The Postal Service has a secret. There is only one key that opens everything. It only makes sense. We can’t be walking around with a ring of keys for all we have to open. The banks of boxes in apartment lobbies open at once with the key. The corner collection boxes. The green relay boxes. The padlocks we use. The box at the end of the glass chute between the elevators in the old hotels. Same key. In that way a substitute on the route already has all the keys needed. One key.
I guess it is not much of a secret. If you worked for the post office you know, or if you even thought about it some, you could guess. There it is at the end of that long chain. One key.
They make a big deal about the key at the office. Do Not Duplicate is stamped on it twice. I find I am always fingering the key, my hand in the pocket with it as I walk. In cross section it has an S shape. It has several deepening grooves and bristles with teeth. I want it not only to open up the boxes of the post office but to turn in every lock, a true skeleton key, opening all the houses on my route. Inside I could arrange the mail further, piles for each family member, on the marble mantel or the little table by the door. As it is, I find myself looking into houses through the mail slot, holding up the brass flap to see the slice of floor and the envelopes and flyers splayed out randomly there. I feel the cool air rush out in the summer. Adjusting my line of sight, I can see walls of framed pictures of grown children who send the postcards I’ve read from all the islands, the color envelopes thick with pictures of grandkids. Clocks hang on the walls. Coats on racks. And sometimes one of the dogs — I’ve heard it bark in the back of the house — will come clicking on the linoleum. Huffing around the corner of the entry hall, he is ready to blow the door down from the inside. A snarl and chomp. The flap on the mail slot is already back in place. That’s when that black nose points through the door, the nostrils blinking, opening and closing, trying to take in all the smells of me. The fear, the loneliness, my own secret combination of nerves.
Years after the trained dogs leave this city, after they’ve grown old and blind, their owners bring them back. They trade them in and leave with new dogs.
I’m out at the airport picking up the orange bags of overnight mail when a dog and its owner will come limping across the tarmac. One of the props of the plane they flew in on still revs while the little trucks, run on propane, weave around with baggage and fuel. The dog and the man were the last down the metal stairway, led by an attendant to the terminal. The dog’s muzzle is white. Its tongue is out, slipping off to the side of its mouth. There is no color left in the clog’s eyes. The clog’s almost blind. Its head is down. The shoulders roll. Someone from the school meets them. They wait in the van as the luggage is stowed. I can see the dog’s head for a second next to its owner. It shakes itself and collapses beneath the window.
And I sometimes read the notes on the postcards they write home while they are waiting for their new dogs, postcards of the school, a color photograph of a German shepherd at attention rigged out and ready to go. The notes are about Spike or Lady, how the dog took the flight, how the dog is off its food, how the dog seems to remember this place. The writing is little and cramped or big as if magnified. The ink smears on the coated glossy stock of the card. They always love the town, the children on the street. The new dog will take some getting used to. “Buster is making new friends with all the retired pooches.” On and on. It’s too much to bear. I read these cards and think of losing them someplace or sending them out on the wrong dispatch. They are so sad, I don’t want them sent. By the time they make it home, the writer will have returned to his or her life. “Oh that. I’d forgotten I’d sent it. It’s just what I told you.”
I read these cards in the new white trucks with the right-handed drive and no windows in the back. You have to use the mirrors to see, and everything is distorted.
My family never write but call. My mail is window mail, stamped with the odd denominations of the definitive issues, the transportation series. Each stamp is a special class. Every one’s soliciting. The stamps depict all these obsolete forms of movement. Canal boats, milk wagons, stagecoaches, pushcarts, carretas, railroad mail cars, a wheelchair with hand-cranked transmission. Bulk rates, presorted, ZIP-plus-4 discounting, carrier route sorting. When it isn’t bills, it is charity, nonprofit dunning. Tandem bicycles, steamships, dogsleds. I read my name through the plastic window on the envelope. I try not to imagine what lists I am on, what those lists say about me. My family call when they have to with important family news. “The mail takes too long to get there,” they say. I am too far away to do anything with the news I get. I sign a sympathy note or write a check during the commercials on TV.
I get other calls in the evening or in the morning as I am dressing for work. I answer, and there is silence on the line for a second or two, then the disconnection. This happens often. I shout hello, hello into the static. I can’t seem to not answer the telephone. You never know. It could be news. For a while I just picked up the phone without saying a word, listened hard to the silence and then the line going dead. I have to sort my route first thing in the morning. I go to bed early. In the dark the phone rings. I let it ring for a long time. When I answer it, there is that moment of silence and that soft click. Just checking. Just checking. There is nothing to be done. I leave the phone off the hook and wait through the warning alarms of the phone company, the recorded message telling me to replace the phone in its cradle. And then even that gives up.
I have a screened-in porch, and in the summer I sit on the swing as the neighborhood gets dark. With the light out, the kids who come through collecting for newspapers, cookies, band uniforms, birth defects can’t see me through the gray mesh. I stop rocking. They rattle the screen door and peer in. Their dogs are circling in the quiet street. Positioning themselves at the foot of the dying oak trees, they crane to look up at the roosting starlings. I let the kids wonder for a bit if I am home, then I go to answer the door. It gets darker. The streetlights come on. The wheezing birds wind down, and the locusts begin to saw. Across the street the lawn sprinklers start up, and the water pools in the street, a syrup on the blacktop. The bug traps sizzle, the blue light breaking into a cloud of sparks. Mosquitoes aren’t attracted to the light. I know at least one is on the porch hanging in the still air, sniffing out the heat I’m giving off. Shadows of cats shoot under a parked car. A blind man comes up the street with a new dog. He is talking to the dog. Commands, encouragements, suggestions all below my hearing. I can just make out the gist of things, the cooing and the nicker. A few paces back a trainer from the school walks in the wet grass, skips over the concrete walks. He turns all the way around as he tags along, making sure no one is following.
Once a month the magazines arrive and the clerks will break into a few copies, never from the same address, leaving them scattered on the tables in the break room. After a few days they put the handled magazines in shrink-wrapped bags labeled with a form. Checked explanations for the condition of the enclosed: Destroyed on conveyor. Fire damaged. Automatic equipment error. And sometimes someone will go the extra distance, tear a few pages, pour on some liquid smoke. Customers suspect. They always suspect. I am stopped on the street, asked about the handling codes stamped on the back of the envelope. A C6 floats in the sky of a sunset on a card from Florida. And NB in red tumbles into it. What’s this? The bar code embossed beneath the address like stitches closing an incision. “You read the mail, don’t you?” I’m told. “I don’t have time.” I try to explain. “Things get lost. Overlooked,” I tell them.