Where I'm Calling From

his pocket.
    The other waitress came straight to Doreen. “Who is this character?” she said.
    “Who?” Doreen said and looked around with the ice-cream dish in her hand.
    “Him,” the other waitress said and nodded at Earl. “Who is this joker, anyway?”
    Earl put on his best smile. He held it. He held it until he felt his face pulling out of shape.
    But the other waitress just studied him, and Doreen began to shake her head slowly. The man had put some change beside his cup and stood up, but he too waited to hear the answer. They all stared at Earl.
    “He’s a salesman. He’s my husband,” Doreen said at last, shrugging. Then she put the unfinished chocolate sundae in front of him and went to total up his check.

What Do You Do in San Francisco?

    This has nothing to do with me. It’s about a young couple with three children who moved into a house on my route the first of last summer. I got to thinking about them again when I picked up last Sunday’s newspaper and found a picture of a young man who’d been arrested down in San Francisco for killing his wife and her boyfriend with a baseball bat. It wasn’t the same man, of course, though there was a likeness because of the beard. But the situation was close enough to get me thinking.
    Henry Robinson is the name. I’m a postman, a federal civil servant, and have been since 1947. I’ve lived in the West all my life, except for a three-year stint in the Army during the war. I’ve been divorced twenty years, have two children I haven’t seen in almost that long. I’m not a frivolous man, nor am I, in my opinion, a serious man. It’s my belief a man has to be a little of both these days. I believe, too, in the value of work— the harder the better. A man who isn’t working has got too much time on his hands, too much time to dwell on himself and his problems.
    I‘m convinced that was partly the trouble with the young man who lived here—his not working. But I’d lay that at her doorstep, too. The woman. She encouraged it.
    Beatniks, I guess you’d have called them if you’d seen them. The man wore a pointed brown beard on his chin and looked like he needed to sit down to a good dinner and a cigar afterward. The woman was attractive, with her long dark hair and her fair complexion, there’s no getting around that. But put me down for saying she wasn’t a good wife and mother. She was a painter. The young man, I don’t know what he did—probably something along the same line. Neither of them worked. But they paid their rent and got by somehow—at least for the summer.
    The first time I saw them it was around eleven, eleven-fifteen, a Saturday morning, I was about twothirds through my route when I turned onto their block and noticed a ‘56 Ford sedan pulled up in the yard with a big open U-Haul behind. There are only three houses on Pine, and theirs was the last house, the others being the Murchisons, who’d been in Arcata a little less than a year, and the Grants, who’d been here about two years. Murchison worked at Simpson Redwood, and Gene Grant was a cook on the morning shift at Denny’s. Those two, then a vacant lot, then the house on the end that used to belong to the Coles.
    The young man was out in the yard behind the trailer and she was just coming out the front door with a cigarette in her mouth, wearing a tight pair of white jeans and a man’s white undershirt. She stopped when she saw me and she stood watching me come down the walk. I slowed up when I came even with their box and nodded in her direction.
    “Getting settled all right?” I asked.
    “It’ll be a little while,” she said and moved a handful of hair away from her forehead while she continued to smoke.
    “That’s good, I said. “Welcome to Arcata.”
    I felt a little awkward after saying it. I don’t know why, but I always found myself feeling awkward the few times I was around this woman. It was one of the things helped turn me against her from the first.
    She gave me a thin smile and I started to move on when the young man—Marston was his name—came around from behind the trailer carrying a big carton of toys. Now, Arcata is not a small town and it’s not a big town, though I guess you’d have to say it’s more on the small side. It’s not the end of the world, Arcata, by any means, but most of the people who live here work either in the lumber mills or have something to do with the fishing industry, or else work in one of the downtown