The Mailman

      “What the fuck, dude. What the fuck, dude.”

       The mailman's hand hung off the back of the chair, fat and papery like a wadded slice of bread. Robby, twisted against the wall, was mouthing the inside of his wrist, his eyes wet and wide.

       I watched Carl take the edge of the kitchen curtain between his thumb and forefinger. He brought it to his face, rubbing the fabric with his hand as if testing the feel of a shirt, then turned it over and sniffed it. The curtain was yellow, plaid with green swirls like bloated teardrops at the corners. It was brown on the side hanging over the sink. The counter was piled with garbage. The place smelled like banana peels. Glossy white kitchen paint met that of the brown living room wall in a precise line. 

       “What'd you do, Carl?” Carl dropped the curtain and squatted on the carpet where the linoleum ended, combing the pile with his fingers stiff. His hand made a tearing sound as it passed. Chunks of lint collected like filthy cotton at his feet. 

       Robby took his hand from his mouth and pushed himself up, staring at Carl as he dragged the lint from the ground. Rob's face looked swollen and pink, like when we were all kids and he was being a wimp on a sleepover. He swallowed a couple of times before he spoke. “Yeah. What the—what the fuck, dude? What the fuck d'you do that for?” Carl's eyes rose from the carpet and trained themselves on Robby, his hand trolling the ground rhythmically. His face was slack.

       “Carl. Where'd you get him?” I took a step toward him and he looked up at me. His teeth glinted like gristle in the dark of his mouth. A shaft of sunlight from the window hit his eye and made it gleam yellow, like the wing of a butterfly. I could see his throat working under the soft, ridged pink skin.

       He coughed. “What?” he said, and smiled, blinking. 

       “Aw, fuck.” Robby moaned in the corner.

       I walked to the mailman and looked at him. He was older than he'd looked from the door. His face was chalky, his cheeks crossed with red capillaries and the pig-bristle of a day-old beard. His eyelids were shut and satiny. The wool of his pants was frayed at the seams; there was a hole in the place where the zipper met the crotch. He wore black cotton gloves. One of his knee socks was drooping on his white calf, and underneath it was an industrial-looking black garter. I put my finger underneath his nose. I felt a wet draft like someone blowing through a straw and I pulled my hand away, wiping it on my pants. “He's not dead.” I said.

       “Oh, thank Christ! Then we can leave him be and get the fuck out of here!” yelled Robby, climbing to his feet. I looked out the kitchen window. The mailman's truck sat in his driveway, cheerful and white. A fat woman in a pink housedress was standing on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips, watching her terrier take a shit on the mailman's front lawn.

       “Robby,” I muttered, “Shut the fuck up or we're all going to jail.” Robby put one hand back over his eyes and with the other smacked the wall, sinking towards it and whimpering curses.

       “We'll put him in that torn up old mattress,” Carl said quietly. He was staring at the pile of fluff he'd made. He flicked the wads with the tips of his fingers. “Just slit it open and put him right inside.”

       “He's not dead,” I repeated. “He's still breathing.” I looked out the window again. “Somebody might come home soon.”

       “Nobody's coming home,” said Carl, and rubbed his eyes. He looked at me. “Are you blind? He lives alone.” His eyes in the gold of his face glowed surreally, the color of dust motes. In the dark room he looked like a lit match, like some wild and glowing animal. He brushed the fluff at his feet into a neat mound, then stood up. His body left the ray of sunlight, darkened. “We'll kill him.”

       Robby's face screwed up. His hand waved in the air in front of him feebly, his other hand pawing at his hair, his eyes, his mouth. “Oh, come on, Carl. I don't want to.” He put his face against the wall. He turned to me suddenly, his hands out, palms up at me. “Danny, I don't want to. Do you want to? I don't want to, man. You can't let him make me. Don't let him—” 

       I popped Robby one before I even knew what I was doing. I felt the heavy hand descend, the iron fist of concrete and white marble, the dense, clamping hand, crimping my eyes, filling the spaces under my jaw, pressing my shoulders down and then exploding up, through my bones, through my fist, and when I hit Robby's face I felt no impact, just watched his head whip back and hit the wall with a smack. An instant later his hands flew up and hid his mouth, his skin white against the red blear spreading from his nose. He held his face and looked at me silently. I turned back to Carl. 

       “How'd you get him out?”

       “I used a rag.”

       “Where is it?”

       He laughed and pulled a wrinkled white rag out of his shirt pocket, waving it around like a hanky, his brows raised. I smelled the refrigerant smell of the chloroform.

       “Were you wearing gloves?”

       “Of course. This shit gives you sores.” He leaned against the kitchen sink, tilting his head back as he folded the rag in a square and tucked it back inside his pocket. 

       “Where'd you put them?”

       He smiled with one corner of his mouth at me and leaned back on his arms, tapping the tiles of the counter with his fingernails. “It doesn't matter. They don't have any of our fingerprints.”

       “He works for the government.” 

       “He's a mailman, Daniel.”

       “You guys can't kill a person. We've never killed a person before,” said Robby from the wall.

       “That's why we're not going to get caught.” Carl kept his eyes on me. I realized I was picking at my fingernails and put my hands in my pockets.

       The mailman snorted and we all jumped. He huffed once or twice, jewels of sweat quaking on the stubble of his upper lip. The hand hanging off the chair jerked itself up and clutched spasmodically at the motheaten crotch. The dark twill chest started heaving in and out like a bellows. A sound came from him like cardboard ripping. He was snoring.

       Carl sighed and looked at his watch. “Let's have a look around,” he said.

       “Carl, man, Carl—”

       “Shut the fuck up, Robby.” He raised his eyebrows at me briskly and strolled to the hall at the back of the living room. “Do what you want, you two little whores.” He cornered the bend into the hall. Robby and I looked at each other.

       “Come on, Robbo. Be a little man.” I walked to him and put my arm over his back. 

       The hall jogged right after the first few steps and it became too dark to see. Robby and I stumbled down the dark passage, groping with our hands out. Carl appeared in a tall blade of light that opened to our left, black against the blue-white radiance of a room. “This way, ladies,” he said smoothly, and disappeared. 

       The whiteness of the room blotted all sight for a moment, and then we were in a bedroom. A peach bedspread loomed in quilted ridges across a four-poster bedframe made of scrolled metal painted white. The headboard rolled in curlicues like a pale gothic mansegate, and the posts were twisted like barber poles. On the wall facing the bed there was a window, and over this was a luminous stained glass picture of a beach scene with a massive gilded frame. Rolling turquoise waves glowed obscenely, and in the upper left corner, a brilliant red sun squatted, top-wide and fat. Black seagulls crawled flylike across a pork-pale, iridescent sky. Through the whole thing you could see faintly the stubbled brown backyard, a rusted swingset, and the clouding top of a brackish arborvitae studded with crows.

       The bathroom was pink, with double sinks shaped like seashells. Vanity lights ringed the mirror, splattered with the foggy skeletons of water droplets and black hairs like little fleas. The floor was strewn with empty toilet rolls and scummy towels. A gold ring was in the wall above each sink, and in both of these a plush, peach hand towel hung folded neatly. On the counter were mounds of tissues, thumbed and brown.
       "Can you believe that good people die while this sack of shit just lives?" I looked at Carl. His face was still impassive, but his hands were clenched. I felt a stinging pain in my own hand and looked down. My thumb was bleeding. I had torn the nail down to its root without noticing. I stuffed my hands into my pockets again.

       “Carl,” I said. “This is nothing like a dog.”

       “I know,” he said. “Dogs have dignity.”

       “No. That's not what I mean.”

       He turned and came very near me. He had a sweet smell, like laundry or Coke. He brought his mouth close to my face so that I felt his breath as he spoke. He looked me in the eyes.

       “No, Dan,” he said, “this is not like killing a dog.” Something sweet but unbearably clean. “But it will be easy.” I could see again behind the pearly mouth the white gleam of his teeth, the bubbles of saliva glittering the edge his tongue. “Daniel,” he said. He put his hand on my cheek. “You're right.” He turned away from me and passed through the smudged door frame into the black hall without a word. 

       Robby looked at me in the mirror.

       “Are we really going to do it, Danny?”

       I looked away from him. In the mirror, my own eyes were absurd, pale and round, ridiculously large and unprotected. My hands stuffing my pockets looked like hobo's purses, my wrists above them hairy and white. I was a small, dark goblin, a monster. 

       “For chrissakes, Robby.” I yanked my hands to my eyes and turned from the mirror. I felt as though a wave of sound were coming over me; there was a rushing in my ears that was palpable, like they were being pressed open with cotton. I pressed my palms to my forehead and saw Robby's t-shirt, the red fabric covering the soft flesh of his belly. At his sides, his hands hung like white rags; the pink swells of his fingers bloomed chubby and limp. He was so goddamn helpless. I thought about my dad, how his hands had looked clenching around his face the day my mom died, veined and reddened, like they were carved of something that had been burned by acid, irrevocably damaged. The world was so fucked up. I could feel my face twisting around it. Heat stabbed my eyes. Robby's white hands lifted, floated towards me.

     “Dan—” he said. I snatched at his elbows, strained the hands out of reach. I could feel the weight, something cold, unbearably heavy. It was pressing down on me; I wanted to shake it off, but there was nowhere to go.