Bound For Glory: Conclusion

Okay, I'm back from vacation, but I figured I'd be jet-lagged. Here is the final excerpt from my book Miss Delivery: A Postal-Mortem. 

Retired mailmen are thickly distributed all over the country, but they aren’t all that frightening if you know what they are. They aren’t decorative, but they aren’t dangerous, either, and they’d be much obliged if you bought them a beer. They’ll get the next round. Oh? You have to go so soon?

As a general rule they can be expected to take care of themselves. The pension is usually adequate for those who have never married, or never divorced, although that’s a thin cross-section. Low standards of self-maintenance serve the rest of them well, as long as they’re not inclined to invest in video poker. The National Association of Letter Carriers, the union that has always looked after our best interests, has even established a nice retirement community in Florida specifically for retired letter carriers. There are five hundred garden-style apartments available, for which there is quite the waiting list. This is where a lucky few of our finest faded blue are quarantined from society. Um, sheltered.

Recently, it was reported that a fire broke out in the development. Thankfully, no one was killed or injured, although a half-dozen or so retirees were displaced. Officials in the fire bureau, last I checked, have been unable to determine the origin of the fire. This is surprising to me. I can see it just as clearly as I have seen my own future.

“Hey Vern,” it starts.

“Hey Herbie. What’s new?”

Herbie and Vern collapse into helpless laughter. Vern is first to recover.

“So I think I got me a propane leak,” he says.

“Naah. You’d smell it,” Herbie reassures him. Kerm and LeRoy let themselves in, leaving the door ajar.

“Vern here thinks he’s got a propane leak,” Herbie says. “But I told him it’d smell.”

“Propane doesn’t smell,” LeRoy informs him. Kerm begs to differ.

“It does smell,” he insists. “It’s just that it sinks to the floor and you don’t notice it.” Randy Randy and Cliff filter in through the open door and are promptly filled in on the disagreement. It has been exactly the same temperature for ten weeks running, season’s closed at the dog track, and they’ve all gotten all the juice they could out of betting on the election. Everyone senses an opportunity to make a wager. Everyone’s perking up.

Randy Randy has a different theory. “Kerm’s almost right. Propane does smell, but it rises to the ceiling, not the floor, and that’s why you can’t tell.”

“Floor,” Kerm says.

“Ceiling,” rejoins Randy Randy.

“I got five bucks on Kerm,” Herbie says. Vern demurs. Frank and Stricky walk in, sniffing money.

“Besides, propane doesn’t even burn,” Herbie asserts.

“Propane burns!” Vern is exasperated. “Jeez! It’s what’s in my stove!”

Herbie stands pat. “Five bucks on Kerm,” he reiterates. Frank pipes up.

“I’ll take five of that,” he says, producing a crisp fin.

“You don’t even know what we’re talking about,” Vern points out. Frank explains, with exaggerated patience, that whatever Herbie is willing to bet in favor of, he’s willing to bet against. “Herbie has no brain,” Frank goes on, “and besides, it’s diesel he’s thinking of. Diesel doesn’t burn. You could drop a match right in a bucket of diesel and nothing would happen.”

“Bullshit,” Stricky says. “Prove it.” Frank goes out to Vern’s garage and pokes around the cans. Meanwhile, Kerm and Randy Randy have gone to fetch a ladder to investigate the ceiling-floor controversy. Cliff and LeRoy agree to volunteer neutral noses. Cliff lies down on the floor, and LeRoy, teetering on the ladder under the direction of Randy Randy, presses his face into the ceiling. Neither of them smells anything.

“That doesn’t prove it doesn’t smell,” Vern points out. “I was just saying I thought I had a leak, because the tank’s been running out so fast. Let me open up the valve for a minute.”

Everyone smells something now. “Oh, shit, that’s Kerm. Jesus Christ, Kermit, put a cork in it,” Vern says.

“Kerm’s a national treasure. Put a tap on Kerm, and we’d solve the whole energy crisis. I’ll bet you any amount of money Kermit here could let one rip for fifteen whole seconds, any time you wanted,” Randy Randy proposes. Wallets fly open. Kerm drops into a crouch and frowns in concentration while Randy Randy holds his finger up, looks at his watch, and waits for the second hand to hit straight-up. Frank comes back in with a gas can, wrinkling his nose. He has also located a nearly empty can of turpentine, which he empties into Vern’s sink, and begins to decant diesel into it. Vern is incensed.

“Crap, Frank, not on my good sofa! Take that to the dining room table. Jesus Christ.”

“Go!” Randy shouts, and Kerm bears down, pacing himself. No one is quite sure, under the circumstances, if the propane has an odor or not. Vern gives the valve another half-turn. Frank is ready with his can of diesel. “Are you sure that’s diesel?” Vern asks. Frank is sure. “But did you get that out of my garage? Because..”

Frank is holding a match against the matchbox. “Prepare to be amazed,” he exults.

Myself, I would have bet any amount of money retired mailmen would smolder a long time, but they don’t. They fizzle right out.

Bound For Glory: Part One

I'm on vacation. While I'm gone, you've been reading excerpts from Miss Delivery: A Postal-Mortem, a book of postal stories I wrote four years ago. We conclude with a two-part fantasy about the end of a career.

Have you ever wanted to see your own future? Think carefully.

I’ve had the opportunity to glimpse my future every few months or so throughout my career. It clumps towards me, stumbling through traffic. I’ve come to recognize it from a distance. My future takes on the shape of a slightly different man every time, but his approach never varies. He first appears as a lumpen mass going nowhere in particular, and in no particular hurry, and then he spies me and tilts across the street with a little more purpose and a spring in his mosey. “HEY!” he’ll start out, projecting from about a block away. “ARE YOU ON YER AUTHORIZED TEN-MINUTE BREAK?” This is followed by a deep, phlegmy chuckle. He is nearly overcome with hilarity by the time he has ambled all the way over to my position, clapping a soiled paw on my shoulder to steady himself. His trousers are puckered up on the sides where the stripes have been torn off. He has a sidewise grin, leaky eyes and a throat full of loogies, and he looks really pleased with himself, because he’s about to deliver his punchline. “Ah used to do what you do,” we say in unison, not that he notices.

I smile and tell him that I’ve already taken my break and am sorry but I have to be moving along, although I haven’t and I’m not, but he’s having none of that. He’s faced down dogs, postal supervisors, and his own personal Kryptonite in the form of laundry detergent, and he’s not about to be fended off. He has spent a lifetime developing two or three conversational themes and he has his wheezy heart set on running them by me. The man--every one of them--is as tenacious about his monolog as a crow attending a freshly-squashed squirrel. You could drive a Buick of distraction right towards him and he’d just hop aside for a few moments and then he’s right back on it. I settle in.

“You’ll never catch me back there, nosiree,” he starts out. “Nope: free as a bird. I did my time. Now it’s time for the good life,” he continues.

“I can see you’re dressed for it,” I say.

“Thing is, they can only ask so much of a man, and then there ain’t no more. It’s like gettin’ blood from a tune-up. And we didn’t have it so cushy back in ‘sixty. Not like you all have it now. Yer own Jeep, and I don’t know what-all.”

“You’ve got something hanging off your chin, there,” I contribute, pointing. The man wipes off a curtain of slime on a crusty sleeve.

“Thing is, they’ll take whatever you can give ‘em, and then they’ll just keep asking for more. You gotta learn to stand up for yerself. ‘You cain’t fire me,’ I tole them, ‘I didn’t do nothing.’” He hikes up his trousers, squints up into the sun, and shoves his arm into his pants up to his elbow for a prolonged scratch. “But they push, and push. It’d make a drinking man out of you, if you didn’t already have the knack,” he concludes.

“You shouldn’t talk with your pants full,” I say.

“Haw. You sound just like my ex-wife, Irma. Anyway,” he continued, “That’s why the boys went on strike back in New York back then. You wouldn’t’a had none of what you got now if it weren’t for the boys in New York.”

“You should have those boils looked at,” I say. “They’re going to start pussing up and you’ll end up stuck to the park bench.”

“Anyway,” the man continued, “I’m done with all that. Free as a bird. No one telling me what to do. Not that they don’t still try. I’m sittin’ at home, minding my own business, and the man come right up to the window and tell me to move it along. What? A man can’t enjoy a little peace and quiet in his own home? After forty years service to his country?”

“You smell like poo,” I observe.

“Haw.”

“Seriously, it’s like something died.”

“Haw. You sound just like my ex-wife.”

“Irma.”

“Naw. Bootsy. Anyway, I ain’t taking any crap from Mr. Fancy Pants Cul-de-sac about where I should and where I shouldn’t be living. It’s a free country. If he thinks it’s so important I ‘move it along,’ then he can just bring his own rope and haul me out of there, because that Econoline ain’t turned over since the oil run out. And that wasn’t my fault.”

“My, look at the time,” I say.

“There wasn’t a thing wrong with the crankcase until my ex-wife Doris got it in her fool head to ‘express herself’ with the .22. Use yer words, I always say, but does she listen?”

“Gotta go,” I insert.

“Haw. You sound just like my ex-wife.”

“Which one?”

The man scratches and ponders, ponders and scratches. “All of ‘em,” he admits, and then my future claps me on the shoulder one more time, turns, and heads off in the direction of the tav.

To be continued.