernous bazaar filled not just with household provisions but with all sorts of prepared exotica. Its name suggests the shifting premise of consumerism, a shift from the practical to the fanciful. While the name
Foodway
is pragmatic and informative, the name
Riteway
is precisely the opposite and, in subtle and complex language, suggests the
rite
of consumption as an aesthetic ritual. On top of everything, I hate the walk out here. There are no sidewalks, and there is no way around the four-lane highway or the bottle-strewn underpasses.

I enter the supermarket. The harsh neon stabs at my eyes, and I pause for a moment inside the pneumatic entrance to allow them to adjust. From moonless, starlit streetlight to the hard blue-white, twenty-four-hour daylight of Riteway.

I take a plastic hand basket and begin my search up and down the aisles. My mouth is dry from walking and red wine. I drink an entire bottle of Crystal Mountain Spring Water, to the astonishment of a lady pushing a mountain of groceries. She maneuvers around me, casts a look of suspiscion, her child riding marsupially in the burgeoning cart. I drop the empty bottle into my basket along with another one for the walk home and continue up the aisle behind the moving mountain. She takes up three-quarters of the aisle with her bulk. She moves slowly on tiny running-shoe-shod feet, her head swinging side to side like a tiller as she selects among brand names, a wad of clipped coupons in her fist. She stops and backs her cart up slightly, blocking the aisle. I turn and walk back the other way.