Jim Thomsen is a writer and editor—and mail carrier—who lives in a small town in western Washington state. He edited the Seattle-centric crime-fiction anthology The Killing Rain. This is the second time he wrote a piece on Facebook that was so fascinating I asked him to expand it for SleuthSayers. Enjoy.
— Rob
Want a Story Prompt? Deliver the Mail
by Jim Thomsen
I rang twice.
She opened the door, wrapped in a towel with not much beneath but a bathing suit.
“Good morning, ma’am,” I said. “I’m your mail carrier. I have a certified letter that needs a signature.”
I showed her the screen on my blue USPS handheld scanner and handed her the stylus attached to it.
She reached for the scanner as well, but the towel started to slip, and she snatched at it.
“Could you hold it for me? I’ve only got one hand free.”
The towel? I almost blurted out.
“The screen thing, I mean,” she said with a self-conscious laugh.
I did so, meaning that I had to stand less than two feet away from her.
She scrawled, and sighed in frustration as the combination of slippery stylus and small screen teamed to make her signature less than legible. Every now and then, she looked at me. At last, she handed it back. “I’m not sure that’s very good,” she said. “I might have to do this inside.”
“I can wait,” I said from the doorway.
“You can come in.”
“Um. I’ll wait here.”
She gave me a long look, then sat in a living-room chair, re-tucking her towel, and bent over the scanner. A moment later, she got up again and handed it back to me.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
I looked at the scanner. Illegible scratch, but the signature field was filled. I smiled. “That’ll do.”
I turned to go, sensing that she was watching me as I started to retreat down her porch steps and back toward where my mail van was idling.
“Wait,” she said.
I turned back, heart beating a little bit faster.
“My letter?”
***
I am a mailman. I don’t particularly want to be. But, much like Stephen Starring Grant, author of the recent hit memoir Mailman, I’m forced into it by financial circumstance. For the last sixteen years, I’ve made my living as a book editor, following twenty-five years as a newspaper journalist. At least, I did, until my business abruptly collapsed at the time of last November’s election. I spent months trying to revive it, but after sputtering along and slowly draining my modest savings along the way, it was, sadly, time to find a “job-job.” It was dismaying to find that there wasn’t much I could do—or would want to do, a few months shy of my sixtieth birthday. I briefly explored taking a part-time newspaper gig, but the company wouldn’t budge off its barely-above-minimum-wage wage. The job listings on Indeed were bleak—lots of openings, but mostly for Amazon delivery drivers, night security personnel, and home healthcare workers.
Then I came across an Indeed listing for mail delivery workers in my small town on Puget Sound and, with a heavy sigh, filled out the application. I soon got a call. The job was not with USPS, but for a contractor called USA Mail, with an offer for a job with a flat daily wage: $150 a day, whether the day was six hours long (rare, but it happens once in a great while) or nine hours (less rare).
But the work had some appeal. I could come into the post office as late or as early as I wanted (within reason, though I usually show up between 6:45 a.m. and 7:15 a.m.). And from then on, there was a comforting routine: case the mail, sort the packages, load everything in a battered minivan repurposed with-right-hand-wheel drive, and deliver along the route. When I’m done, I’m done, and every next day is a new day. I don’t much have to deal with office politics, and I can dress as shabbily as I want (and I want).
Plus, it’s a profession that was practiced by some of our finest creative minds. Charles Bukowski delivered mail in LA, and even wrote a novel about it, Post Office. So did one of my favorite musicians, John Prine, not coincidentally one of our finest observers of the American human condition. Walt Disney did it, as did William Faulkner. Maybe this would be the salt-of-the-earth experience that would get my own novel off the ground. As Bukowski wrote in his novel: “Well, you had to work somewhere. So you accepted what there was. This was the wisdom of the slave.”
So, after passing a drug test—after being told, told my relief, that they were more worried about meth and heroin use than the CBD gummies I take to help me sleep—and a criminal background check, I started work in mid-April of this year. (Apparently, passing those tests is a high bar here, and my supervisor regularly laments not being able to scrape up recruits of sufficient pristinity.)
It’s been … not bad. A little stressful, as the bar is high for accuracy of service—tracked by the aforementioned scanner, which must be used on every package I deliver, and god help you if there’s a discrepancy between what the scanner thinks you should have delivered and what you actually delivered, which can lead to long and sometimes sharp discussions after the route with whoever sits in the postmaster’s seat.
It speaks to a baseline sense of pride in doing the job right, which I share with my coworkers; the same pride I take in catching every error in a client’s novel manuscript. It’s a big deal, and no less than a national trust: Getting what people want and expect into their hands when they want and expect it, and never letting them see how elaborately that particular sausage is made along the way.
But mostly it’s mundane, soothing routine.
***
What I like best about the job, as someone who works in the creative writing world, is how each day is a well-primed firing pin for the storyteller’s imagination. The route itself sets that particular table: my town has a dual nature, not unlike that of good and evil, and it’s easy to see only the good until you scratch beneath that shimmering surface. The waterfront is packed with high-end homes with highly serendipitous views. My mail route touches on a sliver on that, and a larger slice of sightly-above-middle-class basic-suburban neighborhoods. But, go inland a few miles, and I enter a Pacific Northwest edition of Deliveranceville: a world of long twisting dirt lanes, deep woods, dead vehicles, flapping tarps, sagging fences, lichen-crusted sidings, and dogs whose vicious barks may not be worse than their bites. There’s always stacks of lumber and mechanical parts. Rusting appliances. Aggressive PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. And American flags. Always. Lots and lots of American flags.
In addition to The Bath Towel Woman, I’ve encountered:
- A man who always jogs out to my mail van the minute I pull inside a fence and holds up a hand—go no farther!—and takes his packages before I can step out of the truck for an approach to his porch. There’s always the squalling of compressors and saws and pressure hoses in the deep background, and he aways seems to position himself in a way that seems meant to minimize what I can see. After taking the packages, he always points to a dirt-track turnaround so that I don’t advance an inch further onto his land. What he’s doing—and what he doesn’t want me to detect—are open questions that pinball around in my brain pan the remainder of the route. I always get images of the meth lab being built beneath the industrial laundry in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
- A farmhouse that always makes me think of the Clutter family home from In Cold Blood. It’s shabby but well-kept in a way that calls to mind a vacuum-sealed corpse. I deliver packages here maybe twice a week, and every single time, as I approach the weathered porch steps, I see a curtain twitch in an upstairs window, but never a face or even a silhouette. It brings to mind a line from a 1970s horror movie: “Why is Grandma’s room locked from the outside?” Or maybe, I think, it’s a real-life Flowers in the Attic. Should I try to break in and rescue the children?
- The Hamptons House. At the very end of one of those deep dark winding lanes is a tall, ornate wrought-iron gate, with a locker for parcels off to one side to which I deliver perhaps every other day. The approach passes almost nothing but tarpatoriums, as I call them. But, by peering through a tiny break in the evergreens, I catch a glimpse of a sprawling manor on at least twenty acres that wouldn’t look out of place on a Kennedy compound in Kennebunkport. Who are these people? What do they do? And why did they build here in my county’s version of West Virginia?
- The War of the Roses House. I rarely deal with actual residents on my route, which I understand—why come out to make excruciating small talk with a stranger on your front steps?—but on one occasion, the door flew open as I delivered a package and the next thing I knew, I was almost nose-to-nose with a man who was almost purple with rage, who looked like a cyst ready to rupture. For the next few minutes, I’m slowly backing away from a man who thrusts a pile of mail in my face, screaming that his ex-wife doesn’t live here anymore, g**dammit, and it’s very upsetting to get mail addressed to that f***ing c**t, and why am I rubbing his nose in his pain?
Tell me that line isn’t a launching pad for at least a million suspense-story permutations.
***
Like Stephen Starring Grant, I may not last a year in this job—if that. My book-editing business is coming back, and my days—and nights and weekends—are loaded with work. But can I trust that it will be sustainable? I can’t, at least not yet. So I will probably stick with the route and its guaranteed monthly check at least until after the holidays, a stretch of the year that my post-office colleagues speak about in a roundabout way in singularly intimidating tones.
But I’ll admit that, however long it lasts, when I finally stop delivering the mail, I’ll miss it in many ways. I’ll miss getting paid on a regular timetable, miss getting to listen to audiobooks for the five or six hours a day I’m on the road. I’ll miss the soothing properties of pure routine, and the mentally sonorous feeling of getting to surrender the critical-thinking part of my brain to the perfection of pure process execution. And I’ll miss getting a rare window into how others live, where they live, and how they can’t help but reveal something of their most genuine selves in a way you wouldn’t get from seeing these people in public.
Home is where the heart is, but hone is also, perhaps, where the heart is darkest. Especially if I ring twice.
I like that. As, I imagine, any storyteller would.
