The Old Turk's Load Read Free

already shown him. He moved up to substitute letter carrier, then floater, servicing the routes of five regular carriers on their days off, which allowed for a certain amount of planning. He started screwing Faye Thursday afternoons, then moved in with her—to the envy of the regular carrier, whose compulsive womanizing occasionally got him beaten up by irate husbands, boyfriends, and fathers.
    In those early post-office years discipline had been looser. There was always time for small talk, and the Mailman visited other kitchens than Faye’s. When it got hot, he’d leave a pair of cutoffs in the green relay box on Puritan Court, and stash the bag and his uniform in the back room of Cap’n Bill’s underneath the Puritan Hotel. He’d sneak through the side lot of the Tarrantinos’on Beach Court, down Woody Curhan’s cinder driveway, and slide into the cool green murk of Gloucester Harbor. He’d swim around Fort Point to the pump house in front of Cape Ann Fisheries, where Cominelli, the crippled oiler, would spot him and yell, “Hey, Mailman! Where’s my fucking disability check?”
    That was then. Now he couldn’t even take a bath because there was no way to close the blowhole they’d cut in his throat. Two tablespoons would drown him.
    After a few years the regular carrier retired and the Mailman got his route, which took up about twenty-five square blocks in the middle of Gloucester, extending from tony rich folks’ houses on Middle Street to gritty squats on Columbia, two blocks over from Faye’s place. At this point the Mailman conceived the grand scheme regarding his postal career.
    Scheme or no, Faye eventually grew weary of his dark moods and took up with Schultzie, scion to Schultz Brothers, the local trash barons. Schultzie was a much nicer man.The Mailman moved across town, into the basement apartment of a four-family tenement on the back side of Portugee Hill. The basement suited him fine, though he’d occasionally stop in at Faye’s for lunch or a visit, since the route was still his. Sometimes he’d even have a beer after work with Schultzie. It was amiable, subdued. They would’ve let him farther back in, but he kept his distance, like a waterfront cat. The route satisfied whatever need he had for attachments.
    There were 630 souls on his route. He’d once saved Mrs. Alves who’d fallen in her living room, even though her family thought he should’ve let her die there. And he’d witnessed, helpless, the fatal heart attack of Cummings, the ward councilor. He knew where Sammy the Rat slept it off, and could follow Sammy’s slime trail at eight a.m. down to the Dugout, where he’d take his first, trembling drink with the night shift fish packers from Gorton’s just getting off work. The Mailman hadn’t delivered a baby, but he’d witnessed Dickie Lufkin being born in the backseat of a car that never even got started for the hospital. And kept a watch out for the Old Gal who got her daily beating from her boyfriend till she finally moved out, only to have him start beating her at her new place. The cops found him dead one night in the parking lot, but they declared he’d slipped on the ice as he was getting into his car.The Mailman knew the truth, and the Old Gal knew he knew.The whole route was like a spiderweb, and when a gnat hit the sticky the spider knew, and when the spider moved the gnats knew. “Mailman! You fucked my girlfriend/saved my mother/saw my brother die/help me/get lost/ where’s my check?” These connections were fulfilling in a certain way, but they were also intense—which, perhaps, was why people in his line of work had been known to go postal.
    After he recovered from the surgery that marked the end of his career, he took a part-time job at the Gloucester Historical Association. The imposing clapboard Federal-style building had been on the far edge of his route, and once he’d realized what a perfect retirement tit it could be, he’d begun to integrate it into