people’s mail before he deposited it. And rumor had it he also looked through a few windows when the opportunity presented itself. Truth was, Craig was nosey. Maybe it was the profession and maybe it was just heredity, but Craig liked to know about his customers…whether they liked it or not. There were some, of course, who didn’t care for it and weren’t above confronting him about it. And when they did, what could Craig really say? Being a federal employee he wasn’t in a position to argue with the taxpayers. Such things were discouraged and nearly all conflicts of that sort were settled in favor of the taxpayers.
That’s how things like that worked.
Craig was the veteran of a few of those conflicts and in the end, he had to back down. The only recourse for him was to indulge in a bit of spite from time to time. Letters might get lost or opened or they might end up in the bushes (wind blew ‘em there).
But such guerrilla activities could easily cost you your job, so you had to be careful. All routes had their share of nuts and you just had to smile as they told you what a useless fuck you were.
And speaking of nuts, here was a real beauty: Arland Mattson.
He lived in the trim ranch next door to Mitch Barron’s brick two-story, a retiree with nothing better to do than work his yard. In the winter, he scraped his driveway down to the concrete and liked to redistribute the snow is his yard with a snowblower so it would melt evenly. In the summer, though, is when Arland reached his peak cutting his grass and edging the walks and shaping the bushes, taking after offending weeds with a passion. He watered his lawn so much the sidewalks in front of his house had turned the color of rust.
As Craig came up on him, Arland was sweeping the water off his walks. Pushing it into the grass where it inevitably drained right back onto the sidewalk again. No big surprise, because yesterday he’d been trying to rake the rain out of his lawn as if you could possibly squeegee it out like water off your windshield.
“Afternoon, Mr. Mattson,” Craig said as he passed him.
Arland swung around like he’d been caught doing something unpleasant and possibly illegal. “Oh, it’s you. Saw your uniform and thought it might be them other ones come to talk me out of it.”
“Oh? Who’s that?” Craig asked, rain dripping off the brim of his white pith helmet.
“You never mind that,” Arland said. “Just believe me when I say they’re not flooding me out of my house. No, sir.”
“Yeah, don’t let ‘em,” Craig said, as he dropped a few letters into the mail slot.
Arland stood there looking positively absurd in his green gumrubber hip waders and a red-and-black checked hunting coat. “They think I don’t know what they’ve been up to out at that Army base. But I know, just as all of you will soon know. They’ve been manufacturing horrors out there, the most awful things! Tonight we’ll all know about that! I saw it in a dream…things like men that are not men! Long-armed things with pale faces! They’ll be hunting the streets tonight! You mark my word!”
Craig told him he’d sure keep on the lookout for them monstrosities.
He got away from Arland and made it to the Barron’s doorstep. Now the Barron’s were good people. Mitch always had time for a chat when he was home and come Christmas Lily always remembered Craig with a plate of cookies. Home-baked, too, not that store-bought crap. Mitch’s Jeep wasn’t in the driveway, but Craig knew he wasn’t at work. Mitch ran a lathe at Northern Fabricators over in Bethany and they were under water now, so Mitch was laid-off presently. Craig liked Mitch. Mitch was a union man, a steward, and a good one from what he’d heard. He was okay.
Craig dropped some magazines and letters in the box and right away felt eyes on him. Lily Barron was standing there at the window, looking haunted and lost, staring right through Craig like he was made of plexiglass.
Craig swallowed.
He knew what that was all about. It was some kind of tragedy, all right. Lily had herself a twin sister named Marlene who, it was said, wasn’t much more than a barfly living off the state. Once she’d been married to some rich guy over in Elmwood Hills, some real estate mogul named Bittner. Even had a kid out there somewhere. Swam with the uppity-ups. But that was ancient history. Story was, her husband decided he liked men better than girls and Marlene started hitting the sauce and spreading her legs for anything with a dick and that was that.
D-I-V-O-R-C-E, as Tammy said.
Since then, nothing but booze and drugs and all the wrong sort of men. Went right down hill. People said she’d been institutionalized more than once and that was just a damn shame because her sister Lily was just the salt of the earth. But that’s the way it ran with twins sometimes, just like on TV: one good and the other…well, not so good. Like maybe there’d only been enough eggs to make one really good omelet and the other was kind of runny, wouldn’t set right. Marlene had cracked up for good, though, laid open her wrists with a paring knife and then called 911. Word had it that when the cops got there, they found her on the back porch in a rocking chair, covered in her own blood, just as dead as dogshit. Word had it she was still warm, that the rocking chair was still moving when the boys in blue stepped up onto that porch. Some said she was smiling, too.
Craig sucked something into himself and knocked on the door. Lily answered right away. She was looking thin and her eyes were just vacant.
“Mitch went to find Chrissy. He hasn’t come back yet. Have you seen Chrissy?”
Chrissy. Sure, that was Lily’s kid, Mitch’s stepdaughter. Truth was, Craig had not seen her in some time. She was a teenager now, fifteen or sixteen, he figured. Sometimes, in his job, you could just about mark a kid’s age by the magazines they got. Ranger Rick, My Big Backyard, and Highlights gave over to Mad magazine, Game Player, and American Girl, depending on the gender. Soon enough those were replaced by Sports Illustrated for the boys and Seventeen for the girls. So, yeah, Craig was picturing Chrissy closing on sixteen or so. Course, it was the same with parents. At first, they subscribed to everything under the sun. But soon enough, as the kids got older, the subs to Family Fun and Parenting ran out as they just wanted to pretend they didn’t have children.
“No,” Craig finally said, “haven’t seen her. You better stay inside, though, Lily. They’ll be back anytime now.”
The door shut and Craig, who was at times not the most sympathetic creature in the world, felt something inside him sink without a trace. Christ, Lily was a wreck. She had been, up to a few weeks before, the most outgoing person in the world. And now she had not only crawled back into her shell, she had closed the lid after her.
Craig started down the rainswept walk, noticing offhand that the rain itself had lightened up a bit.
He passed two vacant houses, was glad to see that he had no mail for the Darin’s because Lou Darrin, who happened to be the district school superintendent, was probably the biggest dickhead on his route. Craig wasn’t alone in his thinking. Mitch Barron had once described Lou Darrin as a prick wrapped in an asshole and then dipped in a cunt. Which was a very colorful way of saying that most pit bulls had warmer personalities.
Craig scratched his nose with his middle finger as a tribute to Lou Darrin.
Only one more house on Kneale Street and that belonged to Cindy Lee Mayhew, who was just as prime a peach as a man could imagine picking. And Craig was certain of this because he’d done an awful lot of imagining about Cindy Lee Mayhew. She was maybe 24 or 25 with legs up to her neck and high, sleek tits like cruise missiles anxious to bust out of their silos. Her house was flanked by Kneale Street and Court Avenue and the ladies on the block often called her the Countess of Court Avenue, that being “Countess” spelled without an O. No matter, she had long dark hair and flashing blue eyes and she flirted shamelessly with anything that had a dick, knowing as she had since her thirteenth year and her garden had bloomed, the wonderful magic she could work upon the opposite sex.
Cindy Lee had a little red Dodge Probe that she liked to tease Craig about. As in, Oh, I just love the feel of my shiny red Probe or a girl can’t get quite enough of a Probe like that. In the summer, she liked to wash her Probe in the driveway wearing jean shorts cut off almost to her crotch so you could get an eyeful of those long, muscular tanned legs. She completed the picture in a halter that barely held her bountiful charms in place, her hard and flat belly on luscious display. When she did that, she knew and knew damn well that every set of male eyes in the neighborhood were watching just as she knew that every set of female eyes were hating.
Yesterday, when Craig brought up her mail, she’d looked him dead in the eye, said, “Oh, you always deliver things wet like this?”
Oh, Jesus, it had been almost too much.
Today, unfortunately, she was not home. At least she didn’t come to the door as usual and this was a great disappointment for Craig. But his testosterone-charged imagination stepped in and saved the day. It showed him
