Horace Afoot

by Frederick Reuss

  “Hello, Horace,” Mohr says feebly and opens his eyes.

  “You’re awake.”

  He nods his head. “I am.”

  I peel the pack from my shoulders and set it down at the foot of the bed. “The nurse said you were asleep. I hope you don’t mind me coming unannounced.”

  Mohr’s lips part in what must pass for a smile. Against the pillow, and with the plastic tubes coming from his nose, his head looks shrunken. He is covered to the chin with blankets. “I’ve been waiting for you to come, Horace. What’s wrong with your eye?”

  “Lucian,” I correct him. “Someone hit me a few days ago. Mind if I pull up that chair?”

  “It looks awful.”

  I drag a cracked leather chair across the floor. A book lies face down on the cushion. I glance at the title. Treasure Island.

  “I loved it as a boy,” Mohr says, turning his head to me on the pillow. “Would you mind opening the drapes?”

  “Gladly.” The room is flooded with light, transformed. It feels like a college dormitory, littered with books to be studied. I imagine Mohr leaping out of bed, restored to youth and vigor, but he closes his eyes and drifts back to sleep. I sit and flip through the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel. A 1911 edition, illustrated with N. C. Wyeth paintings of iron-jawed buccaneers brandishing swords and pistols.

  Time passes. I wander around the room browsing books, waiting for Mohr to wake up. On the table in the center of the room is a large photograph album, the old-fashioned type with velvet pages. I flip it open in the middle. A young woman and two boys in front of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Mohr and his brother, hair combed flat, eyes squinting. I turn the pages and look at more photographs. Mother, father, boys, car, house, pony ride, Christmas tree, high school graduation, and, at the end of the album, a portrait of a young man in military dress. Mohr’s older brother. A letter slipped into the back panel begins With great regret and heartfelt sorrow it is my duty to inform you of the death of your son, Pvt. James M. Mohr, in action at Heartbreak Ridge, Korea, on September 10, 1951. I close the album, thinking it strange that such a letter should be kept like any other memento.

  Mohr is still sleeping. Sunlight has warmed the room slightly, but the shuttered atmosphere remains. I sit down again in the chair. Mohr stirs. “Do you like Robert Louis Stevenson?” His voice is clogged with phlegm, and he strains to clear his throat.

  “I suppose I do.”

  Mohr lifts his head from the pillow, then lets it fall back. “I love Robert Louis Stevenson.” He closes his eyes and drifts off again.

  The afternoon wears on. I stand at the window and watch as clouds roll in and the sun disappears behind them. A flock of starlings hops and flutters around a bird feeder standing on a pole a short distance from the house. The view from Mohr’s room takes in a good swath of lawn, field, and a barn off in the distance, huge and red and ornamental looking.

  The nurse puts her head in the door.

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “No, I’m not,” Mohr says and opens his eyes.

  She rolls a cart into the room. “Dinner,” she announces and pushes the cart to the side of the bed. “Do you need help sitting up?”

  Mohr lifts an arm. The nurse hoists him upright and slides a large pillow behind him.

  “Chicken noodle,” she says.

  Mohr glances over at me. “My favorite,” he says with a wry smile.

  “Do you want to try sitting at the table?” She speaks in the nursing tone of phony cheer.

  “I’ll stay where I am.”

  She adjusts the cart so that it becomes a bed table and leaves the room as efficiently as she entered it. Mohr takes the spoon from the tray and motions for me to come closer. “Pull up a chair,” he says.

  I move the chair to a spot near the foot of the bed so that Mohr can see me without turning his head to the side. He lifts the spoon to his lips and slurps. His hand is remarkably steady.

  “So, Horace, you finally made it out to visit.”

  “Lucian.”

  “Ah, right. I keep forgetting. Lucian of Samosata. I guess Muriel Maydock finally printed your ad?”

  “No. I’m placing it in another paper.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Los Angeles Times.”

  “That’s convenient.” He smiles, puts a cracker between his lips, breaks an edge. Crumbs fall. He lifts two or three more spoonfuls of soup, returns the spoon to the tray, and leans back, sated and exhausted at the same time. The look of desertion that I noticed the first time I met him is in full bloom—conveniently, because it banishes pity and wards off sorrow. He tilts his head so that he is looking out the window and I see him in bony profile.

  “Have you been out to the dig?” he asks.

  “Not since that first day.”

  “I would like to go out there again.” The comment drifts into the room and fades.

  “I have a new pet.”

  “A pet?”

  “A crow. It was shot right out of the sky over my house.”

  “Have you given it a name?”

  “Not yet.”

  “A pet needs a name,” he says and gazes out the window as the sun returns from behind a bank of clouds. Time passes while I consider crow names. Corvus. Corax. “You know,” Mohr says, after a long silence, “I don’t believe there is a God.” He turns to face me, licks his dry lips. “I decided it a long time ago. But you know what I do believe in?”

  I shake my head.

  “Treasure Island.” He chuckles weakly at his remark.

  “Would you like me to read it to you?”

  He nods enthusiastically, tubes shaking in his nose. “I’d love it. From beginning to end. The whole thing.” He pulls a cord, and the nurse materializes. She readjusts Mohr on his pillows and rolls the tray out of the room.

  I open the book, move the chair to take advantage of the light coming in the window, and begin:

  Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesy, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particular about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the “Admiral Benbow” inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof…

  I read the first chapter, glancing up at the end to see if Mohr has fallen asleep. He is wide awake, lying back on his pillows, eyes moist, unfocused, and wandering in a warm rain of fantasy. “Go on,” he says. I turn the page, settle back into the chair for the long haul, and continue the liturgy. But for a few interruptions—glasses of water and helping Mohr to the bathroom—I read the entire text. It is late when I close the book. Mohr is lying on his side, cheek mashed into the pillow, staring into the room, lost to time. I stand and stretch, place the book on the table in the center of the room. “I have a long walk home.”

  Mohr’s eyes remain fixed in the intermediate distance. “Stay here.” His voice is flat.

  “I need to walk. I’ve been sitting for too long.” I lift my pack from the floor and thread my arms through the straps. Mohr has not changed his expression or looked at me since I closed the book. I stand at the side of the bed. An artery in the hollow of his temple pulses; his scalp is a jaundiced-looking yellow. He has not been shaved in days, and the gray stubble makes his cheeks look gaunt and sunken. The plastic breathing tubes affixed in his nose look almost natural.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow.” I bend down and kiss him on the forehead. The spontaneity of the kiss surprises us both. Immediately I go for the door, pull it open, glance back before leaving. Mohr is smiling, his hollow little face illuminated by the bedside lamp, a mire of tubing, snot, and tears.

  Briskly through the house, down the porch steps and the long driveway. The warm night air is a welcome relief from the conditioned chill of the house, and I am glad to escape from the shuttered quiet
into the riotous croaking of toads and the chirruping of cicadas high in the trees. I can still feel the touch of his dry skin on my lips, smell the uric atmosphere of the room. From the road I glance back at the house. Blue television light flickers in a few upstairs windows, and the fluorescent light of the office pokes out of the window just beside the front door. Even set against a clear, star-filled sky and open to the breeze blowing across the broad lawn and fields, it is a place that seems long ago to have suffocated itself. The Welcome plaque hanging on a post at the side of the road is a cruel touch of irony too deliberate to be overlooked.

  I have one question. Why is it that Mohr hasn’t killed himself? I consider turning back to wake him up, take him from the confinement of that narrow bed, and walk him outside to look up at the stars. It would frighten him. I’m certain it would. I see the dry hollow of his face lying back on the pillow in contented delusion. A complete self-contained world, the world of Treasure Island: uncharted, bursting with buried treasure. Sail to it, explore, and then leave. An island to be discovered anew, over and over and over again, and I’m sure that the worst dreams Mohr ever has are when he hears the surf booming about its coasts.

  At the airport I follow the trail around the perimeter fence and stop to rest at the old site of the lean-to. The red lights of a jet pass high overhead. I watch it move between constellations, Ursa Minor, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia. I think were I Mohr, I would kill myself. And I would do it thinking of Treasure Island, and I would do it right here. Looking at the stars and watching jets take off and land.

  I am tempted to bed down here in the grass, but something impels me onward, and the rest of the walk becomes an endurance test, a long march home to bed.

  At last I reach the top of West Street to find the police at my house and lights and neighbors and the squawk of radio. Sylvia is being escorted to the patrol car by two policemen.

  “Fucking Jesus Christ, Horace. Where have you been?” She struggles to be released. Her hands are bound with a plastic tie.

  “You live here?” the cop asks.

  I nod, look around. The entire neighborhood is awake.

  “Someone reported a break-in.” One of the cops takes me off to the side; the other stays with Sylvia, holding her by the elbow. “We found her inside. She broke in through the kitchen door. Smashed the glass. Tore the house up a little.”

  Sylvia is being told to cool out.

  “She says she’s a friend. That true?”

  I slip my pack off. The neighbor returns inside, turns off the porch light. “Yes, she does. I mean she is. Yes.”

  “Tell ’em to let me go.” Sylvia calls to me.

  The cop tells her to cool it.

  “We will place her under arrest if you decide to press charges.”

  “No. Let her go.”

  “She’s intoxicated,” the cop adds, as though I might change my mind.

  “She’s a friend. Let her go.”

  The cop shrugs in a beats-the-hell-out-of-me way and motions to his partner to let Sylvia go.

  “See. I told you,” she taunts the cop as he cuts the plastic ties around her wrists. When he releases her she saunters over, follows me toward the house muttering under her breath. “Goddamnit, Horace. Where the fuck have you been? I thought you’d never show up.”

  The cops wait until we are inside and the door is closed before driving off. Sylvia stands just inside the front door, a sheepish smile. I go into the kitchen. The cabinets are flung open, contents strewn along the counters, shattered glass on the floor.

  “Mind telling me what you want?”

  She is standing in the doorway looking down at the floor.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Did Tom do that to your eye?”

  “No. His father did.”

  “Big Tom hit you? What for?” Her tone is conversational—to override my anger. If she is drunk, she is hiding it well. With puffy eyes, straggly hair, and dirty tee shirt with faded logo, she looks like any unhappy, middle-aged insomniac out for a midnight jog.

  Not to be distracted, I repeat the question. “What did you come here for?”

  She crosses her arms and looks at the ground, declines to answer.

  “You came for the gun, didn’t you? He sent you here to get his goddamn gun.”

  “No, he didn’t,” she says calmly.

  “That’s what you came for, though. Isn’t it?”

  No answer.

  “Tell your young boyfriend that I’ll give it back when he repays the loan. Tell him if he has any questions he can come here himself and not to send you here to do his dirty work.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. He didn’t send me here, and I don’t do dirty work for him—or anyone else. And I don’t know anything about a gun either.” Her brow condenses into a frown.

  “Then tell me what you broke into my house for.”

  “For money, goddamnit! Okay? I need money.” The hardness in her face melts and tears well up in her eyes, and she turns away. “Look,” she says, “I’m not trying to hurt anyone. I just need some money, okay?” Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she goes into the next room.

  I remain in the kitchen, unsure and not wanting to be swayed by her tears and histrionics. She has to be lying. It seems impossible that she doesn’t know about Schroeder’s gun. But then, maybe she doesn’t. She is sitting in the living room, face in hands. “I’m not going to ask you to leave,” I find myself saying. “But I am tired and I am going to go to bed. You can sleep on the couch if you like. If not, close the door when you leave.”

  She doesn’t respond but remains bent forward, hiding her face in her hands. I go outside to check on the crow. She is in the basket, alert. Half of the meat in the dish is gone. I adjust the towel draped over the back of the basket and return inside.

  “Good-night.” I climb the stairs.

  Sylvia does not respond.

  My room is undisturbed. Evidently the police arrived before she made it upstairs. The gun is still under the mattress. Without bothering to undress, I get into bed and turn out the light.

  Sylvia’s presence downstairs makes it impossible to drift into sleep. I lie awake, conscious of her being in the house, listening in the darkness. I try to distract myself by thinking of the visit with Mohr, of Treasure Island—but sex swarms in and I am unable to obliterate it from my thoughts. A torment. How can I think of sex?

  A creaking on the stairs. I start, shut my eyes, pretend to sleep.

  “Horace,” she whispers.

  Heart pounding, I don’t respond.

  “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 contrad
ictory 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.”