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 grew 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.
