No Forwarding Address - Part One

The road into La Honda stayed dark under the redwoods long after the sky went white. The reporter came up the last stretch on foot. Sheriff's cars had filled the turnout and left nowhere to stop, and by the time the drive showed through the trees he could not have said what he had driven, or what road had carried him to this one. The gap no longer troubled him. He stepped over it the way a man steps over a low place in a floor he already knows is there.

A sign was wired to the gate at the foot of the drive, hand-lettered to be read from the road. WELCOME HELL'S ANGELS. Rain in the night had pulled the paint down in threads from the base of each letter, so the words seemed to run while standing still. Two deputies stood near it. Neither had thought to take it down.

He nodded to the nearer one and went through. The deputy watched him pass the way a man watches the weather change, taking note of the cold without looking for its cause.

The cabin sat back along a creek, five rooms of log and river stone, a plank bridge laid across the water to the door. More people stood on the wet grass than the rooms could have held at once, in loose knots, while deputies worked among them with clipboards. A man in a plain gray suit kept a station near the bridge with a leather case under one arm, and the deputies brought their findings to him and no one else.

They were setting the young people along the split-rail fence in ones and twos to wait. He counted as he crossed the grass, out of an old habit, and let the count stop near fourteen. None of them kept their eyes on the ground or hunted the grass with their feet. One kept up a slow argument with a deputy about whether the morning was legal. A woman sat with her back against the rail and her face turned up to the light coming down through the redwoods, and she did not look at the men taking the house apart around her.

Through the open door, in the dim of the front room, a man knelt and painted a toilet. He worked the brush along the base of the tank in a color that grew nowhere in that valley, a green with an orange coming up under it that seemed to give off its own light. His hands were that color to the wrist. A deputy stood over him with a hand near his belt and waited. The man finished the stroke he was making, laid the brush across the mouth of the can, and stood without hurry, wiping nothing off on his jeans.

The reporter got it into his notebook in a shorthand his hand made without him. He had stood in worse rooms than this and gotten them onto a page. The noise of the place did not reach him. It settled in front of him into the half column it would fill on page nine, and he took what he needed and let the rest go on being loud.

A deputy with a clipboard came to him at last, the way one always did.

"You're not one of ours." The deputy said it flat, already sure.

"Press."

The deputy looked through him and decided he was not worth the paperwork. "Name."

"Fletcher."

He wrote down something that was probably not that and moved off toward the fence. No one asked for a card. No one asked what paper had sent him. He had stopped waiting for them to, the way he had stopped worrying at the missing car, and he let both facts lie where they fell.

They brought the man out then, the one who had been painting. Two deputies walked him across the plank bridge, his colored hands loose at his sides, and he came without trouble, looking at the wet light in the trees as though he had paid for the morning and meant to get his money's worth. At the near end of the bridge he stopped, and the deputies stopped because he had. He looked at the reporter a beat longer than a man looks at a stranger, and whatever he found held him better than the deputies at his elbows.

"You've got the look of somebody left behind," the man said, the way you tell a stranger he has a thread on his collar.

The reporter did not write it down. A deputy put a hand to the man's back and moved him along, and the thing he had said stayed in the clearing with nowhere to land.

The reporter went closer. The man in the gray suit had made a station of a folding table at the near end of the bridge, and the deputies carried things to him to be read into a ledger before they went down into crates. He gave each thing a number in a low even voice and wrote it down, and his face held still from one object to the next. He numbered a bundle of letters bound in a rubber band and set it in the crate. A minute later a deputy brought him what looked like the same bundle, and he numbered it again without a pause, and no one but the reporter seemed to see that the count had gone soft. Something in him leaned toward the table and then caught itself.

On the bridge rail someone had left a brush across the open mouth of a can. As he passed, the back of his sleeve dragged the bristles and took a line of color off them. He did not feel it happen. He was over the water before he saw it, a streak the length of his thumb, the green wet and the orange burning up through it. He did not wipe it away. The wiping seemed the larger decision of the two, and he was tired in a way that had taught him to keep whatever came to his hand.

Near the door a card table with one short leg rocked on the grass. A young deputy sat at it with a shoebox and a coffee can, working through a great heap of mail.

There was a lot of it. The man who lived up this dark road was written to from farther off than one house had any business drawing, and the deputy went through the envelopes one at a time, reading each only long enough to find where it belonged before he laid it in the shoebox. The ones he could not place he set aside, and that pile had grown taller than the sorted one. It leaned against his forearm. Now and then he squared it with two fingers and went on.

The reporter crossed to the table without deciding to. He stood at the young man's shoulder and looked past the shoebox to the pile leaning on the deputy's arm, the letters that had come all this way and left the deputy nowhere to send them on.

His hand, the pen still in it, came down onto the open notebook and stayed.

"Undeliverable," the deputy said, not looking up. "Better than half of it. No return address, and no one left here to sign for it. It goes in the box."

He did not write it down. The pen lay where his hand had put it, and his hand did nothing.

He did not move. His boots stayed in the wet grass, and the creek kept up its noise a few feet away, and the low voice at the folding table went on giving things their numbers. But the clearing thinned at its edges the way a room thins when you have already turned to leave it, and up through the smell of the wet grass came another smell, a shut-in smell, out of a room a long way from this one. Another house on another road. He had walked into it once and found the mail stacked to the height of a standing man, tied in bundles that had come in and never gone back out, and the man who had kept it dead on the floor in the middle of it, with no mark on him that anyone could find.

He had kept out of that house for a long time.

He was standing in it now.

Next Part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/no-forwarding-address-part-two