The man was evil.

"What are you thinking?" Tritia asked.

He looked up, startled and embarrassed to be caught in his ruminations.

"Nothing," he lied, turning back to the book in his lap.

"Something."

"Nothing." He was aware that she was staring at him, but he chose not to acknowledge the fact. Instead, he concentrated on the words in front of him, on the meaning behind the words, on the thoughts behind the meaning, trying to lose himself in the prose. Eventually, he succeeded. Just as he used to fall asleep as a child while pretending to be sleeping as his parents checked in on him, he now began reading while pretending to read.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, he heard Billy's voice, only a fraction louder than the creek song but rapidly gaining in volume. He looked up from his book.

"Dad!"

Billy came splashing through the center of the creek toward them, holding in his hand a wet and soggy envelope. Water was dripping from the uneven ends of his bangs and from his bare arms. There was a look of excited discovery on his face, as though he had just found the Lost Dutchman gold mine or had just unearthed some long-buried treasure. "Dad!"

Doug marked his place in the book and put it down on a large dry rock next to him. "What is it?"

"Come here. You have to come here."

He looked at Tritia questioningly.

"Oh, do something with your son for a change," she said. "Remember what we talked about? Besides, it's a beautiful day. Don't sit here and waste your life reading."

Doug stood up. "That's where he gets it," he said, wagging an admonishing finger in her direction. "It's a part of the rampant anti-intellectualism that's sweeping this country."

"Pedant."

"Fine. But if he turns out to be a gas-station attendant, it's your fault.

I tried my best." He took his wallet out of his pants, placing it on top of his book, then walked over the weeds and rocks toward his son. Scores of tiny brown grasshoppers sprang up at each step, moving frantically from one clump of grass to another. "What is it?" he asked Billy. "And why do you have that letter in your hand?"

"I can't tell you, I have to show you."

"Where is it?"

"Just down the creekaways ."

"Do I have to get wet?"

Billy laughed. "Don't be such a baby. Come on."

Doug took one tentative step into the water. It was cold.

"Weird stuff," Billy promised. He waved the envelope tantalyzingly in the air. "There's more where this came from. That's your only hint."

Doug stepped fully into the water. The creek was cold, but it was shallow and came up only to mid thigh . Billy began moving away, motioning for him to follow, and he waded after his son.

They rounded a bend and then another one, the cliffs growing steeper on the sides. The water was a little deeper here, the rocks at the bottom slippery.

On the floor of the clear creek he could see small black spots on some of the stones. Leeches. "I didn't know you were walking through this kind of area," he said. "I don't like it. It's dangerous. From now on, you stay closer to us."

"It's not that bad."

Doug nearly slipped, and he caught himself on a rock with his hand. Billy, however, was wading straight through the water like an expert. "Well, at least make sure someone's with you if you go out of sight. You could break your head and we'd never know."

Billy had stopped at another bend, pointing around the curve. "There it is," he said.

Doug caught up to him.

And stopped.

Both sides of the creek were littered with envelopes, white and brown and tan and beige. Hundreds of them. They were everywhere, like rectangular patches of snow or some bizarre form of fungus that grew in precise geometrical patterns, covering everything, caught on bushes, sticking out from between rocks. Most of them were wet and waterlogged, in the mud at the edge of the creek. Still others were perched in the branches of nearby trees.

"Weird, huh?" Billy said excitedly. He pulled an envelope from the branches of a sapling next to him.

Doug picked up the two nearest envelopes. Bills. He recognized them immediately from the preprinted return address and the clear window with the name, number, street, city, state, and zip code of the intended recipient. He looked around him. Nearly all of the envelopes seemed to be of the short squarish type that ordinarily housed bills or bad news. Very few were of the long less formal variety or were the small cute envelopes of personalized stationary.

He stared, stunned, at thirty or forty envelopes that looked like they were growing on a tree.

The mailman had been dumping mail at the creek.

It was an inescapable conclusion, but it still gave Doug a strange feeling to acknowledge it. Why would the mailman do such a thing? What was the point?

What was the reason? The very strangeness of it was frightening, and he could not understand what the mailman hoped to gain. It was crazy. If he had simply wanted to get rid of the letters, he could have burned them or buried them or dumped them someplace more convenient. He looked around. The spot was so far off the beaten track that Doug did not see how the mailman could even have known about it. He would have had to hike in a mile and a half from the road to get here, carrying the mailbags, since there was no path to this location that was wide enough to drive upon.

He glanced over at Billy. His son must have seen the expression on his own face, for he had dropped the envelope he was holding. The excitement was disappearing from his eyes and was being replaced by what looked like understanding.

And fear.

Tritia sat in her chair, head tilted back, staring up at the sky. She loved to watch clouds, to lay back and enjoy their billowy transformations, ascribing concrete form to their temporary shapes. And nowhere Were the clouds more visually dramatic than in Arizona. As a young girl growing up in Southern California near the Pacific Ocean, she'd had her share of clear days, of blue Rose Parade skies, but in California the cloud situation was either feast or famine. Either they were nonexistent or they covered the entire sky from horizon to horizon with a monochrome ceiling. Rarely did she see the huge shifting shapes she saw in Arizona, clouds so white against sky so blue that they looked fake. "Trish!"

She sat up straight at the sound of Doug's voice. His tone was unexpectedly serious, and her first thought was that he or Billy had slipped and fallen and broken something, but she saw with relief that they were both walking normally through the water toward her, not holding arms or wrists or fingers.

She relaxed a little, though she noticed that Billy was not as excited as he had been earlier.

He looked . . . scared. She pushed the thought from her mind. "What is it?" she asked.

"You have to see it. Come here." Doug stepped out of the creek toward her.

She stood, adjusting her shorts. "Do I have to?" she asked teasingly, but the only response she received was a slight attempt at a smile. Something was definitely wrong. "What is it?"

"Nothing. Well, not nothing, but nothing serious."

"What is it?"

"I have to show it to you. Come on."

Feeling increasingly apprehensive, she followed Doug into the creek, holding tightly to his arm as the three of them walked over the slippery rocks upstream, moving through small banks of rapids, around bends. Tree branches swiped at her face as the creek narrowed.

"I'm not crazy," Doug said as they rounded a curve, and before she could figure out what the hell he meant by that enigmatic remark, she saw what they had brought her here to witness. Her heart gave a small leap in her chest as she stared at the envelopes, seemingly thousands of them, scattered about both sides of the creek, on the rocks, on the trees, in the weeds, in the mud. It looked almost like a fairy-tale land, this section of the creek, a place that had been either blessed or cursed by magic. She stood rooted to the spot, water coursing over her tennis shoes and ankles. The sight before her was so crazy, so wrong, that she did not know what to think. She looked over at her husband. She had caught his fear, she realized, and though it was not a pleasant feeling, at least she knew she was not alone. The two of them stood next to each other, holding hands. Billy, in front of them, was silent, and she knew from the expression on his face that he too understood that something here was definitely not right.

"There's no road to this spot," Doug said. "He had to walk here, to carry all those sacks, however many there were." He pointed up at the cliff beside them. "I figure he dropped them from up there. It's the only way they could be so scattered and the only way they could get into those top branches."

"But why?" Tritia asked.

He shook his head slowly. "I don't know."

A slight breeze stirred the trees, several envelopes falling from the branches on which they were perched into the creek, and the three of them stood there, silent, unmoving, as the envelopes swirled around their legs and continued downstream.

10.

Doug tried to call Howard after they returned home from the picnic, but he wasn't at either his house or the post office. Or, if he was, he wasn't answering the phone. Doug let the phone ring fifteen times before hanging up.

"That mailman'll be fired for this once Howard finds out," he told Tritia . "It's a federal offense to tamper with the mail. He'll probably go to prison."

He hoped the mailman would go to prison.

They had picked up several envelopes from the creek and had brought them home. They'd looked for mail addressed to themselves but hadn't been able to find any, so they'd settled for envelopes addressed to people they knew. The rescued mail was still in the car. He was planning to show it to Howard as proof. Doug spent the rest of afternoon trying to call Howard, trying to read, trying to listen to the radio, trying to start on the storage shed, but he was anxious, hyper, and could not seem to settle down enough to concentrate on any one thing.

They had spaghetti for dinner that night. Billy complained because it was homemade, with herbs and vegetables from the garden, but he ate it anyway. "Next time," he advised, "let's just have Ragu like normal people."

"This is better than anything you could buy at the store," his father told him.

"And healthier too," his mother added.

Billy grimaced as he swallowed the food.

Doug tried to call Howard again after dinner, but when he picked up the phone, it was dead, no click, no dial tone. He jiggled the twin buttons in the cradle but to no avail. "Something's wrong with the phone," he said. "Did either of you call anyone recently?"

"No one's touched it since the last time you tried to call Howard," Tritia said, clearing the table.

"I'll try the one in the bedroom." He walked into the bedroom, picked up the receiver, but this phone was dead too. He hit the receiver once, hard, against the nightstand and put it to his ear, listening. Nothing. "Damn," he muttered, slamming it down. He'd have to stop by the phone company as well as the post office tomorrow. He stared at the white plastic telephone. He hated dealing with the phone company. Every time he went into their office he saw four or five workers lounging around, trying to pick up on the receptionist, but whenever he asked for someone to stop by his house to investigate a problem, it took at least three days to schedule the call, no matter how simple the problem was, no matter how great the rush.

"Nothing?" Tritia asked as he came back down the hall.

He shook his head. "It's dead."

"Well, there's nothing we can do until tomorrow." She finished putting the dishes into the sink. "You want to wash or dry?"

"Dry," he said tiredly.

She handed him a towel.

There was nothing to watch on either regular TV or cable, and after doing the dishes they decided to put in a videotape. "Something we can all agree on," Tritia said.

Billy trudged upstairs. "I'm watching regular shows."

"I said we're going to watch something we can all agree on," she called after him.

"TV shows are better than movies," Billy called back.

She looked at Doug. " 'TV shows are better than movies.' Did you hear that? Somewhere we went drastically wrong with that child."

He chuckled. "Okay, what's it going to be, then? _Deep Throat_? _Love Goddesses_?"

She hit his shoulder. "Be quiet. He can hear you."

"Yes I can," Billy called from upstairs.

"See?" She picked up the list of their videotapes from the table, scanning it. "Let's watch _Annie Hall_," she said finally. "I haven't seen that for a while."

"Sounds good." Doug got up and went over to the bookcase, turning his head sideways to read the titles on the videotape boxes until he found the right one.

_Annie Hall_ was on the same tape as _The Haunting_ and _Burnt Offerings_, sandwiched in between the two horror movies, and he had to fast-forward the tape to get to it.

"Last chance," he called upstairs as the credits began.

Billy did not even bother to respond.

The movie was as funny, and as on-target, as ever, and Doug was glad that they'd decided to watch a comedy. It helped take his mind off everything else that was going on.

Woody was just entering Christopher Walken's room to talk about night driving when the lights in the house suddenly dimmed into darkness and the television blinked off with a crackle of electronic static. The VCR hummed as it slowly powered down.

"Blackout," Tritia announced. She stood up and felt her way to the kitchen, where she took a flashlight from the junk drawer. She also withdrew a book of matches and two candles. "Are you coming downstairs?" she yelled to Billy. "No. I'm going to bed."

"At eight-thirty?"

"There's nothing else to do."

"You could come downstairs and read by candlelight with us," Doug suggested facetiously.

Billy loudly snorted his derision.

Tritia lit the candles, placing them in candle holders, while Doug moved over to the front windows. "It's kind of weird to have a blackout with no storm," he said, pushing aside the curtains. He peered into the darkness, toward the other homes down the road, and thought he saw yellowish light filtered through the branches of the trees. "That's strange," he said.

"What?"

"I think the Nelsons still have power."

"I could call them --"