The mail isn’t what it used to be.  I remember, you do, too, actual letters in the mail, the kind that requires a sheet of paper to be folded in half before folded in thirds.  A number 6 envelope.  Nice handwritten address.

                  You hardly see that anymore.  Nothing handwritten, except maybe at Christmas.  But those are on the way out, too.  Birthday cards, too.  Thank you cards.  No one takes the time.

                  Nobody uses the mail anymore.  There’s very little mail of any type anymore.    Except at election time.  Dozens of mailed cards.  Always the smiling faces on the pro-candidate cards and the slashes of red and exclamation points on the anti.  Deliberately odd sizes to catch your attention and making hell for me trying to organize my bag.  Promotions for credit cards.  Insurance offers.  And every day that scourge, to me, of a thin newspaper with coupons for the grocery store, and a subscription service for cigars.  Who smokes anymore?  Who mails anything anymore?  When’s the last time you bought a stamp?

                  Yes.  You get mail.  But when was the last time you were excited about checking your box?  But nobody mails out anymore.  Half the collection boxes are removed.  Part of my route is to empty them at the end of the afternoon.  Open the door.  Shake out whatever had collected in the crate.  We’re not allowed to toss out even any obvious trash; that’s someone else’s job, Federal Law.  I inspect that the mail slot itself is clean of gum or glue or whatever it is that folks smear in there to catch the bills and checks and steal folks’ information.  Then I make sure the door is locked again and carry the pathetic pile to the processing office.

                  The mail is a sad business these days.

                  I tried listening to music as I do my route, to cheer me up.  You’re not supposed to.  But I gave it up after awhile, anyway.  I couldn’t concentrate, on either my job, or the music.  It’s better now since I got the route in the valley.  Mostly homes, instead of apartments or businesses.  A pleasant neighborhood.  The streets are flat.  I use the truck less and walk more so at least my daily steps are up.  I look at the trees and the sky.  I know some of the folks and watch for them.  Dogs have always liked me for some reason.  I have no idea why.

                  Cruikshank I didn’t know.  Nothing special about his mail, that I noticed.  I don’t look too closely.  I don’t snoop.  I don’t care, frankly, unless something very odd sticks out, and then the unusual has to be regularly repeated for me to actually register it.

                  C. K. Cruikshank.  There’s a couple of celebrities on my route.  Cruikshank is not.  I googled him.  He works for Warner Brothers in their licensing department.  Charles Knight Cruikshank.  In the photos he’s a rather thick-faced, forty-something.  There’s only a few images of him online.  In one he’s standing behind a long table on a stage, beside a little lectern, receiving some kind of award, he and the other guy holding frozen smiles toward the camera.

                  I probably noticed the very first letter, so rare they are now-a-days, about three months ago.  Number six envelope.  Handwritten address.  Even the return address was handwritten.

                  They arrived once or twice a week.  One day, two arrived the same day but by the postmark I could see that one had been delayed in processing.  I assumed it was a woman, based on the curve in the handwriting.  “Charles Knight” she wrote out, not C.K.  She cared.  She used Zip plus four.

                  I slowed when I approached his house, hoping to see him.  Two stories, like all but the oldest homes on the block.  The yard raised from the sidewalk held back by a little brick wall. 

                  His mail slot was in the front door so it gave me extra time to see what was going on.  It felt intimate to push those letters and the rest of his mail through the slot in his front door and hear them plop, unseen, inside.

                  The letters kept coming.  Each envelope exactly the same.  A grandmother?  She’d be very old.  A daughter at camp?  They reminded me of the letters I wrote home from my summer camp, but I doubt any kid did that these days.  And they kept coming.

                  No one else got mail at his house:  C. K.’s.  I snooped around the yard a little.  Always tidy.  No tricycle in the driveway.  A bare backyard with a few fruit trees, not unusual in this part of the valley.  Nothing else personal in his mail.  A subscription to the Atlantic.

                  The elderly lady next door was eager to talk.  I made an excuse to hand deliver her mail one afternoon and asked about her neighbor.  Married?  Not as far as she knew.  Lived alone.  Quiet.  Out during the weekdays.  Seldom had a visitor.  On the weekends she never saw him.  She seemed to hope I’d have more gossip to give her than vice versa.

                  Still the letters kept coming.  A zip code on the outskirts of Indianapolis.  The return address had only initials, “W. W.” so I couldn’t google her.  Assuming it was a her.  I tired anyway.  I held the envelopes up to the light.  Thick enough to be three or sometimes four sheets of paper.

                  And then I saw him.  Cruikshank.  He was sitting in his car in the driveway, talking on his cell phone.  I stopped as I approached, a house away.  Instead of continuing up past his car and onto the porch and dropping the mail in the door slot, I stayed back and waited while he finished his conversation.  He talked with animation.  Not unhappy, but forcefully.  I could hear nothing through the closed window.  The car was running.  He didn’t notice me.  Unfortunately, this was a day without one of the letters, or I might have made a show of it.

                  He put down the phone and set himself to back out of the driveway.

                  I came up quickly and caught his attention as I came up by the driver’s side door.  I made a motion intended to indicate the question of whether he wanted me to hand him his mail or take it up to the house.  Actually, we’re not supposed to hand mail directly to addressees.  I just hoped I could talk to him.  He waved me off and continued backing up.  I passed him and stepped on to the porch.  Then behind me I heard him call out.

                  “Hey!  Sorry.  Can I ask you something?”

                  I turned.  He looked like his google photo.  But a little sweaty.  Maybe from the heat.  Maybe from the phone conversation.  It was midafternoon.  His tie was loose.

                  “Sure,” I said.

                  “Is there a way to cancel mail service.  You know.  Deny it?”

                  “Cancel the mail?”

                   “If I was… you know.  Is there like a restraining order for mail?”

                  I stepped toward him.  He was kind of poking his head out the open car window.

                  “You mean all mail?  Cancel your mail?”

                  “I don’t know.  Yeah.  Can you do that?”

                  “If someone has your address they can always mail you something.”  I explained.  “I’m going to deliver anything with your address on it.  It belongs to you.”

                  “Yeah.”  He laughed.  “But if I don’t want it?”

                  “Well, you can toss it.  What you do with it is up to you.  You could ‘return to sender’ I suppose.  But that won’t stop the next piece.  You could get a P.O. box.”

                  “All right.  I get it.”

                  “Is there something wrong with your mail?”  I held up the small handful I had for him:  the supermarket flier, a credit card offer.

                  “No.  It’s nothing.  I just wondered.”

                  I chuckled.  “You could just let it pile up on the floor.”  I laughed.  “Something bothering you, buddy?”  I asked, hoping to prolong the conversation.

                  He pulled his head back into the car.  “Nah.  Thanks.  Never mind.”  The window rose.  He turned his head to look behind him.  I watched him back out.

                  I finished my route.  I collected the mail from the mailboxes.  I returned my truck to the yard.

                  So the letters bothered, Cruikshank.  Unwelcome letters.  Not benign updates from a beloved relative.  A harassment.

                  Which gave me a strange feeling a few days later when the next letter turned up.  I found it that morning as I arranged my bag.  No longer an object of curious amusement but energetic.  Vibrating.  I fingered it.  What was it?  Cruikshank didn’t want it.  Was it threatening, or merely disturbing?

                  All morning, as I walked, I wondered about it.  Bringing it closer to his address.  I felt the weight in my bag.  I glimpsed the white edge of it several times as I opened the bag.  Trees, skies, flower gardens, forgotten.

                  Cruikshank’s house was about three quarters of the way through my route.

                  When I got to his porch I pulled out the letter along with the few pieces of the rest of his mail.  Dreadfully curious now, I paused.  He didn’t want it.  He as much as told me he would refuse it, if possible.  I counseled him to give it back to me to “return to sender”.  Maybe I should keep it.  Or throw it away.  It was trash, wasn’t it?  The thin black handwriting of his name and address taunted me.  The stamp:  a hummingbird.  Someone had bought that stamp, peeled it from the backing, placed it there, stuck it down, smoothed it into place.

                  I hesitated.  Touching the envelope I felt it infecting me.  I dropped the letter through the slot.

                  But that night I came back.

                  The next day, I knew, was trash day.  The barrels would be at the curb.  If Cruikshank had thrown it away, it would be there, at the top of the heap.

                  I drove over and parked a block away.  About 10 PM.  I waited in the car another fifteen minutes hoping no one would be on the street.

                  I walked over in the dark.  The trash barrels were out.  The streetlights were bright.

                  Cruikshank’s front windows were lit, but the curtains closed, and the trash at the curb was shaded from the streetlights by a large tree.  He had his trash out but only the green and black bins, no recycling, which is where I would have started.

I opened the miscellaneous bin, expecting a mess but nearly everything was tied up in white plastic bags.  Very neat, but impossible to know what was inside.

                  I heard a voice.  “Nice night, isn’t it?”

                  A man I didn’t recognize had stopped with his dog.

                  “It is,” I said, keeping my voice down.

                  He eyed me by the open bin.  “Lose something?”

                  The dog came over and sniffed my pant leg.  The owner pulled the leash tight.

                  “Yes.” I answered, whispering.  “I think I threw away something I shouldn’t have.”

                  “Ah,” he responded.  “I’ve done that.”

                  The dog looked at me curiously.  Then recognized me by smell.  It leapt, playfully, toward me.

                  “He likes you,” said the owner, proud of an agreeable pet.  “Strange.  He usually barks at strangers.”

                  “It’s OK.  I like dogs.”  I gently pushed the dog off.

                  “They like you, too, it seems,” he said, pulling the leash, “Anyway, I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.”  The man and his dog walked off.

                  I lifted the uppermost white plastic bag from the bin, and then I lifted out the one beneath it as well and set them both on the street beside me. Technically, once you’ve moved your trash to the curb, it no longer belongs to you.  I know the law.  

                  I carried both bags, unseen, back to my car and drove them home in my trunk.

                  Back at my apartment I spread an old sheet on my dining table and tore open the plastic bags.  A copy of the Atlantic.  A supermarket flyer.  An empty wine bottle.  Rice in some kind of sauce over everything.  Dust and lint from an emptied vacuum cleaner.  I moved the wine bottle.  Miscellaneous paper.  An envelope.

                  I carefully withdrew the envelope.  It was the letter I hoped for, only slightly soiled, and unopened.  There were two more letters in the second bag:  one opened, one not.

                  The letters were handwritten.  From a man, not a woman.  William Washington was the name at the bottom, with an address in Indianapolis.  They were complaint letters, all three nearly identical addressed to Charles Knight Cruickshank.

                  Washington claimed that he was owed money.  Cruickshank, in his capacity at the licensing department at Warner Brothers, should have known that Warner Brothers had been using various pieces of music William Washington claimed to have written in numerous television shows, without permission, and without compensation.  The letters referenced earlier correspondence, complained that Cruickshank had failed to respond, threatened legal action, etc.  If the letters themselves didn’t make clear that Washington was a crank, the enclosed spreadsheets proved it.

                  Over two and a half pages, handwritten, Washington listed dozens of programs Warner Brothers had broadcast over the previous months, with carefully notated music cues, ranging in length from several seconds to a minute or two, and at the end of each row Washington calculated the royalties he claimed were owed him.  The smallest numbers were fractions of a cent.  The highest were only a few dollars.  The entries went back about six months.  The two latest letters had xeroxed updates of the earliest spreadsheet with additional rows added and an updated total.  The grand total at the end of the fifth month came to eighteen dollars and fifty-six cents, which had been crossed out and updated with Washington’s latest additions for the current month, now nineteen dollars and twelve cents.  I didn’t check his math.

                  I handled the pages from Washington, turning them in my hand, feeling the weight of the paper.  I lifted an envelope, admiring the way the flap closed, the way envelopes are designed to exactly fit a standard sheet of folded paper.  I chuckled at Washington’s ludicrous request, but his commitment to mailing the letter impressed me.  I appreciated the personal touch of handwriting rather than typing.  I recognized the spreadsheet calculation was the work of a deluded obsessive, but it touched me, all the same.

                  The next day, a Saturday, there was another letter from William Washington in my mailbag.

                  Cruikshank’s car was in the driveway.  As I stepped on to his porch, I could hear voices inside.  I listened more carefully.  A one-sided conversation.  Cruikshank was on the telephone.

                  From the handful of mail I had for him I had placed Washington’s latest letter on top.  Carefully I pealed the stamp from the corner of the envelope.  I waited until I no longer heard Cruikshank’s voice, then I rang the doorbell.

                  “Yes?” he asked, opening the door.  We were separated by a screen.

                  “I’m sorry,” I said.  “There’s postage due on this.  I can’t leave it unless it’s paid.”

                  Cruikshank saw the familiar looking envelope on the top of the pile.  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” he said.  “I don’t want it.”

                  I pretended to be surprised, and official.  “You don’t want your mail?”

                  “I don’t want that mail.” He said.  “You don’t understand.  This is what I was asking you about the other day.  I get these letters all the time.  First, he wrote to me at my place of business.  It’s some crazy person.  I wrote back to him a few times trying to end the matter.  I suppose that’s where he got my name.  Then he must have looked up my home address on google or something and now the letters are coming here.”

                  I nodded.

                  “I get them all the time.  One or two a week.  I just throw them away.  I don’t want it.  I’m certainly not paying for it.”

                  I furrowed my brow, concerned and sympathetic.  “I’m sorry, sir.  I know the mail isn’t always good news, but it shouldn’t be a source of harassment.”

                  “Well, this guy is harassing me, but you told me before there’s nothing I can do.”

                  I feigned thoughtfulness. “Well.  This one has postage due, so I’ll take it back.  And you don’t want mail from this guy, huh?”

                  “No.  I do not,” Cruickshank said emphatically.

                  “Well let me ask my supervisor.  Maybe there’s something we can do.”  I stuffed the letter back in my bag.

                  “I appreciate that.”

                  I opened the screen door and handed him the rest of his mail, entirely junk as far as I could tell, destined for the trash.  “Sorry for the bother.”

                  “Thank you.”

                  That evening I opened Washington’s latest letter.  The same obsessive spreadsheet with the same ludicrous request for exactly nineteen dollars and twelve cents in royalties repeated from the last time.  The same irritated, mildly-threatening, tone.  But good English.  “Dear Mr. Cruickshank” at the top.  “Yours Sincerely” at the bottom.  He had taken the time to write!

                  I wrote him back.

                  I typed my response, pretending to be Cruikshank’s executive assistant and responding on his behalf.  I apologized.  I thanked him for contacting Warner Brothers.  I thanked him for the detailed accounting.  I promised I would look into the matter right away.  I asked him to clarify a few items on the spreadsheet.  I expressed no doubt that he was actually the legitimate composer of all the music cues he cited but I wondered if he could confirm a few timings and broadcast dates for me to point my research in the right direction.

                  I closed by asking him to direct all future correspondence to me.  And then I gave him my home address.

                  I printed the letter, signed it, and folded it in thirds.  I found a number 10 envelope and placed it inside.  I hesitated before I closed the flap thinking how long it had been since I’d written a letter, or even a card, to anyone, thinking how long it had been since anyone had written to me and what a pleasure it would be if someone did.

                  Then I got my check book and made out a check for nineteen dollars and twelve cents, and slipped it in with the letter, sealed it, and set it on the counter by the door to take to the post office.