I had seen it all, I had not thrown up, I had not turned away. But I felt filthy, unclean, covered with blood although none of the flying blood had touched me. The document I had signed had been right—I was part of the murder, I was responsible. And I felt as guilty as if I had been wielding the knives.
I said nothing to Jimmy on the way back, and I got into my pickup without even saying goodbye.
At home, my parents had finished fighting. My mom was sobbing in the bedroom, and my dad was drinking from a bottle and watching TV. He looked accusingly at me as I let myself in. "Where the hell have you been all night?" he demanded.
"Jimmy's," I said.
He turned back to the TV, and I walked down the hall to my bedroom.
In my dreams, the woman was naked and screaming and begging for her life. And I smashed her face with the hammer, bringing it down again and again and again.
I did not call Jimmy for two weeks.
He did not call me.
When Jimmy finally did call, his voice was worried, scared. "Did you get anything in the mail lately?" he asked straight out.
"Like what?"
"Can you come over?" he asked. "Now?"
I didn't really want to go over to Jimmy's, but something in his voice told me that I should. "I'll be right there," I said.
My parents were arguing again. Or rather, my dad was arguing. My mom was crying incoherently, obviously drunk. She had been drunk a lot this past week, and she had been less willing to engage him in battle than usual. I wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not.
I drove to Jimmy's with the windows down. It was cooler tonight, and there was no need for the air conditioner.
He was again sitting on the hood of his Jeep, just as he had on the night we'd gone to the snuff show. Merely seeing him again made me feel unclean, brought back to me the horrible depravity of that night, and my stomach started churning. I remembered that he'd said he'd gone the night before, and I wondered if he'd gone since then. I could not imagine anyone wanting to sit through that butchery more than once.
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.