Firestarter(68)

Let Vermonters handle their own problems, was the unanimous, if unstated, view. "He won't be crossin the pond much longer," one of them said. He took another bite from his Milky Way bar and began to gum it. "Not less he's got him a pair of water wings," another answered, and they all chuckled.

"We won't be seein him much longer," Jake said complacently as Andy approached the store. Andy was wearing Granther's old coat and a blue wool band pulled over his ears, and some memory-perhaps a family resemblance going back to Granther himself-danced fleetingly in Jake's mind and then blew away. "When the ice starts to go out, he'll just dry up and blow away. Him and whoever he's keepin over there."

Andy stopped outside, unslung his pack, and took out several letters. Then he came inside. The men forgathered there examined their nails, their watches, the old Pearl Kineo stove itself. One of them took out a gigantic blue railroad bandanna and hawked mightily into it.

Andy glanced around. "Morning, gentlemen."

"Mawnin to you," Jake Rowley said. "Get you anything?"

"You sell stamps, don't you?"

"Oh yes, Gov'ment trust me that far."

"I'd like six fifteens, please."

Jake produced them, tearing them carefully from one of the sheets in his old black postage book. "Something else for you today."

Andy thought, then smiled. It was the tenth of March. Without answering Jake, he went to the card rack beside the coffee grinder and picked out a large, ornate birthday card. TO YOU, DAUGHTER, ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY, it said. He brought it back and paid for it.

"Thanks," Jake said, and rang it up.

"Very welcome," Andy replied, and went out. They watched him adjust his headband, then stamp his letters one by one. The breath smoked out of his nostrils. They watched him go around the building to where the postbox stood, but none of them sitting around the stove could have testified in court as to whether or not he mailed those letters. He came back into view shouldering into his pack.

"Off he goes," one of the old-timers remarked.

"Civil enough fella," Jake said, and that closed the subject. Talk turned to other matters.

Charles Payson stood in the doorway of his store, which hadn't done three hundred dollars" worth of custom all winter long, and watched Andy go. Payson could have testified that the letters had been mailed; he had stood right here and watched him drop them into the slot in a bunch.

When Andy disappeared from sight, Payson went back inside and through the doorway behind the counter where he sold penny candy and Bang caps and bubble gum and into the living quarters behind. His telephone had a scrambler device attached to it. Payson called Virginia for instructions.

9

There was and is no post office in Bradford, New Hampshire (or in Tashmore, Vermont, for that matter); both towns were too small. The nearest post office to Bradford was in Teller, New Hampshire. At one-fifteen P.m. on that March 10, the small postal truck from Teller pulled up in front of the general store and the postman emptied the mail from the standing box around to the side where Jake had pumped jenny gas until 1970. The deposited mail consisted of Andy's six letters and a postcard from Miss Shirley Devine, a fifty-year-old maiden lady, to her sister in Tampa, Florida. Across the lake, Andy McGee was taking a nap and Charlie McGee was building a snowman.

The postman, Robert Everett, put the mail in a bag, swung the bag into the back of his blue and white truck, and then drove on to Williams, another small New Hampshire town in Teller's zip-code area. Then he U-turned in the middle of what the Williams residents laughingly called Main Street and started back to Teller, where all the mail would be sorted and sent on at about three o'clock that afternoon. Five miles outside of town, a beige Chevrolet Caprice was parked across the road, blocking both of the narrow lanes.

Everett parked by the snowbank and got out of his truck to see if he could help.

Two men approached him from the car. They showed him their credentials and explained what they wanted.

"No!" Everett said. He tried on a laugh and it came out sounding incredulous, as if someone had just told him they were going to open Tashmore Beach for swimming this very afternoon.

"If you doubt we are who we say we are-"one of them began. This was Orville Jamieson, sometimes known as OJ, sometimes known as The Juice. He didn't mind dealing with this hick postman; he didn't mind anything as long as his orders didn't take him any closer than three miles to that hellish little girl.

"No, it ain't that; it ain't that at all," Robert Everett said. He was scared, as scared as any man is when suddenly confronted with the force of the government, when gray enforcement bureaucracy suddenly takes on a real face, like something grim and solid swimming up out of a crystal ball. He was determined nonetheless. "But what I got here is the mail. The U.S. mail. You guys must understand that."

"This is a matter of national security," OJ said. After the fiasco in Hastings Glen, a protective corden had been thrown around the Manders place. The grounds and the remains of the house had got the fine-tooth-comb treatment. As a result, OJ had recovered The Windsucker, which now rested comfortably against the left side of his chest.

"You say so, but that ain't good enough," Everett said.

OJ unbuttoned his Carroll Reed parka so that Robert Everett could see The Windsucker. Everett's eyes widened, and OJ smiled a little. "'Now, you don't want me to pull this, do you?"