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    he Mailman had a croaker named Dr. Paulson who lived in a big Victorian house on Middle Street, a couple of blocks down from Faye and Schultzie’s. His office was in the front room and if you had an appointment in the late afternoon you could smell his wife cooking garlicky dinner in the kitchen to the rear.
    Dr. Paulson’s chief concern as a physician was sodium intake. The Mailman would sit quietly in the comforting glow of the old shellacked wainscoting and Dr. Paulson would ask him how his throat was feeling. The Mailman would indicate that it hurt. Dr. Paulson would listen to his heart and tell him he was using too much salt.Then he’d write a scrip for two weeks’worth of morphine pills or Eukodol.The Mailman would come back five days later and ask for something else—Dilaudid, maybe—and Dr. Paulson would listen to his heart and advise against salt, writing the prescription without a thought. He made his living from customers like the Mailman, and by giving state-mandated physicals to bus and trash truck drivers in the employ of Schultz Brothers. The post office, under federal jurisdiction, had their own more competent doc a few towns away. He was the one who’d discovered the cancer. But after a while the Mailman figured things out and got transferred to the care of his local physician, the senile stethoscopist, Oliver Paulson, MD. Since he filled the prescriptions by staggering them among a half-dozen area pharmacies, everything looked on the up-and-up.
    Weekdays, the Mailman tried to keep to maintenance doses. But on Friday and Saturday nights he’d load up and go on his downtown ramble, working selected bars east along Main Street and returning westward via other waterfront establishments. This was as close as he ever got to recalling the pleasures of his old postal route—the recollection being always perfect, whereas the actual experience had often been marred by aggressive dogs, surly humans, the persistent pressure of the spiderweb. There weren’t many mutts on the route of his ramble and, oddly, once he got the operation, they started liking him. Maybe it was the smell of meat.
    The Mailman had a difficult time venturing on the streets sober. People gawked. At the bank or in the grocery store, it was a constant, hideous game of charades. When he was forced to speak, tellers cringed, children burst into tears. The doctors had tried to get him to use one of those gizmos you hold up against your throat, but there was so much scar tissue, he never found the sweet spot that made the gurgles resonate into speech.
    Friday nights he’d quadruple up on whatever med was in supply, crush it in a soup spoon, mix it with Karo syrup, and swill it down with little gulplets of flat beer. Then he’d float from bar to bar, insulated, stoned, and silent, but with those around him in his drugged-up mystical way, drinking slow lubricating beers, empathizing, telepathing, reading entire life stories in new faces, the happenings of past weeks or months in the ones known to him.
THE OLD TURK’S LOAD 29
    Few conversations interrupted his reverie, but occasionally there’d be adventures. One Friday, just after sunset down at the Main Deck, a rackety bar built out over the water, a guy in full umpire regalia propositioned him on behalf of three not-bad-looking whores standing around the cigarette machine. The ump had just finished working a Little League game down at Boudreau Field but didn’t bother to explain why he hadn’t changed out of his dark pants and jacket and was still wearing his chest protector. Maybe he was expecting rough trade, or thought the outfit would be helpful in Friday night conflict resolution. Twenty bucks got the Mailman a blow job from June in the man’s car ’round the side of the building. June was skinny, with a lean long face, and he came and came into it, in love at that ecstatic moment with her, his drugs, the bar, and the improbable ump.
    Often there were more drugs—Sopors,