Box Nine

Chapter Eight

All right, now just calm down, take a breath, you feel faint? You look a little green, you want to put your head down? Just try to relax for a second, you’re just a little queasy. It happens.”

Eva closes the door to her office and pulls a battered green shade down over the window. Ike sits in the dull-metal straight-back chair, the weight of his upper body resting on his forearms, which rest against his thighs. He’s breathing heavily.

Eva moves behind the chair, puts her hands on his shoulders, lets them rest there for a second, then begins to rub them in small circles down to the shoulder blades, then back in close to the neck.

Ike mutters, “I’m really sorry about this. I just got a little nauseous.”

Eva repeats, “It happens.”

Ike clears his throat. “What should I do? Should I head downtown, tell the postmaster?”

Eva stays silent. She walks to her desk, looks down into the small package laid open for inspection on top of yesterday’s newspaper. She looks at the package’s contents dispassionately, maybe even a little bored, as if she were an aging pathologist and the contents were just one more in a series of autopsies she’s run through year after year. The smell, however, is difficult to ignore.

“My job right now,” she says, “is to be brutally honest with you.”

Ike comes upright in his chair, nods, and says, “I understand that.”

“What you did in opening that package is a big offense. We both know this. Procedure would have been for you to bring it to me. To let me make the determination. You acted on impulse and that surprises me.”

Eva pulls a long black-handled scissors from her pencil cup and makes one slow, deliberate poke at the mess in the center of her desk.

“Still, we’re dealing with a very unusual set of circumstances here. And experience has taught us all that it can be quite costly to march to the letter of the law. We all remember Shipley.”

Ike nods, staring at the floor. He doesn’t actually remember Shipley, but he knows the story that gradually, as time goes by, is being upgraded to legend. It goes back maybe twenty years now, when Quinsigamond was caught in an unusual wave of civil unrest. Shipley was a nighttime sorter down the main station who came across a suspicious package that was making a ticking noise. He was a by-the-book guy and as he walked the long corridor to the supervisor’s office, the bomb went off and Shipley lost his hands.

Though Ike doesn’t know it, Eva has always hoped for a day when Shipley’s common face would grace a commemorative, a sad and noble set to the eyes and two hook arms crossed over the chest.

Eva sits down slowly in her chair, her eyes on Ike the whole time. “I’ll level with you,” she says. “I’ve got a tough call to make here, Ike, and I’ve always found in situations like this that it’s wise to allow a good bit of intuition into the weighing process. Now, nothing I say here goes outside that door, agreed?”

Ike lifts his head and gives a series of fast, short nods.

“Okay,” Eva says. “Then I don’t think there’s any reason to go downtown on this one. It was a freak, a onetime occurrence. Let’s learn from it and move on. I don’t think I need to mention, though, that if it had been Wilson or Rourke, the paperwork would already be in the typewriter. You’re clear on that, right, Ike? I’m letting your past record and your general character carry the day here. You’re aware of my reasons for this decision?”

“I’m aware,” Ike says.

“Now, it might be a little sticky tying up loose ends, but I’ve handled worse. First of all, let’s get the log and see who’s the tenant of box nine.”

She rises out of her seat with a visible burst of energy. Ike is pleased to see her in good spirits, all upbeat and ready to move ahead. He knows that Eva likes him, but he’s also had a small suspicion that she had this weird thing, sort of a fetish maybe, for discipline, for the idea that if you act out of line, there are absolute consequences that must be paid.

Eva pulls a small gunmetal drawer from the index file cabinet that rests on top of the battered green bookcase. It’s identical to the card catalogue file in a library, but the post office uses it to record all the box tenants and their rent payments. Eva lays the box down next to the decimated fish remains and starts to flip through the first cards in the drawer. She stops, grabs a pencil, and writes something down on an old envelope, then she replaces the drawer in the cabinet and sinks back into her chair.

Ike wishes she’d say something, but she just raises her eyebrows, grabs the receiver off the phone, and punches in a number. While she waits for an answer, she tosses the envelope to Ike. It reads—

Loftus Funeral Home

388-3757

and somehow, to Ike, the dead fish in the package makes a little more sense. He thinks up possible answers: some family member displeased with the appearance of their deceased relative, some former embalmer who got fired …

“Hello,” Eva says, in a voice that sounds older than it is. “This is Supervisor Barnes at the Sapir Street Postal Station. May I speak with Mr. Loftus, please?… I see, well, either one, whoever handles the mail … Thank you …”

She puts a palm flat over the phone and says to Ike, “You know that place?”

He nods. “My parents were both buried out of there.”

She pulls her palm away. “Yes, Mr. Loftus, this is Supervisor Barnes, Sapir Street Station, how are you this morning?… That’s great. I’m sorry to bother you, but I was just doing the monthly review of our files here and I just noticed that there’s no notice of rent paid on your post office box since last year … Oh, I see … Would you know the exact date on that by any chance? A ballpark guess … Is that right? Well, again, I’m sorry to bother you. You can imagine how the bookkeeping can get from time to time, clerical errors and … Yes, sir. And how is your service now? Any problems with your carrier?… Very good, then … All right, then. You give me a call if we can be of any assistance … Sorry to disturb you … All right, thanks again … Goodbye.”

She hangs up the phone. Ike wishes she’d get rid of the fish. The smell is filling the office and who knows what kind of parasites might be crawling onto the desk.

“They canceled box nine over a year ago, just like it says on the card.”

Ike doesn’t want to hear this. The idea of a twisted, disgruntled ex-employee was helping to clear everything up for him.

“Who’s got the box now?” he asks.

Eva shakes her head. “Unless there’s a mistake, the box was never rented out again. According to the log, it’s been empty since Loftus Funeral Home let it lapse. I suppose it could still be intended for them. Sent by someone who didn’t know they’d canceled.”

Ike says, “I guess.”

“But it’s odd it’s not addressed to them. It was addressed to the box. There’s no mention of Loftus anywhere on the package.”

They’re silent for a minute, then Ike says, “Lot of messed-up people out there.”

“In here too,” Eva says without any hesitation.

Ike thinks she must be making a reference to Wilson and Rourke and maybe even Bromberg. He thinks she’s really hung up on these people, really a little overconcerned. He’s disappointed to think Eva’s perspective could be so biased or obsessive. He wouldn’t have thought she’d be someone to waste a lot of time thinking about the likes of Wilson and Rourke. They’re small concerns, little aggravations. They’re like a pothole in the street you live on — you just learn to navigate around them. Pretty soon it just comes naturally, reflexively, no thinking involved.

Finally Eva gets up and dumps the whole package into the wastebasket. She goes to the supply closet and takes down a full bottle of generic ammonia, uncaps it, and pours a little into the basket. She puts the ammonia back in the closet and says to Ike, “You never know when you’re going to need that.”

He thinks that in a few minutes the room will be suffocated with the burning reek of ammonia, but at the same time he likes the idea of all of the parasites and germs being poisoned into oblivion. He guesses Eva has made the right choice.

“Who do you think sent it?” she asks.

Ike says, “The fish?” even though he knows she means the fish.

Eva stays mute.

“No idea,” Ike finally says. “There’s no way of knowing. That’s the thing about mail. It can come from anywhere, out of the blue. Without a return address there’s no way to know where it came from …”

He almost bites off his own tongue. What the hell is he saying? Twelve years with the service and he can make a statement like that? The fish must have shaken him on some deeper level that he’s not even aware of yet.

“The cancellation stamp,” he moans.

“Don’t bother to look,” Eva says.

Ike wasn’t really thinking about looking. “No,” he says.

Eva shakes her head slowly and emphatically. Ike thinks she’d look perfect right now if she took a long, thin, foreign cigarette, already in an antique black holder, and inserted it between her lips.

“There was no cancellation mark,” she says. “There was no postage stamp at all. No meter sticker. No indication of origin whatsoever.”

“I was so taken back,” Ike says, “so surprised and all that I didn’t …”

She cuts him off with a single and unconvincing word. “Understandable.”

He pauses, thinks, and says, “So how did it get here?”

Eva puts her hands together and moves them to crack her knuckles, but no sound issues.

“Two possibilities,” she says. “At least two that are most likely. Someone got in here when we were closed and deposited the package.”

“Or?”

“Or one of our own brought it in.”