The Interloper Read Free Page A

hate mail was unlikely to wound him or even capturehis attention. So without a clear plan, I wrote as neutral a letter as possible, asking Henry Joseph Raven to be my pen-pal.
    Dear Mr. Raven,
    My name is John Dark and I’m looking for someone behind bars to correspond with. I have many different interests and I’m involved with a lot of prisoners’ rights causes. If you’re looking for a friend or just want someone to write to, feel free to respond at your earliest convenience. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
    Sincerely,
    John Dark
    I took out a PO box down the street so he could reply without finding out who I was. Unless you have a fake ID, you have to sign up for a PO box under your own name. However, you are free to list names you want to receive mail under. I put John Dark on the list. Any mail coming to him, I was assured by a pimply faced clerk, would be delivered to my box. Also, he told me, I didn’t have to write “PO Box” or “Box #” as part of the address. I could write “Suite 1492”—giving the impression that I was writing from an actual room in an actual building.
    I waited five days before checking the PO box. That would give my letter two days to get there, Raven a day to reply, and two days for his letter to make its way to me. There is no worse feeling than to open a mailbox and find it empty. Every day Iwould convince myself that Raven’s response had been slipped into the slot of my mailbox, and that it was waiting there for me. I’d race to the mailbox, practically knocking people out of the way, pop open the box with my shiny little key and find … nothing. Day after day of nothing.
    Then, one evening, an envelope. My heart was racing as I reached into the box and retrieved my paper quarry. Disappointment. A packet of coupons. Herald of the junk to come: Have You Seen This Child?, Amazing Grace Realty Wants to Sell You a Dream Home, Join our CD Club, Save the Children, Save the Animals, Save the Trees, Save the Earth, Save the Air. Addressed to Resident! The mail was coming in fine, just not from Henry Joseph Raven. I should reiterate that I had no actual plan as to how to respond to his response, if I were to get one. I trusted that I could improvise a way to make him pay for the suffering he had caused the Stockings. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to get a response, because I could not devise any way other than venting my anger, which was unlikely to affect him.
    After three weeks, I closed down the PO box. My anxiety about Raven’s not writing back to John Dark was displaced by a need to figure out how to tell Patty what I had done. I had never kept secrets from her, and I felt that somehow, in my failure, I needed to unburden myself. I took the day off from work to coincide with one of Patty’s “weekends”—she had Wednesdays and Thursdays off. We walked down to our local park. The marine layer hadn’t quite come in as far as our part of town, resulting in cool afternoon sunshine with half-clear skies. The park was full of kids, most of them in the playground section—“No AdultsAdmitted Without Company of Children”—or by the dried-out fish pond. The empty concrete oval was full of young skateboarders trying their tricks.
    The fish pond used to be full of water. I saw it once, as a teenager. I had spent the night in the park, after having taken the bus as far as it would take me away from my aunt and uncle’s house. I remember wondering, before the police found me, how long I could survive eating the fish that swam around in there.
    We made our way toward the middle of the diminutive park, to a patch of grass on which we could play Frisbee. Patty wore black sweatpants and a black t-shirt. We had just started playing. She was not very good at throwing, and I was not very good at catching; in the other direction, we achieved marvelous things. We had begun playing Frisbee because we were looking for an outdoor activity that didn’t