by Tim Curran
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 & 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 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 settl
ed 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 lo
oked 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 that, yes, Cindy Lee was home. In fact, she was in there lying on the couch, just as naked as naked could get, oiled up, tits glistening, one leg thrown over the back of the couch, busily sliding a finger into herself as she waited wet and ready for a certain postman to come and deliver the mail.
Craig stepped off the porch, keeping his letter bag in front of his crotch because he’d just popped a boner hard and straight as a walking stick. He was so preoccupied that he didn’t even notice that the rain had diminished to a drizzle or that the sky had taken on a weird ochre haze.
He rounded the wild rose bushes on the Court Avenue side of Cindy Lee’s house, studying those windows and hoping for a glimpse of her. When that sparkling yellow rain began to fall, he was caught out in the open. The first drops hit him like scalding water that he recoiled from and the next were like acid.
He dropped his bag almost instantly and looked up in the sky, thinking for one crazy moment that he was being drowned in lemonade.
But that was about all he had time to think, as that most peculiar and very corrosive rain ate holes in his face and hands and he tried to scream as his lips went to sauce. Steaming and making a gurgling sound in his throat, he stumbled over Cindy Lee’s rosebushes and fell dead on the other side. As he did so, one hand that had been covering his face pulled away and dropped to his side. Most of his face came with it. The rain stopped almost as soon as it had started and Craig laid there, his flesh oozing off the bones beneath like hot tallow.
He was the only one on Kneale Street who was caught in it.
Even Arland Mattson had gone in five minutes before it fell.