by Jonathan Dee
—
Folks came to the window at the post office seldom enough that Glenn was able to buy himself one of those little bells, like at the front desk of a hotel, and put up a hand-lettered sign that said RING FOR SERVICE, and nobody took it amiss. He was never more than twelve or fifteen feet from that window anyway—the post office just wasn’t that wide—but at least this way he could sit down out of sight, maybe flip through a magazine carefully before rolling it up and sliding it back into its addressee’s box, and watch from behind the wall as the citizens of Howland came in to check their mail. There wasn’t much to see from back there; sometimes he would make bets with himself about which tiny mailbox door would open. He got pretty good at it, because people were creatures of habit and he learned their routines. Sometimes one of the boxes on the lower rows would open and a child’s eye would press up against the slot—they loved to do that—and when they did, Glenn would make a sort of pop-eyed face and give them a little wave. Then he would hear the kid trying to convince his mom that it had happened.
At around eleven thirty every weekday the half-sized local truck would pull noisily into the lot at the back, the truck that delivered the mail from elsewhere in the postal zone, rarely more than half a bag but the guy still had to make the trip, it’s not like you could just let the mail pile up until you considered the trip worth your while. His name was John Francis, and Glenn wished he liked him more, because you didn’t see too many people during Glenn’s average working day, apart from those who rang the bell to summon him out of his chair to provide some service for them, which was obviously a less relaxed sort of interaction.
John Francis wanted to talk about sports, mostly, and for some reason was always frankly disappointed when Glenn couldn’t offer much of anything in return on the subject, apart from sympathetic nods. Still, he’d always invite John to come in out of the truck and sit for a bit. Just for a bit, John would always say, and then after an awkward silence he would confess how worried he’d been all morning about the Pats. Or the Bruins or the Sox or the Celtics; but lately it was the Pats that troubled him.
“Have they started playing already?” Glenn asked. “Seems a little early in the year for football.”
John stared at him. “No,” he said, “they’re in preseason now. That’s my point.”
John looked like the kind of guy who might actually be good at sports. He was probably still in his twenties, and in way better shape than Glenn was, but he never mentioned playing any sports himself, neither in the past nor in the present. It was more as if he were actually a member of the teams he was speaking about. The way he talked about the scouting reports on whomever the Pats were playing on a given Sunday, it was clear that in his mind he was preparing to play in that game. Glenn never understood guys like that. They couldn’t feel embarrassed.
But John Francis never stayed more than half an hour anyway, because he had other stops to make, in towns all up and down the Housatonic. Glenn waved to him as he backed out, then turned to box all the mail in the tied-off, half-filled bag John had dropped on the smooth concrete apron of the loading area.
On the Tuesday before Labor Day, Glenn made the drive from Springfield and unlocked the PO for business. He pulled open the loading-dock door and left it that way because it was a perfect day, and he liked seeing the strip of green on the other end of the lot. Not that pretty or anything, just some trees, but it gave a different sort of border to his tiny, solitary workspace, made it feel bigger and more varied. Fancier. Might as well enjoy it now, because in the wintertime, forget it. The front door had a metal slot cut into it where people could drop mail after hours; five or six envelopes of varying sizes were scattered on the linoleum beneath the slot. Glenn’s first task, this and every morning, was to gather them up before some civilian could walk through the door and accidentally step all over them. At the top of the loose pile was one of those old-fashioned, stiff, waxy manila envelopes, a dark yellow that you rarely saw anymore, that he associated for some reason with childhood, slightly larger than the standard business-size. It was addressed to the Office of the City of Howland, MA. Which was odd because Howland wasn’t a city per se, and had no office by that name, and anyone who lived here, anyone who would know the place well enough to bring a letter after hours to his front-door mail slot, would know that. It wasn’t flat, either, not perfectly—there was something inside it.
So technically it was undeliverable? With no return address. His to do with as he would, though of course there were procedures to follow, but no one would ever know since, federal government or no federal government, he worked alone. Of course he knew where its sender had intended it to go, probably. The door opened and somebody came in, a woman, he could tell from the way the shoes hit the tile. She opened her mailbox, emptied it, and left again. No idea Glenn was so near to her, listening to her, on the other side of a wall with holes cut into it like it was a prison or something.
Whatever was inside the manila business-shaped envelope was loose and moving around. Like dirt or sand. He was within his rights, he was pretty sure, to inspect it; or, if it was legit, he could always just tape it back up and slap one of those stickers on it that said it had been damaged in transit. He held it sideways so that whatever was inside collected at the bottom, and then, as neatly as he could, he cut open the top edge.
Nothing happened. He bent his head and looked inside. There was some kind of grit or powder in there, maybe a spoonful, and a folded piece of paper. Carefully he reached in and pulled out the paper with one blade of the scissors. It too was waxy and stiff, more like a blank index card. Printed on it, in pencil, were the words WHAT YOU DESERVE.
He heard the door open again and without thinking he spun and ran out the open back door of the post office, across the pavement, and threw the envelope into the thin woods. He was panting, and not from the sprint. He’d seen the news. He checked the pads of his fingers for any residue; there was none he could see. Somewhere beneath the sound of the wind and the roaring in his ears he became aware of the bell ringing at the customer window inside. He headed back in, smoothing his hair. What was he supposed to do? Quarantine the post office? Based on what? He’d thrown the evidence into the woods, and it was probably a stretch to call it evidence anyway. White powder could be anything. It could have been cocaine. Most likely, though, it was a prank, intended to cause exactly the panicked reaction it had caused, only at the Town Hall instead of here, in the halls of government instead of in Glenn’s own head.
He didn’t feel sick or anything. He felt a little dizzy. He wasn’t about to get the FBI in here to search the woods for traces of baby powder. No reason to put yourself on the radar that way. The bell again. By the time his legs were able to move him back to the window, whoever was there on the other side had given up and left.
He was pretty strung out by the time he closed up and headed back to Penny’s. John Francis had come as usual but Glenn couldn’t recall a single word of what they’d talked about. Just a prank, he kept telling himself. Somebody from the high school. It was the kind of thing Glenn himself probably would have found irresistibly hilarious back when he was in high school. And then he would have gotten caught. A criminal mastermind, in those days, he was not.
He kept hearing the click of the woman’s heels on the tile. What did I ever do? he wanted to say to the woman. It was like he was having a dream while driving.
“You’re here,” Penny said. She never said, “You’re home.” Which made sense. It wasn’t his home. “Another thrilling day at work?”
It was a joke they had. “You bet,” he said.
“Did you pick up dinner?”
She’d asked him that morning and he’d said he would. “I forgot,” he said. “My bad.”
He looked at her and saw himself dead in her bed in the morning, saw the both of them dead and her kids getting out of their father’s car in the driveway, wondering why there were two cars there, opening the front door. He saw the linoleum floor of t
he tiny, square post office overlaid with bodies.
“Whatever,” Penny said, and smiled. He tried to smile back. “You don’t look good,” she said. She came over and felt his forehead, and shrugged. He stood motionless as she turned away from him, toward the refrigerator, opened the freezer door and pulled out an oversized bottle of white wine.
“Dinner of champions!” she said.
—
Beginning in late spring and all through the summer, Mark had kept on a crew of three to do the work in and around Hadi’s house. It was a succession of small jobs—bollards in the driveway, security cameras concealed in the birch trees around the house and wired underground, reinforcements to all the doors and windows, including bulletproof glass—but he did them serially so he could supervise each one, since none of his men had enough experience with this kind of work to be left alone to do it, as if it were laying tile or upgrading a bathroom. The big security measure—a panic room, though Hadi didn’t call it that—had already been taken: it was part of the house’s blueprint. So Hadi had thought of himself as a potential target for years—all along, really—and Mark figured he was probably right.
They did some work on the roof too. Hadi wanted short-wave antennas installed up there in case other forms of communication went out, and an extra layer of steel as well, under the shingles so as not to change the house’s appearance, which meant taking all the shingles up and nailing them down again. From the roof, Mark could see his own house, looking handsome and unsecured. But any house looked pretty vulnerable from that angle.
Hadi’s home was not as big as Mark had expected. There was plenty of space for a family of four—five bedrooms, a dining room, a media room, a huge living room with picture windows tinted on the outside—but somehow it wasn’t all as excessive and opulent as Mark had assumed a guy like Hadi would go for. He thought a rich man wanted maximum wingspan, either just as a status marker or to make him feel his own limitlessness even in his downtime. If he were a billionaire, that’s probably how he would have looked at it. But he learned a lot, those weeks and months, about how such people lived. Or how Hadi lived, anyway, and he had to have been somewhat representative, just because there weren’t too many men like him in the world.
Hadi wouldn’t sit in front of those picture windows anymore, he confessed. Looking into the woods made him feel too exposed. He didn’t mean metaphorically. Even though the glass was now of a grade that would probably withstand a small missile, even though the woods were now full of high-tech sensors, in the trees and on the ground. He preferred his office upstairs, which was sizable and perfectly comfortable. He had Mark take the skylight out of it, though.
But he didn’t seem nervous or paranoid—just endlessly calculating. He was pretty much like any other client. He just needed a certain peace of mind before he could enjoy his country home. He was one of those guys whose business it was to think of, and provide for, every scenario. Only then could he relax, or work, which in his case seemed more or less the same thing.
Mark’s rate was substantial, and the job had gone on even longer than he’d hoped, because Hadi was always thinking of new measures, new precautions that might be taken: and if a thing might be done, then that thing needed to be done. Mark thought he’d clear maybe sixty-five thousand when it was all over, even after paying the crew, even after all the sometimes baroque expenses associated with making Hadi’s vision of impregnability real. He’d had to send all the way to Maryland for the new window frames, for instance, to some place that did work for Fort Bragg. He cleared it first with Hadi, because the cost was borderline larcenous, but Hadi had just clapped him on the shoulder, delighted with the ingenuity he’d shown in finding the material at all.
He watched everything Mark and his crew did, from a not-quite-respectful distance. He wasn’t critical, just interested—he never said a word unless it was to ask exactly how they were doing something they were doing—but it was still intimidating. When Mark got up the nerve to ask jokingly if Hadi didn’t have any work of his own to do, he replied soberly that he was working mostly with Asian markets lately and so had been up since 2 A.M.
Mark was able to keep all three men on most days, a fourth whenever they were up on the roof. For this job he made a point of hiring only guys he’d worked with, on and off, for years: Hartley, a master carpenter even though mostly rudimentary skills were required for a job like this one, Dave, who lived in Becket and had five kids, and Barrett, who was great with any kind of machinery and technology, which made him ideal for the job even though his usual gigs involved hooking up home theaters and wireless climate controls. He’d also done some security-cam installations before, or so he assured Mark. That relationship was always a little fraught because Barrett had been a year ahead of Mark in the same high school. He had to be careful not to act too much the boss with Barrett, especially in front of other people, because Barrett was capable of going into some kind of prolonged sulk and working half-speed or even just calling in sick the next morning.
Once in a while, when the workday was over, Hadi would invite Mark—never the others—to stick around and talk, have a beer out on the porch. It was a little discomfiting to sit on that porch and see the lights come on in his own house, five hundred yards away. He might have expected a guy like Hadi to want a captive audience to sit and brag about himself, but it wasn’t like that: pretty much all he did was ask Mark questions, mostly about his own work—the craft of it, the economics of it, how he first got interested in it.
“My dad, mostly,” Mark said. It was the answer he always gave. “He was in the home-building business. I mean I wanted to emulate him and rebel against him at the same time. He took a lot of pride in his work but there was only ever one way to do things, and that was the cost-efficient way. The idea that a house could be beautiful, or that it had a history, never entered into it for him.”
After a while Mark felt emboldened to tell Hadi that he had dabbled in the stock market, and even that he had suffered losses, though he wasn’t any more specific than that. Hadi winced sympathetically. “Very tough for an individual to make any headway in that world,” he said. “Or no. That’s not quite right. I mean, technically I’m an individual. What I mean is that it’s very tough for a relatively small amount of capital, such as an honest working man like yourself might have, to get itself taken seriously.”
“What do you two talk about?” Karen would ask him when he came home.
Mark wouldn’t articulate it to her or even to himself, but in fact he was looking for some evidence, some manifestation, of what set him apart from a guy like Hadi: a guy who had everything and from whom nothing could be taken away.
“Not much,” he said instead. “It’s a little old, at this point, actually. But he is a client. My only client right at the moment. So if he wants to have a beer with me, I’ll have a beer with him.”
Karen frowned. “Well, what’s the house like, then?” she said. “Since you’re the only person in town who’s ever seen the inside of it.”
Inside it he felt the contrast—or maybe it wasn’t a contrast at all, maybe it was harmony, it was hard to tell with marriages—between Hadi and his wife: the whole place was decorated with vintage furniture and with antiques (Mark hadn’t seen a single piece post-1950, though he hadn’t been in every room in the house), while the house itself was ultramodern, conspicuously brand new. All the fixtures, all the systems. Not because Hadi was some sort of tech buff but because he could not stand it when things broke or wore out or otherwise failed to do what he expected them to do. The combination didn’t look great, to Mark’s own eye, which was a pretty good one for that sort of thing. It was a compromise, a shotgun wedding of a house. You could read a lot about clients, always more than they realized, in their design decisions.
Mrs. Hadi herself—Rachel—never hung around for long. He’d see her in the kitchen or in the driveway, and he’d smile, but he could tell that she didn’t like having him and his men there, particularly not in
side the house.
“She misses the city,” Hadi said. She’d just opened the porch door, seen them sitting there having a beer, and withdrawn again. “Of course she understands why we had to leave it. But there’s a mourning period.” Mark nodded and looked discreetly away from the tinted door, toward the woods reflected in the dark windows of his own home.
One morning in September Mark came off the roof, backwards down the ladder, and found himself right next to her. She wasn’t doing anything, just standing there, arms folded, looking at him as if he had just dropped out of the sky, which in a way he had, though the presence of the ladder really should have tipped her off.
She had a way of looking at him that suggested she knew that he knew he was good-looking, and that his hickish charms were beneath her. He never addressed her by her first name because he felt uncomfortable using it. But “Mrs. Hadi” didn’t seem right either. They were probably about the same age.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Looks like I’ve got this ladder in your way.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“What are you doing out here?” he said.
“Gardening.” He looked around his feet, in a panic. “No, I’m just joking, for God’s sake. I came out here to have a cigarette.”
She was empty-handed.
“I forgot them inside, though,” she said.
The silences were harder for Mark to bear than when she spoke. “I don’t smoke,” he said.
“Of course not.”
