The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (39 page)

“The men are gone, honey. They won't be back.”

He adjusted the lamp wick and eased into Sally's rocker with his banjo. The instruction book was propped up on the footstool.

“Wonder where those turkeys are today.” She shuffled over to Jeff's recliner to wait with bowed head for his new song, “The Ballad of the Mountaintop.”

This is going to be a good day.

JONATHAN STONE

FROM
Cold-Blooded

T
HROUGH RAIN, SNOW
, sleet, hail, gloom of night, fog of morning, and torpor of afternoon; through cutbacks, and post office closings, and diversity initiatives, and reorgs, and a bureaucratic succession of postmasters general; through truck breakdowns, and snow-tire flats, and post office shootings and bombings, and the holiday rush; through the rise of FedEx and UPS with their swashbuckling, gym-pumped young drivers swerving at high speed arrogantly around you; through the days, weeks, months, through time itself, George Waite has delivered the mail. Thirty-five years now. Through American invasions and wars, and famines and genocides, and tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes, George Waite's red-white-and-blue mail truck has lurched from mailbox to mailbox with the utter predictability of a brightly painted figure on a cuckoo clock.

And not only that—he's delivered the mail for all these years to this same neighborhood. Well, the same, and different. The original, simple, unprepossessing capes and ranches had now transformed into McMansions, some expanding gradually over the years, growing as if through a painful adolescence; others literally scraped from the face of the earth and replaced with something grander and prouder, looming and spanking new. But he has delivered it with the same smile and wave to the neighbors watering their lawns, pushing their kids in strollers, heading out on or back from bike rides. The same exchange of pleasantries.

He knows these people, and they know him.

Hiya, George. How's everything?

He's actually—arguably—saved two of their lives. He watched Jimmy Swale—special needs/autistic—stroll right into the pond, and George jumped out of his truck, splashed into the water after him, pulled out the already flailing kid. His uniform was soaked. The pond turned out to be shallow, so did he really save him? And in his rearview mirror he saw eighty-year-old Mrs. Ostendorf, shuffling back from her mailbox to her house, suddenly grip her chest and drop her mail, and George sprinted from the truck, carried her into her house, called the ambulance (this was before cell phones), and she survived.

For both, George was thanked profusely. The neighborhood threw him an appreciation party. Just a half hour or so—he couldn't take more time than that from his route. John Tepper made a speech—“Honorary Member of the Neighborhood.” Gave him a plaque they'd had made. What a day.

Here was the unspoken little secret of being a mailman: he loved it. He loved the routine and the predictability. He loved how even today, despite the Internet and smartphones, people still looked forward to their mail. To the surprise and excitement of good news or bad.

The other unspoken little secret was that he
knew
their mail. By this time George pretty much knew who was getting what. Who had which banks and which brokerage accounts (statements delivered monthly; most of them hadn't switched to paperless yet). He knew where their kids and parents lived by the birthday cards and letters; he knew the good news and the bad news of the households by the obvious look of a condolence card or colorful birthday card envelopes. He knew the acceptance and rejection letters from colleges, even the paycheck stubs from which employers, until pay stubs largely stopped. He saw the legal-size documents which still went by mail for signatures—for real estate closings, divorces, wills, life-altering events. He often knew what was in the packages he delivered by the size and shape and weight of the box—books, or DVDs, or specialty foods, or even what article of clothing it was from a given retailer: sweaters, or a coat, or slacks, or shoes. (He would also see the FedEx or UPS package waiting at the garage or at the front door, and could often tell what it was in the same way, and often would do the favor of bringing the box in for them if not already at the front door along with the rest of their mail.)

You couldn't
help
knowing. You had to sort it all; you couldn't help seeing who was getting what. In some lives, there was lots of mail. In some lives, there was very little.

He had seen many residents grow old with him, and you couldn't help but note all the change, all the years, evident in their bodies and faces. He'd watched their kids grow. Tricycles, to training wheels, to sleek racing bikes, to reckless teenage driving as they passed his truck, and soon enough adopting the responsible waving and greeting they'd observed all their lives, addressing George with the same postures and cadences as their respective mothers and fathers, the stupefying power of genes.

New people moved into the neighborhood and old people moved out, and occasionally, of course, passed away. Wistful, inevitable, proof of life. An undertone of transition that the neighborhood yards and gardens and routines did their collective best to belie.

Then the Muscovitos moved in. And then, by god, there was change.

No one ever saw them. Any of them. Doorbell rung, casseroles and homemade cookies left on the front steps, no thank-you notes or calls or acknowledgments.

“Seen the new neighbors, George?”

“No, you?”

Shake of head. Shrugs. But people are busy. The neighborhood has always had its absentees: dads who travel, couples in Florida or Georgia for half the year. Jim O'Brien, a trader in Asian currencies, went in to work at 3 a.m. You never saw him—until the weekends, when he lived in his yard, happily planting and trimming and mowing, waving his shears like a television neighbor, tossing a Nerf football with his kids.

George did see Alberto Muscovito's shadow a couple of times, just inside his front door. His silhouette. Arms crossed. Like a criminal or convict interviewed on TV, not wanting to reveal his features or voice. Obviously waiting until George's truck moved down the street, and then heading out quickly to get the mail—focused, not looking up, making no eye contact with any part of the neighborhood.

First came the walls.

Stone walls; elaborate fencing. Nine feet high, three feet over code. Offhand grumbling to George from the neighbors getting their mail. (George was safe to grumble to, always merely passing through, always merely a visitor.) Construction vehicles, crews of Nicaraguan masons and laborers, issuing friendly uncomprehending shrugs when a neighbor wandered by and asked about the new owner. George caught wind of some neighborhood debate about filing formal complaints about the (possible) height violation. But it was the man's own property, after all, and nobody wanted to spend on a legal battle, and it was an aesthetic judgment after all, so, grumbling, they let it go . . .

Little bits of gossip. The two Muscovito boys, nine and twelve, were in boarding school. Muscovito worked in financial services.

And George, you still haven't seen them?

No, haven't.

Pretty mysterious. And all this construction—pretty annoying.

Of course, George knew more than he was saying. He couldn't share the information. Privacy of the U.S. mail; he'd taken an oath and respected it.

But right off, almost immediately, Alberto Muscovito had piles of mail—yet no personal mail at all. Envelopes addressed to both Muscovitos' P.O. address, and to this new house of theirs, so it was a little confusing for the postal system. From senders who obviously wanted to be very sure it got there—putting the P.O. box
and
the home address to be double certain.

Yes, piles of mail. Contracts from individuals and firms George had never heard of. Legal documents from a law firm in the Cayman Islands and from outfits in New Zealand and Malaysia and Micronesia. The Maldives. Mauritius. None of the conventional standardized brokerage and bank envelopes that the rest of the neighborhood got. And the numerous legal and financial documents required no signatures, George noticed, which would have necessitated his actually meeting Mr. Muscovito.

Even though he shouldn't have, even though it came dangerously close to the line on respecting and safeguarding the privacy of the U.S. mail, George jotted down and Googled a couple of the firms.

He was surprised—and then again, not surprised at all—by what he found. Firms with numerous ethics violations. Fraud warnings from various business and trade associations. Warnings from an international watchdog group. And in several cases, no website, no contact info, no information, no Web presence at all. No evidence of existence beyond an address on an envelope. A return address that was just a post office box—on an island overseas.

After the walls and the fencing came satellite dishes. Weird lines to the house. Unmarked small white vans pulling in at night, parked there for hours, sometimes even overnight, then pulling out, the drivers in sunglasses.

Jeez, what's he doing there, George? Tracking satellites? Going off the grid?

The annoyance of the neighbors shifts to a much higher gear with the hammering, drilling, noise, activity at two in the morning. Can't tell what it is, behind the high new walls. And by the time a neighbor frets and paces and fumes and finally calls the police, the sound has stopped, and the police do nothing. It happens a few nights in a row. The neighbors come to anticipate and dread it.

(Soon there's a police cruiser driving slowly through the neighborhood. Drifting slowly past the Muscovito residence, circling lazily—and doing nothing. Even more infuriating, in a way, because of its obvious impotence. The neighbors shake their heads—incompetent suburban cops.)

George hears more anecdotes. Muscovito's Cadillac SUV, with the blacked-out windows, driving in and out at unpredictable hours—midnight, three in the morning, 5 a.m.—and always too fast, way too fast for the neighborhood lanes. The other morning Muscovito almost hit the two Miller kids on their bikes at the corner, up early catching worms. Never even stopped to look and see if they were OK! Tommy Miller fell back into the rhododendrons in terror, crying, poor kid was so scared . . .

And finally, of course, an electric locking gate and—symbolically, inevitably—a new mailbox with it. A large locking mailbox built like a strongbox into the elaborate gate's left stone pillar. Stark contrast to the rickety, rural-route-style mailboxes along the rest of the lanes—cheap, casual, periodically knocked over by a delivery van or snowplow and propped up, dented and brave, their hinged tongues opening and closing with a squeak and falling wide open half the time.

The Muscovitos' new mailbox, a narrow, tamper-proof slot to slip mail into methodically. For George to collect any outgoing mail, a special key issued through the post office and now an official part of the route, forms properly filled in, the whole key-issuing procedure processed through the mail, so George, once again, never sees Muscovito in person.

George gets it all in bits and pieces. Hearing the anecdotes of misery, of mystery. Many of them wrapped in the bland manila envelope of resignation: “The neighborhood is changing, I guess. The world is changing . . .”

George ponders this from the worn, duct-taped driver's seat of his truck. Isn't that what all the resentment is really about? People resent change, they're suspicious of it, they're wistful and nostalgic for the familiar. Doesn't Muscovito have a right to his weird mail? A right to alter his residence and property? A right to his privacy and his odd hours? He's a symbol, a lightning rod of change, in the neighborhood, in the world. A reminder of nature's cycle of decay and replacement, the myth of stasis. Life is change; death comes to all eventually—people, neighborhoods, political systems, nations. All of it. All of us.

George would come to wonder in the days ahead how much this line of thinking had taken hold of him.

He starts small, and quickly. George slips the next Caymans document out of its envelope, snaps a shot of each of its eight pages with his iPhone, slips the document back into the envelope, and reseals it. All postal carriers know how to reseal. They carry special glue in the truck for items that have opened in transit. It takes less than twenty seconds. If you see him in his truck, it looks as though he is sorting mail.

He prints the photos at home.

Overseas account statements. Offshore investments—no doubt unreported and untaxed. Clearly illegal—there in black-and-white. You didn't have to be a genius to see it. Exhibit A.

The only thing more clearly illegal? Opening someone's mailed financial documents. So this is evidence that can be officially used exactly nowhere. Revealed to no one. It serves only as evidence to George.

Across the street from the Muscovitos: the lovely old Davidoffs. Now with their canes and osteoporosis and skin drooping from necks and arms, full lifetimes etched and stretched on them, but smiles of greeting unchanged for all the years since they had moved in as spry newlyweds. And they are a walking mirror, of course. George isn't much behind them. Mandatory retirement with full benefits at the end of the year. Not something he can afford to jeopardize with illegal behavior.

Next door, the Schumans. Doctor Schuman, an old-fashioned GP. Four Ivy League kids: two Harvard, a Yale, a Princeton. He remembers their acceptance letters. Now two physicians, one cancer researcher, one oceanographer. God, he remembers all their bikes. The color of each one.

The neighbors he has grown to love, the neighbors who have grown to love him.

George feels their frustration, their sense of powerlessness. He feels identity with them. It isn't just their neighborhood. It is
his
neighborhood too.