Billy felt Lane, next to him, give him a nudge with his elbow. "That's great, huh? I guess we'll be able to do more stuff."

"Great," Billy repeated. But his thoughts were not on the professor or on archaeology. His eyes and thoughts were focused on the space between the trees where a moment before he had seen the mailman's white hand wave slowly and lovingly good-bye.

7.

Howard pulled into the driveway at seven sharp. It was still light out, but the blue in the east was quietly being usurped by purple, and there was an orange tinge to the pale sky in the west. Billy was sitting on the couch and was right in the middle of a _M.A.S.H._ rerun when Tritia turned off the TV and kicked him upstairs. He complained loudly, but hurried up the steps nonetheless.

He was not comfortable around adults, and he usually hid each time they had friends over. Watching him tromp loudly up the stairs, his mother couldn't really blame him. She'd felt the same way herself when she was his age.

"I'll call you when dinner's ready," she said. "You can come on down and get some food."

"Okay."

Doug stood up and went to open the door.

"Don't say anything about Bob unless he brings the subject up first,"

Tritia suggested. "We're supposed to be cheering him up, taking his mind off his troubles."

He shook his head, pressing past her. "I'm not entirely dim, you know."

She smiled. "Just trying to counteract theHobie Beecham influence."

"Thanks." Doug pulled open the door while Tritia hurried into the kitchen to check on the food, stepping onto the porch just as Howard started up the stairs. "Glad you could make it," he said.

The postmaster smiled. "Glad you invited me." He was wearing his equivalent of dress clothes: new dark-blue jeans, a starched white-and-rose cowboy shirt, and an agate bolo tie. His boots had been shined and his hair slicked back and held in place with some sort of wet-looking gel. In his hand was a gift-wrapped bottle.

"Come in," Doug said, holding the door open. Howard stepped past him, and both of them moved into the house.

Tritia was taking off her apron, and she moved forward to greet their guest. She, too, had dressed up for the occasion and was wearing a low-cut black dress, matching turquoise bracelet and necklace, and silver antique earrings.

Her brown hair was done up in a sophisticated roll. She accepted the proffered present graciously. "Thank you," she said. "But you really didn't have to bring anything."

"I wanted to." Howard looked at her and shook his head appreciatively.

"You sure look mighty beautiful today." He turned to Doug. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again, you're a lucky man."

Tritia blushed. She unwrapped the bottle and turned it around to read the label. "Champagne!" She gave Howard a quick peck on the cheek. "Thanks so much.

I guess this means we'll forgo the Dr. Pepper." She went into the kitchen, put the bottle down on the counter, and threw the wrapping paper in the garbage sack under the sink. "You two keep yourselves busy for a few minutes. I'll get the hors d'oeuvres ready."

Doug motioned for Howard to sit down in one of the chairs across from the couch, and the postmaster obliged. Doug sat down as well. It was warm. The windows were open, the fan on, but the air still bordered on the uncomfortable.

From upstairs came the familiar strains of the theme from _M.A.S.H._ Doug smiled at Howard.

"Excuse me for a moment." He stood up again and walked to the foot of the stairs. "Turn it down," he called out. "It's too loud." The noise of the television faded into a drone, then was silenced. "Billy," he explained, walking back. He settled into the chair. There were questions he wanted to ask, things he wanted to know, but he didn't know how to approach the subject subtly. He cleared his throat, deciding to jump right in, hoping he didn't sound too interested, too curious. "So how're you getting along with the new mailman? Is he still living with you?"

"Yeah," Howard admitted, "but I don't see him much. You know how it is.

I'm an old man. I go to bed earlier than he does, wake up later than he does.

Our lifestyles don't exactly match."

"So what's he like?"

Tritia walked up and placed a plate of cheese crepes on the small table between them. "I'll be back with the champagne," she said sweetly. She fixed Doug with a hard meaningful stare as she turned away from the postmaster, but he pretended not to see it.

Each of them took a crepe and bit into it. "Mmmm," Howard said, closing his eyes and savoring the taste. "That's one thing I miss withMurial being gone: good cooking. You get tired of frozen food and hot dogs after a while."

"Don't you cook?" Tritia asked, bringing them two glasses of champagne.

"I try, but I fail."

She laughed lightly as she returned to the kitchen for her own drink.

"So what's he like?" Doug asked again. "He sure delivers the mail early.

Bob used to come by around noon. Now by the time we eat breakfast and clean up a bit, the mail's there."

"John does start early. He's usually gone before I'm even up. He's done with the entire route by eleven, and he stays until four." Howard grabbed another crepe, popping it into his mouth. "He hasn't turned in a time card yet - it's due this week -- but when he does, Igotta see what hours he puts down.

He's not supposed to be working more than eight. I think it's more like ten or eleven, though."

"Don't you think that's a little weird?" Doug asked. "I mean, delivering the mail so early?"

Trish shot him another withering glance over the postmaster's head as she sat down next to him.

"Yeah, John might be a tad strange. But he's a good worker. He does his job well and gets things done. And he's always eager to do more. That's not something you see a lot of these days. I couldn't ask for a better carrier."

Doug nodded silently. Howard's words were full of praise, but there was an undercurrent of something else in his tone of voice. It was as if he were repeating words he had read and practiced, as if he were saying what he was supposed to say rather than what he actually felt. For the first time since he'd known the postmaster, Doug thought that he was being out-and-out hypocritical, and that was something he never would have thought he'd feel about Howard Crowell. His eyes met Tritia 's across the table, and he knew that she'd caught it too.

But Tritia refused to continue this line of conversation, and she deftly changed the topic to something less personal and more neutral, and Doug followed her lead.

Dinner was excellent, and they ate it slowly. Billy had come down, taken what he'd wanted, and then retreated upstairs to his hideaway. The rest of them ate at the table, enjoying the food at a leisurely pace: Cobb salad, followed by rare roast in wine sauce, served with baked potatoes stuffed with sour cream and chives. To go along with the meal, Tritia had baked some of her homemade bread, whkhwas thick and warm and soft and disappeared almost immediately.

Howard smiled blissfully. "I can't remember when I've had a meal this good."

"Neither can I," Doug said.

"Enjoy it while you can," Tritia told him. "This is our red-meat quota for the month."

"She's very big on eating right," Doug explained. "This is a very health conscious family."

"You need all the help you can get. If you exercised a little more, we could afford to be more lenient. But you live a completely sedentary life. It's the least I can do to see that you eat properly."

Howard chuckled.

Billy came down with his dishes, smiled shyly at the postmaster, then returned upstairs. They finished off the champagne and Tritia brought Howard and Doug each a beer. She drank ice water.

The conversation grew more somber and less frivolous as the meal progressed, and it was Howard who brought the subject up first. He was already well into his second beer. "I keep wondering why Bob did it," the postmaster said, looking down at his plate, pushing the empty potato skin with his fork.

"That's the one thing that really gnaws at me, that I can't understand: why he did it." He looked up at Tritia , his eyes red but his voice even. "You knew Bob.

He was an easygoing guy. He didn't let things get to him. He wasn't an unhappy man. He liked his job, loved his family, had a good life. And nothing changed.

There was no big catastrophe, no death in the family, nothing that would push him over the edge. Besides, if something was bothering him, he would have told me." His voice trembled slightly and he cleared his throat. "I was his best friend."

Tritia put her hand on his. "I know you were," she said softly.

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, forcing himself not to give in to tears. "Ellen's taking it really hard. I mean, harder than I thought she would. She always seemed like such a strong woman." He smiled sadly. "Bob used to call her the Rock." He absently fingered his napkin. "She was all drugged out when I went to see her the other day. The doctor's giving her . . . I don't know what all. He says it's the only way to keep her calm. The boys are the ones who have to take care of everything, but you can see that the strain's starting to show. They have questions just like I do, and there just aren't any answers."

"Are they still staying at the house?" Doug asked.

Howard nodded. "I told them to get out, at least for a while. It just stirs up bad memories, and I'm sure it's not doing Ellen any good."

Doug had a sudden picture of the two sons waking up each morning, each of them taking a shower in the same bathtub where their father had blown his brains out, getting their soap from the indented soap dish in which puddles of his blood and pieces of his fragmented scalp had lain. He wondered how Ellen bathed, how she avoided thinking about what she had seen.

"It'll be all right," Tritia told him.

"I miss him," Howard said bluntly. "I miss Bob." He took a deep breath, then the words came out in a rush. "I don't know what I'm going to do with my Saturdays anymore, you know? I don't who I'm going to be able to ask for advice or give advice to or go places with or . . . Shit!"

And he began to cry.

After dinner, they sat on the porch. It was warm, humid, felt like rain.

Bats, fluttering shadows of darkness, spun in and out of the illuminated circle generated by the streetlamp. From down the road came the harsh electric sounds of a bug zapper instantaneously frying its victims.

"We used to go bat fishing when we were little," Doug said absently. "We would hook a leaf or something to fishing line and throw it up into the air next to a streetlight. The bats' radar told them that it was a bug, so they'd dive for it. We never caught anything, but we came close a few times." He chuckled.

"I don't know what we would've done ifwe'd've caught one."

"You do stupid things when you're little," Howard said. "I remember we used to shoot cats with pellet guns. Not just cats that were wild or strays. Any cat." He downed the last of his beer. "Now it's hard for me to rememberbein' that cruel."

They were silent for a while, too full and too tired to make the effort at conversation. In the east, above the ridge, lightning flashed, outlining billowy dark clouds. Like most summer storms, it would probably come at night and be gone by morning, leaving behind it a heaviness and humidity that would create a boom business at the air-conditioned movie theater and would send people running to the lakes and streams. They looked upward. The evening was moonless, and though there was obviously a storm approaching, the sky directly above them was an astronomer's dream, filled with millions of pinprick stars.

Doug's chair creaked as he shifted his weight, leaning forward. "Where's, uh, John Smith tonight?" The name sounded ludicrous when spoken. "Is he at your house?"

"Don't know." The beer must have loosened his tongue, for Howard shook his head, a vague movement in the darkness. "He's usually not there this early, though. He goes out at night, but I don't know where he goes or what he does.

Some nights I don't think he comes home at all."

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, I been having a hard time sleeping lately. I'm real tired, but I can't fall asleep."

"That's understandable," Tritia said.

"Yeah, well sometimes I get up and walk around, you know, just to have something to do. The other night, I was going out to the kitchen to get a drink of orange juice, and I notice as I pass by that his door's open. I look in there and the bed's made and he's gone. That was around two or three in the morning."

"Maybe he has a girlfriend," Tritia suggested.

"Maybe." Howard sounded doubtful.

"Have you ever seen him sleeping?" Doug asked.

"What kind of question is that?" Tritia frowned.

"Humor me."

"No," the postmaster said, speaking slowly, "come to think of it, I haven't."

"Ever seen his bed unmade?"

Howard shook his head. "But he does stay in his room on Sundays. Don't even open the door. Just stays in there like he's hibernatin ' or something. I think he sleeps then."

"All day?"

Howard shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe he does something else.

He always seems real tired on Monday morning."

Doug felt the coldness wash over him. He didn't know why he was pursuing this line of questioning or what he hoped to find out, but there was something about the mailman that bothered him in a way he could not explain. "Have you been getting many complaints about him?" he asked.

"None."

Doug felt more than a twinge of disappointment. He had been half-hoping to hear that there was a ground swell of resentment against the new mailman, that either residual feelings for Ronda or a recognition of the mailman's own obvious peculiarity had brought in a negative verdict from the public.

"As a matter of fact," Howard continued, "people seem to be very happy with the job he's doing. I can't remember the office ever being so busy.

People're sending more letters, buying more stamps. I don't rightly know what it is, but the people seem to be more satisfied than they were before." His voice took on an edge of bitterness. "That's all well and good, mind you, and I'm not complaining, but I can't help thinking that this is like a judgment against Bob.

I mean, no one's said anything bad about him. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. I hear nothing but praise and good things about him. But on a professional level, people seem to be happier with John." He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was filled with quiet conviction.

"Bob was a damn fine mail carrier. The best I've ever known or worked with, and I can't help feeling that he's being betrayed."

Doug and Tritia were silent.

Howard stood up and walked over to the railing, staring out at the green belt. "John's a good worker. He's polite and hardworking. He does a fine job."

The postmaster's voice was so low they could barely hear it. "But I don't like him. I don't know why, but, God help me, I don't like the man. I don't like him at all."

Howard left after ten. Doug offered to drive him home, but he said he was not drunk, and indeed he seemed to have no trouble walking in a straight line or speaking clearly. Still, Tritia made him drink a cup of coffee before he left, and both of them watched from the porch as he drove away, red taillights disappearing into the trees.