The Old Turk's Load Read Free Page A

his grand scheme, taking care to suck up to the staff, doing extra favors, ignoring their condescending ways. Over time the Yankee bluebloods who ran the place came to rely on his trustworthy, unexceptional presence. They missed him when he dropped the route, sent him flowers in the hospital, and hired him when he got his health back. They started him as a maintenance man. Once he began spending extra time in their research library, there was no reason to object. He offered to index files of letters and newspaper clippings—tedious, eye-straining work too taxing for the dowagers and dilettantes who volunteered there. Punctual, productive, invisible. Within a year he had his own set of keys and the run of the place.
    He’d discharge his janitorial duties in just a few hours, then work upstairs in the research library until the museum closed. He’d take dinner in his car, which required an hour’s chewing and swallowing—far beyond the time he’d have been allotted at L’il Earl’s or Ray-Joe’s Pizza. Anyway, it freaked people out to see him eating in public.The food had to be cut into teeny bits and chewed exceedingly fine so it wouldn’t strangle him. In the course of saving him from cancer, the docs had separated his esophagus from his windpipe. No more nose or mouth breathing. No nose blowing. If he got a cold he had to stuff a tissue up his snout. No more taste or smell.
    When dinner was over he’d return to the darkened building to pursue what had become his abiding passion. He’d begun, just for the fun of it, researching the history of Faye’s house on Church Street. When he discovered that it had been moved in the early 1800s from a few blocks away, he grew curious about the neighborhood. Using old maps, letters, newspapers, drawings, and documents, he reconstructed the history of the houses and families in that corner of his delivery route—back through the 1880s, when the fishing port had been in her prime, to the Civil War, the War of 1812, the Revolution, and beyond—down into that archaic era when every settler could be named, and thus each one loomed like a giant in history. He was certainly no historian—being only dimly aware that such a discipline even existed—but he had the instinct and, by some miracle, the passion. Building on his intimate physical knowledge of the city, the Mailman was re-creating it, street by street and family by family. Now when he walked the streets of his former route, he’d be just as likely to see it in 1767 or 1867 as in 1967.
    He told himself it was just a hobby, a balm to his lonely days. But not too far beneath was the awareness that he’d somehow gotten himself trapped in a present in which there seemed to be no hope, no possibility beyond grinding, stupid repetition.The past afforded the Mailman his only feeling of release. The small pleasures of its continued discovery got him out of bed each day.
    This depressing situation was enhanced by the unfortunate fact that, as a side effect of having his voice box cut out, the Mailman had acquired a nasty addiction to painkillers. With the help of his historical pursuits and his own fundamental toughness, he was managing it. But just barely. At the age of forty-two he was on his way to becoming a junkie.
Let It Be, Leave It Alone!
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    lthough he’d spent most of his life in Manhattan, Walkaway Kelly emerged from his building as if he were landing on an alien planet. The rock beneath him and at his sides surged as he walked, in massive dizzying waves that disappeared when he stopped to watch them roll. Menace hung in the air, a sense of imbalance. He put his head down and trudged east on Fifty-Third, aware that something had seriously disrupted the invisible currents guiding him through the world. Probably that mess he’d gotten into with the transvestite hooker and the German tourist. It hadn’t felt right at the time, but events had swept him along and now he was on the other side, lying low, as if there were a