Requiem for a Postal Worker
Jonathan Farlow
I can't remember what I was doing specifically at the time save standing on the sidewalk and watching the street lights click on one by one leaving small patches of noonday every ten feet or so down the street. I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye as I stooped to get my bicycle which lay beside me on someone or other's freshly mowed lawn. He looked like a ghost in the day's quickly fading light. He glided silently through the intersection at the bottom of the hill and, after a few minutes hesitation, out of apprehension and a doubt that I had seen him at all, I righted my bicycle, saddled up and pedaled after him.
When I reached the intersection he was just passing over the crest of a hill; when I made it to the hill he was just a few feet in front of me but he didn't seem to notice or didn't act like he did. He just loped along dragging his feet and an empty canvas bag, staring down at the sidewalk so his pith helmet obscured his face. It had been hot that day, 104, a record Mama had told me just before lunch when she made me and my friend Doug come in and play indoors until the sun started to go down. Looking at him, and I rode even closer as we started down the next hill, the heat was evident. His clothes were drenched and as a car met us I could see drops of sweat in the headlights hanging off the rim of his hat. His entire demeanor down to the thick smell of sweat that exuded from him was one of fatigue, of depression and of ennui. It was the air of someone who had been staked on an anthill in this unbearable heat and was only released when his spirit had been sufficiently broken.
I hung back when he tossed his bag into a large patch of kudzu growing up a bank beside the road and stopped as he walked out into the middle of the intersection. He stood for a good while with his head bowed and then took off his hat and lay it in the middle of the left-hand lane. Then he got down on his knees for a moment like he was praying before he laid down and put his tired old head on the hat like a pillow. My mom had warned me about that particular intersection. It was on the crest of a hill and people flew through it on their way in and out of town.
"There's no way anybody could see you," she had told me more times than I cared to remember. "You'd end up no more than a greasy spot." And now here was this man lying down in the middle of that same intersection, purposefully putting himself smack in the middle of the most dangerous spot in my young life. What was he trying to do?
"What do you care?" snapped the little red devil that appeared at once on my left shoulder. "Is this really something that you want to get involved in? So the mailman's trying to off himself big deal. It's getting dark, your mom will be calling you soon and besides Gunsmoke's coming on. Head on back home and tell your folks if you want to be the hero, they can call the cops or somebody like that. Hey, listen is that her? You'd better go."
"That is not your mother calling you," whispered the soft voice of the angel that now stood on my right shoulder. "It's a gaggle of geese flying over. You know as well as I do that she won't be calling for good half-hour now and that man needs your help. At least go and ask him what's wrong." We had been to revival the week before so I was feeling holy and did what the later advisor asked of me. I walked over, knelt down beside this poor soul and asked him his story. As I did so I could hear the little devil's voice fading away in my left ear.
"You'll wish you hadn't," he said. "Do you really want to know?" The man's voice was raspy and quivered as he struggled to his feet. I assured him that I did want to know what had reduced him to such a lowly state and took his arm as he slumped to the curb and sat down. His eyes were bloodshot and row after row of dark circles hung beneath them. He looked like he hadn't shaved in a good week or two and his hands shook as he ran them over his long hairy legs that he stuck out into the street.
I soon learned that I was sharing a curb with the former postmaster for the local post office just as his pith helmet was crushed under the wheels of a Peterbuilt hauling hogs. He said that a scant two months before all was right with the world. It was a Monday, but work had been light so shortly before lunch he had hidden away in his office with a copy of the Postmaster's Weekly. It had not turned hot yet and his window was open letting a warm sweet smelling breeze drift through the room and caress his face. Out in one of the outer offices one of the supervisors, a fellow named Clint, was playing a trick on one of the carriers. He had brought a large wood and wire cage to work with a good inch of cedar shavings in the bottom and all the accoutrements that would be useful for keeping the average hamster. The creature that was cuddled into the corner was a great deal larger than a hamster, however. The sign on the cage said it was a mongoose. What it was in reality was a coonskin cap wrapped around a rubber ball. Clint would lead up to the joke by telling the perspective victims what he went through to get the "mongoose." He would tell them how vicious it was, what it could do to a pencil, what mongooses were reported to have done to deadly cobras and then he would ask them if they wanted a closer look. Who wouldn't and as they hovered down over the cage the supervisor would open the lid activating a spring-like mechanism that would shoot the "mongoose" at them. The fits he told me were something to behold and he was laughing to himself as shrieks of fright bled through the walls.
"It bit me! It bit me!" Then came the call, which my new friend said to him marked the beginning of the end.
There was a long pause and the then P.M. said he was about to hang up. He told me that he regretted to this day not doing so, but before he could pull the receiver away from his ear a loud, angry, all too familiar sounding voice came over the line.
"What the hell is that nut doing delivering my mail?" The voice belonged to Wade Burgess, the county manager whom the P.M. had had dealings with before and who in reality had no authority over my friend but who did know a lot of important people, according to Mr. Burgess, and who was the bullying sort. The type that that you'll appease just to get rid of. The P.M. never admitted it to anyone else but me that he was a little afraid of Mr. Burgess. He was very big and very loud and he liked to stand on people's feet and bump their chests with his while confronting them. After such a surprise attack from Wade all my friend could do was stammer over the phone.
"S-S-S-cuse me?"
"Wh-Wh-What is that nut doing delivering my mail?"
"Which nut....I mean what nut do you mean?"
"Who do you think I mean? Are you not aware of who you have delivering mail?" Before my friend could speak again Burgess broke in. "My wife went out onto our front stoop in her house coat to get our paper this morning! She bent over to pick it up and heard a wolf whistle coming from the street! She looked in that direction and saw Fuzzy Mann sitting in a post office truck, wearing a post office uniform holding our mail grinning at her and working his eyebrows! Now if you didn't even know that he was working for you, first off you're not much of a postmaster and second you're not aware of what he's doing out on his route! He's probably harassing every woman in our section of town. Now when the mail runs tomorrow I don't want to see Fuzzy delivering it! Is that clear!"
"Actually I was aware....." Actually this was a lie but regardless Burgess cut off my friend again before he could finish it.
"I think that I've made myself clear!" Then he hung up. The P.M. sat at his desk in silence, his magazine still in his lap until another scream rang out and the "mongoose" hopped by his open door. As Clint went by in pursuit the P.M. called him in and asked him if Fuzzy Mann was indeed in his employ.
"Well uh..." The answer was betrayed by the simple fact that Clint looked down at his feet and wrung the "mongoose" while he searched for an explanation.
"Why in God's name would you hire Fuzzy of all people?"
"Well he's real interested in working for the postal service, said he likes the pith helmets, and he told his uncle that and J.W. kind of pulled some strings with the boys in Winston-Salem. Let me tell you I sent him packing the first time he came by but he was hardly out the door when J.W. called and started leaning on me and then we started getting calls from Winston-Salem so I hired him and put him out on the route." The P.M. related his phone call with Wade Burgess to Clint who shuffled his feet, scratched an awful lot and wiped his brow with the "mongoose."
"Now Wade said that he didn't want him to deliver his mail so put him on another route."
"Well it's his fourth this month."
"How long has he worked here?" Clint began yanking on the mongoose's tail and the P.M. said: "Never mind, Never mind," before he could answer. "You need to take him off the route or fire him one." The look on Clint's face told the P.M. that he would rather attempt the former. "Then find him something to do."
"Well actually we started him as clerk."
"Didn't work out huh?"
"He's not much for handling money or counting for that matter. That's why I put him on the route."
"Well put him in the back sorting."
"We have enough people doing that."
"Put Sandy out on the route; he's been waiting on that for years. Go tell him. He'll get a raise out of it so he should be tickled." My friend went back to his magazine and all was right again until that time the following day.
I should take some time at this point to familiarize everyone with the before mentioned people to enlighten you with my friend's predicament. J.W. Mann was the Mayor at the time and the Mann family was one of the oldest and the most influential in the area. Even at that time the Manns held a lot of pull in the area and J.W. liked to throw his around even more than Wade Burgess liked brandishing his. This can explain how Mr. Mann got his supposed cousin Fuzzy employed with the U.S. Postal Service.
Cicero Mann, known to one and all in the county as Fuzzy, was the alleged cousin of J.W. Mann. I use words such as "supposed" and "alleged" because J.W. always referred to Fuzzy as his cousin, anywhere from second to fifth. He stuck to his story even after it got out that Fuzzy was in reality J.W.'s own son, a fact that the elder Mr. Mann never really disputed although he continued to call Fuzzy cousin. If Fuzzy is indeed J.W.'s son then his lack of height (all the Mann men are quite tall), lack of hygiene, front teeth and good sense, excessive body hair and cock eyes made it seem that Fuzzy was the product of an affair before J.W. married his wife Bernice. Some people in the county who were never confident enough in their assumptions to make their identities known said that Fuzzy was evidence that the Mann family tree did not fork as much as they would like. These are questions that may never be answered. These are questions that many may not want answered were it possible.
The next morning my friend looked in on Fuzzy at least every fifteen minutes and breathed a sigh of relief late morning, right at the time that he had gotten Wade Burgess' call the day before, and had to congratulate himself at a crisis averted. Fuzzy seemed to be doing what was expected of him quickly and efficiently.
The first thing that my friend did notice when he returned from lunch that day was that Fuzzy was conspicuously absent. He asked someone who had been working near his newest employee as to his present location and was pointed toward the front of the post office where screaming erupted just as the P.M. had asked the question. He ran to the door that opened into the lobby and squeezed past Clint who was being blocked from a crowd of people who had gathered in the lobby by Fuzzy. Between Fuzzy and the crowd was a package wrapped in plain brown wrapper and tied with twine sitting on its end on the floor.
"Don't worry folks," Fuzzy was saying as he held his hands out toward them. "Nobody panic, I'm a trained professional!" My friend leaned over and whispered into Clint's ear startling him. His jump was noticed by Fuzzy who repeated much the same speech. "Don't worry boss, I'll take care of this. You go on to the back so ifn' it blows the important people will be able to get out alive!"
"What is he saying?" The P.M. ignored Fuzzy and talked to Clint.
"He says there a bomb in that package."
"What?" said the P.M. who was obvious concerned at this point and he looked toward Fuzzy for some sort of explanation.
"Yes sir, that's right. That woman right there," he pointed to a rather exasperated looking woman in the front of the throng with a beehive and drawn on eyebrows, "dropped this package in the out of town shoot. I looked at the postage and figured that she didn't have enough so I picked it up and started out the door after her when I heard it ticking. I knew right off what was going on so I flew into action. Now if you can get these people out," He pointed to the P.M. "and you call the police," pointing at Clint, "I'll grab her so she won't get away. She's probably a communist or a democrat one!" Before Fuzzy could grab the woman she walked to the package and picked it up. "Look out!" Fuzzy screamed. "She gonna set the thing off!" The woman looked at Fuzzy angrily although she didn't look particularly surprised, and began fishing through her pocketbook. At that point Fuzzy backed up pushing Clint and the P.M. against the wall, and began screaming. "Oh Lord, we're gonna die!" The woman's face kept the expression of extreme vexation as she pulled a letter opener out of her purse. "She's gonna cut me for ruining her plans. It's one of them steel toes!" Instead of sticking the blade into Fuzzy's ample gut, which the P.M. would not have blamed her for, the woman stuck it into the package and cut a large hole at the corner. Then as she began shaking the box, one, two, four, a dozen, twenty, and countless other cat's eye marbles began spilling out where they bounced about on the floor among their feet. The P.M. pulled Clint back inside the door as the crowd erupted into hysterics.
"You and the Man From U.N.C.L.E. pick up those marbles, repackage them, refund that lady her postage and he's fired."
"But," was all that Clint could get out as my friend practically ran back to his office and debated hiding under his desk.
After his dismissal Fuzzy went outside and called his cousin/father from the pay phone in the parking lot. J.W. called the person directly responsible for Fuzzy's hiring, someone whom he knew personally that undoubtedly owned him a huge debt, who called Clint who referred that person to my friend who was told in no uncertain terms that he would hire Cicero Mann back and as a letter carrier. That person would not listen to the P.M. when he said that Fuzzy was unqualified to boil water much less deliver the mail and he did not want to hear the details of the woman who was accused of trying to bomb the post office. In fact, the man said that Fuzzy should be commended for being vigilant and taking charge. When Clint went to call Fuzzy back to work all he had to do was open the front door and call him from where he sat beside the phone booth.
Fuzzy started back on his old route the next morning. When the P.M. asked why he was put on that one Clint said that was the one he requested. At a little after ten my friend's phone rang. He didn't want to pick it up and didn't intend to, but after a good ten minutes of listening to it ring he relented. He knew who it would be and this time there was no pause at the beginning.
"That damn fool stole my dog!"
"Excuse me?"
"I said that Fuzzy Mann, the degenerate that I told you I didn't want delivering my mail, stole my dog this morning!" Out of sheer shock and of being worn down over the last few days my friend could only rest his chin on his chest and listen to his head throb. "I don't supposed that you are going to do anything about his are you?"
"When he gets back we'll get your dog back to you as soon as we can."
"Dog's back!"
"What?"
"The dog's back; he's peeing on the azaleas right know! That idiot stole him out of our front yard, my wife was watching him and followed him to see what he was going to do. He stopped along Well's Creek Boulevard and put him out right there on the side of the street. She brought him back home. It's one thing to have a moron like that working for you but he has just committed a crime and if you aren't going to do something about it I'll call the police. Then me and my lawyer will see you and your supervisor in court. Does he know about the caliber of people that you have working at this post office!"
"I'm sure he does."
"Well somebody needs to do something. The man's a menace and I don't want to have to fear for my property getting stolen by the mailman! Now solve this problem immediately or I will have your job!" Click. My friend got up from his desk and immediately headed toward the door, lest the phone ring again. He pulled just as Clint pushed and face to face in the doorway the supervisor asked him to listen to the facts before he did anything rash.
"The Jenkins' who live just down the road from the Burgess' lost their cocker spaniel Lucky last week and they've been plastering that part of town with posters advertising lost dog and offering a ten dollar reward. Well, Fuzzy's at the Burgess' delivering the mail, making extra sure that he behaved himself just like I told him, and he sees Wade's prize Lab Floyd out in the front yard. Well Fuzzy had torn down one of those posters and Floyd seemed to match the description. He's a dog and he's that chocolate color just like Lucky."
"He's also about ten times the size," my friend reiterated. Remember he was even then a postman for many years and thus an expert on all breeds of dogs. Clint held out a hand in a silent request to let him continue the story.
"So he grabs Floyd, hauls him into the truck and takes off with him. Well he's driving up Well's Creek Boulevard taking glances at the dog in the rear view mirror as he goes and decides that that might not be Lucky after all, so rather than take the dog back he just puts him on the side of the road. I hope the dog made it back home."
"It did. The dog's owner was following the mail truck and took the dog home herself." They stood in silence for awhile listening to nothing more than air blowing out of the vents. Clint's voice sounded loud when he spoke.
"So what are we going to do?" Imagine my friend's predicament. Put yourself in his place. You have an employee with the mental capacity as well as the personality of a squashed turtle, a bullying local official who wants him gone and an influential relative who has pulled strings through the man that you answer to to make sure that he will stay. A phone call to Winston-Salem got the man in question's secretary who could not precisely tell the P.M. where he was, when he would be back or anything concerning who else could be consulted on arranging the dismissal of one Cicero Mann. A phone call to the cousin/father was just as productive. Although he did get to speak to J.W. Mann in person, Mr. Mann would not entertain the idea of talking Fuzzy into resigning or in some other way helping to arrange his dismissal. Mr. Mann told the P.M. that most likely Fuzzy would grow tired of his current profession in a week or two, which he had done with all the rest, and if he didn't then excellent, he would be gainfully employed for once in his life. After hanging up the only way that my friend could think of to even lessen the tension caused by the situation was to personally supervise Fuzzy until he got bored, as Mr. Mann said he would. If not, maybe something would actually seep through Fuzzy's ten-inch skull and he might become somewhat competent at his job.
The next day was Saturday and when Fuzzy went out on his route my friend rode with him. Throughout the entire day the P.M. instructed, corrected and praised Fuzzy with the proper amounts of both and as the day progressed he had to admit that his pupil seemed genuinely interested in learning the ropes. As the afternoon went on he shared several stories and personal accounts to help hammer home points that he was trying to make. Really, the only time that he had to correct Fuzzy more than once was on the subject of talking to the people on his route too long and not moving on with the business at hand. After what had already occurred my friend counted his blessings and considered himself lucky.
As five approached, my friend breathed another sigh of relief and sat down on a bag of mail in the back of the truck as Fuzzy pulled up to the last mailbox on his route. Within view was McLean Boulevard and three blocks beyond that was the Post Office and a full day where he wouldn't have to worry about Fuzzy Mann, his pushy benefactor, or complaining taxpayers. He checked his watch one more time, leaned his head back against the side of the truck and closed his eyes as the light squeak of the mailbox door drifted to his ears like music on the harps of angels. Fuzzy was looking back at the P.M., who had not spoken for several minutes, as he opened the mailbox and did not see a chipmunk that glared out at him from the shadowy recesses of the mailbox. How the chipmunk got there I don't know, my friend did not know; of course, Fuzzy didn't know. Whether the animal crawled in of its own accord and became trapped or was put there as some sort of practical joke, or perhaps it was fate, kismet, or it could've been caused by a build up of bad karma by my friend for a heinous act that he perpetrated in a past life; regardless, the chipmunk was there and decided that its only path of escape was up Fuzzy's arm and into his shirt-sleeve.
My friend was thrown against the back of the truck as Fuzzy screamed something that sounded like mother's day and floored the accelerator. The truck sped down 1st Street and rocketed through the intersection at McLean Avenue. It barely missed a city police car and an ice cream truck, the former quickly giving chase. As the mail truck continued to go even faster my friend screamed at Fuzzy to stop. Fuzzy in turn was, screaming that "it" was in his pants and that he would never whistle at a woman again.
The chipmunk eventually shot out of Fuzzy's pants leg and hid under the seat, much to the relief of Fuzzy who, discovering what "it" was, began to feel around after it so "the little fella wouldn't get squashed." My friend struggled to his feet just in time to see what Fuzzy, in his search to apprehend the wayward rodent, failed to notice. They were fast approaching the end of 1st Street which ended in the post office parking lot, which itself stopped at a large picture window that looked into the lobby and the clerk's counter which was, luckily for everyone involved, completely empty.
It was a good month before my friend went back to work and he was still wearing a truss when he staggered into the rear doors of the post office. Clint met him there and told him that he had bad news.
"You mean he hasn't been fired?" said the P.M., the look on his face similar to that of someone who had been hit with a brick.
"Not exactly." Clint winced as if the act of passing on this little tidbit of news actually caused him physical pain. "He's been promoted."
"Then he hasn't been put in the back sorting. What, have they made him a clerk again?"
"Higher." My friend thought for a bit and then a shocking realization danced through his mind.
"He hasn't been given your job, has he?"
"Well no." As if on cue Fuzzy came through the back doors and passed by them with a curt nod. He was wearing plaid dress slacks, which cleared his ankles by a good two inches, a striped shirt and a tie, obviously a clip on, adorned with the picture of a hula dancer. Under his arm was a rolled up copy of the Postmaster's Weekly. Clint was silent for a few seconds and looked as if he were grasping for words. "The good news is that you haven't been fired. You can get your uniform and bag in the locker room."
My friend finished his story just as my mother appeared over the hill bellowing my name. I jumped up and, as I gathered my bicycle, I was snatched up by the scruff and given a lecture concerning getting home at a decent hour, not talking to strangers, reducing the national debt blah, blah, blah. As I was being let over the hill by the lobe of my left ear I looked back to see that my friend had retrieved his bag from the kudzu and was picking up the shattered remains of his pith helmet.
