Trish shot him another withering glance over the postmaster's head as she sat down next to him.
"Yeah, John might be a tad strange. But he's a good worker. He does his job well and gets things done. And he's always eager to do more. That's not something you see a lot of these days. I couldn't ask for a better carrier."
Doug nodded silently. Howard's words were full of praise, but there was an undercurrent of something else in his tone of voice. It was as if he were repeating words he had read and practiced, as if he were saying what he was supposed to say rather than what he actually felt. For the first time since he'd known the postmaster, Doug thought that he was being out-and-out hypocritical, and that was something he never would have thought he'd feel about Howard Crowell. His eyes met Tritia 's across the table, and he knew that she'd caught it too.
But Tritia refused to continue this line of conversation, and she deftly changed the topic to something less personal and more neutral, and Doug followed her lead.
Dinner was excellent, and they ate it slowly. Billy had come down, taken what he'd wanted, and then retreated upstairs to his hideaway. The rest of them ate at the table, enjoying the food at a leisurely pace: Cobb salad, followed by rare roast in wine sauce, served with baked potatoes stuffed with sour cream and chives. To go along with the meal, Tritia had baked some of her homemade bread, whkhwas thick and warm and soft and disappeared almost immediately.
Howard smiled blissfully. "I can't remember when I've had a meal this good."
"Neither can I," Doug said.
"Enjoy it while you can," Tritia told him. "This is our red-meat quota for the month."
"She's very big on eating right," Doug explained. "This is a very health conscious family."
"You need all the help you can get. If you exercised a little more, we could afford to be more lenient. But you live a completely sedentary life. It's the least I can do to see that you eat properly."
Howard chuckled.
Billy came down with his dishes, smiled shyly at the postmaster, then returned upstairs. They finished off the champagne and Tritia brought Howard and Doug each a beer. She drank ice water.
The conversation grew more somber and less frivolous as the meal progressed, and it was Howard who brought the subject up first. He was already well into his second beer. "I keep wondering why Bob did it," the postmaster said, looking down at his plate, pushing the empty potato skin with his fork.
"That's the one thing that really gnaws at me, that I can't understand: why he did it." He looked up at Tritia , his eyes red but his voice even. "You knew Bob.
He was an easygoing guy. He didn't let things get to him. He wasn't an unhappy man. He liked his job, loved his family, had a good life. And nothing changed.
There was no big catastrophe, no death in the family, nothing that would push him over the edge. Besides, if something was bothering him, he would have told me." His voice trembled slightly and he cleared his throat. "I was his best friend."
Tritia put her hand on his. "I know you were," she said softly.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, forcing himself not to give in to tears. "Ellen's taking it really hard. I mean, harder than I thought she would. She always seemed like such a strong woman." He smiled sadly. "Bob used to call her the Rock." He absently fingered his napkin. "She was all drugged out when I went to see her the other day. The doctor's giving her . . . I don't know what all. He says it's the only way to keep her calm. The boys are the ones who have to take care of everything, but you can see that the strain's starting to show. They have questions just like I do, and there just aren't any answers."
"Are they still staying at the house?" Doug asked.
Howard nodded. "I told them to get out, at least for a while. It just stirs up bad memories, and I'm sure it's not doing Ellen any good."
Doug had a sudden picture of the two sons waking up each morning, each of them taking a shower in the same bathtub where their father had blown his brains out, getting their soap from the indented soap dish in which puddles of his blood and pieces of his fragmented scalp had lain. He wondered how Ellen bathed, how she avoided thinking about what she had seen.
"It'll be all right," Tritia told him.
"I miss him," Howard said bluntly. "I miss Bob." He took a deep breath, then the words came out in a rush. "I don't know what I'm going to do with my Saturdays anymore, you know? I don't who I'm going to be able to ask for advice or give advice to or go places with or . . . Shit!"
And he began to cry.
After dinner, they sat on the porch. It was warm, humid, felt like rain.
Bats, fluttering shadows of darkness, spun in and out of the illuminated circle generated by the streetlamp. From down the road came the harsh electric sounds of a bug zapper instantaneously frying its victims.
"We used to go bat fishing when we were little," Doug said absently. "We would hook a leaf or something to fishing line and throw it up into the air next to a streetlight. The bats' radar told them that it was a bug, so they'd dive for it. We never caught anything, but we came close a few times." He chuckled.
"I don't know what we would've done ifwe'd've caught one."
"You do stupid things when you're little," Howard said. "I remember we used to shoot cats with pellet guns. Not just cats that were wild or strays. Any cat." He downed the last of his beer. "Now it's hard for me to rememberbein' that cruel."
They were silent for a while, too full and too tired to make the effort at conversation. In the east, above the ridge, lightning flashed, outlining billowy dark clouds. Like most summer storms, it would probably come at night and be gone by morning, leaving behind it a heaviness and humidity that would create a boom business at the air-conditioned movie theater and would send people running to the lakes and streams. They looked upward. The evening was moonless, and though there was obviously a storm approaching, the sky directly above them was an astronomer's dream, filled with millions of pinprick stars.
Doug's chair creaked as he shifted his weight, leaning forward. "Where's, uh, John Smith tonight?" The name sounded ludicrous when spoken. "Is he at your house?"
"Don't know." The beer must have loosened his tongue, for Howard shook his head, a vague movement in the darkness. "He's usually not there this early, though. He goes out at night, but I don't know where he goes or what he does.
Some nights I don't think he comes home at all."
"What makes you say that?"
"Well, I been having a hard time sleeping lately. I'm real tired, but I
can't fall asleep."
"That's understandable," Tritia said.
"Yeah, well sometimes I get up and walk around, you know, just to have something to do. The other night, I was going out to the kitchen to get a drink of orange juice, and I notice as I pass by that his door's open. I look in there and the bed's made and he's gone. That was around two or three in the morning."
"Maybe he has a girlfriend," Tritia suggested.
"Maybe." Howard sounded doubtful.
"Have you ever seen him sleeping?" Doug asked.
"What kind of question is that?" Tritia frowned.
"Humor me."
"No," the postmaster said, speaking slowly, "come to think of it, I
haven't."
"Ever seen his bed unmade?"
Howard shook his head. "But he does stay in his room on Sundays. Don't even open the door. Just stays in there like he's hibernatin ' or something. I
think he sleeps then."
"All day?"
Howard shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe he does something else.
He always seems real tired on Monday morning."
Doug felt the coldness wash over him. He didn't know why he was pursuing this line of questioning or what he hoped to find out, but there was something about the mailman that bothered him in a way he could not explain. "Have you been getting many complaints about him?" he asked.