Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) Read Online Free PDF Page A

train continued on behind us, and the station depopulated as if neutron-bombed.
    “This is the town of the King of Sentences.”
    “This little town.”
    “He could be watching us now, don’t act stupid. With a telescope.”
    We blundered along something called Main Street, seeking the post office, until a passerby directed us to Warburton Avenue. Inside the mediocre lobby we staked out a position near the numbered boxes, innocuously pretending to screw up our change-of-address forms so that we had to start over again a dozen times. His box, which we surveilled with peripheral vision only, pulsed with risk and possibility—our own postcard had been handled there, a precursor to this encounter.
    Losing patience, we sidled to the main counter. “What time on the average day does the boxholder typically, you know, pick up?”
    “Box mail goes up at ten thirty.”
    “Right, sure, but mostly when do citizens appear and begin to gather it up, take it to their private homes?”
    “Whenever they care to.”
    “Sure, right, this is America, isn’t it?”
    “Sure is.”
    “Thank you.”
    We resumed charades with the chained pen. Two, three, five, eight, eighteen Hastings-on-Hudsonians lumbered in to check their boxes, sort circulars into recycling bins, greet the postmistress, and trade coins for stamps, each of comically tiny denominations. Everyone in this hamlet, it seemed, had just found a sixteen- or twenty-three-cent stamp in a dusty drawer, and had chosen today to supplement it up to viability using car-seat nickels and pennies.
    Yet somehow between transactions the postmistress had snuck away for a tattling phone call, or so we surmised from the blinking patrol car that now swept up in front of the P.O. Into the lobby strode a cowboyesque figure, a man, late-fiftyish, wearing a badge in the manner of a star, lean and, when he spoke, laconic. Clea read my mind, saying, “You the sheriff in these parts?”
    “Chief of police.”
    “Not the sheriff of Hastings-on-Hudson?”
    “No, ma’am, there isn’t one. Can I ask what you’re doing here?”
    “Waiting.”
    “Have you folks got postal business today?”
    “No,” I said. “But we’ve got business with someone who might have postal business, if that’s okay.”
    “I suppose it might be, sir, but I’m forced to wonder who we’re talking about.”
    “The King of Sentences.”
    “I see. You wouldn’t happen to be the authors of a certain unsigned and borderline-ominous postcard?”
    “Might happen to be, though there was hardly ominous intent.”
    “I see. And now you’re waiting, I’m guessing, for the addressee.”
    “In the manner of free Americans in a federally controlled public space, yes. We checked with the postmistress.”
    “I see. You mind if I wait a bit myself?”
    “By definition we can’t.”
    Soon enough he appeared. The King of Sentences, unmistakably, though withered like a shrunken-apple fetish of the noble cipher in the photograph. He wore a gray sweatshirt and caramel corduroys with the knees and thighs bald, like a worn radial tire. Absurd black Nikes over gray dress socks. Hair white and scant. Eyes tiny and darting. They darted to the not-sheriff, who nodded minimally. The King nodded back with equal economy.
    We collapsed, as planned, to our knees, conveying the beautiful anguish of our subjection to the sole King of Sentences—bowed heads, fingers wriggling as if combing the air for particles of his greatness. A chapter of
I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments
, secreted in the waistband of my underwear, buckled as I knelt there. The King stood inert, if anything sagged slightly. The chief turned and shook his head, a little appalled.
    “You okay?” he asked the King.
    “Sure. Let me talk to them a minute.”
    “Anything you say.” The law went outside, to stand andtake a cigarette beside his cruiser. He watched us through the window. We nodded and waved as we scrambled back to our