The Collection

by Bentley Little

  He came toward me, and I saw that he was carrying a piece of paper in his hand. "Did you get one of these?" he asked.

  I took the paper from him. It was a cheaply printed flyer from the snuff show. "Thinking of Suicide?" the headline read. "If your life is not worth living, do not end it alone. Call us and we will help you put an end to your misery." Underneath this was a telephone number.

  "Jesus," I said. "We're on their mailing list."

  "My sister almost found this," Jimmy said. He looked at it again. "I mean, it doesn't really look that suspicious or anything, but..." His voice trailed off.

  There was silence between us for a moment. "Have you gone back since?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "You?"

  "No." I looked at him. "How come you went back a sec­ond time?"

  He shrugged. "I thought it might be fun."

  "Fun." I got back into my pickup and took off, without even looking at Jimmy. I wondered how he slept at night. I wondered if he had nightmares.

  Driving home, the streets and buildings all seemed dirty and dingy.

  I spent most of the next day in Metro Center, keeping out of the heat, staying within the artificial environment of the mall. I saw no one I knew, which was just as well. I went through bookstores, record stores, clothing stores, trying to sort out the thoughts in my head.

  It was after six when I finally got back home, and no one was around. I went into the kitchen to make myself a sand­wich and saw the flyer on the table.

  "Thinking of Suicide?"

  On the floor next to the table were three crumpled sheets of stationery. I picked one up and uncrumpled it. "Dear Dan," it said in my mother's handwriting. I picked up the next ball of paper. "Dear Dan," it said. She had gotten no further on her last note. There was only my name again: "Dear Dan."

  "No!" I screamed aloud.

  I ran out to the pickup and drove over to Jimmy's. He was out of the house before I was halfway up the lawn. "What's up?" he asked, puzzled.

  "Get in the truck!" I screamed. "We have to get to the show!"

  He asked me no questions but immediately hopped into the cab. I peeled out, following his directions, hoping my short detour to his house would not make me too late.

  It was twenty minutes before we reached the pink build­ing. I leaped out of the pickup and dashed through the door.

  "Fifteen dollars," Charlie Daniels said. "And sign the re­lease."

  I threw him the money, scrawled my signature and ran down the hall.

  "Address and driver's license," he called after me.

  The camera was already rolling as I burst into the room. My mother, bound and naked, was seated on the chair. Her mouth was not gagged, but she was not screaming. Her eyes looked dead. The people staring at her were silent, uncom­fortable.

  "Mom!" I cried.

  And then the man started up the chainsaw.

  The Mailman

  When I was a little boy, my mom and dad used to take me to the county fair each summer. Once, when I was around five or six, I was walking a few steps behind them and was accosted by a dwarf who demanded, "Give me a quarter." He was pushy, insistent, and frightened me, and it was not until I had run to catch up with my parents and saw him approach another fairgoer with the same belligerent demand that I realized he was just trying to round up customers for a ring-toss game.

  I used that incident as the starting point for "The Mailman."

  ***

  If Jack had known that the mailman was a dwarf he never would have moved into the house. It was as simple as that. Yes, the neighborhood was nice. And he'd gotten a fantastic deal on the place—the owner had been transferred to New York by the company he worked for and had to sell as quickly as possible. But all that was beside the point.

  The mailman was a dwarf.

  Jack got the cold sweats just thinking about it. He had moved in that morning and had been innocently unpacking lawn furniture, setting up the redwood picnic table under the pine tree, when he had seen the blue postal cap bobbing just above the top of the small front fence. A kid, he thought. A kid playing games.

  Then the mailman had walked through the gate and Jack had seen the man's small body and oversized head, his fat little fingers clutching a stack of letters. And he had run as f fast as he could in the other direction, away from the dwarf, aware that the movers and neighbors were staring at him but not caring. The mailman dropped the letters in the mail-slot of the door and moved on to the next house while Jack stood alone at the far end of the yard, facing the opposite direction, trying to suppress the panic that was welling within him.

  The dwarf jumped out from somewhere and grabbed Jack's arm. "You got a quarter? Gimme a quarter!" He held out a fat tiny hand no larger than Jack's.

  The young boy looked around, confused, searching for Baker, for his father, for anyone. His glance met, for a sec­ond, that of the dwarf, and he saw an adult's face at his child's level, old eyes peering cruelly into his young ones. A hard, experienced mouth was strung in a straight line across a field of five o 'clock shadow. Jack looked immediately away.

  "Gimme a quarter!" The dwarf pulled him across the sawdust to a booth, where he pointed to a pyramid of stacked multicolored glass ashtrays. "You'll win a prize! Gimme a quarter! "

  Jack's mouth opened to call for help, but it would not open all the way and no sound came out. His eyes, confused, frantic, now darted everywhere, searching in vain for a fa­miliar face in the carnival crowd. He put one sweaty hand into the right pocket of his short pants and held tight to the two quarters his father had given to him.

  "I know you have a quarter! Give it to me!" The dwarf was starting to look angry.

  Jack felt a firm strong hand grab the back of his neck, and he swung his head around.

  "Come on, Jack. Let's go." His father smiled down at him—safety, reassurance, order in that smile.

  Jack relaxed his grip on the coins in his pocket and looked up gratefully at his father. He grabbed his father's arm and the two of them started to walk down the midway toward the funhouse, where Baker was waiting. As he walked, he turned back to look at the dwarf.

  The little man was scowling at him. "I'll get you, you lit­tle son of a bitch." His voice was a low, rough growl.

  Frightened, Jack looked up. But his father, ears at a higher level, hearing different sounds, was unaware of the threat. He had not heard it. Jack gripped his father's hairy arm tighter and stared straight ahead, toward Baker, mak­ing a conscious effort not to look back. Beneath his wind-breaker and T-shirt, his heart was thumping wildly. He knew the dwarf was staring at him, waiting for him to turn around again. He could feel the hot hatred of the little man's eyes on

  his back.

  "I'll get you," the dwarf said again.

  Jack sorted through the mail in his hand. The envelopes were ordinary—junk, bills, a couple of letters—but they felt tainted, looked soiled to his eyes, and when he thought of those stubby fat fingers touching them, he dropped the en­velopes onto the table.

  Maybe he could sell the house. Or call the post office and get the mailman transferred. He had to do something.

  The fear was once again building within him, and he picked up the remote control and switched on the TV. The Wizard of Oz was on, a munchkin urging Dorothy to "follow the yellow-brick road!" He switched off the TV, his hands shaking. The house seemed suddenly darker, his unpacked boxes throwing strange shadows on the walls of the room. He got up and switched on all the lights on the first floor. It would be a long time before he'd be able to fall asleep.

  Jack unpacked in the morning but spent the afternoon shopping, staying far away from his house. He noticed two mailmen on the way to the mall, but they were both of normal size.

  Why hadn't he checked?

  How could he be so stupid?

  He arrived home at five thirty, long after the mailman was supposed to have come and gone. Was supposed to have. For there he was in his absurd blue uniform, lurching ever so slightly to the right
and to the left, not quite balanced on his stumpy legs, three houses up from his own.

  Jack jumped out of the car and ran into the house, shut­ting and locking the door behind him, hurriedly closing the drapes. He crouched down behind the couch, out of view from any window, closing his eyes tightly, his hands balled into tense fists of fear. He heard the light footsteps on the porch, heard the metal clack of the mail slot opening and closing, heard the small feet retreat.

  Safe.

  He waited several minutes before standing up, until he was certain the dwarf was gone. He was sweating, and he re­alized his hands were shaking.

  "Gimme a quarter."

  His experience with the dwarf at the carnival had been scary, but though he'd never forgotten the rough voice and small cruel face, it would not have been enough to terrify him so thoroughly and utterly that he now shuddered in fear when he saw a man under four feet tall. No, it was Vietnam that did that. It was the camp. For it was there that he saw the dwarf again, that he realized the little man really was after him and had not simply been making empty threats. It was there that he learned of the dwarf's power.

  The guards were kind to him at first; or as kind as could be expected under the circumstances. He was fed twice a day; the food was adequate; he was allowed weekly exer­cise; he was not beaten. But one day the food stopped com­ing. And it was three more days before he was given a cupful of dirty water and a small dollop of nasty tasting gruel served on a square of old plywood. He ate hungrily, drank instantly, and promptly threw up, his starved system unable to take the sudden shock. He jumped up, pounding on the door, demanding more food, delirious and half-crazy. But the only thing he got for his trouble was a beating with wooden batons which left huge welts on his arms and legs and which he was sure had broken at least one rib.

  Sometime later—it could have been hours, it could have been days—two guards he had never seen before entered his cell. "Kwo ta?" one of them demanded angrily.

  "English," he tried to explain through cracked and swollen lips. "I only speak—"

  He was clubbed on the back of the neck and fell face­down on the floor, a bolt of pain shooting through his shoul­ders and side.

  "Kwo ta?" the man demanded again. He nodded, hoping that was what they were looking for, not sure to what he was agreeing. The men nodded, satis­fied, and left. Another man returned an hour or so later with a small cupful of dirty water and a few crusts of hard bread smeared with some sort of rice porridge. He ate slowly this time, drank sparingly, and kept it down.

  He was taken outside the next day and, though the bright­ness of the sun burned his light-sensitive eyes, he was grate­ful to be out of the cell. Hands manacled, he was shoved against a bamboo wall with several other silent, emaciated prisoners. He glanced around the camp and saw a group of obviously high-ranking officers nearby. One of the men shuffled his feet, moving a little to the right, and, in a mo­ment he would never forget, he saw the dwarf.

  He was suddenly cold, and he felt the fear rise within him. It couldn't be possible. It couldn't be real. But it was possible. It was real. The dwarf was wearing a North Viet­namese army uniform. He was darker than before and had vaguely Oriental eyes. But it was the same man. Jack felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Kwo ta.

  Quarter.

  The Vietnamese guards had been trying to say "quarter." The dwarf smiled at him, and he saw tiny white baby teeth. The small man said something to another officer, and the other officer strode over, pushing his face to within an inch of Jack's. "Gi meea kwo ta," the man said in a thick musical accent.

  And Jack began to scream.

  He spent the rest of his incarceration in solitary, where he was beaten regularly and fed occasionally, and when he was finally released he weighed less than ninety pounds and was albino white, with bruises and welts and running sores all over his body. He saw several guards on his way to the airstrip, but though he looked wildly around before stepping onto the plane, he saw no sign of the dwarf.

  But the dwarf was waiting for him when he arrived at Vandenburg, disguised as a cheering onlooker. Jack saw the horrible face, the oversized head on its undersized body, between the legs of another POW's family. He had in his hand a small American flag which he was waving enthusiasti­cally. He was no longer Vietnamese—his hair was blond, his light skin red with sunburn—but it was without a doubt the same man.

  Then the face faded back into the crowd as friends and families of the newly released men rushed forward onto the tarmac.

  He had avoided dwarves and midgets ever since and had been pretty successful at it. Occasionally, he had seen the back of a small man in a mall or supermarket, but he had al­ways been able to get away without being seen.

  He had had no problems until now.

  He picked up the mail from where it had fallen through the slot, but the envelopes felt cold to his touch, and he dropped them on the table without looking at them.

  The next day he left the house before noon and did not re­turn until after dark. He was afraid of seeing the dwarf at night, afraid the small man would come slinking up the steps in the darkness to deliver the mail, but the mail had already been delivered by the time he returned home.

  He returned the next night a little earlier and saw the dwarf three houses up from his own, in the exact spot he'd seen him before, and he quickly ran inside and locked the door and closed the curtains, hiding behind the couch.

  He was gone the next three afternoons, but he realized he could not be away every day. It was not practical. He only had three more weeks until he started teaching, and there was still a lot of unpacking to do, a lot of things he had to work on around the house. He could not spend each and every afternoon wandering through shopping centers far from his home in order to avoid the mailman.

  So he stayed home the next day, keeping an eye out for the mailman, and by the end of the week he had settled into a routine. He would hide in the house when the mailman came by, shutting the curtains and locking the doors. Often he would turn on the stereo or turn up the television before the mailman arrived, but he would inevitably shut off all sound before the mailman actually showed up and sit quietly on the floor, not wanting the dwarf to know he was home.

  And he would hear the rhythmic tap tap tapping of the little feet walking up the wooden porch steps, a pause as the mailman sorted through his letters, then the dreaded sound of metal against metal as those stubby fingers forced open the mail slot and pushed in the envelopes. He would be sweating by then, and he would remain unbreathing, afraid to move, until he heard the tiny feet descend the steps.

  Once there was silence after the mail had been delivered, and Jack realized that though he had heard the mail slot open, he had not heard it fall shut. The dwarf was looking through the slit into the house! He could almost feel those horrid little eyes scanning the front room through the limited viewspace offered by the slot. He was about to scream when he heard the slot clack shut and heard the light footsteps re­treat.

  Then the inevitable happened.

  As always, he waited silently behind the couch until the mailman had left and then gathered up his mail. Amidst the large white envelopes was a small blue envelope, thicker than the rest, with the seal of the postal service on the front. He knew what that envelope was—he'd gotten them many times before.

  Postage due.

  Heart pounding, he looked at the "AMOUNT" line, knowing already how much he owed.

  Twenty-five cents.

  A quarter.

  And he stood there unmoving while the shadows length­ened around him and the room grew dark, and he wondered where the dwarf went after work.

  The next morning Jack went to the main branch of the post office. The line was long, filled with businessmen who needed to send important packages and women who wanted to buy the latest stamps, but he waited patiently. When it was his turn, he walked up to the front counter and asked the clerk if he could talk to the postmaster. He was not as brave
as he'd planned to be, and he was aware that his voice qua­vered slightly.

  The postmaster came out, a burly man on the high side of fifty, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a fixed placating smile. "How many I help you, sir?"

  Now that he was here, Jack was not sure he could go through with it. His head hurt, and he could feel the blood pulsing in his temples. He was about to make something up, something meaningless and inconsequential, when he thought of the dwarf's cruel little face, thought of the de­mand on the postage due envelope. "I'm here to complain about one of your mailmen," he said.

  The postmaster's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "One of our mail carriers?" Jack nodded. "Where do you live, sir?"

  "Glenoaks. Twelve hundred Glenoaks."

  The postmaster frowned. "That's Charlie's route. He's one of our best employees." He turned around. "Charlie!" he called.

  Jack's hands became sweaty.

  "He's right in the back there," the postmaster explained. "I'll have him come out here, and we'll get this mess straightened out."

  Jack wanted to run, wanted to dash through the door the way he had come, to hop in the car and escape. But he re­mained rooted in place. The post office was crowded. Noth­ing could happen to him here. He was safe.

  A man in a blue uniform rounded the corner.

  A normal-sized man.

  "This is Charlie," the postmaster said. "Your mail car­rier."

  Jack shook his head. "No, the man I'm talking about is ... short. He's about three feet high."

  "We have no one here who fits that description."

  "He delivers my mail every day. He delivers my neigh­bors' mail."

  "Where do you live?" Charlie asked.

  "Twelve hundred Glenoaks."

  "Impossible. I deliver there."

  "I've never seen you before in my life!" Jack looked from one man to the other. He was sweating, and he smelled his own perspiration. His mouth was dry, and he tried un­successfully to generate some saliva. "Something weird's going on here."