The Mailman Read online

  So where was he?

  The last of the theater workers' cars left, loud rock music blaring distortedly from speakers that were not meant to handle such volume, and now the parking lot was empty save for an abandoned pickup at the far end. The overhead lights, one mounted on a telephone pole, the other on an actual lamppost, blinked simultaneously off.

  And now there was only darkness and silence.

  No, not quite silence.

  There was a soft purring.

  The sound of a new car engine.

  Billy's heart began pounding. He stepped across the sidewalk and looked up and down the street, desperately searching for his dad, but his dad was nowhere to be seen.

  There was only a new red car cruising slowly down the street toward him.

  Panic gripped his chest, and he looked around for some place to hide. But the outside of the theater was flat and featureless, with no alcoves or indentations in which to conceal himself. There were not even any bushes behind which he could duck. The people who had built the theater had torn out all trees and bushes and had paved over the bare flattened ground for their parking lot.

  He was stuck. There was nothing he could do, no place he could go.

  The car pulled into the parking lot. The passenger window slowly lowered, and against the darkness of the interior he saw the mailman's milk-white face and bright-red hair.

  The car stopped next to him. "Need a ride?" The smooth voice was seductive, suggestive.

  "My dad's coming to pick me up," Billy said. His heart was pounding so crazily that he thought he might have a heart attack.

  "Your dad's not coming," the mailman said. His voice was still silky, but there was an undercurrent of menace in it. The passenger door opened. "Get in."

  Billy backed away.

  "Your dad's not around anymore," the mailman said, and chuckled. There was something about the way he stretched out the word "around" that sent a chill of goosebumpsdown Billy's arms. "Get in."

  "No," Billy said.

  "You'll get in, and you'll like it." The mailman's arm stretched out through the open door.

  And continued to stretch.

  And continued to stretch.

  Until his cold white fingers were clamped around Billy's throat.

  And Billy awoke screaming.

  9

  It was Doug's turn to make breakfast, and he plugged in the waffle iron and mixed the batter while Tritia went outside to do her morning watering. He stirred the waffle mix absently. The screaming bothered him. Billy had never had a nightmare of that magnitude before. Even after they had calmed him down, convinced him it was only a dream, he was still pale and trembling and he seemed reluctant to let them leave. But he refused to tell them what the nightmare was about. Doug had pressed him, but Tritia had told him with a slight tug on the arm that the questioning could wait until a more opportune time.

  Billy had slept the rest of the night on the couch downstairs.

  The batter mixed, Doug moved into the living room and peeked out the window. He had placed a letter in the mailbox late yesterday afternoon before Howard came over, a long detailed answering letter to Don Jennings, catching him up on the milestones of his life over the past decade. The red flag on the box was down now, and he glanced over at the clock. Six-thirty-three. The mail was being delivered earlier every day. And on a Saturday. He thought the post office had discontinued Saturday service.

  He walked outside onto the porch, down the steps, and up the drive. Last night's storm had not materialized, passing over Willis without even bothering to say hello, but it had left behind it some hellacious humidity. By the time he reached the mailbox, he was already starting to sweat. He opened the metal door.

  His letter was gone and in its place was a thin white envelope with striped blue trimming addressed to Trish.

  "My tomatoes!"

  He could hear Trish's cry from the road. He hurried up the drive to where she stood in the garden, hose in hand. She looked at him and pointed to the plants at her feet. "Thejavelinas got my tomatoes again!" She kicked the ground. "Goddamn it!"Javelinas had eaten her tomato plants each summer for the past three years. Last year, the tomatoes had been greenish red and almost ripe when the wild pigs had raided the garden. This year, Doug had made a little chicken-wire fence around the garden to keep the animals out, but apparently it hadn't worked.

  "How are the other plants?" he asked.

  "Radishes are okay, zucchini is salvageable, cucumbers are all right, cilantro and the herbs are untouched, but the corn is completely ruined. Damn!"

  "Need some help?"

  She nodded disgustedly. "We'll redo what we can after breakfast. I'll just finish watering right now."

  "We could set traps if you want.Hobie knows how to do it."

  "No traps," she said. "And no poison. I hate the little bastards and I

  want *hem to die, but I don't want to be the one to kill them."

  "It's your garden." He walked around to the front of the house and went up the porch, hearing the sound of slow tired footsteps on the floor as he stepped through the door. He stood unmoving, mouth open in mock incredulity, as Billy headed away from the couch toward the kitchen. "I don't believe it," he said.

  "Miracle of miracles!"

  "Shut up," Billy said.

  "You actually got up on your own."

  "I have to go to the bathroom," Billy mumbled, making his way down the hall.

  "Wait a minute," Doug said seriously.

  Billy turned around.

  "Are you all right?"

  The boy stared dumbly at him for a moment, then recognition registered on his face. He nodded tiredly and walked into the bathroom, slamming the door and locking it.

  Doug deposited the envelope on the coffee table in front of the couch and opened the refrigerator, taking out the butter and jam. From the cupboard he withdrew honey and peanut butter, setting them all on the counter next to the plates. The dirty dishes from last night were still in the sink, but he figured he'd do the dishes all at once after they finished breakfast. He opened the now hot waffle iron and ladled in some batter, closing it and listening to the quiet sizzle, smelling the familiar rich buttermilk odor.

  The toilet flushed and Billy came out, walking straight through the kitchen to the living room, where he automatically turned on the television.

  "TV on Saturday morning?" Doug said. "That's sickening."

  Billy ignored him and turned on a cartoon, settling back into the couch to watch.

  Tritia came in, looking hot and angry, as he pulled the first four waffle squares from the iron. "You want these?" he asked.

  She shook her head. "Give them to Billy."

  "Why don't we go on a picnic today?" Doug suggested, dropping the waffles on a plate. "We haven't done that for a while. It's going to be hot and horrible anyway. We'll go to Clear Creek."

  "Sounds good," Billy said from the living room.

  Tritia looked at her son, pushed the hair back from her forehead, then nodded her assent. "All right," she said. "Let's do it."

  They decided to hike down the path through the green belt rather than drive or walk along the road. It was faster, more fun, and would take them to a less-populated section of the creek. Tritia made them salami-and-cheese sandwiches on homemade bread, and Doug carried the ice chest while she and Billy hauled the folding chairs. To their right, the low gentle slope of the land graduated into a steeper rise, dirt and light sandstone giving way to darker granite. The vegetation changed from pine andmanzanita to aspen and acacia, with longvinelike tendrils of wild strawberries growing parasitically over the rock face, intermixed with ferns and bottlebrush and poison sumac. The trail itsajfwas lined with the tiny red flowers of Indian paintbrush. To their left, the level ground swooped downward to meet the creek, and the path followed this descent in its own late unhurried way.

  They heard the creek before they saw it, a low continuous gurgle that sounded remarkably like the peal of distant thunder. As they g
rew closer, the amalgam of sounds became differentiated and they could hear birds and bugs as well as water. This section of the creek was flanked by saplings -- aspen and cottonwood and sycamore -- that grew in chaotic abundance between the boulders that ran like a second stream along the side of the creek, and they had to walk quite a ways past the bend before finding a flat spot of dirt close enough to the water to set up camp.

  They set down the ice chest between their chairs. Billy had worn his cutoffs and, after grabbing a can of Coke, immediately jumped into the creek, splashing wildly to cool himself off. The water level was low, but still deep enough for him to swim. He dogpaddled for a few moments, dunking his head and pushing from rock to rock, then, bored, stood up and began wading upstream.

  "Don't go too far!" Tritia called out.

  "I won't!" he yelled back.

  Doug sat down on his chair. He had brought along the latest Joyce Carol Oates novel to read. He found Gates, as a person,unrelievedly pretentious and phony, and most of her books boring and much too long, but there was something compelling about her as an artist, and he found himself inevitably reading her novels and short-story collections as soon as they came out. He didn't like either her or her work, but he was a fan.

  Strange how that worked, he thought.Hobie was a hardcore Clint Eastwood fan, and he was not. Yet when it came down to it, he liked more Clint Eastwood movies thanHobie did.

  Life was full of paradoxes.

  The mailman was a paradox. Doug hated the man, but as he had told Howard, the man had been delivering the most consistently good mail they had ever received. Of course, the carrier had nothing to do with the contents of the mail -- if the messenger was not to be blamed for the message, he was not to be congratulated either -- but it was hard not to associate the two.

  He glanced over at Tritia , peacefully looking out over the creek at the cliffs beyond. He was surprised that she had not felt any real dislike for the mailman, that she had not picked up on the unnaturalness that seemed to be an inherent part of his makeup. Ordinarily, she was by far the more sensitive of them, noticing instantly any behavioral aberrance, making snap judgments based on intuition, which were usually correct. He did not see how she could be so blind this time.

  He opened the book on his lap. Why had he been thinking about the mailman so much lately? It was beginning to border on the obsessive. He had to force himself to stop it. He had to quit sitting around, worrying, fretting, and find something else with which to occupy his time. Instead of thinking about the mailman, he should be getting to work on that damn storage shed.

  But Howard didn't like him either.

  That meant nothing. Two negative reactions to a person's personality did not mean that that person was evil.

  Evil.

  _Evil_.

  There. He had thought it, if not actually said it. For that was the word that had been floating in the back of his mind since the day at the funeral when he had first seen the mailman. It was a simplistic word, almostcartoonish in its romantic-pulp implications, but much as he hated to acknowledge or recognize it, it was the word that best described what he felt about the mailman.

  The man was evil.

  "What are you thinking?" Tritia asked.

  He looked up, startled and embarrassed to be caught in his ruminations.

  "Nothing," he lied, turning back to the book in his lap.

  "Something."

  "Nothing." He was aware that she was staring at him, but he chose not to acknowledge the fact. Instead, he concentrated on the words in front of him, on the meaning behind the words, on the thoughts behind the meaning, trying to lose himself in the prose. Eventually, he succeeded. Just as he used to fall asleep as a child while pretending to be sleeping as his parents checked in on him, he now began reading while pretending to read.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later, he heard Billy's voice, only a fraction louder than the creek song but rapidly gaining in volume. He looked up from his book.

  "Dad!"

  Billy came splashing through the center of the creek toward them, holding in his hand a wet and soggy envelope. Water was dripping from the uneven ends of his bangs and from his bare arms. There was a look of excited discovery on his face, as though he had just found the Lost Dutchman gold mine or had just unearthed some long-buried treasure. "Dad!"

  Doug marked his place in the book and put it down on a large dry rock next to him. "What is it?"

  "Come here. You have to come here."

  He looked at Tritia questioningly.

  "Oh, do something with your son for a change," she said. "Remember what we talked about? Besides, it's a beautiful day. Don't sit here and waste your life reading."

  Doug stood up. "That's where he gets it," he said, wagging an admonishing finger in her direction. "It's a part of the rampant anti-intellectualism that's sweeping this country."

  "Pedant."

  "Fine. But if he turns out to be a gas-station attendant, it's your fault.

  I tried my best." He took his wallet out of his pants, placing it on top of his book, then walked over the weeds and rocks toward his son. Scores of tiny brown grasshoppers sprang up at each step, moving frantically from one clump of grass to another. "What is it?" he asked Billy. "And why do you have that letter in your hand?"

  "I can't tell you, I have to show you."

  "Where is it?"

  "Just down the creekaways ."

  "Do I have to get wet?"

  Billy laughed. "Don't be such a baby. Come on."

  Doug took one tentative step into the water. It was cold.

  "Weird stuff," Billy promised. He waved the envelope tantalyzingly in the air. "There's more where this came from. That's your only hint."

  Doug stepped fully into the water. The creek was cold, but it was shallow and came up only to mid thigh . Billy began moving away, motioning for him to follow, and he waded after his son.

  They rounded a bend and then another one, the cliffs growing steeper on the sides. The water was a little deeper here, the rocks at the bottom slippery.

  On the floor of the clear creek he could see small black spots on some of the stones. Leeches. "I didn't know you were walking through this kind of area," he said. "I don't like it. It's dangerous. From now on, you stay closer to us."

  "It's not that bad."

  Doug nearly slipped, and he caught himself on a rock with his hand. Billy, however, was wading straight through the water like an expert. "Well, at least make sure someone's with you if you go out of sight. You could break your head and we'd never know."

  Billy had stopped at another bend, pointing around the curve. "There it is," he said.

  Doug caught up to him.

  And stopped.

  Both sides of the creek were littered with envelopes, white and brown and tan and beige. Hundreds of them. They were everywhere, like rectangular patches of snow or some bizarre form of fungus that grew in precise geometrical patterns, covering everything, caught on bushes, sticking out from between rocks. Most of them were wet and waterlogged, in the mud at the edge of the creek. Still others were perched in the branches of nearby trees.

  "Weird, huh?" Billy said excitedly. He pulled an envelope from the branches of a sapling next to him.

  Doug picked up the two nearest envelopes. Bills. He recognized them immediately from the preprinted return address and the clear window with the name, number, street, city, state, and zip code of the intended recipient. He looked around him. Nearly all of the envelopes seemed to be of the short squarish type that ordinarily housed bills or bad news. Very few were of the long less formal variety or were the small cute envelopes of personalized stationary.

  He stared, stunned, at thirty or forty envelopes that looked like they were growing on a tree.

  The mailman had been dumping mail at the creek.

  It was an inescapable conclusion, but it still gave Doug a strange feeling to acknowledge it. Why would the mailman do such a thing? What was the point?

  What was the rea
son? The very strangeness of it was frightening, and he could not understand what the mailman hoped to gain. It was crazy. If he had simply wanted to get rid of the letters, he could have burned them or buried them or dumped them someplace more convenient. He looked around. The spot was so far off the beaten track that Doug did not see how the mailman could even have known about it. He would have had to hike in a mile and a half from the road to get here, carrying the mailbags, since there was no path to this location that was wide enough to drive upon.

  He glanced over at Billy. His son must have seen the expression on his own face, for he had dropped the envelope he was holding. The excitement was disappearing from his eyes and was being replaced by what looked like understanding.

  And fear.

  Tritia sat in her chair, head tilted back, staring up at the sky. She loved to watch clouds, to lay back and enjoy their billowy transformations, ascribing concrete form to their temporary shapes. And nowhere Were the clouds more visually dramatic than in Arizona. As a young girl growing up in Southern California near the Pacific Ocean, she'd had her share of clear days, of blue Rose Parade skies, but in California the cloud situation was either feast or famine. Either they were nonexistent or they covered the entire sky from horizon to horizon with a monochrome ceiling. Rarely did she see the huge shifting shapes she saw in Arizona, clouds so white against sky so blue that they looked fake. "Trish!"

  She sat up straight at the sound of Doug's voice. His tone was unexpectedly serious, and her first thought was that he or Billy had slipped and fallen and broken something, but she saw with relief that they were both walking normally through the water toward her, not holding arms or wrists or fingers.

  She relaxed a little, though she noticed that Billy was not as excited as he had been earlier.

  He looked . . . scared. She pushed the thought from her mind. "What is it?" she asked.

  "You have to see it. Come here." Doug stepped out of the creek toward her.

  She stood, adjusting her shorts. "Do I have to?" she asked teasingly, but the only response she received was a slight attempt at a smile. Something was definitely wrong. "What is it?"