Horace Afoot by Frederick Reuss Read Free Book Online Page A

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’spost-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