Horace Afoot by Frederick Reuss Read Free Book Online

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