The day after the funeral, Carl waits for Sharon in a red vinyl booth. He shifts in his seat, tries to count the number of green bottles behind the bar, rubs at an imaginary bruise on his leg, searches his pockets vainly for gum, twists around to look out the window and spots Anderson delivering the mail, sees Anderson not thirty yards away, Anderson all tricked up in civil service garb, Anderson with a mail sack thrown over his shoulder. This is the Anderson Carl knew as a boy, this is the extra-tall Anderson, the Anderson who used to force Carl to play Bonnie and Clyde with him, always insisting Carl be Bonnie and lie still on the floor while this extremely tall giant of an Anderson got to be Clyde. Afterwards, Anderson would pull out the Chinese checkers and let Carl win. Sometimes Carl would become bored and not want to be Bonnie but Anderson would show off his father's shiny screwdrivers and saws and shears, would brag about how sharp they were and how easily flesh can be stripped from bone, and Carl would suddenly become interested again. Saturdays would have been endless if not for Anderson.
The front window of Marty's Tavern is wet with steam and Carl has to constantly wipe with his sleeve to keep it clear, but there is no mistaking his eyes. Even with the long blonde beard hanging so low it seems pasted on, the black watch cap pulled snug over the ears and the government issue blue coat, it is instantly clear to Carl that the man slogging through the still falling snow is Anderson. The limp is a dead giveaway, his left foot dragging behind him like an after-thought, his long leg covered with sleet from the knee down as he steadily sloshes along his route. Anderson, Carl thinks. Anderson. Fucking Anderson.
He takes his glasses off for a quick cleaning but puts them back on when he sees Sharon jostling through the happy hour crowd weighted down by two full pitchers, one of beer for herself, the white head splashing over the top and dripping over her hands and down to the floor, and one of ginger ale for him."Everything is okay at the ranch," she says. "Nothing's been burned down. Not yet, anyway." She slides into the booth next to Carl, shoving him over with her bony hip. She looks out through the hole he has rubbed through the misty window and says, "More snow. That flight gets canceled I'm taking somebody down." She has a maroon ribbon strung through her crazy black hair. She always wears a ribbon. In winter it is a variation on red, in summers a stark white. Her frizzy hair shoots out in all directions in a sixties Negro style and Carl thinks it one of her few good features. Her other good feature is her body hair. She has a lot of it. Carl likes all kinds of hair. It makes him excited. "Look at that poor mailman out there; can you believe it? What a horrid job. No wonder they shoot each other."
"Where were you?" Carl asks, now taking off his glasses and wiping them clean on the tail of his untucked shirt.
"Excuse me?" She scratches at her spectacularly lined forehead, a common enough gesture for her but one Carl has grown to hate, convinced it contributes to her chronic skin problem. Sometimes he wants to reach right over and grab one of her pimples between his fingers and squeeze, then maybe she'd learn to not put her hands where they don't belong.
"Twenty-three minutes," he says, pointing at his watch. He lifts the pitcher of beer and fills her glass quickly, getting mostly foam. She leans over the glass and laps at it with her tongue.
"Jesus," she says. "Again with this? When are you going to quit?" She thankfully pulls her hand away from her face and plunges it into her storage locker of a purse. She fumbles for a moment and then comes out with a pack of cigarettes. "I just told you. I called home. My god, did you think I was fucking the bartender?"
Carl takes a quick look toward the bar and sees a woman behind it, a pretty blonde with ruddy cheeks and a bow-tie bent down over the cash register. He stores the image for later use.
"What?" she says.
"Twenty-three minutes is a long time when you're counting," Carl says. "Try it. Try counting to twenty-three sometime."
Sharon pulls a cigarette out of her pack and expertly rolls it between her fingers like a miniature baton.
"Alright," he says, turning back toward the window and watching Anderson disappear into a dark doorway directly across the street. "I didn't mean to start." His hand idly reaches toward her glass but she gets to it first and slides it across the table away from him.
"No," Sharon tells him, bringing a hand to rest momentarily on his shoulder. "It's hard, I know. When my father dies. . . ." she says, her voice trailing off into a sigh. She takes her hand away from him and begins tapping the unlit cigarette on the table. "Stay away from my beer," she says. "Please. We didn't have to come here. You said it was okay."
"It is okay," he says.
"We can go now," she says. "I'll grab some chips from the machine outside our room."
"Chips," he says. "That's fucking wonderful. Great for the skin. I said it was okay. Jesus, what is it with you and chips?" He turns away from the window and toward Sharon. She is pulling at her lower lip, stretching it a painful distance. He studies her face, the half-moon crevices cradling either side of her mouth, a light shadow of hair above her lip, the furrowed lines cutting deep channels across her forehead, the slight sag of flesh under her chin, a red dapple of acne splattered across her face in a pattern of dots which, if connected, would resemble the boot of Italy. He hopes to find her thoroughly ugly and thus expendable, but once again he is disappointed. Her eyes are a blue of endless depth, clear and tranquil, and it is somewhere in this depth they both at one time lived. Those eyes will eventually go shallow, he thinks, their blue as flat as paint.
"Thanks for coming with, anyway," he tells her after the bartender brings two hamburgers which Sharon had ordered at the bar.
She smiles and shrugs.
"My father," Carl says. "Yesterday, in front of that casket, him in there, that's about the longest time I ever spent in a room with him without getting hit. I'm sorry I'm so jumpy."
"I know," she says.
"I half-expected to see that baseball bat in the box with him, that he still had it with him. Waiting for me."
"Yes," she says.
"I expected him to, well, you know . . . . ," he says. "Rise up . . . ."
"It's okay," she says, taking her hand away from her face and setting it on his forearm. "It really is."
"I guess so," he says. "One less person for me to disappoint."
"Look at it that way," Sharon says. "I don't." She brings both her hands back to her face, covering her cheeks completely this time, fingers outstretched and nails digging at her temples.
"Christ," Carl says. "My mother."
"Yes," she says. "Your mother. What a thing to see."
"Christ."
Sharon bends forward to examine her burger closely. The point of her nose is about two inches from it. She begins to scrape the grease from the meat with her fingernail, occasionally stopping to dig the grease out from under her nail with the end of a wooden match stick, then wiping it on a napkin before starting up again.
Carl looks away from her and back out the window. He sees Anderson emerge from the dark passageway into the startling white and efficiently continue down the sidewalk, moving with an almost grace. Carl himself is clumsy. People and things make him nervous. Even as a boy the closest to a friend he had was Anderson. Sometimes Anderson would show him how to operate a power saw, how to build bookshelves and birdhouses, how to carve a duck from a piece of balsa wood. Anderson was good with his hands and he always made sure Carl wore goggles and gloves when the saw was running.
Sharon flips the burger and starts in on the other side. "What are you thinking about?" she asks.
"Nothing," Carl says. He wants a fresh pitcher of ginger ale but is afraid if he sends Sharon for it she might sneak off to the phone again and call whomever it was she called before.
"You're doing it again," Sharon says. "Why do you keep doing this? Stop obsessing. Just stop and relax before you make yourself crazy." She brings both hands back to her cheeks and rubs hard, stretching the skin like a rubber mask. "Ridiculous," she says.
"You know there's fat on the insides of those things, too," he says, pointing at her burger. "Maybe you should just dissemble it and we can send each piece out for dry-cleaning."
"Go to hell," she mumbles and puts the patty back inside the bun. She lifts it to her mouth and takes a bite. She chews with her mouth open and Carl looks away.
Through the window Carl sees Anderson jaywalking across the street to their side, coming right toward them. His beard is not nearly as long as Carl first thought, neither does it look pasted on. His scar, thick and white, begins just at his right temple and runs straight down, disappearing under his beard. Except for this scar and the limp, he looks like a regular mailman, maybe even an exceptionally good one. His customers probably give him hams and cookies and glasses of eggnog at Christmas, Carl thinks. They yell "Hi" to him from across the street. Nobody has ever yelled "Hi" to Carl.
"Look," Sharon says, her mouth still full of meat. "I've been thinking, maybe you should just let me go back and you stay here for a few more days. No, stop, let me at least finish. It doesn't have anything to do with right now. It's something I was thinking even before we left. Your mother could use you here and the space wouldn't hurt us any."
"Right," he says. "Wouldn't hurt us at all. Not at all. Right. Just leave me here."
"Don't be so upset. It was just a suggestion."
"Space," he says. He rolls his head around in a circle, stretching his neck. "What's so god almighty good about space? There's plenty of it everywhere. Space my ass."
"Are you incapable of thinking about nobody but yourself?" Sharon says. "Like maybe your mother."
"You," he says.
"What?"
"You. I think of you all the time." He brings an empty glass to his mouth and goes through the motions of drinking from it. "Twenty-three minutes is an awfully long time," he says. "Jesus, it really is, Sharon, it really and truly is. Trust me on this one."
"For the love of god, I can't fucking believe this; really, I can't. I called our house, Carl. Our home. Jesus. Ten years of this shit and here I still am. She takes a drink from her glass and says, "No, that's wrong. I'm sorry. It hasn't all been shit. It hasn't. It goes in streaks and right now, these last few days, you've been on a bad one." She brings both hands to her face in a favorite move, going after both her jowls and turning them into putty. "Do you want to know who I called? I spoke with our children. That's who I talked to on the phone. I'm at a breaking point here. Is this really worth it to you?"
"Is what worth what?"
"Why are you so goddamn stuck on me? Loneliness? It has to be loneliness. Otherwise, why else? Get a friend, a dog. Just something other than me. You're a walking accusation, Carl. Some days I can't even take a pee without you thinking I'm fucking the tidy bowl man."
Carl thinks for a moment this may be her way of confessing about that plumber they had over the house once. He was a bald and broad-shouldered man with dark hair on his arms. Carl was coming in just as the plumber was leaving. He noticed two coffee cups in the sink. The man charged them fifty dollars, a suspiciously low rate. "So, how were the kids?" he asks.
"As if you don't hate them as much as you hate me. Don't think they don't sense it, don't think just because it's what's in your head it doesn't show."
It was true. He did dislike the children. Both of them. They were dark of hair like their mother, and confident, moving directly from a crawl to a swagger. One nine, the other seven, already full of what Carl has always lacked. He'd have to sit on his hands to keep from throttling them some nights. He wanted girls. Girls are nice. Boys are predators, their prey are other boys. When he was a teenager he would stand naked in front of the mirror and tuck his package neatly away between his legs, imagine himself a girl down there. It seemed better, somehow more natural. Modest and not all stuck-out, not all over the place and showy. Easier to organize. His kids were little snots.
"I have one question," he says. "Explain this to me. Did school get out early today? Because how could you call them when they're still at school?" He throws his hands behind his neck and tries to lean his seat back but since they are in a booth all he succeeds in doing is giving his lower back a pain.
Sharon takes another cigarette from the pack. She lays it down on the table and rolls it back and forth between her hands. "On a Saturday?" she says. "They don't have school on Saturdays, Carl, or are you so wrapped up in yourself you forgot that? I don't know if I can live like this much longer, I really fucking don't, Carl. I really and truly don't. I should've got off this train ten stops ago."
The front door of the bar opens, pouring in light and cold, and in steps Anderson, stomping his feet and brushing snow from his jacket. "Look," Carl tells Sharon. "It's the mailman." Anderson limps directly past their booth and sits at the bar. He slaps the man sitting next to him on the back.
Anderson hands the bartender some mail and she pours him a drink without him asking. A regular, Anderson a regular. Imagine that. Anderson lights a cigarette with a fancy lighter.
"I think my mother should remarry. Do you think that mailman would be interested? He's younger than her, I know, but maybe he'd make her a nice husband. He could be my new father. Couldn't be any worse than the father I had."
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Sharon hisses at him.
"What?"
"Don't you shout at me. You shout at me and I'll get up and leave right now."
Carl considers this. He takes a breath. She will fly back without him. Somebody will sit in the seat next to her, a seat Carl has paid for. They will talk to each other, they will trade reading materials, one of them will give gum to the other. Air travel makes people friendly. The unnaturalness of it, all those small bottles, food on a tray, people in uniforms. There's bound to be laughter. "Don't," he whispers. "Don't go. I'm just nervous. You make me nervous. My father in a box makes me nervous. Phone calls make me nervous. That mailman makes me nervous. He gives me the creeps."
"The mailman? That mailman?"
"Don't point. He'll see us. Did you see that limp of his? And look how tall he is. All that height and a limp. The way he lights his cigarette. Everything about him. Where does a mailman get off being so goddamn tall?"
"Oh, Christ. Let's just go. Do you want to go? We'll go to the room and pack. Then relax. Forget what I said before. I need to get back to the room and pack and you come with me. We'll go."
"In a minute." He looks over at the bar. Anderson has the bartender's hand in his. He traces lines in her palm with a finger.
"I need to use the ladies room and then we'll go."
