Sure, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were out in strength since the flooding began, prophesying the end of the world as they did every few years. Those damn JoHo’s. Craig had had to order them off more than one porch when they got in his way.
Russell was very enrapt by the magazine. “Says here, says right here how them UFO’s people see aren’t alien ships or any of that.”
“No? What the hell are they?”
“Says here they’re angels riding in the sky, keeping watch over the flock.”
“No shit?” Craig said. “Well, I’ll be damned. Them angels better start identifying themselves or the Air Force is going to shoot one of ‘em down.”
Russell, who usually got a kick out of Craig’s mouth, didn’t say anything. He was in a mood. Lots of people were in moods these days and lot more were finding religion now with the rising water. People were saying some nut was even talking on the radio about how to build your very own ark, of all things. But Craig was not surprised by any of it, not really. It followed the usual cycle; he’d seen the same damn sort of crazy thinking as Y2K approached. People started losing their heads when the weather got funny, when there was doom and gloom in the forecast. Craig had been hearing all kinds of wild shit since the flooding began.
He bid Russell good-bye, wondered if he’d get sucked in with the JoHo’s and start knocking on doors. Wouldn’t have surprised Craig a bit. The Boyne’s were okay, but they were soft upstairs. Whole family was like that.
Craig moved off down the sidewalk through the rain. He delivered to the Chambers and the Proctons, the Brietenbachs and the Sepperley’s. That last stop was a quick one, being that Wanda Sepperly was in her nineties and all her friends and family were long dead. About all she ever got were political fliers and JC Penney sale brochures. Sometimes, in the summer, Wanda would sit out on her porch, yellowed bones held together by the thinnest veneer of cellophane, and start talking about the ration books during the war or how that heat wave back in ’38 had been so bad that yards started on fire. But mostly she just sat and stared, barely casting a shadow, mumbling things that Craig could not hear and from the despairing, wizened look on her face, he always figured he was glad of that.
But now and again, she would scare him.
Sometimes her eyes weren’t rheumy and distant. Sometimes they would be far too bright and clear and it was on those days, sitting in that antique wicker rocker, that she would scare Craig. Scare him because those eyes seemed to know far too much. It was like she could look right inside your head and your greatest worry and your darkest secret were known to her.
It was not a pleasant thing at all.
Three years before, one hot July afternoon of yellow-baked lawns and whirring grasshoppers, Craig had stopped, dropped a few letters and she’d been looking that way at him. Not just looking at him, but into him.
“Hello, Mrs. Sepperly,” he’d said, the spit just drying up in his mouth. “How…how are you today?”
Wanda sat there, not rocking, just staring holes through him, a funny little smile on her narrow mouth, her eyes lit like ghost lights. That burning gaze almost made Craig take a step back and fall down the steps. He told himself it was probably heat exhaustion, heat stroke, that he needed to lie down, grab a cool drink. But he knew better. Because this was Wanda Sepperly staring at him, the old lady people called “Mother Sepperly” or “Gramma Sepperly” and very often, “that crazy gypsy fortune-teller.” The latter, of course, never to her face. Because although Mother Sepperly probably didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds and her mind was very often neither here nor there, but someplace else entirely, she still inspired a certain respect. And maybe that was because of her age and maybe it was because more than not were a little uneasy around her and possibly even frightened.
And Craig understood that fear that hot July afternoon. For Wanda would not stop staring at him and when she did speak, her voice was not cracked with age but lucid and smooth as that of a thirty-year old woman: “Craig, them pains you got in yer stomach, they ain’t gonna go away. You should see the doc before you start passing too much blood.”
Thing was, Craig had been having pains. And when he went to an internist, a bleeding peptic ulcer was discovered. Had it gone on much longer, the doc told him, he would have needed surgery. How Wanda Sepperly had known that was beyond him, but since that day Craig was more than a little intimidated by her. And a year later when Wanda told him he should be keeping a tighter reign on that wife of his, it turned out that Jean was indeed having an affair.
But how did you balance any of that out with logic or modern scientific reasoning?
You just didn’t; you accepted as Craig accepted. The old crones about town claimed that Wanda was what they had called “sighted” in the old days. But Craig didn’t want to know about that. He was nosy as nosy got, but there were some things even he didn’t care to know. And if the kids in the neighborhood claimed that she was a witch, Craig figured he didn’t need to know about that either.
Today Wanda was not about, probably inside waiting to die. As he dropped a flier from the Price County Democratic Party into her mailbox, Craig hoped that, God willing, he’d never get that fucking old.
Next stop was the Zirblanski’s, home of the twin pre-teen terrors of Rhonda and Rita. Twin sisters who were legendary ass-kickers that tormented their fellow schoolmates with great zeal and had been both expelled more than once. When they weren’t intimidating others or knocking the shit out of some young tough who thought he was their equal, they were going after one another. One summer, Craig had approached the house and Rhonda came running up the walk, her hair on fire, and another time, he’d got there in time to see Rita thrown through the screen door, her face gashed and bleeding. All Craig could get out of her was that Rhonda had used her head to break the little window on the stove. Then she stormed back inside to give back what she had gotten. They had parents-Mike and Sheila-but they were wisely absent most of the time and tended to keep their heads down when they were home.
Craig deposited the mail here, mostly bills, and got off the porch as quick as he could. The last time he’d seen the girls a few weeks before, they’d been sporting matching red devil tattoos on their forearms…they’d been the temporary kind, but nobody could convince Craig of that.
Those girls weren’t nothing but trouble, he often told his wife over dinner, and it’s only a matter of time before they kill someone and end up in prison.
The next house was the Blake’s.
Well, Miriam Blake actually, now that her bulldog of a husband had finally gone toes up. Roger Blake had been a crazy, drunken NRA freak who liked to play with guns because-word had it-his own pistol had been out of powder and shot for years. He’d been with the Marines in Tarawa or Iwo Jima or one of those awful places and loved to talk about it, loved to show the sword he’d taken off a dead Jap. Now that he was gone, there was just Miriam, but Craig figured that was enough. She still hadn’t taken down the THIS HOUSE PROTECTED BY SMITH amp; WESSON placard on the door.
Craig liked to sneak up on the porch and drop her mail before she heard him. Because when she saw him coming, she couldn’t help but saunter out on the porch and say something smart-assed like, Well, what do you know? A thousand trucks in a row, they didn’t fire your ass after all! or Lookee here, the eagle has landed and what a sorry effing sight he is indeed!
Craig slipped onto the porch, equally as sneaky as old Roger had been on Iwo Jima when he defeated the entire Japanese Imperial Army. He quietly dropped the letters in the box and had almost made it back out to the walk when Miriam knocked loudly on the picture window so he would know from that sour look on her old puss that he had surely not pulled one over on her.
“Old bitch,” Craig said under his breath.
Craig worked his route and the rain fell and sometimes it lightened, but mostly it did not. The world was wet and gray and seeping, a chill mist in the air. A lot of houses looked empty and Craig was glad for this. He delivered to the Gendrou’s (their son Stevey was queer) and the William’s (a couple welfare bums who sold pot) and the Marlick’s (their oldest daughter had gotten mixed up with some black guy over at the college and that just showed you where the world was going).
Not that any of these things were Craig Ohlen’s business.
But truth be told, Craig wasn’t real big on minding his own business. As one of his Kneale Street customers, Miriam Blake, put it, “The day that nosy sonofabitch falls off somebody’s porch and breaks his effing neck is the day I throw an orgy for the neighborhood. Probably steams open the letters before he delivers ‘em.” And if the consensus of Craig Ohlen wasn’t quite so severe in most cases, it was well-known that he often looked through
