Strange how that worked, he thought.Hobie was a hardcore Clint Eastwood fan, and he was not. Yet when it came down to it, he liked more Clint Eastwood movies thanHobie did.
Life was full of paradoxes.
The mailman was a paradox. Doug hated the man, but as he had told Howard, the man had been delivering the most consistently good mail they had ever received. Of course, the carrier had nothing to do with the contents of the mail -- if the messenger was not to be blamed for the message, he was not to be congratulated either -- but it was hard not to associate the two.
He glanced over at Tritia , peacefully looking out over the creek at the cliffs beyond. He was surprised that she had not felt any real dislike for the mailman, that she had not picked up on the unnaturalness that seemed to be an inherent part of his makeup. Ordinarily, she was by far the more sensitive of them, noticing instantly any behavioral aberrance, making snap judgments based on intuition, which were usually correct. He did not see how she could be so blind this time.
He opened the book on his lap. Why had he been thinking about the mailman so much lately? It was beginning to border on the obsessive. He had to force himself to stop it. He had to quit sitting around, worrying, fretting, and find something else with which to occupy his time. Instead of thinking about the mailman, he should be getting to work on that damn storage shed.
But Howard didn't like him either.
That meant nothing. Two negative reactions to a person's personality did not mean that that person was evil.
Evil.
_Evil_.
There. He had thought it, if not actually said it. For that was the word that had been floating in the back of his mind since the day at the funeral when he had first seen the mailman. It was a simplistic word, almostcartoonish in its romantic-pulp implications, but much as he hated to acknowledge or recognize it, it was the word that best described what he felt about the mailman.
The man was evil.
"What are you thinking?" Tritia asked.
He looked up, startled and embarrassed to be caught in his ruminations.
"Nothing," he lied, turning back to the book in his lap.
"Something."
"Nothing." He was aware that she was staring at him, but he chose not to acknowledge the fact. Instead, he concentrated on the words in front of him, on the meaning behind the words, on the thoughts behind the meaning, trying to lose himself in the prose. Eventually, he succeeded. Just as he used to fall asleep as a child while pretending to be sleeping as his parents checked in on him, he now began reading while pretending to read.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, he heard Billy's voice, only a fraction louder than the creek song but rapidly gaining in volume. He looked up from his book.
"Dad!"
Billy came splashing through the center of the creek toward them, holding in his hand a wet and soggy envelope. Water was dripping from the uneven ends of his bangs and from his bare arms. There was a look of excited discovery on his face, as though he had just found the Lost Dutchman gold mine or had just unearthed some long-buried treasure. "Dad!"
Doug marked his place in the book and put it down on a large dry rock next to him. "What is it?"
"Come here. You have to come here."
He looked at Tritia questioningly.
"Oh, do something with your son for a change," she said. "Remember what we talked about? Besides, it's a beautiful day. Don't sit here and waste your life reading."
Doug stood up. "That's where he gets it," he said, wagging an admonishing finger in her direction. "It's a part of the rampant anti-intellectualism that's sweeping this country."
"Pedant."
"Fine. But if he turns out to be a gas-station attendant, it's your fault.
I tried my best." He took his wallet out of his pants, placing it on top of his book, then walked over the weeds and rocks toward his son. Scores of tiny brown grasshoppers sprang up at each step, moving frantically from one clump of grass to another. "What is it?" he asked Billy. "And why do you have that letter in your hand?"
"I can't tell you, I have to show you."
"Where is it?"
"Just down the creekaways ."
"Do I have to get wet?"
Billy laughed. "Don't be such a baby. Come on."
Doug took one tentative step into the water. It was cold.
"Weird stuff," Billy promised. He waved the envelope tantalyzingly in the air. "There's more where this came from. That's your only hint."
Doug stepped fully into the water. The creek was cold, but it was shallow and came up only to mid thigh . Billy began moving away, motioning for him to follow, and he waded after his son.
They rounded a bend and then another one, the cliffs growing steeper on the sides. The water was a little deeper here, the rocks at the bottom slippery.
On the floor of the clear creek he could see small black spots on some of the stones. Leeches. "I didn't know you were walking through this kind of area," he said. "I don't like it. It's dangerous. From now on, you stay closer to us."
"It's not that bad."
Doug nearly slipped, and he caught himself on a rock with his hand. Billy, however, was wading straight through the water like an expert. "Well, at least make sure someone's with you if you go out of sight. You could break your head and we'd never know."
Billy had stopped at another bend, pointing around the curve. "There it is," he said.
Doug caught up to him.
And stopped.
Both sides of the creek were littered with envelopes, white and brown and tan and beige. Hundreds of them. They were everywhere, like rectangular patches of snow or some bizarre form of fungus that grew in precise geometrical patterns, covering everything, caught on bushes, sticking out from between rocks. Most of them were wet and waterlogged, in the mud at the edge of the creek. Still others were perched in the branches of nearby trees.
"Weird, huh?" Billy said excitedly. He pulled an envelope from the branches of a sapling next to him.
Doug picked up the two nearest envelopes. Bills. He recognized them immediately from the preprinted return address and the clear window with the name, number, street, city, state, and zip code of the intended recipient. He looked around him. Nearly all of the envelopes seemed to be of the short squarish type that ordinarily housed bills or bad news. Very few were of the long less formal variety or were the small cute envelopes of personalized stationary.
He stared, stunned, at thirty or forty envelopes that looked like they were growing on a tree.
The mailman had been dumping mail at the creek.
It was an inescapable conclusion, but it still gave Doug a strange feeling to acknowledge it. Why would the mailman do such a thing? What was the point?
What was the reason? The very strangeness of it was frightening, and he could not understand what the mailman hoped to gain. It was crazy. If he had simply wanted to get rid of the letters, he could have burned them or buried them or dumped them someplace more convenient. He looked around. The spot was so far off the beaten track that Doug did not see how the mailman could even have known about it. He would have had to hike in a mile and a half from the road to get here, carrying the mailbags, since there was no path to this location that was wide enough to drive upon.
He glanced over at Billy. His son must have seen the expression on his own face, for he had dropped the envelope he was holding. The excitement was disappearing from his eyes and was being replaced by what looked like understanding.
And fear.
Tritia sat in her chair, head tilted back, staring up at the sky. She loved to watch clouds, to lay back and enjoy their billowy transformations, ascribing concrete form to their temporary shapes. And nowhere Were the clouds more visually dramatic than in Arizona. As a young girl growing up in Southern California near the Pacific Ocean, she'd had her share of clear days, of blue Rose Parade skies, but in California the cloud situation was either feast or famine. Either they were nonexistent or they covered the entire sky from horizon to horizon with a monochrome ceiling. Rarely did she see the huge shifting shapes she saw in Arizona, clouds so white against sky so blue that they looked fake. "Trish!"