The Collection

He asked me no questions but immediately hopped into the cab. I peeled out, following his directions, hoping my short detour to his house would not make me too late.

It was twenty minutes before we reached the pink build­ing. I leaped out of the pickup and dashed through the door.

'Fifteen dollars,' Charlie Daniels said. 'And sign the re­lease.'

I threw him the money, scrawled my signature and ran down the hall.

'Address and driver's license,' he called after me.

The camera was already rolling as I burst into the room. My mother, bound and naked, was seated on the chair. Her mouth was not gagged, but she was not screaming. Her eyes looked dead. The people staring at her were silent, uncom­fortable.

'Mom!' I cried.

And then the man started up the chainsaw.

The Mailman

When I was a little boy, my mom and dad used to take me to the county fair each summer. Once, when I was around five or six, I was walking a few steps behind them and was accosted by a dwarf who demanded, 'Give me a quarter.' He was pushy, insistent, and frightened me, and it was not until I had run to catch up with my parents and saw him approach another fairgoer with the same belligerent demand that I realized he was just trying to round up customers for a ring-toss game.

I used that incident as the starting point for 'The Mailman.'

***

If Jack had known that the mailman was a dwarf he never would have moved into the house. It was as simple as that. Yes, the neighborhood was nice. And he'd gotten a fantastic deal on the place—the owner had been transferred to New York by the company he worked for and had to sell as quickly as possible. But all that was beside the point.

The mailman was a dwarf.

Jack got the cold sweats just thinking about it. He had moved in that morning and had been innocently unpacking lawn furniture, setting up the redwood picnic table under the pine tree, when he had seen the blue postal cap bobbing just above the top of the small front fence. A kid, he thought. A kid playing games.

Then the mailman had walked through the gate and Jack had seen the man's small body and oversized head, his fat little fingers clutching a stack of letters. And he had run as f fast as he could in the other direction, away from the dwarf, aware that the movers and neighbors were staring at him but not caring. The mailman dropped the letters in the mail-slot of the door and moved on to the next house while Jack stood alone at the far end of the yard, facing the opposite direction, trying to suppress the panic that was welling within him.

The dwarf jumped out from somewhere and grabbed Jack's arm. 'You got a quarter? Gimme a quarter!' He held out a fat tiny hand no larger than Jack's.

The young boy looked around, confused, searching for Baker, for his father, for anyone. His glance met, for a sec­ond, that of the dwarf, and he saw an adult's face at his child's level, old eyes peering cruelly into his young ones. A hard, experienced mouth was strung in a straight line across a field of five o 'clock shadow. Jack looked immediately away.

'Gimme a quarter!' The dwarf pulled him across the sawdust to a booth, where he pointed to a pyramid of stacked multicolored glass ashtrays. 'You'll win a prize! Gimme a quarter! '

Jack's mouth opened to call for help, but it would not open all the way and no sound came out. His eyes, confused, frantic, now darted everywhere, searching in vain for a fa­miliar face in the carnival crowd. He put one sweaty hand into the right pocket of his short pants and held tight to the two quarters his father had given to him.

'I know you have a quarter! Give it to me!' The dwarf was starting to look angry.

Jack felt a firm strong hand grab the back of his neck, and he swung his head around.

'Come on, Jack. Let's go.' His father smiled down at him—safety, reassurance, order in that smile.

Jack relaxed his grip on the coins in his pocket and looked up gratefully at his father. He grabbed his father's arm and the two of them started to walk down the midway toward the funhouse, where Baker was waiting. As he walked, he turned back to look at the dwarf.

The little man was scowling at him. 'I'll get you, you lit­tle son of a bitch.' His voice was a low, rough growl.

Frightened, Jack looked up. But his father, ears at a higher level, hearing different sounds, was unaware of the threat. He had not heard it. Jack gripped his father's hairy arm tighter and stared straight ahead, toward Baker, mak­ing a conscious effort not to look back. Beneath his wind-breaker and T-shirt, his heart was thumping wildly. He knew the dwarf was staring at him, waiting for him to turn around again. He could feel the hot hatred of the little man's eyes on

his back.

'I'll get you,' the dwarf said again.

Jack sorted through the mail in his hand. The envelopes were ordinary—junk, bills, a couple of letters—but they felt tainted, looked soiled to his eyes, and when he thought of those stubby fat fingers touching them, he dropped the en­velopes onto the table.

Maybe he could sell the house. Or call the post office and get the mailman transferred. He had to do something.

The fear was once again building within him, and he picked up the remote control and switched on the TV. The Wizard of Oz was on, a munchkin urging Dorothy to 'follow the yellow-brick road!' He switched off the TV, his hands shaking. The house seemed suddenly darker, his unpacked boxes throwing strange shadows on the walls of the room. He got up and switched on all the lights on the first floor. It would be a long time before he'd be able to fall asleep.

Jack unpacked in the morning but spent the afternoon shopping, staying far away from his house. He noticed two mailmen on the way to the mall, but they were both of normal size.

Why hadn't he checked?

How could he be so stupid?

He arrived home at five thirty, long after the mailman was supposed to have come and gone. Was supposed to have. For there he was in his absurd blue uniform, lurching ever so slightly to the right and to the left, not quite balanced on his stumpy legs, three houses up from his own.

Jack jumped out of the car and ran into the house, shut­ting and locking the door behind him, hurriedly closing the drapes. He crouched down behind the couch, out of view from any window, closing his eyes tightly, his hands balled into tense fists of fear. He heard the light footsteps on the porch, heard the metal clack of the mail slot opening and closing, heard the small feet retreat.

Safe.

He waited several minutes before standing up, until he was certain the dwarf was gone. He was sweating, and he re­alized his hands were shaking.

'Gimme a quarter.'

His experience with the dwarf at the carnival had been scary, but though he'd never forgotten the rough voice and small cruel face, it would not have been enough to terrify him so thoroughly and utterly that he now shuddered in fear when he saw a man under four feet tall. No, it was Vietnam that did that. It was the camp. For it was there that he saw the dwarf again, that he realized the little man really was after him and had not simply been making empty threats. It was there that he learned of the dwarf's power.

The guards were kind to him at first; or as kind as could be expected under the circumstances. He was fed twice a day; the food was adequate; he was allowed weekly exer­cise; he was not beaten. But one day the food stopped com­ing. And it was three more days before he was given a cupful of dirty water and a small dollop of nasty tasting gruel served on a square of old plywood. He ate hungrily, drank instantly, and promptly threw up, his starved system unable to take the sudden shock. He jumped up, pounding on the door, demanding more food,