If the city sensed these things, it remained silent.
The city kept its secrets.
LETTERS AND LIES
'Neither rain nor gloom nor dead of night…that doesn't sound right. Now how does that go?' Charlie Blevins shook his head. 'Something something appointed rounds.'
Charlie steered his postal jeep to the curb on Poplar Hills, where box houses with vinyl siding and slatted shutters horseshoed around a cul-de-sac. All the poplars had been cut down because the trees got too tall and homeowners' insurance had gone up. The leaves of the spindly maples that had been planted in their stead were just beginning to turn orange-red, and the grass smelled sweetly of autumn. This was Charlie's favorite time of year.
He lifted the bundle of papers, letters, and catalogs off the seat beside him and swung his tan, knobby legs onto the pavement. The two little dogs behind the fence at 106 were yapping, just as if he hadn't driven by every day, excepting legal holidays and Sundays, for the last five years. Punters, Charlie called them, the kind that would lift satisfyingly off the foot and sail about ten yards.
Charlie walked along the fence to the mail slot hanging by the garage door. The punters followed him every step of the way, tumbling over each other in their frenzy. Charlie pulled a rubber band off the pile of mail, glanced around to make sure the snoopy old bat at 108 wasn't watching, and shot the rubber band through the chain links, hitting the closest dog in the nose. Its face registered surprise, and a good two seconds passed as its brain analyzed the new information. It decided pain was the message the brain was receiving, and the brain sent an order to the dog's mouth commanding it to yelp.
'The U.S. Postal Service. We deliver,' Charlie said, blissfully unaware that he had lifted the line from a rival package company. He walked to 107, whistling cheerfully. 107 had a heft of mail, including a pair of periodicals in plain brown wrappers. Charlie recognized the return address. He delivered a lot of these 'pictorials' to this end of town, where the citizens were just solid enough to worry about appearances. They couldn't just buy their smut off the convenience store rack, right in front of God, the PTA, or whoever else might happen to stop in for a Big Gulp and a pack of smokes.
Charlie dropped off the stack and continued to 108. The curtains didn't part, so Miss Mauretta Whiting, You May Already Be A Winner, was definitely not at home. Today she had a pair of sweepstakes packages from the same clearing house, one addressed to 'Maura White,' the other to 'Ma Whiting.' If she had been home, she would be standing by the mailbox waiting for him.
'Time-dated material,' she would say. She personally blamed him for all the shortcomings of the postal service. She didn't even have to be standing there for Charlie to hear her thin, scratchy voice.
'Why, for thirty-three cents, I'd expect a letter to get here the day before it was mailed. You keep chargin' more and more and gettin' slower and slower. Sometimes they don't get through at all. Back in my day…'
Yeah, they used to walk through six feet of snow with one hand tied behind their backs and a pack of starving wolves latched onto their ankles. Well, this isn't your day anymore, lady, thought Charlie.
He opened her mailbox and crammed it full with her beloved sweepstakes material. Maybe she was just perpetually disappointed that his jeep, and not Ed McMahon's prize wagon, that drove up.
She vanished from his mind as he made his way to 109. The flag was up at the box, so Charlie reached in and pulled out a couple of letters in #10 envelopes. As his fingers brushed the letters, a mild tingle crawled up his arm. He hoped his blood sugar wasn't getting low again. He walked back to the jeep and tossed the letters in the 'out' basket without looking at them.
Charlie finished his rounds and drove back to the office. He walked up the loading bay ramp with the basket of outgoing mail, passing Susan, the counter clerk, who was sucking on a Virginia Slim. Her eyelashes drooped from the weight of mascara, like tree branches that were laden with wet leaves. Charlie's private nickname for her was 'Next Window,' because she had the far more pressing responsibility of pleasing the stockholders of her favorite tobacco company than satisfying the postal customers of Silver Falls, Virginia.
She looked ready to complain, so Charlie obliged. 'Hey, Susan, how's it going?'
'My feet are killing me,' she said. 'I'm thinking about putting in for disability.'
'Well, darling, you go right ahead and then come back in a few months and see how this place falls apart without you. We'd have St. Louis in with San Francisco and next-day air freight would be stacked in the broom closet.'
She fluttered her eyelashes. 'And you'd think a girl would get a raise once in a while. At least a 'thank you' would be nice.'
'There's always the satisfaction of a job well done.' Not that you would know, Charlie silently added. He walked over to the sorter and dumped his basket. Most of the mail would zip down to the center in Danville, where it would leave tonight for parts all over the country and world. Some of it would stay in the office and go out tomorrow on the local routes. A piece or two would fall in a crack and gather lint for a while.
Bob Fender stood by a package bin, looking at a letter as if it were a spot of blood. His blue suspenders, already taut, stretched to the snapping point as he bent over and picked it up. He saw Charlie and said, 'Hey, look here at this.'
Charlie squinted at the letter, cursing the weak fluorescent lights. The postmark was dated fifteen years ago. This branch office had only been open for four years. Before that, they had worked out of a little stone building that had been crumbling since the turn of the century. Somehow, the letter had made the move and remained hidden, like a stowaway that had forgotten to disembark. Bob was willing and able to spend a half-hour of government- subsidized time recounting its possible history.
'That damned thing is loster than a preacher at a strip joint,' said Bob. A good-natured guffaw rippled the folds of his beer gut.
'If it was a love letter, you can bet the flame has long since flickered out,' said Charlie. 'If it's a check, the account's probably closed. If it was news from home, there's sure nothing new about it now.'
'Makes you wonder, though. Looks like a woman's handwriting, or maybe one of them fancy college boy’s. Funny, ain't one word changed in this thing in fifteen years while the rest of the world's just gone on getting crazier. Just like every time there's a mail bomb, everybody yells, 'It was the Aye-rabs,' but then they come to find out it was a good corn-fed country boy instead of a raghead. Just gone on getting crazier.' Bob shook his head. 'Them was simpler times back then.'
'Sure was.' Charlie was anxious to steer Bob off-track before he really got rolling on the list of society's ills. 'So, you going to give this to Red?'
'Well, curiosity killed the cat and never did no good for the mouse, neither. If we deliver this, there'd be a story in the local paper for sure. Some snot-nosed kid fresh out of newspaper school would have a field day comparing us to snails and all that.'
'Yeah, and then laugh up their sleeve like they were the first ones to ever think of it.'
'This baby's going on a one-way trip to the dead letter office.' Bob tossed it in the trash can. 'What they don't know won't hurt them.'
After Bob left, Charlie picked the letter out of the can and looked at the return address. He went into the bathroom and locked the door, then tore open the envelope and slid the letter out. It was musty, like a canvas tent that had been stored in the basement too long. Charlie unfolded the two yellowed pages and read the big cursive scrawl:
Dear Rita:
I know you really owe me nothing since it was a mutual decision to break up. I heard you got married, and I hope you're happy because you deserve it. Here in Kansas, even the sky is flat. I can hardly go day-to-day, sometimes there's no reason to get out of bed. Remember when you used to laugh and say I was crazy? Well, I guess you were more right than you know.
