If this freak snow storm in Southeast Georgia wasn't so scary,
if Tammie was safe at home with her husband and daughter, making
chili, rather than out on these backwoods roads delivering mail, it
would be beautiful. Snowdust blowing the dogwood petals, the petals
themselves like great flakes of snow.
What's ugly, what's awful, are the roads and yards littered with
brittle oak limbs, pine branches, whipped moss and fast-food trash.
An end-of-the-world kind of eeriness to the wind wailing and the snow
settling on blackened stumps, scrub oaks and palmettoes in the
control-burned plats between mailboxes. Since dawn the same milky
light has hovered over the woods like moonlight through fog and
Tammie has to keep reminding herself that it's not that late, that
it's noon and not dusk. Aways back, she had to get out and drag a
fallen tree from the dirt road. She is glad she is farm-girl tough, a
strong blond going dull with gray. Too big to be a "Tammie"--a name
she associates with those Tammie movies of the fifties and how she
used to want to look. Probably the dainty kind of girl her mother had
in mind when she branded her with the name. Well, she would have Mama
know--Tammie never would say this--that one of those breakable
Tammies would have quit delivering mail after "the incident," which
this Tammie has now labeled as nightmare and let go. Or tired to.
Next mailbox and she rolls the truck window down and picks up
the banded stack of mail for Box 595, Cornerville, Georgia, from the
center of the truck seat, opens the icy metal door and shoves the
mail inside. When she looks up through the blowing snow she sees a
tall thin man with black hair and beard walking toward her. Red cap
pulled low over his eyes and arms crossed on the chest of a navy or
black jacket with epaulets of snow. Behind him, in the bulldozed
rectangle of woods, an old blue and white trailer looks cold and
empty--home of Box 595, who Tammie doesn't know personally. Just one
of a dozen or so mobile-home dwellers new to this neck of the woods,
which one of the local land owners has parceled and sold to
outsiders. Used to, Tammie knew the names and backgrounds of
everybody on her route. And though the strangers' names are on the
mail she delivers every day, she thinks of them as box numbers. She
thinks of them as temporary people, temporary families in temporary
dwellings.
"Some snowstorm, huh!" Tammie yells out the window, then buzzes
the glass into place and cranks the gearshift to drive. But before,
she can accelerate, the man's face is framed in the window like a
wanted poster.
She buzzes the glass down. "You scared me," she says and laughs,
embarrassed about looking afraid, feeling weak for having admitted
it. The peppermint candy on her tongue, dissolved to a ragged disk,
turns bitter.
"Phone's out and I need to call the gas company. Bout to freeze
in there." He nods toward the blue and white trailer. His sharp face
is shadowy, pocked and wrinkle-shrunk, though he looks to be only
about thirty or thirty-five. His dry-black hair is tucked into his
jacket collar--a hoop of hair. "Wondered if you'd give me a lift into
Cornerville to make the call," he says.
Looking for a ride up to the highway please ma'am no money no
don't...
Tammie starts to say that she will make the call for him, but
before she can speak the man starts around the rear of the red pickup
with his shoulders hiked and his hands in his jacket pockets. Tammie
presses the UNLOCK tab on the door and almost automatically presses
the LOCK tab below it. Instead she moves her heavy green coat from
the passenger seat to make room for him.
I have to get home I'm pregnant what that lock go to don't shoot
green shirt turns brown with blood...
The door on the passenger side is open, cold wind rattling the
cellophane bag of peppermints and the mail in the canvas crate,
center seat. Tammie places her right arm on top till Box 595 gets in
and closes the door.
"Didn't expect no mail today," he says. "Expected all the
roads'd be closed from trees down."
Tammie laughs. "You know what they say..." And drives forward,
onto the dirt road.
The man just stares at her, seems either angry, scared or
confused. Cigarette smoke and motor oil banish the peppermint and new-
truck smells. Maybe he's on drugs, planning to rob her for fix money.
She has labeled it and let it go. Label it and let it go, her
psychiatrist had said. The odds against it happening again are...
"What you reckon the odds are of us having a blizzard in South
Georgia?" She sits forward, driving with both arms wrapped around the
steering wheel and cracks the peppermint between her teeth.
"Couldn't say." The man pockets his hands in the navy jacket,
stretches his long thin legs toward the middle of the floor and leans
into the other door. His eyes are black. The snow on his shoulders is
melting, running down his jacket front to the plush gray upholstery.
At the next mailbox, another mobile home with a raw pine porch-
in-progress, Tammie pulls off the road and stops. How will she reach
across him to put the mail in the box?
She takes the mail from the crate and passes it to the man. "How
bout sticking this mail in that box there?"
Run move remember the last house you passed help I'm shot no
checks till the first...
South of the mobile home is a plowed field bumpy with smutched
snow where a herd of ringstraked goats grazes stubble and three
children are building a dirty snow man. Tammie presses the truck
horn, waves, and drives back onto the road.
Why would you pick him up in the first place? I don't know, I
can't say. Because it was summer and the blueberries were in and the
radio was playing a glad country song. Because the sun was shining?
But why? Don't ask--I don't know. Because nothing bad ever happens--
except between people who know each other--in this neck of the woods.
Except to me.
Okay. If Box 595 is going to attack her, it will be within the
next ten minutes--make it twenty, because of the wind blowing the
pickup and branches scattered about the road which force her to veer
left and right barely missing the deep carved ditches with ice-rimed
brown water--because this is the long empty stretch between
mailboxes. This is it. Breathe deep, think light, keep your eyes on
the fascinating stretch and bend of liveoaks you never dreamed could
stretch and bend and don't let your eyes stray to the black eyes
pinned on the right side of your face.
"You have children?" she asks.
"Do I have children?" His repeating it, rephrasing it, make him
seem smart and smart-alecky. Making fun of her.
Tammie laughs. He laughs. "No." Curt answer. Definitely not from
around here, she decides. Around here, when asked a question, people
elaborate on the answer, whether yes or no. Does he have a wife,
she'd like to know? He won't seem so threatening if he has a wife.
"Y'all are new here, aren't you?"
"About a year." He stares out the window at a patch of pine
saplings. Or beyond to a stand of flat-topped cypresses backlit by
the snowy sky. His angular jaw twitches. He reminds her of Dustin
Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy." Sick, scrawny, sad. Not black, not
brutish, like the last man.
These here hands beat a lady half to death in Largo Florida so
what make you think I spare you? Belt to the chin, jawbone crunches,
light flickers and goes out then on again...
Halfway there, halfway along the stretch of broomsage and scrub
oaks that look like another part of the country with snow. She drops
her shoulders, relaxes her hands on the textured vinyl of the
steering wheel, which is beginning to feel smooth already from the
sliding of her palms.
Still Box 595 stares out the window.
Around a deep curve, and suddenly an elbowed branch big as the
average tree is across the road.
She slows, stops, and before she can get out he is opening his
door, out and tugging at the branch, inching it from the road to the
ditch, leaving soft black drag marks like carbon across the broach of
whiteness. When there is enough space to drive the pickup through,
she is tempted to leave him, but already he is starting for the
truck, and besides if she drives away now she will be back to where
she was seventeen years ago after her baby was born and she got out
of the hospital and became homebound from fear. If she leaves now,
she will quit her mail route forever.
In the truck again, he is quiet, rubbing his hands together.
Cold-cured cigarette smoke and dirty-hair smells. Long fingers,
filthy nails. She feels sorry for him--probably no running water to
wash with and probably he's been working. Maybe chopping wood to warm
with, or mechanicking on some old car or truck.
She turns the heater on high. "Thank you," she says.
"How much money you...?"
She doesn't hear the last part because of the heater chuffing.
Did he ask how much she made delivering mail or how much she is
carrying with her?
Okay bitch hand it over I know you got money and I ain't talking
change...
"I make pretty good," she says. "Get a raise ever now and then.
Can retire in a couple of years."
"Retire? You don't look old enough to retire."
"Almost fifty." She wishes she hadn't started talking personal.
She wishes for the next mailbox. She will go up to the house on the
pretense of delivering a package and ask for help. Help for what? A
skinny man in her truck hitching a ride into Cornerville to make a
phone call.
Phone. Yes. She needs to check on Miss Reba anyway. He can use
her phone if it's working. But instead Tammie pulls up to the metal
box mounted on a fence post, passes Miss Reba's mail to Box 595, eyes
the unpainted old house with the snow-coated tin roof--smoke shooting
from the brick chimney on the south side--and drives on.
Almost to the highway. Don't panic. And don't even consider
dumping your problems on some poor withered widow again.
Pain is deeper, pain is meaner that what she feels, this wet
stinging bullethole in her right side, the impact of which seemed to
have shoved her forward through the woods, away from the dump of
precious mail in the clearing of pines and palmettoes, all the
catalogues and letters and those postal-patron flyers that she's
often thought about dumping just to test the feeling of doing
something forbidden because she always does right, always delivers
the least little bogus sweepstakes announcement because she should
and because you never can tell--somebody has to win, somebody has to
lose...
Now his knees are spread, one black athletic shoe is resting
atop the other; he is fidgeting with his hands in his pockets,
pulling his navy jacket together in front, either his right thumb or
a pistol barrel tenting it. He seems uncomfortable, trying to get
comfortable. Or on the verge of making happen what can't happen
because it's improbable and unfair.
Tammie drives faster, praying to God that on the next curve
there won't be a tree blocking the road, then re-praying to God--Let
a tree blow down before I get there. This time she will leave Box
595. This time she won't care whether she is back to the fear-filled
days after she was robbed and shot and almost lost her baby, who is
seventeen now: Mira--they named her Mira, because the doctor said
only a miracle would pull her through. It would take a miracle to
have her born alive.
On the deep pine-flanked curve and nothing, no tree down, and
beyond the curve bright white sand and snow, as if the sun is
suddenly shining and the storm is over, then straight up the straight
road ahead. Then home.
"Pull down that ramp up there on the left," he says, and she
doesn't gasp and doesn't look and knows he is pointing a pistol at
her.
It's okay, she's been there before and come out alive. Practice
must count for something. But the odds against it happening again
were so promising; the odds against her getting out of this one alive
seem as unpromising as the odds against this happening again
apparently are.
She turns the truck left, over crunching dead pine straw and
drives up the narrow woods road. Strangely not at all alarmed. Been
there, done that, she thinks in her sister Beth's voice. Beth, who
never had to work, never wanted to work, knows all the popular things
to say from TV, and who said, You're crazy for going back out there.
I don't care if they have given you another route. And Tammie had
said, The odds are against it...
"The money's in the bag." She lifts the dingy white canvas bag
from the humped middle of the floor and tosses it to him. "Ain't much
but I got twenty dollars in my wallet." She reaches across to the
glove compartment for her wallet and he cracks her wrist with the
pistol butt.
"Drive," he says.
Jarring sharp throb, wisdom-tooth ache, then mere pulsing pain.
"When we get up there apiece," he says, "I'm gone let you out
and I'll take the truck. The truck's all I want."
"Why?"
Why would a man shoot a pregnant woman for a few pennies,
nickels and dimes? Crack cocaine.
"Crack cocaine?" she asks.
"You crazy, woman!" He laughs. His jaw twitches. Unlike the
other man, Box 595 looks trembly, weak, easy enough to whip.
"I've been here before," she says.
"So what?" He apparently thinks she is talking about the road
through the wintry woods.
She feels giddy, dazed, looks at the pistol now and sees it
gleaming silver, like a Roy Rogers toy. Not scary like the thick
black gun she was shot with seventeen years ago. Or maybe it's
because this is the second time around and her fear has worn out from
peaking and sliding: she used to hold her breath, waiting for her
first attacker to be paroled and come after her again. Finally she
had graduated to thinking about him daily, then weekly, then monthly,
then yearly, only to find out that the big black man she had pictured
has now been recast as a skinny white man.
She feels new, yet old from trying to foresee.
She drives on with branches slapping the truck and moss snaking
across the windshield. She dreads the cold outside. That's all. At
least she's not pregnant.
So hot with her own hot blood streaming down her right side and
her jaw throbbing and mosquitoes biting and locusts ringing in her
ringing ears, running and not stopping till she is stopped by another
man in a pickup who chases her down on foot and rescues her and...
"I think this is it," she says and brakes. When she switches the
key to lock position, the wind rushing in the pines picks up. She is
no longer in motion, no longer programmed to go.
"I didn't tell you to stop." He gouges her in the healed wound
on her side.
She opens the door, sucks in the cold air, gets out and closes
the door behind her.
He pops out the other door, holding the pistol in both hands,
swings it up and over the bed of the truck, like on TV. Like on TV.
"What're you, a crazy woman?" He yells and the wind bats the
words about the frozen woods.
She starts walking along the truck tracks toward the road.
Hearing behind her the familiar rhythm of pounding feet and intakes
of breath between shouts. "Hey, you, you better stop," he yells.
"Don't make me shoot."
She keeps going. This time, walking. She doesn't stop walking,
even when she hears the truck start and back and head her way. She
steps into the cold rattling palmettos to let it pass, and memorizes
the red truck against the gray woods and that face framed in the
window like a wanted poster. Her second attacker, who she plans later
to forget out of spite.