by David Brin
Mrs. Howlett propelled him through the crowd. Gordon smiled and nodded as hands came out to touch his sleeve. Wide eyes followed his every movement.
Hunger must make me a better actor. I’ve never had an audience react quite like this before. I wish I knew exactly what it was I did that made them feel this way.
One of those watching him from behind the long buffet table was a young woman barely taller than Mrs. Howlett, with deep, almond eyes and hair blacker than Gordon remembered ever seeing before. Twice, she turned to gently slap the hand of a child who tried to help himself before the honored guest. Each time the girl quickly looked back at Gordon and smiled.
Beside her, a tall, burly young man stroked his reddish beard and gave Gordon a strange look—as if his eyes were filled with some desperate resignation. Gordon had only a moment to assimilate the two as Mrs. Howlett pulled him over in front of the pretty brunette.
“Abby,” she said, “let’s have a little bit of everything on a plate for Mr. Krantz. Then he can make up his mind what he wants seconds of. I baked the blueberry pie, Mr. Krantz.”
Dizzily, Gordon made a note to have two helpings of the blueberry. It was hard to concentrate on diplomacy, though. He hadn’t seen or smelled anything like this in years. The odors distracted him from the disconcerting looks and touching hands.
There was a large, spit-turned, stuffed turkey. A huge, steaming bowl of boiled potatoes, dollied up with beer-soaked jerky, carrots, and onions, was the second course. Down the table Gordon saw apple cobbler and an opened barrel of dried apple flakes. I must cozen a supply of those, before I leave.
Skipping further inventory, he eagerly held out his plate. Abby kept watching him as she took it.
The big, frowning redhead suddenly muttered something indecipherable and reached out to grab Gordon’s right hand in both of his own. Gordon flinched, but the taciturn fellow would not let go until he answered the grip and shook hands firmly.
The man muttered something too low to follow, nodded, and let go. He bent to kiss the brunette quickly and then stalked off, eyes downcast.
Gordon blinked. Did I just miss something? It felt as if some sort of event had just occurred, and had gone completely over his head.
“That was Michael, Abby’s husband,” Mrs. Howlett said. “He’s got to go and relieve Edward at the trap string. But he wanted to stay to see your show, first. When he was little he so used to love to watch TV shows.…”
Steam from the plate rose to his face, making Gordon quite dizzy with hunger. Abby blushed and smiled when he thanked her. Mrs. Howlett pulled him over to take a seat on a pile of old tires. “You’ll get to talk to Abby, later,” the black woman went on. “Now, you eat. Enjoy yourself.”
Gordon did not need to be encouraged. He dug in while people looked on curiously and Mrs. Howlett rattled on.
“Good, isn’t it? You just sit and eat and pay us no mind.
“And when you’re all full and you’re ready to talk again, I think we’d all like to hear, one more time, how you got to be a mailman.”
Gordon looked up at the eager faces above him. He hurriedly took a swig of beer to chase down the too-hot potatoes.
“I’m just a traveler,” he said around a half-full mouth while lifting a turkey drumstick. “It’s not much of a story how I got the bag and clothes.”
He didn’t care whether they stared, or touched, or talked at him, so long as they let him eat!
Mrs. Howlett watched him for a few moments. Then, unable to hold back, she started in again. “You know, when I was a little girl we used to give milk and cookies to the mailman. And my father always left a little glass of whiskey on the fence for him the day before New Year’s. Dad used to tell us that poem, you know, ‘Through sleet, through mud, through war, through blight, through bandits and through darkest night …’ ”
Gordon choked on a sudden, wayward swallow. He coughed and looked up to see if she was in earnest. A glimmer in his forebrain wanted to dance over the old woman’s accidentally magnificent misremembrance. It was rich.
The glimmer faded quickly, though, as he bit into the delicious roast fowl. He hadn’t the will to try to figure out what the old woman was driving at.
“Our mailman used to sing to us!”
The speaker, incongruously, was a dark-haired giant with a silver-streaked beard. His eyes seemed to mist as he remembered. “We could hear him coming, on Saturdays when we were home from school, sometimes when he was over a block away.
“He was black, a lot blacker than Mrs. Howlett, or Jim Horton over there. Man, did he have a nice voice! Guess that’s how he got the job. He brought me all those mail order coins I used to collect. Ringed the doorbell so he could hand ’em to me, personal, with his own hand.”
His voice was hushed with telescoped awe.
“Our mailman just whistled when I was little,” said a middle-aged woman with a deeply lined face. She sounded a little disappointed.
“But he was real nice. Later, when I was grown up, I came home from work one day and found out the mailman had saved the life of one of my neighbors. Heard him choking and gave hirn mouth-to-mouth until th’ ambulance came.”
A collective sigh rose from the circle of listeners, as if they were hearing the heroic adventures of a single ancient hero. The children listened in wide-eyed silence as the tales grew more and more embroidered. At least the small part of him still paying attention figured they had to be. Some were simply too far-fetched to be believed.
Mrs. Howlett touched Gordon’s knee. “Tell us again how you got to be a mailman.”
Gordon shrugged a little desperately. “I just found the mailman’s fings!” he emphasized around the food in his mouth. The flavors had overcome him, and he felt almost panicky over the way they all hovered over him. If the adult villagers wanted to romanticize their memories of men they had once considered lower-class civil servants at best, that was all right. Apparently they associated his performance tonight with the little touches of extroversion they had witnessed in their neighborhood letter carriers, when they had been children. That, too, was okay. They could think anything they damn well pleased, so long as they didn’t interrupt his eating!
“Ah—” Several of the villagers looked at each other knowingly and nodded, as if Gordon’s answer had had some profound significance. Gordon heard his own words repeated to those on the edges of the circle.
“He found the mailman’s things … so naturally he became …”
His answer must have appeased them, somehow, for the crowd thinned as the villagers moved off to take polite turns at the buffet. It wasn’t until much later, on reflection, that he perceived the significance of what had taken place there, under boarded windows and tallow lamps, while he crammed himself near to bursting with good food.
5
… we have found that our clinic has an abundant supply of disinfectants and pain killers of several varieties. We hear these are in short supply in Bend and in the relocation centers up north. We’re willing to trade some of these—along with a truckload of de-ionizing resin columns that happened to be abandoned here—for one thousand doses of tetracycline, to guard against the bubonic plague outbreak to the east. Perhaps we’d be willing to settle for an active culture of balomycine-producing yeast, instead, if someone could come up and show us how to maintain it.
Also, we are in desperate need of …
The Mayor of Gilchrist must have been a strong-willed man to have persuaded his local emergency committee to offer such a trade. Hoarding, however illogical and uncooperative, was a major contributor to the collapse. It astonished Gordon that there still had been people with this much good sense during the first two years of the Chaos.
He rubbed his eyes. Reading wasn’t easy by the light of a pair of homemade candles. But he found it difficult getting to sleep on the soft mattress, and damn if he’d sleep on the floor after so long dreaming of such a bed, in just such a room!
He had been a little sick, earlier. A
ll that food and homebrewed ale had almost taken him over the line from delirious happiness to utter misery. Somehow, he had teetered along the boundary for several hours of blurrily remembered celebration before at last stumbling into the room they had prepared for him.
There had been a toothbrush waiting on his nightstand, and an iron tub filled with hot water.
And soap! In the bath his stomach had settled, and a warm, clean glow spread over his skin.
Gordon smiled when he saw that his postman’s uniform had been cleaned and pressed. It lay on a nearby chair; the rips and tears he had crudely patched were now neatly sewn.
He could not fault the people of this tiny hamlet for neglecting his one remaining longing … something he had gone without too long to even think about. Enough. This was almost Paradise.
As he lay in a sated haze between a pair of elderly but clean sheets, waiting leisurely for sleep to come, he read a piece of correspondence between two long-dead men.
The Mayor of Gilchrist went on:
We are having extreme difficulty with local gangs of “Survivalists.” Fortunately, these infestations of egotists are mostly too paranoid to band together. They’re as much trouble to each other as to us, I suppose. Still, they are becoming a real problem.
Our deputy is regularly fired on by well armed men in army surplus camouflage clothing. No doubt the idiots think he’s a “Russian Lackey” or some such nonsense.
They have taken to hunting game on a massive scale, killing everything in the forest and doing a typically rotten job of butchering and preserving the meat. Our own hunters come back disgusted over the waste, often having been shot at without provocation.
I know it’s a lot to ask, but when you can spare a platoon from relocation riot duty, could you send them up here to help us root out these self-centered, hoarding, romantic scoundrels from their little filtered armories? Maybe a unit or two of the US Army will convince them that we won the war, and have to cooperate with each other from now on.…
He put the letter down.
So it had been that way here, too. The clichéd “last straw” had been this plague of “survivalists”—particularly those following the high priest of violent anarchy, Nathan Holn.
One of Gordon’s duties in the militia had been to help weed out some of those small gangs of city-bred cutthroats and gun nuts. The number of fortified caves and cabins his unit had found—in the prairie and on little lake islands—had been staggering … all set up in a rash of paranoia in the difficult decades before the war.
The irony of it was that we had things turned around! The depression was over. People were at work again and cooperating. Except for a few crazies, it looked like a renaissance was coming, for America and for the world.
But we forgot just how much harm a few crazies could do, in America and in the world.
Of course when the collapse did come, the solitary survivalists’ precious little fortresses did not stay theirs for long. Most of the tiny bastions changed hands a dozen or more times in the first months—they were such tempting targets. The battles had raged all over the plains until every solar collector was shattered, every windmill wrecked, and every cache of valuable medicines scattered in the never-ending search for heavy dope.
Only the ranches and villages, those possessing the right mixture of ruthlessness, internal cohesion, and common sense, survived in the end. By the time the Guard units had all died at their posts, or themselves dissolved into roving gangs of battling survivalists, very few of the original population of armed and armored hermits remained alive.
Gordon looked at the letter’s postmark again. Nearly two years after the war. He shook his head. I never knew anyone held on so long.
The thought hurt, like a dull wound inside him. Anything that made the last sixteen years seem avoidable was just too hard to imagine.
There was a faint sound. Gordon looked up, wondering if he had imagined it. Then, only slightly louder, another faint knock rapped at the door to his room.
“Come in,” he called. The door opened about halfway. Abby, the petite girl with the vaguely oriental cast to her eyes, smiled timidly from the opening. Gordon refolded the letter and slipped it into its envelope. He smiled.
“Hello, Abby. What’s up?”
“I—I’ve come to ask if there is anything else you needed,” she said a little quickly. “Did you enjoy your bath?”
“Did I now?” Gordon sighed. He found himself slipping back into Macduff’s burr. “Aye, lass. And in particular I appreciated the gift of that toothbrush. Heaven sent, it was.”
“You mentioned you’d lost yours.” She looked at the floor. “I pointed out that we had at least five or six unused ones in the storage room. I’m glad you were pleased.”
“It was your idea?” He bowed. “Then I am indeed in your debt.”
Abby looked up and smiled. “Was that a letter you were just reading? Could I look at it? I’ve never seen a letter before.”
Gordon laughed. “Oh surely you’re not that young! What about before the war?”
Abby blushed at his laughter. “I was only four when it happened. It was so frightening and confusing that I … I really don’t remember much from before.”
Gordon blinked. Had it really been that long? Yes. Sixteen years was indeed enough time to have beautiful women in the world who knew nothing but the dark age.
Amazing, he thought.
“All right, then.” He pushed the chair by his bed. Grinning, she came over and sat beside him. Gordon reached into the sack and pulled out another of the frail, yellowed envelopes. Carefully, he spread out the letter and handed it to her.
Abby looked at it so intently that he thought she was reading the whole thing. She concentrated, her thin eyebrows almost coming together in a crease on her forehead. But finally she handed the letter back. “I guess I can’t really read that well. I mean, I can read labels on cans, and stuff. But I never had much practice with handwriting and … sentences.”
Her voice dropped at the end. She sounded embarrassed, but in a totally unafraid, trusting fashion, as if he were her confessor.
He smiled. “No matter. I’ll tell you what it’s about.” He held the letter up to the candlelight. Abby moved over to sit by his knees on the edge of the bed, her eyes rapt on the pages.
“It’s from one John Briggs, of Fort Rock, Oregon, to his former employer in Klamath Falls.… I’d guess from the lathe and hobby horse letterhead that Briggs was a retired machinist or carpenter or something. Hmmm.”
Gordon concentrated on the barely legible handwriting. “It seems Mr. Briggs was a pretty nice man. Here he’s offering to take in his ex-boss’s children, until the emergency is over. Also he says he has a good garage machine shop, his own power, and plenty of metal stock. He wants to know if the man wants to order any parts made up, especially things in short supply.…”
Gordon’s voice faltered. He was still so thick-headed from his excesses that it had just struck him that a beautiful female was sitting on his bed. The depression she made in the mattress tilted his body toward her. He cleared his throat quickly and went back to scanning the letter.
“Briggs mentions something about power levels from the Fort Rock reservoir.… Telephones were out, but he was still, oddly enough, getting Eugene on his computer data net.…”
Abby looked at him. Apparently much of what he had said about the letter writer might as well have been in a foreign language to her. “Machine shop” and “data net” could have been ancient, magical words of power.
“Why didn’t you bring us any letters, here in Pine View?” she asked quite suddenly.
Gordon blinked at the non sequitur. The girl wasn’t stupid. One could tell such things. Then why had everything he said, when he arrived here, and later at the party, been completely misunderstood? She still thought he was a mailman, as, apparently, did all but a few of the others in this small settlement.
From whom did she imagine they’d get mail?
She probably didn’t realize that the letters he carried had been sent long ago, from dead men and women to other dead men and women, or that he carried them for … for his own reasons.
The myth that had spontaneously developed here in Pine View depressed Gordon. It was one more sign of the deterioration of civilized minds, many of whom had once been high school and even college graduates. He considered telling her the truth, as brutally and frankly as he could, to stop this fantasy once and for all. He started to.
“There aren’t any letters because …”
He paused. Again Gordon was aware of her nearness, the scent of her and the gentle curves of her body. Of her trust, as well.
He sighed and looked away. “There aren’t any letters for you folks because … because I’m coming west out of Idaho, and nobody back there knows you, here in Pine View. From here I’m going to the coast. There might even be some large towns left. Maybe …”
“Maybe someone down there will write to us, if we send them a letter first!” Abby’s eyes were bright. “Then, when you pass this way again, on your way back to Idaho, you could give us the letters they send, and maybe do another play-act for us like tonight, and we’ll have so much beer and pie for you you’ll bust!” She hopped a little on the edge of the bed. “By then I’ll be able to read better, I promise!”
Gordon shook his head and smiled. It was beyond his right to dash such dreams. “Maybe so, Abby. Maybe so. But you know, you may get to learn to read easier than that. Mrs. Thompson’s offered to put it up for a vote to let me stay on here for a while. I guess officially I’d be schoolteacher, though I’d have to prove myself as good a hunter and farmer as anybody. I could give archery lessons.…”
He stopped. Abby’s expression was open-mouthed in surprise. She shook her head vigorously. “But you haven’t heard! They voted on it after you went to take your bath. Mrs. Thompson should be ashamed of trying to bribe a man like you that way, with your important work having to be done!”